The Bloomsbury Handbook to Ageing in Contemporary Literature and Film 1350204331, 9781350204331

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THE BLOOMSBURY HANDBOOK TO AGEING IN CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE AND FILM

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THE BLOOMSBURY HANDBOOK TO AGEING IN CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE AND FILM Edited by Sarah Falcus, Heike Hartung, and Raquel Medina

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BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2023 Copyright © Sarah Falcus, Heike Hartung, Raquel Medina, and contributors 2023 The editors and contributors have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Authors of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p. ix constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover image © ‘Confined at the Movies’, Barbara Zecchi, 2018 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: HB: 978-1-3502-0433-1 ePDF: 978-1-3502-0434-8 eBook: 978-1-3502-0435-5 Series: Bloomsbury Handbooks Typeset by Newgen KnowledgeWorks Pvt. Ltd., Chennai, India To find out more about our authors and books visit www.blo​omsb​ury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

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CONTENTS

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A cknowledgements  

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N otes

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C ontributors  

Introduction  Sarah Falcus, Heike Hartung, and Raquel Medina

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Part One: Genre  Sarah Falcus

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1 Novels of ripening: The maturation of the Bildungsroman  Michaela Schrage-Früh and Margaret O’Neill

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2 Drama: Performing age, fighting ageism  Valerie Barnes Lipscomb

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3 Ageing in poetry: A windfall  Tess Maginess

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4 Children’s literature: Young readers, older authors  Vanessa Joosen

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5 Writing successful ageing? The aches and pains of illness narrative and life review  Martina Zimmermann

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6 Picturing what happens at the end: Graphic narratives of ageing and end of life  Kathleen Venema

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7 Ageing in science, speculative, and fantasy fiction  Susan Watkins

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8 Old age and the Gothic  Zoe Brennan

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9 Ageing in crime and detective fiction, film, and television: Subversion and protest  Marla Harris

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10 Serializing age: Shifting representations of ageing and old age in TV series  Maricel Oró-Piqueras

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11 It’s never too late to have a happy ending: Comedy film and ageing  Hanna Varjakoski

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Part Two: Themes and Concepts in Contemporary Ageing Studies  Heike Hartung

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12 Feminism, gender, and age  Nicole Haring and Roberta Maierhofer

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13 Queer ageing  Heather Jerónimo

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14 Stars and protagonists in the Hollywood conglomerate: Performativities of hegemonic masculinity and the third-age imaginary  Josephine Dolan 15 Late style: Rejuvenating the debate  Amir Cohen-Shalev 16 Fallen, falling, clinging, and crawling: The everyday age effects of drama and performance  Bridie Moore

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17 Home care, cinema, and the relational turn in age studies  Sally Chivers

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18 Postcolonial ageing studies: Racialization, resistance, re-imagination  Emily Kate Timms

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19 Nation and ageing: Mother India’s mutable body  Ira Raja

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20 Ageing in Latin American cinemas  Barbara Zecchi and Raquel Medina

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21 Narratives of old age and climate change: Silver tsunamis and rising tides  Anna-Christina Kainradl and Ulla Kriebernegg

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22 Ageism and ableism on the silvering screen: Entanglements of disability and ageing in films centred on dementia  Hailee M. Yoshizaki-Gibbons 23 The phenomenology of frailty: Joan Didion as case study  Elizabeth Barry

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Part Three: Case Studies  Raquel Medina

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24 Dementia in Japanese cinema: The family and rural nostalgia  Katsura Sako

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25 Changing the face of Catalan theatre: New portraits of old age in two contemporary dramatic comedies  Núria Casado-Gual

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26 History’s intricate invasions: Ageing and traumatic memory in Caribbean discourse  Paula Morgan

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27 Ageing in contemporary Welsh fiction in English  Elinor Shepley

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28 African American women and ageing: Remembering Afro-Amerindian ancestors in Alice Walker’s Now Is the Time to Open Your Heart  Saskia M. Fürst

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29 Contemporary age narrative in Aotearoa New Zealand  Paola Della Valle

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30 Representations of ageing in Russian fiction: Between remembering and forgetting  Dagmar Gramshammer-Hohl

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31 Beckett’s radical exploration of the vulnerability of ageing women in Happy Days and Rockaby  Irene De Angelis 32 Affective-oriented time: Finitude and ageing in Jackie Kay’s border country  Marta Cerezo

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33 A seasoned, female Robinson Crusoe: Ageing, solitude, and resilience in Louise en hiver 427 Aagje Swinnen 34 Ageing and narration in Huntington’s Disease memoirs  Pramod K. Nayar

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FIGURES

2.1 Table / List ‘Dramatic Theatre vs. Epic Theatre’ 

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6.1 ‘Here’s what I used to think happened at “the end” ’ from Can’t We Talk about Something More Pleasant? 

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6.2 ‘June 24th, 2009’ from Can’t We Talk about Something More Pleasant? 

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6.3 Special Exits: A Graphic Memoir 

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6.4 Nigel Baines’s Afloat (p. 148) 

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11.1 Sylvi (Saara Pakkasvirta), Inkeri (Leena Uotila), and Raili (Seela Sella) in Ladies of Steel 

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19.1 ‘Bharat Bhiksa’ (India begging) 

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24.1 Family scene from Sakura saku 

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33.1 Louise reading from Robinson Crusoe 

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33.2 Louise positioned as outsider 

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33.3 Louise and Pépère looking at each other 

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The editors are grateful to all of the authors for their valuable contributions to this volume and for making the field of Age(ing) Studies what it is today. We also appreciate their patience through the long process of compiling this volume and the global and local setbacks along the way. The editors extend their sincere thanks to Barbara Zecchi for giving us permission to use her artwork on the cover of this book. The editors, authors, and publisher gratefully acknowledge the permission granted to reproduce the copyright material in this book. • Table / List ‘Dramatic Theatre vs. Epic Theatre’ from ‘The Modern Theatre is the Epic Theatre’ from Brecht on Theatre, edited and translated by John Willett. Translation copyright © 1964, renewed 1992 by John Willett. Reprinted by permission of Hill and Wang, a division of Farrar, Straus and Giroux. All Rights Reserved. • Images from Roz Chast, Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant? © Roz Chast, 2014, Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant?, Bloomsbury Publishing Inc. • Image from Joyce Farmer, Special Exits: A Graphic Memoir. © Joyce Farmer. Courtesy of Fantagraphics Books (www.fantag​raph​ics.com). • Image from Nigel Baines, Afloat: A Memoir about Mum, Dementia, and Trying Not to Drown. © 2019. Used with the author’s permission. • Image from Ladies of Steel directed by Pamela Tola © Helsinki-filmi Oy. All rights reserved. • ‘Bharat Bhiksha’ (India Begging), c. 1878. The Calcutta Art Studio. © By kind permission of the Trustees of Victoria Memorial Hall, Kolkata, India. • Images from Robinson Crusoe. © JPL Films. Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders and to obtain their permission for the use of copyright material. The publisher apologizes for any errors or omissions in the above list and would be grateful if notified of any corrections that should be incorporated in future reprints or editions of this book. The third-party copyrighted material displayed in the pages of this book is done so on the basis of ‘fair dealing for the purposes of criticism and review’ or ‘fair use for the purposes of teaching, criticism, scholarship or research’ only in accordance with international copyright laws and is not intended to infringe upon the ownership rights of the original owners.

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Elizabeth Barry is Professor at the University of Warwick in the Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies. She works in the fields of modern literary studies, medical humanities, and literary age studies and has published on representations of ageing in the work of Samuel Beckett, Marcel Proust, and Alice Munro, as well as in contemporary North American fiction. She edited the Boydell collection Literature and Ageing with Margery Vibe Skagen in 2020. Zoe Brennan is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at the University of the West of England. Her research interests focus on texts which explore the intersection between old age, gender, and sexuality. She is the author of The Older Woman in Recent Fiction (2005) and has recently published on subjects such as aged masculinity in the Edwardian ghost story and Angela Carter’s gothicizing of urban spaces in the Bristol trilogy. Núria Casado-Gual is Associate Professor at the Department of English and Linguistics of the University of Lleida. As the Principal Investigator of Grup Dedal-Lit (2013–22), she has led two competitive projects in the field of cultural gerontology, co-edited three volumes of essays on literary representations of ageing, and published articles on cultural interpretations of old age in international journals such as Aging & Society, The Gerontologist, and Feminist Media Studies. With Julia Henderson and Benjamin Gillespie, she has co-edited a special issue on age and performance for Theatre Research in Canada (2021). Núria Casado-Gual is also a theatre practitioner. Eight of her plays have been published to date. Marta Cerezo is Lecturer of English Literature at the Department of English Studies, Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia, where she teaches BA and MA courses on medieval and renaissance literature. Her research interests focus on two clearly differentiated research lines: on the one hand, the study of the work of William Shakespeare, and on the other, the analysis of authors of contemporary English narrative from the parameters of Age / Ageing Studies. She is the author of Critical Approaches to Shakespeare: Shakespeare for All Time (2005) and the co-editor of Traces of Aging: Old Age and Memory in Contemporary Narrative (2016). Sally Chivers is Full Professor of English and Gender & Social Justice at Trent University, as well as past director of the Trent Centre for Aging & Society. Recipient of the 2021 Trent University Distinguished Research Award, for her research on the social and cultural politics of disability and ageing, her publications include From Old Woman to Older Women: Contemporary Culture and Women’s Narratives (2003) and The Silvering Screen: Old Age and Disability in Cinema (2011), and she is the co-editor of The Problem Body: Projecting Disability on Film (2010) and Care Home Stories: Aging, Disability, and Long-Term Residential Care (2017).

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Amir Cohen-Shalev teaches at the School of Society and the Arts, Ono College, Israel. His research interests are creativity in old age, ageing in film, cinematic representations of dementia, and the poetry of old age. Among his publications are Both Worlds at Once – Art in Old Age (2002), Visions of Aging – Old Age in Film (2008), and Praying on the Fleeting Abundance – the Poetry of Old Age [in Hebrew] (2017). Irene De Angelis is Associate Professor of English Literature at the University of Turin. She is a board member of European Federation of Associations and Centres of Irish Studies and the Director of the Interdepartmental Centre for Irish Studies CISIRL. Her publications include a monograph on the international outlook in Derek Mahon’s poetry (2010), a monograph on W. B. Yeats’s Noh Plays (2010), and The Japanese Effect in Contemporary Irish Poetry (2012). She has also published essays and book chapters on authors as varied as Derek Mahon, Seamus Heaney, Michael Longley, Samuel Beckett, Marina Carr, Rudyard Kipling, W. S. Maugham, Aldous Huxley, and Alan Bennett. In 2019 she published an Italian translation of Mahon’s The Rain Bridge, with drawings by Sarah Iremonger. Her research interests include East–West studies, eco-criticism, the representation of ageing in literature, literature and the visual arts, and modern manuscript analysis. Paola Della Valle is Associate Professor of English Literature at the University of Turin. She specializes in New Zealand and Pacific literature, postcolonial criticism, and gender studies. She is the author of three monographs: From Silence to Voice: The Rise of Maori Literature (2010), Stevenson nel Pacifico: una lettura postcoloniale (2013), and Priestley e il tempo, il tempo di Priestley (2016). She has written on New Zealand, Pacific, and British authors, including W. Ihimaera, P. Grace, F. Sargeson, N. Hilliard, R. Finlayson, J. Frame, R. Hyde, S. Figiel, K. Jetn̄il-Kijiner, O. Wilde, W. S. Maugham, R. L. Stevenson, J. B. Priestley, and C. Phillips. She is a member of the Advisory Board of the Journal of New Zealand and Pacific Studies. Josephine Dolan is the author of Contemporary Cinema and ‘Old Age’: Gender and the Silvering of Stardom (2017) and has published numerous articles concerned with gender and ageing. Her involvement with international research groups and networks includes Centre for Women, Ageing and Media (WAM), European Network in Aging Studies (ENAS), North American Network in Aging Studies (NANAS), ‘Grup Dedal-Lit’ (University of Lleida). Now working as an independent scholar, she happily embraces retirement, and in resisting the rejuvenatory paradigm, she is proud to call herself an old woman. Sarah Falcus is Reader in Contemporary Literature at the University of Huddersfield. She works at the intersection of ageing studies and literary studies. Her current research centres on two main areas: children’s literature and ageing; and ageing / the lifecourse in science and speculative fiction. She is the primary collaborator on the project ‘Ageing and Illness in British and Japanese Children’s Picturebooks 1950–2000: Historical and Cross-Cultural Perspectives’, funded by the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, principal investigator Professor Katsura Sako. She is the co-director of the Dementia and Cultural Narrative Network. Saskia M. Fürst is an assistant professor in the English Studies Department at the University of The Bahamas. She completed her PhD on the representations of older Black women in US literature and

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print advertisements. Her article on ‘The Sexy, Mature Black Woman in US Advertisements: From Aunt Jemima to the Pro-age Campaigns’ is included in Racial and Ethnic Identities in the Media (2016). Her research interests include afrofuturism, ageing studies, black studies, film studies, and gender studies. Dagmar Gramshammer-Hohl is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Slavic Studies at the University of Graz, Austria. She specializes in literary and cultural studies with a focus on twentieth-century and contemporary Russian literature, emigration, and age / ageing studies. In her PhD thesis, she analysed representations of women’s ageing in Russian fiction. Dagmar Gramshammer-Hohl was granted the Prof. Paul Petry Award in Ageing Studies in 1998. She has widely published on ageing in Slavic literatures. Among her recent publications is the essay collection Foreign Countries of Old Age: East and Southeast European Perspectives on Aging (2021), co-edited with Oana Hergenröther. Nicole Haring is a PhD candidate at the Center for Inter-American Studies of the University of Graz, Austria. Her research interests focus on feminist theory, gender studies, cultural gerontology, and education. She received a Fulbright Scholarship to study in the United States in 2019–20 and the Elisabeth-List Fellowship for Gender Studies from the University of Graz in 2020–1. Currently, she is a working on her dissertation on intergenerational storytelling as a recipient of a doctorial fellowship from the Austrian Academy of Science. Marla Harris is an independent scholar who earned her PhD from Brandeis University, investigating British women writers’ negotiation of silence(s) in eighteenth-century novels. Her current research focus is crime and detective fiction, along with speculative fiction. Her articles have appeared in Clues, African American Review, Journal of Popular Culture, Children’s Literature in Education, and The Lion and the Unicorn. In addition, she has contributed to several edited volumes, including Rape in Stieg Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy and Beyond: Contemporary Scandinavian and Anglophone Crime Fiction (2012), Nancy Drew and Her Sister Sleuths (2008), and The Jewish Graphic Novel: Critical Approaches (2008). Heike Hartung is an independent scholar who teaches at the University of Rostock, Germany, and the University of Graz, Austria. She earned her PhD in English studies at the Freie Universität Berlin and her PhD habil. at the University of Potsdam. In her publications she applies the methods of literary theory and cultural studies to the interdisciplinary fields of ageing, disability, and gender studies. Recent publications include the monograph Ageing, Gender and Illness in Anglophone Literature: Narrating the Bildungsroman (2016) and the co-edited collection Ageing Masculinities, Alzheimer’s and Dementia Narratives (2022). Heather Jerónimo is an associate professor of Spanish at the University of Northern Iowa. She specializes in contemporary Spanish literature and film, with an emphasis on non-normative families, ageing studies, and queer theory, often with a transatlantic focus. Jerónimo has published on these topics in several book chapters and articles in peer-reviewed journals, such as Letras Femeninas, Bulletin of Spanish Studies, Revista Canadiense de Estudios Hispánicos, and Hispanófila. Her most recent publication was a co-authored article in Foreign Language Annals (2021) on the use of Twitter to create an educational community in the Spanish literature classroom.

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Vanessa Joosen is Associate Professor of English literature and children’s literature at the University of Antwerp in Belgium. She combines research on children’s literature and fairy tales with theories and methods from age studies, gender studies, translation studies, and digital humanities. She is the author of Adulthood in Children’s Literature (2018) and edited the volume Connecting Childhood and Old Age in Popular Media (2018). Anna-Christina Kainradl is a pre-doctoral researcher at the Center for Interdisciplinary Research on Aging and Care at the University of Graz. Her dissertation focuses on old age and migration in Austria in the context of the Austrian Healthcare System, analysing the sensitivity of medical-ethical theories to intersectional discrimination. She also teaches medical ethics at the Medical University of Graz and is involved in projects dealing with age, autonomy, knowledge, and health literacy. Her publications discuss age(ing) in the context of health, care, and climate change. Ulla Kriebernegg is director of the Center for Interdisciplinary Research on Aging and Care and Associate Professor of American Studies at the University of Graz as well as adjunct professor at the Medical University of Graz. In her research and teaching, she focuses on North American literary and cultural studies, Ageing and Care Studies, and Medical Humanities. Ulla is deputy chair of the European Network of Aging Studies, co-edits the Aging Studies book series (Transcript), and is Associate Editor of The Gerontologist. Since 2020, she has been a Fellow of the Trent Centre for Aging & Society, Canada. Ulla has taught internationally and has won several teaching and research awards. Valerie Barnes Lipscomb is a professor of English at the University of South Florida. Among her current projects is co-editing the Palgrave Handbook of Literature and Aging; she also has published a monograph, Performing Age in Modern Drama (2016), and a co-edited collection, Staging Age (2010). Her articles on theatrical representations of age have appeared in journals such as Modern Drama, Comparative Drama, the Journal of Aging Studies, and Age, Culture, Humanities. Lipscomb serves as treasurer of the North American Network in Aging Studies and has chaired the Modern Language Association’s Age Studies Forum. Tess Maginess is Professor of Lifelong Learning at Queen’s University, Belfast. Her research interests include literature, literary gerontology, older people’s learning, migration studies, and artsbased research. Recent books include Representations of Dementia in Literature: Interdisciplinary Perspectives (2017) and Enhancing the Wellbeing and Wisdom of Older Learners: A Co-research Paradigm (2016). Among her awards are the Vice Chancellor’s Prize for Engaged Research (2022), a Higher Education Academy Teaching Fellowship (2013), and the BERA-Sage Research Practitioner of the year award (Community), 2011. Roberta Maierhofer is Professor of American Studies and Director of the Center for Inter-American Studies at the University of Graz, Austria. Her research interests focus on cultural gerontology, feminist theory, gender studies, and inter-cultural and transnational education. In the 1990s, she developed the approach of anocriticism that focuses on the intersections of gender and age. She is a founding member of the European Network of Aging Studies and a leading expert in the field. Raquel Medina is a visiting research fellow at Aston University and Dean of Area Studies at IES Abroad Barcelona. She is the author of Cinematic Representations of Alzheimer’s Disease and

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Surrealismo en la poesía española de posguerra. She has served as co-editor of Sexualidad y escritura and Envejecimientos y cines ibéricos. She has published numerous articles, book chapters, and reviews on contemporary Spanish poetry, women writers, film, and cultural studies. Her current research focuses on cultural representations of ageing and dementia across cultures. She is the director of the research network CinemAGEnder and co-director of the Dementia and Cultural Narrative Network. Bridie Moore is Senior Lecturer in Drama, Theatre, and Performance at the University of Huddersfield and also lectures at the University of Leeds. She completed her AHRC-funded PhD at the University of Sheffield in 2018. Her research centres on the performance of age and ageing in contemporary British Theatre. Her PhD included an element of practice-as-research, and to facilitate this in 2012 she formed Passages Theatre, a group for performers over the age of fifty. They have staged performances that toured locally and nationally. She is currently working on a book for Routledge, provisionally entitled Performing Ageing Femininities. Paula Morgan is Professor of West Indian Literature and Culture and University Director of the Regional Institute for Gender and Development Studies, University of the West Indies. Morgan’s research focus includes gender, violence, and trauma; representation of crime in the Anglophone Caribbean; and pedagogical approaches to Caribbean literature and culture. Professor Morgan has published numerous essays and single-authored, co-authored, or co-edited journal collections, instructional texts, and scholarly books, including The Terror and the Time: Banal Violence and Trauma in Caribbean Discourse (2007). Paula Morgan has received awards for teaching, publication, and graduate supervision. Pramod K. Nayar teaches at the Department of English, University of Hyderabad, India. Among his newest publications are Alzheimer’s Disease Memoirs (2021), Essays in Celebrity Culture (2021), The Human Rights Graphic Novel (2020), Indian Travel Writing in the Age of Empire, 1830–1940 (2020), and Ecoprecarity (2019), besides essays on the art of Covid-19, sports celebrity, post-humanism, graphic novels, and the edited collection, From ‘Discovery’ to the ‘Civilisational’ Mission: English Writings on India (5 vols, 2022). He is currently working on a book on the nuclear humanities. Margaret O’Neill is a postdoctoral researcher at the Irish Centre for Social Gerontology, NUI Galway, Ireland. Her research interests focus on social and cultural representations of ageing and contemporary Irish writing. She has published widely in this area, and recently co-edited the collections Ageing Women in Literature and Visual Culture: Reflections, Refractions, Reimaginings (2017), a special issue of Nordic Irish Studies on Women and Ageing in Irish Writing, Drama and Film (2018) and Women and Ageing: Private Meaning, Social Lives (2020). Maricel Oró-Piqueras is Associate Professor at the Department of English and Linguistics, Universitat de Lleida. She is also a member of the research group Dedal-Lit, since it started working on the representation of fictional images of ageing and old age in 2002. Her research interests include ageing and old age in contemporary fiction as well as representations of gender and ageing in film and TV series. She is co-editor of Serializing Age: Ageing and Old Age in TV Series (2016), Re-Discovering Age(ing): Narratives of Mentorship (2019), and Age and Ageing in Contemporary Speculative and Science Fiction (2023).

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Ira Raja is a professor of English at the University of Delhi, India. Her research is concentrated on South Asia, with ageing, intimacy, care, colonialism, friendship, memory, objects, and nationstates being some areas of particular interest. Her most recent publications include the following co-edited special journal issues: “Postcolonial World Literature” (Thesis Eleven 2021) and “In the Line of Fire: The Public University in India” (Postcolonial Studies 2021). Ira is part of the DFGfunded RTG Minor Cosmopolitanisms located at the University of Potsdam, Germany. She is Honorary Associate of the Department of Social Inquiry at La Trobe University, Australia. Katsura Sako is Professor of English at Keio University, Japan. She is interested in the intersection of ageing studies and literary studies. She has published in journals such as Contemporary Women’s Writing, Feminist Review, and Women: A Cultural Review. She is also the co-author of Contemporary Narratives of Dementia: Ethics, Ageing, Politics (2019) and the co-editor of Contemporary Narratives of Ageing, Illness and Care (2022) (both with Sarah Falcus). Michaela Schrage-Früh is Lecturer in the School of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures at the University of Galway, Ireland. Her research interests focus on literary age studies and cultural dream studies. She is the author of two monographs and has co-edited four collections of essays on the theme of gender and ageing, Ageing Women in Literature and Visual Culture: Reflections, Refractions, Reimaginings (2017), a special issue of Nordic Irish Studies on Women and Ageing in Irish Writing, Drama and Film (2018), Women and Ageing: Private Meaning, Social Lives (2020), and Ageing Masculinities in Irish Literature and Visual Culture (2022). Elinor Shepley works in research development for arts, humanities, and social sciences at Cardiff University. She completed her PhD on the subject of ageing in Welsh fiction in English at Cardiff in 2018. Aagje Swinnen is Professor in Aging Studies at Maastricht University (NL). She has published on representations of ageing in literature, photography, and film; literary approaches in dementia care; and ways in which artists give meaning to creativity in the later stages of their career. Her work has been published in Journal of Aging Studies, The Gerontologist, Dementia, Ageing & Society, and Feminist Media Studies. Her co-edited work includes Popularizing Dementia (with M. Schweda, 2015) and Aging, Performance, and Stardom (with J. A Stotesbury, 2012). Swinnen is co-founder of the European Network in Aging Studies and co-editor of Age, Culture, Humanities. Emily Kate Timms is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Vienna, Austria. She received her PhD from the University of Leeds in 2021 and her thesis, ‘Postcolonial Representations of Age and Ageing in Aotearoa New Zealand and Caribbean Texts’ explores the intersections between postcolonial thought and critical gerontology, age studies, and dementia studies. She has published articles in the Journal of Postcolonial Writing, Moving Worlds: A Journal of Transcultural Writings and Essays & Studies. At present, she is a postdoctoral researcher on the ERC-funded ‘Poetry off the Page’ project investigating British Black and South Asian poetry in performance. Hanna Varjakoski is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Eastern Finland in the department of social sciences. In her doctoral dissertation, which is situated at the intersection of cultural gerontology, humanistic media studies, and gender studies, she investigated media portrayals of

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ageing, older people, and later life. Her other academic interests focus on older people’s neighbour relations and networks, and healthy ageing in a digital world. Kathleen Venema is Associate Professor in the English Department at the University of Winnipeg, where she works on life writing about ageing, illness, disability, and care. Her most recent publication was the chapter, ‘Remembering Forgetting: Graphic Lives at the End of the Line’, in Life Writing Outside the Lines: Gender and Genre in the Americas (2020). Her article, ‘ “I Wrote Letters? To You?”: Letters as Memory Prompts in Dementia Care’, is forthcoming in the Journal of Epistolary Studies. Her Alzheimer’s matriography, Bird-Bent Grass: A Memoir, in Pieces (2018), was shortlisted for the Alexander Kennedy Isbister Award for Non-fiction. Susan Watkins is Professor of Women’s Writing in the School of Cultural Studies at Leeds Beckett University. She is the author of Twentieth-Century Women Novelists: Feminist Theory into Practice (2001), Doris Lessing (2010), and most recently, Contemporary Women’s Post-Apocalyptic Fiction (2020). She is co-editor of Scandalous Fictions: The Twentieth-Century Novel in the Public Sphere (2006), Doris Lessing: Border Crossings (2009), and The History of British Women’s Writing Vol. IX 1945–1975 (2017). She has published articles on women’s writing in the Journal of Southern African Studies, Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, LIT: Literature Interpretation Theory, and Feminist Review. Hailee M. Yoshizaki-Gibbons is an assistant professor in biomedical humanities at Hiram College. She received her PhD in disability studies with a concentration in gender and women’s studies. Hailee’s research employs an intersectional lens to examine the ways gender, race, class, and immigration status mediate the lives of old and disabled people and those who care for them. Her current project analyses how temporality influences the care relationships between old women with dementia and the immigrant women of colour employed to care for them in dementia units of nursing homes. Barbara Zecchi is Professor of Visual and Performance Studies in the Department of Languages Literatures and Cultures, and Director of the Film Studies Program at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Her research interests focus on European and Latin American cinemas, women filmmakers, feminist film theory, adaptation theory, and ageing studies. In 2017 she was elected as Associate Member of the Academy of Film of Spain. In addition to about a hundred articles and numerous video-essays, she is the author, editor, or co-editor of ten volumes, including La pantalla sexuada, Envejecimientos y cines ibéricos and Gender-Based Violence in Latin American and Iberian Cinemas. Martina Zimmermann is a lecturer in health humanities and health sciences in the Department of English at King’s College, London. She trained in pharmaceutical sciences, specialized in neuropharmacology, and obtained her Habilitation in Pharmacology. She holds a second PhD in health humanities and has written two books about cultural and scientific narratives of dementia, The Poetics and Politics of Alzheimer’s Disease Life-Writing (2017) and The Diseased Brain and the Failing Mind: Dementia in Science, Medicine and Literature of the Long Twentieth Century (2020). She currently runs a research programme on ageing, funded by a UK Research and Innovation Future Leaders Fellowship.

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Introduction SARAH FALCUS, HEIKE HARTUNG, AND RAQUEL MEDINA

All narratives are in one sense stories of age: of past, present, and future, and the human place in time. Whether they imagine human life in expansive generational terms, during key moments of the lifecourse, or even beyond the human, in post-human or geological time, all narratives are driven by and bound to temporal structures that are in their turn linked to the human experience of time. If to narrativize is to engage in writing age, then ageing in its turn is inherently bound to narrative. We understand age and ageing (individual, generational, social) through narrative, and we make sense of our own lives in time through the narratives we both create and encounter. It is not, then, surprising that in seeking to understand what shapes and expresses age and ageing, we turn to narrative, both broader cultural discourses and, more specifically, literary and filmic narratives. As Elizabeth Barry argues, ageing is opaque on so many levels, happening to us in ways we may notice only in retrospect, or in ways that seem to accelerate the pace of time. ‘Literary narrative’, for Barry, ‘attending by definition – albeit in a myriad of ways – to the difference that time makes, might be able to offer some elucidation’ (2020: 2). So many scholars have expressed the importance of literary narratives to our understanding of age and ageing, not only in scholarly but also in broader social and political contexts, that we are able to claim this heritage in this Handbook and position the collection within that powerful, if recent, tradition. With early work emerging in the 1990s, when literary approaches to age and ageing ‘came of age’, in Anne Wyatt-Brown’s evocative phrase (1990), by the early twenty-first century, the literary study of age and ageing in its cultural context has reached maturity: it has come to supplement and challenge a public discourse on ageing that sees it mainly as a political and demographic ‘problem’ in many countries of the world. In the face of alarmist demographic projections and accompanying cultural narratives of risk, decline, and burden, literary narratives and age studies perspectives offer an exploration of the ways in which embodied, interconnected lives unfold in and across time. In this Handbook to Ageing in Contemporary Literature and Film we provide a concise introduction to how the interdisciplinary and intersectional endeavour of Age(ing) Studies has shaped and been shaped by literary and film studies in recent decades. We refrain from dwelling on the complexities of periodization; while most of the chapters here concentrate on late twentiethand early twenty-first-century texts and contexts, some trace back the lineage of these texts. Our concern is less with what ‘contemporary’ – as an inherently shifting target – might or might not mean. Instead, we seek to explore how literary and filmic narratives have addressed, contributed to, and shaped our understanding of and experiences of age and ageing in recent decades. In focusing on the contemporary period, we self-consciously recognize the challenges and opportunities of rapid

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demographic change and the tangle of cultural, political, and economic discourses surrounding this, from the ‘grey tsunami’ and the ‘dementia boom’ to ‘successful ageing’. The Handbook follows a tripartite structure, looking, first, at the relationship between age and ageing and genre, incorporating narrative genres as well as poetry, drama, and imagery. The second part explores key themes and concepts at the intersection of literary and Age(ing) Studies. The third part brings together case studies focusing on individual artists, national traditions, and global ageing. The book contains original contributions by pioneers in the field as well as new scholars, with the aim of bringing together current scholarship on ageing in literary and film studies and offering new directions and perspectives. This book broadens the intercultural direction of Age(ing) Studies by including scholarship from non-Western countries and cultures, with contributions by scholars from and on topics about Latin America, Africa, Asia, Eastern Europe, and the Middle East. ‘Ageing Studies’ and ‘Age Studies’ are terms that have been used by cultural gerontologists since the 1990s to talk about the interdisciplinary field that focuses on cultural approaches to age and ageing. However, the terms may invoke different ideas about age and ageing. The term Ageing Studies, still commonly used, may suggest a temporal perspective, one that figures ageing as a movement through time. Nevertheless, many North American and European arts and humanities scholars exploring age and ageing in cultural texts now employ the term Age Studies (Gullette 1997, 2018; Woodward 1999; Katz 2014) to distance themselves from biomedical discourses that conceive ageing within the binary decline / successful ageing. Margaret Morganroth Gullette, pioneer in the field, has suggested using ‘age’ to avert what she perceives as the intrinsic ageism of the word ‘ageing’. Gullette’s rejection of the term Ageing Studies in favour of Age Studies to name the field is based on the use made by hegemonic discourses of the notion of ageing as decline. The decline master narrative constructs ageing as a feared process that needs to be stopped or at least slowed down. The volume as a whole reflects these debates about nomenclature with varying uses of terms such as Ageing Studies and Age Studies, and in this introduction we keep open the possibilities of both terms (and their implications for the nature of the field) in the use of ‘Age(ing) Studies’. Leni Marshall (2015) emphasizes the power of literary narratives of age and the impact and the long-lasting effects that Age(ing) Studies analyses may have on changing negative conceptualizations of ageing and old age. All chapters in this Handbook make clear what film and literary studies can contribute to the knowledge of age and ageing, from many different perspectives. Approaches from these disciplines share the basic view that literary and film representations of ageing do not merely serve the purpose of illustrating age-related knowledge. Instead, they have epistemological functions for constituting this knowledge by conceptualizing and reflecting upon age in different forms, styles, and genres of artistic representation. The specific methods of what she called ‘literary gerontology’ were summarized by Wyatt-Brown in the 1990s, referring then mainly to early work in the US-American humanities (1990, 1992). She identified approaches from literary studies to the knowledge of age which encompassed analyses of attitudes towards old age with reference to individual artists from psychoanalytic perspectives; the application of gerontological concepts such as the ‘life review’ and the ‘lifecourse’ to the analysis of literary texts; analyses of the creative process in late life; and studies of the impact of the emotions on age representation. More recently, Hannah Zeilig has argued for the critical potential of identifying the personal, emotional, social, and political constructions of ageing in order to make age and gender ideologies visible. Her catalogue of questions may be seen as representative also of what we attempt to achieve in this Handbook. These questions include querying the age ideologies that underpin literary and, by extension, film

Introduction

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narratives, interrogating how age, gender, and ethnicity interact to shape the narratives that we are told, and examining how the specific artwork under consideration relates to other narratives and discourses on age (Zeilig 2011: 30). In response to questions which aim to differentiate our knowledge about age, the discipline of cultural Age(ing) Studies has evolved, interrogating the binary of decline / successful ageing in its exploration of the embodied experience of ageing in film and literature. Reflecting this expansion of the interdisciplinary endeavour of Age(ing) Studies, this Handbook aims not only to present the state of the art of the discipline, but also to outline new directions it may take. For this we can draw on much current and emerging work in literary and film studies. Gender and feminist studies have been foundational to the field of Age(ing) Studies and recent work both builds on and extends that intersectional tradition, with greater attention now paid to ageing masculinities (Armengol et al., 2022) and queer ageing (Hess 2019; Sandberg 2013; Cruikshank 2013). Important earlier studies of late style, notably that of Edward Said (2006), have been expanded and critiqued in more recent work (McMullan and Smiles 2016; Hutcheon and Hutcheon 2012). Emerging themes in studies of ageing in film and literature include care (Chivers and Kriebernegg 2017; Falcus and Sako 2021), memory (Grenier and Valois-Nadeau 2020), ecological concerns and ageing (Woodward 2020), and travel (Francescato et al. 2017). The Handbook reflects these developments, with attention paid to, amongst other things, the relationship between home, care, and the nation, and performativity, late style, and frailty. In its earlier stages, Age(ing) Studies endeavoured to distinguish itself from disciplines such as Disability Studies in order to avoid historically persistent definitions of old age as pathological (Schäfer 2004: 56–9). Yet, the connections between both – conceptually and methodically – have proved productive. This can be seen, for example, in the wealth of research that has appeared in recent years on representations of dementia in literature (Maginess 2018; Falcus and Sako 2019; Krüger-Fürhoff, Schmidt and Vice 2022; Goldman 2017; Bitenc 2019; Hartung, Kunow and Sweney 2022) and film (Capstick, Chatwin, and Ludwin 2015; Medina 2018; Bitenc 2019; Deng 2023) or cultural representations of dementia more generally (Swinnen and Schweda 2015; H. P. Zimmermann 2018). As the first part of the Handbook illustrates, studying different genres in film and literature with reference to age representation has proved productive. Recent work has focused, for instance, on age representation in age and illness memoir (M. Zimmermann 2017), detective fiction (Sako 2016; Burke 2017), children’s literature (Joosen 2017, 2018), and the Bildungsroman or novel of formation (Hartung 2016). While these are mainly narrative genres, more recently work on poetry has begun to emerge (Lehmann and Synnes 2023). To this can be added research on the visual arts (Kampmann 2020; Jordan 2022), and film, television and other media (Dolan 2020; Oró-Piqueras and Wohlmann 2015; Shary and McVittie 2016; Medina and Zecchi 2020; Ylänne 2015; von Hülsen-Esch 2021). Age(ing) Studies is an interdisciplinary field that first emerged in North America and Western Europe, and therefore their cultural, political, social, and economic contexts have shaped the approaches that humanities and arts scholarship have taken when analysing age and ageing in literature and film. However, the realities of age and ageing expand beyond these specific Western spaces and, although we acknowledge the important impact these notions of ageing have had on a globalized world, we consider that other realities need to be recognized, researched, and showcased. The intersection between postcolonial studies and ageing has enabled more diverse critical perspectives on what it means to age in place. In fact, the readings and analyses of literary

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and filmic texts belonging to other cultural contexts show that the decline and / or successful ageing narratives are not hegemonic at all and have very little importance in some cultures. The proliferation of representations of ageing has meant the increased publication of work from and based on different national contexts. This includes a special journal issue on aspects of literature and age in the German language and cultural context (Vedder and Willer 2012), and, more specifically, on German language representations of dementia (Dieckmann 2021). Recent work on Slavic literatures and on East and Southeast European cultures more broadly has been brought together in edited collections (Gramshammer-Hohl 2017; Gramshammer-Hohl and Hergenröther 2021). Important work is now being published on literary and cinematographic representations of ageing and dementia in Japan (Falcus and Sako 2021), in East and South East Asian cinemas (Deng 2023), on literature in New Zealand (Timms 2020), and on Iberian and Latin American cinemas (Zecchi et al. 2021). Nevertheless, the study of narratives and discourses of age(ing) in non-Western national contexts is still relatively rare within Age(ing) Studies, a situation to which our Handbook responds in all of its parts. Age(ing) Studies continues to change and expand. The original focus on close reading and representational strategies and effects remains central and important, recognizing the power of images of age in our cultural and social imaginaries. Nevertheless, increasingly important are approaches that consider creativity and its role in the lifecourse; the effects of age and ageing on reading and viewing, which encompass, for instance, the re-reading of texts and re-viewing of films and other visual media throughout the lifecourse; the materiality of texts and their place in the world; the repercussions of this materiality for the embodied experience of age and ageing in time; and the interrelationship of affect and ethics on different experiences and representations of age and ageing. Showcasing the variety of approaches, contexts, and concerns in the area, this Handbook celebrates the thriving, intersectional, and interdisciplinary field that is contemporary Age(ing) Studies.

REFERENCES Armengol, J. M., L. Ayalon, R. Maierhofer, and M. Unt (eds.) (2022), ‘Aging Masculinities: Social Constructions and Cultural Representations’, Special Issue of Journal of Aging Studies, 63: 1–2. Barry, E. (2020), ‘Introduction: The Difference That Time Makes’, in E. Barry with M. V. Skagen (eds), Literature and Ageing, vol. 73, Essays and Studies, 1–16, Cambridge: D. S. Brewer. Bitenc, R. A. (2019), Reconsidering Dementia Narratives: Empathy, Identity and Care, London: Routledge. Burke, L. (2017), ‘Missing Pieces: Trauma, Dementia and the Ethics of Reading in Elizabeth is Missing’, in T. Maginess (ed.), Literature: Interdisciplinary Perspectives, 88–102, New York: Routledge. Capstick, A., J. Chatwin, and K. Ludwin (2015), ‘Challenging Representations of Dementia in Contemporary Western Fiction Film’, in A. Swinnen and M. Schweda (eds), Popularizing Dementia. Public Expressions and Representations of Forgetfulness, 229–48, Bielefeld: transcript. Chivers, S., and U. Kriebernegg, eds (2017), Care Home Stories. Aging, Disability, and Long-Term Residential Care, Bielefeld: transcript. Cruikshank, M. (2013), Learning to Be Old: Gender, Culture, and Aging, Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Deng, M. (2023), Ageing, Dementia and Time in Film: Temporal Performance, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Introduction

5

Dieckmann, L. (2021), Vergessen Erzählen. Demenzdarstellungen in der deutschsprachigen Gegenwartsliteratur, Bielefeld: transcript. Dolan, J., ed. (2020), Aging Femininities: Troubling Representations, Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars. Falcus, S., and K. Sako (2019), Contemporary Narratives of Dementia: Ethics, Ageing, Politics, New York: Routledge. Falcus, S., and K. Sako, eds (2021), Contemporary Narratives of Ageing, Illness, Care, New York: Routledge. Francescato, S., R. Maierhofer, V. Minghetti, and E.-M. Trinkaus, eds (2017), Senior Tourism. Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Aging and Traveling, Bielefeld: transcript. Goldman, M. (2017), Forgotten: Narratives of age-related dementia and Alzheimer’s disease in Canada, Montreal: McGill-Queen's Press. Gramshammer-Hohl, D., ed. (2017), Aging in Slavic Literatures. Essays in Literary Gerontology, Bielefeld: transcript. Gramshammer-Hohl, D., and O. Hergenröther, eds (2021), Foreign Countries of Old Age. East and Southeast European Perspectives on Aging, Bielefeld: transcript. Grenier, L., and F. Valois-Nadeau, eds (2020), A Senior Moment. Cultural Meditations of Memory and Ageing, Bielefeld: transcript. Gullette, M. M. (1997), Declining to Decline: Cultural Combat and the Politics of the Midlife, Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. Gullette, M. M. (2018), ‘Against “Aging” – How to Talk about Growing Older’, Theory, Culture & Society, 35 (7–8): 251–70. Hartung, H. (2016), Ageing, Gender, and Illness in Anglophone Literature: Narrating Age in the Bildungsroman, New York: Routledge. Hartung, H., R. Kunow, and M. Sweney, eds (2022), Ageing Masculinities, Alzheimer’s and Dementia Narratives, London: Bloomsbury. Hess, L. M. (2019), Queer Aging in North American Fiction, Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. Hülsen-Esch, A. von, ed. (2021), Cultural Perspectives on Aging: A Different Approach to Old Age and Aging, Berlin: de Gruyter. Hutcheon, L., and M. Hutcheon (2012), ‘Late Style(s): The Ageism of the Singular’, Occasion: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Humanities. https://arc​ade.stanf​ord.edu/sites/defa​ult/files/artic​ le_p​dfs/OCCA​SION​_v04​_Hut​cheo​ns_0​5311​2_0.pdf. Joosen, V. (2017), ‘Age Studies and Children’s Literature’, in C. Beauvais and M. Nikolajeva (eds), The Edinburgh Companion to Children’s Literature, 79–89, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Joosen, V., ed. (2018), Connecting Childhood and Old Age in Popular Media, Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Jordan, S. (2022), ‘Ageing and Care in the Visual Field: The Photography of Martine Franck’, in K. Sako and S. Falcus (eds), Contemporary Narratives of Ageing, Illness, Care, 10–30, New York: Routledge. Kampmann, S. (2020), Bilder des Alterns. Greise Körper in Kunst und visueller Kultur, Berlin: Reimer. Katz, S. (2014), ‘What is age studies?’, Age, Culture, Humanities: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 1: 17–23. Krüger-Fürhoff, I. M., N. Schmidt, and S. Vice, eds (2022), The Politics of Dementia. Forgetting and Remembering the Violent Past in Literature, Film and Graphic Narratives, Berlin: de Gruyter. Lehmann, O., and O. Synnes, eds (2023), A Poetic Language of Ageing, London: Bloomsbury Academic. Maginess, T., ed. (2018), Dementia and Literature. Interdisciplinary Perspectives, London: Routledge. Marshall, L. (2015), Age Becomes Us: Bodies and Gender in Time, Albany: SUNY Press.

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McMullan, G., and S. Smiles, eds. (2016), Late Style and Its Discontents: Essays in Art, Literature, and Music, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Medina, R. (2018), Cinematic Representations of Alzheimer’s Disease, London: Palgrave Macmillan. Medina, R., and B. Zecchi (2020), ‘Technologies of Age: the Intersection of Feminist Film Theory and Aging Studies’, Investigaciones Feministas, 11 (2): 251–62. Oró-Piqueras, M., and A. Wohlmann, eds (2015), Serializing Age: Aging and Old Age in TV Series, Bielefeld: transcript. Said, E. (2006), On Late Style: Music and Literature against the Grain, London: Bloomsbury. Sako, K. (2016), ‘Dementia and Detection in Elizabeth Is Missing and Turn of Mind’, Contemporary Women’s Writing, 10 (3): 315–33. Sako, K., and S. Falcus (2021), ‘Care, Generations and Reciprocity in Children's Picturebooks in Japan’, in K. Sako and S. Falcus (eds), Contemporary Narratives of Ageing, Illness, Care, 177-99, New York: Routledge. Sandberg, L. (2013), ‘Affirmative Old Age: The Ageing Body and Feminist Theories on Difference’, International Journal of Ageing and Later Life, 8 (1): 11–40. Schäfer, D. (2004), Alter und Krankheit in der Frühen Neuzeit. Der ärztliche Blick auf die letzte Lebensphase, Frankfurt am Main: Campus. Shary, T., and N. McVittie (2016), Fade to Gray: Aging in American Cinema, Austin: University of Texas Press. Swinnen, A., and M. Schweda, eds (2015), Popularizing Dementia: Public Expressions and Representations of Forgetfulness, Bielefeld: transcript. Timms, E. K. (2020), ‘Postcolonial Representations of Age and Ageing in Aotearoa New Zealand and Caribbean Texts’, doctoral dissertation, University of Leeds, UK. Vedder, U., and S. Willer (2012), ‘Schwerpunkt Alter und Literatur’, Zeitschrift für Germanistik, 2: 274–89. Woodward, K., ed. (1999), Figuring Age. Women, Bodies, Generations, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Woodward, K. (2020), ‘Ageing in the Anthropocene: The View from and beyond Margaret Drabble’s The Dark Flood Rises’, in E. Barry with M. V. Skagen (eds), Literature and Ageing, vol. 73, Essays and Studies, 37–64, Cambridge: D. S. Brewer. Wyatt-Brown, A. M. (1990), ‘The Coming of Age of Literary Gerontology’, Journal of Aging Studies, 4 (3): 299–315. Wyatt-Brown, A. M. (1992), ‘Literary Gerontology Comes of Age’, in T. R. Cole, D. van Tassel, and R. Kastenbaum (eds), Handbook of the Humanities and Aging, New York: Springer, 331–53. Ylänne, V. (2015), ‘Representations of Ageing in the Media’, in J. Twigg and W. Martin (eds), Routledge Handbook of Cultural Gerontology, 391–8, London: Routledge. Zecchi, B., R. Medina, C. Moreiras-Menor, and M. P. R. Pérez, eds (2021), Envejecimientos y cines ibéricos, Valencia: Tirant Lo Blanc. Zeilig, H. (2011), ‘The Critical Use of Narrative and Literature in Gerontology’, International Journal of Ageing and Later Life, 6 (2): 7–37. Zimmermann, H. P. (2018), Kulturen der Sorge. Wie unsere Gesellschaft ein Leben mit Demenz ermöglichen kann, Frankfurt am Main: Campus. Zimmermann, M. (2017), The Poetics and Politics of Alzheimer’s Disease Life-Writing, Cham: Palgrave Macmillan.

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PART ONE

Genre SARAH FALCUS

We begin this Handbook with a consideration of the ways in which our narratives of ageing are both shaped by and exploit the conventions of genre. Genre is mutable and flexible. Recent scholarship turns away from the idea of genre as restrictive and instead sees it as, in Melissa Valiska Gregory’s words, ‘generative and productive’ (2018: 715). Genres ‘create effects of reality and truth, authority and plausibility, which are central to the different ways the world is understood’ (Frow 2006: 15). Following on from this, then, generically shaped knowledges are bound up with the exercise of power’ (15). Given Age(ing) Studies persistent concern with the way that narratives – or perhaps, more broadly, discourses – shape as well as reflect our ways of being in the world at different stages of the lifecourse, it is not surprising that genre and ‘generically shaped knowledges’ are areas of scholarly interest. From early work on midlife and older age re-imaginings of the Bildungsroman, to more recent scholarship on science fiction and ageing, the connection between genre and the narrative expression of ageing is central to Age(ing) Studies. Within this part of the Handbook, authors engage with a range of what might more strictly be called modes, genres, and subgenres (Frow 2006: 103–4), including poetry, comedy, the Gothic, detective fiction, and science fiction and fantasy. They offer not a comprehensive survey of genre but instead an invitation to take a sweeping or more focussed approach to the relationship between genre and ageing. They broadly subscribe to John Frow’s articulation of the relationship between text and genre: texts ‘do not “belong” to genres but are, rather, uses of them; they refer not to “a” genre but to a field or economy of genres, and their complexity derives from the complexity of that relation’ (Frow 2006: 15). The Handbook embraces the sometimes pejorative use of the term genre (as in genre fiction or film) to explore popular, well-read, and viewed genres such as comedy film and detective fiction, recognizing the power and changing position of genre in contemporary culture. Addressing contemporary literature, Theodore Martin argues that genre is ‘changing status’ with popular genres being adopted by many authors and a concurrent trend to ‘confer literary status on popular genres themselves’ (2017: 8). According to Martin, ‘genre now plays a powerful role in dictating both the concerns of art and the aims of its study’ (2017: 8). In the Handbook, we appreciate the importance of mass consumed and often much-loved narratives,

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rejecting the assumption that they are necessarily formulaic and conservative. We assume instead that all narratives (and texts) have some relationship to genre(s) (see Frow 2006: 14). All the chapters in this part of the Handbook explore how genre enables complex, even contradictory narratives of ageing across the lifecourse. Whilst not ignoring the undoubted constraints of genre, they recognize that the ‘use’ and complexity of genre may help us to reimagine the way that ageing is understood. This part of the Handbook begins with an exploration of the possibilities of challenging the power of the decline model of ageing that exerts such pressure on the way growing older is narrativized and experienced. Michaela Schrage-Früh and Margaret O’Neill open the volume with an examination of ageing in the contemporary Bildungsroman, building on the work of scholars such as Barbra Frey Waxman, Margaret Morganroth Gullette, and Heike Hartung (Chapter 1). They argue that the contemporary Reifungsromane offers sometimes experimental narratives of the complexities and affordances of older age. Picking up on the possibilities of experimental strategies, Valerie Barnes Lipscomb’s engagement with recent developments in theatre and ageing draws on a documentary theatre script to suggest that Brechtian theatre may offer particular opportunities for the challenge to the linear decline model of ageing (Chapter 2). Tess Maginess’s ambitious overview of poetry and age then takes a broad view to suggest that poetry not only offers the potential to contest stereotypes of ageing, but also that reading poetry may promote resilience (Chapter 3). Recognizing the lifecourse approach to ageing and the need to consider experiences and narratives of all stages of a life, the Handbook then moves to explore the relationship between childhood and adulthood. Developing her important work at the intersection of children’s literature and ageing studies, Vanessa Joosen (Chapter 4) considers how adult authors construct childhood and adolescence, and the intergenerational dialogue that is enabled or not by this process. In Chapters 5 and 6, Martina Zimmermann and Kathleen Venema analyse a genre that perhaps more than any other foregrounds the relationship between narrative and the lifecourse: the memoir. Developing her work on the memoir of dementia, Zimmermann explores the role of illness in memoirs about ageing, looking at the work of May Sarton and Diana Athill. Zimmermann examines the possibilities and constraints of the diary versus the life review, offering an analysis of the way that genre might shape the retrospective narratives of our lives. Venema turns to a different set of texts, though one that undoubtedly addresses some of the same concerns with illness and change: filial graphic memoirs. She reads these graphic stories of ageing and end-of-life care as a unique mode that offers ‘deep histories for older characters’ to consider change over time and the meanings of that change. The next three chapters explore three very popular (sub)genres: science fiction and fantasy (SFF), Gothic fiction and film, and detective fiction. Susan Watkins (Chapter 7) and Zoe Brennan (Chapter 8) recognize the potentially damaging and stereotypical nature of the use of horror and the grotesque – particularly the grotesque older body – yet suggest that in both SFF and the Gothic the movement beyond realism allows genres to make crucial contributions to our thinking about age and ageing. Marla Harris (Chapter 9) argues that detective fiction is a form of ‘social protest literature’, considering both long-running series with ageing detectives and the subversive possibilities of comic revenge crime narratives. Though a number of the chapters in this section analyse visual narratives and genres, the final two chapters put the visual centre stage as they turn to TV and film. Maricel Oró-Piqueras (Chapter 10) engages with the changing landscape of popular, anglophone TV (notably North American and

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Part One: Genre

British) to analyse the recent proliferation of series with protagonists in their sixties, seventies, and eighties. Hanna Varjakoski (Chapter 11) similarly focusses on a subgenre in which older characters and plots that foreground ageing are becoming more common: comedy film. Comedy can be marginalizing and reinforce stereotypes (as endless birthday cards about ‘milestone’ ages make clear), but Varjakoski here makes a case for the subversive potential of comedy in her analysis of older characters in recent Finnish film. Reviewing the importance of genre for Age(ing) Studies and, more broadly, for our cultural narratives of ageing across the lifecourse, this part of the Handbook maps out emerging trends at the meeting point of Age(ing) Studies and genre studies. In addition, it highlights key concerns that resonate throughout the volume – including intergenerationality, performativity, care, illness, and embodiment – providing a fitting introduction to the volume’s exploration of age and ageing in contemporary literature and film.

REFERENCES Frow, J. (2006), Genre, London: Routledge. Gregory, M. V. (2018), ‘Genre’, Victorian Literature and Culture, 46 (3–4): 715–19. Martin, T. (2017), Contemporary Drift: Genre, Historicism, and the Problem of the Present, New York: Columbia University Press.

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CHAPTER ONE

Novels of ripening: The maturation of the Bildungsroman MICHAELA SCHRAGE-FRÜH AND MARGARET O’NEILL

INTRODUCTION: COMING OF AGE The Bildungsroman, as defined by nineteenth-century scholars with reference to Johann Wolfgang Goethe’s Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (1795) (Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship), initially focused on a youthful male protagonist’s development into a well-rounded individual, shaped in his interactions with the characters he encounters on his travels. Female characters in these novels typically serve as symbolic representations of the protagonist’s stages of development, culminating in the hero’s harmonious marriage with an idealized woman. The genre’s definition was later broadened to encompass European novels of formation with more realistic settings and plots, including coming-of-age novels by, for instance, Frances Burney, Jane Austen, and George Eliot, about young women whose ‘apprenticeship’ and character formation are confined to domestic settings and the process of courtship (Hirsch 1979: 308). Their maturation often takes place ‘internally rather than “on the road” ’ (Waxman 1985: 319). Despite critical tendencies to read these novels as a social critique of women’s limited opportunities (Hartung 2019: 2), they have also been criticized as showing female characters who ‘grow down’ (Pratt qtd in Waxman 1985: 319) rather than up. As Heike Hartung claims, ‘These developments within feminist literary history provide the background for reconceptualizations of the Bildungsroman from the perspective of age studies’ (2019: 2). The cultural narrative of ageing is often presented as a linear ‘decline narrative’ (Gullette 1997); it tends to be marked by one-sided negative stereotypes emphasizing physical and cognitive deterioration, and ultimately marginalizes older people by rendering them socially invisible. In contrast, contemporary versions of the Bildungsroman portray the variety, richness, and complexity of the subjective experience of ageing, ‘extending the notion of individual development to all stages of the life course’ (Hartung 2019: 3) and focusing on ‘maturity rather than youthfulness as a value’ (2019: 4). Cases in point are recent genres such as the midlife progress novel, the Reifungsroman, and the Vollendungsroman, terms which are sometimes used interchangeably, as they counterbalance the prevalent concept of decline and decay in later life with more positive narratives of progress, growth, and completion. These narratives also sometimes interrogate social factors that might thwart individual development in a demanding, at times alienating, world and raise questions as to the ambiguities of, and possibilities for, final self-realization and meaningmaking in older age.

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BILDUNGSROMANE OF LATER LIFE: MIDLIFE PROGRESS NOVEL, REIFUNGSROMAN, AND VOLLENDUNGSROMAN The midlife progress novel, identified by Margaret M. Gullette in 1988, refers to novels that centre on midlife in a positive way by offering ‘new plots of recovery and development in those years; and favourable views on midlife looks and midlife outlooks; midlife parenting and childing, midlife subjectivity’ (Gullette 1988: 5). These narratives tend to favour ‘open-endedness, thus expressing an optimistic attitude towards the future as an intrinsic dimension of a character’s maturity’ (Hartung 2019: 3). Gullette explores both male and female midlife progress narratives, including works by Saul Bellow, John Updike, Margaret Drabble, and Anne Tyler, as examples of counternarratives to what she identifies as the dominant cultural narrative of ageing as decline (1997). This does not mean that these texts deal with purely positive, upbeat experiences of ageing. For instance, as Gullette notes, ‘Recovery novels, however painful and elegiac, are a form of progress narrative. They show protagonists surviving the harsh events encountered as time passes and demonstrating some continuity of selfhood’ (Gullette 2004: 71). Stories of adversity and survival also inform Reifungsromane, intertwined with a central journey motif. The Reifungsroman, or novel of ripening, as defined by Barbara Frey Waxman in 1985, arguably represents the predominant subgenre of Bildungsromane of later life. It may be found to contain elements of the midlife progress novel and the Vollendungsroman. In Waxman’s original definition it centres mainly on narratives about older women, whose ageing process is depicted in terms of change, growth, and new opportunities. Like Gullette, Waxman focuses on works by North American and British writers, such as Doris Lessing, Elizabeth Taylor, Barbara Pym, May Sarton, and Margaret Laurence. Thus, the narrative of development that is foregrounded in this subgenre as it is classically understood is orientated to a Global North, white middle-class value system. However, as an underutilized and under-researched narrative form that deals with journeys outside and beyond dominant coming-of-age stories specifically celebrated in the Bildungsroman, it opens out the potential for varied and nuanced explorations of self-representation and selfdiscovery across gender, age, contexts, and cultures. Waxman identifies female protagonists who, in later life, are depicted as ‘forging new identities or reintegrating fragmented old ones’ (1985: 319) and who, by the end of the novels, typically ‘have become revitalized, newly selfknowledgeable, self-confident, and independent before they move forward’ (Waxman 1990: 17). One such character is Kate Brown in Doris Lessing’s The Summer before the Dark ([1973] 2002), a woman in her mid-forties whose successful ageing process is condensed within one summer, the first in twenty years that she spends without her family. To achieve successful reifung, she ‘must introspectively return to her half-formed self prior to the years of marriage and motherhood … to begin anew the growth that her future promises’ (Waxman 1985: 322). After several ‘false starts’, attempts to ‘recapture her lost youth and sexuality’ (Waxman 1985: 324), Kate comes to embrace her ‘graying, independent self ’ (Waxman 1985: 330). This development is accompanied by a dream journey sequence that symbolically charts Kate’s interior progress and leads her to a second spring, suggesting a cyclical understanding of time that undermines the decline narrative (Schrage-Früh 2016: 173–4). Similar narrative elements can be found in various contemporary Reifungsromane such as Clare Boylan’s Beloved Stranger (1999) (Schrage-Früh 2017), Michèle Roberts’s Reader I Married Him (2004) (Falcus 2013) and novels by Penelope Lively (OróPiqueras 2015). In recent decades, the genre has expanded to include experiences of reifung

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in male characters, for instance, in novels by John Banville (Ingman 2018) and J. M. Coetzee (Gray 2009). While the Reifungsroman tends to focus on characters entering midlife or older age, in 1992 Constance Rooke coined the term Vollendungsroman, or novel of completion, to identify a type of novel that began to burgeon in the mid-twentieth century. It typically focuses on ‘an elderly protagonist engaged in an assessment of his or her life’ (Rooke 1992: 253) and on disengagement from social life as a process of ‘completion’ (1992: 247). Centrally, it considers the losses and gains of such disengagement. While acknowledging the realities of decline and loss, authors create a world in which older individuals experience affirmation through new relationships or outlets for personal enrichment, thus defying social stereotypes of later life. Life review, a process theorized by Robert Butler (1963) as a universal inner experience in later life, is regularly used as a narrative device in this genre, within which unresolved conflicts may come to the fore or new meanings may be generated. Rooke reads Laurence’s novel The Stone Angel ([1964] 1993) as an example. In this novel, ninety-year-old Hagar recalls her life story and seeks atonement on the path to affirmation before death. For Hagar, her pride has been a strength but also a barrier to connection with others in her life. Self-knowledge and peace lie in understanding that she ‘must always, always have wanted … simply to rejoice’ (Laurence 1993: 292). A theme of connection, or its avoidance, similarly informs Julian Barnes’s The Sense of an Ending (2011). The protagonist, Anthony, in his sixties, is prompted to review his life when he unexpectedly receives a small inheritance from the mother of a college girlfriend. As he revises his memories of past experiences, he recognizes and learns to accept feelings of regret, and through retrospective insight experiences affirmation of life (Oró-Piqueras 2014; Pamuk 2020).

LIFE REVIEW AND REMINISCENCE Bildungsromane of later life are informed by life review and reminiscence as central to the protagonists’ journeys into or through old age. Discussing the importance of remembrance in later life, Robert Butler proposes that ‘an inner experience or mental process of reviewing one’s life’ (1963: 65) is a universal occurrence for older individuals and may be observed in writings across history. Yet, he observes a pejorative tendency in the psychotherapeutic discourse of his time to consider reminiscence as a symptom of degeneration and as escapist, passive, or voidfilling. The process of life review may be defined as a ‘progressive return to consciousness of past experiences, and, particularly, the resurgence of unresolved conflicts; simultaneously, and normally, these revived experiences and conflicts can be surveyed and reintegrated’ (Butler 1963: 66). Thus, the life review involves pain as well as pleasure. It is ‘shaped by contemporaneous experiences and its nature and outcome are affected by the lifelong unfolding of character’ (Butler 1963: 66). Therefore, while it is personal, it is also social and contextual. However, there is a lack of esteem for reminiscence as a valuable cultural storehouse, which, as Marc Kaminsky explores, is indicative of the declining position of older people in society (1984: 137). The revaluation of reminiscence is not only culturally enriching but goes hand in hand with supporting an ethos of dignity and respect for older people. While Butler considers life review to be largely a looking back, closely connected to preparation for end of life, later theorists expand on the process, as well as further differentiate between life review and reminiscence. Kaminsky (1984) draws on psychologist Erik Erikson’s life cycle model

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to suggest that a motivation for reminiscence may derive from the need to integrate and give meaning to previous stages of life to attain wholeness, the alternative to which is despair at the lack of time ‘to try out alternate roads to integrity’ (Erikson in Kaminsky 1984: 147). For Kathleen Woodward, the emphasis of the life review lies on ‘the examined life, on how we evaluate our life, on the arrival at a certain truth’ (1997: 2). Querying Butler’s emphasis on location, consistency, and coherence, Woodward distinguishes reminiscence as more fragmentary than the life review, as a process concerned with a moment or moments from the past. With reference to psychoanalyst Christopher Bollas, she delineates how reminiscence is a social and psychic process, involving ‘the creation of a certain kind of mood, one that is generative or restorative’ (1997: 2). In this perspective, reminiscence is underwritten by hope. Cultural gerontology has shown that identity formation is closely connected with continual life reviewing, a process extending ‘well into old age’ (Ray 2000: 27), and thus life review is so often encapsulated within Bildungsromane of later life. The life review may involve reminiscence and dream elements, expressions of nostalgia or regret, and reconsideration as well as reorganization of past experiences (Butler 1963: 68). The process is suggestive of the path to wisdom, reflecting such ‘features of the personality as flexibility, resilience, and self-awareness’ (Butler 1963: 69). Revealing identity as being ‘constantly under construction’ (Ray 2000: 29), processes of life review revise dominant representations of older age and support Gullette’s ‘active concept of aging as selfnarrated identity’ (1997: 220). In fictional life review, the narrators are involved in the process of ‘storying’ and ‘restorying’ (Ray 2000: 28) their lives and identities, as they review and reminisce on their personal, relational, and contextualized pasts. They thus demonstrate the creative and regenerative potential of memory and imagination. These processes, given the mutable nature of memory, bring to the fore multiple selves in the course of ongoing transformation, unsettling the familiar and the traditional to open out space for the new (DeFalco 2010). As Amelia DeFalco demonstrates, life narratives are multiple, they look in various directions, and they may contain ambiguity, gaps, instabilities, and contradictions (2010: 26). As we will show in our analyses of selected recent Reifungsromane, such narratives of ageing not only disrupt linear conceptions of age as decline but can also be suggestive of meaning-making and creativity in later years.

JOURNEYS OF RIPENING IN RECENT FICTION In the following examples of journeys of ripening from contemporary Anglophone and European literature, as the protagonists find opportunities for reifung, variations may be observed on themes that suffuse the genre, such as social and geographical liminality, bereavement and loss, human or animal connection, and, centrally, personal growth. In connection, and in contrast to the traditional Bildungsroman, these works incorporate narrative devices such as life review and reminiscence. We focus on a selection of Reifungsromane featuring characters who seek to redefine or reinvent themselves in response to challenging experiences of loss or crisis. Centrally, the Reifungsroman often narrates an older woman’s rediscovery, redefinition, and integration of her younger self, whose wishes, desires, and ambitions have been on hold during years of marriage and child-raising or who realizes that her ageing self has outgrown former identity constructions. The protagonists are often women in their forties to sixties who become conscious of their outward signs of ageing and, in turn, their social and sexual invisibility.1 In recent novels, sometimes the protagonists are men, who also observe signs of their ageing, have to adapt to changes

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caused by retirement or bereavement, and are constrained by differently gendered social ideals, for instance, power, success, and physical and emotional strength. Women are affected by a social ‘double standard of ageing’ (Sontag 1972); thus scholarly work has concentrated on narratives of female development. However, contemporary mass-marketed ‘successful ageing’ also evokes fears about the relationship between ageing and male health, wealth, and virility (Calasanti and King 2005). As such, authors and scholars are increasingly attending to the stereotypes that affect men’s as well as women’s experiences of ageing. In this section, we consider women’s and men’s journeys of ageing in works by European and North American writers Monika Maron, Fredrik Backman, Siri Hustvedt, and Rachel Joyce. These texts, set in Germany, Sweden, Britain, and the United States, respectively, all focus on white, mainly middle-class protagonists whose quests for reassessment, new experiences, and personal growth are not impeded by economic precarity or social exclusion. Yet, as we will show, the traditionally middle-class genre of the Bildungsroman leaves room for explorations of failed or incomplete reifung, thereby allowing for critical interrogations of notions of progress and success, and suggesting alternative visions of ‘successful’ ageing as a communal and post-anthropocentric process. This is the case, for instance, in recent Irish novels by Sara Baume and Joseph O’Connor, which challenge the possibility of traditional notions of individual reifung and completion.

FEMALE REIFUNG IN WORKS BY MONIKA MARON, FREDRIK BACKMAN, AND SIRI HUSTVEDT Monika Maron’s character, Johanna Märtin, the protagonist of Endmoränen ([2002] 2004) (End Moraines) and Ach Glück (2007) (Oh Happiness), grapples with changes in her life in her mid-fifties. Like Kate Brown in Lessing’s The Summer before the Dark, she faces an empty nest, anticipating that her only daughter Laura, about to leave for America, will from now on feature in her life mainly as ‘Erinnerung und Sehnsucht [memory and longing]’ (2007: 103).2 Johanna’s job as a writer of historical biographies has lost its appeal and purpose, as the subversive messages she used to hide in her work to protest against the GDR (German Democratic Republic) regime are no longer needed in post-reunification Germany.3 Her marriage has gone stale, even though she has forgiven her husband Achim’s affair with a younger woman. Society’s ‘double standard of ageing’ (Sontag 1972) is filtered and voiced through his character; he fails to see how any man might have a ‘Faible für alternde Frauen [a weakness for ageing women]’ (Maron 2007: 95) and considers Johanna’s longing for change ridiculous in a woman her age (2007: 200). In Endmoränen, Johanna spends time alone in her rural holiday home to reflect upon her past and present, her ageing process, and what to do with the second half of her life, what she calls ‘öde lange Restzeit [tedious long remaining time]’ (Maron 2004: 55). Her initially bleak outlook is, however, alleviated by written and spoken conversations with friends, and by a brief affair with a younger man, Igor, affirming that she is still both sexually desiring and desirable. The sequel Ach Glück spans the duration of Johanna’s flight from Berlin to Mexico, with the narration alternating between chapters filtered through Johanna’s consciousness and those focalized through Achim, who wanders around Berlin seeking to assuage his growing fear of losing Johanna. This narrative choice throws into relief the discrepancy between Johanna’s journey of ripening and Achim’s refusal or inability to change. The narrative presents Johanna in a liminal space, neither here nor there – ‘zwischen den Zeiten, zwischen den Orten, zwischen den Sprachen [between times,

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between places, between languages]’ (Maron 2007: 88) – on her long transatlantic flight, without quite knowing what she hopes to find in Mexico. During her flight Johanna reflects on her life and the recent past, especially her encounters with Igor and the unexpected joy brought to her by Bredow, a dog she has rescued. She marvels at the dog’s capacity to find happiness in the moment and, in walking him, rediscovers her love of nature. These events inspire Johanna’s decision to accept her older friend Natalia’s invitation to join her on a quest to track down the elusive and eccentric artist Leonora Carrington in Mexico. The novel thus emphasizes the importance of female friendship and solidarity in older age as well as the need for positive older role models. The narrative ends with Johanna catching a glimpse of Natalia’s wide-brimmed, purple hat in the airport, a symbol of freedom, opportunity, and the subversive potential of women’s older age.4 A similar journey is narrated in Britt-Marie Was Here (2016), by Fredrik Backman, translated from the Swedish by Henning Koch, in which 63-year-old Britt-Marie leaves her cheating husband to embark on a challenging journey of transformation, undertaken in a liminal space and informed by connection with the social and natural world. Upon leaving her unhappy marriage, Britt-Marie gradually emerges from a cocoon of self-doubt and a lifetime of underappreciation. The balcony boxes that she takes with her on leaving their home, which ‘may look as if they only contain soil, but underneath there are flowers waiting for spring’ (37), symbolize that life is cyclical, with new growth and vitality. She finds a job as a caretaker at a recreation centre earmarked for closure in the run-down town of Borg. Just off the motorway, Borg represents a liminal space, recalling the space of the transatlantic flight in Ach Glück, where Britt-Marie finds an outlet for cultivation and growth. She becomes a mentor, friend, children’s soccer coach, and an object of romantic desire, connections that will be central to her development. In particular, the friendship that emerges between Britt-Marie and a girl, Vega, is a formative one for both, thus demonstrating the significance of generational connections between women for personal growth. Additionally, Britt-Marie fosters a connection with a rat that she feeds daily on the understanding that neither will abandon the other. She confides in the rat her childhood memories, and we learn that the principles of cleanliness and routine by which she lives result from a traumatic early life experience. Cleaning and organizing are her armour; however, they are also valuable skills, which, combined with newfound courage, enable Britt-Marie to bring coherence and energy to the community of Borg. Such skills in women are typically undervalued and disregarded as inconsequential to the public-sphere-orientated experience that informs the dominant male Bildungsroman. Furthermore, whereas the traditional female Bildungsroman typically ends in marriage, as the protagonist conforms to social expectations, this novel, not unlike Maron’s, remains open-ended, leaving BrittMarie with room for continued growth. Britt-Marie’s story suggests the importance of intergenerational connection and community, important aspects in many narratives of ripening. These aspects are further explored in Siri Hustvedt’s The Summer without Men (2011), in which the protagonist, 55-year-old poet Mia, faces a crisis when her husband of thirty years pauses their marriage to start an affair with a younger woman. After suffering a psychotic breakdown, Mia moves to a rented apartment in her native town in Minnesota where she initially bemoans her fate: ‘Now, menopausal, abandoned, bereft, and forgotten, I had nothing left’ (Hustvedt 2011: 66). However, during her ‘summer without men’ she rebuilds and even enjoys herself as she opens up to and becomes involved in the lives of the women around her, including the pubescent girls in her poetry class, her young neighbour with two small children, and the residents of a retirement complex, including her 87-year-old widowed mother

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and her circle of friends. These much older women, ‘the Five Swans’, serve as role models, who ‘shared a mental toughness and autonomy that gave them a veneer of enviable freedom’ (Hustvedt 2011: 9). In her engagement with these characters, Mia builds a relational identity, as the novel presents what Woodward calls a ‘a model of generational continuity’ in which ‘three generations are linked to each other through a heritage of care for the next generation’ (1999: 153). Reflecting on the journey of life, Mia notes, ‘however jumbled that past may be in our heads, we are always moving inexorably toward an end. In our minds, however, while we are still alive and our brains can still make connections, we may leap from childhood to middle age and back again’ (Hustvedt 2011: 210). In so doing she actively works through painful memories, such as her father’s death and brother-in-law’s suicide, continually analysing, re-positioning, and re-storying her younger self ’s experiences from different perspectives, learning from her fellow characters and creating a restorative mood in reminiscences with her mother and the ‘Swans’. Unlike Johanna and Britt-Marie, at the end of the novel it is clear that Mia will give her penitent husband a second chance, but she has come a long way from the distraught woman who spent a week in a psychiatric unit upon learning of his affair. Reconciliation becomes possible precisely due to her maturation process, facilitated by reminiscence, intergenerational friendships, and insight into human frailty.

MALE REIFUNG IN RACHEL JOYCE’S THE UNLIKELY PILGRIMAGE OF HAROLD FRY Literary texts engaging with male reifung remain scarce. As Billy Gray explains, with reference to Gullette (1997), many fictional representations of older men retain an ideology of personal identity as entwined with masculinity and sexual identity, and this sense of self can be threatened by the ageing process. It is thus essential that authors challenge these presumptions and engage with male ageing as a historical and contextual process so that the critique of traditional concepts of masculinity can be elaborated (Gray 2009: 22, 35).5 As the examples of female reifung discussed earlier indicate, life review, often prompted by experiences of change, loss, and crisis, is a necessary process in moving onward in older age. This is also the case in Rachel Joyce’s The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry ([2012] 2013), a recent example of a Reifungsroman in which, true to the conventions of the original Bildungsroman, a male protagonist embarks on an actual journey on foot. Harold, a recent retiree in his mid-sixties, receives an unexpected letter from his former colleague Queenie, who disappeared twenty years ago after committing a selfless act of friendship for Harold. Deeply upset by the news that Queenie has terminal cancer, Harold can only inadequately express his regret in the short reply he pens to her. However, on his way to post the letter, a girl tells him how her faith saved her aunt from terminal cancer. This chance meeting prompts Harold to embark on his ‘unlikely pilgrimage’ with the intention to personally deliver his letter to Queenie, driven by his faith that if he keeps walking, his friend will live. The novel is modelled on John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678), an early modern predecessor of the nineteenth-century Bildungsroman (Cole 1992: 34; Hartung 2016: 3). The protagonist Harold6 is a modern Everyman, whose spontaneous ‘pilgrimage’ changes his own dreary and hopeless life as well as triggers change and hope in others. Harold’s walk north across England, spanning more than 600 miles and taking several months, is symbolic of the journey of life (Cole 1992). It is a journey of spiritual recovery and self-discovery, as Harold’s physical journey is complemented by a journey inwards through which he relives and integrates memories from

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various life phases: ‘In walking, he unleashed the past that he had spent twenty years seeking to avoid, and now it chattered and played through his head’ (Joyce 2013: 113). In this regard, the text can additionally be read as a recovery novel (Gullette 2004). Harold’s memories entail traumatic scenes from his childhood and adult life, most crucially the gradual estrangement from his only son David, who committed suicide at the age of twenty. As he walks, Harold works through his feelings of guilt, inadequacy, and failure. He learns to forgive himself as well as others. This reifung is presented as a process of gradual rejuvenation symbolized by the blossoming of nature; Harold starts out in March and arrives at his destination in June. The many hardships of his journey, as well as his various encounters with friendly strangers, who encourage, assist, and confide in him, cause both outward and inward change. We learn that ‘passing his reflection in shop windows, the man staring back at him was so upright and appeared so sure-footed, he had to look twice to check it was really himself ’ (Joyce 2013: 178). When his wife Maureen meets him at a later point of his journey, she feels that ‘it was the paired-down vitality of him that made her tremble; as if he had at last become the man he should have been all along’ (Joyce 2013: 271–2). He gradually begins to feel closer to Maureen, with whom he has lived a life of silent hostility and endurance ever since their son’s death: ‘He thought of his wife, scrubbing away at stains he could not see. He felt in a strange way that he understood her better’ (Joyce 2013: 166). This understanding occurs partly through learning how to care for others – a stray dog who joins Harold for a while and a young troubled man who seems like a reincarnation of his dead son – as well as learning to let go when both eventually decide to part ways with him. At the end of his journey, there is hope for a new beginning with Maureen, who has undergone a similar internal process of change, albeit in the confines of their home, her development thus following the more conventional trajectory of the female Bildungsroman.7 While Harold’s life review is depicted as an isolated and partly painful process, at the end of the novel, as Maureen and Harold reminisce together, dwelling on happy memories from their early courtship, the importance of such shared memories is emphasized. Harold expresses his fear of getting Alzheimer’s like his father and losing these memories, invoking the cultural narrative of ageing as cognitive decline: ‘As I walked, I have been remembering so much. … Some of the memories have been hard. But some of them have been beautiful. … I’m frightened that one day, maybe soon, I will lose them again, and this time it will be forever’ (Joyce 2013: 345). Maureen, too, has a vision of old age involving decline and loss (Joyce 2013: 346), yet the book ends on a hopeful note as they face the future together: ‘They caught hands again, and walked together towards the water’s edge, two small figures against the black waves. Only halfway there, one of them must have remembered again and it passed like a fresh current of joy between them. They stood at the water’s edge, not letting go, and rocked with laughter’ (Joyce 2013: 347).

REIFUNG INTERRUPTED: SARA BAUME’S SPILL, SIMMER, FALTER, WITHER AND JOSEPH O’CONNOR’S GHOST LIGHT As the novels discussed so far demonstrate, journeys of ripening in both male and female characters tend to involve life review, reminiscence, and cyclical movement, although on a progressive path. In the process of change and growth, they bring pain as well as pleasure. Although the experience is personal, it does not tend to be solitary but draws strength from love, friendship, nature, and community. Yet such narratives of recovery, integration, and progress are not always entirely

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successful or complete. Several recent Irish novels explore the challenges of life review and reifung in older characters, for instance, those struggling to survive in adverse living conditions, as in Sara Baume’s Spill, Simmer, Falter, Wither (2015) and Joseph O’Connor’s Ghost Light (2010).8 In Baume’s novel, 57-year-old narrator Ray is an ageing and possibly autistic social outcast, who recognizes himself in and forms a bond with One Eye, a mangy, mistreated dog he adopts and saves from being euthanized. The novel is told in the second person, as a monologue addressed to One Eye, and as such is indicative of Ray’s exclusion from human community as well as his gradual movement towards a post-anthropocentric realm, where he begins to experience nature through the eyes and instincts of an animal. Ray, ‘an old man’ (Baume 2015: 12), who ‘has never been anywhere in the world’ (Baume 2015: 16), embarks on a road trip through rural Ireland to escape the authorities who he fears want to seize One Eye. In some respects, Ray’s journey through the natural world and the four seasons, as suggested by the book’s title, is reminiscent of Harold’s, yet it lacks positive and meaningful interactions with strangers, who avoid and shun him. As Ray opens up to the dog, his traumatic memories of a motherless, neglected childhood, his dependency in adulthood on his cold, domineering father, his social seclusion, and his father’s death, for which he feels responsible, gradually find expression. Yet Ray’s burgeoning insights into how society has failed him and his emotional reifung as he cares for and bonds with the dog do not lead to psychological or social integration. His journey on the outskirts of human society eventually ends when he runs out of money. Here, the circular journey, leading him back to his father’s house, ‘the saddest place in our whole small world’ (Baume 2015: 275), symbolizes a dead end. Setting One Eye free, Ray finds that suicide is his only way forward. In another example, in Joseph O’Connor’s Ghost Light (2010), as 67-year-old impoverished actress Molly Allgood navigates the streets of 1950s’ war-torn London, accompanied by reminiscence of moments from her past and a deceased lover felt as a ghostly but assuring presence, the confrontation between past and present identities brings about ‘a source of uncanniness’ (DeFalco 2010: 22) as the strange imposes on the familiar, unsettling secure identity. As with the character of Ray in Baume’s novel, Molly is a social outcast. As an Irish emigrant facing social marginalization, and living in poverty, her experience of ageing is informed by stereotypes and isolation (O'Neill 2017). Reminiscence of moments from her past, including glimpses of her life as an actor, sustains Molly on her journey across the city to take part in a radio play that will be her last performance. The difficulties of facing one’s ageing are revealed, for instance, when Molly is confronted with a portrait of an old woman in an art gallery and dwells on her own changing face and voice as well as her ‘fretfulness with age … troubled watchfulness of a child in an unfathomable world’ (O’Connor 2010: 59–60). However, Molly’s vibrant inner life counterbalances negative self-and-other perceptions of ageing, to reveal the many layers that comprise the ageing subject. For instance, in the same scene, Molly’s thoughts turn towards her own art on the stage: ‘Several years had passed since your greatest performances, but that did not seem to matter to the audience or the actors. And really, it didn’t matter to you. … You knelt to the ovation, touched your breast like a diva’ (65–6). She also recalls how when reporters described her as the playwright’s muse, she shifted their attention to her professional training (66). Such recollections strengthen and sustain Molly. Additionally, as in Baume’s novel, second-person narration is utilized, which has the effect of evoking a connection between Molly and the reader. Her journey represents one of creativity and defiance, as her inner world enriches her outer world and additionally allows her to confront social

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discrimination. However, the realities of the dynamics of inequalities accumulated over a lifecourse ultimately prevail, and the ending of the novel is bleak. While the characters in these incomplete Reifungsromane renegotiate their identities to an extent, such narratives raise questions about the possibility of coherency and consolidation. As Heather Ingman observes, there is also ‘the difficulty of moving towards greater self-realization in a postmodern world of fractured and unstable identities’ (2018: 109). This difficulty is exacerbated in characters trapped in precarious living conditions, marginalized by society, traumatized, or cognitively impaired. Given such complexities, the Reifungsroman is necessarily evolving while it yet supports protagonists to develop and expand in later life.9

CONCLUSION: THE MATURATION OF THE BILDUNGSROMAN The world is experiencing a ‘longevity revolution’, as the proportion of older people has seen considerable growth and is projected to continue increasing (United Nations 2019). Accordingly, we may expect to see the continued flourishing and development of these Bildungsromane of later life. As we engage with them, it will be important to acknowledge how older individuals’ lives, and the risks and opportunities they may encounter, have changed significantly in recent decades (United Nations 2019). By drawing on social and cultural gerontology, literary studies can inform new understandings of what ageing may mean in different contexts. Additionally, intersections of gender, race, class, and sexuality, or illness and disability, can inform the experience of ageing and may inflect the genre as it develops. For instance, as Hartung points out, the positive construction of ageing as progress and growth is complicated by experiences of dementia in later life, even though dementia narratives ‘also provide counter-narratives to a crisis discourse of age as inevitable decline by questioning the validity of notions of progress as linear development’ (2016: 3). Complicating and subverting linear, chronological, and traditional notions of ageing, contemporary Bildungsromane of later life attest to the need to do justice to the complexity, subjectivity, and richness of the lived experience of ageing. As society continues to denigrate age as a burden, such works, giving voice to older protagonists who traditionally might have been represented as secondary figures, are all the more important for supporting the cultural and intrinsic value of age. As Kaminsky observes, the cultural value of reminiscence has devalued alongside the position of elders in the community; therefore in its revaluation ‘nothing less than our attitude towards old people is at stake’ (1984: 137). Bringing to the foreground the personalized, relational, and embedded experiences of growing older, which are so often underrepresented in contemporary discourse, these fictional life stories can reframe the cultural decline narrative.

NOTES 1 A rare example of a protagonist in her mid-seventies is Lily Butler in Clare Boylan’s novel Beloved Stranger (1999). After completing her reifung by forging intergenerational friendships and undergoing life review after her husband’s illness and death, Lily realizes that ‘deep inside she would be sustained by the seed of her own life, reaching up for the light. There wasn’t much left of her life, but it was money unspent’ (252). For a detailed discussion of this novel as a Reifungsroman, see Schrage-Früh (2017). 2 All translations are ours. 3 For a discussion of Maron’s work in the context of GDR history, see Byrnes (2010).

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4 The image of the wide-brimmed, purple hat contains numerous intertextual references, including to surrealist artist and poet Meret Oppenheim’s poem ‘Oh große Ränder an meiner Zukunft Hut [Oh my wide-brimmed future’s hat]’ and to Jenny Joseph’s poem ‘Warning’, both of which envision women’s older age in positive and subversive ways. 5 Gray refers to men as making this challenge; however, we suggest authors more broadly due to recent examples of women depicting alternative characterizations of men’s ageing, and vice versa. 6 The protagonist’s first name Harold may also refer to Lord Byron’s long narrative poem Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1818), which features a young, world-weary traveller. 7 As Hartung notes with reference to The Pilgrim’s Progress, ‘Bunyan’s text has been read as central for exploring the cultural origins of the modern life course, which opened up the iconography of ageing (i.e. the ages of life and the journey metaphor) to women, who had been invisible in the medieval stages-of-life doctrine (Cole, Journey 26)’ (2016: 82). 8 Reifung is also shown to be incomplete for older characters struggling to integrate traumatic experiences and past identities, as in Irish novels Anne Enright’s The Green Road (2015) and John Banville’s The Sea (2005). Ingman (2018) analyses reifung and ageing in these novels. 9 On further novels exploring the limits of progress and development, see Hartung (2011).

REFERENCES Backman, F. (2016), Britt-Marie Was Here, trans. H. Koch, London: Sceptre. Banville, J. (2005), The Sea, London: Picador. Barnes, J. (2011), The Sense of an Ending, London: Jonathan Cape. Baume, S. (2015), Spill, Simmer, Falter, Wither, London: Penguin. Boylan, C. (1999), Beloved Stranger, London: Abacus. Bunyan, J. ([1678] 2008), The Pilgrim’s Progress, ed. R. Pooley, London: Penguin. Butler, R. N. (1963), ‘The Life Review: An Interpretation of Reminiscence in the Aged’, Psychiatry, 26 (1): 65–76. Byrnes, D. (2010), Rereading Monika Maron: Text, Counter-Text and Context, New York: Peter Lang. Byron, G. G. (1954), ‘Childe Harold's Pilgrimage’ (1812–1818), in A. S. B. Glover (ed.), Byron: Poems Selected, 160–90, London: Penguin. Calasanti, T., and N. King (2005), ‘Firming the Floppy Penis: Age, Class, and Gender Relations in the Lives of Old Men’, Men and Masculinities, 8 (1): 3–23. Cole, T. (1992), The Journey of Life: A Cultural History of Aging in America, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DeFalco, A. (2010), Uncanny Subjects: Ageing in Contemporary Narrative, Columbus: Ohio State University. Enright, A. (2015), The Green Road, London: Jonathan Cape. Falcus, S. (2013), ‘Addressing Age in Michèle Roberts’s Reader, I Married Him’, Contemporary Women’s Writing, 7 (1): 18–34. Gray, B. (2009), ‘ “Your Stay Must Be a Becoming”: Ageing and Desire in JM Coetzee’s Disgrace’, Nordic Journal of English Studies, 8 (3): 21–37. Gullette, M. M. (1988), Safe at Last in the Middle Years: The Invention of the Midlife Progress Novel, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Gullette, M. M. (1997), Declining to Decline: Cultural Combat and the Politics of the Midlife, Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. Gullette, M. M. (2004), Aged by Culture, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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Hartung, H. (2011), ‘The Limits of Development? Narratives of Growing Up / Growing Old in Narrative’, Amerikastudien, 56 (1): 45–66. Hartung, H. (2016), Ageing, Gender and Illness in Anglophone Literature: Narrating Age in the Bildungsroman, New York: Routledge. Hartung, H. (2019), ‘Reifungsroman / Vollendungsroman / Bildungsroman’, in D. Gu and M. E. Dupre (eds), Encyclopedia of Gerontology and Population Aging, Cham: Springer. Hirsch, M. (1979), ‘The Novel of Formation as Genre: Between Great Expectations and Lost Illusions’, Genre, 12: 293–311. Hustvedt, S. (2011), The Summer without Men, London: Sceptre. Ingman, H. (2018), Ageing in Irish Writing: Strangers to Themselves, Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. Joyce, R. ([2012] 2013), The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry, London: Black Swan. Kaminsky, M. (1984), ‘The Uses of Reminiscence’, Journal of Gerontological Social Work, 7 (1–2): 137–56. Laurence, M. ([1964] 1993), The Stone Angel, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Lessing, D. ([1973] 2002), The Summer before the Dark, New York: HarperCollins. Maron, M. ([2002] 2004), Endmoränen, Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Verlag. Maron, M. (2007), Ach Glück, Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Verlag. O’Connor, J. (2010), Ghost Light, London: Vintage. O’Neill, M. (2017), ‘ “This Is How Time Unfolds When You Are Old”: Ageing, Subjectivity, and Joseph O’Connor’s Ghost Light’, in C. McGlynn, M. O’Neill and M. Schrage-Früh (eds), Ageing Women in Literature and Visual Culture: Reflections, Refractions, Reimaginings, 289–302, Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. Oró-Piqueras, M. (2014), ‘Memory Revisited in Julian Barnes’s The Sense of an Ending’, Coolabah, 13: 87–95. Oró-Piqueras, M. (2015), ‘The Complexities of Female Aging: Four Women Protagonists in Penelope Lively’s Novels’, Journal of Aging Studies, 36: 10–16. Pamuk, Ç. A. (2020), ‘Memory, Identity and Old Age: The Sense of an Ending as the Story of Ageing’, Cankaya University Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences, 14 (2): 229–39. Ray, R. E. (2000), Beyond Nostalgia: Aging and Life-Story Writing, Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia. Roberts, M. (2004), Reader, I Married Him, New York: Little, Brown. Rooke, C. (1992), ‘Old Age in Contemporary Fiction: A New Paradigm of Hope’, in T. R. Cole, D. D. Van Tassel and R. Kastenbaum (eds), Handbook of the Humanities and Aging, 241–57, New York: Springer. Schrage-Früh, M. (2016), Philosophy, Dreaming and the Literary Imagination, Cham: Palgrave. Schrage-Früh, M. (2017), ‘ “Embarking, Not Dying”: Clare Boylan’s Beloved Stranger as Reifungsroman’, in C. McGlynn, M. O’Neill, and M. Schrage-Früh (eds), Ageing Women in Literature and Visual Culture: Reflections, Refractions, Reimaginings, 55–71, Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. Sontag, S. (1972), ‘The Double Standard of Aging’, The Saturday Review, 23 September 1972: 29–38. United Nations (2019), World Population Ageing 2019 Highlights, New York: Department of Economic and Social Affairs Population Division. Waxman, B. F. (1985), ‘From “Bildungsroman” to “Reifungsroman”: Aging in Doris Lessing’s Fiction’, Soundings. An Interdisciplinary Journal, 68 (3): 318–34. Waxman, B. F. (1990), From the Hearth to the Open Road: A Feminist Study of Aging in Contemporary Literature, Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.

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Woodward, K. (1997), ‘Telling Stories, Aging, Reminiscence and the Life Review’, Doreen B. Townsend Center Occasional Papers 9, UC Berkeley: Doreen B Townsend Center for the Humanities. Woodward, K. (1999), ‘Inventing Generational Models: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, Literature’, in K. Woodward (ed.), Figuring Age: Women, Bodies, Generations, 149–68, Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

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CHAPTER TWO

Drama: Performing age, fighting ageism VALERIE BARNES LIPSCOMB

During the past decade, a lively international conversation has developed among scholars who take an age-studies approach to dramatic texts. As a literary genre, of course, drama is unique in that it is meant to be performed; it is by nature a slippery text, simultaneously complete and incomplete, suggestive, a road map of sorts leading to multiple destinations in individual productions and iterations of performance. Although drama over the centuries has often foregrounded stock characters that sustain negative stereotypes of ageing and older age, age-studies critics are attracted to contemporary drama’s myriad possibilities of representing the full lifecourse. As Lawrence Switzky notes in the introduction to a Modern Drama special issue on ageing, ‘the public, communal circumstances of theatre are just as able to expose an audience’s complicity in reifying and collapsing the pluralism of age as they are to reinforce it’ (2016: 135). Those circumstances also mean that scholarship in contemporary dramatic literature draws just as much on theatre and performance studies as it does on literary theory. While some critics are grounded mostly in textual studies and others mostly in performance, the nature of the genre requires addressing all the elements that culminate in a particular production. Much of the interest in contemporary ‘postdramatic’ theatre is relevant to studies of the dramatic text as well. Accordingly, this chapter will address recent work at the intersection of literary, theatre, and age studies, then indicate possible new directions by analysing a documentary theatre script.

RECENT SCHOLARSHIP Most age-studies scholarship in contemporary drama traces its roots to Anne Davis Basting’s The Stages of Age: Performing Age in Contemporary American Culture (1998), which examines performances varying from senior theatre to butoh dance to Carol Channing’s revival of her starring role in Hello, Dolly! Basting employs performance theory to shine a light on what had been a glaring gap in theatre criticism, which generally had ignored issues of age and ageing while thoroughly interrogating other aspects of identity. Particularly influential has been Basting’s concept of viewing the body in temporal depth, ‘literally to see time across space. It is to witness the event of ageing, to anticipate the changes the body will produce, and to remember changes already passed’ (141). More recently, scholars such as Bridie Moore (2014) and Julia Henderson (2016) have applied Basting’s model, which extends perception beyond an older body on stage, to contemplate all ages that the body has been.

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Fifteen years passed after Basting’s book before another monograph was devoted to ageing and drama. Michael Mangan’s Staging Ageing: Theatre, Performance and the Narrative of Decline addresses how drama, theatre, and performance engage with older age as an experience, an idea, or a sociocultural category (2013: 175). His broad scope ranges from Greek stock characters to a British radio play, and he analyses performances of the dramatic texts whenever possible. His explanation of method applies to much of the criticism in this subfield: An emphasis on the performed text is particularly appropriate in relation to the theme of ageing, because in theatrical performance the physical presence of the actor’s body itself – and the way that that body is used in conjunction with the codes and conventions of movement, gesture, make-up and costume – inevitably becomes one of the theatrical signs from which the audience constructs meanings. (2013: 6) This book also offers an especially valuable section on memory and reminiscence, but it serves more broadly as an introduction to the multiple considerations of age, drama, and performance. Relating to the larger age-studies conversation now under way on representations of dementia and care, several scholars have turned their attention to performance of and accommodations for medical challenges. Núria Casado-Gual (2015, 2016) notes that the plays of Joanna McClelland Glass foreground middle-aged and older characters, portraying progress as well as decline in a rounded representation of the truths of ageing. Bridie Moore (2017, 2022) and Benjamin Gillespie (2018) each engage with Peggy Shaw’s unique performance piece Ruff, created after Shaw experienced a stroke. Playwright / director Julia Gray (Gray et al. 2020) has been part of a multidisciplinary team studying ways to reduce the stigma of cognitive impairment, revolving around the researchinformed play Cracked: New Light on Dementia. Critic Julia Henderson (2019) examines two regional Canadian productions that each featured a performer with significant memory loss. She describes the methods used in staging the plays as the ‘dramaturgy of assistance’, identifying that they ‘embraced and foregrounded the relational and embodied selfhoods of the performers, and in doing so highlighted the performers’ musical talents and the strength of their relationships, rather than casting them as a curious “weird other”. This resulted in deeply affecting performances that served to counter dementia narratives of loss, tragedy, moral failing and horror’ (2019: 72–3). Several of these productions challenge the valorization of memorizing lines, traditionally the cornerstone of performing the dramatic text. In addition to performers’ adjusting to cognitive change, more and more plays (e.g. Sharr White’s 2011 The Other Place, Florian Zeller’s 2012 The Father, Stephen Karam’s 2015 The Humans, Jordan Harrison’s 2015 Marjorie Prime) address the subject of cognitive impairment, indicating that this branch of age-studies criticism will continue to develop. Building from the foundation Basting laid, drama critics primarily have viewed age both as more conscious performance and more unconscious performative, asserting that we really do ‘act our age’, and that the performative nature of age is nowhere more evident than in contemporary drama. The application of performativity to age traces theoretically from Judith Butler (1993), who posited gender as performative. An individual constantly performs actions associated with a chronological age; the repeated performances then constitute a perceived reality of age, both for the subject and for anyone interacting with the subject (Lipscomb and Marshall 2010: 2). This perspective has been fruitful in analysing canonical works by playwrights from Thornton Wilder and Paula Vogel to Athol Fugard and Brian Friel. My work during the past decade or so has focused

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on performativity and the construction of the self, particularly in the memory play. This subgenre, usually identified as dating back to Tennessee Williams’s 1944 The Glass Menagerie, features a character whose memories are portrayed on stage. I argue that works such as Menagerie and Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman (1949) represent a longing for an ageless self, demonstrated by performing different ages without any physical alteration or acknowledgement (Lipscomb 2012, 2014, 2016a, b; Lipscomb and Marshall 2010). Even those not specializing in drama / theatre, such as leading age-studies scholars Kathleen Woodward (2006) and Margaret Morganroth Gullette (2004), have found theories of performance useful to their examinations of age. While most drama-focused age-studies scholars have been concerned with age performativity, eminent theatre scholar Elinor Fuchs (2014) in an award-winning essay addresses older selfperformance and recognition in drama through the lens of Bertolt Brecht’s famous alienation effect. Fuchs exposes the ageism that can underlie typical dramatic structure, noting that the peak-anddecline narrative so roundly criticized in age studies also is the traditional plot trajectory associated with Aristotelian drama. However, she argues, Bertolt Brecht offers an alternative for age studies as he does for theatre. Fuchs takes up the Brechtian approach in more depth in a 2016 essay, ‘Rehearsing Age’, asserting that Brecht’s epic theatre can result in a process-oriented, lifecourse perspective.

MOVING FORWARD IN DRAMA AND AGE STUDIES Brecht’s theories are useful as age-studies scholars become increasingly vocal about identifying and fighting ageism in all aspects of theatre, from discriminatory casting practices to the stereotypical characters and plots that dominate the mainstream stage. In this chapter, I extend Fuchs’s argument to conclude that plays that do not concentrate on just one aged protagonist or follow the wellmade plotline may hold the most promise for disrupting the ageist decline narrative. I offer the evolution of Old Enough to Know Better: Aging Well in Sarasota, a recent documentary theatre production in an area of Florida known for its older population, as a possibility for moving forward in drama and age studies. In this play, multiple characters reflect on the past, crafting fluid age performances in conjunction with temporal shifts. As the play’s script became increasingly Brechtian from the first version to the final production, I contend it became more effective in counteracting the decline narrative that continues to pervade the presentation of ageing in Western culture. Through this study, I hope to integrate the numerous threads of age-studies work in drama – not only traditional textual analysis, but also creating plays, examining mise-en-scène, encouraging audience reflection, and effecting social change – to address the contemporary call for activist, anti-ageist drama. In the 2014 article, Fuchs coins a term for the epiphany that occurs in some canonical plays: In the great plays that depict age and impending death not as comic spectacle, but from the inside, as living experience, there often comes a moment that could impel the nomadic gerontologist back to Brecht to borrow his term Verfremdung, usually translated as ‘alienation’ or ‘estrangement’. ‘Estragement’, as I conceive it, without the ‘n’, producing a hybrid of ‘age’ and ‘strange’, is not so much a perceptual / political moment, as in Brecht, but a late-life developmental moment in which the familiar also becomes strange. In an age-conscious Verfremdung scene the ageing figures may see as if for the first time, or the scene may depict a late-life experience in which

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the old are estranged from their former selves and look back with astonishment on their past limitations. (2014: 76–7) Fuchs here extends Brecht’s most famous theatrical concept to the portrayal of the lived experience of ageing. Brecht ([1964] 1992) contrasts what he calls epic theatre with the theatrical tradition that dates back to Aristotle. While Aristotelian drama emphasizes a tightly woven, linear plot that captivates the audience so that spectators empathize with characters, becoming ‘lost’ in the play, Brechtian epic theatre disrupts linearity and empathy. Opposed to Aristotle’s advocacy of unity in time, place and action, the Brechtian narrative may be episodic, a ‘montage’, jumping in time and place, and employing various devices to prevent the audience from identifying closely with the action ([1964] 1992: 37). For example, his famous work Mother Courage and Her Children ([1939] 1996) covers a dozen years without a clear, specific sense of setting in each scene, and placards announce what is about to happen, removing the element of suspense. In production, Brecht instructed actors to ‘demonstrate’ their characters rather than become them. This approach is intended to alienate the audience from full involvement in the play, producing the Verfremdungseffekt, or alienation effect. Brecht’s stated purpose was to keep the audience outside the emotions of the play, rationally studying the issue or argument being presented. While Brecht’s ideas were seldom fully realized on stage, they profoundly affected the course of twentieth-century theatre. Fuchs’s 2016 article argues that Brecht deserves continued attention as we build the intersection of age studies and dramatic criticism. Brecht’s chart claims that Aristotelian drama is centred on the ‘unalterable’ human who has his ‘eyes on the finish’ in a linear course, which Fuchs notes corresponds with the traditional ageing narrative of peak, decline, and focus on death (Fuchs 2016: 147). Conversely, the Brechtian epic theatre suggests a ‘more flexible account of the life trajectory, where a human life (as in one of Brecht’s plays) would be seen as a “process” and the human subject as both “alterable” and “able to alter”. A life on this side of the ledger moves in surprising ways, in “curves and jumps”, not simply in foretold steps leading to the grave’ (Fuchs 2016: 148).

A BRECHTIAN APPROACH TO COUNTER AGEISM With Fuchs’s argument in mind, I assert that a theatre that intends to disrupt the ageist decline narrative could well choose to craft a script that follows multiple older characters rather than one older protagonist and follows multiple disjointed narratives rather than the traditional unified plot arc. If the theatre intends to take more of a lifecourse perspective, a Brechtian approach may be more successful. And, that is the course that I contend the script took for Old Enough to Know Better (Cannon 2015) a documentary play about ageing that resulted from two years of theatre and research collaboration under the direction of Jason Cannon, Associate Artist at Florida Studio Theatre (FST) in Sarasota, Florida. As Kathy Black and I outlined in the Journal of Aging Studies (2017), FST leaders have a long-standing commitment to devising theatre that reflects its community, where more than half of the local population is at least fifty years old. They began by conducting more than 200 hours of interviews with older area residents as well as consulting local professionals in gerontology and elder care. Black and I served as consultants throughout the project, as FST was committed to ensuring that the final script was theoretically sound and demographically representative. As the theatre’s staff collaborated with professional actors to

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develop the script, drafts were presented as staged readings to the interviewees, academicians, theatre supporters, and local leaders in ageing services. Each reading was followed by a talkback to gather feedback on the work in progress. The eventual public production, Old Enough to Know Better, was a seventy-five-minute script presented to more than eight hundred people during a ten-day run, cast with eight professional actors. The script was then trimmed to one hour using six actors for a tour reaching nearly six hundred people in nine area locations, such as retirement communities and senior centres. To develop the script, the staff combed interview transcripts for recurring themes and narratives that would be particularly engaging as drama, resulting in an introduction to and overview of experiences of ageing among community members. Rather than verbatim theatre, which is limited to the exact words of interviewees, Old Enough to Know Better takes a documentary stance by using the actual interview material but crafting composite characters. The eight actors in the fullscale production – four older than fifty, four younger – played multiple characters. While the audience could not always easily differentiate characters from one monologue or dialogue to the next, the show focused on six male and six female central characters in addition to several brief roles, such as interviewers asking questions. This bit of artistic licence not only allows for greater comprehension, cohesion, and attention to aesthetic considerations, but also has the benefit of including more interviewees’ narratives on stage. The script specifies that the ages of the actors ‘intentionally subvert the presentation of age’ in the scenes involving couples – a younger-looking actor is paired with an older-looking actor, regardless of the ages they play. The main characters are not highly differentiated on stage and do not call each other by name, in order to emphasize their responses as representative and to enhance the audience’s ability to identify with their thoughts. They also do not have a through-line of character and plot development individually, although the script returns to the same characters. Each vignette stands alone. Focusing on individual stories and everyday experiences, the play also trains a spotlight on particularly thought-provoking narratives that may surprise audiences of any age. While the theatre company members who crafted the interview materials into a play did not purposely follow Brechtian principles as they compiled and revised, a comparison of the first and final versions of the full-length script reveals that it became more Brechtian during the revision process. This trend coincided with editing the script’s length, as less and less exposition and contextual material were retained. From the first draft of the full script to the final version, more than 8,000 words were trimmed, taking the play from about 22,000 to about 14,000 words. In a Brechtian manner (see Figure 2.1), the streamlined full script was more of a ‘montage’, so rather than painting one full picture and building from one scene to the next, it presented ‘each scene for itself ’. Examples of comparison in three traditional areas of interest in theatre – casting, setting, and plot – show that the script moved more clearly to the epic theatre side of Brecht’s comparison chart, rather than the traditional Aristotelian method that Brecht called ‘dramatic theatre’. The casting notes for the play detail that the actors chosen should represent a range of ages. In the first version of the script, those notes simply give age ranges for each performer, such as twenties or sixties, and specify that each performer will play multiple characters. The final version is much more explicit about subverting the notion of age-appropriate casting. The notes say, for example, ‘Actress 3 and Actor 2 can be cast anywhere in their mid 20s-40s, as long as they definitely appear to be of a different / younger generation than their respective partner, and they also need to be able to convey “weight”, as in experience and life authority, so that their portrayal of older

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FIGURE 2.1  Table / List ‘Dramatic Theatre vs. Epic Theatre’ from ‘The Modern Theatre Is the Epic Theatre’ from Brecht on Theatre, edited and translated by John Willett. Translation copyright © 1964, renewed 1992 by John Willett. Reprinted by permission of Hill and Wang, a division of Farrar, Straus and Giroux. All rights reserved.

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characters reads as theatrically provocative rather than ludicrous / unbelievable.’1 The final version also points out the lack of congruity and continuity in the characters’ ages, that they seem fluid at times: ‘They’ll say they are one age, but then later they’ll mention being married 60 years and the math doesn’t work. THAT’S OK.’ The final script disrupts not only casting for a particular character’s age, but also the very concept of stable age, preventing the audience from following an unbroken thread of characterization. The Brechtian device creates distance between audience and performance, while presenting a broader range of the experiences of ageing.

ALIENATION TECHNIQUES IN STAGING The Brechtian alienation techniques most evident in Old Enough involve the staging guidelines. Throughout the scripting process, scenery was always minimalist, never intending to realistically replicate a living room or interview setting. However, scenery was further simplified from the first version to the final one: initially, actors used a doorframe on wheels to indicate the passage of time and the connection of the younger self to the older self. By the final version, that doorframe is absent; the only requirement is a chair for each actor. As Brecht recommends, the play does not adhere at all to Aristotle’s unities of time, place, and action. The script describes the setting as Sarasota ‘And wherever the memories take us. Time and space – like memory – are entirely fluid’. For example, one character begins to recount a memory, then the cast starts to portray the story on stage as if it is taking place in the present, without any overt staging shifts. It becomes clear that the point about ageing made in each vignette is the focus, not the individual character or plot arc. And rather than memorizing lines and transforming into characters, actors carry scripts and address the audience directly when they are responding to interviewers’ questions. These staging measures make the play flexible for production in a variety of spaces, so that the theatre could adapt the script to tour in the community as well as mount a full version in the FST space. Moreover, carrying a script and stripping down the staging choices remind the audience that this is documentary theatre, the real words of real people, rather than a fictional narrative in which to escape from everyday concerns. The script was divided into ‘chapters’ rather than scenes, providing delineation while emphasizing a narrative approach, noting that the characters were sharing parts of their life stories. While the doorframe disappears from the script in later iterations, the final version adds a staging element that is quintessentially Brechtian: projections of chapter headings and memorable quotations. The play is divided into sections focussed on various topics related to ageing, each introduced by a projection of the heading and a quotation about ageing, accompanied by a few bars from a song. The prologue, for example, uses ‘When I’m 64’ by The Beatles, and this quotation from Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables (1862): ‘There is an unspeakable dawn in happy old age.’ An actor announces the title of each chapter and the quotation, again creating distance between audience and performance. The announcement also enables the play to tour without the projections while maintaining the integrity of the script and some of the distance within the narrative. Even as the projections continuously remind the audience that they are watching a play, within the chapters actors offer additional quotations about ageing as transitions when the conversation shifts. These interjections prevent the audience from becoming ‘lost’ in the action. Another choice that relates to staging is that the interviewees devote most of their energy to explaining what they have experienced in the past rather than working through any current issues. The interview transcripts then naturally align more with the Brechtian mode of demonstrating

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rather than committed embodiment; the actors and characters are not quite living the moment but are recalling past moments. The final script makes this most explicit: At all times (unless specifically noted) resist the maudlin or the heavy. Even when talking about deeply emotional things, there is the distance of time and reflection, and the good humor of lessons learned and shared. Emotional responses are those of people looking back and having a present tense response rather than the initial response in the past. REFLECTING is more effective here than RE-LIVING. Brecht asks actors to illustrate or show the character rather than become the character, a feat more easily described than accomplished. The interviewees’ focus on past experiences recalled in the present provides that Brechtian distancing within the content of the play, encouraging audience members to recognize and ponder the issues raised.

BRECHTIAN PLOT DESIGN From the first draft to the final play, the differences in casting and staging are clear, but the shift in plot arc is more subtle. Of course, Aristotle in Poetics (Janko trans. 2010) singled out plot as the most essential element of drama. The concept of what would constitute a traditional plot developed over time, and, in 1863, Gustav Freytag’s Technique of the Drama ([1863] 1968) codified its elements in what came to be known as Freytag’s Pyramid: exposition, an inciting incident of conflict, rising action, climax, falling action, and denouement. Contemporary Western audiences expect some adherence to this model in the vast majority of plays, even if that structure is as basic as building to a point of highest tension towards the end of the play, followed by an identifiable release of that tension. As Old Enough employs composite characters and is more oriented to vignette than to unified plot, it offers an intriguing response to audience expectations for traditional plot elements. Both the initial and the final versions of the script begin with an enactment of the phenomenon that Kathleen Woodward (1991) theorizes as the mirror stage of old age, the rejection of the aged physical reflection. The initial draft incorporates the doorframe as actors who are at least twenty years apart in apparent chronological age enter: (Lights up on an empty doorframe. The sound of radio static, someone trying to tune in to various songs … finally tunes in to Sinatra ‘A VERY GOOD YEAR.’ ACTRESS 1 and 4 enter, simply crossing the stage from opposite directions, but as they pass the doorframe, they stop. They have sensed each other. They approach the doorframe. Examine it. Spin it – and each other – until the frame is perpendicular to the audience and they are in profile.)           ACTRESS 1     I pass by windows and I …           ACTRESS 4     … I just see this old lady …           ACTRESS 1 and 4     … and I don’t know who she is.           ACTRESS 4     But I’m not old.           ACTRESS 1     I’m too busy to be old.

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The scene then continues to establish that age will be pliable, not limited to chronology or appearance, reflecting how characters feel. One character soon states, ‘If you use me in the play, I want you to cast me with someone who’s 20.’ The character points to another, younger actor, who then continues the speech: ‘That’s how old I feel.’ The exchange represents theatrically the fluidity of the sense of the ageing self (Lipscomb 2016a), while explaining to the audience why not all of the actors performing a play about ageing are older. The opening also prepares the audience for a play outside the general contemporary understanding of realism, which is underscored in the final version of the script as even the basic doorframe is omitted from the set. Regarding exposition, the script describes the project from which the play stems, but the extent to which the play explicitly announces its purpose fluctuated during the revision process. Some versions of the script were much more intentional about explaining to the audience that the show does not attempt to characterize every possible aspect of ageing, that it is not able to reflect every possible voice in the community. I contend this fluctuation correlates with the formative feedback from stakeholders throughout the development process: they would point out a demographic or aspect of ageing that the script lacked, and the playwriting team would try to address that omission. The early version thus prioritizes presenting the range of interview responses – for example, how important sex is to one couple, and that another couple is content with not having sex anymore at all. The final version still illustrates a broad spectrum of experiences but attends more to whether a particular story is intriguing. The fully developed script leans towards not explaining itself, not belabouring the background of the interviewing project; it takes a more Brechtian stance. There is less of the Aristotelian orientation to the world of the play, which traditionally helps the audience enter the drama and become enthralled. Gone is the initial version’s overview, such as ‘We interviewed almost a hundred people, most of them here in Sarasota’, and ‘These are your words; these are your stories.’ The final script still does include a few of the interviewees’ responses about the nature of the project, such as one character’s asking, ‘You want me to sign a release?’ and another’s comment: ‘I mean that’s a responsibility of plays of this type, is to make a person feel that they are still a part of society.’ What remains is a sense of the process that resulted in the play rather than a general introduction to the project. The background has been pared down to target individual narratives. The Brechtian choice of narrative rather than plot arc, of compartmentalized scenes rather than sustained and linear development, is clearly the framework for Old Enough. The script evolved to focus more tightly on self-contained stories, not on a series of mini-plots involving each main character. Some of the interviewees’ words eventually were edited to remove extraneous sentences that did not add directly to the narrative. In other instances, a portion of the narrative was omitted that may have constituted an interesting story but was not directly relevant to the subject of ageing. Over time, fewer of the interviewers’ questions remained, such as ‘Do you have a favourite song?’ That query recurred seven times in the first version, offered as a sort of motif, but in effect it seemed repetitive. As the script was finalized, in order to reflect the prevalence of a particular interview response, multiple actors voice the response, such as several separate characters referring to dying as the process of life or the body ‘shutting down’. Although there is no unified, linear plot to be identified, the dozens of stakeholders who offered formative feedback during the development process preferred some basic Aristotelian delineation of beginning, middle, and end, especially a solid sense of climax and resolution. It could be a cause for dismay that the script turned to the topic of death to provide the climax and ending of a documentary

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play about growing old. This would appear to reinforce Western culture’s master narrative of decline, which Margaret Morganroth Gullette (2004) identified years ago and which continues to dominate narratives of older age. However, addressing death was a natural reflection of the interviews, which the stage directions note: ‘In almost 100 interviews, the two topics our interviewees (ages 55 to 101) talked about most eagerly and consistently were sex and death. Especially with death, there is a familiarity and even ease with the topic. Again … not melodramatic or self-pitying. And zero shame or embarrassment.’ The final script thus attempts to prevent performance choices that would feed into the stereotypes regarding older people’s sexuality and their attitudes about mortality. The handling of death as a topic and as a climax most definitely morphed from the initial script to the final one, resulting in smoother transitions and subversion of stereotypes. The first version places a brief story about responding to death in a section designated as an epilogue. Although the story itself was uplifting, that placement gestures towards the master narrative of death-as-inevitablefinality; it was the last episode of the play’s first version. The final version’s ­chapter 5, entitled ‘Companionship’, slowly turns to the topic of losing spouses and partners, which leads naturally into ­chapter 6, ‘A Good Death’. This section starts about two-thirds of the way through the play and serves as the climactic chapter, unquestionably the height of dramatic tension. It occupies about ten of the sixty-four pages, so that there are only ten pages left in the play after the culmination of the death section – reflecting the dramatic convention for the falling action of a play to be much shorter than the rising action. In the final version, an actor who portrays a dying character leaves the stage permanently at the end of ­chapter 6, signalling the finality of death. However, it is not an actor who plays one of the recurring characters who exits, so it heightens the poignancy of loss without affecting the episodic nature of the action. Most of the interviews rejected the notion that facing one’s mortality is frightening or depressing. Therefore, as one character recalls a memorial service in which the deceased had left a final wish asking the mourners to dance, the script indicates that all the characters dance on stage, first reluctantly, then joyfully. Death is recast as a celebration of life; more importantly, the play does not end there. In the final version of the script, the section on death is followed by two more chapters, one about notions of time and the final chapter, ‘If Youth But Knew’, which dispels misconceptions about ageing. The ending of the final script returns to the mirror metaphor established at the beginning of the play, but demonstrates acceptance of the image rather than rejection:            ACTRESS 3     You look in the mirror …            ACTOR 3     … and you get to the point where you really understand yourself …            ACTRESS 3     … the good things …            ACTOR 3     … and the bad.            ACTRESS 4 and ACTOR 4    (a discovery)     And you really like what you see. While this resolution may seem too neatly contrived, it is firmly rooted in the interview transcripts. These mirror-theme responses obviously serve as a dramatic frame for the action, reassuring

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the audience in a traditional comic manner rather than fully unsettling the audience as Brecht advocates. The show ends with another quotation: ‘Beautiful young people are accidents of nature, but beautiful old people are works of art. – Eleanor Roosevelt.’ Thus, the Brechtian elements balance with the need for dramatic closure that can be difficult to achieve in a non-linear narrative arc. The final slide adds one more layer of resolution to the play, while meeting the dual goals of presenting ageing as an issue and presenting high-quality art on stage.

AUDIENCE RECEPTION As one of my overarching aims is to suggest that creating and examining purposefully anti-ageist theatre should be an ongoing goal for scholars working at this intersection, one more component of dramatic analysis should be addressed: audience reception. Did the script indeed fight ageism, and if so, how and for whom? That certainly was an intention, as the play evolved from staged readings of drafts for an invited audience, including interviewees, academicians, theatre supporters, and leaders in local ageing services – all of whom were concerned with accurate depictions of older people that would combat ageist stereotypes. The final version then was staged at the theatre and promoted to a general audience, but that does not mean that the show reached younger community members. The US theatre audience tends to be older than the general population. As an example, according to the Broadway League website, for 2018–19 (2019), ‘The average age of the Broadway theatregoer was 42.3 years old. This average has hovered between 40 and 45 years old for the past two decades.’ Weil and Lefkowitz (2019) note that the ageing of the live-theatre audience demographic can cause alarm among theatre-makers, who continue to be youthful and youth oriented. However, the case can be made that most scripts being produced and published ignore the reality of the current older theatre audience, that they primarily reflect the younger demographic of typical theatre practitioners. Such bias is explored in Kathleen Woodward’s remarks, which pertain to the film About Schmidt but can apply equally to theatre: ‘The youthful structure of the look – that is, the culturally induced tendency to degrade and reduce an older person to the prejudicial category of old age – also underwrites, I would argue, the relation of the spectator to the characters in the film. The spectator is positioned as younger and thus as superior to Schmidt (or vice versa)’ (Woodward 2006: 164). Scripts often assume a younger subject position, while the reality is that the current theatrical audience does not skew young. Simply creating authentic theatre about and by the actual demographic in the audience, so often underrepresented on stage, can be a powerful anti-ageist tool to educate theatre practitioners as well as audience members. The public performances of Old Enough included talkbacks that were recorded for academic analysis, which found that the play counters older people’s internalized ageism and fosters greater acceptance about the circumstances of others’ ageing. Responses emphasized how much attendees identified with the events and attitudes performed on stage. It was common, also, to hear older audience members’ pleasant surprise at identifying with the play, as they had believed that they were alone in their attitudes. Their experiences were acknowledged, normalized, and valued. Although this project is part of a slight positive trend in recent years towards portraying older adults in significant roles on stage, it remains a priority to create and promote theatre mimetic of the full lifecourse, to use drama to fight ageism.

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CONCLUDING THOUGHTS Rather than discuss Old Enough to Know Better as a model to be replicated, I offer it as one example of a collaboration involving every perspective of age-studies dramatic scholarship, moving towards advocating anti-ageist theatre and effecting social change. As Anna Harpin notes, ‘Theatre’s capacity to throw light on the splintered space between appearance and reality, its capacity to dramatize the constructedness of language and image, its capacity to testify to the volatility of meaning and truth, render it a striking form for the imagining and negotiation of sociocultural identity’ (2012: 68). Returning to Fuchs’s correlation between Brechtian theatre and a lifecourse perspective, I believe identifying Brechtian elements in the production of Old Enough to Know Better provides insight into how and why this play resonated with audiences. It strikes a balance by assuring the audience that the words are those of real people, their neighbours, allowing identification and empathy without Aristotelian immersion into another dramatic world. A collage of narratives creates multi-vocal representation of the diverse older community. The play successfully challenges stereotypes of ageing while negotiating the audience’s expectations about a traditional play structure and a traditional view of ageing. The Brechtian approach to documentary theatre about ageing thus holds promise for other theatre groups who want to reflect their community’s concerns and for critics to move forward the public conversation about ageing and ageism. Thanks to Jason Cannon and Florida Studio Theatre for access to the archival copies of the preliminary and final versions of the script of Old Enough to Know Better.

NOTE 1 Because the various versions of the script are unpublished, I am using descriptive phrases rather than page numbers to indicate where in the scripts I’ve quoted.

REFERENCES Aristotle (2010), Poetics, trans. Richard Janko, in Vincent B. Leitch (ed.), The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, 2nd edn, 88–115, New York: Norton. Basting, A. D. (1998), The Stages of Age: Performing Age in Contemporary American Culture, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Black, K., and V. B. Lipscomb (2017), ‘The Promise of Documentary Theatre to Counter Ageism in AgeFriendly Communities’, Journal of Aging Studies, 42: 32–7. Brecht, B. ([1964] 1992), Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic, ed. and trans. John Willett, New York: Hill and Wang. Brecht, B. ([1939] 1996), Mother Courage and Her Children, trans. David Hare, New York: Arcade. The Broadway League (2019), ‘The Demographics of the Broadway Audience: 2018–2019 Season’, https:// www.bro​adwa​ylea​gue.com/resea​rch/resea​rch-repo​rts/ (accessed 11 November 2020). Butler, J. (1993), Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’, New York: Routledge. Cannon, J. (2015), Old Enough to Know Better: Aging Well in Sarasota, Sarasota: Florida Studio Theatre.

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Casado-Gual, N. (2015), ‘Ambivalent Pathways of Progress and Decline: The Representation of Aging and Old Age in Joanna McClelland Glass’s Drama’, Theatre Research in Canada – Recherches Theatrales au Canada, 36 (1): 106–23. Casado-Gual, N. (2016), ‘Joanna McClelland Glass’ Mrs. Dexter and Her Daily and the Inter-play among Age, Gender and Class’, Canada and Beyond: A Journal of Canadian Literary and Cultural Studies (5), doi:10.33776/candb.v5i0.3024. Freytag, G. ([1863] 1968), Technique of the Drama: An Exposition of Dramatic Composition and Art, trans. Elias J. MacEwan, New York: Blom. Fuchs, E. (2014), ‘Estragement: Towards an “Age Theory” Theatre Criticism’, Performance Research, 19 (3): 69–77. Fuchs, E. (2016), ‘Rehearsing Age’, Modern Drama, 59 (2): 143–54. Gillespie, B. (2018), ‘Memory Divided’, PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art, 40 (2): 107. Gray, J., S. L. Dupuis, P. Kontos, C. Jonas-Simpson, and G. Mitchell (2020), ‘Knowledge as Embodied, Imaginative and Foolish Enactment: Exploring Dementia Experiences through Theater’. Forum Qualitative Sozialforschung / Forum: Qualitative Social Research, 21 (3), doi:10.17169/fqs-21.3.3444. Gullette, M. M. (2004), Aged by Culture, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Harpin, A. (2012), ‘The Lives of Our Mad Mothers: Aging and Contemporary Performance’, Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory, 22 (1), 67–87. Harrison, J. (2016), Marjorie Prime, New York: Theatre Communications Group (World premiere 2014, New York premiere 2015). Henderson, J. (2016), ‘Challenging Age Binaries by Viewing King Lear in Temporal Depth’, Theatre Research in Canada-Recherches Théâtrales au Canada, 37 (1): 42–61. Henderson, J. (2019), ‘Dramaturgy of Assistance: Performing with Dementia or Age-Related Memory Loss’, Research in Drama Education: The Journal of Applied Theatre and Performance, 24 (1): 72–89. Hugo, V. (1862), Les Misérables, trans. I. F. Hapgood, https://www.gutenb​erg.org/files/135/135-h/135-h.htm. Karam, S. (2015), The Humans, New York: Theatre Communications Group. Lipscomb, V. B. (2012), ‘ “The Play’s the Thing”: Theatre as a Scholarly Meeting Ground in Age Studies’, International Journal of Ageing and Later Life, 7 (2), 117–41. Lipscomb, V. B. (2014), ‘ “Putting on Her White Hair”: The Life Course in Wilder’s The Long Christmas Dinner’, Age, Culture, Humanities, 1, https://agecu​ltur​ehum​anit​ies.org/WP/putt​ ing-on-her-white-hair-the-life-cou​rse-in-wild​ers-the-long-christ​mas-din​ner-2/. Lipscomb, V. B. (2016a), ‘Age in M. Butterfly: Unquestioned Performance’, Modern Drama, 59 (2), 193–212, doi:10.3138/md.59.2.4. Lipscomb, V. B. (2016b), Performing Age in Modern Drama, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Lipscomb, V. B., and L. Marshall, eds (2010), Staging Age: The Performance of Age in Theatre, Dance, and Film, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Mangan, M. (2013), Staging Ageing: Theatre, Performance and the Narrative of Decline, London: Intellect. Miller, A. ([1949] 2015), Death of a Salesman, in The Penguin Arthur Miller: Collected Plays, 153–250, New York: Penguin Random House. Moore, B. (2014), ‘Depth, Significance, and Absence: Age-Effects in New British Theatre’, Age, Culture, Humanities, 1, https://agecu​ltur​ehum​anit​ies.org/WP/depth-signi​fica​nce-and-abse​nce-age-effe​cts-in-newbrit​ish-thea​tre/.

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Moore, B. (2017), ‘The Age Performances of Peggy Shaw: Intersection, Interoception and Interruption’, in C. McGlynn, M. O’Neill and M. Schrage-Früh (eds), Ageing Women in Literature and Visual Culture, 73–92, London: Palgrave Macmillan. Moore, B. (2022), ‘Improvisation and Vulnerability: Circuits of Care in Performances of Age and Ageing’, in K. Sako and S. Falcus (eds), Contemporary Narratives of Ageing, Illness, Care, 31–46, London: Routledge. Switzky, L. (2016), ‘Introduction: Modern Drama, Aging, and the Life Course’, Modern Drama, 59 (2), 135–42. Weil, J., and D. Lefkowitz (2019), ‘The Seventh Age on Stage: Representation of Older Adults and Aging in U.S. Broadway and Off-Broadway Theater’, Educational Gerontology, 45 (11), 645–56. White, S. (2011), The Other Place, New York: Dramatists Play Service. Williams, T. ([1944] 2011), The Glass Menagerie, New York: New Directions. Woodward, K. (1991), Aging and Its Discontents: Freud and Other Fictions, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Woodward, K. (2006), ‘Performing Age, Performing Gender’, NWSA Journal, 18 (1), 162–89. Zeller, F. (2012), The Father: A Tragic Farce, trans. C. Hampton, New York: Dramatists Play Service.

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CHAPTER THREE

Ageing in poetry: A windfall TESS MAGINESS

INTRODUCTION While the representation and indeed construction of age in poetry is as ancient as it is various, in this chapter, I must confine myself, for reasons of economy, to contemporary poetry. I will begin by setting out some broad theoretical frameworks and then will offer a brief consideration of literary gerontology – the interdisciplinary nexus within which I will consider what is, by necessity, a small selection of poetry that has to do with older age. There is still a tendency to polarize perceptions of ageing in cultural discourses as broadly following a decline narrative or, conversely, a narrative of successful ageing (Maginess, 2018), proposed over forty years ago by Martha Clark (1980), and still discernible in Aagje Swinnen’s formulation of stereotypical conceptualizations of age as ‘opposing discourses of physical and mental decline versus wisdom and transcendence’ (2018: 543). The positive ageing construct has been neatly framed by William L. Randall and A. Elizabeth McKim as the ‘process of growing versus getting older’ (2004: 237). Gene D. Cohen (2010) also focuses on positive growth. Joanna Freuh artfully reminds us that the word ‘old’ comes from the German ‘alt’ and the Indo-European base for that word is ‘al’, to grow, and from the Latin ‘alere’, ‘to nourish’ (1994: 266). Lars Tornstam (2005) argues further for the possibility of a gerotranscendent perspective where age is characterized by a welcome solitude and an attitude of beneficence and caring for others. The dialectic of decline and growth is, it might be argued, discernible also in theorizations of late-life creativity. In this chapter I will be discussing some poems in which the focus is not just upon ageing but on the artist reflecting upon ageing as an artist. This relates to the claim among critics and theorists that there is such a thing as late style or late-age creativity. Gordon McMullan and Sam Smiles (2016) argue that the proponents of late-age creativity assert that great artists embark upon some profound changes of style, tone, and content. They argue that this late-age creativity as characterized by scholars can be summarized into two modes: ‘serene, synthetic and consummatory or irascible, discordant and recalcitrant’ (2016: 3–4). In parenthesis they add, ‘and sometimes in a curious, contradictory combination of both’. I hope to demonstrate that this parenthetical statement may need to come out from behind its marginalizing brackets as it describes many lateage contemporary poems where the focus is ageing. Hans-Werner Wahl and Hans-Jörg Ehni (2020: 6) cite Peter Laslett (1991) who argues that the Third Age can be a peak phase for artists. In the irascible mode, we may place, for example, Edward Said (2004) not altogether despairingly postulating that the artistic oeuvre of late-life

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artists often breaks away from their previous works to embark upon an art of discontinuity, of rupture, of disunity. It may be observed that this second mode of late-age creativity could constitute a recognizably post-modern ‘reading’ and yet, of course, it could be timeless. In this zeitgeist, according to Said, the artist registers ‘an increasing sense of apartness and exile and anachronism’ (2004: n.p.). Others, as Linda Hutcheon and Michael Hutcheon (2012) eloquently explain, espouse a more Romantic interpretation, which sees in late-age work that first mode: an impulse towards a gerotranscendent visionary outlook or towards the creation of a kind of crowning masterwork which represents an artistic high point or apotheosis. And even Said concedes that, ‘age confers a spirit of reconciliation and serenity on late works … a miraculous transfiguration of reality … a remarkable holiness and sense of resolution’ (2004: n.p.). Increasingly, though, perhaps as the range and variety of poetry on ageing expands, and literary gerontology as a field correspondingly reaches towards a more complex, contradictory, and polyvalent understanding, we are offered a view of ageing which is both negative and positive, constricting and liberating, shocking and tender. Or perhaps it is the case that, following Hutcheon and Hutcheon (2012), critics have begun to eschew these ‘master narratives’ of anomie and transcendence, since the actual artistic work proves too big a handful for its interpreters, who attempt to cast it, inexorably, in the image of their times from one age to another. McMullan and Smiles aver, furthermore, that these grand narratives are a ‘critical and ideological construct, the product of a certain critical wish fulfilment’ (2016: 1). Swinnen (2019) cautions, too, against the dangers of getting caught up in the commodification of creativity – the sloganizing of creativity as part of a neoliberal agenda of individual self-realization. Adopting a more gerontological perspective, McMullan and Smiles draw attention, rather, to the specific impact of old age on creativity, arguing that it is contingency not transcendence that is a, if not the, ‘defining factor of late style’ (2016: 7). They recommend that we should ‘redefine old age style as something which is directly or indirectly the product of the adjustments and collaborations necessary for creative artists in old age, not something that exists despite such contingencies’. This may be a little sheer, but it is perhaps a bracing corrective which enables us to adopt a more interdisciplinary viewpoint. That, in turn, may enhance our appreciation of both the challenges and ‘contingencies’ facing older artists from a gerontological perspective and of the ‘achieve of, the mastery of the thing’ to borrow from Gerald Manley Hopkins (1918). That is to say, the particular literary representation of ageing and creativity is not just distinctive but distinguished, whether disharmonic or consummatory. Or, as is likely to be more common in a postmodern culture, contradictorily both. The portrait of the artist as an old woman / man may be celebratory and serene, may be raging and disruptive, or may constitute a kind of reverse Künstlerroman (the subgenre of novels dealing with the making not just of a central protagonist, but also of an artist) that derives its vitality and dramatic tension from the imbrication and agon of positive and negative forces of ageing and creativity. It is within these different perspectives that I will consider a number of poems that perhaps also help to illuminate my title. ‘Windfall’ is the last word in the last poem of Seamus Heaney’s last collection, and I also end this chapter with it. It is, in the end, an oxymoronic word – a ‘windfall’ is the forgotten and worthless bruised apple, which is pulled off the tree by the wind, and also a stroke of unexpected good luck. Perhaps that says something both impossibly contradictory and polyvalent about ageing. I will return to Heaney later. First, though, some brief thoughts on the capacious subject of literary gerontology.

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LITERARY GERONTOLOGY Hannah Zeilig (2012: 20) aptly cites the succinct definition offered by Pia Kontos (2003) that literary gerontology is the interpretation of ageing and creativity through close reading of literary texts. Ulla Kriebernegg argues that ‘film and fiction have been functionalized by gerontologists to achieve a better understanding of growing old’ (2015: 839). Yet, as Zeilig argues, ‘the analysis is intrinsically weakened when literature is used to support pre-formulated ideas’ (1997: 47). So literature, and perhaps, most especially poetry, should not be regarded as a kind of sociology manqué. I concur with Anne M. Wyatt-Brown who argues that literary gerontology should not just be ‘efferent’ but should also pay attention to literature as a wrought craft (1990: 301). Jonathan Culler (2015: 348) resists the conscription of literature for an exclusive position or role as disrupter, however attractive it might be to many readers. He warns that while it is possible to see the lyric, in particular, as making contributions to ‘structures of feeling, community formation, instantiation of ideology or its disruption and exposure, subversion or containment’, nonetheless it is the ‘unpredictability of the lyric’s efficacy and the different kinds of framing to which it is subject’ which must be underscored. Culler also sees as the great paradox of the lyric ‘that while frequently it constitutes a complaint about or resistance to the status quo, its social effectiveness may ultimately depend upon some sort of catchiness or memorability’ (2015: 336–7). Literature, especially poetry, with its very complex and polyvalent play of language, as Ira Raja argues, ‘often problematizes, subverts and interrogates neat conceptual frameworks’, representing ageing as ‘multiple, contested and complex’ (2010: xv). And it is not surprising either, at the level of form, that the postmodernist zeitgeist of uncertainty, contradiction, anomie, and polyvalence would also register itself in what Juliana Spahr describes as techniques of ‘fragmentation’ and ‘disjunction’ ([2002] 2014: 558). As we will see, some of the poems about ageing do precisely that, but others reflect the hegemonic pathologization of age and the narrative of decline. My own approach here is akin to New Formalism(s) in that I see the importance, as Marjorie Levinson, citing Rooney (2000: 25), expresses it, of a ‘revision and re-animation of form in an age of interdisciplinarity’ (2007: 559). The challenge then is not only to embrace interdisciplinarity but also to cherish the special insights which poems about ageing offer us precisely because they are highly wrought and complex aesthetic forms. Following the poet Lyn Hejinan (1980), cited by Spahr ([2002] 2014: 561), I would suggest that poetry itself can be ‘a mode of inquiry’, ‘a language of inquiry’.

OLD AGE AS LOSS: THE DECLINE PARADIGM Margaret Morganroth Gullette (2017: n.p.) challenges the very word ‘ageing’, suggesting that it is, in fact, an entrenched ideology based on a master narrative of lifecourse decline which affects people at every age. She strikes an optimistic note, though, suggesting that the ‘hegemonic decline position’ is, fortunately, becoming controversial even among scientists, who have tended to regard ageing as associated with disease – or even as a disease. One of the most insidious effects of the prevalence of the decline narrative must be that people growing old internalize this very negativity. In a co-research project that I conducted with older learners, I discovered a reluctance to engage with discussions of ‘ageing’ (Maginess 2017). And this negativity is borne out by the actual experience of older people. Hannah J. Swift and Ben Steeden (2020) report that one in three people experience age prejudice or age discrimination and they define older people as those over fifty.

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The Irish poet, Eavan Boland, at the age of around fifty, wrote the poem ‘Anna Liffey’ ([1997] 2003). To some extent it is autobiographical. The title echoes Joyce’s Anna Livia Plurabelle in Finnegans Wake (1939). The poem challenges the polyphony of Joyce’s novel and offers a desolate representation of an increasingly muted older woman: An ageing woman Finds no shelter in language … Words she once loved … Have suddenly become dwellings For someone else – Rooms and a roof under which someone else Is welcome, not her. (Boland [1997] 2003: 282) The extract invokes a kind of unhousing, a casting out, reminiscent of Shakespeare’s King Lear. Given the historical association of women with dwellings and domesticity – woman as homemaker – this has its own ironic freight. But ageing here is also a metaphor for language itself. The speaker’s anomie, her estrangement, is specifically artistic. I referred earlier to what I term the reverse Künstlerroman. The literature under discussion in this chapter is the story of the artist as an old woman / man. But in Boland’s poem we have indeed the opposite of the making of the artist (Künstlerroman); we have the unmaking, the unhousing, the rendering obsolete and anachronistic of the artist. We can hear echoes here of Said’s (2004) baleful characterization of the late-life artist. An older person may well feel like the speaker in Boland’s poem, that their skills and knowledge have become obsolete. The speaker’s position is not unlike that of the Danish poet Charlotte Strandgaard, as described by Simonsen (2017: 242), in a female, liminal zone, a no man’s land – a place where older women have no use. Within a more specifically social as well as aesthetic context, perhaps what Boland’s speaker hints at here is the dislodging of an older generation of poets, the sense that they are obsolete and are not called upon to contribute to the artistic community or to the community of poetic practice. While Boland’s alienation is depicted as intersectoral (ageing and being a woman), often identified as a double burden in terms of how society treats older people (Gullette 2017; Åberg, Kukkonen, and Sarpila 2020; Hempel et al. 2020; Harris 2020), Boland’s intersectoral exclusion is also more specifically to do with her situation as an artist. This is, as it were, the internal story or ‘plot’ of the poem. And it is in dramatic contrast to the ‘anxiety of influence’ thesis adumbrated by Harold Bloom (1973); here the younger generation is not only not in awe of the previous generation of writers, they are either contemptuous or crassly insouciant. In this poem, the reader is, perhaps, being quietly reminded of Virginia Woolf ’s call for a room to write in, but again, here there is the grim development that having created, somehow, a room, the older woman writer is no longer welcome to inhabit it. The style is plain, almost understated; we have only the almost pleading anaphora of ‘someone else’, but that does not detract from the grievousness of the speaker’s predicament and her precarity as a declining older woman. The baleful association of ageing with decline is inscribed in ‘Forgetfulness’ by the American writer Billy Collins (1999: 20–2). Collins focuses on memory through a series of references to what happens to the process of remembering literary works. Though the tone is spry, bordering on the frivolous, Collins manages to deliver through this poem a serious, even threnodic commentary about the nature of the relationship between nature and art, between change and

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what is immutable – one of the great themes of poetry. And, as we will see, the poem manages its own volta, its own polysemic challenge to decline. The material of literary texts is central to the world of the poem, albeit it as a threatened species, apt to be forgotten. So perhaps the poem is also a commentary on what he perceives as increasing cultural amnesia. The loss, the decline is gradual: ‘The name of the author is the first to go / followed obediently by the title, the plot’ (20). But forgetfulness dictates that memory does not obey. And that is not the worst of it: ‘the heartbreaking conclusion, the entire novel / which suddenly becomes one you have never read, / never even heard of …’ (20). Collins uses the apostrophe in a very innovative way, implying that the speaker is actually addressing himself descending into forgetfulness of his identity as reader. Even with the undoubted benefits of ‘rote’ learning for laying down a kind of hard foundation, the somatic and the cognitive are inverted as memory is conceived of as a Puckish creature which seems to be hiding in different parts of the body. Memory loss is now transformed into another kind of metaphor, rather beautiful as well as poignant, as the speaker, addressing the reader and maybe himself, floats towards a place the reader, if not the speaker, recognizes as Lethe, classical terrain of oblivion and forgetfulness: ‘No wonder the moon in the window seems to have drifted / out of a love poem that you used to know by heart’ (22). However, the line can also be read in the opposite way; what is left, after memory has slipped away, is the moon itself – nature and that wonderful rapturous moment when the ‘you’ of the poem sees the moon in the window. And, as with all great images, there is another meaning again; the moon is not just nature but inflected by a love poem not just read, but known by heart. Thus, there is a kind of retrieval, perhaps, as literature itself seems to supply a kind of aide memoire. The polyvalent meanings offer a kind of kaleidoscopic view of old age. The musicality of the poem, subtle rather than conventional (a meandering tetrameter with sonorous alliteration and assonance, especially in those last lines), allows the reader and also perhaps, ironically, the author, to remember it also. This is a good example of what Culler (2015: 336–7) calls memorability; paradoxically, a poem about forgetfulness allows us to remember because of its musicality, not because of its clear messaging, recalling here also Raja’s (2010: xv) highlighting of the aesthetic worth of polyvalent meanings.

IMAGINING OPTIMISM Wyatt-Brown (1990: 310) suggests that some older women writers use language to become more agentic. She cites Gullette (1988), who argued that middle age can be a period of renewal. As we have seen, Gullette’s more recent perspective (2017), while inveighing against the negative decline narrative at the heart of the discourse of ageism, equally challenges the essentially neoliberal ‘ageing as progress’ narrative. She argues for the validity of a myriad personal narratives, implicitly acknowledging perhaps that writers can and have changed these simplistic narratives of decline and progress. Lois Elinoff Rubin (2009) argues that there is in feminist scholarship a considerable body of gerontological work which contests the decline narrative, including that of Betty Friedan and Margaret Morganroth Gullette herself. Within the ‘positive’ narrative of ageing, there are a range of positions. Maya Angelou’s poem, ‘On Aging’ ([1978] 2015: n.p.), focuses on a key theme in newer scholarship on ageing, how personhood is preserved. The tone is stoic. The poem warns against making assumptions as it gently offers the inside perspective of the older person:

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When you see me sitting quietly, Like a sack left on the shelf, … Hold! Stop! Don’t pity me! Hold! Stop your sympathy! … I’m the same person I was back then. There is a frank acknowledgement of physical decline in the poem and the anaphoric ‘less’ creates a sense of cumulative diminishment, yet, the speaker feels lucky because she can still breathe in – denoting that her focus is not on herself but on taking in the world. We cannot help but hear how, after an opening section which is a little slow moving, even sluggish, and a middle section which is quite jerky, the poem resolves itself in the end into a swinging anapestic rhythm (two unstressed syllables followed by a stressed) – like a waltz; a dance, then, to the music of time. Angelou’s poem can be viewed as an implicit rejection of the commercialized ‘successful ageing’ narrative. This is quite distinct, of course, from the far more nuanced gerontological advocacy of age as a period of renewal and growth and sense of agency, to which I will turn shortly. The plain diction of Angelou’s poem resiles from the kind of hyperbolic pseudoscientific language associated with the proliferation of ‘anti-ageing’ products. As Swift and Steeden (2020), among others, contend, unrelentingly positive representations of older people are sometimes unrealistic, putting pressure on older people to conform to images of ‘successful ageing’ that they have not generated and that for many are unattainable. Darrin Hodgetts, Kerry Chamberlain, and Graeme Bassett (2003: 426) describe this as ‘the maintenance of atomized individualism associated with the pursuit of selfinterest as opposed to co-operative ventures and the interests of the community’. While ageing as a process of decline has been medicalized, ageing as something to be averted is now commodified within a neoliberal economy as the Forever Young industry.

REPRESENTING AGE AND THE OLDER ARTIST AS CONTRADICTORY AND POLYVALENT Swinnen argues that the poetry of Louise Bourgeois exemplifies the discourse of creativity across the life span that asserts that ‘creativity continues, grows and renews itself ’, as opposed to the decline model (2018: 123). The artist as represented in the poetry of Bourgeois, Swinnen contends, is ‘not to be reduced to one particular identity as an older woman artist. She is simultaneously vulnerable and strong, active and reflective’. Swinnen’s analysis demonstrates that a ninety-year-old artist can be not just working but inventing ‘performances of self ’ (2018: 135). Scarlett Cunningham (2014), in analysing the poetry of Lucile Clifton, brings in another dimension. In addition to the not-infrequent representation of the literal embodiment of age by women artists, Clifton’s intersectoral perspective focuses also on the relationship between age, race, and the female body. Rather in contrast to Gullette’s (2017) negative identification of age with physical heaviness, Clifton celebrates heaviness as part of her desirability and fecundity as a Black woman. According to Cunningham (2014: 32), whiteness and thinness are collocated as a negative state of affairs, and she offers Clifton’s ‘My Dream about Being White’ (1988) as strong evidence. Most importantly, Cunningham (34) argues, what makes Clifton’s poetry so notable is her ability to show a range of conflicting attitudes towards her ageing body. Cunningham (30–1) argues that Clifton’s late poetry acknowledges her own decline into ill health (and thinness) but

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also partakes of a more gerotranscendent vision, specifically celebrating the possibility of an afterlife. It is, perhaps, not surprising that a recursive theme in poetry about old age is sexuality and desire, given the focus of society on female physical attractiveness and fecundity. This is certainly prominent in Clifton. Peter Simonsen (2017: 242) also draws attention to female sexuality and desire in his discussion of the Danish poet Charlotte Strandgaard, for example, in her tender, humorous, and transgressive poem, ‘Lover and Friend’ (2015). Likewise, Sylvia Hennenberg (2006: 116) notes Adrienne Rich’s challenge to the taboo on sexual intimacy. Judith A. Sugar (2019) endorses this taboo breaking, suggesting that sexuality is an important element of older adults’ identity. However, as Freuh points out, double standards have not made this easy for women: ‘The old male lecher receives admiration as well as ridicule for his hypervirility, but the ageing female sex icon’s hyperfemininity is society’s target for fear of women gone wild, the body finally having a mind of its own’ (1994: 266). What many poets, perhaps especially women poets, are doing, it seems, is, as the Dutch poet Emma Crebolder argues (qtd in Swinnen 2018: 559), ‘reinvent[ing] the ageing process itself ’ and thus reinventing discourses of ageing. Hennenberg perceives the same challenge to negative stereotypes of female ageing in the poetry of May Sarton, arguing that, in fact, Sarton’s work, actively constructing ageing, forms ‘an ongoing cycle of lamentation, acceptance and celebration’ (2006: 111). Moving beyond quiet optimism or stoicism are poems which represent ageing as a time for liberation and even licence. On the gentle end of the slope towards this kind of mood we have Indian poet Mugdha Sinha’s ‘Alter Ego’ (2010: 47–8). Here freedom is enabled through access to a simple but effective medical aid. The title introduces a pun that is as rueful as it is wryly humorous. The poem describes an old lady whose bones are crumbling. In a lovely ironic metaphor, Sinha describes her stiff bones as ‘swaggering’ on her hips and knee joints. But, then the old lady acquires a new ‘ivory bone’, her walking stick (47). Far from being an awkward accoutrement, the stick is envisioned as a new part of the old lady’s body, allowing her to ‘gracefully negotiate / the curves and bumps / of roads and shadows’ (47). That last word suggests that her sight is failing a little too, or that her world is metaphorically shadowed. In a kind of gerotransformation, her new ‘alter ego’ allows her to be altered (48): me my alter ego, and my ageless dignity. While there is a discernible rhythm – three ‘feet’ or beats to the line – the feet are not regularly distributed, giving a freedom to the soundscape that is very apposite for the theme and mood of the poem. Sinha captures the sense of her speaker’s ungainly and awkward movement in the clever word and line split: ‘un necessary swaggering on my hips / and knee joints’ (47). As the last line seems almost to snap under the weight of the previous one, we can almost hear as well as see her ready to topple, her knee joints too weak for her body. The sharp consonants, ‘k’ and ‘t’, contribute to this sense of brittleness and fragility. As we move towards the conclusion, the liberation of the speaker’s spirit as well as body is also evoked through the use of broad, capacious ‘u’ and ‘a’ assonance: ‘curves / bumps; roads / shadows’ (48). Her movement is now like a dance, there is music in her gait, no longer is she iambic. She has, through science, overcome that state which Woodward (1986) characterizes as the self alienated from the body.

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For the professional poet, the corpus (a strangely ironic word) is often of huge importance – that legacy is a kind of life review indeed but in the case of poets like Heaney, it is a gerotranscendent vision, which is consoling and even paradigmatic for the reader also. Heaney’s ‘A Kite for Aibhin’ (2010: 85) will form my conclusion, embodying as it does such a richly complex response to ageing. In inscribing the poem ‘after L’Aquilone’ by Giovanni Pascoli (1855–1912), the characteristically modest Heaney acknowledges his debt to the Italian poet, perhaps also hinting that while Pascoli was on the school curriculum in his time, just as Heaney is in Northern Ireland, immortality can be as fragile as mortality. The poem begins with a vision, and the pale blue heavenly air may evoke the Virgin Mary, in a poem, after all, about ascension: Air from another life and time and place, Pale blue heavenly air is supporting A white wing beating high against the breeze. (85) Heaney’s ‘stance’ is to involve the reader immediately, to beckon him or her into the scene, with the confirmatory ‘yes’ which follows. We realize as readers that we, too, have been experiencing an air from another life, time, and place, as we move towards the unfamiliar air of Heaney’s Derry, where he is both child (through memory) and old man (as poet recounting memory) so that we may share the excitement – another kind of generosity, a kind of gerotranscendent agape. There is a lovely little irony too. It is Pascoli, very famous in his time in Italy, but a marginal figure in the British and American ‘canon’, who is responsible for providing his memory of or inventing the miracle of the kite in the first place. Heaney uses the Pascoli poem as a kind of imaginative catalyst to transport himself and the reader back into that rural childhood, but of course, with the double helix of the narrating poet recalling (or even inventing) a scene where a group of children gather on a hill to launch a kite. The older poet is reprising not only his own childhood but also his poetic youth which reimagined or created the story of his childhood (Randall and McKim 2004). The poem, thus, could be seen as an example of that late-life creative master narrative of synthesis and transcendence. We soar from air to ground: ‘all of us there trooped out / Among the briar hedges and stripped thorn’. The phrase ‘all of us there’ brings us back to an earlier poem, in the collection North, ‘The Seedcutters’ ([1975] 1998b: 51). Heaney has always been interested in the marginal, the ordinary, the communal. So in the poem we have the beautiful phrase, ‘all of us there, our anonymities’. Heaney is literally back in a joyous moment in childhood; he is there, in the moment. He alludes to another of his poems from North, ‘Exposure’, in the phrase ‘long-tailed comet’ ([1975] 1998a: 90). In that poem, Heaney worries that by following the poetic vocation he may miss ‘the comet’s pulsing rose’. In ‘A Kite for Aibhin’, by contrast, the tone is wryly humorous. In this recursis or recycling of the phrase, ‘our long-tailed comet’, the older Heaney (despite having suffered a stroke) has lost none of the excitement of the young lad, kite flying: And now, it hovers, tugs, veers, dives askew Lifts itself, goes with the wind until It rises. (85) But the hand of an ageing man now flying a kite, literally or metaphorically, is like a ‘spindle / unspooling’, a frail instrument. The kite, perhaps a metaphor for a poem, or at least a metaphor for a metaphor, begins to climb, ‘carrying and carrying farther, higher’. The speaker must remain

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on the ground, ‘planted, yet his heart is longing to rise like the kite’. Dramatically challenging the concept of late-life creativity as an apotheosis, it is clear that the body is declining. Yet, the speaker does not lament this but simply accepts it: Until string breaks and – separate – elate The kite takes off, itself alone, a windfall. (85) There is a yearning, indeed, to let go of the body, the physical corpus, perhaps as a way of preserving the aesthetic corpus or as a kind of new freedom in which his imagination and spirit could fly unencumbered and ‘elate’. There is, also, a joy in solitude as the speaker disengages from the world. The phrase ‘itself alone’ alludes to the political party desiring a United Ireland, Sinn Féin (ourselves alone). Heaney’s formulation characteristically connects him to his political heritage and separates him from it, qua poet. But as he grows into old age he begins to develop a poetics of liberation, of freedom, characterized by metaphors of air, of flight. The quiet aural drama of the rise and fall cadence and the simple, common yet apposite image of the kite with its polyvalent meanings are rich paradoxes perhaps achievable only through age.

CONCLUSION This chapter has made no claims to be comprehensive, yet, even in this tiny glimpse into the corpus of contemporary poetry on older age, it is evident that both very negative and very positive representations of growing old sit alongside more complex, polyvalent, even paradoxical portraits of older people, including older people as artists. As poets challenge and reformulate hegemonic discourses of age with courage and humour, there is, alas, not yet much evidence that governments have moved from the crude divide and conquer rhetoric which sees the old only as a burden (Zeilig 2014). Yet poetry has a curious way of seeping into consciousness. The future achievement of the interdisciplinary engagement between gerontologists and literary scholars lies not just in understanding more fully and subtly the ‘imagined’ experience of old age, but perhaps also in understanding how literature, and in particular poetry, can offer a mode of inquiry which can fiercely or playfully challenge the dangers of abstraction and dogmatism which can occasionally mar academic discourse. Poetry is a way of seeing, and it is also, a way of being, finding consolation and joy right to the door of death.

REFERENCES Åberg, E., I. Kukkonen and O. Sarpila (2020), ‘From Double to Triple Standards of Ageing. Perceptions of Physical Appearance at the Intersections of Age, Gender and Class’, Journal of Aging Studies, 55 (100876): 1–12. Angelou, M. ([1978] 2015), ‘On Aging’, in Maya Angelou: The Complete Poetry (Kindle edition), unpaginated, London: Virago. Bloom, H. (1973), The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry, New York: Oxford University Press. Boland, E. ([1997] 2003), ‘Anna Liffey’, in P. Crotty (ed.), Modern Irish Poetry: An Anthology, 279–85, Belfast: Blackstaff Press. Clark, M. (1980), ‘The Poetry of Aging: Views of Old Age in Contemporary American Poetry’, The Gerontologist, 20 (2): 188–91.

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Cohen, G. D. (2010), ‘Creativity and Aging: Psychological Growth, Health, and Well-being’, in R. Cole, R. E. Ray, and R. Kastenbaum (eds), A Guide to Humanistic Studies in Aging: What Does It Mean to Grow Old?, 182–205, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Collins, B. (1999), ‘Forgetfulness’, in Questions about Angels, 20–2, Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press. Culler, J. (2015), Theory of the Lyric, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Cunningham, S. (2014), ‘The Limits of Celebration in Lucille Clifton’s Poetry: Writing the Aging Woman’s Body’, Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, 35 (2): 30–58. Elinoff Rubin, L. (2009), ‘Creativity in Later Life: The Poetry of Maxine Kumin and Linda Pastan’, Journal of Aging, Humanities and the Arts Humanities, 4: 245–65. Freuh, J. (1994), ‘Visible Difference: Women Artists Aging’, in J. Freuh, C. Langer, and A. Raven (eds), New Feminist Criticism: Art Identity, Action, 264–88, Michigan: Avalon Publishing. Gullette, M. (2017), ‘Against “Aging”: How to Talk about Growing Older’, Theory, Culture & Society, Think-Pieces, 20 December. Available at: theoryculturesociety.org (accessed 11 December 2020). Harris, J. G. (2020), ‘Confronting Ageism and the Dilemmas of Aging: Literary Gerontology and Poetic Imagination – Baranskaya to Marinina’, Laboratorium: Russian Review of Social Research, 12 (2): 146–68. Heaney, S. ([1975] 1998a), ‘Exposure’, in Opened Ground: Poems 1966–1996, 90, London: Faber and Faber. Heaney, S. ([1975] 1998b), ‘The Seedcutters’, in Opened Ground: Poems 1966–1996, 51, London: Faber and Faber. Heaney S. (2010), ‘A Kite for Aibhin’, in Human Chain, 85, London: Faber and Faber. Hempel, M., M. Breheny, P. Yeung, B. Stevenson, and F. Alpass (2020), ‘The Relationship between Childhood Circumstances and Late Life Physical and Mental Health: The Role of Adult Socioeconomic Status’, Research on Aging (29 September): unpaginated. Available at: https://journ​als.sage​pub.com/doi/ full/10.1177/01640​2752​0961​560 (accessed 14 December 2020). Hennenberg, S. (2006), ‘Of Creative Crones and Poetry: Developing Age Studies through Literature’, NWSA Journal, 18 (1): 106–25. Hodgetts, D., K. Chamberlain, and G. Bassett (2003), ‘Between Television and the Audience: Negotiating Representations of Ageing’, Health, 7 (4): 417–38. Hopkins, G. M. (1918), ‘The Windhover’, in R. Bridges (ed.), Poems of Gerald Manley Hopkins, 12, London: Humphry Milford. Hutcheon, L., and M. Hutcheon (2012), ‘Late Styles(s): The Ageism of the Singular’, Occasion. Interdisciplinary Studies in the Humanities, 5 (4): 1–11. Available at: https://arc​ade.stanf​ord.edu/occas​ ion/late-sty​les-age​ism-singu​lar (accessed 11 June 2021). Kriebernegg, U. (2015), ‘Literary Gerontology: Understanding Aging as a Lifelong Process through Cultural Representation’, The Gerontologist, 55 (Issue Suppl. 2): 839. Levinson, M. (2007), ‘What Is New Formalism?’, Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, 122 (2): 558–69. Maginess, T. (2017), Enhancing the Wellbeing and Wisdom of Older Learners: A Co-research Paradigm, Abingdon: Routledge. Maginess, T., ed. (2018), Dementia and Literature: Interdisciplinary Perspectives, Abingdon: Routledge. McMullan, G., and S. Smiles, eds (2016), Late Style and Its Discontents: Essays on Art, Literature and Music, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Raja, I. (2010), Grey Areas: An Anthology of Indian Fiction on Ageing, New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Randall, W. L., and A. E. McKim (2004), ‘Towards a Poetics of Aging: The Links between Literature and Life’, Narrative Inquiry, 14 (2): 235–60. Said, E. (2004), ‘Thoughts on Late Style’, London Review of Books, 26 (15), unpaginated, 5 August. Available at: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v26/n15/edward-said/thoughts-on-late-style (accessed 10 June 2021). Simonsen, P. (2017), ‘To Age with Honour: Charlotte Strandgaard’s Welfare State Poetry of Ageing in No Man’s Land’, in A. M. Bjorvand and T. Norheim (eds), Literature and Honour, 234–48, Oslo: Universitetsforlaget. Sinha, M. (2010), ‘Alter Ego’, Indian Literature, 54, 4 (258): 47–8. Spahr, J. ([2002] 2014), ‘Introduction to American Women Poets in the 21st Century: Where Lyric Meets Language’, in V. Jackson and Y. Prins (eds), The Lyric Theory Reader: A Critical Anthology, 557–67, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Sugar, J. A. (2019), Introduction to Aging: A Positive, Interdisciplinary Approach, New York: Springer. Swift, H. J., and B. Steeden (2020), Doddery but Dear: Examining Age-Related Stereotypes, London: Centre for Ageing Better. Available at: https://www.age​ing-bet​ter.org.uk/sites/defa​ult/files/2020-03/Dodd​ ery-but-dear.pdf (accessed 14 December 2020). Swinnen, A. (2018), ‘ “Writing to Make Ageing New”: Dutch Poets’ Understandings of Late-Life Creativity’, Ageing & Society, 38: 543–67. Swinnen, A. (2019), ‘Late-Life Creativity’, in D. Gu and M. E. Dupre (eds), Encyclopedia of Gerontology and Population Aging, 1–8. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-69892-2_2 (accessed 11 June 2021). Tornstam, L. (2005), Gerotranscendence: A Developmental Theory of Positive Aging, New York: Springer. Wahl, H. W., and H. J. Ehni (2020), ‘Advanced Old Age as a Developmental Dilemma: An In-depth Comparison of Established Fourth Age Conceptualizations’, Journal of Aging Studies, 55: 1–9. Woodward, K. (1986), ‘The Mirror Stage of Old Age’, in K. Woodward and M. Schwartz (eds), Memory and Desire: Aging, Literature, Psychoanalysis, 97–113, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Wyatt-Brown, A. M. (1990), ‘The Coming of Age of Literary Gerontology’, Journal of Aging Studies, 4 (93): 299–315. Zeilig, H. (1997), ‘The Uses of Literature in Social Gerontology’, in A. Jamieson, S. Harper and C. Victor (eds), Critical Approaches to Gerontology, 39-49, London: Open University Press. Zeilig, H. (2012), ‘The Critical Use of Narrative and Literature in Gerontology’, International Journal of Aging and Later Life, 6 (2): 7–37. Zeilig, H. (2014), ‘Dementia as a Cultural Metaphor’, The Gerontologist, 54 (2): 258–67.

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CHAPTER FOUR

Children’s literature: Young readers, older authors VANESSA JOOSEN

INTRODUCTION Age is central to the study of children’s literature on various levels. The most common communicative situation in this discourse is marked by an imbalance in age, with adult authors writing for an audience that primarily consists of children and adolescents (as well as adults reading the books as mediators or for their own pleasure). Moreover, children’s books are populated by characters of all ages, and many stories revolve around intergenerational relationships and growing up. Given the role of books in children’s early socialization and the educational weight that is attributed to them, the narratives are likely to contribute to the age norms that children are taught. A large body of scholarship has investigated the construction of childhood in children’s literature (amongst others Beauvais 2015; Gavin 2012; Immel 2009; Sánchez-Eppler 2011); a smaller number of studies discuss young readers’ response to the books (Fjällström and Kokkola 2015; Park 2012; Sipe 2008). Despite the centrality of age in both fields, up until recently, scholars in age studies and children’s literature studies rarely drew on each other’s work, with the former focusing more on adulthood and senescence and the latter on childhood and adolescence. Since the 2010s, an increased exchange between both fields has arisen from a joint interest in theoretical and methodological approaches to age, evolving conceptualizations of the lifecourse, the ageist stereotypes that some children’s books convey, and their potential for fostering intergenerational dialogue (Henneberg 2010; Joosen 2015, 2018b; Benner and Ullman 2019; Deszcz-Tryhubczak and Jaques 2021). This chapter tries to continue this effort to unite insights from both fields and focuses on an aspect of children’s literature that is understudied: the age of the author. In recent years, critics have nuanced the idea that only adults write children’s books. The #OwnVoices debate that is best known from critical race studies and disability studies finds a parallel in children’s literature studies with a renewed interest in child authors and intergenerational collaborations (Stephens 1995; Alexander and McMaster 2005; Smith 2017; Wesseling 2019; Van Lierop-Debrauwer and Steels 2021). Children’s writings and artwork have stayed under the radar because little material is published, and / or the young contributors are not always acknowledged for their input. While the internet provides new platforms for child and teenage authors to share their creative work, especially fan fiction, the use of aliases and lack of personal data make it difficult to identify them (Duggan 2017).

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Rather than contributing to the debate on child authors, however, this chapter investigates how published adult authors negotiate the increasing temporal distance from their own childhood and adolescence as they write children’s literature. Debates about otherness cannot simply be exported from other theoretical paradigms to children’s literature studies. Perry Nodelman’s (1992) analogy of the child and the colonized subject, for example, has been criticized. After all, ‘children’s authors were once themselves children, and so the children for whom they write are not wholly Other’ (Bradford 2001: 12). Children are only temporal others and investments in them as ‘adults in the making’ are considered important for a culture’s future returns. Vice versa, as ‘former children’, adult authors have had the experience of being young but have also grown out of youth. In this chapter, I will draw on age studies to refine the broad category of ‘adulthood’ as it is used in children’s literature theories. Following the stages of the lifecourse, I first discuss how authors attest to engaging with their own youth in writing, and then move on to explore to what extent children’s books reflect the concerns of the authors’ later life stages. To this aim, I have interviewed seven writers of children’s literature: Aidan Chambers (1934), Guus Kuijer (1942), Jacqueline Wilson (1945), Anne Fine (1947), David Almond (1951), Joke van Leeuwen (1952), and Bart Moeyaert (1964). All have writing careers of at least four decades and are widely read, while also having received substantial critical acclaim. I occasionally supplement my analyses with other recent interviews with these authors, short reflections on some novels that they discuss in the interviews, and theories from age studies and children’s literature studies, all with the aim of gaining a better understanding of how children’s writers negotiate age differences between themselves and their young readers.

AUTHORSHIP CRITICISM Ingo Berensmeyer, Gert Buelens, and Marysa Demoor (2019) have observed a ‘return of the author’ in literary criticism that finds a parallel in ‘a deep-seated public desire to relate the work of a writer to that writer’s identity, age, gender, and her / his life story’ (3). Although most literary scholars will refrain from drawing simplistic parallels between authors’ lives and their fictional works, writers do rely on events and experiences from real life as the context and inspiration for their works. Scholars in age studies have noted that some authors turn to the subject of old age when they grow old themselves or approach the topic differently as they age (e.g. Henneberg 2006). Rather than trying to derive authorial intentions or reinstalling the author as a centre of control over the text’s meaning, I follow Alison Booth’s suggestion for ‘the inclusion of the author’s biography and of historical context(s) as contributing, unfolding texts, in an alert intertextuality’ (1991: 89). An author’s biographical information or interpretation of their works then becomes a relevant intertext, but one that exists alongside other perspectives. Moreover, as Adrienne Gavin points out, the engagement with childhood in literature is multifaceted and can serve various purposes: Created from authors’ autobiographical or biographical imperatives, social intent, historical inspiration, or literary imaginations, the fictional child is an artefact that expresses memories or intuitive understanding of childhood or symbolically pictures the child as innocent, victim, blank slate, born sinner, infant tyrant, visionary, or signifier of nostalgia, hope, despair, or loss. (2012: 2) An author’s personal memories or observations of children can be steered by or merged with such tropes of childhood, especially when they are used as the basis for fictional stories.

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YOUTH In her seminal article ‘Risky Business: Talking about Children in Children’s Literature’, Marah Gubar (2013) distinguishes between three different models of the relationship between childhood and adulthood. A ‘difference’ model treats children as fundamentally other and unknowable to adults. This discourse easily slips into a ‘deficit’ model that views children as lacking the skills and knowledge that adults have obtained. Gubar proposes that we view the relationship between childhood and adulthood in terms of ‘kinship’ instead: ‘Children and adults are akin to one another, which means they are neither exactly the same nor radically dissimilar. The concept of kinship indicates relatedness, connection, and similarity without implying homogeneity, uniformity, and equality’ (Gubar 2013: 453). This also has consequences for the way the lifecourse is conceptualized: ‘There is no one moment when we suddenly flip over from being a child to being an adult. Our younger and older selves are multiple and interlinked, akin to one another rather than wholly distinct’ (Gubar 2013: 454). The idea of kinship features strongly in the way that children’s authors describe their engagement with their memories and their childhood selves. While children are considered to be the best ‘experts’ on youth (Alexander and McMaster 2005), in popular discourse, children’s authors are often presented as second best. They are described as adults who have retained a connection with their younger selves that most others have lost and that allows them to approach childhood with a unique sense of empathy and understanding (Joosen 2018a: 149). Some authors cultivate this idea by stating that they have never grown out of childhood. Both Annie M. G. Schmidt and Roald Dahl said that they had always remained eight years old (Van Buul 1991; Viñas Valle 2015), while Miffy illustrator Dick Bruna claimed that he had always stayed four (Wouda 2000). More common is the idea that successful children’s authors have stayed in touch with their ‘inner child’ and continued fostering their childhood memories in adulthood. In Feeling Like a Kid, Jerry Griswold argues that such ‘acute memories’ are ‘the most distinguishing feature of gifted writers for the young’ (2006: 4). Drawing on childhood reminiscences is, however, a more complex process than he – and various children’s authors with him – makes it appear. According to Jacqueline Rose’s influential work ([1984] 1993), children’s literature never deals with childhood as children live it, because that experience remains fundamentally inaccessible to adults. Instead, it offers readers the desires and fears that adults project onto the life stage of youth. More recently, Maria Nikolajeva has invoked neuroscience to assert the inaccessibility of childhood experiences to adults: ‘An adult writer knows hardly more about what it is like to be a child than what it is like to be a bat. This is because of the cognitive gap between adult and child; a gap that memory cannot bridge’ (2019: 26). Even those who do not share this fundamental scepticism must acknowledge that memories are usually incomplete and can be distorted (see amongst others Waller 2019). Moreover, when writing fiction, authors also have to imbed their recollections into a fictional story that can appeal to contemporary young readers. Plot requirements and aesthetic considerations may necessitate further changes to remembered events. While it lies beyond my aims and capacity to assess to what extent the recollected feelings and events of the authors I interviewed correspond to their lived past experiences, they showed a keen awareness of the negotiation that takes place in their work between what they recall from childhood and the requirements of an engaging story. Moreover, in the act of writing and later thinking about their own work, a reassessment of their memories and a new understanding of their childhood experiences sometimes occurred. The Flemish author Bart Moeyaert is an interesting

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case in point. He made his debut in his late teens with Duet met valse noten (1983, Duet with False Notes), a novel he had started at age thirteen. It draws on his experience as a young actor and mentions specific places that he frequented as an adolescent. His second novel, Terug naar af (1986, Back to Square One), features an alter ego who, like Moeyaert himself, fails his maths exam and has to repeat his final year of secondary school. Such clear, direct connections are lost in later work, and Moeyaert himself has felt confused about the influence of his personal memories on his characters. For example, he thinks that the adults in his work are inspired by his parents but has changed his mind about how exactly that works: I have long thought that Betjeman [the adult antagonist in Bare Hands] was a reckoning with my father, which is why this book became very emotional as I was writing it, but I’m not sure if that is completely true, because the mothers in my books are not the sweetest creatures either. So maybe I mirror them, my father and my mother, and vice versa. (Interview with Vanessa Joosen. 15 October 2020, my translation) Moeyaert shows a tendency to interpret his fiction biographically in hindsight, while acknowledging that he does not have a full understanding of the relationship between memory and fiction. The process of transformation is also what David Almond highlights in describing his autobiographical short stories for children, collected in Counting Stars (2000). The writing provided ‘a way of dealing with experiences in my own childhood and not confronting them directly but using them as a basis for fiction to reimagine them’ (Interview with Vanessa Joosen. 13 November 2020). At the heart of the stories lie the deaths of his sister Barbara and his father when he was eight and fifteen years old, respectively. In re-imagining these losses, Almond (2020) says: I found a way for the first time to write about them that was not just a kind of indulgence of grief or sadness, but a way of using that sadness, using that grief, to reconstruct them as fiction. Story writing and creating any kind of art is an act of healing, putting together things that are lost, of reassembling things that are being fractured … and also weirdly it was a way of going back to me when I was a little boy and to my sisters when they were little girls, and saying ‘it will be okay, it will be alright’. The stories in Counting Stars express an ambivalence about the possibility of revisiting the past. ‘The Time Machine’ takes the narrator back to ‘the year before my father dies’ (Almond 2000). It fulfils the desire to relive the period before this tragic loss, while in the story itself, the young protagonist also dreams of being reunited with his deceased sister. When entering the Time Machine he is quickly stripped of the illusion of a return to the past. The machine is a fraud, operated by a woman in a short skirt, with so much makeup ‘caked on her face’ that he is confused about her age. She asks him to lie about his experiences, kisses him, gives him money, and lets him lie at her breasts. Instead of the promised journey to the past, he is propelled forward in his developing sexuality. The failed attempt to travel back in time thus becomes a step in growing up. Almond allows his readers – and himself – more comfort in ‘The Kitchen’, where the entire family is reunited, including the deceased sister and father. While the story addresses incomplete memories – one sister fails to remember the scene with which the book opens – it shows the solace that can be found in supplementing those memories with the imagination. As Barbara explains: the ‘bits made up … kept me safe and real in all your hearts’ (Almond 2000). A different kind of imagination is at work here than in ‘The Time Machine’: not created from cheap illusions but from an emotional connection that feels more real than actual events.

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Guus Kuijer believes that he started fostering these kinds of memories in childhood. As a child growing up in the Netherlands the 1940s and 1950s, he was taught the importance of remembrance to avoid a new war and took it on as a personal duty, storing painful personal experiences: ‘I thought that … it almost makes me cry again … I thought it would help. That I could prevent it from happening to me again if I only remembered it. … I think that’s why I remember so much from my childhood’ (cited in Pronk 2020, n.p.). While Kuijer acknowledges that some memories may have been distorted, he credits this active remembrance as one reason why he can easily identify with children’s feelings. As the testimonies by Moeyaert, Almond, and Kuijer show, complicated and unhappy memories surfaced often in the interviews – more often, in fact, than moments of bliss from the past. The authors do not look back with the nostalgia that Gavin describes as typical of a Romantic view on childhood: ‘a lost, idealized, clear-visioned, divinely pure, intuitive, in-tunewith-nature, imaginative stage of life, of whose spirits adults felt the loss and sought to capture in literature’ (2012: 8). While such a Romantic idealization of childhood has remained influential to date, the authors who I have studied for this article offer only a selection of those traits. Many of Joke van Leeuwen’s stories, for example, feature children who use their imagination as a strategy for resilience. She warns against viewing children as a different species: ‘I think, gosh, don’t you remember? Don’t you remember what it felt like to be standing on a square completely surrounded by adults and feeling you couldn’t breathe, just to mention something. Or how you could feel humiliated without the adults noticing?’ (Interview with Vanessa Joosen. 26 November 2020, my translation). Van Leeuwen does not see herself as an autobiographical author but stresses the importance of what she calls gevoelsherinneringen – the memory of the feelings associated with childhood. Anne Fine thinks that a similar sense of disempowerment as a child influenced her personality and the fictional characters in her books. She connects the distress that critics have identified in her fictional families (see amongst others Tucker 2001: 49–68) to her mother’s period-related moods and the tensions at home that she suffered as a child who could not predict how her mother would react. Fine links an edginess in herself, which is reflected in some of her characters, to a tendency to criticize rather than praise children. When she was a mother herself, she found it eye-opening to see how children could be raised on positive endorsement instead. Creating child characters in adulthood can be a formative experience through which some authors learn to understand their past and present selves better. About the protagonist of Tegenwoordig heet iedereen sorry (2018, These Days Everyone’s Called Sorry), Moeyaert says: ‘You are writing yourself down … and you know you are describing things you used to do yourself. With the mind of a fifty-year-old you look back and think: ah yes, of course’ (Interview with Vanessa Joosen. 15 October 2020, my translation). In hindsight, and with the experience of a middle-aged man who is concerned with discourses on childhood, Moeyaert can thus look back on habits that he had as a child and teenager and interpret why he behaved in particular ways. When writing Counting Stars, Almond says that he ‘found a way of writing about myself as if I was not myself, so it was like even I discovered myself ’. By fictionalizing childhood memories, adult authors thus gain new insights into their younger identities. At the same time, their adult experience and their writing practice add perspectives to their own engagement with childhood. In the next section, I consider in what other ways the adulthood of children’s authors plays a part in their writing process.

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ADULTHOOD While many of the most famous children’s authors and illustrators remained childless, parenthood has prompted some people to start writing and others to move from adult to children’s fiction. A. A. Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh (1926) is the most famous example of this, featuring his son Christopher Robin as a character (Schutt 2006: 75). Philip Kerr wrote The Akhenaten Adventure ‘in an attempt to encourage his eldest son to read’, while Louisa Young co-authored her first children’s book, Lionboy, with her eight-year-old daughter Isabel Adomakoh Young (Beckett 2009:169). Parenthood also turned Anne Fine into a writer, albeit more indirectly. When she became a mother in the 1970s, she yielded to social pressure and gave up her job. This coincided with a move to Edinburgh and a rough period in her marriage. ‘I wrote out of pure escapism’, she explains, and found joy in writing The Summer-House Loon (1978), a Young Adult (YA) novel in which the protagonist’s boredom is relieved by the arrival of a mysterious trespasser. Of the seven authors whom I interviewed, four have children. None turned to children’s literature because they became parents, but their own children did inspire their writing. Van Leeuwen says that she ‘carefully watched her son’ as he was growing up. According to critics, Van Leeuwen’s poetry ‘effortlessly captures the child’s logic and emotional realm’ (De Schepper 2012, my translation). One of her best-known poems directly cites her seven-year-old son: ‘Mum, he says / one morning, if dinosaurs / won’t exist ever again, can / the same thing happen / to bears and people, and where / have you put ready my clothes?’ (my translation). Van Leeuwen also asked him for details about his holiday job as a teenager for a novel she is currently writing. Fine calls The Book of the Banshee (1991), which deals with a moody teenager, one of her most autobiographical novels, while her (step)daughters’ vegetarianism and subsequent fights with their meat-loving father provided the idea for The Chicken Gave It to Me (1992). Only a Show (1990) was inspired by admiration for her daughter, who overcame her stage fright with ventriloquism. In Up on Cloud Nine (2002), a novel about a teenage boy who likes taking risks, Fine wrote down her own fear and relief ‘when you get them in bed safely every night, and you think “phew, safe in bed, I have kept her alive for another day” ’ (Interview with Vanessa Joosen. 27 October 2020). In her work, she thus used the experiences and feelings of her children, which she witnessed, as well as her own emotions as a parent. Such layers can provide moments of relatability to adult readers of children’s books. Being a parent can also make authors aware of gaps in the market. Neil Gaiman was already a respected author of uncanny adult fiction when he developed the idea for Coraline (2002) for his daughter of five, because he found the children’s literature available too ‘nice’ and ‘safe’ (Beckett 2009: 166–7). Almond felt inspired to collaborate with an illustrator for My Dad’s a Birdman (2007) when his daughter became eight and he noticed a lack of illustrated books for older children. Some authors do research to help them construct younger characters credibly. Aidan Chambers’s Young Adult novels were informed, amongst other things, by psychological and philosophical literature, news clippings, and fiction by adolescent authors. He was also in regular touch with many of his young readers, some of whom he consulted for advice (Joosen 2021). For example, a group of Swedish teenagers convinced Chambers that Postcard from No Man’s Land, which he had conceptualized as an adult novel, should be published as YA (Chambers 2018). In Artful Dodgers (2009), Gubar highlights drama as a medium where intergenerational, collaborative creation thrived in the nineteenth century. For Chambers, one of the most inspirational moments in his

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career was working closely together with young actors on a stage adaptation of his novel The Toll Bridge (1992) in 1997, and Almond mentions working with children on drama as important. Chambers, Kuijer, and Almond also drew on their experience as teachers, and Fine mentions school visits as a way of keeping in touch with changing educational practices. In addition to contact with children, personal experiences in adulthood can find their way into children’s books. Kuijer (2020) does not think that his evolving age had an impact on his writing, but did base books on events that happened to him in adulthood, such as having ducks. In a similar vein, Jacqueline Wilson thinks that ‘the only significant change is that there are many more cats and dogs in my later work – since I’ve become a pet owner myself ’ (Interview with Vanessa Joosen. 26 November 2020). Other age-related experiences are more fundamental. Moeyaert sees his growing self-confidence as an adult reflected in young protagonists who take their lives into their hands. Whereas the main characters of his early novels make the best of events that are inflicted on them, later protagonists resist and claim more agency. For Moeyaert, this evolution in characterization parallels his own growth in his late twenties and thirties, something he describes as ‘growing older myself and learning to live better’. Almond finds his early work more overtly dark than his later books and also links that to personal development: ‘I have become less willing to indulge darkness as a way of controlling a story.’ Interestingly, he sees his writing for young readers as contributing to that development: it has helped him ‘as a person become more hopeful, more optimistic’. Central to Chambers’s take on the kinship between adolescence and adulthood is the idea of ‘recognition’, which played an important part in writing The Toll Bridge. In developing the identity crisis of the protagonist, he parallels the turmoil of adolescence to anxieties felt in midlife. As Chambers explained in a letter, the author recognized ‘the adolescent state, the adolescent crisis lived again as if it were in the present, as now. Yet with this difference … the author imports into the consciousness of his protagonist understandings that only the middle-aged author can actually achieve’ (Fax to Jacques Dohmen, photocopied at Chambers’s Home in 2015, Chambers 1993). Without becoming truly equal, the recognition helped Chambers to develop the story about an adolescent’s existential crisis at a time of transition. Experiences from adult life can also get in the way of writing for children. Joke van Leeuwen mentions a period in the 1990s when, due to personal reasons, she felt that her mind was not springerig (jumpy, elastic) enough to produce children’s literature. This led her to write more poetry and novels for adults. After some time, she was able to recover the ‘freshness of thoughts’ that she thinks is needed to ‘identify with beginning people’ (2020, my translation) and turned to children’s books again. The need for an occasional shift to adult literature is not unusual in prolific children’s authors, despite the fact that authors like Moeyaert, Van Leeuwen, and Kuijer also resist the segmentation of literature into age groups. Fine does see a fundamental difference between writing for children and adults. For the former, she always considers what will interest them with ‘a more professional eye’, while for the latter, ‘You’re talking about your own life one way or another’, including ‘passion, marriage, divorce, looking after old people’. When authors discuss the differences between writing for children and adults, their age norms become explicit. A shift to adult literature is often motivated by themes or plots that authors feel will not appeal to children, or by a level of darkness, violence, and sexuality that they don’t feel comfortable addressing to young readers. The differences become especially clear when they address similar themes in books for young and adult readers (Shavit 1986). Several of Almond’s books, for example, revolve

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around the friendship between adolescent boys. One is an outsider who displays a fascination with darkness and violence and this attracts but also frightens the protagonist, who usually comes from a more shielded environment. Whereas in his YA novel Kit’s Wilderness (1999), the violence is contained and the story ends with some optimism for all the characters, in the adult novel The Tightrope Walkers (2014), Almond goes further in bringing to the fore the dark, violent, and sexual aspects of the boys’ relationship. No redemption is offered for Vincent, who first becomes a social outcast and then disappears from view after raping the protagonist, Dominic’s girlfriend. Almond felt less comfortable putting such explicit scenes in books for young readers. The Tightrope Walkers was published as YA in the United States, which shows the relativity of age categories in the crossover range.

OLD AGE There are various ways in which children’s authors feel that their own ageing has had an impact on their writing, even though a straightforward parallel can often not be drawn. ‘It’s not like I am going to write more about old people or something’, Van Leeuwen says at age sixty-eight (my translation). Some authors do, however. Chambers’s later novels, in particular Postcards from No Man’s Land (1999) and Dying to Know You (2012), confront adolescents with issues of old age, such as imminent death and prostate problems. The books put mutually empowering intergenerational relationships between teenagers and older people central. In real life, Chambers has kept corresponding with his adolescent readers but finds that his rising age also confronted him with the limits of his imagination in his seventies. In particular, the development of social media and digital communication alienated him from contemporary youth: ‘Adolescence was always alive in me and “inhabited” me. I knew it viscerally, so to speak. … I no longer feel I belong to “the age between”. And this has caused a crisis in my writing life’ (interview with Vanessa Joosen. 17 January 2018). Wilson notes a similar problem but has solved it differently. While the 75-year-old writer says that she ‘was determined to be ultra contemporary in my books twenty or thirty years ago’, she has turned to historical fiction to avoid addressing the modern world. At seventy-three, Fine shares Chambers’s reservations about social media and believes that she has written her last children’s book: ‘I think it is now impossible for someone my age to write a realistic book for children. The last one I wrote was four years ago and it has been a misery from start to finish.’ In addition to social media, Fine mentions ‘sensitivity readings’ (where books are screened for inclusivity) by publishers as particularly off-putting, for example, when she was asked to change a ‘fat mole’ in a story to avoid body shaming. Kuijer kept up a steady production of children’s books until Florian Knol (2006) but has only published adult work since then. While his last children’s books give prominent roles to older figures, such strong intergenerational connections featured in two of his earlier books as well. It is unlikely that he was put off by the modern world, as his Polleke (2003) series addresses topics like refugees and political correctness, and mobile phones feature in Florian Knol. In his late seventies, Kuijer runs an active twitter account. When asked if he will still write children’s books, he says he does not know. Seeking connections between the present and the past has been a hallmark of Almond’s writing, and this also holds for the relationship between young and old age. He actively seeks out the common ground between the ages that is so crucial in Gubar’s kinship model: ‘What

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drives me to write is finding a common element between a man of my age and a child of ten and a child of ten five thousand years ago and a child of ten in three hundred years’ time and finding something that somehow contains all of those elements’ (Almond 2020). To accomplish this, Almond sometimes steers the attention away from the modern world, for example, by focusing on a teenager’s connection with his grandfather and his town’s past in Kit’s Wilderness. In other works, he puts modern innovations, such as robots and artificial intelligence, central to reflect on how they help us to understand crucial aspects of humanity, such as agency and spirituality. Van Leeuwen goes a step further in her embrace of old age and the modern world. Computer programs helped her create new illustrations when her declining eyesight made it more difficult to make detailed pen drawings, so that modern technology led to new artistic experiments which she enjoyed. While she felt that with her most recent poem, ‘Levenslust’ (2019, Zest for Life) she may have struck a final chord in her work for adults, she keeps being inspired to produce children’s books: ‘You get older and more wrinkly, but not in your mind, that can just keep on hopping around’ (Van Leeuwen 2020). The mental elasticity that she once felt was lost has returned with new force.

CONCLUSION ‘Given the oddities of psychic life, we easily feel a host of different ages at the very same time’, argues age critic Lynne Segal (2014). Children’s authors cultivate that feeling of kinship in their creative practice, as they match their memories from childhood – events and feelings, real and imagined – with their adult experiences and storytelling interests. This internal interaction between past and present, adulthood and childhood, that the authors describe can take various shapes. It can lead to an emotional reconnection and a revision of past experiences, as the authors reshape them as stories. Vice versa, the reflection on their own younger selves can also help them to gain new insights and even healing in their adult lives. It is, moreover, a process that is never finished, as the ageing process continues and the world – including experiences of childhood – keeps changing. While not all authors need contact with real children to keep fostering their creative process, for some, these encounters are helpful to inspire them and remind them of the kinship between the stages in life. ‘There is a kind of prejudice about children’, Almond explains, ‘about what they are capable of thinking about, what they are capable of asking’ (2020). Instead of viewing children in terms of a deficit in knowledge and insights, Almond argues that ‘adults and children should spend more time together, we should not separate them’ (2020). Children’s literature is one place where different generations come together, in and through stories. While these fictional stories cannot be assumed to reflect experiences from childhood or adulthood authentically and in all their diversity, they can be the start of real conversations through which different generations gain more understanding of what divides them, and what they share.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This article was written as part of the research project Constructing Age for Young Readers (CAFYR). This project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program (grant agreement No. 804920). I am grateful to the authors for sharing their views with me.

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Sipe, L. R. (2008), Storytime: Young Children’s Literary Understanding in the Classroom, New York: Teacher’s College Press. Smith, V. F. (2017), Between Generations: Collaborative Authorship in the Golden Age of Children’s Literature, Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Stephens, J. (1995), ‘Writing by Children, Writing for Children: Schema Theory, Narrative Discourse and Ideology’, Belgisch Tijdschrift Voor Filologie En Geschiedenis, 73 (3): 853–63. Tucker, N. (2001), ‘Anne Fine’, in N. Tucker and N. Gamble, Family Fictions: Anne Fine, Morris Gleitzman, Jacqueline Wilson and others, 49–68, London: Continuum. Van Buul, T., ed. (1991), Altijd acht gebleven: Over de kinderliteratuur van Annie M. G. Schmidt, Amsterdam: Querido. Van Leeuwen, J. (2019), Levenslust, Amsterdam: Querido. Van Lierop-Debrauwer, H., and S. Steels (2021), ‘The Mingling of Teenage and Adult Breaths: The Dutch Slash Series as Intergenerational Communication’, in J. Deszcz-Tryhubczak and Z. Jaques (eds), Intergenerational Solidarity in Children’s Literature and Film, 218–30, Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Viñas Valle, L. (2015), Deconstructing Dahl, Newcastle, CT: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Waller, A. (2019), Rereading Childhood Books: A Poetics, London: Bloomsbury. Wesseling, E. (2019), ‘Researching Child Authors: Which Questions (Not to) Ask’, Humanities, 8 (2), doi:10.3390/h8020087. Wouda, T. (2000), ‘Ik ben altijd een kind van vier gebleven’, Trouw (2 October). Available at: https://www. trouw.nl/home/–ik–ben–alt​ijd–een–kind–van–vier–geble​ven–∼acbc4​f5e/ (accessed 23 September 2017).

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CHAPTER FIVE

Writing successful ageing? The aches and pains of illness narrative and life review MARTINA ZIMMERMANN

INTRODUCTION This chapter explores the connection between ageing and illness to interrogate the concept of successful ageing.1 Sociologists John W. Rowe and Robert L. Kahn (1987) introduced this concept in the 1980s to overcome the separation of ‘diseased versus normal’ populations and ‘disease-related and age-determined’ research findings; an emphasis on ‘usual’ ageing, they argued, would support acceptance of particular disease states in older age. Successful ageing emphasizes masculinist ideals rife in capitalist societies, including individual achievement, productivity, and autonomy, and, in comparison to concepts like affirmative old age or harmonious ageing, denies that material changes of the body are part of the ageing process (Liang and Luo 2012; Sandberg 2013). In retaining the youthful body as its ideal, it does not challenge ageism (Katz and Calasanti 2014; Sandberg 2013). This normative power of successful ageing has created pressures for older people, as they realize that much of the biological ageing process is ‘outside their control’: not achieving successful ageing comes close to failure (Calasanti 2016: 1093) and is aligned with concepts of decline that dominate cultural perspectives on ageing in the West (Gullette 2004). This chapter explores successful ageing in life narratives. I follow Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson in my use of this term to identify writing about a life from a point of view internal to the subject, characterized by three aspects: (1) the narrator confronts their own life as lived, but also as seen by others, including achievements, appearance, and relationships; (2) life narratives are written during the subject’s lifetime and, therefore, reflect the narrator’s awareness of their mortality; and (3) life narrators want to persuade their readers of their version of lived experience (2001: 5–6). Illness often is part of the ageing process and experiencing illness can influence these three aspects. ‘Illness story making’, writes Arthur Kleinman, is prevalent among older people, as they ‘weave illness experience into the apparently seamless plot of their life stories, whose denouement they are constantly revising’ (1988: 49). To date, much scholarship on ageing life writing with an interest in illness concerns itself with dementia. Amongst others, studies have considered the poetic and political dimensions of recent dementia life writing, including the role of such narratives in giving a voice to people with dementia (Zimmermann 2017, 2020: 123–9), analysed their narratorial and

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ethical challenges (Falcus and Sako 2019: 26–79), and explored their potential to increase empathy in care (Bitenc 2020). This chapter does not focus on a particular condition typical in older age. In looking at illness as such in prominent published life writing by older people, this chapter argues that life writing is fraught with contradictions: it seems to embrace the challenges of older age, but the narrative strategies it adopts reflect the underlying pressures created by successful ageing. Why is this the case? Successful ageing takes as its foil the privileged white middle-class background of the Western cultural context. This context encourages triumphalist plots that have a positive closure (Conway 2007; Ehrenreich 2009). Like successful ageing itself, such plots leave little room for the real suffering and distress that may come with bodily change in older age. This appears particularly relevant for a genre like the diary, where chronological order may seem to predetermine, if not impose, a narrative of decline, against which the author-narrator has to plot. This chapter aims to show how a specific narrative form and frame will always articulate a particular version of the narrative of ageing and illness. To do this, it will focus on two genres of life narrative, the diary and the memoir, attending, amongst other things, to the role of reminiscence in these genres. Robert N. Butler describes reminiscence as a particular kind of life review in older people, finding that it is ‘prompted by the realization of approaching dissolution and death, and by the inability to maintain one’s sense of personal invulnerability’ (1964: 266). As episodic life writing, a diary records daily occurrences and emotional responses; it can take a reminiscence approach in individual entries, but its drive is forward looking without ‘foreknowledge’ about the plot of what remains of life (Smith and Watson 2001: 193). In comparison to the diary’s chronological immediacy, reminiscence is the main pursuit of the memoir (Smith and Watson 2001: 198). This chapter considers the possibilities and limitations of diary and memoir in exploring what it means to age, specifically looking at the role of illness in directing self-representations of ageing. The focus of the chapter is on exactly the cultural context that underwrites successful ageing – white, upper middle class, Anglo-American – looking at several of May Sarton’s (1912–1995) diaries and two of Diana Athill’s (1917–2019) memoirs. The American novelist and poet May Sarton published a significant number of diaries, beginning in her late forties. I will particularly look at understandings of acute illness as compared to chronic degenerative events in her later writings, to think through the role of these experiences in picturing ageing as a desirable period in life. How did Sarton fashion herself in At Seventy: A Journal ([1984] 1993), at a chronological age traditionally perceived of as representing a transition to older age? How does her recovery from a cerebrovascular event in After the Stroke: A Journal (1988) read in comparison to her final three diaries, Endgame: A Journal of the Seventy-Ninth Year ([1992] 1993), Encore: A Journal of the Eightieth Year. A Personal Triumph (1993) and At Eighty-Two: A Journal ([1996] 1997), and what does this tell us about the role of illness in Sarton’s endeavour to pitch herself as ageing successfully? The second part of this chapter will take a closer look at the final two memoirs by nonagenarian British writer Diana Athill, Somewhere towards the End (2008) and Alive, Alive Oh! (2015). That Athill could produce these narratives already suggests the privileged perspective of a certain degree of health and well-being after having lived a long life. Storytelling happens from the vantage point of a life’s happy closure, and the product of this writing becomes part of the author-narrator’s legacy, formulating and embodying the culmination of success in ageing. In essence, this chapter challenges the concept of successful ageing as a state in life that can be attained by force of will and as a notion that can conquer ageist stereotypes. Older age life writing reveals successful ageing as flawed if such writing wants to engage rightfully with the lived

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experience of ageing. The texts explored here have been studied widely, and this contribution is only able to take a snapshot of the work already done in the field, especially as the central focus of this chapter is neither on loneliness in old age nor on the experience of lesbian ageing. Its main aim is to show how prominent life writing echoes, rather than challenges, concepts of successful ageing.

MAY SARTON: ILLNESS AS AGEING IN THE MOMENT This section considers May Sarton’s later diaries, in particular After the Stroke (1988) and her final three diaries, Endgame ([1992] 1993), Encore (1993) and At Eighty-Two ([1996] 1997), reading them against At Seventy ([1984] 1993). At Seventy ([1984] 1993) pitches old age as a phase in life worth attaining (Gilleard 2018: 416). Sarton does this by integrating culturally sanctioned narratives of ageing, while explicitly arguing against them. For example, in making chronological age the diary’s theme, Sarton follows the cultural narrative that seventy marks a transition to old age (Waxman 1997: 56–91). At the same time, At Seventy keenly asserts that she is not old yet, Sarton intimating that ‘real old age begins when one looks backward rather than forward, but I look forward with joy to the years ahead and especially to the surprises that any day may bring’ ([1984] 1993: 9–10). Sarton’s position on the future is well supported by the form of the diary, as its chronological immediacy moves towards the future. It also underpins her argument against ageing as the autumn of life: ‘A matter of saying farewell, but the strange thing is that I do not feel it is autumn. Life is so rich and full these days. There is so much to look forward to’ ([1984] 1993: 161). It comes as no surprise that Sarton begins the diary in spring, symbol of the renewal of life, repeatedly affirming that she is ‘awfully glad to be alive’ ([1984] 1993: 9, 251, 286). Sarton seemingly embraces the change that comes with ageing when she writes that ‘there are some changes at seventy that mean old age. I don’t mind’ ([1984] 1993: 193). Yet, she does not detail these changes. Instead, she writes about feeling more herself, happier, balanced, and powerful; more able to cope than at fifty ([1984] 1993: 10, 37). These assertions are in line with Sarton’s life-long positive perspective on old age, something that literary scholarship has long recognized (e.g. Springer 1980; Wolf 1987; Waxman 1997; Henneberg 2003; see especially Gilleard 2018). Accordingly, bodily markers of old age, like wrinkles, are taken as the boon and signifier of a rich long life. While conceding that she has to ‘face wrinkles’ as the ‘first sign of old age’, Sarton reminds herself that they ‘do not really diminish the beauty of an old face’ ([1984] 1993: 306). Rather, a face ‘without lines’ suggests to her ‘something unlived, empty, behind it’ ([1984] 1993: 61). This cultural script works as long as she is healthy: ‘seventy is not old, especially if good health is in the cards’ ([1984] 1993: 272). Health is productivity. Sarton is well and happy in At Seventy, because she feels ‘total concentration on creation’ and is able to ‘work in peace’ ([1984] 1993: 229, 252). It is significant that the only drug featuring (and only once) in the diary is Ritalin, which Sarton takes to enhance attention, because she realizes that ‘what I am doing now … requires immense patience with little to show for the concentrated hours’ ([1984] 1993: 280). Loss of productivity becomes Sarton’s determinant of old age. And in her later diary, After the Stroke, she connects illness with old age, because with acute illness comes loss of productivity (1988: 199). The stroke she suffers in 1986 makes her ‘take a leap into old age instead of approaching it gradually’ (1988: 17). Sarton perceives of herself as old at this point, because she notices significant bodily change that makes her depend

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on others, both psychosocial and biomedical factors determining ‘how old a person feels’ (Stephan, Sutin, and Terracciano 2015: 1). During the year of recovery, chronicled in After the Stroke (1988), Sarton becomes intensely aware of her body as constituting the precondition of her vitality. Retrospectively confirming her perspective in At Seventy, Sarton writes that youth ‘has to do with not being aware of one’s body, whereas old age is often a matter of consciously overcoming some misery or other inside the body. One is acutely aware of it’ (1988: 17, emphasis original). Sarton describes her stroke as constituting ‘a radical change of life’ (1988: 25). But in describing what happens to her, she really follows the idea that illness constitutes ‘the negation of [one’s life] rather than … an aspect in one’s life’ (Avrahami 2007: 23). She feels that she leads a ‘half-life’, can’t ‘handle’ her life, does ‘not choose’ her life – that she is ‘cut off from what was once a self ’ (1988: 60, 132, 148, 75). In other words, Sarton adopts the culturally prevalent binary of young versus old (Woodward 1999: xvii), not perceiving of herself on a life-long continuum of ageing where changes in bodily function characterize an ongoing ageing process. As is the case in many illness narratives, writing is Sarton’s strategy to regain control (Frank 1995). After the stroke, Sarton confesses ‘how exasperating it is no longer to be able to do what seemed nothing at all even a year ago’ (1988: 14). Yet, she puts pen to paper and keeps writing, ‘even as she protests not to be her true self ’ (Mintz 2007: 195). This is especially important since, even though not justified by her medical records or her pathogenesis, Sarton begins to be concerned about the slowness of her mind. Her concerns zero in on ‘the threats of senility, the helplessness of physical decay, the frustrations of waning power’ (Springer 1980: 46). These associations speak to the cultural narrative of ageing as connected to loss of cognitive prowess, but they are also understandable after Sarton had witnessed dementia in her long-term partner (Sarton [1977] 1995). Sarton explains that she revised After the Stroke before it went to press (1988: ix). But regaining control goes much farther than being able to choose what contents of daily life to share with the public. It also concerns the kind of narrative told. Even if Sarton navigates the frustrations of her condition, After the Stroke follows the rebirth myth (Hawkins 1999: 31–60), as stroke remains an acute event where the individual’s emphasis rests on recovery, not the capabilities lost (Zimmermann 2012). Sarton describes herself as the ‘phoenix’ who begins to ‘rise from its embers’ after having ‘reached the very end, death itself ’ (1988: 13). Her writing and recovery complete, Sarton eventually asserts that ‘now that I am well again I am not any longer the very old woman’ (1988: 158). It is only from this vantage point that she is able to adopt a position typical of affirmative old age – to accept the ageing body as part of the human condition, a body that will become frailer the older one gets: The body is part of our identity, and its afflictions and discontents, its donkey-like refusal to do what ‘ought’ to be done, destroys self-respect … How beautiful an old face has been to me! So if I mind the wrinkles now it is because I have failed to ascend inside to what is happening inside – and that is a great adventure and challenge, perhaps the greatest in a lifetime … a part of accepting the human condition. At least, being well, I may be able to do better at it now than even a month ago. (1988: 97, emphasis original) This passage resonates with the tone of At Seventy, where Sarton muses on old age as still in the future. Having performed, in literary form and myth, her full recovery, she is able, from the vantage point of renewed health, to consider ageing once more as a desirable phase in life: ‘It has been a

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long journey, but now I do not think about the past at all, only rejoice in the present – and dream of the future … and my seventy-fifth birthday … there is much I still hope to do. And I rejoice in the life I have recaptured and in all that still lies ahead’ (1988: 243). Arthur Frank, in his typology of illness narratives, explores the restitution narrative as one that offers no real scope for the inner development of the author-narrator (Frank 1995; Vickers 2016), and Sarton’s desire for closure feels painfully unrealistic, especially when read with the benefit of hindsight and against her final three diaries. Endgame ([1992] 1993), Encore (1993) and At Eighty-Two ([1996] 1997) reveal the ‘social and biological correlates of subjective age’ (Stephan, Sutin, and Terracciano 2015: 3) – shortness of breath and decrease in grip strength being just two phenomena increasingly mentioned by Sarton as indicators that she has reached old age. Yet, in her final three diaries, Sarton pitches herself as ill rather than old. She suffers from a heart rhythm disorder, which may give rise to another stroke. She also has digestive difficulties and complains about fatigue, both of which are possible effects of the drug amiodarone that controls her fibrillating heart; indigestion, in turn, causes her ‘constant pain and increasing frailty’ ([1992] 1993: 9). These conditions are experienced by many older people; they connect to ‘clinical and physical performance measures that are important for the health and functioning of the individuals, but are not necessarily diseases’ (Stephan, Sutin, and Terracciano 2015: 2). Yet, in fashioning herself as ill, Sarton can describe herself as going ‘through this year of getting well, and thinking about old age’ ([1992] 1993: 90). She can treat old age as an objective entity rather than something that happens to her (Gilleard 2018: 422). Taking a bodily state as illness rather than ‘a new normal’ is a powerful move in Western culture because illness seems to hold out the hope, even expectation, of betterment and cure – it is ‘a commitment to the future’ (Clare 2017: 86). Fashioning herself as ill, not old, is Sarton’s strategy not to accept her situation as the new normal, that is, to reject the idea that ‘I simply must learn to live with it and forget about imagining that some doctor might find a solution’ ([1992] 1993: 57). In addition, in Encore, Sarton rarely uses the word ‘old’. The notion of ‘triumph’ in the diary’s subtitle and the text throughout (1993: 12, 51) also keeps this journal knitted to the cultural narrative of overcoming rather than accepting old age as a part of life that might bring aspects of decline. And instead of accepting that ageing might entail a decrease in outputs, Sarton keeps comparing her current productivity to that of her younger self, feeling she does ‘nothing, nothing whatever’ (1993: 41). Sarton’s biographer sums up her perspective: ‘May did not want to die, she did want life on her own terms – wellness’ (Peters 1997: 392). A focus on Sarton’s fiction induces scholars to believe that ‘Sarton seems to have worked through her own task of self-development’ (Wolf 1987: 294). But reading Sarton’s full body of diaries alongside her authorized biography, I concur with gerontologist Chris Gilleard that Sarton never ‘fully accepted old age, not at least as something that had “really” happened to her’ (2018: 422). Chronicling her situation in diary entries perhaps enhances the challenge of writing about old age. The form itself suggests that ageing involves a process of decline, as the passing of time becomes clear from entries being dated. Concurrently, the struggle with daily life and lack of success in ageing (because of her decreasing autonomy and lost youthful energy) are emphasized by the intervals during which Sarton does not write (Mintz 2007: 186). Sarton really only accepts ageing as characterized by bodily changes in the final pages of her last diary, At Eighty-Two. And even though she dedicates this journal to ‘Kairos: A unique time in a person’s life; an opportunity for change’ (karios, in Greek, denotes a decisive moment or

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window of opportunity), she only comes to the acceptance of change after having completed the writing of this diary, that is, after the process of writing has taken her to the realization that ‘it will be good for me to talk about old age, find out where I should bear down more heavily on myself and where I should let things go’ ([1996] 1997: 342). This perspective – to take a step back and review the situation in relation to her lived life – comes late for Sarton, perhaps because she writes in the form of a diary. A memoir relies more heavily on such retrospection, because it is less subject to chronological immediacy. Reading Diana Athill’s memoirs against Sarton’s diaries will enable further reflection on the role of narrative perspective in writing successful ageing.

DIANA ATHILL: WISDOM AND THE LIFE REVIEW Fears of ageing especially concern the middle aged (Woodward 1991: 32). Diana Athill’s musings on old and very old age bring this out. The BBC reporter and publisher wrote several memoirs over her lifetime, and I will look at Somewhere towards the End (2008) and Alive, Alive Oh! (2015) to explore Athill’s view on old age. Confirming Waxman’s (1997) understanding of seventy as a turning point, Athill agrees with Sarton that ‘being “over seventy” is being old: suddenly I was aground on that fact and saw that the time had come to size it up’ (2008: 13). But in comparison to Sarton, Athill takes a life review approach from outside the ongoing ageing experience. Interpreting from the vantage point of ripe old age, Athill can be more open about some losses in old age. Unlike Sarton, Athill does not write from lived moments of pain, despair, and loneliness, or doubts about continued productivity. Therefore, she is able to offer these two memoirs as the learned wisdom of a lifetime. Such an interpretation comes with the different kind of reader engagement enabled by a life review. We take Athill as having reached old age, rather than following her through the chronicled struggles towards it. Her chronological age – eighty-nine in the first book and ninety-eight in her second – further contributes to the reader’s perception that Athill has aged successfully: she approaches a century. Having aged successfully, Athill can portray herself as ‘one rather lucky old woman’ (2015: 6) and her account as offering ‘object lessons’, which demonstrate ‘how not to think about getting old’ (2008: 5). Like Sarton, Athill follows the cultural script of successful ageing. She opens Somewhere towards the End with the account of having planted a tree fern, musing whether she will see it grow. In planting a tree as a symbol of life, Athill sets the scene for a positive take on ageing. The book ends with a postscript on the tree fern which ‘now has nine fronds … It was worth buying’ (2008: 183). The reader being able to close the book in the awareness that Athill lived to see the fern grow already melds success to ageing. This symbolism additionally places Athill at the beginning and end of a narrative circle as well as the circle of life. This is important in relation to Athill’s childlessness, which conceptually removes her from a sense of biological continuity (Becker 1997) and shared life experience with other older women (Simon 1988). Athill’s childlessness is one of the topics explored in the closing pages of Somewhere towards the End (2008: 161). It also features at the textual centre of her final memoir, Alive, Alive Oh!, in a chapter that gives the memoir its title (2015: 61–88), as she survived the complications that made her lose a child in the fifth month of pregnancy at the age of forty-three. Where Athill chooses to place childlessness in each of her accounts shows her full awareness of the power of narrative tactics when dealing with loss in relation to ageing. Reflections on loss seemingly come easy for Athill. The form of the life review gives her much more freedom than Sarton has as regards editing and omissions. Even though Athill lost her lover

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to a heart attack and experienced a friend’s dementia, she focuses on what might be seen as minor losses where she articulates loss as part of ageing. Such losses comprise the interest in novels or her appetite (2008: 134, 136). They also include no longer feeling sexual interest (2008: 15), which she describes as ‘a new sort of freedom’ (2015: 2). These losses, some more significant than others, can be reflected on from the certainty that she has reached a comfortable place. Sarton, for example, worries about when and how the moment of moving to a nursing home might come ([1984] 1993: 41–2) and how she could finance it (1988: 199). By comparison, at the time of writing about such issues in her second memoir, Athill finds such questions successfully resolved. In addition, Athill can admit some of the losses, because she places them alongside the gains and riches of old age. She continues to drive and takes pleasure in gardening and, most of all, indulges in writing (2008: 97–102, 105, 145). Sarton writes a lot about gardening, too. But in her case, the reader is compelled to appreciate gardening as Sarton’s way to contain depression and loneliness in daily life, not least as it had played a major role in Journal of a Solitude ([1973] 1992). In Athill’s account, we take gardening as a recipe for healthy old age. Where Athill writes about the more profound losses that come with the body’s exhaustion, she chooses vocabulary slightly at odds with the fact explored: ‘dwindling energy is one of the most boring things about being old’ (2008: 132) – the notion of boredom deflecting attention from the experience of true loss. In a similar vein, Athill mentions – perhaps with a pinch of irony – the ‘luxury’ of the wheelchair ‘which many misguided old people dread’ (2015: 130). In looking back, Athill is able to stay in control more readily than Sarton, who never has the benefit of foreknowledge. Organizing her accounts by themes, Athill controls the trajectory of experience as well as the plotline; she can also choose the sequence of events and the vignettes that pepper her account. Consequently, Athill can depict her life as ‘pockmarked with regrets. One knows so well, after all, one’s own lacks and lazinesses, omissions, oversights, the innumerable ways in which one falls short of one’s own ideals’ (2008: 161). And she can picture her life-long development successfully: ‘I had seen it for so long as a life of failure, but now, when I look back – who would believe it, it was nothing of the sort!’ (2008: 157). In Athill’s life, some emotional turmoil was only conquered at the distance of twenty years (Pattullo 2019), and the two memoirs present the result of Athill’s learning. Sarton, by comparison, writes from within the physical situation of decline and struggles against this decline moment by moment, perhaps best put into words in the diaries’ titles themselves: Endgame and Encore. Writing from the vantage point of retrospection also empowers Athill to narrate acceptance of her mortality. She can ignore the taboo of writing about death exactly because her chronological age brings her close to death (Burack-Weiss 2006: 75), broaching her nearness to death very openly: ‘Death is no longer something in the distance, but might well be encountered any time’ (2015: 158). The view on life projected here strongly aligns with Mary Mothersill’s (1999) insight that fear of death is nowhere near as problematic as the fear of dying before ‘one’s time’ – a sensation palpable especially in Sarton’s last four diaries. Before her stroke, in comparison, Sarton feels ‘detached from the areas of pain, the loss of love, the struggle to get the work completed, the fear of death’ ([1984] 1993: 37). Like Sarton, Athill is very clear about the fact that good health in old age removes one from concerns about old age. She deftly summarizes what makes a good old age, as she reviews her family history: ‘Most of the women on both sides of my family live into their nineties, keeping their wits about them. None of them has ever had to go into an old person’s home, or has even had

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to employ live-in carers’ (2008: 53). The absence of dementia, in particular, avoids the need for care or institutionalization (Higgs and Gilleard 2015: 50). But the experience of Athill’s 92-yearold mother resonates with some of Sarton’s challenges in At Eighty-Two: ‘she was deaf, blind in one eye and depending on a contact lens for sight in the other, so arthritic in her hips that she could hardly walk, and in her right arm that it was almost useless. She also had angina … and vertigo’ (2008: 54). Pain and discomfort associated with physical decline strongly influence how one experiences old age, and Athill can write so positively about it because she remained free from such complaints. For Athill, a heart attack ‘would be the timely conclusion of a long and good life, not a tragedy’ (2008: 58), while dementia represents the ultimate spectre of old age: ‘only those old people afflicted with senile dementia move on to another plane. For the rest of us, as we have sown, so do we reap’ (2008: 79). Like Sarton, Athill takes brain ageing as the decisive determinant of failed ageing. This brings home all the more that successful ageing in life writing, at least to some degree, is positively biased by their author-narrators’ continued cognitive prowess. Like Sarton, Athill grapples with change in older age, but her narrative perspective enables her to know that she mastered this change. Where Sarton struggles with concerns as to what the future might bring, Athill, from the vantage point of retrospection, is able to organize key life events in a way that supports a positive life story.

CONCLUSION: AGEING, BUT ONLY FOR REFLECTION Single old women are often considered ‘among the poorest members of society’ and rarely part of extended social networks (Alberti 2019: 158). May Sarton and Diana Athill do not fall into this category. Both reflect the self-reliance and self-sufficiency accrued over a lifetime that qualitative research has identified in never-married older women and lesbians (Simon 1988; Nystrom and Jones 2012). Both women were unconventional in their lives and works. Both came from privileged white backgrounds: Athill from minor English aristocracy, Sarton from a very successful immigrant family. They had different literary careers – Sarton published poetry and fiction, while Athill concentrated on memoir – but in the texts explored in this chapter both write to overcome death as the endpoint of the continuum of ageing in which they live and write. Life writing traces life. But in its literariness, it is also in some ways fiction. Sarton revised her diaries for publication, and Athill wrote from the vantage point of a successful very old age. Both were lucky to have avoided other chronic and perhaps more disabling conditions, and the activity and process of writing by themselves imply that the author-narrators can rely on significant cognitive capabilities. What these narratives convey and confirm is that successful ageing is perceived of as a combination of high cognitive and physical functioning that enables continued engagement with life and desired activities and absence of disabling conditions (Rowe and Kahn 1997). Successful ageing is a powerful cultural script, especially when considering that the accounts discussed in this chapter were published as anti-ageist conversations increasingly took hold. Accepting old age as a given is easy when it comes with good health – and when it is done from the vantage point of having lived a significant part of this old age in good health. Likewise, to fashion ageing as illness can help in the moment of an acute condition, like a cardiovascular event, when recovery is forthcoming. But this strategy has more of a negative impact on self and quality of life when the new normal corresponds to an eternal state of ill health. Sarton seems to me to be acutely aware of her increasing old age, without ever wanting to acknowledge it. Her body causes

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her to feel old. But writing about old age is fraught with the challenge of having to write against the ‘powerful impulses in modern Western culture to perfect, control or even to transcend the body’ (Couser 2012: 10). Culturally, ageing is connected to decline and loss, and, once Sarton feels old because of her stroke, she does ‘not want to write about old age because I am there’ (1988: 100). The idea of successful ageing fails to accommodate the fact that much of ageing happens along a continuum between health and disease, and that where we are on this continuum is to a great extent not within our control (Cole 1992: 238–9). Writing about ageing as lived on this continuum (and with the prospect of shifting further along this continuum, towards death) does not sit well with the ageless ideal inherent in successful ageing. Normal or ‘usual’ ageing, which includes everything from wrinkles to tiredness and exhaustion, is not good enough (Gullette 2010: 334–5). Adjusting to an ever-changing new normal is difficult, especially when considering that medical problems of old age have been allocated to disease-specific concepts for many decades (Moreira and Palladino 2009: 357). And as long as the search for a cure determines how society thinks about the role of medicine in older age (O’Mahony 2017), there is little hope for acceptance of biological change in ageing. Still, accepting ageing in the moment of time is hard to do, when ageing involves a struggle with uncertainty and doubt about performance and independence – parameters that continue to be intimately connected to a sense of self in Western culture.

NOTE 1 This work was supported by a UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship [MR/T019794/1]. I owe thanks to Brian Hurwitz for observations on a draft of this chapter and to Neil Vickers for pointing me to Eli Clare’s monograph.

REFERENCES Alberti, F. B. (2019), A Biography of Loneliness, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Athill, D. (2008), Somewhere towards the End, London: Granta. Athill, D. (2015), Alive, Alive Oh! And Other Things That Matter, London: Granta. Avrahami, E. (2007), The Invading Body: Reading Illness Autobiographies, Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. Becker, G. (1997), Disrupted Lives: How People Create Meaning in a Chaotic World, Berkeley: University of California Press. Bitenc, Rebecca A. (2020), Reconsidering Dementia Narratives: Empathy, Identity and Care, Abingdon: Routledge. Burack-Weiss, A. (2006), The Caregiver’s Tale: Loss and Renewal in Memoirs of Family Life, New York: Columbia University Press. Butler, R. N. (1964), ‘The Life Review: An Interpretation of Reminiscence in the Aged’, in R. Kastenbaum (ed.), New Thoughts on Old Age, 265–80, New York: Springer. Calasanti, T. (2016), ‘Combating Ageism: How Successful Is Successful Aging?’, Gerontologist, 56: 1093–101. Clare, E. (2017), Brilliant Imperfections: Grappling with Cure, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Cole, T. R. (1992), The Journey of Life: A Cultural History of Aging in America, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Conway, K. (2007), Illness and the Limits of Expression, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Couser, G. T. (2012), Signifying Bodies: Disability in Contemporary Life Writing, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Ehrenreich, B. ([2009] 2010), Smile or Die: How Positive Thinking Fooled America and the World, London: Granta. Falcus, S., and K. Sako (2019), Contemporary Narratives of Dementia: Ethics, Ageing, Politics, Abingdon: Routledge. Frank, A. (1995), The Wounded Storyteller: Body, Illness, and Ethics, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Gilleard, C. (2018), ‘Suffering Old Age? An Exploration of May Sarton’s Later Life in Writing’, Educational Gerontology, 44: 416–24. Gullette, M. M. (2010), ‘Ageism and Social Change: The New Regimes of Decline’, in T. R. Cole, R. E. Ray, and R. Kastenbaum (eds), A Guide to Humanistic Studies in Aging: What Does It Mean to Grow Old?, 319–40, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Gullette, M. M. (2004), Aged by Culture, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Hawkins, A. H. (1999), Reconstructing Illness: Studies in Pathography, 2nd edn, West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press. Henneberg, S. (2003), ‘Granny at Seventeen: May Sarton’s Early Encounters with the Land of Old Age’, Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, 22: 357–70. Higgs, P., and C. Gilleard (2015), Rethinking Old Age: Theorising the Fourth Age, London: Palgrave. Katz, S., and T. Calasanti (2014), ‘Critical Perspectives on Successful Aging: Does It “Appeal More Than It Illuminates”?’, Gerontologist, 55: 26–33. Kleinman, A. (1988), The Illness Narratives: Suffering, Healing, and the Human Condition, New York: Basic Books. Liang, J., and B. Luo (2012), ‘Toward a Discourse Shift in Social Gerontology: From Successful Aging to Harmonious Aging’, Journal of Aging Studies, 26: 327–34. Mintz, S. B. (2007), Unruly Bodies: Life Writing by Women with Disabilities, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Moreira, T., and P. Palladino (2009), ‘Ageing between Gerontology and Biomedicine’, BioSocieties, 4: 349–65. Mothersill, M. (1999), ‘Old Age’, Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association, 73: 9–23. Nystrom, N. M., and T. C. Jones. (2012), ‘Aging in the Lesbian Community’, in T. M. Witten and A. E. Eyler (eds), Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender Aging: Challenges in Research, Practice and Policy, 130–61, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. O’Mahony, S. (2017), The Way We Die Now, London: Head of Zeus. Pattullo, P. (2019), ‘Diana Athill Obituary’, Guardian, 24 January. Available at: https://www.theg​uard​ian. com/books/2019/jan/24/diana-ath​ill-obitu​ary (accessed 15 December 2020). Peters, M. (1997), May Sarton: A Biography, New York: Fawcett Columbine. Rowe, J. W., and R. L. Kahn (1987), ‘Human Aging: Usual and Successful’, Science, 237: 143–9. Rowe, J. W., and R. L. Kahn (1997), ‘Successful Aging’, The Gerontologist, 34: 433–40. Sandberg, L. (2013), ‘Affirmative Old Age – the Ageing Body and Feminist Theory on Difference’, International Journal of Ageing and Later Life, 8: 11–40. Sarton, M. (1988), After the Stroke: A Journal, London: The Women’s Press. Sarton, M. ([1973] 1992), Journal of a Solitude, New York: Norton.

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Sarton, M. ([1984] 1993), At Seventy: A Journal, New York: Norton. Sarton, M. (1993), Encore: A Journal of the Eightieth Year. A Personal Triumph, London: The Women’s Press. Sarton, M. ([1992] 1993), Endgame: A Journal of the Seventy-Ninth Year, London: The Women’s Press. Sarton, M. ([1977] 1995), The House by the Sea, New York: Norton. Sarton, M. ([1996] 1997), At Eighty-Two: A Journal, New York: Norton. Simon, B. L. (1988), ‘Never-Married Old Women and Disability: A Majority Experience’, in M. Fine and A. Asch (eds), Women with Disabilities: Essays in Psychology, Culture, and Politics, 215–25, Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. Smith, S., and J. Watson (2001), Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Springer, M. (1980), ‘As We Shall Be: May Sarton and Aging’, Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, 5: 46–9. Stephan, Y., A. R. Sutin, and A. Terracciano (2015), ‘How Old Do You Feel? The Role of Age Discrimination and Biological Aging in Subjective Age’, PLoS ONE, 10 (3): e0119293. Vickers, N. (2016), ‘Illness Narratives’, in A. Smyth (ed.), A History of English Autobiography, 388–401, New York: Cambridge University Press. Waxman, B. F. (1997), To Live in the Center of the Moment: Literary Autobiographies of Aging, Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia. Wolf, M. A. (1987), ‘Human Development, Gerontology and Self-Development through the Writings of May Sarton’, Educational Gerontology, 13: 289–95. Woodward, K. (1991), Aging and Its Discontents: Freud and Other Fictions, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Woodward, K. (1999), ‘Introduction’, in K. Woodward (ed.), Figuring Age: Women, Bodies, Generations, iv– xxix, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Zimmermann, M. (2012), ‘Narrating Stroke: The Life-Writing and Fiction of Brain Damage’, Medical Humanities, 38: 73–7. Zimmermann, M. (2017), The Poetics and Politics of Alzheimer’s Disease Life-Writing, Basingstoke: Palgrave. Zimmermann, M. (2020), The Diseased Brain and the Failing Mind: Dementia in Science, Medicine and Literature of the Long Twentieth Century, London: Bloomsbury.

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CHAPTER SIX

Picturing what happens at the end: Graphic narratives of ageing and end of life KATHLEEN VENEMA

INTRODUCTION ‘Here’s what I used to think happened at “the end” ’, Roz Chast writes, about six months after moving her 95-year-old parents into a seniors’ residence (Figure 6.1). The words appear at the top of the page, in the hand-printing that characterizes most of Chast’s graphic narrative, and they sit directly above a row of three comics panels. Four hand-printed sentences follow the row of comics and occupy the remaining half of the page (2014: 148). Like almost every page in Chast’s bestselling memoir, Can’t We Talk about Something More Pleasant? (2014), this one appears at first glance to be a spontaneous mix of hastily scribbled visuals and text, but its surface simplicity belies layers of meaning. Chast’s three comics panels, for instance, visualize what it is that she used to think about how people died. In the first, a medium-view drawing of an older woman in a bed sits underneath the words, ‘One day, old Mrs McGillicuddy felt unwell, and she took to her bed’ (2014: 148). The second panel offers a closer view of the same woman, now clearly uncomfortably ill, under the words, ‘She stayed there for, oh, about three or four weeks, growing weaker by the day.’ In the final panel, above a drawing of Mrs McGillicuddy’s tombstone, we read: ‘One night, she developed something called a “death rattle”, and soon after that, she died. The end.’ The first of the hand-written sentences that follows the comics’ abrupt chronology acknowledges Chast’s growing awareness: ‘What I was starting to understand was that the middle panel was a lot more painful, humiliating, long-lasting, complicated, and hideously expensive.’ Chast’s point, of course, is that any assumptions she had had about the easy tidiness of death have been obliterated by the reality of caring for her parents. The arguably juvenile visual form with which she makes her point might seem, at first, like mockery, both of older people and of popular beliefs about those who are older. Attention to Chast’s page, however, reveals the multiple levels at which it works, including cueing its readers to think about temporalities of ageing and dying; simultaneously showing and challenging comfortable mystifications of life’s end; and alerting us to the fact that we create narrative coherence when we read comics by projecting events and time frames into panels and into the gutters between panels.1

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FIGURE 6.1  ‘Here’s what I used to think happened at “the end” ’ from Can’t We Talk about Something More Pleasant?, Bloomsbury Publishing Inc. © Roz Chast, 2014.

Comics scholars regularly underscore the complex reading-viewing processes that graphic narratives like Chast’s require,2 given the genre’s unique capacity to both show and say. Candida Rifkind and Linda Warley’s extended description of the processes is helpful in its detail. Readers of graphic narrative, they explain, must simultaneously ‘interpret both words and drawn images’, at the same time that they make sense of ‘frames, gutters, blank spaces, speech balloons or boxed commentary, and more’. This deciphering process, they add, goes on while readers also ‘navigate the tensions between individual panels, panels in sequence, and the whole page layout’ (2016: 10). Reading graphic narratives, they assert, is a considerably less linear process than reading conventional narratives (2016: 10). It is also, I propose, profoundly rewarding of the effort and not for the faint of heart.

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This chapter introduces eight long-form memoirs by adult artists who use words and pictures to tell stories about their parents,3 in the years that their parents approach and, in some cases, experience their lives’ end. I read three of the texts closely to support my argument that graphic narrative is a uniquely provocative form for narrating stories about age, ageing, and end of life. Graphic narrative, as I demonstrate, is especially adept at representing the multiple, intersecting events and temporalities that have shaped long lives, thereby making available deep histories for older characters who might be devalued elsewhere by neoliberal discourses of autonomy and independence. The form is also distinct for its ability to represent the hybrid subjectivities that caregiving requires and creates; make visible the work of intergenerational memory in exploring what a life has been and what it has meant; and visualize aged and ageing bodies, including caregivers’ bodies as they change through time. The chapter focuses on Roz Chast’s Can’t We Talk about Something More Pleasant?, Joyce Farmer’s Special Exits: A Graphic Memoir (2010), and Nigel Baines’ Afloat: A Memoir about Mum, Dementia, and Trying Not to Drown (2019),4 and briefly introduces five other Englishlanguage graphic narratives of ageing.5 I ground my choice of long-form texts in both the strong case Martina Zimmermann makes for analysing book-length Alzheimer’s narratives (2017: 16–17) and Hillary Chute’s endorsement of the ‘seriousness of purpose’ that long-form comics require (2017: 249). As this chapter demonstrates, book-length graphic narratives about ageing and end of life are singularly able to represent, value, celebrate, and remember the complexity of long lives lived. I note, however, that the texts I consider are all by caregivers, and therefore subject to the cautions that Sarah Falcus and Katsura Sako issue in relation to dementia narratives, specifically that both the subject’s story and their claim to personhood might be ceded to the caregiver-author (2019: 43). Zimmermann articulates a range of similar concerns, reminding us that questions about reliability, subject position, narrative framing, and levels of collaboration must always be asked about memoirs by caregivers (2017: 72–3). It may also be important to note that all eight writer-artists occupy the middle class broadly defined; that three of the eleven parents depicted were working class; that six of the authors are female and two are male; and that two of the authors are Canadian, four are American, one is British American, and one is British. What needs to be emphasized is that, with one nuanced exception, all eight memoirs are written by and about white people.6 I begin the chapter, therefore, by acknowledging the limitations of its whiteness, especially given what Covid-19 continues to teach us about the ways in which ageing and end-of-life experiences are, statistically, several orders of magnitude more difficult for people from Indigenous, Asian, Black, and other minority communities. Clearly there are many more stories that need to be drawn and told, read, heard, viewed, and analysed.

PARENTS AND CHILDREN Roz Chast was already an award-winning New Yorker cartoonist when she published Can’t We Talk about Something More Pleasant? in 2014. In Talk, Chast brings her darkly humorous signature style to an extended story about caregiving through the years of her parents’ very old age. By way of extremity, exaggeration, self-deprecation, and unabashed denigration of ageing and older people, Chast tracks Elizabeth’s and George’s physical and mental decline; situates their ongoing narrative present as an outcome of their personalities and their personal histories; chronicles the staggering

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work involved in securing adequate, desirable, and financially accessible care; and regularly acknowledges the range of ugly emotions caregiving can prompt. Like many of the caregiver memoirs that Falcus and Sako (2019: 42–51) reference, Talk also quickly reveals itself to be almost as much about Chast as it is about her parents. Talk’s first two chapters promptly establish that Chast’s choice, as an adult, to see her parents infrequently is a result of her parents’ difficult personalities (2014: 4, 6, 15, 16, 28–33, 34–6), their often-fraught relationship with one another (2014: 7, 10, 17, 19, 30), and her acutely unhappy childhood (2014: 11, 13, 32, 36). Chast does not use the term neoliberalism, but she is quick to clarify that, where her parents are concerned, neoliberal notions of independence and autonomy, including economic independence and autonomy, suit her just fine (2014: 10–11). Indeed, much of Talk’s early tension derives from Chast’s simultaneous desire for only minimal contact with her parents and the unhappy realization that only she can provide the care they increasingly need. That tension emerges visually and narratively in the memoir’s frenetic structure, what I have called elsewhere its ‘poetics of chaos’ (Venema 2018: 666). Almost every one of Talk’s 228 pages functions as a discrete narrative unit, each one designed as its own idiosyncratic mix of text and visuals. As a result, readers are constantly obliged to recalibrate their cognitive, visual, and narrative expectations, effectively inhabiting the shifting, unpredictable subjectivity that care often demands. Chast’s ‘poetics of chaos’ thus aptly instantiates what Arthur Frank calls ‘chaos stories’, narratives whose compulsiveness reflects the desperate anxiety that illness and caregiving sometimes provoke (1997: 97–112). Chast’s peculiar gift is wringing maximum dark humour from extreme caregiving anxiety, including by juxtaposing rapidly mixed visual styles with the narrator’s7 frequent invocations of predictable, linear stages of ageing (Chast 2014: 10, 20, 27, 103, 148, 149). Though her parents sometimes adhere to expected patterns, the narrator emphasizes how much more often they resist, refuse, exceed, or otherwise baffle expectations (2014: 3, 4, 16, 23, 26, 27, 57). Nowhere is the juxtaposition more acute than in the final chapters, which recount the mother’s long decline after the father’s death (2014: 161–222). ‘Where, in the five Stages of Death, is EAT TUNA SANDWICH?!?!?’ (2014: 176; emphases in original) a large, frazzled-looking Roz demands in a massively bolded, double-underlined thought balloon at the top of the page, having arrived to find her mother – already in expensive palliative care for weeks – dressed, sitting up, and eating lunch (2014: 173–5). ‘Maybe if my mother and I had been close’, the narrator adds in the first of the hand-printed sentences that take up the remainder of the page, ‘I would have been thrilled to see her out of bed, chomping away. But we weren’t’ (2014: 176). And here – despite the text’s chaotic appearance – two of its crucial themes intersect, specifically the narrative’s focus on money, finances, and the economics of care, and the resonant question of whether the mother has, over her long life, shown her daughter sufficient love. Much earlier, in the memoir’s third and fourth chapters, the narrator establishes the parents’ fraught relationship with money, their life-long scrimping and saving, and the possessions they have hoarded long past their usefulness (2014: 38, 39, 40–2, 45–7). The passages are often laughout-loud funny, a comedic foil for a painful story about how the parents’ eccentricities and the mother’s exceptionally difficult personality traumatized Roz’s childhood and exacerbate the challenges of providing care. About six months after the previous example, the mother now in a state of ‘suspended animation’ (2014: 199), Talk again exemplifies what Amelia DeFalco calls comics’ capacity to ‘convey the necessity and rewards of care alongside … the ambivalent feelings

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it can inspire’ (2016: 226). Roz appears here on the bottom half of the page, pulled in multiple directions by text-heavy thought balloons and weighted down by the hand-printed dilemmas that fill the top half of the page: ‘Would I feel different about her slow, drawn-out passage into death if we had been closer? Would I have bought truckloads of extra-strength Ensure?’ (Chast 2014: 200; emphases in original). Significantly, one of the memoir’s most striking uses of comics follows immediately (Figure 6.2). About 20 per cent of Talk’s pages are designed exclusively as comics, and most of them are arranged, as in Figure 6.2, in the classic three panels per row, three rows per page pattern (Kukkonen

FIGURE 6.2  ‘June 24th, 2009’ from Can’t We Talk about Something More Pleasant? Bloomsbury Publishing Inc. © Roz Chast, 2014.

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2013: 26). This page, however, is unique because it is the only one headed by a specific date, and further noteworthy because the date appears in heavily emphasized handwriting, the prominent style one might find at the top of a bulletin board display. Conceptually, the page is about how, even at this very late stage in her very long life, the mother fails to engage emotionally with her daughter. ‘I wanted to have a final conversation with my mother about the past’, the narrator writes in the first panel, above a drawing of Roz saying, ‘I wish we could have been better friends when I was growing up’ (Chast 2014: 201). Karin Kukkonen notes the importance of attending to comics’ ‘mise-enpage’ (2013: 19), the overall sense of how the elements on a given page relate to one another, and her prompt to consider alternative paths when considering a comics page (2013: 26) is apt here. Stepping back to examine the page as a whole reveals that it tells its conceptual story twice, both according to the usual top-left-to-bottom-right reading pattern and even more emphatically when the three columns are read in turn, top-to-bottom, left-to-right. Reading the first column as a unit, that is, we discover only Roz in all three panels, facing left, shown in progressively closer shots, clearly nonplussed by her mother’s response. In the second column, read top-to-bottom, only the mother is visible, facing right, persisting in the lack of affect she has shown throughout her daughter’s life. According to Kukkonen, ‘if characters look at something, chances are it’s important’ (2013: 13). Designed so that Roz and her mother appear to be speaking into separate voids, the page’s first two columns underscore the vast emotional distance between them, something the final column verifies. Headed by a panel showing the mother’s noncommittal response, the third column’s middle panel is the only one on the page in which both characters appear, the scribble above Roz’s head instantly recognizable as comics’ shorthand for consternation. The column culminates in the page’s final panel, a long-shot view from far above the mother’s hospice bed and Roz’s now-empty chair, under the multivalent caption, ‘It was time to go’ (Chast 2014: 201). Read in two directions simultaneously, the comics’ panels powerfully double their stark irony, irony that turns to heartbreak when we find these hand-printed sentences on the next page, above a photograph of a young Roz and her mother: I left her room … as if everything was fine. … When I got in [my car], I cried. The bellowing quality of the sobbing and the depth of the sadness I felt surprised me. … But I knew: if there had ever been a time … for us to get to know one another … that time had long since passed. (2014: 202) Talk narrates the three months between this memorable day and the mother’s death in just eight pages, the final two of which are a hand-printed account of the mother’s last month. One page before this narrative account, we find the memoir’s final comics, including, in the last panel on the page, almost hidden in the bottom right corner, the only depiction of the mother and daughter together since the photograph on page 202. ‘About a week before she died, we had one last conversation’, the caption reads, above the characters, who face one another. ‘I love you’, the mother says in a speech balloon. ‘I love you too’, Roz replies (Chast 2014: 208). The conversation is not foreshadowed in any way and receives no further narrative commentary, underscoring how deeply ambiguous the mother–daughter relationship remains to the end. Poignantly, however, and by dramatic contrast with the memoir’s regularly scathing depictions of ageing bodies, it ends with thirteen delicate sketches of the mother’s final days. I am deeply struck by the re-vision these elegiac portraits require, as are Falcus and Sako (2019: 67), and Tanya Kam, who reads Chast’s dramatic aesthetic shift here as honouring ‘the integrity of her mother’s death’ (2018: 230). However utterly

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Elizabeth Chast may have dominated her daughter’s life, however easy she has been to dislike throughout, she is also – these drawings remind us – a real, detailed, complex, dignified, human, bodily person, dying.

PAST LIVES In a recent article on bodies in graphic narratives of illness, G. Thomas Couser takes explicit exception to Chast’s representation of her parents in what he calls the same ‘neurotic’ style that characterizes her New Yorker cartoons (2018: 372). By contrast, Couser praises Joyce Farmer’s Special Exits: A Graphic Memoir for its capacity to depict recognizable individuals instead of caricatures, to render bodies with literal depth, and to set those bodies into realistically detailed backgrounds (2018: 363). Couser’s article focuses mainly on texts about specific illnesses and disabilities, but these passing assessments gesture at ways in which Talk and Exits are both similar to and very different from one another. Like Talk’s Elizabeth and George Chast, Exits’ Rachel and Lars Drover are very old Americans, have just one child, only modest financial resources, and armslength relationships with medical professionals. At the point that the narratives begin, all four of the characters already accommodate their respective partner’s physical and cognitive limitations and accept minimal levels of care from their daughters. And both narratives proceed in broadly similar ways, to tell stories about how the characters variously and unpredictably acknowledge, ignore, access, refuse, request, navigate, and negotiate the increasing levels of care that they and their spouses require. Differences between the two texts, however, are striking. Intriguingly, for instance, and like only one of the other texts noted here, Exits is not narrated in the first person. Though Farmer explicitly acknowledges that the story is about her father and her stepmother (2010: vi), and though she is clearly the author of the pictures and the words, the memoir proceeds without the intervention of a narrating ‘I’. Exits is by a caregiver, and it is emphatically a narrative about care (DeFalco 2016: 230–4), but its focus throughout is on its very old protagonists: on page after page and in panel after panel, Exits returns our gaze to Rachel and Lars and the slow-moving, heavy-set bodies they inhabit. Minus an explicit ‘I’, and distinctly unlike Talk, Exits unfolds unencumbered by either a narrating daughter’s expectations or existing cultural scripts for ageing and dying. Exits is also dramatically different from Talk in its design. Where Talk uses colour and mixes and shifts styles, structures, and layouts with almost every page, Exits is stunningly visually predictable. Except for chapter breaks, every one of Exits’ 200 pages is designed as a black-andwhite comics page, and with very few exceptions, every comics page is divided into four equal rows, each row split into two equal panels. Individual panels, moreover, are minutely detailed and densely inked, offering myriad elements to which a reader might attend and from which a reader might derive meaning. DeFalco accurately reads Farmer’s intensely controlled structures as rendering the constrained space and the limited resources available during the cascading series of crises that characterize the protagonists’ final years (2016: 230). But an exclusive focus on Exits’ only incrementally changing days potentially obscures the nuanced stories that quietly accrue. Over the memoir’s fourteen chapters, multiple chronological episodes – most of them at least two pages long, some as long as seven pages – unobtrusively introduce recurring characters, offer flashbacks to earlier times, and narrate events whose importance emerges as details accumulate.

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I would add, therefore, to Couser’s observation that the visuality of graphic narrative compels the reader to slow down and ‘dwell on what is happening’ (2018: 353, 365), that the visuality of graphic narrative compels re-reading. With time and attention and a willingness to re-view earlier events, a reader of Exits discovers that numerous, initially uninflected events have lifechanging consequences. Early in the story, for instance, eighty-year-old Rachel slips into the bathtub, obliging Lars, who is almost as old, to pull her out with considerable difficulty (Farmer 2010: 13). Despite Rachel’s extreme pain and discomfort, she and Lars opt not to get medical help (Farmer 2010: 13–14), and instead accommodate their daily lives over the ensuing months to her markedly decreased mobility (36–42). It takes another crisis, about two years later,8 to learn that Rachel’s pelvis was fractured during the fall (48), but by this point, the undiagnosed break is at best a secondary concern. Rachel is in hospital now because – in an episode so significant that it occupies the whole of Exits’ third ­chapter – her untreated glaucoma prompts a wracking migraine that signals the permanent loss of her eyesight (46). Twelve panels into the worst of the migraine, Lars asks Rachel where her eye drops are and whether she has been taking them. Rachel, distressed, retorts, ‘I take all my pills, you know that’ but a small grimy bulb top can be seen in the panel, amongst multiple medication bottles jumbled on the coffee table beside the couch where – because of physical limitations – Rachel spends most of her days. Over the next three panels, Lars searches for and extracts the bottle, only to discover that the eye drops have expired. The page’s final panel shows him weeping as he reads from a medical manual: ‘Regular use of eye drops prevents blindness … otherwise … damage is permanent’ (45; ellipses in original). What makes the discovery especially devastating is that a careful re-view of the narrative discovers that the eye drops have been visualized multiple times to this point (15– 17, 26, and twice on 27), clearly available, not yet grimy, not yet expired, but forgotten in the complexities of Lars’s and Rachel’s other health issues. Heartbreakingly, the blindness that could have been avoided exacerbates various of Rachel’s existing disabilities and dramatically accelerates her cognitive decline. Exits works with similarly explicit and implicit potency when depicting its protagonists’ histories. Much more extensively than Talk does, Exits explores Lars’s and Rachel’s pasts, on one occasion via daydreams (21–3), but most often in the course of intergenerational memory work (10–11, 63–4, 66–7, 69–72, 73–4, and throughout). These conversations, usually with their daughter Laura, offer quietly detailed histories for elderly characters who might easily otherwise be reduced to stereotype and caricature (DeFalco 2010: 2). In one of the most riveting instances, the memoir explores Rachel’s unexpected support for reproductive rights, a story that unfolds without hurry, over years of time and pages of text. It begins with Rachel’s adherence to, and history with, evangelical Christianity, which gets established so early in the narrative (Farmer 2010: 10–11) that her advice to a distressed neighbour about a year later comes as a surprise. The young woman briefly seeks shelter with Rachel, explaining that she needs an abortion but that her brother is trying to prevent it because he wants the extra welfare payment (26–7). Unexpectedly, Rachel offers unconditional support, copies a number from the phonebook, and elaborates: ‘Planned Parenthood has clinics. Their counselors can help you, no matter what you decide to do. Here’s the number. Don’t tell anyone I helped you’ (27). The episode receives no further commentary, nor is Rachel’s religious orientation revisited, but the subject returns, obliquely at first, about two years later, at exactly the narrative’s midpoint, after Lars and Laura discover antique guns while cleaning the garage (95–9). ‘I got stopped once

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for having guns at the airport’, Rachel volunteers, as the conversation turns to what the ancient guns would say if they could talk, and over the next page and a half, nine panels tell a story from several years previously (101–2). Rachel’s narration appears in boxed commentary above six of the panels, which visualize her as already old, at an airport, on her way to visit family, and encountering an X-ray machine for the first time (Figure 6.3). The panels show Rachel’s confusion when a uniformed officer claims she has a gun in her bag, her reluctance to open her bag, and then her compliance. The sixth panel on page 102 is especially noteworthy because focused on Rachel’s open suitcase. A headless officer is pictured to the left of the suitcase; one of Rachel’s dresses lies stretched out in the lower foreground, alongside scattered undergarments and socks; and another officer, almost faceless, is pictured on the right upper portion of the panel, reaching both his hands underneath the dress and saying, ‘Here they are!’ The absence of Rachel’s boxed narration, here and in the previous panel, seems significant. Because the scene is allegedly part of a joke; the next panel shows the first uniformed man pull out two gun-shaped glass bottles of aftershave, to the great amusement of six other officers, all male, three of whom carry thick, heavily inked metal-detector wands. But Rachel is not laughing; the episode’s final panel shows her from the side, jaw set, stoically pushing her baggage cart as the seven officers look on or re-enact the hilarity, three metal-detector wands still clearly in view. Comics’ powerful ability to activate the tension between what Chute calls ‘the seeable and the sayable’ (2010: 217) prompts the possibility that this encounter recalls a sexual assault at some point in the past by multiple men in positions of authority. Hunched, heavy-set, slow-moving, caneusing, de-sexualized Rachel, we are reminded by this sequence, cannot have reached her advanced age except by acquiring a long history as an embodied, female person. The narrative does not ever explicitly make this point but the next page reinforces the possibility. As many of Exits’ pages do, this one shows Rachel and Laura together, in this case, watching the news while eating lunch. An unspecified amount of time has elapsed since Rachel told her story about the airport, and when Rachel, who cannot see, asks Laura what is on TV, Laura explains that an abortion clinic has been bombed and that most of the demonstrators seem to be men. ‘That’s a terrible thing to do!’ Rachel responds emphatically, ‘they don’t know what it’s like to be a woman’. ‘Aren’t you against abortion?’ Laura queries, ‘You’re religious!’ ‘I don’t like it’, Rachel replies stoically, staring straight ahead, ‘but sometimes it’s for the best’ (Farmer 2010: 103; emphases in original). Over the page’s final four panels, stepmother and stepdaughter deepen their solidarity on this crucial political stance, though we never learn the exact origins of Rachel’s unexpected position. The provocative, only-partially told, story receives a poignant coda, not many pages but about four months later, when the neighbour from the earlier episode arrives for an Easter visit. ‘I want to thank you for the help you gave me a few years ago’, she tells Rachel, ‘You saved my life’ (2010: 109). By now it is almost two years since Rachel lost her eyesight, during which time her cognitive health has declined drastically (51, 58–9, 77, 87–9). ‘You’re welcome, Sheralee’, she responds, her facial expression unreadable, ‘but I don’t remember saving your life’ (109). Careful reading and re-reading of Exits’ details makes it clear that nothing is incidental, and this almost imperceptibly accumulating story, positioned at the memoir’s midpoint, quietly underscores graphic narrative’s powerful rewards. The story unfolds incrementally over months and years and pages, using words and pictures – and the tension between words and pictures – to remind us that multiple, complex, sometimes unspeakable events shape long lives, give those lives unanticipated,

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FIGURE 6.3  Special Exits: A Graphic Memoir. Copyright @ Joyce Farmer. Courtesy of Fantagraphics Books (www.fantag​raph​ics.com).

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often unspoken meaning, and sometimes make it possible for those lives to save other lives, in ways that might otherwise be left permanently unseen.

PICTURING CARE By now, an increasing number of graphic memoirs narrate, remember, and, sometimes, eulogize long lives lived: Lucy Knisley’s clever, often hilarious Displacement: A Travelogue (2015), about the complications of caring for her very old grandparents on a holiday cruise; Aneurin Wright’s Things to Do in a Retirement Home Trailer Park When You’re 29 and Unemployed (2015), a deeply wise and often visually astonishing account of the months during which his father dies of emphysema; Rebecca Roher’s surprisingly joyful Bird in a Cage (2016), in which an extended family coordinates to provide care for and remember a vividly historicized grandmother; the heartbreaking ageing process entirely out-of-sync that Sarah Leavitt’s Tangles: A Story about Alzheimer’s, My Mother and Me (2010) documents; and Dana Walrath’s story of exceptional dementia care in Aliceheimer’s: Alzheimer’s through the Looking Glass (2016).9 Each of these narratives invites detailed analysis, but I conclude by reading Nigel Baines’s Afloat: A Memoir about Mum, Dementia, and Trying Not to Drown. The only self-published memoir I consider here, Afloat deserves extended attention for both its extraordinary visual quality and its breathtaking deployment of comics’ techniques. Like Bird in a Cage, Tangles, and Aliceheimer’s, Afloat is explicitly focused on caregiving for a mother ageing with dementia, but it exceeds each one of these narratives in its vehement advocacy for better care for people who have been disabled by age-related health conditions; its excoriating critique of the neoliberal ideologies that have penetrated health institutions and public models of care; and its explicit existential reflections on life, living, dying, and death. Like Wright’s, Baines’s is a story about both his parent’s unique situation and a sustained exploration of the fact that all living is ageing, and that, by extension, all living is dying. Like Chast, Baines focuses on the staggering work involved in securing adequate and financially accessible care, the frequently disorienting experience of caregiving, and the extreme guilt that caregiving can induce. In even more detail than Talk, Afloat explores Nigel’s childhood and adolescence, though Afloat never suggests that Nigel’s parents are responsible for the traumas he experienced in his younger years. Like Chast, Baines is frequently laugh-out-loud funny, and like Chast, he uses a variety of visual styles. More so than any of the other texts, however, Baines’s work is often startlingly beautiful, offering deeply developed image patterns, primarily related to water in its myriad forms, but also related to literal and metaphorical placement and movement. Baines’s text is exceptional, moreover, for demonstrating, again and again, the complex meanings and the conceptual depth that narrating with both words and pictures enables. There are far too many visual tours-de-force in this 176-page narrative to reference, so I focus on just a few of the points at which Baines reveals the special aptness of comics form for stories about ageing, caregiving, and end of life. ‘Imagine your brain as the Titanic’, an early, double-page spread proposes, deepening illness narratives’ familiar trope of shipwreck by using four, equalsized, page-length, vertical panels to show an ocean liner hitting an iceberg and sinking, while the narrator draws parallels between chaos onboard the Titanic and dementia’s effects in the brain (2019: 24–5). A different aesthetic exposes the deadly speciousness of that paramount neoliberal value, ‘individual choice’. By filling two pages with six, equal-sized, page-width horizontal panels, Baines visualizes ‘The care system’ as a passenger arriving at an airport with a ticket in hand,

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who is required to choose everything from the kind of plane he’d like to fly on, the pilot for his flight, and the time he’d like to fly based on his own calculations of the relationships among fuel requirements, airport regulations, and weather charts (2019: 90–1). Sometimes Baines dazzles, as in these first two examples, by rendering metaphors ‘concrete on the page’ (Chute 2017: 259); sometimes he leaves comics’ power implicit, as in a poignant five-page sequence in which nineteen small, randomly recurring panels communicate the eerie repetitions and non-repetitions that characterize his mother’s behaviour as she fails, more and more frequently, to situate herself in her life, remember Nigel’s answers to her questions, or fathom what his answers might mean (Baines 2019: 109–13). At various points, Baines explicitly links comics techniques to both the ways in which we create the stories of our lives and to the experiences of advancing dementia. Noting the crucial interpretive work a reader does to make sense of the gutters between comics panels, he begins with a comics page that visualizes how, as he puts it, ‘the most important stuff is done in the gaps. That’s where you create the story in your imagination … And so it is with life. The gaps between words. The spaces between moments. The things that seem to be missing. This is where our stories get made’ (2019: 122–3). The next page deepens the analogy by exploring its relationship to dementia: ‘And so with Mum it was the missing things that really stood out. The first year Mum didn’t send me a birthday card. The first Sunday that Mum didn’t call. The missing … cushion … on the spare bed … when I came to visit. The truth sits in those gaps’ (2019: 123). The words are all the more poignant because they surround a row of three apparently innocuous comics panels – Nigel looking at his mail slot, Nigel glancing at his phone, a carefully made bed minus a decorative cushion – that quietly highlight the work that is done by caregivers and comics readers, when gaps in the pictures help us understand the importance of what is missing. When a new care home must be found to accommodate his mother’s increased needs, however, Baines briefly leaves meaning-making behind. Having described the new home’s daunting distance from his mother’s town, the narrative devotes a full colour page to its horror-story appearance (2019: 146–7), and then, in a quietly stunning display of comics’ capacity to communicate the non-linear and the non-logical, visualizes Nigel’s difficulty finding his mother when he comes to visit (Figure 6.4) (2019: 148). This Escher-like sequence / non-sequence invites us to follow Nigel left-to-right, as he opens a door, then slides down a pole, then (or is it later) climbs down (or is it up) a ladder, then exits a lift, while also crossing right-to-left, possibly to re-climb the ladder. Impossible in real terms and yet impossible not to see (Baetens and Frey 2015: 105–6), the page’s paradoxical possibilities induce in readers something like the vertigo, the nausea, the confusion, and the frustration experienced by anyone who has tried to navigate both literally unfamiliar spaces and bureaucratic mazes designed with neither actual human beings nor their caregivers in mind. Much more could be said about Afloat, but I will end with the emotional and existential aftermath of Nigel’s mother’s death, focused on the phrase ‘1933–2017’ that now encapsulates her life. The sequence begins with Nigel standing atop the dash that separates massive numbers representing his mother’s birth and death years, underneath the ruminations: ‘That dash. That little dash. That is a life. It’s all in there in that little typographic mark. Everything you did, thought, saw, dreamed of, laughed and cried about. All you. In the dash’ (Baines 2019: 163). It is a disconcerting observation and one the narrator extends over the next several pages, recalling the angst of his youth and his regular ponderings, then, of living and dying, overtop a drawing of Nigel bent double under the weight of a massive, gigantic dash (2019: 164). The narration continues on

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FIGURE 6.4  Nigel Baines’s Afloat (p. 148). © 2019. Used with the author’s permission.

the next page, describing the panicked depression that his mother’s death occasioned in him, but adding: ‘Nothing lasts for ever though, not even the bad things … Suddenly the idea of a finite life was … fine. Maybe when you’ve seen the most scared person pass through trauma it can have an inspiring effect’ (2019: 164; second ellipses in original). And then, in an instance of comics’ ability to address complex internal realities by visualizing them (Chute 2017: 258), Baines draws himself

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again, now easily carrying a much-shrunken dash, under the words, ‘Something profound had changed. After decades of wrestling and carrying and searching, my feet were light and I could tuck the dash under my arm as though it had absolutely no weight at all’ (2019: 165). From this point to the end, the text takes eleven pages to address a range of material and existential issues, including rallies of support for other caregivers (2019: 173); fervent calls to reconsider how we think about illness, dementia, ageing, and dying (2019: 167, 172); and a beautifully complex, confounding visual reminder that ‘the world is more than what is presented through our senses’ (2019: 170–1). Perhaps especially in a narrative that has so repeatedly, so startlingly, and so effectively mobilized comics’ resources to visualize the complexities of ageing, illness, caregiving, and death, it is powerful to be reminded: ‘Even our finitude can be comforting if we have lived authentically and understand there is more than what we can see’ (2019: 170).

CONCLUSION I am not yet aware of any graphic narratives of ageing and end of life authored by ageing subjects themselves, but into the gap between that first-hand narration and the caregiver memoirs discussed here, I invoke Chute’s claim for comics’ complex models of witnessing, the form’s capacity to direct empathic attention to the experiences of familiar and unfamiliar others (2016: 50). Repeatedly inviting us to both see and read, these graphic narratives remind us that ‘what happens at the end’ is deeply connected to what happened before. ‘What another person looks like to you is your responsibility’, Margaret Morganroth Gullette insists in Ending Ageism, or How Not to Shoot Old People (2017: 51; emphases in original).10 Though she acknowledges that this may be ‘impossible to put into practice’, she reminds us of the life-changing possibilities when ‘Others’ – in this case, ageing Others – are looked at properly (2017: 51). As this chapter has demonstrated, graphic narratives about older people in their final years of life go some considerable distance to breaking through stereotypes and caricatures, inviting us to see – via comics’ breathtaking conceptual capacities – the value of those old people’s lives and our own, entwined as we are in the witnessing, empathizing, ongoing process of ageing together.

NOTES 1 Scott McCloud defines comics as ‘juxtaposed pictorial and other images in deliberate sequence intended to convey information and / or to produce an aesthetic response in the viewer’ (1993: 9). McCloud’s explications of gutters and closure as defining features of comics (62–9), and his extended discussion of the relationship between comics’ design and perceptions of temporality (94–117) are also directly relevant here. 2 I use the terms ‘comics’ and ‘graphic narrative’ interchangeably. 3 Bird in a Cage and Displacement both focus on grandparents. 4 Hereafter, I will refer to these texts respectively as Talk, Exits, and Afloat. 5 To my regret, I cannot read Japanese and therefore can reference but not meaningfully represent Yūichi Okano’s enormously popular and culturally influential Pecoross’ Mother and Her Days (Falcus and Sako 2019: 68–76). 6 Walrath describes her Armenian mother’s experience of being racialized on arriving in the United States (2016: 17, 45). 7 I distinguish between the memoirs’ authors (in this case, Chast), the texts’ narrators (i.e. the voice of the words on the page), and the characters depicted (in this case, Roz).

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8 Time is marked only vaguely in the narrative. Two years is an approximation, based on occasional captions like ‘Six months later’, or ‘Months go by’, or ‘Life drifts on’. 9 Paco Roca’s Wrinkles (2015) and Hiromi Goto’s Shadow Life (2021) deserve extended attention but are not memoirs. 10 Gullette attributes the statement to Michael Lessac.

REFERENCES Baetens, J., and H. Frey (2015), The Graphic Novel: An Introduction, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Baines, N. (2019), Afloat: A Memoir about Mum, Dementia, and Trying Not to Drown, Croydon: Flying Carp Books. Chast, R. (2014), Can’t We Talk about Something More Pleasant?, New York: Bloomsbury. Chute, H. (2010), Graphic Women: Life Narrative & Contemporary Comics, New York: Columbia University Press. Chute, H. (2016), Disaster Drawn: Visual Witness: Comics, and Documentary Form, Boston, MA: Harvard University Press. Chute, H. (2017), Why Comics? From Underground to Everywhere, New York: Harper. Couser, G. T. (2018), ‘Is There a Body in This Text? Embodiment in Graphic Somatography’, a / b: Auto / Biography Studies, 33 (2): 347–73. DeFalco, A. (2010), Uncanny Subjects: Aging in Contemporary Narrative, Columbus: Ohio State University Press. DeFalco, A. (2016), ‘Graphic Somatography: Life Writing, Comics, and the Ethics of Care’, Journal of Medical Humanities, 37: 223–40. Falcus, S., and K. Sako (2019), Contemporary Narratives of Dementia: Ethics, Ageing, Politics, New York: Routledge. Farmer, J. (2010), Special Exits: A Graphic Memoir, Seattle, WA: Fantagraphics. Frank, A. (1997), The Wounded Storyteller: Body, Illness, and Ethics, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Goto, H., and A. Xu (2021), Shadow Life, New York: First Second Books. Gullette, M. M. (2017), Ending Ageism, or How Not to Shoot Old People, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Kam, T. (2018), ‘Comic Thanatography: Redrawing Agency, Dialogism, and Ethics in Can’t We Talk about Something More Pleasant?’, Inks: The Journal of the Comics Studies Society, 2 (2): 215–35. Knisley, L. (2015), Displacement: A Travelogue, Seattle, WA: Fantagraphics. Kukkonen, K. (2013), Studying Comics and Graphic Novels, Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell. Leavitt, S. (2010), Tangles: A Story about Alzheimer’s, My Mother and Me, Calgary: Freehand. McCloud, S. (1993), Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art, New York: HarperCollins. Rifkind, C., and L. Warley (2016), Canadian Graphic: Picturing Life Narratives, Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press. Roca, P. (2015), Wrinkles, Seattle, WA: Fantagraphics. Roher, R. (2016), Bird in a Cage, Wolfville: Conundrum Press. Venema, K. (2018), ‘Remembering Forgetting: Graphic Lives at the End of the Line’, a / b: Auto / Biography Studies, 33 (3): 663–86.

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Walrath, D. (2016), Aliceheimer’s: Alzheimer’s through the Looking Glass, University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. Wright, A. (2015), Things to Do in a Retirement Home Trailer Park When You’re 29 and Unemployed, University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. Zimmermann, M. (2017), The Poetics and Politics of Alzheimer’s Disease Life-Writing, London: Palgrave Macmillan.

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CHAPTER SEVEN

Ageing in science, speculative, and fantasy fiction SUSAN WATKINS

INTRODUCTION Fredric Jameson has argued that ‘the longevity drama is not “really” about longevity at all, but rather about something else, which can a little more rapidly be identified as History itself ’ (1996: 32). He continues: ‘The motif of some special privilege of long life offers a dramatic and concentrated symbolic expression of class disparity itself ’ (40). The tendency to regard literature about life extension or other challenges to the ‘natural’ human ageing process as ‘really’ about something else should be resisted. Roger Luckhurst has claimed that the push to view science fiction (SF) as about anything other than science and technology can be countered by studying SF as a ‘literature of technologically saturated societies … a popular literature that concerns the impact of Mechanism (to use the older term for technology) on cultural life and subjectivity’ (2005: 3). If we extrapolate from this thinking, we can see science, speculative, and fantasy fictions about ageing as serious attempts to examine the impact of ageing on our cultural and social life and subjectivity. In the words of well-known ageing studies scholar Kathleen Woodward, speculative fiction ‘allows us to inhabit other worlds with different youth-age value systems with the goal of returning to our own enlivened with deeper understanding and insight, renewed energy, and fresh perspectives on how to build our age world in meaningful and just ways’ (2019: 376). We can therefore point to the ambivalence of speculative fictional visions of the future as creating an important imaginative space for possible contestation of dominant conceptions of the future and ageing.1 However, it is also the case that ageing in these genres can be presented in horrific or dystopian terms. This chapter will begin by examining how speculative fiction engages horror motifs of the aged body as grotesque, before paying attention to dystopias of declining fertility and ageing as well as those that focus on the ‘burden’ of care for older people. I will then analyse fictions of rejuvenescence and life extension and consider changeling narratives and folk tales as foundational interventions in a genre that is capable of disrupting conventional generational time and human evolutionary patterns in order to introduce generational discontinuity. The chapter concludes by considering speculative writing about ageing from the Global South, which offers a far more positive vision of the ageing process.

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HORRIFIC AGEING H. Rider Haggard’s colonial fantasy novel She (1886) offers us the prototypical image of the aged and shrunken female body, punitively destroyed by a second bathing in the pillar of fire that initially conveyed immortality. Famously described in terms redolent of late Victorian fin de siècle anxieties about degeneration and reversal of evolution, Ayesha, the centuries-old ‘She Who Must Be Obeyed’ of the novel, experiences a suddenly accelerated ageing process, during which she appears to turn into ‘a monkey’ and grow ‘smaller, and smaller yet, till she was no larger than a baboon. Now the skin was puckered into a million wrinkles, and on the shapeless face was the stamp of unutterable age … nobody ever saw anything like the frightful age that was graven on that fearful countenance, no bigger now than that of a two-months child’ ([1886] 2001: 292). The compressed reversal of ageing here (Ayesha becoming like a ‘two-months child’), in actuality engages familiar motifs of ageing as a second childhood. Patrick Brantlinger argues: Haggard’s stories also form part of the early history of science fiction … Haggard may seem peripheral to the development of science fiction, and yet his African quest romances could easily be transposed to other planets and galaxies. In his popular account of science fiction, Billion Year Spree, Brian Aldiss notes the frequency with which Ayesha’s horrific death in the pillar of fire has been imitated (plagiarized?) by science fiction writers. According to Aldiss: ‘from Haggard on crumbling women, priestesses, or empresses – all symbols of women as Untouchable and Unmakeable – fill the pages of many a scientific “romance” ’ (139). The misogynistic traits of She and more generally of imperialist adventure fiction also characterize much science fiction with its fantasies about alien invaders and the exploration and conquest of outer space. (2001: xxvi–xxvii) While the legacy of explicit misogyny and racism that She bequeaths to speculative fiction is noted by both Aldiss and Brantlinger, then, what has been less discussed is the influence of the trope of immortality or eternal youth as inevitably or intrinsically unethical, dangerous, and horrific. In She, ideas of persistence over geological time and the cyclical repetition of events, cultures, and even particular characters, from the re-purposing of the tomb of Kor as a dwelling place for the Amahagger to Kallicrates’s reincarnation as Leo Vincey, are capable of offering powerful romantic attractions for the reader. Explicitly, however, such ideas are challenged within the novel by the privileged narration of academic and scholar Holly, who believes that immortality can only be found in heaven, commenting (when offered immortality by Ayesha) that: I will live my day and grow old with my generation, and die my appointed death, and be forgotten. For I do hope for an immortality to which the little span that perchance thou canst confer will be but as a finger’s length laid against the measure of the great world; and, mark this! The immortality to which I look, and which my faith doth promise me, shall be free from the bonds which here doth tie my spirit down. ([1886] 2001: 251) Holly’s Christian faith is closely associated therefore with a conventionally human life span, in comparison with Ayesha’s cynical moral relativism, the consequence of her eternal life. Those civilizations that are associated with lengthy patterns of cyclical degeneration are unfavourably compared with England in the novel.

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DEMODYSTOPIA Declining fertility and ageing Concerns about changes in the life span and fertility of the population as a whole are prominent in what Andreu Domingo terms the ‘demodystopia’, those dystopias relating to demographic change and population concerns. He argues that ‘typically, they present demographic evolution as a social problem in need of an urgent solution’ (2008: 725). As Domingo explains, these texts are context dependent, responding to their historical and cultural moment in specific ways, from ‘fear of overpopulation in the “population bomb” era; later, threatened societal senescence or swamping by immigrants under ultra-low fertility; new reproductive regimes under genetic engineering; and the geopolitics of demographic change’ (725). A text such as Logan’s Run (1967), which was adapted as a better-known film in 1976, is redolent of concerns about over-population. Domingo particularly notes the popular cultural influence mid-twentieth century of Paul R. Erlich’s bestselling 1968 The Population Bomb, with its vision of mass famine in what we would now call the Global South and its call to writers to engage with this issue in their work (729). Logan’s Run imagines a world of pleasure in which, due to scarce resources, enforced euthanasia ends the lives of all the inhabitants at the age of twenty-one (thirty in the film). The reader learns that ‘the seeds of the Little War were planted in a restless summer during the mid-1960s, with sit-ins and student demonstrations as youth tested its strength’ ([1967] 1976: n.p.). The novel ends with Logan, the hero, escaping the earth and asserting that ‘dying young is a waste and a shame and a perversion. The young don’t build. They use. The wonders of Man were achieved by the mature, the wise’ (146). More recent demodystopias that focus on declining fertility and the threat of human extinction, rather than the risks of over population, such as P. D. James’s Children of Men ([1992] 2018) and Jane Rogers’s The Testament of Jessie Lamb (2011), also comment on ageing either explicitly or by implication. In James’s Children of Men, for example, witnessing a ‘Quietus’ ceremony, in which older people are drowned at sea, is a turning point for the protagonist, Theo Faron. Early in the novel, Theo seems relatively unconcerned about other authoritarian aspects of the civic response to universal infertility, but watching the ceremony shifts him towards resistance to the regime. Taking place out at sea, the Quietus is a horrible composite parody of a wedding and funeral service. Elderly women change in beach huts into bridal white, with the beach huts, ‘which for so many decades had echoed with the laughter of children’ ([1992] 2018: 104), now ‘repaired and newly painted’ (105) for their grotesque new purpose. The description of one old woman’s death makes disturbing use of the horrific mode we have previously mentioned, with her ‘wild white hair, the nightdress sticking to her body, the swinging, pendulous breasts, the arms with their weals of crêpy skin … the breast swaying obscenely like a giant jellyfish’ (107). This focus on the grotesque elderly body is juxtaposed again with the beach huts, when Theo wakes from a beating by the State Security Police (the Quietus is not meant to be observed) to find himself in the space between two beach huts, amidst the detritus of long-forgotten holidays half buried in the dirty sand: the gleam of silver paper, an old plastic bottle, the rotting canvas and splintered struts of a deck chair, and a child’s broken spade. He shuffled painfully to get closer and reached out his hand, as if to lay hold on it would be to lay hold on safety and peace. (109)

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The almost-forgotten remnants of family seaside holidays with young children act as a normative reference point here against what is being done to unwanted older people. That nostalgia, when accompanied by the vision of the old woman’s grotesque body, relies in the same way as the regime in the novel does on normative assumptions about the relative value and status of youth and age. Without question, the novel draws on what ageing studies scholar Gullette refers to as the ‘decline ideology’ (2004: 11) in its construction of the embodiment of older women in particular. The Testament of Jessie Lamb imagines a world in which young women as well as older people become dispensable in the service of securing the next generation and the future of humanity. Set in the near future, Rogers’s novel is narrated by Jessie, a fifteen-year-old girl, who tells the story of the effects on humanity of maternal death syndrome (MDS), a virus similar to Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease or AIDS, which is deadly for pregnant women.2 In desperation at the imminent extinction of humanity, the government creates the ‘Sleeping Beauty’ programme, which vaccinates embryos that were created in in vitro fertilization clinics before MDS spread and then incubates them in the comatose bodies of young women. The young surrogates will physically survive the process, but it is a death sentence, as they will themselves inevitably develop MDS. Many girls volunteer and are accepted onto the programme despite being underage. The techno-scientific establishment explicitly excludes older women who would have been of child-bearing age pre-MDS, like Jessie’s Aunt Mandy, since MDS develops and is fatal far more quickly in older women. Mandy is a tragic figure in the novel, haunted by the trauma of the absence of a child, exploited by men, and suffering from mental illness. When she finally becomes pregnant, in the mistaken belief that she will be allowed to become a Sleeping Beauty, she in effect deliberately causes her own death. Jessie envisages herself as Mandy’s mirror image. Her opposite. Because it didn’t work for her, it was going to work for me. She was the minus and I was the plus, what I was going to do could cancel her out. Not her, but the badness, the sadness, the hopelessness. I could cancel all that. No baby for her = baby for me. Negative / positive. (Rogers 2011: 162–3) In her mathematical language (pluses, minuses, equals, cancels) Jessie positions her decision to volunteer as a necessary equivalent to older women’s inutility in the face of MDS and its threat to humanity. However, the novel does question the extent to which she is in a position to consent to her own actions and asks the reader to challenge the way she positions herself as a sacrificial heroine, partly by including her father’s perspective on her actions, even though that perspective is itself ethically suspicious. The burden of care What Lee Edelman refers to as reproductive futurism, which ‘sees the Child as the emblem of futurity’s unquestioned value and purpose’ (2004: 40) without questioning such an association, is present in both James’s and Rogers’s texts and arguably in all demodystopias of declining fertility. Reproductive futurism is also present in dystopian texts focused on the ‘burden’ of caring for increasing numbers of old people, although in some cases such texts do suggest possible alternatives to that social responsibility. The short story ‘Mil euros por tu vida’ (2008), by the Spanish writer Elia Barceló offers us a critique of reproductive futurism connected not only with assumptions about ageing but also with migration and economic privilege. Set in 2033, eternal

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youth is now possible for those older people who can afford to pay to have their personalities transferred into the bodies of younger, usually economically disprivileged hosts. The transfer period operates for twenty hours out of twenty-four. Abraham and Sarah are paid one million euros each to act as ‘host’ bodies for two rich older people. The money will be sent home to support their families in Africa. However, while hosting an older woman’s personality, Sarah becomes pregnant. Debate follows over whose child this ‘really’ is. The rights of children born to hosts of older people, as well as the rights of hosts themselves in relation to any child conceived while acting as a host, are also issues of concern. Priscilla Layne remarks that although ‘nothing has changed regarding global wealth disparities and the exploitation of the poor’ (2019: 71), Barcelò provides an open ending to the story, which offers the possibility that all four parents (the two hosts and the two elderly customers who have paid to transfer their minds into host bodies) will parent the child. Ninni Holmquist’s The Unit ([2006] 2010) also offers readers a more critical perspective on reproductive futurism as it pertains particularly to the burden of care.3 Being ‘needed’ in the future Scandinavian democracy in which the novel is set depends on explicitly articulated terms agreed by national referendum: after the age of fifty (women) and sixty (men) those with no children or partner have to move into units and donate their biological material for the benefit of younger people with families. Liorsi argues that the novel critiques an emerging medical discourse about ‘the need to preserve health, to deal with diseases not manifested yet, but already envisaged in their future manifestation, and to make health a manipulable object for biopower and bioeconomy’ (2019: 997). Liorsi’s concept of the ‘ante-tempus patient’ demonstrates how bioeconomics can disrupt temporal distinctions between present health and future illness. Illness can be moved into the future for some groups rather than others, for example, by experimentally making the dispensable ill in the present. We might add to this analysis the point that bioeconomics also anticipates future ageing by transporting it, like a spectre, into the present for younger subjects. Individuals are urged to take responsibility for their own health and assume the ‘burden’ of self-care in ways that anticipate and attempt to defer or even prevent the emergence and progression of the ageing process, with its attendant economic and social implications around future collective and individual responsibility for care work. In effect, then, the novel extrapolates from our current neoliberal discourse about ‘healthy’ ageing in order to comment critically on it. A dispensable person in the novel’s terms, Dorrit is over fifty, with no partner and no children. Her future is therefore individually implausible, and in the Unit she begins to donate her biological material and take part in scientific experiments. As is the case with many ‘critical’ dystopias, which generate ‘hope by resisting closure [and] maintain the utopian impulse within the work’ (Baccolini and Moylan 2003:7), we are initially offered the prospect of Dorrit’s escape from the Unit. Dorrit becomes pregnant, but instead of becoming ‘needed’, because of her age she is expected to donate the embryo or give up her baby for adoption. Dorrit does temporarily escape from the Unit towards the end of the novel but makes the decision to return, having to some extent internalized the value system (around who does and does not have a plausible future) by which she is surrounded, which works in tandem with her feelings of ethical responsibility to support a friend in the Unit who is about to make her final, fatal donation of biological material. The novel is thus an intelligent metafictional commentary on (and refusal of) readerly investment in the devices of escape and resistance which are often central to dystopian texts.

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REJUVENESCENCE AND LIFE EXTENSION – TITHONUS TRANSFORMED One alternative to dystopia and horror that speculative fictions offer readers can be found in the presence of historical myths of bodily rejuvenescence, combined with assumed biomedical technical breakthroughs to extend life and ‘bio-engineer ageing out’ (Mangum 2002: 69). Mangum argues that ‘in this genre, elaborate technologies counter the threat of loss … Death is the loss most central to a great deal of science fiction, and … the search for immortality forms almost a sub-genre of this literature’ (70). As Joseph D. Miller demonstrates, immortality can sometimes be obtained in ‘modern, technologically optimistic science fiction’ such as Robert A. Heinlein’s without changing human beings too fundamentally (1996: 78). However, in a large proportion of SF texts that address ageing, it is assumed that the consequences of immortality would be ‘suffering, loneliness, alienation, or boredom’ (Mangum 2002: 70). Rosen refers to this as the ‘Tithonus syndrome’, in which ‘futility and punishment result from partial granting of the desired outcome’ (1996: 125). The importance of the Tithonus myth – everlasting life without everlasting youth – in speculative fictions of ageing therefore cannot be overstated. Drew Magary’s The End Specialist (2011), published in the United States as The Postmortal, is a case in point, although in this novel, both eternal life and youth are present. After a cure for ageing is discovered, humanity suffers a series of unexpected crises and consequences, and the effects on postmortal individuals range from an increase in ‘cycle’ marriages – ‘till death us do part’ is no longer feasible apparently – to enduring the attacks of pro-death terrorists. The narrator’s job as an end specialist involves ending the lives of post-mortals in a manner and at a time of their choosing, although predictably, this expands to include enforced endings on behalf of the state. Many speculative fiction texts cogitate on the idea that immortality can persist at the level of the gene, or in virtual or digital form, if not at the level of the individual. Brett Cooke points out that ‘as individual organisms, we are barely even temporary. Like all life forms, we exist in a state of continual flux, whether this involves our opinions, our psyche (which is hardly a monolith), or even the cells and atoms that constitute them. On the other hand, our “genes are forever” ’ (1996: 90–1). His essay bears witness to the popularity of seeding expeditions to other worlds in the face of Earth’s destruction in SF classics including Olaf Stapledon’s First and Last Men ([1930] 1999), James Blish’s The Seedling Stars ([1957] 1992), and Arthur C. Clarke’s The Songs of Distant Earth ([1986] 1998). The effort to preserve human genetic material, if not specific human individuals, against the ageing and death of the species is present in all these texts. Resisting ageing and mortality via preservation in virtual or digital rather than ‘meat’ format is another trope of speculative fiction from early on. Although it finds its most obvious flowering in cyberpunk, such as William Gibson’s Neuromancer ([1984] 2016), we can also see the push towards transhumanist fictions of life extension, immortality, and resurrection in, for example, Iain M. Banks’s Culture series (1987–2012). A novel such as John Wyndham’s The Trouble with Lichen ([1960] 2008) offers readers a potentially richer examination of the consequences of extending the human life span, which is accompanied in this novel by the persistence of youthfulness. The book concerns the discovery of a rare lichen which has an ‘antigerone’ effect, delaying the ageing process to extend longevity for several hundred years. The novel constructs this discovery as one that is particularly important for women. For the protagonist, scientist Diana Brackley, the extra life span means that the work of

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reproduction and childcare will occupy only a relatively small place in women’s lives. Women can therefore set about the acquisition of real power. Diana begins secretly to treat the women clients of her high-end beauty clinic, aiming to create an elite group who will fight for women’s rights to access the antigerone treatment when the discovery is made public. The novel asks how gendered social arrangements, the ageing process, and ideas about the future might interact. Life extension and a slowing of ageing then become more than merely fantasies of ‘indefinitely extending longevity’ (Lafontaine 2009: 53).

GENERATIONAL TIME, HUMAN EVOLUTION, AND GENERATIONAL DISCONTINUITY Changeling narratives and other folk tales offer us some of the earliest examples of a cultural preoccupation with ageing. Such tales often encourage readers to rethink normative conceptions of time and human development. In many folk tales the protagonist spends one night with the faery folk and emerges to find that decades of a human time span have passed and everything has changed and become unfamiliar. A well-known literary reworking of this traditional tale is Washington Irving’s Rip Van Winkle ([1819] 2010), in which the protagonist sleeps through the American Revolution. The figure of the changeling, another staple of folklore, also contains within it, according to Adam Lawrence, ‘the components for a sophisticated exploration of themes relevant to modern SF’ (Lawrence 2018: 90). Classic stories such as F. Scott Fitzgerald’s ‘The Curious Case of Benjamin Button’ ([1922] 2008) develop the changeling narrative in order to challenge conventional ideas about normative masculine development and success in US culture. However, Lawrence argues: Even today, ‘changeling’ still denotes a folkloric or supernatural figure and a primitive form of prescientific diagnosis: a person with deficient intelligence, a child with a congenital disease, or a child or adult who has been exchanged for another. But it is my argument that the legend in its many variants provided the narrative formula for a science-fictional speculation on an array of related themes, including especially biological engineering, symbiosis, and hospitality. (109) We need only add the theme of ageing and time to Lawrence’s list. The impact of time travel can often function in speculative fiction as an equivalent to more technological modes of life extension or slowing of the ageing process in its effects on social, gender, and family structures. Mangum argues that SF is ‘deeply preoccupied with time – depicting time travel [and] triumphs over time that allow space travel’. These preoccupations mean that ageing and old age become a ‘crucial feature’ of speculative fiction (2002: 80). In Naomi Mitchison’s 1962 novel Memoirs of a Spacewoman, for example, time travel affects sexuality, family structures, and definitions of the human, because time travel requires that space explorers are put into time blackouts in order to survive long journeys to other worlds. Mary, the spacewoman of the title, is heterosexual and has children by a number of different fathers, each of whom is deliberately and carefully chosen by her for the role. Those Terrans who are not explorers and are ‘time-bound’ are looked down on by those who time travel. Mary’s role on expeditions is communication, including via telepathy, which is highly valued. In fact, telepathic or other Psi powers are often associated in speculative fiction with the changes to subjectivity, perception, and communication attendant

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on time travel. Thus, flexing linear time, chronometric time, and the human life span enables new attitudes to ageing to develop. Many such new attitudes can be seen in recent fiction, particularly in the short story and novella form, as if the challenge that new temporalities and ageing narratives offer to human cognition necessitates a compression, disturbance, or questioning of conventional fictional modes. In short stories such as Ted Chiang’s ‘Story of Your Life’ ([2002] 2015), which was adapted as the 2016 film Arrival, and Ken Liu’s ‘The Waves’ (2012, 2016), the very grammar that we use to express time is pressed into new shapes. In ‘Story of Your Life’ the narrator, a linguist, encounters an alien species with an entirely novel communication system that uses a different conception of temporality. This is apparent in sentence structures the narrative uses such as the following: ‘I remember a conversation we’ll have when you’re in your junior year of high school’ ([2002] 2015: 129), in which tenses push awkwardly against one another and we are unsure whether what the narrator describes has the status of memory or future event. On his website, Ken Liu notes of his short story: ‘The Waves’ follows waves of humanity as they spread out from Earth, each succeeding wave overtaking the one before it. And so the biologically immortal are taken over by cyborgs, and mechanical post-humans are, in turn, taken over by beings of light and energy. … Ultimately, ‘The Waves’ is about transformation and the power of memory and narrative, themes that have dominated my fiction for some time now. Once immortality and fixing one’s age at a particular point become actual choices for those travelling through space on an exploratory mission, the question of what it means to be human shifts and changes. The anchor in the story, if there is one, is provided by the origin myths and tales from around the world that intersect the story of the space mission. No such anchor is present in Yoko Tawada’s The Last Children of Tokyo (2014, 2018). As Sarah Falcus notes, this novella is centrally concerned with generational disorder (2020) and with ‘a temporal anxiety that brings together a sense of individual, species and planetary lateness’ (2020: 65). The experience of reading this dystopian, post-apocalyptic text, in which children like Mumei bear the physical burdens of ageing and are cared for by their great grandparents, who remain vigorous and healthy, is disconcerting in the extreme, with the book’s abrupt and unexpected conclusion upending any readerly expectations.

WRITING ON AGEING FROM THE GLOBAL SOUTH Sanna Lehtonen’s 2013 study, Girls Transforming: Invisibility and Age Shifting in Children’s Fantasy Fiction Since the 1970s, asks the question: ‘What if she [a girl or young woman] was able to turn magically younger or older, or resist the natural ageing process? Would she be the superwoman of our age, the one that is properly empowered but always looks like a twenty-year-old? Or is she the Loathly Lady, the ugly hag who is really a beautiful young girl in disguise or under a curse?’ (2013: 1). Many of the texts that she considers do not offer, as she recognizes, particularly subversive or novel answers to this question. However, in her attention to queer ageing, or texts that depart from ‘the normative assumptions concerning mainstream human lives’ (164) and make use of queer temporalities (Halberstam 2005), Lehtonen finds a more thought-provoking reworking of conventional thinking about ageing, time, and humanity. She argues that the figure of the shaman or witch in fantasy fiction brings into play specific ideas about liminality and border

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crossing in order to challenge ‘normative life trajectories’ (169) and deliberately refuses to offer simple answers to the questions raised for the reader about empowerment and agency (193). Doyenne of speculative fiction, Ursula K. Le Guin’s 1976 essay on ‘The Space Crone’ argues that women should ‘wholeheartedly’ relish the opportunity the menopause provides to ‘become a Crone’ ([1976] 1989: 3). According to Le Guin, the ‘Space Crone’ embraces the fact that change is intrinsic to the human condition, because ‘only a person who has experienced, accepted, and acted the entire human condition – the essential quality of which is Change – can fairly represent humanity’ (6). Le Guin’s focus on the acceptance of impermanence and ideas of self-birth – ‘She must bear herself, her third self, her old age, with travail and alone’ (5) – offers us a very different and far more positive understanding of age, one that commands respect for (rather than dismissal of) the elder woman figure. Although Le Guin herself was undoubtedly writing from a position of relative privilege, her essay is an early attempt to point out how culturally specific and damaging Western, First-World ideas about ageing as horrific and burdensome actually are, particularly as they are internalized by women. Some critics have made rather facile attempts to associate Le Guin with an anthropological approach to non-Western cultures. Her father was well-known American cultural anthropologist Alfred Kroeber and she grew up in an academic environment that welcomed those from many cultures and backgrounds. However, Samuel Gerald Collins asserts that ‘Le Guin is not an anthropologist’ (2009; 522). He continues: ‘Le Guin seems [not] to have inherited … a patrimony of assumptions about culture, religion, mythology, and gender but a style of restless engagement with knowledge and science … an open-ended process – less of an inheritance than a transgenic accretion’ (525). It is important, then, in the spirit not of the anthropological gaze but of engaging with difference, to look to writing in the speculative mode from heritages and histories other than the First World for sources that validate ideas about ageing from the Global South. Nalo Hopkinson’s work is a good case in point. Hopkinson was born in Jamaica, and as a child lived in Jamaica, Trinidad, Guyana, and the United States. Her family moved to Canada when she was sixteen years old. She lived there until 2011, and she currently lives in the United States. As one of a number of writers whose work is frequently associated with African futurism, Hopkinson has argued that: ‘I start from a tradition of science fiction and fantasy, which is about building on folklore … my native lore, not from the European’ (Hopkinson 2004: 9). Drawing from her ‘native lore’ involves a recognition throughout, for example, her 1998 novel Brown Girl in the Ring of the value of African and Caribbean religious and cultural practices and beliefs. Set in a post-apocalyptic Toronto, Brown Girl in the Ring (1998) features a young woman protagonist, named Ti-Jeanne, who learns the value of Afro-Caribbean cultural traditions as a living heritage that is passed on particularly via her grandmother. African and Caribbean conceptions of life and death as continuous, therefore, of past and present as coterminous, are present in the conception of ageing in the novel. As I have previously argued, Hopkinson’s understanding of temporality in the novel thus draws on what Heather Russell refers to as ‘Great Time’ (Watkins 2020). Russell argues that ‘African Atlantic narratives … frequently … posit fundamental, ideological contestations of Euro-American discursive and epistemological formations’ (2011: 12) and instead make use of traditional African ideas about cyclical, cosmogonic (rather than linear) time. The novel requires Ti-Jeanne to not only take the place of her grandmother and mother but also make use of their ancestral wisdom: the spirit Papa Osain tells Ti-Jeanne that although her grandmother’s work is finished, ‘the end one [Ti-Jeanne] go win through’ (1998: 98). At the novel’s denouement,

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the villain is defeated by the power of the Oldest Ones, as the dead, the living, past, present, and future unite. Ti-Jeanne calls on and fully acknowledges and makes use of the wisdom and spiritual experience of older African and Caribbean generations (particularly as this is transmitted via the maternal line).

CONCLUSION These different traditions of respect for older people and their experience offer readers a much more positive view of ageing. As Woodward has it, they allow the ‘building [of] our age world in just and meaningful ways’ (2019: 376). Speculative fictional visions are thus able to generate an important imaginative space for contestation of dominant conceptions of the future and ageing. Admittedly, some of the writing examined here relies on stereotypical and negative perceptions of ageing, whether implicitly or explicitly. Immortality or eternal youth can be viewed as inevitably or intrinsically unethical, dangerous, and horrific. The Tithonus myth – everlasting life without everlasting youth – is often prominent. Those demodystopias that focus on declining fertility and the threat of human extinction, rather than the risks of over population, inevitably comment on ageing via their reliance on reproductive futurism, where children are ‘the future’ and older people can be a grotesque ‘burden’. However, changeling narratives and other folk tales, as early examples of a cultural preoccupation with ageing, encourage readers to rethink normative conceptions of time and human development. In the most interesting speculative fiction examined here, the challenge that new temporalities and ageing narratives offer to human cognition necessitates a compression, disturbance, or questioning of conventional fictional modes.

NOTES 1 The umbrella term speculative fiction will be used here to include fantasy and science fiction. Critical debate about terminology is extensive, but the following provide useful overviews: Lucie Armitt, Fantasy (2020); Andrew Milner, Locating Science Fiction (2012); P. L. Thomas, Science Fiction and Speculative Fiction: Challenging Genres (2013). 2 See my discussion in Contemporary Women’s Post-Apocalyptic Fiction, London: Palgrave, 2020, 48–55. 3 See my discussion of The Unit and The Trouble with Lichen in Jayne Raisborough and Susan Watkins, ‘Critical Future Studies and Age: Attending to Future Imaginings of Age and Ageing’, Culture Unbound, 13, 2 (2021): 15–37.

REFERENCES Armitt, L. (2020), Fantasy, Abingdon: Routledge. Baccolini, R., and T. Moylan, eds (2003), Dark Horizons: Science Fiction and the Dystopian Imagination, New York: Routledge. Banks, I. M. (1987–2012), The Culture Series, London: Orbit. Barcelo, E. (2008), ‘Mil Euros por tu Vida’, in Futuros Peligrosos, 65–102, Zaragoza: Edelvives. Blish, J. ([1957] 1972), The Seedling Stars, London: Arrow. Brantlinger, P. (2001), ‘Introduction’, in H. R. Haggard, She, 1–16, London: Penguin. Chiang, T. ([2002] 2015), ‘Story of Your Life’, in Stories of Your Life and Others, 109–72, London: Picador. Clarke, A. C. ([1986] 1998), The Songs of Distant Earth, London: HarperCollins.

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Collins, S. G. (2009), ‘Fiddling with Le Guin: Making New Connections with Science Fiction’s Anthropologist’, Science Fiction Studies, 36 (3): 522–8. Cooke, B. (1996), ‘The Biopoetics of Immortality: A Darwinist Perspective on Science Fiction’, in G. Slusser, G. Westfahl, and E. Rabkin (eds), Immortal Engines: Life Extension and Immortality in Science Fiction and Fantasy, 90–101, Athens: University of Georgia Press. Domingo, A. (2008), ‘Demodystopias: Prospects of Demographic Hell’, Population and Development Review, 34 (4): 725–45. Edelman, L. (2004), No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Erlich, P. (1968), The Population Bomb, Cutchogue, NY: Buccaneer Books. Falcus, S. (2020), ‘Age and Anachronism in Contemporary Dystopian Fiction’, in E. Barry and M. V. Skagen (eds), Literature and Ageing, vol. 73, Essays and Studies, 65–86, Cambridge: D. S. Brewer. Fitzgerald, F. S. ([1922] 2008), ‘The Curious Case of Benjamin Button’, in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and Six Other Stories, 1–28, London: Penguin. Gibson, W. ([1984] 2016), Neuromancer, London: Gollancz. Gullette, M. (2004), Aged by Culture, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Haggard, H. R. ([1886] 2001), She, London: Penguin. Halberstam, J. (2005), In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives, New York: New York University Press. Holmquist, N. ([2006] 2010), The Unit, trans. Marlaine Delargy, London: Oneworld. Hopkinson, N. (1998), Brown Girl in the Ring, New York: Grand Central. Hopkinson, N. (2004), So Long Been Dreaming: Postcolonial Science Fiction and Fantasy, Vancouver, BC: Arsenal Pulp Press. Irving, W. ([1819] 2010), Rip Van Winkle and Other Stories, ed. J. Donnelly, London: Puffin. James, P. D. ([1992] 2018), The Children of Men, London: Faber and Faber. Jameson, F. (1996), ‘Longevity as Class Struggle’, in G. Slusser, G. Westfahl, and E. Rabkin (eds), Immortal Engines: Life Extension and Immortality in Science Fiction and Fantasy, 24–44, Athens: University of Georgia Press. Lafontaine, C. (2009), ‘Regenerative Medicine’s Immortal Body: From the Fight against Ageing to the Extension of Longevity’, Body and Society, 15 (4): 53–71. Lawrence, A. (2018), ‘From Fairy Host to Mutant Community: The “Singular” Changeling in Folklore, Medical Discourse, and Theories of Evolutionary Change’, Preternature: Critical and Historical Studies on the Preternatural, 7 (1): 88–118. Layne, P. (2019), ‘The Darkening of Europe: Afrofuturist Ambitions and Afropessimist Fears in Damir Lukacevic’s Dystopian Film Transfer (2010)’, Seminar: A Journal of Germanic Studies, 55 (1): 54–75. Le Guin, U. K. ([1976] 1989), ‘The Space Crone’, in Dancing at the Edge of the World; Thoughts on Words, Women, Places, 3–6, New York: Grove Press. Lehtonen, S. (2013), Girls Transforming: Invisibility and Age-Shifting in Children’s Fantasy Fiction Since the 1970s, Critical Explorations in Science Fiction and Fantasy, Jefferson, NC: McFarland. Liorsi, B. (2019), ‘The Ante-Tempus Novel: Prevention and Patienthood in Recent Speculative Fiction’, Textual Practice, 33 (6): 983–1003. Liu, K. (2012), ‘Story Notes: “The Waves” ’, Ken Liu: Writer. Available at: https://ken​liu.name/ blog/2012/10/01/story-notes-the-waves-in-asim​ovs/# (accessed 21 December 2020). Liu, K. ([2012] 2016), ‘The Paper Menagerie’, in The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories, 195–217, London: Head of Zeus.

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Luckhurst, R. (2005), Science Fiction, Cambridge: Polity Press. Magary, D. (2011), The End Specialist, London: Harper Voyager. Mangum, T. (2002), ‘Longing for Life Extension: Science-Fiction and Later Life’, Journal of Ageing and Identity, 7: 69–82. Miller, J. D. (1996), ‘ “Living Forever or Dying in the Attempt”: Mortality and Immortality in Science and Science Fiction’, in G. Slusser, G. Westfahl, and E. Rabkin (eds), Immortal Engines: Life Extension and Immortality in Science Fiction and Fantasy, 77–89, Athens: University of Georgia Press. Milner, A. (2012), Locating Science Fiction, Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. Mitchison, N. (1962), Memoirs of a Spacewoman, London: Victor Gollancz. Nolan, W. F., and G. C. Johnson ([1967] 1976), Logan’s Run, New York: Bantam. Raisborough, J. and S. Watkins (2021) ‘Critical Future Studies and Age: Attending to Future Imaginings of Age and Ageing’, Culture Unbound, 13 (2): 15–37. Rogers, J. (2011), The Testament of Jessie Lamb, Dingwall: Sandstone Press. Rosen, S. L. (1996), ‘Alienation as the Price of Immortality: The Tithonus Syndrome in Science Fiction and Fantasy’, in G. Slusser, G. Westfahl, and E. Rabkin (eds), Immortal Engines: Life Extension and Immortality in Science Fiction and Fantasy, 125–35, Athens: University of Georgia Press. Russell, H. (2011), Legba’s Crossing: Narratology in the African Atlantic, Athens: University of Georgia Press. Stapledon, O. ([1930] 1999), First and Last Men, London: Victor Gollancz. Tawada, Y. ([2014] 2018), The Last Children of Tokyo, trans. M. Mitsutani, London: Granta. Thomas, P. L., ed. (2013), Science Fiction and Speculative Fiction: Challenging Genres, Rotterdam: Sense Publishers. Watkins, S. (2020), Contemporary Women’s Post-Apocalyptic Fiction, London: Palgrave. Woodward, K. (2019), ‘Afterword: Literary Antidotes to the Toxin That Is Ageism’, Studies in American Fiction, 46 (2): 373–81. Wyndham, J. ([1960] 2008), Trouble with Lichen, London: Penguin.

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CHAPTER EIGHT

Old age and the Gothic ZOE BRENNAN

INTRODUCTION Since its genesis, the Gothic genre has consistently pushed to the forefront aspects of existence that the wider society would rather ignore. During the first wave, texts such as Matthew Lewis’s bestselling The Monk ([1796] 2016) explored madness, sex, and terror, challenging dominant Enlightenment rhetoric about human progress and intellect. A century later, Bram Stoker’s Dracula ([1897] 1994) undermined the, albeit surface, respectability of late-Victorian England, tapping into panic caused by ideas about evolution and showing the human subject as a ‘bite’ away from transforming into a bestial vampire. It is fitting, then, that contemporary Gothic literature and film, which has flourished since the late 1960s, responds to a society that problematizes old age and characterizes it in terms of deterioration and loss. Betty Friedan, in The Fountain of Age, suggests that these discourses make old ‘age so terrifying that we have to deny its very existence’ (1993: 9). Gothic texts counter this trend and shine light onto old age and those ageing into it. Their refusal to let us bury our anxieties is consistent with a genre that ‘offers ways of exposing, and articulating, some of the horrors and fears’ that preoccupy us ‘without ignoring them, dismissing them or panicking’ (Wisker 2016: 238). In terms of old age, the panic manifests itself in widespread ageism, at both individual and institutional levels. We need only consider prejudiced attitudes towards the most vulnerable old during the Covid-19 pandemic to gain a sense of their extensive and insidious nature. Numerous studies have commented on the fact that from ‘health advisories on age vulnerability, to the ghettoizing of older adults for risk mitigation, ageist rhetoric has been a dominant theme for pandemic control’ (Lichtenstein 2021: 206). Policymakers and the media promoted a ‘them’ and ‘us’ attitude drawn along generational lines which supported a ‘rhetoric of disposability’ surfacing in ‘questions about who should live or die when medical resources are scarce, hospital systems overwhelmed, and Covid-19 roils the globe. Older patients are deemed disposable’ (Lichtenstein 2021: 206). However, stress about older people placing a strain on reserves is not solely tied to this historical moment but amplifies pre-existing concerns about an ageing population as an unmanageable and devastating ‘grey tsunami’. Ageism is one of the reasons why age is ‘an undertheorized sign of difference in the humanities’ (DeFalco 2009: 1). This lack of attention to age has been true of Gothic studies in the past, but recently there has been an increased interest in this aspect of identity. Much of the scholarship centres on the figure of the vulnerable orphan or the demonic child, the proverbial ‘bad seed’; however, discussions of characters at the other end of the lifecourse are beginning to appear. British

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academics Avril Horner and Sue Zlosnik, for example, in ‘No Country for Old Women: Gender, Age and the Gothic’ (2016) examine the older female protagonists who populate texts from the late eighteenth century to the present day. Spanish researcher Marta Miquel-Baldellou, in essays such as ‘ “I Wanted to Be Old”: Gender and Aging in Daphne Du Maurier’s Rebecca and Susan Hill’s Mrs de Winter’ (2018), approaches work by Gothic authors from Edgar Allen Poe to Stephanie Meyers through the lens of ageing. Following a slightly different route, Marlene Goldman argues in Forgotten: Narratives of Age-Related Dementia and Alzheimer’s Disease (2017) that Canadian writers of both fiction and non-fiction have relied on Gothic tropes of apocalyptic ageing in portraits of dementia and Alzheimer’s to the detriment of more productive discourses. This chapter aims to join the growing conversation and highlight some of the interesting texts that foreground older characters. I largely discuss European and North American material due to the dangers of literary colonization and co-opting of texts for what is a traditionally European canon. Work by Latin American authors, for instance, is as likely to be in dialogue with magic realism as it is the Gothic. Whilst it is certainly possible to discuss transnational Gothic without appropriation, especially in an increasingly globalized world, as Glennis Byron points out in ‘Global Gothic’ (2012), it is beyond the scope of this chapter to engage meaningfully with this area. Whilst negotiating generic boundaries, I am going to offer a definition of what constitutes a Gothic text. It is a necessarily provisional description because the Gothic is a particularly slippery term. Marie Mulvey-Roberts captures its elusiveness in the ‘Introduction’ to The Handbook of the Gothic asking: ‘What is Gothic literature? Is it a plot, a trope, a topos, a discourse, a mode of representation, conventions of characterisation or a composite of all these aspects?’ (2009: xxi). Taking on board the implication that Gothic literature is a ‘composite’, Kelly Hurley usefully offers a summary of its key elements. She suggests that Gothic texts are generally ‘popular’, contain ‘sensationalist and suspenseful plotting’ and depict supernatural or seemingly supernatural phenomena or otherwise demonstrate a more or less antagonistic relation to realist literary practice; actively seek to arouse a strong affective response (nervousness, fear, revulsion, shock) in their readers … are concerned with insanity, hysteria, delusion, and alternate mental states in general and offer highly charged and often graphically extreme representations of human identities, sexual, bodily and psychic. (Hurley 2002: 192) Although Hurley is describing literature from the turn of the twentieth century, this broad account captures the continuing preoccupations of contemporary Gothic fiction and film. Authors and directors continue to create emotive, and emotional, works that draw audiences and readers to a ‘dark yet familiar brew’ driven by ‘an uneasy and eerie dialectic between anxiety and desire’ (Mulvey-Roberts 2009: xxi).

THE ABJECT OLDER PERSON Bodies under siege from the vicissitudes of ageing are central to discussions of old age. Without wanting to replicate a stance that pathologizes the older individual, the ageing body as a biological ‘machine’ that is ‘running down’ stands as a stubborn counterpoint to discourses of ageing that posit it as a period of potential growth and positive transformation. This sketch of the older figure chimes with the wider concerns of the Gothic, as the body under duress, regardless of its age,

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is at the forefront of many narratives. From the start, authors have focused on figures who are menaced by torture or painfully transformed, that bleed and cry and monstrously challenge the limits of what it is to be human. Whether villainous or vulnerable, they are often represented as abject: a concept discussed most influentially by Julia Kristeva in Powers of Horror ([1980] 1982). She takes a psychoanalytic perspective on abjection, considering phenomena that trouble the subject’s ‘borders’ and sense of possessing a stable self, ranging from bodily waste (sweat, blood, pus, and faeces) to the more abstract things that have no respect for boundaries (a so-called friend who betrays one). Such things elicit ‘queasiness and horror’ because they remind ‘one of traumatic infantile efforts to constitute oneself as an ego’ and ‘of the fragile nature of an ego that remains threatened by and yet attracted to the possibility of dissolution’ (Hurley 2007: 138). Readers are simultaneously drawn to and repelled by scenes of abjection, helping to explain its prevalence in Gothic texts. Kelly Hurley, in her essay ‘Abject and Grotesque’, helpfully emphasizes that the fear of dissolution can also be triggered by thoughts of our ‘fate’; the loss of identity that comes with our eventual death (2007: 145). Authors use this unease to abjectify an older character’s struggles with embodiment as a signifier of our ultimate dissolution. Their depictions of unruly bodies, subject to illness and loss of function, act as reminders of our ‘clumsy earthiness and changeful mortality’, emphasizing ‘the material thingness of the human subject’ (Hurley 2007: 138). Bestselling American author Stephen King uses the abject body’s ability to create disgust in a fascinated reader in Dolores Claiborne (1992). The eponymous 65-year-old protagonist narrates the novel in the form of a confession to the police. To convince them that she did not murder her wealthy, elderly employer, Vera Drake, Dolores admits to killing her physically abusive husband thirty years earlier. The supernatural elements of this story are slim and instead the horror comes from King’s portrayal of the female body as consistently under threat, focusing on a handful of visceral episodes to illustrate its vulnerability. At one end of the lifecourse, Dolores’s adolescent daughter is sexually abused by her father and at the other end, Vera must battle her own body and learn to manage physical dependency. Bodies are not only misused by those who share the domestic space but also by the labour it takes to care for those in it. King painstakingly describes the effort it takes for Dolores to launder Vera’s sheets in winter, a process which culminates in hanging them on the line with ‘hands numb, fingers purple, shoulders achin, snot leakin off the end of y’nose’ (King 1992: 21). Not only is housework gendered in the novel but so too is the caring role as Dolores slowly transitions from Vera’s housekeeper to her caregiver. This reflects the fact that in wider society, it is usually women who adopt this position. In the United States, at the time of the novel’s publication, ‘90% of paid aides to older adults, regardless of whether the care provided [was] offered in the home or institution, [was] provided by women’ (Browne 1998: 30). King captures Dolores’s difficulties as the lone carer of a wheelchair-bound and overweight individual, who also suffers from episodes of confusion. In a different novel these aspects of daily life might be overlooked but King uses them to take readers deep into the realms of the abject. Near the start of the story, he focuses on the battle of wills that takes place on ‘cleanin day’. Vera deliberately soils herself when Dolores is busy elsewhere, one day pushing her to breaking point: She was sittin up in bed, wide awake, covers thrown back, her rubber pants pushed down to her big old flabby knees and her diapers undone … Great God! The bed was full of shit, she was covered with shit, there was shit on the rug, on the wheelchair, on the walls … It looked like

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she musta taken up a handful and flang it, the way kids’ll fling mud at each other … Was I mad! Mad enough to spit! ‘Oh Vera! Oh, you dirty BITCH!’ (King 1992: 31–32) The visceral language, describing an excessive amount of faeces, confronts readers’ anxiety about the loss of bodily control which can generate ‘penalties of stigmatization and ultimately physical exclusion’ because to be ‘ascribed the status of competent adult person depends upon the capacity to control urine and faeces’ (Featherstone and Hepworth 1991: 377). Vera, here, is not a ‘competent adult’ but infantilized by the narrator’s reference to ‘diapers’ and even more so by the fact that her actions are likened to those of children who wilfully make a mess. Paradoxically, this ‘loss’ of control is a way of trying to claw back some of the mastery she has lost in becoming dependent on Dolores. Vera is willing to lose some dignity to shift the balance of power and in this scene is both victim of an ageing body and a disruptive grotesque. Interestingly, this episode also works to amplify the question that runs throughout the novel: why does Dolores put up with such abject behaviour? The narrative offers a slow reveal as to the nature of their relationship. We gradually learn that they helped each other out at various life-changing moments and, although often their interactions are fraught, they continue to support each other. In exploring the sisterhood between two old women, King moves us beyond the usual stories about husbands and wives, or mothers and daughters, and into less charted territory. Although there is a long tradition of Gothic texts portraying the female body as monstrous, as a fatal temptation or a castrating mother, the senescent male body easily crosses into this territory. Mexican Canadian novelist Silvia Moreno-Garcia makes much of the abjection inherent in the twisted patriarch, Howard Doyle, in her novel Mexican Gothic (2020). As the title suggests, she taps into a slew of generic conventions, not only presenting us with a villainous head of family but also his reign over an isolated and dilapidated ancestral home, ‘High Place’, mouldering in the mountains of rural Mexico. Noemi, a young socialite from Mexico City, is sent there by her father to investigate her cousin’s claims that she is being poisoned by her husband, Howard’s son, and that the house ‘brims with every single evil and cruel sentiment’ (Moreno-Garcia 2020: 8). Obviously, her cousin’s report is true. ‘High Place’ is a living organism in a symbiotic relationship with its inhabitants, a relationship which extends their lives if they do not leave the site for too long. Howard, originally from England, is over 400 years old and made his fortune from Mexico’s silver mines. Moreno-Garcia works to expose the country’s exploitation by unscrupulous colonialists who paid native labour a pittance to work in dangerous conditions. She also connects Howard to the suspect practice of eugenics. He is fascinated by why the Mexican workforce lasted longer than their original European counterparts and wants Noemi to marry one of his heirs as he believes she will strengthen the family’s bloodline. Yet, it is not just outsiders that he exploits; he also feeds vampirically on younger members of his family and demands that one of them sacrifice their body to him once his current one degrades due to senescence. Noemi is shocked to learn that they agree as they see him as godlike and the transfiguration as a way of retaining a measure of immortality. When Noemi arrives, she describes Howard as ‘ancient, his face gouged with wrinkles, a few sparse hairs stubbornly attached to his skull. He was very pale too, like an underground creature. A slug, perhaps’ (Moreno-Garcia 2020: 28). Although this description is unflattering, as the text progresses and Noemi comes to understand his plans, he becomes increasingly abject with his rotting body

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mirroring his psychological corruption. Forced to take part in preparations for the body-swapping ritual, she is shocked when taken to his room to find him nude on the bed with lips ‘as bloated as his leg, crusted with black growths, and a trail of dark fluid dripp[ing] down his chin.’ She is repulsed: ‘It was horrid, horrid, and she thought he was a corpse, afflicted by the ravages of putrefaction, but he lived’ (Moreno-Garcia 2020: 204). Howard is horrific and abhuman. His remaining grandson turns against him and breaks the unnatural cycle by escaping to a new life with Noemi. Like Howard’s grandson, readers of both Mexican Gothic and Dolores Claiborne are presented with older bodies that fascinate as much as they disgust and work as monstrous memento mori.

THE DEMONIZED OLDER PERSON Intergenerational tension is also at the heart of the American author Ira Levin’s Rosemary’s Baby (1967). A young couple, Rosemary and her actor husband Guy, move into an apartment and become friendly with their older neighbours, Roman and Minnie Castevet, who we gradually learn are practising Satan-worshippers. Guy secretly joins their coven and, in exchange for career success, allows them to drug Rosemary and take her to a black mass where she is impregnated by Satan. Although disorientated, Rosemary is partially aware of what is going on and is ‘suddenly surrounded by naked men and women, ten or a dozen’ who ‘were elderly, the women grotesque and slack-breasted’ (Levin [1967] 1994: 77). Tellingly, Levin offers no equivalent details about the male members of the coven and his distasteful description points to the idea that women are valued for their youthful bodies. Colette Browne, in Women, Feminism and Ageing, says on this subject that ‘society’s emphasis on youth and physical beauty has negative implications for women’s changing appearance’ adding that rather ‘than physical changes being viewed as signs of character and distinction, a woman’s aging appearance marks the end of her worth as defined by her sexuality and ability to reproduce’ (1998: 41). These barren female characters can only stand by and assist Rosemary’s impregnation and Levin represents their nakedness as monstrous because of their age. In the faithful 1968 film adaptation, director Roman Polanski also portrays the older women as verging on the grotesque. Even when clothed, the female actors look coarse and incredibly outmoded next to Mia Farrow’s ethereal Rosemary with her avant-garde Vidal Sassoon pixie cut. Minnie, played by Ruth Gordon, is plastered in clownish make-up which emphasizes her age whereas her husband Roman, actor Jason Isaacs, looks distinguished throughout the film, dressed in a variety of smart jackets and ties. Until we reach the black mass which demonstrates Roman’s power and influence, Rosemary, and by extension the reader who only has access to her limited perspective, is encouraged to dismiss the older protagonists. Levin relies on ageism to drive the initial undecidability of the narrative. Readers must underestimate the older characters for the slow build-up of terror to work as we try to piece together the various clues and discover what is going on. Guy, after their first meeting, mockingly refers to the Castevets as ‘Ma and Pa Kettle’, referring to a ‘hillbilly’ couple who starred in a series of comic American films from the late 1940s (Levin [1967] 1994: 48). Levin presents them as figures of fun, particularly Minnie who is fussy and self-confessedly nosey. Guy also assumes that they will be lonely, warning ‘if we get friendly with an old couple like that we’re never going to get them off our necks’ (Levin [1967] 1994: 48). Although he is right about the consequence, he is not about the cause; the coven forms a self-made urban family and the Castevets do not want the young couple for friendship but for Rosemary’s ability to reproduce. The newcomers’ ageist misreading

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prevents them from avoiding danger and even Guy, who gains a measure of acting success for his part in the plot, is ultimately manipulated to further Roman’s ends. Levin demonizes the coven not only because they are Satan-worshippers but because they fail to step down for the younger generation. Roman does not cede any power to Guy and remains the alpha male, eventually greeting the baby’s international visitors himself. He pushes aside his female contemporaries, who are fussing over the child, simultaneously encouraging Rosemary ‘to be a real mother’ as they are ‘too old. It’s not right’ (Levin [1967] 1994: 200). Duplicating the social disqualification of older women, he self-servingly ignores the fact that normative masculinity has come to be ‘embodied by middle-age and younger men’, and that during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries ‘old’ was ‘incorporated as a cultural gauge for what masculinity is not’ (Thompson 2004: 1). Roman, as a leader of a powerful, largely aged cabal is neither ‘normal’ in his dealings with the devil nor ‘normal’ in his refusal to sit on the periphery of events. Another Gothic horror film that dramatizes this intergenerational tension is American director Ari Aster’s Midsommar (2019). He literalizes the gerontological ‘fair innings theory’, the advocates of which, Sara Schotland explains in ‘Forced Execution of the Elderly: Old Law, Dystopia, and the Utilitarian Argument’, ‘hold that if all else is held equal, one should devote the scarce resources to prolong the life of younger individuals who have not yet had their “fair innings” ’ (2013: 171). She goes on to explain how authors over the centuries have pushed this logic to extremes in dystopian imaginings where geronticide is the norm. Aster’s vision taps into this movement, focusing on a group of American anthropology students accompanying their Swedish friend to his home village, which is holding a midsummer celebration. Far from the quaint experience they envisaged, the festival is underpinned by a series of bizarre rites. The first shocking ceremony consists of, what Aster terms, ‘attestupa’, a violent ritual suicide where senescent members of the community throw themselves off a cliff, symbolically making way for the next generation, who orchestrate events. Although the older characters here are not physically forced to jump, the cultural coercion that they experience is plain. Dani, the only female visitor, thinks her insensitive boyfriend takes it too coolly, asking ‘Are you not disturbed by what we just saw?’ He replies ‘I’m trying to keep an open mind though. It’s cultural, you know? We stick our elders in nursing homes. I’m sure they find that disturbing. I think we really need to at least try to acclimate.’ The audience is supposed to find such cultural relativism foolish, although he is right that the experience of ageing is affected by culture and the spectre of being institutionalized in a ‘bad’ nursing home haunts the popular imagination. Schotland usefully reminds us that ‘while geronticide might seem a far-fetched, dystopian nightmare, the question of whether and how to distribute health care resources as our population ages is, of course, a topic of extensive commentary’ (2013: 171). Although the film was released before Covid-19 struck, its dramatization of a generational struggle for resources is timely.

THE UNCANNY OLDER PERSON The Visit (2015) portrays a more intimate, but equally disturbing, cross-generational encounter. It is a ‘mock-doc’ about fifteen-year-old Becca and her brother Tyler’s first visit to their grandparents, Nana and Pop Pop. Indian American director M. Night Shyamalan turns the old couple’s home into an uncanny space ‘marked by the collapse of boundaries, by the strange trespassing into regions

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of the familiar, and vice versa’ (DeFalco 2009: 6). Even before they meet, Becca, who is recording the trip for a school project, captures this sense of defamiliarization as she muses: ‘We don’t know their temperament or their proclivities’; a sensation which, counter-intuitively, intensifies as the week progresses. This bewilderment is largely due to the fact that the siblings are not familiar with old people and find even very ordinary things odd; such as when Pop Pop tells them that there is an early curfew which he puts down to age: ‘We are old people and go to bed at 9.30.’ They are surprised but accept his explanation as it fits in with their conception that older people are intrinsically strange and do things differently. Their judgements are related to an internalized ageism which, as Robert Butler – who coined the phrase in the late 1960s – says, allows ‘younger generations to see older people as different from themselves’ to the extent ‘that they subtly cease to identify with their elders as human beings’ (qtd in Bytheway 2016: 338). Shyamalan takes this as a starting point and plays with the siblings’ judgement about the line between the ‘usual’ and the ‘unusual’. Later, they hear sounds outside of their room and see Nana vacantly wandering around in an old-fashioned nightgown, but the next night, more disturbingly, they see her jerkily running up and down the corridor. When Becca asks about this Pop Pop explains her conduct as ‘sundown syndrome’, a symptom of dementia where an individual becomes agitated at the onset of dusk. Becca passes this onto Tyler and reassures him that although this is not ‘normal’ adult behaviour, it is a ‘normal old age problem’, though he remains sceptical. The older characters’ uncanniness is emphasized by their duality, with familiar and kind exteriors hiding interiors that are unsettling and erratic. Shyamalan here employs a classic Gothic trope, which can be traced back most famously to Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde ([1886] 2019), to create a sensation of uncertainty. Both the viewer and children become increasingly unsure as to which ‘side’ of the grandparents they will be presented with. Pop Pop cares for and protects Nana but saves his soiled incontinence pants in a fly-infested pile in the woodshed. Nana, tidy by day in her neat cardigan, possesses a hidden ‘night-time’ body which, sometimes nude, scampers on all fours and retches. Freud’s suggestion that ‘everything is uncanny that ought to have remained hidden and secret and yet comes to light’ seems particularly apt and helps explain why the children are so disturbed (qtd in DeFalco 2009: 7). In The Visit these secrets are age-related, and further, often connected to an abject body. In the final scenes of the film, the ultimate ‘secret’ is revealed when Becca finds out that Nana and Pop Pop are imposters, escaped patients from a psychiatric hospital, who have murdered her actual grandparents. The uncanny house is replaced by a terrifying and violent one, with Nana trying to vampirically bite Becca, who delivers a fatal blow with a shard of broken mirror. Meanwhile, Pop Pop sadistically punishes Tyler by rubbing his incontinence pants in the germ-phobic’s face until Becca rushes in to save her brother. As in Rosemary’s Baby, there is an element of the film which warns the audience about underestimating the old as it turns out they can be just as dangerous as the next adult. Shyamalan parodies the ease with which the old can be Othered and, ultimately, they are not frightening because of their age-related behaviours but because they are insane and murderous. However, the film does not fundamentally challenge ageist presumptions that place older individuals in a category that lies outside ‘normal’ adulthood, because it relies on these attitudes for the plot twist to work. Further, ageism drives the horror of the film with the audience being both entertained and repulsed by the grotesque bodies and ‘secret’ age-related behaviours that Shyamalan reveals on screen.

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THE ‘YOUTHFUL’ OLDER PERSON Vampires do not suffer from being underestimated and socially disqualified because, despite being some of the oldest characters in literature and film, they tend to appear to be young and so are treated as such. Yet this was not always the case. Stoker’s Dracula, for instance, is described by Jonathan Harker as a ‘tall old man’ with a ‘long white moustache’ who is ‘clad in black from head to foot’ ([1897] 1994: 25). Miquel-Baldellou in ‘From Pathology to Invisibility: Age Identity as a Cultural Construct in Vampire Fiction’ suggests that the popularity of this figure in Victorian literature coincides with the period’s interest in old age and ‘the creation of the elderly subject as a category in the medical discourse’ and a figure in need of ‘public provision’ (2014: 126). Miquel-Baldellou suggests that over the years the cultural erasure of the old figure has overtaken its pathologization, resulting in contemporary vampires who are still ancient in years but look youthful and supernaturally beautiful. Old bodies have been literally written out of the vampire script. She credits Ann Rice as leading the way, in Interview with The Vampire (1976), with her aristocratic creation Lestat de Lioncourt and the even younger vampire child, Claudia. This generic shift fits with Nina Auerbach’s assertion, made in Our Vampires, Ourselves, that there is no such creature as ‘ “The Vampire”; there are only vampires’ (1995: 5). She argues that they are not a homogenous group but reflect the concerns of their times and so blend into the ‘changing cultures they inhabit’ (6). In the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries, society consistently applauds those individuals who look younger than their years, holding them up as role models with which to chastise those who do not, at the very least, try to minimize physical signs of ageing, and contemporary vampires reflect this obsession. This worship of the youthful is certainly echoed in the global phenomenon that is the Twilight series of five books, written by Stephanie Meyer and published between 2005 and 2020. The stories focus on the romantic relationship between the human Bella Swan and vampire Edward Cullen. Like Rice’s Lestat, the Cullens occupy the position of glamorous outsiders, but unlike their predecessor, they are ethically sound as they do not eat humans to survive. Therefore, not only are they set apart from the local community, but also from the wider vampire community, which views them with suspicion. Critics such as Lauren Rocha, in ‘Wife, Mother, Vampire: The Female Role in the Twilight series’, note that Bella internalizes ageist attitudes about beauty being synonymous with youth and that ‘aging will endanger her future with Edward because Edward will not be attracted to her as her looks fade’ (2014: 72). The second book in the series, New Moon (2006), begins on the morning of Bella’s eighteenth birthday and is often referenced to illustrate her fear of ageing. She dreams of her grandmother, whose ‘skin was soft and withered, bent in a thousand tiny creases that clung gently to the bone underneath’ (Meyer 2007: 3). However, this dream turns into a ‘nightmare’ when she realizes that it is her reflection: ‘That was me … Me, ancient, creased and withered.’ Her fears are intensified because Edward is ‘excruciatingly lovely, and forever seventeen’ and she believes he will not desire her as she ages (Meyer 2007: 6). Bella is not alone in her belief that with age comes a loss of personal and sexual ‘value’, as Edward’s sister Alice makes clear later in the chapter. Responding to Bella’ s complaints about getting older, she asks: ‘Don’t women usually wait till they’re twenty-nine to get upset over birthdays?’ (Meyer 2007: 10). Behind the seemingly flippant question lies the assumption that all women do not want to age. Meyer’s texts suggest that whilst physical ageing is undesirable, being chronologically old has its advantages. Most obviously, her vampires have accumulated wealth and experience. For instance,

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Edward’s sire Carlisle, seen by Bella as ‘impossibly youthful and lovely as ever’ (Meyer 2007: 26), is a doctor with an encyclopaedic knowledge of medical practices garnered during the 300-odd years of his existence. He is gratified by his profession and explains that it is ‘pleasant knowing that, thanks to what I can do, some people’s lives are better because I exist’ (Meyer 2007: 34). Nevertheless, Meyer is not offering a radical reframing of the possibilities of old age, which allows for the continuing development of self-fulfilment, for example. Instead, she represents the Cullens as possessing both eternally youthful exteriors and largely youthful lifestyles based around, for instance, school and active parenting.

THE WISE OLDER PERSON Overwhelmingly, Gothic texts tend to be moulded by cultural doubts about ageing. Still, there is a recurrent figure who moves the conversation into those areas nascent in Meyer’s narratives: the wise old person. Although Roman Castevet and Howard Doyle in many ways fit this description, I want to discuss positive portraits driven by sympathetic intergenerational relationships where an older character’s wisdom is deployed to help and protect others. Such stories counter the contemporary dismissal of the knowledge possessed by older people. Friedan bemoaned the fact that we ‘who are approaching age can hardly remember a time when older people were respected, looked up to, venerated for their wisdom’ (Friedan 1993: 9). Simone de Beauvoir famously explained this trend: ‘Modern technocratic society thinks that knowledge does not accumulate with the years but grows out of date’ (qtd in Horner and Zlovnik 2016: 184). Notwithstanding, Gothic texts have a complex relationship with a past which refuses to stay put; individuals return from the dead in the form of ghosts and vampires, antique secrets and curses haunt the present, and there is suspicion about new ways of doing things. A belief in the ‘old ways’ and ancient knowledge is less obsolete here than in other genres. An old Red Riding Hood narrates Jamaican Canadian author Nalo Hopkinson’s ‘Riding the Red’ (2001), and calls on her life experience to educate her adolescent granddaughter about female sexuality. Carian Hart in ‘Gothic Folklore and Fairy Tale: Negative Nostalgia’ explains that ‘the Gothic shares many formal and conceptual features with folklore and fairy tale’ including ‘heroines who are threatened with rape, incest, mutilation, murder’, ‘are kidnapped, confined, rescued’ and ‘face monstrosity in all its forms’ (2020: 1–2). Feminist re-workings of fairy tales, of which Hopkinson’s is an example, often make explicit the sexuality that underscores many traditional narratives; far from subtly in the case of ‘Red Riding Hood’ with its lesson that young adolescent women should not stray from the path in case they fall victim to strangers with ‘wolfish’ appetites. Hopkinson’s Red Riding Hood coaches her granddaughter on what to do if she meets the wolf in spite of her ‘saintly’ daughter’s attempt to dismiss her ‘old wives tales’. The old woman asserts: It’s the old wives who best tell those tales, oh yes. It’s the old wives who remember. We’ve been there, and we lived to tell them. And don’t I remember being young once, and toothsome, and drunk on the smell of my own young blood flowing through my veins? … I could make wolfie slaver, I could, and beg to come close. (Hopkinson 2001: 3) Hopkinson offers an alternative take on the relationship between the girl and wolf, portraying a young Red Riding Hood as possessing agency and an active desire. Her older self feels that history will repeat itself but this time she will play the part of the grandmother rather than ingénue.

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Interestingly, the scenario is not without appeal: ‘Ah, but wouldn’t it be sweet to ride the red, just once more before I’m gone, just one time when I can look wolfie in the eye, and match him grin for grin, and show him that I know what he’s good for?’ (Hopkinson 2001: 6). Not only does she refuse to be silenced, but she also rejects the socially acceptable role of sexless older woman as she knows that she is more than a match for ‘wolfie’. Equally redoubtable is Aunt Lydia, from Canadian author Margret Atwood’s The Testaments (2019), a sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale ([1985] 1987) in which readers are introduced to Gilead, a totalitarian patriarchal theocracy where women are categorized according to their fertility status. The narrator, Offred, is a handmaid, an involuntary surrogate chosen to carry a baby for a highranking officer in the regime. Often described as speculative fiction, The Handmaid’s Tale is ‘probably less clearly a Gothic fiction’ (Wisker 2016: 72). Nonetheless, recently it, and by extension The Testaments, has been successfully claimed for the genre. As Gina Wisker, in Contemporary Women’s Gothic Fiction (2016), points out, ‘the entrapment of women in their roles defined by childbearing capabilities and their silencing and mastering’ are a ‘set of Gothic curtailments which reconfigure the locked attics or dungeons’ as a ‘late twentieth-century incarceration in roles, clothes and behaviours based on religious fundamentalism’ (2016: 72–3). The fearsome middle-aged Aunt Lydia haunts the text in her role as an instructor to the handmaids, enforcing compliance and obedience to the regime. Offred portrays her as the villainous female face of the society, who terrorizes her young charges with both psychological and physical violence and threats. In The Testaments, set fifteen years later, Atwood makes a volte-face and dramatically rehabilitates the older woman. Lydia, now the narrator, remains an important figure in Gilead but explains how she has been continually working to destroy the system from within. Collecting and hiding evidence about crimes committed, Aunt Lydia also feeds information to the Mayday resistance movement who smuggle handmaids to safety in Canada. Atwood establishes her as a complex character with a wry sense of humour and a sharp mind. Throughout the narrative she reflects on the often-hard choices and imperfect compromises she has had to make, asking her reader: ‘Try not to think too badly of me, or no more badly than I think of myself ’ (Atwood 2019: 404). Towards the end of the book, we learn she has been successful in helping bring down the regime but not before she is called to account. Stating that ‘Torture is like dancing: I’m too old for it’ (Atwood 2019: 404), she plans to inject herself with a fatal dose of morphine and die on her own terms, leaving behind her diaries to act as her testament. Although I have not discussed the age of the authors in this chapter, it is noteworthy that Atwood, a septuagenarian at the time of publication, bestows continuing influence and political acuity on her fictional peer. In the face of dismissive ageist discourses, this can be framed as an example of the social activism for which Atwood is known.

CONCLUSION As this chapter has demonstrated, there are many preoccupations that are shared by ageing studies and Gothic literature and film. At the top of the list, and where this chapter started, is an interest in the troublesome, and troubling, body. Writers and directors reflect society’s anxious ‘association of old age with decline and death’ and the body as its ‘dominant signifier’ (DeFalco 2009: 2). They push it to extremes, creating monstrous figures whose abject exterior reflects a rotten core or focus on uncanny bodies that unsettle those around them. Another key concern in both fields is intergenerational relationships. Some Gothic authors focus on the conflict this

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generates and the creation of an ‘us’ and ‘them’ boundary connected to age identity. This leads to tyrannical patriarchs guarding their power or younger characters trying to grasp it. Other writers show a more hopeful, cooperative bond where the older figure plays experienced guide to the younger one. It would have been interesting to find more positive representations of old age along these lines, but it is the nature of the genre to focus on, and expose, the anxieties that permeate our culture. Nonetheless, Gothic’s engagement with older characters is such fertile ground that I am sure more stories, and studies, will follow that broaden our ideas about what it means to be old.

REFERENCES Atwood, M. ([1985] 1987), The Handmaid’s Tale, London: Virago. Atwood, M. (2019), The Testaments, London: Chatto and Windus. Auerbach, N. (1995), Our Vampires, Ourselves, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Browne, C. V. (1998), Women, Feminism and Ageing, New York: Springer. Byron, G. (2012), ‘Global Gothic’, in David Punter (ed.), A New Companion to The Gothic, 369–78, London: Blackwell. Bytheway, B. (2016), ‘Ageism’, in M. L. Johnson (ed.), The Cambridge Handbook of Age and Ageing, 338–45, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DeFalco, A. (2009), Uncanny Subjects: Aging in Contemporary Narrative, Columbus: Ohio State University Press. Featherstone, M., and M. Hepworth (1991), ‘The Mask of Ageing and the Postmodern Life Course’, in M. Featherstone, M. Hepworth, and Bryan S. Turner (eds), The Body: Social Process and Cultural Theory, 371–87, London: Sage. Friedan, B. (1993), The Fountain of Age, London: Jonathan Cape. Goldman, M. (2017), Forgotten: Narratives of Age-Related Dementia and Alzheimer’s Disease, Montreal: McGill-Queen’s Press. Hart, C. (2020), ‘Gothic Folklore and Fairy Tale: Negative Nostalgia’, Gothic Studies, 22 (1), 1–13. Hopkinson, N. (2001), Skin Folk, New York: AOL Time-Warner. Horner, A., and S. Zlosnik (2016), ‘No Country for Old Women: Gender, Age and the Gothic’, in A. Horner and S. Zlosnik (eds), Women and the Gothic: An Edinburgh Companion, 184–98, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Hurley, K. (2002), ‘British Gothic Fiction, 1885–1930’, in J. E. Hogle (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction, 189–208, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hurley, K. (2007), ‘Abject and Grotesque’, in C. Spooner (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Gothic, 137– 46, London: Routledge. King, S. (1992), Dolores Claiborne, London: Hodder and Stoughton. Kristeva, J. ([1980] 1982), Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, New York: Columbia University Press. Levin, I. ([1967] 1994), Rosemary’s Baby, Victoria: Hinkler Books. Lewis, M. ([1796] 2016), The Monk, Oxford, Oxford University Press. Lichtenstein, B. (2021), ‘From “Coffin Dodger” to “Boomer Remover”: Outbreaks of Ageism in Three Countries with Divergent Approaches to Coronavirus Control’, Journals of Gerontology: Social Sciences, 76 (4): 206–12. Meyer, S. (2007), New Moon, London: Atom.

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Miquel-Baldellou, M. (2014), ‘From Pathology to Invisibility: Age Identity as a Cultural Construct in Vampire Fiction’, Alicante Journal of English Studies, 27: 125–41. Miquel-Baldellou, M. (2018), ‘“I Wanted to Be Old”: Gender and Aging in Daphne Du Maurier’s Rebecca and Susan Hill’s Mrs de Winter’, 1616 Anuario de Literatura Comparada, 8: 87–105. Moreno-Garcia, S. (2020), Mexican Gothic, London: Quercus. Mulvey-Roberts, M. (2009), ‘Introduction to the First Edition’, in M. Mulvey-Roberts (ed.), The Handbook of the Gothic, 2nd edn, xviii–xix, London: Palgrave Macmillan. Rice, A. (1976), Interview with the Vampire, New York: Knopf. Rocha, L. (2014), ‘Wife, Mother, Vampire: The Female Role in the Twilight Series’, Journal of International Women’s Studies, 15 (2): 267–79. Schotland, S. D. (2013), ‘Forced Execution of the Elderly: Old Law, Dystopia, and the Utilitarian Argument’, Humanities, 2 (2): 160–75. Stevenson, R. L. ([1886] 2019), Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, London: Firestone Books. Stoker, B. ([1897] 1994), Dracula, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Thompson, E. H. (2004), ‘Guest Editorial’, Journal of Men’s Studies, 13 (1): 1–4. Wisker, G. (2016), Contemporary Women’s Gothic Fiction, London: Palgrave Macmillan.

Filmography Midsommar (2019), Dir. A. Aster, Sweden: Nordisk Film. Rosemary’s Baby (1968), Dir. R. Polanski, USA: Paramount Pictures. The Visit (2015), Dir. M. N. Shyamalan, USA: Universal Pictures.

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CHAPTER NINE

Ageing in crime and detective fiction, film, and television: Subversion and protest MARLA HARRIS

INTRODUCTION In Muriel Sparks’s Memento Mori (1959) a gang is apparently stalking the novel’s older characters by phone, warning them to ‘Remember you must die’. Interpreting the calls as death threats, they hire a detective to find the perpetrators. There is no conspiracy, despite the dead bodies piling up at the end, but multiple examples of the abuse of older people, from the exploitation of Godfrey and Charmian Colston by the scheming Miss Pettigrew to Jean Taylor’s mistreatment by the callous nurses of the Maud Long Medical Ward. The ominous phone calls are merely statements of fact, and the solitary murder that takes place is the result of a botched home robbery. While Memento Mori is neither detective nor crime fiction, Margaret Morganroth Gullette (2017) has persuasively argued that there is an insidious real-life ‘plot’ targeting older people, resulting in innumerable everyday micro-aggressions, from jokes about their declining cognitive abilities to jibes about their parasitic role in the economy. Ageism, according to Gullette, belongs in the same category as prejudices that discriminate against persons based on their perceived membership in a social group, but ‘compared to sexism, racism, and transphobia, ageism is the least censured, the most acceptable and unnoticed’ (2017: xiii). For postcolonial critic Harm-Peer Zimmermann, the binary opposition of old age / youth ‘constitutes old age as a negative foil to preferred values and norms’, with old age defined as ‘the Other per se’ (2016: 87). Crime and detective fictions prove to be important sites for investigating attitudes towards older people that position them as Other in part because of these genres’ longstanding concern with issues of ‘social justice, (in)equality, and cultural conflict’ (Mintz 2020: 2). The same spotlight that has been used to interrogate assumptions about race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, social class, disability, and neurodiversity can be turned on ageism. What I propose to examine in this chapter are the strategies by which writers of crime and detective narratives expose and contest the ‘cultural bias and prejudice’ directed against the older detective on the basis of age, as well as the ways in which ageism provides a motive for older people in these texts to commit criminal acts (Mintz 2020: 2). In addition to being protagonists, older characters may also feature as colourfully eccentric mentors in the detective’s life, or as victims in need of

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rescuing: Sue Grafton’s T Is for Trespass ([2007] 2016), part of her Alphabet series (1982–2017), has both. Kinsey Milhone, Grafton’s detective heroine, is close friends with her octogenarian landlord Henry Pitts, an exemplar of independent Third Agers, those ‘fit and healthy retirees in their 60s, 70s or even 80s who are appreciated and valued for their social, professional and financial resources’ (van Dyk 2016: 109). The opposite is true of Kinsey’s curmudgeonly nextdoor neighbour Gus Vronsky, who falls into the clutches of a con artist posing as a nurse. Despite being the same age as Henry, he is bitter, alone, and full of self-pity, telling Kinsey, who saves his life, ‘You think I complain too much, but you don’t know the half of it. You’ve never been old’ (Grafton [2007] 2016: 59). My focus in this chapter, however, is on ageing and ageism as it impacts detective and criminal. The serialized format of many crime and detective narratives, as Katsura Sako (2019) points out, makes them especially suitable for considering ageing. Readers’ close emotional ties to a favourite fictional detective may increase their sensitivity to and sympathy with the detective’s physical and / or cognitive changes. Additionally, watching long-running television detective serials closely identified with a particular actor, to whom the viewer has formed a strong attachment over a number of years – like John Thaw in Inspector Morse (1987–2000), David Suchet in Hercule Poirot (1989–2013), David Jason in A Touch of Frost (1994–2010), Peter Falk in Columbo (1968–2003), or Helen Mirren in Prime Suspect (1991–2006) – may normalize the ageing process, insisting on the characters’ continuity despite wrinkles, white hair, and other physical signs of age. The visual aspects of television and film also play a subtle, but critical role in affirming the capabilities of fictional detectives (and by extension, older people in general) by casting established older actors, such as Joan Hickson in Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple (1984–96), Glenda Jackson in Elizabeth Is Missing (2019), and Ian McKellen in Mr. Holmes (2015). Unlike the television serials mentioned above, detective novels and short stories have often imagined their protagonists implausibly remaining the same age or ageing slowly, like Grafton’s Kinsey Milhone, who stays in her thirties. What has changed noticeably in crime and detective fiction of the past two decades, for Alexandra Alter (2011), is writers’ willingness to acknowledge and dramatize the passage of time, so that readers are increasingly likely to encounter fictional detectives ‘grappling with creaking joints, hearing loss, poor eyesight, declining mental powers and the existential dread of retirement’. Given the growing global population of older people, this inclusiveness is a welcome response to an audience craving more visibility. While foregrounding the older person in crime and detective fiction has led to greater realism, physical or cognitive impairment also functions as plot device, creating suspense by casting doubt on the detective’s ability to solve the mystery or crime, which may, ironically, reveal the reader’s own ageist assumptions and anxieties about ageing. Among significant developments is the emergence of what might be termed the dementia detective novel, the subject of recent scholarship by Katsura Sako (2016, 2019), Sadie Wearing (2017), David M. Orr (2020), and Spencer Meeks (2020). Along with this realistic turn, however, there has been a proliferation of darkly comic crime narratives in which older protagonists engage in criminal behaviour, resorting to vigilantism against persons or institutions because they feel that the law does not see them or listen to them. Together, these detective and crime texts, realistic and ironic, constitute a body of social protest literature that offers a critique of how Western society devalues older people, wasting them as a resource or antagonizing them at its peril. The first part of this chapter focuses on the ageing detective, while the second part addresses the ageing criminal.

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AGEING DETECTIVES The word ‘old’ has become a repository for all kinds of assumptions about people over a certain age. In Agatha Christie’s Nemesis ([1971] 2011b) Miss Marple faces nagging questions about her abilities solely based on her age. A dying woman, Elizabeth Temple, offers her a clue, but is fearful that Miss Marple may not be up to the challenge: ‘You’re older, but you can still find out things, can’t you?’ (Christie [1971] 2011b: 160). Miss Marple, still mentally acute, solves her puzzling final case, despite her own self-doubt and her client Jason Rafiel’s solicitors considering her ‘far too old to be able to take care of herself ’; more than in any previous Marple novel, the conclusion feels like a riposte to everyone who, like her caregiver Cherry, believes ‘You’re a bit old, you know, to do this sort of thing’ (Christie [1971] 2011b: 55, 278). Biological age is not a deterrent for the amateur fictional detective, but it is for the fictional police facing mandatory retirement. In contrast to the private detective or amateur sleuth, like Holmes, who carries on crime-solving into his nineties in Michael Chabon’s The Final Solution: A Story of Detection (2004) and Mitch Cullin’s A Slight Trick of the Mind (2005), age sixty has been the deadline for UK police detectives (although it varies widely by country, with Sweden’s police retirement age currently sixty-eight). Older police officers in fiction are typically depicted as dedicated workaholics being pushed out by an unfairly ageist bureaucracy that values youth and technological expertise over age and streetwise experience. J. A. Jance (2020) circumvents this inconvenient ending by having her Seattle homicide cop J. P. Beaumont metamorphose into a private eye. For others, like Prime Suspect’s Jane Tennison, who skips her farewell party to disappear into the London night at the end of the series finale, ‘The Final Act’ (2006), retirement equals narrative death. However, some detective fiction texts, such as the British television show New Tricks (2003– 15), have rejected such closure. A comedy-drama centred on a cold-case squad of retired male detectives supervised by a younger female boss, New Tricks indulges in clichéd jokes about ageing, as the men compare prescription medicines, or show a bus pass instead of a police ID, but it also sympathetically conveys how closely wedded police work is to their sense of worth. Ridiculed by the police bureaucracy, the former detectives solve impossible cases and prove their doubters wrong in each episode, implicitly making the point that these older detectives are definitely not ‘too old’ for the job. Similarly, Scottish novelist Ian Rankin, determined to be realistic, retired his Detective Inspector John Rebus in Exit Music (2007). Rebus’s post-retirement novels, starting in 2012, explore the former detective’s uneasy transition back to policing, first serving with a cold-case squad, then accepting a humbling demotion to Detective Sergeant, and finally becoming a police consultant ‘Like Sherlock Holmes’ (Rankin 2015: 88). As with New Tricks, Rankin occasionally deploys Rebus’s liminal status for humour, for example, when Rebus passes himself off as Malcolm Fox, his one-time nemesis in the Complaints Department. His friendship with a gangster of a similar age, Morris Gerald Cafferty, ‘more solid and long-lasting than any other relationship in the two solitary men’s lives’, opens the door to his return to policing as unofficial liaison between the police and Cafferty (Alegre 2011). Rebus’s own relevance, ironically, depends upon Cafferty maintaining his position as a key player in the Edinburgh underworld, rather than being convicted and sentenced for his crimes. Rankin’s increasingly contrived ways of inserting his retired detective into cases, after his cold-case unit is shut down and he is aged out of the force for a second time, underscore Rebus’s awkward fit as neither an official cop nor an ordinary civilian.

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Yet, Rebus tactically leverages his obvious age and the fact that he is ‘not even a proper cop’ but ‘just an old age pensioner’, in order to gain information from suspects (Rankin 2018: 178, 315). His inhaler, which he carries because of his chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, is both necessary medical equipment and a prop that makes him less physically threatening. Apparent signs of age or age-related impairments in the older detective can also be useful to misdirect readers in order to produce relief or surprise when the case is successfully resolved. While Miss Marple’s catalogue of ailments in Nemesis – diminished sight and hearing, and difficulty going up and down stairs – contributes to a more believable characterization of an older woman, it also leads other characters to assume that she is more harmless and less competent than she actually is. Not only do detectives sometimes exaggerate physical impairment, but they may also counterfeit cognitive impairment as a detecting strategy. In Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s ‘The Dying Detective’ ([1913] 1986), Sherlock Holmes pretends to be on his deathbed and feigns a feverish delirium to trick Culverton Smith into confessing to his nephew’s murder. So, too, Miss Marple in Nemesis puts on the semblance of ‘patent incapacity and general state of senility and dither’ to coax an address out of Mrs Vinegar in the Jocelyn St Mary post office (Christie [1971] 2011b: 182). Mrs Vinegar’s pity accentuates how readily cognitive impairment is conflated with older age, exacerbating our fears as readers about ageing. While these ruses afford the reader enjoyment at watching Miss Marple at work or reassurance that Holmes is only acting a role, recent fictions featuring detectives with dementia, including Cullin’s A Slight Trick of the Mind (2005), a novel about a nonagenarian Sherlock Holmes, and Henning Mankell’s The Troubled Man (2009), the final novel about Inspector Kurt Wallander, confront the fictional detective’s (and the reader’s) anxieties about memory loss more directly. A key element of such narratives, according to Sako (2016), is the interpretive challenge they pose for readers, who must continually distinguish between what is real and what is not. Maud Horsham, an amateur detective with dementia in Emma Healey’s Elizabeth Is Missing (2014), tries to find her friend Elizabeth; that disappearance summons repressed memories of Maud’s sister Sukey, who went missing seventy years earlier. The reader moves back and forth between timelines, not always certain what happened, when it happened, or even if it actually happened. The dementia detective story can also become a medical mystery. The reader of Mankell’s The Troubled Man, for instance, is drawn into diagnosing Wallander, in a subplot that competes for the reader’s attention with the detective’s official assignment, to locate the missing Hakan von Enke. As clues pile up, readers decipher each misstep Wallander makes, from leaving the stove on to forgetting to add laundry detergent to the wash, as a possible sign of disease. His consultation with a doctor, who assures him that he is not suffering from Alzheimer’s, proves to be a red herring. For the older, well-established male detective like Wallander and Holmes, dementia signifies a ‘loss of authority and autonomy’ that threatens both their identity and reputation (Wearing 2017: 126). The diagnosis is equally fraught for the older female detective, like Maud Horsham; being perceived as ‘a dotty old woman’ represents an ageist and sexist stereotype that denies older women like herself rationality and self-control (Healey 2014: 81). Nor is it a label that she, unlike Miss Marple, can casually put on and take off. Maud, whose insistence that her sister was murdered and buried in Elizabeth’s garden is initially met with disbelief by everyone, including the police, is finally vindicated. Yet she quickly forgets that she has already solved the mystery, falling back on the more comforting belief that her sister simply moved away, an example of how the dementia detective novel ‘softens the anxiety and fear provoked by forgetting’ for its protagonists and its

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readers (Wearing 2017: 135). The dementia detective novel, in rejecting ‘the more apocalyptic, “monstering” ideologies of the disaster scenarios of dementia’, and affirming the continuity of self through memories and emotions, helps de-stigmatize the older person with memory loss (Wearing 2017: 136).

AGEING CRIMINALS Although older detectives have been treated seriously by literary gerontologists, fictional older criminals have not received the same attention, perhaps because they are so often figures of comedy or pathos. For instance, critic Scott Tobias (2019) identifies ‘a charming little subset of heist films about elderly men pulling off bank jobs, often out of boredom, and the authorities struggling to reconcile these crafty old geezers with the much younger hoodlums they might have expected’. While the American film Going in Style (1979) is about older men with nothing to do looking for adventure, the British film King of Thieves (2018) concerns ex-convicts who find themselves unable to fit into society after spending most of their adult lives in prison. Yet, in some films, novels, and short stories of the last decade, older protagonists are instead motivated to commit crimes by a sense of injustice, by the failure of institutions and persons to value them, to see them and listen to them. Taking matters into their own hands by becoming criminals is a way of protesting against the stereotyping of older people as physically weak, emotionally vulnerable, and mentally confused, and challenging the idea that older people, compared to younger people, are necessarily ‘less flexible, risk-averse and less creative’ (van Dyk 2016: 111). Unfortunately, despite the revolutionary potential of such darkly comic revenge narratives, they remain fantasies, offering individual solutions to systemic problems. An early precursor is May Sarton’s novel As We Are Now (1973). When Caro Spencer’s allegations of abuse at the Twin Elms Nursing Home are met with gaslighting, she burns down the home in a mass murder-suicide, but where Spencer finds escape only in death, older characters in more recent texts survive to achieve happy endings. Just as Miss Marple uses her appearance to solve crimes and catch perpetrators by conforming to the stereotype of ‘An ordinary rather scatty old lady … an elderly lady with a habit of snooping and being inquisitive’, so these older criminals exploit ageist expectations about older people to commit crimes with impunity (Christie [1971] 2011b: 50). Maud, the 88-year-old serial murderess of Helene Tursten’s volume of short stories, An Elderly Lady Is Up to No Good (2018), set in Sweden, consciously adopts the persona of ‘Very Old Lady’ as camouflage, similar to Miss Marple, but with criminal intent (2018: 22). People ‘automatically assumed she was deaf, which she most definitely was not. Nor was she senile. But she had learned that it was smart not to reveal that all her senses were in full working order; instead, she allowed people to act in accordance with their own preconceptions’ (Tursten 2018: 12). Being typecast allows her the freedom to get away with murder, which she uses frequently to solve the problems in her life. For example, in the opening story, ‘An Elderly Lady Has Accommodation Problems’, she kills in order to protect her spacious rent-free apartment from a young woman who reasons that an older woman does not need so much space. Among her other victims are an antique dealer who tries to steal her paintings and a young woman who schemes to marry Maud’s ex-fiancé to take his money. More than simply a coldblooded killer, she is also arguably an avenger of crimes against older people. Janina Duszejko, the herb-gathering astrologer of Olga Tokarczuk’s Polish novel, Drive Your Plow over the Bones of the Dead ([2009] 2019), seems to be exactly the type of absent-minded

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busybody that Miss Marple sometimes impersonates. Like Miss Marple, she presents herself as an amateur detective, ready to help the police with the mysterious murders of several local hunters by offering up her theory that the forest animals turned on them. Rather than a harmless eccentric, however, she turns out to be a serial killer. Her alleged motive is revenge on the men for executing her dogs, but she is also angry at them for dismissing her as a ‘little old lady’, ‘silly old bag’, ‘crazy old crone’, and ‘madwoman’ (Tokarczuk 2019: 26). The novel raises expectations that Janina may have dementia but never seriously entertains this facile diagnosis. Instead, Tokarczuk implies that Janina’s extreme acts are sane and understandable in an ageist, sexist world where she was pensioned off from a job she loved to make way for the ‘army of younger people standing behind me, breathing down my neck’, where her empathy with wild animals is ridiculed, and where she is repeatedly made to feel ‘Useless and unimportant’ (Tokarczuk 2019: 115, 195). Although disability does not necessarily accompany ageing, these older criminals take full advantage of how ‘the word “old” itself typically functions as an automatic signal of the need for assistance adaptation’ (Lamb 2015: 313). Hercule Poirot is an example of an older detective who exploits the spurious correlation of disability with age in order to cross the line into criminality. Terminally ill with coronary heart disease in Agatha Christie’s Curtain ([1975] 2011a), he pretends to be more feeble than he is, relying on a wheelchair as his alibi when he executes Stephen Norton, knowing that no one will believe that a frail older man unable to walk could kill anyone, let alone move a body. Like Poirot, older criminal protagonists in these fictions employ props stereotypically associated with older people, weaponizing them in their choreographed crime scenes. Maud in Tursten’s An Elderly Lady deliberately pushes her wheeled Zimmer frame into the legs of her alcoholic, wife-battering neighbour, causing him to trip and fall down the stairs to his death, in what the police interpret as a tragic accident. On another occasion she uses a cane to knock a woman into a swimming pool and hold her under the water until the victim drowns; the police at the crime scene mistake Maud for an ineffectual would-be rescuer. Even an ordinary white plastic grocery bag becomes an accessory to murder for Janina in Tokarczuk’s Drive Your Plow; no one suspects that she is using it to haul around the frozen deer head with which she bludgeons her victims, making it ‘the ideal murder Weapon for an old woman. Old girls like me always go about with plastic bags, don’t they?’ (2019: 261). While Tokarczuk’s novel and Tursten’s short stories target individuals who mistreat or ignore older people, the films Going in Style (2017) and Golden Years (2016), as well as Catharina Ingelman-Sundberg’s novel The Little Old Lady Who Broke All the Rules ([2012] 2016), offer a pointed critique of social, medical, and financial institutions that have failed in their duty of care towards older people, especially around the issue of healthcare insecurity. In thinly veiled updatings of the Robin Hood story, ordinary retirees turn to crime out of desperation – to take revenge on greedy banks or corporations that have cheated them out of the money they are owed, or care homes that have taken their money but have mistreated them. According to the logic of these narratives, if older people are invisible, then becoming an outlaw is a heroic response. In Going in Style (2017), a dramatic remake of the earlier American film, the trigger for the bank robbery is not boredom, but blue-collar workers being cheated out of healthcare coverage and pensions after a lifetime of labour. The three protagonists reason that jail will assure them room and board, and, most importantly, medical care. Despite unexpected obstacles, they avoid prison and share the money, enabling one of the men to afford a life-saving kidney transplant.

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Similarly, the British film Golden Years (2016) takes aim at the lack of social support for older people, its cynicism evident in its satirical title. When middle-class couple Arthur and Martha Goode find themselves unable to afford Martha’s medicine, they embark on a bank-robbing spree, incongruously combined with a cross-country holiday in their camper van, along with two other couples. The grotesque rubber old-age masks that they wear for the robberies reinforce the invisibility of older people because the police instantly assume that the thieves are young men in disguise. Not only are women accomplices to the robberies – Martha ‘drives’ the getaway Zimmer frame – but also the wife of the police detective who is pursuing them is so sympathetic to their plight that she joins them and persuades her husband to let them go unpunished. Unlike the typical heist narrative, the criminal mastermind in Ingelman-Sundberg’s Swedish novel The Little Old Lady Who Broke All the Rules (2012) is 79-year-old Martha Andersson, an avid fan of crime novels, who plots her escape with four friends from their mismanaged retirement home. At first, they only want to draw attention to its dysfunction, and go to prison, believing, like the thieves of Going in Style (2017), that the benefits of prison life outweigh the loss of freedom. They orchestrate a successful robbery at a major art museum in order to get the attention of the police, but when the police review the surveillance tapes, they see only ‘confused old folks’ and ‘poor OAPs’ (Ingelman-Sundberg 2012: 128). Martha wearing gloves inside the museum is put down to rheumatism, and her Zimmer frame, retrofitted with a reflector and special tubing (to hold wire-cutters), is merely evidence that ‘old people could do all sorts of daft things’ (IngelmanSundberg 2012: 150). Ironically, it is through crime, and the celebrity it brings, that they regain a sense of identity and purpose: ‘By committing crimes, they had at least shown how much energy old people could have. Old people can do things too’ (Ingelman-Sundberg 2012: 162). Christina, one of the gang in The Little Old Lady, bankrolls their lengthy stay in a luxury hotel. Compared to the working-class heroes of Going in Style and the middle-class suburbanites of Golden Years, Christina is comfortably well off, but these three narratives, cutting across class lines and nationalities, underscore how the mistreatment of older people is an international issue that affects persons of all socio-economic levels. Ultimately, with their unrealistic plots, happy endings, and feel-good messages, these heist novels and films remain escapist entertainment, too good to be true, rather than a blueprint for serious reform of care homes, banks, and healthcare institutions. The cheery blurb on the back cover of the paperback version of The Little Old Lady, proclaiming a new era of anti-ageist activism, trivializes the actual abuse that some older people experience: ‘Fed up with early bedtimes and overcooked veggies, this group of feisty seniors sets about to regain their independence, improve their lot, and stand up for seniors everywhere’ (Ingelman-Sundberg 2012, back cover). The lack of punishment also marks these narratives as fantasy; even when the thieves of The Little Old Lady do spend time in prison, potential dangers are glossed over and turned into comic adventures. In their competence, technological skills, and financial resources, Ingelman-Sundberg’s heroes superficially resemble the successful Third Agers described by Silke van Dyk (2016): older people who are ‘capable human beings’ as opposed to Fourth Agers, who are ‘objects of care’ (117). Third Agers ‘are held to possess wisdom and experience, to be loyal to employers and others, to be reliable in all respects, and patient and thorough as well as less competitive and more charitable than their younger contemporaries’ (van Dyk 2016: 110–11). These older criminals, who might be regarded as exceptional, share some traits of Third Agers, but they do not conform to the expectation that they should be uncompetitive, nonthreatening, and selfless. In fact, The Little Old Lady, whose

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protagonists plaster ‘Old People Are Capable’ stickers on their luggage, is open to conflicting readings; although explicitly advocating for older people, it might also be considered a sly satire of the highly idealized Third Ager.

CONCLUSION Crime fiction writer Patricia Cornwell has said of her medical-examiner heroine Kay Scarpetta that ‘people don’t want to read about her when she’s 80’ (Alter 2011). Today’s writers, readers, and viewers of crime and detective narratives may beg to differ. In Writing beyond the Ending: Narrative Strategies of Twentieth-Century Women Writers (1985), Rachel Blau DuPlessis explored the narrative constraints that led to limited outcomes for nineteenth-century female characters in fiction: marriage or death. Her queries can usefully be asked about older characters in fiction: ‘What stories can be told? How can plots be resolved? What is felt to be narratable by both literary and social conventions?’ (DuPlessis 1985: 3). Much as twentieth-century authors interrogated cultural assumptions about gender, race, class, ethnicity, and sexuality, so twenty-first-century authors are contesting attitudes about ageing through the stories they tell about older investigators and criminals in crime and detective narratives, writing beyond the endings represented by retirement, dementia, and physical decline. One intertextual strategy cited by DuPlessis involves women writers’ rewriting of canonical texts from the perspective of marginal characters in order to highlight and question the dominant narrative’s gender bias. The same narrative technique can expose ageism in classic texts. In a close reading of Margaret Maron’s short story ‘The Adventures of the Concert Pianist’ (2011), for example, Charlotte Beyer argues that Maron’s recasting of Mrs Hudson, Sherlock Holmes’s landlady, as an amateur detective, not only presents ‘an important challenge to male authority, including that of Holmes’, but also to the ‘stereotypes of ageing femininity’ present in Conan Doyle’s fiction and in television adaptations (Beyer 2017: 66, 73). The shift in perspective implicitly contrasts the image of Conan Doyle’s reliable landlady Mrs Hudson, hovering (mostly) silently in the background, with that of Maron’s Mrs Hudson as a character in her own right with a social network outside 221B Baker Street, reminding readers of how ageism is embedded in popular fiction and taken for granted. Throughout this chapter I have suggested some ways in which contemporary writers of crime and detective narratives deliberately draw attention to how perceptions about ageing negatively impact their characters. For older professional detectives, retirement serves as notice that their skills have an expiration date. Although private detectives have no mandatory age limits, like professional detectives, they, too, encounter challenges in proving that they can solve cases despite physical and / or cognitive impairment. The problems of the ageing criminal in realistic detective fiction are remarkably similar to those of the ageing detective. Rankin’s gangster boss Cafferty, unlike the police detective Rebus, faces no age cut-off, yet he is constantly threatened by younger gangsters scheming to depose him and take over, and his shift to more legitimate businesses leaves him straddling two worlds, like Rebus. A very different kind of realistic narrative, the twenty-firstcentury dementia detective novel takes aim at dire fears about cognitive impairment and memory loss as a necessary corollary of ageing, by challenging stereotypes about dementia that adversely impact the perception of older people in general. Set against these more realistic plotlines are ironic narratives in which older persons not identifying as career criminals choose to become murderers or thieves because they believe that

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they have been unfairly victimized or made to feel vulnerable or outcast because of their age. Like detectives solving crimes, they derive a sense of purpose and identity from plotting crimes; like detectives, they take advantage of ageist stereotypes to achieve their ends. Their extreme actions – resorting to murder and large-scale theft – are not blamed on mental illness or dementia but treated as rational responses to an unjustly ageist society. As Gullette explains, ‘revenge fantasy proves to anyone who feels stifled by ageism that they are capable of righteous anger. The innate wish to be recognized as persons of equal worth cannot be suppressed entirely’ (2017: 195). Satisfying as they may be, these escapist revenge fantasies are ultimately limited in their real-world effects. Nonetheless, twenty-first-century crime and detective fiction, as popular fiction with a global audience and a long-standing concern with social justice, is in a unique position to reclaim the agency, visibility, and voice of the older person in the text.

REFERENCES Alegre, S. M. (2011), ‘Aging in F(r)iendship: “Big Ger” Cafferty and John Rebus’, Clues, 29 (2): 73–82. Alter, A. (2011), ‘The (Really) Long Goodbye’, Wall Street Journal, 1 July 2011. Available at: https://www. wsj.com/artic​les/SB1000142​4052​7023​0456​9504​5764​0581​346 (accessed 1 February 2020). Beyer, C. (2017), ‘“I, Too, Mourn the Loss”: Mrs. Hudson and the Absence of Sherlock Holmes’, in S. Naidu (ed.), Sherlock Holmes in Context, 61–82, London: Palgrave Macmillan. Chabon, M. (2004), The Final Solution: A Story of Detection, New York: HarperCollins. Christie, A. ([1975] 2011a), Curtain: Poirot’s Last Case, New York: William Morrow. Christie, A. ([1971] 2011b), Nemesis, New York: William Morrow. Conan Doyle, A. ([1913] 1986), ‘The Adventure of the Dying Detective’, in L. Estleman (ed.), Sherlock Holmes: The Complete Novels and Stories, vol. 2, 385–400, New York: Bantam. Cullin, M. (2005), A Slight Trick of the Mind, New York: Doubleday. DuPlessis, R. B. (1985), Writing Beyond the Ending: Narrative Strategies of Twentieth-Century Women Writers, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Grafton, S. ([2007] 2016), T Is for Trespass, New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons. Gullette, M. M. (2017), Ending Ageism or How Not to Shoot Old People, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Healey, E. (2014), Elizabeth Is Missing, New York: Penguin. Ingelman-Sundberg, C. ([2012] 2016), The Little Old Lady Who Broke All the Rules, trans. R. Bradbury, New York: HarperCollins. Jance, J. A. (2020), Sins of the Fathers, New York: William Morrow. Lamb, E.G. (2015), ‘Age and / as Disability: A Call for Conversation’, Age Culture Humanities 2. Available at: http://agecu​ltur​ehum​anit​ies.org/WP/wpcont​ent/uplo​ads/2016/08 (accessed 1 May 2021). Mankell, H. ([2009] 2012), The Troubled Man, trans. L. Thompson, New York: Vintage Books. Maron, M. (2011), ‘The Adventures of the Concert Pianist’, in L. R. King and L. S. Klinger (eds), A Study in Sherlock: Stories Inspired by the Holmes Canon, 230–49, New York: Bantam, Kindle edition. Meeks, S. (2020), ‘Neuro-Crime Fiction: Detecting Cognitive Difference’, Crime Fiction Studies, 1 (1): 79–95. Mintz, S. (2020), The Disabled Detective: Sleuthing Disability in Contemporary Crime Fiction, London: Bloomsbury.

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Orr, D. M. (2020), ‘Dementia and Detectives: Alzheimer’s Disease in Crime Fiction’, Dementia, 19 (3): 560–73. Rankin, I. (2007), Exit Music, New York: Little, Brown. Rankin, I. (2015), Even Dogs in the Wild, New York: Little, Brown. Rankin, I. (2018), In a House of Lies, New York: Little, Brown. Sako, K. (2016), ‘Dementia and Detection in Elizabeth Is Missing and Turn of Mind’, Contemporary Women’s Writing, 10 (3): 315–33. Sako, K. (2019), ‘Aging and Detective Fiction’, in D. Gu and M. E. Dupre (eds), Encyclopedia of Gerontology and Population Aging, Cham: Springer. Available at: https://doi. org/10.1007/978-3-319-69892-2_248-1 (accessed 3 November 2020). Sarton, M. (1973), As We Are Now, New York: W. W. Norton. Spark, M. (1959), Memento Mori, New York: New Directions, Kindle edition. Tobias, S. (2019), ‘ “King of Thieves”: Bank Heist Film Deposits a Great Cast but Withdraws the Style’, NPR.org. Available at: https://www.npr.org/2019/01/24/687422​360 (accessed 10 November 2020). Tokarczuk, O. ([2009] 2019), Drive Your Plow over the Bones of the Dead, trans. A. Lloyd-Jones, New York: Riverhead Books. Tursten, H. (2018), An Elderly Lady Is Up to No Good, trans. M. Delargy, New York: Soho Crime Press. van Dyk, S. (2016), ‘The Othering of Old Age: Insights from Postcolonial Studies’, Journal of Aging Studies, 39: 109–20. Wearing, S. (2017), ‘Troubled Men: Aging, Dementia and Masculinity in Contemporary British Crime Drama’, Journal of British Cinema and Television, 14 (2): 125–42. Zimmermann, H.-P. (2016), ‘Alienation and Alterity: Age in the Existentialist Discourse on Others’, Journal of Aging Studies, 39: 83–95.

Filmography Going in Style (1979), Dir. M. Brest, USA: Warner Brothers. Going in Style (2017), Dir. Z. Braff, USA: De Line Pictures. Golden Years (2016), Dir. J. Miller, UK: MoliFilms Entertainment. King of Thieves (2018), Dir. J. Marsh, UK: Working Title Films. Mr. Holmes (2015), Dir. B. Condon, UK: BBC Films.

TV Programmes Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple (1984–96), BBC. Columbo (1968–2003), [TV programme] NBC. Elizabeth Is Missing (2019), BBC One, 8 December. Hercule Poirot (1989–2013), ITV. Inspector Morse (1987–2000), ITV. New Tricks (2003–15), BBC. Prime Suspect (2006), Granada / ITV, 22 October. A Touch of Frost (1992–2010), [TV programme] ITV.

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Serializing age: Shifting representations of ageing and old age in TV series MARICEL ORÓ-PIQUERAS

INTRODUCTION The success and proliferation of television series in recent decades is unquestionable. Critics such as Glen Creeber (2004), John Caughie (2000), and Sue Thornham and Tony Purvis (2012) agree that the television serial has the power ‘to give voice to an increasing number of perspectives and points of view’ (Creeber 2004: 7) by involving the audience and making them part of the experiences which the characters they regularly view live through. Both John Fiske (1989) and Creeber (2004) highlight the polysemic potential of television series, achieved by the entangled narratives that compose a series. Creeber argues that Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of ‘heteroglossia’ – defining the multi-layered intertextual possibilities of the novel – can be easily applied to serial television (2004: 7). For Fiske, television is ‘a complex cultural medium … full of contradictory impulses’ (1989: 20) that may promote a specific ideology and, at the same time, promote an oppositional one through different characters. It is precisely this multi-layered meaning intrinsic to television series that makes them a rich resource for the exploration of the ways in which ageing and, more specifically, old age is represented. In her study of representations of ageing and old age in cinema, Pamela Gravagne (2013) states that each of the films she analyses tells a story about ageing and old age; however, this individual story is also a collective story about the political, economic, and social reality of growing older in a particular place and time; about the ways in which ageing intersects with other social categories; about how to act, what is expected, and how to relate to other people; and, perhaps more importantly, about how to think of ourselves and our changing place in society as we grow old (14). By seeing ourselves reflected in art and media, we make sense of ourselves both individually and socially. The extended form of the television series together with current on-demand viewing options makes this even more notable since we have the option of following the past and present lives of characters over different seasons and, thus, see how they develop throughout their own ageing and maturing. That is why negative portrayals of old age in television series and media in general not only affect how older citizens see themselves, but also how ‘older people are perceived by the community’ (Healey and Ross 2002: 110) as well as ‘how young people anticipate their future’ (Kessler, Rakoczy, and Staudinger 2004: 532).

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As Anita Wohlmann and I argue in our introduction to Serializing Age (2016), numerous scholars within age / ageing studies have explored the potential of looking at representations of ageing and old age in films; however, up until recently, TV series and representations of old age seemed to have attracted less attention. In the research on ageing, old age and TV series published in the 1990s and 2000s, John Bell (1991), Eva-Marie Kessler, Katrin Rakoczy, and Ursula M. Staudinger (2004), Myrna Hant (2007), and Jake Harwood (2007), among others, proved that there were very few characters in old age in television series and, when they appeared, they tended to be stock characters with specific roles which responded to stereotypes that pictured old age as related to boredom, inactivity, repetitiveness, and ultimately, decline. With the emergence of video-ondemand platforms, the habits of viewers in relation to the consumption of television series have clearly changed since viewers can decide the pace at which they watch the series; in other words, they do not depend upon the channel showing one episode every day or every week, but can, for instance, decide to watch several episodes in one single day. At the same time, these platforms have also become producers of their own TV series. In this more competitive, choice-based market, there is pressure to explore new topics, characters, and settings and to extend the possibilities of both narrative plots and temporal frames. Changes in TV viewing and production, therefore, offer opportunities for more varied representations of ageing. Grace and Frankie (2015–present) and The Kominsky Method (2018–present), series produced by Netflix (and analysed later in this chapter), for example, are two of the latest television series with older characters as protagonists. This chapter provides a literature review of serializing age, from researchers who started to study the presence of older characters in television series in the 1990s to more recent studies in which characters in their old age are closely analysed. The series analysed in these studies are set in Western countries. This research has shown that the fact that the television series extends in time has contributed to more nuanced representations of characters in their ageing into old age within different social and cultural backgrounds. Here is where the study of TV series’ older characters becomes particularly interesting, since the audience is presented with a character who lives throughout various life situations and decisions and who has to adapt to constantly changing circumstances. Focusing on four case studies of recent TV series featuring characters in their sixties, seventies, and eighties, this chapter provides an overview of emerging representations of age and ageing within TV series.

AGEING AND OLD AGE IN TV SERIES: AN OVERVIEW Most studies published in the 1990s, the 2000s, and the 2010s (Vernon et al. 1990; Healey and Ross 2002; Butler 2006; Harwood 2007; Aniol, Koronkiewicz, and Solowska 2013) highlight the limited and often stereotypical representation of older people on TV, especially in prime time, despite the statistical evidence of a growing ageing population; as Harwood (2007) states, ‘patterns seem depressingly consistent over the years, with very little indication of trends towards increased representation of older adults’ (2007: 153). For Tim Healey and Karen Ross (2002), both TV programmes and advertising ‘include a very narrow repertoire of images of older people’ (110), and Robert N. Butler (2006) quantifies the presence of people above sixty-five in American TV as being ‘fewer than 2% of characters of TV series and movies broadcast in the prime-time’ (12). Kessler, Rakoczy, and Staudinger (2004) focus on the scarce representation of old age in German TV series and conclude that when older characters are present, they are depicted with overly

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positive social participation and financial resources so that topics such as ‘retirement, reduced social networks, dependency, death and dying’ (532) are rarely represented. In a more recent study, Aniol, Koronkiewicz, and Solowska (2013) look at the representation of old age in Polish and American TV series. They find that women in their sixties, seventies, and eighties are still primarily portrayed as mothers and grandmothers, whereas male characters are allowed to pursue both professional objectives and partner relationships. They do, however, also point to a recurrent role for both male and female older characters: that of the advisor, through which older characters ‘are presented as experienced and competent people, giving relevant tips and advice, making appropriate and right assessment’ (393). Whilst seemingly a more positive representation of age and ageing, this role is nevertheless limited to the traditional association of age and wisdom. Overall, according to these studies, old age was still represented in very limited ways and stereotyped in television series until the beginning of the 2010s. The underrepresentation of people over sixty as well as the lack of diversity in the portrayal of older characters are recurrent points in studies that look at the presence and depictions of older characters on TV. John Bell’s (1991) article on the discourse of ageing in television is probably one of the first studies to consider representations of ageing and old age in TV series. According to Bell, the number of older characters in prime-time dramas and situation comedies is proportionally less than the number of older people in the countries where the series he analysed were set, namely, the UK and United States. Moreover, when older characters appear, they present a general image of health and well-being, but they fall within specific stereotypes; they ‘tend to be shown as more comical, stubborn, eccentric, and foolish than other characters’ (1991: 306). Bell focuses on two TV series in different genres in which old characters are at the centre of the series, namely, Murder, She Wrote (1984–96) and The Golden Girls (1985–92). For Bell, these series are the first ones in which older characters are portrayed as significant and active members of their communities and are ‘mentally active and quick-witted’ (1991: 309). Bell nevertheless also refers to the fact that none of the programmes in which old characters appear promote ‘rational discourse’ on problems that ‘might lead to positive social change’ (1991: 309), such as health care or the role of older citizens in increasingly ageing societies. In her later study, Myrna Hant (2007) specifically refers to the representation of older women in US / UK television series and defines their presence as either piercingly invisible or mainly set within the roles of mothers and grandmothers; thus, once again, debate around the role of older women in society beyond the family context seems to be missing. From her analysis, Hant concludes that ‘to depict an older woman as an intellectually vital, sexually active, productive member of society is very rare’ (2007: 8). Despite the fact that Bell analyses male and female older characters in his study and Hant focuses on only female characters, both point to the fact that older women are not only misrepresented in comparison to their male counterparts, but they also tend to be set within domestic roles that respond to very specific stereotypes. Both point out that The Golden Girls and Murder, She Wrote are exceptional in the fact that their lead characters are women over sixty who are portrayed as active, intelligent, and appreciated members of their communities. When comparing the reception of The Golden Girls to that of Hollywood films, Shary and McVittie (2016) consider that narrative lines with love stories, dating, and sexuality with older characters were more accepted in TV series than in the film industry. The Golden Girls is considered an exception in the sense that the series offered a more nuanced representation of ageing and old age in television series and also in film, offering narrative lines that not only focused on love stories and dating, but also brought up topics such as loneliness, shrinking economic resources

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after retirement, and female friendship in old age. However, Harwood and Giles (1992), Bawer (2018), and Küpper (2016) point out discursive ambiguities emerging from the use of humour in relation to the older female characters within the show. Whereas Harwood and Giles interpret the use of comic puns with age references as basically making use of negative stereotypes within female ageing for comedic purposes (1992: 429), Küpper’s analysis of specific episodes within the show suggests that The Golden Girls ‘undermines widespread stereotyped judgements about older age and youthfulness’ (2016: 263). As a comedy with five lead characters from their fifties to their eighties, The Golden Girls exploits stereotypes from different age groups and, by doing so, also questions such stereotypes since the long format of the TV series provides a deeper knowledge of the characters as well as their lifecourses. Thus, going back to Fiske’s words, the show uses a specific ideology in relation to age representation and, at the same time, by displaying the past and present hopes and concerns of the characters, it also undermines it. Gender stereotypes as well as the roles attributed to older male and female characters are recurrent topics analysed in research on television series. In a study in which she analyses gender stereotypes in two episodes of The Golden Girls through a viewer-response analysis with undergraduate students, Cohen (2010) states that students could not agree on whether the episodes reinforced or challenged stereotypes such as older women are old-fashioned, are not interested in sexual activity, are cared for by their families, and are invisible. For Cohen, a possible answer to undermining stereotypes of old age and offering a more nuanced vision of age on TV is to focus ‘less on chronological age and physical indicators and more on positive social acts and relationships’ (2010: 613). However, more recently, Van Bauwel (2018) affirms the ongoing invisibility of older women in contemporary television series through an analysis of discourses of ageing from different episodes with dominant age-related themes in US series Sex and the City (1998–2004), Desperate Housewives (2004–12), and Girls (2012–17). According to Van Bauwel, the ideological meanings within these storylines could be summarized as ‘losing femininity, masking of ageing, wisdom of ageing’ (2018: 25), again giving a narrow vision of old age and, more specifically, of female ageing. Thus, Van Bauwel’s work aligns with Kessler, Rakoczy, and Staudinger’s and Aniol, Koronkiewicz, and Solowska’s analysis of the fact that positive images of ageing in television series are either attached to non-ageing (i.e. keeping a youthful appearance and way of life) or to attributes such as wisdom, popularly seen as the only positive attribute that ageing may bring with it. Contrarily, topics related to social and community collaboration and support in old age, desire and sexuality, increasing physical vulnerability, retirement, death, and dying seem to be absent in these series and television in general. Núria Casado-Gual and Oró-Piqueras (2017), however, taking on the research by Hant on the representation of older women and focusing on the representation of the older female characters in US series Six Feet Under (2001–5), conclude that there is a small increase in the number of more nuanced representations of ageing femininities in television series. The four older women in the series embrace loss through creativity, loss understood as both the loss of loved ones and the loss of their youthful dreams in the face of the limited choices with which they are left as women entering old age. However, as Kristyn Gorton (2009) argues in her analysis of the series Six Feet Under and Brothers and Sisters (2006–11), there is also a tendency to punish those older mother figures who pursue romantic relationships. Karina Gomes Barbosa (2017), for her part, identifies Grace and Frankie as offering alternative ways of representing ageing and old age in television series. According to Barbosa, ‘the fact of bringing four old individuals to the foreground already

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promotes visibilities that give a different look’ (2017: 1441); something which is complemented by the fact that the bodies in the series, that is, Frankie and Grace and their ex-husbands Robert and Sol, are not presented as ‘ageless’ old (Marshall and Katz 2012) or within the ideology of successful ageing (Katz and Calasanti 2014). Moreover, as Barbosa argues, Grace and Frankie also embraces key topics which are intergenerational: friendship, homosexuality, family and community support, illness, among others. After many years of underrepresentation and stereotyping of older characters in TV series, characters in their sixties, seventies, and eighties are getting more attention, which is also translating into more nuanced representation of ageing experiences.

EMERGING TOPICS WITHIN TV SERIES: CASE STUDIES Last Tango in Halifax (2012–20) and Gold Digger (2019), produced and broadcast by the BBC, and Grace and Frankie (2015–present) and The Kominsky Method (2018–present), two Netflix series, will serve as cases in point to analyse emerging tendencies in relation to ageing and old age in television series. The series focus on white middle-class characters in the UK and the United States, respectively; in other words, the representation of older characters as protagonists is still mainly set within a heteronormative, middle-class, white environment. One of the recurrent concerns in criticism on television series in the last years has been the scarcity of old characters with lead roles. The main characters of these four TV series are men and women in their sixties, seventies, and eighties. In these cases, the audience is invited to witness the day-to-day lives of these characters, their concerns and hopes, the relationships they establish with their families, neighbours, and friends, as well as the ways in which they face ageing and old age. As Gorton states, ‘The serial structure allows the audience to “get to know” the characters slowly, which is significant as it creates the potential for the audience to eventually accept these older desiring characters more fully than they would in watching a two-hour movie’ (2016: 233). Whereas Last Tango in Halifax is concerned with the love story between Celia Dawson and Alan Buttershaw, two widowed characters who used to be sweet hearts in their adolescence and who find each other again in their seventies, Gold Digger represents the story of Julia Day, a wealthy sixtyyear-old woman and mother of three, who starts a relationship with 36-year-old Benjamin Greene. Grace and Frankie and The Kominsky Method also present love pursuits in their storylines, although the central topic in both series is friendship. Despite not liking each other much, Grace and Frankie, whose husbands had been business partners and friends for a long time, start to co-habit in the beach house that the two families owned after they find out that their husbands have been lovers for the last twenty years. Thus, in the very first episode of the series, Grace and Frankie, in their late seventies, have to imagine a new life for themselves. Similarly, The Kominsky Method focuses on friendship, in this case two male friends in their seventies. Sandy Kominsky, once a reputed actor, is trying to make a living through his acting school and specific acting method, while dealing with a history of failed marriages and unsteady young lovers; his best friend and agent, Norman Newlander, is grieving the loss of his wife of more than forty years. Love, desire, and sexuality in old age are present in the four series, either as a main topic or as a secondary one. In Last Tango in Halifax, Celia and Alan set their relationship as well as their desire at the centre of their lives. They have a close relationship with their daughters and grandchildren and try to help whenever they are needed. However, they do not subjugate their desires or their relationship to the needs of their families; contrarily, as Gorton states in her article on the series,

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Celia is a ground-breaking older female role model in media since she ‘is not the maternal figure conflicted between her role as carer and her desire’ (2016: 235). Gorton analyses the series as exploring the desire of three ageing women: Celia, but also Caroline (Celia’s daughter) and Gillian (Allan’s daughter), both in their fifties. For Gorton, within the series, age is constructed as an ‘empowering force’; in other words, ‘it is because they are older, rather than in spite of being older, that their desire is seen as deeper and more sustainable’ (2016: 232). In the third episode of the series, Celia tells her daughter Caroline that she has had sex with Alan after a long time. Caroline seems quite surprised by her mother’s confession, prompting Celia to respond: ‘I thought you might be happy for me’ (Season 1 [S1], Episode 3 [E3]). Setting female desire rather than children’s needs at the centre of life is also a central topic in Gold Digger. In the first episode, Julia Day is presented as a wealthy, lonely, and somehow naïve woman as she sits alone on her hotel bed in London on the day of her sixtieth birthday after none of her children have joined her for lunch since they are busy with last-minute commitments. In this first episode, we learn that she left her job and a promising career as a conservator to take care of her family. She gives this information to Benjamin Greene, a young man whom she meets by chance while in London, and with whom she forms a relationship. As soon as her children meet Benjamin, they agree that they need to protect Julia as well as her wealth and start spying on him. Even her ex-husband agrees with his children that Julia is losing touch with reality and needs to be protected. It is just after announcing her engagement to Benjamin to her children that Julia tells them: ‘I’m sixty years old, I’m your mother but I’m also other things. In the absence of your support, I’ll ask you to keep your mouths shut’ (E4). However, up until the very last episode, in which Benjamin’s difficult childhood and adolescence are explored, the series plays with the possibility that Benjamin is with Julia for her money rather than really attracted to her and, ultimately, in love with her. Thus, not only Julia’s children, ex-husband, and acquaintances doubt that a younger man can be attracted to an older woman, but the audience is also encouraged to doubt his attraction to her until the very end of the series. The series therefore plays with the ageist assumption that a woman past her ‘prime’ years is not considered attractive, as the title of the series itself suggests. Both Celia, in Last Tango in Halifax, and Julia, in Gold Digger, seem to have had unhappy relationships with their former husbands and fathers of their children. The fact that they remarry is presented as a chance to have more nurturing and mature relationships. As Caroline, Celia’s daughter, affirms at Allan and Celia’s wedding: ‘Your extraordinary love for each other inspires everyone’ (S2, E1). Similarly, at Julia and Benjamin’s wedding, Julia says: ‘My first marriage gave me my children, which is the very best thing in my life. And this … [pointing at Benjamin] this is my after and I’m not letting it go’ (E3). Thus, returning to Gorton’s arguments, Celia and Julia make their own desire a priority when deciding to marry again; but not only that, they acknowledge Alan and Benjamin as equal life-long partners whom they have chosen for themselves, free from social expectations and cultural impositions. Female sexuality is also explored in Grace and Frankie through the character of Grace who, through her friendship with Frankie, comes to terms with her own desire and sexuality. Frankie – depicted as a former hippie, creative and spiritual and always at ease with her body and her sexuality – is the one who pushes Grace to explore her body and to express her emotions more openly. For instance, when Grace starts dating again, Frankie advises her to try her natural lubricator. As Frankie tells Grace, ‘As our body ages, our vagina stops producing the natural lubricants’, to which Grace answers: ‘You’re just going to keep talking about my vagina, aren’t you?’ (S1, E8). Frankie later

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gives Grace a vibrator as a present, an act that leads them to create their own vibrator adapted to women with arthritis called ‘vybrant’, which results in big business success. During the six seasons of the series, both women have different love ventures through which they also test and ultimately balance their friendship, the most important and stable relationship for the two women throughout the series. In S4, Grace starts a relationship with Nick, a businessman much younger than herself. Whereas Grace believes that she has to show her ‘performing self ’ in order to keep Nick by her side, taking extra care with her make-up and clothes and making sure he does not notice the knee problems which force her to use a cane, Nick is the one who convinces Grace that he is in love with her for what she is, independent of her age or the prosthetic devices she uses. Grace herself believes that a younger man cannot be attracted to an older woman, a cliché that seems to be questioned in both series, The Gold Digger and Grace and Frankie. In her article on the representation of the sexuality of older men and older women in film and television, Tiina Vares (2009) observes the pervading presence of a gendered double standard of ageing according to which older men are portrayed as sexually active, often with younger women, much more often than older women are seen as sexually active. Despite the fact that Celia, Julia, Grace, and Frankie experiment with new love pursuits, have sexual intercourse, and talk openly about their desire as well as their sexuality, the women’s bodies are never openly shown in bed or in scenes that suggest sexual intercourse. At a textual level, however, the three series depict the older female protagonists looking for their own pleasure by commenting on their sexual experiences. For instance, in an episode in which Frankie advises Grace to use her cane until she has kneereplacement surgery, Grace answers: ‘Oh, if Nick saw me with this cane, he wouldn’t swell up so much.’ For Frankie, sexual intercourse is not only about genital stimulation, but also about intimacy and having fun: ‘I don’t have that problem with Jacob. During sex he knows that half of the noises we’re making have absolutely nothing to do with pleasure’ (S5, E4). In the three series and through the experiences of the female protagonists, pleasure comes not only from sexual intercourse but also from sharing intimate moments in which individual and partner confidence is built. Whilst the three series still do not fully show the female ageing body in sex scenes, they do portray a wider conception of sexuality to that mainly based on penetration. In her book Out of Time, Lynne Segal points out that women writers, as opposed to male writers, do not refer to sexual desire in old age through ‘dramatic moans and revulsion’ (2014: 125), as Philip Roth, Martin Amis, and John Updike did; on the contrary, Adrienne Rich and Hortense Calisher, among others, celebrate female bodies and desire, no matter the age. Similarly, Celia in Last Tango in Halifax, Julia in The Gold Digger, and Grace and Frankie in Grace and Frankie acknowledge their experience of bodily pleasure and give expression to their desire. In the same way as Grace and Frankie, The Kominsky Method revolves around the friendship of two people in their seventies, namely, Sandy Kominsky and his agent Norman Newlander. Despite the fact that desire, love, and sexuality are also present in the lives of these two old friends, there are more prominent topics in the series that have not often been explored in series with older characters. In relation to desire, love, and sexuality, Sandy actually represents the opposite of what Vares (2009) describes as a gendered double standard of ageing. After a long history of failed marriages and romances, often with women much younger than him, Sandy decides it is time to start a relationship with an independent and mature woman. As he tells Norman, ‘I’ve been married three times and I can’t think of any pleasant anecdote’ (S1, E4). Norman, on the other hand, has

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just lost his wife and is coping with bereavement, not only the death of his wife and best friend, but also the loss of a long, happy marriage. Despite trying to attend dinners and going out on dates in order to move on with his life, he constantly feels that he is being disrespectful to his wife when approaching other women. Instead, he talks to his dead wife, Eileen, while he is at home and discusses all kinds of issues with her. Bereavement after a long marriage is therefore one of the main topics in the series. The ups and downs of the process are represented in Norman’s character as he oscillates between moments in which he feels contented and moments of desperation. One evening, after having a vivid vision of a fight with his wife, Norman leaves the house and finds himself lost in the middle of the city. When Sandy goes to pick him up, Norman confesses: ‘I think maybe I’m losing my mind. I thought I was angry but the truth is that I’m scared; I’m scared all the time’; to which Sandy responds: ‘We’re all scared and you know why? Because it’s a fucking scary world!’ (S1, E8). This is an affirmation to which Sandy offers his friendship as a solution: ‘You’re not alone. I’m right here in front of you’ (S1, E8). However, the series not only deals with loss represented through Norman’s bereavement, but also with shrinking social and family relations as one gets older. Norman and Sandy call each other at various times during the day to check on each other or comment on something that has just happened to them. In the series, these conversations, which are usually sharp and witty, add humorous insights to their situation as old men living on their own. True friendship is thus presented as a valuable asset when growing older both in Grace and Frankie and The Kominsky Method. However, whereas Grace and Frankie seem to become allies in a world particularly ageist for women, Sandy’s and Norman’s support resides in commenting on the physical but also social losses that old age brings with it. When Sandy is waiting for the results of the biopsy of his prostate, Norman tells him: ‘I wake up every morning thinking what part of my body I’m not going to feel today’; to which Sandy responds: ‘We’re passengers on boats that are slowly sinking’ (S1, E4). In another episode in which Sandy calls Norman, Sandy asks Norman how his evening is looking, to which he answers: ‘I’m watching cocoon; the spaceship is taking old people for their last trip. It’s not so nice when you are in that age’ (S1, E4). Through irony and humour, Norman and Sandy share concerns that result from their ageing process; namely, loneliness – both of them live alone in big houses – and failing health; two of the main worries that the cohabitation between Grace and Frankie in the beach house solves. Both series present friendship as a source of care, support, and companionship in a society in which the characters feel that they are becoming increasingly invisible. As the above suggests, failing health is also one of the topics present in these series. In their studies on the representation of ageing and old age in film, Sally Chivers (2011) and Gravagne (2013) argue that, despite timid exceptions, old age in film is still very much ingrained within a decline ideology (Gravagne 2013: 5) and presented as a time of inescapable disability (Chivers 2011). However, the extended format of the TV series allows a more nuanced representation of the ways in which the characters within the series described in this section deal with specific physical ailments and illness. Following the lead characters over different episodes and seasons encourages greater knowledge of the characters’ life circumstances and choices; moreover, the audience witnesses not only the appearance of a specific ailment or illness with which the character has to deal, but also the way in which his or her social circle deals with it. None of the series negates the fact that old age may bring health issues with it, but they also provide ways of dealing with these as well as with an increasing feeling of vulnerability. In Last Tango in Halifax, Alan suffers a heart attack in the last episode of season one. After some days in coma, he regains consciousness and,

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while being aware that he will need some time to recover his strength, Alan asks Celia to go on with their wedding preparations. Alan’s heart attack strengthens Alan and Celia’s love for each other and reinforces their initial determination to make the most of their time left together. In Grace and Frankie, Frankie has a mild stroke that keeps her in hospital for a while. Even though Frankie can go on with her life with some lifestyle changes, such as eating more healthily and taking medication, she becomes obsessed with her vulnerability and with the fact that she may have another stroke and die from it, to the point that she refuses to go to Santa Fe with her new lover, Jacob. It is at this point that Grace takes her on a balloon trip to prove to her that she can still do anything she wants. The third season finishes with Grace and Frankie on the balloon with the sentence ‘let’s just see where the balloon takes us’ (S3, E13), implying, in a similar way to Alan’s heart attack in Last Tango in Halifax, that Frankie’s health issue is actually a wake-up call to make the most of their time left, be it marry the person they love or spend time with friends and family. In The Kominsky Method, Sandy has problems with his prostate from the very first episode of the series. Although the narrative line around Sandy constantly needing to visit the bathroom as well as undergo checkups and a biopsy is presented with humour, the audience also witnesses Sandy’s worry about the possible worsening of his health. In one episode he sits on a park bench reflecting on the fact that he may have prostate cancer; he says to himself: ‘Look at these people; happy, clueless, taking their healthy asses for granted’ (S1, E5). Thus, once again, the fact of having to face a serious illness makes the older character reflect on the extent to which life and health are taken for granted in advanced societies. In the three series, this realization results in characters establishing stronger relationships with their partners and friends and in valuing the time they have left.

CONCLUSION In her introduction to the section ‘Literature and Ageing’ in the Routledge Handbook of Cultural Gerontology, Sarah Falcus states, ‘Stories of age do not provide answers to questions about ageing. They do not illustrate gerontological concepts. They can offer comfort, inspiration and possibility’ (2015: 53). Similarly, television series that focus on ageing and old age through lead characters who are in their sixties, seventies, and eighties provide plausible examples of living into old age in the twenty-first century at the same time as they shape attitudes and beliefs about age and the lifecourse. The enhanced visibility of older characters in television series contributes to a better understanding of ageing into old age at the same time as it may foster public debate about topics such as care and increasing loneliness in old age (Loos and Ivan 2018; Aniol, Koronkiewicz, and Solowska 2013). Despite the still-insufficient presence of lead characters in old age in television series, the examples presented here may be considered media products which are increasingly in demand due to the silvering of audiences (Dolan 2017). At the same time, they are providing more complex and diverse representations of age by openly dealing with topics such as love, desire, and sex in old age, friendship, shrinking relationships as one ages, as well as failing health.

REFERENCES Aniol, J., K. Koronkiewicz, and E. Solowska (2013), ‘The Old Age in Polish and American Series’, Journal of Education, Culture and Society, 4 (2): 375–96. Barbosa, K. G. (2017), ‘Affects and Female Age in Grace and Frankie’, Estudios Feministas, 24 (3): 1437–45.

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Bawel, S. V. (2018), ‘Invisible Golden Girls? Post-feminist Discourse and Female Ageing Bodies in Contemporary Television Fiction’, Feminist Media Studies, 18 (1): 21–33. Bell, J. (1991). ‘In Search of a Discourse on Aging: The Elderly on Television’, The Gerontologist, 32 (3): 305–11. Butler, N. R. (2006), Ageism in America. Open Society Institute. Available at: https://aging.colum​bia.edu/ sites/defa​ult/files/Ageism​_in_​Amer​ica.pdf (accessed 30 October 2019). Casado-Gual, N., and M. Oró-Piqueras (2017), ‘Romantic, Sexy, Creative or Simply Unruly: Affirmative Models of Ageing Femininity in the Cult Series Six Feet Under’, Women: A Cultural Review, 28 (3): 217–39. Caughie, J. (2000), Television Drama: Realism, Modernism, and British Culture, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Chivers, S. (2011), The Silvering Screen, Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Cohen, H. L. (2010), ‘Developing Media Literacy Skills to Challenge Television’s Portrayal of Older Women’, Educational Gerontology, 28 (7): 599–620. Creeber, G. (2004), Serial Television. Big Drama on the Small Screen, London: British Film Institute. Dolan, J. (2017), Contemporary Cinema and Old Age. Gender and the Silvering Screen, London: Macmillan. Falcus, S. (2015), ‘Literature and Aging’, in J. Twigg and W. Martin (eds), Routledge Handbook of Cultural Gerontology, 53–60, London: Routledge. Fiske, J. (1989), Television Culture, London: Routledge. Gorton, K. (2009), ‘Domestic Desire: Older Women in Six Feet Under and Brothers & Sisters’, in S. Gillis and J. Hollows (eds), Feminism, Domesticity and Popular Culture, 93–106, London: Routledge. Gorton, K. (2016), ‘“I’m Too Old to Pretend Anymore”: Desire, Ageing and Last Tango in Halifax’, in M. Oró-Piqueras and A. Wohlmann (eds), Serializing Age: Aging and Old Age in TV Series, 233–51, Bielefield: Transcript Verlag. Gravagne, P. (2013), The Becoming of Age: Cinematic Visions of Mind, Body and Identity in Later Life, Jefferson, NC: McFarland. Hant, M. (2007), ‘Television’s Mature Women: A Changing Media Archetype: From Bewitched to The Sopranos’, CSW Update Newsletter. Available at: https://escho​lars​hip.org/uc/item/3357r​9nz (accessed 15 October 2014). Harwood, J. (2007), Understanding Communication and Aging. Developing Knowledge and Awareness, New York: Sage. Harwood, J., and H. Giles (1992), ‘“Don’t Make Me Laugh”: Age Representations in a Humorous Context’, Discourse and Society, 3 (4): 403–36. Healey, T., and K. Ross (2002), ‘Growing Old Invisibly: Older Viewers Talk Television’, Media, Culture & Society, 24 (1): 105–20. Katz, S., and T. Calasanti (2014), ‘Critical Perspectives on Successful Ageing: Does It “Appeal More Than It Illuminates”?’, The Gerontologist, 55 (1): 26–33. Kessler, E. M., K. Rakoczy, and U. M. Staudinger (2004), ‘The Portrayal of Older People in Prime Time Television Series: the Match with Gerontological Evidence’, Ageing and Society, 24 (4): 531–52. Küpper, T. (2016), ‘“Blanche and the Younger Man”: Age Mimicry and the Ambivalence of Laughter in The Golden Girls’, in M. Oró-Piqueras and A. Wohlmann (eds), Serializing Age: Aging and Old Age in TV Series, 251–68, Bielefield: Transcript Verlag.

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Loos, E., and L. Ivan (2018), ‘Visual Ageism in Media’, in L. Ayalon and C. Tesch-Römer (eds), Contemporary Perspectives on Ageism, 163–76, New York: Springer. Marshall, B. L., and S. Katz (2012), ‘The Embodied Life Course: Post-ageism or the Renaturalization of Gender?’, Societies, 2 (4): 222–34. Oró-Piqueras, M., and A. Wohlmann (2016), Serializing Age. Aging and Old Age in TV Series, Bielefield: Transcript Verlag. Segal, L. (2014), Out of Time, London: Verso. Shary T., and N. McVittie (2016), Fade to Gray: Aging in American Cinema, Austin: University of Texas Press. Thornham, S., and T. Purvis (2012), Television Drama: Theories and Identities, London: Palgrave Macmillan. Van Bauwel, S. (2018), ‘Invisible Golden Girls? Post-feminist Discourses and Female Ageing Bodies in Contemporary Television Fiction’, Feminist Media Studies, 18 (1): 21–33. Vares, T. (2009), ‘Reading the “Sexy Oldie”: Gender, Age(ing) and Embodiment’, Sexualities, 12 (4): 503–24. Vernon, J., J. Allen Williams Jr., T. Phillips and J. Wilson (1990), ‘Media Stereotyping: A Companion of the Way Elderly Women and Men Are Portrayed on Prime-time Television’, Digital Commons, University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Sociology Department, Faculty Publications.

TV Series Brothers and Sisters (2006–11), Creator John Robin Baitz, ABC. Desperate Housewives (2004–12), Creator Marc Cherry, ABC. Girls (2012–17), Creator L. Dunham, HBO. Gold Digger (2019), Creator M. Dickens, BBC One. The Golden Girls (1985–92), Creator S. Harris, NBC. Grace and Frankie (2015–present), Creator M. Kauffman, Netflix. The Kominsky Method (2018–present) Creator C.k Lorre, Netflix. Last Tango in Halifax (2012–20), Writer S. Wainwright, BBC. Murder, She Wrote (1984–96) Creators P. S. Fischer, Richard Levinson, William Link. Sex and The City (1998–2004), Creator D. Star, HBO. Six Feet Under (2001–5), Creator A. Bell, HBO.

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CHAPTER ELEVEN

It’s never too late to have a happy ending: Comedy film and ageing HANNA VARJAKOSKI

INTRODUCTION Due to population ageing, there has been an ‘increasing necessity to tell and consume stories of ageing for the big screen’ (Casado-Gual 2020: 2257). The mainstream film industry, with Hollywood leading the way, has responded to this ‘necessity’ with a proliferation of films that feature older actors and ageing. Interestingly, many of the recent popular Anglo-American films featuring older protagonists have been comedic: Calendar Girls (2003, Dir. Nigel Cole), The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (2012, Dir. John Madden), Last Vegas (2013, Dir. John Turteltaub), Going in Style (2017, Dir. Zach Braff), Book Club (2018, Dir. Bill Holderman), and Senior Moment (2021, Dir. Giorgio Serafini), just to name a few. Some of these films are clearly targeted at the ‘baby boomer’ audience, like romantic comedies featuring older women in leading roles (Jermyn 2014: 109). Yet, comedies with older protagonists can attract audiences of all ages, as evidenced by some recent Nordic films. This is the case with the Finnish film comedies Ladies of Steel (Teräsleidit 2020, Dir. Pamela Tola), a comedy about three older sisters taking to the road, The Grump (Mielensäpahoittaja 2014, Dir. Dome Karukoski)1 and Happier Times, The Grump (Ilosia aikoja, Mielensäpahoittaja 2018, Dir. Tiina Lymi), which relate the story of a rural-living, eighty-something-year-old man who is trying to come to terms with the world changing and the impact of his wife’s dementia in their lives. In terms of box office numbers, all three comedies were the most successful Finnish films in their respective release years. When broadcast on TV, The Grump was, according to the viewing figures, in the monthly top five programmes among the demographic groups of twenty-five to forty-four and forty-five to sixty-four years old, and the sequel was the most viewed movie on Finnish television in January 2021 (Finnpanel). In addition, the Swedish box office-hit comedies A Man Called Ove (En man som heter Ove 2015, Dir. Hannes Holm) and The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out of the Window and Disappeared (Hundraåringen som klevt ut genom fönstret och försvan 2013, Dir. Felix Herngren) have been popular among younger audiences. Every second Swede in the age group fifteen to twenty-nine years has seen the comedy about the centenarian escaping from a nursing home to undertake an epic journey. More than one in three people in the

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same age group have seen A Man Called Ove. In terms of box office numbers, both comedies are among Sweden’s most successful films of all time (Swedish Film Institute 2017). Judging by the popularity of some ‘silvering’ comedy films, there seems to be a demand for (comic) stories about later life and well-known ageing actors in leading roles. But why is comedy so popular when depicting stories about ageing and later life? Financially speaking, comedy sells. In many countries around the world, comedy, with its subgenres, is one of the most successful of film genres.2 Due to population ageing, the share of older film audiences is growing too. Without essentializing the preferences of older audiences, older viewers may want to see ageing film stars who are ‘speaking to their own age demographic’ (Whelehan and Gwynne 2014: 1). Broadly speaking, comedy and humour have played a notable part in constructing cultural representations and understandings of ageing and older people, for better and for worse. Just think about the ageing-related jokes that circulate in everyday life, humorous birthday cards, and the whole industry of books aiming to expose the humour in ageing. Representing older people in a comic manner is widespread and persistent – it transcends national borders, generations, cultures, and different art forms. In many cases, this ‘comic manner’ might better translate as derogatory joking – considering that in the media environment older adults and ageing are often portrayed in a rather unfavourable light. One might even argue that there are no real cultural codes of conduct telling us not to make fun of older people or that ageist humour is politically incorrect (cf. Haller and Ralph 2003: 3, about disability humour). Clearly, humoristic portrayals of ageing can be hurtful and trigger unwanted affects, such as shame and embarrassment, if what is intended to be funny is not perceived that way. Representing ageing in comedy film, then, can be a contradictory endeavour. Comedy as a genre builds on stereotypical representations of social groups and cultures: exploiting and exaggerating commonly recognized stereotypes (both positive and negative) for comic ends is part of its generic conventions. One might say that comedy films should be credited for explicitly making visible the stereotypical ways in which ageing and older people are perceived in the public domain, particularly by younger people. When perpetuating stereotypical, one-dimensional, or even demeaning portrayals, comedic films can, however, contribute to a culture that works to marginalize older people and see ageing in negative terms. As Margaret Gatling (2013: 73) claims, comedy is ‘the quintessential medium for expressing unacceptable, dangerous and offensive scenarios in ways that are more-or-less palatable’. However, approaching comedy film only through the lens of unfavourable portrayals would be reductive because it ignores the subversive potential of comedy (Neale 2000; Horton and Rapf 2013) and the ways in which comedic films have diversified and offered more nuanced representations of ageing and older people. The subversive potential of comedy derives from the view that the genre provides a platform ‘to explode stereotypes about age, gender, and sexuality’ (White 2014: 156). Some scholars even assert that transgressions in comedy are not only permissible but obligatory (see Mortimer 2017: 19). Comedy is also an apt vehicle to explore the highs and lows of later life without automatically rendering ageing as a tragedy and older people as objects of pity. Humoristic framing can make it easier to tackle issues that otherwise might be difficult to touch upon, such as death. Overall, comedy and ageing create an interesting combination since, paradoxically, while comedies typically use stereotypes, represent ageing in a comic manner, and even render older characters as objects of laughter, the genre also opens a space to discuss awkward topics, to challenge ossified perceptions of

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age and gender, to imagine alternative ways to age, and to play with socio-cultural norms regarding ageing. Thus, comedy can concurrently be both confirming and transgressive, funny and hurtful – depending on the context, the film, and the viewer. There are many studies that analyse the intersections of comedy, gender, class, race, ethnicity, and nationality, but research on ageing / older age and film comedy has been far scarcer until recently. With a few exceptions, research on ageing in comedy film has mainly investigated popular British and American movies. For instance, Claire Mortimer’s Battleaxes, Spinsters and Chars: The Ageing Woman in British Film Comedy of the Mid-Twentieth Century (2017) offers an interesting historical exploration of female ageing and comedy film. Margaret Gatling (2013) has analysed a selection of contemporary Anglophone comedy films, concluding that the films represent ageing in stereotypical ways and that middle age, in particular, tends to be represented as a time of crisis. According to her, screen representations of ageing are mostly negative and unrealistic, and older characters ‘are often portrayed as being hard of hearing, incontinent of urine or confused and this is used for comic effect’ (2013:12). However, in her study Gatling also found that older adult sexuality has become a more common topic in recent comedic narratives, which she sees as challenging the stereotype of sexlessness in later life (see also Gatling, Mills, and Lindsay 2017). Portraying later life sexuality in comedic films is clearly linked to a wider cultural phenomenon where active sexuality has become an integral part of representations of positive and successful ageing (Marshall 2014). Some recent comedies have also featured stories about LGBT ageing, such as a gay man coming out at seventy-five in Beginners (2010, Dir. Mike Mills). For Hess (2014: 166), the film is subversive because ‘it breaks the persistent stereotype of the predatory, miserable, and lonely aging gay man; it breaks with the traditional pattern of the coming-out story, in which the child comes out to the parent; and it opens up a new perspective on (gay) fatherhood’. The burgeoning of studies on ageing in cinema has been accompanied by interest in specific film comedy topics and subgenres, such as late-life romantic comedies (e.g. Marshall 2009; Jermyn 2011; Hobbs 2013; Casado-Gual 2020). Some scholars even suggest that a new variation of romcom in Hollywood film has emerged, namely, the ‘gerontocom’,3 which focuses on older protagonists’ love affairs. Late-life romcoms, such as Something’s Gotta Give (2003, Dir. Nancy Meyers), It’s Complicated (2010, Dir. Nancy Meyers), and Elsa & Fred (2014, Dir. Michael Radford), portray older adults as romantic and sexual beings (see Jermyn 2014; Casado-Gual 2020), yet tend to reinforce the idea that relationship seeking and coupling are central in the pursuit of successful ageing – a discourse that ‘gerontocoms’ are often seen as promoting. Unsurprisingly, portrayals of ageing in ‘gerontocoms’ are also highly gendered. As Hobbs (2013: 43) explains, ‘the films seem to suggest that men are wont to act in ways that are considered outside their social age, while women worry over whether their behaviour conforms to what is appropriate for their social age’. If the ‘greying’ of mainstream cinema (Jermyn 2014) has helped comedy to regenerate in terms of storylines, it has also granted some older actors the possibility of late-life careers. Especially for older female actors who may struggle to find film roles after they turn forty, comedy seems to offer new opportunities since comedic films are more welcoming ‘for a range of actors’ (Tueth 2012: 25). According to Deborah Jermyn (2012: 39, 41), comedy ‘proffers a more tolerable space for ageing women to keep working’ and often affords ageing actors ‘more satisfying (though not unproblematic) opportunities’ in comparison to many other genres. However, comedic films can be a mixed blessing. As Jermyn (2015) notes in her discussion of Robert de Niro’s role in the comedy

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The Intern (2015, Dir. Nancy Meyers), acclaimed older male actors are easily derided by critics for starring in comedies. Overall, the majority of current knowledge about ageing in comedy film focuses on women, although studies on ageing masculinities in comedies are emerging (e.g. Marklund 2018; Röber 2020, on TV Britcoms). The scarcity of research on comedic older men is slightly surprising, considering that comedy has long been dominated by men, whether it be film comedy, television comedy, or stand-up. According to Schäfer and Schwanebeck (2020: 69), existing studies on masculinities mainly see masculinity ‘first and foremost, marked by crises and violent behaviour’ and as a result, scholarly work has focused on more ‘serious’ or dramatic genres like war, action, and crime. To rectify the lack of attention to masculinity in comedy, this chapter looks at both men and women in recent comedy films. In what follows, this chapter offers a short overview on comedy as a genre before exploring representations of older female figures in comedic film. The chapter then examines how ageing masculinities have recently been negotiated in a comedic film context. In order to be more inclusive to productions that are non-Hollywood and non-Anglophone, this chapter offers examples from recent Finnish film. Finnish comedy film has its own peculiarities and characteristics, but it also resembles Anglo-American comedy and is part of international film culture and its global trends.

COMEDY AS A GENRE Comedy as a genre is vast and slippery. Comedic films can be difficult to categorize neatly since they often include features from other genres and types of comedy (Horton and Rapf 2013). Romantic comedies and comedy dramas are good examples of this mixture of genres and moods. Moreover, a single film can include elements from all types of comedy, such as parody, satire, and irony. Comedies also vary in style. In comparison to, for instance, slapstick or screwball comedy, romcom and comedy drama tend to be less excessive and more ‘realistic’ in terms of characters and style (see Seppälä 2015). Nevertheless, comedic film generally intends ‘to produce laughter and is usually explicit about this intent’ (White and Mundy 2012: 3) by using jokes, gags, and incongruous moments. Some have also argued that a happy ending is central to comedy narratives – which as a premise, sounds promising considering that death often seems to dominate older film characters’ horizon of expectation in narratives and closures (see also Varjakoski 2019: 12). In comedy films, impending death may of course work as the driving force of the story, but the narratives do not ‘have’ to end in the death or misery of the older character as tends to be the case with many drama films about later life. In comedic film narratives, older characters, too, are granted opportunities for a happy ending, for instance, in the form of new beginnings and prospects of a good later life. Popular notions of comedy tend to cast it as lightweight and culturally less prestigious than other film genres. Yet, according to Horton and Rapf (2013: 4), comedy is ‘one of the most important ways a culture talks to itself about itself ’. It does so by commenting on societal preoccupations, prejudices, and dreams, while exploring tricky social questions and personal problems (Horton and Rapf 2013: 2). Indeed, comedy has traditionally offered a space where social injustices, ills, and all things human can be safely addressed through humour. With regard to ageing studies, scholars have often drawn from Bakhtinian thinking in exploring the subversive potential of comedy. Estelle Tincknell, for instance, has used Bakhtin’s ideas of carnivalesque behaviour and bodily grotesque to explore how in some British comedy films conventional discourses around age, gender, and race

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are overturned when older Asian female characters transform from conventional Indian ‘Aunties’ into figures of excess (Tincknell 2020: 135; see also White 2014). Thus, representing ageing through comedy can be an enterprise with ‘serious’ potential. As Kathleen Rowe (1995: 9) notes, ‘comedic genres of laughter’ exploit transgression and inversion, and of all genres, comedy tends to most fully utilize the potential to represent change and transformation. Due to this subversive potential, comedy offers the possibility of exploring and enacting ageing in ways that go beyond the dull and the conventional. Indeed, when progressive and uplifting age representations have appeared on screen, they have often taken place within a comedic context. For instance, the American TV-comedy series Golden Girls (NBC 1985–92) delivered more favourable depictions of ageing and made older women visible in prime-time television (see Harwood and Giles 1992). Thirty years later, comedy series Grace and Frankie (Netflix 2015–) is deemed to be ground-breaking with its ‘positive representations of ageing sexuality, female agency, and selfefficacy’ (Fiedler and Casey 2021: 938).

REPRESENTING OLDER WOMEN IN A COMEDIC CONTEXT According to Josephine Dolan (2020: 8), film representations of older women are typically troubling in that affirmative portrayals are often undermined ‘by the reiteration of needy, passive femininity’. Nevertheless, Mortimer (2017: 19) argues that comedy offers ‘an ideal narrative space for women to challenge gender roles’ and ‘to stage narratives of escape from the dominant discourses of female ageing’. Hence, comedy opens a space to explore subversive lifecourses and to imagine alternative ways in which women may age. When compared to other film genres, comedies have granted older women more screen time, more agency, and more room to explore possibilities that go beyond the usual domestic setting. For instance, some recent comedic films, like The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, depict older women travelling to foreign locations in search of adventure, change, and freedom. At the same time though, these films take a relatively age-appropriate stance towards ageing, and they tend to emphasize ‘wealth, health and productivity as the requisites for desirable ageing’ (Falcus and Sako 2014: 206). Nevertheless, comedy films can present female characters that are not commonly seen on the big screen, namely, women who do not conform to the dominant cultural expectations, normative gender traits, or ‘age-appropriateness’. The genre is also flexible, for instance, in the ways different dimensions of gender, like femininity and masculinity, are performed and articulated. For instance, in the Finnish comedy film Off the Map (Äkkilähtö 2016, Dir. Tiina Lymi) we see an older woman portrayed as a female warrior of a sort, as she takes to the road with her tractor and a shotgun to rescue her granddaughter. The ageing femininity presented in Off the Map is far from needy and passive; it is independent and agentic. Comedy can even be seen as entailing feminist potential when it presents older female figures who have ‘let themselves go’ and who refuse to conform to the neoliberal criteria of ageing well or ‘successfully’, as is the case with the eccentric older female character in The Lady in the Van (2015, Dir. Nicholas Hytner) and the figure of the ‘bag lady’ in the Finnish comedy The Garbage Prince (Roskisprinssi 2011, Dir. Raimo O. Niemi). These three female figures do not follow the normative model of the female lifecourse; nor do they succumb to a vision of ageing that sees late-life romances, rejuvenation, and capitalist consumption (cf., Falcus and Sako 2014) as the way women ‘should’ age.

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Comedy has traditionally allowed older women to behave ‘badly’ and to express resistance and obscenity. As Kathleen Rowe claims in The Unruly Woman: Gender and the Genres of Laughter (1995), comedy provides a platform for the representation of female unruliness, resistance, and ‘unacceptable’ emotions, such as anger. Yet angry older women in comedies are typically rendered as ‘battle-axes’ or ‘harridans’, that, according to Mortimer (2015: 73), are ‘a perennial source of humour’ and ‘figures of ridicule’ since they often defy normative gender traits by being domineering. Ridicule disguised as humour is an easy way to mitigate the uneasiness that arises when women stop being conformative and controllable, or when they invert gender norms in a way that places them as ‘women on top’. The Finnish comedy film Ladies of Steel, which was a nominee for the European Film Academy’s award for European Comedy 2020 and which I will examine in more detail next, offers an example of comedy opening up a space for expressing anger that does not automatically expose ageing women to ridicule and vilification. The film begins with the following scene: one of the leading female characters, the 75-year-old Inkeri, has hit her dismissive husband on the head with a frying pan. The husband lies seemingly lifeless on the living room floor. Thinking she has killed the man, Inkeri decides to enjoy her last moments of freedom before the impending imprisonment. She picks up her older sisters and together they take to the road (see Figure 11.1). When an upset Inkeri confesses to having killed her husband, her feisty sister comforts Inkeri by saying: ‘Everyone wants to kill their husband. I’ve killed all five of mine.’ In Inkeri’s case, ageing is depicted as a process of finding the strength to break away from a repressive domestic regime and to stand up for herself. Ladies of Steel is concurrently a touching story of a woman finding her voice again in later life and a ‘traditional’ comedy film in that the narrative contains all sorts of mishaps, incongruous events, violations of age-appropriate behaviour, and witty dialogue saturated with dark humour (Figure 11.1). One could criticize Ladies of Steel for resorting to a rather easy comedic recipe by portraying the older protagonists acting like youngsters: they swear, get drunk, and hook up with men. However,

FIGURE 11.1  Sylvi (Saara Pakkasvirta), Inkeri (Leena Uotila), and Raili (Seela Sella) in Ladies of Steel directed by Pamela Tola. © Helsinki-filmi Oy. All rights reserved. Photo by Sami Kuokkanen.

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at the same time the film allows its female characters to be agentic, obscene, and sexually desiring. The assumption that sexual activity and sexual desire are associated with young women only (Hinchliff 2014) is challenged in the comedy when Inkeri initiates intimate contact with her teenage crush and the eldest sister, over eighty-year-old Sylvi, picks up a thirty-year-old man in a disco and ends up having sex with him. Earlier, when older women have been depicted as desiring young men, for instance, in drama or thriller films, the female characters have mostly been portrayed as predatory ‘cougars’ who are obsessive, nymphomaniac, and dangerous (Medina Bañón and Zecchi 2020: 256). The depiction of Sylvi’s sexual desire in Ladies of Steel does not, however, follow this stereotyping, for her sexual desire is not represented as dangerous or destructive. Instead, it is portrayed as something that produces a favourable response in the young man and results in Sylvi being the object of sexual desire, as we see in the final scene of the film when Sylvi and the young man unexpectedly meet again. With some exceptions, portraying older women as sexual and as sexually desiring has generally been a rarity on the big screen. Recently, however, depictions of sexy older women have become a trend in ‘silvering’ comedic films and beyond. Critics have pointed out though that only older women with youthful appearances are granted sexual screen roles and that these films tend to present an active sex life as a prerequisite for ‘good’ ageing (Hinchliff 2014; Marshall 2014). This, however, is not exactly the case with Ladies of Steel. Rather, the film aims at revising the ways in which older (female) sexuality is usually presented in film. For instance, the intimate reunion between Inkeri and her teenage crush is not represented as comical (cf. Gatling Gatling, Mills, and Lindsay 2017: 24). Perhaps the absence of parodic framing of the scene indicates that general attitudes towards older adults’ sexuality have indeed become more accepting. The topic is not that taboo anymore – at least when it comes to conventional heterosexuality. Nevertheless, displaying explicit sex scenes and visibly ageing naked bodies is still rare in mainstream film although a few examples can be found, such as the German film Cloud 9 (Wolke 9 2008, Dir. Andreas Dresen) and the Argentinian drama film The Bed (La Cama 2018, Dir. Mónica Lairana). But, as Marshall and Swinnen (2014: 160–1) have shown, aged bodies are generally veiled with filmic techniques like lighting, blurring, filters, and camera work, thus teaching ‘the viewers about acceptable levels of visibility for time-ripened women’s bodies’. Also, sexuality that is culturally perceived as deviating from the conventional tends to receive humorous treatment. In my interpretation, this is the case with the sexual encounter between the eldest sister Sylvi and the young man in Ladies of Steel. The encounter is portrayed as a drunken one-night stand after which Sylvi is shown wandering in a hotel corridor practically naked and somewhat confused. Humoristic framing offers a space to mock the cultural expectations that tell older women to behave in a certain way: to be quiet, to stay inconspicuous, to fawn, and to conform. As Rowe (1995) aptly notes, comedy can be used to critique and to challenge the social and symbolic systems that keep women in their place, and for this reason, comedy should not be overlooked as a weapon with political power. Ladies of Steel illustrates well how comedy as a genre allows women to defy masculine authority and to express anger and sexual desire, yet it also reflects the complexity related to presenting transgressive characters and norm-breaking actions in a comedic context. The genre allows women to break age and gender-based norms of behaviour, but at the same time, by rendering norm-breaking and transgression as laughable, comedy eventually supports dominant conceptions of what is seen as age and gender appropriate for older women.

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HUMORISTIC DEPICTIONS OF AGEING MASCULINITIES Comedy has traditionally put younger men front and centre (Schäfer and Schwanebeck 2020), leaving older men to be mainly portrayed through stereotypes of ‘dirty’ or grumpy old men, who are ‘moaning, angry, messy or miserable’ (Jackson 2016: 8). In relation to culturally idealized masculinity, older men have mostly been rendered as ‘failing masculinities’ (Röber 2020: 153). However, representing ageing masculinities in comedy film should receive more attention, especially if we consider Schäfer and Schwanebeck’s (2020: 74) suggestion, that ‘funny men [can] reconfigure the performance of masculinity… [and] laughter and ridicule – articulated by men, but also aimed at men – (re)write masculinist myths and narratives’. The stereotype of an angry and grumbling old man has been used widely for comic ends, as the American films Grumpy Old Men (1993, Dir. Donald Petrie) and Grumpier Old Men (1995, Dir. Howard Deutch),4 the British–German comedy drama Unfinished Song (2012, Dir. Paul Andrew Williams), the Swedish comedy A Man Called Ove (2015), and the Finnish equivalents The Grump (2014) and Happier Times, Grump (2018) prove. While the American versions are about two rival next-door neighbours courting younger women in the neighbourhood, the Nordic versions are more ‘serious’ in terms of topics addressed, such as the loss of a loved one and a sense of alienation from contemporary society. Happier Times, The Grump, for instance, begins with a scene where the older male protagonist is saying goodbye to his wife by her deathbed. Devastated by the loss, the man finds no reason to remain in this world and intends to die. Represented as a rational and self-reliant man who bottles up his emotions, Grump heads home, gives his potato stock away, and starts building a coffin for himself. Besides drawing humour from the protagonist’s stubbornness, suicidal intentions, rather racist and sexist mind-set, and his preference for old ways of doing things, the Nordic Grump films are rich in societal commentary. Here, humour opens up a space to critically consider wider modes of thinking, such as dominant ideas of ‘proper’ manhood or the ideal of self-reliance which is highly valued in many Western countries and commonly urged upon older people, too (Cruikshank 2013). Usually, living up to the ideal of self-reliance is an endeavour that heroic young male characters embody, and other film genres tend to ennoble. In a late-life context though, this ideal transforms into a comic portrayal of an old man struggling to hang on to the ideal of what it means to be a self-reliant man. In The Grump, the protagonist, for instance, falls down the stairs and lies on the cellar floor for two days since asking for help and showing vulnerability conflict with the ideals of self-reliance and ‘real’ manliness. As Sarah L. Canham (2009: 90) explains, ‘a real man’ is expected to display traits such as toughness, power, independence, control, and sexual and physical competence, which are culturally seen as forming the script of hegemonic masculinity. However, older men may struggle to live up to the hegemonic standards of masculinity (Canham 2009: 90–1). Nevertheless, in The Grump ‘proper’ manliness is attributed to the old male figure, which is contrary to the common cultural conception (Meadows and Davidson 2006: 296). Grump is also actively taking the reins and ‘putting things right’, which, according to Marklund (2018: 49), is a rather unusual role for old men in film, but in comedy that is possible. Meanwhile, the cultural expectation of self-reliance and hegemonic masculinity is made fun of through Grump’s character. The comedic framing also enables the character to eventually reconstruct his ageing manhood so that ‘real manliness’ is not exclusive of relationality and the acceptance of change. Eventually, this reconfiguration grants Grump the possibility of ‘happy’ ageing in terms of regaining the will to

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live and rebuilding his relationship with his estranged sons and with the present-day society the character earlier felt so alienated from. In contrast to comedies that depict later life as an opportunity for transformation, some films merely represent it as a chance to act like young men again, especially in the face of impending death, as in The Bucket List (2013, Dir. Rob Reiner) and Going in Style. Chivers (2011: 136) summarizes The Bucket List by saying that ‘regardless of their life experiences or means – what men of all ages really want is to jump out of planes, drive fast cars, sleep with young women, and hang around with their buddies’. Or rob a bank, as three older male buddies do in Going in Style. A good part of this film’s humour is derived from the protagonists stumbling to keep up with the current world and from the men’s physical ageing, which stereotypically renders them clumsy and tired, among other things. Nevertheless, the older male characters are still able to maintain their masculinities by carrying out the action-oriented armed heist. Although Jackson (2016: 8) claims that ageing men are often seen as becoming ‘men of a limited or inferior kind as they age’, in a comedic context they can still ‘be kings’, as one of the male characters declares in Going in Style. The ways in which comedy film enables a continuum of ‘bad’ and action-oriented behaviour for its male characters throughout the lifecourse is not as intriguing as the potential that humoristic framing can provide in reconstructing masculinist ideals, myths, and narratives. As the Finnish Grump movies illustrate, the comedic context opens up a space for men to abandon traditional masculine norms, such as self-reliance and emotional restraint, and to be vulnerable and even needy. In addition, comedy grants men opportunities to laugh at themselves and to be incompetent, to step back from restricting cultural expectations and to look for new meanings in later life. If comedy is more inclined than other film genres to represent change and transformation, then the genre provides good opportunities for ageing men to renegotiate their identities and positions, especially in relation to power and changing physical competence. All in all, as for women, for men too, comedy offers a convenient arena to explore and to embrace ageing as a liberating process.

CONCLUSION Comedy film is often regarded as less prestigious than other film genres, yet comedy’s ability to reach large audiences makes it an important arena where cultural knowledge and everyday conceptions about ageing are produced and negotiated. Recognizing the role of genre in shaping portrayals of ageing is vital though. As with any other genre, comedy has its own conventions and objectives. Above all, comedic films are meant to be entertaining and make the audience laugh. They do so by exploiting commonly recognized stereotypes, such as the grumpy old man, and often by portraying ageing in a comical manner which, understandably, can be seen as degrading and illmeaning, depending on the context. Nevertheless, the opportunity to criticize the surrounding society and culture has always been eagerly exploited in comedy. Comedy can be used as a platform to expose and critically examine cultural conceptions of ageing and underlying values in society, while allowing ‘more anarchic and unresolved tensions in the representation of the ageing body and behaviors’ (Whelehan and Gwynne 2014: 10). Since comedy often encourages inversion and incongruity, comedic films allow older characters to be agentic, to take new roles for themselves, to act foolishly and to explore outside of the norm.

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For older female characters, comedy offers an arena to escape from the domestic sphere and to express anger, rebelliousness, and sexual desire. As a result, in comedy films we can see older female characters who are less conformative in relation to normative and dominant cultural expectations. However, it is interesting that transgressive older women, such as Sylvi in Ladies of Steel, are often portrayed as more or less ‘senile’. It seems that older women who are too excessive, behave too badly or are too radical in contesting age and gender-based norms of behaviour become somehow problematic. Culturally, one way of solving the ‘problem’ is by rendering them as cognitively impaired. In comedies, this labelling is assigned more often to older women5 than older men – at least in Finnish comedy films. Clearly, ‘badly’ behaving men are better tolerated, because men are more wont to act outside their social age, as Hobbs (2013: 43) claims. In the comedies discussed in the chapter, the genre enables older men to address their vulnerabilities while negotiating their ageing manhood in relation to the script of hegemonic masculinity. Comedic framing allows older men to remain heroic and action oriented, but as Röber (2020: 165) notes, ‘Later-life masculinity still relies heavily on learned masculine traits [and] behaviors … [that emphasize] conceptions of later-life masculinity that centre around middle age’. Yet, comedy as a genre could have a lot to offer to ageing men in terms of creating new or alternative ways of performing masculinities – a potential that both film-makers and academics could explore in more depth. And lastly, it is no coincidence that ageing-related bodily changes and forgetful older characters are often portrayed in a humorous vein across popular culture: humour has proven to be helpful in addressing, adjusting to, and coping with all sorts of difficult issues and ambivalent feelings. Yet, this chapter has suggested that representing ageing in a comedic and humorous context entails serious potential in another sense, too. The use of comedy enables depictions of ageing in ways that do not render ageing solely as a tragedy and older people as passive objects of care and pity. The decline narrative is still there, more or less explicitly, and it is often used for comic ends, but comedy can nevertheless offer representations of ageing that are affirmative, bold, and even progressive while featuring stories about later life that have a happy ending.

NOTES 1 The film is an adaptation of a successful Finnish book by Tuomas Kyrö. The Grump (Mielensäpahoittaja). The narrative originally started as a radio play, but the character has since appeared in newspaper columns, books, theatre, and film. 2 See, for example, New York Film Academy (2016), https://www.nyfa.edu/stud​ent-resour​ces/12-of-the-mostpopu​lar-movie-gen​res-by-coun​try/. 3 A term coined by Time Out reviewer Anna Smith. 4 According to internet sources, the American version is getting a remake soon with Eddie Murphy and Samuel L. Jackson as the grumpy old men. 5 For more on the feminization of dementia in mainstream film, see Capstick, Chatwin, and Ludwin (2015).

REFERENCES Canham, S. L. (2009), ‘The Interaction of Masculinity and Control and Its Impact on the Experience of Suffering for an Older Man’, Journal of Aging Studies, 23 (2): 90–6.

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Capstick, A., J. Chatwin, and K. Ludwin (2015), ‘Challenging Representations of Dementia in Contemporary Western Fiction Film. From Epistemic Injustice to Social Participation’, in M. Schweda and A. Swinnen (eds), Popularizing Dementia: Public Expressions and Representations of Forgetfulness, 229–52, Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag. Casado-Gual, N. (2020), ‘Ageing and Romance on the Big Screen: The “Silvering Romantic Comedy” Elsa & Fred’, Ageing & Society, 40 (10): 2257–65. Chivers, S. (2011), The Silvering Screen: Old Age and Disability in Cinema, Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Cruikshank, M. (2013), Learning to Be Old: Gender, Culture, and Aging, 3rd edn, Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Dolan, J. (2020) ‘Older Women and Cinema: Audiences, Stories, and Stars’, in K. Ross, I. Bachmann, V. Cardo, S. Moorti, and M. Scarcelli (eds), The International Encyclopedia of Gender, Media, and Communication, 1–9, doi:10.1002/9781119429128.iegmc191. Falcus, S., and K. Sako (2014), ‘Women, Travelling and Later Life’, in I. Whelehan and J. Gwynne (eds), Ageing, Popular Culture and Contemporary Feminism: Harleys and Hormones, 203–18, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Fiedler, A., and S. Casey (2021), ‘“I Played by All the Rules! Why Didn’t You Tell Me There Weren’t Any Rules, It’s Not Fair!”: Contradiction, Corporeality, and Conformity in Grace and Frankie’, Continuum, 35 (6): 938–54. Finnpanel, ‘TV Audience Measurement’, Monthly Top Programs by Genre Movie January 2021. Available at: https://www.finnpa​nel.fi/tulok​set/tv/kk/ohj​ryh/2021/1/eloku​vat.html (accessed 6 July 2021). Gatling, M. (2013), ‘Representations of Age and Ageing in Comedy Film’, PhD dissertation, James Cook University, Australia. Available at: https://res​earc​honl​ine.jcu.edu.au/39247/1/39247-gatl​ing-2013-the​sis. pdf (accessed 5 May 2021). Gatling, M., J. Mills, and D. Lindsay (2017), ‘Sex after 60? You’ve Got to Be Joking! Senior Sexuality in Comedy Film’, Journal of Aging Studies, 40: 23–8. Haller, B., and S. Ralph (2003), ‘John Callahan’s Pelswick Cartoon and a New Phase of Disability Humor’, Disability Studies Quarterly, 23 (3/4). Available at: https://dsq-sds.org/arti​cle/view/431/608 (accessed 6 December 2020). Harwood, J. T., and H. Giles (1992), ‘“Don’t Make Me Laugh”: Age Representations in a Humorous Context’, Discourse and Society, 3 (4): 403–36. Hess, L. M. (2014), ‘Portrait of the Father as a Gay Man: A New Story about Gay Aging in Mike Mills’s “Beginners”’, Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association, 47 (2): 163–83. Hinchliff, S. (2014), ‘Sexing Up the Midlife Woman: Cultural Representations of Ageing, Femininity and the Sexy Body’, in I. Whelehan and J. Gwynne (eds), Ageing, Popular Culture and Contemporary Feminism: Harleys and Hormones, 63–77, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Hobbs, A. (2013), ‘Romancing the Crone: Hollywood’s Recent Mature Love Stories’, Journal of American Culture, 36 (1): 42–51. Horton, A. and J. E. Rapf (2013), ‘Comic Introduction. “Make ’em Laugh, Make ’em Laugh”’, in A. Horton and J. E. Rapf (eds), A Companion to Film Comedy, 1–11, Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell. Jackson, D. (2016), Exploring Aging Masculinities: The Body, Sexuality and Social Lives, Palgrave Macmillan. Jermyn, D. (2011), ‘Unlikely Heroines? “Women of a Certain Age” and Romantic Comedy’, Cineaction, 85 (85): 26–33.

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Jermyn, D. (2012), ‘Glorious, Glamorous and that Old Standby, Amorous: The Late Blossoming of Diane Keaton’s Romantic Comedy Career’, Celebrity Studies, 3 (1): 37–51. Jermyn, D. (2014), ‘ “The (Un-Botoxed) Face of a Hollywood Revolution’: Meryl Streep and the “Greying” of Mainstream Cinema’, in I. Whelehan and J. Gwynne (eds), Ageing, Popular Culture and Contemporary Feminism: Harleys and Hormones, 108–23, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Jermyn, D. (2015), ‘“Grey Is the New Green?”: Gauging Age(ing) in Hollywood’s Upper Quadrant Female Audience, The Intern (2015), and the Discursive Construction of “Nancy Meyers”’, Celebrity Studies, 9 (2): 166–85. Marklund, A. (2018), ‘No Country for Old Men: Utopian Stories of Welfare Society’s Shortcomings in A Man Called Ove and The 100-Year-Old Man’, Journal of Aesthetics & Culture, 10 (2): 48–55. Marshall, B. L. (2014), ‘Sexualizing the Third Age’, in C. L. Harrington, D. D. Bielby, and A. R. Bardo (eds), Aging, Media, and Culture, 169–80, Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. Marshall, K. (2009), ‘Something’s Gotta Give and the Classic Screwball Comedy’, Journal of Popular Film and Television, 37 (1): 9–15. Marshall, L., and A. Swinnen (2014), ‘“Let’s Do It Like Grown-Ups”. A Filmic Mènage of Age, Gender, and Sexuality’, in C. L. Harrington, D. D. Bielby, and A. R. Bardo (eds), Aging, Media, and Culture, 157–68, Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. Meadows, R., and K. Davidson (2006), ‘Maintaining Manliness in Later Life: Hegemonic Masculinities and Emphasized Femininities’, in T. M. Calasanti and K. F. Slevin (eds), Age Matters: Realigning Feminist Thinking, 295–312, New York: Routledge. Medina Bañón, R., and B. Zecchi (2020), ‘Technologies of Age: The Intersection of Feminist Film Theory and Aging Studies’, Investigaciones Feministas, 11 (2): 251–62. Mortimer, C. (2015), ‘Angry Old Women: Peggy Mount and the Performance of Female Ageing in the British Sitcom’, Critical Studies in Television, 20 (2): 71–86. Mortimer, C. (2017), ‘Battleaxes, Spinsters and Chars: The Ageing Woman in British Film Comedy of the Mid-Twentieth Century’, PhD dissertation, School of Art, Media and American Studies, University of East Anglia. Available at: https://uea​epri​nts.uea.ac.uk/id/epr​int/65122/1/fin​alfi​nalj​uly.pdf (accessed 9 June 2021). Neale, S. (2000), Genre and Hollywood, London: Routledge. New York Film Academy, ‘12 of the Most Popular Movie Genres by Country’, Student Resources, published 6 August 2016. Available at: https://www.nyfa.edu/stud​ent-resour​ces/12-of-the-most-popu​lar-movie-gen​ res-by-coun​try/ (accessed 2 May 2021). Röber, F. (2020), ‘Laughable Old Men: Conceptions of Ageing Masculinities in the Britcom’, Anglistik: International Journal of English Studies, 31 (2): 153–69. Rowe, K. (1995), The Unruly Woman: Gender and the Genres of Laughter, Austin: University of Texas Press. Schäfer, F., and W. Schwanebeck (2020), ‘An Introduction in Three Jokes’, Anglistik: International Journal of English Studies, 31 (2): 69–76. Seppälä, J. (2015), ‘Contesting Marriage: The Finnish Unromantic Comedy’, in T. Gustafsson and P. Kääpä (eds), Nordic Genre Film. Small Nation Film Cultures in the Global Market, 159–72, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Swedish Film Institute, Analyser och statistik/Publikundersökningar, published 29 November 2017. Available at: https://www.fil​mins​titu​tet.se/sv/fa-kuns​kap-om-film/ana​lys-och-statis​tik/publi​kund​erso​knin​gar/ (accessed 15 November 2021).

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Tincknell, E. (2020), ‘Monstrous Aunties: The Rabelaisian Older Asian Woman in British Cinema and Television Comedy’, Feminist Media Studies, 20 (1): 135–50. Tueth, M. (2012), Reeling with Laughter American Film Comedies: from Anarchy to Mockumentary, Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press. Varjakoski, H. (2019), ‘In and Out of Control: Portraying Older Women in Contemporary Finnish Comedy Films’, European Journal of Cultural Studies, 22 (5–6): 684–99. Whelehan, I., and J. Gwynne (2014), ‘Introduction: Popular Culture’s Silver Tsunami’, in I. Whelehan and J. Gwynne (eds), Ageing, Popular Culture and Contemporary Feminism: Harleys and Hormones, 1–13, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. White, G., and J. Mundy (2012), ‘Introduction’, in Laughing Matters. Understanding Film, Television and Radio Comedy, 1–19, Manchester: Manchester University Press. White, R. (2014), ‘Funny Old Girls’, in I. Whelehan and J. Gwynne (eds), Ageing, Popular Culture and Contemporary Feminism: Harleys and Hormones, 155–71, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Filmography Äkkilähtö (Off the Map) (2016), Dir. T. Lymi, Finland: Solar Films. Beginners (2010), Dir. M. Mills, USA: Olympus Pictures; Parts and Labour; Northwood Productions. The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (2012), Dir. J. Madden, UK: Blueprint Pictures. Book Club (2018), Dir. B. Holderman, USA: Apartment Story; Endeavor Content; June Pictures. The Bucket List (2013), Dir. R. Reiner, USA: Warner Bros.; Zadan / Meron Productions; Two Ton Films. Calendar Girls (2003), Dir. N. Cole, UK: Harbour Pictures. Elsa & Fred (2014), Dir. M. Radford, USA: Cuatro Plus Films; Defiant Pictures; Creative Andina. En man som heter Ove (A Man Called Ove) (2015), Dir. H. Holm, Sweden: Tre Vänner. Going in Style (2017), Dir. Z. Braff, USA: New Line Cinema; Village Roadshow Pictures; De Line Pictures. Mielensäpahoittaja (The Grump) (2014), Dir. D. Karukoski, Finland: Solar Films. Grumpier Old Men (1995), Dir. H. Deutch, USA: Lancaster Gate; Warner Bros. Grumpy Old Men (1993), Dir. D. Petrie, USA: John Davis; Lancaster Gate; Warner Bros. Hundraåringen som klevt ut genom fönstret och försvan (The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out of the Window and Disappeared) (2013), Dir. F. Herngren, Sweden: NICE Scripted Entertainment. Ilosia aikoja, Mielensäpahoittaja (Happier Times, The Grump) (2018), Dir. T. Lymi, Finland: Solar Films. The Intern (2015), Dir. N. Meyers, USA: Waverly Films. It’s Complicated (2010), Dir. N. Meyers, USA: Universal Pictures; Relativity Media; Waverly Films. La cama (The Bed) (2018), Dir. M. Lairana, Argentina: Rio Abajo; Gema Films; Topkapi Films. The Lady in the Van (2015), Dir. N. Hytner, UK: Tristar Pictures; BBC Films; Tristar Productions. Last Vegas (2013), Dir. J. Turteltaub, USA: CBS Film; Good Universe; Laurence Mark Productions. A Man Called Ove (En man som heter Ove) (2015), Dir. H. Holm, Sweden: Tre Vänner; Productions AB; Film I Väst; Nordisk Film. Roskisprinssi (The Garbage Prince) (2011), Dir. R. O. Niemi, Finland: Periferia Productions. Senior Moment (2021), Dir. G. Serafini, USA: Goff Productions. Something’s Gotta Give (2003), Dir. N. Meyers, USA: Columbia Pictures; Warner Bros.; Waverly Films. Teräsleidit (Ladies of Steel) (2020), Dir. P. Tola, Finland: Helsinki filmi. Unfinished Song (2012), Dir. P. A. Williams, UK / Germany: Steel Mill Pictures; Coolmore Productions; Egoli Tossell Pictures.

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Wolke 9 (Cloud 9) (2008), Dir. A. Dresen, Germany: Peter Rommel Productions; Senator International; RBB.

TV Series Golden Girls (1985–92), Creator S. Harris, NBC. Grace and Frankie (2015–22), Creators M. Kauffman and H. J. Morris, NBC. Netflix.

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PART TWO

Themes and Concepts in Contemporary Ageing Studies HEIKE HARTUNG

The chapters in this section bring together thematic concerns and theoretical concepts in contemporary Age(ing) Studies that promise to provide new directions for future research or revise existing, key concepts in the research field. As an interdisciplinary endeavour, Age(ing) Studies has practised the transformation of concepts from literary and film studies by applying them to analyses of the ageing body in different cultural settings. If one of the earliest productive links between the humanities and representations of ageing was constituted through the lenses of Feminist Criticism and Gender Studies, other theoretical approaches emerging in theory’s heyday from the 1970s to the 1990s – such as materialist, psychoanalytic, post-structuralist approaches, queer, and postcolonial theory or, more recently, ecocriticism – have been applied to the study of ageing. The idea that theories travel in time and space, a metaphor first introduced by Edward Said who linked conceptual travel to ‘a point of origin’, ‘a distance traversed’ and ‘conditions of acceptance … or resistances’ (1983: 226–7), is particularly apt for the conceptual framework of Age(ing) Studies. As an appropriately flexible tool of interdisciplinary and transcultural research in the humanities, concepts as ‘sites of debate, awareness of difference, and tentative exchange’ (Bal 2002: 13) have been promoted as the ‘basis for an intellectual adventure’ (Bal 2009: 18), one that Mieke Bal has described as offering ‘miniature theories’ (2009: 19). The circulation and transfer of influential ideas in the humanities has also been defined by cultural ‘turns’ that indicate ‘methodological and conceptual breaks’ which foster processes of ‘differentiation, refiguration and reorientation’ (Bachmann-Medick 2006: 23, qtd in Neumann and Tygstrup 2009: 4). The specific turn to the cultural analysis of embodiment, or the ‘body turn’ in Gender Studies (Krüger-Fürhoff 2005; Braidotti 2011), has been important for theorizing the ageing body. ‘Age’ as the difference which time makes, providing an ‘index that is temporal without being temporary’ (Kunow 2009: 305), is a cultural category that makes a difference also in conceptualizing embodied experience. The first three chapters of Part Two unravel the links between gender, sexualities, and the ‘acculturated body’ (Weiss and Haber 1999: xiii–xiv). Beginning with an overview of American

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feminist criticism in the twentieth century, Nicole Haring and Roberta Maierhofer (Chapter 12) show how the ‘greying’ of feminism, together with Susan Sontag’s important recognition of the ‘double standard of aging’, paved the way for an awareness of age in the 1990s as a cultural category to be reckoned with. The chapter situates Maierhofer’s concept of ‘anocriticism’ as a significant contribution to intersectional approaches to literature. Drawing on the metaphor of ‘waves’ in their historical review of feminist perspectives, the authors argue for a focus on the hidden and marginalized rather than the ‘new’ in the intergenerational and critical reading they practise. In her chapter on ‘queer ageing’ (Chapter 13), Heather Jerónimo asks what ‘queer’ adds to the (in-)visibility of age and how ‘queer’ reconceptualizes the category of ‘age’, providing a global perspective on a growing body of films and literature centring on queer protagonists. She identifies specific themes of queer ageing, queer timelines, and queer life histories, calling into question Western-centric categories of queer theory and history. In addition to bringing together a broad, global range of texts, her research indicates that presently ageing queer identities in non-Western contexts are more frequently kept hidden than acknowledged. Turning to the ageing male body, Josephine Dolan (Chapter 14) investigates the intersection of hegemonic masculinity and ageing in the context of the Hollywood star system. Dolan comes to the conclusion that male stars, who apparently never retire, may reverse the links between old age and decline in their perpetual performances of ‘successful ageing’. At the same time, this uplifting version of the third-age imaginary raises the troubling issue that it remains a predominantly white, heterosexual, and able body to which this narrative is restricted. The subsequent two chapters examine how the aesthetic concepts of late style and performance shape representations of male artists’ old age and the experience of staging female ageing, respectively. Amir Cohen-Shalev (Chapter 15) reconsiders the controversial concept of artistic late style by reviewing the critical positions in the debate against a universalizing, transhistorical notion of late style. As a specific example he draws on the French film-maker Claude Sautet’s life-long career to demonstrate how the challenge of late style as an aesthetic concept may be employed to enliven a humanistic, interdisciplinary study of this concept more generally. Whereas the scarcity of women artists as case studies for late style in art and literary history has frequently been observed as being related to a lack of interest in older female artists (Swinnen 2019; Falcus 2019), Bridie Moore (Chapter 16) shows that the concept of performance is more adaptable to female experience. In a chapter that explores the embodied effects of performances of ageing femininity in recent stage productions of canonical dramas, she analyses three different female roles to examine autoethnographically how these performances manifest, respond to, and challenge age effects in the (middle-)aged, heterosexual, female audience. Focusing on social spectacle more than arts or aesthetics, Sally Chivers’s chapter (Chapter 17) on how the cultural concept of care interacts with the relational turn in age studies reads the Hong Kong film Still Human as a rare treatment of the migrant care worker’s perspective. Relationality is an important issue in this exemplary analysis of a fiction film, in which Chivers illuminates the ethical, emotional, and familial tendencies of this particular story of a Filipina domestic worker and the older disabled man she works for, placing the specific relationship in the context of the dominant stories about what constitutes a good care relationship. The ageing body is addressed in the context of different geographical spaces in the next three chapters, which turn to ageing and the postcolonial in the Caribbean context, to the Indian nation imagined as the aged and gendered maternal body, and to representations of ageing and old age

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in Latin American cinemas. Emily Kate Timms (Chapter 18) considers concepts of ethnicity and race, the postcolonial and decolonial, in order to illustrate how incorporating these concepts significantly shifts the conceptual frame of both postcolonial and Age(ing) Studies. Her reading of Beryl Gilroy’s novel Frangipani House shows how Gilroy’s aesthetics disrupt racialized and gendered expectations of older Afro-Guyanese women, arguing that the linked perspectives of postcolonial and critical Age(ing) Studies may foreground resistive ways of ageing that reimagine agency, care, and intergenerational relations. Turning to representations of age in post-Independence Indian literature, Ira Raja (Chapter 19) reads the contemporary Hindi writer K. B. Vaid’s play ‘Our Old Woman’ as a national allegory. Raja argues that the play continues to deploy age as a metaphor for social, political, and cultural decline, while also feeding off the materiality of the ageing body, to foreground a more ambivalent account of the nation as one that is heterogeneous, discrepant, and mutable rather than timeless, essential, and unchanging. With reference to a wide range of films representing ageing in Latin American cinemas, Barbara Zecchi and Raquel Medina (Chapter 20) illustrate that film discourse is not universally ageist or youth centric. They argue that even though Age(ing) Studies have been conceptualized within a white heteronormative framework, intersectional perspectives may provide new insights into the diversity of the ageing experience. With their contribution they put Latin American film, which has up to now failed to receive proper critical and theoretical consideration, on the map of contemporary Age(ing) Studies. The final three chapters in Part Two examine the ageing body in different kinds of crisis: first, the crisis of climate change; second, the crises of disability and dementia; and third, the crisis of the frail body. In their chapter on climate change, Anna-Christina Kainradl and Ulla Kriebernegg (Chapter 21) analyse how categories of age and gender come into play in the related crisis narratives of old age and anthropogenic climate change. Questions of responsibility and guilt, familiar from the ‘burden narrative’ of old age, are significant also for environmental discourses of intergenerational justice, as Kainradl and Kriebernegg show with reference to dystopian literary texts, which represent a decaying, desiccated nature that is mirrored in descriptions of the ageing female body. The chapter argues for a more sensitive and less ageist conversation about environmental degradation that challenges simple binary constructions of ‘young’ and ‘old’. Turning to entanglements of disability and ageing in films centred on dementia, Hailee YoshizakiGibbons (Chapter 22) reconceptualizes the interconnectedness of disability and ageing, drawing on scholarship from film and disability studies. Yoshizaki-Gibbons reads the film What They Had, which was praised for representing dementia ‘accurately’, as a text that reinforces stigmatizing practices and cultural ideologies. In the final chapter of this section, Elizabeth Barry (Chapter 23) examines the concept of frailty with reference to philosophical and social phenomenology to bring to light the lived experience of older persons. Barry qualifies the guiding assumptions that define old age and determine its treatment when she reconceptualizes frailty as ‘not at odds with vitality’, as something that allows one to find a new life, even ‘a new energy for this life, from within it’. She draws on Joan Didion’s memoir Blue Nights to argue that texts such as this constitute a kind of ‘practical phenomenology’ that can disclose the subjective experience of frailty. As this wide range of concepts in their different relations to embodied ageing shows, the intellectual journey of interdisciplinary Age(ing) Studies is an ongoing process of mapping knowledge about life in time. Conceptualizations of the ageing body move from gender and sexualities to aesthetics and relationality, to the ageing body in space and, in ways that are not as final as they may seem, to the body in crisis.

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REFERENCES Bachmann-Medick, D. (2006), Cultural Turns. Neuorientierungen in den Kulturwissenschaften, Reinbek: Rowohlt. Bal, M. (2002), Travelling Concepts in the Humanities. A Rough Guide, Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Bal, M. (2009), ‘Working with Concepts’, European Journal of English Studies, 13 (1): 13–23. Braidotti, R. (2011), Nomadic Subjects. Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory (2nd edn), New York: Columbia University Press. Falcus, S. (2019), ‘Review of Late Style and Its Discontents: Essays in Art, Literature, and Music, by G. McMullan and S. Smiles, eds.’, Age Culture Humanities 4. Available at: https://agecu​ltur​ehum​anit​ies. org/WP/dou​ble-rev​iew-late-style-and-its-disc​onte​nts-ess​ays-in-art-lit​erat​ure-and-music-edi​ted-by-gor​donmcmul​lan-and-sam-smi​les-2/ (accessed 27 July 2022). Krüger-Fürhoff, I. M. (2005), ‘Körper’, in C. V. Braun and I. Stephan (eds), Gender@Wissen. Ein Handbuch der Gender-Theorien, 66–80, Köln: Böhlau. Kunow, R. (2009), ‘The Coming of Age: The Descriptive Organization of Later Life’, in A. Hornung and R. Kunow (eds), Representation and Decoration in a Postmodern Age, 295–309, Heidelberg: Winter. Neumann, B., and F. Tygstrup (2009), ‘Travelling Concepts in English Studies’, European Journal of English Studies, 13 (1): 1–12. Said, E. (1983), ‘Traveling Theory’, The World, the Text, and the Critic, 226–47, Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Swinnen, A. (2019), ‘Late-Life Creativity’, in Danan Gu and Matthew E. Duprez (eds), Encyclopedia of Gerontology and Population Aging, Springer. Weiss, G., and H. F. Haber, eds. (1999), Perspectives on Embodiment. The Intersections of Nature and Culture, New York: Routledge.

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CHAPTER TWELVE

Feminism, gender, and age NICOLE HARING AND ROBERTA MAIERHOFER

INTRODUCTION Recognition of age as a cultural category in the 1990s would not have been possible without the introduction of gender as a category of analysis in literary and cultural studies in the decades before. Feminist theory determined the theoretical and methodological tools that led to the establishment of Age / Ageing Studies as a field. Susan Sontag, the first to address the intersection of gender and age at a conference of the Institute of Gerontology in 1973, identified the ‘Double Standard of Aging’ as applied to men and women. In a feminist tradition, Sontag early on acknowledged ageing as a social judgement of women rather than as a biological eventuality. Since the beginning of the 1990s, anocriticism (Maierhofer 1995) has been the term used for applying Susan Sontag’s approach of linking theories of gender and age to cultural and literary analysis in order to explain the specificity of ageing as a cultural category. Therefore, this article discusses the development of a feminist theoretical position in terms of age and ageing and will present as an example of a reading of gender and age Toni Cade Bambara’s short story ‘My Man Bovanne’, published in 1972 during the second wave of feminism, in order to emphasize the inherently intersectional and relational aspect of such a text when an anocritical approach is applied.

FEMINISM IN THE US-AMERICAN CONTEXT In Feminist Studies, the widely used wave chronology understands first-wave feminism as a movement that predominantly focused on legal aspects and made women’s right to vote their priority. Significant events of the first wave include the first women’s rights convention held at Seneca Falls in the United States in 1848 and finally, the achievement of the right to vote in the United States in 1920 (Laughlin et al. 2010: 76). Besides women’s suffrage, the movement fought for more female political representation and for marriage and property rights (Zimmerman 2017: 55). Following the legal implementation of women’s rights of the first wave, second-wave feminism emerged through the civil rights movement in the 1960s and expanded the discussion by offering an understanding of detailed mechanisms of power and discrimination, such as rape, sexual harassment, and violence. Additionally, second-wave feminism addressed institutionalized gender disparities with regard to workplace discrimination, unequal pay, and access to education. Sexuality and reproductive rights were also on second-wave feminism’s agenda (Phillips and Cree 2014: 937). The movement’s slogan ‘The personal is political’ (Hanish 1970) summarized that personal experience was now understood as determined by political, social, and economic

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contexts (Maierhofer 2019: 2). Importantly, Simone de Beauvoir’s pivotal work The Second Sex (1949) provided the theoretical foundation for distinguishing between sex (biology) and gender (culturally constructed). Her famous claim that ‘one is not born but rather becomes a woman’ (6) guided second-wave feminists in their consciousness-building and awareness-raising campaigns to challenge patriarchal systems that privilege on the basis of sex and, hence, declare male-centred ideologies the norm and define women as ‘the other’. Feminist theories and approaches developed throughout the 1970s and 1980s and allowed for further adaptations addressing any form of oppression and for an understanding of all identity markers as cultural constructions (e.g. ‘race’, ‘class’, ‘age’). The popular matrix of ‘race’, ‘class’, and ‘gender’, especially influential in US-American cultural theory, was expanded in 1989, when Kimberlé Crenshaw coined the term ‘intersectionality’. Crenshaw refers to the interconnectedness of power based on different social categories, which as a legal scholar, she demonstrated by a case of a Black woman facing discrimination on the basis of both gender and race. While authors and activists, such as Angela Davis (1981), Audre Lorde (1984), and Gloria Anzaldua (1987) (among others), provided pivotal texts on the multi-burdened oppression of women, Crenshaw’s term offered a concept that could express both the gendered social and political as well as cultural constraints experienced over the lifecourse. Understanding identity construction as a complex and interconnected reality offered feminist theorists and writers a basis for their approach of investigating gendered lives. Despite the fact that the term ‘intersectionality’ received broader recognition only much later, early on it already served as a useful point of departure in feminist theory to express an understanding of how (gendered) power dynamics govern our lives. Although, in her work, Crenshaw aimed at addressing in particular the intersections of race and gender in the application of law, the feminist movement advanced her understanding and used it as a guiding principle to address interplays of ‘gender, ability, age, race, sexuality, nationality, and class’, which cause discrimination dependently and / or independently from one another (Okolosie 2014: 90). Thus, intersectionality has been labelled as one of the most significant theoretical contributions that gender studies has so far made (MacCall 2005: 1771). In 1992, Rebecca Walker declared the emergence of third-wave feminism in ‘Becoming the Third Wave’. Female empowerment and gender equality were at the forefront of third-wave feminism, which also aimed at catalysing social and political involvement to counter heteronormativity and colonialism. Reclaiming the political activism of the decades before, feminists now sought political power as a way to turn theoretical outrage into action. Additionally, the progress of digitalization brought opportunities for digital feminist activism, to which Donna Haraway’s earlier developed account on the ‘cyborg’ (1986) contributed significantly and was picked up and adopted by digital feminist activists. Hence, the spheres of feminist activism and theoretical development expanded with the third wave (Zimmerman 2017: 55). In addition to the increased significance of digitalization, intersectionality and the inclusion of diverse voices, such as from the Black, Indigenous, and LGBTQI+ communities, continued to be important issues within third- and fourth-wave feminism. Addressing all forms of social stereotypes and advocating for the deconstruction of binary thinking became tools for negotiating a feminist consciousness in the third and fourth waves. Having won the major legal battles in prior movements, it had now become more difficult to define how and where gender inequalities could and should be addressed, as both the academic and the public discussion concerning fourth-wave feminism in terms of definition, starting points, and key arguments had become challenged and contested

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territories. Generally, fourth-wave feminism expanded the ideas of previous movements and has had its focus on diversity, intersectionality, trans inclusion, sexual minority rights, reproductive justice, and the deconstruction of privilege (Baumgardner 2011; Vogel 2014). Furthermore, this contemporary movement relies on the understanding of global and local events as interrelated and thus highlights the importance of relationality. In terms of the re-politicization of second-wave politics, it is also important to acknowledge that the ‘old’ concept of ‘the personal is political’ continues to be an important feminist tool. E. Ann Kaplan has argued that the contemporary feminist movement also aims at uniting previous movements to determine a feminist consciousness that confronts the complex world we are all living in to create collaboration across national, racial, and ethnic divides (Kaplan 2003: 51–5). By referring to feminist theory and their distinct timelines with the term ‘waves’, which suggests an adaptable and fluid as well as isolated and separate quality, the interconnectedness of concerns related to gendered conditions and experiences are ignored. Seemingly favouring individualism over community, self-centredness over solidarity, the term itself has become the issue. Despite the fact that the metaphor allows for a recognition of the constructedness of established scholarship based on exclusion and hierarchy, it also bears the danger of emphasizing the stereotypical notion that theories need to be based on competition rather than collaboration, on exclusion rather than inclusion, and therefore reinforces a patriarchal progress narrative countering an intergenerational and intersectional supportive approach. Whereas the metaphor of ‘wave’ might be read as erasure, it can also be defined as disturbances in a regular and organized way. No longer relying on the redundancy of one ‘old’ idea being replaced by something new, an anocritical analysis as an intersectional feminist approach can appreciate the interconnectedness of time and experience, thus supporting an intergenerational understanding of current (feminist) needs and demands. No longer pitting legitimate feminist concerns of one generation against the other, social, political, economic, and cultural power can be made visible by literary texts, referring to the past, present, and future. Cultural representations document the material realities of what it means to live at a certain time, in a certain place, and thus provide insights into the mechanisms of patriarchal structures by questioning individual as well as collective social limitations and boundaries experienced in time and space in a world structured on the basis of exclusion. In addition, the narratives themselves as well as their interpretations often present strong, sometimes neglected, female voices of resistance and thus are an important feminist tool to question and subvert conventionality and existing power dynamics. Literary texts presenting diverse life narratives can be interpreted as an indication of the power of the status quo as well as documenting subversive voices as a demand for change. Feminist literary criticism is not only strongly linked to political and cultural activism of the feminist movement, but also can be seen as activism in its own right, as it offers an engagement with existing circumstances and demands revision and change. Judith Fetterley’s concept of the ‘resisting reader’ (1977), for example, as a distinct and significant feminist literary approach set out to change the understanding of literary criticism and aimed at stimulating a revision of literary texts. While feminist literary critics of the 1980s and 1990s aimed at deconstructing the canon to incorporate previously neglected writings (specifically by women and minority groups) and to provide critical interpretations of established literature guided by feminist theory, later generations have been able to contribute to an already more open and inclusive canon by defining in more detail the challenges of gendered experiences over the lifecourse. Following this feminist tradition, age

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has not only become an important intersecting identity marker, but also literary critics in the field of Age(ing) Studies have taken on the task of feminist critics to interpret the world and at the same time to perform a political act by changing the consciousness of the reader and their relationship to what they read. Thus, as significant cultural representations, literary texts are still tools for feminist criticism not only to discuss gender and its intersection with age, but also point to the importance of an intersectional reading (Maierhofer 2019: 2).

GENDER AND AGE: INTERSECTIONALITY AND ANOCRITICISM Susan Sontag, the first to address the intersection of gender and age as a cultural category at a conference of the Institute of Gerontology in 1973, identified the ‘Double Standard of Aging’ as applied to men and women. In her analysis of the difference of ageing for men and women, Sontag distinguished between old age and ageing. Positioning herself in a feminist tradition, Sontag understands ageing as a social and gendered construct and thus argues that old age is ‘a genuine ordeal, one that men and women undergo in a similar way’, whereas growing old is ‘an ordeal of the imagination – a moral disease, a pathology – intrinsic to which is the fact that it afflicts women much more than men’ (Sontag 1972: 31). It is, thus, the social judgement of women and their ageing that limits them to imagine themselves without social and cultural constraints. Youthfocussed narratives of energy, mobility, and ‘wanting’ have all traditionally been associated with ‘masculinity’, whereas age has been associated with incompetence, helplessness, and passivity – all qualities that are traditionally defined as ‘feminine’. Women and old age are hence seen as ‘the other’ and masculinity and youth are seen as the norm (Woodward 1991). By challenging normative social constructs, second-wave feminism – although ignoring the category of age at the time – laid the foundation for the inclusion of age as a social and cultural category. In 1978, Nina Baym criticized American literary scholarship for having a bias in favour of things male: whaling ships rather than sewing circles as a symbol of the human community. Baym speaks of literary critics as ‘displaying an exquisite compassion for the crises of the adolescent male, but altogether impatient with the parallel crises of the female’ (1978: 20). From the 1990s on, feminists, such as Germaine Greer or Betty Friedan, were confronted with their own ageing and demanded an inclusion of the intersection of gender and age when discussing gendered life experiences. While feminist literary scholarship in the 1970s and 1980s turned from analysing female characters in male texts according to male experience and instead chose female experience and perspectives with an emphasis on the earlier years in life, with ‘the greying of American feminism’ (Maierhofer 2000: 68), it was no longer adolescence but middle and old age that became a concern to feminists, and age was thus introduced as a social and cultural marker. Greer, for example, positioned menopause as a feminist rite of passage of empowerment (Greer 1992: 32). However, in literary and cultural studies, investigations of the intersections of gender and age continue to be scarce. Roberta Maierhofer (1995, 1999, 2000, 2003, 2004a, 2004b, 2007, 2012, 2019), Kathleen Woodward (1999), and then Sally Chivers (2003) were among the first to investigate this particular intersection, whereas among recent scholarship José Armengol (2018) and Linda Hess (2019) have taken up the task of exploring this particular intersection in their scholarship. Particularly the concept of anocriticism has emerged from this investigation and is an approach used since the beginning of the 1990s to investigate the intersections of age and gender. Reflecting on Sontag’s gendered understanding of age / ageing, anocriticism evolved from critical investigations

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of fictional accounts of older women in US-American culture, as one of the most individualized cultural domains that allowed for an individual investigation of female ageing on the basis of multicultural narratives. By doing so, anocriticism developed into a feminist tool to focus on the similarities of older women and their individual potential for resistance and subversion in their process of growing older (Maierhofer 1999: 130; 2003: 26, 2004a: 320, 2004b: 156). Hence, anocriticism aims at ‘linking theories of gender and age in search of a specific culture of aging’ (Maierhofer 2019: 3). Elaine Showalter’s term ‘gynocriticism’ (1977, 1985) – a study of women writers and their history, styles, themes, genres, and structures – and Greer’s term ‘anophobia’ (1992: 4) to define the fear of old women influenced Maierhofer to define anocriticism as a ‘method to trace the aspect of aging in cultural representations, the stories we tell ourselves, in order to generate understanding of what it means, in Margaret Morganroth Gullette’s (2004) term, to be “aged by culture” ’ (Maierhofer 2019: 3). Furthermore, anocriticism demands a distinction between chronological age and cultural stereotypes associated with old people, following feminist theories’ distinction between sex (biological) and gender (cultural). As an inherently feminist approach, anocriticism thus insists on a deconstruction of binaries to escape the confining oppositions of young and old, and also of male and female. This implies examining how age is actively constructed and shaped not only by writers and readers of literary texts, but also by people in society in general (Maierhofer 2003). In doing so, anocriticism, however, aims not at providing a strict theoretical structure, but rather an interpretative approach which understands the agency of a gendered individual experience of ageing as a protest against the generalization of individual experiences as the norm. As this approach was developed in the context of US-American literary and cultural studies, the traditional cultural narrative of the United States with its focus on the individual invites interpretations that investigate the ambivalences of narratives, where an established cultural narrative of rugged individualism and proclaimed self-sufficiency is questioned by portraying not only tensions between self and other, but also providing narratives of connection, community, and support by marginalized groups. These ambivalences allow readers to understand not only individual and collective limitations and boundaries, but also imagined transgressions of social norms as a determining part of individual narratives (Maierhofer 2003: 33, 2007: 121). By focusing on stories by strong and self-confident socially marginalized protagonists, we as readers can understand social structures and boundaries not as ‘natural’ or ‘essential’, but as human-made constructions of power relying on exclusion on the basis of defined aspects of belonging. As a precise approach for analysing the intersections of age and gender, anocriticism has provided a useful tool to contribute to the solving of the ‘eponymous “et cetera” problem’ (Cho, Crenshaw, and McCall 2013: 787) of intersectionality. Since the coining of the term by Crenshaw in 1989, intersectionality has travelled and proven to be a valuable tool across disciplines and practices but has also revealed its limitations. Sumi Cho, Kimberlé Crenshaw, and Leslie McCall (2013) describe the ‘et cetera’ problem as an issue regarding ‘the number of categories and kinds of subjects (e.g. privileged or subordinate) stipulated or implied by an intersectional approach’ (787). Guided by a feminist understanding of interconnectedness of identity markers, anocriticism can be seen as highlighting in particular the intersections of age and gender, yet also taking additional categories into consideration thus offering a valuable tool for Cultural Gerontology and Age(ing) Studies. Barbara Ratzenböck (2019), for instance, applied it in her sociological work and has identified four crucial dimensions of anocriticism that support its intersectional and interdisciplinary

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character: (1) age and ageing’s collective cultural construction and relation to gender, (2) the individual dimension of ageing, (3) people’s interpretive power and narrative performance with regard to age and ageing, and (4) age and ageing’s potential for resistance and change (2019: 27). As intersectionality from the start has been viewed less as a fixed system, but more of a point of departure to better understand individual identities within social structures, that allows a gathering for indefinite explorations of the overlapping and conflicting dynamics (Lykke 2011), anocriticism provides a valuable route for intersectional thinking. As Jeff Hearn and Sharon Wray (2015) have concluded, ‘the challenge is to theorize the interconnections of age, gender(s), sexualities, ethnicities, and other social divisions, and their location in time, place and culture’ (206). Although, as a feminist approach, anocriticism predominantly explored the intersection of women and age, it also provides the opportunity to investigate the intersection of age and all other genders. As traditionally it was necessary to focus feminist advocacy on women as the ones experiencing the worst effects of gender discrimination, they were also the ones who made gender a visible political category. Since the late 1980s, nearly parallel to the development of anocriticism, gender studies began to pay increased attention to men’s lives as well as to an understanding of the linkage between all genders in the upholding and resistance of power structures. Michael Kimmel (2000), as a forerunner of including the studies of all genders in gender theory, advocates for investigating ‘men as gendered beings’. As a result, masculinity – namely, the associations, behaviours, roles, signs, and / or practices related with being a man / socially male – has been redefined as a specifically gendered category, rather than the paradigm of ‘universality’, revealing it as a social construction across different times and cultures (Hearn 2006; Gilmore 1990). Addressing the intersections of age and gender with regard to men, Sontag (1972) as well as de Beauvoir (1949) have defined the contradicting experiences of ageing for men and women. Late life has not only been recurrently described as a lesser concern for men, but also as a completely different reality for men and women. Nevertheless, an anocritical reading of cultural representations of gender allows us to explore the potential of resistance and subversion of gendered ageing as stereotypical interpretations limit all genders and restrict old protagonists to define themselves as individuals in their own rights. Feminist theory has laid the theoretical ground for epistemological developments to include and constantly adapt its realm to provide inclusive gender narratives and approaches. Based on a feminist theoretical stance, the intersections of all genders and ageing can be investigated through anocriticism, particularly by highlighting Ratzenböck’s (2019) four identified dimensions. Contemporary feminist theory has highlighted how gender transformation processes and changes, such as gender fluid, non-binary and trans identities, are ingrained in feminist movements and important to address in order to continue the work for social and political justice. Literary representations again have provided a concrete arena to investigate the potential of fictional subversion to provide diverse voices a stage to define themselves as individuals who are part of the collective (grand) narrative. In their fictional narratives, contemporary authors have provided subversive interpretations of normative assumptions concerning the status quo and thus have deconstructed binaries of gender and age as an inherent feminist practice. Hence, looking at gender and age and its intersections has provided the possibility for constant adaptations of the definition of gender and age and offers a gendered interpretation of what it means to age at a certain place at a certain time.

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‘MY MAN BOVANNE’ (1972) – AN ANOCRITICAL READING Demonstrating how an anocritical reading of cultural representations can create a basis for selfdetermination that goes beyond the realm of fictionality, Toni Cade Bambara’s short story ‘My Man Bovanne’ from her first collection of writings, Gorilla, My Love (1972), will be used for a close reading to explore the intersections of gender and ageing as well as the complex intersectionality this literary piece represents. Revisiting a text from the 1970s acknowledges the importance of such texts for the present as a building block for following generations of writers. Without the important contribution of writers such as Paule Marshall, Toni Morrison, Audre Lorde, Adrienne Rich, or Toni Cade Bambara, the writing of those that followed would not have been possible. By applying Ratzenböck’s four dimensions of anocriticism when interpreting a text from the 1970s, the importance of interdisciplinary academic collaboration also becomes evident. Toni Cade Bambara’s text is very much placed in the time and context of her writing as well as offering a general understanding to the restrictions, limitations, and opportunities that ageing offers. Presented as a story of an individual’s experience positioned in a collective setting, it makes visible the interpretative power and narrative performance of the protagonists. Most importantly, it allows an understanding of ageing’s potential for resistance and change, as the story itself counters a conventional ‘progress’ narrative of life by positioning an individual ‘progress’ narrative of development. Therefore, anocriticism provides the possibility for resistance and subversion by regarding literary and cultural representations as manifestations of power dynamics which theorize intersections of age and gender. Hence, anocriticism contributes to solving the ‘et cetera’ problem of intersectional theory by providing a distinct approach for gender and age within the realm of intersectionality. Bambara’s short story counters the invisibility of older women in society by centring a female character who is independent and self-confident and thus repudiates trivializing, cultural stereotypes associated with old age. The theme of visibility is introduced early in the short story by the narrator, Hazel, when she observes that ‘blind people got a hummin jones if you notice’ (3). Referring to the blind man Bovanne, Hazel signifies that he goes unnoticed and is ignored due to his disability and lower social class. Bovanne thus lacks a form of authority and power because of his invisibility. The characters share the feeling of invisibility based on their intersecting identity markers. Hazel is invisible as an older Black woman in a society that values appearance and youth, whereas Bovanne is invisible due to his class and disability. Additionally, both characters in the short story are African American and thus they bring another significant identity category into the mix. The intersectionality that the short story so openly displays demonstrates how the popular matrix of ‘race, class, and gender’ is expanded by the intersecting category of age. Not only old age, but also youth is explored in the short story and hence, intergenerational tensions are omnipresent. Hazel’s children critically interfere with their mother’s behaviour towards Bovanne. Juxtaposing the younger generation with the older, common characteristics of these binaries become apparent. The younger generations stand for public opinion and are characterized through language and political speech, particularly viewed in the social and historical context of the story. Hazel and Bovanne, on the other hand, communicate during their intimate dancing through sensuality and body language: And I press up close to dance with Bovanne who blind and I’m hummin and he hummin, chest to chest like talkin. Touch talkin like the heel of the hand on the tambourine or on a drum. (4)

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Hazel is caught between seeing herself through the critical eyes of her children and the affectionate ones of Bovanne, who appreciates her sexuality and appearance as a ‘very pretty woman’ (5). The intimacy between Bovanne and Hazel causes an immediate reaction in her children, who drag her into another room with the clear intention to put an end to her sensual behaviour on the dance floor. Her children’s fixed perception of how their mother should behave in the scene is challenged by Hazel asking them to define how she danced with Bovanne to which her daughter, Elo, replies, ‘Like a bitch in heat’ (5). Her son, Task, adds, ‘Well uhh, I was going to say like one of them sexstarved ladies getting on in years’ (5). Her children’s strong remarks hurt Hazel tremendously (‘I don’t answer cause I’ll cry’ [5]‌). The children have a problematic perception not only of their mother’s persona as an older woman, but also of Bovanne due to his status and abilities. Bovanne, who has always supported and helped their community with his handy skills, is being degraded by Hazel’s children. Elo, in particular, makes condescending remarks about his appearance and disability and calls him ‘that tom’ (6), declaring his subordination to others. Addressing the apparent tension between the characters, Hazel concludes that their reaction can only be caused by the ‘generation gap’ (6), where her children again lecture her for her lack of knowledge: ‘Generation gap’, spits Elo, like I suggested castor oil and fricassee possum in the milk-shakes or somethin. ‘That’s a white concept for a white phenomenon. There is no generation gap among Black people.’ (6) Addressing the generation gap as a ‘white concept’, the characters demonstrate the political consciousness of the story that engages with the challenges of white supremacy. Yet, declaring the generation gap as a social construction for white people romanticizes the idea of generational collaboration in the Black community and thus diminishes Hazel’s experience of being misunderstood and rendered invisible by her children. Clearly not agreeing with her children’s explanation of the generational tension between them, Hazel finds herself once again invisible. Thus, the narrator embodies an ambivalence of conformity regarding old age, where her children view her as asexual and old, yet she views herself as a sensual being. The relation between Bovanne and Hazel’s children is also noteworthy as it brings into question the understanding of masculinities. Emphasizing binaries of race, class, and gender, Bovanne is not only blind, but old, Black, and poor, whereas Hazel and her family are shown as part of the upcoming, affluent, and self-confidently politically active Black elite. Bovanne, as an older blind man, does not embody power for the younger characters in the story. Thus, he is invisible for their political agenda and even seen as a threat to their programme due to his affection towards their mother, whom they will need for their activism. Hence, Bovanne embodies the intersections of race, class, gender, age, and disabilities and thus challenges heteronormative assumptions of masculinity which are associated with power and youth. What R. W. Connell (2005) calls ‘hegemonic masculinity’ is subverted by Bovanne’s character in the short story and therefore amplifies a diversity of masculinities that are created on the basis of intersectionality. Additionally, the intersections of race, class, gender, age, and disability in Bovanne’s character enhance the relationality towards the other characters, particularly the younger generation, who disregard him due to his lack of authority and power. Understanding masculinities not only in their plurality based on intersectionality, but also through their relationalities towards each other reveals power dynamics of domination and subordination. Moreover, the recognition of relationalities uncovers their construction based on inclusion and exclusion and thus highlights

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the gender politics that can be found not only in the construction of femininities and womanhood, but also in masculinities and manhood (Connell 2005: 37). Both Bovanne and Hazel have been invited to the party to serve the purpose of winning a certain vote and to represent the ‘grass roots’ of the community. Through their narrow definition of the Black power movement, the children demand a certain kind of Black identity of their mother and become frustrated and angry at her for not conforming with their idea of how a woman of her age should act. They scold Hazel for not being Black enough, and her daughter accuses her for not being political enough and thus invisible. Hazel performs a political act by asking Bovanne, who is being ignored, to dance. Her children’s reaction towards her interaction with Bovanne make her realize that there is more at stake than simply the misperception of a blind man. She understands that her children no longer see her as an individual with needs of her own, but rather expect her to support their political agenda in a ‘council of the elders’, exercising influence in the community in favour of her children. This council would merely generate good will in the community, without having a leadership position, authority, or power. In the encounter between Hazel and her children, Bambara shows the limitations of a political movement that merely allows for the binary distinction between Black and white, young and old. The condescending arrogance of her children reminds Hazel of the behaviour of the police when they dominate minorities and discriminate on the basis of race. In this case, however, the issue is not skin colour, but age – ‘Pullin me out of the party and hustlin me into some stranger’s kitchen in the back of a bar just like the damn police. And ain’t like I’m old old’ (5–6). The treatment Hazel experiences makes her realize that she and Bovanne are treated similarly and thus the relationality between intersecting categories of oppression and domination are made apparent. Hence, she takes the empty rhetoric of her children (‘old folks is the nation’ [6]‌) seriously and uses the political jargon to explain why she leaves the party with Bovanne. Although Hazel dances at first with Bovanne out of compassion and as a way of protesting his treatment at the event, in the course of the story she begins to respect him. The title ‘My Man Bovanne’ already indicates the growing relationship between the two and, as an abridgment for the phrase ‘that’s my man, Bovanne’, becomes an expression of condescending praise and seeming acceptance. Bovanne as everybody’s man becomes Hazel’s man when she finally takes him home with her. By taking care of Bovanne as a deliberate act, Hazel also takes care of herself and therefore dissolves the dichotomy of self and other. In this short story published in the 1970s, Hazel as a protagonist is shown as privileged in terms of class but marginalized in terms of gender and age. Therefore, her proud and defiant assertion of her sensuality, sexuality, and beauty, and acceptance of her age demonstrate age and ageing’s potential for resistance and change, which eventually lead to a reconciliation of self and other.

CONCLUSION Academic traditions demand a constant framing of research in terms of a narrative of progress. Innovation is frequently interpreted as the new and the need to overcome the old. Therefore, literary gerontology is often caught up in discovering unchartered territory and claiming unknown academic land for exploration. However, feminist scholarship has shown that it is not the new, but the hidden, the marginalized that contributes to the field. Age(ing) Studies offers the possibility of a discussion of identity as both possibilities and restrictions of the individual through social structures

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and the necessity to express this search of the self within the social context as an expression of one’s own narrated identity in terms of both success and failure, but more importantly of all the ambivalences that lie in between (Maierhofer 2019). ‘Re-vision’, then, ‘the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical direction’ (Rich 1972: 18) can thus lead to a new awareness of our own identity and the ageing process. When Lisa Tuttle (1986) defined feminist theory as asking ‘new questions of old texts’ (184), this can be read as an invitation to re-vise and re-visit texts intended to question the status-quo and initiate change – fiction, nonfiction, as well as academic – to re-assess their importance, but also to re-position such texts in terms of social, cultural, and political achievement in the here and now. This ‘democratic’ positioning can thus offer insights that define anew the necessary defined goals and offer an intergenerational perspective. Investigating intersectionality and relationality within a short story of the recent past through an anocritical lens enhances an understanding of individual experiences of ageing and gender that take place in a certain structure, at a certain time and in a certain place. Thus, ageing becomes visible as a matrix of experience and time. By re-visioning the two protagonists of the story, Hazel and Bovanne, as individuals resisting confining stereotypical roles, we as readers, despite differences, can learn to resist fixed notions of age and gender, as these fictional expressions – from a different time, a different place, and different circumstances – offer us ‘counter worlds’ (Maierhofer 2003) that allow us all to move beyond established definitions of self.

REFERENCES Anzaldua, G. (1987), Borderlands / La Frontera: The New Mestiza, San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books. Armengol, J. M. (2018), ‘Aging as Emasculation? Rethinking Aging Masculinities in Contemporary U.S. Fiction’, Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, 59 (3): 355–67. Baumgardner, J. (2011), ‘Is There a Fourth Wave? Does It Matter?’, Feminist.com. Available at: https://www. femin​ist.com/resour​ces/artspe​ech/gen​wom/baum​gard​ner2​011.html (accessed 29 October 2021). Baym, N. (1978), Woman’s Fiction: A Guide to Novels by and about Women in America, 1820–1870, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Cade Bambara, T. (1972), ‘My Man Bovanne’, in T. Cade Bambara (ed.), Gorilla, My Love, 3–10, New York: Vintage Books. Chivers, S. (2003), From Old Woman to Older Women: Contemporary Culture and Women’s Narratives, Columbus: Ohio State University Press. Cho, S., K. W. Crenshaw, and L. McCall (2013), ‘Toward a Field of Intersectionality Studies: Theory, Applications, and Praxis’, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 38 (4): 785–810. Connell, R. W. (2005), Masculinities, 2nd edn, Berkeley: University of California Press. Crenshaw, K. W. (1989), ‘Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics’, University of Chicago Legal Forum 1 (1989): 143–67. Davis, A. (1981), Women, Race and Class, New York: Random House. de Beauvoir, S. (1949), The Second Sex, London: Vintage Classics. Fetterley, J. (1977), The Resisting Reader: A Feminist Approach to American Fiction, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Gilmore, D. (1990), Manhood in the Making: Cultural Concepts of Masculinity, New Hampshire, CT: Yale University Press.

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Greer, G. (1992), The Change: Women, Aging and the Menopause, New York: Knopf. Gullette, M. M. (2004), Aged by Culture, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Hanish, C. (1970), ‘The Personal Is Political’, Carolhanisch.org, Available at: http://www.carol​hani​sch.org/ (accessed 29 October 2021). Haraway, D. (1986), ‘A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s’, Australian Feminist Studies, 2 (4): 1–42. Hearn, J. (2006), European Perspectives on Men and Masculinities: National and Transnational Approaches, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Hearn, J., and S. Wray (2015), ‘Gender: Implications of a Contested Era’, in J. Twigg and W. Martin (eds), Routledge Handbook of Cultural Gerontology, 201–9, New York: Routledge. Hess, L. M. (2019), Queer Aging in North American Fiction, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Kaplan, E. A. (2003), ‘Feminist Futures: Trauma, the Post-9/11 World and a Fourth Feminism?’, Journal of International Women’s Studies, 4 (2): 46–59. Kimmel, M. S. (2000), The Gendered Society, New York: Oxford University Press. Laughlin, K., J. Gallagher, D. S. Cobble, E. Boris, P. Nadasen, S. Gilmore, and L. Zarnow (2010), ‘Is It Time to Jump Ship? Historians Rethink the Waves Metaphor’, Feminist Formations, 22 (1): 76–135. Lorde, A. (1984), Sister Outsider, Berkley: Crossing Press. Lykke, N. (2011), ‘Intersectional Analysis: Black Box or Useful Critical Feminist Thinking Technology’, in M. T. Herrera Vivar and H. Lutz (eds), Framing Intersectionality – Debates on a Multi-Faceted Concept in Gender Studies, 207–21, London: Routledge. MacCall, L. (2005), ‘The Complexity of Intersectionality’, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 30 (3): 1771–800. Maierhofer, R. (1995), ‘The Graying of American Feminism’, in T. Frank (ed.), Values in American Society, 113–21, Budapest: Eötvös Loránd University. Maierhofer, R. (1999), ‘Desperately Seeking the Self: Gender, Age, and Identity in Tillie Olsen’s Tell Me a Riddle and Michelle Herman’s Missing’, Educational Gerontology 25 (2): 129–41. Maierhofer, R. (2000), ‘Simone de Beauvoir and the Graying of American Feminism’, Journal of Aging and Identity, 5: 67–77. Maierhofer, R. (2003), Salty Old Women Frauen, Altern und Identität in der amerikanischen Literatur und Kultur, Essen: Die Blaue Eule. Maierhofer, R. (2004a), ‘The Old Woman as Prototypical American’, in W. Hölbling and K. Rieser (eds), What Is American? New Identities in U.S. Culture, 319–36, Münster: LIT. Maierhofer, R. (2004b), ‘Third Pregnancy: Women, Ageing, and Identity in American Culture. An Anocritical Approach’, in C. Jansohn (eds), Old Age and Ageing in British and American Culture and Literature, 155–71, Münster: LIT. Maierhofer, R. (2007), ‘Der gefährliche Aufbruch zum Selbst: Frauen, Altern und Identität in der amerikanischen Kultur. Eine anokritische Einführung’, in U. Pasero, Ursula Pasero, Gertrud M. Backes, and Klaus R. Schroeter (eds), Altern in Gesellschaft. Ageing – Diversity – Inclusion, 111–27, Wiesbaden: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften. Maierhofer, R. (2012), ‘Das Leben als narrativer Akt: Altern als erzählen’, in H. Mitterbauer and K. Scherke (eds), Moderne. Kulturwissenschaftliches Jahrbuch 6 (2010/11). Themenschwerpunkt: Alter(n), 97–111, Vienna: Bolzano Studien Verlag. Maierhofer, R. (2019), ‘Feminism and Aging in Literature’, in D. Gu and M. E. Dupre, Encyclopedia of Gerontology and Population Aging, 1–8, Cham: Springer.

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Okolosie, L. (2014), ‘Open Space: Beyond “Talking” and “Owning” Intersectionality’, Feminist Review, 108: 90–6. Phillips, R., and V. E. Cree (2014), ‘What Does the “Fourth Wave” Mean for Teaching Feminism in TwentyFirst Century Social Work?’, Social Work Education: The International Journal, 33 (7): 930–43. Ratzenböck, B. (2019), ‘Media Relations. How and Why Older Women Care for Information and Communication Technologies’, PhD dissertation, Department of Sociology / Center for Inter-American Studies, University of Graz. Rich, A. (1972), ‘When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision’, College English, 34 (1): 18–30. Showalter, E. (1977), A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from Bronte to Lessing, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Sontag, S. (1972), ‘The Double Standard of Aging’, Saturday Rev, 55: 29–38. Tuttle, L. (1986), Encyclopedia of Feminism, Harlow: Longman. Vogel, W. (2014), ‘Riding the Fourth Wave in a Changing Sea’, The Brooklyn Rail: Critical Perspectives on Art, Politics, and Culture. Available at: https://brook​lynr​ail.org/2014/09/crit​icsp​age/rid​ing-the-fou​ rth-wave-in-a-chang​ing-sea (accessed 29 October 2021). Walker, R. (1992), ‘Becoming the Third Wave’, Ms. Magazine, 11 (2): 39–41. Woodward, K. (1991), Aging and Its Discontents: Freud and Other Fictions, Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Woodward, K. (1999), Figuring Age: Women, Bodies, Generations, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Zimmerman, T. (2017), ‘#Intersectionality: The Fourth Wave Feminist Twitter Community’, Atlantis, 38 (1): 54–70.

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CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Queer ageing HEATHER JERÓNIMO

INTRODUCTION When older queer characters are fortunate enough to exist in literature or film, they often symbolize loss (of health, vitality, sexuality) as they are juxtaposed against both youth and heterosexuality. All ageing individuals inhabit the socially queered space of otherness regardless of sexuality, existing within the fluid category of old age (Hess 2019) and inhabiting bodies prone to ‘abject leakages’ (Sandberg 2008: 125). Linn Sandberg and Barbara Marshall were among the first theorists to assert that all ageing is a queer endeavour, especially for those who do not participate in ‘successful ageing’, a concept defined by Rowe and Kahn in 1987 as having three components: ‘low risk of disease and disease-related disability; maintenance of high mental and physical function; and continued engagement with life’ (Rowe and Kahn 2015: 593).1 While all ageing individuals are othered, older people with additional marginalized identity markers – related to queerness, race, ethnicity, or class – occupy the intersection of multiple social invisibilities, especially if they cannot achieve the heteropatriarchal and ableist standards (Sandberg 2008: 121) of successful ageing. Acknowledging ageing as a queered construct creates space for discussion of the multiplicities of ageing, a concept Sandberg elucidates upon with affirmative old age, a term that recognizes the realities of the ageing body without marking it with negative connotations. This is a challenge to the binary notion that ageing must either be successful (non-existent) or a narrative of decline (Sandberg 2013: 11–12). While all ageing contains queer potential and characteristics, this chapter assesses global examples of older literary and cinematic characters who identify as queer due to their sexuality. Literature and film’s inclusion of older characters – although they are rarely foregrounded – is slowly shifting from a negative focus on narratives of old age that ‘revel in its disadvantages’ (Chivers 2011: xx) and reveal society’s unease with older people to an incorporation of more diverse and positive representations of older characters. Common negative themes about older queer individuals include the narrative of ageing as decay, loss of sexual vigour, uncertainty about the future, and the trope of the predatory older gay individual.2 Another prevalent theme addresses queer individuals’ place within the heteronormative family, an institution that often provides cares for its queer members while constraining their expression of sexual identity. Positive themes emphasize hope for the future and the desire for queer community or alternate family formations. Old age queer narratives vary worldwide, but the repetition of specific topics highlights both the struggles and the aspirations of certain members of this group. Bearing in mind

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considerations of global differences in attitudes towards queerness, this chapter will summarize prevalent themes from a global sampling of literature and film related to older queer individuals. While this chapter responds to a growing body of work that is slowly diversifying the message about older queer individuals, the themes and texts introduced here merit more expansive analysis in future research. Queer individuals are present in all cultures and societies, but due to societal stigma or fear of persecution, many such individuals exist in silence. Accounts of queer lives often do not form part of a society’s official narrative. As Michal Witkowski writes about queer history in Poland, ‘The history of homosexual life here has yet to be written, unless you count streams of urine on a tin wall as writing’ (2011: 26). While queer representation is growing in contemporary literature and film, those who seek older queer characters may still find the task daunting, as older people are rarely the protagonists of the story, making them more difficult to find.3 Even institutions dedicated to the study of queer communities have tended to ignore the older queer demographic. Queer theory, for example, has traditionally prioritized younger people, the coming out narrative and the Bildungsroman experience, as both Lee Edelman and Jack Halberstam assert (Sandberg 2015: 19). Queer history in general has often been silenced, leaving older queer individuals to be doubly overlooked in literature, film, and theory. To adequately analyse older queer characters in literature and film from around the world, one must consider the ways in which the experience of queer ageing differs from heterosexual ageing, in addition to varying cultural conceptions of ageing. Queer ageing scholars frequently use the Global North as an all-encompassing reference, skewing a theoretical lens that should account for international constructions of age. Just as the lived experiences of queer youth often do not parallel the lives of their heterosexual counterparts, the timeline of queer ageing is unique. As ‘heterosexual dominant norms define what it means to be an older person – from the decline of our bodies to retirement, support communities, and living conditions’ (Ramirez-Valles 2016: 1), queer gerontology recognizes that older queer individuals cannot be quantified by heterosexual standards, which would represent queer ageing as ‘failed, miserable or simply as non-futures’ (Sandberg and Marshall 2017: 4). A heterosexual concept of ageing cannot be applied to a queered life timeline, as queer individuals may ‘not live the normative milestones such as marriage and parenthood’ (Ramirez-Valles 2016: 16). Representations of older queer characters in literature and film should reflect the lived realities of queer protagonists rather than being submitted to heterosexual markers of success. Another way in which queerness re-conceptualizes the concept of ageing is the point at which an individual is considered old. In many countries, including the United States (Ramirez-Valles 2016), India (Sharma and Subramanyam 2020), and the United Kingdom (Bonner-Thompson 2017), queer culture places extreme emphasis on youth and beauty, meaning queer individuals may selfidentify as old much sooner than their heterosexual counterparts would do so. For gayby boomers, a generation of queer individuals who came of age during the gay rights movement and experienced the decimation of their peer group by AIDS, reaching thirty years of age could be considered an accomplishment that confers older status to the individual (Ramirez-Valles 2016: 41). In comparison with their heterosexual peers, the life span of queer individuals is disproportionately threatened by homophobic violence, which affects approximately one-third of queer individuals in the United States (Barker 2003: 49). In the Canadian novel Little Fish (2019), three young transwomen discuss how the meaning of age is distinct in queer communities:

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‘Age is completely different for trans people. The way we talk about age is not how cis people talk about age.’ ‘You mean that thing’, said Wendy, ‘where our age is also how long we’ve been out or on hormones or whatever?’ ‘Or do you mean that thing’, said Lila, ‘where we don’t age as much. Because we die sooner’. (Plett 2019: 11) Lila’s statement highlights the fact that ageing is a privilege many queer individuals do not experience. A lifetime of stigmatization towards queer individuals can cause early ‘accelerated and exacerbated’ (Ramirez-Valles 2016: 16) ageing markers. Queer individuals may face challenges amplified by society’s treatment of them throughout their lifetimes, such as HIV / AIDS, mental health issues, limited social connections, substance abuse, and job discrimination (at times leading to prostitution and increased exposure to violence), all of which drastically reduce queer life spans (14). Violence against queer individuals (equally possible from strangers or family members) is elevated worldwide, another factor contributing to the near impossibility of imagining queer ageing. According to Linda Hess, the prevalent ‘concept of the tragic queer’ crafts the narrative of the queer individual who dies young and horribly, which ‘spreads the message that queer ageing will not happen’ (2017: 3). For queer individuals worldwide, ageing is far from a guarantee; as Lila and Wendy’s conversation in Little Fish illustrates, queer youth might not plan for or think about ageing, perhaps lacking cultural and personal examples of older queer individuals in their lives. As an identity marker, ageing is further complicated through a global lens. Median life expectancy varies markedly worldwide, meaning that old age cannot be quantified with a universal number. The Western image of an older person with grey hair, wrinkles, and a cane does not align well with the concept of old age in other cultures. In the Indian novel Mohanaswamy (2013), the eponymous protagonist is described as ‘getting on in years, facial wrinkles and a few strands of grey hair were beginning to show. Now, after crossing thirty-five, it was quite embarrassing to invite young men over for sex – a half an hour of play in bed would drain him out’ (Vasudhendra 2019: 146). Thirty-five would not be considered old in most Western contexts, and with only a few grey hairs, Mohanaswamy does not embody the Western image of an older individual. A consideration of differing global age markers is crucial in the construction of a well-rounded perspective of old age. Furthermore, an analysis of global queer protagonists should not impose Western definitions or values on the role of sexual identities within a given culture. The Western adherence to a binary structure is insufficient for analysing more complicated gender, sexuality, and identity structures in many parts of the world. Peter Jackson writes of the ‘explosion of Thai identities’ (2000: 409) in the second half of the twentieth century that produced ‘at least seven contemporary types of phet’ (414), or eroticized genders, categories whose definitions remain fluid and changeable. In the Philippines, factors including social prestige and occupation hold more cultural weight than gender roles and sexual orientation when it comes to understanding one’s identity or place in society (Nuñez Inton 2017: 3). While these are only two examples, they demonstrate a breadth of lived experiences that Western queer theory cannot adequately discuss. Megan Sinnott and other scholars of the Global South have expressed scepticism about queer theory’s applicability in the non-Western world (Sinnott 2010: 20), particularly Dennis Altman’s idea of global queering, the concept that globalization has led to an international (Western) queer identity (Altman 1996: 7).4 Pedro Gomes Pereira offers a decolonial theory of queerness, suggesting that existing queer theory

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need not be discarded, but rather the Global South might engage in ‘a rereading of the Global North’s theories in order to revise them, bend them, scrutinize their silences and obliterations, and to make them speak differently’ (2019: 64). Pereira reflects on the legacy of colonialism, which has shaped understandings of sexuality and gender in much of the world (2019: 52). In India, for example, queer narratives have been erased by ‘the violence of colonization and the inadequacy of terminology borrowed from the west’ (Mallick Choudhuri 2009: 1). While queerness may not be approved of by mainstream Indian society, in part due to colonial legacy, it may not factor widely into Indian society’s consciousness, as little vocabulary exists with which to describe queerness. In Kannada, a language spoken in southwestern India, there is ‘no equivalent word for “gay” … You wouldn’t even find it in dictionaries and newspapers’ (Vasudhendra 2019: 36). If a concept cannot be named, it becomes more difficult to discuss.

NEGATIVE EFFECTS OF AGEING ON THE QUEER BODY Across the globe, the most ubiquitous theme within the literature and film under analysis relates to the negative effects of ageing on the queer body – including loss of sexual vigour – which often induce shame in older characters. Notable scholars such as Margaret Morganroth Gullette, Linda Hess, and Dustin Goltz have respectively discussed the decline narrative of ageing, the invisibility and unattractiveness associated with old age and the prioritization of youthfulness in gay culture (Gullette 2004), all topics reaffirmed in literature and film. In non-Western cultures, scholarship reveals that older individuals place less importance on maintaining sexual vigour (Lamb 2015: 40), although older queer characters analysed in this chapter frequently express regret related to how ageing has changed their bodily experience of sexual activity. Detailed negative depictions of their bodies demonstrate the marginalized position of older queer adults within queer communities. In the Chinese novel Crystal Boys (1983), queer men of all ages congregate at a park in Taiwan, prostituting themselves for cash, seeking romantic partners and forming a queer community. While not excluded from the community, older gay men are relegated to a peripheral role. Old DickHead, whose name indicates his social status in the group, is ‘a sixty-year-old sex fiend whose neck was covered with scaly skin’ (Hsien-yung 1995: 22). Other older gay men in the novel are also described negatively, looking ‘like death warmed over’ (196) with ‘rheumy eyes’ (212). The mixture of disgust, pity, and acceptance with which older gay characters are viewed by their younger counterparts is reflected in the Polish novel Love Town (2011), wherein the narrator thoroughly describes characters’ ageing bodies as he interviews older queer protagonists who reflect on life during communist-era Poland. The narrator’s language, alternately belittling and compassionate, vacillates between male and female pronouns to describe the novel’s transwomen as ‘pot-bellied pensioners’ (Witkowski 2011: 6) with legs ‘tattooed with a web of veins’ (9) and hands ‘covered with liver spots’ (15). Older characters in Love Town do not renounce sexual experiences; rather, they adapt to the changing reality of sex later in life, evidenced in the narrator’s account of one queer character who ‘would take out her dentures and give … a blowjob’ (187). This is one of the few examples of characters resisting the unrelenting barrage of representations of queer bodies in decay that emphasize ageing as an undesirable physical transformation. Shame about protagonists’ ageing bodies and lost or altered sexual abilities is compounded by social stigmatization of queerness, a homophobia that many protagonists have internalized and struggle to overcome. In the Japanese novel Forbidden Colors (1951), a misanthropic old man

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named Shunsuké manipulates Yuichi, a beautiful young gay man, into sleeping with all the women who have slighted Shunsuké. His hatred of women ultimately reveals a self-hatred and internalized homophobia, as he comes to realize that he is in love with Yuichi, despite believing himself to be heterosexual. Shunsuké laments that the ‘homosexual’s hell and the woman’s hell are the same – namely, old age’ (Mishima 1999: 156). Yuichi is not attracted to Shunsuké, nor to any of the older gay men who pursue him. Shunsuké, often described as an ‘ugly old man’ (5), sees his ageing body as hideous, particularly because he has come to understand his sexual orientation too late in life for youth-focused Yuichi to view him as an acceptable sexual partner. Shame is the connecting thread between descriptions of the physical body and sexuality for the protagonist in Lydia Kwa’s short story ‘Oh-chien’ (2019), as well. The narrator, an older lesbian woman who grew up in Singapore, was always ashamed of her sexuality until a move to Canada allowed her to engage in relationships with other women. Returning to Singapore as an older woman, she realizes that she can no longer eat raw oysters, one of her favourite delicacies, due to food sensitivities she developed in older age. Oysters, considered an aphrodisiac and an image that evokes female anatomy, symbolize the protagonist’s shame tied both to early feelings about her sexuality and her current loss of sexual vitality. The narrator feels that she is ‘still a monster, but of a different sort. Her legs were covered in freakish red rashes, horridly uncomfortable, flaring up either because of the heat, or due to an allergic reaction to the wrong kind of food’ (Kwa 2019: 224). Empowered in Canada, the protagonist is once again relegated to the role of monstrous other in Singapore, due to her sexuality and her ageing body, which can no longer perform physically or sexually as she would like it to, her internalized shame about her sexuality manifested physically in her body. For literary characters discussed in this section, internalized homophobia and ageism construct an antagonistic relationship between protagonists and their bodies. Although their sexual desires have not faded, characters feel betrayed by their bodies’ loss of vitality and, in many cases, have accepted society’s association of their ageing, queer bodies with death and disease.

THE TROPE OF THE PREDATORY OLDER QUEER INDIVIDUAL Adding to the monstrous representation of older queer individuals, several films and novels portray this demographic as predatory or evil, particularly when describing relationships between older and younger gay men. The older man’s role is either lascivious predator or financial patron and mentor, creating ‘dialectical tensions between the figure of the predatory “dirty old man” and the kindly and asexual grandfather role’ (Goltz 2014: 1505). This concept is not new; one needs only to consider James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room (1956), where older gay men like Jacques and Guillaume prey on Giovanni, vulnerable due to his age, immigration status, and social standing. Jacques is a ‘disgusting old fairy’ (Baldwin 2013: 107) and Guillaume is ‘precipitate, flabby, and moist’ (155), examples from a longstanding literary pattern of disparate power dynamics wherein the older, more established gay man provides financially for the younger man in return for sexual favours, which may be given willingly or under duress. In several narratives, the younger men appreciate the attention and care of the older men. Although the older men’s affections are tinged with sexual desire, their lust is usually commingled with some level of emotional connection. In the Mexican film Callejón de los milagros (The Alley of Miracles, 1995), don Rutilio is an established bar owner and respected family man who begins a relationship with a much younger man. Don Rutilio initiates this relationship with a gift of socks. His

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younger partner appears to feel genuine affection for don Rutilio, although the established pattern of gift-giving facilitates such feelings. Another Mexican film, Cuatro lunas (Four Moons, 2014), demonstrates the ‘predatory’ reach of older gay men, showing how younger, heterosexual men can be ‘corrupted’ by the money or influence of older gay men. One of the interconnected stories in Cuatro lunas focuses on Professor Joaquín Cobo, an older poet with a wife, adult daughters, and grandchildren, who uses his grandchildren’s Christmas money to pay for sex with a younger, heterosexual man who is prostituting himself to earn money to cross the border to be with his wife and child. Although the younger man is not gay, an emotional connection forms between the two men, and Professor Cobo helps him financially on his journey. In the Chinese novel Crystal Boys, mentioned above, many young gay boys have been rejected by their families and are looking for the protection of an older gay man. Little Jade is taken in by Old Zhou, an angry and sometimes violent man. Despite his abuse, Little Jade cares for him deeply and is devastated when Old Zhou tosses him aside for a different young boy. Throughout these narratives, moments of authentic emotional connection between older and younger queer men emerge, even though the impact of disparate power dynamics on such relationships must be considered. Most frequently, however, older gay men seeking to engage sexually or romantically with younger men are portrayed as predatory or even evil. In Forbidden Colors, two old men make a bet to see who can bed Yuichi first, becoming aroused at the idea of forcing or tricking him into having sex with them. One of them ponders, ‘I wonder if the kid has ever given himself to someone he doesn’t desire’ (Mishima 1999: 156). Shunsuké, the older protagonist who manipulates Yuichi, cruelly delights in inflicting suffering on others due to his internalized homophobia. Older gay men in general in Forbidden Colors are characterized as manipulative and poised to take advantage of others. The trope of the predatory older queer individual focuses primarily on men, but older lesbians are occasionally portrayed as lecherous. Argentinian poet Alejandra Pizarnik’s poem ‘Violario’ (2002) describes a lustful older woman – one of the ‘viejas de cara de lobo’ (33), or wolf-faced old women – who attempts to sexually harass a younger woman at a wake. The poem’s title is a play on words, both describing sexual violation and the wake itself (in Spanish, velorio). The poetic voice in ‘Violario’ expresses disgust at being propositioned by an older woman, reflecting sentiments shared by younger gay men in the aforementioned texts. An analysis of such extreme negative representations of older queer protagonists must be cognizant of the influence of homophobia (internalized or other) in the creation of texts and films. There is a danger in assuming that any queer representation is positive exposure; rather, such portrayals of queer characters, which are not uncommon in older films, serve to perpetuate negative stereotypes against the queer community. Arguably the most one-dimensional, evil character encountered in this research is Maharani, an older, transgender pimp in the Bollywood thriller Sadak (1991). Self-dubbed as the ‘king of the flesh trade’, Maharani delights in surrounding herself with beautiful young women, only to ruin their lives and convert them to prostitutes. Maharani is a murderer and a truly unredeemable character. Although Sadak is a Bollywood film, the evil queer character functions similarly in cinema from many cultures, including Nollywood (the Nigerian film industry), where gay characters ‘are almost always a direct and clear threat to heterosexual marriages. Nollywood has only three possible endings for these characters: they are either killed off, imprisoned, or become born again Christians who return to heterosexuality and denounce their sins. In this way, gay characters are erased and denied agency and, at the same time, shown to be

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appropriately punished’ (Green-Simms 2016: 143). This observation shows the importance of a critical lens; audiences must consider the function of older queer characters in literature and film, as their mere presence does not guarantee a positive representation.

THE HETERONORMATIVE FAMILY: CARE AND CONTROL The importance of creating and maintaining a heteronormative family – constructed as both a site of comfort and a constraining force for older queer individuals – is prevalent in many films and texts with queer narratives, especially non-Western ones. Older queer individuals must choose to either conceal their sexual identity in order to receive the protection of the heterosexual family, or, less commonly, they may dare to seek out non-biological queer families. Rowe and Kahn’s concept of successful ageing prioritizes ‘heteronormative relationships [which] come to be equated with happiness’ (Sandberg 2015: 28), establishing marriage, childrearing, and family creation as indicators of a successful life. The importance of the heteronormative family is crucial in Suk Suk (Twilight’s Kiss, 2019), a film set in Hong Kong that tells the story of Pak and Hoi, two older men who meet in a public restroom and begin a romantic relationship. Both men have children and grandchildren; Pak remains married, while Hoi is divorced but has not come out as gay to his family. Hoi wants Pak to leave his wife so they can spend their remaining years together, but Pak’s role within his family is important to him. He has just retired and begun to receive an allowance from his eldest son, who tells him, ‘It’s time to enjoy life while you can.’ Film director Ray Yeung explains that for a Chinese father, the biggest achievement imaginable for an older person is to have independent adult children who provide a financial allowance for their parents. Children are a ‘life insurance policy’ for retirement, the ‘final treasure’ that positions the heteronormative family as a site of comfort and care (Yeung 2020). In many non-Western cultures, intergenerational reciprocity stipulates that adult children care for and often live with their older parents, a concept ‘regarded as much more normal and valued than is living independently’ (Lamb 2015: 38), a contrast to successful ageing’s goal of maintaining independence. Even though Pak cares deeply for Hoi, he chooses to keep his heteronormative family intact, as intergenerational reciprocity is Pak’s primary marker for assessing happiness and success in his older age. Contributing to the demands of heteronormativity, generational and religious constraints at times confine older queer individuals to lives of unfulfilled dreams with bleak futures. In Little Fish, Wendy is a young transwoman who learns from her grandfather’s closeted gay friend Anna that her deceased grandfather might have been gay or even transgender like herself. When Wendy asks Anna if she is gay, Anna replies defensively, ‘I’ve never touched a woman!’ (Plett 2019: 262). Anna’s internalized homophobia and religious beliefs have prevented her from acting on or acknowledging her sexual orientation. Marguerite (2017), the Canadian short film nominated for an Oscar in 2019, centres on an older woman who reveals to her lesbian caretaker that she too is a lesbian, although she repressed those desires throughout her life. She is now older and alone, unlikely to experience a lesbian relationship, stifled by the more conservative societal upbringing of her youth. The fact that her caretaker is a lesbian provides spectators with hope for the next generation, as she tells Marguerite about her happy life with her girlfriend. In Marguerite, age becomes a metaphor for queer progression,

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wherein the older queer woman represents regret and repression, while her younger caretaker symbolizes hope for potential queer futures.

QUEER FUTURES AND THE DESIRE FOR COMMUNITY Several of the texts and films under analysis point towards the possibility of positive futures and alternative community formations for older queer people. For those willing to break from the heteronormative family, queer community formation helps to counterbalance the allure of children and grandchildren who ‘signify futurity in later life. If the negativity associated with old age is largely linked to a disabled future that eventually turns into a non-future through death, the grandchild becomes a trope of futurity, where one’s life course continues beyond one’s own life through the grandchild’ (Sandberg 2015: 31). Some texts and films under analysis have queered this intergenerational timeline, rejecting the heteronormative family as the only way of relationship and future building and refusing Lee Edelman’s argument that there is no future for queer individuals5 (Edelmann 2004). In Little Fish, Wendy’s desire to discover more about her grandfather’s past is a theme throughout the novel. By the conclusion, Wendy is reconciled to the fact that she will never be certain about her grandfather’s identity, a fitting nod to the invisibility of much of queer history. In the novel’s last chapter, Wendy dreams about her grandfather, Henry, using female pronouns to describe her grandfather in the dream. They were sitting on a couch, and Henry was swaddled in long billowy clothing. Henry had a baby in her arms, and its face leaned against Henry’s chest. Her hair was thinning and grey like it’d always been when Wendy was a kid, but her fingers were long and smooth and lotioned. … Henry just stayed there and smiled at Wendy, and her smile got bigger and bigger with joy pouring out of her face, and as the couch grew scratchy and the air under it whirled and screamed, Henry pulled her feet onto the couch with the baby still in both arms and leaned forward on her knees in her long billowy clothing looking at Wendy, and she laughed with her radiant, pure lit-up smile getting bigger and bigger until both of their faces were almost touching with light light light shining from all of Henry’s soft lotioned body, until they were so close, Henry now silent and smiling at Wendy deep and big and light. (Plett 2019: 289) Wendy offers no explanation or interpretation of her dream, but the joy and connection between Wendy and her grandfather are evident. Her dream can be understood through Halberstam’s concept of ‘queer space’, which references ‘the place-making practices within postmodernism in which queer people engage’ to consider ‘nonnormative logics and organizations of community, sexual identity, embodiment, and activity in space and time’ (2005: 6).The dream is a queer space wherein queer temporality rules and Wendy, her grandfather, and the baby (a symbol of queer future) find joy and strength in their connection to a rich history and future populated by queer individuals. Wendy’s dream shows the subversive potential of a family constructed through dreams and imagination; while queer individuals have been historically silenced, Wendy’s dream allows her to imagine a queer future by recovering a queer version of her family’s past. With her dream, Wendy appropriates and queers the heteronormative notion of generational inheritance that allows older family members to pass beliefs, morals, and genetic and financial inheritances to their progeny. Although the baby in the dream is not biologically related to her, Wendy accepts the baby as her family, embracing a connection not limited to genetic ties.

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For those older queer individuals who have been rejected by their families or never had children, community formation with other queer individuals becomes a vital support system. Queer older people ‘have been found to receive significant social support from their ‘ “families of choice”, which may consist of friends, former lovers, or members of a partner’s family’ (Suen 2015: 229). In the Uruguayan novel Cantoras (2019) by Carolina de Robertis, a community of lesbian women builds and defends a queer space of their own in the wilderness by the sea, escaping societal pressures and their country’s dictatorship to live uninhibitedly. The novel follows the women throughout their lives; as older women, they remain happy and free, and they do not express any desire for a more traditional type of family. In the film Suk Suk, set in Hong Kong, the group of older gay men who care for one another forms a clear example of a queer community, as the men fulfil roles typically met by adult children, such as accompanying each other to doctor’s appointments, cooking for each other, and providing emotional support. Several of these men are organizing to petition the city for the construction of a gay nursing home, as they do not have children to care for them in their old age. For many queer people, regular nursing homes are dangerous places where they must either confront the homophobia of bigoted residents or tragically return to the closet for their own safety (RamirezValles 2016: 3). While many of the men in Suk Suk want a gay nursing home, they are reluctant to speak out at the city council meeting and be publicly labelled as gay. Others state that they would not move into a gay nursing home, even if it existed, because they would not want their adult children to know about their sexuality. One man laments, ‘Even when we’re old, when our parents and partners have passed away and our children have come of age, we still can’t be ourselves.’ Individuals like Pak choose to keep this part of their identity secret and continue to live with their families and children, exchanging the chance to live their identities openly for the support and protection provided by the family unit. For others, who have lost familial support by coming out, or who never had that family structure to begin with, the need to find a queer space to inhabit becomes more pressing. While older queer characters often struggle to create and maintain supportive communities, several texts and films show the potential promise of a queer future.

CONCLUSION Representations of older queer protagonists are as diverse as the cultures in which they live. Despite global differences in what constitutes successful or positive ageing, necessitating a variety of international theoretical perspectives on sexualities and ageing, several themes relevant to queer ageing are present in the literature and films under analysis. Heterosexual and queer older protagonists share certain ageing struggles, such as frustrations related to the ageing body. Older queer protagonists often experience shame that is connected to changes in their sexual vitality, complicated by echoes of internalized homophobia, while literature and film frequently represent them as older sexual predators. Especially in non-Western cultures, many older queer individuals prioritize participation in the heteronormative family and its intergenerational care structures over freely expressing their queer identity. For other older queer individuals, the creation of queer communities or alternative families provides hope for an enriching queer future. As more literary and cinematic representations of older queer characters are produced and analysed, literature and film will continue to reshape and expand cultural narratives of queer identity.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Searching for films and texts with older queer protagonists felt like trying to complete a 10,000piece puzzle whose pieces had been scattered throughout the house. Thank you to my colleagues and friends who either helped me find puzzle pieces or graciously allowed me to talk non-stop about my puzzle, including but not limited to: Hilal Ergül, Shuchi Karim, Ana Kogl, Maria Leicy, Amanda Petersen, Hamida Saleh, Yasemin Sari, Verica Savic, Garbiñe Vidal-Torreira, Jolene Zigarovich, and Elizabeth Zwanziger.

NOTES 1 In 2015, Rowe and Kahn published ‘Successful Aging 2.0: Conceptual Expansions for the 21st Century’, an article that briefly noted the need to consider sexual orientation as a factor in ageing. 2 The trope of the predatory older gay individual – often but not always a man – is prevalent in Western literature and film. Niall Richardson describes the predatory older gay man as an individual who ‘secures brief relations with much younger men often through monetary exchange or other forms of coercion’ (2020: 105). 3 Queer invisibility, complicated by the invisibility of old age, was a significant barrier to this research. This researcher was limited by language barriers (dependent on texts originally in English and Spanish, or those that had been translated into one of these languages), as well as barriers of access, as many films are difficult to locate. The researcher contacted acquaintances around the globe during this search; respondents overwhelmingly indicated that this type of text or film did not exist in their countries, although in many – but not all – cases, this proved false. 4 Many scholars have written critiques of Altman’s concept of global queering, including Peter Jackson’s ‘An Explosion of Thai Identities: Global Queering and Re-Imagining Queer Theory’ (2000) and David Halperin’s ‘A Response from David Halperin to Dennis Altman’ (1996). 5 Linda M. Hess’ 2017 article ‘ “My Whole Life I’ve Been Dressing Up Like a Man”: Negotiations of Queer Aging and Queer Temporality in the TV Series Transparent’ offers an excellent analysis of the show’s queered timeline.

REFERENCES Altman, D. (1996), ‘On Global Queering’, Australian Humanities Review, 2: 1–17. Baldwin, J. (2013), Giovanni’s Room, New York: First Vintage International. Barker, J. C. (2003), ‘Lesbian Aging: An Agenda for Social Research’, in G. Herdt and B. de Vries (eds), Gay and Lesbian Aging: Research and Future Directions, 29–72, New York: Springer. Bonner-Thompson, C. (2017), ‘“The Meat Market”: Production and Regulation of Masculinities on the Grindr Grid in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, UK’, Gender, Place & Culture: A Journal of Feminist Geography, 23 (11): 1611–25. Chivers, S. (2011), The Silvering Screen, Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Edelman, L. (2004), No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Goltz, D. B. (2014), ‘“We’re Not in Oz Anymore”: Shifting Generational Perspective and Tensions of Gay Community, Identity, and Future’, Journal of Homosexuality, 61 (11): 1503–28. Gomes Pereira, P. P. (2019), Queer in the Tropics: Gender and Sexuality in the Global South, Cham: Springer Briefs in Sociology. Green-Simms, L. (2016), ‘The Emergent Queer: Homosexuality and Nigerian Fiction in the 21st Century’, Research in African Literatures, 47 (2): 139–61.

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Gullette, M. (2004), Aged by Culture, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Halberstam, J. (2005), In a Queer Time & Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives, New York: New York University Press. Hess, L. M. (2017), ‘“My Whole Life I’ve Been Dressing Up Like a Man”: Negotiations of Queer Aging and Queer Temporality in the TV Series Transparent’, European Journal of American Studies, 11 (3): 1–19. Hess, L. M. (2019), Queer Aging in North American Fiction, Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. Hsien-yung, Pai (1995), Crystal Boys, trans. H. Goldblatt, San Francisco, CA: Gay Sunshine Press. Jackson, P. A. (2000), ‘An Explosion of Thai Identities: Global Queering and Re-Imagining Queer Theory’, Culture, Health & Sexuality, 2 (4): 405–24. Kwa, L. (2019), ‘Oh-Chien’, in L. Linsangan Cantor and N. Yi-Sheng (eds), Sanctuary: Short Fiction from Queer Asia, 219–26, Hong Kong: Signal 8 Press. Lamb, S. (2015), ‘Beyond the View of the West: Ageing and Anthropology’, in J. Twigg and W. Martin (eds), Routledge Handbook of Cultural Gerontology, 37–44, New York: Routledge. Mallick Choudhuri, S. (2009), ‘Transgressive Territories: Queer Space in Indian Fiction and Film’, PhD diss., University of Iowa, Iowa City. Mishima, Y. (1999), Forbidden Colors, New York: First Vintage International. Nuñez Inton, M. (2017), ‘The Bakla and the Silver Screen: Queer Cinema in the Philippines’, PhD diss., Lingnan University, Hong Kong. Pizarnik, A. (2002), Prosa completa, Barcelona: Editorial Lumen. Plett, C. (2019), Little Fish, Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press. Ramirez-Valles, J. (2016), Queer Aging: The Gayby Boomers and New Frontier for Gerontology, Oxford: Oxford Scholarship Online. Richardson, N. (2020), ‘Ageing Predators and Asexual Old Queens: Challenging Stereotypes of CrossGenerational Gay Relationships in Beginners and Gerontophilia’, in J. Gwynne and N. Richardson (eds), Cross Generational Relationships and Cinema, 105–22, Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. Robertis, C. de (2019), Cantoras, New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Rowe, J. W., and R. L. Kahn (2015), ‘Successful Aging 2.0: Conceptual Expansions for the 21st Century’, Journals of Gerontology: Series B, 70 (4): 593–6. Sandberg, L. (2008), ‘The Old, the Ugly and the Queer: Thinking Old Age in Relation to Queer Theory’, Graduate Journal of Social Science, 5 (2): 117–39. Sandberg, L. (2013), ‘Affirmative Old Age: The Ageing Body and Feminist Theories on Difference’, International Journal of Ageing and Later Life, 8 (1): 11–40. Sandberg, L. (2015), ‘Toward a Happy Ending? Positive Ageing, Heteronormativity and Un / happy Intimacies’, Lambda Nordica, 20 (4): 19–44. Sandberg, L. J., and B. L. Marshall (2017), ‘Queering Aging Futures’, Societies, 7 (3): 1–11. Sharma, A. J., and M. A. Subramanyam (2020), ‘Psychological Wellbeing of Middle-Aged and Older Queer Men in India: A Mixed-Methods Approach’, PLOS One, 15 (3): 1–25. Sinnott, M. (2010), ‘Borders, Diaspora, and Regional Connections: Trends in Asian “Queer” Studies’, Journal of Asian Studies, 69 (1): 17–31. Suen, Y. (2015), ‘Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Ageing’, in J. Twigg and W. Martin (eds), Routledge Handbook of Cultural Gerontology, 226–33, New York: Routledge. Vasudhendra, E. (2019), Mohanaswamy, trans. R. Terdal, New Delhi: Harper Perennial. Witkowski, M. (2011), Love Town, London: Portobello Books.

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Yeung, R. (2020), ‘Hong Kong Cinema: Twilight’s Kiss (Suk Suk) Conversation with Director Ray Yeung’ (Zoom, 2020).

Filmography Callejón de los milagros (The Alley of Miracles) (1995), Dir. J. Fons, Mexico: Videovisa. Cuatro lunas (Four Moons) (2014), Dir. S. Tovar Velarde, Mexico: ATKO Films. Marguerite (2017), Dir. M. Farley, Canada: DIY Films. Sadak (1991), Dir. M. Bhatt, India: NH Studioz. Suk Suk (Twilight’s Kiss) (2019), Dir. R. Yeung, Hong Kong: New Voice Film Productions.

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Stars and protagonists in the Hollywood conglomerate: Performativities of hegemonic masculinity and the third-age imaginary JOSEPHINE DOLAN

INTRODUCTION There exists a growing body of scholarship variously concerned with ageing and gender in the employment contexts and representational systems of the Hollywood conglomerate – that is, the globalized cinema complex that dominates the distribution and exhibition of Anglophone films across the gamut of media platforms (Miller 2004). In general terms, some existing scholarship foregrounds how long-standing male privileges in off-screen working practices are exacerbated as women age (Schaap 2011; Lauzen 2015; Anderson and Daniels 2016); some interrogates the conglomerate’s on-screen intersections of gendered differences and ageing (Chivers 2011; Gravagne 2013; Shary and McVittie 2016; Dolan 2019); some draws specific attention to formations of postmenopausal femininity mobilized by protagonists and stories (DeFalco 2010; Richardson 2019); some are focused on ageing and gender within star and celebrity culture more broadly (Wearing 2007; Jermyn 2012; Dolan and Tincknell 2012; Harrington, Bielby, and Bardo 2014; Dolan 2014, 2020; Jermyn and Holmes 2015). Threading through this is a concern with the Hollywood conglomerate’s articulations of ageing masculinity in the guise of auteurism (Cohen-Shavlev 2009); paternalism (Hamad 2014); or gender and genre (Gates 2010; King 2010; Lennard 2014; Evans 2015; Donnar 2016; Wearing 2017; Bühring 2017); or stardom (Chivers 2011, Pederby 2011: 145–68, Boyle and Brayton 2012; Dolan 2017); while Richardson’s reading of performative femininity articulated by ageing male actors successfully queers any automatic elision of biological sex and socially constructed gender. Although not forming the main thrust of arguments, this existing research forges implicit connections to R. W. Connell’s concept of hegemonic masculinity (Connell 1995; Connell and Messerschmidt 2005). This chapter aims to develop that connection

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by asking, ‘How do stars of the Hollywood conglomerate articulate the intersection of hegemonic masculinity and ageing?’

PERFORMATIVITIES: HEGEMONIC MASCULINITY, AGEING, AND STARS Both masculinity and ageing have been disentangled from biologically essential accounts of the body, with each formation located in Judith Butler’s (1990) theory of the performative and its understanding that gender is culturally produced through normalized gestures and actions whose constant reiterations establish the ostensible realities of biological bodies. Following on, Connell (1995) shifted attention from established feminist concerns with the power dynamics of a gender binary that positions masculinity as a privileged category and instead focused on the performative gestures that constitute differences and hierarchies of power between men. Once normalized, such gestures are rendered hegemonic – that is, they pass into common sense and are placed beyond scrutiny because they are seemingly natural. Subsequently, in collaboration with James W. Messerschmidt, Connell was to add that there is no necessary correspondence between hegemonic ideals and the ways in which most men and boys live their lives since ‘hegemony works in part through the production of exemplars of masculinity (e.g. professional sports stars)’ (Connell and Messerschmidt 2005: 846). The leap from sports to film stars is largely self-evident, though it is important to note that stars of any ilk mobilize different types, such as ‘The Tough Guy’ and ‘The Rebel’ (Dyer 1979: 54–61). Different types of male stars highlight the variable ways that hegemonic masculinity is articulated. But variability should not be confused with inclusivity since hegemonic masculinity and its manifestation in the Hollywood star system is persistently and disturbingly white and heteronormative (Carroll 2011). The high profile and long careers of Black, Asian, and Minority Ethnic (BAME) stars like Samuel L. Jackson, Morgan Freeman, Jackie Chan, and Denzel Washington do not pose a challenge to the white hegemony of stardom since the Hollywood conglomerate’s racialized hierarchies are shored up by multiple and mutually supportive strategies such as niche stereotyping, less prominent ‘side-kick’ roles for BAME stars and actors, relatively high frequency of BAME character deaths, and preponderance of ‘white’ storylines, each of which is compounded by the general swirl of cinematic discourse (Bogle 1991). Like Connell, age theorists Valerie Lipscomb and Leni Marshall also draw on Butler, contending that ‘age as well as gender can be viewed as performative, in that each of us performs the actions associated with chronological age minute by minute’. Acknowledging the materiality of the body, Lipscomb and Marshall stress that ‘the meanings associated with the biological aspects of gender (or age) are constructed’ (2010: 2; emphasis in original). Also arguing for age as a cultural construction, Kathleen Woodward suggests that chronologically measured life stages such as ‘babyhood, childhood, teens, middle-age, old-age are ascribed different norms of behaviour’ and operate as markers of social difference (1999: x). Here, the behavioural norms of life stages operate to act as performative reiterations of ageing as much as a chronologically measured trajectory of life stages. While the meanings of life stages are typically organized into a narrative of cumulative growth and progress, old age is constituted as a narrative of social and biological decline that prefigures the end of life (Gullette 1997). This narrative of decline is powerfully gendered, with the menopause mobilized as a biological marker of women’s entry into decline and old age. No comparable biological meanings are aligned

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to male bodies, though retirement from paid work constitutes a primary male (and masculine) herald of decline, while simultaneously operating as subsidiary markers of female (and feminine) ageing (Jackson 2016). Lisa-Nike Bühring’s (2020) study of male corporate executives suggests that early career success is equated to hegemonic ideals of masculinity. While this equation is undermined by retirement, it can be shored up by compensatory practices that align with the meanings and performativities of successful ageing (Dillaway and Byrnes 2009) and / or the thirdage imaginary (Gilleard and Higgs 2005). In comparison, stars never retire. Whenever we see male or female stars whose chronological age might signal retirement for the majority of the population, they are at work whether acting in films, appearing at publicity and promotional red-carpet events, and / or engaging with audiences via chat shows and social media. With ageing male stars, not only are they ‘at work’ in the sense of employment, but they are also ‘at work’ in the performativities of both hegemonic masculinity and the rejection of decline that underpins the third-age imaginary. Because of this, the overarching position of stars as embodiments of hegemonic masculinity is continually reiterated and re-secured even as they chronologically age. But this tells us very little about the performative gestures of hegemonic masculinity articulated by specific stars as they age, or how any of this threads through the films they populate.

HEGEMONIC MASCULINITY AND AGEING: PROTAGONISTS, STARS, AND THE ‘ECONOMY OF CELEBRITY’ For analytical purposes it is useful to separate protagonists and stars even though the two are inextricably linked. The basic difference between them can be illustrated by film franchises, such as James Bond, where the eponymous hero operates as a recognizable continuity despite multiple star replacements over the course of time, though the ‘meaning’ of Bond is differently inflected by individual stars. Strictly speaking, protagonists and stars are both the products of semiotics and discourse. However, Richard Dyer (1979, 1986) has argued that stars are images produced in the meshes of multimedia circuits and then mapped onto the bodies of actors whose off-screen existence embodies and naturalizes cultural values, such as the third-age imaginary and hegemonic masculinity. In comparison, protagonists are fictitious characters that drive the action of the story within the diegesis of a film but have no embodied existence beyond the star that performs them. Coining the term ‘the economy of celebrity’, Graeme Turner ([2004] 2014) suggests that stars simultaneously operate as commodified products and as promoters of consumer culture. Of note here is Patrick Stewart’s endorsement of Nintendo Brain Age products. Elsewhere I argue that Nintendo’s Stewart-led promotional films effectively reiterate the dichotomy of superior male and inferior female intelligence and thereby shore up gender binaries (Dolan 2017: 97–103). But this left the specific iterations of hegemonic masculinity embodied by the ageing Stewart unexplored. After more than fifty years in the public eye, Stewart has run the gamut of high and popular roles from Shakespearean theatre to TV to blockbuster cult films, while his links to science fiction genres and Marvel universe films now accord him ‘nerd icon’ status from both fan networks and the gaming community alike. In the guise of ‘nerd icon’ Stewart reworks the ‘Tough Guy’ type as a cerebral iteration of third-age, hegemonic masculinity that melds with those techno-competencies that are stereotypically held to be the preserve of youth. The association between Stewart and Brain Age games forges a circular dynamic offering ongoing support to Stewart’s ‘nerd’ image

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even as that image informs Nintendo’s Brain Age marketing to older consumers. At the same time, Stewart’s special appeal within the intergenerational circuits of Star Trek: The Next Generation (1987–94), Marvel, and gaming worlds effectively effaces ostensible age differences, and thereby his embodiment of hegemonic masculinity is constituted as an ageless and unbroken continuity between youth and the third-age imaginary. Clint Eastwood is similarly bound up in ‘the economy of celebrity’ and its articulation of hegemonic masculinity as an unbroken and ageless continuity. Like Stewart, Eastwood also performs the ‘Tough Guy’ type, though in a more obvious macho formation derived from the multiple protagonists of iconic spaghetti westerns and Harry Callaghan, Dirty Harry’s uncompromising law enforcement agent (Dir. Don Siegel 1971). But where Stewart’s image is explicitly mobilized by the actor for Nintendo, Eastwood’s is co-opted by a labyrinthine media circuit in the marketing of masculine garments and style. Crucially, neither garments nor style are simply accessories worn by already gendered and aged subjects. Rather, they should be seen as accoutrements in the performativities of gender and age. As Eastwood ages the strap lines of glossy men’s magazines, ‘Vintage Style: Clint Eastwood’ (Esquire 2012), and online blogs alike, ‘at 81, he is as smart, tough and cool as ever’ (Laverty 2012), increasingly herald the star as a style icon. Unlike fashion, which is subject to seasonal design whims and the regulations of age-appropriateness, style is a constant. The constancy of Eastwood’s style harks back to Glenn Wright’s costume design for Harry Callaghan – an edgy, Neapolitan cut suit, that more than thirty years later, is still described as ‘surprisingly contemporary’ (Laverty 2012). Long associated with corporate, hegemonic masculinity, the suit can be cut to connote conservative tradition à la British royal family; or following Eastwood, the Neapolitan cut suit continues to signify urban and edgy formations (Dolan 2017: 31–69). Eastwood is also applauded for appearances in ubiquitous denim wear: ‘he still looks better in jeans (and a T-shirt) than guys less than half his age’ (Fox n.d.). Originating as tough work wear associated with globalized American myths of self-sufficient cowboys and pioneers, denim clothing transferred to the youth market through influential macho rock stars and screen icons like James Dean and Steve McQueen, while simultaneously forging an alignment to the hegemonic masculinity they embody. Where the suit chimes with retro trends, denim is frequently marketed as ‘vintage’ (Salazar 2010). In both cases, Eastwood aligns his embodiment of hegemonic masculinity with the clothing he wears and thereby forges an ahistorical continuity that links generations of men from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century. At the same time, as with mature cheese, fine wines, and classic cars, the connotations of ‘vintage’ serve to rebuff the narrative of decline since ageing is articulated as an ongoing improvement to the hegemonic masculinity embodied by stars.

PROTAGONISTS: DIEGETIC FICTIONS OF DECLINE As with stars, hegemonic masculinity is constantly aligned with the third-age imaginary through the protagonists of diverse screen dramas, including macho action genres. Invariably, the protagonists of geriaction stories suffer bored and lonely retirements while ailing and aching bodies mobilize the narrative of decline. Or, in detective dramas such as Mr. Holmes (Dir. Condon 2015), decline is signalled by loss of memory and suggestions of dementia. Yet, the narrative of decline is consistently overturned, rendered a fiction, when a recall to former employment reiterates the physical and / or cerebral supremacy that underpinned working lives, and the invincibility of the ageing protagonist is

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thereby asserted. Even when played for ironic laughs, action heroes successfully reprise the fictions of car chases, fist fights, and shoot-outs. And somehow, their bruised, battered bodies and minds are never broken (Lennard 2014; Wearing 2017; Dolan 2017: 189–97). This trope of fictional decline also threads through animated films such as Up (Dir. Docter 2009) that are not reliant on the visible bodies of stars. Gravagne highlights how Up’s protagonist, Carl (voiced by Ed Asner), is established in isolated decrepitude before displaying the type of ‘continuing athletic prowess’ usually associated with age-defying geriaction heroes (2013: 62–3). Consistently, ageing protagonists display ‘mental acumen, quick reflexes and an impressive sagaciousness that the younger generation painfully and obviously lacks’ (Vitols and Lynch 2015: 14), Thus, not only is the narrative of decline refuted by the performances and performativities displayed by these protagonists but, as with stars, their age counts as a valued improvement to the hegemonic masculinity they embody. Fictions of masculinity’s decline and recovery also shape depictions of erectile dysfunction in romantic comedies like Something’s Gotta Give (Dir. Meyers 2003) and The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (Dir. Madden 2015). With erectile dysfunction constituted as an acute signifier of masculine decline (Marshall 2011) it is no surprise that its rehearsal is frequently confined to romantic comedies where humour serves to deflect the anxieties surrounding taboo subjects. Equally, the hetero conventions of romantic comedy offer the reassurance that coupledom and coupling will be achieved, and in the case of Something’s Gotta Give, Jack Nicholson’s image of irresistible sexual potency offers similar assurances. Even so, both films deftly register the shame of erectile dysfunction through Harry and Norman’s (Ronald Pickup) secretive use of Viagra. Not only is the condition to be hidden, so too is its pharmaceutical remedy. Despite the implications of product placement, neither of these films offer wholesale endorsement of Viagra, since the ultimate solution for declining virility is a shift in sexual focus from chemical support and younger women to chemical-free sex in a ‘generationally appropriate’ relationship with a ‘special’ older woman – Harry with Erica (Diane Keaton) and Norman with Carole (Diana Hardcastle). The trope of the sexualized older woman marks a positive shift in the Hollywood conglomerate’s representational repertoires; yet here, they are reduced to sexual carers enabling ‘the symbol of masculinity, heterosexual intercourse’ to be ‘continually achieved’ through their care of ‘ageing, frail bodies’ (Chivers 2011: 134). Effectively, the ‘generationally appropriate’ relationship and associated penetrative sex not only refute the looming narrative of decline but also reiterate the potently virile version of hegemonic masculinity that is always already embodied by stars like Nicholson. Once a film’s end credits roll round, the star is placed beyond the frame of the film whose diegetic fiction of decline is held in sharp relief to stardom’s embodiment of unassailable hegemonic masculinity.

AGEING PROTAGONISTS AND THE TROUBLING CONTINUITIES OF INTERGENERATIONAL MASCULINITY The vulnerability of the ageing protagonist is a recurring cinematic trope that ‘responds to the claim that the body is not, as its posturing ostensibly claims, invincible’ (Lennard 2014: 97–8). Consistently, the ageing protagonists’ rehearsal of physical or cerebral prowess is always a temporary alleviation of decline. For instance, the eponymous and ageing Rocky Balboa (2006; Dir. Stallone) ultimately loses his fight against a young pretender, Mason ‘The Line’ Dixon (Antonio Tarver). And in Up, once Carl has saved his home from the predations of developers, he is returned to lonely

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isolation with his reserves of ingenuity and super-mobility seemingly exhausted. In a similar vein, we know that dementia will eventually defeat Holmes’s (Ian McKellen) intellect, and in Gran Torino (Dir. Clint Eastwood 2008), we witness the death of its protagonist, Walt (Clint Eastwood). Here, then, the articulation of hegemonic masculinity by protagonists is only ever a temporary achievement contingent on a context of crisis. This contingency plays an important function in films characterized by a deeply moving intergenerational male bonding whereby the ageing tough guy is ‘manoeuvred into a paternal role in which his authority is legitimised … restated and romanticised’ and consequently, ‘his masculinity is enshrined as a mythic model for younger men’ (Lennard 2014: 106). As Hamad (2014) argues, the paternalism of mythic masculinity is not confined to the geriaction film. Consider how Walt in Gran Torino helps Thao Vang Lor (Bee Vang) to ‘man up’ through an introduction to the macho practices of the building industry and the wisecracking quips of homosocial exchanges, or how Carl in Up plays grandfather figure and masculine resourceful role model to the earnest Russel (voiced by Jordan Nagai), or how the eponymous Mr Holmes plays nurturing father figure to lonely Roger Munro (Milo Parker). In each instance, a fatherless boy is mentored by an ageing protagonist who, for the duration of a crisis at least, refutes the shadow of decline through the performativities of hegemonic masculinity. The crucial issue here is that ageing protagonists do not mentor in the guise of declining figures on the brink of the fourth-age imaginary. Rather, their mentoring coincides with a provisional ability to articulate the performativities of third-age masculinity as hegemonic ideals. This raises two further points. First, protagonists are pulled back from the fourth-age imaginary and positively located in the performativities of a third-age masculinity informed and improved at the intersection with hegemonic ideals. Thus, like vintage stars, the no-longer declining protagonist articulates a trajectory of improvement. Second, at the very least, younger characters are taught by their ageing mentors to recognize masculinity’s most valued behaviours and attributes. Even as they learn to recognize hegemonic ideals of masculinity, they are able to induce that such ideals are not simply a source of admiration. Rather, it is visibly demonstrated that such ideals can be acquired, assimilated, and embodied at any point along the course of a long life. Clearly, these films do not propose that hegemonic masculinity can be handed down like a gift, but they nonetheless hold out the promise that its ideals are learned performativities to be passed down the generations. Notably, the Walt and Thao relationship of Gran Torino is both intergenerational and inter-racial and could readily be read as the enrichment of hegemonic masculinity through the integration of BAME attributes. But Herbert J. Gans is less optimistic, suggesting that Gran Torino plays into a broader process of phenotypical ‘whitening’ whereby middle class ‘East Asians and lightskinned Latinos’, who for decades were constituted as ‘non-white’, are now reconfigured as ‘white’ (2012: 268). While seeming to challenge racial binaries and hierarchies, this process actually ‘operates to protect white privilege by pushing African Americans further and further below the next higher social and economic strata’ (2012: 276). Gans adds that ‘whitening’ is not seized or earned through resistance, but it is conferred by those already in possession of its privileges. Following on then, just as Walt bequeaths to Thao his most treasured possessions of combat medals and iconic car, so too his mentoring in the performativities of hegemonic masculinity serves to confer ‘whiteness’ onto his Hmong disciple and to secure the racial binary that marginalizes BAME actors and stars who are unable, or unwilling, to pass for white.

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Just as we need to question the seeming adjustment to hegemonic masculinity’s ‘whiteness’, we need also to recognize the limitations of challenges to its heteronormative frame. For instance, telling the story of Hal (Christopher Plummer) who comes out when aged seventy-five, Beginners (Dir. Mills 2010) successfully unsettles long-standing negative stereotypes of gay identity – the desexualized queen, or the predator of younger men. It also offers a father–son mentoring dynamic as Oliver (Ewan MacGregor) learns from his father that it is never too late to change the course of one’s life: never too late to foster self-integrity. Yet Niall Richardson (2019) observes that the film is ultimately concerned with ‘how the heteronormative majority contend with the “threat” of the ageing, gay male body’ (2019: 199). All too typically this ‘threat’ is defused by the death of the older gay man thereby protecting the heteronormative family and creating a distance between gay masculinity from those hegemonic ideals embodied by ageing stars and protagonists alike. Thus, even though the Hollywood conglomerate has ostensibly changed its representational systems in line with changing social mores, it continues to articulate straight masculinity as the hegemonic ideal.

CONCLUSION The positive conclusion to be reached is that the Hollywood conglomerate fully exploits the default alignment of stars and hegemonic masculinity to unsettle any automatic links between retirement, ageing, and the narrative of decline. Stars never retire, and thereby male stars never mobilize the narrative of age as decline. Consequently, they operate as exemplars of successful ageing within the ‘economy of celebrity’ and by extension, through the roles they play. Across the genre spectrum, protagonists for whom even dementia offers no hindrance perform a shift from initial retirement-related decline into successful ageing when a call upon professional expertise replenishes their claims to hegemonic masculinity – if only for the duration of a crisis. And, for both stars and protagonists, intergenerational relationships forged via fan bases, or consumer culture or on-screen mentoring dynamics formulate ageing as both a valued improvement and a treasured legacy. Running counter to this positive assessment are several troubling issues, not least stardom’s validation of those extended working lives frequently proposed as a resolution to the fiscal and social costs of ageing populations in ways that efface the very real obstacles to deferred retirement faced by many people. Moreover, the alignment between hegemonic masculinity and the thirdage imaginary articulated through protagonists of various genres renders decline as a readily dismissed diegetic fiction. Even films like Mr. Holmes and Something’s Gotta Give gloss the cultural verisimilitude of dementia or erectile dysfunction through their all-too-easy resolutions that render both conditions little more than temporary inconveniences. Also, in Something’s Gotta Give and The Second Best Marigold Hotel, the multiple underlying and often irresolvable causes of erectile dysfunction are neglected. Instead, the condition is shown to be an individual’s failure to reconcile with third-age performativities and ‘generationally appropriate’ relationships, while the entitlements of masculinity are stretched to include a sexual carer in the guise of a similarly aged woman. But more disturbing is the reiteration of hegemonic masculinity as white and heterosexual. Even as films like Beginners unsettle existing gay stereotypes, the death of the protagonist effectively effaces gay identity and re-secures both the nuclear family and hegemonic masculinity to the heteronormative frame. At the same time, the long-standing on-screen marginalization of BAME

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stars and prominent actors continues to shore up the Hollywood conglomerate’s privileged normative whiteness. Even when the ageing white protagonist of Gran Torino mentors a BAME character into the performativities of hegemonic masculinity, rather than it being inflected and changed through the insertion of non-white gestures and performativities, the reverse happens and whiteness is conferred onto the youthful disciple. While this powerfully illuminates the cultural construction of race, it also throws into relief the ubiquitous and pervasive privileges and power of whiteness, especially when aligned to the performativities of third-age hegemonic masculinity. Thus despite greater diversity in racial, sexual, and age categories in the Hollywood conglomerate’s representational system, little has really changed in the twenty-five plus years since Connell first foregrounded the racial and sexual limitations of hegemonic masculinity.

REFERENCES Anderson, H., and M. Daniels (2016), ‘Film Dialogue from 2,000 Screenplays Broken Down by Gender and Age’, The Pudding, 16 April. Available at: https://pudd​ing.cool/2017/03/film-dialo​gue/ (pudding.cool) (accessed 17 November 2020). Bogle, D. (1991), Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, & Bucks, New York: Continuum. Boyle, E., and S. Brayton (2012), ‘Ageing Masculinities and “Muscle Work” in Hollywood Action Film: An Analysis of the Expendables’, Men & Masculinities, 15 (5): 468–85. Bühring, L.-N. (2017), ‘Declining to Decline: Aged Tough Guys in the Expendables and the Expendables 2’, Journal of Extreme Anthropology, 1 (3): 1–20. Bühring, L.-N. (2020), ‘The Social Construction of Ageing Masculinities in Neoliberal Society – Reflections on Retired German Men’, PhD thesis, University of Gloucestershire: Gloucester. Butler, J. (1990), Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, New York: Routledge. Carroll, H. (2011), Affirmative Reaction: New Formations of White Masculinity, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Chivers, S. (2011), The Silvering Screen: Old Age and Disability in Cinema, Toronto: Toronto University Press. Cohen-Shavlev, A. (2009), Visions of Aging: Images of the Elderly in Film, Portland, OR: Sussex Academic Press. Connell, R. W. (1995), Masculinities, Cambridge: Polity Press. Connell, R. W., and J. W. Messerschmidt (2005), ‘Hegemonic Masculinity: Rethinking the Concept’, Gender & Society, 19 (6): 829–59. DeFalco, A. (2010), Uncanny Subjects: Aging in Contemporary Narratives, Columbus: Ohio State University Press. Dillaway, H., and M. Byrnes (2009), ‘Reconsidering Successful Aging: A Call for Renewed and Expanded Academic Critiques and Conceptualizations’, Journal of Applied Gerontology, 28 (6): 702–22. Dolan, J. (2014), ‘Smoothing the Wrinkles: Hollywood, Old Age Femininity and The Pathological Gaze’, in C. Carter, L. Steiner, and L. McLaughlin (eds), The Routledge Companion to Media and Gender, 342–51, London: Routledge. Dolan, J. (2017), Contemporary Cinema and ‘Old age’: Gender and the Silvering of Stardom, London: Palgrave. Dolan, J. (2019), ‘Representations of Older Women and White Hegemony’, in D. Gu and M. E. Dupre (eds), Encyclopedia of Gerontology and Population Aging, Springer, doi:10.1007/978-3-319-69892-2_165-1.

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Dolan, J. (2020), ‘Older Women and Cinema: Audiences, Stories, and Stars’, in K. Ross (ed.), The International Encyclopaedia of Gender, Media, and Communication, Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell. Available at: https://online​libr​ary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/978111​9429​128.iegmc​191 (accessed 21 October 2020). Dolan, J., and E. Tincknell, eds (2012), Ageing Femininities: Troubling Representations, Newcastle-uponTyne: Cambridge Scholars Press. Donnar, G. (2016) ‘Narratives of Cultural and Professional Redundancy: Ageing Action Stardom and the “Geri-Action” Film’, Communication, Politics & Culture, 49 (1): 1–18. Dyer, R. (1979), Stars, London: British Film Institute. Dyer, R. (1986), Heavenly Bodies: Film Stars and Society, London: Routledge. Esquire (2012), ‘Vintage Style: Clint Eastwood’, 3 September, Esquire, Available at: http://www.esqu​ire. co.uk/style/fash​ion/news/a424/vint​age-style-clint-eastw​ood/ (accessed 7 September). Evans, N. (2015), ‘No Genre for Old Men? The Politics of Aging and the Male Action Hero’, Canadian Journal of Film Studies, 24 (2): 25–44. Fox, A. (n.d.), ‘Style Icon: Clint Eastwood’, askmen, Available at: http://www.Style Icon: Clint EastwoodAskMen (accessed 6 December 2020). Gans, H. J. (2012), ‘“Whitening” and the Changing American Racial Hierarchy’, Du Bois Review: Social Science Research on Race, 9 (2): 267–79. Gates, P. (2010), ‘Acting His Age? The Resurrection of the 80s Action Heroes and Their Aging Stars’, Quarterly Review of Film and Video, 27 (4): 276–89. Gilleard, C., and P. Higgs (2005), Contexts of Ageing: Class, Cohort and Community, Cambridge: Polity. Gravagne, P. (2013), The Becoming of Age: Cinematic Visions of Mind, Body and Identity in Later Life, Jefferson, NC: McFarland. Gullette, M. (1997), Declining to Decline: Cultural Combat and the Politics of the Midlife, Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. Hamad, H. (2014), ‘Paternalising the Rejuvenation of Later Life Masculinity in Twenty-First Century Film’, in I. Whelehan and J. Gwynne (eds), Ageing, Popular Culture and Contemporary Feminism: Harleys and Hormones, 78–92, London: Palgrave Macmillan. Harrington, C. L., D. Bielby, and A. R. Bardo, eds (2014), Ageing, Media, and Culture, Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. Jackson, D. (2016), Exploring Ageing Masculinities: The Body, Sexuality and Social Lives, London: Palgrave MacMillan. Jermyn, D. (2012), ‘“Get a Life Ladies. Your Old One Is Not Coming Back”: Ageing and the Lifespan of Female Celebrity’, Celebrity Studies, 3 (1): 1–12. Jermyn, D., and S. Holmes, eds (2015), Women, Celebrity and Cultures of Ageing: Freeze Frame, London: Palgrave MacMillan. King, N. (2010), ‘Old Cops: Occupational Ageing in a Film Genre’, in V. B. Lipscomb and L. Marshall (eds), Staging Age: The Performance of Age in Theatre, Dance, and Film, 57–84, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Lauzen, M. M. (2015), ‘The Celluloid Ceiling: Behind-the-Scenes Employment of Women on the Top 100, 250, and 500 Films of 2015’, The Celluloid Ceiling. Available at: http://womeni​ntvf​ilm.sdsu.edu/ files/2015_C​ellu​loid​_Cei​ling​_Rep​ort.pdf (accessed 18 November 2020). Laverty, C. (2012), ‘Style Icon: Mr Clint Eastwood’, Mr. Porter, 24 January. Available at: https://www.mrpor​ ter.com/jour​nal/jour​nal_​issu​e48/4#1 (accessed 7 November 2020).

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Lennard, D. (2014), ‘Too Old for This Shit? On Ageing Tough Guys’, in I. Whelehan and J. Gwynne (eds), Ageing, Popular Culture and Contemporary Feminism: Harleys and Hormones, 93–107, London: Palgrave Macmillan. Lipscomb, V. B., and L. Marshall, eds (2010), Staging Age: The Performance of Age in Theatre, Dance, and Film, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Marshall, B. L. (2011), ‘The Graying of “Sexual Health”: A Critical Research Agenda’, Canadian Review of Sociology, 48 (4): 390–413. Miller, T. (2004), Global Hollywood 2, London: BFI. Pederby, D. (2011), Masculinity and Film Performance: Male Angst in Contemporary American Cinema, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Richardson, N. (2019), Ageing Femininity on Screen: The Older Woman in Contemporary Cinema, London: I. B. Tauris. Salazar, J. B. (2010), ‘Fashioning the Historical Body: The Political Economy of Denim’, Social Semiotics, 20 (3): 293–308. Schaap, R. (2011), ‘No Country for Old Women: Gendering Cinema in Conglomerate Hollywood’, in H. Radner and R. Stringer (eds), Feminism at the Movies: Understanding Gender in Contemporary Popular Cinema, 151–63, New York: Routledge. Shary, T., and N. McVittie (2016), Fade to Gray: Aging in American Cinema, Austin: University of Texas Press. Turner, G. ([2004] 2014), Understanding Celebrity, London: Sage. Vitols, M. Z., and C. Lynch (2015), ‘Back in the Saddle Again: Ethics, Visibility and Aging on Screen’, Anthropology and Aging, 36 (1): 11–19. Wearing, S. (2007), ‘Subjects of Rejuvenation: Aging in a Postfeminist Culture’, in Y. Tasker and D. Negra (eds), Interrogating Postfeminism: Gender and the Politics of Popular Culture, 277–310, Durham NC: Duke University Press. Wearing, S. (2017), ‘Troubled Men: Ageing, Dementia and Masculinity in Contemporary British Crime Drama’, Journal of British Cinema and Television, 14 (2): 125–42. Woodward, K. ed. (1999), Figuring Age: Women, Bodies, Generations, Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Filmography Beginners (2010), Dir. M. Mills, USA: Focus Features. Dirty Harry (1971), Dir. D. Siegel, USA: Warner Bros. Pictures. Gran Torino (2008), Dir. C. Eastwood, USA: Warner Bros. Pictures. Mr. Holmes (2015), Dir. B. Condon, UK, USA: 20th Century Fox (UK), Miramax, Roadside Attractions (USA). Remember (2015), Dir. A. Egoyan, Canada, Germany: Entertainment One (Canada), Tiberius Film (Germany), A24 (US). Rocky Balboa (2006), Dir. S. Stallone, USA: Sony Pictures Releasing. The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (2015), Dir. J. Madden, UK: Fox Searchlight Pictures. Something’s Gotta Give (2003), Dir. N. Meyers, USA: Sony Pictures Releasing (North America), Warner Bros. Pictures (international).

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Up (2009), Dir. P. Docter, USA: Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures. X-Men (2000), Dir. B. Singer, USA: 20th Century Fox.

TV Series Star Trek: The Next Generation (1987–94), Paramount Domestic Television.

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CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Late style: Rejuvenating the debate AMIR COHEN-SHALEV

INTRODUCTION The idea of late style, a concept with a long and convoluted discursive history, has seen a resurgence of critical popularity in recent years (McMullan and Smiles 2016). This chapter begins with a genealogy of late style in historical perspective. I then turn to summarize the critical arguments against universal and trans-historical notions of late style. After offering a rebuttal of these arguments and an example of late style in cinema by exploring Claude Sautet’s lifelong movie-making career, I conclude by pointing to major directions in which a humanistic, interdisciplinary study of late style can progress, showing how the recent attack on late style rekindles the debate, positioning late style as a challenge that cannot be ignored.

BACKGROUND: LATE STYLE IN A HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE ‘Old-age style’, ‘late work’, ‘lateness’, and ‘late style’ are interchangeably used to characterize the underlying qualities of the work of selected authors, primarily, though not exclusively, in old age, triggered by the imminence of death and offering a radical vision of the essence of their craft. Late style tends to cross disciplines and is seen in art, music, literature, and cinema. Critics often invoke the examples of Titian, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, and Ludwig van Beethoven, yet there is no consensus regarding the common denominator of ‘late work’ and whether it is indeed universal. Furthermore, any idea of late style must face the challenge of the competing ‘age-decrement hypothesis’, a deeply ingrained tradition, at least in the Western hemisphere, starting with Adolphe Quetelet (1835), continuing with George M. Beard ([1874] 1987), and culminating with modern scientific rigor (Lehman 1953; Simonton 1990). This tradition instructs us that mental and creative performance unavoidably decline with age (Kaufman, Kaufman, and Lichtenberger 2011; Zhang and Niu 2013). Such age-related cognitive decline includes, according to psychological tests, attention deployment (considered to be particularly important for creative thinking, ideational fluency, flexibility, and originality; see Smith, Michael, and Hocevar 1990) as well as so-called divergent thinking. Sporadic attempts to salvage the lost dignity of older people (Mcleish 1976; Kastenbaum 1992) nevertheless remind us that metrics of creativity can be biased and arbitrary (Sasser-Coen 1993; Hendricks 1999). But in an era where the horror of ageing as a memento mori is inevitably highlighted by the age-decrement hypothesis (Simonton 2012), any

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discussion of creativity in late life is already biased. The negative premises and implications of earlier measurements of creativity across the life span, while disguising themselves as scientific, objective, and neutral, are, in fact, an illustration of the midlife discourse that frames the research on ageing (see Featherstone and Hepworth 1989, 1991; Hazan 1980, 1994, 2011). Yet it is through this very midlife perspective that critics are looking at late style to try and define it. The first comprehensive study within the North American ‘productivity approach’, seeking to establish measurements of creative productivity along the life span, was Harvey Lehman’s Age and Achievement (1953). Lehman concluded that in old age, artists were more likely (compared to younger people) to engage in completion and preparation for publication of earlier materials, and in the writing of textbooks, general and specialized histories, personal memoirs, and discussions of the problems of old age. Today, Lehman’s work is perceived as unfavourable to old age, even as ageist, but his achievement was to push forward the peak of creative achievement to middle adulthood, which was quite a feat in mid-twentieth-century, youth-centric American culture. In the United States, Lehman’s work continued to set the tone for additional empirical studies based on measurements of achievement over the life span. Independently, European scholarship has also rediscovered late style. A. E. Brinckmann ([1925] 1968), a German art scholar who was active between the world wars, introduced the notion of ‘old-age style’ (‘Altersstil’), applying it to the twilight glow and underlying anarchism of the late works of Michelangelo, Titian, Donatello, and Rembrandt. Georg Simmel, who addressed the issue of late style in the 1920s, offered a positive reading of transcendence and closure, while Theodor Adorno, who published his study of late style in 1937, already in the shadow of Nazism, saw in late style a conflict-ridden genre of revolt, resistance, and imminent catastrophe. All in all, proponents of old-age style coming from the bastions of cultural humanism were considered too ‘unscientific’ by positivists and later too ‘essentialist’ by post-modernists, thus remaining in the margins of the dominant academic discourse on creativity. Late style in the European humanistic (Simmel–Brinkmann–Adorno) tradition was detained with the Second World War, to be re-engaged by Edward Said six decades later. Said’s posthumous On Late Style (2006) rekindled the interest in the concept. For certain major artists, Said claims, late style manifests itself in a stubborn, hard-headed refusal to find resolution, a ‘resignation from the possibility of synthesis’. The freedom offered by late style allows contradictions to be held in tension, ‘as equal forces straining in opposite directions, by the artist’s mature subjectivity, gained as a result of age and exile’ (Said 2006: 148). Lateness, then, for Said, combines the endogenous vector of creative longevity with the exogenous condition of exile. An exiled person himself, towards the end of his life and in sickness, Said cultivated a view of old age as a form of ‘otherness’ imposed by socio-historical and political circumstances. ‘Lateness’ conceived as creative maturity within a broader context is also in agreement with recent context-bound, system models that contextualize creativity (Mumford and Gustafson 1988; Runco 2004; Hennessey and Amabile 2010).1 Other humanistic conceptualizations of late style also exist, referring to it as saying the most with the least through economy of means, concise emotional expression, directness, and de-sublimated engagement (Kastenbaum 2000; Clark 1972). Since artistic creativity has widely been seen as stemming from and resting on deep personal conflict and contradictions (Cohen-Shalev 2002), it followed that as life draws to an end, there should be a developmental push towards reconciliation and integrity (Kastenbaum 2000). My own studies of works produced in old age conceived them as an outgrowth of previous life span developmental stages but not their integration (Cohen-Shalev

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2002). Creativity in old age manifests a breaking away from the artist’s midlife stylistic conventions, boldly defying what once they had so diligently perfected. This means that ‘late style’ while having a universal, although elusive, quality must be properly understood and fine-tuned in the context of the developmental trajectory and social context of each author. While the concept of lateness as a largely age-free category has maintained some relevance in literary circles, in the social sciences the search after old-age style was largely abandoned for various reasons. In their survey of the literature on lateness, Hutcheon and Hutcheon (2012, 2016) maintain that no generalized late-style discourse can encompass all the variety of individual artists’ careers. Old-age style became lost between opposites like ‘late’ versus ‘old-age’ style, cessation versus continuity, completion versus unexpected change, decline versus rejuvenation, and abstraction versus dementia. In addition, there is the glaring absence, until quite recently, of eminently creative women (Wyatt-Brown and Rossen 1993). For all its emphasis on continuity of development and its belief in the enduring strength of the human spirit, humanistic gerontological psychology has yet to present a convincing and consensual alternative to the age-decrement view.

LATE STYLE RECHARGED The essays in Late Style and Its Discontents (McMullan and Smiles 2016) share a sceptical view about the desire for universal and trans-historical notions of late style and attempt to undermine ‘the credibility of late style as a coherent concept in aesthetics’ (2016: 30). The universalizing and transcendent meanings of late style are, for the contributors of this anthology, a way of ignoring the historical contingency and critical construction of lateness, in both its epochal and biographical modes. For the art historians, critics and literary scholars gathered in Late Style and Its Discontents, most of the late-style discourse is a myth that is, at best, ‘unproductive’, and at worst potentially harmful, critically unsound, an unhappy result of an understandable yet deplorable human weakness for a redemptive message, propagated mostly by scholars outside their ‘sphere of competence’ (McMullan and Smiles 2016: 16). I would like to argue that in parallel, the very existence of this book is a symptom that late style cannot be ignored. Late style is therefore both charged (in the sense of being attacked) and recharged. The main criticism is in four parts: conceptual and crossdisciplinary vagueness, over-generalization, the role of the critic, and extra-textual considerations of ‘wishful thinking’. The first part is conceptual and cross-disciplinary vagueness. In this critical view, late-style proponents are charged for having developed not a theory but a discursive field, with different emphases and values, reflecting different technical traditions of ‘style’ and cultural expectations regarding ‘old age’. Their approaches are therefore better understood not as guides to a widespread aesthetic phenomenon but as historically conditioned attempts to reconcile the ‘problematic’ last works of selected artists with what they considered to be the relevant progressive developments of their own time. Seen in this light, the credibility of late style as a coherent concept in aesthetics, with a wide application across art forms, cultures, and epochs, is discredited. A parallel issue here is that of professional authority and territory-marking, namely, who is legitimately authorized and qualified to handle the materials of art in general, and late art, in particular. The second issue concerns the danger of overgeneralization. This critical argument sees ‘late style’ not as a natural phenomenon – a real, if ineffable, characteristic of the output of certain geniuses late in life – but a trope, an artistic construct, a genre that creative artists could choose

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to adopt. Smiles’s (2016) oppositional distinction between the transcendence-resolution model (Simmel, Brinkmann) and the Adorno–Said model of rupture portrays not a single late-style discourse but two, which does allow some form of (soft) generalization. The third criticism highlights the role or even ‘complicity’ of the critic in the discourse of late style, the critic as self-consciously shaping a late style for its subject. This is also stressed in Carel Blotkamp’s The End: Artists’ Late and Last Works (2019). Late style may be nothing more than a critic’s fantasy, a by-product of our hunger for hidden meanings, narrative closure, and valedictory statements. Related to the last critical point is an extra-textual consideration criticizing old-age style as a ‘wishful thinking’, a projected fantasy of fighting off gerontophobia. Ben Hutchinson (2016) goes even further to suggest that ‘rather than being a stable set of qualities it would seem that late style is something closer to a Rorschach test, where the observer sees what he or she wants to see in the inkblot’ (in McMullan and Smiles, 2016: 239).

REBUTTAL Late style should be approached as an interdisciplinary phenomenon. Those critical of it will be critical of anything which transgresses the boundaries of their disciplinary territories. Considering the critic–artist dyad, critics evidently have their interpretative bias. It was such bias that made Ibsen scholar H. L. Mencken alter the playwright’s biography so that his stroke predates the writing of When We Dead Awaken, contrary to fact. It was not the Ibsen that Mencken knew and adored, and the changes in the last play were simply too much for the critic to take. Having no critical tools with which to approach the play, the disappointment with the unexpected transformations led to a distorted perception. This is, of course, an extreme response but a significant one all the same. It is also echoed in critical analyses of artists with dementia. Dementia as a disease category is incredibly idiosyncratic in manifestation and rarely runs a smooth course of manageable decline (Kitwood 1997). Capacities can wax and wane, sudden losses are frequently observed, while varying degrees of ‘rementia’ (temporary regaining of abilities) are also quite common. What manifests itself is a gradual disorganization of self, a process requiring a cautiously negotiated ‘structuring and destructuring’ of the self and its changing relation to the world (Gubrium and Holstein, 1990). Seeing dementia as an on–off mental disease, and asking whether George Oppen, Hans Hartung, or any other artist with dementia were ‘in their right mind’ (McMullan and Smiles 2016: 44) when making their late works are inadequate premises in analysing these works. Pablo Picasso’s problematic last works, which were initially dismissed as senile scrawls before being celebrated as bold experiments, are described in Late Style and Its Discontents as displaying ‘preoccupations typical of the elderly’ (2016: 101), which actually sounds ‘like a perfectly possible definition of late style’ (Brown 2018). How we look at late style is evidently important and tells a lot about who is looking. Subjectivity is inherent to the interpretation of late-life work, not as a liability but an asset. Most of us who study late style are basically in the same position as Socrates – knowing that there is much that they do not know about what it is like to be old, and contemplating those ‘travelers who have gone a journey which I too may have to go’ (Mangan 2013: 16). But there is much more here than wishful thinking. In his Cambridge lecture, Kenneth Clark (1972) wonders why old-age style did not pick up momentum until the twentieth century, even though evidence of its existence has been with us for over three centuries. Clark correctly pointed to an underlying correspondence between the

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psychological characteristics of old age, as they are expressed in art, and the sensibilities of the postmodern observer. Transcendental pessimism, a retreat from naive realism, discontent with the doctrine of progress, and impatience with grand narratives – these old-age style features are also said to be common to the postmodern condition (or predicament). Recently, sociologists have indeed argued that elderly people in contemporary society are not merely victims of modernity, urbanization, industrialization, and social alienation, but also vanguards of postmodern experience. In this analysis, old people are perceived as people who find themselves in the unique position of being at the brink of society (Dowd 1986), endowed with the distance for engendering selfawareness and social creativity. Such social creativity is, contrary to prevailing stereotypes, a quality derived from the relative loosening of social constraints and the newly acquired freedom gained in later life (Rosenmayr 1983). The criticism of late style as a mere generalization has more power, yet it overlooks the personal varieties of late style. A generalizing concept of late style (in the singular) is inevitably ageist (Hutcheon and Hutcheon 2016). Rather than going out to settle the long rigmarole of variations and paradoxes in late style, let us take a different route. The key is to adopt Wittgenstein’s concept of categorical family resemblance: to qualify as late style, not all late works have to be like all others in the same way, but it will be enough to identify certain common features for inclusion in the category of late style. A central common feature is the attempt to integrate and reconcile strong competing impulses. My suggestion (Cohen-Shalev 1989, 2002) is that late works of long-lived creative masters involve the playing out of a core dilemma that characterized their work from the start in a way that is closely linked to historical times and circumstances as perceived and negotiated through personal temperament. It is interesting to return to these suggestions considering Said’s (2006) posthumous book. The fact that Said’s approach to lateness is age-free has been insufficiently stressed. A major part of the writers and musicians he addresses, including those addressed by other scholars influenced by his book, are not old: they are either young (Schubert, Mozart) or middle aged (Beethoven, Lampedusa, Schumann). From the standpoint of the model I proposed, these creative individuals are caught in a developmental phase where they are required, as it were, to take a stand and state a priority vis-à-vis the social order surrounding them. The work of artists who, for various individual or epochal reasons, cannot or choose not to oblige by social demands, may become intransigent, unresolved, and socially confrontational. While Said’s concept of lateness capitalized on social confrontation unrelated to chronological age, other scholars have maintained a perspective gained singularly in old age, a perspective that encapsulates ‘the whole world in a grain of sand’, offering ‘a vision of the whole which is possible only from a summit’ (Woodward 1980: 168). Yet because of these characteristics, old-age style is also very ambiguous. There is an ambiguity inherent in the ageing situation of simultaneously possessing a sense of self and otherness about oneself. This ambiguity sometimes allows for the embracing of literal form and metaphysical content, freedom and discipline, mind and body, fragments and whole, and – ultimately – life and death. However, old-age style is inherently difficult to follow. Its introversion is often expressed through a private language that can be too personal. It is further expressed in the language of old age and through images that the non-old are not yet quite familiar with. This otherness places the aged beyond middle-age society’s ‘zone of comfort’. The art of old age is therefore not consumer-oriented; on the contrary, it can be solitary and frightening – consider, for example, the case of Ingmar Bergman’s Saraband, Alain Resnais’s

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Providence, or Claude Sautet’s A Heart in Winter. Nevertheless, it is through old-age style that we can sometimes pursue what Kastenbaum calls ‘personal universals’ (1992: 287) – a significant bridge between immediate actuality, biographical as well as artistic, and a larger reality far beyond the particulars of time, place, and style. Rudolf Arnheim (1986), towards the end of his long career, wrote briefly about late style, and explicitly maintained that its stylistic features are by no means universal. He presented an idea that has gone unfortunately unheeded, of a gradual move with age from hierarchy towards homogenization. This distinction incorporates contradictive elements in the literature of oldage style, the redemptive (Simmel, Brinkman), and the socially confrontational (Adorno, Said). In a study of late style in motion picture (Cohen-Shalev 2008), I showed that several cinematic auteurs, such as Bergman and Kurosawa, exemplify several characteristics in line with those delineated by old-age style scholars. These include unresolved contradictions, defiant withdrawal, and dispensing with technical virtuosity and ornament. Others, such as Claude Sautet in his last films, matched old-age style to a lesser degree, emphasizing characteristics such as departure from earlier style and changes in worldview. In these late films, however, late style is also very personal and full of an idiosyncratic potential that cannot and should not be reduced to general formulae.

CINEMATIC LATE STYLE: CLAUDE SAUTET When he died in 2000, at the age of seventy-six, French film-maker Claude Sautet left a corpus of cinematic works that faithfully reflects the Parisian middle-class milieu he had always been a part of, together with a sound, positivistic optimism in values such as friendship, fidelity, and mutuality. His last two films, Un coeur en hiver (A Heart in Winter) (1992) and Nelly et Monsieur Arnaud (Nelly and Mr. Arnaud) (1995), constitute a significant departure in style, tone, and worldview, as they undermine that savoured positivism, introducing a pervasive sense of doubt, obstinate questioning, ambivalence, and contradictions. During his lifetime, Claude Sautet’s works achieved considerable critical attention and recognition, but they were short-changed in acclaim. Working alongside film luminaries such as Jean-Luc Godard, Francois Truffault, Alain Resnais, Claude Chabrol, and Jaques Rivette, in a cinematic era dotted with experimentation and innovation, Sautet was considered conservative, even reactionary. His choice of milieu, the Parisian middle class, coupled with a natural timidity, left him overshadowed by the extravagant revolutionaries of the ‘New Wave’ (Nouvelle Vague) in French cinema. Marital fidelity, the meagre comfort of friendships as social safety nets, the intricacies of interpersonal communication – these themes, which constantly appeared in his cinema – received competent but far from groundbreaking cinematic treatment. In Sautet’s late work, produced in his seventies, these themes are given a very different treatment and, despite superficial continuity, give way to a considerably altered style of film-making. In what follows I examine the proposition that Sautet’s last two films, when compared to his midlife works, constitute a developmental continuum which culminates in a style that is unique to old age. While the characteristics of this developmental continuum can be generalized, they are also uniquely expressed in the cinematic career of Sautet. I therefore intend to show how Sautet’s old-age style is personally unique as well as comparable to the broader artistic phenomenon of late style. Although old-age style contains both stylistic and thematic elements, my focus will be on psychological themes concerning the films’ composition, narrative, plot, and characters’ motivations.

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Sautet’s cinematic career began with a prolonged apprenticeship period between 1951 and 1969, consisting of the co-writing of scripts and assistant directorships to films of then better-known filmmakers such as Marcel Ophuls (Peau de banane, 1963) and Louis Malle (The Thief, 1967). There were also marginal directing efforts in the form of a couple of gangster movies which have very little to do with his later reputation; there was nothing particularly original or individual in these early efforts. During this period Sautet gradually gained the reputation of a ‘script doctor’ who was called upon, usually at the last moment, to save failed, stuck, or nearly aborted projects. The skills he acquired during these two decades, coupled with well-developed skills in teamwork, and a self-effacing, timid personality, prepared him for the series of films starting with Les choses de la vie (The Things of Life) (1969). The thematic foundations of his mature midlife phase are already apparent in Les choses de la vie: Behind a love triangle of an architect, his wife, and mistress, one discerns the ethical and emotional picture Sautet would perfect over the next two decades. It is a rich and complex picture, where the romantic aspect is a pretext for a thorough examination of middle-class life. One feature which stands out in Sautet’s work during this period is what has come to be known as his ‘choral’ films, which revolve around more than one subplot. They are the stories of various heroes who continually come together only to go their own separate ways again, creating a criss-crossing kaleidoscope of characters in motion. It is a structural element with stylistic features and, at the same time, a substantial thematic cornerstone of major importance: It is human togetherness, the friendship, that eventually saves the day. Relationships are often painful and unsatisfactory – full of disappointments and crises – but at the end, friends stick together. In his last two films, a Heart in Winter and Nelly and Mr. Arnaud, the real subject is what happens beneath the surface of a superficial relationship. Although Arnaud and Nelly do not interact as lovers, they tacitly acknowledge the irresistible pull between them. As in A Heart in Winter, two adults dabble in the unacknowledged currents below their excruciatingly courteous surface. The characters, although familiarly middle class, almost typecast, lead the audience to completely different perceptions, from the extreme of seeing Nelly as a kind of ‘kept woman’, to viewing Nelly as an independent, proud, and dignified young woman. Like Bergman’s last film Saraband, made in his eighties, and Kurosawa’s last three films also made in his eighties – Rhapsody in August, Dreams, and Madadayo – Sautet’s late films exemplify a stylistic departure marked by growing ambivalence and ambiguity. As a result, these late films are disturbing rather than peaceful, open-ended rather than providing closure. For Sautet, this departure undermines his midlife bourgeois romanticism. To recapitulate, we observe in Sautet’s cinematic career a threefold developmental path. It is important to emphasize that this developmental path does not refer directly to the personal life of Sautet but to his films. He began his career with an unfocused stage of apprenticeship, searching for his artistic identity through various genres and professional involvements. Then, in his elaborated second stage, Sautet matured through a relaxed and conventional depiction of everyday relationships in the bourgeois middle-class Parisian milieu. The second phase hinged on a core dilemma of having to choose between self-realization and compromise. This dilemma was accentuated through drama, ending with a cathartic choice in the fundamental values of human relations. In Sautet’s third filmographic phase, the sense of restraint becomes fragile. The elegant finesse that enabled Sautet to take the most potentially dramatic circumstances and treat them with kid gloves is time and again threatened, as when Maxime hits Stephane on the jaw in a café (an ironic reminder, perhaps, of Sautet’s early ventures into gangster films) and when Nelly and Arnaud get into an ugly exchange of

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obscenities. Frustration speaks out more loudly in these films than Sautet ever imagined in previous films. It threatens to undermine the ‘good manners’ that settled every possible misfortune in his earlier works. The late films of Sautet thus hinge on deconstruction and de-sublimation, producing an existential disquiet that disturbs and unsettles the midlife compromise of the second phase without offering any alternative resolution. While Sautet’s late films present some of the characteristic features of late style, such as de-sublimation and deconstruction of artifice, they do it in a relaxed style unique to him. Sautet’s late style therefore illustrates the interplay between the universal and the personal, his cinematic career evolving as it did according to a general life span developmental path while also following an idiosyncratic pace and style. Sautet demonstrates how ‘late manner’ or ‘old-age style’ is not the prerogative of a few select geniuses at the edge of the human creativity continuum but, in his case, the expression of ‘normal’, ‘ordinary’ ageing. Claude Sautet was no doubt a talented film-maker, yet the title ‘movie genius’ (too lightly used in certain circles) would not fit him, nor would he have felt comfortable with it. The point I wish to make is that Sautet’s late films, precisely because of his middle-of-the-road filmographic career, illustrate how ‘late style’ comes in many forms and shapes. When his two late films are compared to his previous work, their late style stands out: an intensified inwardness, pervasive ambivalence, economy of technical means, and a daring directness of emotional expression; an individuated, at times disturbing, frankness in the presentation and analysis of emotional life. It is this disturbing, disquieting quality lurking underneath the clean, urbane facade that brings the old Sautet so close to the solitary monologues, in paint, sound, or word, of elderly artists of the past, be it the selfmockery of the late Verdi, the cruel self-searching of the old Ibsen, the wrinkled ecclesiastic grin of Rembrandt’s late self-portrait, or the audacious brushwork of the old Monet (Cohen-Shalev 2002). The qualities associated with late style, be it intensification (Rosenthal 1968), ‘holy pessimism’ (Clark 1972), homogeneity (Arnheim 1986), or wisdom (Erikson 1982; Kastenbaum 2000), are certainly there, bearing the personal mark of Sautet’s life span artistic development. Sautet’s late style thus illustrates, once more, the developmental outcome of a lifetime of creative experience, fortified by ageing – not a guiding set of theoretical postulates but a response to an inner dictation.

CONCLUSION There is a constant oscillation between acknowledgement of the importance and fruitfulness of oldage style, and at the same time persistent critical denouncement of it. This oscillation remains, as do some of the late works discussed, unresolved. What may be deeply entrenched is the recognition of the value and significance of the ideational legacy of the early exponents of late style, not their inadequate attempts to define an all-encompassing theory. It is to the early thinkers’ credit that they planted a positive view of old age creativity, and of ageing at large, in a historical period of rampant ageism and gerontophobia, when developmental thought leaned heavily towards childcentred perception and quantitative measures of performance. Old age, obviously, can also be a time of renewed wisdom and perspective. It can be the ‘still point of the turning world’ (T. S. Eliot’s [1952] central metaphor in ‘Burnt Norton’, the first of his late ‘Four Quartets’). There is an alternative path in psychology that has advocated old age as a necessary stage for achieving ‘psychic wholeness’ (Bateson 1972; de Beauvoir 1972), ‘centroversion’ (Neumann 1959), and ‘ego-integrity’ (Erikson 1964). Keeping all that in mind should help us

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consider possible higher-order, content-free comparative aspects for future interdisciplinary study of old-age creativity. One direction is to consider how in some cases, old artists do not merely exhibit the stylistic features associated with lateness (abstraction, fragmentation, formal dissolution, foreshortening, minimalism) but embody them. The reduced vocabulary, crystallizing into a few prime symbols, also invokes the gerontological-cognitive concept of selective optimization with compensation. Another, humanistically inspired direction, is following the developmental quest to integrate and reconcile strong competing impulses. It is reminiscent of the psychoanalytical tradition of Erik Erikson as well as of the tradition of Simmel and Brinkmann, with an emphasis on psycho-gerontological processes as well as the psychology of the creative process rather than artistic style as such. These integrations may represent the working out of personal dualities. Depending on the individual, we may see more of the tightly disciplined person becoming freer, or more of the rhapsodic creator becoming more focused and restrained. In a similar vein, Kastenbaum has referred to my suggestion (Cohen-Shalev 1989, 2002) by arguing that late-life works of a number (though definitely not all) of long-lived creative masters involve the playing out of themes and conflicts that characterized their work from the start (a core dilemma) and are closely linked to historical times and circumstances as perceived and negotiated through personal temperament. Creative artists find their style (in the sense of a distinctive ‘voice’, not the epoch-conditioned critical construct employed by art critics and historians) in early or middle adulthood and continue to hone and cultivate it thereafter. Latelife developments offer a potential, often unrealized, but an opportunity all the same, for a different perspective, that may take the form of allowing long-standing contraries their equal and fair share of expression. Not either–or but ‘Both Worlds at Once’ in the words of seventeenth-century poet Edmund Waller (‘Growing Old’, in Muir [1961] 2013: 11) existing side by side in a homogenized space rather than hierarchical topography (Arnheim 1986). For those who, for various individual or epochal reason, cannot or choose not to oblige by social demands, their work may become, in Said’s words, intransigent, unresolved, and socially confrontational.

NOTE 1 These models examine the social and environmental influences on creativity as well as its broad implications for the psychology of human performance.

REFERENCES Arnheim, R. (1986), ‘On the Late Style’, in R. Arnheim (ed.), New Essays on the Psychology of Art, 285–96, Berkeley: University of California Press. Bateson, G. (1972), Steps to an Ecology of Mind, New York: Ballantine. Beard, G. M. ([1874] 1987), Legal Responsibility in Old Age, New York: Russell. Blotkamp, C. (2019), The End. Artists’ Late and Last Works, London: Reaktion Books. Brinckmann, A. E. ([1925] 1968), ‘Spätwerke grosser Meister’, in G. Rosenthal (ed.), From El Greco to Pollock. Early and Late Works by European and American Artists, 11, Baltimore, MD: Baltimore Museum of Art. Brown, W. (2018), ‘Review of Late Style and Its Discontents’, Comparative Literature Studies, 55 (2): 423–7. Clark, K. (1972), The Artist Grows Old, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Cohen-Shalev A. (1989), ‘Old Age Style: Developmental Changes in Creative Production from a Life Span Perspective’, Journal of Aging Studies, 3 (1): 31–7. Cohen-Shalev, A. (2002), ‘Both Worlds at Once’ – Art in Old Age, Lanham, MD: American University Press. Cohen-Shalev, A. (2008), Visions of Aging: Images of Old Age in Film, Sussex: Sussex Press. de Beauvoir, S. (1972), The Coming of Age, New York: Putnam. Dowd, J. J. (1986), ‘The Old Person as Stranger’, in V. W. Marshall (ed.), Later Life: The Social Psychology of Aging, 147–90, Beverly Hills, CA: Sage. Eliot, T. S. (1952), The Complete Poems and Plays 1909–1950, New York: Harcourt, Brace. Erikson, E. H. (1964), Insight and Responsibility, New York: Norton. Erikson, E. H. (1982), The Life Cycle Completed, New York: Norton. Featherstone, M., and M. Hepworth (1989), ‘Ageing and Old Age: Reflections on the Postmodern Life Course’, in B. Bytheway, T. Keil, P. Allat, and A. Bryman (eds), Becoming and Being Old: Sociological approaches to Later Life, 133–57, London: Sage. Featherstone, M., and M. Hepworth (1991), ‘The Mask of Ageing and the Post-Modern Life Course’, in M. Featherstone, M. Hepworth, and B. Turner (eds), The Body: Social Process and Cultural Theory, 370–89, London: Sage. Gubrium, J., and J. Holstein, eds. (1990), Ageing and Everyday Life, Oxford: Blackwell. Hazan, H. (1980), The Limbo People: A Study of the Constitution of the Time Universe among the Aged, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Hazan, H. (1994), Old Age: Constructions and Deconstructions, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hazan, H. (2011), ‘From Ageless Self to Selfless Age: Toward a Theoretical Turn in Gerontological Understanding’, in L. W. Poon and J. Cohen-Mansfield (eds), Understanding Well-Being in the Oldest Old, 11–26, New York: Cambridge University Press. Hendricks, J. (1999), ‘Creativity over the Life Course – a Call for a Relational Perspective’, Journal of Aging and Human Development, 48 (2): 85–111. Hennessey, B. A., and T. M. Amabile (2010), ‘Creativity’, Annual Review of Psychology: 61: 569–96. Hutcheon, L., and M. Hutcheon (2016), ‘Historicizing Late Style as a Discourse of Reception’, in G. McMullan and S. Smiles (eds.), Late Style and its Discontents: Essays in Art, Literature, and Music, 51– 68, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hutcheon, L., and M. Hutcheon (2012), ‘Late Style(s): The Ageism of the Singular’, Occasion: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Humanities. http://occas​ion.stanf​ord.edu/node/93. Hutchinson, B. (2016), ‘Afterword’, in G. McMullan and S. Smiles (eds), Late Style and Its Discontents: Essays in Art, Literature, and Music, 235–9, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kastenbaum, R. (1992), ‘The Creative Process: A Life-Span Approach’, in D. Van Tassel, T. R. Cole, and R. Kastenbaum (eds), Handbook of the Humanities and Aging, 285–305, New York: Springer. Kastenbaum, R. (2000), ‘Creativity and the Arts’, in T. R. Cole, R. Kastenbaum, and R. E. Ray, Handbook of the Humanities and Aging, 381–401, New York: Springer. Kaufman, J. C., S. Kaufman, and E. O. Lichtenberger (2011), ‘Finding Creative Potential on Intelligence Tests via Divergent Production’, Canadian Journal of School Psychology, 26: 83–106. Kitwood, T. (1997), Dementia Reconsidered, Buckingham: Open University Press. Lehman, H. C. (1953), Age and Achievement, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Mangan, M. (2013), Staging Ageing: Theatre, Performance and the Narrative of Decline, Intellect Books. McLeish, J. (1976), The Ulyssean Adult: Creativity in the Middle and Later Years, Toronto: McGraw-Hill.

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McMullan, G., and S. Smiles, eds (2016), Late Style and Its Discontents: Essays in Art, Literature, and Music, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Muir, K. ([1961] 2013), Last Periods of Shakespeare, Racine and Ibsen, Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. Mumford, M. D., and S. B. Gustafson (1988), ‘Creativity Syndrome: Integration, Application and Innovation’, Psychological Bulletin, 103: 27–43. Neumann, E. (1959), Art and the Creative Unconscious, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Quetelet, L. A. ([1835] 1968), A Treatise on Man and the Development of His Faculties, New York: Franklin. Rosenmayr, L. (1983), Die Späte Freiheit, Berlin: Severin und Siedler. Rosenthal, G., ed. (1968), From El Greco to Pollock, Baltimore, MD: Baltimore Museum of Art. Runco, M. A. (2004), ‘Creativity’, Annual Review of Psychology, 55: 657–87. doi:10.1146/annurev. psych.55.090902.141502. Said, E. (2006), On Late Style: Music and Literature Against the Grain, London: Bloomsbury. Sasser-Coen, J. A. (1993), ‘Qualitative Changes in Creativity in the Second Half of Life: A Life-Span Developmental Perspective’, Journal of Creative Behavior, 27 (1): 18–27. Simonton, D. K. (1990), ‘Creativity and Wisdom in Aging’, in J. E. Birren and K. W. Schaie (eds), Handbook of the Psychology of Aging, 320–9, San Diego, CA: Academic Press. Simonton, D. K. (2012), ‘Creative Productivity and Aging: An Age Decrement – Or Not?’, in S. K. Whitbourne and M. J. Sliwinski (eds), Handbooks of Developmental Psychology. The Wiley-Blackwell Handbook of Adulthood and Aging, 477–96, Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell. doi:10.1002/9781118392966.ch24. Smiles, S. (2016), ‘From Titian to Impressionism’, in G. McMullan and S. Smiles (eds), Late Style and Its Discontents: Essays in Art, Literature, and Music, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Smith, K. L. R., W. B. Michael, and D. Hocevar (1990), ‘Performance on Creativity Measures with Examination-Taking Instructions Intended to Induce High or Low Levels of Test Anxiety’, Creativity Research Journal, 3: 265–80. Woodward, K. (1980), At Last: the Real Distinguished Thing: The Late Poetry of Eliot, Pound, Stevens and Williams, Columbus: Ohio State University Press. Wyatt-Brown, A. M., and J. Rossen (1993), Aging and Gender in Literature: Studies in Creativity. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia. Zhang, W., and W. Niu (2013), ‘Creativity in the Later Life: Factors Associated with the Creativity of the Chinese Elderly’, Journal of Creative Behavior, 47 (1): 60–76.

Filmography Le voleur (The Thief) (1967), Dir. L. Malle, France / Italy: United Artists. Les choses de la vie (The Things of Life) (1969), Dir. C. Sautet, France: Lira Films. Nelly et Monsieur Arnaud (Nelly and Mr. Arnaud) (1995), Dir. C. Sautet, France / Italy / Germany: Les Films Alain Sarde. Peau de banane (Banana Peel) (1963), Dir. M. Ophuls, France: Les Films du Jeudi. Un coeur en hiver (A Heart in Winter) (1992), Dir. C. Sautet, France: Roissy Films.

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CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Fallen, falling, clinging, and crawling: The everyday age effects of drama and performance BRIDIE MOORE

INTRODUCTION This chapter explores the problematic staging of heterosexual desire in the ageing woman, focusing particularly on the title character in Jean Racine’s Phèdre ([1677] 1998), Blanche Dubois in Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire (1947) and Hester Collyer in Terrence Rattigan’s The Deep Blue Sea ([1952] 1999). I draw on developments in cognitive science research to explore how audiences – particularly ageing heterosexual women – might perceive these representations. As both a practice-based and traditional researcher I use autoethnographical methods to research how performances manifest an age effect in my own body, exploring how my presentation of self in everyday life (Goffman, 1959) might be conditioned by, respond to, and challenge such age effects. But first, a short survey of how the postmenopausal woman has been commonly represented in drama will be useful.

DRAMA AND THE (POST-)MENOPAUSAL WOMAN From ancient times, post-menopausal female sexual desire has been condemned in literature and drama. Pat Thane notes that the odes of Horace, ‘describe, with varying degrees of revulsion and pity, how these pleasures are no longer available to [women]. … The women are toothless, haggard, sex-crazed, disgusting’ (2000: 42). Yvonne Oram, writing on representations of the old woman in Elizabethan / Jacobean drama, observes that ‘the perfect old woman of the period is the one who accepts her aged state without fuss, denies her sexuality and most importantly, provides a good example to younger women’ (2013: 9). She goes on to comment that ‘any evidence of the old woman experiencing sexual desire and seeking sexual satisfaction would bring on … male mockery’ (2013: 117). Attitudes to ageing women hardened through the seventeenth century, as historian Lynn Bothelho comments, ‘It was said that a menopausal woman could cause grass to dry up, fruit to wither on the vine, and trees to die’ (2005: 127). She also quotes Racine (whose Phèdre is discussed below) as saying, ‘She took care to paint and to adorn her face … to repair the irreparable outrage of the years’ (2005: 134). Racine was clearly deeply unsettled by the idea of the

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libidinous ageing woman and, as we shall see, created the sexually crazed version of Phèdre, who is finally obliterated by suicide. David Troyansky notes that in the eighteenth century, ‘comedies commonly involved … the continued efforts at seduction by an ageing woman. Such behaviour was held up to ridicule’ (2005: 204). However, he also says that by the late-eighteenth century, ‘aged characters had become more dignified, a shift that can be tied to secularisation and a more social and deferential view’ (2005: 204). This continued into the nineteenth century, when there is little focus, in canonical dramas, on the admonition of old women for desires of the flesh. However, by the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, post-menopausal female desire again occupied the stage. In 1896, Chekhov created Arkadina in The Seagull, an ageing actress, jealously possessive of her young lover Trigorin, but dismissive of her son Konstantin, who remarks, ‘she wants to live and love and dress in light colours, and there am I, twenty-five years old, perpetually reminding her that she’s stopped being young’ (1988: 63). This heralds a renewed interest in ageing female desire, taken up later in, among others, The Deep Blue Sea (1952) and A Streetcar Named Desire (1947), discussed below. In the twenty-first century, plays such as April De Angelis’s Jumpy (2011) continue to represent the comic hopelessness of such desire. As Oram laments, ‘just as in Shakespeare’s day, it’s rare to find any kind of celebratory media vision of the ageing female body or of sexuality in the old woman’ (2013: 118–19). Before I go on to describe and comparatively analyse the three twentyfirst-century productions of the canonical dramas mentioned above, I will explore how audiences might perceive these representations, drawing on developments in cognitive research and Judith Butler’s notion of performativity.

COGNITIVE SCIENCE, PERFORMATIVITY, AND SPECTATORSHIP A problematic construction of feminine ageing is particularly prevalent in canonical dramas.1 Such works rely heavily on ‘stock types’ or what cognitive science might call ‘prototypes’ (McConachie 2008: 101).2 Bruce McConachie proposes that theatre studies should turn to the discoveries of cognitive science when analysing the processes of spectatorship. So, here I draw on McConachie’s work to explore the effects of performances of ageing femininity in three canonical dramas, examining how these might influence embodiments of ageing femininity. I analyse the way recent productions, and the demands of the texts, place the desiring / ageing female in a tension between the horizontal and vertical spatial positions on stage, often marginalizing her to the edge of the visual field (the floor). These axes are identified as spatial / cognitive ‘universals’ in cognitive science theory. Bringing insights from cognitive science together with Judith Butler’s phenomenological theories of performativity helps to analyse how plays might impact on an ageing female subjectivity, particularly my own, producing an ‘effect’ of age in the body. Butler argues that the performance of (gender) identity in everyday life is an ‘effect’, constructed by ‘cultural apparatus’ (2006: 199). This apparatus includes theatre, which generates spatial relations, movement, images, and sounds, all visuomotor stimuli that are categorized cognitively as representation. This representation promotes, as Butler puts it, a ‘stylistics of existence’ (1988: 521) – a bodily practice – and renders particular performances of middle-aged femininity possible or impossible in everyday life. McConachie draws attention to the falsifiable knowledge that is generated by neuroscientific research and proposes this as an alternative theoretical framework with which to understand processes of spectating. On this basis, and drawing on cognitive research, he rejects semiotics and

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the notion that we ‘read’ a performance in the same way we ‘read’ a text, contending that, for instance, ‘Saussurean semiotics does not account for the differences between visual perceptions and visuomotor representations’ (2008: 63). Visuomotor representations on stage, he asserts, are of vital importance in understanding the intention of an action: ‘viewers generate visuomotor representations when they watch actors. This system works … to enable spectatorial engagement in performance. Visuomotor representations function as part of a viewer’s “mirror neurons” to stimulate empathy’ (2008: 63). Explaining the function of mirror neurons, McConachie cites Italian researchers in the early 1990s ‘who noticed that many of the same group of neurons in the brain of a monkey fired when the monkey watched a male scientist bring a peanut to his mouth as when that monkey brought a peanut to its own mouth’ (2008: 70). This ‘simulation’ is significant for analysing the effect of live performance. McConachie also draws attention to ancient hominids’ ability to ‘trace the movements of another body onto a body map of the self in the mind / brain and to place that self into the context of the world’ (2008: 116). Taken together these ideas give insights into how we perceive and process representations of others. McConachie’s concentration on the systems by which humans generate empathy – particularly the function of the mirror neurons – leads him to conclude that ‘in conventional mimetic theory, playwrights and actors do the imitating. [However,] it is audiences who mirror the actions of those they watch on stage; cognitive imitation is a crucial part of spectating’ (2008: 72). On this capacity for ‘motor imagery’, McConachie quotes Pierre Jacob and Marc Jeannerod, who assert that ‘the observation of others’ bodily movements is a crucial source for the learning of skilled gestures by imitation’ (2008: 72). Such understanding not only acknowledges how spectators perceive dramatic action but also draws attention to the way they might be physically changed by performance. According to the research cited above, such cognitive responses to visuomotor intention and action prime the muscles neurochemically for action and therefore lay the foundation of social conditioning. Butler’s notion of performative acts that generate and produce gender (and, many argue, age) is therefore compatible in many ways with the understanding developed in neuroscience, from which McConachie draws.3 It is possible, then, to see aspects of identity, such as gender and age, as forms of technique that humans acquire by mirroring and simulating the behaviour they witness, as much as they might also respond to ‘narratives of decline’ which Margaret Morganroth Gullette identifies as promoting ‘unconscious habits of thought …, ways of seeing bodies and holding one’s own’ (2004: 28). It is also reasonable to assume that, as humans have ‘a more highly evolved mirror system than other animals’ (McConachie 2008: 71), we understand precisely the ways our own bodies map on to the one witnessed and therefore we will identify more or less with the behaviour of the model (due to age, gender, sexuality etc.). This specific identification should determine our levels of attention and what behaviour is learned and internalized. Indeed, Ben Spatz, researching embodied technique, refers to anthropologist Marcel Mauss, ‘who developed his notion of les technique du corps after noticing that a particular way of walking, which he first observed in New York, had travelled to Paris via the cinema’ (2015: 32). No doubt those who acquired this body style identified strongly with the Hollywood stars they had seen. Cognitive researchers Giles Fauconnier and Mark Turner, in their exploration of humans’ unique capacity for ‘conceptual blending’, note that ‘dramatic performances are deliberate blends of a living person with an identity, they give us a living person in one input and a different living person, an actor, in another … The spectator is able to live in the blend’ (2002: 266). Although they

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contend that the spectator’s ‘normal animacy and agency, … must all be inhibited’ (2002: 267), I propose that if the spectator is living ‘in the blend’ (e.g. of Phèdre / Helen Mirren) and her mirror neurons are engaged in the activity of simulating the actions and modelling the intentions of the actor / character, then to some degree her physical and social self is also implicated in this blend. The degree to which this three-way blend accommodates her own physicality may be determined by the similarity between her and the actor / character’s identity. This identification should determine the potency of certain performances to influence specific individuals in a physical sense. As with the Hollywood walk, mentioned above, such adoption of what Butler would call a ‘behavioural script’ (1988, 2006) suggests that in theatre and performance situations character identity and intention are grasped via attention, mirroring, and simulation, especially of those we specifically identify with.

A COGNITIVE APPROACH TO SPECTATING PERFORMANCES OF AGE McConachie draws attention to certain ‘conceptual universals’ resulting from our evolution in a specific environment with particular bodies, for instance, walking upright in a universe that is subject to the laws of gravity. Consequently, spatial conceptions such as up–down, near–far, centre–periphery and figure–ground (among others) are universal concepts that our species uses to structure thinking. Lakoff and Johnson (1980) propose that our thinking is largely metaphorical, contending that we create spatial orientation metaphors, based on our universal experiences of the physical world, to help structure our thinking. They acknowledge that ‘metaphor is not merely a matter of language. It is a matter of conceptual structure. And conceptual structure is not merely a matter of the intellect – it involves all the natural dimensions of our experience, including aspects of our sense experiences: color, shape, texture, sound, etc.’ (1980: 235), all important aspects of theatre performance. Lakoff and Johnson point to orientational metaphors, which include those that spring from the up / down orientation; for example, ‘HAPPY IS UP; SAD IS DOWN … my spirits rose … he’s really low these days … HAVING CONTROL OR FORCE IS UP; BEING SUBJECT TO CONTROL IS DOWN … I am on top of the situation … HIGH STATUS IS UP; LOW STATUS IS DOWN … She’ll rise to the top … he has little upward mobility’ (1980: 15–16). When applied to ageing, a structuring metaphor such as ‘over the hill’ obeys the negative ‘down’ trajectory and sanctions the disappearance of old people from the visual landscape. The characters that are under scrutiny here, as desiring / ageing females, are subject to the metaphor that places them on that downward journey, fulfilling Gullette’s ‘narrative of decline’ (2004: 28). In previous work I have proposed that in at least one contemporary drama – Nicholas Wright’s The Last of the Duchess (2011) – frail old age is rendered ‘ob-scene’ (Moore 2014: 183–90), in other words, that which must remain beyond representation, outside the frame of the stage. There I was concerned with representations of frail old age, but here I examine the figure of the middleaged / desiring heterosexual woman and propose that – in a censorial move, and in anticipation of her aged relegation to the off-stage position – she is orientated towards the margins of the stage, particularly the stage floor.4 I identify ways in which her movement within the stage frame, between the vertical and horizontal, works in a visuomotor sense to consolidate a representation of the desiring / ageing female as fallen, falling, put down, diminished, clinging, crawling, occupying the prone position or in a state of dying or death. I will examine this orientation in three major productions that occurred between 2009 and 2016 in the UK, in which the characters were played

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by women in their forties, fifties, and sixties.5 First, I will describe these productions and how spatial orientations operate within each, then go on to a comparative analysis of how age-effects are manifest as a result. Finally, I will explore the effect of such representations on my own everyday age performance. Phèdre From the outset Helen Mirren, in the 2009 National Theatre production of Racine’s drama, staggers into the space, collapsing towards the horizontal margin of the stage. Reviewer Kate Basset describes the ‘doomed Queen’, saying ‘As soon as she steps gingerly into the loggia … Mirren collapses in a heap’ (2009: 57). From this point Mirren oscillates between the horizontal and the vertical: David Benedict describes her as ‘ramrod-backed’ and ‘unbending’ (2009: 23), but, as the production photographs show, she is frequently floored, or clinging for support to her nurse or the indifferent Hippolytus, her stepson (Dominic Cooper), whom she loves with a raging passion. The drama performs the degradation and fall of this neo-classical, middle-aged, desiring woman; throughout the play Phèdre swings between self-loathing and intense incestuous desire. Thinking her husband Theseus (Stanley Townsend) dead, and having confessed her love to Hippolytus, Theseus returns, and to hide her shame she accuses Hippolytus of raping her. She finally becomes entirely laid low. In her last scene – a mirror image of her first appearance – she staggers back on stage, having poisoned herself. She dies slowly, confessing her false accusation, and as Suzanna Clapp notes, ‘She totters towards death like someone who has been eviscerated’ (2009: 13), her unnatural desire having finally brought her to the ultimate horizontal plane, the floor of the stage. A Streetcar Named Desire Towards the end of the final scene in A Streetcar Named Desire, the ageing Southern Belle, Blanche DuBois – played in the 2014 Young Vic production by Gillian Anderson – lies prone, wrestled to the floor in the bedroom of her sister’s apartment by the asylum Matron. Blanche, recently raped by her brother-in-law Stanley (Ben Foster), is being committed to an ‘institution’ for the insane. Blanche, lying prostrate, stiffly horizontal, presents a figure of personal and mental annihilation. This collapse has been prefigured a number of times in the performance: Blanche takes long baths, soaking in the tub to calm her nerves; she falls to her knees after being assaulted by her drunken suitor Mitch (Corey Johnson); she then climbs, drunken and clothed, into the bath before soonto-be-rapist Stanley carries her ‘inert’ body to the bed in the penultimate scene, in preparation for the rape. In this production (unlike the 1947 premiere), the rape itself is not veiled; however, Blanche’s identity is obscured as Stanley covers her prone upper body with the lower layers of her dress in a frenzied action of obliteration that indicates the rape. In the last scene, however, as she lies floored, the doctor uses her name, calling ‘Miss DuBois’, courteously offering, in the guise of a kind stranger, his ‘protection’ (1963: 225). Hearing her name, she makes one startling and agentic move: from her position on the horizontal axis of the stage floor she slowly reaches up a hand in a vertical gesture to take the doctor’s arm. He supports her, her fragile desire still tenuously intact, leading her off-stage – in a mockery of gallantry – towards what might be sanctuary or further abuse, but certainly to incarceration. The ageing, still desiring, woman cannot be contained within the bounds, either of the stage or of sanity.

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The Deep Blue Sea At the opening of The Deep Blue Sea, Hester Collyer – played in the 2016 National Theatre production by Helen McCrory – is discovered lying in front of the gas fire after a botched suicide attempt. She recently left her high court judge husband William (Peter Sullivan) to live with ex fighter pilot, Freddie Page (Tom Burke), whom she had fallen for a year earlier. He, an alcoholic, damaged by his war experiences, is unable to return her devoted passion; attempted suicide is the result. When Hester’s husband, informed of the suicide attempt, leaves after a short visit and she is alone for the first time, she walks, hanging onto the furniture, then crawls across the apartment and finally returns to the floor in an echo of the position in which she was found at the opening, expressing the wish for self-erasure. The play takes place over one day, as the tenants in the boarding house deal with and cover up her attempted suicide. She struggles at first to hide the situation and, when all is revealed, to convince Freddie to stay. These efforts result in undignified strategizing and pleading, and towards the end, Freddie having gone (or so she thinks), she prepares another bid for oblivion. Fellow tenant, the mysterious Mr Miller (Nick Fletcher) confronts her with the truth: ‘Your Freddie has left you. He’s never going to come back again. Never in the world. Never’ and the stage directions read ‘At each word she wilts as if at a physical blow’ ([1952] 1999: 85). In the 2016 production they both sit on the floor discussing her options. Hester decides eventually to choose life ‘beyond hope’ but ‘without despair’ (85) as Mr Miller describes it. Unlike both Phèdre and Blanche, her last act is one of determination to remain upright, self-supported, determined, and this is the stance she adopts as she finally sees Freddie out of the flat. From the opening image of her prostrate form in front of the gas fire she is in a constant tension between the vertical and horizontal planes of the stage. She chooses, at last, to remain on her feet and in the frame. However, she has not retained the desired object, nor therefore desire itself, and so can end the drama centre stage, upright yet alone.

EVERYDAY AGE EFFECTS It is remarkable that productions of these canonical dramas, starring such identifiable ageing actors as Mirren, Anderson, and McCrory, offer enactments of flooring, spillage, overbalancing, wilting, leaning, and falling, showing a visuomotor intention to complete a downward trajectory. As an ageing / desiring woman audience member, identifying with such figures, I – as we have seen from cognitive research – mirror their actions, movements, and intentions, evaluating these visuomotor stimuli as pertaining closely to my own subjectivity. Occupying this specific subject position as I do, witnessing ageing / desiring female protagonists falling, clinging, leaning, or collapsing to the floor, is a form of neurological and muscular training in the act of reduction and marginalization, one that will ultimately prepare me for disappearance from the frame altogether. This impetus or ‘effect’ will be expressed in my body, subtly lowering and downgrading its status. Jacob and Jeannerod observe that ‘the perception of biological motion automatically triggers, in the observer, the formation of a motor plan to perform the observed movement …. Thus, motor imagery lies at the interface between the planning of movements and the observation of others’ movements’ (in McConachie, 2008: 22). Observing the motion of these actor / characters – with whom I identify – forges neural pathways that condition mine and others’ future responses, producing an age effect that grinds the figure of the ageing / desiring woman down towards the floor, reducing her to one edge of

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the frame of the stage, or even beyond, to the wings and exit. As Mirren / Phèdre and Anderson / Blanche remain desiring, even to the end of the drama, they are relegated to such positions, and the one who desires the most violently (Phèdre) is the one most violently brought down. As noted above, the only one left upright onstage is McCrory / Hester who has given up on her passion and decided to live on, alone, without desire, and ‘beyond hope’. Even though I recognize that these dramas (and other cultural stimuli) condition my everyday understanding of what it is to be a middle-aged, desiring woman, I want to understand and assert myself as a whole, viable, fully realized citizen, who still occupies a centre-stage position. Consequently, I now use the revelations of the cognitive science referred to above, dissentingly. As a researcher of performance practice, I have tools to counter the influences of these canonical dramas and other cultural apparatus. My goal is to resist this downward trajectory, to strive for an elevated stance within the visual field. To this effect I practise an everyday performance of open posture, reaching upwards and outwards, creating a high-status body language, and achieving what Anca Cristofovici describes as ‘significant form’ and ‘accomplished shape’ (1999: 275). This I must recreate consciously every moment of every day (and I often fail in this). I support the centre of my body, relax my shoulders, and face the world at eye level (rather than casting my eyes to the floor and collapsing my core) in the hope that my presence and most pertinently my sexuality will not be obscured. For a woman to present with an open, high-power posture is a sexual signal; it exposes the genital area, the stomach and particularly the breasts, which are thrust upwards and outwards as the shoulders extend and the neck lengthens. As women age beyond youth, this sexually open presentation becomes even less acceptable than in younger days and, as with the dramas analysed above, social and cultural sanction results in collapse.6 My everyday performance practice draws on such techniques as those developed by Frederick Alexander, in which the poise of the head is, as Joan Arnold describes, ‘a natural oppositional force in the torso that easily guides us upward and invites the spine to lengthen, rather than compress, as we move’ (Arnold n.d.). I also create the expression of pride – argued by Jessica Tracy and Richard Robins to be one of the universal ‘basic emotions’ (2004: 194) – displaying ‘head tilted slightly back, visibly expanded posture, and arms raised above the head or hands on hips’ (2004: 194). This posture – known also as ‘power posing’ – elevates testosterone and reduces cortisone levels and can even positively determine job seekers’ outcomes when adopted by subjects prior to interviews (Carney, Cuddy, and Yap 2010). Expanding the body upwards and outwards counters any mirroring of collapse that I might be compelled towards when watching such performances as analysed above. As John Dewey in his introduction to Alexander’s The Use of the Self asserts: The discovery of a central control which conditions all other reactions brings the conditioning factor under conscious direction … . It converts the fact of conditioned reflexes from a principle of external enslavement into a means of vital freedom. (1985: 10–11) Ageing / desiring women would do well to acknowledge the benefits of such practice to counter the messages of cultural apparatus, including canonical dramas, which bring us down to the edge of the frame and conspire to diminish or extinguish our sexuality. Further research into the ways that this practice might be applied in a therapeutic setting, or into ways that the figure of the aged / desiring woman in canonical – or other dramas – conditions low-power physical responses in the audience, would benefit those aged women who identify with and may inadvertently mirror such marginalizing representations.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Thanks to Erin Lee, Head of Archive, National Theatre, NT Archive, NT Studio, who sent me the press clippings from which the review quotes are taken.

NOTES 1 By canonical drama I mean the works of dramatic literature that appear regularly in the programming of large theatres, particularly in the UK. For more on age in contemporary British dramas see my 2014 article ‘Depth Significance and Absence: Age Effects in New British Theatre’, Age, Culture, Humanities. Issue 1. http://agecu​ ltur​ehum​anit​ies.org/WP/depth-signi​fica​nce-and-abse​nce-age-effe​cts-in-new-brit​ish-thea​tre/. 2 The terms ‘stock type’ and ‘prototype’ differ subtly from the term ‘stereotype’ in that these terms preclude the exclusively negative connotations that the term stereotype denotes. Prototypes enable humans to conceptualize the world and represent it to themselves cognitively, to aid immediate decision-making in social interactions. According to Dagmar Zeithamova, ‘Prototypes provide a concise representation for an entire group (category) of entities, providing means to anticipate hidden properties and interact with novel stimuli based on their similarity to prototypical members of their group. A prototype learning system is a system of cognitive processes together with their underlying neural structures that enables one to learn (extract) a category prototype from a set of exemplars’ (2012: 2717). This we can apply to the category old, ageing or middle aged. Stock types / characters in drama represent social types that form power structures, particularly in comedies, and have been a ubiquitous device in dramatic representation since ancient Roman times and earlier (McCarthy 2004; Mangan 2013). The concept of stock types relates to the idea of prototypes in that the characters function synecdochally, condensing social categories. Of course, the function of prototypes and stock types can lead to discriminatory practices and the misrepresentation of individuals, but the term prototype focuses more on the nuanced ways such categorization structures thinking. McConachie argues that ‘much of the fun of good theatre is to watch how actor characters move beyond the initial prototypes we have assigned to them to deepen and complicate our sympathies and antipathies’ (2008: 101). 3 Age studies scholars have extended Butler’s ideas to examine ways in which age is produced as an effect. See, for example, Basting (Stages of Age 1998: 7–8; 2000: 258–71), Lipscomb (‘ “The Play’s the Thing” ’: 2012: 117– 41), Russo (‘Ageing and the Scandal of Anachronism’ 1999: 21) and Twigg (‘The Body, Gender, and Age’ 2004: 60–1). 4 By ‘desiring’ I mean particularly evincing sexual desire – in all the cases examined here specifically heterosexual desire. 5 Helen Mirren, born 26 July 1945, turned sixty-four during the run; the late Helen McCrory, born 17 August 1968, turned fifty during the production; Gillian Anderson, born 9 August 1968, turned forty-four while playing Blanche. 6 This may partly – but as I have argued not mainly – be associated with biological phenomena such as loss of bone density and muscle strength.

REFERENCES Arnold, J. (n.d.), ‘The Alexander Technique’. Available at: https://www.ale​xand​erte​chni​que.com/articl​es2/ arnol​dat/ (accessed 15 June 2021). Bassett, K. (2009), ‘Lust, Incest, Carnage – but It’s Hard to Care’, Independent on Sunday, 14 June 2009. Basting, A. D. (1998), The Stages of Age: Performing Age in Contemporary American Culture, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

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Basting, A. D. (2000), ‘Performance Studies and Age’, in Thomas R. Cole, Robert Kastenbaum, and Ruth E. Ray (eds), Handbook of the Humanities and Ageing, 2nd edn, 258–71, New York: Springer. Benedict, D. (2009), ‘Legit Reviews: Phèdre’, Variety, 22–28 June 2009. Available at: https://vari​ety. com/2009/legit/revi​ews/phe​dre-2-120​0475​165/ (accessed 15 June 2021). Botelho, L. A. (2005), ‘The 17th Century’, in Pat Thane (ed.), The Long History of Old Age, 113–74, London: Thames & Hudson. Butler, J. (1988), ‘Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory’, Theatre Journal, 40 (4): 519–31. Butler, J. ([1990] 2006), Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, Abingdon: Routledge. Carney, D. R., A. J. C. Cuddy, and A. J. Yap (2010), ‘Power Posing: Brief Nonverbal Displays Affect Neuroendocrine Levels and Risk Tolerance’, Psychological Science, 21 (10): 1363–8. Chekhov, A. ([1896] 1988), ‘The Seagull’, in Chekhov: Plays, trans. Michael Frayn, London: Methuen. Clapp, S. (2009), ‘So Much Wind Yet So Little Power’, The Observer, 14 June 2009. Cristofovici, A. (1999), ‘Touching Surfaces: Photography, Aging, and an Aesthetics of Change’, in K. Woodward (ed.), Figuring Age: Women Bodies Generations, 268–93, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. De Angelis, A. (2011), Jumpy, London: Faber and Faber. Dewey, J. (1985), ‘Introduction’, in F. Alexander (ed.), The Use of the Self, London: Orion Books. Fauconnier, G., and M. Turner (2002), The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and the Mind’s Hidden Complexities, New York: Basic Books. Goffman, I. (1959). The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, New York: Anchor Books. Gullette, M. M. (2004), Aged by Culture, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Lakoff, G., and M. Johnson (1980), Metaphors We Live By, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Lipscomb, V. B. (2012), ‘“The Play’s the Thing”: Theatre as a Scholarly Meeting Ground in Age Studies’, International Journal of Ageing and Later Life, special issue, A. Swinnen and C. Port (eds), Ageing, Narrative, and Performance: Essays from the Humanities, 7 (2): 117–41. Mangan, M. (2013), Staging Ageing: Theatre, Performance and the Narrative of Decline, Bristol: Intellect. McCarthy, K. (2004), Slaves, Masters, and the Art of Authority in Plautine Comedy, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. McConachie, B. (2008), Engaging Audiences: A Cognitive Approach to Spectating in the Theatre, Basingstoke: Palgrave McMillan. Moore, B. (2014), ‘Depth Significance and Absence: Age Effects in New British Theatre’, Age, Culture, Humanities. Issue 1 (163–95). Available at: http://agecu​ltur​ehum​anit​ies.org/WP/depth-signi​fica​nce-andabse​nce-age-effe​cts-in-new-brit​ish-thea​tre/ (accessed 15 June 2021). Oram, Y. (2013), Old Bold and Won’t Be Told: Shakespeare’s Amazing Ageing Ladies, London: Thames River Press. Racine, J. ([1677] 1998). Phèdre, trans. Ted Hughes, London: Faber and Faber. Rattigan, T. ([1952] 1999), The Deep Blue Sea, London: Nick Hern Books. Russo, M. (1999), ‘Ageing and the Scandal of Anachronism’, in K. Woodward (ed.), Figuring Age: Women Bodies Generations, 20–33, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Spatz, B. (2015), What a Body Can Do: Technique as Knowledge, Practice-as-Research, Abingdon: Routledge. Thane P. (2000), Old Age in English History: Past Experiences, Present Issues, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Tracy, J., and R. Robins (2004), ‘Show Your Pride: Evidence for a Discrete Emotion Expression’, Psychological Science, 15 (3), 194–7. Troyansky, D. G. (2005), ‘The 18th Century’, in Pat Thane (ed.), The Long History of Old Age, 175–211, London: Thames & Hudson. Twigg, J. (2004), ‘The Body, Gender, and Age: Feminist Insights in Social Gerontology’, Journal of Ageing Studies, 18: 59–73. Williams, T. ([1947] 1963), ‘A Streetcar Named Desire’, in Penguin Plays: Tennessee Williams, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. Zeithamova, D. (2012), ‘Prototype Learning Systems’, in N. M. Seel (ed.), Encyclopedia of the Sciences of Learning, Boston, MA: Springer.

Productions The Deep Blue Sea, by Terence Rattigan, National Theatre, London, 8 June–21 September 2016, Dir. Carrie Cracknell. Phèdre, by Jean Racine, National Theatre, London, 11 June–27 August 2009, Dir. Nicholas Hytner. A Streetcar Named Desire, by Tennessee Williams, The Young Vic, 23 July–19 September 2014, Dir. Benedict Andrews.

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CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Home care, cinema, and the relational turn in age studies SALLY CHIVERS

INTRODUCTION In the early days of the coronavirus pandemic, ubiquitous media stories illuminated the horrifying situation of many long-term care residents. A spotlight shone on a sector rife with abuse, profiteering, and other predictably but too often ignored results from decades of undervaluing both care work and older adults. Stories of older adults abandoned in urine-soaked diapers, desperately dehydrated, and going without food overtook public conversations about the finer points of how to improve institutional care (Inspectors-warned-of-dehydrat; Sedensky and Condon 2020). Longterm care residents had no guarantee of basic needs such as food, water, and hygiene, so the bar does not have to be set very high to invite considerable improvement. However, while nursing homes took centre stage, home care remained in the murky shadows. Public cautions ignored conditions of care at home and shortages in the labour force for home care. For example, a prominent geriatrician in Ontario, Canada, went so far as to implore people to move their loved ones out of long-term care if at all possible (Picard 2020). This public condemnation of institutional care, to the extent of demanding the rescue of loved ones from its clutches, did not seem to acknowledge that the work of care continues when someone moves out of institutional care. I situate this chapter in the relational turn of age studies as it pertains to long-term care, focused on how home care appears in the cultural record. Examining home care in the public imagination is urgent yet complicated because of an increased romanticization of ageing-in-place combined with the privatization of home care provision. Humanities scholarship has the potential to illuminate the intricacies of home care as part of the long-term care continuum, rather than as simply opposed to institutional care. To illustrate this potential, I argue that Oliver Siu Kuen Chan’s 2018 comedy drama Still Human (淪落人, Lun lok yan, Hong Kong) re-imagines the relational dynamics of home care, particularly pushing back against the family focus that pervades policy, scholarship, and cultural representations of care. I do so to highlight the often ignored or under-considered perspectives of paid migrant care workers while putting pressure on assumptions about their perspectives, desires, and needs. To articulate the significance of the relational turn of age studies to home care as part of a continuum of long-term care, I show how Still Human contributes to a conversation that humanities age scholars are well equipped to expand, approaching Still Human not as a case study but as an example of how to learn from imaginative constructions of care that reveal elements of the broader

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cultural and social world. That is, I approach it not as about a truth but as part of a pattern of stories that shows norms, values, limits, and possibilities. The film offers a perspective rarely seen in the Western cultural record – that of a Filipina domestic worker – and portrays that not solely as a site of struggle but also as a site of creativity and joy. Thus, Still Human offers an example of social spectacle more than art in this chapter, though aesthetics play a role in my interpretation. We must uncover and interpret how care as paid work enters the fictional record to understand the ethical, emotional, and familial tendencies of dominant stories about who is (and who is not) a good carer and to put those stories in their material and embodied contexts.

AGE EQUITY AT ‘HOME’ Popular and scholarly perspectives on ‘ageing well’ typically consider institutional care a failure (Armstrong and Banerjee 2009). The deplorable conditions of such institutions laid bare during the coronavirus pandemic show how justified such perspectives are. Nonetheless, long-term care advocates and scholars accept that a notable portion of the population will still live in long-term care residences – colloquially known as nursing homes or care homes – at some point in their late life (Armstrong 2021). Rather than adulating ageing-in-place – a common term used for remaining at ‘home’ even when care needs accrue in later life – long-term care advocates have persistently argued for better conditions in institutional settings (Armstrong and Braedley 2013; Daly 2015; Lloyd et al. 2014; Øye et al. 2016) so that those places have the opportunity to succeed. Changes to such conditions are essential to age equity. The demonization of institutional care – however justified – encourages an unjustified romanticization of the concept of home. This exaltation of home creates an impossible model for institutional care, which cannot possibly replicate in a single building type or set of practices multiple residents’ differing ideals of home (Adams and Chivers 2017). Moreover, the vaunting of home creates an equally troubling problem for care work that takes place in people’s homes since it cannot possibly fulfil the associated idealization of flexibility and familiarity that people imagine must accompany ageing-in-place. The romanticization of home care intensified during the pandemic. On the one hand, the dread and fear that accompany nursing home stories cause considerable harm. It would not be helpful or accurate to attach the same connotations to home care. But it is also potentially harmful to ignore how home care is rife with similar problems to those that plague long-term residential care, especially when home care is also increasingly privatized and tied to for-profit interests. For example, in Ontario, while a public outcry poured shame on the privatization of long-term institutional care, a newly minted Bill 175 now allows for the privatization of home care provision (Oved et al. 2020). As Arlie Hochschild points out, ‘Given the growing power of the market-place and bureaucracy, carers are pressured to deliver care in a standardised time-limited way’ (2000: 127). Thus, some of the fantasies that accompany longing for home care, especially the idea that it is more flexible and allows for personal choice, dissipate even more when carers punch a time clock, moving from house to house under time constraints, with targets to meet and accountability checklists to fill out. Their lack of work flexibility means home care can be as rigid as institutional care and similarly relies on global labour and capital flows. Home care has long been an idealized first choice: the best way to grow old unless one manages to do so without requiring care at all. But even though it is more appealing, people living at

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home while requiring care remain largely out of public sight and mind, except as a symbol of the unquestioned preferable option should care become needed. Cultural gerontologists have the collective opportunity to build on attention to the perils and possibilities of nursing home care. In doing so, they could offer similarly significant insights through the interpretation of cultural artefacts that depict home care. Such analysis might allow for a reconceptualization of the possibilities and limits of home care as an antidote to long-term residential care. Moreover, this approach would allow for the re-imagination of care across a spectrum of places and approaches.

CARE WORK AND THE RELATIONAL TURN Calling out the ageism behind the treatment of older adults, especially those older adults who live in institutions, will only be influential if we acknowledge and continue to enumerate that care is undervalued work due to assumptions about gender, race, age, and disability. Improvement to longterm care will rely on valuing older adults who require care while also valuing care work. Most importantly, such scholarship must continue to recognize and amplify how care work happens in the same physical, social, political, and cultural contexts within which ageing occurs. To uncover the potential for cinema to extend the critical conversation about the limits and possibilities of home care, I build here on Kathleen Woodward’s claim that stories that connect precarious care workers’ perspectives with those they care for could strengthen global care chains (2013). As she says, ‘one way to press for changes in social policy is by telling stories of caregivers and elders together’ (emphasis in original, 45). She draws from Hochschild, who defines global care chains as ‘a series of personal links between people across the globe based on the paid or unpaid work of caring’ (2000: 131). In asking how cultural texts give voice to caregivers who form global care chains, Woodward invites cultural gerontologists to consider what Kim Sawchuk later calls ‘the relational turn’ in connection with care work and migration (2019: 222). This chapter arises from long-term care research that contributes to this ‘relational turn’ in age studies scholarship that attends to the ‘deep and intimate connection between materiality and embodiment’ (Sawchuk 2019: 222) as well as to the multiplicity of people involved in any care relationship. As with institutional care, changes to care conditions are essential to home care, particularly since the sector similarly relies on global care chains. Long-term care advocates note that choice for its own sake does not equal autonomy. They aver that if we continue to undervalue care work, we will not see an improvement in quality of care, that for-profit interests have no place in this health care sector, that what seem like minor details (such as laundry, cleaning, locks, and location of meal preparation) dictate life and work in care settings, that gender and race play a significant role in long-term care, that dignity and joy are possible in long-term care (Armstrong and Day 2017; Braedley 2018; Storm, Braedley, and Chivers 2017). Thinking of care as relational (among people as well as between people and environment) shifts the concept of person-centred care – in which the term ‘person’ refers to the older adult in need of care more so than the other people doing the work. Relationship-centred care considers both the work and the receiving of care, along with the mutuality of the two. But even more than that, a relational approach to ageing considers the structural conditions – physical, social, political, and cultural – in which care occurs. Though mainstream and even alternative cinema increasingly portray stories that feature older actors and plotlines more salient to late life, such films frequently offer narratives that promote shallow ideas of active ageing set up in opposition to decline. While depictions of caregiving have

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become a hallmark of what I have called the ‘silvering screen’, the cinematic focus has overwhelmingly been on family caregivers, even more so than on the people cared for (Chivers 2011). Moreover, when they delve into conditions that require care, they tend to favour the perspective of family members doing care work over paid care workers. The gritty moments of care, such as those caused by urinary incontinence or wandering to the point of an older person becoming lost, often appear as pivotal moments in silvering screen films (Chivers 2011). Such moments signal to the family caregiver and the cinema audience that it is time to move to institutional care. The assistance a home care worker could offer rarely appears, and when it does, it comes across as a brief and sometimes abusive invasion into the family unit (Chivers 2015). The perspectives of those who do the care work, especially those care workers who migrate across borders and forego their own in-person family relationships to support white Western families, are rarely considered, except to move along the central plot. Reflecting a similar impetus, perhaps because of Hochschild’s influence, scholarly work that considers the perspectives of people who migrate to do care work often interrogates the significance of family, not only the families whom the workers assist but also the families left behind (Francisco-Menchavez 2018). The assumption that moving far from ‘home’ for such characters is necessarily and solely loss understandably pervades what little scholarship takes up the perspective. Still Human raises questions about what besides, or in addition to, money might motivate a care worker to leave the Philippines (or anywhere) to work abroad. Still Human Both veteran actor Anthony Wong and debut actor Crisel Consunji won awards for their performances in Still Human. The film is unusual in depicting a Filipina care worker’s perspective as part of a narrative about the connection between her need for employment that hampers her dream to become a photographer and an older disabled man’s need for care that hinders his dream to travel with his son. After establishing Leung Cheong-Wing’s (Wong) disability and dire need for care, the film begins and ends with former nurse Evelyn Santo (Consunji) arriving at and departing from a bus stop near the public housing apartment where her grumpy employer lives. Evelyn does not want to be arriving to work for Cheong-Wing any more than he wants to be in a situation that means he needs her, but her aversion does not come from a reluctance to leave family behind at ‘home’. Instead, as the film unfolds, viewers learn that Evelyn forestalls her career dreams of becoming a photographer because she needs money to pay a lawyer for an annulment from her abusive husband, still in the Philippines (where divorce is illegal). Similarly, Cheong-Wing’s dreams of travelling with his son have been forestalled by a catastrophic workplace accident that resulted in his paralysis and ensuing abandonment by all but a workplace friend Cheung Fai (Sam Lee), who has been struggling to do the care work in between different maids that Cheong-Wing hires and fires.

JOINT PRECARITY The introduction of each main character foregrounds their joint precarity. Viewers meet CheongWing through a medium shot that stereotypes him as a disabled man, slumped over in a wheelchair. A low-angle shot has just revealed the dust motes floating in the air past a dirty, swinging lampshade.

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Like the dust, the sound of a construction drill invades the room. The audience doesn’t yet know it, but the construction noise is doubly aggravating because it recalls the workplace accident that caused Cheong-Wing’s disability. A high-angle shot reveals his confined, messy apartment with peeling wallpaper and visible water damage, emphasizing his need for assistance. As film critic Fionnuala Halligan describes it, ‘Cheong-wing lives in cramped conditions on a public housing estate which looks eerily similar to a prison’ (2019). The film repeatedly returns to images of the static symmetry among apartments on the estate, compared to the more glamorous apartment buildings featured in the film with shiny lobbies and signs of life in the courtyard. The depiction of Cheong-Wing’s apartment pushes back against romanticized ideas of ageing-in-place, which rarely consider what is desirable for people who don’t live in well-appointed houses. He comes across as disembodied – the audience first sees his head, then his feet, and then his entire body. Viewers meet Evelyn as she arrives at the bus stop to begin her position as what the film refers to sometimes as a helper and more often as a maid. The power dynamic instantly emerges as she tells Cheong-Wing her name in English and then rushes to follow him downhill to the apartment building. While they move, he lectures her angrily in Cantonese about his distrust of ‘you people’, as the English subtitles translate it, as well as the inconvenience and expense he faces each time he must re-hire. Thus, Evelyn’s arrival has immediately prompted both the racial politics of her work life and the broader economic and social context for the whole story. Only at the apartment building door does Cheong-Wing realize Evelyn does not understand the Cantonese he speaks, which further incenses him. The first object Evelyn unpacks is her camera. Next, she posts on social media a photo of her suitcases in her tiny, threadbare room with the caption: ‘It is not home, but shelter.’ This post establishes her regret at having to be working in Hong Kong, her photographic talent, and how social media becomes part of the narrative. At the same time, the post allows the film to emphasize that ‘home’ is as complicated as ‘care’. These introductions establish the characters’ joint precarity: Cheong-Wing lives in public housing with little income to hire the care workers he needs, and Evelyn depends upon him to the extent of surrendering her passport. Her precarity is magnified by the prejudices she faces as a Filipina worker in Hong Kong, highlighted in Cheong-Wing’s opening tirade.

EVELYN’S DREAM Still Human offers insight not only into the cinematic record of care pertinent to long-term care for older adults but also into social issues. As Halligan puts it, ‘Chan’s film still manages to cast a cool eye on Hong Kong’s social hierarchies, illustrating how discrimination can kill the human soul’ (2019). Film critic Justin Lowe adds, ‘Chan excels at portraying the often-precarious lives of overseas Filipino workers with compassion and insight, gracing them with the humanity and dignity they’re often denied in real life’ (2018). While these critics emphasize how implausible the film is, they don’t see the lack of verisimilitude or believability as an impediment to the effectiveness of conveying a situation that otherwise avoids the public eye. The characterization of Evelyn helpfully complicates the tendency to assume that Filipina domestic workers at the service of a family in a new country necessarily regret the loss of a desired connection with family members in the Philippines. Her employer is shocked to learn that Evelyn is a university graduate and experienced nurse. She has come to Hong Kong to raise the funds she needs to annul a violent marriage. However, her mother – who worked as a maid in Hong Kong

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herself for decades – continually demands that Evelyn send funds home to fix a roof and attend to other similar needs. Her daughter rails against these demands since she is desperate to get out of her marriage and go to photography school. Over social media, Evelyn connects with other Filipina domestic workers in Hong Kong who mock the idea that maids are treated like family. At the same time, she continues to fight with her mother about obligations at ‘home’. Evelyn’s dream is not to return to her family in the Philippines but to continue her journey West to pursue a career in photography. To pursue that dream, Evelyn must first pay her way out of her confining marriage and then raise funds for school, so she is locked into the first position she could find in Hong Kong. She gets each Sunday off and spends it with the friends she met on social media. They gather at the HSBC centre, sitting next to other similar groupings of Filipina domestic workers in carefully arranged but ad hoc cardboard enclosures that echo the uniformity of Cheong-Wing’s housing estate. Evelyn’s new friends teach her (and the film audience) about the hierarchy of care work, with the worst being care for older adults and then kids. The preferred positions involve solely cleaning, even if in a large fancy house. Through their discussion, viewers learn that Evelyn is unique in being placed in a public housing estate but that newcomers do often start with employers who are ‘not well off ’. The film emphasizes Evelyn’s situation by portraying in vivid and gritty detail her daily work: cleaning, going to the market, feeding, changing Cheong-Wing’s clothes, applying medication to his rectum, massaging and exercising his legs, waking at four in the morning to turn him, lifting him from his wheelchair into bed, recharging his wheelchair, sponge-bathing him, and shampooing and rinsing his hair. Shocked that she must clean his excrement, her new friends encourage her to find a better placement and yet warn her not to get fired because that would land her back in the Philippines, emphasizing how she is dependent on Cheong-Wing. The critical assessment of Still Human as implausible likely comes from the film’s effective representations of a migrant worker as victimized but also powerful, hopeful, and dynamic and a person with a disability as impoverished and abandoned, but also powerful, humorous, and capable of intensely effective empathy. The film seems unbelievable because it emphasizes the central characters’ dreams as possible, even on the brink of fulfilment. It is remarkable enough to present a feature film whose lead character is a migrant worker. It is even more so to have that character represented as powerful, hopeful, and dynamic without ignoring structural constraints.

LEARNING TO FALL Besides the original fall by Cheong-Wing at the construction site, three key falls mark the shifting power dynamics and growing relationship between Cheong-Wing and Evelyn, which goes beyond their interdependence. In the first, just as Evelyn begins to gain sceptical Cheong-Wing’s trust, she drops him while transferring him from bed to his chair, breaking his leg. The hospital cannot accommodate the kind of care he needs, such as being turned every four hours. His friend Fai advocates for him well before his sister Leung Jing-Ying (Cecilia Yip) arrives. However, Fai cannot convince the kind but firm hospital nurse to allow Evelyn to stay to help at the hospital, just as he has been unable to persuade Cheong-Wing to pay for a safety bell. The accident leads CheongWing’s otherwise neglectful sister to accuse Evelyn, who she confuses with the previous maid, of incompetence and threaten to fire her, emphasizing Evelyn’s precarity along with the racism she faces. Jing-Ying’s anger does not arise from her feeling she could do better than Evelyn, but rather

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from what seems to be resentment that Cheong-Wing needs care. Evelyn begins to do bicep curls with a water bucket, desperate to be strong enough to do the difficult care work, so she is not fired and sent back to Hong Kong. Cheong-Wing takes amused pleasure in ordering her around, laughing at how quickly she moves to comply with his demands until a cockroach appears, sparking terror in Cheong-Wing, a terror which Evelyn uses to make him promise not to fire her, shifting the power structure yet again by making him give in before she crushes the cockroach. Cheong-Wing’s second significant fall occurs after a flashback to how his son Wang Chun-Yin (Himmy Ting-Him Wong) failed his exams because of Cheong-Wing’s accident. The older man falls out of bed as he tries to reach his phone. He considers knocking on the wall to wake Evelyn but decides not to and just sleeps on the floor until she finds him. Meanwhile, the film again flashes back, this time to the original construction site accident. These flashbacks are significant not only in how they offer the audience a back story but also in how they evoke the haplessness of CheongWing’s accident. They also answer the perennial question posed to disabled people (especially wheelchair users) of ‘what happened?’ But rather than doing so as a form of reassurance, they emphasize the fragility and temporariness of able-bodiedness. The film subsequently emphasizes a sense of loss by portraying a dream wherein Cheong-Wing uses the railing in his apartment courtyard to pull himself up and jump towards the clouds spinning overhead. However, the hopeful dream dissipates once Evelyn discovers him on the floor, and he can see the excrement he has left behind when she lifts him into his chair. The dream sequence that accompanies Cheong-Wing’s second fall is taken further in a third fall scene in which Evelyn herself falls while she runs to shut off the stove as the kettle whistles while she showers. In a trope of disability cinema wherein a non-disabled actor demonstrates his physical wholeness in a fantasy sequence, Cheong-Wing pictures himself standing up and racing to save her, swooping her up from the ground. As reality takes hold, viewers learn he has finally installed the safety bell, so he’s able to use that to save Evelyn. The mutual vulnerability revealed by these fall sequences is reinforced when Cheong-Wing does Evelyn’s hair while her arm is broken from the fall. The progression of falls underscores the relationship between Evelyn and Cheong-Wing, which is itself a function of how they fit within a broader socio-political structure.

CARE AS RELATIONSHIP The heart of Still Human – between Evelyn’s arrival and departure – revolves around their developing relationship. As is typical of grumpy buddy films and romantic comedy, the two turn out to have much in common, despite their differences in background, age, and role. Most significant for the film’s depiction of care chains, their similarities rest not only on thwarted yet unexpected dreams but also on the fact that both are separated from family by distance and dislocation. The power dynamics between the two characters continually shift as they reorient their goals, needs, and desires. That interplay reveals a fascinating and complicated microcosmic glimpse at one emblematic portrayal of home care that relies on the global care chain. The development of the relationship, and its power shifts, can also be tracked through details in the plot, such as the sometimes playful and sometimes fractious banter about how well Evelyn chooses to clean the corners of the apartment floor. Taking advice from her Sunday friends, Evelyn begins to leave the corners dirty, playing dumb to her employer as he chides her to do a better job. While Cheong-Wing immediately realizes that she is faking an inability to understand

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his instructions, rather than anger him, it makes him happy beyond amusement, to the point of him beginning to respect her. When Evelyn wants to learn Cantonese from Cheong-Wing, he uses her non-cleaning of the floor corners as leverage. When she feels guilty about selling a camera he generously buys for her or for allowing him to fall, she scrubs the corners energetically. The interplay emulates but goes beyond a typical push and pull between employer and employee to instead mark the ongoing negotiations of power that are part of mutual vulnerability. Cheong-Wing’s attitude towards Evelyn shifts each time he learns to see her differently, the first time when he realizes she is playing dumb about cleaning the corners. But more significantly, his attitude to her changes when he learns that Evelyn has a dream, something he at first hurtfully assumes is impossible for a maid. Rather than mere spectacle as can be the case for disabled characters on screen, Cheong-Wing is a cipher for the audience and an example of how attitudes could change if people considered the full humanity of those who do the undervalued work of care. For instance, he stands up to his sister in the face of her discriminatory treatment of Evelyn, asking, ‘Aren’t maids human beings?’ His understanding of Evelyn’s full humanity arises from him beginning to see her as a person with a dream and with artistic ambitions. The development of empathy on Cheong-Wing’s part is what critics refer to in questioning the authenticity of the portrayal. The film shows empathetic development, which many critics find implausible. The film raises the question of how empathy grows, regardless of how implausible Cheong-Wing’s empathy appears to be. In the process, the film questions the composition and role of family in home care.

FORGET FAMILY A set of family photographs in Cheong-Wing’s apartment haunts the space and the film, illustrating what was lost through Cheong-Wing’s family members’ inability to cope with who he has become as the result of his accident. Along with video chats, social media, and other snapshots, these photographs become touchstones for understanding how relationships shift due to disability and care, as other characters begin to make up for the family who cannot be there for Cheong-Wing. As Cheong-Wing introduces Evelyn to what will be her room, the first space the audience sees her take a photograph to post on social media, the film flashes back to when it had been his son’s room, establishing his loss as well as how Evelyn stands in for a family member. His own family – wife, son, sister – has all but abandoned him in the aftermath of the accident. While video calls with his university-age son Chun-Yin show that some people relied on such technology for social connection before a global pandemic, such technologically mediated conversations further reveal that his son has moved to the United States with Cheong-Wing’s former wife, both living with her new husband whom Cheong-Wing flinches to hear his son call ‘Pop’. Subsequently, viewers witness Cheong-Wing pausing before he hits ‘like’ on a Facebook-style post picturing his son with his stepfather, as Cheong-Wing reluctantly acknowledges how his role in the family has been effaced. Cheong-Wing’s sister Jing-Ying appears from time to time as a cold, judgemental woman who detests what he has become and grieves the loss of his past self, perhaps because, as viewers eventually learn, he had raised her. The film manages to develop her antipathy towards Evelyn without entirely condemning the sister, in part by conveying her connection with photos of Cheong-Wing. Before returning Jing-Ying’s wallet, left behind during a rare visit to Cheong-Wing, Evelyn slips a snapshot she has taken of present-day Cheong-Wing behind the nostalgic family photo Jing-Ying

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keeps there. When Jing-Wing sees this smiling portrait that captures Cheong-Wing’s new existence as something well beyond tragedy and burden, she weeps with what appears to be a combination of love, happiness, and perhaps regret, emulating to some degree the empathetic development depicted through Cheong-Wing. The pattern of photography within the film reinforces how Cheong-Wing’s friend Fai functions as an extension of these family members who for their own reasons do not do the work of care for Cheong-Wing. Evelyn’s first photos with a new camera are of Cheong-Wing and Fai, reflecting but different from the family photographs that decorate the corner of his apartment. Fai plays a range of familial roles in between maids’ hirings and firings, for which he often takes responsibility. Fai explains that he feels he needs to care for Cheong-Wing both because Cheong-Wing had treated him like family and because ‘his family is no more than strangers’. As the film develops, the relationship between Evelyn and Cheong-Wing becomes at times uncomfortably challenging to classify. Viewers might scoff at Jing-Ying’s inability to imagine their emerging friendship as anything but romance. Still, the cinematic tropes of montage and nearkissing embraces have likely led them along a similar presumptuous path. However, as CheongWing increasingly takes an interest in Evelyn’s dream to be a photographer, it becomes clear that the unit they have developed is more akin to a family structure. For example, when Jing-Ying arrives for a holiday meal, she expresses confusion and then shock to see Evelyn’s food at the same table. Evelyn shuffles off to the kitchen to eat separately, revealing how easily a family-style meal had slipped into the daily routine. Other meal scenes with Fai emphasize how like a family unit the three have become and show the flaws of policy based on more traditional familial ties. On the one hand, their relational unit seems to be what Hochschild describes, drawing on Freud, as displacement. But that conjecture relies on conventional ideas of family as the desired, ideal space of care and companionship. Still Human emphasizes possibilities that question that framing. It does so by depicting Cheong-Wing support Evelyn’s professional photography dream, to the extent that she leaves his employ, and also by having the award-winning photograph that launches her career be a particularly moving image of Cheong-Wing helping a boy who has dropped a balloon, not subtly titled ‘Dream Giver’.

CONCLUSION While I, of course, do not hope for an exposé of home care to reveal the same scandalous situation as recent attention to institutional care has, the sector still must be part of the relational turn of age studies that accounts not only for relationships among people but also physical, social, political, and cultural conditions. In offering an analysis of Still Human, I explore how thinking differently and more deeply about care stories shifts the broader age studies landscape. My argument relies on how rare glimpses of migrant care-worker perspectives in fiction film are salient to age studies and particularly to understanding the relational turn. That said, I note that current fictional representations of the paid care worker’s perspective tend to shy away from showing what it means to do work for the oldest old so that the film I am writing about features at best the young end of the category of old. Still, the film is rare in the perspectives it displays and in explicitly depicting the bodywork of care. It helps to illuminate how the discourse of home care ignores paid work through a focus on family. The film makes clear who that leaves out and the possible harm that comes from that exclusion.

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The concept of family that pervades social policy, limiting what frameworks we can imagine putting in place, comes into question through the careful framing of relationships illuminated by photography within Still Human. This film offers the potential to re-situate the story of global care chains, the relational story of care, and how family takes priority within policy and resource distribution. Set in Hong Kong, the story depicts global flows of labour and is globally relevant. In portraying delicate power rebalances, the film reimagines the relational dynamic of home care. Moreover, the film showcases that the relational turn of age studies as it pertains to care is about the relationship between care worker and cared for (sometimes also employer) as well as about how that relationship develops within a broader social and especially economic system. In this story, that system refuses the romanticization of home and of family on both Evelyn and Cheong-Wing’s part, instead showing how their relationship develops in the face of related but distinct challenges from the social structure. Remarkably, the connections develop into sparks of creativity and joy as the characters learn calligraphy together, support Evelyn’s dream of photography, and laugh their way through the day-to-day work of care and life, without dismissing the grit that accompanies both.

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mob​ile/ins​pect​ors-war​ned-of-dehy​drat​ion-and-malnu​trit​ion-at-a-toro​nto-long-term-care-home-in-spr​ ing-2020-1.5428​714?cli​pId=89619 (accessed 1 September 2021). Francisco-Menchavez, V. (2018), The Labor of Care: Filipina Migrants and Transnational Families in the Digital Age, Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Halligan, F. (2019), ‘ “Still Human”: Hong Kong Review’, Screen Daily. Available at: https://www.scre​enda​ ily.com/revi​ews/still-human-hong-kong-rev​iew/5137​802.arti​cle (accessed 1 September 2021). Hochschild, A. R. (2000), ‘Global Care Chains and Emotional Surplus Value’, in W. Hutton and A. Giddens (eds), Global Capitalism, 130–46, New York: The New Press. Lloyd, L., A. Banerjee, C. Harrington, F. Jacobsen, and M. Szebehely (2014), ‘It Is a Scandal! Comparing the Causes and Consequences of Nursing Home Media Scandals in Five Countries’, International Journal of Sociology and Social Policy, 34 (1/2): 2–18 doi:10.1108/IJSSP-03-2013-0034. Lowe, J. (2018), ‘ “Still Human”: Film Review’, The Hollywood Reporter, 1 September 2021. Oved, M. C., B. Kennedy, K. Wallace, E. Tubb, and A. Bailey (2020), ‘For-Profit Nursing Homes Have Four Times as Many COVID-19 Deaths as City-Run Homes, Star Analysis Finds’, The Toronto Star, Toronto. Available at: https://www.thes​tar.com/busin​ess/2020/05/08/for-pro​fit-nurs​ing-homes-have-four-times-a s-many-covid-19-dea​ths-as-city-run-homes-star-analy​sis-finds.html (accessed 1 September 2021). Øye, C., T. E. Mekki, F. F. Jacobsen, and O. Førland (2016), ‘Facilitating Change from a Distance – A Story of Success? A Discussion on Leaders’ Styles in Facilitating Change in Four Nursing Homes in Norway’, Journal of Nursing Management, 24 (6): 745–54, doi:10.1111/jonm.12378. Picard, A. (2020), ‘If You Can Get Your Relatives Out of Seniors’ Homes, Try to Do So as Fast as You Can’, The Globe and Mail. Available at: https://www.theg​lobe​andm​ail.com/can​ada/arti​cle-if-you-can-get-yourrelati​ves-out-of-seni​ors-homes-try-to-do-so-as/ (accessed 1 September 2021). Sawchuk, K. (2019), ‘Afterword. Relational Entanglements: Ageing, Materialities, and Embodiments’, in S. Katz (ed.), Ageing in Everyday Life: Materialities and Embodiments, 215–24, Bristol: Policy Press. Sedensky, M., and B. Condon (2020), ‘As COVID Deaths Soar, Nursing Home Deaths Caused by Neglect Surge in the Shadows’, PBS NewsHour. Available at: https://toro​nto.cityn​ews.ca/2020/11/19/ not-just-covid-nurs​ing-home-negl​ect-dea​ths-surge-in-shad​ows/ (accessed 1 September 2021). Storm, P., S. Braedley, and S. Chivers (2017), ‘Gender Regimes in Ontario Nursing Homes: Organization, Daily Work, and Bodies’, Canadian Journal on Aging / La Revue canadienne du vieillissement, 36 (2): 196–208, doi:10.1017/S0714980817000071. Woodward, K. (2013), ‘A Public Secret: Assisted Living, Caregivers, Globalization’, International Journal of Ageing and Later Life, 7 (2): 17–51.

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CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Postcolonial ageing studies: Racialization, resistance, re-imagination EMILY KATE TIMMS

INTRODUCTION Reflecting on her experience caring for her mother and father, the Indigenous studies scholar Sandy Grande ([Quechua] 2018: 169) pointedly notes a ‘conspicuous absence of a counter discourse and politics of aging within Native American and Indigenous studies’ in the face of entrenched productivist logics that render (older) Indigenous lives as disposable within ageist, ableist, classed, and racialized structures of settler colonialism. Grande’s clarion call for Indigenous ontological engagements with older age forcefully brings into relief the ways in which age studies and cognate fields such as critical gerontology concentrate on white, middle-class experiences of ageing within the Global North (see also Chivers 2011). As more age studies and critical gerontology scholars acknowledge and address these omissions, it is timely to consider how these fields have historically attended to intersections of ‘race’ and ‘ethnicity’ with old age and trace their emergent turns towards postcolonial and decolonial thought. While these moves constitute welcome developments in studies of age and ageing, I suggest that such work risks drawing on a version of postcolonial thought that is perhaps more familiar than current. In this chapter, I stake out further opportunities for interdisciplinary connections between age studies and postcolonial critique to advance postcolonial ageing studies approaches as vital frames for exploring pluriverse representations of ageing. I will conduct a reading of Guyanese author Beryl Gilroy’s 1986 novel Frangipani House, which closely depicts the situation of ageing African-Guyanese women living in residential care and their relationships with younger family members living in the Black diaspora.1 My reading of Gilroy’s text indexes how many postcolonial and Indigenous authors have also been preoccupied with imagining the kinds of counter-politics and discourses of ageing that Grande looks for. Adopting multifaceted postcolonial ageing studies approaches to consider age and ageing, I propose, necessarily decentres ontologies and normalcies associated with the (white) Global North to resist and reimagine the contours of ageing, agency and care in a world living with the enduring effects of colonization and neoliberal modernity.

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DEFINING RACE AND ETHNICITY IN AGE STUDIES AND CRITICAL GERONTOLOGY The relative neglect of older Black, Indigenous, and People of Colour in age studies and critical gerontology is paralleled by slippery conceptualizations of race and ethnicity across both fields.2 Sandra Torres notes that, historically, gerontological studies treated race as a classificatory system based on genetic and / or physiological traits and ethnicity as a broader categorization encompassing cultural practices, a common ‘originary’ or ‘ancestral’ homeland, religion, or other ‘traditions’ that directly determines one’s experience of old age (Torres 2015). In treating ethnicity and race as interchangeable catalogues of immutable traits, such scholarship produces discrete ideas or assumptions about particular ‘requirements’ for people living into old age or generates inconclusive statements regarding the significance of race and / or ethnicity for older people (see also Zubair and Norris 2015). Whiteness, in turn, becomes an invisible and crucially under-theorized signifier in which ‘racial’ or ‘ethnic’ ‘others’ are distinguished from an uninterrogated ‘dominant’, or ‘hegemonic’ ethnic group situated in European, American, Canadian, as well as other settler colonial contexts. These configurations of race and ethnicity in gerontological research further obscure the profound effects that racialization and racism have on the lifecourse (Torres 2020: 343–4; see also Torres 2019). Cumulatively, these conceptual deployments of race and ethnicity within gerontological and / or age studies inquiry, at best, lead to reductivist interpretations of ageing within complex heterogeneous communities. At worst, such perspectives risk recapitulating the very racialized and hierarchized epistemological and material structures that shore up asymmetrical relations of power and privilege experienced by older people. Such conceptualizations are being displaced in age studies and critical gerontology in favour of definitions advanced within cultural theory and critical race studies. As Stuart Hall summarizes, race ‘is the centrepiece of a hierarchical system that produces differences’ wherein sociocultural designations of ‘race’ and ‘ethnicity’ are inextricable from asymmetrical systems of power (2017: 33). Such systems emerge out of Western modernity and are tied to histories of imperialism and colonization. Racialization describes the process by which the assignation of (confected) racial categorizations manifests in unequitable power relations between groups (Brah 1996: 153–4). Consequently, ‘race’ and ‘ethnicity’ work discursively within power relations and result in material disadvantages for groups identified as ‘other’ from the dominant group. Crucially, critical race and Black studies scholars emphasize that whiteness is positioned at the apex of these inequitable power relations (see Weheliye 2014: 3). Racial or ethnic hierarchies lead to devastating forms of oppression including the transatlantic trade in enslaved Africans and the Jewish Holocaust, as well as shore up ongoing endemic social, economic, and health inequalities for minoritized communities. However, these histories of discrimination and marginalization are simultaneously histories of resistance, challenge, and activism, in which people agitate for more equitable futures. For example, activist groups may, at times, lay claim to a shared ‘race’ or ‘ethnicity’ as a call for power and legitimacy as with Indigenous land rights movements (Allen 2002). Another example is the self-conscious deployment of political Blackness wherein Black and Asian people formed coalitions to campaign for antiracist social and material changes in Britain during the 1970s and 1980s (Gilroy 1992). As such, ‘race’ and ‘ethnicity’ are socio-historical constructs which are constantly reproduced and necessarily exist in relation to materialities of power that need to be accounted for in age studies and critical gerontology.

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Cultural theorists and critical race studies scholars have long problematized essentialized assertions of race. As Hall (2017) also argues with his concept of ‘difference’, ethnic groups are not homogenous entities but are always internally variegated and in constant transformation, leading to complex forms of cultural hybridity. Paul Gilroy’s concept of the ‘Black Atlantic’ (1993) explores the implications of diaspora on ‘race’ and ‘ethnicity’, revealing that seemingly discrete ‘racial’ or ‘ethnic’ groups engage with transnational patterns of migration and cultural exchange. Rather than privilege a reified concept of ‘race’, the experiences of the Black diaspora demonstrate that ethnicity is in ‘an infinite process of identity construction’ transcending national and ethnic boundaries (Gilroy 1993: 14–15). Many Black feminist and critical race studies scholars contend that focusing on race as the sole signifier for explaining privilege and disadvantage is not sufficient for meaningful antiracist and feminist activism. Kimberlé Crenshaw’s (1991) examination of Black women’s difficulties in accessing justice in the United States legal system led her to coin the term ‘intersectionality’ to explain how the interaction of different facets of identity compounds certain systemic disadvantages or privileges that would not be detected via single identity-based analyses. This overview situates race and ethnicity as structurally and socially constituted which, on the one hand, has legitimized axes of privilege and disadvantage that underpin racism, imperialism, colonial control, and other insidious mechanisms of power, but also, on the other, have been knowingly rearticulated and challenged to produce new forms of resistance and activism. For our purposes here, then, ‘race’ and ‘ethnicity’ are socio-historical constructs implicated with systems of power in profoundly uneven and dynamic ways to produce far-reaching epistemic, embodied, and material impacts on what it means to grow old, how we age throughout the lifecourse, and how generations care for each other in a world grappling with colonial histories, neocolonial presents, and neoliberal capitalist modernity.

POSTCOLONIAL AND DECOLONIAL THOUGHT IN AGE STUDIES AND CRITICAL GERONTOLOGY Despite the focus in postcolonial studies critique on the complexities of race, ethnicity, and its attendant power hierarchies, the turn towards postcolonial theory in age studies since 2010 curiously divests itself of these preoccupations. In December 2016 the Journal of Ageing Studies published a special issue entitled ‘Theorising Age – Postcolonial Perspectives in Aging Studies’. The editors’ introduction declares that ‘we are convinced that postcolonial concepts of strangeness and marginality, of “othering” and subalternity … open up new perspectives on the old person as “the other” ’ (van Dyk and Küpper 2016: 81). This claim is built on canonical scholarship by Homi Bhabha (1994), Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (1999), and Edward Said (1978) which played a key role in postcolonial studies’ theoretical development. However, the implications of such arguments – that older people become isolated and subjugated subalterns – reinforces assumptions that age is consonant with decline and / or that older people become subject to disempowering norms surrounding ‘successful’ ageing. Such perspectives seem unaware of the renewed criticism of ‘the other’ as a categorization that unhelpfully perpetuates exclusion within postcolonial studies itself (Young 2012). In their limited recourse to the most ‘canonical’ postcolonial theories, many age studies and critical gerontology debates tread familiar lines of critique with new labels that reinforce the ‘otherness’ of the old or reproduce arguments about ‘othering’.

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Some critical gerontologists have responded to this initial turn to the postcolonial in age studies by favouring decolonial paradigms. Saloua Berdai Chaouni et al. (2021: 3) describe decolonial thought as uniquely capable of overcoming postcolonial studies’ perceived ‘culturalism’ and ‘excessive focus on binary categories of difference’. They draw on decolonial thinkers such as Walter Mignolo to argue that decolonial perspectives decentre Western ontologies and methodologies that reproduce colonial thinking and hierarchies in gerontological research (see Mignolo 2009; Chaouni et al. 2021: 4–6). An example of cultural gerontology with a decolonial lens is May Chazan and Madeline Whetung’s (2021) work with community groups including Indigenous First Nations elders in Canada Turtle Island. Chazan and Whetung foreground participants’ words and Indigenous understandings of time and extended kinship networks to critique settler heteronormativities that suffuse models of successful ageing.

TOWARDS POSTCOLONIAL AGEING STUDIES Yet these moves to decolonial thought in age studies and critical gerontology risk missing other significant contributions that postcolonial perspectives can make. Postcolonial studies is a broad, and conflicted, field of study and the ‘postcolonial’ as a term encompasses a wider range of critical preoccupations than has been acknowledged thus far by critical gerontologists and age studies scholars (see McLeod 2000). I would stress that Chaouni et al.’s assertion that ‘decoloniality recognizes that colonial thinking and colonial logic did not cease after territorial colonialism’ (2021: 3) is shared by postcolonial critique, which remains very much preoccupied with the continuities of colonialism and has always concerned itself with the material conditions of coloniality (see Huggan 2013). As such, there are a multitude of ways in which postcolonial critique may speak to experiences of age and ageing beyond the registration of ‘otherness’ or ‘exile’. For example, as normativities associated with ageing and its materiality become subtly implicated in neoliberal economic valuations of productivity, independence, and autonomy, I propose that older people from ex-colonial territories and Indigenous communities are at particular risk of becoming subsumed or instrumentalized in what Neil Lazarus (2011: 85) terms the ‘restructuring of class and social relations worldwide … in the interests of capital’ of the world economy. The postcolonial ageing studies approaches that I present in this chapter, then, perform situated analyses of ageing to explore the particularities, the problems, and the possibilities of age and ageing in communities still grappling with the legacies of colonization and its contemporary manifestations. Such approaches are predicated upon, firstly, expanding the archive of creative and theoretical materials that are typically drawn upon in age studies critique and, secondly, reframing how such texts may be read when matters of age and ageing are at stake. Postcolonial ageing studies methods, on the one hand, bring postcolonial thought and located ontologies into conversation with age studies and critical gerontology and, on the other, explore the fault lines and convergences between these fields’ contrastive political, ethical, and activist priorities. Crucially, postcolonial ageing studies readings of texts go beyond registering the effects of colonization on what it means to grow old: they reimagine what it could mean to age within and athwart the damaging legacies of colonial modernity and neoliberalism’s tenets of individualism, productivity, autonomy, and eschewal of disability and / or illness in old age. Such approaches enable us to ask fresh questions and produce new theorizations of ageing as it relates to vital debates surrounding age and ageing including on agency, care, intergenerational well-being, and colonial trauma. Hence,

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a fuller deployment of the postcolonial in age studies unearths the continuities of colonialism and its contemporary global guises, registers ongoing forms of resistance to these manifestations, and imagines new forms of material and cultural relations beyond these colonial legacies that are made manifest across pluriverse experiences of age and ageing. How might such a conceptualization of postcolonial ageing studies contribute to work in literary age studies and critical gerontology concerned with race, ethnicity, coloniality, and its intersections? Since the turn of the twenty-first century, more literary ageing studies critics are investigating how older people become racialized ‘others’ within ‘white’ or ‘Western’ structures of power. Many readings emphasize that Western colonialism’s racialized hierarchies reconfigure familial structures and unmoor older people from erstwhile expected social functions, with damaging consequences (see Worsfold 2004). By contrast, literary criticism foregrounding intersectional approaches to race, ethnicity, gender, and age tend to focus on ageing racialized people’s resistance to such power dynamics. For example, Saskia M. Fürst (2017) reads the subversive behaviour of Annie Eliza, an ageing African American woman in Clarence Major’s Such Was the Season (1987), as undermining the racist and ageist reification of youthful white feminine beauty in Atlanta, Georgia. Intergenerational care often occupies a privileged position within these interpretations and is frequently figured in literary age studies scholarship as safeguarding cultural knowledges or as reciprocal arrangements. Monika Gomille (2007) and Ira Raja (2009) discuss tropes in AfricanAmerican and African-Caribbean fiction and Indian short stories, whereby older people give care by passing on cultural inheritances, or younger people develop new reciprocal ways of caring for their older people respectively. Older women are often interpreted as loci for intergenerational cultural continuity, especially in migratory and diasporic contexts. For example, Katie Walsh (2017) and Sally Chivers (2003) explain the importance of older women’s storytelling for preserving ethnic identities in Chinese American or immigrant Japanese cultures in fiction by Amy Tan (The Bonesetter’s Daughter, 2003) and Hiromi Goto (Chorus of Mushrooms, 1994). For Walsh and Chivers, these older women help first-generation descendants to come to terms with their complex positionality within dominant white societies despite their dislocation from an originary ancestral ‘home’. Marlene Goldman (2015: 84) and Paula Morgan (2014: 139) consider how David Chariandy’s novel Soucouyant (2007) links dementia with the traumatic legacies of colonization and racism experienced by Adele, a Trinidadian migrant living in Canada. The possibilities latent within intergenerational storytelling and memory in Chariandy’s novel overwrite these painful histories with the redemptive possibility of (maternal) intergenerational connection. Readings that advance the cultural salve of intergenerational care through storytelling often bring into relief the structural inhospitality of institutional care. For example, Patricia Life (2017) probes the marginalization of Indigenous First Nations men in Canadian care homes in Thomas King’s Green Grass, Running Water (1993) and Amelia DeFalco’s (2016) reading of Soucouyant reveals the uncaring, racist environments underpinning supposedly ‘multicultural’ nations. Cumulatively, much literary age studies criticism positions nurturing, culturally confident familial care in opposition to racializing institutional and / or civic care conditioned by (implicitly or explicitly white or at least Eurocentric) colonial and / or settler cultures. The foregrounding of cultural intergenerational care in literary age studies echo decolonial moves to privilege situated ontologies of ageing from the Global South, with Sweta Rajan-Rankin (2018: 36) advocating that age studies and critical gerontology researchers need to ‘reclaim older ways of knowing that predate and can form alternate discourses’ to Western ideals about ageing.

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The Black or African matriarch, a social stereotype characterized by matrifocal headed households managed by an assertive, yet selfless, Black woman, has been championed as one ‘alternate discourse’ with Tamara Baker et al. (2015: 54) suggesting that the stereotype’s characteristic ‘perseverance, strength, and optimism is an essential component of black female identity’ and should be incorporated into successful ageing paradigms. Amanda Grenier and Jill Hanley (2007: 218) present a similar argument, suggesting that the stereotype could be used by older Black women as an affirmative identity to navigate ageist institutions. The figure has also been adopted into models of a ‘good’ intergenerational diasporic care structure, with Karen Olwig (2013: 147) using the term to contend that transnational caring relationships give ‘meaning and purpose’ to older Caribbean women, legitimizing the continuance of the matriarchal familial structure across transnational and diasporic care networks. Yet we might pause here to consider whether some of this important work intending to ‘decolonize’ ageing studies and critical gerontology may risk recapitulating (racialized) colonial logics. Is there a possibility of effectively buying into ossified ‘precolonial’ notions of race and culture when exploring literary representations of ageing and care? What are the stakes of incorporating the Black matriarch into ‘successful’ ageing frameworks that are designed to shift responsibility for ageing and care onto older individuals? Are transnational caring networks complicated by the material unevenness underpinning global migration and life in the diaspora? The Jamaican author and anthropologist Olive Senior (1991: 79–80) identifies problems associated with the Black matriarch ‘myth’ in the Anglophone Caribbean. The economic necessity for adults to migrate to former colonial metropoles, Canada, and the United States meant that disproportionate numbers of older Black women had to care for their grandchildren. This social situation, stimulated by exploitative histories of colonization, administrative decolonization, and an inequitable world economy, generates a structural gendered and racialized ageism within the Anglophone Caribbean whereby older women are disproportionately stereotyped as ageing Black or African matriarchs (Senior 1991: 12–15). Despite the matriarch’s ‘alleged power’, Senior concludes, these roles are rarely chosen, and these matriarchal figures carry the burden for ensuring intergenerational familial economic ‘advancement’ at the cost of their own agency (1991: 102). Consequently, despite the positive attributes of the matriarch figure, it becomes very difficult to disentangle the stereotype from the damaging colonial histories that gave rise to it (see also hooks 1981). Postcolonial ageing studies approaches, I suggest, can further draw out the complexities of racialized experiences of ageing while attending to the speculative qualities of the literary imagination that envision more equitable forms of agency and intergenerational care in old age.

RESISTING THE ‘BLACK MATRIARCH’ AND RE-IMAGINING CARE IN FRANGIPANI HOUSE My postcolonial ageing studies reading of Beryl Gilroy’s Frangipani House (1986) explores how literary representations of intersectional configurations of age, gender, and race bring erstwhile celebrated models of intergenerational care to crisis. Gilroy’s novel is preoccupied by the care that older African-Guyanese women can give and receive in communities that are shaped by colonial histories and neoliberal economics. The novel charts the experience of Mabel ‘Mama’ King, a 69-year-old African-Guyanese woman living in Georgetown, Guyana. Her daughters have migrated to the United States and sent their children to live with their grandmother. In return they give

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Mama money to care for her and the children’s material needs. When Mama is deemed too ‘old and shaky’ (Gilroy 1986: 9) to look after herself, her daughters relocate her to Frangipani House residential home for middle-class Black women. She experiences neglect and elder abuse under the care of Matron Olga Trask, escapes, and ends up in hospital. The extended family return to Georgetown and argue over the older woman’s care: her daughters want to send Mama King back to Frangipani House while her pregnant granddaughter Cindy and African American husband Chuck plan to take her to America. Mama rejects both arrangements, and her daughters leave their mother with Cindy and Chuck. The racialized and gendered dynamics of familial caring and ageing in Frangipani House are informed by Guyana’s colonial past as its slowing mining industries caused working-age adults to migrate and leave their children primarily in the care of their grandmothers. Frangipani House intertwines affect with the pragmatics of care as Gilroy connects the traumatic inheritances of colonialism with intergenerational caring relationships in the present. I use the term ‘affective economies of care’ to tease apart the novel’s entangled caring relationships, building on Amelia DeFalco’s (2012: 393) theorization of ‘affective economies’, defined as ‘systems of exchange that employ affective response as a currency’ that situate care ‘as a means to power, an opportunity for “colonization” that proves difficult to resist’. In Frangipani House, care becomes a ‘crisis’ when Mama King is perceived by her family and Matron Trask as no longer functioning as a Black matriarch in a mutually dependent caring relationship. For her daughter Token, caring for her ageing mother threatens her tenuous grasp on the material necessities needed to survive amidst the enduring financial and physical precarity of an uneven, racialized transnational economy: ‘Over here [Guyana] we’re rich, over there [the United States] we’re hard working. Because of her, I have nothing to show for my whole life’ (Gilroy 1986: 114–15). The practicalities and demands of paying for care, which are only fulfilled by working in the American economy, become an exhausting form of economic entrapment as Token likens her situation to ‘being bound up like the lianas in the jungle’ (113). Caring is not a means to power in this racialized and gendered economic system; rather, the hardships associated with living in the Black diaspora mean that the prospect of care in old age, and the lack of reciprocity associated with it, signify material and psychological suffocation. Consequently, Mama’s grandchildren seek to reconstitute their ailing grandmother into a healing matriarch by invoking an ‘African’ model of intergenerational care, a move which is typically celebrated by postcolonial critics’ readings of Gilroy’s novel (see Hoving 2001: 118; Chancy 1997: 74–5). Chuck blames the eponymous ‘Caucasian’ care home for Mama King’s plight and argues that the material realities of survival in the Black diaspora have erased what he perceives to be an ‘African’ sentiment of valuing older people. He tells Token, ‘We have to go back to the African village for answers’ as ‘the old in Africa have a place and a function’ (Gilroy 1986: 110). However, by attending to the racialized and gendered affective economics of care in the novel, it becomes apparent that Gilroy knowingly romanticizes ‘African’ elderhood and is sceptical of the uncritical imposition of such roles on African-Guyanese women. Gilroy probes the limitations of any easy recourse to the African matriarch within Chuck’s speech itself as his perception of African ageing is little more than an ossified understanding of ‘indigenous’ ways of life gleaned from a twelve-month stay with an unnamed African ‘tribe’ (117). In fleeting moments of introspection, he uses the idea of an African matriarch as a salve for ‘the tentacles of neglect’ that he feels when remembering the traumatic ‘burden’ and ‘unbelievable loneliness’ of his childhood growing up in the diaspora (118).

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These transient reflections reveal the fallacy of replacing a pernicious model of Western ‘care’ with an ‘authentic’ African panacea by exposing an affective economy of familial trauma at the heart of constructions of the romanticized Black matriarch. Gilroy reveals that imagined ‘African’ models of feminine elderhood become absorbed into an exploitative masculine fantasy of diasporic healing. The family’s projections of the Black matriarch role onto Mama King have implications for her agency. Chuck and Cindy’s commitment to figuring Mama King as a matriarch figure leads them unilaterally to decide to solve the ‘problem’ of Mama’s care by taking her to America to care for their soon-to-be-born baby (117). The symbolic overdetermination of the African matriarch as a template for intergenerational relations and care in the novel effectively deprives older women of their agency, in this case Mama’s ability even to be consulted on her own welfare. It becomes apparent that Gilroy conveys the ethical dubiousness of uncritically recovering precolonial ‘cultural’ iterations of the ‘African’ matriarch. The family’s argument is preceded by Mama’s unhappy residency at Frangipani House. Gilroy is clearly disparaging of the kind of ‘care’ that the home provides as Mama King is subjected to a range of indignities and kept sedated with medicines and injections. The head of Frangipani House, Matron Olga Trask, who trained in the United States before returning to Guyana, is initially caricaturized as an avaricious descendant of a ‘rampant European’ and ‘insatiable for power in a serious and efficient manner’ (Gilroy 1986: 2). Under Olga, institutional care appears to espouse racialized ‘Caucasian’ European values of efficiency and exploitation (Gilroy 1986: 2). Within such a system, the older Black women of Frangipani House appear to be pushed into a position of exploited neocolonial dependency, firmly positioned at the bottom of a racialized hierarchy. Yet these scenes of institutional caring are also built on other pernicious traumatic affective economies emerging from Guyana’s colonial inheritances. It transpires that Olga’s caring practices are not rooted in a genetic predisposition to ageism, avarice, and cruelty inherited from the ancestral ‘European’. Rather, they are influenced by her distressing experiences of a racialized and gendered violence that are linked to economic difficulties facing Guyanese since colonization and racial hierarchies that value perceived ‘whiteness’. These histories underpin Olga’s fraught relationship with her mother for whom she cared in old age. Matron’s mother ‘humiliate[d]‌herself to give [Olga] nice hair and skin’ and consequently ‘sells’ her daughter to a man ‘old enough to be [her] grandfather’ to service debts (83). Her mother’s attempts to give the ‘gift’ of lighter skin to socially advantage her daughter come at the cost of affective care. Olga realizes that her complicity in facilitating a colonial dynamic of care is rooted in the ‘searing pain’ (106) of being treated as a racialized sexual commodity, which leaves her desensitized and unable to enact the emotional or affective qualities of care for Frangipani House’s residents. Her alienation from her own mother leads her to romanticize her (now deceased) grandmother as a cleansing and healing influence. Olga tries to repair this traumatic history by adopting Mama King into a new affective economy of care. By fantasizing that she would approach Mama King in the hospital and say ‘Be my mother. Stay here free’, she replaces her biological mother with an imagined ageing Black matriarch, reminiscent of her grandmother, who could give her the ‘loving care’ she did not receive growing up in Guyana (106). The carer manoeuvres within a ‘Caucasian’ care structure to project a fragile (and unrealized) fantasy onto the older Black woman to remedy historic gendered and racialized sexual and economic trauma. Matron Trask, Cindy, and Chuck perpetuate a system, albeit from different perspectives, whereby to ‘care’ means to mould the older Black woman into an affective resource to alleviate painful gendered and racialized colonial traumas in the present. Gilroy rejects

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easy binaries between ‘Western’ and ‘African’ caring as younger Guyanese engage in contentious attempts to recover the older Black woman as a healing Black matriarch in a new, largely imagined, affective economy of care.3 Given Mama King’s circumstances as an older woman living with illnesses, the question that Gilroy’s novel asks is: how is it possible to be agentic and aged among conflicting, but no less exploitative, versions of old age and care? Mama King appears despondent, protesting that Frangipani House is ‘a deep dark hole’ (Gilroy 1986: 9). Her cry anticipates critical gerontology scholarship by Paul Higgs and Chris Gilleard (2010: 122, 125–6; 2016: 8–10) on the ‘social imaginary’ of the ‘fourth age’ as a metaphorical ‘black hole’ that signifies when older people are perceived as becoming dependent, frail, and devoid of agency. By contrast, Gilroy’s aesthetics reimagines agency by representing Mama King’s frailty in old age as a destabilizing and destructive, yet eventually transformative, agentic potential. These newfound agencies are predicated on her pragmatic and affective engagement with her ageing embodiment and caring labour which challenges the entropic connotations of the fourth age. Higgs and Gilleard’s concept of the fourth age as a black hole can be reframed from the vantage of postcolonial critique by exploring how Caribbean cultural theorists have used similar metaphors. The Guyanese writer and essayist Wilson Harris (1990) compares contemporary scientific understandings of black holes and quantum theory with Indigenous Amerindian ontologies of constant revision and change within an ‘abyss’ to describe the transformative capacities of Guyanese literature. In aesthetic terms, Harris describes textual ‘frailties’ and ‘diminutives’ as subtle points in Guyanese fiction that disrupt and invite the continual revision of meaning (1990: 182). In attributing great transformational power to aesthetic ‘diminutives’ that exist in peripheral, abysmal, voids, Harris proposes that black holes are sites for transformation and constant reimagining rather than entropic abjection and agentic foreclosure. I draw on Harris’s use of the black hole metaphor to suggest that Gilroy’s aesthetics posit alternative forms of agency for Mama King. The older woman reconfigures intergenerational caring relationships by exercising a new form of agency which does not buy into the myth of autonomy nor is subjected to the demands and fantasies of her family. Gilroy portrays Mama King as exercising agency in being and not-being by constantly redefining her caring responsibilities through an inconspicuous or, in Harris’s terms, diminutive, pattern of speech that makes and erases her worth as based on her caring labour. We witness this aesthetic transition during the novel’s final chapter when Cindy gives birth to twins. She tells Cindy and Chuck: ‘You don’ need me. I stayin’ here … .’ ‘Mama!’ said Cindy. ‘Don’t play jokes on us. We need you now. Who will help me?’ ‘I will do the best I can’, she said. ‘But’, she added fiercely, ‘my heart brittle – like eggshell. It easy to break.’ (Gilroy 1986: 125) Mama’s speech exercises a form of agency through not-being, by writing herself out of the racialized and gendered role of the ageing matriarch. She purposefully resists and destabilizes expected affective economies of care by answering Cindy’s question with a qualified response that she will only do the best that she ‘can’. The comparison of her heart to a ‘brittle’ eggshell at once registers Mama King’s physical and affective frailty and imagines her embodied potential to become something new, as an egg is simultaneously a point of nothingness and potential – a ‘void’ – from which new life eventually begins. As such, she warns against the pressures of the

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affective caring economies that could threaten her newfound agency, causing her to affectively and physically ‘break’. Contrary to interpretations in postcolonial literary criticism which assume that Mama King agrees to accompany her grandchildren to America to help care for the twins (see Hoving 2001), my reading of Frangipani House suggests that Mama King writes herself out of the historical role of the providing, caring grandmother and refuses to board the plane with Cindy and Chuck. Consequently, Mama King’s emergent agency uncouples her role as a caring matriarch from material labour and expected ‘African’ norms as she proposes a more equitable intergenerational arrangement which reforms material and affective labour into an affectionate care for her greatgrandchildren at a diasporic distance.

CONCLUSION My reading of Frangipani House demonstrates that a postcolonial ageing studies analysis of age and its intersections does more than critique ‘dominant’ racist ‘Western’ forms of institutional care in favour of a ‘culturally-situated’ intergenerational care model. By analysing the affective economies underpinning institutional and familial care, it becomes apparent that both structures are complicit in the ongoing valuation of older Black women as affective resources. While it is undeniable that older Caribbean women are valuable contributors in their communities, we must remain alert to the tendency to romanticize – and racialize – an ideal of a culturally constant, eternally caregiving, ageing Caribbean woman in postcolonial literary criticism and age studies. Rather, Gilroy’s aesthetics begin to reimagine how older Black women can attain a newfound form of agency and reshape the legacies of postcolonial affective economies of care. In pursuing an interdisciplinary postcolonial ageing studies analysis – which draws on, refines, and expands on situated Caribbean cultural theory and history, the notion of the fourth age as a black hole, and affective economies respectively – we can read Frangipani House as reimagining more dynamic and equitable means of caring across intersections of race, gender, and old age despite traumatic legacies of colonialism and racialization. My reading of Frangipani House is one example of the interdisciplinary potential of postcolonial ageing studies analysis advanced in this chapter. These perspectives move beyond coining new words to describe familiar problems associated with age and ageing. Rather, postcolonial ageing studies methodologies attend to the often complex and subtle aesthetics, ethics, and politics of ageing that are bound up in the postcolonial materiality of nations living with the legacy of coloniality and its racialized power structures. I perform these readings by identifying and assessing ideas and theories within age studies and critical gerontology that can travel productively into postcolonial debates or can be reclaimed from the vantage of postcolonial critique. Furthermore, such interdisciplinary methods necessarily complicate – and critique – the treatment of old age in postcolonial literary criticism and nuance existing debates within age studies and critical gerontology. As my reading of Frangipani House demonstrates, postcolonial ageing studies methodologies exceed the registration of the damaging effects of racialization, colonization, and neoliberal capitalism on people made ‘peripheral’ by the (white) Global North. Rather, such methods have the capacity to reimagine forms of agency, care, and intergenerational relations and work towards futures that bypass the racialized and colonial logics that remain at large in neoliberal capitalist modernity. Ultimately, I suggest that there needs to be a postcolonial ‘worlding’ of the words, the methodologies, and the metaphors by which we come to consider the cultural construction and materiality of old age so

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that it becomes possible to imagine – and question – a plurality of intergenerational futures and ‘elsewheres’ of age and ageing.

NOTES 1 Gilroy returns to her preoccupation with ageing in the Black diaspora in her essay ‘On Black Old Age … A Diaspora of the Senses?’ (Gilroy 1994). 2 I use the collective term Black, Indigenous, and People of Colour (BIPOC), as opposed to ‘non-white’, to consciously decentre whiteness as being the norm from which these groups of people are defined. In individual analyses of texts I will use the collective terms used by the author. 3 My reading builds on work in postcolonial studies that complicates any easy binarization between ‘Black’ and ‘white’ ontologies of ageing and care (see Koegler 2020; Timms 2020).

REFERENCES Allen, C. (2002), Blood Narrative: Indigenous Identity in American Indian and Ma¯ori Literary and Activist Texts, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Baker, T., N. T. Buchanan, C. A. Mingo, R. Roker, and C. Brown (2015), ‘Reconceptualising Successful Aging Among Black Women and the Relevance of the Strong Black Woman Archetype’, The Gerontologist, 55 (1): 51–7. Bhabha, H. K. (1994), Location of Culture, London: Routledge. Brah, A. (1996), Cartographies of Diaspora: Contesting Identities, London: Routledge. Chaouni, S. B., A. Claeys, J. van den Broeke, and L. De Donder (2021), ‘Doing Research on the Intersection of Ethnicity and Old Age: Key Insights from Decolonial Frameworks’, Journal of Aging Studies, 56: 1–9. Chancy, M. J. (1997), Searching for Safe Spaces: Afro-Caribbean Women Writers in Exile, Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. Chazan, M., and M. Whetung (2021), ‘ “Carving a Future Out of the Past and Present”: Rethinking Aging Futures’, Journal of Aging Studies, n.p. doi:10.1016/j.jaging.2021.100937. Chivers, S. (2003), From Old Woman to Older Women: Contemporary Culture and Women’s Narratives, Columbus: Ohio State University Press. Chivers, S. (2011), The Silvering Screen: Old Age and Disability in Cinema, Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Crenshaw, K. (1991), ‘Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Colour’, Stanford Law Review, 43 (6): 1241–99. DeFalco, A. (2012), ‘Caretakers / Caregivers: Economies of Affection in Alice Munro’, Twentieth Century Literature, 58 (3): 377–98. DeFalco, A. (2016), Imagining Care: Responsibility, Dependency, and Canadian Literature, Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Fürst, S. M. (2017), ‘African American Humour and the Construction of a Mature Female MiddleClass Identity in Clarence Major’s Such Was the Season’, in C. McGlynn C, M. O’Neill, and M. SchrageFrüh (eds), Ageing Women in Literature and Visual Culture: Reflections, Refractions, Reimaginings, 275–88, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Gilleard, C., and P. Higgs (2010), ‘Aging without Agency: Theorising the Fourth Age’, Aging and Mental Health, 14 (2): 121–8.

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Gilroy, B. (1994), ‘Black Old Age … The Diaspora of the Senses?’, in Melba Wilson (ed.), Healthy and Wise: The Essential Health Handbook for Black Women, 249–57, London: Virago. Gilroy, B. ([1986] 2011), Frangipani House, London: Hodder Education. Gilroy, P. (1992), There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack: The Cultural Politics of Race and Nation, London: Routledge. Gilroy, P. (1993), The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Goldman, M. (2015), ‘Purging the World of the Whore and the Horror. Gothic and Apocalyptic Portrayals of Dementia in Canadian Fiction’, in A. Swinnen and M. Schweda (eds), Popularizing Dementia: Public Expressions and Representations of Forgetfulness, 69–88, Bielefeld: Transcript. Gomille, M. (2007), ‘Old Women as Storytellers in Postcolonial Fiction’, Journal of Aging, Humanities, and the Arts, 1 (3–4): 201–10. Grande, S. (2018), ‘Aging, Precarity, and the Struggle for Indigenous Elsewheres’, International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 31 (3): 168–76. Grenier, A., and J. Hanley (2007), ‘Older Women and Frailty: Aged, Gendered and Embodied Resistance’, Current Sociology, 55 (2): 211–8. Hall, S. (2017), The Fateful Triangle: Race, Ethnicity, Nation, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Harris, W. (1990), ‘The Fabric of the Imagination’, Third World Quarterly, 12 (1): 175–86. Higgs P., and C. Gilleard (2016), Personhood, Identity and Care in Advanced Old Age, Bristol: Policy Press. hooks, b. (1981), Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism. Boston: South End Press. Hoving, I. (2001), In Praise of New Travellers: Reading Caribbean Migrant Women Writers, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Huggan, G. (2013), ‘General Introduction’, in G. Huggan (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Postcolonial Studies, 1–26, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Koegler, C. (2020), ‘Queer Home-Making and Black Britain: Claiming, Ageing, Living’, Interventions, 22 (7): 879–96. Lazarus, N. (2011), The Postcolonial Unconscious, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Life, P. (2017), ‘Outside the Nursing-Home Narrative: Race and Gender Exclusions in Green Grass, Running Water’, in S. Chivers and U. Kriebernegg (eds), Care Home Stories: Aging, Disability, and Long-Term Residential Care, 191–201, Bielefeld: Transcript. McLeod, J. (2000), Beginning Postcolonialism, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Mignolo, W. (2009), ‘Epistemic Disobedience, Independent Thought and Decolonial Freedom’, Theory, Culture and Society, 26 (7–8): 159–81. Morgan, P. (2014), The Terror and the Time: Banal Violence and Trauma in Caribbean Discourse, Kingston: University of the West Indies Press. Olwig, K. (2013), ‘Migration and Care: Intimately Related Aspects of Caribbean Family and Kinship’, in Loretta Baldassar and Laura Merla (eds), Transnational Families, Migration and the Circulation of Care, 133–49, London: Routledge. Raja, I. (2009), ‘Rethinking Relationality in the Context of Adult Mother-Daughter Caregiving in Indian Fiction’, Journal of Aging, Humanities, and the Arts, 3 (1): 25–37. Rajan-Rankin, S. (2018), ‘Race, Embodiment and Later Life: Re-animating Aging Bodies of Color’, Journal of Aging Studies, 45: 32–8. Said, E. W. (1978), Orientalism, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

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Senior, O. (1991), Working Miracles: Women’s Lives in the English-Speaking Caribbean, London: James Curry. Spivak, G. C. (1999), A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present, London: Harvard University Press. Timms, E. K. (2020), ‘“I Could Turn Viper Tomorrow”: Challenging Reproductive Futurism in Merle Collins’s The Colour of Forgetting (1995)’, in Elizabeth Barry and Margery Vibe Skagen (eds), Literature and Ageing, 105–27, Cambridge: Boydell & Brewer. Torres, S. (2015), ‘Expanding the Gerontological Imagination on Ethnicity: Conceptual and Theoretical Perspectives’, Ageing & Society, 35: 935–60. Torres, S. (2019), Ethnicity and Old Age: Expanding Our Imagination, Bristol: Policy Press. Torres, S. (2020), ‘Racialization without Racism in Scholarship on Old Age’, Swiss Journal of Sociology, 46 (2): 331–49. van Dyk, S., and T. Küpper (2016), ‘Postcolonial Perspectives in Aging Studies: Introduction’, Journal of Aging Studies, 39: 81–2. Walsh, K. (2017), ‘Storytelling in Amy Tan’s The Bonesetter’s Daughter: Belonging and the Transnationality of Home in Older Age’, Identities, 24 (5): 606–24. Weheliye, A. G. (2014), Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Worsfold, B. (2004), ‘Ageing Patriarchs in Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, Charles Mungoshi’s Waiting for the Rain and Nuruddin Farah’s Close Sesame’, in M. V. Grau and N. Casado Gual (eds), The Polemics of Ageing as Reflected in Literatures in English, 155–76, Lleida: University of Lleida. Young, R. (2012), ‘Postcolonial Remains’, New Literary History, 43 (1): 19–42. Zubair, M., and M. Norris (2015), ‘Perspectives on Ageing, Later Life and Ethnicity: Ageing Research in Ethnic Minority Contexts’, Ageing and Society, 35: 897–916.

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CHAPTER NINETEEN

Nation and ageing: Mother India’s mutable body IRA RAJA

INTRODUCTION: ‘AN IMAGINED INDIAN SELF’ Gender has been widely acknowledged by postcolonial scholars as a central component of ‘the metaphor of the sanctified and patriarchal extended family’, rallied in the cultural politics of Indian nationalism as the key idiom in which to construct a sense of community that was not only not obligated to the West but that was verily superior to it (Chakrabarty 1992: 17). Age, in the form of the older parent, whose presence gives the ‘sanctified’ family its ‘extended’ or sometimes ‘joint’ moniker, however, has not secured quite the same attention as gender. This is not to say that age is entirely absent from postcolonial scholarship. Rather, that it is primarily its ideological deployment in Orientalist discourse, which casts India as a dying civilization alongside labelling its current inhabitants childlike, that has received the most scrutiny (Nandy 1988: 17; Inden 1990: 1, 139; Said 1995: 99, 115). The trope of age in anti-colonial thinkers, on the other hand, from Swami Vivekananda’s call for ‘the freshness and vigor of youth’ to Gandhi’s invocation of ‘Young India’, has not been the subject of much investigation (Vivekananda 1997: 304).1 Age is paid even less attention in critical analyses of literary, cultural, and social science discourses since Independence. This neglect is particularly striking in the case of postIndependence Indian literature wherein age is ubiquitous as a site of cultural authenticity, playing a role not dissimilar to that of gender in the nationalist discourse. On the rare occasion that the preponderance of age in fiction is even recognized as a phenomenon, it is viewed askance as one sign of an intensifying cultural conservatism. Thus, the late Rajendra Yadav, chief editor of the high-brow literary Hindi monthly, Hans, observed in the course of a conversation in 1998 that, on average, seven out of ten stories submitted to his magazine featured a venerable, older protagonist. Yadav related this occurrence to the broader cultural and political climate of the country at a time when the nation was being urged to rejuvenate a so-called Hindu way of life that specifically involved reverence for elders and the hoary past which they were seen to represent. As a self-confessed progressive, Yadav located this idealization of age, of which he was deeply critical, within the ‘family values’ rhetoric of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), a Hindu Nationalist entity which proposes that social relations, including those between ruler and ruled, are best modelled along the paternalistic, multigenerational structure of the traditional family (Basu et al. 1993: 6, 21, 32, 48). Insightful as Yadav’s comments are in relation to subcontinental politics, my reading of postIndependence Indian literature reserves a rather more complex role for age than discernible in

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Yadav’s account. My approach, more oblique than a survey of the field, involves a close reading of one literary text in particular, the iconoclastic Hindi writer, K. B. Vaid’s short play, ‘Our Old Woman’ (2001: 33–79). The chief interest of this text inheres in its implicit engagement with an identifiably Indian predilection for metaphorizing age as the location of an ‘imagined self ’ (Cohen 1998: 104), a phenomenon that is widely represented in contemporary literature.2 This essay argues that while ‘Our Old Woman’ continues to deploy age as a metaphor for social, political, and cultural decline, it also feeds off the materiality of the ageing body, that is, its manifest lack of integrity and its slippery location along the rigid binaries of youth and age, to underwrite an altogether more ambivalent, if not quite optimistic, account of the nation as an entity that resists totalizing narratives, especially ones that revolve around notions of an essential, exclusive, and timeless India.

THE NATION AS AN OLD CRONE The play features a group of five men and women, all of whom give ‘the impression of being more than one’, ‘their costumes emblematic of the various costumes of the country’, encircling the eponymous old woman of the title, who meanwhile reclines alone on ‘a high, antique, throne-like bed’, amidst the ‘beautiful ruins’ of an old building, cut loose from familial space and significance (see stage directions 2001: 33). Even as she remains silent, the multitude represented by the surrounding chorus cogitates feverishly about her identity. As quickly becomes clear, in addition to being a real person (‘somebody’s mother’), the old woman also corresponds to the postcolonial nation, with the chorus doubling up as her unmindful children / citizens, trying to work out what they owe her. Casting the nation as an old crone might initially seem like a novelty but age as a trope for thinking about social change has a long history and one that has been the subject of considerable commentary. Certainly, Western thinking, starting with the pre-Socratics through eighteenthand nineteenth-century theories of progress and social evolution, has drawn consistently on the seemingly neutral idea that cultures move from birth and infancy to maturity and growth, followed by decay and death, in a manner that mimics the biological growth of living organisms (Tipps 1973: 201; Nisbet 1969). Theories of social progress sound a lot less anodyne though when extended beyond the life cycle of individual nations, into the realm of colonialism. This is particularly true of cultural difference from and within European colonies, where racial inequality was all too often re-articulated as an inequality of power not just between men and women, that led, for instance, to the characterization of India as the ‘Oriental Bride’ or the ‘effeminate Bengali’ (see Sinha 1995), but also between different age groups, evident in the colonial casting of India as childish or senile (see Nandy 1988). Additionally, age offered colonial ideology a ready means of resolving the problem of dismissing certain cultures as uncivilized. Thus, the long tradition of European preoccupation with India, as observed most notably by Edward Said, but also Ashis Nandy, was characterized by a temporal splitting of the good India which lay in the past, from the bad India, which lived in the present. Mapped onto the biological life cycle, such splitting allowed for the considerable achievements of Indian civilization to be attributed to the days of its youth, and its current degradation to senescence. As Nandy writes: ‘The civilized India was in the bygone past; now it was dead and “museumized”. The present India, the argument went, was only nominally related to its history; it was India only to the extent it was a senile, decrepit version of her once-youthful, creative self ’

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FIGURE 19.1  ‘Bharat Bhiksa’ (India Begging), c. 1878. The Calcutta Art Studio. By kind permission of the Trustees of Victoria Memorial Hall, Kolkata, India.

(1988: 17). Moreover, as part of the progress / regress cycle, India was destined to go through periodic decline, whereas the temporal framework of linear development to which Europe laid claim meant that it could look forward to endless progress for itself. Needless to say, for India to be part of the trajectory of unlimited progression it had to enter European history – a condition met in the fulfilment of the colonial project. In what I read as a particularly vivid illustration of this narrative, a print of the Calcutta Art Studio, from the late 1870s, ‘Bharat Bhiksa’, features Bharat / India as a haggard crone, clasping a string of prayer beads in one hand, and prodding a naked, darkhaired male child towards a luminous Britannia with the other.

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The India of ‘Bharat Bhiksa’ which clearly recalls ‘Bharat Mata’ – a reference to Mother India that had become common by this time – is not the resplendent goddess-like creature of contemporary calendar art but a rather sad old woman (Ramaswamy 2010: 80–1), who must, having run the course of her life, entrust her child’s future to the care of a rival mother whose full breast offers a promise of nourishment that the ‘old crone’ can clearly no longer afford.

THE SEAMS OF GENDER In an essay ‘Radicalizing Temporal Difference: Anthropology, Postcolonial Theory, and Literary Time’, Stefan Helgesson points to a contradiction at the heart of postcolonial scholarship. Postcolonial scholars, he contends, while being deeply critical of the colonial gambit of placing the others of the Western self notionally in another time than that of the West, have also, simultaneously and contradictorily, affirmed the idea of separate temporalities for the challenge that it poses to ‘the unitary time of Western modernity’ (Helgesson 2014: 546). Although numerous analyses of colonial discourse have sanctioned the idea of temporal difference, let me briefly reprise one such account, if only because its version – admittedly aimed at distinguishing not the colonizer from the colonized, but the home from the world, within the colony – gained considerable traction. As Partha Chatterjee, the scholar in question, notes with reference to the writings of early-twentiethcentury Bengali nationalists, the positing of a truly indigenous selfhood was possible only in the private and feminized space of the middle-class Indian home, even as the demands of colonial rule and cultural compromise were accommodated in the worldly and masculinized domain of the public (Chatterjee 1997). The private domain of the home, associated more with continuity than with change, was presided over by what Chatterjee refers to as the ‘new woman’ of the nationalist imagination. As the chief bearer of the signs of a national tradition, the new woman was fundamentally different from both the ‘western’ or the Westernized woman, on the one hand, and from the ‘common woman’ who was forced to work for a wage in the public domain, on the other (Chatterjee 1997: 9, 127; see also Chakravarty 1989). The spatial demarcation of ‘authentic’ versions of Indian femininity from the ‘inauthentic’ was of course tenuous from the start, a point vividly instantiated by one of the favourite figures of nineteenth-century social reform movements, the young widow. As a subject with potentially dangerous desires, the young widow needed to be incorporated into the new domestic economy through remarriage and so on in a way that the widow as an older woman who remained conspicuously absent from reformist concerns, did not. Freed from the protection of a husband, this indeterminate figure from nineteenth-century reformist discourse remains unsettled in the writings of early twentieth-century Bengali nationalists, where it haunts their distinction between the home and the world, if only by its silent yet ineradicable presence on the threshold.3 The challenge to the inner–outer distinction, posed by the older woman, is only amplified over time. As Chatterjee notes, the home as the true space of Indian bourgeois femininity was not impervious to change (Chatterjee 1997: 125). The increasing demands for women-only schools, colleges, and female doctors meant that by the time of Independence many more middle-class women were visible in the public, political, and economic life of the nation than was the case at the turn of the previous century (Sangari and Vaid 1989: 14), greatly compromising one of the primary signifiers of the middle-class woman’s respectability – her confinement to the inner sphere (S. Bharat 1994; Roopnarine et al. 1992; Ramu 1989).

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Social change, involving the movement of an ever-increasing number of women beyond the life of the home is widely documented both in post-Independence Indian fiction, which traces the impact of this shift on the family in general, and in the discourse of social gerontology, where its implications for older people in particular are debated. That women are prominent in sociological narratives as agents of change is evident from Indian social gerontology’s standard explanation for the perceived breakdown of the extended family: the emergence of the ‘working woman’. Study after study argues that women’s entry into the workforce compromised the unity of the traditional family and adversely affected the status of old people. Typically, ‘working women’ were selfish; their being away from home meant that the family elders were left unattended; often they pressed their husbands for moving out of the multi-generational household so that they did not have to look after the ageing parents-in-law (Sharma and Dak 1987: 9–10; Bose and Gangrade 1988: 59; Rajan, Mishra, and Sarma 1999: 39–41). Literature surveys, purportedly offering a dispassionate overview of the fiction of the time, likewise, hold forth on the problems presented by ‘the ever-increasing number of working or “earning” women in society’. As the well-established Hindi writer, Ram Darasa Misra, notes in his thematic account of the post-Independence Hindi short story, the new woman’s awareness of her capacity for earning contributed to her self-confidence, her decisiveness, and not least, her moral laxity (Misra 1983: 46). In his overtly judgemental portrayal, Misra finds the new woman to be virtually indistinguishable from the heavily parodied form of the Westernized woman of nineteenth-century Bengali folk literature, except that his tone is closer to realism. What I have sought to show here is how the bourgeois woman of the nationalist imagination now merges with the Westernized woman of the postcolonial nation to confuse the spatial division between the public and the private, on which hung nationalist notions of authenticity and continuity. Since their location within a patriarchal, multigenerational family structure was critical to older people and women’s capacity for signifying an identity alternative to the West, the spatial distinction between the home and the world, between the public and the private, was foundational to anti-colonial resistance (Kunow 2016: 107). But this anti-colonial, nationalist position is rudely challenged with the destitute mother in Vaid’s play hinting darkly at the bourgeois home, from which she has been banished, as the locus not of continuity but contestation: First W[oman]: Third M[an]: Second W: First M: Second M: First W: Third M: Second W:

Her folks must have driven her out. Saying, we can’t take care of you anymore. Times have changed. You too should change. Your old garb. We can’t take care of you anymore. Quite likely she started cursing them. And they started starving her. (2001: 35)

In what I want to flag as my point of departure from Chatterjee, the old parent’s expulsion from the feminized interiority of the home into the world outside, as seen in Vaid’s play, compromises the spatial and gendered basis of the middle-class home as the location of an imagined essential Indianness dating back to the remote past. Whereas the bourgeois woman had been singled out in early-twentieth-century writings of Bengali nationalists to signify the nation, the introduction of age into the equation meant that even the delimited category of the bourgeois woman was suddenly

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too large and unwieldy to withstand scrutiny. Gender and space were no longer available for the unproblematic siting of a timeless India. These categories now needed to be split further along generational lines, to signal the differential capacities of youth and old age for connoting cultural purity. Put differently, although the shift from the colonial to the postcolonial in this play continues to be characterized by the use of the female body as the locus of an imagined selfhood, through its implicit reconfiguration of the home as a space of conflict, from which the older woman has been expelled, the play serves to expose the fault lines in the categories of gender and space, contesting their claim to a seamless, homogeneous location of uncompromised selfhood in the postcolonial nation.

SCRAMBLING TELEOLOGY The paradigm of separate temporalities that found such favour with nineteenth-century Indian nationalists eager to distinguish the home from the world within the colony, also found spirited endorsement, at least on this one count, from postcolonial scholars, such as Dipesh Chakrabarty, who sought to theorize the relationship between the colonizer and the colonized in terms that ‘actively advocated the elaboration of a historiographical practice that affirmed discrete temporalities’ (Helgesson 2014: 546). But as Helgesson observes, the work of postcolonial scholars is not always clear on how the colony as culturally and historically distinct from the colonial power, is to retain its distinction in the face of the spatial expansion of capitalist modernity ‘forcing what is different and separate together’ (Helgesson 2014: 548). That this distinction should collapse was certainly an intended outcome of the structural reinvention of the new nation through the process of modernization, which also served as an implicit national response to the colonial imputation of decay and decline. Although modernization theory as the preeminent critical framework for making sense of the process whereby traditional societies became modern seemed more future oriented than the idea of separate temporalities so dear to postcolonial scholars, the manner in which it approached the study of social change in non-Western societies was deeply grounded in the ideologies of evolution and developmentalism, which had provided imperialism with much of its sanctimonious and quasi-scientific rhetoric (Tipps 1973: 200–1). As the new social imaginary, of which industrialization, urbanization, and development were the necessary attributes, modernization signalled a progressive march towards an unending improvement of the human condition. Deeply imbued with positivistic assumptions about linear progress, modernization theory was a twentieth-century take on the Enlightenment legacy of ‘the Great Idea of Progress’, enabling within its framework for the ‘ageing India’ of Oriental scholarship to resurface as the ‘traditional India’, while the previously young Europe was now recast as ‘modern’. To be sure, the template for the mother’s transformation, as visualized by the chorus in Vaid’s play, adheres closely to the imagined transformation of the nation in the framework of modernization theory. The mother thus, merging seamlessly with the nation, is set to ‘sparkle’ with the accoutrements of capitalist modernity: high-rise buildings and advanced technology for the most mundane tasks: First M[an]: All this publicity will bring in tons of tourists. First W[oman]: We’ll get filthy rich.

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These ruins will become radiant then. Our old woman also. She’ll sparkle. The ruins will turn into a tall tower. With one hundred and one stories Each story will contain a thousand suits Each suite will have scores of comforts Machines for washing clothes Machines for drying clothes.

… Second W: First M: Second M: First W: Second W:

Machines for losing fat. Machines for tit and for tat. To each her own computer Everything in obscene abundance Our old woman a virtual doll. (2001: 70–1)

The chorus’s plans for transforming the old woman into ‘a whole new woman’ include, among other things, giving her a ‘face-lift’, getting ‘her wrinkles ripped’, ‘her hair bobbed’, and rigging her out in ‘tight blue jeans’ (71). These plans, however, change abruptly when the chorus realizes that material motivations for getting the mother to look young and modern might not be as fully rewarded as it had imagined. That the mother in her modern avatar may not be as attractive to wealthy foreign tourists now prompts the chorus to work for the exact opposite ends: ‘hire western experts’ to ensure that ‘the ruins look even more ruined’ and that ‘the old woman looks even older’! Other changes envisioned to impress and attract foreign money include turning ‘these ruins into an ashram’, ‘a very traditional ashram’ and ‘transform our old woman into a goddess’ (73). The nation’s presumably steady move away from tradition towards modernity, when mapped onto the mother’s body, in other words, quickly throws into doubt any presumptions about linear progression, be it for the individual or the nation. The mother’s ‘other worldliness’, ‘her superstitions’, ‘her obsession with untouchability’, ‘her blind faith’, ‘her addiction to hocus pocus’, ‘her ritualism’ (56), may seem to be cultivated with an eye to the market, as suggested in the chorus’s plans for making her more attractive to tourists. Alternately, it may be seen to bear testimony to the truth of Neil Lazarus’s contention that, ‘within the space / time of capitalist modernity, … emergent features, including those rising to dominance, exist alongside other features – whether themselves dominant or residual, “major” or “minor” – of earlier historical provenance’ (2011: 109). Both interpretations, different from each other as they are, reveal the presumed trajectory of modernity as linear, unidirectional and monolithic to be more of an ideological projection than an accomplished fact. Further, not unlike the abstract entity of the nation, the physical body of the mother, very obviously marked by age, also provides ‘instances of overlapping and intertwined temporalities’, with unclear boundaries between past and present (Kunow 2016: 107). In what is critical to my unfolding argument, the old, snotty, and bearded mother who is also simultaneously describable as beautiful, radiant, and luminous (Vaid 2001: 37), invites the reader to think of the somatics of age in ways that challenge the widespread obsession with linear progression and time-worn questions

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aimed at establishing how old is old and when does it begin, amongst others (Kunow 2016: 107–8). As Rüdiger Kunow avers, the fact of overlapping and intertwined temporalities in the context of postcolonial nations, which points to an uncertain and incomplete disengagement from the colonial past, also resonates with the preoccupation that older people display through questions such as how much of their earlier selves live on into old age, and in what ways can they continue to recognize themselves as being the same person they once were (Kunow 2016: 107; see also Kauffman 1986). To the extent that questions to do with continuity, chronology and linear progression plague the postcolonial nation as much as they do the ageing body, one might conclude that the latter serves better as a metaphor for the nation than either youth or midlife. In the following section I will examine more closely how the physical attributes of the ageing body in Vaid’s play, which are initially readable as signs of decline, go on to underwrite an altogether more enabling, if irreverent, reading of the nation as one that is heterogeneous, discrepant, and mutable rather than timeless, ageless, and unchanging.

AN INESSENTIAL INDIANNESS In an essay titled ‘The Indian Contexts and Subtexts of My Text’, Vaid makes a striking claim: ‘I see little unanimity or clarity as to what constitutes Indianness.’ An early short story, ‘Buṛhiyā kı Gatharı’, on which the play ‘Our Old Woman’ later came to be based, was an exploration of precisely this theme.4 As Vaid explains, the story was an ‘oblique and unabashed admission of my own enormous indecision as to what constitutes bhāratıyatā (Indianess) and my equally enormous ambivalence toward what some of my more patriotic peers represent as bhāratıyatā’ (Vaid 2017: 97). Of the several ways in which Vaid’s play extends his short story’s concern with defining Indianness, perhaps the most notable is that of having the mother embody several temporalities at once. This ploy is useful in undercutting the view of time as an ‘irreversible phenomenon’, associated with modernization theory’s distantiation and differentiation of the present from a previous superseded reality (Basu 2017: 51). Problematically, however, the idea of multiple temporalities that intertwine and overlap each other, can be seen to underscore a mutually harmonious co-existence, such as Manisha Basu claims to be characteristic of the temporal structure of metropolitan Hindutva with its ‘system of instantaneous simultaneities’ that seeks to place contemporary Hindus on the same temporal plane as their mythological forbears from ancient scriptures, dispensing with ‘the idea of temporal distance, and consequently, the possible energy of difference’ (Basu 2017: 48, 51). The mother’s ageing body in Vaid’s play, I suggest, is closer to what Helgesson might call a ‘radical heterotemporality’ exposing the ‘jagged edges of difference’ (Basu 2017: 48) that constitute, qualify, even contradict each other in what leads to a thickening of time rather than its elimination. Whether she is seen as an individual or a substitute for the national community, the mother personifies a radical multiplicity that includes mythical time (‘When she was world-renowned as the Golden Sparrow’, Vaid 2001: 54); domestic time (‘a helpless old woman’ who has been abandoned by her family, 46); national time (a woman with ‘a glorious past’, 75, whose ‘bundle contains our heritage’, 64); personal time (‘she is out of date’, 42); cosmic time (‘Our old woman who is immortal’, 51); spiritual time (‘Her wisdom is ancient’, 42); embodied time (‘she appears to be ageless’, 37); biological time (‘not imperishable’, 51); historical time (has endured ‘a horrible history’ of being ‘violated again and again / By foreign raiders’, 48); agricultural time (‘she’ll bloom again / And put forth a new flower’, 54); and geological time (‘Like a doll of sand’, 77). In refusing to collapse the

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distance, and consequently the difference between separable sequences of past, present, and future (Basu 2017: 50), the concept of radical heterotemporality, I suggest, lends a certain density to time, that is elided in concepts of poly, multi- or overlapping temporalities which can serve to paper over the cracks and fissures between them. Taking my cue from Stefan Helgesson, I suggest that the time of the nation being impossible to reduce completely to ‘evolutionist, colonial, and culturalist paradigms’ (Helgesson 2014: 556) means that the radical heterotemporality of the mother may in fact be beyond the power of language to represent. To be sure, the chorus repeatedly qualifies, even negates, its account of the old woman, deploying elocutionary and lexical modalities, such as the use of axioms, interrogation, disavowal, and contingency, to cast the entire narrative as ‘a fundamental hesitation regarding the very reliability of representation’ (Montaut, 2001: 84). Although it is possible to read self-doubt of the kind displayed by the chorus as the liberating characteristic of the Sartrean open gaze (see Zimmermann 2016), there is in truth nothing liberating or open about the gaze of the chorus in ‘Our Old Woman’. Its wavering between negative and positive stereotypes of age, at all times appears to maintain youth as the ‘privileged empty point of universality’ (Žižek qtd in van Dyk 2016: 118), to present the mother not in her absolute difference or her alterity but ‘in terms that the [youthful] self already knows’. This, as Harm-Peer Zimmermann argues, citing Spivak, is the dialectic of postcolonial reason: ‘it operates from the outside and in doing so places itself [and not the other] at the centre’ (2016: 88). If the self-doubt of the chorus only produces new, if more nuanced, representations, one might ask, after Zimmermann: what are older people to do? (2016: 89). Vaid’s play, I suggest, may be read as an implicit response to precisely this question. The representation of heterotemporality may be beyond the scope of language, it seems to say, but it is not beyond the scope of literature clearly, which while being in language, is able to convey the limitations of language (see Helgesson 2014: 557). At the same time as documenting the failure of language to establish different and distinct categories, which are the ‘only warrant of stable identities’ (Montaut 2001: 87), ‘Our Old Woman’ also points to the success of the literary text in referencing the idea of radical heterotemporality, paving the way for reimagining Indianness as changeable, inessential, and porous. As I will show in my next section, what the play offers in place of linguistic constructions of the ageing body is an insistence on greater and sustained attention to its materiality, at the same time as it calls out a major blind spot of postcolonial theory, which is its predilection for constructivist analysis (Kunow 2016: 102).

BODY LANGUAGE In an essay on national longing for cartographic form, Sumathi Ramaswamy points to the importance of maps in visualizing the boundaries of the nation-space: ‘If it were not for the map, the nation-space would remain an abstraction’ (2007: 39–40). For maps to inspire an affective allegiance, though, they need to be supplemented by the somatic imagination. As Ramaswamy explains, superimposing the body of Mother India onto the scientific map of the nation results in a ‘bodyscape’ which ‘insert[s]‌into the impersonal geographical space of India the image of an apparently familiar (mother) goddess’. Not only does this ‘transform abstract territory into lived nation’, it also ‘personalize[s] the nation space and present[s] it as an entity worth dying for’ (Ramaswamy 2007: 35). For nationalists in a colonial world wrestling with an idea of India that appeared to be ‘materially, discursively and even cartographically unstable’, she concludes,

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‘the female body in its apparent singularity conferred unity, wholeness and stability’ (Ramaswamy 2007: 48). The power of national allegory, emblematized in the historical hope that Mother India would command the sacrifices that its cartographic representation alone could not, however, is clearly eviscerated in Vaid’s postcolonial dramatization. So, despite the play beginning with the flesh-andblood form of the mother as a thinly veiled metaphor for the nation, it also parodies nationalist assumptions insofar as her evident distress only serves to repel the children instead of drawing them to her rescue:5 First M[an]: Second M: First W[oman]: Third M: Second W: First M: Second M: First W: Third M:

But if she is our mother, we can’t leave her here like this. If she is our mother, we’ll have to do what we say we can’t do. But how can we if we can’t? But if she is our mother? We should deny it. We should pretend to be unaware of the truth. The truths we are unaware of can’t hurt us. Unawareness is the mother of bliss. So we should scamp. (2001: 43)

What unfolds in the following pages is the chorus’s gradual abstraction of the substantive mother and its corresponding amplification of her symbolic function – a literary phenomenon of which a real life counterpart became evident in the protests that erupted across university campuses in the country in 2016 in support of the mothers of Rohit Vemula, a Dalit PhD scholar from the University of Hyderabad, who killed himself in protest against caste discrimination in the university, and Najeeb Ahmad, a researcher from Jawaharlal Nehru University, who went missing in the wake of campus violence in the same year. Campus unrest spread across the country over the next few years, culminating in country-wide demonstrations against provisions of the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) of 2019 which, for the first time in the history of Independent India, promulgated religion as the basis of citizenship. The state’s apparent apathy towards the distraught mothers of Rohit and Najeeb found a new target in the now storied mothers and grandmothers of Shaheen Bagh, the iconic site of peaceful anti-CAA sit-in protests in Delhi, one of whom, the 82-year-old Bilkis Bano, went on to feature in Time magazine’s list of ‘100 Most Influential People of 2020’. Even as these women, many of whom were stepping into the limelight for the first time in their lives, to speak out for their children, were being trolled as anti-national and worse,6 cries of ‘Long Live Mother India’ continued to rend the skies.7 More than the nation having to be imagined as a mother for it to feel real, it was seemingly the embodied mother now who had to be visualized as an intangible entity called the nation, before her plight could elicit any kind of response from her children. Needless to say – and this is the key take away from my discussion above – not all embodied mothers can hope to attain the level of abstraction required to speak for the nation. Marked by their caste, class, and religion as the nation’s perpetual other(s), mothers such as Radhika Vemula, Fatima Nafees, and Bilkis Bano can never hope to rise above the particular, the individual, and the isolated. Vaid’s analysis and critique of the cultural inclination to allegorize the nation, the increasing tendency, that is, to privilege the non-material over the embodied, now starts to make better sense. Although the fear of the body in social gerontology often translates as the fear of reducing age to the body alone, in general, as Elizabeth Anker contends, the idealized human body in its liberal

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configuration either elides aspects of corporeal existence in the name of reason or normalizes them through ‘calculations of symmetry and likeness’ (Anker 2012: 16). While this idealized body, and its corollary in the unified, nuclear, impermeable body politic, may be traced back to the Middle Ages, it assumes more explicit parallels with a distinctly liberal subjectivity in the context of democracy (Anker 2012: 16). The integrating effect of reason on the chaotic individual self here offers an analogy for the way democratic process unites a national population into ‘a balanced, selfauthorising whole’ (Anker 2012: 20). The imagery of the state as body politic, that is to say, depends on an idealized body of a particular kind – one that is unified, impermeable, and successfully assimilated. This unease with the messiness of real bodies, Anker concludes, is what paves the way for liberalism’s discrimination against non-normative bodies that are also often raced, gendered, and otherwise disadvantaged in particular ways (2012: 16–17). Vaid’s play challenges this idealized body of liberalism, which is in effect founded on a disavowal of embodiment, in various ways, starting with an emphatic rejection of the discursive. Unlike the Mother India of ‘Bharat Bhiksa’, whose silence is a condition of the medium (being a picture, she cannot talk back), the old woman in Vaid’s play actively weaponizes silence as an agential move, flagging her resistance to ideological appropriation by the representational economies of the nation (Cohen 1998: 120): Second W[oman]: First M[an]: Second M: First W: Third M: Second W: First M: Second M: First W:     First W: Third M: Second W: First M: Second M: First W: Third M:

We are the ones who’re barely alive. That’s why she won’t talk to us. That’s why she is feigning sleep. Or unconsciousness. Or sickness. She thinks we are useless. Good for nothing. Perhaps she wants us to buzz off so she can summon others. She knows we are good for nothing. (2001: 39) Let’s not forget that old people are often devious. They have masks for faces. Their faces are not the indices of their minds. Their eyes are like eagles’ eyes. Their silences are sinister. Their fits are fathomless. Their diseases are their weapons. (2001: 46)

The power of the mother’s silence, evident in the quote above, is further underscored by the fact that while she remains unperturbed by the non-stop chatter around her (55), the chorus is rattled, even threatened by her silence, repeatedly looking to fill in the blanks she offers in response to its construction of her.

MUSIC WITHOUT WORDS If the mother’s steadfast refusal of speech is readable as a potent, if implicit, valorization of the body, then her pointed embrace of ‘music without words’ serves as an equally powerful, and this

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time, explicit endorsement of the same body. Notably, the mother has for some forty pages of the play been at the centre of a scene that mimics the manner of an ethnographic encounter in which she is cast as a passive object who is “there” not for her own sake, but to be exhibited, studied, and talked about by the chorus standing ‘on the edge of a space looking in and / or down upon’ her (Kunow 2016: 103). Her eventual recourse to music then effectively negates the chorus’s overdetermined gaze. If this alludes to, in Zimmermann’s excellent reminder, the Latin source of the word ‘resignare’, that is, to render invalid, it also calls attention to, as he observes, the word’s more contemporary usage of being resigned to the judgement of others. Her ability to maintain her cool – whether it is through her stoic silence or her singing – seems to bracket out the troll army of the chorus. As she shrugs off the negativity that is heaped on her she appears accepting of these insults even as she derides the power of the chorus to insult her (Zimmermann 2016: 90). Amplifying the resounding effect of the silence that has characterized her for the better part of the play, the mother’s very deliberate turn at the end towards ‘music without words’ directs the audience’s attention away from the chorus’s ‘words … without music’ (Vaid 2001: 78–9) very effectively onto the ageing body itself. The chorus’s final admission that it is ‘afraid of the truth’, appears to revivify the mother: The old woman raises her head very slowly; stretches herself very slowly, gets off the bed very slowly, balances the bundle on her head and, a few moments before the end of the play, joins the other characters whose amazement is reflected in their gradually fading voices. As their voices begin to fade, the old woman begins to open her mouth out of which issues heavenly music without words. (78) The play ends with the mother’s somatic as against the chorus’s discursive performance, challenging the philosophical premise of the obsession with language, to foreground instead a phenomenological point of view, in which sounds, signs, movements, and rituals ‘figure as possibilities for living alterity and giving it expression’ (Zimmermann 2016: 94). As their voices start to fade, the old woman opens her mouth out of which issues ‘heavenly music’. In this final act of pitting the older woman against the chorus, the play underscores yet again her unique subjectivity, and her final refusal to be restored to the bosom of the joint family. To the extent that the woman also stands in for the nation, her rejection of the extended family may also be read as the nation’s disavowal of a cultural identity inseparable from this ostensibly unchanging family form. Even though all stages of human life are arguably more or less hospitable to the performance of heterotemporality, as a trope for the postcolonial nation old age seems to me more valuable than either youth or midlife. As a particularly fine illustration of this tenet, Vaid’s play rescues the ageing body in all its non-unified, unassimilated, and permeable glory, not to shore up the normativity of the unified and impermeable body of youth, as one might expect (see Anker 2012: 20), but instead to exemplify a profound alternative to the ‘essential nation’ emblematized not just in the familial body of the nationalist imagination but also the whole gamut of literary and sociological discourses in the postcolonial nation. In Vaid’s characterization, the body of the old woman / nation is finally embraced for what it is. When the chorus points at the old woman to claim ‘who wouldn’t want to be barely alive like that’ (38), it is rejecting the traditional reasons offered for embracing the body metaphor, namely to confer unity and integrity to the national body, traits hardly associated with

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popular representations of age. Being old and ‘barely alive’, as the play makes clear, means to be like the mother – inessential, open, and impossible to totalize. To that extent, then, the old mother of Vaid’s play offers a template for defining Indianness that speaks much more to the realities of the postcolonial nation struggling with the xenophobia of a militant Hindutva than would the coherent and impermeable body of youth or midlife.

CONCLUSION: THE ALLEGORY OF AGE In a highly controversial essay from 1986, Frederic Jameson claimed that political commitment in Western literature was re-contained and psychologized in a way that was strikingly different from the tendency in ‘third-world texts’ to read psychology or libidinal investment in primarily political and social terms: ‘In third world texts, even those which are seemingly private … the story of the private individual destiny is always an allegory of the embattled situation of the public third-world culture and society’ (71–2, also 69). Nearly fifteen years after the widespread panning of Jameson’s thesis, Vaid appears to embrace allegory, even national allegory, begging the question why any writer, especially one as connected to the wider literary world as Vaid, would want to write what is arguably a textbook case for a discredited thesis. Could a writer do anything new with material which lent itself to the most stereotypical uses? As my chapter has shown, indeed he could. In Vaid’s reworking of the national allegory, the political category of the nation is made accessible through the intimate figure of the mother, in a way that speaks to Jameson’s characterization of literature from the West, at the same time as the mother’s predicament references the nation (she is never just an old woman), in a way that recalls Jameson’s characterization of ‘third-world writing’, thus confounding Jameson’s schematic distinction between East and West (1986: 74). But there is another issue with Jameson’s thesis that is brought out rather vividly in Vaid’s play which initially reads as a particularly accurate illustration of the Jamesonian thesis: Not every private third-world story that aspires to public and political significance is necessarily recognizable as legitimate in the postcolonial nation. Indeed, the readiness with which the nonagenarian mother of an Indian prime minister, himself often labelled as the ‘Emperor of Hindu Hearts’,8 has been hailed as ‘Mother India’,9 has eluded mothers of the ‘wrong’ kind. However problematic one may find it for women to be insistently thought of as mothers and daughters of the nation, the point is that even if one longed for that identity, her caste, class, or religion may mean that she does not qualify. Not all private stories, even in Jameson’s ‘third world’, can equally aspire to have allegorical significance at the level of the nation. Re-imagining Mother India as an older woman releases the nation from the tyranny of timelessness. As must be clear from the discussion above, even though Vaid’s play sets out to stage an allegorical equivalence between body and nation, the ageing body of the mother incarnate finally fails to neatly map on to the Mother India of the nationalist imagination, causing the allegory not only to function self-reflexively to uncover the fault lines in metaphors of nationalism, but also to re-imagine the nation in ways that are highly subversive of the established conventions. An ageing Mother India who embraces the messiness of real bodies not only paves the way for a legitimization of non-normative bodies, she also enables a salient critique of an unease with the plurality and diversity of the national body politic that has come to be associated with the resurgence of Hindutva politics in India in the past twenty-five years.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank Priya Kumar for encouraging me to write this essay, and Deepika Bahri, Janaki Abraham, Rajni Palriwala, Simona Sawhney, and Udaya Kumar for their comments and feedback. This essay would not have been possible without access to the online library resources provided by La Trobe University, Australia.

NOTES 1 Young India (1919–31) was the title of a weekly journal in English started by M. K. Gandhi to popularize India’s demand of self-government. 2 A small sample of which might include: Bhagat (1985); Das (1991); Desai (1991); Devi (1986); Sahni (1962); Sahni (1990); Shivani (1991); Singh (1992); Singh (1996); Tendulkar (1997); Yadav (1994). 3 I would like to thank Prof. Udaya Kumar for this insight. 4 I am grateful to Saumya Sethia for providing me with a copy of this story. 5 By abstracting women’s bodies into what Sumathi Ramaswamy terms ‘bodyscapes’ – making use of the human body to map territory – patriotic ideology is perceived by its materialist and feminist critics to have appropriated the image of the woman’s body without due consideration of its impact on real women’s bodies. Vaid’s depiction of the nation as mother, however, eludes this charge: By getting an actor to perform Mother India on stage, Vaid makes a move that is very different to that of superimposing the female form on to a map of the nation. Vaid’s play, that is to say, does not invite the audience to imagine the nation as a woman but rather to imagine the woman on the stage as the nation. The figure of the woman, through her sheer physical presence on the stage, then, draws attention to the nation only after the audience has acknowledged her physicality. Her bodily presence, in other words, precedes her metaphorical significance. 6 https://www.booml ​ i ve.in/fake-news/2015-video-from-pakis​ t an-fals​ e ly-lin​ k ed-to-shah​ e en-bagh-lockd​ own-7987?inf​init​escr​oll=1. 7 https://www.republ​ i cwo​ r ld.com/india-news/polit​ i cs/amit-shah-at-jeet-ki-goonj-progra​ m bha​ r atmata-ki-jai.html. 8 https://www.red​iff.com/news/col​umn/ram-tem​ple-cro​wns-modi-as-first-hindu-hri​day-sam​rat/20200​804.htm. 9 https://thepr​int.in/india/mot​her-india-heera​ben-bjp-lead​ers-hail-pms-mot​her-for-sup​port​ing-coro​navi​ruswarri​ors/386​164/.

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Bose, A. B., and K. D. Gangrade (1988), The Aging in India: Problems and Potentialities, Delhi: Abhinav. Chakrabarty, D. (1992), ‘Postcoloniality and the Artifice of History: Who Speaks for “Indian” Pasts?’, Representations 37: 1–26. Chakravarty, U. (1989), ‘Whatever Happened to the Vedic Dasi? Orientalism, Nationalism and a Script for the Past’, in K. Sangari and S. Vaid (eds), 27–87, New Delhi: Kali. Chatterjee, P. (1997), The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories, Delhi: Oxford University Press. Cohen, L. (1998), No Aging in India: Alzheimer’s, the Bad Family and Other Modern Things, Berkeley: University of California Press. Das, K. (1991), ‘Summer Vacation’, trans. from Malayalam by V. Sankaranarayanan and A. Bijlani, in The Inner Courtyard: Stories by Indian Women, Lakshmi Holmstrom (ed.), 26–38, Calcutta: Rupa. Desai, A. (1991), ‘A Devoted Son’, in The Penguin Book of Modern Indian Short Stories, S. Alter and W. Dissanayake (eds), New Delhi: Penguin, 92–101. Devi, M. (1986), ‘The Son’, trans. from Bengali by Devi, Indian Literature, 29 (2): 42–56. Helgesson, S. (2014), ‘Radicalizing Temporal Difference: Anthropology, Postcolonial Theory, and Literary Time’, History and Theory, 53: 545–62. Inden, R. (1990), Imagining India, Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Jameson, F. (1986), ‘Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism’, Social Text, 15: 65–88. Kaufman, S. R. (1986), The Ageless Self: Sources of Meaning in Late Life, Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press. Kunow, R. (2016), ‘Postcolonial Theory and Old Age: An Explorative Essay’, Journal of Aging Studies 39: 101–8. Lazarus, N. (2011), The Postcolonial Unconscious, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Misra, R. D. (1983), Modern Hindi Fiction, Delhi: Bansal. Montaut, A. (2001), ‘Vaid’s Poetics of the Void: How to Resist Communal and Global Terror’, Hindi: Language, Discourse, Writing, 2 (3): 81–107. Nandy, A. (1988), The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self Under Colonialism, New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Nisbet, R. A. (1969), Social Change and History: Aspects of the Western Theory of Development, New York: Oxford University Press. Rajan, S. I., U. S. Mishra, and P. Sankara Sarma (1999), India’s Elderly: Burden or Challenge? New Delhi: Sage. Ramaswamy, S. (2007), ‘Body Politic(s): Maps and Mother Goddesses in Modern India’, in R. H. Davis (ed.), Picturing the Nation: Iconographies of Modern India, 32–50, New Delhi: Orient Longman. Ramaswamy, S. (2010), The Goddess and the Nation: Mapping Mother India, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Ramu, G. N. (1989), Women, Work and Marriage in Urban India: A Study of Dual and Single Earner Couples, New Delhi: Sage. Roopnarine, J. L., E. Talukder, D. Jain, P. Joshi, and P. Srivastav (1992), ‘Personal Well-Being, Kinship Tie, and Mother-Infant and Father-Infant Interactions in Single Wage and Dual Wage Families in New Delhi, India’, Journal of Marriage and the Family, 54 (2): 293–301. Sahni, B. (1962), ‘The Boss Came to Dinner’, trans. from Hindi by J. Ratan, in Contemporary Hindi Short Stories, 15–20, Calcutta: Writer’s Workshop. Sahni, B. (1990), ‘Chacha Mangal Sain’, trans. from Hindi by J. Ratan, in We Have Arrived in Amritsar and Other Stories, 189–208, New Delhi: Orient Longman.

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Said, E. W. (1995), Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient, London: Penguin. Sangari, K., and S. Vaid (1989), ‘Recasting Women: An Introduction’, in K. Sangari and S. Vaid (eds), Recasting Women: Essays in Colonial History, 1–26, New Delhi: Kali. Sharma, M. L., and T. M. Dak (1987), Aging in India: Challenge for the Society, Delhi: Ajanta. Shivani (1991), ‘Grandmother’, 1979, trans. from Hindi by M. Pande, in Women Writing in India: 600 B.C. to the Present, vol. 2, Susie Tharu and K. Lalita (eds), 181–8, Delhi: Oxford University Press. Singh, D. N. (1992), ‘Lautna’, in Maee Ka Shokgeet, 59–72, Delhi: Radhakrishna. Singh, K. (1996), ‘Go Your Way, Baba!’ in Anthology of Hindi Short Stories, B. Sahni (ed.), trans. J. Ratan, 420–35, New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi. Sinha, M. (1995), Colonial Masculinities: The ‘Manly Englishman’ and the ‘Effeminate Bengali’ in the Late Nineteenth Century, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Tendulkar, P. V. (1997), ‘A Woman Called Aai’, trans. from Marathi by P. Deshpande, in Katha Prize Stories, Vol. 6, Geeta Dharmaraja and Meenakshi Sharma (eds), 105–24, New Delhi: Katha. Tipps, D. C. (1973), ‘Modernization Theory and the Comparative Study of Societies: A Critical Perspective’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 15: 199–226. Vaid, K. B. (2001), ‘Our Old Woman’, trans. by the author, Hindi: Language, Discourse, Writing, 2 (3): 33–79. Vaid, K. B. (2017), ‘The Indian Contexts and Subtexts of My Text’, in D. Dimitrova and T. de Bruijn (eds), Imagining Indianness: Cultural Identity and Literature, 95–110, Palgrave Macmillan. van Dyk, S. (2016), ‘The Othering of Old Age: Insights from Postcolonial Studies’, Journal of Aging Studies, 39: 109–20. Vivekananda, S. Complete Works. Vol. 3. Mayavati Memorial Edition. Calcutta: Advaita Ashrama, 1997. Yadav, R. (1994), ‘Biradari Bahar’, in Katha Yatra, R. Yadav (ed.), New Delhi: Radhakrishna, 129–43. Zimmermann, H.-P. (2016), ‘Alienation and Alterity: Age in the Existentialist Discourse’, Journal of Aging Studies, 39: 83–95.

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CHAPTER TWENTY

Ageing in Latin American cinemas BARBARA ZECCHI AND RAQUEL MEDINA

INTRODUCTION Accidentally stung by a golden scarab-shaped mechanism that grants eternal youth, the ageing antique dealer Jesús Gris (Federico Luppi), in Guillermo del Toro’s debut feature Cronos (1993), is persecuted by both an uncontrollable thirst for blood and by the harassment of some North American thugs, who want to make a fortune from his device. At the end of the film, faced with the choice between killing his granddaughter or dying, Jesús opts for destroying the Cronos mechanism, which results in his death. Rather than receiving the expected fate, however, he is rewarded with the gift of returning to his beloved family and to his ageing body. Establishing a sharp division between what is good and what is evil – addiction versus self-control, deception versus common-sense ethics, happiness versus horror, family love versus dubious profit, life versus death, and ultimately ageing versus eternal youth – Del Toro makes a parody of the dominant youth-obsessed order (absence of wrinkles, strong sexual drive, and hairy heads) thus enabling an alternative discourse that embraces and celebrates ageing. Therefore, to some extent, this Mexican variation of a vampire tale may serve as an indicator of the amicable relationship of Latin American cinema with old age, in opposition to Hollywood’s pervasive addiction with youth, that will be addressed in this chapter. This contribution analyses the representation of ageing and old age in Latin American cinemas with the goal of venturing beyond the widespread assumptions that cinema discourse is universally youth-centric and ageist. To this end, there are three dimensions that this essay seeks to explore. First, it focuses on film productions that challenge the North American white, upper-middle-class, heteronormative model for ageing that characterizes mainstream cinema, without underestimating the influence that this model has in cinema worldwide – and, for that matter, in Latin America. Second, it questions the dominant theoretical premises that universalize such a model. Ageing studies (or age studies: age / ing studies from now on1) have been conceptualized within a white heteronormative framework. Yet, because age is a universal intersection, intersectional perspectives (on gender, sexuality, body image, ability, race, ethnicity, socio-economic status, geographic, regional backgrounds, etc.) can provide new insights into the diversity of the ageing experience. As a way of opening new theoretical paths and forging new concepts and critical parameters, this contribution proposes broader ideological and political ways of exploring old age by engaging with feminism, affect theory, and post-humanist thinking. In particular, it delves into the crossovers between

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age / ing studies, gender studies, material eco-criticism, and the ecological humanities. Third, by inserting Latin American cinemas into the theoretical discourse on ageing, it intends to overcome the marginality and struggle for legitimacy of non-mainstream discourses in relation to hegemonic epistemological systems. In this context, Latin America either has failed to receive proper critical and theoretical consideration or has been elided altogether from contemporary debates. The goal of this contribution is to rethink, through the lenses of Latin American cinemas, major conceptual premises both in cultural gerontology and in film theory created by the hegemonic theoretical discourse of the Global North. The nuanced panorama of less-examined films in a broad array of nations (Mexico, Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Cuba, Costa Rica, Dominican Republic, Colombia, Panama, and Brazil) and languages (Spanish, Portuguese, Kaqchikel, Aymara, and Dulegaya) offers particularly valuable case studies to question the role that Hollywood cinema plays in shaping the discourse on age worldwide. How do Latin American films resist and subvert the dominant narratives of age? Recent data show that Latin America represents only 5 per cent (less than US$ 3 billion) of the anti-ageing global market (estimated to be worth about US$ 50.2 billion in 2018).2 Does this situation have an impact on how old age is represented on these countries’ screens? If age is constructed culturally, do different cultures construct age differently? With these questions in mind, this essay analyses a broad spectrum of Latin American films from diverse and complementary angles.

BEYOND THE YOUTH-CENTRIC GAZE Kathleen Woodward’s ‘the youthful structure of the look’ (1989) is the predominant theoretical paradigm in visual age / ing studies used for the analysis of cinematic expressions of old age. In dialogue with Laura Mulvey’s well-known theoretical parameters about scopophilia and the male gaze (1975), Woodward argues that the look is culturally charged with negative predetermined notions of old age as decline because the spectator is positioned as younger and thus constructed as superior, unless a non-normative text invites the spectator to feel otherwise. Mainstream cinema – one of the most powerful ‘technologies of age’ (Medina and Zecchi 2020) – capitalizes on and gives agency to young, white, sexually active straight men, thus reproducing and reinforcing hegemonic social discourses about gender and later life. In general, older people are invisible on the Hollywood screen. When visible, old age – and women’s old age in particular – is portrayed according to what Margaret Morganroth Gullette has called the ‘dominant narrative of decline’ (2004), that is, a time of decrepitude and loss. In this context, the so-called successful ageing effort fostered by cosmetic and pharmaceutical industries and by the neoliberal imperative to maintain the young and sexually active body is nothing more than the other side of the same coin. The alternative between decline and success is indeed a false dichotomy because ageing successfully is the equivalent of not ageing. Constructing ‘a not old self ’ (Katz 2005) is at the centre of the hyperconsumerist anti-ageing framework of the Global North parodied in Guillermo del Toro’s debut film discussed above. In this sense, as in the case with the narrative of decline, successful ageing presents old age as the dreadful end of life, and as such, it has to be feared and postponed. Hollywood remakes of Latin American films offer fertile ground for comparison and contribute to the argument that different cultural contexts give shape to different representations of ageing and old age. Despite their almost literal shot-for-shot renditions, the North American productions deviate significantly from the Latin American films in their representations of ageing, modifying

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the original films according to the Hollywood youth-centric paradigm and the youthful structure of its look. Films such as Elsa and Fred (Dir. Michael Radford, 2014), based on the Argentinian Elsa y Fred (Dir. Marcos Carnevale, 2005); Gloria Bell (Dir. Sebastián Lelio, 2018), an adaptation of the Chilean Gloria (also directed by Sebastián Lelio, 2013); Puzzle (Dir. Marc Turtletaub, 2018), after Rompecabezas (Dir. Natalia Smirnoff, Argentina, 2010) fit into the group of ‘Americanized remakes’ in Lauren Rosewarne’s categorization: ‘The key motive behind the remaking is to produce a new American film with American stars and American settings. [The original is] enhanced through higher production values, better looking casts and a faster-paced, more slickly presented plot’ (2020: 5). The goal of the remakes is to correct elements that would not make the story attractive for the mainstream North American audience. Significantly, in their Hollywood versions, characters, especially women, become younger, or younger looking. For instance, both Puzzle and Rompecabezas start with the birthday party of the protagonist, but only in the Argentinian film is her age (fifty) revealed. In the remakes, the older female body is hidden: the protagonist’s frontal nude in the strip-tease scene in Gloria is notably absent from Gloria Bell; similarly, the haptic shower scene in Rompecabezas does not make it into Puzzle. Moreover, the remakes dilute the central theme of their referents (midlife, or later-life, crisis) and displace them with other concerns. While Rompecabezas is a film about turning fifty, and, as James Wegg put it, ‘who wins what, sleeps with whom, or moves out doesn’t matter a bit’ (2011: n.p.), Puzzle is all about who wins what, sleeps with whom, or moves out. Ageing is invisible in the Hollywood remakes, or, when it is visible, such as in Elsa and Fred, old age is understood as a disease. Elsa’s love and desire to live rejuvenate Fred, bringing his portrayal derisively closer to successful ageing. By contrast, in the Argentinian referent, the protagonists experience old age as a vital stage that must be lived in the way one wants and not according to the ageist expectations dictated by social norms (JuanMoreno 2019). Indeed, these remakes are examples of ‘successful ageing’ and negative Hollywood attitudes towards old age that contrast with the representations of ‘affirmative age’ and empathy of Latin American films. Rompecabezas, Gloria, and Elsa y Fred are just some of the many visual expressions of old age in a broader corpus of Latin American films3 that opposes the false dichotomy between decline and success and features affirmative embodiment of ageing that ‘aim[s] to acknowledge the material specificities of the ageing body … in terms of difference, but without understanding it as a body marked by decline, lack or negation’ (Sandberg 2013: 12). For Linn Sandberg (2013) and Anna Freixas, Luque, and Reina (2012) affirmative ageing is a theoretical space that recognizes the material specificities of the older body – a body that had lost its centrality in cultural gerontology (namely, in Gullette’s argument that we age by culture). In this context, ‘presboempathic visuality’ (Zecchi 2019b, 2022) displaces the youthful structure of the look through a complicit and empathic gaze that overcomes the implications of visual normativity. For Laura Marks, ‘haptic visuality’ (2000) triggers memories of multi-sensorial experiences that produce meaning. In this sense, the act of haptic contemplation strategically foregrounds the materiality of the image, and therefore deconstructs its representational nature. In a similar fashion, ‘presboempathic visuality’ evokes tactility through strategies such as blurred extreme close-ups and long duration shots. Presbyopia (‘old eyesight’, from Ancient Greek πρέσβυς, présbus, ‘old man’, and ὤψ, ṓps, ‘eye’) is the gradual loss of the eyes’ ability to focus on nearby objects, due to the ageing process. The haptic imagery of these films, their blurry and grainy texture, resembling presbyopic vision, is nothing more than an empathic response that allows the filmmaker, visually and metaphorically, to be at the same level

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of – and to feel like – the ageing character and encourages in the viewer the act of haptic visuality. Ultimately, the presboempathic gaze enables affirmative old age and empowers it.

SEXUAL PLEASURE IN LATER LIFE Sex between older people seems to be off limits in white American and British society and even more on screen: old age sex is ‘unwatchable’ (Waltz 2002). Yet, in recent decades, US medical and sociological approaches to ageing have stressed the importance of being sexually active in later life. Nonetheless, as some have rightly pointed out (Katz and Marshall 2002; Calasanti and King 2005; Marshall 2006), this sexuality is mainly circumscribed to men and the Viagra phenomenon. While male sexuality is considered to be an essential part of so-called healthy or active ageing, female sexuality in old age has been hidden and considered shameful. As Judith Gardiner has illustrated, men and women age asymmetrically; while men enjoy a longer heyday: ‘Women climb the slope of social desirability more swiftly and are more rapidly thrown from its peak’ (Gardiner 2002: 98). Susan Sontag (1972) observed that in popular culture and media, men mature, while women age. Ageing women are specifically prone to criticism, hence the proliferation of pharmaceutical and cosmetic industries that sell the need to maintain a youthful femininity that masks ageing as well as a sexualized masculinity. The representation of older women’s sexuality in Latin American film productions seems to challenge the Hollywood status quo in at least three different ways. A first group of films – which, significantly, includes numerous male-authored titles such as Gloria (Dir. Sebastián Lelio, Chile, 2013), El amor menos pensado (Dir. Juan Vera, Argentina, 2018), and Whisky (Dir. Juan Pablo Rebella and Pablo Stoll, Uruguay, 2004) – focuses on (heterosexual) older women, adopting those same strategies used by the hegemonic film discourse to represent (heterosexual) younger women. In an attempt to present age (or, rather, to hide it) as an irrelevant element not addressed by the plot, in this corpus, to varying degrees, the older female body is portrayed intentionally as a glamorous object for the male gaze, exposed as spectacle of ‘the youthful structure of the look’ and as the ‘to-be-looked-at-ness’ of commercial cinema (to use Mulvey’s coinage). The only apparent subversive element – that is, the only striking difference between mainstream cinema and this imaginary – is the female protagonist’s age. A completely different approach to the representation of sexuality in midlife and beyond is found in another group of films depicting older bodies graphically, without concealing their age. Their ‘defects’ (as Hollywood would define them) are either ignored or loved. This is the case in films such as Magnolia (Dir. Diana Montenegro, Colombia, 2011), Rosa (Dir. Mónica Lairana, Argentina, 2010), La cama (Dir. Mónica Lairana, Argentina, 2018), and Ixcanul (Dir. Jayro Bustamante, Guatemala, 2015), among others. Contrary to its treatment in commercial cinema, the older imperfect body is not the object of scorn, but rather the site of a new pleasure. If middle and old age mean, according to patriarchal scientific discourse, the loss of sex appeal, and if menopause marks the ‘beginning of the end’, in these audiovisual products, they represent, as Freixas, Luque, and Reina would put it, the beginning of a ‘more to come tomorrow’ (2012: 119). Regardless of the fact that these films challenge the status quo in forms still strictly anchored to a heteronormative imaginary, they envision a female eroticism that often dispenses with men and the erect phallus. The protagonists are seen to enjoy sex after menopause through intercourse but also through masturbation (Zecchi 2017, 2019a).

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Finally, a third group of films – such as Dólares de arena (Dir. Laura Amelia Guzmán and Israel Cárdenas, Dominican Republic, 2015), or Las herederas (Dir. Marcelo Martinessi, Paraguay, 2018) – produces scenes that evoke a tactile presboempathic eroticism centring on the mature female body as an escape from the prominently heterosexual visual economy of commercial cinema. These films dispense with the phallocentric and heteronormative paradigm of pleasure and challenge the myth that identifies sexuality with genitality. For instance, both the tactile union (embraces and intertwined hands) between the mature white European woman with the very young black Dominican girl in Dólares de arena and the look of desire of the older woman towards the younger in Las herederas are excellent examples of how these films present (homo)erotically charged affirmative ageing bodies as alternatives to the traditional objects of scopophilia.

DEMENTIA BEYOND MEMORY LOSS Raquel Medina’s (2018) study of the representation of dementia in film highlights how cinema has been one of the most popular platforms for presenting dementia as the object of fear and horror. On Golden Pond (Dir. Mark Rydell, 1981) was the first fictional feature film to talk about dementia in the United States, followed by Do You Remember Love? (Dir. Jeff Bleckner, 1985). Since then, the first two decades of the twenty-first century have witnessed an important number of films in which Alzheimer’s disease is the main topic, including films from North America and the United Kingdom such as Iris (Dir. Richard Eyre, 2001), Away from Her (Dir. Sarah Polley, 2004), The Savages (Dir. Tamara Jenkins, 2007), The Iron Lady (Dir. Phyllida Lloyd, 2011), and Still Alice (Dir. Richard Glatzer, Wash Westmoreland 2014), among other films. The tragic tone of these works, usually narrated from the perspective of a family member or the caregiver, seeks to evoke the spectator’s sympathetic response towards the hardships faced by those living with the person with Alzheimer’s disease (Swinnen 2012: 314). Their focus is on representations of symptoms, deficits, loss, and the disappearance of the self. It is important to stress that, in most of these films, dementia mainly affects women, thus visually gendering it and reinforcing the discrimination and stereotyping of women. Through the trope of dementia, unsuccessful ageing is linked to women who are unable to socially perform either with the body or the mind and who therefore are depicted as zombies with a vacant stare. An important body of films from Latin America offers a depiction of ageing and dementia beyond the memory / forgetting divide. Several films employ the trope of dementia to bring to the fore important feminist matters related to ecofeminism, nationhood, motherhood, and matrophobia. Although there is a clear gendering of dementia in these films, this gendering cannot be characterized as discriminatory or stigmatizing. The Rest I Make Up (Dir. Michelle Memran, Cuba, 2018), Corteza (Dir. Lourdes Paloma Rincón Gregory, Colombia, 2016), Las horas contigo (Dir. Catalina Aguilar Mastretta, Mexico, 2014), among others, present the daily life of women living with Alzheimer’s disease. Vulnerability and mortality are normalized within daily routine in these films, and – through a presboempathic gaze – the viewers may ‘experience’ the women’s recollections of past memories, or ‘feel’ their present sensations of pleasure. Dementia is used in many films as a trope to directly or indirectly explore gender issues as well. Women account for two-thirds of the world population living with dementia, and in most countries, women are expected to serve as caregivers to older people and the ill. If the focus is on mainstream films from the Global North, female characters shown as the persons living

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with dementia predominate. Even in more positive depictions as is the case in Away from Her (Dir. Sarah Polley, 2004), these women are generally presented as the origin of the problems, psychological and physical alike, affecting those close to them. In films such as Dona Cristina perdeu la memoria (Dir. Ana Luiza Azevedo, Brazil, 2002), Las buenas hierbas (Dir. María Novaro, Mexico, 2010), Gatos viejos (Dir. Pedro Peirano, Sebastián Silva, Chile, 2010), and Antes la lluvia (Dir. Brenda Venegas, El Salvador, 2022), however, the focus is on the subjectivity of the person living with Alzheimer’s disease or on the positive impact the disease has on those close to the women: sisterhood, friendship, and intergenerational bonding are some of the themes emerging from these films. These representations do not dwell on negative aspects but rather on the use of dementia / Alzheimer’s disease to explore important national, cultural, social, political, gender, religious, and ethnic issues. Consequently, these films approach Alzheimer’s disease from a rich variety of perspectives, highlighting different experiences of the disease and diverse ways of presenting it aesthetically. Furthermore, it can be argued that a new concept of time / temporality emerges from the films presenting dementia narratives. For instance, Rice et al.’s (2017: 8) proposal for a feminist crip time proves to be very useful given that it replaces a fixed and linear understanding of time – of a ‘future perfect’ – with multiple and changing understandings of temporality that include non-normative representations. Dementia’s temporality is fluid, and its fluidity is not based on chronological temporality, nor on a perpetual present, but on the principles of new and constantly regenerating temporalities defined by interpersonal relationships; thus, not remembering can lead to the power of continuous self-regeneration and self-redefinition.

AGEING PLACENTAS: INTERGENERATIONAL RELATIONSHIPS Affect theory’s belief that power is a thing of the senses, that is, power feels before it thinks, can be a way of tracing emotional responses to old age and ageing. In mainstream cinema, pervasive emotional responses to old age and ageing range from annoyance, impatience, irritation, anger, and fear to sadness, pity, compassion, and sympathy. The encounter with the ageing body may trigger feelings of disgust, repulsion, and aversion. These emotions are culturally and politically mediated. In youth-driven neoliberal societies, older people appear to be at odds with imperatives of independence and autonomy, and their care is envisioned as a burden. At most, love, nurture, affection, and care are being ‘prescribed through the act of consumption’ (Goodley, Lawthom, and Runswick-Cole 2014), such as, for instance, in the ads of senior-care living options. As Gorton suggested, ‘feeling is negotiated in the public sphere and experienced through the body’ (2007: 334). To what extent do different public spheres – or rather ‘affective atmospheres’ to use Brennan’s terminology (2004) – condition individual emotional responses about old age? And, more specifically, how do Latin American films represent intergenerational relationships, and love for the mother (i.e. the ‘sacred’ affect of patriarchal society)? The term ‘placenta’ in this section title comes from Rosi Braidotti’s ‘placenta politics’, that is, a ‘relational frame that facilitates coexistence [and] interaction’ (2018: 316). In this sense, the intersection (i.e. coexistence and interaction) of age / ing studies with post-human feminism, affect theory, and the politics of emotion can lend an instructive framework for interpreting the issues underlying physical exchanges, emotions, feelings, sentiments, habits, and behaviours shaping these intersubjective / intergenerational relations and reframe configurations of the ageing (grand)mother.

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From Vsevolod Pudovkin’s Мать, (Mother) (1926) to Darren Aronofsky’s Mother! (2017), from melodrama to horror cinema, from the nurturing sacrificial ‘virgin’ paradigm to its underside, namely, the evil, narcissistic, unmotherly figure, the experience of motherhood has remained a prominent topic throughout the history of film worldwide and has drawn a significant degree of critical attention. Through diverse theoretical approaches, studies by Marianne Hirsch (1989), Ann Kaplan (1992), Barbara Creed (1993), Lucy Fischer (1996), Linda Williams (2017), Mary Ann Doane (1987), Susan Douglas and Meredith Michaels (2004), and, for the Latin American context, Isabel Arredondo (2013), and Michelle Hughes Miller (2017), among others, have explored the visual expression of both self-effacing mothering and bad, phallic motherhood. Their works have denounced cinema’s contribution to the institution of motherhood as a patriarchal tool for the control of women, while highlighting alternative film representations that depart from traditional discourses on maternity and reverse the dominant source of the narrative point of view (i.e. from the children’s subjectivity to the mother’s insights about her own experience). By means of envisioning – and glorifying – motherhood as the way for women’s fulfilment (e.g. in the numerous Mexican films interpreted by actor Sara García, the ‘official mother of Mexico’ in the 1930s through to the 1960s), Latin American cinemas do not shy away from reinforcing the absorption of the concept of womanhood into the category of maternity. On the other hand, through a false dichotomy, they also condemn women who do not feel the call for maternity, or are inadequate, selfish phallic mothers (from La malquerida, Dir. Emilio Fernández, Mexico, 1949, to Por tu culpa, Dir. Anahí Berneri, Sergio Wolf, Argentina, 2010). Many films depict domineering matriarchs (e.g. La ciénaga, Dir. Lucrecia Martel, Argentina, 2001; La pantalla desnuda, Dir. Florence Jaugey, Nicaragua, 2014; Miriam miente, Dir. Natalia Cabral and Oriol Estrada, Dominican Republic, 2018; or Araña, Dir. Andrés Wood, Chile, 2019) or confuse sexual desire with maternal desire, a confusion that has shaped the paradigm of maternal asexuality (from Lola, Dir. Maria Novaro, Mexico, 1989, to Crímenes de familia, Dir. Sebastián Schindel, Argentina, 2020). In addition, the ageing body of the mother (or father) generates feelings of disgust and repulsion (Alba, Dir. Ana Cristina Barragán, Ecuador, 2016), which in turn causes in viewers emotions of shame, discomfort, inadequacy, and unworthiness. Yet, an opposite visual response to the status quo gives birth (pun intended) to myriad complex multidimensional (grand)mother figures not bound to patriarchal conventions. Recent films deal with the concept of the aged (grand)mother in relation to her adult daughter / son or grandchildren, by subverting what Elizabeth Freeman calls ‘chrononormativity’, that is, ‘the condition when cultural manipulations of time convert historically specific regimes of asymmetrical power into seemingly ordinary bodily tempos and routines, which in turn organize the value and meaning of time’ (2010: 3). For Freeman, in mainstream cinema, the number of films dealing with conflicts between generations due to longevity, promoted by neoliberal agendas, is burgeoning. Yet, the ‘chrononormativity’ of generational conflict and age crisis benefit neither the older generations nor the younger ones. In contrast, films that supplant the youthful structure of the gaze will also challenge ‘chrononormativity’ in terms of social and economic productivity, and feature sentiments towards old age that include love, respect, admiration, solidarity, and desire. They include postmenopausal pregnancies that – by departing from grotesque, laughable representations – shape an unconventional, ‘chronotransgressive’ imaginary that instils sentiments of harmony and complicity. They propose intergenerational solidarity as the one outcome that can result in better

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living conditions and social equality for both younger and older generations (such as in the coming-of-age tale Ixcanul, Dir. Jayro Bustamante, Guatemala, 2015). They give shape to ageing mothers who openly discuss their unwillingness to conform to the self-sacrificing role, or whose socioeconomic conditions do not allow them to undertake that role (Que horas ela volta, Dir. Anna Muylaert, Brazil 2015; Don’t Call Me Son, Dir. Anna Muylaert, Brazil, 2016); and (grand) mothers who are granted their wish to die with dignity (Las buenas hierbas, Dir. María Novaro, Mexico 2010; No quiero dormir sola, Dir. Natalia Beristain, Mexico 2012), or who, by defying the neoliberal imperative of self-sufficiency, do not fear vulnerability and dependence (Las horas contigo, Dir. Catalina Aguilar, Mexico 2014). Finally, some films tackle desire – not the desire of psychoanalysis (desire for what we lack), but rather what Braidotti (1994) (via Deleuze) calls ‘nomadic affectivity’, or ‘the multi-faceted affective turn’, that is, a post-human desire based on the complex connection of humans with other humans and non-human beings that blurs ‘fundamental categorical divides between self and other … [expressing each] subject’s capacity for multiple, non-linear and outward-bound inter-connections’ (Braidotti 2005: 6). Films such as No quiero dormir sola (Dir. Natalia Beristain, Mexico, 2012), Las horas contigo (Dir. Catalina Aguilar, Mexico, 2015), Em três atos (Dir. Lucia Murat, Brazil, 2015), among others, display non-linear and outward-bound intergenerational connections through haptic, presboempathic takes of the bodies (wrinkled skin vis-à-vis smooth skin), blurring the divide between grandmothers and granddaughters, old and young, thus making it difficult to distinguish who is who. In this sense, then, affective dis-identification is an act of love.

TOWARDS AFFIRMATIVE AGEING Bruno Latour’s well-known phrase ‘To modernize or to ecologize? That’s the question’ (1998) reveals an implicit alliance between political ecology and the old. Global warming, ecopathy, and, to maintain the ‘mother’ trope of the previous section, Mother Earth are some of the topics tackled by this last group of films. By elaborating on the same theoretical premises of the previous one, this section shifts its focus to another angle of the ‘multifaceted affective turn’ seen above, namely, the interconnection of old age with concerns about the Anthropocene sustained by political ecology. Hence, with no intention of flattening the discourse that takes into consideration the intersectional perspectives on the significant markers of human difference that have characterized the above pages (e.g. gender, sexuality, body image, ability, race, ethnicity, socio-economic status, geographic and regional backgrounds), this last section ultimately transcends identity issues to provide a preliminary approach to the crucial role of age in relation to the post-human universe. Several films – such as, for instance, Se venden conejos (Esteban Giraldo, 2015) – show how the (heteropatriarchal and capitalist) domination of nature is related to the exploitation and oppression of women (Mellor 1997; Mies and Shiva 1993; Wenzel 1998). They tackle the connections and alliances between older women and the ecosystem and deal with notions of female identity rooted in the continuity with nature and in their sense of community. Through the intersection of old age with race and ethnicity issues, Las buenas hierbas (Dir. María Novaro, Mexico 2010), Ixcanul (Dir. Jayro Bustamante, Guatemala, 2015), La llorona (Dir. Jayro Bustamante, Guatemala, 2019), Panquiaco (Dir. Ana Elena Tejera, Portugal and Panamá, 2017), and Wiñaypacha (Dir. Óscar Catacora, Perú, 2017) show how knowledge about plants, animals, micro-organisms, and humans

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existed for centuries in indigenous (female) cultures before they were appropriated by Western (male) sciences. For Patrícia Vieira, Monica Gagliano, and John Ryan (2015) plants and humans interconnect in multiple ways, and plants are considered as agents of ethical communication. Ageing and ecofeminism are to be considered in these films not as a melancholic perception of the past, but as a necessary step to preserve the future and save the planet as well as their cultural traditions. The use of indigenous languages on the verge of extinction such as ‎Kaqchikel in Ixcanul, Aymara in Wiñaypacha, and Dulegaya in Panquiaco can be read as part of the same effort. Topics such as the loneliness of older people, the abandonment of rural areas, and migratory movements of the younger generations to urban areas evolve into a strong criticism of the results of globalization – the loss of identity, alteration of traditional lifestyles, causing poverty, culture, and language loss – and they vindicate the necessity to return to communicating in and with nature. Furthermore, these films place the ageing subject out of the traditional linear temporality of hegemonic film discourses. This corpus ‘invites spectators to engage with a non-productive present that challenges the teleological linear time: the reiterative actions of the characters allow us to linger in the present, instead of constantly wondering what will happen next’ (Sainz 2021). In these representations, teleological time as such is eradicated: the passing of time disappears, and its duration stands. In this context, the concept of ‘lived time’ proposed by Joshua St Pierre is particularly useful: while the objective chronological marker, constituted by the hegemonic ‘straightmasculine’ time, corresponds to ‘a future-directed linearity abstracted from the flux of bodily time’ (2015: 50), ‘lived time’ is defined by its fluidity and duration (2015: 57), which eradicate any sign of age and ageing, and with it, binaries such as male–female, young–old, beautiful–ugly, pleasure– disgust, or able–disabled. These films represent older people not only as an endangered species that must be safeguarded and protected, but also as subjects endowed with agency, capable of healing and being healed. They suffer ‘dispossession’ (Butler and Athanasiou 2013), but they are seen as capable of resisting the violence of our times. These films juxtapose the stereotype of the powerless ‘injurable’, disposable old person with the inscription of old age with dignity and ultimately empowerment. In all these cases, the representation of old age is marked neither by decline nor by success. Ultimately the characters in these films do not seem to fear death. In Braidotti’s words, ‘Making friends with the impersonal necessity of death is an ethical way of installing oneself in life as a transient, slightly wounded visitor’ (2013: 132). Or, as Donna Haraway puts it, ‘We are not posthuman, we are compost’ (2015: 161).

CONCLUSION In Guillermo del Toro’s Cronos (1993), the supremacy of youth is erased to foreground the old rather than the young vampire. Some years later, in El espinazo del diablo (2001) the pact between childhood and old age wins out over evil youth. This notion of old age as a worthy and respectable stage in life is also the one emerging from the analysis of Latin American cinemas just presented, which reveals a discourse that resists and subverts Hollywood’s hegemonic discourse on age. The positive relationship of Latin American cinemas with old age displaces the youth-centric gaze or youthful structure of the look to give way to a presboempathic visuality that presents the material specificities of the older body. Instead of hiding older bodies, the haptic imagery of many

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of the films with their blurry and grainy texture introduces a presboempathic gaze that ultimately empowers affirmative old age. Ageing female bodies are shown on screen as they are, thereby not only making them visible at last but also presenting and vindicating their sexuality and sexual pleasure. If the older body is unveiled, the memory loss of the older mind is presented as a metaphor used to explore a wide array of feminist issues that range from ecofeminism to nationhood, among others. The presboempathic gaze allows the viewer to undergo the characters’ experiences and, therefore, to distance themselves from the hegemonic negative notion linked to memory loss. Emotions and feelings about old age in Latin American cinemas are central to their alternative understanding of, for instance, intergenerational relationships and motherhood. Likewise, many Latin American films explore the key role of age in relation to the post-human universe, as well as the alliances between older women and the ecosystem, female identity rooted in the continuity with nature and sense of community. This continuity brings to the fore a concept of time that differs from the chronicity of heteronormative time by presenting time as a continuous present that makes the passing of time disappear. In conclusion, the analysis undertaken in this essay has shown that there is an ample and burgeoning body of Latin American films that introduce and propose diverse and non-hegemonic notions of ageing and old age. These new ways of presenting and gazing at older people, in particular older women, all illustrate Gullette’s (2004) assertion that we are aged by culture. Hence, Latin American cinemas are good examples of how culture has the power to contribute to de-stigmatizing ageing and erasing ageism.

NOTES 1 ‘Ageing studies’ and ‘age studies’ have been used interchangeably by cultural gerontologists. However, Margaret M. Gullette (2017) has proposed to use temporal locations (i.e. ‘age’) in order to avoid the ageist identification of the term ‘ageing’. Like Gullette, we acknowledge that the term ‘ageing’ is generally used in hegemonic discourses to refer to a process that needs to be reverted or disguised. Yet, we also believe that the word ‘ageing’ denotes the natural lifecourse phenomenon (we all age the moment we are born) and therefore should not be avoided. We maintain that the use of an overarching term such as ‘age / ing’ is an effective way to address both ‘age’ and ‘ageing’. 2 Data collected in the global anti-ageing products market report by Mordor Intelligence: https://www.mor​dori​ ntel​lige​nce.com/indus​try-repo​rts/anti-aging-produ​cts-mar​ket. 3 In particular the production of women film-makers whose interest in ageing-related issues seems to increase as they get older – directors such as María Novaro from Mexico, Anna Muyalert and Lucía Murat from Brazil, and Lucrecia Martel from Argentina, just to mention a few – offer indispensable perspectives on women’s old age experience. A new generation of women film-makers is also giving shape to rich and complex ageing characters: these directors include, among others, Mónica Lairana and Natalia Smirnoff in Argentina; Mariana Chenillo, Catalina Aguilar Mastretta, and Natalia Beristain in Mexico; Diana Montenegro and Lourdes Paloma Rincón Gregory in Colombia; Maite Alberdi in Chile; and Brenda Venegas in El Salvador. Their films display an empathic imagery that conveys what Silvan Tomkins called ‘affective resonance’ (1962): the emotions and experience of the older characters are felt as one’s own. This imagery triggers an emotional response that is not cathartic (followed by action), but rather filled with inaction. The concept of ‘affection-images’ or ‘recollection-images’ that Laura Marks borrows from Deleuze is particularly useful here: ‘those affection images lead … to sublimation, to contemplation rather than to reaction of movement’ (2000: 73).

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REFERENCES Arredondo, I. (2013), Motherhood in Mexican Cinema, 1941–1991: The Transformation of Femininity on Screen, Jefferson, NC: McFarland. Braidotti, R. (1994), Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory, New York: Columbia University Press. Braidotti, R. (2005), ‘Affirming the Affirmative: On Nomadic Affectivity’, Rhizomes 11–12. Available at: http://www.rhizo​mes.net/issu​e11/braido​tti.html (accessed 7 December 2020). Braidotti, R. (2013), The Posthuman, Cambridge: Polity Press. Braidotti, R. (2018), ‘Placenta Politics’, in R. Braidotti and M. Hlavajova (eds), The Posthuman Glossary, London: Bloomsbury. Brennan, T. (2004), The Transmission of Affect, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Butler, J., and A. Athanasiou (2013), Dispossession: The Performative in the Political, Cambridge: Polity Press. Calasanti, T., and N. King (2005), ‘Firming the Floppy Penis. Age, Class, and Gender Relations in the Lives of Old Men’, Men and Masculinities, 8 (1): 3–23. Creed, B. (1993), The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis, New York: Routledge. Doane, M. A. (1987), The Desire to Desire: The Woman’s Film of the 1940s, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Douglas, S., and M. Michaels (2004), The Mommy Myth: The Idealization of Motherhood and How It Has Undermined Women, New York: Free Press. Fischer, L. (1996), Cinematernity: Film, Motherhood, Genre, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Freeman, E. (2010), Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Freixas, A., B. Luque, and A. Reina (2012), ‘Secretos y silencios en torno a la sexualidad de las mujeres mayores’, in A. Salinas Alverdi (ed.), Estudios Etarios y relaciones intergeneracionales, 117–27, México: MICGénero-ISSUU. Available at: https://issuu.com/micgen​ero/docs/cat__l​ogo_​micg​__ne​ro_2​012 (accessed 6 December 2020). Gardiner, J. K. (2002), Masculinity Studies and Feminist Theory: New Directions, New York: Columbia University Press. Goodley, D., R. Lawthom, and K. Runswick-Cole (2014), ‘Posthuman Disability Studies’, Subjectivity, 7 (4): 342–61. Gorton, K. (2007), ‘Theorizing Emotion and Affect: Feminist Engagements’, Feminist Theory, 8 (3): 333– 48, doi:10.1177/1464700107082369. Gullette, M. M. (2004), Aged by Culture, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Gullette, M. M. (2017), ‘Against “Aging”: How to Talk about Growing Older’, Theory, Culture & Society. Available at: https://www.theor​ycul​ture​soci​ety.org/blog/marga​ret-mor​ganr​oth-gulle​tte-aging-talk-grow​ ing-older (accessed 4 February 2022). Haraway, D. (2015), ‘Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene: Making Kin’, Environmental Humanities, 6: 159–65. Hirsch, M. (1989), The Mother / Daughter Plot: Narrative, Psychoanalysis, Feminism, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Hughes Miller, M. (2017), Bad Mothers: Regulations, Representations, and Resistance, Bradford, ON: Demeter Press.

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Juan Moreno, D. (2019), ‘Sin fecha de caducidad. Notas sobre gastronomía, mujeres y vejez en el cine español del siglo XXI’, La nueva literatura hispánica, 23: 31–50. Kaplan, E. A. (1992), Motherhood and Representation: The Mother in Popular Culture and Melodrama, London: Routledge. Katz, S. (2005), Cultural Aging: Life Course, LifeStyle and Senior Worlds, New York: Broadview Press. Katz, S., and B. L. Marshall (2002), ‘‘‘Forever Functional”: Sexual Fitness and the Aging Male Body’, Body and Society, 8 (4): 43–70. Latour, B. (1998), ‘To Modernize or to Ecologize? That’s the Question’, in N. Castree and B. Braun (eds), Remaking Reality: Nature at the Millenium, 221–42, London: Routledge. Marks, L. (2000), The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Marshall, B. L. (2006), ‘The New Virility: Viagra, Male Aging and Sexual Function Introduction’, Sexualities, 9 (3): 345–62. Medina, R. (2018), Cinematographic Representations of Alzheimer’s Disease, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Medina, R., and B. Zecchi (2020), ‘Technologies of Age: The Intersection of Feminist Film Theory and Aging Studies’, Investigaciones feministas: Metodologías Feministas: nuevas perspectivas, 11 (2): 251–61. Mellor, M. (1997), Feminism and Ecology, Oxford: Wiley. Mies, M., and V. Shiva (1993), Ecofeminism, Nova Scotia: Fernwood. Mulvey, L. (2009), ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, in L. Mulvey, Visual and Other Pleasures, 14–27, London: Palgrave Macmillan. Rice, C., E. Chandler, J. Rinaldi, N. Changfoot, K. Liddiard, R. Myktiuk, and I. Mündel (2017), ‘Imagining Disability Futurities’, Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy, 32 (2): 213–29. Rosewarne, L. (2020), Why We Remake: The Politics, Economics and Emotions of Film and TV Remakes, London: Routledge. Sainz, C. (2021), ‘Cinema Turns: Catalan Creative Documentary’, Journal of Videographic Film & Moving Image Studies, 8 (1). Sandberg, L. (2013), ‘Affirmative Old Age: The Ageing Body and Feminist Theories on Difference’, International Journal of Ageing and Later Life, 8 (1): 11–40. doi:10.3384/ijal.1652-8670.1381. Sontag, S. (1972), ‘The Double Standard of Aging’. Available at: https://unz.com/print/Satu​rday​Rev-1972se​ p23-00029/ (accessed 6 December 2020). St Pierre, J. (2015), ‘Distending Straight-Masculine Time: A Phenomenology of the Disabled Speaking Body’, Hypatia. 30 (1): 49–65. doi:10.1111/hypa.12128. Swinnen, A. (2012), ‘Everyone Is Romeo and Juliet: Staging Dementia in Wellkåmm to Verona by Suzanne Osten’, Journal of Ageing Studies, 26 (3), 309–18. doi:10.1016/j.jaging.2012.01.006. Tomkins, S. (1962), Affect Imagery Consciousness, New York: Springer. Vieira, P., M. Galionoand and J. Ryan, eds (2015), The Green Thread: Dialogues with the Vegetal World, London: Lexington. Waltz, T. (2002), ‘Crones, Dirty Old Men, Sexy Seniors: Representations of the Sexuality of Older Persons’, Journal of Aging and Identity, 7 (2): 99–112. doi:10.1023/A:1015487101438. Wegg, J. (2011), ‘Alone in the Country: Review of Puzzle, Rompecabezas’. Available at: http://www.jame​sweg​ grev​iew.org/Artic​les.aspx?ID=1389 (accessed 6 December 2020). Wenzel, L. (1998), ‘GENESIS II: An Ecofeminist Reclamation Project’, On the Issues magazine. Available at: https://www.onth​eiss​uesm​agaz​ine.com/199​8win​ter/w98​_Wen​zel.php (accessed 6 December 2020).

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Williams, L. (2017), ‘Something Else besides a Mother: Stella Dallas and the Maternal Melodrama’, JCMS Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, 1000 (1): 2–27 doi:10.1353/cj.2018.0091. Woodward, K. (1989), ‘Youthfulness as a Masquerade’, Discourse, 11 (2): 119–42. Zecchi, B. (2017), ‘Sex after Fifty: The “Invisible” Female Ageing Body in Spanish Women-Authored Cinema’, in Santiago Fouz-Hernandez (ed.), Spanish Erotic Cinema, 202–18, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Zecchi, B. (2019a), ‘Gendered Aging and Sexuality in Audiovisual Culture’, in D. Gu and M. E. Dupre (eds), Encyclopedia of Gerontology and Population Aging, Cham: Springer. doi:10.1007/978-3-319-69892-2. Zecchi, B. (2019b), ‘Presbo-empathic Visuality: Soft Focus and Old Age’, Video-Graphic Essay. Available at: https://vimeo.com/321897​608 (accessed 6 December 2020). Zecchi, B. (2023), ‘Envejecimiento y desenfoque: la visualidad presboempática en el cine intergeneracional español’, Studies in Spanish & Latin American Cinemas, 19 (3).

Filmography Alba (2016), Dir. A. C. Barragán, Ecuador: Caleidoscopio Cine. Antes la lluvia (2022), Dir. B. Venegas, El Salvador. Araña (Spider) (2019), Dir. A. Wood, Chile: Bossa Nova Films, Magma Cine, Wood Producciones. Away from Her (2004), Dir. S. Polley, Canada: Foundry Films, The Film Farm, Capri Releasing, HanWay Films, Echo Lake Productions. Corteza (Bark) (2016), Dir. L. P. Rincón Gregory, Colombia. Crímenes de familia (The Crimes That Bind) (2020), Dir. S. Schindel, Argentina: Buffalo Films, Magoya Films, INCAA, Directv, Tieless Media. Cronos (1993), Dir. G. del Toro, Mexico: Prime Films, Iguana Producciones. Do You Remember Love? (1985), Dir. J. Bleckner, USA: Dave Bell Associates. Dólares de arena (Sand Dollars) (2015), Dir. L. A. Guzmán, Israel Cárdenas, Dominican Republic: Aurora Dominicana, Canana Films, Rei Cine Dona Cristina perdeu la memoria (Miss Cristina Loses Her Memory) (2002) Dir. A. L. Azevedo, Brazil: Casa de Cinema de Porto Alegre. El amor menos pensado (An Unexpected Love) (2018), Dir. J. V., Argentina: Patagonik, Kenya Films, INCAA. El espinazo del diablo (The Devil’s Backbone) (2001), Dir. G. del Toro, Spain: Canal+, Tequila Gang, El Deseo. Elsa & Fred (2014), Dir. M. Radford, USA: Defiant Pictures, Río Negro, Creative Andina. Elsa y Fred (2005), Dir. Marcos Carnevale, Argentina: Sahazam Producciones, Tesela P.C. Em três atos (In Three Acts) (2015), Dir. L. Murat, Brazil. Gatos viejos (Old Cats) (2010), Dir. P.Peirano, S.Silva, Chile: Elephant Eye Films. Gloria Bell (2018), Dir. S. Lelio, USA: Filmnation Entertainment, Fabula. Gloria (2013), Dir. S. Lelio, Chile: Fabula. Iris (2001), Dir. R. Eyre, UK: Miramax, BBC, Intermedia Films. The Iron Lady (2011), Dir. P. Lloyd, UK: Pathé, Film4 Productions, UK Film Council, Canal+, Cinecinema, Goldcrest Films, DJ Films. Ixcanul (Ixcanul Volcano) (2015), Dir. J. Bustamante, Guatemala: La Casa de Producción, Tu Vas Voir Production.

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La cama (The Bed) (2018), Dir. M. Lairana, Argentina: Rio Abajo, Gema Films, Topkapi Films, Sutor Kolonko, 3 Moinhos Produções Artísticas La ciénaga (The Swamp) (2001), Dir. L. Martel, Argentina: Eyeworks Cuatro Cabezas, TS Productions, 4k Films, Wanda Visión. La llorona (2019), Dir. J. Bustamante, Guatemala: La Casa de Producción, Les Films du Volcan, El Ministerio de Cultura Y Deportes de Guatemala. La malquerida (1949), Dir. E. Fernández, Mexico: Cabrera Films. La pantalla desnuda (2014), Dir. F. Jaugey, Nicaragua: Camila Films. Las buenas hierbas (The Good Herbs) (2010), Dir. M. Novaro, Mexico: FOPROCINE, IMCINE, Centro Universitario de Estudios Cinematográficos (CUEC), Centro de Capacitación Cinematográfica (CCC), Axolote Cine. Las herederas (The Heiresses) (2010), Dir. M. Martinessi, Paraguay: La Babosa Cine, Pandora Film, Mutante Cine, Norsk Filmproduksjon A / S, Esquina Filmes. Las horas contigo (The Hours with You) (2014), Dir. C. Aguilar Mastretta, Mexico: La Banda Films, Cuevano Films. Lola (1989), Dir. M. Novaro, Mexico: Conacite 2, Cooperativa José Revueltas, Macondo Cine Video, RTVE. Mãe só há uma (Don’t Call Me Son) (2016), Dir. A. Muylaert, Brazil: Dezenove Filmes, Africa Filmes. Magnolia (2011), Dir. D. Montenegro, Colombia: Fondo para el Desarrollo Cinematográfico y la Fundación Gilberto Alzate Avendaño. Matb (Mother) (1926), Dir. V. Pudovkin, Russia: Mezhrabpomfilm. Miriam miente (Miriam Lies) (2018), Dir. N. Cabral and O. Estrada, Dominican Republic: Faula Films, Mallerich Films Paco Poch. Mother! (2017), Dir. D. Aronofsky, USA: Protozoa Pictures. No quiero dormir sola (She Doesn’t Want to Sleep Alone) (2012), Dir. N. Beristain, Mexico: Chamaca Films, Woo Films, Fidecine, FOPROCINE, Conaculta, IMCINE. On Golden Pond (1981), Dir. M. Rydell, USA: Lord Grade, ITC Entertainment, IPC Films. Panquiaco (2017), Dir. A. E. Tejera, Portugal and Panamá: Too Much Productions, Animal, Mestizo Cinema, Wiznitzer Films. Por tu culpa (It’s Your Fault) (2010), Dir. A. Berneri, Sergio Wolf, Argentina: BD Cine, INCAA, Tu Vas Voir Production. Puzzle (2018), Dir. M. Turtletaub, USA: Olive Productions. Que horas ela volta (The Second Mother) (2015), Dir. A. Muylaert, Brazil: Africa Filmes, Globo Filmes, Gullane Pictures. The Rest I Make Up (2018), Dir. M. Memran, USA. Rompecabezas (Puzzle) (2010), Dir. N. Smirnoff, Argentina: Carrousel Films, Vista Sur Films S.r.l, Fonds Sud Cinéma, Zarlek Producciones, Las Niñas Pictures, INCAA. Rosa (2010), Dir. M. Lairana, Argentina: INCAA. Se venden conejos (Rabbits for Sale) (2015), Dir, Esteban Giraldo, Colombia: Juan Manuel Betancourt. The Savages (2007), Dir. T. Jenkins, USA: Fox Searchlight. Still Alice (2014), Dir. R. Glatzer, Wash Westmoreland, USA: Big Indie Pictures, Killer Films. Whisky (2004), Dir. J. P. Rebella and P. Stoll, Uruguay: Control Z Films, Rizoma Films, Wanda Visión, Pandora Filmproduktion. Wiñaypacha (Eternity) (2017), Dir. Ó. Catacora, Perú: Cine Ayamara Studios.

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CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

Narratives of old age and climate change: Silver tsunamis and rising tides ANNA-CHRISTINA KAINRADL AND ULLA KRIEBERNEGG

INTRODUCTION Age as a category of difference has increasingly entered into discussions about who is responsible for anthropogenic climate change and the measures to be taken to combat it. Yet, current debates about the global climate crisis do not primarily focus on questions about age and ageing. Global warming and its consequences for an ageing population have also become more relevant for scholars in the field of Ageing Studies who have begun to analyse fictional representations of what it means to grow old in the Anthropocene (Woodward 2020). Exploring cultural representations of crisis and change, both fictional and scholarly texts address the complex dynamics of individual and collective agency, oppression and dependency, care and conviviality, vulnerability and resistance, as well as intergenerationality and responsibility. As this chapter aims to show, these dynamics often crystallize in dystopian imaginations of climate change and environmental degradation. Dystopian novels of the past decades, according to Sarah Falcus, ‘are inherently concerned with the exploration of lateness in the form of what Frank Kermode calls “the sense of an ending”, an expression of apocalyptic thinking through writing and reading’ (2020: 65). Using threatening feelings of lateness and precarity, dystopian fiction points to both species and planetary vulnerability while at the same time presenting the possibility of change, alerting readers that devastation and crisis may be avoided, argues Falcus (2020: 65). Both discursive fields, that of ageing and demographic change, and that of climate change and environmental degradation, share similar dynamics: they are staged as discourses of risk (cf. Beck 1986: 8; Kunow 2004: 30; Hoydis 2020: 85) and call for ‘responsible action’ concerning the future on an individual as well as on a societal level. Images of crisis, decay, and death threaten us into ‘responsible’ behaviour (cf. Katz and Marshall 2018: 65), succumbed by the fallacy that we can avoid or at least control ageing the same way we approach climate change. Axel Goodbody emphasizes the fear of not being able to control nature when he argues from an ecocritical perspective that ‘climate change has become the principal focus for worries about the continuing limitations of our ability to control nature despite modern science and technology, and about our physical weakness, vulnerability, and mortality’ (2012: 23).

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As we will show, metaphors of ageing and climate change are merged and blurred using a metonymic shift of desiccation, destruction, and death from global warming, applying it to the ageing body and society. Age is spatialized and represented as dystopia, literally a ‘bad place’, its threat intersecting with the imagery of a destroyed planet. Falcus offers an insightful way of describing this menace: ‘Threats to the future, and by extension therefore our ways of imagining the future, are both inextricably linked to and metonymically represented by generational disorder and by figures of ageing. Our sense of an ending therefore depends upon and foregrounds narratives of ageing and generational identity, making ageing itself fundamental to dystopian writing’ (Falcus 2020: 65–6). For a critical analysis of intersections between ageing and climate change as represented in literature and film, Ageing Studies and Ecocriticism lend themselves well as converging lenses – an approach which demands further research. The following chapter aims at contributing to this field primarily from an Ageing Studies perspective, revealing the entanglement of both discourses in order to work towards intergenerational conviviality and solidarity in combatting climate change. As Kathleen Woodward has suggested, we are trying to ‘bring together the fields of critical age studies and humanistic studies of climate change’, fields that, to her knowledge, ‘have not been in conversation with each other’ (2020: 88). Although she does not explicitly mention Ecocriticism, she implicitly addresses its central tenets, namely, the analysis of the ‘relationship between literature and the physical environment’ (Glotfelty 1996: xviii) by asking the question, ‘how can we deploy the categories of young and old, and the heuristic of generational time with its affective power, to deepen our understanding of the gravity of climate change and the peril we – and others in the biosphere – face?’ (Woodward 2020: 90). This question seems most relevant for our considerations of the fictional texts analysed in this chapter. We will discuss Margaret Atwood’s short story ‘Torching the Dusties’ (2014) and Lucy Kirkwood’s play The Children (2017) in order to facilitate the above-mentioned conversation. Analysing these texts, we will deal with their disastrous metaphors of ageing and climate change, looking for revealing intersections between descriptions of individual and societal ageing, and unsettling and disturbing climate change imagery. Such metaphors suggest that dealing carelessly and irresponsibly with the resources of both one’s own body and the planet inevitably culminates in disaster. On a societal level, an ageing population is represented as dangerous for the survival of the planet, as ageist metaphors such as ‘the silver tsunami’ (Charise 2012: 1) show. In both texts analysed in this chapter, geronticide is explicitly suggested as a solution: Margaret Atwood’s story equates old people with ‘parasitic dead wood’ (2014: 256) that needs to be ‘torched’ in order to enable younger generations to grow. Kirkwood, in contrast, portrays one of the protagonists’ internalized ageism as something that leads to a discussion about whether or not to commit acts of ‘eco-altruism’ (Kalb 2018: n.p.): Is it the responsibility and duty of the protagonists to sacrifice their allegedly valueless lives and go back to the damaged power plant they had helped build decades ago? Should they volunteer to replace younger workers in their attempt to repair the contaminated nuclear power plant?

‘TORCHING THE DUSTIES’ Public discourse in Margaret Atwood’s short story ‘Torching the Dusties’, published as the closing tale of Stone Mattress (2014), has shifted towards a normalization of the old as ‘other’. The story

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follows Wilma and Tobias, two companions trapped inside Ambrosia Manor, an upscale, gated retirement community that is besieged by a violent mob – an anti-older-people movement called ‘Our Turn’. Members of the movement operate internationally in large numbers (‘They say millions are rising up’, Atwood 2014: 245). Wearing baby masks, they gather outside nursing homes across North America with the intention to literally ‘torch the dusties’ (256), meaning to set care homes and their trapped residents on fire. What they announce is that they are seeking to clear away ‘the dustballs under the bed’ (256). The story is set in a pre-apocalyptic world that is characterized by the effects of heat waves and tidal floods: A hurricane heading for New Orleans, another one pummelling the eastern seaboard, the usual thing for June. But in India it’s the opposite story: the monsoons have failed and there are worries about a coming famine. Australia is still gripped by drought, with, however, a deluge in the Cairns area, where crocodiles are invading the streets. Forest fires in Arizona, and in Poland, and also in Greece. (Atwood 2014: 239) Against this backdrop, ‘the old’ are positioned as scapegoats for the disastrous state of the world and become a new target group of a life-threatening form of ageism. They are seen as an economic and social challenge and are blamed for having destroyed the earth, causing climate change with their selfish and irresponsible behaviour: There is rage out there, and yes, it’s sad that some of the most vulnerable in society are being scapegoated, but this turn of affairs is not without precedent in history, and in many societies – says the anthropologist – the elderly used to bow out gracefully to make room for young mouths by walking into the snow or being carried up mountainsides and left there. But that was when there were fewer material resources, says the economist: older demographics are actually big job creators. (Atwood 2014: 257) As this passage shows, the ‘burden narrative of old age’ and the resulting intergenerational conflicts are explained as an anthropological constant. The talk show pits young against old as the anthropologist and the economist debate the actions of ‘Our Turn’. Remarkably, it is a student of the humanities who calls in to argue that geronticide might be a solution because old people are ‘eating up the health-care dollars’, and the economist who interrupts the student to observe ‘that is all very well, but innocent lives are being lost’ – to which the anthropologist counters: ‘that depends on what you call innocent’. This passage can be seen as a tipping point in the story at which the readers understand that irreversibly ‘the old’ have been discursively framed as ‘other’, legitimizing ‘Our Turn’s’ violent behaviour. ‘Our Turn’ protests the sheer existence and growing number of old people as well as their individual behaviour which is described as being careless, ignorant, and harmful. The irresponsible use of resources is exemplified in the story when Wilma admits that her macular degeneration is a result of her hedonistic, excessive, and luxurious lifestyle of earlier days: Too much golf without sunglasses, and then there was the sailing – you get a double dose of the rays from the reflection off the water – but who knew anything then? The sun was supposed to be good for you. A healthy tan. They’d covered themselves in baby oil, fried themselves like pancakes. The dark, slick, fricasseed finish looked so good on the legs against white shorts. Macular degeneration. Macular sounds so immoral, the opposite of immaculate. ‘I’m a

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degenerate’, she used to quip right after she’d received the diagnosis. So many brave jokes, once. (Atwood 2014: 229) Wilma here addresses her infirmities not only as a result of old age, but also on a moral level. It is through the description of her bodily ailments that she makes sense of her younger behaviour. Again, the central topics of the story (guilt, responsibility, justice) are negotiated via the ageing body. Wilma’s bodily decay results from using ‘too much’ (Atwood 2014: 229) on the individual level, just as the overuse of resources is contributing to environmental disaster on a collective level. As in Atwood’s other work, her use of sarcasm as a means of social critique is evident. Her tale problematizes the way in which old age is ‘othered’, stigmatized as useless, inefficient, and burdensome. The old are positioned as scapegoats for the disastrous state of the world. As Tobias reports of ‘Our Turn’: ‘ “They say it’s their turn”, says Tobias. … “Their turn at what?” “At life, they say. … They say we’ve had our turn, those our age; they say we messed it up. Killing the planet with our own greed and so forth” ’ (Atwood 2014: 243–4; elisions in the original). Just as descriptions of the ageing body parallel descriptions of climate change, the reasons for these two (catastrophic) images are also compared: ignorance is given as a reason in both cases, and the destruction of the planet which happened ‘not on purpose’ (Atwood 2014: 244) is paralleled to the careless treatment of her own youthful body (‘but who knew anything then?’, 229). According to Tobias, the young activists wear baby masks to emphasize their own innocence: ‘Chubby, smiling babies. Some say Time to Go’ (238). The baby masks serve to highlight the extreme binary opposition between young and old that the story presents as normalized. The appeal of the figure of the child ‘lies in [its] power to awaken our nostalgic identification’ with innocence and ‘promises a … future … minus anything that currently disturbs the body politic’ (Falcus 2020: 66). It is thus a ‘figure of futurity’ (67) that is set off against old age as a ‘figure of the past’, as an embodiment of burden and guilt. As Margaret Gullette explains in Ending Ageism, or How Not to Shoot Old People, the othering of old people can lead to scapegoating: ‘People tend to distance themselves from individuals or groups that frighten them. Fear can be taught, heightened, or redirected: after World War II, against communists; after 9/11, Muslims; today, immigrants. Social-identity and terror-management theories, informed by age theory, explain how fear can be manipulated against old people. A handy new group to target’ (2017: xxi). Atwood’s story deals with exactly this process and carries it to the extremes. Her text positions old age as a peculiar kind of ‘other’ in the context of climate change. Andrea Charise illustrates how the perceived threats of demographic change and climate change result and converge in a metaphorical language of disaster: ‘This ominous rhetoric of rising, swamping, tides, and disease – amplified by the authoritative tones of medical and health policy expertise – conceives of population ageing as an imminent catastrophe. Conceived en masse, the elderly are naturalized as a liquid cataclysm whose volume exceeds the nation’s ability to contain, or even guard against, an abstracted human burden’ (Charise 2012: 3). Stephen Katz has argued that the origins of this discourse of a ‘crisis of capacity’ (1) can be traced back to the nineteenth century when the older population was constituted, in ‘Malthusian-tinged, alarmist debates’ (Katz 1996: 72) as a subject of knowledge and politics ‘that accentuated the growing number, neediness, and poverty of elderly persons as a primary social problem’ (72). In the story, this discourse is taken up and amplified by old people’s collective guilt for the disastrous state of the world. As Sabrina Reed observes, the short story ‘combines a critique of ageism in our current society with a cautionary tale of why the young might one day rebel against the environmental profiteering they

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see perpetrated by the old’ (2019: 3). This analysis is complicated by the ambiguity so typical of Atwood’s stories that open up questions of intergenerational relationships, responsibility, and guilt. The social and economic burden is reinforced through the imagery of environmental threat both on the level of ageing individuals and on a collective level. The Children In Lucy Kirkwood’s eco-drama The Children (2017), two ageing nuclear scientists, married British couple Hazel and Robin, live in a cottage by the sea. They get an unexpected visitor, retired engineer and former co-worker Rose, whom they have not seen in several decades. As is typical of such kinds of ‘unexpected guest plays’ (Hoydis 2020: 84) the visitor troubles the fragile domestic order. If at first the couple seems to live in a ‘precarious normality’ (Billington, qtd in Hoydis 2020: 86), the conversation seems conflict-laden and turns increasingly aggressive as more and more details about their earlier amorous entanglements and jealousy come to the fore. Most importantly, however, it becomes clear that the play is set in a post-apocalyptic world where clean water, clean air, uncontaminated food, and electricity are luxury goods, and where the ageing protagonists’ health is deteriorating. Hazel and Robin inhabit an area near the coastal ‘exclusion zone’ (13) that is still severely affected by nuclear radiation stemming from a devastating accident that happened in the power plant they used to work in several decades earlier. Back then, an earthquake had hit the coast, causing a tsunami that damaged the power station. As Julia Hoydis points out, the play alludes to the Japanese Fukushima Daiichi plant’s accident in 2011, when a post-earthquake tsunami caused a nuclear meltdown (2020: 85). As in other nuclear accidents such as Sellafield (1957) and Chernobyl (1986), a task force of retired volunteers called the ‘Skilled Veteran Corps’ (85) was sent to clean up the mess, risking lethal contamination. Similarly, in the course of the play, Rose reveals the reason for her visit: she wants Hazel and Robin to join her in repairing the power station they used to work in during their professional lives as there has recently been another accident that is causing radioactive leakage: ‘Right now I am looking for a team of twenty people over the age of sixty-five. To take over and let the young ones go, while they still have the chance, while there’s still the possibility of, well, life’ (49). Yet, her question seems to be the ‘elephant in the room’ as they are discussing it but never name it directly: ROBIN. HAZEL.   ROBIN. ROSE. HAZEL.

And you are telling us this because …? Don’t be callow Robin. You understand perfectly well what she’s saying what she’s asking / well I’m sorry but no No but is that what you’re saying? Are you asking / us to I’d like you to consider it. It’s out of the question. Help yourself to salad. (Kirkwood 2017: 51–2)

This scene can be considered the anti-climactic turning point of the play. The protagonists vehemently fight about whether or not they should risk their lives in order to fix the leakage in the deteriorating plant. Who is responsible for the environmental disaster, and who is supposed to repair the damage done? Rose is convinced that this should be their responsibility, having an attitude Kalb calls ‘eco-altruism’ (2018, qtd in Hoydis 2020: 85), ‘the acceptance of our demise to make room on Earth for younger people, as a practical, ecological problem’ (Kalb 2018: n.p.):

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ROSE. You have the power to … you have a power. You have power, and you’ve both already had long and full lives. HAZEL. Long? Long, I’m sixty-seven that’s / not long ROSE. The people working there now are in their twenties and thirties, they have young families, / it’s not     … HAZEL. I AM NOT OLD. ROBIN. You must have known, what you’re saying, what you’re / asking HAZEL. She is saying you are past your sell-by date, you are dispensable, shrivelled-up cannon fodder, this bloody COUNTRY. (Kirkwood 2017: 53) While in Atwood’s story the young mob resorts to geronticide to punish the old who are supposed to make room for the younger generation, Kirkwood’s text addresses the utilitarian ethical debate ‘of whether sacrifice and death for the greater good of the community should take priority over the (by comparison short-term) protection of one’s own life’ (Hoydis 2020: 92). Hazel, who accuses Rose of ‘guilt tripping’ them (49), is decidedly against going, her husband Robin, who is severely ill and presumably does not have a long future ahead of him, considers joining Rose and her crew in their effort to fix the damaged pipes. As in ‘Torching the Dusties’, older people take the blame for the disastrous state of the environment. They can be seen as representatives of ‘a long tradition of speculative writing about ageing and enforced death’ (Falcus 2020: 72–3) and belong to the discursive tradition of burden narratives leading to geronticide (Charise 2012; Hartung 2016: 31–4; Kriebernegg 2018; Kainradl and Kriebernegg 2020). Hoydis’s analysis of the ethical dilemma of a sacrifice for the greater good and her focus on risk are very convincing, but do not address the central aspect of age discrimination that is also crucial in this context. While we agree with Hoydis’s description of Kirkwood’s notion of ‘self-sacrifice for the sake of others’ (Hoydis 2020: 85–6), we argue that (internalized) ageism resulting in a devaluation of one’s own life might be at play in this particular dilemma. The question of the extent to which the lives of a few individuals may be sacrificed for the sake of a larger number of people plays out against the backdrop of a society that devalues old age unless it is justified by being purposeful to others. As Margaret Cruikshank points out, one of the roles of older people is to serve others, and ‘since those who serve others are unquestionably useful, the service role has some appeal. But it masks doubt that the old are worthy in and of themselves’ (2013: 43), and is a role that ‘locates their value in action, not in being’ (2013: 43). In contrast to youth, old age is considered less worthy, and shortening older peoples’ lives is not seen as deplorable. This idea drives Kirkwood’s character of Rose, who sees it as a moral obligation to sacrifice her own life for younger generations. Fixing the broken pipes in the toxic power plant is an act of penance for the predictable disaster they had created in earlier days. They see this reparation as their duty and as a kind of collective punishment their generation should undergo: ROSE. We built a nuclear reactor next to the sea then put emergency generators in the basement! We left them with a shit-show waiting to happen and no evacuation procedure! And then they were the ones standing in the dark, trying to fix something we could have predicted, we should have predicted, opening valves by hand, even though it was already too late! (Kirkwood 2017: 55) Similar to ‘Torching the Dusties’, the protagonists discuss generational responsibility and guilt in The Children in the context of old people’s knowledge of the dangerous consequences of their actions.

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While Wilma and Tobias insist that they did not act irresponsibly on purpose, Rose states very clearly that a disaster was predictable. And although Wilma and Tobias consider their responsibility to be small, for them, as Bruey argues, ‘old age means, as Atwood so bluntly puts it, that the clock has run out: it’s “pay-up time” (165)’ (Bruey 2017: 18). In addition to this focus on guilt, their arguments can be seen in light of weighing the interests of old and young. Arguing that they have lived longer lives already, Rose suggests that all lives are not equal. Her argument is based on the assumption that a person’s future life is worth more than a person’s past life. Having a life ahead of oneself is worth more than having lived a long life. She is thus convinced that they should go instead of the younger generation. Rose attributes little importance to the last phase of their lives and buys into the ageist assumption that older people are less worthy, as Hazel points out (‘shrivelled-up cannon fodder’, Kirkwood 2017: 53, see above). Moreover, younger people seem to be of more social importance for her than older people (‘you are dispensable’, 53). As Hazel suggests in a small remark, old people even pose a danger to society. She laconically comments on the similarities between her generation and power plants: ‘Besides, retired people are like nuclear power stations. We like to live by the sea’ (Kirkwood 2017: 13). Hazel’s joke functions because of its unexpected punch line. Evoking the stereotypical ageist notion of the old person’s desire to retire by the sea, the sea has a calming effect on the power station and the old person alike. In the joke, the idealized simile of the safe power plant and the old person’s desire to calmly retire by the water is inverted via the natural disaster of a tsunami. Readers are aware of the fact that in this play a nuclear power station near the sea caused the environmental catastrophe in the first place. Thus, what comes to mind immediately when comparing old people with nuclear plants is the danger both pose, not their preference of being near the sea. Creating a catastrophic discourse for old age and the environment that is unexpected eventually makes Hazel’s joke work. The joke also plays into the notion that old people pose a risk for society. It is reminiscent of the generational accusations evident in ‘Torching the Dusties’ but becomes a mere ‘explosive potential’ of older generations that Hazel’s joke alludes to but does not make clear. The joke also works because of the familiarity of a wider discursive connection of ageing as global risk. Moreover, ageing also plays a central role in the relationship between the three protagonists. The dialogues reveal that Hazel and Rose differ regarding their approaches to their ageing bodies. Having had breast cancer, Rose still struggles with several effects of radioactive exposure, such as nose bleeds, and feels that her best days lie behind her. Hazel tries fighting her ageing process by being ‘obsessively health-conscious’ (Hoydis 2020: 88). And when she implores Rose to fight against dying (‘People of our age have to resist – we have to resist, Rose’, Kirkwood 2017: 15), it remains unclear whether their resistance is a resistance to the post-apocalyptic world, or to ageing. It alludes to a discourse of ‘healthy ageing’ as the epitome of what is considered ‘good’ and ‘necessary’, with all the ambivalences that the debate harbours. Focusing on the parallels between ageing and the environment, however, the protagonists struggle to live ‘normal lives’ which seems absurd and futile given the situation that they find themselves in. Finally, the three characters decide to go and repair the power plant. They call a taxi and are waiting to be picked up when they are surprised by a sudden wave that devours and presumably kills them. The play ends in an apocalyptic scene with the following stage directions: ‘Very gradually, the sound of a wave building. / It grows and grows / It crashes upon us. / Silence / Distantly, a church bell rings. As if from under water. The sound distorted but unmistakable. / End’ (Kirkwood 2017: 79).

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The underwater bell, as readers learn earlier in the play, is a kind of ‘ghost bell’ that Robin sometimes hears; it belonged to the church of the medieval town that used to be in the vicinity of Hazel’s and Robin’s home near the sea. One day during the Middle Ages, the cliff on which it stood allegedly ‘crumbled off like wet cake. / The houses, the school, the church, the marketplace. / Just tumbled into the water’ (27). The play’s ending parallels this event and insinuates that the dramatic images of the end of their ageing correlate with the characters’ failing power against their environment. Kirkwood’s play not only alludes to the nuclear disaster of Fukushima in 2011 but alludes to the growing threat of coastal erosion that has been affecting England and other countries in the last decades. As Andrew Anthony reports in a recent article in The Guardian with the title ‘Sands of Time Are Slipping away for England’s Crumbling Coasts amid Climate Crisis’, large parts of the coast are at risk of being underwater by 2050: ‘It’s a story of disappearance taking place all along the eastern coast of England’ (Anthony 2022).

CONCLUSION As both texts show, metaphors of climate change and ageing overlap and have a mutually reinforcing effect. The catastrophic imagery of drought, catastrophe, and destruction describes both nature affected by anthropogenic climate change and the stories’ groups of old people and their ageing bodies on an individual level. In ‘Torching the Dusties’, for instance, old people worry about their ‘slow decay and involuntary leakage’ (Atwood 2014: 231) – a term also used for the lethal power plant in The Children (Kirkwood 2017: 51). Moreover, the metaphor of ‘the parasitic dead wood at the top’ (Atwood 2014: 256) equates the threat to a tree’s healthy growth, with old people being a burden and hindering the progress of a healthy society. Metaphors reinforcing a binary opposition of ‘old’ and ‘young’ in representations of apocalyptic conflict lead to even more stigmatization and an increase in burden narratives. Catastrophic narratives of old age such as these are represented in Atwood’s and Kirkwood’s stories and intertwined with financial and environmental threats to society. This is reflected, for instance, in the G20 summit held in Osaka, Japan, which declared that ‘for the first time, the world’s top policymakers in the G20 are tackling economic issues related to ageing and falling birth rates. In their communique, the Group said that demographic change requires a mix of “fiscal, monetary, financial and structural policies” ’ (United Nations 2020). On change.org, a platform for grassroots petitions, for instance, a group called ‘Biogerontology Global’ has recently urged the World Economic Forum to tackle ageing, which they think is ‘objectively the largest global risk to humanity in terms of likelihood and impact’ (change.org 2020). The activists link ageing to environmental change: ‘In 2020, the top 5 global risks in terms of likelihood were all environmental. Solving aging would significantly lessen these risks. Without human aging, people would not be planning to die. They would have a stake in the long-term future of the environment’ (change. org 2020). Countering this argument, Kirkwood’s play presents the ageing characters as being by no means as selfish as the scientists behind ‘Biogerontology Global’ assume older people to be. They do feel that they have a long-term stake; their actions are shaped by moral, intergenerational responsibility. Kathleen Woodward’s research on intergenerational relations highlights this aspect and could be understood to contradict ‘Biogerontology Global’. She insists on ‘the heuristic of generational time with its affective power’ when she argues ‘that the most influential way to frame the dangers of climate change is precisely in terms of the future of generations who are

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our intimates or whom we feel to be our intimates – our children and our grandchildren, and by extension, children and grandchildren around the globe’ (2020: 54–5). Through the critical analysis of aesthetic representations such as dystopian stories, insights can be gained into the meaning of age(ing) as well as its complexity, ambiguity, and contradictoriness. Therefore, our analysis takes a political stance ‘with the aim not only of interpreting the world, but also of redefining the relationship between text and reader, and subsequently between reader and world, through a change of consciousness’ (Maierhofer 2007: 116, own translation). The genre of dystopian literature offers both opportunities and challenges: by raising awareness for the disastrous effects of climate change, dystopian texts might lead to a change in behaviour that has a positive impact on the environment. Yet, it also raises the question whether speculative fiction representing future scenarios might veil the fact that people are already living in climate dystopias in many places of the earth. Framing ‘the old’ as scapegoats may also shift the focus away from and conceal other socio-political problems that need to be tackled, including social inequalities and fault lines that run throughout generations. To conclude, questions of climate protection can only be answered by a collective effort including all generations and age cohorts in addition to radical changes in policy making and governing structures. Margaret Atwood addresses this aspect in her famous apocalyptic essay ‘It’s Not Climate Change – It’s Everything Change’ (2015) which is a dire warning against ignorance and inactivity, and a call to action. Problematizing and combatting anthropogenic climate change requires a change of consciousness and behaviour on a larger scale which is by no means agedependent. Yet, arguments that lead to social division through ageist discourses may undermine such efforts. Reading climate fiction through the lens of Ageing Studies raises awareness of the discursive entanglements of guilt, responsibility, and age stereotypes. Deconstructing them creates an awareness that allows for more intergenerational understanding, offering opportunities to collaboratively rethink the future of the planet.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS We would like to acknowledge the patience and generosity of this volume’s editors whose supportive critique and comments have helped advance the main arguments of this chapter. Also, we would like to thank our colleague, Eva-Maria Trinkaus, for her insightful observations.

REFERENCES Anthony, A. (2022), ‘Sands of Time Are Slipping away for England’s Crumbling Coasts amid Climate Crisis’, The Guardian, 1 January 2022. Available at: https://www.theg​uard​ian.com/envi​ronm​ent/2022/jan/01/ sands-slip-engl​and-crumbl​ing-coa​sts-eros​ion-ris​ing-sea-lev​els (accessed 30 August 2021). Atwood, M. (2014), ‘Torching the Dusties’, in M. Atwood, Stone Mattress. Nine Tales, 225–68, New York: Nan A. Talese. Atwood, M. (2015), ‘It’s Not Climate Change – It’s Everything Change’, Medium.com, 27 July 2015. Available at: https://med​ium.com/mat​ter/it-s-not-clim​ate-cha​nge-it-s-eve​ryth​ing-cha​nge-8fd9a​a671​804 (accessed 30 August 2021). Beck, U. (1986), Risikogesellschaft: Auf dem Weg in eine andere Moderne, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp.

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Bruey, E. (2017), ‘“Pay-Up Time”: (Un)Balanced Accounts in Margaret Atwood’s Stone Mattress’, Margaret Atwood Studies, 11: 17–28. Available at: atwoodsociety.org/volume-11-table-of-contents/ (accessed 4 February 2022). change.org (2020), ‘Declare Aging the Top Global Risk’, Change.org. Available at: https://www.cha​nge.org/p/ world-econo​mic-forum-recogn​ize-human-aging-as-a-glo​bal-risk (accessed 19 August 2021). Charise, A. (2012), ‘ “Let the Reader Think of the Burden”. Old Age and the Crisis of Capacity’, Occasion. Interdisciplinary Studies in the Humanities, 4: 1–16. Available at: https://arc​ade.stanf​ord.edu/occas​ ion/%E2%80%9Clet-rea​der-think-bur​den%E2%80%9D-old-age-and-cri​sis-capac​ity (accessed 23 November 2019). Cruikshank, M. (2013), Learning to Be Old, 2nd edn, Plymouth: Rowman and Littlefield. Falcus, S. (2020), ‘Age and Anachronism in Contemporary Dystopian Fiction’, in E. Barry and M. Vibe Skagen (eds), Literature and Ageing, 65–85, Cambridge: Boydell & Brewer. Glotfelty, C. (1996), ‘Introduction: Literary Studies in an Age of Environmental Crisis’, in C. Glotfelty and H. Fromm (eds), The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology, xv–xxxvi, Athens: Georgia Press. Goodbody, A. (2012), ‘Frame Analysis and the Literature of Climate Change’, in T. Müller and M. Sauter (eds), Literature, Ecology, Ethics: Recent Trends in Ecocriticism, 15–34, Heidelberg: Winter. Gullette, M. M. (2017), Ending Ageism: Or, How Not to Shoot Old People, Camden: Rutgers University Press. Hartung, H. (2016), Ageing, Gender and Illness in Anglophone Literature: Narrating Age in the Bildungsroman, New York: Routledge. Hoydis, J. (2020), ‘A Slow Unfolding “Fault Sequence”: Risk and Responsibility in Lucy Kirkwood’s The Children’, Journal of Contemporary Drama in English, 8 (1): 83–99. Kainradl, A.-C., and U. Kriebernegg (2020), ‘“They Say We Messed It Up. Killing the Planet with Our Own Greed”: Alternswissenschaftliche Überlegungen zu einem generationengerechten Klimadiskurs in Margaret Atwoods “Torching the Dusties”’, Limina, 3 (1): 166–91. Kalb, J. (2018), ‘Lucy Kirkwood’s The Children: The Environmental Disaster and Ethics’, The Theatre Times, 5 January. Available at: https://thet​heat​reti​mes.com/lucy-kirkw​ood-the-child​ren/ (accessed 28 August 2021). Katz, S. (1996), Disciplining Old Age. The Formation of Gerontological Knowledge, Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia. Katz, S., and B. L. Marshall (2018), ‘Tracked and Fit: FitBits, Brain Games, and the Quantified Aging Body’, Journal of Aging Studies, 45 (6): 3–68. Kirkwood, L. (2017), The Children, London: Bloomsbury. Kriebernegg, U. (2018), ‘“Time to Go. Fast Not Slow”: Geronticide and the Burden Narrative of Old Age in Margaret Atwood’s “Torching the Dusties”’, European Journal of English Studies, 22 (1): 46–58. Kunow, R. (2004), ‘“Ins Graue”: Zur kulturellen Konstruktion von Altern und Alter’, in H. Hartung (ed.), Alter und Geschlecht. Repräsentationen, Geschichten und Theorien des Alters, 21–44, Bielefeld: transcript. Maierhofer, R. (2007), ‘Der gefährliche Aufbruch zum Selbst. Frauen, Altern und Identität in der amerikanischen Kultur: Eine anokritische Einführung’, in U. Pasero, G. Backes, and K. Schroeter (eds), Altern in Gesellschaft. Ageing-Diversity-Inclusion, 111–28, Wiesbaden: VS Verlag. Reed, S. (2019), ‘ “Torching the Dusties”: Margaret Atwood’s Cautionary Parable on Ageism and Economics’, Margaret Atwood Studies Journal, 13: 3–16. Available at: https://engl​ish.sxu.edu/sites/atw​ ood/jour​nal/index.php/masj/issue/view/23 (accessed 7 February 2022).

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United Nations (2020), ‘G20 Osaka Summit – Ageing’. Available at: https://www.un.org/deve​lopm​ent/desa/ pd/eve​nts/g20-osaka-sum​mit-age​ing (accessed 28 August 2021). Woodward, K. (2020), ‘Ageing in the Anthropocene: The View from and beyond Margaret Drabble’s The Dark Flood Rises’, in E. Barry and M. Vibe Skagen (eds), Literature and Ageing, 37–64, Cambridge: Boydell & Brewer.

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CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

Ageism and ableism on the silvering screen: Entanglements of disability and ageing in films centred on dementia HAILEE M. YOSHIZAKI-GIBBONS

INTRODUCTION In 2020, the Alzheimer’s Association reported that the number of people with dementia in the United States continues to increase rapidly. Currently, there are approximately 5.8 million people with dementia in the United States, but by 2025, this number is expected to grow by 22 percent to 7.1 million people. Accordingly, there has also been an expansion of representations of dementia in media, particularly in film. As an age-related impairment intertwined with cultural fears of dependence, debility, loss of self, and death, dementia illuminates the ways in which ageing and disability are deeply entangled in American culture and society (YoshizakiGibbons 2018). Within diverse media, including news, television, and film, dementia has often been presented as ‘the ultimate nightmare’, as Sally Chivers notes (2011: 61). Indeed, several horror films have emerged that feature a ‘demented’1 character as the source of fright and revulsion, such as The Taking of Deborah Logan (2014) and Relic (2020). However, films that examine the everyday consequences and the care, financial, and social burdens of dementia are far more common. Here, the ‘nightmare’ of dementia is more insidious and subtle, but present nonetheless. However, despite robust collections of scholarship that analyse disability in film and ageing in film, there have been limited scholarly explorations of how representations of ageing and disability intersect, with Chivers’s (2011) work being a notable exception. This dearth of scholarship reflects disciplinary boundaries between disability studies and ageing studies, which are often fields on parallel paths (Yoshizaki-Gibbons 2018). Drawing from ageing studies scholar Chivers’s (2011) concept of ‘the silvering screen’ and disability studies scholars David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder’s (2000) theory of ‘narrative prothesis’, this chapter seeks to examine the ways ageing and disability are culturally entangled, and how this enmeshment is reflected in films about dementia and dementia care. It also endeavours to place disability studies and ageing studies in

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conversation with one another. Through an analysis of the US film What They Had (2018), I argue that representations of dementia in film allow the viewer to situate themselves within systems of compulsory youthfulness (Gibbons 2016) and compulsory able-bodiedness / able-mindedness (Kafer 2013; McRuer 2006). Like many films about dementia, What They Had relies heavily on discourses of dementia connected to loss of self, burden, tragedy, and death, thereby reflecting ‘social anxiety about identity, self, and meaning’ (Chivers 2011: xix). I also contend that the film forwards and reinforces cultural ideologies and practices of institutionalization, which continues to be widely viewed as the ‘solution’ to the ‘problem’ of dementia. In this chapter, I first provide a brief overview of the plot of What They Had. Next, I consider how the film highlights the ways in which disability and ageing are entwined through its portrayal of dementia. Then, I discuss how the film subtly emphasizes the ‘burdens’ of caregiving and furthers the belief that old people with dementia ‘belong’ in nursing homes. Lastly, I reflect on the ways that many films centred on dementia, including What They Had, often reinforce and forward ableist and ageist ideas about dementia and, more broadly, disability and ageing. What They Had In 2018, What They Had, by first-time writer and director Elizabeth Chomko, premiered to critical acclaim. According to a movie review published by the AARP, ‘What They Had may be the best movie yet made about Alzheimer’s and its impact on families’ (Appelo 2018: para 1). The film centres on the Everhardts, a family in crisis due to the worsening dementia of Ruth, the matriarch of the family. In the opening scenes, Ruth leaves home in the middle of the night during a snowstorm. Her disappearance is a catalyst to reunite the entire family: Norbert (or Bert), Ruth’s husband; Nicky, Ruth’s son; Bridgit (or Bitty), Ruth’s daughter; and Emma, Bridgit’s daughter and Ruth’s granddaughter. When Nicky first alerts Bridgit, over the phone, that their mother is missing, Bridgit asks, ‘What do you mean she’s gone?’. The phrase ‘she’s gone’ carries a literal and figurative meaning throughout the film – Ruth is portrayed as constantly in danger of both physically and mentally disappearing due to her progressive dementia. Even the film’s title, What They Had, is in the past tense, as though Ruth is slowly but surely slipping away. As a result, determining where Ruth should be cared for is a central premise of the plot and the family agonizes for much of the movie over the best place for Ruth. Consequently, What They Had is a film about caregiving as much as it is about ageing and disability. Whereas Bert is insistent that Ruth stays at home with him, Nicky is adamant that Ruth needs to be institutionalized. Bridgit is in the middle, torn between siding with her brother Nicky and pleasing her father Bert. Ultimately, after Bert dies, Nicky and Bridgit institutionalize Ruth in a dementia unit in a nursing home – with the implication that this is a ‘happy ending’ for Ruth and her family.

COMPULSORY YOUTHFULNESS IN THE ‘SILVERING SCREEN’ What They Had is part of a growing collection of movies that Chivers (2011) has labelled ‘the silvering screen’. According to Chivers (2011), ‘The silvering screen features aging prominently; not just as a background concern to make youthful plots more virile and fascinating, but as a central premise that drives the film’ (xvi). Silvering screen films often reflect social concerns about ageing and disability. Despite featuring old characters and issues related to ageing prominently, these films

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touch on viewers’ fears of old age as a time of increasing frailty, unattractiveness, dependence, and disability. As noted by Chivers (2011), The silvering screen flourishes by tapping into the concerns of an aging audience and portraying issues frequently associated with aging, ranging from the apparently humorous ‘Am I really still sexy’ to the apparently tragic ‘Why can’t I remember my name and, especially, my husband?’ (xviii) Thus, the silvering screen reflects cultural anxieties over prolonged life spans and what type of ‘old age’ one will achieve – a ‘youthful’ old age in which one is attractive, healthy, able-bodied / ableminded, active, and independent or a ‘decrepit’ old age in which one is increasingly wrinkled, ill, forgetful, disabled, unproductive, and dependent. These fears are reflective of what I have termed compulsory youthfulness, or ‘the social mandate to maintain the ideals of youthfulness in regards to ability, memory, health, appearance, activity, energy, sexuality, and social roles throughout the lifecourse, including in later life’ (Gibbons 2016: 75). As ageing and disability are culturally entangled, compulsory youthfulness is interconnected with compulsory able-bodiedness / able-mindedness (Kafer 2013; McRuer 2006). In a deeply ableist and ageist culture, the ideals of able-bodiedness / able-mindedness and youthfulness are transfigured into compulsions, thereby constructing able-bodiedness / able-mindedness and youthfulness as not only natural and normal, but also advantageous and imperative (Yoshizaki-Gibbons 2021). Hence, under these compulsory systems, people must strive towards normalcy (i.e. non-disabled and nonold) to be legitimatized, included, and economically, politically, socially, and culturally supported. Furthermore, compulsory youthfulness is ensnared with dominant neoliberal capitalistic discourses of ‘successful aging’ (Katz and Calasanti 2015; Lamb 2014; Rubinstein and de Medeiros 2015). A ‘successful’ old age is a social construction defined by health, able-bodiedness / able-mindedness, and independence. Under neoliberal capitalism, to age ‘unsuccessfully’ and be disabled, chronically ill, and dependent is marked as a failure – and one with serious consequences, such as isolation, institutionalization, and even death (Gibbons 2016; Yoshizaki-Gibbons 2021). In What They Had, Bert represents a ‘successful’ ager. At seventy-five years old, Bert is portrayed as physically fit, healthy, and independent – apart from heart issues. He walks without use of a mobility aid, drives a convertible, and attends numerous community and church events. He is depicted as mentally fit as well, capable of communicating clearly and compellingly. He is also apparently intelligent and adept at playing Chinese Checkers, a strategy game. His mental agility – particularly his memory – is often portrayed as in direct contrast to Ruth’s declining mental abilities, disorientation, and memory loss. In one emotional scene, Nicky confronts Bert again about placing Ruth in a nursing home, yelling, ‘I know it’s hard but I’m begging you, okay? This is the best memory care in Chicago.’ Bert retorts, Let me tell you something. Those pictures [hanging] on the [Christmas] tree in there, tell her how she takes her coffee, how many ice cubes she likes in her scotch. That’s memory care. I was there for every memory she made in the last 60 years and if I wasn’t there, I heard about it at least 37 times. So, I am the best memory care in Chicago! While this interaction importantly demonstrates the ways in which memory is relational (Basting 2009), Bert positions his memory in opposition to Ruth’s, illustrating for the audience that his memory ensures Ruth’s well-being.

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Conversely, Ruth is constructed as an ‘unsuccessful’ ager due to her dementia. Dementia is often positioned as the antithesis of successful ageing. As Daffner (2010) posits, successful ageing could even be defined as ‘eluding the development of dementia’ (1102). For many, dementia represents the ultimate, most feared ‘pathology’ or ‘abnormality’ in later life (Marist Institute of Public Opinion 2014; Yoshizaki-Gibbons 2018). Ruth is portrayed as ‘deteriorating’ throughout the film, becoming increasingly more confused, disoriented, reliant on others, and in need of protection. At times, Ruth’s dementia is portrayed humorously, with the family laughing off minor mishaps and mistakes. While in church, Emma tells her Uncle Nicky, ‘Grandma drank the holy water.’ Nicky quips, ‘Well at least she’s hydrated.’ Ruth occasionally joins in on the laughter, such as when she confuses a stapler with a phone. However, as the plot progresses, Ruth’s dementia also progresses. The family finds less and less humour in how her dementia shapes the way she views the world and interacts with others. The nature of Ruth’s dementia transitions from humorous and idiosyncratic to tragic and perhaps even dangerous if she continues wandering. Ruth represents the decline into what Twigg (2004) has referred to as ‘deep old age’, or a time of increasing debility, disablement, and dependency. This deterioration also reflects Gilleard and Higgs’s conception of the fourth age. As Gilleard and Higgs (2010) note, ‘The fear of the fourth age is a fear of passing beyond any possibility of agency, human intimacy, or social exchange, of becoming impacted within the death of the social’ (125). Gilleard and Higgs contend that this anxiety transforms the fourth age into a ‘black hole’ from which there is no return. As dementia is culturally constructed as a living death, it is deeply entrenched in social unease of the fourth age and deep late life. As Bitty says to her father Bert, ‘She’s going to get worse, Dad. She’s going to forget everything.’ Ruth thus represents a threat to – and the demise of – the youthful, active, able-bodied ‘successful’ old age that Bert might have achieved had he not been caring for an old wife with dementia.

THE ‘BURDEN’ OF CARE Bert repeatedly insists he can provide the best possible care for Ruth due to their long-term, loving relationship. He explains to his children, ‘I bathe her, I feed her, I give her her pills, I wipe her ass, and I do it a hell of a lot better than some aide, who does not give one goddamn hoot about who she spent 60 years becoming!’ Yet, Bert begins to appear less patient with Ruth and more despondent about her condition. His physical health starts to suffer. Despite initially being portrayed as healthy and active, Bert is gradually worn down throughout the film, with his debilitation attributed to the burden and stress of caring for Ruth. Bert’s transition highlights another central concern of silvering screen films – the responsibilities and costs of care and caregiving. As noted by Sally Chivers and Ulla Kriebernegg (2018), social and cultural meanings of old age and disability cannot be separated from care. Care, particularly care for old disabled people, is rarely depicted as rewarding, fulfilling, or meaningful in silvering screen films. Instead, it is more often portrayed as difficult, emotionally and physically taxing, and costly. Chivers (2011) observes, ‘In more recent cinema, disability on the part of the elderly signifies … the burden that aging boomers threaten to become’ (58). Such rhetoric extends beyond films and other media to the political and economic arenas. For example, the Alzheimer’s Association (2020b) argues that Alzheimer’s disease is ‘the most expensive disease in America’ due to the cost of meeting the complex care needs of people with dementia, particularly those who are institutionalized. In this regard, films like What They Had both create and reinforce cultural ideologies that society is

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experiencing a ‘crisis’ of care and that old and disabled people are burdensome socially, economically, and politically. Ruth is portrayed as requiring more and more care and the threat of losing her entirely to dementia is always looming. As Nicky says to Bitty at the beginning of the film, ‘I knew this was gonna happen. I’ve been tellin’ Dad for years, “You gotta figure out what you wanna do with mom when the time comes because we all know it’s coming.” ’ In this interaction, the ‘time’ Nicky is referring to is when Ruth’s dementia progresses to the point that she is essentially ‘gone’ and in need of care that Bert and the family cannot provide. Bitty also references this ‘time’ when she gently tells her Dad that Ruth is going to forget everything. This rhetoric reflects dominant cultural discourses that people with dementia are essentially ‘the living dead’, or ‘shells of their former selves’ (Behuniak 2010) and thus in need of institutionalization. Although Bert never expresses that caring for Ruth is a burden due to his deep love for her, his worsening heart issues signify the physical and emotional toll caregiving is taking on his health and well-being. Ultimately, caring for Ruth leads to Bert’s death – shortly after a stressful incident in which he believes Ruth has left home and is missing again, Bert has another heart attack and does not survive. Ruth, on the other hand, lives on and transitions seamlessly and happily to the dementia unit of a nursing home. Hence, the burden of care is reinforced through Bert’s death and Ruth’s survival. Care, a life sustaining force for old and disabled people, is represented as debilitating to non-disabled caregivers to the point of death.

DEMENTIA AS NARRATIVE PROSTHESIS Bert and Ruth’s endings should be understood as tragic – institutionalization and death. And yet, the film ends on a hopeful note, with Bitty moving on from her failed marriage and Nicky finally getting his life together. Bitty and Nicky can grow and progress as characters because, unlike their father Bert, they are unburdened from caring for Ruth, who is now ‘thriving’ in dementia care in a nursing home. Therefore, What They Had exemplifies a representational phenomenon that Mitchell and Snyder (2000) referred to as ‘narrative prosthesis’. When literary and visual representations employ disability as narrative prosthesis, disability becomes a metaphor and a plot device – a ‘crutch upon which literary narratives lean for their representational power, disruptive potentiality, and analytical insight’ (Mitchell and Snyder 2000: 49). Thus, narratives often employ disability as a problem, setback, or deviance to be solved, overcome, or eradicated through cure, death, or removal from society. In doing so, disability as narrative prothesis reinforces ableist ideas about disability. According to Cachia (2019), ‘Unfortunately, the disabled body typically becomes a stand-in for reductive notions of the universal or normal human condition – the disabled body as the failing, deviant, and wrong member of mainstream society’ (247). Indeed, In What They Had, Ruth, the character with dementia, serves solely as a device to further the plot and her dementia functions as a metaphor for loss, dependency, burden, and tragedy. Her institutionalization is understood as a happy ending for her, and an ending that allows her adult children to move on with their lives and live out their dreams. As noted by Chivers (2011), ‘Alzheimer’s creates an old person who can be responsibly abandoned in order for a previous caregiver to make room for a socially endorsed, youth-emulating later life’ (69). Consequently, the audience is not expected to identify with Ruth, but rather her adult children, thereby confirming to viewers that, compared to this old and disabled woman with

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dementia who finally ends up in a nursing home, they are healthy, youthful, able, independent, and have the rest of their lives ahead of them. Furthermore, viewers are made to feel better about institutionalization as a necessary outcome for old people with dementia.

IDEOLOGIES AND PRACTICES OF INSTITUTIONALIZATION Ultimately, What They Had reinforces dominant ideologies and practices of institutionalization, particularly for people with dementia. Institutionalization represents a primary point of tension between disability studies and ageing studies (Yoshizaki-Gibbons 2021). Disability studies approaches institutionalization from an abolitionist perspective, arguing that institutions, as a part of the medical industrial complex, are inherently a site of control, violence, trauma, and marginalization for disabled people (Ben-Moshe 2020; Chapman, Carey, and Ben-Moshe 2014). Conversely, ageing studies views institutions as necessary, and although the field still advocates for community care over institutional care, it ultimately does not challenge the existence of institutions given that a significant number of elders require institutional care at some point in their lives (Beerens et al. 2013; Chivers and Kriebernegg 2018). Examining What They Had through disability studies and ageing studies perspectives reveals this contention between the disciplines. Critical disability studies media scholars have observed a ‘kill or cure impulse’ in representations of disability (Chasnoff 2020). The kill or cure impulse refers to film and television shows’ tendency to gravitate towards one of three endings for disabled characters: death, institutionalization (which serves as a metaphor for death), or cure. In the documentary Code of the Freaks (Chasnoff 2020), disability studies scholar Alyson Patsavas explains, ‘What’s a happy ending for a disabled character? Killing disabled people is a happy ending. Curing disability is meant to be a happy ending. Institutionalizing is meant to be a happy ending.’ As dementia exists outside the bounds of cure and death is inevitable, the narrative arc for characters with dementia often ends in institutionalization, most frequently in dementia units of nursing homes. This storyline can be found in numerous films and television shows, including The Father (2020), The Savages (2007), A Song for Martin (2001), Iris (2001), Orange Is the New Black (2013–19), Neighbours (1985–2022), Casualty (1986– present), and The Sopranos (1999–2007). What They Had follows this familiar narrative. The issue of where Ruth should receive care as her dementia progresses serves as the primary driver of the plot. The film follows Nicky and Bitty as they try and convince Bert to place Ruth in a dementia unit in a nursing home. As Bitty and Nicky push their father to institutionalize Ruth in ‘memory care’, Bert resists, insisting, ‘Your mother is fine’, and, ‘Every year she’s better!’ and, ‘She’s fine, she’s swell!’ However, throughout the story, Bert is portrayed as denying the inevitable – until he finally relents. The viewer vicariously experiences the agony of making such a decision, but always with the understanding that, ultimately, Ruth will end up in a nursing home. Various discourses are used to lead the family (and the viewer) to the conclusion that institutionalization is the best possible outcome for Ruth. Ruth’s living situation and future are often discussed without her present, gesturing to the cultural belief that old people with dementia are incapable of making major life decisions or practising autonomy. Additionally, Ruth is often talked about as an object or animal, and the family is uncertain or in disagreement about where to ‘place’ or ‘put’ her and there is fear about her ‘getting out’. For instance, Nick uses this type of language when Ruth is first missing, explaining to Bitty, ‘I’ve been telling [Bert] for years, you gotta

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figure out what you wanna do with Mom … It’s over, she’s going to a place. And he’s gonna have to let her.’ In another scene, Bitty has locks installed on every door of her parent’s condo and explains to Bert, ‘That way she can’t get out!’ These objectifying discourses are subtle, yet significantly dehumanizing. When Ruth acts in socially unacceptable ways, her behaviour is attributed to her dementia, and it is implied that she should no longer live in the community as a result. For instance, during a scene in church, a Catholic priest sprays holy water on Ruth, who asks, ‘Is it raining in here?’ The man in front of Ruth turns around and rudely gawks at her so Ruth defiantly shows him her middle finger. Later, Nicky points to this incident as a reason Ruth needs to be in a nursing home, exclaiming, ‘She’s flipping people off in church, Dad. She’s drinking the holy water!’ Many other examples are given of Ruth’s ‘inappropriate’ or ‘problematic’ behaviours, including wandering, sundowning, confusing Bert for her dad, confusing Bitty for her mom, flirting with her son Nick, and asking Bitty and Bert how they know each other. Furthermore, Ruth’s ‘safety’ is constantly in question. After Ruth wanders away from home in the opening scene and is missing for some time, a doctor at the hospital, Dr Zoe, must evaluate her. Much to the family’s confusion, Dr Zoe performs a pelvic exam. Afterwards Dr Zoe reports, ‘Now they are safer in memory care … During wandering episodes, women are often assaulted – sexually. I didn’t see any evidence of that today, but I’d be very concerned about her getting out again.’ There are also numerous conversations that indicate institutionalization is helpful, rather than harmful, to old people with dementia. For instance, Dr Zoe shares, ‘They … typically improve [in memory care]. Some of them feel more at home among their peers than with their own family. As strange as that sounds.’ Later, Nick asks Bitty, ‘Do you know why they get better in memory care? Because they don’t have people in their face all the time saying, “Don’t forget me, please don’t forget me, please don’t forget me, you’re losing your mind.” The one blessing of this disease is they don’t remember they don’t remember.’ These discourses surrounding people with dementia consistently reinforce the idea that old people with dementia ‘belong’ in nursing homes, and nursing homes are the best possible place for them to be. At various points in the film, Ruth herself seems to imply that she should be institutionalized. In a scene shortly after Ruth wanders away from home, Ruth asks Bitty, ‘Why did I get on that train? I live here. Oh, God. I don’t know what’s the matter with me. Oh yes. Yes, I do.’ Seemingly experiencing a moment of clarity and recalling her diagnosis, Ruth then questions, ‘Should I be in a home, do you think?’ Bitty responds, ‘What do you think?’ Ruth replies, ‘I don’t know. I don’t know. Night, Mama.’ Her disorientation at the end answers her question. In another scene, Bert, Nicky, Bitty, and Emma are arguing about institutionalizing Ruth, and the chaos is heightened due to the phone constantly ringing in the background. Ruth leaves the room to answer the phone and can be overheard trying repeatedly to answer it. She re-enters the room frustrated, holding what appears to be a phone to her ear, and says to Bert, ‘This damn thing doesn’t work! You said you’d fix it a hundred times, you turkey! It’s not working!’ Bitty looks away from her mom with a pained expression on her face and Bert looks defeated. It is Emma who interjects and says, ‘Grandma, it’s a stapler.’ Ruth echoes, ‘It’s a staple.’ ‘Stapler’, Emma gently corrects. Ruth looks at the stapler in her hand and then bends over, laughing hysterically, exclaiming, ‘What the hell am I doing with this?’ Ruth, Bitty, and Emma all laugh. Ruth is laughing so hard she needs to sit down, and she jokes, ‘Just ship me out. Put me on a canoe and ship me out to the ice float.’ Although Ruth is joking, Bert does not laugh, with the implication that perhaps there is a bit of truth in Ruth’s humour.

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Interestingly, Ruth had already spent a significant amount of time in nursing homes. Viewers learn early in the film that Ruth was in geriatrics for much of her career. Later, it is revealed that she was a nursing home administrator. Bert draws on his wife’s experiences as evidence that Ruth should not be placed in a nursing home. When arguing with Bitty and Nick about placing Ruth in institutionalized dementia care, Bert retorts, ‘I am not putting your mother in a nursing home. She spent 30 years working in nursing homes. They’re horrible and I’m not doing it to her!’ And yet, after Ruth’s dementia progresses further and Bert is more worn down, Bert eventually agrees to place Ruth in institutionalized dementia care. Before Ruth enters the nursing home, however, Bert dies. Bert’s death forecloses the possibility of him changing his mind and ultimately refusing to institutionalize Ruth. Consequently, Bitty and Nicky can move forward with their plan of putting Ruth in a nursing home without interference from Bert. His death essentially guarantees Ruth’s fate and creates a ‘happy ending’ for Bitty and Nicky because they can move forward with their lives without having to worry about caring for their mother. His death also creates a ‘happy ending’ for Ruth, who is represented as living the remainder of her life in a place old people with dementia ‘belong’. One of the limitations of the film is that the story glosses over the financial aspects of care, which is often a central deciding factor when individuals and families are making determinations about care. At one point, Bitty asks Nicky, ‘What about a live-in person?’ Nicky responds, ‘Insurance doesn’t cover it.’ Bitty notes, ‘It doesn’t cover memory care either.’ Nicky retorts, ‘Well, it covers some of it and then [Bert] sells the condo.’ Beyond this conversation, the financial aspects of care are not discussed, which highlights the Everhardts’ privilege as a presumably middle- or upper middle-class family. The conversation briefly underlines that due to current social structures in the United States that are overly dependent on informal family caregivers, many families are forced between caring for people with dementia at home with little to no social, economic, or political support and placing them in nursing homes. The discussion also draws attention to the limitations of insurance and the tendency of insurance (particularly public insurance, such as Medicaid) to favour funding for institutional care over home and community-based services (HCBS; Accius and Finn 2017). HCBS ensure disabled and old people age in place and remain in their homes and their communities rather than receive care in institutions. What They Had fails to reflect that the majority of people with dementia in the United States receive care in home and community-based settings, often with the support of familial caregivers and increasingly with the support of HCBS. However, due to the United States’ overreliance on and lack of support for family caregivers, dementia still places many older adults at risk of institutionalization (Alzheimer’s Association 2020a). According to Jean Accius and Brendan Flinn (2017), old and disabled people ‘are still disproportionately served in nursing facility settings’ (2). Furthermore, states vary widely in their implementation of HCBS, and many states – including Illinois, where What They Had takes place – have long wait lists for their HCBS waivers but no wait lists for nursing home care, thereby creating an institutional bias that affects old disabled people, particularly those with dementia (Dernbach 2019). These complex issues deserve more attention and exploration in films and other media, but What They Had unfortunately only examines them superficially. Fundamentally, when Ruth is shown happy, calm, and safe in the bright, white, clean, and inviting nursing home, the message that nursing homes are ‘horrible’ places is directly challenged, and the viewer is reassured that nursing homes are in fact ‘good’ places for old people with dementia. In Code of the Freaks (Chasnoff 2020), Alyson Patsavas observes:

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Films … institutionalize [the disabled character] in a sort of figurative form of death that places the disabled person back in the institution in a way that they feel good about. Both they and the viewer are meant to feel, ‘Oh, well they’re in a safe place, they’re in a good place’, and of course, institutions within these films are places that people want to be in that bear very little resemblance to actual institutions. Though the nursing home Ruth is institutionalized in is only shown briefly in the final scenes, it features a picturesque, colourful, well-maintained garden with countless flowers in bloom and a bench for residents and visitors to sit on, bright hallways with floor-to-ceiling windows, other friendly residents with dementia who are clean and well-groomed, and a kind care worker who has the time to greet Ruth as soon as she walks in the door and accompany her down the hall. It is uncrowded, quiet, and welcoming. In this regard, What They Had contrasts films that present nursing homes as dark, depressing, and horrifying, such as Never Too Late (2020) or The Manor (2021). What They Had thus functions to comfort viewers about the role of nursing homes in US society. Unfortunately, the images of the nursing home in What They Had do not reflect the reality of many nursing homes in the United States, which are overcrowded, understaffed, drab, and hospitallike (Chivers and Kriebernegg 2018; Yoshizaki-Gibbons 2020). The film’s choice to represent the facility Ruth enters differently than the majority of nursing homes in the United States is intentional and serves to alleviate any anxiety about institutionalization viewers may feel. In a review of the movie, Monica Castillo (2018) writes that it ‘ends on a bittersweet, comforting note’ (para 7) – implying that viewers will be touched and reassured by the outcome. As noted by Chivers (2011), films centred on dementia and care are ‘reassuring [to] audiences who interpret the film as an accurate representation of lived reality [which reinforces] that placing a family member in such a setting is in fact the best possible ‘solution’ to late-life care problems’ (59). Thus, What They Had serves to assuage the guilt non-disabled (and perhaps non-old) viewers may feel as they consider nursing home care for their loved ones with dementia. Consequently, the film reinforces cultural beliefs and upholds established practices of institutionalizing old people with dementia.

CONCLUSION: ENTANGLEMENTS OF DISABILITY AND AGEING IN REPRESENTATIONS OF DEMENTIA Integrating disability studies and ageing studies’ perspectives to analyse films centred on dementia reveals the many ways that disability and ageing are culturally entangled. What They Had seeks to humanize old people with dementia and approach issues related to dementia care and caregiving with lightheartedness, humour, and sensitivity. However, representations of dementia in film frequently position the viewer in opposition to the character with dementia, and What They Had is no exception. While the audience may feel empathy for the old person with dementia, they are not expected to identify with them. Consequently, the viewer is able to retain their desires to remain as youthful and able-bodied / able-minded as possible throughout the lifecourse. These desires reflect three of the compulsory systems at work in our society –compulsory youthfulness and compulsory able-bodiedness / able-mindedness – that situate old age and disability as abnormal, abject, undesirable, and signs of individual failure to age ‘successfully’. Even films that seek to personalize dementia, such as What They Had, often employ metaphors of dementia as a site of

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loss, burden, tragedy, and death. As a result, many of these films end with the old character with dementia being institutionalized in a nursing home. Such films not only fail to illustrate the potential and promise of home and community-based care, but also present institutional care as the only option, and moreover, the best possible outcome for people with dementia and their loved ones. It is unsurprising, given these representations, that institutionalization continues to be society’s ‘solution’ to the ‘problems’ of dementia and dementia care in the United States. Dementia crystallizes dominant cultural anxieties about ageing and disability and consequently, dementia illustrates the ways that ageing and disability are entangled in our social fears of lack or loss of mental and physical function, dependence, burdening others, and death. As a result, despite praise from critics that films such as What They Had ‘accurately’ represent dementia and dementia caregiving, these films further ableist and ageist assumptions about dementia and, more broadly, ageing and disability.

NOTE 1 People with dementia have largely rejected the word demented, although there are some exceptions (see Skloot, 2004). Here, I am making an argument about how the characters are constructed as ‘demented’, with demented not only referring to dementia but a broader conception of madness, dangerousness, irrationality, and unpredictability. For example, in The Taking of Deborah Logan, Deborah is initially diagnosed with dementia but ultimately, we learn she is possessed by an evil spirit.

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Castillo, M. (2018), ‘Reviews: What They Had’, RobertEbert.com. Available at: https://www.rog​ereb​ert.com/ revi​ews/what-they-had-2018 (accessed 31 July 2022). Chapman, C., A. C. Carey, and L. Ben-Moshe (2014), ‘Reconsidering Confinement: Interlocking Locations and Logics of Incarceration’, in L. Ben-Moshe, C. Chapman, and A. C. Carey (eds), Disability Incarcerated: Imprisonment and Disability in the United States and Canada, 3–24, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Chivers, S. (2011), The Silvering Screen: Old Age and Disability in Cinema, Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Chivers, S., and U. Kriebernegg (eds) (2018), Care Home Stories: Aging, Disability, and Long-Term Residential Care, Bielefeld: transcript. Daffner, K. R. (2010), ‘Promoting Successful Cognitive Aging: A Comprehensive Review’, Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease, 19 (4): 1101–22, doi:10.3233/JAD-2010-1306. Dernbach, B. Z. (2019), ‘Illinois’ Medicaid Backlog Leaves More Than 100,000 without Health Coverage’, 3 May. Available at: https://chic​ago.sunti​mes.com/2019/5/3/18621​229/illin​ois-medic​aid-back​log-lea​ ves-more-than-100-000-with​out-hea​lth-cover​age (accessed 31 July 2022). Gibbons, H. M. (2016), ‘Compulsory Youthfulness: Intersections of Ableism and Ageism in “Successful Aging” Discourses’, Review of Disability Studies, 12 (2–3): 70–88, http://hdl.han​dle.net/10125/58668. Gilleard, C., and P. Higgs (2010), ‘Aging without Agency: Theorizing the Fourth Age’, Aging & Mental Health, 14 (2): 121–8. Kafer, A. (2013). Feminist Queer Crip, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Katz, S., and T. Calasanti (2015), ‘Critical Perspectives on Successful Aging: Does It “Appeal More Than It Illuminates?”’ The Gerontologist, 55 (1): 26–33. Lamb, S. (2014), ‘Permanent Personhood or Meaningful Decline? Toward a Critical Anthropology of Successful Aging’, Journal of Aging Studies, 29: 41–52, doi:10.1016/j.jaging.2013.12.006. Marist Institute for Public Opinion (2014, April 5), ‘Alzheimer’s Most Feared Disease’, Marist Poll. Available at: https://mar​istp​oll.mar​ist.edu/1114-alz​heim​ers-most-fea​red-dise​ase/ (accessed 31 July 2022). McRuer, R. (2006), Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability, New York: New York University Press. Mitchell, D. T., and S. L. Snyder (2000), Narrative Prosthesis: Disability and the Dependencies of Discourse, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Rubinstein, R. L., and K. de Medeiros (2015), ‘ “Successful Aging,” Gerontological Theory, and Neoliberalism: A Qualitative Critique’, The Gerontologist, 55 (1): 34–42, doi:10.1093/geront/gnu080. Skloot, F. (2004), In the Shadow of Memory, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Twigg, J. (2004), ‘The Body, Gender, and Age: Feminist Insights in Social Gerontology’, Journal of Aging Studies, 18 (1): 59–73, doi:10.1016/j.jaging.2003.09.001. Yoshizaki-Gibbons, H. M. (2018), ‘Engaging with Ageing: A Call for the Greying of Critical Disability Studies’, in K. Ellis, R. Garland-Thomson, M. Kent, and R. Robertson (eds), Manifestos for the Future of Critical Disability Studies, 179–88, New York: Routledge. Yoshizaki-Gibbons, H. M. (2020), ‘Time and Again: Old Women and Care Workers Navigating Time, Relationality, and Power in Dementia Units’, unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Illinois at Chicago. Yoshizaki-Gibbons, H. M. (2021), ‘Integrating Critical Disability Studies and Critical Gerontology to Explore the Complexities of Ageing with Disabilities’, in M. Putnam and C. Bigby (eds), Handbook of Aging with Disability, 32–43, New York: Routledge.

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Filmography Code of the Freaks (2020), Dir. S. Chasnoff, USA: Personal Hermitage Productions. En säng för Martin (A Song for Martin) (2001), Dir. D. B. August, Sweden: Film I Väst, Helkon Media. The Father (2020), Dir. F. Zeller, France & UK: Les Films du Cru, Film4. Iris (2001), Dir. R. Eyre, R. UK: BBC Films, Fox Iris Productions; Intermedia, Mirage Enterprises. The Manor (2021), Dir. A. Carolyn, USA: Blumhouse Television. Never Too Late (2020), Dir. M. Lamprell, Australia: Screen Australia; F. G. Film Productions, South Australian Film Corporation, Myriad Pictures, McMahon International Pictures, The Post Lounge, White Hot Productions, Filmology Finance. Relic (2020), Dir. N. E. James, Australia: Screen Australia, Film Victoria, Nine Stories Productions, AGBO, Carver Films. The Savages (2007), Dir. T. Jenkins, USA: This Is That Productions, Ad Hominem Enterprises, Lone Star Film Group, Cooper’s Down Productions. The Taking of Deborah Logan (2014). Dir. A. Robitel, USA: Bad Hat Harry, Casadelic Pictures, Jeff Rice Films, Guerin-Adler-Scott Pictures. What They Had (2018), Dir. E. Chomko, USA: Unified Pictures, Bona Fide Productions, Look to the Sky Films, June Pictures.

TV Series Casualty (1986–present), Creators J. Brock and P. Unwin, BBC. Neighbours (1985–2022), Creator R. Watson, Grundy Television & Fremantle Australia. Orange Is the New Black (2013–19), Creator J. Kohan. Netflix. The Sopranos (1999–2007), Creator D. Chase, HBO.

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CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

The phenomenology of frailty: Joan Didion as case study ELIZABETH BARRY

INTRODUCTION This chapter sets out to consider the elusive category of frailty – both as medical diagnosis and as lived experience – as it is conceptualized in philosophy, history, and anthropology, and represented in the life writing of Joan Didion. It seeks particularly to understand further the complex experience of time as it is lived in this condition and to consider it in relation to the category – and experience – of change in its broadest sense. What sort of change ushers in the experience of feeling, or being seen as, frail? And how does frailty bespeak a fundamental change in one’s relationship to, and tolerance of, the phenomenon of change itself?

FRAILTY AND THE INDIVIDUAL Frailty is a concept that sits at the intersection of biomedical, material, social, and ethical discourses, often drawing on medical language but serving social needs. It is conceptually unstable but socially and ethically powerful, determining clinical and social priorities and commanding strong feelings and ethical positions. As anthropologist Sharon Kaufman (1994: 48) has observed, its definition is broad and qualitative, the American Heritage Dictionary defining it as ‘having one or more health or functioning decrements that seriously affect the person’s ability to carry out the expected and usual activities of daily living’ (4). As such, it can be invoked in relation to dangerous systemic health conditions, loss of mobility, sensory impairment, cognitive decline, or psychological vulnerability, usually identifying two or more of these conditions in combination, but the thrust of its use is generally to signal a loss of independence and a need for external intervention. These conceptions of frailty, identifying it as originating with those charged with supporting or surveilling the older individual, raise questions familiar to those working in age studies about the stigmatization and objectification of older people. Philosopher Sally Gadow, in writing about frailty, cites John Berger, who observes that if we treat individuals as objects of scrutiny, they are held at an affective distance from us: They are the objects of our ever-extending knowledge. What we know about them is an index of our power, and thus an index of what separates us from them. (Berger 1980: 71, cited in Gadow 1986: 237–8)

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Classification as ‘frail’ separates the older person from the doctor or social worker making the evaluation and places them in a marginal and implicitly inferior category with respect to the rest of society. Amanda Grenier, Liz Lloyd, and Chris Philipson have argued, likewise, that the process by which older people are ‘frailed’ – classified as dependent and vulnerable to rapid decline – also construes them as ‘failed’ (2017: 318–21, 326–7). As Kaufman (1994: 46) argues, there are competing ideological positions in the medicine of older age in this respect: the official view of the older person, along with any other recipient of medical care, as an autonomous and self-determining subject (wielding what is so often referred to as ‘patient choice’, Fox 1990), and the expectation of the frail individual to surrender absolutely to the medical discourse and practices wherein they are a passive object of intervention and treatment. It is vital, of course, to keep the older person as agent and individual subject in view. Autonomy may not be an unalloyed good, however, in the context of frailty, obscuring – as Kaufman argues – the important role of community, and elevating independence over the interdependence that is central and necessary to all human flourishing. How can the frail individual and those around them balance the need for autonomy and the need for care – so delicate and precarious a relationship in any human relationship at any stage of life – at this challenging juncture? The consideration of frailty in the discussion that follows will try to keep these conceptual and ideological tensions in view, if it cannot entirely resolve them. It will turn to the philosophy of subjectivity itself to recover the lived experience of the individual from these objectifying practices. It will also take as its exemplary case study, in Joan Didion’s (2011) Blue Nights, a portrait of frailty that wrestles in plain sight with the tension between autonomy and vulnerability, a struggle which Didion’s memoir takes as a central theme.

PHENOMENOLOGY AND THE LIVED EXPERIENCE OF AGE It is perhaps an impossible task to speak of ageing in a manner shorn of ideology and value judgement. But I want to propose an approach that intends, at least, to found itself on the direct relationship between subject and world. Phenomenology, the philosophy of subjectivity itself, understands our lived experience as embodied beings, and as such has a particular pertinence for the study of older age. In considering the mediation of our experience by the dimensions of time and space, it might help us to understand a ‘phase’ of life when both time and space often become subject to new kinds of limitation. Indeed, frailty is most often identified at a point in time where certain capacities and freedoms have been lost, and the end of life is felt to have come near. It also changes our relation to the world around us, to the scope and nature of the space we might still be able to navigate, and to the kind of home we might now be able to inhabit. This first form of philosophical phenomenology (which might be thought of as phenomenology ‘proper’, identified with the thinking of Edmund Husserl, Henri Bergson, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty), attends to these structures of experience and how they determine our perception, sensation, memory, and imagination in the moment, and thereby mediate our relationship with the world. This is a fundamentally embodied process: we know the world that our bodies allow us to discover and intuit. That world therefore constitutively changes as we become frail and our relationship to our body changes. The chapter also introduces the more diffuse methodology that is social phenomenology, a loose grouping of approaches that examine the meanings attached to lived experience – here the experience of advanced older age – by the prevailing culture and society, and considers how the individual

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might navigate such experience in an authentic manner. Social phenomenology has explored the subjective nature of ageing in a way that not only identifies but also ‘transcends’, in Catherine Wondolowski and D. Karl Davis’s words, ‘the fixed categories that have defined ageing objectively’ (1988: 263). It thinks about how the individual might actively and self-reflectively determine their relationship to each life stage, rather than submit passively to their social construction. It allows, in other words, a crucial margin between us and the frailed older person that society makes of us. Instead, this second approach thinks of the subject – at whatever age – as an active ‘agent in society’ (Starr 1982–3: 266), both in terms of personal self-determination and in their dealings with the world. A conceptual framework that attends to the older individual as an agent and, furthermore, as an agent who continues to develop, experience change, and change themselves is a valuable one in age studies, where the emphasis can seem to fall on loss of agency as well as on physical and mental rigidity. It may be argued that few of the changes that determine the experience of frailty are positive ones, of course. Indeed, in one sense, vulnerability to change – and physical and social difficulties in weathering it – might be seen as a defining characteristic of frailty. Paying attention to the psychological dimensions of this experience, and the subjective attitudes encountered in dealing with change – even in the form of inevitable physical depredation – is nonetheless of value, I want to suggest, and might offer a rich account of both the concept and the lived reality of frailty. Finally, as a way of resolving or at least superseding the tensions between these two versions of phenomenology, I want to think about the uses of existential phenomenology. This builds on philosophical phenomenology but considers the meaning of subjective experience and its relationship to the parameters of an individual existence as well as to a broader understanding of existence per se. An existential approach such as that taken by philosopher and professor of nursing Sally Gadow can reveal dimensions not captured or considered in either medical or social discourses: questions of existential vulnerability, contingency, finitude, and our fundamental relationship of dependence on one another. This form of phenomenology also encompasses the work of Havi Carel, which, while it takes as its subject illness in relatively young adulthood, also extends its consideration intermittently to ageing and acts as a model for this enquiry. Carel argues for the revelatory potential both of sudden illness and of more gradual ageing, both offering a shift not only in our perception of the world and its norms, but also in our understanding of what those norms could and should be. For both Gadow and Carel, a philosophical framework for an enquiry into the nature of frailty offers something that goes beyond moment-by-moment lived experience and allows us to ask what frailty might tell us about existence, and existential and social belonging, as a whole. Frailty might, they argue, allow us to think critically about assumptions that determine the way we evaluate ourselves, our relationships, and our life narrative at any given stage. And it might, finally, invite us to think about care as a virtue and dependency as a fundamental, and ongoing, condition of being human. As well as drawing on philosophical and social phenomenologies of frailty, illness, and older age, the chapter will also use the phenomenological concerns and principles discussed to guide a reading of first-person accounts of older age: principally Joan Didion’s memoir Blue Nights and, more passingly, memoirs by Florida Scott-Maxwell and Claudia McWilliam, and the great modernist work of auto-fiction, Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. I follow Patricia Waugh in contending that literary life writing and even fiction – particularly modernist fiction like Proust’s so attentive to consciousness and embodiment – can offer a ‘practical counterpart

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to theoretical phenomenology’ (Waugh 2013: 24) in this respect. Such writing can disclose the existential, affective, and ethical meaning of living in frailty, as well, in the case of Didion’s work, as debating the merits and demerits of autonomy-at-all-costs for the ageing subject in an explicit but nuanced way.

PHENOMENOLOGIES OF FRAILTY Philosophical phenomenology: The time and space of ageing An emphasis on subjective time, as encountered in philosophical phenomenology, can capture the ways that time newly comes into focus, becomes palpable, and also becomes strange to us. Time can pass more slowly as we live it in older age, tasks taking longer and days passing with less incident, but, as Arthur Schopenhauer observed in the 1851 Parerga and Paralipomena, it seems to have passed more quickly when we look back on it (Schopenhauer 2014: vol. I, 404). Henri Bergson (2000) argued in his 1889 essay Time and Free Will that our experience of lived time takes the form of what he calls such ‘intensities’, impressions which are not quantifiable, but arrive via sensation and mood; attention to a newly charged relationship to bodily sensation, as well as a new apprehension of the nearness of our own ending, change our relationship to time. Our experience of space and distance also change. If the world is what our bodies allow us to know as the world, then that world changes when we can no longer move quickly or far in it – or, looked at a different way, if our needs in relation to such movement are not met by the social environment in which we live. Glenda Laws (1997) has observed the dimensions of this new relationship, involving changes in motility (how far we can move) and scale (what the new scope of our world might be), thinking about their implications for sociality as well as activity and access to services. These practical concerns also bear on our existential sense of being in the world: we become confined to – and identified with – a fixed location and lose our spatial sense of freedom. Havi Carel, investigating the phenomenology of illness, quotes S. K. Toombs describing a loss of mobility, as might be experienced in older age, as ‘anchoring one in the Here, engendering a heightened sense of distance between oneself and surrounding things’ (1995: 11; see Carel 2016: 222). As we will see in our reading of Didion’s memoir, frailty, like other kinds of illness, ‘modifies not only one’s body, but one’s sense of space’ (Carel 2016: 222). Phenomenology can disclose the general structure of these new dimensions to the world. Social phenomenology This ­ chapter – and phenomenologies of ageing in general – do not confine themselves to considerations of the individual subject in isolation, however. They seek to bring such subjective experience to bear on a critique of normative external judgements (clinical, social) – what Amanda Grenier, after Foucault, calls ‘dividing practices’ (Grenier 2007: 426) – and for this it is also helpful to draw on the wider framework of social phenomenology, as described by Jerrold Starr (Starr 1982–3). Grenier (2007) invokes Foucault’s concept of ‘dividing practices’, processes of division and objectification that follow or form part of naming and classification, to identify discourses and practices which divide older people into ‘frail’ and ‘non-frail’, for instance, or institute thresholds for (the loss of) independence and autonomy – either formally (in medicine or social care) or informally (in wider social relations). Social phenomenology, by contrast, gives the power to

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describe, name, and evaluate back to the ageing individual. As a branch of enquiry, it advocates for what Alfred Schutz called ‘biographical [and implicitly autobiographical] work’ (Schutz 1962, cited in Starr 1982–3: 262) as a generative approach to understanding and historicizing social life, and in this case, life in older age. It sees the ageing individual not as a passive objective of external forces but as an ‘active, self-reflexive agent in society’ (Starr 1982–3: 266) whose development is more flexible and inventive than a linear ‘ordered change’ theory of ageing (dominated by a timeline of losses) would suggest. Amanda Grenier has argued that frailty as a category is invoked most often by those observing the subject rather than the subject itself: either as an identification of an objective (or pseudo-objective) level of need or as a fate to do with loss of physical capacity or psychological robustness that has befallen the individual in the eyes of others (2007: 436). As Grenier notes, then, there is value in accounts and enquiries that consider the robustness of the concept from a subjective point of view – does the lived experience of advanced old age bear out these external judgements? Understanding and defining frailty, I would argue, in line with Starr’s position on ageing, is not to dismiss the reality of biogenetic factors or material social circumstances, or even the soundness of the evaluations they support, but to allow for a more nuanced interpretation of these evaluations. A phenomenology attentive to both the foundational structures of experience (a subject’s relationship to time, space, and embodiment) and the meanings of that existence produced by the prevailing culture, can, in the words of K. J. Gergen, ‘[challenge] the guiding assumptions of [that] culture’ and foster ‘reconsideration of existing constructions of reality’ (1980: 54). Social phenomenology has been employed to think about the distinctive stage of life that older age might represent and has been particularly – and helpfully for our purposes – concerned with the experience of change. The work of Gergen (1980), Starr (1982–3), and, more recently, Alan Blum (2014) considers the assumption that age is a time where the individual actor initiates fewer changes and is more occupied with managing changes that are thrust upon them – an assumption that these authors challenge. The ageing individual is assumed to face unwanted and aversive physical changes (amounting to a narrative of decline, in Margaret Morganroth Gullette’s [2004] influential terms), as well as structural exclusions and often reductions in both social capital and spending power (Gullette 2004). The refreshing angle that social phenomenology offers, however, is to situate older age neutrally with respect to other life stages, and to think in terms of ageing as a process rather than age as a distinct category, or fixed and static stage. Blum (2014) argues in relation to ageing and development (from infancy onwards) that one should not think about age stages as defined by ‘lack’ (what has elsewhere been called a ‘deficit’ model), either at an early stage of life (when certain cognitive and physical skills have not yet developed) or at a later one when certain capacities may be lost. It is not about having ‘too few’ years, or too many. What is more significant is the way in which the individual deals with each different life stage and its distinctive character. As Blum writes, ‘failures’ with respect to age consist in ‘ways of orienting inflexibly or incoherently to [the] boundaries and limits’ of each age stage, citing as illustration postures such as ‘arrested development, fixation, regression’ and, later, a preoccupation with a ‘desire to turn back the clock’ (30). Conversely, adaptation, flexibility, inventiveness, and self-knowledge emerge as the implicit factors for ‘success’ in this dynamic account of social and individual becoming across the lifecourse. The startling (or perhaps commonplace) revelation in social psychologies of adulthood prevalent from the late 1970s onwards is that adults change and develop, as well as children. As Orville Brim put it (albeit in the partial language of his day), ‘any man can change, in any way, at

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any time’ (Brim 1974: 16, cited in Starr 1982–3: 258): change is not the preserve of the early stages of life. These accounts of flexible self-determination offer a useful corrective to the standard narrative of decline and increasing passivity in the ageing subject and allow us to attend to what is dynamic in the character of ageing. They too have limitations, however, when applied to the condition of frailty – though these are limitations that are in themselves instructive. When applied to frailty, they run up against the fact that the condition may undermine the ability of the subject to manage and behave flexibly towards change itself. Frailty is a stage in which change can be rapid, unpredictable, and reversible at a fine scale, even if incremental and generally predictable at a larger one. Further, the complex mixture of subjective and objective perspectives at play in the construction and experience of the condition means that frailty is not just a change in relation to which a subject can adopt a more or less active attitude; it is a change wherein passivity towards this change is – or can feel as though it is – thrust upon one. Previous strategies and tenets of selfhood, such as autonomy, independence, or industriousness, can even become maladaptive, as one’s need for support becomes more pressing. It is defined by and synonymous with being vulnerable to personal and social circumstances and is in this sense at once internal and external, intensely subjective, and intensely – and constitutively – relational. This is not a uniformly negative picture, although it is one that alerts us to the conceptual as well as practical challenges that the condition of frailty presents. If we reconsider the thinking that is done in the name of social phenomenology from the perspective of a nominally frail older individual, we see more clearly the normative nature of these accounts of ageing ‘successfully’, in Blum’s term (2014: 31), at any age stage. In using these terms, Blum – inadvertently, perhaps – aligns himself with other advocates of ‘successful ageing’, a still-dominant concept often traced back to an article by John Rowe and Robert Kahn in 1987, but first criticized under the ironic guise of an ‘enlightened view of ageing’ as early as 1983 by Thomas Cole. This is what Cole calls a ‘positive mythology’ of ageing (Cole 1983: 35, 39), born of the culture of modern capitalism according to which it is deemed necessary to remain ‘healthy, sexually active, engaged, productive, and self-reliant’ (35) into late life. In order to counter an ageist decline narrative, although he did not describe it in those terms, an alternative consensus was emerging, for Cole, that might be almost as harmful. Traditional, spiritual perspectives on older age allowed people to tolerate the ‘ambiguity, contingency [and] intractability’ of the experience of ageing, and even to seek ‘strength and personal growth by accepting frailty and decay’ (Cole 1983: 36). In the course of modernity, however, the rise of liberal individualism – tied to capitalism – put an end to this toleration of frailty. As Cole has it, ‘this existential integrity was virtually lost in a liberal culture that found it necessary to separate strength and frailty, growth and decay, hope and death’ (1983: 36). The individual must display physical self-control and the frail older body, representing, as Cole puts it, the ‘limits of this control’, came to represent dependence and, within the system of Victorian liberal morality, thereby also failure and even sin. In Blum’s emphasis on self-determination and autonomy, there is more than whiff of this liberal ideal of individualism. Existential phenomenology: Frailty and freedom It might be possible, however, to consider the older person as what Sally Gadow has called a ‘selfdefining subject’, able to wield a flexible attitude towards their own frailty, without falling back onto a

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liberal morality which requires estrangement from one’s body and deplores any sign of dependency. In fact, Gadow has moved beyond the harmful binaries of ‘strength and frailty, growth and decay’ that Cole decries, to argue for frailty as complementary with, and even sometimes producing, a kind of vitality. She does not name it explicitly as such, but her invocation of existentialist thought reads in fact as a third form of phenomenology, existential phenomenology, in its description of ‘intensity’ of experience, ‘vitality’, and ‘life-force’ (Gadow 1986: 242–3), all terms central to the thought of phenomenological philosopher Henri Bergson and synonymous with the philosophy he helped to found. The very distance from engagements and duties in this time of life can allow, as Gadow puts it, ‘the pure intensity, the life-force per se, [to] appear in all its strength’ (1986: 242). Her position does not just accommodate frailty and dependency, then, but finds in them the source of a new and even cherished experience of life. As she writes: Frailty is at once a limit and a freedom – the freedom to lavish all of one’s intensity upon the creation of a new self-body relation in which the body is not a mere object but a subject, a beloved whose so-called imperfections are an essential part of the whole. (Gadow 1986: 243) This is also, she observes elsewhere, ‘a beloved … from whom one must soon be parted’ (1986: 241). She sees in frailty a new way of being embodied, a new relationship with the world, and a new relationship with time itself. Gadow contrasts this existential integrity with what she calls the ‘rationalist’ view, identified with Anglo-American traditions of moral philosophy and metaphysics, which see the body as an object to be known – and in being known, to be kept at a distance. From the ‘purview of the rational, the purely metaphysical’, the body (and in particular the intrusive ageing body) is philosophically ‘accidental’, non-essential, and subject to an unsettling contingency. To be frail is also, in this account, to be irrational, corruptible, and transient, representing a ‘testimony to finitude, imperfection, and eventual death’ (Gadow 1986: 242). Gadow’s account does not deny the relationship between frailty and finitude, or even the capacity of advanced older age to be painful and frightening, but she quotes Florida Scott-Maxwell’s account of living in older age, which sees pain as a kind of intensity, and hence a new energy; older age brings one into contact with the ‘natural intensity of life’, something that is, Scott-Maxwell writes, both ‘our reward and undoing’ (Scott-Maxwell 1979: 32; cited in Gadow 1986: 242). Frailty is not at odds with vitality, but allows one to find a new life, and even a new energy for this life, from within it. Phenomenology and the Epoche¯: Frailty as revelation Finally, still one more form of phenomenology pertinent to the understanding of frailty is the Husserlian framework offered by Havi Carel in her 2016 work Phenomenology of Illness, mentioned above. Carel’s philosophical study of illness, drawing on her own experience of the sudden onset of severe disease aged thirty-five, is also instructive as a model for thinking about ageing and its continuities with other bodily experience, as well as a salutary reminder that one can encounter frailty at any time of life. Carel describes the world that is revealed to her by illness: A new world is created, a world without spontaneity, a world of limitation and fear: a slow, encumbered world to which the ill person must adapt. Many people experience this loss of spontaneity through ageing. In illness this opaque and alien world can emerge overnight. (2016: 76–7)

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Carel’s phenomenological treatment of illness and – intermittently – older age, also qualifies the accounts given by Cole and Gadow of liberal rationalism in finding currents in recent AngloAmerican philosophy that can accommodate a positive understanding of frailty, and even dependence. She invokes the thinking of Alisdair MacIntyre, a ‘rationalist’ philosopher in Gadow’s terms, who is known for his conception of lifecourse (in the 1981 After Virtue) as a kind of heroic narrative quest, and the self as a rational actor in that narrative – exactly the sort of account that a disabling period of older age would seem to derail. MacIntyre’s thought develops, however, between After Virtue and the 1999 book that argues for a more expansive and inclusive model of the self – a work aptly entitled Dependent Rational Animals (MacIntyre 1999). Following MacIntyre, Carel proposes that: the illusion of autonomy and independence, and the misunderstanding of adulthood as subsuming the whole of human life, are errors that lead to an inadequate moral view. (2016: 70) The kind of changed relation to the world that comes with illness can qualify, if not correct that view. The fact of ageing also seems by definition to challenge this view of the autonomous self (especially as the way that Carel, after MacIntyre, uses ‘adulthood’ would seem to exclude advanced old age as it does childhood). Fully fledged selfhood would in this (flawed) account, Carel suggests, seem predicated on levels of independence that are not available in childhood and are often compromised in the last stages of life. A truer and more comprehensive perspective on life would accommodate these liminal stages, reflecting the observation of Sally Gadow that ‘an unalterable given in human existence is the possibility of injury and destruction, the quality of frailty’ (1986: 238). For Carel, illness and ageing can both be philosophically corrective, and even revelatory, insofar as they reveal the inherent lack of autonomy available to rational subjectivity. She identifies this revelatory potential with Husserl’s phenomenological epochē. We customarily live our lives in an unquestioning way taking for granted our capacity to perform with our bodies, our mind, and our words. All these things are thrown into question in what Husserl calls an ‘epochē’ (Husserl 1988), which might be identified in the shock of sudden illness, and perhaps, in those moments when we are brought up short by our bodies, struck by the sudden realization of our age and the changes it has wrought. This may have a specific dimension: everyday concepts such as ‘near’ or ‘far’, for example, might change their meaning as our mobility is compromised (Carel 2016: 98, 222), or our sense of time be transformed as movement and cognition slow. It is also – as it is for Husserl – an existential shift, whereby customary understandings of our relationship to the world and our sense of belonging in it fall away, and we see our embodiedness and the world it allows us to know, our interdependent relations with others, and our relationship to finitude – what Husserl calls our ‘pure living’ (1988: 20). Any full account of human life – and even of human flourishing – must embrace, rather than exclude, such insights.

THE LIVED REALITY OF FRAILTY: THE CASE OF JOAN DIDION The time of frailty In the final part of this discussion, I want to consider the writer Joan Didion’s (2011) memoir of ageing, Blue Nights, as a window onto some of the experiences that come under the umbrella of ‘frailty’ and a demonstration of the meanings that they can disclose: a new relationship to embodiment, a new apprehension of existential finitude, a revelation of – or perhaps in this case a concession to – the fundamentally interconnected and interdependent nature of human existence.

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And to start with, I want to look at the concept of time, a concept key to any discussion of the subjective experience of age, and a central concern in Didion’s work. Time presents a paradoxical face when living with frailty, as Kathleen Woodward (2015) has observed in her discussion of Didion and frailty as a horizon of risk. So far, we have thought about the incremental change that characterizes older age, in contrast to serious and unforeseen illness. Frailty, however, is a condition which threatens the distinction Carel draws between the often-sudden change in conditions of living encountered with serious illness, and the slow, if inexorable, change that ageing brings. Woodward observes that frailty inhabits an unstable position between the categories of chronic and acute illness (Woodward 2015). The condition of frailty is predictable in itself, but – once arrived – it makes every day unpredictable. Bodily change is incremental, but the body is also at constant risk of a violent and irreversible deterioration. And the experience of time in such a condition is a complex one. In one sense, time quickens with the apprehension of risk. On the other, it slows, every movement deliberate, life robbed of spontaneity. One feels time anew. Frailty is made of such paradoxes, disaster felt as at once suspended, poised to descend in one fell swoop, and playing out in slow motion. This slow-motion atrophy of her everyday existence extends to Didion’s relationship with space as well as time and foregrounds the connection between the two. She writes about the new relationship she has to the world, occasioning an increasing ‘[focus] on this issue of frailty’ (2011: 106). When she goes out, she fears ‘bicycle messengers knocking me to the ground. The approach of a child on a motorized scooter causes me to freeze, to play dead’ (106). She no longer goes out to Three Guys for breakfast: ‘what if I were to fall on the way?’ The loss of ‘balance’ she describes is both physical and mental: the world has changed its parameters and she can no longer rely on her body in a habitual way. This body signals its relationship with contingency – the temporary and provisional nature of its relationship with any given place – and its response to the new sense of danger is to anticipate and perform its own extinction, to ‘play dead’. The expression, connecting frailty with impending death, is drily comic here but the connection is unmistakeable. Self-protection now consists in not taking up space in the world, not imposing oneself on a scene; it signals the encroachment of death into the everyday of Didion’s existence. Didion, writing in Blue Nights, describes the arrival of this condition of frailty, hastened by the death of both members of her immediate family (her husband John Dunne in 2003 and her adult daughter, Quintana Dunne, in 2005) and her own age-related health concerns. From the outset, the effect that this condition has on her perception of time is foregrounded. She observes that when she was young and well she heard the phrase ‘time passes’ as ‘Time passes, but not so aggressively that anyone notices’ (2011: 17; emphasis in the original). ‘Or even’, she goes on, ‘Time passes, but not for me.’ Now, in her present, time is palpable – a revelation of an intangible but irrefutable kind. Here is Didion in Blue Nights describing her long-held state of willed ignorance towards frailty – and in so doing that frailty itself: Could it be that I did not figure in either the general condition or the permanence of the slowing, the irreversible changes in mind and body, the way in which you wake one morning less resilient than you were and by Christmas find your ability to mobilize gone, atrophied, no longer extant? … The way in which your awareness of this passing time – this permanent slowing, this vanishing resilience – multiplies, metastasizes, becomes your very life? (2011: 17)

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She sets out to document this experience of change in older age: in the particular terms of her (indisputably glamorous) life, as she goes on, ‘the way in which you live most of your life in California, and then you don’t’. Didion’s definitive departure from California both is and is not the entry into a kind of antechamber of death. She lived for ten years after Blue Nights was written, dying only in 2021, so in one sense this apprehension was premature. As the opening onto a realization of the possibility, if not the imminence, of her own death, however, this transition in her life could still be seen as a watershed. One might think at this juncture, in relation to Didion’s changed relation to the prospect of her own death, of Marcel Proust’s reflections on this kind of change in the last volume of In Search of Lost Time (Finding Time Again). The narrator there writes: This idea of death established itself permanently within me, in the way that love does … the incapacity to descend a staircase, to recall a name, to get up … they had both come together … the great mirror of the mind had inevitably reflected a new reality. (2003: 352) Proust’s narrator, like writer Florida Scott-Maxwell in her sustained reflection on what it is to grow old, The Measure of My Days, explicitly connects Carel’s sense of the revelatory potential of physical adversity with the life stage of advanced old age: age becomes, as Scott-Maxwell writes (both ironically and unironically) a period of ‘heroic helplessness’ (1979: 198). It is a period, for Scott-Maxwell, of passion without energy, a place on the ‘far side of precept and aim’, in which time has no content but seems nonetheless to ‘expand us’ (33). Scott-Maxwell’s terms are strikingly similar to the famous ending to Proust’s novel, where frailty – tottering, trembling – is simply a natural response to being atop stilts that have grown taller each year: to be dizzied by the altitude of acquired time, elevated rather than weighed down by the mountain of memories each contains. Yet where Proust requires aesthetic ingenuity to transmute bodily infirmity into authority, ScottMaxwell sees a natural connection akin to Carel’s: an age of discovery. We are, Scott-Maxwell puts it simply, ‘people to whom something important is about to happen’ (128). Sally Gadow, writing of frailty that it is ‘testimony to finitude, imperfection and eventual death’, quotes Scott-Maxwell: ‘When a new disability arrives, I look about to see if death has come, and I call quietly, “Death, is that you?” ’ (Scott-Maxwell 1979: 36, cited in Gadow 1986: 238). There is an obvious cost to this apprehension of mortality, of course, and Scott-Maxwell does not shy away either from physical suffering or from fear: pregnant with her impending death, in her striking image, she feels the panic of a women in late pregnancy who feels herself filled up and colonized by the baby, its life leaving no room for her at all. Gadow offers a philosophical account of this fullness, this tipping point, rendered also (in less positive terms) in Didion’s suggestion that frailty can metastasize to become one’s very life. If bodily infirmity in older age becomes too pronounced, Gadow suggests, it is ‘no longer a background, a horizontal boundary marking the remote limits of human endeavour; it has overtaken the self at its very center’ (1986: 239). Didion, after a fall at night, observes something similar: this incident is something that ‘altered my view of my own possibilities, shortened, as it were, the horizon’ (2011: 142). What emerges here is a time of unpredictability within a larger framework of inexorable progression towards the horizon of death – a horizon that has suddenly come nearer. This open, even curious, attitude to dying is very much at odds with Blum’s characterization of the potential ‘failure’ of older age: an attitude oriented towards the past, characterized by a ‘perpetual yearning to turn back the clock and reverse mortality’ (2014: 30). In fact, this is an age stage preoccupied

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by the future: both the immediate context of risk and the less tangible horizon of death. Far from resisting change, as Blum suggests we might do in displaying arrested development or regressing (as a young or mature adult), the attitude that Didion displays in her newfound (self-ascription of) frailty is one open and clear-eyed towards the future. Even if that future is a foreshortened one, it is one to which we orient ourselves, not only adapting to but also anticipating change. Frailty as an obscure object of knowledge Didion elaborates on moving to the East Coast as a kind of harbinger of the end of her life later in the memoir. Southern California, where she lived for most of her life, has seasons of a sort (sudden rains, periodic winds) but ‘arriving as they do so theatrically as to seem strokes of random fate’, they do not bear witness to the passage of time as do the seasons on the East Coast. As she puts it, ‘seasons in Southern California suggest violence, but not necessarily death. Seasons in New York [where she moves later in her life], the relentless dropping of the leaves, the steady darkening of the days … suggest only death’ (2011: 69). Illness can occur suddenly, even theatrically; ageing is inexorable, both easier and harder to bear for being predictable, for being known. But how far and how is frailty known, even in the living of it? The complexity of the condition, already alluded to, is compounded by its ambiguous relationship to time: the fact that it is both state and process, identified by objective bodily symptom (muscle weakness, or bone fragility, for instance) in the present, but framed always in terms of the future and the horizon of risk. Sharon Kaufman has even argued that its dual identity as ‘quality and process’ situate it not in the body of the older person so much as in the process of anticipation and adaptation on the part of the individuals themselves but also their family and the health and social systems that – in the best scenario, at least – surround and support them (Kaufman 1994: 49). The lived experience of frailty is at once a palpable reality and a threat, its identification with underlying conditions meaning that a relatively minor illness can start a cascade of problems and trigger more severe and rapid decline. The mesh of predictable and unpredictable, chronic and acute, is hard to narrativize and sometimes even to see: an appearance of health can deceive and good function vanish overnight. Some ‘frailty checklists’ even include psychological aspects, such as mood disorder, and firstperson accounts of the experience cannot disentangle the physical loss of capacity from the fear or sadness that can sometimes attend it – an aspect that is made central in Blue Nights by Didion’s dramatic personal losses. In the novelist Candia McWilliam’s account of her functional blindness, attended by falls and ill health, What to Look for in Winter, she observes the clean distinction between the doctors who think that her blindness is purely physiological and those who think it entirely psychologically induced. ‘I am not sure which is the case’, she writes, ‘but suspect a category error in any hard and fast distinction. All I know is that I am falling through the dark’ (McWilliam 2011: 39). For Didion as for McWilliam, the physical aspects of frailty somehow both stand in for and intensify other, more psychological aspects of this time of life, including grief, regret, and shame. This question of knowledge is also one that might qualify Blum’s social phenomenological account of ageing. In this account, the stages and transitions of the lifecourse are known (even if resisted); the subject has but to strike an attitude towards their given life stage. The critique of prevailing conceptions of old age and frailty offered by Didion and McWilliam rests on the fact that such conceptions exclude these stubborn unknowns: the complex aetiology of symptoms that

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have both physiological and psychological causes; the point at which a physical incapacity ends and a failure of will takes over; the refusal to identify with stigmatizing classifications of life stage; the bifurcation in the autobiographical self of clear-eyed narrator and mysterious, opaque object of narration. The aspect of process alluded to above calls for a complex and dynamic structure in the writing of frailty, a call to which Didion’s work responds. It is no accident that the experience of frailty starts to express itself in metaphors of darkening or falling. Blue Nights, as much as it is the story of bodily change or emotional disturbance, is the story of what Didion does not know, has been slow to realize, perhaps still resists knowing. It is a story of trading on what she used to know but finding that that knowledge no longer fits the shape of her current existence – with deleterious effects.

FRAILTY AND TOLERANCE Frailty is hard to know and to own in oneself in a society which seems to repudiate its very basis. As has been seen in the discussions by Thomas Cole, Sally Gadow, and Sharon Kaufman, to live in North America in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries is to gain self-worth and identity by one’s very individuality and the degree to which one can forge one’s own path. Even in the social phenomenology that makes a virtue of flexibility and adaptation to changed bodily condition, this is something the individual must do for themselves as agent of their own destiny. How can the individual accept even a degree of dependency in this particular cultural milieu? Didion is a fascinating instance of someone who has internalized and acted in accord with the ideology of self-reliance faultlessly – or perhaps even to a fault. On the one hand, she has always presented herself as vulnerable in body, writing about her debilitating experiences of illness and heartbreaking loss, and cultivating an image as physically slight, causing her to be ‘frailed’ even relatively early in life, as well as in older age. She is often described along with her fictional heroines as excessively thin (Menand 2015; Gelfant 1986: 52), frail (Gelfant 1986: 52; Jerslev 2018: 356; Menand 2015), and even – completely speculatively – ‘anaemic’ (Deshane 2012). On the other hand, she has insisted on her own resilience and traded in her writing on the tension between vulnerability and endurance. The ‘spare elegance’ of her prose itself is noted, and it is described as both vulnerable (McLennan 2019: passim), and also tough (Nelson 2017; McLennan 2019: 29). Indeed, being tough and being vulnerable are no longer opposites there. Didion’s explicit strategy has been to move briskly and unsentimentally on from heartache, failure, illness, and loss, both in narrative terms and in her own mode of living. Blue Nights marks a turning point in this respect, however. Didion at first describes a characteristically hardy attitude to both loss and ageing. She adopts as a kind of mantra the attitude to which her daughter once gave voice: ‘Like when someone dies, don’t dwell on it’ (155, 161, 168, 181; emphasis in the original). In this spirit, she keeps moving in the wake of her daughter’s death and her own increasing ill health – physically, a punishing schedule of flights and engagements, and creatively, writing and attending rehearsals of her own and her friends’ work for the theatre – until she collapses with shingles, brought on by exhaustion. She dedicates herself in advanced age to ‘maintain[ing] momentum’ (2011: 165) – even when, as it does, this starts to feel like ‘pushing oneself … beyond endurance’ (170). What has looked like strength, a steely determination to manage on her own in fact starts to reveal itself as a failure to cope with the new horizon of risk and bodily weakness, a self-sabotaging strategy which has squandered her physical and mental reserves.

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Blue Nights tells the story of her realization that the liberal ethic described by Thomas Cole, whereby one must remain ‘engaged, productive, and self-reliant’ – a supremely successful strategy for Didion as a younger woman, bolstered by family – might be less effective in older age and in bereavement. Her memoir offers what social phenomenologist Alfred Schutz looks to in (auto) biographical accounts: a means of understanding and historicizing such social attitudes. It offers a critique of the internalized slogans that saw Didion offering herself as a perfected version of the individualistic capitalist character, dedicated to work discipline and self-reliance: maintain momentum, work harder, spend more time alone (Didion 2011: 164, 105, 105, respectively). These are the mantras, as she says, that ‘echoed all the way down’ (164). Didion struggles to find in herself the ‘tolerance’ (Cole 1983: 39) for ageing and frailty that Cole suggests might replace what he describes ironically as an ‘enlightened’ – but unforgiving – modern version of ageing. Her memoir does not offer much in the way of evidence for a shift in strategy, or an accommodation to her changing body and its changing relationship to space and time. One feels that it might have been a hard task for Didion to have seen her body, as Gadow counsels, as ‘a beloved whose … imperfections are an essential part of the whole’ (1986: 243). But this memoir, as well as – to a lesser extent – Didion’s earlier memoir about her husband’s sudden death, The Year of Magical Thinking – tells the story of the price of maintaining momentum in spite of frailty – and the realization of this price. These works speak not only of experiencing overwhelming loss and its attendant grief, but also – in the wake of these experiences – of revising one’s entire understanding of what it is to be tough, strong, resilient; what it might mean to endure. The markers of Didion’s control over her life and the manifestations of her will – so central to her success both professionally and socially – come to seem maladaptive in this last period of her life and in the face of unbanishable tragedy. Her work ethic, her lack of sentimentality, her bodily discipline, her rhetorical vigour: all of these seem to turn against her. She describes herself, brushing off the diagnosis of shingles: ‘still oblivious to the extent to which maintaining momentum was precisely what had led me to the doctor’s office’ (2011: 174). The very unshakeable determination to impose these principles itself becomes a kind of frailty. Perhaps this is, more accurately, a ‘bad’ frailty, to be set against a ‘good’ frailty that Kaufman identifies with an ‘adaptational process’: a process that encompasses other people and which involves support and care. Didion’s independence, and the resourcefulness – even inventiveness, in Blum’s term – with which she finds ways to ‘maintain momentum’, might at first seem to be aligned with the characteristics of ageing successfully, and Didion herself has lived according to this assumption. What she finds, however, is that what constitutes flexibility in this instance is the ability to relinquish or at least modify key aspects of her identity. Adaptation takes the shape of formerly abjured behaviours: slowing down, working less hard, and, implicitly, relying more on others (after the self-injunction to ‘be alone more’ is shown to be a dangerous, if not catastrophic one). This rupture in lifelong habits did not prove easy, one can infer, but she reaches out to her nephew, Griffin (‘Griffin and I understand each other’ [108]) and reasserts her ability to ‘tell a true story’ (109) as a vital form of connection with which to ward off isolation. To do less, rather than more, is a hard precept: to do less feels as though to be less herself. She comes to realize, however, that there might be a difference between doing and being. Where she finds integrity – if not comfort – is in coming to know, after all, what frailty is by living it. She cannot embrace, but she comes to recognize, the ‘relentless … darkening of the days’ (69), foreshadowing death, in this new hinterland of frailty. ‘I know’, she writes, ‘what the frailty is, I know what the fear is’ (188). This is the ‘true story’ that she has to tell.

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CONCLUSION Didion cannot quite bring herself to follow Sally Gadow’s precepts and learn to love her imperfect body or relish the approach of death as the next ‘important’ (Scott-Maxwell 1979: 128) role she has to play. She does, however, give a vivid picture of how it feels to become frail, and to feel ‘frailed’ by the world around her, in early twenty-first century North America, labouring to remain the self-reliant, industrious individual that her social milieu demands. The literary writing under discussion here has touched on the range and contrast in attitudes that an experience of frailty might provoke in the subject: from wonder (Proust, Scott-Maxwell) to bewilderment (McWilliam) to denial (Didion). All these writers share the sense of revelation that Carel has suggested such an experience might offer: the idea of a new world opening up, whether welcome or unwelcome, in which the dimensions of time and space change. Once-tangible horizons in space (Three Guys for breakfast) may have come to seem impossibly far, but the ultimate horizon in time has come suddenly close. The ‘flexibility’ that Alan Blum identifies with successful ageing at any time of life, whether health and productivity are possible or not, is demonstrated in the openness to these profound life changes, and the uncertainty they usher in. A philosophy attentive to the lived experience of time and space, which understands the world to be offered to us only at the behest of the body, cannot predict or quantify the ever-changing horizon of risk or the limit of the life lived in frailty, but it may offer one of the best ways to describe it.

REFERENCES Berger, J. (1980), About Looking, New York: Pantheon. Bergson, H. ([1889] 2000), Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Date of Consciousness, Whitefish, MT: Kessinger. Blum, A. (2014), ‘Aging as a Social Form: The Phenomenology of the Passage’, Journal of Medical Humanities, 35: 19–36. Brim, O. (1974), ‘Selected Theories of the Male Mid-Life Crisis: A Comparative Analysis’, paper presented at the Annual Meetings of the American Psychological Association, (unpublished). Carel, H. (2016), Phenomenology of Illness, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Cole, T. R. (1983), ‘The “Enlightened View of Ageing”: Victorian Morality in a New Key’, The Hastings Center Report, 13 (3): 34–40. Deshane, E. (2012), ‘Evelyn Deshane on Joan Didion’, Many Gendered Mothers Project. Available at: http:// the​many​gend​ered​moth​ers.blogs​pot.com/eve​lyn-desh​ane-on-joan-did​ion.html (accessed 13 May 2022). Didion, J. (2011), Blue Nights, New York: Knopf Doubleday. Fox, R. C. (1990), ‘The Evolution of American Bioethics: A Sociological Perspective’, in G. Weisz (ed.), Social Science Perspectives on Medical Ethics, 201–20, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Gadow, S. (1986), ‘Frailty and Strength: The Dialectic in Ageing’, in T. R. Cole and S. Gadow (eds), What Does It Mean to Grow Old? Reflections from the Humanities, 235–43, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Gelfant, B. (1986), ‘Review: Joan Didion: Essays and Conversations by Ellen G. Friedman’, Western American Literature, 21 (1): 51–4. Gergen, K. J. (1980), ‘The Emerging Crisis in Life-Span Developmental Theory’, in P. Baltes and D. G. Brim (eds), Life Span Development and Behavior, 31–63, Cambridge, MA: Academic Press.

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Grenier, A. (2007), ‘Constructions of Frailty in the English Language, Care Practice and the Lived Experience’, Ageing & Society, 27: 425–45. Grenier, A., L. Lloyd, and C. Philipson (2017), ‘Precarity in Late Life: Rethinking Dementia as a “Frailed” Old Age’, Sociology of Health and Illness, 39 (2): 318–30. Gullette, M. M. (2004), Aged by Culture, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Husserl, E. ([1931] 1988), Cartesian Meditations, trans. Dorion Cairns, Dordrecht: Kluwer. Jerslev, A. (2018), ‘The Elderly Female Face in Beauty and Fashion Ads: Joan Didion for Céline’, European Journal of Cultural Studies, 21 (3): 349–62. Kaufman, S. (1994), ‘The Social Construction of Frailty: An Anthropological Perspective’, Journal of Aging Studies, 8 (1): 45–58. Laws, G. (1997), ‘Spatiality and Age Relations’, in A. Jamieson, S. Harper and C. Victor (eds), Critical Approaches to Ageing and Later Life, 90–101, Maidenhead: Open University Press. MacIntyre, A. (1999), Dependent Rational Animals: Why Human Beings Need the Virtues, London: Duckworth. McLennan, M. (2019), Philosophy and Vulnerability: Catherine Breillat, Joan Didion and Audre Lorde, London: Bloomsbury. McWilliam, C. (2011), What to Look for in Winter: A Memoir in Blindness, London: Vintage. Menand, L. (2015), ‘Out of Bethlehem: The Radicalization of Joan Didion’, New Yorker, 17 August. Available at: https://www.newyor​ker.com/magaz​ine/2015/08/24/out-of-bethle​hem (accessed 28 May 2022). Nelson, D. (2017), Tough Enough: Arbus, Arendt, Didion, McCarthy, Sontag, Weil, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Proust, M. ([1913] 2003), In Search of Lost Time: Volume 6, Finding Time Again, trans. Ian Patterson, London: Penguin. Schopenhauer, A. (2014), Parerga and Paralipomena [1851], 2 vols., trans. Sabine Roehr and Christopher Janaway, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Schutz, A. (1962), Collected Papers, Vol. 1: The Problem of Social Reality, Leiden: Martinus Nijhoff. Scott-Maxwell, F. (1979), The Measure of My Days, London: Penguin. Starr, J. M. (1982–3), ‘Toward a Social Phenomenology of Aging: Studying the Self Process in Biographical Work’, International Journal of Aging and Human Development, 16 (4): 255–69. Toombs, S. K. (1995), ‘The Lived Experience of Disability’, Human Studies, 18: 9–23. Waugh, P. (2013), ‘The Naturalistic Turn, the Syndrome, and the Rise of the Neo-Phenomenological Novel’, in J. Peacock and T. Lustig (eds), Diseases and Disorders in Contemporary Fiction, 17–34, London: Routledge. Wondolowski, C., and D. K. Davis (1988), ‘The Lived Experience of Aging in the Oldest Old: A Phenomenological Study’, American Journal of Psychoanalysis, 48 (3): 261–70. Woodward, K. (2015), ‘Feeling Frail and National Statistical Panic: Joan Didion in Blue Nights and the American Economy at Risk’, Age Culture Humanities, 2: 347–67.

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PART THREE

Case Studies RAQUEL MEDINA

This third part of the Handbook brings together case studies focusing on artists and genres from different national traditions. Intending to broaden the intercultural direction of Age(ing) Studies, the chapters in this part comprise scholarship that focuses on ageing in cultural texts and by artists from a wide range of geographical locations. Ageing is diverse and needs to be understood in the context of that diversity. Jay Sokolovsky (2009) acknowledges that each culture has its way of understanding reality, and therefore ageing. An intersectional perspective is also crucial, whereby class, gender, race, ethnicity, and religion are all conceived as having an important role to play in the experience of ageing across the lifecourse. Ageing studies have been strengthened in the past three decades by feminist approaches to ageing and have underscored the intersections of age with gender, race, sexuality, social class, religion, and ethnicity (Crenshaw 1991; Calasanti and King 2015). This intersectional approach to ageing has found a fruitful space in the discipline of cross-cultural gerontology. Following this idea of diversity in ageing across cultures, cross-cultural gerontology, as defined by Sandra Torres (2011: 341), ‘examines how different cultures conceptualize the process of ageing, and the social position that old age holds’. In explaining this conceptualization, Torres (2011: 341) argues that the understanding of ageing is based on cultural values, which in addition are transferred from one generation to the next and determine how people from a given culture make sense of their community. As the chapters included in this part demonstrate, despite globalization, Western perceptions of ageing are not universally dominant and are often contested; hence the urgency of approaching ageing from a cross-/inter-cultural perspective. For instance, most of these case studies analyze cultural texts offering representations of ageing and old age that differ from Western binary approaches to ageing as either a decline narrative or one of success. Closely related to what Linn Sandberg (2013) has coined as affirmative old age, most chapters included in Part Three focus on discourses of ageing characterized by its diversity and even fluidity. In this sense, one of the most important features of the case studies included in this part is that they make clear how age cannot be understood without considering the cultures from which discourses of ageing emerge. The intersectionality and cultural diversity of age reveal texts in which different

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groups of ageing people not only are subject to inequality but are also given a voice to express and defend a variety of conceptualizations of ageing that are not rooted in the binary success / decline narrative. The cultural and national contexts of the texts explored here affect the variety of approaches used in analysis. These include gender studies, post-colonialism, environmentalism, posthumanism, affects and emotions, intergenerational understanding, and even cultural memory. The intersectional and critical approaches employed reveal differences, but also some commonalities in terms of cultural metaphors and symbols used to explore and narrativize age and ageing. Within the context of filmic representations of ageing in Japan, Katsura Sako (Chapter 24) investigates dementia care practices in Japan as represented in three films. These films foreground intergenerational relationships and cultural nostalgia for the rural home as a place that anchors the self. On the one hand, the films reject the Cartesian body–mind division that reduces those living with dementia to narratives of loss and decline. On the other hand, they indicate that although there have been changes in the discourse of care practices in Japan, the pressure to care is still placed on families, suggesting the persistent cultural myth of familial care in Japan. One of the key topics identified by Sako is the role nostalgia for a traditional and rural past plays in the representation of ageing. It is the same nostalgia that Dagmar Gramshammer-Hohl (Chapter 30) finds in Russian émigré literature where older protagonists come to embody nostalgia for the lost past of rural life in pre-Stalinist culture. The idea of a ‘safe place’ for older people and their role in the community appears also in the Māori context in the chapter by Paola Della Valle (Chapter 29). The ‘problem’ of an increasingly ageing population has led the New Zealand government to devise protocols and strategies for improving the health and well-being of older people. As the chapter suggests, literature plays an important role in criticizing or sustaining the status quo regarding older people in New Zealand. Memory is a key metaphor that surfaces in some of the chapters in this part. Memory is explored from the post-colonial perspectives of cultural memory and trauma. In Chapter 26, Paula Morgan examines the interface between individual traumatic memory and broader violating social memories in the work of Caribbean writers. Here fiction effectively articulates political, cultural, and ethical imperatives that enhance the potential for communality and the value and dignity of human societies. In Chapter 28, Saskia M. Fürst centres her analysis on the writer Alice Walker, the first African American woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Remembering her African Amerindian roots functions as a curative process for the mature, upper-class, Black female protagonist in Walker’s Now Is the Time to Open Your Heart. These two chapters revolve around the notions of individual and cultural memories and the need not to forget even if the past remembered is a traumatic one. Time is a key element in many of the chapters in this part. In the case of memoirs written by people diagnosed with Huntington’s Disease (HD) and / or by their carers or family members, time is shaped by the certainty of a progressive physical and cognitive deterioration; that is, these memoirs revolve around the notion of decline. Pramod K. Nayar (Chapter 34) characterizes these narratives as ones that foreground the knowledge that people living with HD have about the disease and its progression. He argues that these memoirs use narrative techniques such as ‘performative prolepsis’ to express how the physical decline and cognitive impairment of the future already affect the present narrative of the person living with HD.

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Time is also present in Marta Cerezo’s chapter (Chapter 32), in which death and finitude in Jackie Kay’s poetry are approached from the perspective of liminality and affective theory. Following Jan Baars’s consideration of time in ageing and his notion of ‘finitization’, Cerezo perceives in Kay’s poetry an ethical aspect of ageing that, due to the fluidity and vulnerability of old age, allows the person to move affectively towards the other. In Kay’s poetry, Cerezo identifies what she calls ‘affective-oriented time’: time experienced in affective orientation towards the other and towards oneself. Intersections of age and gender with aspects such as ethnicity, race, and the environment are core to many chapters included in this part, as seen, for instance, in Paula Morgan’s analysis of Caribbean literature. Gender and age are linked to ecocritical and post-humanist perspectives in Aagje Swinnen’s chapter (Chapter 33) about the French-Canadian animated film Louise en hiver (2016), an adaptation of Defoe’s (1719) The Life and Strange and Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe. The analysis examines how the female protagonist is affected and effected by the landscape and her canine companion Pépère, and ultimately discusses the value older individuals like Louise have for our communities. Elinor Shepley’s chapter (Chapter 27) on Welsh literature offers a fascinating analysis of short stories that deal with older women who grow personally and politically when they are widowed. But the chapter also returns to the topic of memory, ethnicity, and storytelling. Thus, employing Barbara Frey Waxman’s notion of Reifungsroman, the chapter argues that the contemporary trope of the returning older native who revisits places from childhood complicates the twentieth-century figure of the older storyteller or remembrancer of the past – and an associated conception of Welsh identity – by turning its focus to the present and the future. Ageing women are also the focal point of the chapter on Samuel Beckett by Irene De Angelis (Chapter 31). This chapter explains Beckett’s obsession with ageing, particularly with ageing women. Beckett conceived old age as a process that foregrounds the individual’s increasing vulnerability – as a form of impairment. His ageing or aged characters bear the scars of history (Second World War) on their minds and bodies; thus, their movements are limited, and they experience confinement. According to De Angelis, the growing immobility and invisibility of these ageing bodies, on the verge of disappearing into nothingness, correspond to a reduction of the psyche to fragments, a feature which particularly characterizes Beckett’s more radically experimental plays of his late period. Gender is the focus of Núria Casado Gual’s chapter (Chapter 25) on new Catalan theatre, but also the ageism and stereotypes that still prevail in contemporary Catalan society. Drawing from the double framework of Theatre Studies and Age(ing) Studies, Casado Gual shows how the contemporary ‘age-turn’ of Catalan drama coincides with a time in which well-known male and female actors of the baby-boom generation are entering their later years. The two comedies analysed by Casado Gual, although not completely abandoning age stereotypes, succeed in fostering reflection on the subjective experience of ageing and the socio-cultural factors that condition it. The diversity of ageing across cultures shown in this final part stresses the importance of approaching Age(ing) Studies from a variety of cultural contexts, including, but also moving beyond, Western narratives about and perspectives on ageing. Even when the cultural representations of ageing emerge from Western cultures, as is the case of some of the chapters included in this part, they offer new and rich perspectives on ageing that not only emphasize difference but also go beyond the narratives of decline or successful old age.

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REFERENCES Calasanti, T., and N. King (2015), ‘Intersectionality and Age’, in J. Twigg and W. Martin (eds), The Routledge Handbook of Cultural Gerontology, London: Routledge. Crenshaw, K. (1991), ‘Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color’, Stanford Law Review, 43: 1241–99, doi:10.2307/1229039. Sandberg, L. (2013), ‘Affirmative Old Age: The Ageing Body and Feminist Theories on Difference’, International Journal of Ageing and Later Life, 8 (1): 11–40. Sokolovsky, J. (2009), ‘Introduction: Human Maturity and Global Ageing in Cultural Context’, in J. Sokolovsky (ed.), The Cultural Context of Ageing: Worldwide Perspectives, xv–xix, Westport, CT: Praeger. Torres, S. (2011), ‘Cross-Cultural Differences in Ageing’, in I. Stuart Hamilton (ed.), An Introduction to Gerontology, 340–62, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

Dementia in Japanese cinema: The family and rural nostalgia KATSURA SAKO

INTRODUCTION Dementia affects not only the person with dementia but also those around that person, especially, family members in caring roles. Stories of dementia are therefore often those of families. This is particularly the case in Japan, a country where elder care has historically been considered a family responsibility. There is a large body of cultural narratives about dementia and family in Japan (see Sako forthcoming; Sako and Falcus 2015), and Japanese cinema provides a particularly fertile ground, with a rich tradition of family drama which ‘has remained salient within [contemporary] Japanese filmmaking’ (Bingham 2015: 119). This chapter considers three examples of popular cinematic narratives and explores the discourse and the representations of dementia and family in them: Shunya Ito’s Hanaichimonme (One Silver Coin’s Worth of Flowers) (1985), Tomio Kuriyama’s Home Sweet Home (2000), and Mitsutoshi Tanaka’s Sakura saku (Blossoms Blossom) (2014).1 These films have potentially had an important impact on the popular imagination about care and dementia in Japan. Hanaichimonme, Japanese Academy Best Film Award winner, and Sakura saku, which is based on a short story written by a famous song writer and singer, are both mainstream films, which feature well-known actors and are produced by one of the largest film production and distribution companies in Japan. Home Sweet Home is an independent film, and yet it was directed by an experienced director of family drama, with some established actors in main roles. In Hanaichimonme, an old man is diagnosed with Alzheimer’s; the latter two films do not mention a formal diagnosis, but in each an old man has a cognitive impairment that the texts imply is dementia. In all three films, the care responsibility falls on the old man’s son’s family, testing their familial and generational relationships. Situating these films in the context of the anxiety over an ageing population and care in contemporary Japan, I examine how their familial narratives of dementia depict the complex relationality of illness and care and how they all deliver a reassuring vision of a self-sufficient and self-caring family, with recourse to the nostalgic evocation of rurality.

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CARE AND THE FAMILY IN CONTEMPORARY JAPAN With a rapidly ageing population2 and a declining birth rate, there has been a growing sense of crisis over the provision of care in Japan. The traditional model of care was based on the patrilineal Confucian family in a multigenerational household where women cared for dependent family members. In particular, care for the aged parents was considered the responsibility of the eldest son, and by extension, of his wife. Social and economic as well demographic changes since the postwar period have made this model of family, and of care, unsustainable. The care crisis is therefore often associated with the decline of the traditional family. However, as scholars have suggested, this Confucian family was largely constructed by the state in the early twentieth century to facilitate the country’s swift modernization and industrialization (see White 2002 for detailed discussion). This model has since played an ideological role in official policies in Japan, including care policies which have promoted familial care as ‘tradition and culture’ (Tokoro 2009: 61). In the 1990s, the government finally began to socialize care and in 2000, introduced Long-Term Care Insurance (LTCI), obliging all over forties to contribute to the cost of care services. This has increased the provision of social care, and diversified forms of families, households, lifecourses, and values have also brought more sons and husbands into caring roles. Nonetheless, the provision of social care remains inadequate for the rapidly growing demand, and the majority of primary carers are still women, raising a concern that care continues to be sustained by and reproduce gender inequality (Ueno 2011). As many families are forced to care under difficult circumstances, both older and younger generations are made vulnerable – financially, socially, emotionally, and physically – as incidents of abuse and suicide testify (Kasuga 2012). In short, the family is a contentious site in the discourse and debates about care in Japan. As in other ageing societies, the rising prevalence of dementia among the population has added to the anxiety about care in Japan. There have been initiatives in recent decades to promote an ethical understanding of people living with dementia. For example, the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare changed the diagnostic term for dementia from chiho sho (‘chiho’ means being demented, and ‘sho’ means disease) which had negative connotations, to the more neutral term, ninchi sho (‘ninchi’ means cognition) in the attempt to de-stigmatize the condition (Ministry 2004). Recent years have indeed seen a greater representation of people with dementia in media and publishing as well as a growing number of support and advocacy groups for them and their families and friends (Sako forthcoming). The understanding of dementia has also been inflected by specific cultural factors such as the local cultural concept of boke, forgetfulness that is believed to be preventable (Ikeda and Roemer 2009; Traphagan 1998). William E. Deal and Peter J. Whitehouse (2000) and John Traphagan (1998) have also suggested that the socially oriented concept of self in Japanese culture contributes to an approach to dementia that is more concerned with behavioural problems that signify social and moral failures than cognitive problems that are often seen as threats to self in Western contexts. In the three films, the family provides a unique relational space through which the complexity of the experience of dementia can be explored. The films all explore what Joan Tronto describes as two elements of care that are needed to ‘care well’: ‘a disposition to care and care work’ (2005: 130). But they do so in different ways and to different degrees, reflecting the thirty years that lie between them and the changing situations and discourses around care and dementia in Japan that are described above.3 The caregiving in Hanaichimonme largely conforms to the traditional

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gendered model of familial care, while Home Sweet Home is more questioning about this and explores the possibility of non-kinship care. The more recent Sakura saku sees male members giving intimate care, although this is necessitated by the daughter-in-law’s refusal to give care. While the families struggle with caregiving in these films, external or institutional care is seen as a last and undesirable option (Hanaichimonme), unavailable and unaffordable (Home Sweet Home), or it is not mentioned at all (Sakura saku). Despite these differences, all of the films attend to and represent the embodied experience of dementia, exhibiting what Edward R. Drott describes as ‘holistic theories of self and person’ (2018: 11). This means that although the films depict cognitive problems, they are not treated as an existential threat to one’s self. The films therefore reject the Cartesian cognitive-based model of the subject and of dementia, a model that associates dementia with loss. In this respect, the three films support the recent calls in dementia studies for a more expansive understanding of the self that includes its embodiment (Kontos, Miller, and Kontos 2017). At the same time, the films do differ in some other ways in their representations of dementia. Considered together, the films exhibit a broad shift of focus from the family’s to the old man’s perspective, which also corresponds to a shift of focus from ‘care work’ to ‘disposition to care’, or from ‘care for’ to ‘care about’ in their explorations of familial care. Hanaichimonme and Home Sweet Home mostly represent dementia from the family’s perspective, focused on the challenges of caregiving and the old man’s behavioural problems. In Sakura saku the old man’s subjective experience is central to the narrative of family recovery and there is a closer exploration of the relationality in the experience of dementia and care. Central to the representation of dementia and, more broadly, to the narrative of familial care in these films is the nostalgic evocation of rurality. The films all feature a family’s movement from urban to rural places, and this movement is key to the family’s overcoming of the challenges of care and the resolution of familial and generational disconnection. In particular, rurality is associated, in both narrative and visual terms, with history, natural landscape, and most importantly, home. Through this nostalgic evocation, the rural place is represented as a place of healing both for the old man with dementia and for the family. Such rural nostalgia is rooted in the history of industrialization in Japan since the late nineteenth century, which involved rapid and mass migration from rural, agricultural areas to cities. The migration continued into the 1970s, causing overpopulation and poor living conditions in cities and depopulation in rural areas and their economic and cultural isolation (Sugimoto 2003: 68–9). Paul Waley suggests that this history connects to the two distinctive approaches to landscape in contemporary Japan: ‘the preoccupation with construction’ and ‘nostalgia for an imagined rural landscape’ that is promoted through its link with ‘the virtues of “home” (furusato)’ (2011: 91). As Adam Bingham suggests, using the examples of Ozu’s Tokyo monogatari (Tokyo Story) (1953) and more recent works, these contrasting spatial meanings are also important in Japanese family drama that is concerned with the tension between older generations in the country and city-dwelling younger generations.4 Similarly, the three films examined in this chapter utilize this contrast to highlight and resolve familial and generational tensions caused or exposed by the challenges of caregiving. The nostalgic rural home also provides a space for a strong evocation of the embodied self. The centrality of familial care in these films indicates the continuing dominance of the ‘myth’ of “family care” ’ in the Japanese popular cultural imagination (Ueno 2011: 104; translation by the author). Mapped out in the family’s movement from urban to rural places, the narrative of familial

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care and recovery in the films concludes with a vision of a self-sufficient and self-caring unit. This is the vision of the ideal family found in official discourses and policies, a family described by Merry White as: ‘a compliant, productive, and reproductive middle-class family, able to manage the care of its own dependents across generations’ (2002: 11). This reassuring vision of the family may be a reflection of a country that continues to struggle with the pressures of demographic changes. Hanaichimonme Produced in 1986 in the midst of the high economic growth described as the ‘bubble economy’, Hanaichimonme paints a picture of a country where public sources of care were severely limited and care responsibilities fell upon families, especially women. Set in Shimane and Osaka, the film explores the impact of dementia on the Takano family. Fuyukichi, who is diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease in the film, is a figure clearly connected to the past: he lives with his wife in rural Shimane (known as a spiritual and historical place in Japan); formerly a successful archaeologist, he is virtually forced to retire due to his perceived obsolete status – he is no longer research active and has broken a pot that he himself had excavated because of his unsteady hands. The symptoms of his Alzheimer’s worsen in the film, but his wife falls ill and two daughters nearby are unable to care (one is married and her primary responsibilities are for the family she is married into and the other, unmarried daughter works at night and is unable to provide the full-time care that the father needs). Fuyukichi moves in with his son, Haruo’s family in urban Osaka and his daughter-in-law becomes his primary carer; the family is falling apart, however: son Haruo lives alone near his workplace and is having an affair; wife Keiko has a drinking problem; and the children are detached from Haruo. Some aspects of the representations of dementia in the film reflect the negativity and anxiety around dementia, which was called chiho sho at the time of the production. One example of this is the use of the life-in-death image of a zombie in the film, an image that is prevalent in the imagery of dementia (Behuniak 2011). In an early episode that first clearly marks Fuyukichi’s illness in the film, a shot of the suddenly darkening summer sky intimates his disorientation, followed by a scene of torrential rain. Furthermore, Keiko’s search for the father-in-law is dramatized in a Gothic mode, as she walks into a dark cave, formerly an excavation site for his research; the camera moves slowly, simulating the movement of a torch in Keiko’s hand, and suddenly it presents a close-up frontal shot of Fuyukichi’s expressionless face, with his mouth hanging open, on his slumped upper torso against the wall of the cave. Turning Fuyukichi into an object of horror, this shot conveys Keiko’s fear rather than his. Similarly, in a geriatric hospital where Fuyukichi temporarily stays, he and other older people with dementia are seen in the dark, with a vacant look and in white institutional clothes. While the film contains these representations that objectify people with dementia, it does not reduce Fuyukichi’s self to cognitive function. For example, Fuyukichi’s failure to recognize his son does not upset the family, and the grandson tells Haruo, in a light-hearted tone, ‘Don’t be sad, Dad. He is forgetting all of us.’5 Instead, the film draws attention to Fuyukichi’s embodied self. His seemingly aimless ‘wandering’ therefore is presented as something meaningful to him, through his strong connection to archaeology: he walks out every evening, in a suit and with a briefcase, to ‘give lectures’ as Keiko surmises; he enters a construction site, but this act is explained by the broken pot he digs out from the ground, with a big smile. Katherine Brittain et al. suggest that the pathologization of walking as ‘wandering’ relates to the Cartesian mind–body dualism. Within this

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framework, walking is an act of the mind but when it is taken over by the body, walking becomes ‘incorrect’ (2017: 272). In Hanamichimonme, attention to an embodied self turns Fuyukichi’s seemingly random ‘wandering’ into meaningful walks. At the same time, the film does emphasize Fuyukichi’s perceived failure to adhere to social norms, bearing out Drott’s observation that in Japanese films ‘this [cognitive dysfunction] in itself is not treated as a major concern. Rather it is the antisocial behaviour of the senile elder that becomes central to these narratives’ (2018: 14). In relation to this, Drott suggests that food is ‘a potent symbol of sociality or asociality’ in Japanese films (15). In Hanaichimonme, Fuyukichi’s manner of eating is associated with his asociality, as he is seen gorging food, dropping food on the floor, or continuing to eat in the midst of a family argument over his care. In some cases, the film not only indicates the logic of Fuyukichi’s behaviours but also emphasizes the external and social risks they engender. For instance, his mishandling of the kitchen cooker while ‘cooking’ in the middle of the night sets off a safety alarm, causing all residents of the building to evacuate in confusion. Fuyukichi’s ‘excavation’ of a broken pot during his ‘wandering’ mentioned above is reduced to a social embarrassment for the family when he is brought back in a police car, waving proudly at curious-looking neighbours. Therefore, while the film suggests the meaning of Fuyukichi’s behaviours for himself, it also depicts the negative social consequences that they may have. The narrative of family recovery in the film is hinged upon the contrast between urban and rural places and the new and the past. In the urban space of Osaka, away from his rural home, Fuyukichi is seen to be out of place. The images of sprawling construction sites are a sign of economic prosperity, but one that ironically recalls archaeological excavation in reference to Fuyukichi’s professional life. In one panoramic shot of this landscape, a tiny figure of Fuyukichi is seen on the balcony of the family’s flat in a high-rise building in a way that emphasizes his dislocation. In contrast, rural Shimane is associated with ancient history, scenic natural landscape, and Fuyukichi’s identity and selfhood. This is emphasized by the documentary film that opens the film which has recorded Fuyukichi’s excavation work in the ‘country of myth’. Faced with Fuyukichi’s advancing condition, the family moves him to a geriatric hospital but seeing the inhumane care there, Haruo decides to bring his father back home to Shimane. As they approach Shimane, the film depicts Fuyukichi’s emotional reaction to the panoramic view of the open sea at sunset, a reaction not verbalized but embodied in his wailing, suggesting his awareness of the place. The family’s reunion is also emphasized through the nostalgic rural imagery: in the early evening’s breeze and residual light, the family walk through lush greenery, and signs of a traditional summer festival – lanterns, women in summer kimono, and the lute music heard in the distance – add an almost magical other-worldly quality to the scene. In this evocation of peaceful rural life, the couple walk together, following the children walking with their grandfather; from behind them, the viewer witnesses their togetherness. The care responsibility for Fuyukichi has helped Keiko to stop drinking; Haruo has ended his affair; the children enjoy a harmonious time as a family. As the family regains its coherence, there is a sense of generational succession. In the closing scene, Fuyukichi is seen in his futon, his upper body propped on his elbows against the floor. He is presented like a child playing with a toy as he is trying to put together pieces of a broken pot. His interest in the pot and his faint humming of the song of Hanaichinonme, which his wife used to sing, do affirm his embodied selfhood, but Haruo and Keiko’s tears and her joining in the singing of Hanaichimonme also convey the sense of the loss of the older generation, the father, who has become a child, lost just like the broken pot.

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Home Sweet Home Home Sweet Home is a comic drama about the Yamashita family’s care crisis. Hiroshi, a widower and a former successful opera singer, has dementia and lives with his son, Taro, and his wife, Kikuyo, who together run a sushi restaurant. When a violent fight between Hiroshi and Taro leaves Taro permanently wheelchair-bound and the restaurant closed, care for Hiroshi presents a practical and economic problem to Kikuyo. Two daughters are unable to help: Matsuko is in a broken marriage, and Kazuyo is pursuing her career as a professional pianist. Released in late 2000, shortly after LTCI was implemented, the film contains no visible sign of the impact of the new care programme. Instead, affordable and good quality external care is hardly available in the film, and the family is in danger of being ‘wreck[ed]’ as Matsuko puts it. As the title suggests, the home as a locus of belonging and care is significant in this film, and the film depicts the family’s search for a home for Hiroshi but, ultimately, for themselves. The film explores the care crisis in post-bubble Tokyo, where the economy and family life seem more precarious. The Yamashitas live in an old district of Tokyo that is popular with foreign tourists. Foreign customers in business suits at Taro’s sushi restaurant suggest a global economy that enmeshes both the family’s traditional trade and the local community. Close shots of Taro’s culinary skills that produce aesthetically pleasing sushi emphasize the cultural and economic capital they represent. In contrast, Matsuko’s husband is unemployed for months and due to the financial strain, she, with her family, moves back in with her parents. Therefore, although focused on one family, the film situates the care crisis in this broader, post-bubble economic landscape that endangers familial care. Tokyo’s urban space of capital production alienates Hiroshi, an old man with dementia. The opening scene shows a black and white panoramic view of the Sumida River, a landmark of this part of Tokyo, accompanied by classical music. The viewer is immersed in this nostalgic vision, until the images turn to colour and the camera shows Hiroshi at the riverbank, conducting his imaginary orchestra to the classical music coming from a music player, in front of a group of homeless people. Later, out of his immersion, he becomes lost and is taken to a police station. As the opening scene at the riverbank exemplifies, this film depicts Hiroshi’s embodied self in relation to his love of music, and his subjective world is often represented on screen. At the same time, the film emphasizes, as does Hanaichimonme, the antisociality that his behaviours signify, and these behaviours are presented as more troubling than his failure to recognize his family members. For instance, Hiroshi keeps interrupting Kazuyo’s piano lessons with pupils. Crucially, it is Hiroshi’s loud singing that leads to the fatal fight between him and Taro. The film presents this fight in a farcical manner that is common in the comic family drama, but in doing so, emphasizes the animalistic aggressiveness of Hiroshi, contrasting it to Taro’s elegant culinary skills, which are highlighted on screen shortly before the fight. In this way, dementia literally figures as a physical and financial threat to the able-bodied, productive younger generations of the family. In the film, running out of options, the women in the Yamashita family decide to leave Hiroshi, in the middle of the night, at a residential community located in Iwate where he grew up. This plot alludes to Obasuteyama (Mountain of Abandoned Old Mothers), a well-known old story in Japan. In this story set in a rural village, a son abandons his old mother on a mountain, as the local custom dictates, to reserve resources for younger generations in the community. The story reveals the ethical complexity around care and abandonment in the country (see Danley 2015; Traphagan 2013) and

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has been adapted in many works including the Palme d’Or winner, Narayama bushiko (The Ballad of Narayama) (1983). Home Sweet Home evades the ethical questioning of the abandonment in favour of a comical dramatization of the care crisis. Matsuko literally delivers Hiroshi to Iwate in the restaurant’s delivery van, and non-diegetic marching music frames her as a woman on a mission. Just like the old woman in Narayama bushiko, Hiroshi is left perched on a stone, but with food, sake, money, and Matsuko’s letter asking for his temporary care. Parodying the obasute plot, the film highlights the consequences of the shortage of, not food, but care, in contemporary Japan. Like Shimane in Hanaichimonme, Iwate, a northern prefecture, is associated with agriculture, and the residential community there represent an ideal nurturing rural home. The local accent in the residents’ speech and long distance views of the rural landscape with Mt Iwate are part of the peaceful rural imagery in the film. The residence houses a small group of old women who are unable to rely on relatives for care and support. This non-kinship community or a ‘group home’ as the residents call it in the film, nonetheless forms a family-like unit of care. Like Hanaichimonme, the film exploits the association of food with sociality to indicate the functionality of this model of care: while the Yamashita family in Tokyo eat, often alone, take-away, instant, or hospital meals, the residents share the meals they cook using the vegetables they grow. Upon his arrival at the residential community, Hiroshi’s visceral response to the miso soup offered by the women affirms the therapeutic power of the community. The film’s investment in this new model of care is clear in Kazuyo’s decision to move there and open another residence for men and her parents’ decision to follow and help her. The film closes on an optimistic note, as the residents share Taro’s elaborate dishes and enjoy a musical performance by Hiroshi and Kazuyo. In this film, care is gendered in that it is primarily women who are involved in or concerned about securing a caring environment. Nonetheless, the community of care it depicts clearly moves away from the traditional model of care that is based on kinship. It is however a self-sufficient community that is supported by able-bodied, independent residents. This is suggested by the ‘narrative prosthesis’ (Mitchell and Snyder 2001) that the film exercises as Taro overcomes his disability in his role as a cook and Hiroshi demonstrates his able-bodiedness in saving a drowning child in the river. The residents’ various contributions of skills and labour, from cleaning to operating construction vehicles, are presented on screen like a catalogue, with each resident’s life history provided in the voice-over by the manager as she speaks to Kazuyo. This model of nonkin care, then, does not solve all problems related to care. In the film, the manager acknowledges this in her conversation with Kazuyo: ‘I have one big worry. What if everyone starts needing wheelchairs?’ She answers herself, hastily, ‘As long as we stay fit we don’t need public help, less trouble for the nation.’ The reference to the nation alludes to the care crisis it faces. On screen is the panoramic view of Mt Iwate that the two women are looking at and the sequence closes with Kazuyo’s determined face. The viewer may be expected to share the manager’s optimism, reassured by these images of the future of care for the nation. Ultimately, however, the manager’s question remains unanswered as it is unclear whether or how the residential community it depicts would accommodate the dependence that may become inevitable in the future. Sakura saku In Sakura saku, Shuntaro Osaki lives with his son’s family in Tokyo and begins to show symptoms of dementia. This challenges the already disintegrating family: Shunsuke has neglected his family

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for his successful corporate career and had an affair in the past; his wife is resentful and out of the resentment, refuses to care for her father-in-law; the teenage son has opted out of university and works part-time in a convenience store. He has thus failed to follow the normative path for young men in Japan: to become a white-collar worker. The apathetic teenage daughter spends time at home reading comic books and eating snacks.6 As in the two other films, it is the real and imagined rural home that brings into focus the embodied self of the person with dementia and heals the rupture within the family. There is a greater representation of the experience of dementia from a subjective perspective in this film than in the other two films, partly because Shuntaro’s dementia is at an early stage and he is generally more verbally communicative than Fuyukichi and Hiroshi. More significantly, the film presents a much more individualized narrative of dementia by weaving Shuntaro’s personal history into it, while far less concerned with the antisociality of some of his behaviours. For instance, just like Home Sweet Home, this film begins with Shuntaro’s ‘wandering’. The viewer sees Shuntaro performing kabuki, a form of traditional drama, in a street, blocking traffic and getting wet in heavy rain. This, however, is preceded by the title sequence which presents a child kabuki actor and cherry blossoms, enabling the viewer to imagine the psychological world of Shuntaro as he engages in the seemingly illogical behaviour. There are signs of his disconnection from the external world – a few pedestrians discreetly look back at Shuntaro and a car circumvents him, sounding its horn – but the camera stays focused on Shuntaro at the centre of the frame, keeping the viewer’s focus on him, inviting the viewer to imagine what these behaviours mean for him. This meaning becomes clear later when Shunsuke realizes that his father is looking for his childhood home. This individualized narrative of dementia resists the othering of the person with dementia, but it also centralizes memory in the representation of dementia. This is most prominent in the family’s search for Shuntaro’s childhood home that drives the narrative of familial care in the film. The search is based on Shuntaro’s fond, and yet increasingly inconsistent, memories of his childhood in rural Fukui, a brief period of happiness with his parents in a house with a cherry tree before his father died. To help him remember, Shunsuke launches a family road trip to find this home. The lack of information about the exact location of the home as well as Shuntaro’s increasingly unresponsive state add an element of detection to the family’s search. Remembering and forgetting therefore become central to the narrative of dementia in the film. However, in this film, memory is not reduced to individual cognitive function, as the film makes remembering a familial endeavour and depicts the affective and collective aspects of memory. Key to such remembering in the film is nostalgic rurality and this, as in the other two films, is connected to history, nature and of course, home. Following the family’s journey from Tokyo to rural Fukui, the film represents on screen open fields, remote villages, and a traditional wedding and festivals that the family encounters. As the family gets closer to Fukui, there is a growing sense of Shuntaro’s self, in an embodied form, returning: at a festival in an old shrine in the middle of woodland (set in the historic Heisen-ji Shrine in Fukui), he responds to the music and plays the lute beautifully, as he used to. The shots of the deep green trees and grounds around the shrine accompany his lute music on screen, emphasizing its synchronicity with the natural and historic environment. The camera then slowly zooms out to present an extreme long shot of the shrine and the crowd at the festival, including the family in the front of it, framed by thick lines of tall trees on both sides, while Shuntaro’s lute fades into the distance. The voice-over by an old local woman who is moved by his

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music closes this sequence – ‘for someone born in this country, that song may be part of a distant memory’, reiterating connection between self, memory, history, and the land. The road trip also helps to heal ruptures within the family, and the film utilizes, like the other two films, the social meaning of food to mark the return of familial order through one convivial dinner. Significantly, this dinner also celebrates Shuntaro’s sudden (although not long-lasting) state of lucidity, suggesting a strong connection between remembering and family coherence. Ultimately, the lack of material evidence (the house and the cherry tree) at the likely location of the home makes it difficult to verify Shuntaro’s memory. Nonetheless, the film depicts affective and shared remembering by showing on screen the cherry flowers that the family sees or imagines, flowers that finally help Shuntaro to remember. Therefore, while centralizing memory, the narrative of the family journey rejects an understanding of memory as an individual function based on storage and retrieval. This road trip completes the healing of the family in the film: Shunsuke renews his commitment to the family and gives up the chance of promotion; his wife overcomes her resentment and apologizes to her father-in-law for not caring for him earlier; both children re-establish connection with their father and show maturity and care about their grandfather. The care about Shuntaro that the wife and the daughter come to show suggests the restoration of gendered familial care. At the same time, the film represents the son and the grandson providing intimate care for Shuntaro, suggesting the continuation of patrilineage that is established through care rather than power. The closing scene of the film presents an idealized vision of the caring family unit: the whole family sit together in line, hand in hand, and imagine the cherry blossoms that Shuntaro would have seen as a child. Significantly, in this scene, the camera angle shifts from behind the family to capture them from high above (see Figure 24.1) until they become part of the landscape, under the imagined cherry blossoms, arguably the symbol of the country, with an ‘intense’ connection to ‘conceptions and representations of the Japanese self ’ (Ohnuki-Tierney 2002: 12). This is a picture, not just of one Osaki family, but of the ideal family that is fit to care for its members, a comforting vision for a nation struggling with the pressures of demographic changes.

FIGURE 24.1  Family scene from Sakura saku (2014), directed by Mitsutoshi Tanaka. © Japan: Toei. All rights reserved.

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CONCLUSION These three films reveal the complex relationality in the experience of dementia. They all produce a representation of dementia that is attentive to the embodiment of self and considered together, they exhibit a growing ethical approach to people with dementia, something that may reflect a change in the understanding of the condition in Japan. The films also respond to changing practices of familial care, with Home Sweet Home and Sakura saku depicting the possibility of care that goes beyond traditional boundaries of kinship and gender. Ultimately, however, all three films are invested in the ideal of family as a source of care and present a narrative of familial and generational reconnection through the power of nostalgic rurality. The image of the self-caring and self-sufficient family may offer a comforting vision to a country struggling to find ways to meet the challenges that an ageing population and care present.

NOTES 1 Hanaichimonme is a traditional children’s game. Children play the game while singing lyrics that describe the negotiation over the price of a flower between the seller and the buyer. The author does not use the transliteration of the title Home Sweet Home as the original title is composed of the English words, although written in the Japanese writing system. 2 The proportion of the population 65+ was 4.9% in 1950, 7.1% in 1970 and 28.4% in 2019 (Cabinet 2020: 3). 3 The selected three films reflect the tendencies that I observed in 21 contemporary Japanese films about dementia from 1973 to 2019. In all except one, the care relationship is set in a family context; roughly half of the films feature a male character with dementia, whereas primary carers are women in almost all of the films. 4 Bingham points out that a funeral often appears in Japanese family drama to necessitate ‘familial reunion following a period of distance or estrangement’ and dramatize generational tensions (105). This is also the case in many narratives of dementia; see, for example, Kanon (Canon) (2016); Betonamu no kaze ni fukarete (In the Winds of Vietnam) (2015); Watashi no michi: Waga inochi no tango (My Way: Tango Is My Life) (2012); Kokotsu no hito (Twilight Years) (1973). 5 The quotations from the films are translations by the author except those from Home Sweet Home, where the DVD provides English subtitles. 6 These troubled children may allude to ‘youth problems’ which have caused concern in recent decades in Japan. Goodman relates this concern to broader social anxieties about the state of the country, including demographic changes, explaining that ‘the well-being of these young people’ has become a significant concern for the future of the country (2012: 164).

REFERENCES Behuniak, S. M. (2011), ‘The Living Dead? The Construction of People with Alzheimer’s Disease as Zombies’, Ageing and Society, 31 (1): 70–92. Bingham, A. (2015), Contemporary Japanese Cinema Since Hana-Bi, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015. Brittain K., C. Degnen, G. Gibson, C. Dickinson, and L. Robinson (2017), ‘When Walking Becomes Wandering: Representing the Fear of the Fourth Age’, Sociology of Health & Illness, 39 (2): 270–84, doi: 10.1111/1467-9566.12505. Cabinet Office (2020), Annual Report on the Ageing Society [Summary] FY2020, https://www8.cao.go.jp/ kou​rei/whi​tepa​per/w-2020/zen​bun/pdf/1s1s​_01.pdf.

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Danely, J. (2015), Aging and Loss: Mourning and Maturity in Contemporary Japan, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Deal, W. E., and P. J. Whitehouse (2000), ‘Concepts of Personhood in Alzheimer’s Disease: Considering Japanese Notions of a Relational Self ’, in S. O. Long (ed.), Caring for the Elderly in Japan and the US: Practices and Policies, 317–33, Abingdon: Routledge. Drott, E. R. (2018), ‘Aging Bodies, Minds and Selves: Representations of Senile Dementia in Japanese film’, Journal of Aging Studies, 47: 10–23. Goodman, R. (2012), ‘Shifting Landscapes: The Social Context of Youth Problems in an Ageing Nation’, in R. Goodman, Y. Imoto, and T. Toivonen (eds), A Sociology of Japanese Youth: From Returnees to NEETS, 159–73, London: Routledge. Ikeda, M., and M. K. Roemer (2009), ‘ “Distorted Medicalization” of Senile Dementia: The Japanese Case’, World Cultural Psychiatry Research Review, January 2009: 22–7. Kasuga, K. (2012), ‘“Singuruko” to dokyosuru koureisha Kazoku no kaigokiki – kyurai no kazokukan kara dakkyaku o’ (Care Risks for Older Family Living with ‘Single Child’: The Need to Move beyond the Conventional Conception of Family), Japanese Journal of Home Care Nursing, 17 (2): 119–23. Kontos, P. C., K. L. Miller, and A. P. Kontos (2017), ‘Relational Citizenship: Supporting Embodied Selfhood and Relationality in Dementia Care’, Sociology of Health and Illness, 39 (2): 182–98. Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare. ‘ “Chiho” ni kawaru yogo ni kansuru kentokai hokokusyo’ (Report of Working Committee for an Alternative Phrase for ‘Chiho’), 2004. https://www.mhlw.go.jp/shi​ ngi/2004/12/s1224-17.html (accessed 11 May 2022). Mitchell, D. T., and S. L. Snyder, (2001), Narrative Prosthesis Narrative Prosthesis: Disability and the Dependencies of Discourse, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Ohnuki-Tierney, E. (2002), Kamikaze, Cherry Blossoms, and Nationalisms: The Militarization of Aesthetics in Japanese History, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Sako, K. (forthcoming), ‘Contemporary Narratives of Dementia in Japan’, in P. Crawford and P. Kadetz (eds), The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Health Humanities, Palgrave. Sako, K., and S. Falcus (2015), ‘Dementia, Care and Time in Post-war Japan: The Twilight Years, Memories of Tomorrow and Pecoross’ Mother and Her Days’, Feminist Review, 111: 88–108. Sugimoto, Y. (2003), An Introduction to Japanese Society, New York: Cambridge University Press. Tokoro, M. (2009), ‘Ageing in Japan: Family Changes and Policy Developments’, in T. Fu and R. Hughes (eds), Ageing in East Asia: Challenges and Policies for the Twenty-First Century, 54–71, London: Routledge. Traphagan, J. W. (1998), ‘Localizing Senility: Illness and Agency among Older Japanese’, Journal of CrossCultural Gerontology, 13 (1): 81–98. Traphagan, J. W. (2013), Rethinking Autonomy: A Critique of Principlism in Biomedical Ethics, Albany: State University of New York Press. Tronto, J. (1993), Moral Boundaries: A Political Argument for an Ethic of Care, New York: Routledge. Ueno, C. (2011), Kea no shakai gaku – Tojisha no fukushi shakai he (Sociology of Care: Towards Welfare Society That Honours Individual Autonomy), Tokyo: Ohtabooks. Waley, P. (2011), ‘The Urbanization of the Japanese Landscape’, in V. L. Bestor, T. C. Bestor, and A. Yamagata (eds), Routledge Handbook of Japanese Culture and Society, 89–99, Abingdon: Routledge. White, M. I. (2002), Perfectly Japanese: Making Families in an Era of Upheaval, Berkeley: University of California Press.

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Filmography Betonamu no kaze ni fukarete (In the Winds of Vietnam) (2015), Dir. K. Omori, Japan / Vietnam: Argo Pictures. Hanaichimonme (One Silver Coin’s Worth of Flowers) (1985), Dir. S. Ito. Japan: Toei. Home Sweet Home (2000), Dir. T. Kuriyama. Japan: Home Sweet Home Joei sen nin iinkai. Kanon (Canon) (2016), Dir. T. Saiga. Japan: Kadokawa. Kokotsu no hito (Twilight Years) (1973), Dir. S. Toyoda. Japan: Toho. Narayama bushiko (The Ballad of Narayama) (1983), Dir. S. Imamura. Japan: Toei. Sakura saku (Blossoms Blossom) (2014), Dir. M. Tanaka. Japan: Toei. Tokyo monogatari (Tokyo Story) (1953), Dir. Y. Ozu. Japan: Shochiku. Watashi no michi: Waga inochi no tango (My Way: Tango Is My Life) (2012), Dir. H. Wada. Japan: Phantom Film.

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CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

Changing the face of Catalan theatre: New portraits of old age in two contemporary dramatic comedies NÚRIA CASADO-GUAL

INTRODUCTION The emergence of old age as a prominent topic in contemporary drama and theatre clearly reflects the significance it has acquired in cultural and social domains. Despite the ‘declinist’ tradition of Western drama (Mangan 2013; Fuchs 2014), playwrights, and other theatre artists, have begun to broaden the spectrum of old age. With the increase of central roles for older actors, a change of ‘face’ is quite literally taking place in the theatre world, and with it, a different ‘age imagery’, as Bridie Moore puts it (2017: 15), is conveyed. Within the European scene, Catalan theatre is not an exception. The contemporary ‘age-turn’ of Catalan drama coincides with a time in which actors of the baby-boom generation are entering their later years. The new interest in plays that revolve around ageing has capitalized on the stage experience of their generation as well as on the cultural value that these theatre artists have for Catalan audiences. As the protagonists of new productions centred on old age, quite a few of them have headlined some of the commercial successes of recent theatre seasons. This chapter examines the representations of old age promoted by two dramatic comedies that opened in 2019 and that have had a significant impact on Catalan audiences through their highly successful seasons and extended tours: La dona del 600 (The Woman with the 600), by Pere Riera, and Un dia qualsevol (One Day among Many), by Oriol Tarrasón.1 Both plays were directed by their authors in their first productions and had their premieres at two of the most important commercial theatres in Barcelona. Following their first seasons, they toured at different intervals between 2020 and 2021.2 Based on a close reading of the texts and their performances, and drawing from the double framework of Theatre Studies and Age(ing) Studies, the study examines the dramaturgical and theatrical elements whereby Riera’s and Tarrasón’s plays signify the complexities of ageing and, by doing so, undermine stereotypes of old age. As will be demonstrated, some of the dramatic conceits used in the two texts do not necessarily guarantee a radical change in age ideology.

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However, both pieces succeed in fostering reflection on the subjective experience of ageing and the socio-cultural factors that condition it, thereby contributing to more nuanced portrayals of the experience of getting older, in Catalonia and elsewhere.

LA DONA DEL 600 (THE WOMAN WITH THE 600) Pere Riera, a well-established Catalan playwright, wrote and directed La dona del 600 for a co-production by Bitò Produccions and Minoria Absoluta. The show opened in October 2019 at Teatre Goya, one of Barcelona’s best-known venues for mainstream theatre. Two essential elements make the piece potentially meaningful for a mature audience: on the one hand, the cast, composed of five popular names of the Catalan scene, and led by two veteran and highly respected actors in the main roles (Jordi Banacolocha and Mercè Samprieto3); on the other hand, the title’s reference to the small FIAT manufactured by SEAT, which evokes the ideals of freedom and modernity that the little car represented in the last decade of Franco’s dictatorship and the advent of Spain’s new democracy.4 Both the SEAT 600 and the play’s older protagonists become closely intertwined in the universe of the play, to the extent that the car becomes a projection not only of ‘the woman’ foregrounded in the title, but also of Tomàs, her widower, as a retired worker from a car company. In fact, the central conflict of the piece revolves around the SEAT 600 that Tomàs has been skilfully re-constructing for three months, piece by piece, in his apartment, and that his daughters, Montse and Pilar,5 are shocked to find out about. The car is an exact reproduction of ‘Confit’ (‘Candy’), the 600 that his late wife owned and that was considered just another member of the family. Even though Tomàs’s daughters recognize the emotional value of the car, they demand that their father gets rid of it on account of his health and the neighbours’ safety – a request that Tomàs fiercely refuses to obey in highly dramatic terms: ‘Before you dismantle the 600 you will have to dismantle me!’ (Riera 2019: 9). Right from the beginning, Pilar and Montse’s opposition to the presence of the 600 in Tomàs’s home triggers their examination of his old age, as if the car had materialized an aspect of Tomàs’s identity that had not been quite visible up until that moment. Significantly, Tomàs is the only figure in the list of dramatis personae whose age is specified (Riera 2019: 3): defined as ‘a widower in his seventies’, the first scene presents him as an energetic character with a very dynamic life, and his new ‘car project’ plays an important role in this. However, his overprotective daughters focus instead on their father’s ‘biological’ and ‘social’ age (Woodward 1991: 149), only to interpret it in negative terms and through the partial lens of their own professions (as a doctor, in Montse’s case, and a city-hall officer, in Pilar’s). Beyond their professional perspectives, the two women are conditioned by the cultural narrative that associates old age with decline (Gullette 2004), and consequently, regard their father’s car enterprise as both excessive and inappropriate for his age, and mainly, a sign of senility. In theatrical terms, Montse and Pilar’s views offer a re-interpretation of what Michael Mangan has considered to be ‘the most blatant negative stereotype of old age’: the cliché of the foolish old man (2013: 79). This classical figure, which dates back to the senex of Roman comedies, was often represented through enfeebled men who resisted the removal of their (often excessive) authority (81). To Montse and Pilar’s eyes, Tomàs has become an eccentric old man who, more than anything else, needs to be controlled. Pilar and Montse’s conflict with Tomàs allows the two sisters not only to express their views about their ageing father but also to reflect on their own age. In both cases, the narrative of decline

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is also shown to condition their self-perceptions, especially in their interpretation of their ‘social age’. As Sara Arber and Jay Ginn put it, this dimension of age, which is composed of ‘social attitudes and behaviour seen as appropriate for a particular chronological age’, is itself ‘cross-cut by gender’ (1995: 5). Indeed, as women in their early fifties, Pilar and Montse have internalized a self-inflicted ageist and sexist discourse that renders them ‘too old’ for certain aspects of life, as shown by Montse’s surprise at the prospect of getting married ‘at fifty’ (Riera 2019: 58) or by Pilar’s mixed feelings towards her husband, from whom she has recently separated (63–4). The agedness they feel in the context of their relationships is also perceived as ridiculous, even decadent, in personal terms. In fact, it is used as a source of attack when, in the middle of an argument, one sister reminds the other one of how ‘old’ they have become (20, 27, 36, 37, 58). In contrast to his daughters’ negative views of age, Tomàs’s old age is presented in a positive light, not only through the vitality he devotes to his car enterprise, but also through his resourcefulness, whereby he demonstrates his self-knowledge and his capacity to ask for help when necessary. Significantly, Tomàs relies on two characters who regard him on equal terms: his neighbour, whom we never get to see, and Manel, his ex-son-in-law and secret collaborator, and the fourth character in the play.6 Albeit in different ways, these two figures contribute to representing Tomàs’s old age from constructive, anti-ageist perspectives. On the one hand, it is implied that Tomàs maintains a sexual relationship with the widow who lives downstairs – an affair that, especially through Pilar’s shocked reaction (26), discloses biased views about sex in old age, but which, in Montse’s view, in this case, is considered as ‘perfectly normal’ (27). More significantly, through Manel’s eyes Tomàs is presented as an individual, rather than as an old man and, consequently, his old age is signified as part of the continuum of life. In fact, it is to Manel that Tomàs actually explains the value that the 600 has for him, and especially for his wife: ‘It gave her freedom … That’s why she loved the thing so much … I want it here, Manel. Not in a garage. Here, with me’ (Riera 2019: 51). At that stage, the car has clearly become a symbol not only of Tomàs’s love for his late wife, but also of his own independence in later life. When, by the end of the play, Pilar and Montse come to terms with their own midlife insecurities and Pilar reconciles with Manel, they also learn to respect Tomàs’s right to make his own decisions. Montse is the first one to come to this realization: ‘Dad has always given us the freedom to do what we wanted … He taught us to make our own mistakes and to correct our own errors’ (Riera 2019: 66). Once Pilar accepts the lesson, the dispute over the permanence of the 600 is resolved. Considering the different forms of reconciliation with which the play concludes, La dona del 600 may be regarded as favouring a positive ‘age effect’, as Moore puts it (2014), with potential impact on all members of the audience, regardless of their age: indeed, the empowerment of Tomàs’s old age, which results from the resolution of the generational conflict, is shown to benefit not only Tomàs’ himself, but also the younger members of the family who, by taking Tomàs as a referent, gain a better understanding of each other’s needs and of themselves. The play’s representation of old age through Carme, Tomàs’s late wife and the ‘woman’ of the title, brings with it a complementary palette of meanings. To start with, Carme is presented as a liminal character that straddles the past and the present through flashback scenes. As a vivid memory for her husband and daughters, she also contributes to undermining the apparent division between young and old by enhancing the similar ways in which time (especially through its concurrence with loss) affects all the characters. In this respect, and through her disruption of the play’s chronology, she generates what Jan Baars has denominated ‘a complex intergenerational time perspective’ (2012: 163), through which all the figures share their memories of her. In their

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collective evocations, Tomàs, Pilar, and Montse not only learn to come to terms with loss together, but also create a more meaningful context for their own experience of ageing, in which Carme becomes a referent as someone who was serenely conscious of living her last days. The most significant flashback scene in this respect is Carme’s first long scene with her daughters, in which she tells them she has cancer. In contrast with Pilar and Montse’s anxious reaction, Carme is shown to display a calm and self-confident attitude. When she says she is lucky to have daughters who are ‘old enough’ to cope with this situation (48), she implicitly associates maturity with attributes like courage and wisdom – a positive reading of ageing that, far from being realized, will become an ideal for the two daughters to aspire to. Beyond her (inter)generational role, Carme’s characterization also offers a complex performance of female ageing in the play. In this sense, Carme’s charismatic personality and the subplot that is developed through her flashback scenes help broaden the narrow scope through which older women have (if at all) predominantly been represented in the theatre until very recently (Basting 1998; Hill and Lipscomb 2010; Harpin 2012; Moore 2017). A more nuanced representation of ageing femininity is attained, in the first place, through the sense of independence that Carme managed to retain within the traditional gender roles she fulfilled in her lifetime. As with Tomàs’s characterization, the SEAT 600 plays an important role in Carme’s alternative performance of female old age. To Carme, the car symbolized the freedom she gained in her middle age when she learnt to drive (51), which she maintained until her later years. At a collective level, Carme’s commitment to her car and, hence, to her own independence personifies the modest freedom that was regained (especially for women) after Franco’s dictatorship. However, Carme’s ‘Confit’ not only gave her freedom of movement, but also, more significantly, allowed her to maintain a long-lasting affair with another man. It is implied that this relationship, which her husband tolerated, was over in her later years, but as soon as Carme received her prognosis, she drove to her lover’s house to say goodbye to him. The subtlety with which this aspect of Carme’s characterization provides visibility to female desire in the play detaches this figure from the grotesque image of the ‘bad old woman’, with which mature female sexuality, whenever visible, has often been ridiculed in visual culture (Markson 2003). On the contrary, the references to Carme’s affair with Domingo signal the intricacies of Carme’s emotional life and underline the important role that love and sexuality continued to play in her late adulthood. Besides contributing to a more nuanced portrayal of female ageing, Carme’s relationship with Domingo allows for another positive ‘age effect’ to unfold, which again bears generational significance. When Montse and Pilar find out about their mother’s secret love story (42), they also realize that their parents’ marriage was less conventional than they had imagined. As Mercè Samprieto (‘Carme’ in the production) contends, Riera’s play brings to the fore the fact that many adult children ‘do not know about their parents’ intimate lives’.7 Significantly, Tomàs and Carme’s relationship (and the role that Domingo played in it) enables Pilar and Montse to regard their parents not only through their parental role but also as an ageing couple from whom they can learn about the complexities of mature love. As Tomàs proudly tells his daughters in the last scene of the play: ‘It was worth it, all of it, because she and I … she and I knew how to deal with it’ (Riera 2019: 75). Like their individual characterizations, Carme and Tomàs’s lifelong loyalty contributes to re-evaluating age-scripts (and gender roles associated with them) from an alternative angle.

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UN DIA QUALSEVOL (ONE DAY AMONG MANY) Similarly to La dona del 600, Oriol Tarrasón’s Un dia qualsevol is a successful dramatic comedy co-produced by Les Antonietes with Barcelona’s Grec Festival that counted on three highly recognized actors in the main roles.8 Despite the excellent reception the play had in its opening shows in 2019, the members of the cast were unsure that a play so explicitly focused on old age could be successful;9 therefore, its subsequent second season and the long tour that followed were a surprise to the creative team itself.10 Despite its similarities with La dona del 600, the portrayal of old age in Un dia qualsevol differs from Riera’s piece in two significant ways: firstly, in the choice of a nursing home as the play’s setting, and, secondly, in the centrality of a female older figure in its dramatic universe. Nursing homes have mainly been culturally associated with the narrative of decline, and, in particular, with stereotypical images of dementia or the idea of social / familial abandonment. Such a negative view is derived, as Sally Chivers and Ulla Kriebernegg put it, from ‘panicked views of the nursing home as a dreaded fate for people who may actually benefit from new living quarters in late life’ (2017: 17). At the beginning of the play, ‘El Bon Repòs’ (The Good Rest) is presented as a place where personal freedom is considerably reduced, and where residents – mainly represented by Ernest (played by Pla) and Mateu (played by Ferrer) – feel lonely or bored, and are disciplined through diet and infantilizing activities (Tarrasón 2019: 4, 12, 23, 38). However, the arrival of a new resident, a woman called Solange (played by Colomer) who initially envisaged the home as a ‘senior hotel’ (6, 9), changes the narrative by transforming the place into a space of mutual care and agency. Her friendship with the two men, as well as with Rosa (a nurse played by Annabel Castán), eventually renders the home a ‘transitional’ setting that paves the way for a more advanced stage of interdependence: towards the end of the play, Solange proposes that Ernest and Mateu move with her to a house she will rent (41), a proposal that the two men end up accepting (46). Solange’s character conception is the central asset of Tarrasón’s care-home story. Defined as a woman of seventy-five years of age, Solange is described as ‘vital, determined, cheerful’ (Tarrasón 2019: 2). In the original production, Colomer’s attractive appearance and dynamic performance elicit a constructive narrative of old age. In particular, the character’s enthusiasm about her new home suggests the possibility of a new beginning and, through this suggestion, El Bon Repòs is presented in a completely different light. Solange’s name itself is a symbol of the new life (and identity) that the new arrival wants to adopt in the care home: as revealed in the third scene, Solange’s real name is ‘Marta Riera’, a typical Catalan combination, but the more glamorous ‘Solange’ is the only name she wishes to be addressed by from now on (6). This detail from Tarrasón’s text has autobiographical overtones and, significantly, is strongly imbued with positive meanings of old age: as indicated in the playscript, the author dedicates the play to his grandmother ‘Solange’, a woman who wanted to be called by this name when she grew older, and whose wish was never taken seriously by her family. In his posthumous tribute, Tarrasón draws from his grandmother’s chosen name to recreate a creative older woman with a charismatic personality. Amidst the ‘silence and cultural amnesia’ that, as Anne Davis Basting puts it (1998: 113), shroud older people and especially older women, Solange’s model of ageing femininity stands out as exceptional. Solange’s rich characterization is based on her capacity to realize the full potential of her later years, including a new sense of independence. Even though she speaks lovingly of her late husband, she regrets that she always depended on him (Tarrasón 2019: 32). In this new phase of

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her life, in which, as she tells her two new friends, ‘she still has lots of things to do’ (30), she refuses to let her life simply ‘go by’ (16). The renewed vigour that Solange experiences in her seventies, once she has ceased to measure her life by the traditional roles of spouse, mother, or grandmother, allows her to enter her later years, in line with Betty Friedan’s approach to old age (1993), with a broader project of ‘personhood’. In a way similar to Pilar and Montse in Riera’s text, Solange’s daughter, Miriam, is incapable of understanding Solange’s late-life empowerment. Through Miram’s constant phone calls – in which she questions her mother’s decision to move to a home and insists that she should live with her – Tarrasón illustrates the infantilization of older parents by their adult children. When, towards the end of the play, Miriam threatens to legally incapacitate Solange (Tarrasón 2019: 37), her exaggerated concern becomes a form of ageist abuse. Undermining Miriam’s declinist views of her mother, the play constantly shows Solange as a reflective character who, despite her idealism, has developed a pragmatic form of wisdom. As Jan Baars explains, the association between ageing and wisdom is manifested in different kinds of insight that the older person can offer to others. One of them is the capacity of the older person to give ‘an adequate response to specific situations’, normally as a result of their life experience (Baars 2012: 221–2). For instance, Solange tells Rosa that, ‘with age’, she has learnt to respect other people’s decisions (Tarrasón 2019: 33). In a similar vein, the character displays her emotional intelligence by helping her friends at sensitive moments without interfering with their privacy – as when Ernest receives a very difficult letter from his son (30–1), or when she learns about Rosa’s terminal illness (33). Solange also has significant lessons to share with Mateu and Ernest: for instance, in a conversation with them, she reflects on the importance of not letting fear dominate one’s life, and of giving those we love the freedom to leave (37). In many ways, Solange’s characterization corresponds with the figure of the archetypal wise woman, a positive (but rather infrequent) cliché of ageing femininity (Brennan 2005: 134). However, Solange’s appeal as an older female figure lies in the combination of features from this constructive type with aspects that defy normative interpretations of gender and old age. One of them is the open manifestation of the character’s sexuality. More evidently than for Carme in La dona del 600, sexuality is a natural part of Solange’s life. To the surprise of her two friends, she talks about it openly: in this respect, one of the most amusing scenes of the play shows Solange sharing a survey on sexual habits with the two men. The scene hilariously leads to Solange’s suggesting a ménagea-trois in order to fulfil an unrealized sexual fantasy (Tarrasón 2019: 28), an invitation that Ernest and Mateu end up accepting. In the original production, Tarrasón and the three actors managed to strike a balance between the comic, tender, and provocative tones of this singular threesome with a scene that showed the three characters’ semi-nude bodies in a dim light, slowly caressing one another to the sound of sensual music. Even though Rosa’s unexpected entrance interrupts Solange and Ernest’s first kiss and, in this way, prevents the sequence from developing further, the scene effectively undermines the cultural taboo of sexuality in old age (Gott 2005) and counteracts the ‘unwatchability’ of elder nudity (Woodward 1999) by transforming the older characters’ bodies into agents of eroticism. When Rosa asks, in shock: ‘Aren’t you ashamed of yourselves?’ and Mateu quickly admits that he is ‘a little’, Solange replies: ‘I am not. I think that at our age we look quite great’ (Tarrasón 2019: 29). Solange’s pride in her body and that of her partners is part of the figure’s anti-ageist stance, which becomes the source for other age-deviant forms of behaviour or, in Aagje Swinnen’s words,

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‘age bending’ practices (2012: 8). Thus, when one night she and Mateu are not admitted at a karaoke bar because of their age, Solange uses the home’s radio station to summon an improvised disco party. By claiming ‘youth-associated’ scripts as her own through her disruptive performances, Solange undermines the young–old binary that segregates her and her friends. It is mostly through the combination of the wise and the unruly older woman in Solange’s character creation that Tarrasón generates not only a positive model of ageing femininity, but also a more complex view of later life in the play.

THE AMBIVALENT PROGRESS OF A NEW STAGE As has been shown, both La dona dels 600 and Un dia qualsevol resort to dramaturgical devices that efficiently undermine reductive (and especially declinist) representations of ageing. Nevertheless, as prominent age scholars have demonstrated (Gullette 2016; Mangan 2013; Lipscomb 2016; Moore 2017), a play’s dramatic focus on ageing does not guarantee a radical change in age ideology. Despite the sense of empowerment with which their older protagonists complete their narrative arc, and the apparently happy resolutions of the two plays that challenge the ‘peak-and-decline’ narrative of age (Gullette 2004: 130) reflected in classical dramatic structures (Fuchs 2014: 72), other aspects of the two plays may create dual age effects on the audience. This last section examines such ambiguities, which, in parallel to the positive ‘age effects’ described, may lead to contradictory interpretations of ageing in the two shows. One of the sources of ambiguity in the two plays is the combination of different registers of comedy and drama, which corresponds to the composite tone of their genre. In Un dia qualsevol, where comedy is clearly dominant, some moments of parody and black humour generate a sense of critical distance towards controversial aspects of ageing. This is the case of the scene in which Ernest and Mateu revise their daily dose of pills and exchange those they think they do not need (Tarrasón 2019: 35–6), an absurd gesture that parodies the over-medicalization of old age within the context of institutional care. Even more problematically, the theme of euthanasia is also introduced in parodic terms when Solange suggests to Ernest and Mateu that they should prepare what she calls a ‘rescue kit’ for Rita, a bed-ridden resident (Tarrasón 2019: 17–20). Even though these scenes draw from black humour in order to expose extremely delicate, even sinister issues, the sense of subversion that often results from hyperbolic display (Swinnen 2012: 8) is not fully attained in neither case. Rather, both scenes reinforce clownesque, even grotesque aspects of the figures’ physical characterization that prevent an in-depth exploration of the issues they touch on: while the two men’s exchange of pills ends up affecting Mateu’s intestine, it is Ernest’s shocked reaction at Solange’s proposal to ‘rescue Rita’, as well as Mateu’s difficulties because of his missing his upper teeth during this conversation, that become the focus of attention. In both cases, the older (male) body is utilized as a source of eschatological humour which sublimates serious debates related to old age.11 La dona del 600 resorts to more moderate tones in its use of comedy, but in this case the play’s ‘dramatic’ (almost ‘melodramatic’, at times) emphasis on the traditional family (attained through an almost nostalgic re-creation of essentially ‘good-natured’ characters who reconcile after various misunderstandings) inevitably reinforces the heteronormative family structure. At the same time, the ‘absence of drama’ in a play that evokes the last days of a terminally ill character can also be read critically. While Carme’s decision not to receive any form of treatment for her aggressive

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cervical cancer expresses the value that personal freedom has for this character, it also normalizes her death due to her old age. As Moore contends, ‘the ease with which an aged character can take leave of this world might result in dangerous age-effects that diminish the value of a longlived life’ (2017: 53). According to Moore, dying is often the price that older women ‘pay for the crime of feminine ageing’ (24) in cultural narratives. In this sense, Carme’s characterization can be connected with an archetypal representation of female ageing that prevails in popular culture, especially the cinema: that of ‘the older dying woman’ (Markson 2003: 98). Carme’s stereotypical condition as a ‘dying’ figure not only diminishes the dramatic effects of her death in a realistic context, but also reinforces death itself as the main theme in Carme’s character creation as an older woman. The latter effect, in particular, prevents the exploration of other dimensions of the character’s experience of ageing. Another aspect that may generate an ambivalent age effect in the two plays is the final image with which they conclude. The tableau that reproduces the family’s reconciliation at the end La dona del 600, with Tomàs, Pilar, Montse, and Manel sitting inside the car and imagining a journey together, powerfully suggests the play’s evolution from conflict to reconciliation. However, the Beckettian overtones created by their static, illusory ride also suggest the futile nature of the characters’ optimism and signify old age as a paradoxical ‘journey to nowhere’. Likewise, Un dia qualsevol performs its ‘happy ending’ by showing Ernest, Mateu, and Solange carrying suitcases and leaving the care home to the sound of Frank Sinatra’s ‘Fly Me to the Moon’: while, again, the trope of the journey suggests the figures’ move to a new state of interdependence that is to be celebrated, it also underlines the abandonment of the care home as a place that cannot satisfy the characters’ needs. Besides confirming an ‘old’ care-home narrative with their ‘new’ care-home story (Chivers and Kriebernegg 2017), the characters’ leaving the place renders the residents who must stay their less capable / successful ‘others’. In fact, Solange, Mateu, and Ernest’s ‘flight’ to the ideals of senior cohousing is only ‘dramatically effective’ if set in contrast with them. Finally, the casts of the two plays themselves may exude similarly dual effects on the audience. On the one hand, having fine and experienced actors such as Banacolocha, Samprieto, Colomer, Ferrer, and Pla in the main roles promotes a positive age imagery that affects not only the audience but also their younger partners: as Gonyalons contends, referring to Samprieto and Banacolocha, it is stimulating to see older actors playing leading roles with such precision and vitality, and their performance certainly offers an alternative to predominantly negative notions of ageing.12 In this respect, the practice of age-appropriate casting in the two shows is, to borrow Gullette’s words, not ‘just aesthetically right’ (considering the canons of mainstream theatre) but also ‘powerfully countercultural, a force for sustaining threatened bodies and age relations’ (2003: 23). To Colomer, the alignment between the actors’ chronological age and that of their characters offers a more realistic portrayal of old age that also favours identification from the older members of the audience.13 Such a connection, which is part of the theatrical experience, is made even more rewarding when the cultural capital accrued by these theatre artists throughout their lifecourse enriches the mechanism of viewer-character identification. On the other hand, the potent image (and value) of the two casts suggests an ideal of active, healthy ageing that is mainly reinforced by Tomàs’s and Solange’s plotlines in the two plays, but that not all the members of the audience necessarily comply with. This elitist age effect has been observed by film and age scholars who have warned about the ambivalent role that some older actors (especially female) play in changing our youth-dominated culture by privileging ‘a specific type of older person, who conforms to a narrow identification in

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terms of race … socio-economic class and political ideology’ (Richardson 2019: 24). Even though none of the actors of the productions discussed enjoys the celebrity status of film actors, they do generate associations of a privileged form of ageing through their ongoing popularity and longlasting engagement with their profession. This was particularly (albeit inadvertently) reflected by the season of Un dia qualsevol at Sala Villarroel, which had members of the charity Amics de la Gent Gran (Friends of the Older People) play stand-up parts in some scenes: while this strategy helped recreate the atmosphere of a nursing home and, through its integration of performers with disabilities, effectively enhanced the diversity of the play’s representation of old age (as well as the diverse reality of the members of the charity itself), it inevitably created a divide between the vivid, clearly defined personalities of the main characters (conveyed by the actors’ craft and imbued with their public image) and those of the anonymous figures. Paradoxically enough, though, the ambivalent juxtaposition of professional and non-professional performances also underscored the actors’ age over their distinctive social profile and corporealities.

CONCLUSION: TOWARDS A THEATRE OF ALL AGES This chapter has presented the different dramaturgical and theatrical strategies whereby two commercial plays have contributed significantly to changing the ‘face’ of Catalan theatre in recent theatre seasons. Through their age-centred plots and character creations, Riera’s and Tarrasón’s dramatic comedies highlight aspects of the experience of ageing that are all too often ignored or under-represented, such as the disempowerment of older people by members of the same family or in certain forms of institutional care, the importance of sexuality and affective relations in old age, the forms of wisdom that may emerge in later life, and the value of preserving personal freedom while at the same time nurturing respectful relations of interdependence across the lifecourse. By making age a dignified source of artistic creativity with a successful commercial result, La dona del 600 and Un dia qualsevol also highlight the value of having (and seeing) older performers develop narratives of ageing that generate alternative views of old age. The ambivalences detected in both dramaturgies and their performances indicate that the gradual change towards a more inclusive theatre for all ages is only starting to be developed. However, plays like Un dia qualsevol and La dona del 600 challenge the reduction of age to essentialist ideologies dominated by decline, and their impact contributes to broadening perspectives around the experience of growing older. In their respective seasons and tours, the members of the two creative teams could witness some of the ‘age-effects’ of their plays through reactions and responses observed during the shows and post-show talks: Pla believes that some forms of institutional care that disempower older people were effectively highlighted in their show;14 Ferrer referred to the ‘butterflies in the stomach’ that they felt their audiences had in the ménage-à-trois scene (2020); and Samprieto and Gonyalons highlighted the ‘stir’ that Carme’s secret affair created among members of the audience, especially older people. Likewise, the actors of both productions appreciated the higher degree of ‘empathy‘ towards older people and a deeper ‘understanding’ of the experience of ageing that many spectators of the two plays said they had felt while watching the show, regardless of their age. As Planas contends, plays like La dona del 600 help generate reflection about later life among members of the audience of very different ages, something he considers fundamental for individualistic societies that have lost the capacity to listen to older people.15 At a time when theatre (and the world at large) is being re-built to move towards a post-Covid time, plays with older characters in their

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main roles and a thematic focus on ageing have become, in the new jargon developed through the pandemic, an ‘essential cultural / human good’. Following the saturation of images with which the media, mainly due to the pandemic, have equated old age with loss of agency and vulnerability, a reverse ‘age effect’ is needed: to use Colomer’s words when referring to her performance as Solange, plays that focus on the possibilities of old age work ‘like a mantra about the need to use the strength and energy you feel right now, at this moment. This energy, which is infectious … is both a sign of hope and a declaration of our personal freedom within the process of growing older’.16 Theatre can certainly offer such an emancipating possibility for all ages, but only if it leans towards richer and bolder narratives of old age.

NOTES 1 My sincerest thanks to the authors for having offered their manuscripts of the text for this study and to the actors of both shows for having taken the time to answer my questions. Special thanks are due to Imma Colomer and Pep Planas for having coordinated the author’s contact with their respective creative teams. For the sake of clarity, the plays’ titles, as well as the quotes taken from the two texts and the interviews with the actors, are offered in the author’s translation. 2 In both cases their tours were interrupted several times due to Covid-19-related measures. 3 Jordi Banacolocha’s name is associated with many important productions of the history of Catalan theatre. Mercè Samprieto is one of the most famous of Catalan actresses of her generation and is also well known to Spanish audiences through her TV and film roles in national and international productions. 4 The SEAT 600 was made from 1957 to 1973, a period which corresponded with the last stage of Franco’s dictatorship, marked by technocratic financial policies and the opening up to consumerism. At the same time, that period also saw the inception of clandestine political parties, led by young leaders who would strongly oppose the dictator. In a way, the car encompassed the advent of a new era in socioeconomic and political terms. 5 In the play’s original production, Montse and Pilar were played by Àngels Gonyalons and Rosa Vila, two actresses with important theatre and TV careers. 6 In the original production, Manel was played by Pep Planas, another popular actor with a successful career that includes significant theatre, TV, and film roles. Manel’s good intentions and naiveté are the source of many comic moments in the play. 7 Mercè Samprieto (actor), personal communication with the author, 24 November 2020. 8 The main characters were played by Imma Colomer, Pep Ferrer, and Quimet Pla in the original show. Whereas Ferrer is well-known through his TV roles in Catalan and Spanish soap operas, Colomer and Pla embody the history of modern Catalan theatre as co-founders of the emblematic company Els Comediants and, in Colomer’s case, of Teatre Lliure. In 2020, Colomer received the ‘Creu de Sant Jordi’ (Saint George’s Cross), the most important distinction that the Catalan government bestows on distinguished citizens in recognition of their contribution to Catalan culture. 9 Pep Ferrer (actor), personal communication with the author, 26 October 2020; and Imma Colomer (actor), personal communication with the author, 24 October 2020. 10 After its success at the 2019 Grec Festival, the show transferred to Sala Villarroel for a full season, which was followed by a very long tour. The play was also broadcast on the public Catalan TV channel in January 2020, and in November of the same year Imma Colomer was nominated to a ‘Premi Butaca’ (an annual award given to very popular productions and important performances of the Catalan scene) for her role as Solange. 11 The play’s premiere took place at a time when Spain’s first euthanasia law was being discussed. The law was passed on 17 December 2020.

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Àngels Gonyalons (actor), personal communication with the author, 28 November 2020. Imma Colomer (actor), personal communication with the author, 24 October 2020. Quimet Pla (actor), personal communication with the author, 1 November 2020. Pep Planas (actor), personal communication with the author, 24 November 2020. Imma Colomer (actor), personal communication with the author, 24 October 2020.

REFERENCES Arber, S., and J. Ginn (eds) (1995), Connecting Gender and Ageing: A Sociological Approach, Buckingham: Oxford University Press. Baars, J. (2012), Aging and the Art of Living, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Basting, A. D. (1998), The Stages of Age: Performing Age in Contemporary American Culture, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Brennan, Z. (2005), The Older Woman in Recent Fiction, Jefferson, NC: McFarland. Chivers, S., and U. Kriebernegg (eds) (2017), Care Home Stories: Aging, Disability, and Long-Term Residential Care, Bielefeld: transcript. Friedan, B. (1993), The Fountain of Age, New York: Simon and Schuster. Fuchs, E. (2014), ‘Towards an “Age Theory” Theatre Criticism’, Performance Research, 19 (3): 69–77. Gott, M. (2005), Sexuality, Sexual Health and Ageing, Milton Keynes: Open University Press. Gullette, M. M. (2003), ‘Acting Age on Stage: Age-Appropriate Casting, the Default Body, and Valuing the Property of Having an Age’, Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism, 18 (1): 7–28. Gullette, M. M. (2004), Aged by Culture, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Gullette, M. M. (2016), ‘Politics, Pathology, Suicide, and Social Fates: Tony Kushner’s The Intelligent Homosexual’s Guide to Capitalism and Socialism with a Key to the Scriptures’, Modern Drama, 59 (2): 231–48. Harpin, A. (2012), ‘The Lives of Our Mad Mothers: Aging and Contemporary Performance’, Women and Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory, 22 (1): 66–87. Hill, J., and V. B. Lipscomb (2010), ‘Performing Female Age in Shakespeare’s Plays’, in V. B. Lipscomb and L. Marshall (eds), Staging Age: The Performance of Age in Theatre, Dance and Film, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Lipscomb, V. B. (2016), Performing Age in Modern Drama, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Mangan, M. (2013), Staging Ageing: Theatre, Performance, and the Narrative of Decline, Bristol: Intellect. Markson, E. W. (2003), ‘The Female Aging Body through Film’, in C. Faircloth (ed.), Aging Bodies. Images and Everyday Experience, 77–102, Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press. Moore, B. (2014), ‘Depth, Significance, and Absence: Age-Effects in New British Theatre’, Age, Culture, Humanities, 1. Available at: http://agecu​ltur​ehum​anit​ies.org/WP/depth-signi​fica​nce-and-abse​nce-age-effe​ cts-in-new-brit​ish-thea​tre/ (accessed 8 March 2021). Moore, B. (2017), ‘Effects, Metaphors, and Masks: Reading and Doing Age in Contemporary British Theatre’, PhD diss., Faculty of Arts and Humanities, Sheffield, University of Sheffield. Richardson, N. (2019), Ageing Femininity on Screen: The Older Woman in Contemporary Cinema, London: Bloomsbury. Riera, P. (2019), La dona del 600, unpublished manuscript, Barcelona, typescript.

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Swinnen, A. (2012), ‘Benidorm Bastards, or the Do’s and Don’ts of Aging’, in A. Swinnen and J. Stotesbury (eds), Aging, Performance, and Stardom: Doing Age on the Stage of Consumerist Culture, 7–17, Wien: LIT Verlag. Tarrasón, O. (2019), Un dia qualsevol, unpublished manuscript, Barcelona, typescript. Woodward, K. (1991), Aging and Its Discontents: Freud and Other Fictions, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Woodward, K. (1999), Figuring Age: Women, Bodies, Generations, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Woodward, K. (2006), ‘Performing Age, Performing Gender’, NWSA Journal, 18 (1): 162–89.

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CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

History’s intricate invasions: Ageing and traumatic memory in Caribbean discourse PAULA MORGAN

INTRODUCTION The belatedness of trauma and its capacity to lurk beneath the surface of consciousness awaiting its opportune moment for eruption has significant implications for ageing studies. It is now well known that catalysts of psychic trauma encountered in childhood or adulthood may not do their discombobulating work immediately but may await the onset of ageing to produce emotional and behavioural challenges. Correlations between ageing and traumatic memory have drawn the attention of generations of Caribbean writers who grapple with violating national and personal histories and test the power of the creative imagination to dredge up the repressed, the silenced, and the erased. Their fictional enquiries which also probe healing interventions, speak to the intricacies of the troubled interface between individual traumatic memory and broader violating social and cultural memories. This enquiry revisits a longstanding quarrel which Caribbean writers have had with cultural representations of the region, its customs, and its peoples, in imperial histories and literary canons. The pernicious representations, their enduring power as repositories of cultural memory, their persistent intrusion into contemporary discourses have fuelled a multi-generational, multi-ethnic project of redress. This chapter focuses on writers who in their quest to test sinews of connection to a denigrated and dishonoured past, invoke ageing, elders, and ancestral worldviews as an antidote to cultural rupture and spiritual disquiet. In the process, they craft literary ‘ancestories’ which stand as repositories of cultural survival with the potential to regenerate rootedness and to address collective malaise.1 The textual analyses point to myriad ways of negotiating submerged vestiges of self and community which cling like revenants, haunting absent presences, reflective of repressed societal and personal traumas seeking articulation. The enquiry considers tropes which are being crafted to analyse the ruptures peculiar to Antillean history, with its attendant anxieties, identity crises, and representational dilemmas. It highlights the symbolic currency of ageing in working through traumas which have become inherent to group identity formation. The chapter will present a brief overview of facets of the Caribbean sociocultural framework which lay the groundwork for symbolic deployment of ageing in literary representations. This will

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be followed by a discussion on how conceptualizations of ancestries, elders, and ageing serve a complex range of ideological objectives. The final portion of the chapter will support the assertions made through close textual analyses of two short representative narratives written by Caribbean writers from divergent class, race, ethnic, and temporal positionalities, both of whom engage the interface of ageing with the foundational catalyst of modern Caribbean nations – the traumatic imperial enterprise of the Indies and its aftermath.

SOCIOCULTURAL FRAMEWORK A persistent legacy of the ancestral cultures of Caribbean peoples is the focus on intergenerational connectivity and interdependence. Deep and enduring respect for parents and elders have long been a part of the social fabric, societal trauma notwithstanding. The ancestral tribal cultures of West Africa and the rural Gangetic plains of India from which the region’s majority Afro- and IndoCaribbean people groups originated, held elders in high esteem. This enquiry focuses on the literary deployment of African-derived cosmologies which envision the world as populated by the living, the dead and the unborn. Recently departed ancestors are held to play a pivotal role in terms of preserving the well-being of the community or even exacting revenge for ancestral neglect. Positive stances, including respect for elders and veneration of ancestors, as well as rootedness in the earth and ancestral culture, are seen as pivotal to individual and communal well-being. Well-being in turn is associated with long life, freedom from guilt and regret and healing from disease. Indeed, this cosmology interprets intense individualism and self-reliance as a form of soul sickness (Miller 2013; Morgan 2020). Although these belief systems and some of the attendant social practices are losing ground in contemporary times, respect for elders remains a significant facet of the communal psyche and looms large in literary and cultural imaginaries. Given contemporary legacies of historical ruptures in paternal connectivity, intergenerational linkages overwhelmingly survive as matrilineages which confer privileges, alongside potentially burdensome duties of care.2 In Caribbean and other African diasporic literary imaginaries, the interface between progenitors and the writer and / or protagonist has come to represent what African American Nobel Laureate, Toni Morrison, terms the capacity of artists to simultaneously possess ‘a tribal identity or racial sensibility and an individual expression of it’ (1984: 339). The quest for origins and the embrace of racial antecedents are of vital importance to people and groups reeling from violent and violating ruptures from land, language, tribal, and familial connections. As part of the arsenal for negotiating the challenges of intensely beautiful, geopolitically vulnerable, culturally multifaceted, economically challenged island societies, Caribbean artistes and knowledge workers have crafted homelands of the imagination; elders and ancestors have become pivotal to this endeavour. This phenomenon is not limited to the Caribbean. Toni Morrison, based on her reading of a cross section of contemporary African American fictions, identifies an overwhelmingly female cast of aged characters and maternal ancestresses. They function as a ‘sort of timeless people’ whose relationships to the characters are ‘benevolent, instructive and protective and they provide a kind of wisdom’ (Morrison 1984: 343). These timeless people are culturally rooted in ancient cosmologies and practices. They transcend time, ageing, physical decay, and even death to serve as pointers and guides to progeny, negotiating hostile social orders and uncertain futures.3 Morrison concludes: ‘whether the novel took place in the city or in the country, the presence or absence of

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that [ancestral] figure determined the success or happiness of the character. It was the absence of an ancestor that was frightening, that was threatening, and it caused huge destruction and disarray in the work itself’ (1984: 339, emphasis added).4

CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK If soul sickness and collective trauma have emerged out of denigration and loss of ancestral and cultural moorings, it stands to reason that healing intervention would rest on recuperation of this connection. In Caribbean fictions, return to revisionary African cultural moorings has sparked the literary imagination of generations of Caribbean writers of diverse ancestries and class positionalities. In a bid to recover denigrated and erased subjectivities and to recover cultural continuity with precolonial worlds, epistemologies, and ontologies, Caribbean writers and thinkers of diverse ethnicities enter what Theo D’haen in ‘Cultural Memory and the Postcolonial’ terms the therapeutic use of postcolonial counter memory in discourse involving a protracted process of negotiation with the legacy of European colonialism (2015: 3). Marianne Hirsh, exploring the imperative faced by the progeny of Holocaust survivors to become the keepers of the previous generation’s memories, speaks to the problematics involved in even defining them as memories. Mentioning formulations such as belated memory, absent memory, inherited memory, and vicarious witnessing, she settles on the concept of post-memory defined as the ‘structure of inter- and trans-generational transmission of traumatic knowledge and experience’ which though connected to the past is not ‘actually mediated by recall but by imaginative investment, projections and creation’ (2008: 107). Hirsh’s formulation is predicated on the notion that the generation with direct experience of the trauma has actively passed on memories through stories and artefacts such as family pictures to those with whom they shared affiliative connection. This is done in such a compelling manner that their progeny run the risk of finding their own narratives and experiences displaced or even supplanted by the process of becoming memory keepers and narrators of traumas which they have never directly experienced. This enquiry probes the modalities of recall deployed by writers who, as descendants of perpetrators or victims, grapple with the traumas generated by enslavement which have been silenced, erased, and negated. In other words, this transgenerational inheritance is characterized by lack of articulation, expression, transmission, the intrusive absent presence, and infused meanings of what Erna Brodber terms in Myal, ‘the half that has never been told’ (2014a: 66). African American Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison’s account of traversing this terrain is instructive. Morrison locates this process of recuperation and recovery in the concept of re-memory. This notion is connected to her pique at epistemic violence which has traditionally censored and whitewashed testimonies of the enslaved and denied expression of interiority for African Americans in slave narratives and autobiographies. In ‘The Site of Memory’, Morrison describes an inventive process triggered by attending to the close of life of her father and grandmother. Commenting on the impulse which thereafter led her to imaginatively capture their interior lives, Morrison indicates: … these people are my access to me; they are my entrance into my own interior life. Which is why the images that float around them – the remains, so to speak, at the archaeological site – surface first, and they surface so vividly and so compelling that I acknowledge them as my route

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to a reconstruction of a world, to an exploration of an interior life that was not written and to revelation of a kind of truth. (1995: 95) Brodber’s The Rainmaker’s Mistake, which will be explored subsequently, is just such an act of literary archaeology, to unearth suppressed and submerged realities of amnesiac elders who are approaching the end-of-life transition. While in no way denying the efficacy of testimony to address trauma in some cultural contexts, I argue that these fictional evocations raise questions about the intense focus on the curative impact of narrative, speech, and testimony. Judith Herman in Trauma and Recovery argues that psychoneuroses induced by terror can be reversed through the use of words. She advocates that trauma can be transmuted into testimony with a private dimension, which is confessional and spiritual, and a public aspect which is political and judicial … The action of telling a story, in the safety of a protected relationship can actually produce a change in the abnormal processing of the traumatic memory. With this transformation of memory comes relief of many of the major symptoms of posttraumatic stress disorder. (1992: 181–3) The creative works explored in this essay point to alternative modalities for addressing Antillean and African diasporic societal and individual traumas. These diverse modalities emerge in the analyses of the layering and interface of evocations of ageing, ancestry, racialized identity, and history within Caribbean fictions. The representative texts selected for close reading deal with the intrusion of the traumatic aftermath of the colonial encounter in the present. They provide for a reading of cross-ethnic representations of the aftermath of the imperial encounter between worlds. ‘The Wedding Photograph’ (2015) is authored by a descendant of the planter class – Trinidadian writer Lawrence Scott of French Creole extraction. The Rainmaker’s Mistake (2007) is an allegory crafted to intervene into discourses surrounding commemoration of the abolition of slavery. Its author, Afro-Caribbean Jamaican-born Erna Brodber, who crafts her fictions with activist intent, wrote to intervene therapeutically in legacies of trauma. She argues: ‘It is about studying the behaviour of and transmitting these findings to the children of the people who were put on ships on the African beaches and woke up from this nightmare to find themselves on the shores of the New World’ (2007: 164). To accomplish their divergent ideological objectives of cross-ethnic empathetic identification (Scott) and a quest for pathways of healing and wholeness (Brodber) both writers deploy pivotal tropes of ageing. Together they yield insights into the high stakes involved in their negotiation of what Marianne Hirsch terms ‘guardianship of a traumatic personal and generational past with which some of us have a living connection’ (2008: 107). The writers in their reconstruction of collective and personal memory exemplify what Walcott, in his Nobel Prize acceptance address, terms the ‘love that reassembles our African and Asiatic fragment … this gathering of broken pieces [which] is the care and pain of the Antilles’ (1992).

SILENT LAYERS OF SORROW Lawrence Scott in ‘The Wedding Photograph’ (2015) explores the discomfort of the close to 100-year-old protagonist, Elspeth, a descendent of the West Indian planter class who returned to England as a child, losing in the process foundational memories of her childhood spent in a

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plantation great house on a cocoa estate in South Trinidad. As she nears 100 years and grapples with Alzheimer’s disease, her cousin seeks to trigger her memory through a family photograph of his parents’ marriage taken in front of the estate’s great house.5 In the photograph, Elspeth appears as a girl whose ‘large staring eyes did not tell us what she was seeing. She appeared to be in mourning for someone who eluded her’ (Scott 2015: 69). Seeking an explanation for why Elspeth, both in her childhood and near centenarian incarnations, seems to be focused outside of the frame of the photograph, the narrator surmises: ‘Elspeth’s recent panic and fear had originated in this terrible estrangement and abandonment as a small child who would have experienced her mother’s absence from Trinidad as abandonment and as a form of death’ (Scott 2015: 78). This is yet another highly credible though inaccurate speculation in relation to the catalyst of anxiety and attachment traumas. The narrative strategy warns against seeking too facile an explanation for the complex social relations of the place and season. Physiological changes wrought by Alzheimer’s disease throw up fragments of hitherto erased childhood memories, generating agitation and anxiety in the process. Vague presences which haunt Elspeth’s consciousness beg to be admitted; their story awaits the reconstruction of fragments of memory of a near 100-year-old mind grappling with vascular impairment. Marianne Hirsch in ‘The Generation of Postmemory’ argues that photographs, and especially those which survive cataclysmic events, function as ‘ghostly revenants from an irretrievable past world’ (2008: 115). The viewer in the present can, through the photographic image, arguably ‘see and touch the past’ and also try to ‘reanimate it by undoing the finality of the photographic take’. Thus, the photograph lends veracity as an ‘indexical or contiguous object’ due to its proximity to the target in front of its lens and is also ‘iconic, exhibiting a mimetic similarity to that object’ (Hirsch 2008: 115). Hirsch argues that it has the power to draw from a storehouse of familiar and unexamined cultural images and assumptions that thereby intervene between thought and the ‘deepest emotional impulses’. In Scott’s story, the family photograph intended as a trigger for recall for the cognitively compromised elder works differently, presumably because Elspeth has lost hold on the repository of ‘pre-established expressive forms’ (108). The photograph works to evoke what it hides. The setting is telling. Power relations were highly spatialized on plantations. The master’s great house, constructed to display the grandeur and wealth of the estate, stood at the centre of a network of inclusions and exclusions in a symbolic economy in which prestige and influence were accorded based on proximity to the master. The mystery which evades retrieval and resolution is also embodied in the great house, which is personified as an autonomous being, closed, shuttered, jealously guarding its secrets: The house, with its lowered jalousies, eyelid closed, the white curtains drawn across the glass windowpanes, pulled in tightly shut, was its own self, its own veiled face, as if the photographer had not wanted his composition to be distracted by any stray detail which might have emanated from the interior of a bedroom or a dining room; perhaps an unwanted face or the shadow of a moving figure at his or her tasks within. (Scott 2015: 67–8, emphasis mine) The narrator conveys the shifting ground of unreliable memory by proffering numerous inaccurate explanations for the mystery of what the photograph hides and thereby ushers the readers into the shadowy, shape-shifting mental terrain of the protagonist. Despite collective impulses towards erasure and masking, the photograph reactivates affective responses, which direct Elspeth’s focus to the world beyond its frame. It generates the recall of suppressed memories of an enslaved workforce

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rendered invisible in the family portrait but lurking behind the closed visage of the house. These workers are the erased and denigrated energizers of the elegant and graceful plantation lifestyle. They provide not only the productive, sexual, and reproductive labour which drives the economic and psychosexual dynamics of the plantation, but also the affective labour which is pivotal to the servant mother–child relationship. The recall of her enslaved other mother is triggered by a retrieved photograph of Old Nurse. Elspeth recalls: ‘Yes, she comes to comfort me at night, carrying me, a baby in a basket’ (Scott 2015: 80). With the recovered memory of Old Nurse, who was herself a repository of suppressed remembrance, the protagonist exhumes the presences of generations of the enslaved who lived and died without records of their names: ‘there were no names like there would be names on graves, or in a family Bible’ (79). Elspeth’s befuddling experience of forgetting to forget is amplified into a collective requirement to restore to remembrance (non)persons erased from official and family records. Meandering through time, she recalls her youthful adherence to the strategies imposed by her enslaved other mother to override the de-personalization of the enslaved as labouring conveniences: ‘I repeated after Old Nurse those names: names, tasks, punishments and the number of lashes, which were noted in the earliest of ledgers, she told me’ (79). They who died bereft of official and family records, are admitted into personhood when this aged and incapacitated carrier of memories forgets to forget. The learning and telling return to the impaired mind of the protagonist at two levels. The first level deals with her personal existential mystery: ‘Who am I? Where did I come from?’ (Scott 2015: 74). This is extrapolated into: What is my place? And who are my people? Secondly, in terms of communal histories: to what extent am I required to acknowledge culpability for the shrouded history of the plantation house? For Elspeth, this means retrieving her emotional connection to Old Nurse who is representative of a cadre of house slaves who performed care labour, granting maternal affective connection to the progeny of the planter class while invariably living away from their own children. Only then does she grasp the significance of the spectres which emerge decades later to haunt her London flat. Elspeth comes to welcome the other faces of denigrated and dishonoured workers who Old Nurse showed her – the private faces and lives of living, breathing, social beings, graceful dancing men and women who existed beyond the limits of the photograph, out of sightlines of the great house and beyond the pastures. Ironically, Lawrence Scott, of French Creole ancestry, and his protagonist, both descendants of the planter class, testify to the same terror generated by the absence of the Black ancestors, which Toni Morrison identifies as a thread running through African American fictions. Elspeth muses: ‘These memories crowded her London flat and came to live with her. These were the people she had not been able to remember. Their absence had frightened her. Old Nurse was that relative she was trying to recall, who had returned now to comfort her in the absence of her mother’s protection’ (80, emphases added). The shift in temporality to the present time of the narrative is reflective of both the impaired cognition of the centenarian, and of potential temporal and spatial continuities, which allow for the intrusion of the past into the present in ways which are alien to Western, secular worldviews. In this idyllic narrative of reconciliation, Elspeth reclaims the enslaved as natives of her person, spectral ancestors who return from the other side of a collective troubled history to impart moorings, groundedness, and belonging. This terrain explored in Lawrence Scott’s ‘The Wedding Photograph’ is traversed in a range of narratives written by descendants of the planter class (Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea (1966); Olive

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Senior’s title story ‘The Pain Tree’ (2017), Michelle Cliff ’s ‘The Land of Look Behind’ (1990), Barbara Lalla’s Arch of Fire (1989), and Cascade (2010)). Together they point to the question raised by Derek Walcott in ‘The Muse of History’: ‘But who in the New World does not have a horror of the past, whether his ancestor was torturer or victim? Who in the depth of his conscience is not screaming for pardon or for revenge?’ (1974: 39). My perspective is that these narratives of the planter class go beyond this binary to evoke latent cross-ethnic connections, affective linkages, and nurturing duties of care rooted in childhood. They also declare that the alleviation of psychic disease spawned by imperialism and nurtured in contemporary systemic injustices is to be found in an admission of guilt and complicities, alongside an embrace of shared vulnerabilities. Scott’s narrative of ancestry and ageing is exemplary of a cross section of Caribbean fictions which appeal for a way to be human, for a process which honours the humanity of the person beyond a season of social usefulness, and for a deeper understanding of the frailty, vulnerability, and interconnectivity of humankind. These stylistically complex trauma narratives working through codes, symbols, and signs render the submerged memories of their ageing protagonists as stubbornly resistant to recovery and representation, and hence do not readily support notions of the therapeutic efficacy of narrative to address the fragmentary, discordant, and unresolvable nature of personal and collective traumas. The narratives demonstrate the high ideological stakes negotiated within Antillean social frameworks, through representations of racialized identities, cross-ethnic allegiances, ancestry, and ageing. As the unnamed narrator of David Chariandy’s Soucouyant expresses it poignantly: ‘Memory is a bruise still tender. History is a rusted pile of blades and manacles. And forgetting can sometimes be the most creative and life-sustaining thing that we can ever hope to accomplish. The problem happens when we become too good at forgetting’ (2007: 32).6 Deploying fictional evocations of ageing and ancestry, a cross section of Caribbean writers carefully explores the manner in which individual and personal histories interface with collective and familial histories; national and communal notions of being and becoming; and cartographies of transnational and diasporic migrations. They produce a complex interface of space–time interactions, peoples, nations, and narrations – some told, some submerged, some unspeakable and unrepresentable, some silenced but carried and enacted in the flesh. Violating histories act as rhizomes with unwelcome presentday eruptions. Histories ripen in individual lifespans; ageing brings harvest.

ENCRYPTED MEMORY The second narrative selected for close reading in this chapter presents a troubling response to Hirsh’s question: ‘What aesthetic and institutional structures, what tropes best mediate the psychology of post memory, the connections and discontinuities between generations, the gaps in knowledge that define the aftermath of trauma’? (2008: 107). And to this I might add: How do tropes differ in accordance with the racialized subject position of the implied author and those that people the possible world of the text? Whereas the catalysts of re-memory and the tropes of its outworking for writers from the planter class involve dismantling the structures of the great house and embracing the spatialization of trauma within the plantation and neo-imperial structures, Erna Brodber’s The Rainmaker’s Mistake locates the catalyst for re-memory in a grim, interiorized, and painful, corporeal embodiment. Continuing her decades-long concern with colonialism as an agent of spirit theft and zombification, Brodber seeks in this allegory a psychosocial explanation for the infantilization of

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the formerly enslaved and the failure of Black diasporic populations to thrive and to fully inhabit freedom, some 200 years after the abolition of the slave trade. In the process, she subordinates the more commonly explored political, economic and legal facets of the decolonization project. Evoking the body as the baseline site for the spatialization of trauma, Brodber probes flawed, deeply interiorised, ontological notions of self-worth, value, autonomy, and purpose. The novel asks what, after an extensive passage of time, is the root of the ongoing obsession with the colonizer and the enduring hope for his return as rescuer and saviour? What happens when trauma is so deeply embedded and so pivotal to the formation of the subject that it becomes impossible to pass through the state of mourning into wholeness? Brodber indicated that The Rainmaker’s Mistake (2007) was written to clarify Orlando Patterson’s notion expressed in Slavery and Social Death. Patterson argues, ‘Slaves differ from other human beings in that they are not allowed to integrate the experience of their ancestors into their lives, to inform their understanding of social reality with the inherited meanings of their natural forebears, or to anchor the living present in any community of conscious memory.’ (1982: 5). Musing on this concept, Brodber in ‘History and Social Death’ extrapolates: Are we, the descendants of enslaved Africans, like our forefathers socially dead even after nearly two centuries of official emancipation? It seemed to me that social death takes a considerable amount of time to be established, and I think so would the resurrection; and this … is only possible where the history becomes heritage and begins to anchor the living present in the conscious community of memory. (2012: 114) For Brodber, resurrection power to redress the deeply entrenched condition is encoded in the ancient Rainmaker, who functions as a device for the cause, consideration, and resolution for social death. In The Rainmaker’s Mistake, the storytellers who enter the narrative as a group of frisky enslaved innocents, the six-year-old about to enter the pickney gang, cheerfully embrace the myth that they entered the world as brown yams, the issue of the colonizer Mr Charlie’s seed buried in the patient earth. For the duration of their enslavement, aided by a potion they ritualistically imbibe during the annual Founder’s Day ceremony, the slave gangs are frozen at the various life stages appropriate for the range of estate functions. They know no ageing, no sexuality, no responsibility, no reflexivity, no mortality. With emancipation comes a slow, painful, bewildering descent into decision-making, self-knowledge, sexuality, and death. In a bizarre reworking of the perception of elders as the repositories of wisdom, the formerly ageless overseer, Woodville, returns to the newly freed subjects as an instructional tool, to impart the knowledge necessary for them to inhabit their freedom. In the process, Brodber moves away from the traditional notion of dead ancestors who seek avenues to effectively communicate with and safeguard the living. Boundary-shattering notions of the coexistence of the living and the dead find manifestation here in an ancient, incapacitated, and little more than ejaculating corpse. An amnesiac with no grasp of his personal and communal history, the silent intrusive spectre must be made to give voice to the unspeakable, if the community is to find its way into a viable future ‘in the free’ (Brodber 2007: 150). Brodber presents the former overseer as the embodiment of a cryptological archive. The notion of the subject as cryptological archive is articulated by Jonathan Boulter in Melancholy and the Archive: Trauma, History and Memory in Contemporary Novels. In a quest for archival material

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which would respond to this age’s anxiety about shaping ethical responses to catastrophic histories, Boulter identifies conditions which would make of the subject a repository of melancholia as opposed to mourning, arguing that the former would facilitate a healthy working through of loss. He questions: ‘What are the implications of the idea that the subject, in loss, becomes an archive of loss, a site where the memory of loss and trauma is maintained in a kind of crypt?’ (2011: 3). To extrapolate this argument to the Caribbean condition in general and to Brodber’s work in particular, the subject stands to be transformed into a cryptological archive when he or she is incapable of re / membering unspeakable horrors; when the task of articulating personal and collective catastrophe overwhelms the sensibility; when memory proves unstable; when ageing and death overtake expression and articulation; when the subject maintains this melancholic identification because the traumatic moment becomes inherent to identity formation.7 This begs the question of what is required to usher postcolonial subjects away from wallowing in melancholia in order to engage the healthy task of mourning. What is the depth of loss when the subject becomes too wrapped up in, and perchance even enraptured, with the violations of the past, to pass through into a more viable foundation for subject formation? In Brodber’s narrative, Woodville’s loss of ontology raises his value as an epistemological source of historical knowledge. He embodies a submerged encrypted history which is embedded in his body but lost to his conscious mind until the moment of his death, when the entirety of life flashes before him. His practically dead body which remembers what is lost to his consciousness teaches the living. It speaks of Black males used as studs, an ejaculating organ bereft of soul and spirit; it speaks of the loss of affective connection to women whom he would have sought to love; it speaks to the impact of the absence of fathering which is supplanted by Mr Charlie’s seductive paternalism which in turn masks economic opportunism; it speaks to apathy, paralysis, and social death suffered by nonpersons. Trapped in his exhausted maleness and diminished patriarchy, he can only weep and moan at the mention of the erased women he served as stud to people the plantation. For Brodber, who commends the excavation of submerged realities, no individual / specimen is too far gone to yield the insight necessary for the advancement of community. The aim is not simply to find a place in the future but to find a place ‘in the free’. This requires the embrace of ‘naturalness twinned to mortality accompanied by hope and duly tempered by responsibility’ (Brodber 2007: 150). Brodber’s narrative stands alongside David Chariandy’s Soucouyant in terms of their focus on encoding the communications of ageing bodies that (re)member grim realities deeply inscribed in the flesh. Repeatedly, the act of narrating the deeply encoded reality falls to a subsequent generation, who must also come to know the trauma in the flesh. This is powerfully invoked in Chariandy’s trick tendons, manifestations of quarrels deep in the bones, like history, which pass from generation to generation, reflecting corporeal lineage and inheritance as methods of re-cognition, even when the mind is marred and the body is disfigured beyond resemblance.

CONCLUSION The representative narratives explored in this essay traverse the interface of historic traumatic memories and symbologies of ageing. They belie the Western focus on linearity and logic of expressive and healing interventions based on narrative. They indicate that Caribbean knowledge workers of diverse ethnicities are weaving a collective web of memorials informed by their diverse ethnic positionalities and vantage points in relation to shared memory. The expressions of male

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and female authors alike are deeply rooted in the domestic terrain. Their message extends beyond the power of narrative to resolve communal and historical traumas. In addition, and at times in substitution, they point to the declarations communicated through grim and messy corporeality; identification with mythological beings which testify when words fail; affirmation of cosmologies and faith systems which would nail debilitating psychic distress to pain trees; memories are embodied in defiled and wounded women who represent the violated island body. Traumas are encapsulated in houses, recorded in family portraits, and transmitted intergenerationally through blood and / or cross-ethnic affective lineages to do their work of discombobulation for successive generations. Marianne Hirsch points to the danger of the domestic orientation of such a project: familial structures of mediation and representation facilitate the affiliative acts of the post-generation. The idiom of family can become an accessible lingua franca easing identification and projection across distance and difference: This explains the pervasiveness of family pictures and family narratives as artistic media in the aftermath of trauma. Still, the very accessibility of familial idioms needs also to engender suspicion on our part: does not locating trauma in the space of family personalize and individualize it too much? Does it not risk occluding a public historical context and responsibility, blurring significant differences – national difference, for example, or differences among the descendants of victims, perpetrators, and bystanders? (Hirsch 2008: 115) Caribbean writers have collectively avoided the pitfalls identified by Hirsch. The charge of blurring the differences between perpetrator and victim, which can be perceived as dishonest and untenable, can also be read as a literary genuflection on the part of the writerly descendants of the planter class, which is reflective of a conciliatory stance. Representations of intimate familial pleasures and nightmares; of horrific life circumstances, traumas, ageing, and Alzheimer’s have been invested in the hands of these master storytellers with complex layers of societal, transnational, transgenerational meaning. The writers are fierce in their commitment never to mask or deny the moral imperative to bear witness to injustice and to chart the manner in which it drills down into individual lives. Their thrust remains transformational. Their deployment of tropes of ageing calls attention to a duty of care for those whose tumultuous journeys through more oppressive times have delivered to their progeny the opportunities and insights, voice and fora which must not be taken for granted today. By asserting that Black and all other subjugated lives – past, present, and future – matter, the narratives effectively articulate and make visible political, cultural, and ethical imperatives to acknowledge and bear witness to the psychic impact of societal traumas, and thereby enhance the potential for communality and the value and dignity of all human societies.

NOTES 1 The term ‘ancestories’ emerged during the Sixteenth Annual Conference on West Indian Literature on the theme, Ancestors. This concept was articulated during the collective process of preparing the call for papers and gained resonance during the deliberations. The conference was held at UWI St Augustine in March 1998. 2 Contemporary instances of women carrying excessive duties of care for older relatives emerged in the recently concluded UWI Work Life Balance Project (2020). One facet of the project invited respondents to prepare a journal in response to open-ended questions. This process was intended to elicit information on the events of

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a workday in interface with acts of memory and meaning making in relation to baffling processes of ageing and the loss of agency of self or loved one. Consider, for example, Toni Morrison’s elder Baby Suggs who teaches the damaged and mutilated emancipated slaves to love themselves (Beloved, 1988). This is central theme for American writer of Barbadian lineage, Paule Marshall, who evokes matriarchs, spiritual mothers, and maternal ancestresses in the majority of her fictional representations. Cases in point include Mrs Thompson (Brown Girl, Brownstones, 2009) who forms a safety net for the disoriented, culturally adrift young protagonist; the Barbadian grandmother in ‘To Da-duh in Memoriam’ (1991) who matches wits with her American-born grandchild. Da-duh, who embodies the folk wisdom of the elders and cultural rooting in the Caribbean birthplace, is fearful of machines. She dies during the 1937 air raids. Marshall’s spiritual mothers in Praisesong for the Widow (1983) administer traditional healing practices as they accompany the protagonist on her journey towards spiritual awakening. Healing mothers also take centre stage in the work of Jamaican, Erna Brodber. In Nothing’s Mat (2014b), matriarchs are the keepers of an intricately woven mat which represents hitherto masked fractal as opposed to fragmented family networks, interconnected memories, and healing practices. This stance is not uniform. In Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), Nanny, the grandmother figure ravaged by slavery, cultural orphanage, and unending life crises, survives as a souldestroying figure whose craving for security leads her to usher her frisky young granddaughter, Janie, into the safe harbour of a loveless marriage to an exploitative older man. Her fragmentation is succinctly expressed in her plea, ‘Put me down gently Janie. Ah’m a cracked plate’ (17). Olive Senior’s ‘The Pain Tree’ refers to the servant mother’s residence in a former slave hut which becomes a repository of unarticulated trauma permeated with ‘silent layers of sorrow so humbly borne’ (2017: 13). For a full discussion of this text, see P. Morgan’s (2014) The Terror and the Time: Banal Violence and Trauma in Caribbean Discourse. For a brief discussion of strategies used by Caribbean Writers to seek access to interiorized historical wounds which have not been archived, see my essay, ‘Creative Writers as Tomb Raiders’ (Morgan 2019). This analysis expands on the discussion of The Rainmaker’s Mistake which is mentioned briefly there.

REFERENCES Boulter, J. (2011), Melancholy and the Archive: Trauma, History and Memory in the Contemporary Novel, London: Continuum. Brodber, E. (2007), The Rainmaker’s Mistake, London: New Beacon. Brodber, E. (2012), ‘History and Social Death’, in Caribbean Quarterly, 58 (4): 111–15, doi:10.1080/00086 495.2012.11672459. Brodber, E. (2014a), Myal, Long Grove, IL: Waveland Press. Brodber, E. (2014b), Nothing’s Mat, Kingston: UWI Press. Chariandy, D. J. (2007), Soucouyant, Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press. Cliff, M. (1990), ‘The Land of Look Behind’, in Ramabai Espinet (ed.), Creation Fire: A CAFRA Anthology of Caribbean Women’s Poetry, 68–9, Toronto: Sister Vision. D’haen, T. (2015), ‘Cultural Memory and the Postcolonial’, in Micaela Symington (ed.), Literatures, Poetiques, Mondes, Paris: Honore Champion. Herman, J. (1992), Trauma and Recovery, New York: Basic Books. Hirsch, M. (2008), ‘The Generation of Postmemory’, Poetics Today, 29 (1): 103–28, doi:10.1215/03335372-2007-019. Hurston, Z. N. (1937), Their Eyes Were Watching God, New York: Harper & Row.

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Lalla, B. (1989), Arch of Fire, Kingston: Kingston Publishers. Lalla, B. (2010), Cascade, Mona, Jamaica: University of the West Indies Press. Marshall, P. (1983), Praise Song for the Widow, New York: E. P. Dutton. Marshall, P. (1991), ‘To Da-duh in Memoriam’, in Reena and Other Tales, New York: Feminist Press. Marshall, P. (2009), Brown Girl, Brownstones, Mineola, NY: Dover. Miller, K. (2013), Writing Down the Vision: Essays and Prophecies, London: Peepal Tree Press. Morgan, P. (2014), The Terror and the Time: Banal Violence and Trauma in Caribbean Discourse, Mona, Jamaica: University of the West Indies Press. Morgan, P. (2019), ‘Propitiating Vengeful Duppies of History: Creative Writers as Tomb Raiders’, in D. Mastey and H. Regis (eds), ‘Seeking Space: Shaping Aesthetics’ Tout Moun: Caribbean Journal of Cultural Studies, 5 (1): 1–8. Morgan, P. (2020), ‘Finding an Equilibrium but Full of Ups and Downs: Narratives of Ageing and Caregiving’, in P. Mohammed and C. A. Boodram (eds), Connecting the DOTS: Work. Life. Balance. Ageing, Kingston: Ian Randle Publishers. Morrison, T. (1984), ‘Rootedness: The Ancestor as Foundation’, in M. Evans (ed.), Black Women Writers (1950–1980), 339–45, New York: Anchor. Morrison, T. (1988), Beloved, New York: Penguin Books. Morrison, T. (1995), ‘The Site of Memory’, in W. Zinsser (ed.), Inventing the Truth: The Art and Craft of Memoir, 83–102, Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Patterson, O. (1982), Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Rhys, J. (1966), Wide Sargasso Sea, New York: W. W. Norton. Scott, L. (2015), ‘The Wedding Photograph’, in M. Munroe (ed.), The Haunted Tropics: Caribbean Ghost Stories, 67–81, Mona, Jamaica: University of the West Indies Press. Senior, O. (2017), The Pain Tree, Leeds: Peepal Tree Press. Walcott, D. (1974), ‘The Muse of History’, in What the Twilight Says: Essays, 36–64, London: Faber and Faber. Walcott, D. (1992), “The Antilles: Fragments of Epic Memory.” https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/ literature/1992/walcott/lecture/. Accessed March 2023.

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CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

Ageing in contemporary Welsh fiction in English ELINOR SHEPLEY

INTRODUCTION Welsh fiction in English often attends to the experiences of marginalized and subjugated peoples. From industrial novels by writers from working-class communities (R. Williams 1979) and texts that adopt child narrators (J. Williams 2000, Knight 2004), to fiction that renders experiences of disability (Knight 2004, Burdett 2014), there is a concern with those on the peripheries of society. This focus has been linked to Wales’s geographic, political, and cultural distance from the institutions where power was located before devolution and to the peculiar linguistic position of Welsh writers working in English, who, because they do not generally speak Welsh, are ‘aware of the rich and continuing cultural heritage in the Welsh language’ but ‘shut out from it’ (Brown 2001: 27). Given this affinity with those who are oppressed or isolated, it is unsurprising that older characters have played significant roles in Anglophone Welsh fiction since its emergence in the early twentieth century. Twentieth-century Welsh fiction in English includes texts that give voice to those at the frailer end of the ageing spectrum and reveal ageist attitudes. Texts from this period also include a considerable number of ageing characters who act as links to the past and remembrancers of family, community, or national histories. In addition, older characters are often storytellers, passing on their narratives and knowledge to younger generations and fostering community cohesion and continuity.1 These figures are frequently associated with a conception of Welsh identity grounded in speaking Welsh, nonconformist religious belief, stoicism, and working-class struggle (Shepley 2018). Emma Schofield argues that Anglophone Welsh fiction published since devolution in 1999 reflects a process of ‘adaptation and transformation’ in the country (2014: 33). Having represented the economic and social effects of Wales’s transition from an industrial to a post-industrial nation in the late twentieth century, writers are now involved in re-imagining both Wales and Welsh identity (177). This chapter considers contemporary fiction by Glenda Beagan, Emyr Humphreys, and Christopher Meredith in which older protagonists navigate ageing and the societal expectations that come with later life in the context of Welsh culture and society after devolution. The texts discussed imagine new possibilities for ageing characters involving processes of self-discovery, reconnections with national identity, and returns to places from childhood. They engage with the barriers created by ageist attitudes and damaging ideals of successful ageing. The figure of the older remembrancer of the past is complicated when protagonists find themselves unsure whether to focus their attention on the past or the future. The act of writing is also important for older characters in these texts. It

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enables protagonists to reassess their earlier lives and to engage with communal histories that are important to their identities. The theme of writing brings a self-consciousness to one short story by an older writer, suggesting anxieties about the role of fiction in constructing Welsh identity. Literary gerontology is often concerned with the trajectories of protagonists’ lives. Conceptions of later life characterized by degeneration and loss have been designated ‘decline narratives’ (Gullette 2011: 54) and viewed as problematic due to their propagation of ageist attitudes and limiting expectations of later life. This chapter is informed by the concept of the decline narrative and the work of critics who have identified alternatives to such negative trajectories, particularly Barbara Frey Waxman’s use of the term Reifungsroman or ‘novel of ripening’ to describe texts by women writers in which older female protagonists – often widows – ‘literally take to the open road in search of themselves and new roles in life’ (Waxman 1990: 16). Contemporary Welsh fiction in English features a trope in which older widowed women move home and grow personally and politically after their husbands’ deaths. Moreover, Waxman’s study is especially relevant to this essay because it is one of a small number of critical works which considers older protagonists’ relationships with their cultural or national identities. As well as intersecting with concepts of nationhood, ageing and gender identities converge in various contemporary Anglophone Welsh texts. A significant proportion of the criticism on wider literatures and ageing explores such intersections between age and gender, giving particular focus to patriarchal attitudes towards ageing women in Western cultures. It is not surprising, therefore, to find that a number of literary critics have utilized feminist theoretical approaches in their readings of texts about ageing.2 In keeping with such approaches, this essay uses Sara Ahmed’s theorization of migration and her work on queer phenomenology to inform analysis of conceptions of home and the trope of the returning older native in short stories about older widowed women. There is considerably less criticism on literature about masculinity and ageing than on texts about older female identity. This paucity of scholarly work seems to stem from a gap in research, rather than a lack of cultural products and creative texts worthy of attention.3 Sociologist Jeff Hearn’s broad discussion of the imaging of ageing men – which examines historical constructions and biographical and autobiographical accounts – suggests that there are many avenues to be explored (Hearn 1995). I draw on Hearn’s analysis of the effects of twentieth-century changes to work and the advent of retirement on older male identities in my analysis of their presentation in Meredith’s The Book of Idiots, as well as Toni Calasanti and Neal King’s theorization of masculine ‘successful ageing’ as promoted in dominant cultural discourse (2005).

GROWTH IN WIDOWHOOD AND THE RETURN OF THE OLDER NATIVE Several recent Anglophone Welsh short stories centre on widowed women who move home and grow personally and politically after the deaths of their husbands. This trope contributes to the creation of largely positive imaginings of older women’s lives and the texts provide a contrast to works that depict old age as a predominantly downward trajectory of decline and loss. Glenda Beagan’s protagonist Judith appears in two linked stories in The Great Master of Ecstasy (2009). In ‘Birth of an Oxbow’, Judith is recently bereaved and overwhelmed by memories of her husband, ‘benign bully’ Bob, and of her mother (98). These dead relatives feel more real to her than her living family, implying that she is focused on her past rather than the present or future. There is

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a gap of a year between this story and its partner ‘A Bad Case of September’. Judith is now living in the seaside resort of Llandudno in north Wales – a place that holds fond memories for her – in a retirement block called ‘Avalon Court’ (117). This ironic name prompts one to ask whether the character’s move will signify development or decline by alluding to the mythical island where King Arthur was taken after his last battle, apparently to die. Her return to a place known from childhood also suggests that she may be concerned with the past. However, it is revealed that Judith is becoming more forward looking. Beagan’s texts share characteristics with Waxman’s ‘Reifungsroman’ (1990). In addition to centring on an older female protagonist who relocates as part of her exploration of her identity in later life, the short stories reflect the form and structure of Reifungsromane: through third-person limited omniscient narratives, they represent an older woman’s revitalizing internal journey using flashbacks and sections from the protagonist’s diaries, especially in ‘Birth of an Oxbow’ (16, 184–5). As is the case in the novels analysed by Waxman, Beagan’s imagining of Judith’s later life is not always positive. Common Reifungsroman anxieties including self-doubt, loneliness, and grief appear alongside the all-important passage into self-discovery fostered by an ‘embrace of new commitments and interests’ – Judith begins writing for the first time in decades and takes up Welsh classes (16). Furthermore, the texts follow other Reifungsromane by rendering the internal process of emotional stocktaking, including reviewing her marriage, that the protagonist goes through following the loss of her husband – a practice that Waxman identifies as important to widowed protagonists’ journeys towards ‘ripening’. For Judith, this stocktaking is facilitated by rereading diaries from her youth and by the act of writing, especially writing about twenty-first century Llandudno and her childhood memories of the town. Once living in Llandudno, Judith grows emotionally. Although Bob still exists for her as an internal, critical voice, she becomes more confident in expressing her feelings; for example, when she disagrees openly with her English neighbour on the issue of bilingual utility bills. This emotional honesty causes a change in the protagonist’s perception of her marriage. Judith is distanced from her family because Bob ‘disliked’ her daughter-in-law Shani ‘intensely’ (Beagan 2009: 103). Realizing this gulf was not caused by Shani, but an unreasonable aversion on Bob’s part, the protagonist is surprised to find herself accusing him: ‘Bob, you deprived me of my grandchildren’ (125). She understands that she was dominated by her husband and recognizes that her identity has been in crisis since his death. Following this epiphany, Judith’s focus turns towards the future as she resolves to visit her family. Particularly illuminating to a reading of Beagan’s texts is Waxman’s discussion of contemporary British and North American novels in which ‘as they travel, [the protagonists] gradually come to terms with crucial decisions they made as youths; with past experiences, often sexual, that influenced their lives; and with their cultural roots’ (1990: 17, emphasis mine). Reengagement with the Welsh language and a growing awareness of her national identity situate Judith within a wider group of Reifungsroman protagonists who reconnect with similar aspects of themselves. Moving to Llandudno places Judith in northwest Wales – an area with a high number of firstlanguage Welsh speakers. However, the town itself attracts many retirees from outside Wales, who, like Judith’s neighbour, may not identify as Welsh or feel tolerant towards the language (Carnegie 2019). Thus, her altercation with her neighbour prompts the protagonist to reconsider her own national identity. Hailing from Flintshire, Judith was ‘brought up to speak Cymraeg Sir Fflint [Flintshire Welsh], and a smattering at that’, which left her with a ‘sense of linguistic inferiority’ in comparison to first-language Welsh speakers from west Wales (Beagan 2009: 119–20). More

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confident about her Welshness in later life, she recognizes the destructiveness of these feelings of inferiority and enrols in a language class to revitalize the Welsh she learnt as a child. Whilst writing about childhood memories of a Llandudno view, Judith realizes Bob’s dislike for Welsh-speaking Shani came from his own inferior sense of Welshness. As she returns to the view once more, further insights emerge: when they first met, Bob resented the protagonist for being ‘just a little bit more Welsh than he was’ and mocked her for it (136). Hence, by learning Welsh again, Judith is not just embracing her national identity, but also rejecting some of the strictures of her marriage. Moreover, Judith’s decision reflects her involvement in the realities of Wales in the early twenty-first century, rather than her memories (and Bob’s opinions) of Welsh culture in the mid twentieth century. Competing against first-language speakers in eisteddfodau4 as a child, Judith felt she didn’t belong. However, she perceives ‘a new inclusiveness’ in relation to the language (136). Indeed, the pattern of decline in the number of Welsh speakers has reversed in the past thirty years thanks to policy changes relating to broadcasting, education and public services in the 1980s and 1990s, which were followed by further legislation after the formation of National Assembly for Wales (now the Senedd / Welsh Parliament) (Mac-Giolla Chríost 2012). Thus, when she attends a Welsh course, the character becomes part of the changing shape of contemporary Welsh society and associated developments in conceptions of Welsh identity. Although she has explored her past through her writing and emotional stocktaking, Judith is also engaged with the present and future of Wales. Beagan’s short stories are not the only examples of Welsh fiction in English that might be classed as Reifungsromane. The situation of the protagonist in Emyr Humphreys’s ‘Home’, also published in 2009, bears various similarities to that of Judith, but combines the trope of the older widow who moves home and grows personally and politically with allusions to the figure of the older custodian of the past. Dilys, who is 73 years old, has also lived vicariously through her husband: she gave up the chance of a good job to travel the world in ‘hot pursuit’ of Dennis’s ‘brilliant’ career and, like Judith, feels uncertain of her identity without him (Humphreys 2009: 142). In search of somewhere to settle following Dennis’s death, Dilys also chooses a place associated with happy childhood memories, buying ‘Henefail’, a house on the island of Anglesey near the former site of her grandfather’s smallholding. As in Beagan’s texts, social developments and intellectual pursuits help Dilys to overcome her grief and build a new life. Where Judith feels part of a community at her adult education classes and takes steps to repair her relationship with her family, Humphreys’s protagonist finds a mutually supportive surrogate family developing around her new home in the unlikely form of her ageing gardener Wil Hafan, Bulgarian immigrant and survivor of domestic violence Katica (her ‘daily help’), Katica’s children, local shopkeeper Mrs Price, and Price’s son (152). Dilys is also engaged in preparing her grandfather’s letters and her minister father’s sermons and papers – which are full of local and family history – for posthumous publication. By setting his character these tasks, Humphreys is alluding to the figure of the older custodian of the past. However, the writer complicates this figure when he renders it in a contemporary context. Where, in twentieth-century Anglophone Welsh fiction, older custodians of the past tend to be focused firmly on the events, people, and values of the past, which can cause tensions with younger generations,5 in ‘Home’, Dilys is concerned with the demands of the present and fixes on the future as much as she turns to former times. The short story is upbeat in tone, despite being embedded in the societal changes and popular concerns of early twenty-first century Britain through the inclusion of immigrants from eastern Europe trying to make lives for themselves, a new corner shop hoping to survive in the days of the ‘big four’ supermarkets and an incident of

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gang violence in which Katica’s son Cedric and Cledwyn Price from the corner shop are attacked and Cedric stabbed. Dilys facilitates the development and preservation of the little community that evolves around her home, smoothing over disagreements and encouraging friendships. In keeping with the idea that this disparate band of characters become like family to one another, when her grandson fails to visit, she installs Cedric in the bedroom she had prepared, so that the injured boy is near to his mother while she works. While recuperating, Cedric plays chess with Cledwyn using a set that belonged to Dilys’s son. Thus, the protagonist is creating a new form of support network in the absence of close family. The fact that this surrogate family is multi-generational emphasizes Dilys’s involvement with the future of her community and is also in keeping with an aspect of the Reifungsroman. Waxman explains that older female protagonists of these texts travel ‘inward, backward, forward into fuller, more intense lives and richer, more philosophical deaths’ (1990: 183; emphasis mine). In her discussion of Paule Marshall’s Praisesong for the Widow, she notes that, having turned to the past by reconnecting with her ancestors’ journey from Africa to the United States as slaves, protagonist Avey Johnson focuses on the future by resolving to ‘transmit her rich cultural heritage’ and the learning from her personal journey ‘to future generations’ (134) by reconnecting with her daughter. Dilys’s little community does not just reach across generations, but also nations, combining Katica and her Bulgarian-Liverpudlian children, the local Prices and Wil Hafan, and Dilys, who spent decades abroad before returning to the home of her ancestors. This multi-nationalism signals a multiplicitous conception of belonging in twenty-first-century Wales, undermining the more rigid definitions of Welshness associated with earlier renderings of the older custodian of the past. It is in keeping with Dilys’s concern with both the past and the future that her new home is a barn conversion. The protagonist’s choosing this building, which is no longer used for farming, suggests an openness to repurposing the old for the needs of the present and future. Schofield argues that regeneration ‘is particularly significant in Anglophone Welsh writing from the years following the introduction of devolution’ (2014: 197). Where pre-devolution fiction attends to the social and economic problems that came in the wake of industrial decline and ‘a country which … was torn between an irrecoverable past and an uncertain future’, texts written after the establishment of the Senedd ‘reflect a gradual shift away from the past and towards the future’, with renderings of topographical changes to Wales suggesting the country’s ‘reimagining’ and ‘rebirth’ (187, 203). Dilys’s journey reflects this trend and, relatedly, both ‘A Bad Case of September’ and ‘Home’ are preoccupied with the idea of older people finding a place that is right for them in later life. Judith worries that she has made a mistake by moving to Llandudno to demonstrate her independence from her son and daughter-in-law. However, by the hopeful ending of Beagan’s text, the protagonist finds herself thinking that she will phone Shani when she gets ‘home’: ‘Not when I get back. No, when I get home. Because that’s what Avalon Court was now’ (2009: 137–8). Similarly, the title of Humphreys’ story emphasizes the importance of feeling settled and Dilys expresses the need to ‘find a still centre in [her] confused world’, a ‘dwelling’ she ‘can call home’, following Dennis’s sudden death (146–7). Humphreys is perhaps alluding to Heidegger’s concept of ‘dwelling’ here: an allencompassing activity involving a relationship with and contribution to a particular place, which is the foundation of human identity and the ability to be at peace on the earth ([1954] 2001). Further, in her study of queer phenomenology and the significance of orientation, Sara Ahmed asks how we ‘find our way’ and ‘feel at home’ in the sense of existing in a place that fits with one’s sense of oneself (2006: 7). Thus, Judith and Dilys’s vacillations over where they should live

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in early widowhood reflect their uncertainties about their identities without their husbands. One can also interpret Dilys’s actions through the lens of Ahmed’s theorization of migration. The critic argues that migrants view several places as home and often feel least at home in the place from which they perceive themselves to have originated; it is ‘the most unfamiliar’ place because they do not have their own memories of it, only family stories and second-hand rememberings. Migrants compensate for these missing personal memories by engaging with national histories or collective memories (Ahmed 1999: 330). Although Dilys has childhood memories of Anglesey, she has spent more than forty years abroad. The character’s interest in her father and grandfather’s writing on the area around Henefail can, therefore, be read as an attempt to foster familiarity and ‘dwell’ in her new house by discovering the past of her ancestral locale. As well as helping her to connect with her new home, editing family papers prompts Dilys to reassess her relationship with the Welsh language and her national identity. Considering old family correspondence, she speculates: ‘There must be some kind of a link between the language of my childhood and the healing process of happiness’ (Humphreys 2009: 155). Like Judith, Dilys is riled by an outsider’s attitude to Welsh culture. Her English grandson’s desire to ‘take a look at Wales … sounds suspiciously like those nineteenth, and for that matter twentieth-century guidebooks where the intrepid traveller is advised to advance into the unknown via Chester, Shrewsbury and Gloucester’ (159–60). This protective attitude to her country is a new development: ‘Under the influence of Dennis, I suppose, I was always inclined to believe that race, religion and nationality were a pain in the neck’ (160). That Dilys and Judith’s new awareness of their national identity develops alongside enriching intellectual and social pursuits suggests that embracing this identity in later life can bolster feelings of security in one’s sense of self more generally. Indeed, in their analysis of Anglophone Welsh novels of the 1980s and 1990s about the closure of heavy industry in South Wales, Jane Aaron and M. Wynn Thomas discuss monoglot English-speaking characters who begin learning Welsh when they are made redundant, explaining that they are ‘attempting to get to know themselves through their national rather than work identities’ (2003: 295). In being widowed, Dilys and Judith have undergone sudden changes in role that might be viewed as similar to the experience of redundancy. Moreover, it is being without their beloved but domineering husbands that has allowed Dilys and Judith to reconnect with their Welsh identities. Thus, issues of gender and national identity intersect and the characters’ embracing the language and identity that that they set aside when they married coincides with a new openness to feminist thoughts and actions. As she re-assesses her marriage to Bob, Judith begins to kick back against male dominance generally. She dubs the second bedroom in Avalon Court her ‘Room of Her Own’ after Virginia Woolf (Beagan 2009: 117) and rejects the opinions of a canonical male writer in its arrangement: ‘She stopped writing and looked out of the window. Somebody, it might have been Somerset Maugham, had said somewhere that a writer should always sit with his (note that personal pronoun) back to the window. Well she hadn’t’ (2009: 124). Similarly, the care Dilys affords the female members of her surrogate family might be interpreted as a kind of sisterhood. For example, Katica has been left a single parent following the disappearance of her violent husband, so the largely matriarchal Henefail family is supporting her where her abusive partner did not. Judith and Dilys’s roles as returning older natives coming back to places from their childhoods can therefore be interpreted in the context of gender theory. Ahmed considers the lines, paths, and directions that individuals are oriented towards and ‘directed’ to take by societal expectations. Taking a particular path both marks out and repeats

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conventional ways of thinking and living. Individuals can be ‘pressured’ or ‘pressed’ into routes (Ahmed 2006: 16–17) and can be on the wrong path. Retracing one’s steps and re-orientating is difficult, but not impossible. The critic is writing about queer gender and sexuality here, but her ideas might be applied to ‘lines of life’ (18) encouraged by other gendered expectations. If Dilys and Judith committed to specific paths due to pressure from their husbands and patriarchy more generally, their returns to childhood places in widowhood are acts of retracing, re-orientating, and choosing new trajectories. For these ageing female protagonists, returning to past places and identities enables them to fashion new futures for themselves that resist the downward trajectory of the decline narrative, instead welcoming the kind of ‘ripening’ described by Waxman.

WORK, RETIREMENT, AND OLDER MASCULINITY Intersections of age and gender are also important to representations of male ageing in Anglophone Welsh fiction. The significance of employment and retirement to masculine self-image is a key theme in Christopher Meredith’s The Book of Idiots. This irreverent, dark comedy of a novel explores the ways in which middle-aged narrator Dean and his male associates are affected by work, ageing, illness, and mortality. Hearn argues that where, in pre-industrial societies, ‘increasing and greater age’ was ‘the major determinant of the social power of different men’, with industrialization under capitalism, the situation has changed: ‘Labour-power has been transformed from generational ownership to ownership of the body on the “free market” … beyond a certain point, the older the man, the weaker he becomes not just physically and bodily, but also socially.’ Somewhat reassuringly, the sociologist notes that a change in the focus of labour from ‘the body to the mind / technology’ through the expansion of office and professional work means that older men’s labour can still be valuable (Hearn 1995: 100). The social meaning of work and its significance for men’s pride and confidence are a concern in The Book of Idiots. The novel is set in the South Wales valleys – the centre of British coal production and significant producers of steel until the dismantling of heavy industry in the 1970s and 1980s – and the late-twentieth-century shift in the UK economy from the industrial to the post-industrial is apparent in the working lives of Meredith’s characters. Most are known to the narrator through his job at the Foundation: an organization involved in the construction industry, but not in the business of building itself. Dean and his associates are the planners rather than the builders and architects. They appear aware of the movement in labour identified by Hearn ‘from the body to the mind / technology’, but the change is problematic, rather than helpful, for this group of middle and retirement-aged men. Buildings, roads, and other built infrastructure hold symbolic weight in the text. When Dean’s colleague Graham describes a disempowering experience at the Foundation’s headquarters that has convinced him to retire, the fact that the physical machinery of the building has been locked within a central core is significant. Trapped in a toilet cubicle with a broken lock and faulty flush, Graham finds that, because the fittings have been designed to conceal any working parts, he cannot use his physical skills to repair the cistern or free himself. Relatedly, the narrator ‘can’t think of being in an office as work’ and betrays a desire to be physically challenged and making something directly, rather than just planning: Work is what an engine does when it burns fuel to drag you down the road … It’s what [Dean’s former colleague] Jeff Burridge did in his workshop turning his chair legs or in his allotment

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turning earth. He’d said something like that before he left the Foundation. I want to bloody make something. We do make things, I said. No we don’t, he said. We dick around the edges while other people make things. (Meredith 2012: 16) When Dean meets Jeff by chance sometime later, his former colleague has been retired for several years. Sarah Vickerstaff argues that ‘whereas in the past retirement happened to people, now it seems that there is more choice in how to do retirement’ (2015: 297). Unfortunately, Jeff is not in this position. While The Book of Idiots reflects the fact that, in post-industrial societies, retirement has become an individualized experience that takes various forms (Vickerstaff 2015: 300) through the inclusion of other, different retired men,6 we learn that this character had no choice but to retire early to avoid disciplinary procedures at work and has not adjusted well. Jeff ’s frustration over being distanced from the products of his labour at the Foundation developed into full-blown aggression in his next job teaching at a local college. This combativeness got the better of him when he punched a disrespectful student, suggesting he felt threatened by younger men pre-retirement. Jeff ’s subsequent removal from the labour market before he was ready has left him feeling weakened socially. The character seems lonely when he comes across Dean at the local swimming pool, extending their one-way conversations for as long as possible, despite the narrator’s attempts to curtail them. Jeff ’s superficially enthusiastic description of days spent at his allotment betrays a struggle to fill the empty hours now his work is done and his sons grown: ‘I bloody love it. Don’t know how I found the time before I finished … I got all this time see. All this time. I go up dead early some mornings. Pat’s still sleeping. No Dennis now see. Or Mark. We don’t see ’em much.’ (Meredith 2012: 85). The text is filled with references to the trappings of twenty-first-century life: Renault Meganes, Nordic walking and the pretension that dubs a foyer an atrium, for example (97). Significantly, where the narrator has the confidence and cultural fluency to adopt these fashions with discrimination, Jeff is excluded from and alienated by them (41). Attempting to buy swimming trunks in modern ‘Endurance’ fabric on Dean’s recommendation, he cannot find a pair to fit him (89). One can read Jeff ’s search for technical trunks and swimming lessons as unsuccessful attempts to achieve the model of masculine ‘successful aging’ identified by Calasanti and King, which requires older men to spend money engaging in activities usually undertaken by the middle-aged and making associated purchases. Even if individuals have the resources to buy into such pursuits, they will still age (Calasanti and King 2005). Thus, Jeff envies but cannot emulate middle-aged Dean’s front crawl and the technical trunks are not designed for his weightier body. Given the impossibility of this character achieving the ‘successful aging’ ideal, his loneliness, and suggested feelings of redundancy, his later suicide is poignant but unsurprising. In addition to revealing the harm caused by the ‘successful aging’ ideal, The Book of Idiots critiques the marginalization of older people in the workplace. There is a preoccupation with ‘timing’ in the novel. Dean’s narrative emphasizes the plot’s early deaths, near misses, and happy accidents, but he and other characters reinforce an inflexible conception of the lifecourse that assigns roles by age. When staff at the Foundation choose their preferred candidate to replace Graham, three of the four applicants are dismissed due, in part at least, to their age or gender, while the successful candidate is judged to be at the right point for the job: ‘It’s like, astronomers say there’s only a certain band in solar systems that can have lifebearing planets. Not too hot, not too cold, not too big, not too small … Owens is the one in the zone.

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The others either don’t know enough or they’ve forgotten it. They’re either too old or too young.’ ‘Or too female?’ Graham said. ‘I’m glad you said that’ Edith said. (Meredith 2012: 139–40) That the older and younger applicants are discounted along with the one woman suggests that age is as important a factor as gender in the othering of individuals in the workplace. Assumptions are also made about the oldest candidate that imply Dean and his colleagues are stereotyping him. In addition to Andy’s comment that this mature, experienced candidate will have ‘forgotten’ the expertise required for the job, Graham imagines that, because he himself wants to ‘coast’ until his imminent retirement, the candidate would do the same (Meredith 2012: 139). The inaccuracy of these assumptions is revealed when preferred candidate Owens argues that the ‘old guy’ is the best person for the job and that it is a genuine passion for Wales that motivates him: ‘That old guy, he’s your man. Thing is, he’s brilliant. He’ll be taking a pay cut to come here … Didn’t you ask him? His wife died. He wants to move back to Wales. He wants to build here. He’s genuine, man. He’s a gift’ (144–5). Like Humphreys’s Dilys and Beagan’s Judith, then, the oldest candidate is part of the trope of the returning older native, reconnecting with Wales as he grieves for his wife. Furthermore, the character’s desire to ‘build’ in Wales and the work of the Foundation more generally make The Book of Idiots another text in which regeneration is related to reimagining Wales after devolution. Despite this ageing character’s desire to contribute to Wales’s future, Meredith’s novel reveals the problematic association of futurity with youth and the barriers it creates for older people. Having realized that the older candidate is the best person for the job, Dean is dumbfounded when his superiors appoint the ‘unfeasibly young’ Kyle (Meredith 2012: 136). A broader uncertainty about the extent to which older characters are enabled to contribute to Wales’s future is apparent in other texts. While ‘Home’ is forward looking and optimistic, Humphreys wrote a more ambivalent short story about an older male chronicler of the past who is drawn to the landscape of his youth by the desire to regenerate it. ‘The Man in the Mist’ (2003) charts the life of Glyndwr Brace, who leaves rural north Wales to pursue a career as a BBC newsreader in London. Success comes easily and the qualities that make Glyn popular are linked to the Welsh identity in which he takes great pride. He shares his name with the legendary Owain Glyndwr and his ‘mellifluous’ voice is reminiscent of such romantic figures as Richard Burton and Dylan Thomas (Humphreys 2003: 91). This is a conception of Welshness that has much in common with that associated with twentiethcentury remembrancers of the past: founded on a knowledge of the past and the Welsh language and the character’s nonconformist background. However, despite his exaggerated performance of Welshness, as he grows older, Glyn’s career falters. The criticisms levelled against him suggest both ageism and that playing on a concept of Welshness that is now past cannot benefit his career in the present: ‘Glyn Brace’s voice was too deliberately melodious and his manner too ingratiating for contemporary taste. He was a has-been covered with an evangelical mildew … and the public had no desire to be preached at and certainly not by a fading Welsh jeune premier’ (Humphreys 2003: 91).7 A foray making Welsh history documentaries delays his professional demise temporarily, but the character is eventually bullied into early retirement just as he loses his wife to an affair. At this point of professional and personal chaos, Glyn buys a dilapidated cottage in the valley where he grew up, hoping to help reverse the post-industrial decline there. However, having withdrawn into

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an ascetic existence, he apparently does little more than ‘keep an eye’ on the sheep (Humphreys 2003: 106). Knowledge of Humphreys’s life and oeuvre suggests a self-consciousness to this story. The writer worked as a producer at BBC Wales and ‘contributed notable programmes on Welsh history, myth and literature to Channel 4’ (Stephens 1998: 336). Further, Humphreys’s non-fiction work, The Taliesin Tradition ([1983] 1989), is a product of his concern that Wales’s culture, history, and identity are not forgotten and his belief that – following in the tradition of ancient poets such as Taliesin – writers, ministers, and politicians can foster remembrance. The characterization of Glyn therefore reveals an anxiety about the ability of writers to be effective custodians of the past and to halt the erasure of traditional Welsh culture. He is another older character whose attention is pulled back and forth between the past, present, and future. Despite borrowing from Welsh culture and history to shape his TV persona and career, Glyn has been unable to ride the wave of broadcasting fashion or to halt the changes in his valley. Humphreys was eighty-four when ‘The Man in the Mist’ was published in his ironically titled collection Old People Are a Problem and was perhaps contemplating the role of the Welsh writer – particularly as he or she ages – and the narratives of fiction or television in the construction of Welsh identity.

CONCLUSION The novel and short stories examined in this chapter make positive contributions to the body of literature in English that engages with ageing and later life. Contemporary Anglophone Welsh fiction includes examples of Reifungsromane, which offer imaginings of older women’s lives that contradict the trajectories of decline narratives and instead present widows who grow in confidence and create new identities in their journeys towards ‘ripening’. Meredith’s The Book of Idiots presents a varied picture of older male ageing and critiques the treatment of older people in the workplace, suggesting that age and gender discrimination go hand in hand. The novel also attends to the identity problems and feelings of disempowerment that can exist for ageing men in retirement and post-industrial employment, prompting the reader to consider the roles available to older men (and women). Age and gender intersect in all the fiction analysed earlier. Moreover, age, gender, and national identity converge when Beagan and Humphreys’s older female protagonists find it easier to shape their lives, including exploring their Welsh identities, when freed from the expectations of their marriages. Engagements with the past are also important to older identities in the texts discussed. In the trope of the returning older native, going back to a place from childhood gives older women in particular the chance to reconnect with aspects of themselves that have been set aside, to reorientate and choose different paths. The act of reassessing one’s past is indicated to be helpful in finding one’s way in later life, while engaging with the history of one’s place helps one older character to feel at home and embedded within her community. Older protagonists’ relationships with the past are not always straightforward in contemporary Welsh fiction in English, however. Ageing characters tend to switch focus between the past, present, and future, seeming uncertain where to fix their attention. The failure of Glyn in ‘The Man in the Mist’ to secure popularity using his studied brand of Welshness once society changes and he grows older suggests that conceptions of identity grounded in ways of life that no longer exist are not helpful in the twenty-first century. Beagan’s Judith is perhaps the character who is able to find the happiest balance, coming to terms with past mistakes and her imperfect marriage

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and seizing the opportunity presented by a new attitude to the Welsh language to be part of a wider reworking of Welsh identity after devolution. Thus, where Humphreys’ text seems to suggest that Welsh writers will struggle to transmit the histories of Wales as change inevitably continues, Beagan perhaps signals a way through. The writer allows her protagonist to appraise the past realistically and engage in the present with all its complexities so that she might shape a small part of the future.

NOTES 1 See, for example, Old Nanni, who remembers the birth of every member of the congregation of Capel Sion in ‘Be This Her Memorial’, part of Caradoc Evans’s seminal collection My People ([1915] 1987); Miss Eurgain, with her memories of studying piano under Liszt in nineteenth-century Germany and being ‘rescued in her nightdress from a burning house in Paris’ in The Black Venus (1944) by Rhys Davies; and the protagonist’s grandmother Mary Lydia in Glyn Jones’s The Valley, the City, the Village ([1956] 2009), who recounts Welshspeaking and working-class oral histories that are threatened with elision. For a full discussion of the ageing storyteller in Welsh fiction in English, see my PhD thesis (Shepley, 2018). 2 Sarah Falcus (2013) and Marta Miquel-Baldellou (2012) employ Judith Butler’s conception of identity – particularly gender identity – as a performance. Similarly, Kathleen Woodward describes the operation of ‘the youthful structure of the look – that is, the culturally induced tendency to degrade and reduce an older person to the prejudicial category of old age’ (2006: 164) in contemporary feature films, apparently taking inspiration from Laura Mulvey’s notion of the ‘male gaze’. 3 Some illuminating studies of male ageing in literature do exist, however. Margaret Morganroth Gullette’s monograph on the midlife progress novel (1988), for example, considers male protagonists created by Saul Bellow, John Updike, and Anne Tyler alongside women rendered by Tyler and Margaret Drabble, and Lynne Segal has written on older male sexuality as represented by Philip Roth, Martin Amis, Updike, and Edmund White (2013). Further, Sara Munson Deats and Lagretta Tallent Lenker’s edited collection (1999) includes five essays on the representation of older men that consider drama, fiction, and biography spanning the seventeenth to twentieth centuries and employ a range of theoretical approaches. 4 An eisteddfod (plural: eisteddfodau) is a cultural festival involving competitions in singing, poetry, and other forms of musical performance. Eisteddfodau are usually conducted in Welsh. 5 See, for example, Glyn Jones’s bildungsroman The Valley, the City, the Village, in which protagonist Trystan struggles to determine his own path in the face of his grandmother Mary Lydia’s insistence that he pursue the career expected of working-class grammar school boys like himself and become a nonconformist minister. In a dream sequence, Mary Lydia leads a ‘Great Judgment’ in which the working-class histories of local families are recounted and Trystan’s wayward friend Nico is urged to ‘learn and remember’ the hardships and injustices endured by his ancestors (Jones [1956] 2009: 348). 6 See, for example, Peter, the amateur glider pilot who takes Dean out flying and is a picture of competence in the sky. He is ‘older than Jeff … close to seventy’, but still has the physique of a younger man: ‘He was in a check shirt, jeans and trainers. Only his hands and face looked old’ (Meredith 2012: 215). 7 For an example of an older character who has cultivated his Welshness to advance his career, see Kingsley Amis’s The Old Devils. The novel’s events centre on the return of poet and ‘up-market media Welshman’ Alan ‘Alun’ Weaver and his long-suffering wife Rhiannon to South Wales after several decades in London (Amis 1986: 14). Pathologically dishonest in his marriage and his dealings with his friends, Alun is also guilty of pretension and fakery in his professional life. His writing is a poor imitation of the work of the late, great Brydan (a thinly veiled reference to Dylan Thomas), his romantic mane of white hair is dyed for effect, and his research trips and creative endeavours are planned with TV coverage in mind.

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REFERENCES Aaron, J., and M. W. Thomas (2003), ‘“Pulling You Through Changes”: Welsh Writing in English before, between and after Two Referenda’, in M. W. Thomas (ed.), Welsh Writing in English, 278–309, Cardiff: University of Wales Press. Ahmed, S. (1999), ‘Home and Away: Narratives of Migration and Estrangement’, International Journal of Cultural Studies, 2 (3): 329–47. Ahmed, S. (2006), Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Amis, K. (1986), The Old Devils, London: Hutchinson. Beagan, G. (2009), The Great Master of Ecstasy, Bridgend: Seren. Brown, T. (2001), ‘The Ex-Centric Voice: The English-Language Short Story in Wales’, North American Journal of Welsh Studies, 1 (1): 25–41. Burdett, G. (2014), ‘Filling the Void: Representation of Disability in Contemporary Welsh Writing in English’, PhD thesis, Swansea University. Calasanti, T., and N. King (2005), ‘Firming the Floppy Penis: Age, Class, and Gender Relations in the Lives of Old Men’, Men and Masculinities, 8 (1): 3–23. Carnegie UK Trust (2019), ‘Llandudno’, Understanding Welsh Places. Available at: http://www.under​stan​ding​ wels​hpla​ces.wales/en/comp​are/W37000​243/ (accessed 20 June 2022). Davies, R. (1944), The Black Venus, London: Heinemann. Deats, S. M., and L. T. Lenker (eds) (1999), Aging and Identity: A Humanities Perspective, Westport, CT: Praeger. Evans, C. ([1915] 1987), My People, Bridgend: Seren. Falcus, S. (2013), ‘Addressing Age in Michèle Roberts’s Reader, I Married Him’, Contemporary Women’s Writing, 7 (1): 18–34. Gullette, M. M. (1988), Safe at Last in the Middle Years: The Invention of the Midlife Progress Novel: Saul Bellow, Margaret Drabble, Anne Tyler, and John Updike, Berkeley: University of California Press. Gullette, M. M. (2011), Agewise: Fighting the New Ageism in America, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Hearn, J. (1995), ‘Imaging the Aging of Men’, in M. Featherstone and A. Wernick (eds), Images of Aging: Cultural Representations of Later Life, 97–115, London: Routledge. Heidegger, M. ([1954] 2001), ‘Building Dwelling Thinking’ (1954), in A. Hofstadter (trans.), Poetry, Language, Thought, 141–59, New York: Perennial Classics. Humphreys, E. ([1983] 1989), The Taliesin Tradition, Bridgend: Seren. Humphreys, E. (2003), Old People Are a Problem, Bridgend: Seren. Humphreys, E. (2009), The Woman at the Window, Bridgend: Seren. Jones, G. ([1956] 2009), The Valley, the City, the Village, Cardigan: Parthian. Knight, S. (2004), A Hundred Years of Fiction, Cardiff: University of Wales Press. Mac-Giolla Chríost, D. (2012), ‘The Welsh Language: Devolution and International Relations’, Georgetown Journal of International Affairs, 13 (1): 15–21. Meredith, C. (2012), The Book of Idiots, Bridgend: Seren. Miquel-Baldellou, M. (2012), ‘Aged Females through the Victorian Gothic Male Gaze: Edgar Allan Poe’s Madame LaLande and Sheridan le Fanu’s Carmilla’, in J. Dolan and E. Tincknell (eds), Aging Femininities: Troubling Representations, 17–26, Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars.

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Schofield, E. (2014), ‘Independent Wales?: The Impact of Devolution on Welsh Fiction in English’, PhD thesis, Cardiff University. Segal, L. (2013), Out of Time: The Pleasures and the Perils of Ageing, London: Verso. Shepley, E. (2018), ‘Ageing in Welsh Fiction in English, 1906–2012: Bodies, Culture, Time, and Memory’, PhD thesis, Cardiff University. Stephens, M. (ed.) (1998), The New Companion to the Literature of Wales, Cardiff: University of Wales Press. Vickerstaff, S. (2015), ‘Retirement, Evolution, Revolution or Retrenchment’, in J. Twigg and W. Martin (eds), Routledge Handbook of Cultural Gerontology, 297–304, Abingdon: Routledge. Waxman, B. F. (1990), From the Hearth to the Open Road: A Feminist Study of Aging in Contemporary Literature, New York: Greenwood Press. Williams, J. (2000), ‘The Place of Fantasy: Children and Narratives in Two Short Stories by Kate Roberts and Dylan Thomas’, Welsh Writing in English, 6: 45–66. Williams, R. (1979), The Welsh Industrial Novel, Cardiff: University College Cardiff Press. Woodward, K. (2006), ‘Performing Age, Performing Gender’, National Women’s Studies Association Journal, 18 (1): 162–89.

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CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

African American women and ageing: Remembering AfroAmerindian ancestors in Alice Walker’s Now Is the Time to Open Your Heart SASKIA M. FÜRST

INTRODUCTION In her piece ‘Who Says an Older Woman Shouldn’t Dance?’, Gloria Wade-Gayles ([1996] 2003: 8) states, ‘Becoming older is a gift, not a curse, for it is that season when we have long and passionate conversations with the self we spoke to only briefly in our younger years.’ As a mature woman, Wade-Gayles has become a writer and is eager to explore this new facet of her identity, which she states would not have been possible until she reached midlife. This understanding of midlife and old age as a creative and generative period in life is not a common notion in mainstream Western societies. Rather than celebrate a period in a woman’s life where her priorities no longer revolve around marriage, having and raising children and / or achieving success in her career, the dominant discourse regarding the fear of ageing and respective loss that comes with a woman’s lack of marketability for a heterosexual partner prevails in mainstream Western societies. These ideas are not new but have been highlighted by feminist scholars within Age(ing) Studies, such as Simone de Beauvoir with her 1972 book titled The Coming of Age. In it, she notes how society, in general, dreads ageing and renders the process invisible, particularly for women. In 1991, Kathleen Woodward published the edited volume Figuring Age: Women, Bodies, Generations with the explicit goal of making women’s experiences with ageing visible. In the same year, Germaine Greer’s (1991) The Change: Women, Ageing, and the Menopause explores some of the possibilities but also the common myths and stereotypes US women face during this stage of their later years. More recently, Margaret Cruikshank’s (2003) Learning to Be Old: Gender, Culture, and Aging, among other publications, continues to address the ways in which women’s bodies have been ‘Othered’ and rendered invisible through the category of old age. And while ageing certainly may

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be accompanied with bodily and mental changes (even decline), this does not mean that it cannot still be a fruitful and productive phase of a woman (or man’s) life. Wade-Gayle’s personal narrative of progress and self-development in her later years reflects the Reifungsroman literary genre. Coined by Barbara Frey Waxman (1990: 16), such narratives ‘depict women’s rite of passage into senescence thematically as a ripening process. … While Reifungsromane do not paint a uniformly rosy picture of old age … there is, nevertheless, an opening up of life for many of these ageing heroines as they literally take to the open road in search of themselves and new roles in life’. The features of such novels include a first-person point of view from a protagonist who takes a journey, either literally or metaphysically (through dreams), whereby they ‘come to terms with crucial decisions they made as youths; with past experiences, often sexual, that influenced their lives; and with their cultural roots’ (Waxman 1990: 16–17). Not only does this genre refute stereotypical narratives of ageing as a process of decline in Western societies, but, as a literary genre, these novels allow readers to identify and empathize with the struggles midlife and older women may face. Thus, Reifungsromane challenge Western, patriarchal norms of devaluing elderly people, particularly women. In her book Declining to Decline: Cultural Combat and the Politics of the Midlife, Margaret M. Gullette (1997) explores the Reifungsroman and what it has achieved for midlife protagonists, specifically in her chapter ‘Midlife Heroines, “Older and Freer”: Constructing the Female Midlife in Contemporary Fiction’. She refers to the midlife progress novel, which I understand as a subcategory within Reifungsromane, as a still emerging genre that ‘permit[s]‌readers to compare the values and options of protagonists, stabilizing, expanding, and overthrowing (parts of) their own sense of self; developing ambitions, altering decisions; revising and renaming their very feelings; finally, renarrativizing their life courses’ (Gullette 1997: 79). Many of these aspects are found in novels featuring older Black female protagonists by African American female writers. For example, writers like Paule Marshall, Toni Morrison, Gloria Naylor, and Alice Walker address the fears of ageing but also the possibilities for growth and healing. Their protagonists usually find renewed purpose in their midlife years through engaging with their selected communities. Before this is possible, however, their protagonists must find a renewed sense of wholeness to their identities, often achieved through newly discovered abilities to cross (temporal) boundaries, remembering and re-experiencing their ancestors’ lives and re-defining their self-identities as mature Black women. Yet, with respect to memory, Gullette (1997: 86) argues that protagonists, like Celie and Sethe from Walker’s The Color Purple (1982) and Morrison’s Beloved (1987), respectively, must ‘be able to get free of the bulk of [their] past … The past has been borne in order that the present might be different.’ However, memory functions in a different manner within the novels of Marshall, Naylor and Walker, whose middle- and upper-class protagonists are in their fifties plus. As Silvia Pilar Castro-Borrego (2011: 11) notes, within African American women’s literature, ‘The search for wholeness functions as a venue where re-memory, as conceived by Toni Morrison, functions as a link to a past which is understood as powerful and useful once we are ready to confront it and accept it through the wise guidance of ancestry.’ Thus, memory or rather re-memory is not just a process ‘to get free of ’ but is a crucial process for Black female protagonists to heal their identities and find a renewed purpose to their later years by bringing ancestral voices and lived experiences to their present. While Gullette points out the strengths and weaknesses of this emerging genre, without taking different class and ethnic backgrounds into account, her reading of how memory

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functions for midlife and older African American protagonists does not include the concept and use of re-memory. In this chapter, I argue that Alice Walker’s novel Now Is the Time to Open Your Heart expands that concept of re-memory in African American literature and Literary Gerontology Studies – as part of Age(ing) Studies – to include Amerindian ancestry. Here, the 57-year-old bisexual, divorced1 Kate, narrates the story of her journey from the United States to the Amazon and back to resolve her inability to continue her profession as a writer, the feelings of disharmony within her conception of her sense of self, her inability to accept her ageing body, and the resulting desire to end her relationship with her current lover, a younger man.2 Actively including works like Walker’s into Gullette’s definition of the midlife progress novel would progressively expand the genre to include positive associations with memories and generative processes of re-memory through which new ambitions, new concepts of the mature female self, and new spaces for community solidarity can be made for midlife protagonists of diverse ethnic backgrounds.

AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN’S ENGAGEMENT WITH AGEING: (IN)VISIBILITY AND RESISTANCE TO SOCIAL NARRATIVES OF DECLINE Historically, African American women have never lived up to the norms of white female beauty standards in the United States as they have often been relegated to stereotypical representations, such as purely sexual beings (the Jezebel), the domineering Black woman (also the Matriarch), asexual and passive bodies (the Mammy figure), and the angry Black women (see Collins 2000; HarrisPerry 2011). However, Black women have resisted and contested the myths and misrepresentations of their womanhood for decades. As Caroline Brown (2012: 2) notes, many contemporary African American writers are re-contextualizing a specific African diasporic subjectivity through the embodiment of Black bodies in creative works. The historical ramifications of slavery have rendered Black female bodies as hyper-visible through the above stereotypes to justify treating them as ‘sexual surrogate[s]‌, human breeder[s], and violently ungendered commodit[ies]’ (3). To combat the invisibility of their diversified lived experiences, Brown (2012: 4) looks at several novels and art works by African American women which engage with the past and ancestors symbolically to recreate African diaspora performance traditions to reimagine a sense of belonging in America for Black women. Her work reflects a growing body of literature which locates a space for resistance to and negotiations of Black female identity through embodiment, which highlights the fluidity of identity and culture (see also Bennett and Dickerson 2001; Billingslea-Brown 1999; Lee 1996, among others). Indeed, representations of Black women, or the lack thereof, further impact their constructions of their identities. As contemporary Black scholars have argued, the lived experiences and constitutions of Black female identities are not fixed, static, or universally singular. Already in 1990, bell hooks (1990: 28) argues, Employing a critique of essentialism allows African-Americans to acknowledge the way in which class mobility has altered collective black experience so that racism does not necessarily have the same impact on our lives. Such a critique allows us to affirm multiple black identities, varied black experience. It also challenges colonial imperialist paradigms of black identity which represent blackness one-dimensionally in ways that reinforce and sustain white supremacy.

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Thus, this chapter, like many Black feminist endeavours, identifies similar techniques employed by Black women writers due to the shared history of slavery that impacts African American’s concepts of their selves, in the present, while still highlighting the ways in which Black women’s interaction with their past and their ageing bodies is also quite diverse. This perspective mirrors postcolonial discourses on feminism, particularly regarding the dangers of supposing a homogenous experience for all women across ethnic, class, and national distinctions. As Chandra Talpade Mohanty (1984: 338) notes, ‘The discursively consensual homogeneity of “women” as a group is mistaken for the historically specific material reality of groups of women. This results in an assumption of women as an always-already constituted group, one which has been labelled “powerless,” “exploited,” “sexually harassed,” etc., by feminist scientific, economic, legal and sociological discourses.’ Sara Mills (1998: 98) further stresses the need for postcolonial feminist theory to focus on different national and cultural experiences of women. Indeed, feminist postcolonial analyses of literary works can enable the ‘unlayering [of] the palimpsest of the patriarchal and the colonial narrative by engaging their [women’s] ambiguities, filling their voids, transgressing their taboos, interrogating their in-between(s)’ (Nagy-Zekmi 2003: 178). In a similar vein, African American women writers address how class differences affect the ways in which some of the African American protagonists can be geographically mobile to resolve their fears of ageing or whether tactics like humour and masquerade must be employed to survive in hostile environments of poverty and structural racism in the United States (see Fürst 2017, 2021). As such, Black women writers in the United States engage in the very postcolonial feminist strategies advocated by Silvia Nagy-Zekmi (2003: 178) that transform the female subject into ‘writing its own text(s), thus repositioning women’s role as producers of history and of culture’. In her early research on ‘Comparative Life Styles and Family and Friend Relationships Among Older Black Women’, Jacquelyn Johnson Jackson (1972: 478) states, ‘Old blacks already effective in coping with such adverse conditions as racism and poverty may display greater competence in and satisfaction with adjustments to retirement and old age than do whites.’ In her introduction to Age Ain’t Nothing but a Number: Black Women Explore Midlife, Carleen Brice (2003: ix) notes that ‘African American culture isn’t as youth-focused as the predominant culture’. Similarly, in a study of fifty retired African American women professionals, Kathleen Slevin and C. Ray Wingrove (1998: 147) found that these middle- and upper-class Black women were mostly positive about being older and only one woman in the group expressed concern about her loss of physical attractiveness due to ageing. They postulate that this may be because the women in the study still lead active lifestyles and thus have greater self-esteem that offset Western social norms that favour a youthful appearance (147). These findings concur with Gail Sheehy’s results after conducting surveys of women in menopause, whereby she also notes that African American women may deal with menopause better than white women as they have different beauty standards and are more likely to gain respect and prestige in their midlife and later years (in her 1995 bestselling book New Passages: Mapping Your Life across Time as cited in Gaston and Porter [2001] 2003: 66). However, as Jackson ([1967] 1997: 37) notes, Black women ‘grow old in different ways’. Not surprisingly, she also posits that ‘blacks reaching old age already ineffectively equipped to cope with their devalued statuses, roles, and conditions may display even greater incompetence and dissatisfaction in adjusting to retirement and old age than do whites’ (Jackson 1972: 478). Brice (2003: ix) further states that Western society’s preoccupation with women’s value in their youthful appearance can and does lead to similar forms of anxiety, fear, and disappointment with ageing for

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Black women. As early as 1972, Susan Sontag ([1972] 2008: 202) argued in her seminal article ‘The Double Standard of Aging’ that ‘men are “allowed” to age, without penalty, in several ways that women are not’. She explains that since women’s value is placed in their appearance and ability to remain attractive to heterosexual men, as they age and ‘lose’ these features, they are not celebrated for their grey hair nor their facial wrinkles as with older men (Sontag 2008: 202). Furthermore, she notes that women subject themselves to extreme diets, workout regimes, and even beauty operations to maintain a youthful appearance (Sontag 2008: 208–10). Yet, Sontag (2008: 204) only briefly mentions that there may be social class differences with regards to perceptions of ageing for women. She does not make any distinctions between experiences for non-white, nonheterosexual women. Julie Winterich (2007: 63), from a small study on ageing and appearance including thirty women aged forty-six to seventy-one of different sexual orientations and class and educational backgrounds, tentatively suggests that with regard to grey hair, ‘perhaps women of color in this study accept their gray hair because their marginalized statuses allow them more freedom with age to reject dominant appearance standards with which they could never fully comply’. In her conclusion, she states, Mainly white, heterosexuals talked about body work in light of beauty concerns, such as dieting and dyeing their hair. They did not seem to question cultural standards about femininity; they characterized weight gain as an individual failure and gray hair as something to hide, rather than unreasonable standards. Thus, the data underscore the link between femininity, heterosexuality, and appearance. In contrast, some lesbians and women of color critique that link with age, and one benefit is that they do not tend to conflate their sense of selves with their bodies. (Winterich 2007: 65) While Winterich’s study shows the potential for ways in which Black women resist narratives of decline surrounding ageing, due to historically racialized concepts of Black female bodies, it is equally possible that some internalize stereotypical Western notions of ageing and participate in ‘successfully ageing’ – maintaining a more youthful bodily appearance – and ageism towards older people. What is clear is that, as Jackson (1997: 37) already noted, Black women age differently, and more studies and research need to be conducted as we still know relatively little about Black women and ageing. Within literature, Zoe Brennan (2005: 4) also states that different ethnic groups have varied attitudes towards ageing and limits her analysis of representations of older protagonists in literature to white characters in North American and British literature in The Older Woman in Recent Fiction. She particularly references Naylor’s Mama Day (1988) and how the old protagonist Miranda is treated with ‘great respect’ as part of the African discourse that Naylor utilizes in her works (Brennan 2005: 4). When reviewing the history of the role of grandmothers in African American communities, Jillian Jimenez (2002: 526) notes that elders in West Africa often held important religious positions and were respected as advisors and storytellers and for providing connections between the past and the present, which was passed on to African American grandmothers, post slavery. This connection to the past and ancestors is incorporated in the African American concept of re-memory, a term defined by Mae Henderson when analysing Morrison’s Beloved. She argues that Morrison’s novel serves two purposes: ‘the exploration of the black woman’s sense of self, and the imaginative recovery of black women’s history’ (Henderson 1991: 65). Because of the legacy of forced illiteracy on African slaves throughout the Black diaspora, Henderson states that

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authors like Morrison must discover a narrative method to organize memories and configure stories for present literary works that narrate past lives without the support of historical documents. By incorporating these past lives and stories in present narrations, re-memory is ‘in fact, that which makes the past part of one’s present’ through a process of haunting, even bodily possession of present bodies (Henderson 1991: 68, 67). In both Naylor’s Mama Day and Marshall’s Praisesong for the Widow (1983), the older female protagonists are haunted by their ancestors – crossing temporal boundaries – as part of their journey in resolving their respective dilemmas; Miranda discovers how to save her great-niece Ophelia through remembering her slave ancestor, Sapphira, and Avey begins the process of finding a new purpose in her later years as a widow, rooted in her childhood summer home on Tatum Island, after remembering the collective experiences of her African ancestors during the middle passage. Similarly, Walker employs re-memory in her novel Now Is the Time to Open Your Heart. However, since her protagonist Kate Talkingtree is AfroAmerindian, the instances of re-memory in the novel include ancestors from both heritages.

THE FUNCTION OF REMEMBERING AFRO-AMERINDIAN ANCESTORS IN NOW IS THE TIME TO OPEN YOUR HEART Readers are introduced to Kate in the opening of the novel as she discovers her dissatisfaction with Buddhism to guide her life and her displeasure with her ageing body. Although an upper-class woman, Kate realizes that she feels disconnected from the other students in her meditation class who are predominantly middle- or upper-class white people (Walker 2005: 3). Because of her discontent, Kate removes the diverse religious memorabilia in her home, leaving everything in a state of disarray. This reflects her inner self as she says that it is her house which is ‘now in disarray … [that] mirrored a dissolution she felt growing inside herself ’ (11). Even her younger male partner Yolo, who lives with her, can see that she has lost her way; she is ‘a woman no longer sure there was a path through life or how indeed to follow one if there was’ (14). Thus, her frustration with Buddhism is an extension of her inner turmoil and lack of clarity about her midlife identity. Kate also discusses her ageing body in negative terms of loss and decline. She states that ‘her life was changing. She had felt it begin to shift beneath her feet. Or above her feet, because the change had started in her knees. In her fifty-seventh year they had, both of them, mysteriously, out of the blue, begun to creak’ (9). She describes the noise as unnerving and the ‘failing’ of her body, which used to be ‘the body of a dancer – ever graceful, gliding’ as ‘terrible’ (10). She invests in orthotic insoles to address the ‘creak’, which works until she decides to stop wearing them in favour of sandals in the summer and going barefoot on the beach. As Sontag (2008) argues, Kate subjects her body to regimes to reverse or prevent a further state of physical decline. In this regard, she has internalized Western ageist values and views of ageing as a period of loss. She is also at an impasse with regards to her purpose in life and profession as a writer. She states, ‘Every word she wrote now she thought of burning’ (12). Thus, Kate’s writing dilemma and dismay with her ageing body are manifestations of her unclear purpose in her later years. Interestingly, Kate does not dye her grey hair. She states that this is mostly because she forgets, but it is also because she feels ‘humiliated to be eradicating some part of her hard-won existence’ (18). Further, she does not seem unsettled about her fuller body figure or that her breasts are sagging. Yolo remarks that Kate’s ‘eyes sparkled to find herself still vitally alive’, when he first met her (18). Kate’s acceptance of her grey hair and increased weight in her midlife years reflects the

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research conducted by Winterich (2007). As a bisexual woman of colour, she does not fit white beauty norms in the United States and does not feel as compelled to maintain them as she ages. At a later point in the novel, Kate admits that when she first discovered her grey hair and dyed it, she began to feel humiliated, like when she used to straighten her hair in high school. She says, ‘It felt like I was abusing myself. Hiding something important that was not really at fault’ (Walker 2005: 38). In connecting her experience of greying hair with that of straightening her hair as a teenager, Kate links a moment of racial resistance with that of ageist resistance. However, her reduced bodily agility does upset her, and so Kate’s character is at times ambiguous in the ways in which she internalizes and resists Western social norms on ageing. As with the upper-class, African American protagonist Avey in Praisesong for the Widow, who travels to the small island of Carriacou, Kate is only able to discover a renewed purpose to her life by changing geographical spaces. As Kate comments in the novel of herself and the five women and two men between the ages of forty and sixty-five who travel with her, ‘They had the look of people distancing themselves from the centre of things, as their own cultures defined it. Seeking the edge, the fringe. But also, paradoxically, the heart’ (Walker 2005: 51). Indeed, Roberta Maierhofer (2003: 161) notes in her literary analysis of North American fiction featuring older, female protagonists that women who have accepted the social norms of US patriarchal society are generally in a static state of mind. Those who rather reflect upon their previous lives and ‘define their own points of view’ move from the static, silent position in storytelling to one of self-narration through the centring of their own life stories (Maierhofer 2003: 161–2). Before her journey to the Amazon, Kate is unable to write and occupies a static mental space. However, through crossing geographical and temporal boundaries, Kate can begin her journey of connecting with her ancestors through remembering to return to a generative mental state. In the Amazon and under the guidance of Armando and his protégé, Anunu (an Afro-Amerindian shaman), Kate drinks yagé and experiences a process of bodily cleansing. After seven hours of ‘gutwrenching nausea’ and diarrhoea induced by the plant medicines, Kate sits wearing a mask over her eyes and dreams of her ancestors. In her analysis of Praisesong for the Widow, Susan Rogers (2000: 86) argues that Avey’s process of purging the contents of her body, through vomiting and diarrhoea, ‘is situated as a positive process. It is presented as a return to a place of potential and recovery’.3 The same is true for Kate as only after this bodily ‘cleansing’ does she have space within her body to be possessed by her ancestors. Indeed, this is not the first instance of bodily purging in the novel. Already, before Kate travels to the Amazon, her friends encourage her to find a source of water to resolve her fears of ageing and writer’s block since Kate states, ‘She began to dream each and every night that there was a river. But it was dry. There she’d be in the middle of an ancient forest searching for her life, i.e., the river, and … it would be sand’ (Walker 2005: 12). This first journey consists of a rafting trip down the Colorado River in the company of nine other women. On the evening of the fourth day, she becomes sick with a fever and throws up, symbolically releasing her body of ‘all the words from decades of her life’ (Walker 2005: 22). Kate realizes that she has collected and retained so many words that were said or remained unsaid to her loved ones that they physically make her ill. She also discovers that in her current relationship with Yolo, and in the large house they bought together, she feels ‘trapped. Captured most of all by possessions’ (29). Sitting in the valley along the river while recovering, Kate discovers the liberating effect in fully releasing herself from the desire to consume and possess material goods, as part of a Western consumerist society: ‘She felt the lightness of being in the open space around her. Her walls the

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canyon’s walls, she owned them not at all; her floor, the river beach. Her view, the heavens’ (29). Both by the river and later in the Amazon, Kate strengths her spiritual connection with her Amerindian heritage, valuing harmony with nature and distancing herself from Western capitalist values.4 Once in the Amazon, Kate dreams of Grandmother, embodied as a tree, who Kate claims as an ancestor through her Amerindian heritage as a racially mixed North American. She states, ‘I am an American … Amerindian to the Americas. Nowhere else could I, this so-called Black person – African, European, Indio – exist … Only here’ (54). Significantly, Walker presents Grandmother Yage to Kate as ‘a medicine of origins and endings’5 and in the form of a tree (166).6 Kate’s adopted last name is Talkingtree, and she believes that people and plants are related (71); these are indications of her existing connections to her Indigenous heritage. Through re-living Grandmother’s experiences and acquiring her knowledge, Kate remembers one possible history for African Americans with Indigenous ancestry while retaining her own personal narrative of empowerment in the story as well: discovering a new purpose for her later years in helping others and thereby restoring a sense of wholeness to her identity. Thus, by remembering Grandmother as an Amerindian ancestral figure, Walker expands the African American concept of re-memory to include Amerindian heritages. Meanwhile, Alexis Brooks De Vita (2000: 37) points out in her book chapter titled ‘Trees as Spiritual Mothers’ that ‘the tree binds and bridges the worlds of the living and dead between the reaches of its own roots and branches’ in pan-African beliefs and literatures. Brooks De Vita (2000) focuses on several African American literary works to identify how trees function as mythatypes7 to empower the female protagonists. For example, she argues that the chokecherry tree image whipped into Sethe’s back in Beloved is a powerful symbol of ‘mythical, ancestral, and personal rememory’, providing both a personal history and a collective experience of Black women’s experience with slavery (42–3). She also considers Celie’s identification with trees, according to a Shugian philosophy that rejects a patriarchal god in favour of nature, the key process in her ability to find agency and independency in her midlife years in The Color Purple (De Vita 2000: 50–2). In this manner, Grandmother could also be a connection to Kate’s African heritage, as Grandmother provides Kate with the knowledge and wisdom to accept her ageing body (and thus her younger lover) and heal her identity. In such a reading of Grandmother, as a process of remembering her African heritage as linked to her Amerindian one, I do not read Grandmother as an ‘exotic Other’. However, considering Kate’s initial desire to use Buddhism to address her fears of ageing, it is possible that Walker exotifies Grandmother and Kate’s Amerindian heritage in a problematic strategy of rendering Buddhism as a ‘palatable version of cultural otherness’ (Spivak as cited in Da Rocha 2012: 132) for an African American readership. Yet, Grandmother can also be read as an ‘exotic’ figure that empowers Kate to embrace the process of ageing as a generative one.8 In the last chapter set in South America titled ‘Kate Awoke the Last Day’, Kate dreams the night before that she is walking through her home, which has been transformed by an old woman ‘famous for making things beautiful’ (Walker 2005: 174). Kate wakes stating, ‘So that is old age! … The ability to visit what is ugly and to transform into beauty anything you touch’ (175). Through her time in the Amazon of dreaming and remembering Grandmother, Kate finally accepts a truth she mentions earlier in the novel: to disguise her age would also mean ‘eradicating some part of her hard-won existence’ (18). She is finally able to fully embrace the process of ageing and acknowledge the beauty it holds, especially at the level of her body.

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Kate additionally dreams of an African American ancestor who lived during slavery, Remus. In her dreams, he narrates the story of how he suffers at the hands of his owner (having his teeth pulled without anaesthesia due to his owner’s envy), his death by night riders and how the men then fight amongst themselves. This is the story that Remus wants Kate to remember, as a warning. Since her ancestors have lived many lifetimes as human beings, Remus proclaims, ‘Our job is to remind you of ways you do not want to be’ (100). Thus Kate, by having forgotten her AfricanAmerindian ancestry, has adopted harmful Western practices, such as holding on to accumulated words and material possessions and fearing old age. Remembering Remus’s life story and pain imparts this awareness to Kate and prepares her to assist Remus, even though he is an ancestor.9 After listening to his story, Kate encourages him to eat corn—a symbolic act because this was the food item he had to plant, harvest, shuck, and shell as a slave. Remus then gains a new set of teeth (corn-teeth) and finds contentment with his sense of self. Through looking at his reflection in Kate’s eyes, ‘his happiness seemed to make him weak. He stumbled and began falling forward, into her. She felt the heaviness of him … he was now inside her, she no longer felt his weight. And … she saw herself lying peacefully, sound asleep’ (102–3). His bodily possession of Kate is a benign process as he peacefully becomes a part of her; his memories are incorporated into Kate’s, becoming hers as well, like her teachings with Grandmother.10 Through remembering both Grandmother and Remus, Kate fully embodies her AfricanAmerindian ancestry and finally discovers her renewed purpose as an older woman of colour; she proceeds to listen to her companion’s stories of suffering and trauma in the Amazon and assists them in their self-identity healing process to reach, as Maierhofer (2003) posits, generative mental states able to narrate and voice parts of their life stories in the novel. When back in the United States, Kate extends this circle of friends to include those she has made on the Colorado River, Yolo’s friends from Hawaii11 and members from Kate’s women’s council. They will form her chosen community that she will assist in her midlife and later years. Similar to Miranda in Mama Day,12 the function of giving back to her community provides Kate with a sense of ‘rootedness’ within her chosen community that enables her to overcome her fears of ageing. Thus, in her search for a wholeness, Kate remembers and even embodies her ancestors (their life experiences, pain, and suffering) to link her ancestral past to her present life as a midlife, upper-class woman of colour and thereby (re-)celebrates her ageing body, embraces Yolo as her younger, heterosexual lover and (re-) claims her religious altar with its diverse memorabilia in her home.

CONCLUSION Re-memory, as used in African American literature, challenges Gullette’s limited view of the function of memory in women’s midlife progress novels. In her book Ten Is the Age of Darkness: the Black Bildungsroman, Greta LeSeur (1995: 11–12) presents how Black writers have reshaped the white, European bildungsroman to document their experiences. She notes that Black writers have sought to ‘identify the traditions of their race by defining people individually, thus capturing a collective experience’ (LeSeur 1995: 2). As LeSeur, hooks, and Nagy-Zekmi advocate, Walker’s novel provides one perspective on ageing in the United States from an upper-class African-Amerindian woman, centring a normally marginalized perspective in literature, that has not been accounted for in Gullette’s predominantly white, literary gerontologist perspective. Kate’s use of re-memory to re-live the past, not to ‘get free of the bulk of her past’ (Gullette 1997: 86) but to find a new

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purpose, an ‘opening up of life’ (Waxman 1990: 16) is a technique employed by the protagonists in Naylor, Marshall, and Morrison’s novels, as well. Thus, the function of re-memory for ageing protagonists is one literary method Black women writers have employed which reshapes the midlife progress novel to include Black experiences without essentializing and singularizing the voices of older Black women in the process, eliminating potential white supremacist features within the definition of the genre. However, Maria Lauret (2001: 198) critiques the ending of the novel because Kate and her partner Yolo ‘exhibit every trait of the smug middle class-ness … so problematic at its beginning’. Unlike Marshall’s Avey, Kate does not undergo self-development through an abandonment of (white) middle- and upper-class values. Kate’s rejection of consumerism and capitalist values is short-lived as she and Yolo enjoy their favourite Chinese take-out, take a bath filled with half a bottle of L’Occitane Ambre bubble bath, and reflect upon the global problems in the world at the end of the novel (Walker 2005: 194). Kate does not have to engage significantly with the legacies of racism in the United States towards Indigenous Peoples or African Americans, nor does she engage in more than a surface level appropriation of Buddhism13 and Indigenous practices, ignoring histories of oppression facing these peoples. While she provides additional visibility for ageing women of colour in the novel, she risks perpetuating white supremacist values of consumerism, materialism, and unacknowledged cultural appropriation. At times, Kate’s embodied experiences seem superficial and neoliberal as they do not initiate a deeper level of change in her chosen lifestyle, particularly regarding her upper-class privilege as a coloured woman. Regardless, the centring of the lives of ethnically diverse older women (and men) who accompany Kate in the Amazon and Kate’s own voice in the novel challenges the narratives of decline associated with ageing in the United States. As Sally Chivers (2003: x) notes, ‘A humanitiesbased approach to aging can consistently maintain the crucial complexity of growing old because such works of art, such a literature, can comfortably encompass contradictions and even gain their aesthetic strength from doing so.’ Thus, Walker expands the concept of re-memory to include Amerindian ancestors in African American literature, even if problematically, at times, and highlights the limitations in Gullette’s definition of the female midlife progress novel genre. Despite her specific socio-historical challenges, and because of her economic advantages, Kate, while at times ambiguous, follows in Wade-Gayles’s footsteps to fully live her life in her fifties plus as in her younger years and does indeed ‘dance, then, in spite of [her] age and because of [her] age’ (2003: 5).

NOTES 1 Kate mentions that she had been married several times, of varying lengths, but only references a short marriage to Lolly and a longer one to a husband with whom she had a child in the novel (Walker 2005: 32–6, 83–4). 2 Maria Lauret (2011: 199, 208) identifies an autobiographical impulse in the novel from Alice Walker’s own life experiences and goals. Walker travelled to the Amazon in 2001, and several passages in the novel repeat, almost verbatim, her opinions, as voiced in interviews. 3 Rogers (2000: 87) also notes that this idea of a ‘tabula rasa’ of mind and body evokes the problematic perception that Black women, when they reach this state of ‘blankness’, could be perceived as lacking autonomy – as objects to be written upon, or not – as a legacy of slavery. 4 Gerri Bates (2005: 171) considers this as Kate’s participation in the first stage of her self-healing and transformation, according to New Age religious practices.

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5 In the novel, yagé (Indigenous plant medicines) is ingested to induce a state of dreaming; however, Kate refers to the plant medicines and her initial dreaming state as Grandmother. Because of this, I consider Grandmother to be one of Kate’s remembered ancestors in my analysis. At one point, Kate refers to Grandmother as a large reptile (91) and the other participants in the Amazon see Grandmother as a snake or dragon, as well (Walker 2005: 165–6). 6 Kate describes Grandmother as, ‘The oldest Being who ever lived. Her essence was that of Primordial Female Human Being as Tree’ (Walker 2005: 53). 7 Using Kara Holloway’s (1992) concept of African American myths in literature that serve as linguistic mediators between the spirit and the self and offer a way of structuring memory and telling rooted in African traditions for Black women writers, Alexis Brooks DeVita expands on this context to identify mythatypes, a series of myths that repeatedly occur in African American women’s literature which are rooted in African traditions, religion, and cultural practices that serve to empower the female protagonists. 8 Anna Cristina Gomes da Rocha argues for a similar analysis of the ‘exotic’ Other in her chapter titled ‘Mapping the Exotica India: Body, (In)visibility, and Fragmentation as Metaphors of Female Identity in Siddharth Dhanvant Shanghvi’s The Last Song of Dusk’. 9 In her analysis of ancestor figures in Walker’s novels, Jana Heczkova (2008) notes that in earlier novels, ‘the ancestral figure is a sublime entity which excites admiration and respect in the subjects living in the present’. However, in Now Is the Time to Open Your Heart, Walker ‘transforms the ancestor into a human being whose personal problems are emphasized and can be settled only by an intervention from his / her present-day counterparts’ (Heczkova 2008). 10 Anunu says that she experienced a fading of the memories of Grandmother, ‘But she’d realized the teachings simply became a part of her. They became hers’ (Walker 2005: 208). As Kate relates this to Yolo towards the end of the novel, she affirms that she feels the same. 11 Yolo is the second narrator in the novel. Initially, it seems as though their relationship will end with Kate’s journey down the Colorado River because Yolo does not dream of dry rivers like Kate does. However, just after Kate leaves, Yolo dreams that he is lost and trying to find his way to a river. He wakes up aware that their relationship is not over and that he ‘has somehow joined her journey’ (Walker 2005: 16). He decides to take a vacation to Hawaii. Through his chance encounter with Aunty Pearlua, who was born a man but lives as a woman to honour and remember the Mahus heritage of matriarchy, he undergoes his own self-development process that rejects harmful consumerist practices und unhealthy lifestyle choices (Walker 2005: 128–9, 177–83). Like Kate, he has a chapter titled ‘Yolo Woke’, in the novel. 12 Miranda is actively involved in her community in Willow Springs and usually comments positively on her ageing process in Mama Day, thus mirroring Slevin and Wingrove’s (1988) findings. 13 Kyle Garton-Grundling (2015) argues that Walker presents Buddhism and Asian religions as accessible to and liberatory for African Americans in the novel – for example, the Tibetan meditation technique of tonglen which involves breathing in the suffering of others and exhaling compassion. Garton-Grundling asserts that Walker keeps Kate rooted to her African heritage to retain her ethnic authenticity throughout the process of re-claiming Buddhism for self-healing through Grandmother’s teachings.

REFERENCES Bates, G. (2005), Alice Walker: A Critical Companion, Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Beauvoir, S. D. (1972), The Coming of Age, New York, NY: Putman. Bennett, M., and V. Dickerson, eds (2001), Recovering the Black Female Body: Self-Representations by African American Women, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Billingslea-Brown, A. J. (1999), Crossing Borders through Folklore: African American Women’s Fiction and Art, Columbia: University of Missouri Press.

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Brennan, Z. (2005), The Older Woman in Recent Fiction, London: McFarland. Brice, C. (2003), ‘Introduction’, in C. Brice (ed.), Age Ain’t Nothing but a Number: Black Women Explore Midlife, ix–xiii, Boston: Beacon Press. Brooks De Vita, A. (2000), Mythatypes: Signatures and Signs of African / Diaspora and Black Goddesses, Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Brown, C. A. (2012), The Black Female Body in American Literature and Art: Performing Identity, New York: Routledge. Castro-Borrego, S. P. (2011), ‘Introduction: From Fragmentation to Wholeness, an Exploration’, in S. P. Castro-Borrego (ed.), The Search for Wholeness and Diaspora Literacy in Contemporary African American Literature, 189–212, Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars. Chivers, S. (2003), From Old Woman to Older Women: Contemporary Culture and Women’s Narratives, Columbus: Ohio State University Press. Da Rocha, A. C. G. (2012), Narratives of Women: Gender and Magical Realism in Postcolonial Texts, dissertation, Universidade de Aveiro. Fürst, S. M. (2017), ‘African American Humour and the Construction of a Mature Female MiddleClass Identity in Clarence Major’s Such Was the Season’, in C. McGlynn, M. O’Neill, and M. SchrageFrüh (eds), Ageing Women in Literature and Visual Culture, 275–87, Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. Fürst, S. M. (2021), Mature, Working-Class Black Women in US and Anglophone Caribbean Literary Works (Conference Presentation), 24 June. Gender and Age / Aging in the Context of Popular Culture, Center for Inter-American Studies, University of Graz, Graz, Austria. Garton-Gundling, K. (2015), ‘“Ancestors We Didn’t Even Know We Had”: Alice Walker, Asian Religion and Ethnic Authenticity’, Journal of Transnational American Studies, 6 (1): 1–22. Gaston, M. H., and G. K. Porter ([2001] 2003), ‘Maneuvering through Menopause: A Rite of Passage’, in C. Brice (ed.), Age Ain’t Nothing but a Number: Black Women Explore Midlife, 61–70, Boston: Beacon Press. Gullette, M. M. (1997), Declining to Decline: Cultural Combat and the Politics of the Midlife, Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia. Harris-Perry, M. V. (2011), Sister Citizen: Shame, Stereotypes, and Black Women in America, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Heczkova, J. (2008), ‘“Timeless People”: The Development of the Ancestral Figure in Three Novels by Alice Walker’, Current Objectives of Current Postgraduate American Studies 9. Available at: https://copas.unireg​ensb​urg.de/arti​cle/view/104/128 (accessed 29 March 2015). Henderson, M. (1991), ‘Toni Morrison’s Beloved: Re-membering the Body as Historical Text’, in H. Spillers (ed.), Comparative American Identities: Race, Sex, and Nationality in the Modern Text, 62–86, New York: Routledge. Holloway, K. F. C. (1992), Moorings and Metaphors: Figures of Culture and Gender in Black Women’s Literature, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. hooks, b. (1990), ‘Postmodern Blackness’, in Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics, 23–31, Boston: South End Press. Jackson, J. J. (1972), ‘Comparative Life Styles and Family and Friend Relationships Among Older Black Women’, The Family Coordinator, 21 (4): 477–85. Available at: https://doi.org/10.2307/582​691 (accessed 12 July 2016). Jackson, J. J. ([1967] 1997), ‘The Plight of Older Black Women’, in M. Pearsall (ed.), The Other Within Us: Feminist Explorations of Women and Aging, Colorado: Westview Press.

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Jimenez, J. (2002), ‘The History of Grandmothers in the African-American Community’, Social Service Review, 76 (4): 523–51. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1086/342​994 (accessed 27 July 2016). Lauret, M. (2011), Alice Walker, 2nd edn, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan. Lee, V. (1996), Granny Midwives & Black Women Writers: Double-Dutched Readings, New York: Routledge. LeSeur, G. (1995), Ten Is the Age of Darkness: The Black Bildungsroman, Columbia, Missouri: University of Missouri Press. Maierhofer, R. (2003), ‘Third Pregnancy: Women, Aging and Identity in American Culture’, in C. Jansohn (ed.), Old Age and Ageing in British and American Literature and Culture, 155–72, Münster: LIT Verlag. Mills, S. (1998), ‘Post-colonial Feminist Theory’, in S. Jackson and J. Jones (eds), Contemporary Feminist Theories, 98–112, New York: New York University Press. Mohanty C. T. (1984), ‘Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses’, Boundary, 2 12 (3): 333–58. Available at: https://doi.org/10.2307/302​821 (accessed 4 December 2007). Nagy-Zekmi, S. (2003), ‘Images of Sheherazade [1]‌: Representations of the Postcolonial Female Subject’, Journal of Genders Studies, 12 (4): 171–80. Available at: https://psyc​net.apa.org/doi/10.1080/0958​9230​ 3200​0141​517 (accessed 6 November 2021). Rogers, S. (2000), ‘Embodying Cultural Memory in Paule Marshall’s Praisesong for the Widow’, African American Review, 34 (1): 77–93. Available at: https://doi.org/10.2307/2901​185 (accessed 5 August 2015). Slevin, K., and R. Wingrove (1988), From Stumbling Blocks to Stepping Stones: The Life Experiences of Fifty Professional African American Women, New York: New York University Press. Sontag, S. ([1972] 2008), ‘The Double Standard of Aging’, in S. McDaniel (ed.), Ageing, 201–15, London: Sage. Wade-Gayles, G. ([1996] 2003), ‘Who Says an Older Woman Can’t / Shouldn’t Dance?’, in C. Brice (ed.), Age Ain’t Nothing but a Number: Black Women Explore Midlife, 5–10, Boston: Beacon Press. Walker, A. (2005), Now Is the Time to Open Your Heart, London: Phoenix. Waxman, B. (1990), From the Hearth to the Open Road: A Feminist Study of Aging in Contemporary Literature, Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Winterich, J. (2007), ‘Aging, Femininity, and the Body: What Appearance Changes Mean to Women with Age’, Gender Issues, 24: 51–69. Available at: https://psyc​net.apa.org/doi/10.1080/0958​9230​3200​0141​ 517 (accessed 21 May 2014).

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CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

Contemporary age narrative in Aotearoa New Zealand PAOLA DELLA VALLE

INTRODUCTION This essay explores representations of old age and ageing in contemporary New Zealand literature, from the 1960s to the present. Firstly, it shows how ideas about what constitutes the best care for older people have changed throughout time. It also illustrates how the government of an officially bicultural country like Aotearoa New Zealand1 (which is gradually turning into a multicultural country) has responded to the needs of an increasingly older population with policies that take into account older people’s different cultural and ethnic backgrounds. Secondly, it aims at demonstrating that literature can contribute to public discourse, in this particular case by exploring the topics of old age and ageing from a critical perspective that both historical and scientific research cannot provide. I will follow Martha Nussbaum’s argument that literature is an instrument ‘offering good guidance of both a predictive and normative type’ (Nussbaum 1995: xvi) and her concept of literary imagination as ‘an essential ingredient of an ethical stance that asks us to concern ourselves with the good of other people whose lives are distant from our own’ (xvi). According to Nussbaum, ‘narrative literature’ creates a record that helps the reader envision other possibilities, namely, ‘the honourable, the producible case’ (xviii). In consequence, it is able to provide descriptions of and commentaries on changing societal customs and norms, record what is lost and predict what could happen. By inducing a process of identification, it can morph the viewpoint not only of common readers but also of politicians, those administering the law, and other influential people as well. It can therefore have a practical impact on decision-making and formal normative procedures. The second part of this essay will thus illustrate some images of age and ageing in New Zealand literature that registered or even anticipated notions of ‘positive’ or ‘negative’ ageing within different ethnic and cultural paradigms, thus contributing to public debate on this topic.

POLICIES AND STRATEGIES ON AGEING IN AOTEAROA NEW ZEALAND According to the 2018 Census Aotearoa New Zealand has a population of 4,699,755 inhabitants, the majority of whom are of European descent (70.2 per cent).The largest minority is that of the Māori, the indigenous population of Polynesian origin (16.5 per cent), followed by Asians (15.1 per cent), and non-Māori Pacific Islanders from Polynesia and Micronesia (8.1 per cent).2 Aotearoa

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New Zealand is formally a bicultural country, with Māori being the official language together with English. During the nineteenth century, before old-age pensions were introduced with the Old Age Pension Act (1898), followed by the Social Security Act (1938), which guaranteed the pension for every New Zealander over sixty-five, the family and benevolent institutions had been the centre of support for frail older people. With access to government pensions, even ‘the “deserving poor” were able to pay for their care, and the concept of homes for frail elderly was established’ (Stokes 2006: 28). Throughout the twentieth century institutional care was thus promoted. Some rest homes were established by the government for returning soldiers as a reward for their service; others were run by churches or private companies. An increasing number of institutions for residential care emerged after the Second World War, when women began to outnumber men in older age groups, so much so that by the mid-1970s Aotearoa New Zealand ‘had the highest rate of rest home residency in the Western world’ (Swarbrick 2018: 3). The previous decade had also seen the rise of the first formal theory of ageing, laid out by Cumming and Henry (1961) and known as ‘disengagement theory’, which theorizes the function of rest homes and the separation of older adults from society. The premise was that, since ageing involves a gradual but inexorable process of decline, society should promote a mutual withdrawal (or disengagement) between the individual and the collective, in anticipation of inevitable death. Disengagement theory gained popularity when the baby boom generation started entering the labour market.3 The retirement of older people was seen as a necessity to allow the entry of the young into the workforce and so the creation of rest homes and retirement villages was encouraged. This theory somehow implies a view of old age as unproductive and therefore useless in economic terms, indirectly reflecting the ethos of materialistic consumer society grounded in the capitalist system, which was triumphing in the Western world in the 1950s and 1960s. From the 1980s, however, ‘gradually ideas about older people remaining connected with family and community gained wider acceptance’ (Williams 2017), with an attendant change in old age policies. Swarbrick explains that older New Zealanders were encouraged to continue living in their own homes rather than applying for residential care. Home-based services emerged through public, private or voluntary sector agencies and older people were given support services such as ‘Meals on Wheels, mobility aids and household help provided by district health boards’ (Swarbrick 2018: 3). This policy is called ‘ageing in place’. In the late 1980s a plethora of new paradigms in gerontology emerged, such as ‘continuity theory’, introduced by George Maddox in 1968 but formalized by Robert Atchley only in 1989, which reversed Cumming and Henry’s approach to ageing. Continuity theory focuses on the individual and his / her history and conceives ‘positive’ ageing as the continuation of one’s lifestyle, likes, and dislikes: ‘in making adaptive choices middleaged and older adults attempt to preserve and maintain existing psychological and social patterns by applying familiar knowledge, skills, and strategies’ (Diggs 2008). After continuity theory, the approach that has most influenced all later trends on ageing is the ‘life course perspective’, which emphasizes the importance of the interplay of social factors (i.e. government policies, social constructs, economic conditions, and family structure) and individual biological ageing. Among the latest generation of theories, ‘critical gerontology’ (CG) has also gained considerable relevance, definitely influencing the New Zealand government’s recent protocols on ageing. One of the basic principles of CG is that ‘culture patterns our knowledge’ (Luborsky and Sankar 2014: 2). CG is critical of ‘traditional positivist approaches to knowledge

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which have been prevalent in social gerontology’ (Edwards 2010: 91) and ‘suspicious of the claims that “value-free science” is an approach that benefits all’ (92). The cultural relativism embraced by CG underlines that ‘variables such as health, illness, ethnicity, family, and self are not universal. Instead, each culture provides its own definition of these constructs’ (Luborsky and Sankar 2014). CG is therefore concerned with issues of social justice and the interpretation of the meaning of human experience within a certain cultural context: a theory that proves useful in multicultural countries and is in tune with the needs of ethnic minorities such as the Māori. The New Zealand population is increasingly ageing. According to the government’s official statistical reports, the number of people aged sixty-five plus doubled between 1991 and 2020, to reach 790,000, and is projected to double again by 2056. As a response, the government has recently launched a new major protocol on ageing, ‘Better Later Life–He Oranga Kaumātua 2019 to 2034’, which continues the ‘Positive Ageing Strategy’ (PAS) carried out over 2001–19. ‘Better Later Life’ basically follows the guidelines of PAS, which acknowledged the crucial impact of ethnic / cultural factors on positive ageing, recognized cultural diversity as a value not a drawback, and valorized the contribution of older people to their families and communities, an idea that reflects the communal spirit of the Māori social structure, based on the extended family (whānau)4 and a tribal organization rather than the Western notion of nuclear family. Taking into account the results obtained by PAS, ‘Better Later Life’ has traced the new trends of old age policies with a view to better supporting the increasing number of over sixty-fives across all ethnic groups.5 The new strategy reinforces the battle against ageism, by stressing that older people should be valued and treated with dignity. Of primary importance is to keep older people safe from abuse, discrimination, and neglect, sustain their adaptation to change (e.g. to new technologies), and favour their participation in the community. The protocol recognizes and promotes the respect of diversity among older people, with reference to socio-economic conditions, culture, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality. It openly supports a ‘whole-of-life’ perspective to ageing, taking into consideration individual factors concerning genetics, culture, socio-economic conditions, ethnicity, and life experiences. Finally, it encourages a whānau-centred approach. The responsibility to plan and act for later life is to be taken collectively by individuals, families and whānau, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), businesses, and central and local governments, in order for older people to lead ‘valued, connected and fulfilling lives’ (Office for Seniors 2019: 20–1). The plan’s emphasis on family, whānau, and participation in the community underscores interrelatedness as the core principle in ‘positive’ ageing as well as the value of inter-generational relationships. It also shows a total rejection of disengagement theory in favour of an approach founded on CG, a lifecourse perspective, and ageing in place. While advocating the respect of diversity in the treatment of older people, the plan seems to have moved its focus towards a view of ‘positive’ ageing as inherently communal, incorporating principles of Māori and Polynesian tribal cultures that attribute relevant roles to their elders and are based on extended families. Interestingly, in her foreword to the document, the New Zealand Minister for Seniors Tracey Martin addresses the different ethnicities of the country using the expression ‘tribal groups’ and acknowledges the importance of older people, calling them ‘respected elders’. The passage has the flavour of a Māori ritual speech of welcome on the marae:6 To the tribal groups of our nation, greetings to you all. To our respected leaders and elders, with these few words I acknowledge you all, especially for the manner in which you act as an

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example to the younger generations. It is your guidance and wisdom that ensures the survival and retention of our knowledge and traditions. This recognition is reflected here in our working together to develop a strategy for the benefit of all. (Office for Seniors 2019: 2) Sarah Wood has provided a synthetic review of recent scientific literature on Māori ageing (Wood 2018). She reports that engagement with Māori culture and language is always associated with a higher quality of life: contact with the marae appears to be of paramount importance for older people. Also crucial is their involvement in public roles and offices, such as representing the community at public meetings or formal occasions (e.g. funerals), delivering speeches (only for men), and performing karanga7 (for women). In his 2010 study, Māori scholar William John Werahiko Edwards had already offered a Māori version of PAS, because he thought the strategy still promoted a Western ‘productivist’ approach. He recorded anxiety in some of his Māori interviewees about not being good enough for their role of kaumātua (elders) and noted a condition of stress related to the great amount of work due the reduced number of other older people performing this role within the community. For kaumātua the idea of retirement as disengagement does not exist, today as in the past. Edwards’ argument is in tune with what was predicted twenty years ago by M. H. Durie, the father of ethno-psychiatry in Aotearoa and initiator of culturally oriented treatments in mental illness therapy for Māori. Durie expressed his concern that within a changing modern urban society whānau ties might become loose and the number of culturally alienated and disadvantaged older Māori would increase (Durie 1999: 102). He encouraged Māori solutions to Māori problems, whereby the reciprocal relationship between kaumāutua and community should be valorized together with the principle that ‘a positive, if demanding, role is complemented by an assurance of care and respect’ (105). Of course, the concept of ‘positive’ ageing is cultural. Productivity, for example, can be understood as older people’s contribution to New Zealand GDP (Gross Domestic Product) in the Western view, while Māori elders can be overproductive (even overburdened) in their official roles, as previously shown, without producing in a monetary sense. The Western ‘productivist’ mode is still evoked in ‘Better Later Life’ in the financial sections of the strategy, viewing elders as a ‘workforce’ who can make a significant contribution to society (Office for Seniors 2019: 12). By 2036, the document says, the sixty-five plus population will contribute NZ$ 50 billion as consumers, NZ$ 13 billion as taxpayers, and NZ$ 25 billion in unpaid or voluntary work. The document advocates that people should also be materially prepared for later life and helped to achieve economic security thanks to financial assistance and updated information on savings schemes or other initiatives aimed at integrating NZ Super (the basic pension guaranteed by the government to all citizens and permanent residents aged sixty-five plus) with extra income. Nevertheless, the works of Edwards and Durie have certainly influenced this protocol for the importance attributed to cultural and ethnic aspects and the central position given to family and community in positive ageing. These changing perspectives towards ageing and old age throughout the second half of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first have been recorded in literature, in texts that comment on the status quo or criticize it and suggest possible alternatives for the future. The next section will illustrate how two famous New Zealand writers of European descent, Frank Sargeson and Janet Frame, stigmatize the view of old age in the materialistic society of the 1960s and the application of disengagement theory in real life. It will then show how the situation changes throughout time, due to new visions and policies, which reflect the increasing influence of Māori culture in Aotearoa.

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This evolution is recorded by Māori writers, such as Rora Paki-Titi, Hone Tuwhare, Witi Ihimaera, and Patricia Grace, who became well-known during the Māori Renaissance of the seventies.

SOME LITERARY REPRESENTATIONS OF OLD AGE Images of solitude are prevalent in New Zealand literary representations of old age during the second half of the twentieth century. The ethos of productivism promoted by the spread of capitalism, industrialism, and consumer society seems to envisage old age as unproductive and useless. This view, together with the baby boom in the decades following the Second World War, may be one of the factors giving rise to disengagement theory, which in fact dates back to the 1960s. Older people are deemed distant beings in taste and language, interests, and inclinations. They are not good customers in a mercantile society and are, therefore, considered a burden to the system, ostracized by younger generations or relegated to boarding houses and rest homes. Literature records this attitude and often describes older people as awkward, idiosyncratic, solitary individuals who don’t fit in and are therefore excluded from mainstream society. Sometimes, there is also a lack of communication and a sense of antagonism between generations. This situation is clearly stigmatized in some of the works of Frank Sargeson (1903–1982) and Janet Frame (1924–2004). Sargeson is generally remembered for his sketches of itinerant labourers in the bush and unemployed job hunters living in a puritanical society affected by the Great Depression. His later short fictions, published in the mid-1960s, shift to present-day suburbia and feature many lonely elders, thus confirming the society’s attitude towards old age mentioned earlier. As Janet Wilson underlines, ‘the idiosyncratic antics of the elderly inhabitants … suggest that the suburbs are merely an alternative setting for Sargeson’s earlier gallery of underdogs and outcasts’ (Wilson 2010: 16). In ‘Just Trespassing Thanks’ (1964), an old suburban recluse, Edward Corrie, spends his time indoors immersed in classical poetry to avoid seeing what ‘many abstract forces’ (Sargeson 1973: 272) together with bulldozers and builders have done around his ‘ancient’ cottage, now sieged by tarmac, cement, and the fumes coming from the nearby motorway. While denouncing the uncontrolled development enforced by modern urbanization in the name of ‘progress’, the man advocates the return to a spiritual connection with nature and takes refuge in the poetic world of imagination. The older protagonist is unfit for modern society and has become an outcast. One morning he finds three young people wanted by the police sleeping on his veranda. The three fugitives use his house as a temporary shelter and are able to open the channels of communication between different generations only because they turn out to be poets themselves. They recreate a communal space or ‘a country of the imagination’ (Sargeson 1973: 282) and use a language that a modern hermit like Corrie can still understand. Needless to say, he won’t report them to the authorities. The story underlines the difficulty of intergenerational communication and the forced isolation of older people, who do not partake of the values promoted by productivism and unconditional progress. The possibility of interaction between generations can only occur in the timeless dimension of poetry, a liminal space outside society, and with young people who do not conform to mainstream society, such as the three outlaws. In ‘Beau’ (1965), the old protagonist has never been able to overcome the years of the Depression and find a stable job, due to his atrophied arm and extreme myopia. So after the Indian summer of the war period, in which the lack of men at home and his refined British accent allowed him to receive women’s attentions (which explains the title), he must live a solitary later ‘life of unfinancial

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leisure’ (Sargeson 1973: 292), relying only on an unemployment benefit. To overcome his isolation, he begins an epistolary relationship with himself, so that he can at least have some moments of socialization with the postman. Beau will end up retiring to a squalid boarding house, another symbolic space of disengagement together with the rest home, spending his time writing letters where he explores the glorious (invented) genealogy of the family he has never had. The same boarding house appears in three more short stories, among which is ‘Charity Begins at Home’ (1966), dealing with another tenant, an old gentleman known as the Major, who was simply looking for a place to live and, conversely, found a place to die, cared for by the landlady and another lodger. The old man doesn’t seem to have a family or relatives. The story underlines the lack of familial obligations towards older people in a society where they are perceived as a burden and ostracized. It also highlights the importance of non-familial care to compensate for this lack. However, here care is improvised and dependent upon the generosity of strangers, not carried out by the community, a network of friends or even official institutions. In ‘An International Occasion’ (1969), one of the tenants, Karl, organizes a collective Sunday dinner to recreate a semblance of warmth and human relationships among the old misfits living in the boarding house. This ends miserably with a fire set by one of the lodgers, bad-tempered Chris, whose ‘boredom was an insanity’ (Sargeson 1973: 326). The search for a putative family seems unrenounceable but proves unreachable. Again, Sargeson explores how for low-class older adults care relies on the intervention of benevolent strangers, who replace the family and absent institutions. Squalid boarding houses become places of disengagement for lonely older people with modest means. Frame’s The Carpathians (1988) also denounces the isolation of older people in a materialist society that is neither inclusive nor considers them as a resource. The novel was published when the concept of ‘continuity’ in gerontology was slowly replacing that of ‘disengagement’ but still reflects the latter. In point of fact, older people appear as lonely figures, deserted by their relatives, lost in memories they cannot hand down, and repositories of a language that will die with them. The town of Puamahara, where the novel is set, ‘has more than the usual number of homes and hospitals for the aged’ (Frame 1988: 13), where they are locked up like the ‘mentally ill’. The general indifference towards them can be seen as a general disregard for heritage and a cause of the residents’ disconnection. Madge McMurtrie, who is dying of cancer, cannot communicate with her grandniece because the words she uses – paddocks, keepsake, creek – are outdated, as she laments: ‘I speak the language of another age’ (30). Connie Grant, just arrived from England after being widowed, is not allowed to live with her son’s family: ‘They don’t want a grandmother. I’m so lonely, so lonely. My husband dead, my house gone, the furniture too, and now I am in another country where no-one wants me’ (92). George Coker is deserted by all his children and his personal effects put up for auction soon after his death. Hercus Millow is mostly alone and lost in his war memories. The Carpathians not only provides a critique of Western materialist society, forgetting whoever is no longer productive, but also seems to attack the previously mentioned disengagement theory and its belief that separating the aged from the collective minimizes the disruption to society when they pass away. Frame’s novel underlines not only the pain that this separation is causing to older people (whether they are in residential institutions or ostracized in their own homes), but also the loss for the community in terms of heritage, memory, and affective bonds. When the first books by Māori writers appeared during the Māori Renaissance of the 1970s, they offered a completely different approach to old age in literature. Hone Tuwhare was the very first Māori to publish a book: the collection of poems No Ordinary Sun (1964). He was followed by

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Witi Ihimaera, with a book of short stories (Pounamu Pounamu, 1972) and a novel (Tangi, 1973), and by Patricia Grace with the collection Waiariki and Other Stories (1975). As I have explained elsewhere (Della Valle 2018), they depict older people as ‘living taonga’ (treasures), custodians of the family’s heritage and past, repositories of the Māori language, and defenders of the ancestral land. They are represented as the fulcrum of the extended family (whānau) for their support of younger problematic members, contribution to the education of younger generations, and assumption of official roles in traditional ceremonies. In these texts, older Māori have a crucial function in the community and are not isolated. Intergenerational contact is the norm. For example, in Tuwhare’s poem ‘That Morning Early’ the young narrating voice wakes up in the morning with an aching stomach and wonders how long it will take before his Nanny comes bringing leaves of koromiko8 ‘to chide and O most firmly to assure me / that all my rumble belly yearnings shall match / the fearful splendour of riven skies / mending …’ (Tuwhare 1964: 10). The grandmother is a normative and affective figure carrying the recognized authority of a healer, given to her by experiential knowledge. Ihimaera’s Pounamu Pounamu also features many older relatives within their communities. In ‘A Game of Cards’ all the extended family accompanies Nanny Miro on her last journey, by playing cards with her on her deathbed, and in ‘Beginning of the Tournament’ grandmothers holding a walking stick in one hand and a hockey stick in the other are involved as players in a Māori tournament, whose aim is to get Māori people together and revive traditions such as action songs, popular dances, and traditional food. In Grace’s ‘Parade’, from Waiariki, Granny Rita and old Hohepa manage the organization of the Māori parade for the local carnival. Although they are conscious of the patronising attitude of the authorities, who seem to remember the Māori community only to put on that annual spectacle for tourists, they are nevertheless proud ‘to show others who we are’ (Grace 1975: 88). These narratives are often imbued with a nostalgic tone, as if the authors wanted to fix images of a world doomed to disappear under the pervasive influence of Western ‘progress’ and its effects: the shift of Māori from rural to urban centres, the spreading of the nuclear family replacing the extended one, and the rise of different models of ‘successful’ ageing. The same nostalgic attitude is found in one of the earliest Māori short stories, written by Rora Paki-Titi, which appeared in 1956 in the magazine Te Ao Hou (The New World), a publication of the Māori Affairs Department that collected the very first literary and journalistic ‘enterprises’ of Māori people. It was then selected for publication in the first miscellany of Māori literary works, appearing in 1970 and edited by M. Orbell: Contemporary Maori Writing.9 The title, ‘Ka Pu te Ruha, ka Hao te Rangatahi’, is a well-known Māori proverb describing the succession of generations in life as a natural event: ‘The worn-out net lies in a heap and the [new] net goes fishing’ (Orbell 1970: 151). The content of this autobiographical story conveys the true spirit of the proverb, which does not mean older people should be discarded or relegated to an inferior rank by the rising younger generations. On the contrary, Paki-Titi underlines the charisma and vitality of the elderly members of a community, playing roles that are different from those of the young but equally important. She describes with some nostalgia the numerous ‘grannies’ of her extended family: grandparents, great-uncles and great-aunts, great-grandparents, all of them regarded as kaumātua (elders). They are represented as industrious and constantly working for the community. Older men were great orators and ‘could speak for a whole hapu [village], or perhaps for several’ (Paki-Titi 1970: 9). Children were proud of them and ‘vied with one another as to whose granny was best – of course the one who yelled the loudest and shook his stick the hardest was best’ (10). They also exerted a sort of social control in the

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community and passed on knowledge as well as morals. Their influence could sometimes become too invasive and despotic, for example, when they arranged marriages, causing the young to rebel. However, the balance traced by Paki-Titi is one that underlies older people’s passing away as a great loss that cannot be properly compensated, not even by books, to which they are compared: ‘One by one our elders passed on. And we who were once richly endowed with kaumatua are now without a background. … Today we know not where to turn for this vital advice, except perhaps to books’ (12–13). Paki-Titi’s short story envisages the future trends of New Zealand society, highlighting the loss that direction implies for younger people and the larger community. The divide between Māori and non-Māori age narratives in more recent texts is still present, albeit less sharp due to the homogenization created by the modern urban lifestyle in New Zealand society. Meantime, the authors of the Māori Renaissance have reached an advanced age (Tuwhare passed away in 2008 at 86) and their perspective has changed: now, they are the aged. The realization of being old and frail is one of the main themes in Hone Tuwhare’s last collection Oooooo….!!! (2005), written when the author was eighty-two. In the last section of the book, entitled ‘Some thoughts on (im)mortality’, he focuses on the deterioration of his body with irony and scatological humour. In ‘A “piss-up” pome!’ he describes with scoffing precision his inability to control the ‘jet stream of urine’ (Tuwhare 2005: 84) that causes him to wet his pants. His longstanding problems with haemorrhoids are punctiliously described in ‘Biographical (?)!!! Yes! & devoid of lies!!’ and insomnia is the focus of ‘Let me rest my head on your fat belly, hine’, while in ‘Just drifting … Hone’ he celebrates the virtues of his comfortable toilette: ‘WOT / a fortunate Fella I am to / have a Speedway track / to my Shit House, so that / the troublesome internal / waste-product may be / unceremoniously unburdened’ (89). Old age gives Tuwhare the liberty not only to explore scatological and sexual themes, but also to experiment with language, abrogating grammar and lexical rules, playing with words (e.g. WOT, thusly, vitamints, post coitus-ically speaking) and using punctuation marks emphatically (as can be seen in the title of many poems). The book also includes moments of serious reflection on time, death, and the meaning of life. In ‘I feel like a vulnerable pā-site’ he compares his frail body to a pā (fortified Māori village) sieged by an unforgiving enemy. However, a constant antidote to the painful realization of human mortality, here and in other poems, is the resort to Māori mythology, which figuratively explains the naturalness of the life-and-death cycle. It fulfils the sense of belonging to a community (of the living and non-living) and of being a ring in a chain that connects the ancestors and the descendants. It also shows one’s origin and one’s direction. So the older poet feels ‘freed at last, / to accept – with humility – / the earth-smelling pungency / of the Grand Dame – mother, / of us all: Papa-tū-ā-Nuku: / our Earth-mum’ (83). Tuwhare looks back with sardonic detachment to the academic recognition of his work and the numerous rewards received in ‘On becoming an Icon (!)’ and ‘Restorative work on … “humility”. Aa-e, hoki!’. At eighty-two he considers himself ‘a veteran of survival’ (Tuwhare 2005: 72). His consolation lies in the title of another poem: ‘If I should die, think nothing (nihil) of it. Happens, naturally ... to all’ (93). Here again, after a sombre reflection on the inexorable passing of chronological time (‘To my deaf ear, I raise / the Wrist to which / my watch is strapped’) the poet ends up thinking that he will live on through his great-grandnephews and nieces, who will inherit his wrist-watch and ‘reclaim, the rhythm / the 4 / 4 Boogie of your heart. / For, on their tiny feet / you march’ (93). In Grace’s collection Small Holes in the Silence (2006), it is sometimes difficult to distinguish the ethnic origin of the characters in stories dealing with universal themes. However, in ‘Four Corners’, the 72-year-old female protagonist and narrating voice is doubtless Māori, as testified by

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her marked communal attitude and by the name of her elderly aunt, Tangiroa. The protagonist’s neighbourhood epitomizes a multicultural ageing society, with most residents over seventies, and the implementation of the ‘ageing-in-place’ paradigm in supported accommodation. The story, however, seems to underline the limitations of this apparently successful formula. Most residents are like monads: they don’t know each other and don’t socialize. The protagonist learns from the 86-year-old man next door that an unidentified ‘old woman over the road’ has died (Grace 2006: 141). Actually, the protagonist knew this woman very well. She was ‘only’ seventy and had a minor disability. For this reason, the narrator helped her twice a week with some chores and used her spade to grow vegetables for both. The narrator’s communal attitude is, however, an exception in the neighbourhood. Two contrasting images of ageing are shown. One is represented by 92-year-old aunt Tangiroa, who visits the narrator every week and is cared for with a sense of filial obligation. A special tea is made for Tangiroa in the nice cup and saucer from the china cabinet, accompanied by a piece of buttered home-baked bread spread with homemade plum jam. There is a relaxed familiarity in the chitchat of aunt and niece about winning Tele Bingo and in the little nap taken by the former after her treat. The other image is embodied in the lonely ‘old woman over the road’. She appears as a desolate anonymous figure, deserted by her children, who come rarely and then just ‘to steal her things’ (Grace 2006: 142), and by the other neighbours, apart from the protagonist. The support the woman receives from the council (a home help and someone to cut the lawn) is not enough, in practical and emotional terms. Eventually, the narrator bakes some bread and takes it with a jar of homemade plum jam to the funeral, offering this nameless neighbour the same special attention she gives to the older people of her own family. What Grace is pointing to in this story is the emotional distance between generations in urban contexts and the extreme vulnerability of older people when they cannot rely on a family or a caring community, even if they are apparently independent, ageing in their own home, and given institutional support services. Grace underlines the importance of inclusivity and belonging in the context of ageing, although she is not necessarily advocating the return to old rural models of extended families. An affective network or a whānau can be replaced by forming a different family structure, with neighbours or friends. This also occurs in her novel Baby No-Eyes (1998), where the protagonist Te Paania constitutes a new family in an urban context, made up of her son Tawera (but not Tawera’s father), her great-grandaunt Kura (who has come from the countryside to help) and a homosexual couple of very good friends, Dave and Mahaki (Della Valle 2007: 132). The communal structure can be re-arranged according to the needs of the people in specific situations. In Ihimaera’s ‘Going to the Heights of Abraham’, first published in the Sunday Star-Times 2000 AD Millennium: The Anthology and then included in the volume Ihimaera. His Best Stories (2003), the narrator is woken up every night by a phone call from his 87-year-old father living on a faraway farm outside Gisborne. The old man does not want to go to sleep because he is afraid of dying. The story expresses a deep affective bond between father and son and the reversal of previous roles: ‘I the son have become the father. He the father has become the son’ (Ihimaera 2003: 211). The protagonist suddenly realizes the frailty of the older man, who once appeared ‘invincible’ and ‘indestructible’ (210) to him. Engulfed in a busy city life that prevents him from paying frequent visits to his father, the son had not noticed the slow decline of his old parent: ‘something happened to our God of a father, our laughing, muscled, carelessly handsome Daddy. Somebody took him away and put this other, older, person in his place’ (208). The strange situation of having to comfort a parent who has turned into a child, however, does not disturb him: ‘loving my father in his autumn

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years has become my greatest gift to him as a son’ (211). So, at the end of the story the narrator is able to divert the old man’s attention from death onto a place he has never seen before: the Heights of Abraham in Quebec, the site of a historical battle he learnt about at school. Although the nightly phone calls continue, they are now focused on when they will manage to leave for this celebrated place. The protagonist has been able to give his father a reason for going on living. A recent non-Māori view on ageing is offered by Diane Brown’s Taking My Mother to the Opera, an intimate study of the author’s own family but also of a ‘new territory’ (Brown 2015: 67): that of ageing, disease, and death. Green describes Brown’s writing as ‘narrative poetry, poetic narrative or poetry as memoir’ (Green 2015). The book could be in fact defined as a poetic family history, made of episodes retrieved from memory. It follows a genre widely spread in Aotearoa New Zealand after the 1990s, anecdotic poetry, which proves congenial for a literature ‘grown wary of grand narratives, yet still hungry to populate its landscape with specific, localised story’ (Smaill 2016: 315). Brown’s biographical account ‘covers the complexities of family’ and ‘the familiarity that comes with family too’ (Shi 2016), using different inflections: she can be sympathetic or ironic, preoccupied or sharp, affectionate or critical. The poet delves deep into her parents’ personalities and their reactions to ageing. The mother is a strong and downto-earth woman, who does not believe in poetry (Brown 2015: 12) and never said ‘I love you’ to her daughter (60). Her mottos are ‘Actions not words’ (12) and ‘You can’t eat poems’ (49). She rarely phoned her daughter because she ‘did not want to interfere’ (89). Despite the two women’s divergent characters, a dialectical (sometimes confrontational) relationship is always present, even after the mother is diagnosed with dementia. The roles are reversed: the daughter is now ‘dishing out commands: / eat, drink, wash your hands’ (63) and the mother’s litany of supposedly missing items and food (89) is received patiently and even humorously by the daughter. She is first looked after by carers at home and then enters a rest home after her husband’s death, when her condition gets worse (98). The reader follows the slow decline of the old woman, who gradually abandons her iron firmness of purpose and starts questioning past choices (94) but does not lose her sardonic view in describing the condition of existential boredom in her new home: ‘I just wish it would get a move on, / she says. All this hanging around / for nothing is boring’ (95; emphases in the original). Rest homes are stigmatized by the father too. When the mother is finally diagnosed with dementia, he tells the author: ‘Promise you won’t put her in one of those houses’ (52); and when he himself has a stroke and is hospitalized, he tries to escape by stealing another patient’s walker (79). Brown has many affinities with her father’s high ideals, love for words, and intellectual curiosity. She describes with great sensitivity his distress at not being independent any longer after a stroke that has affected his ability to speak. When he realizes that he will never go back to his own home, ‘Tears cascade / down his face, without a sound’ (70). Brown identifies with him describing his life in the rest home as ‘incarceration’ (76) and his new house as a prison: ‘His new locked home’ (74). The relationship with her father is not idealized and also includes moments of confrontation: ‘Accused of selfishness, something in me / snapped, the way it does when there’s / an element of truth. Where were you / when I needed you? I spat back’ (80). The author also offers a realistic description of the carer’s sense of impotence while helping older people with a major disability and highlights the limits of one’s emotional strength. Her commemoration at the funeral is an unrhetorical recognition of the father, including the act of reading a poem of his and then of hers:

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I don’t cry, he wouldn’t want that, not when he couldn’t solve my pain. In any case, no one wanted him to remain in the rest home without the rug where he practised yoga and forward rolls; without Mum and without words. So I laugh, tell jokes, a performance so polished. I’m watching myself in the wings, knowing I’ll be embarrassed later, but hoping he sees I’m trying to do him proud, hoping he knows what he’s given me. (83)

CONCLUSION The above-mentioned representations of ageing in literature offer a record of changing attitudes in New Zealand society, gradually embraced by the official strategies about ageing. The concepts of ‘successful’ ageing for Māori and non-Māori reveal a cultural and ethnic distance, which has become less wide over the course of time. The presence of a family (nuclear or extended) and the inclusion in a supportive community are increasingly deemed to be important factors for the well-being of older people. Official protocols not only foster the physical and material independence of older people but also recognize that this is not enough and must be accompanied by an affective network and a real social inclusion. The resort to rest homes is always stigmatized and considered necessary only in extreme cases of disabilities. ‘Narrative literature’ offers a subjective view that is, however, exemplary of a larger trend. It also encourages a process of identification in the reader, who is led to see problematic situations, deficiencies, and needs. It plays therefore a normative and predictive function enacting, in Nussbaum’s terms, that ‘ethical stance that asks us to concern ourselves with the good of other people whose lives are distant from our own’ (Nussbaum 1995: xvi).

NOTES 1 Aotearoa means ‘the land of the long white cloud’ in the Māori language. This was the image seen by the first Polynesian voyagers approaching the country in the late thirteenth century and became its indigenous name. 2 See New Zealand’s 2018 Census at: https://www.stats.govt.nz/info​rmat​ion-relea​ses/2018-cen​sus-pop​ ulat​ion-and-dwell​ing-cou​nts. As people claim more than one ethnicity, counts sum to more than the total population and proportions sum to more than 100 percent. 3 The period between the end of Second World War and the mid-1960s was one of great fertility and registered a considerable increase of births, known as the ‘baby boom’. 4 Whānau means family in Māori and it generally refers to an extended one, including grandparents, greatgrandparents, great-uncles and great-aunts, cousins and relatives in general.

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5 The term ‘older people’ is used to mean people plus 65 plus (p. 7). The document recognizes, however, that people age differently and have different aspirations and needs. 6 The marae (meeting grounds) is the space in front of the wharenui (meeting house), which is the centre of the community in a Māori traditional village. Official ceremonies and funerals take place here. 7 A karanga is a ceremonial call of welcome to visitors onto a marae, generally performed by women. 8 Hebe stricta, a plant endemic to New Zealand, eaten to control diarrhoea and dysentery. 9 The use of a macron for long vowels (e.g. in Māori) was not respected in early writings.

REFERENCES Brown, D. (2015), Taking My Mother to the Opera, Dunedin: Otago University Press. Cumming, E., and W. Henry ([1961] 1979), Growing Old: The Process of Disengagement, New York: Arno. Della Valle, P. (2007), ‘The Wider Family: Patricia Grace Interviewed by Paola Della Valle’, The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, 42 (1): 131–41. Della Valle, P. (2018), ‘Representing Age and Ageing in New Zealand Literature: The Māori Case’, in C. Concilio (ed.), Imagining Ageing, 165–81, Bielefeld: [transcript]. Diggs, J. (2008), ‘The Continuity Theory of Aging’, in S. J. Loue and M. Sajatovic (eds), Encyclopedia of Aging and Public Health, Boston: Springer. doi:10.1007/978-0-387-33754-8_103. Durie, M. H. (1999), ‘Kaumātautanga. Reciprocity: Māori Elderly and Whānau’, New Zealand Journal of Psychology, 28 (2): 102–6. Edwards, W. J. W. (2010), ‘Taupaenui: Māori Positive Ageing’, unpublished Doctoral Thesis, Massey University, Palmerston North, New Zealand. Available at: https://mro.mas​sey.ac.nz/han​dle/10179/1331 (accessed 14 July 2021). Frame, J. (1988), The Carpathians, New York: George Braziller. Grace, P. (1975), Waiariki, Auckland: Longman Paul. Grace, P. (1998), Baby No-Eyes, Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press. Grace, P. (2006), Small Holes in the Silence, Auckland: Penguin Books. Green, P. (2015), ‘Poetry Shelf Review: Diane Brown’s Taking My Mother to the Opera – A Rollercoasting, Thought Provoking, Detail Clinging, Self-Catapulting, Beautiful Read’. Available at: https://nzpoet​rysh​elf. com/2015/12/07/poe​try-shelf-rev​iew-diane-bro​wns-tak​ing-my-mot​her-to-the-opera-a-rol​lerc​oast​ing-thou​ ght-provok​ing-det​ail-cling​ing-self-cata​pult​ing-beauti​ful-read/ (accessed 24 July 2021). Ihimaera, W. (1972), Pounamu Pounamu, Auckland: Heinemann. Ihimaera, W. (1973), Tangi, Auckland: Heinemann. Ihimaera, W. (2003), Ihimaera: His Best Stories, Auckland: Reed. Luborsky, M. R., and A. Sankar ([1993] 2014), ‘Extending the Critical Gerontology Perspective: Cultural Dimensions’. First published in Gerontologist, 33 (4) 1993. National Institute of Health (NIH) Public Access. Author manuscript, available in PMC 2014 5 November, 1–8: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/ artic​les/PMC​4221​265/ (accessed 11 July 2021). Nussbaum, M. C. (1995), Poetic Justice, Boston: Beacon Press. Office for Seniors, Better Later Life – He Oranga Kaumātua 2019 to 2034 (2019), The Office for Seniors – Te Tari Kaumātua, New Zealand Government. Available at: https://super​seni​ors.msd.govt.nz/docume​nts/ bet​ter-later-life/bet​ter-later-life-strat​egy.pdf (accessed 10 July 2021). Orbell, M., ed. (1970), Contemporary Maori Writing, Wellington: Reed.

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Paki-Titi, R. ([1956] 1970), ‘Ka Pu te Ruha, ka Hao te Rangatahi’, in M. Orbell (ed.), Contemporary Maori Writing, 9–13, Wellington: Reed. Sargeson, F. (1973), The Stories of Frank Sargeson, Auckland: Longman Paul. Shi, E. (2016), Book Review: Taking My Mother to the Opera, by Diane Brown, 1 April 2016. Available at: https://bookse​ller​snz.wordpr​ess.com/2016/04/01/book-rev​iew-tak​ing-my-mot​her-to-the-opera-by-dian e-brown/ (accessed 24 July 2021). Smaill, A. (2016), ‘Anecdote in Post-1990 New Zealand Poetry’, in M. Williams (ed.), A History of New Zealand Literature, 311–29, New York: Cambridge University Press. Stokes, Dianne (2006), ‘The Last New Home: Residential Care for the Elderly in New Zealand’, unpublished thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of requirements for the degree of Master of Philosophy (Sociology), Massey University, Palmerston North, New Zealand. Swarbrick, N. (2018), ‘Care and Carers’, Te Ara- Encyclopedia of New Zealand. Available at: http://www. teara.govt.nz/mi/care-and-car​ers/print (accessed 10 July 2021). Tuwhare, H. (1964), No Ordinary Sun, Dunedin: John McIndoe. Tuwhare, H. (2005), Oooooo!!!, Wellington: Steele Roberts. Williams, E. (2017), ‘A History of Residential Care in New Zealand’. Available at: https://www.elder​net. co.nz/gaze​tte/a-hist​ory-of-resi​dent​ial-care-in-new-zeal​and/ (accessed 10 July 2021). Wilson, J. (2010), ‘Introduction’, in F. Sargeson (ed.), Frank Sargeson’s Stories, 9–19, Devonport: Cape Catley. Wood, S. (2018), ‘Understanding Māori and Ageing – A Literary Review’, Te Kura Nui o Waipareira, (7): 28–41.

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CHAPTER THIRTY

Representations of ageing in Russian fiction: Between remembering and forgetting DAGMAR GRAMSHAMMER-HOHL

INTRODUCTION The vicissitudes of history and social upheavals provide a backdrop against which Russian fiction introduces older protagonists and negotiates the topic of ageing. In this chapter, special emphasis will, thus, be placed on the stock representation of older people as embodiments of the past. First, a brief overview will be given of how, throughout the twentieth century, representations of age and ageing reflect cultural change: images of age and ageing acquire specific meanings in, for instance, early Soviet literature1 with its cult of the ‘New Man’; in Russian émigré writing, which strives nostalgically to preserve and regain the lost Russian past; in the Soviet-Russian village prose of the 1960s and 1970s with its call for a return to traditional peasant and pre-Stalinist values; and in texts written in and after the perestroika years, where older people – particularly older women – come to represent the crumbling of a tyrannical regime. As will be demonstrated, many works of fiction deal with cultural change by presenting a conflict between old and young protagonists: one way of life must be completely refused and ‘forgotten’ in order for the next one to take shape. Contemporary Russian (auto-)fiction is not so much about forgetting the recent past than about the need to remember it: there is a trend in contemporary Russian literature to unearth repressed family memories and give voice to departed relatives. As will be argued, this has also left its imprint on representations of age and ageing. Readings of works by Svetlana Aleksievich, Sergei Lebedev, Mariia Stepanova, and Liudmila Ulitskaia will be proposed to support this argument.

FORGETTING THE PAST? The image of the ageing protagonist embodying the past constantly recurs in Russian literature, especially in times of crisis and upheaval. The past can be perceived as something of value which has been lost or as something negative that has been fortunately overcome. The older characters personifying that past are either idealized or demonized in a corresponding manner, with young protagonists often presented as their counterparts. This aspect is most striking in early Soviet fiction, where being old was equated to being obsolete, a ‘remnant of the past’ (perezhitok proshlogo).

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Marietta Chudakova (1998: 75) has argued that after the Russian Revolution, people spoke about belonging to the older or the younger generation to express their sense of belonging to a particular social class. In revolutionary Russia, which venerated newness and youth, being ‘old’ meant being an aristocrat or bourgeois, an agent of the ancient regime. Lenin is reported to have said that ‘the worst sin consists in being over fifty-five’ (cited in Lovell 2005: 100). Old age, thus, was per se suspicious. A contrasting juxtaposition of old and young characters is prominent in Maksim Gor’kii’s [Gorky’s] novel Mat’ (Mother, 1906–7), which was written some time before the Russian Revolution of 1917 but retrospectively canonized as the first work of Socialist Realism. In this novel, the progressive, revolutionary youth confront their seniors, who represent the much-detested traditional values and outdated social system. The rigidity and intransigence of the political regime is allegorized by deathlike old characters who strive to acquire immortality by weakening the young and healthy (Gorky 1911: 461; Gor’kii 1970: 321–2). Pelageia Nilovna, the mother referred to in the novel’s title, is also an older woman; however, as the story unfolds, she develops an understanding of her son’s and his comrades’ revolutionary activities and their aspirations and decides to support these young people and their cause. In a way, she rejects everything which is ‘old’ within herself. In Socialist Realist texts written in the 1930s and 1940s, many older female characters appear, all of whom are modelled on the example of Gor’kii’s glorified mother and who join in the construction of communism (Gasiorowska 1968). However, immovable older characters who are not able to let go of their pre-revolutionary views and values abound in works of Soviet fiction. Satirist Mikhail Zoshchenko, in Materinstvo i mladenchestvo (Motherhood and Infancy, 1929), lets his narrator pronounce the overall verdict on old women that ‘Actually, they cling to the old ways’ (Zoshchenko 1994: 251).2 The hope for a better future, thus, lies in the younger generation which receives special attention in the decades following the Revolution. Children, and especially those born and raised after 1917 – that is, under the completely new, socialist conditions – are gradually seen as the ideal ‘New Men’, who will grow up without knowing selfishness or greed (Smith 2007). A distorted picture of the prospective society in which these New Men (and Women) would live is presented in Evgenii Zamiatin’s dystopian novel My (We, 1924).3 The story is set in the One State (Edinoe gosudarstvo), which suppresses any sign of individuality and refers to people as numbers. The everyday life of these ‘numbers’ is strictly synchronized and uniform; the houses are transparent, and no privacy is granted, except for limited hours of sexual intercourse, which are state-controlled and regulated by ‘tickets’. In this totalitarian state, an ‘Ancient House’ (Drevnii dom) that functions as a kind of museum serves as a reminder of the old world which has been overruled and replaced by the new collectivist society. The Ancient House’s guard is an old woman whose wrinkles and nearly ‘grown together’ mouth sharply contrast with the overall sleekness and smoothness cultivated by the One State, in places ranging from the streets and glass walls to the numbers’ bald heads. The state worships reason and has erected a Green Wall in order to banish anything natural behind it. The old woman’s eyes, however, resemble those of a beast that the protagonist D-503 once caught a glimpse of through the Wall, and her hands caress a branch that extends towards her from a wormwood bush (Zamiatin and Huxley [1920/1932] 1989: 68–9). Thus, she embodies the wild and untamed nature that has otherwise ceased to exist in this antiUtopia. As Rafaela Božić (2021: 243) has convincingly argued, old age is presented in We as ‘something that is personal, almost an act of rebellion’.

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Another well-known dystopian novel, Kotlovan (The Foundation Pit, 1930) by Andrei Platonov,4 evokes disturbing images of Stalin’s plans for collectivization and the construction of communism. The latter is symbolized by the projected erection of an ‘all-proletarian house’ (obshcheproletarskii dom); however, this house never even comes close to being completed. On the contrary, while the plans for building this home for the ‘future people’ constantly grow in size, the only thing the workers do is to dig an ever-deeper foundation pit. The construction workers, such as Kozlov, feel that they do not entirely belong to the ‘bright future’ that lies ahead of them but, instead, to the old, weak, and obsolete world. The personification of that better, communist future is a little girl named Nastia whom the workers cherish above all. The fact that the foundation pit finally becomes the child’s grave implies that the construction of communism – or Stalin’s method of constructing it – is doomed to failure. In Russian émigré literature and culture of the time, the younger generation also receives special attention. The October Revolution and the ensuing Civil War (1917–22) drove more than one million people to flee the country in search of safety and a new home. Great numbers of them settled in Germany (‘Russian Berlin’) and France (‘Russian Paris’). These émigrés believed that they had taken the real, true Russia with them, whereas the country that was left to the Bolsheviks represented some sort of disfigured, false version of Russia. They considered it their task to build a ‘Russia Abroad’ (Zarubezhnaia Rossiia) in order to preserve genuine, pre-revolutionary Russianness and pass it on to the future generation, who presumably would revive or reconstruct ‘Old’ Russia on the home soil (Raeff 1990). The older generation, therefore, was greatly concerned with what was perceived as the impending ‘denationalization’ (denatsionalizatsiia) of the young. The members of the ‘older generation’ considered themselves as émigrés with a past and a home country with which they identified, whereas the ‘young generation’ was regarded as deracinated and, thus, unable to understand and convey true Russianness (see Morard 2010). Feelings of displacement and homesickness, as well as strangeness and self-estrangement, are linked in many texts of émigré literature to the notion of age. In a poem by Russian exile Dmitrii Merezhkovskii, Piataia (The Fifth, 1930), for instance, foreign land and old age even appear as two sisters – keeping company with misery and infirmity – who are all waiting together for the fifth sister: death (Merezhkovskii 1995). Thus, the exilic experience is represented as equal to, or connected with, another experience of alterity, which also involves loss and irreversibility: the feeling of growing old (GramshammerHohl 2015, 2017). Nostalgia for former times also resurfaces in Soviet Russian literature; in this case, nostalgia for pre-Stalinist peasant life and values, a main feature of the so-called village prose (derevenskaia proza) of the 1960s and 1970s. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s story Matrenin dvor (Matryona’s House, 1959) served as its model. In the old woman Matrena (and her house), the narrator eventually finds the ‘genuine Russia’ (kondovaia Rossiia) that he had sought in vain for such a long time (Solzhenitsyn 1970: 197). Soviet village prose abandoned the praise for progress that is so characteristic of kolkhoz literature. By means of idealizing old women, the traditional, pre-Stalinist peasant values and virtues are opposed to the evils and problems associated with urban life, industrialization, and modernity. The old women’s ageing (and dying) mirror the end of village life; in Valentin Rasputin’s novel Proshchanie s Materoi (Farewell to Matyora, 1976), the traditional peasant culture is ‘sinking’ quite literally, as the Siberian island community of Matera, situated on Angara river, is threatened by flooding due to the construction of a hydroelectric plant (Rasputin [1976] 1990). Together with its old protagonists, the text mourns not only the destruction of the natural landscape but even

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more so the loss of the last island of Russian culture’s ‘essence’. Rasputin’s novel Poslednii srok (Borrowed Time, 1970) is another case in point. In this text, the old Anna and her friend Mironikha are described as ‘the last two old-fashioned old women in the world’ (Rasputin 1978: 544). As they die, the world and the virtues they represent are lost irretrievably with them. Another personification in the guise of an older person, namely, that of the more recent totalitarian past, can be found in so-called Russian women’s prose (Zhenskaia proza) written in the late 1980s and 1990s. In these texts, ‘monster mothers’, as Larisa Lissjutkina calls them, abound – older women who tyrannize their family members or dominate and overprotect their weak sons (Lissjutkina 1999). Lissjutkina interprets these oppressive mother figures as mirroring the totalitarian state, the legacy of which continues to rule the lives of its ‘sons’ and ‘daughters’. Liudmila Ulitskaia’s ‘Queen of Spades’ in the eponymous story Pikovaia dama (1998) is considered to be one of these despotic old women, although the author herself does not agree with this reading of her text (Gramshammer-Hohl 2021: 374). The most extensively investigated character in this respect is certainly Anna Andrianovna from Liudmila Petrushevskaia’s novella Vremia noch’ (The Time: Night, 1992). Anna is a grandmother and, at the same time, a substitute mother to her little grandson Timochka. She epitomizes the direct opposite of the kind-hearted and caring old mothers and grandmothers described in Soviet village prose, although she at least partly identifies herself in that archetypical role (Doak 2011). In Helena Goscilos interpretation, Petrushevskaia’s narrative is an ‘investigation of totalitarian maternal pseudonurture’ (Goscilo 1995: 107). Constantly out of money, Anna tries to provide the child with food, often abstaining from eating herself. At the same time, she perceives her children, and especially her daughter, as not appreciating that sacrifice; thus, she sees herself as a victim who is denied the nurturing love that she gives to others. However, it is important to note that the reader is in the protagonist’s grip (just as all of the novel’s characters are): Anna Andrianovna is imbued with ‘telling power’ and silences all the other voices in the text – especially her daughter’s (Goscilo 1995: 112–13). Once again, the family serves as a miniature model of society, with the older generation embodying the legacy of the past.

REMEMBERING THE PAST, RESHAPING THE FUTURE In contemporary Russian literature, considerable attention is being paid to the painful experiences made over the past century in the world and civil wars and under a totalitarian regime. Genres such as the generation or family novel, memoirs, and auto-fiction relate collective traumas as reflected in individual life stories. The second decade of the twenty-first century saw a real boom in Russian memory narratives, which often include autobiographical references and / or are based on documentary material (letters, diaries, photographs). As Aleksandr Etkind has stated, in view of a lack of adequate memorials to the victims of twentieth-century catastrophes – a ‘memory without memorials’ (Etkind 2013: 246) – in present-day Russia, literature has stepped into that role (241). Contemporary Russian literature, thus, fulfils an essential function regarding cultural remembrance: as opposed to official Russian memory politics with its focus on Soviet – and Stalin’s – alleged achievements, it presents ‘alternative historiographies’ (Tippner 2019: 204) and gives voice to suppressed and competing memories. Older protagonists, whose ageing parallels the social upheavals and cultural change that have occurred since the Russian Revolution, play a major part in these narratives.

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In Sergei Lebedev’s debut novel Predel zabveniia (Oblivion, 2011), the first-person narrator has to cross the ‘limit’ of oblivion (such is the original Russian title) and to literally pass through Russia’s repressed memories in order to be able to unburden himself and his life, and to start from scratch. In a dense narrative and very poetic language Lebedev recounts the protagonist’s attempt to unravel his ‘Second’ Grandfather’s secret, which lies in the past and, obviously, somehow relates to himself. The so-called ‘Second Grandfather’ (Vtoroi ded)5 is, in fact, his parents’ old, blind neighbour who gradually gains their confidence and creates an uncanny bond with the boy. Initially being only some sort of substitute grandfather, he finally becomes related to the child by the blood he donates to him, thus saving the boy’s life. As a consequence of the blood transfusion, the old man dies – not incidentally precisely on the day of the August coup d’état attempt of 1991 which would lead to the collapse of the Soviet Union: just as the Second Grandfather lives on in the boy’s veins, the Soviet legacy continues to determine the country’s fate. As Alena Heinritz points out, the Second Grandfather’s blood causes the boy’s physical involvement in a past that he cannot have experienced due to his young age (Heinritz 2017: 72)6 – a ‘secondary’ involvement, one might add. To find out about this past will be the task of the grown-up narrator. His forebodings, which resurface throughout the text in fragmentary childhood recollections, dread of seemingly animate objects, and nightmares, finally turn out to be justified: the narrator discovers that the Second Grandfather was the commander of a Soviet prisoners’ camp, a perpetrator, whose hunger for power ultimately also caused his little son’s and wife’s deaths. Following the tracks of the Second Grandfather’s guilt and misdeeds, the narrator reaches the ‘limit of oblivion’: a hole in the ground, a funnel (voronka) that turns out to be a mass grave of former prisoners frozen in the permafrost. He falls into this funnel and tries to climb out, but then realizes that he will not be able to save himself unless he descends even deeper into the grave (where he finds an axe in the melting ice that will help him go out).7 He, thus, must not flee but go through the horrors of the past and integrate them into his consciousness in order to free himself from the burden. Time that does not overcome itself is ‘fruitless’ (Lebedev 2016b: 75; 2011: 88), but the deceased’s death is a process of transition that must be completed by the living (2016b: 213; 2011: 272). Forgetting, the novel thus suggests, is not the solution, but overcoming time is possible only if the protagonist goes beyond the limit of oblivion and confronts the past that continues to shape his – and his country’s – future. Significantly, the Second Grandfather, the boy feels, is not as ‘old’ and ‘ailing’ as he pretends to be. Old age is, the narrator states, a ‘mask’ (2016b: 91; 2011: 107). According to Featherstone and Hepworth (1991), the bodily appearance represents a ‘mask of ageing’ that prevents one from seeing how a man or woman experiences themselves in this body; this mask, thus, leads to a misrecognition of the person behind it. However, from the perspective of Lebedev’s firstperson narrator, the Second Grandfather has deliberately chosen to wear the ‘mask of ageing’; it is something that shelters him from being recognized as who he really is: His body was matching his desire to appear to be a little old man, a lisping, gray granddad with teeth-in-a-glass. Grandfather II … traded his body for the signs of aging, even though he was in good health, and it helped him, let him hide behind age … . The false teeth, the elderly lifestyle, the insistent use of baby words…; walking stick, medication schedule, milk toast instead of soup – all a mask to fool people and cunning to fool death, self-deprecation, marked impotence; here I am, I’m blind, harmless, and weak, I am like a bug in Your hand, do not squash me, Lord. (Lebedev 2016b: 91; 2011: 107)

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Taken in an allegorical sense, the past embodied by the Second Grandfather is not what it seems to be either: it has not ‘gone by’ but is more vital than one might think. Just as Oblivion, Lebedev’s 2016 novel Liudi avgusta (People of August) – yet to be translated into English – can be subsumed under what Igor Narskij has termed ‘grandchildren’s literature’ (Narskij 2013: 279–80), typical of contemporary Russian writing.8 The narrative evolves from a manuscript of the first-person narrator’s grandmother Tania. This manuscript contains the old woman’s written memories; however, the grandson cannot find in these notes any useful information on his grandfather Mikhail, who somehow has disappeared from the family’s memory. In grandmother’s manuscript, the grandfather is, again, kept in silence. Only when he discovers Tania’s old hidden diary does the narrator realize who his grandfather was: not an innocent man but someone who had most smartly adjusted to the political circumstances of his time. Following the discovery of the diary, the grandson makes the search for grandfathers – grandfathers who got lost during the Stalinist purges and died in the camps of the gulag – a profession. He subsequently becomes involved in shady business, and the narrative further develops into a kind of thriller – a fact that reveals how much the grandson resembles his grandfather or, in other words, how much the shadowy and life-threatening circumstances of the post-Soviet nineties resemble those under which grandfather Mikhail had struggled to survive. The narrator feels a ‘secret connection’ with the grandfather, as though the latter represented a ‘fateful figure that recurs across generations’ (Lebedev 2016a: 22), or, as the novel’s title suggests, that resurfaces in the fateful month of August. Thus, in this novel, too, the past has not been overcome and continues to shape the Russians’ present and future. This aspect is conspicuous in the narrator’s description of the motives of his clients who want him to find out about the past and fate of their grandparents: I saw how people … fear their – deceased and living – grandfathers and grandmothers; just how a child that reads a horror tale fears the Iron-Teethed-Old-Man or the Red-Eyed-Old-Woman, owners of a hut in a distant swamp. The grandfathers were dark spectres in the inner world of those who sought me … . Actually, people often contacted me in order to soothe, in a pagan way, the defunct or to find an undead; as if the dead had never found peace and called for being fed with the fresh, bloody flesh of feelings. (134) From the first-person narrator’s perspective, older people in post-Soviet Russia are not as weak, desperate, and poor as they seem to be; among them, undercover, hide Stalin’s ‘retired hangmen’ that prepare to ‘vote for the return of hangmanship’ (144). People, thus, need to uncover their grandparents’ secrets in order to free themselves from the shadows of the Soviet past. These shadows also permeate Mariia Stepanova’s highly appraised narrative In Memory of Memory (Pamiati pamiati, 2017), a literary search for the lost traces of her widely ramified RussianJewish family. The text draws on material from the author’s family archive, personal recollections, as well as on literary and theoretical memory discourse (from Marcel Proust to Marianne Hirsch). Here again, the past weighs heavily on the present: Russia is said to have passed ‘from one space of tragedy to the next as if it were a suite of rooms, a suite of traumas, from war to revolution, to famine and mass persecution, and on to new wars, new persecutions’ (Stepanova 2021: 84; 2019: 74). However, within this traumatic space, the author’s forebears somehow managed to survive. Stepanova’s text explains this by her grandparents’ efforts in remaining invisible, ‘keeping themselves apart from the wide current of history, with its extra-grand narratives and its margins of error: the deaths of millions’ (2021: 27; 2019: 24). The grandparents’ invisibility

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is also connected to their ageing: commenting on her great-grandmothers’, Sarra’s and Betia’s, photographs, the narrator states: ‘What difference is there between them? History is such a strange thing – it cancelled all the choices they made before 1917 and quickly reduced both to old women, hardly distinguishable in the grandeur of their last years of life’ (2021: 328; 2019: 331). Soviet history, thus, has erased both women’s individuality – who they were and whom they might have become under different circumstances. Here again, old age functions as a protective disguise. In Memory of Memory is not – and demonstrates that it cannot be – about the individual life trajectories of the author’s forebears; it is about the impossibility of creating a coherent version of a (traumatic) past. The (great-)grandparents’ survival does not obliterate the atmosphere of constant threat which they had to endure; it rather highlights the sense of imminent danger which now appears as a legacy passed on by the survivors to their grandchildren, to whom the past appears as ‘a sheet of opaque paper blocking out the light of the present’ (Stepanova 2021: 84; 2019: 74). Like Stepanova or Lebedev, Liudmila Ulitskaia, in her 2015 novel Lestnitsa Iakova (Jacob’s Ladder), draws on facts from her own family history and interweaves them with a fictional plot (Ulitskaia [2015] 2018). She incorporates authentic letters and diary entries from her family archive into the story of her fictitious protagonist Nora; her grandfather Iakov Ulitskii, the author of the letters and diaries, becomes the fictitious Iakov (Jacob) Osetskii. Nora’s mother and father die of cancer. The father refuses to share his memories with his daughter while he is still alive and leaves Nora with nothing but an empty, meaningless text. Nora only learns from her grandparents’ letters, which she finds after her parents’ death, about her grandfather’s fate in the Stalinist camps. When Nora finally studies her grandfather’s KGB dossier, she learns that her father Genrikh had denounced his own father Jacob as an ‘enemy of the people’ in order to save himself and his career. The novel refers to the fact that in Soviet times, one’s ancestry directed one’s individual destiny: having a bourgeois or kulak – or a Jew like Iakov Osetskii – among one’s ancestors would often cause people to fall victim to repression. This led to what Ulitskaia, among others, calls a ‘social amnesia’, a refusal to reminisce about one’s family members. In an interview conducted in 2018, Liudmila Ulitskaia reported that readers of Jacob’s Ladder told her they were finally encouraged by the novel to search for traces of and information about their ‘forgotten’ relatives (Gramshammer-Hohl 2021: 371–2). The image of the biblical Jacob’s ladder serves as a symbol of a strong familial bond among relatives across generations. Each individual stands on this ladder, with forebears who preceded them and progeny that will follow. This strong familial bond, support, and continuity, the novel suggests, keeps a person grounded. The reader follows not only Nora’s grandparents’ story through their letters and diaries but alternately also Nora’s own story as she grows older. Across all the crises that the protagonist has experienced, there is one strong continuity: her love for Tengis, a stage director from Georgia who routinely disappears from Nora’s life and returns to his Georgian wife but then reappears again on a regular basis. It is he who helps Nora when her son loses ground after leaving Russia for America and becoming addicted to drugs. What saves the young man is his return to the family’s fold and starting his own family, thus finding his place on ‘Jacob’s ladder’. However, as Anja Tippner (2019: 221) points out, kinship is not necessarily defined in the novel as a blood relationship but may also be elective affinity. Tusia, Nora’s mentor, is a case in point: the older woman serves as a role model and character for Nora to identify with, not least in terms of her

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Jewish descent (212). In her old age, Nora very much becomes like Tusia was. She also recognizes her own and her son’s and grandson’s connectedness, physical (through an inherited skin disease) and intellectual (through their shared interest in arts), with grandfather Iakov Osetskii. Another work worthy of mention, the final one to be discussed here due to this Handbook’s limited space, is Svetlana Aleksievich’s Secondhand Time (Vremia sekond khend, 2013).9 The Belarusian author10 who writes in Russian received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2015 for her documentary prose, a literary genre based on interviews with a wide range of different people from the former Soviet Union – interviews that the author synthesizes into works of art. Secondhand Time is dedicated to people’s evaluation of the post-Soviet years and necessarily contains many memories of what living in Soviet times meant. Naturally, a great number of older people speak out about how they experienced the collapse of the USSR and the dawn of seemingly new times. In fact, as one older woman says in Aleksievich’s text: ‘Our country doesn’t exist anymore, and it never will, but here we are…old and disgusting…with our terrifying memories and poisoned eyes. We’re right here!’ (Alexievich 2016: 281; 2014: 268) In the interviewee’s self-assessment, as in that of many others to whom Aleksievich lent her ear, all those people who have outlived the collapse of the Soviet Union represent the socialist past that will not end as long as they exist. Among those who personify the ‘socialist drama’ is the narrator herself (2016: 14; 2014: 7). The older people who have their say in Aleksievich’s text feel they are in a ‘foreign country’ now, although they have stayed in the same place (2016: 293; 2014: 279). One interviewee asserts: ‘I’m nothing but a doddering old fool. … I’ve been alive too long, it’s no good living this long. … My time was up before my life could end. You have to die along with your era’ (2016: 186; 2014: 173). Their old age makes them feel out of place, because the experiences they had in their youth are so different from what the younger generation lives today. The latter, on the other hand – the grown-up children with whom the author spoke – feel the same way. They associate the older generation with a past that they strive to forget. The son of one interviewee confesses he thinks that ‘our elderly are no innocents’ (2016: 301; 2014: 287). A daughter makes clear that she will not let her mother help raise her own daughter, because her mother would convey to the child a ‘Soviet’ world that is completely different from the world outside (2016: 378; 2014: 364). Aleksievich’s collage of voices thus seems to confirm the existence of a deep gap that divides the older, Soviet generation from a younger, post-Soviet one. The cultural change brought about by the collapse of the USSR appears to make the ‘before’ untranslatable to the ‘after’, and vice versa. However, Aleksievich’s polyphonic text ends on a different note: a sixty-year-old ‘everywoman’ (2016: 509; 2014: 491) speaks of the steady stream of life in her Russian village, where there has not been any fundamental change, whether under socialism or capitalism. The continuity that characterizes her life, as she perceives it, is expressed in terms of delaying ageing until a later time: ‘I don’t feel like getting old, I have no desire to get old at all’; ‘the important thing is to make it to spring’ (2016: 510; 2014: 491–2). The bouquet of lilacs from her garden, a symbol of spring that she finally gifts to the narrator, conveys the idea that constancy and a new beginning do not necessarily exclude one another.

CONCLUSION The renowned literary scholar and semiotician Iurii Lotman, in his final book Kul’tura i vzryv (Culture and Explosion, 1992), described culture as a modelling system that informs

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and influences the ‘beyond-the-system’, thus, how reality is interpreted and experienced. In a binary model of culture, cultural change occurs through ‘explosions’ that lead towards complete destruction – and, thus, forgetting – of the past. A ternary model of culture, by contrast, does not seek to totally replace, but to preserve – thus, to build in parts on what was before. According to Lotman, the binary model prevails in Russian culture; ‘it’s very Russian to start over from the smoking ruins’,11 as one interviewee in Aleksievich’s Secondhand Time also states (Alexievich 2016: 316; 2014: 302). In literary representations of cultural change, this paradigm is frequently reflected, as I argue, in a contrasting juxtaposition of ‘older’ and ‘younger’ generations: older people appear as those who must be removed and replaced by the young (such as in texts that embraced the Russian Revolution), or they are represented as true Russian culture’s guards who are needed to restore what the young have lost or destroyed (e.g. in Russian village prose). In a similar vein, Boris Dubin (2005: 249) characterizes the antagonism of ‘Fathers and Sons’ – borrowed from the title of Ivan Turgenev’s famous 1862 novel – as a key concept in twentieth-century Russia. Lotman advocates a ternary model of culture which builds on continuity with the past. Remembering, not forgetting, thus underlies this pattern of cultural change. It seems that contemporary Russian prose, unlike many texts written in the past century, favours such a ternary model. Grandchildren trace their forebears’ stories and seek connections and identification. They reflect on how the past informs – or ‘contaminates’ (Etkind 2013: 15) – the present condition of the individual as well as collective Russian Self. In texts of this ‘grandchildren’s literature’, age and images of ageing, and the irresolvable transgenerational links of the ‘old’ and the ‘young’, speak of the need to confront and remember the past instead of repressing and forgetting it; only then will the future begin.

NOTES 1 The Soviet Union was founded in 1922 and dissolved in 1991. However, the term ‘Soviet literature’ does not simply correlate with these dates. 2 Unless otherwise indicated, all translations are mine [D.G.-H.]. 3 This novel could not be published in Soviet Russia before 1988. 4 This novel was not published in the Soviet Union until perestroika. 5 ‘Grandfather II’ in Antonina W. Bouis’s translation (Lebedev 2016b). 6 See also Frieß (2017: 300). 7 See Frieß (2017: 305, 312) for intertextual references to Dante’s Divine Comedy. 8 See also Urupin / Zhukova 2020. 9 Works by Guzel’ Iakhina or Evgenii Vodolazkin, which might be of interest in this context, are not considered either due to the article’s limited space. 10 Aleksievich’s books could not be published in Belarus between 1999 and 2013 (Hielscher 2018: 23); in 2021, obviously due to her political activity during the mass protests against the authoritarian Lukashenka regime, the author’s name was removed from the Belarusian school curriculum. 11 In the Russian original ‘a smashed trough’ (razbitoe koryto), an expression which alludes to Aleksandr Pushkin’s Skazka o rybake i rybke (Tale of the Fisherman and the Fish, 1835) and denotes a situation where everything once possessed is lost.

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REFERENCES Aleksievich, S. ([2013] 2014), Vremia sekond khend, Moscow: Vremia. Alexievich, S. (2016), Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets, trans. Bela Shayevich, New York: Random House. Božić, R. (2021), ‘Aging in Soviet Utopian and Dystopian Literature’, in Dagmar Gramshammer-Hohl and Oana Hergenröther (eds), Foreign Countries of Old Age: East and Southeast European Perspectives on Aging, 235–52, Bielefeld: transcript. Chudakova, M. (1998), ‘Zametki o pokoleniiakh v sovetskoi Rossii’, Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 30: 73–91. Doak, C. (2011), ‘Babushka Writes Back: Grandmothers and Grandchildren in Liudmila Petrushevskaia’s Time: Night’, Forum for Modern Language Studies, 47 (2): 170–81. Dubin, B. (2005), ‘Pokolenie: smysl i granitsy poniatiia’, in Iurii Levada and Teodor Shanin (eds), Ottsy i deti: Pokolencheskii analiz sovremennoi Rossii, Moscow: NLO, 61–79. Etkind, A. (2013), Warped Mourning: Stories of the Undead in the Land of the Unburied, Stanford: Stanford University Press. Featherstone, M., and M. Hepworth (1991), ‘The Mask of Ageing and the Postmodern Life Course’, in M. Featherstone, M. Hepworth, and B. S. Turner (eds), The Body: Social Process and Cultural Theory, 371–89, London: Sage. Frieß, N. (2017), ‘Inwiefern ist das heute interessant?’: Erinnerungen an den stalinistischen Gulag im 21. Jahrhundert, Berlin: Frank & Timme. Gasiorowska, X. (1968), Women in Soviet Fiction, 1917–1964, Madison: University of Wisconsin. Gor’kii, M. ([1907] 1970), Mat, in Polnoe sobranie sochnenii. Khudozhestvennye proizvedeniia v 25-i tomakh, vol. 8, 5–346, Moscow: Nauka. Gorky, M. (1911), Mother, New York: D. Appleton. Available at: http://www.gutenb​erg.org/ files/3783/3783-h/3783-h.htm (accessed 24 January 2021). Goscilo, H. (1995), ‘Mother as Mothra: Totalizing Narrative and Nurture in Petrushevskaia’, in S. S. Hoisington (ed.), A Plot of Her Own: The Female Protagonist in Russian Literature, 102–13, Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Gramshammer-Hohl, D. (2015), ‘Altern und Exil in der russischen Emigrationsliteratur’, in A. Zink and S. Koroliov (eds), Unterwegs-Sein: Figurationen von Mobilität im Osten Europas, 255–66, Innsbruck: Innsbruck University Press. Gramshammer-Hohl, D. (2017), ‘Exile, Return, and “the Relative Brevity of Our Life”: Aging in Slavic Homecoming Narratives (Nabokov – Kundera – Jergović)’, in D. Gramshammer-Hohl (ed.), Aging in Slavic Literatures: Essays in Literary Gerontology, 185–201, Bielefeld: transcript. Gramshammer-Hohl, D. (2021), ‘Commemorating Russia’s Great Old Women: An Interview with Ludmila Ulitskaya’, in Dagmar Gramshammer-Hohl and Oana Hergenröther (eds), Foreign Countries of Old Age: East and Southeast European Perspectives on Aging, 371–7, Bielefeld: transcript. Heinritz, A. (2017), ‘Burying the Undead: Coming to Terms with the Soviet Past in Novels by Olga Slavnikova and Segei Lebedev’, Acta Universitatis Carolinae / Studia Territorialia 2: 59–78. Hielscher, K. (2018), ‘Die Menschenforscherin: Leben und Werk Svetlana Aleksievičs’, Osteuropa, 68 (1–2): 5–26. Lebedev, S. (2011), Predel zabveniia, Moscow: Pervoe sentiabria. Lebedev, S. (2016a), Liudi avgusta, Moscow: Intellektual’naia literatura.

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Lebedev, S. (2016b), Oblivion, trans. Antonina W. Bouis, New York: New Vessel Press. Lissjutkina, L. (1999), ‘Mütter-Monster? Auseinandersetzung mit der Vergangenheit in Texten jüngerer russischer Autorinnen’, Feministische Studien, 17: 35–48. Lotman, I. M. (1992), Kul’tura i vzryv, Moscow: Gnozis, Progress. Lovell, S. (2005), ‘Les Enjeux politiques du vieillissement en Russie soviétique’, Politix, 72: 99–122. Available at: https://www.cairn.info/revue-poli​tix-2005-4-page-99.htm (accessed 24 January 2021). Merezhkovskii, D. ([1930] 1995), ‘Piataia’, in E. Vitkovskii (ed.), ‘My zhili togda na planete drugoi …’: Antologiia poezii russkogo zarubezh’ia 1920–1990 (pervaia i vtoraia volna), vol. 1, 38, Moscow: Moskovskii rabochii. Morard, A. (2010), De l’émigré au déraciné: La ‘jeune génération’ des écrivains russes entre identité et esthétique (Paris, 1920–1940), Lausanne: L’Âge d’Homme. Narskij, I. ([2008] 2013), Fotografie und Erinnerung: Eine sowjetische Kindheit, trans. F. Marthaler, Cologne: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. Petrushevskaia, L. ([1992] 1996), ‘Vremia noch’’, in Sobranie sochinenii v 5-i tomakh, vol. 1, 311–96, Kharkov: Folio. Platonov, A. ([1930] 1990), Kotlovan. Available at: https://ilibr​ary.ru/text/1010/index.html (accessed 24 January 2021). Raeff, M. (1990), Russia Abroad: A Cultural History of the Russian Emigration, 1919–1939, New York: Oxford University Press. Rasputin, V. ([1970] 1978), Poslednii srok, in Povesti, 395–555, Moscow: Molodaia gvardiia. Rasputin, V. ([1976] 1990), Proshchanie s Materoi, in Pozhar. Povesti, 7–178, Moscow: Sovetskii Pisatel. Smith, S. A. (2007), ‘The First Soviet Generation: Children and Religious Belief in Soviet Russia, 1917–41’, in S. Lovell (ed.), Generations in Twentieth-Century Europe, 79–100, Houndmills: Palgrave. Solzhenitsyn, A. ([1959] 1970), Matrenin dvor, in Sobranie sochinenii v 6-i tomakh, vol. 1, 195–231, Frankfurt am Main: Posev. Stepanova, M. ([2017] 2019), Pamiati pamiati, Moscow: Novoe izdatel’stvo. Stepanova, M. (2021), In Memory of Memory, trans. S. Dugdale, London: Fitzcarraldo. Tippner, A. (2019), ‘Familiengeschichten als Gegengeschichten: Jüdische Identität in zeitgenössischer russischer Literatur’, Osteuropa, 69 (9–11): 203–22. Ulitskaia, L. ([1998] 1999), ‘Pikovaia dama’, in L. Ulitskaia, Veselye pokhorony. Povest’ i rasskazy, 402–34, Moscow: Vagrius. Ulitskaia, L. ([2015] 2018), Lestnitsa Iakova, Moscow: AST / Redaktsiia Eleny Shubinoi. Urupin, I., and M. Zhukova (2020), ‘Zu Poetiken des Transgenerationalen in der russischen Literatur der 2010er Jahre: Sergej Lebedev, Guzel’ Jachina, Marija Stepanova’, in Y. Drosihn, I. Jandl, and E. Kowollik (eds), Trauma – Generationen – Erzählen: Transgenerationale Narrative in der Gegenwartsliteratur zum ost-, ostmittel- und südosteuropäischen Raum, 223–39, Berlin: Frank & Timme. Zamiatin, E. (1924), We, New York: E. P. Dutton. Available at: https://www.gutenb​erg.org/ files/61963/61963-h/61963-h.htm (accessed 24 January 2021). Zamiatin, E., and A. Huxley ([1920/1932] 1989), My / O divnyi novyi mir, Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia Literatura. Zoshchenko, M. (1994), Sobranie sochinenii v 5-i tomakh, vol. 1, Moscow: Russlit.

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CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

Beckett’s radical exploration of the vulnerability of ageing women in Happy Days and Rockaby IRENE DE ANGELIS

INTRODUCTION In the vast panorama of scholarship regarding Samuel Beckett’s oeuvre, it may seem difficult to find areas of investigation which are relatively unexplored, yet his representation of old age is so pervasive that, as we shall see, it may still offer fertile new ground for speculation, as shown by the 2016 special issue of the journal Samuel Beckett Today / Aujourd’hui, titled ‘Clinique et poétique du vieillir dans le théâtre de Beckett’ / ‘Clinics and Poetics: Beckett’s Theatre and Aging’ (Barry 2016). This essay focuses on Beckett’s representation of ageing women in his ‘female solo’ Happy Days (1961) and later in Rockaby (1981). Starting from his lifelong interest in old age, my analysis will investigate the playwright’s view of the impairment connected with senescence, from the portrayal of Winnie and her declining beauty to the ‘mortal decline’ of a prematurely aged unnamed woman (W), charted by ‘a recorded poetic incantation’.1 Beckett’s career as a writer, which culminated in 1969 with the Nobel Prize for Literature, is characterized by a deeply felt desire to escape from the narrow cultural boundaries of his native Ireland. To quote from Chris Ackerley and Stanley E. Gontarski, Beckett was ‘a consummate European, more comfortable in the intellectual milieu of Europe than that of his native “prosodoturfy” ’ (2004: xv). The 1930s in Paris, in particular, were a truly life-changing experience for him, and partly determined his later decision to switch from the English language of his AngloIrish ancestors to French. It was between 1946 and 1960, in the second, most creative stage of his literary career, that he opted for this change. His first novel in French was Mercier et Camier, which he started writing in the summer of 1946. This was followed by a trilogy of critically acclaimed novels, Molloy (1951), Malone meurt (1951), and L’Innomable (1954), which he later translated into English. The three novels were followed by three plays, En attendant Godot (1952), Fin de partie (1957), and La dernière bande (1958), also subsequently translated into English. According to Christopher Murray, this linguistic change coincided with a ‘switch of identity’, a way of putting

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‘a distance between himself and the Irish experience’ (2007: 433). In Paris, Beckett was in touch with his fellow countryman James Joyce, whose work he profoundly admired, and which had an enormous impact on him. With Joyce, Beckett shared the rejection of the cultural stagnation which affected their native country. Their work, however, could not have been more different, as Beckett himself pointed out in his famous 1956 interview with Israel Shenker, in which he spoke about Joyce’s artistic tendency ‘toward omniscience and omnipotence’, in stark contrast with his own interest in ‘impotence’ and ‘ignorance’ (Mercier 1977: 8, in Murray 2007: 434). Murray adds that ‘whereas Joyce expanded, Beckett contracted; where Joyce was inclusive of experience, of the world, Beckett was exclusive’. The critic also speaks about Beckett’s ‘attenuation and minimalism’ as ‘features that are non-Irish. For virtually by definition, Irish rhetoric has traditionally been expansive and cumulative’ (Murray 2007: 434). Beckett’s ‘non-Irishness’ may partly be connected to his cosmopolitan Weltanschauung and to his writing ‘by subtraction’, in stark contrast with Joyce’s omniscient writing ‘by expansion’. If we take into consideration Beckett’s other Irish literary predecessors, namely, W. B. Yeats, Lady Augusta Gregory, and J. M. Synge, whose names are traditionally associated with the Irish Literary Revival and the Abbey Theatre, it becomes clear that he was very far from the cultural nationalism that shaped their writings. Beckett wrote ‘drama for a “new age” ’ (Murray 2007: 434), which was utterly ‘new’ even in the way it represented old age. In fact, if the trope of the Irish Nation personified as Cathleen Ní Houlihan, the Poor Old Woman, or the Sean-Bhean Bhocht was common in the writing of Yeats, Lady Gregory, and Sean O’Casey, Beckett’s cosmos of old people and particularly ageing women is completely devoid of such political connotations. It is a universe whose representation breaks not only with the Irish nationalist tradition, but also with the realism of Ibsen, Strindberg and Chekhov, to consider a wider framework. Beckett’s drama is closer to the surrealism of Alfred Jarry, whose Ubu Roi left Yeats appalled in 1896, and to the Theatre of Cruelty of Antonin Artaud. As Murray argues, rather than by the twentieth-century realism of G. B. Shaw, O’Casey, O’Neill, and Arthur Miller, Beckett was influenced by symbolism and by Jean-Paul Sartre’s existentialism, the latter of which to him was the equivalent of what Marxism had ideologically been for Bertolt Brecht (Murray 2007: 435). His older characters are neither mad and wise like Shaw’s Shotover, nor heroic like Miller’s Willy Loman, who is dismissed from work at only sixty-three. As we shall see, Beckett’s idea of old age is associated with embitterment, loneliness, fear, and hopelessness. The ageing protagonists of his works are portrayed as outcasts, who hope to be released from life’s vale of tears. In his oeuvre, Beckett conceives old age as a process which shows the individual’s increasing vulnerability. It usually involves some form of impairment or marginalization, and these characteristics are portrayed with dark irony and pitiless cruelty. Such a harsh depiction mirrors his nihilistic vision of the world, torn by war and despair. When in 1935 Beckett attended Carl Jung’s third Tavistock lecture, he became fascinated with the idea of ‘birth astride of a grave’,2 a recurring image in many of his plays. Moreover, before, and later, after the Second World War, Beckett’s ageing or aged characters bear the scars of history on their minds and bodies. Their movements are partially if not totally limited and they experience confinement, as they are often entombed, buried alive, maimed, blinded, or imprisoned in a claustrophobic situation. This condition of deterioration, decay, and exhaustion translates into a state of precariousness and of suspension between life and death. The growing immobility and invisibility of these ageing bodies, on the verge of disappearing into nothingness, correspond to a reduction of the fragmented psyche to

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splinters, a feature which particularly characterizes Beckett’s more radically experimental plays of the last period, culminating in the unstoppable flow of words ‘regurgitated’ by the disembodied Mouth of Not I (1972), the first play of the trilogy also constituted by Footfalls (1976) and Rockaby (1981). The following section of this essay will explore Beckett’s idea of and obsession with ageing, focusing in particular on his haunting representation of ageing women.

AN AGEING WOMAN ON THE VERGE OF DISAPPEARANCE Happy Days was originally written by Beckett in English, and it was first published by Grove Press in 1961. At the time, the playwright was living in Paris, where he bought a big apartment that he would soon share with his wife, Suzanne Deschevaux-Dumesnil. It is difficult to tell whether Beckett shared the same view of life as Sartre and de Beauvoir, who for a long time opted against settling down on existential principles. However, it was during this life-changing period that Beckett’s imagination conceived one of his most memorable ageing women, Winnie, who, in his own words, is an ‘opulent blonde, fiftyish, all glowing shoulders and décolleté’ (Harmon 1998: 77). If the spectators close their eyes for a moment, while listening to Winnie speak, they can hear ‘the chatter of a middle-aged woman in a semi-detached house in the outskirts of London’ (Bertinetti 2017: 112, translation mine). However, what is most striking about the condition of this ageing female protagonist, who still hopes to be desirable, is that when the curtain rises on Act 1, she is buried up to her waist in a mound of earth, under the scorching light of the sun. Winnie’s partial immobility, which increases in Act 2, when she is swallowed by the earth up to her neck, is a visual representation of her existential entrapment.3 Her husband Willie, a man in his sixties, is also partially visible on stage,4 but she remains the real protagonist of the play, as is also evident from the first title which Beckett conceived, Female Solo. When the bell rings, Winnie begins her daily routine, in her pathetic attempts to get ‘through the day’ and to ‘dodge despair’ (Whitelaw 1995: 149). In her grave of earth, this ageing, middle-class woman wearing a string of pearls around her neck finds her only comfort in her black shopping bag and the old objects it contains, which she tries to make last – a lipstick, a mirror, a toothbrush, and a tube of toothpaste which is running out. Ackerley and Gontarski speak about Winnie’s ‘physical and mental world in ruins’ (2004: 244): in fact, the woman shows signs of both bodily and cognitive deterioration, since her memory seems to fail, but despite her awareness of it, she does not complain and instead keeps up her façade of respectability, while ‘babbling away’ (Whitelaw 1995: 149). As Winnie reminisces about her ‘fleeting joys’ (141), she also shows signs of anxiety about becoming increasingly invisible: in fact, since her body is partially swallowed by the earth, she is neither fully visible nor fully invisible, both literally and metaphorically. While she keeps on talking to fight against the ravages of time, she is also afraid of loneliness. Obviously, there is Willie, whose silent presence she needs to validate her existence. Most of the time Willie is asleep; at one point he looks at a pornographic postcard, presumably remembering the days when he was still sexually active, but he is essentially portrayed as all instinct. While Winnie is ‘a creature of the air’ (‘if I were not held … in this way, I would simply float up into the blue … like gossamer’, 151–2), Willie is ‘of the earth’, ‘wallowing on all fours, often naked’; if she is ‘mind or spirit’, he is ‘nature or earth’ (Ackerley and Gontarski 2004: 245). In Act 1, most of the time he is asleep, or, because of his mobility problems, he crawls, while in Act 2 his complete silence leads Winnie to doubt whether he might even have gone deaf or dumb (167). Now in her fifties, Winnie is a

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post-menopausal woman on the verge of disappearance. She and Willie do not have children and their chances to have an offspring are over. Her condition is different from that of her husband in terms of fertility, since as pointed out by Simone de Beauvoir in her 1972 essay The Coming of Age: ‘in women, the reproductive function is suddenly interrupted at a comparatively early age. The phenomenon is unique in the aging process, which in every other respect is a continuous development; and it takes place at about fifty with the menopause – the abrupt termination of the ovarian cycle and of menstruation’ (1972: 26). This post-menopausal condition is a sort of grey area in the life of a woman, as emphasized by Winnie’s own words: ‘Getting on … in life. … No longer young, not yet old’ (165). Her place as female and wife is in the mound of earth, which as emphasized by Shari Benstock is a reversal of the ‘earth mother’ associated to fecundity (1990: 183). Despite her physical and existential entrapment, Winnie tries to keep Willie alive with her unstoppable chatter, her reassuring daily rituals and her memories of the past, which are her own personal ways of expressing care, while she struggles hard to find normality even in the abnormal condition in which she is confined. Winnie’s absurd situation, which is not explained, as it is not explained why, in Act 2, she is buried up to her neck, is crucial for an understanding of the play, ‘which has (wrongly) been defined, and sometimes staged, as optimistic, as a eulogy of tenacity and of human resistance in the face of life’s adversities and the inevitability of death’ (Bertinetti 2017: 112, translation mine). Winnie tries to give meaning to the small, trivial things that fill her days, hiding in primis from herself the bare truth about the ‘desolate reality in which her illusory sentences resound’, ‘in a context that shows all their vacuity’ (112, translation mine). Thus, it becomes clear that, in the play, it would be utterly misleading to search for a message of hope about the human condition. In Beckett’s impassioned portrayal of the ageing Winnie, we may catch a glimpse of his bitter smile at the human condition, especially in inhuman circumstances. As Joelle Chambon interestingly argues, Winnie’s ‘capacity to sustain … her “humanity in ruins” … shows us … Beckett’s deriding smile’ (2016: 173). This ‘deriding smile’ calls to mind the Italian playwright Luigi Pirandello’s ‘feeling of the opposite’ (sentimento del contrario), which he explored in the 1908 (1998) long essay ‘L’umorismo’ (On Humour). He explained the concept by evoking the image of an ageing woman, whose excessively made-up face makes her look ridiculous and arouses the onlookers’ laughter. The effect is pathetic, and the observers perceive that there is something odd about her situation. Maybe this old woman disguises herself in this way because she is aware of her physical decay, but she still longs to be desired by her lover. Her desperation may seem comic, but if the spectators go beyond the initial hilarity, questioning the hidden reasons behind it, they may experience the ‘feeling of the opposite’, which moves them from laughing out loud to smiling bitterly. A similar effect is also achieved by the frail, moving figure of Beckett’s Winnie, who still longs to be attractive. Many female actors have performed Winnie’s role over the years, from Madelaine Renaud to Billie Whitelaw and Giulia Lazzarini, to mention but a few, and a comparison between their performances allows us to better appreciate the subtle nuances of Beckett’s representation of ageing women. Moreover, his depiction of the tortured or limited female ageing body, which his characters mainly experience through their physical decline and their return to primary needs, has inspired various artists to show ‘what unusual beauty and vitality may be found through the fragility’ of ageing (Chambon 2016: 174). Maguy Marin (May B, 1981) and Maurice Béjart (L’Heure exquise, inspired by Happy Days, 1998) are only two among the many international choreographers and

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dancers who have drawn fruitful inspiration from Beckett, and their experiments in performance offer an alternative way of approaching his portrayal of ageing women.5 Happy Days, which is a play about ageing femininity, ambivalently ends with a revolver, Brownie (which is visible throughout the play on the mound of sand), and a love song. Winnie, who in Act 2 is nearly buried alive, misinterprets Willie’s struggles to reach her, as she does not realize that he is in fact reaching for the revolver, a possible means to end life’s suffering. Will he commit suicide? Will he kill Winnie? Or will he perhaps try to put an end to both of their desperate lives? The spectators are left to wonder, while Winnie, after announcing (in the future perfect) that ‘this will have been another happy day!’ (168, emphasis added), sings The Merry Widow’s Waltz. Beckett’s muse Billie Whitelaw, who first performed Winnie in 1979, recounts how during rehearsals Beckett once told her that Winnie ‘was child-like’ (154, emphasis added). This consideration brings to mind the ‘emmet moment’, earlier in the play, when the ‘exhausted couple’ (Ackerley and Gontarski 2004: 244) notice the presence of an ant and share a moment of entertainment, which seems to take them back to their youth. Indeed, in Beckett’s writing, old age is sometimes seen as a sort of second childhood, a stage of life where the life cycle returns to its beginning and individuals experience a form of regression. Furthermore, in a note addressed to Whitelaw, Beckett added that ‘Winnie wants to float up, she’s bird-like’ (Whitelaw 1995: 154, emphasis added). Although Winnie is inexorably ageing towards death, she still longs for lightness and freedom. Beckett famously wrote, ‘When you are up to your neck in shit, all you can do is sing’, and this is exactly what his ‘child-like’, ‘bird-like’ protagonist Winnie does at the end of the play: she sings. Her portrayal emphasizes how, despite her increasing vulnerability, invisibility, and the physical decay associated with the passing of time, her soul has not lost its élan vital.

CHARTING THE MORTAL DECLINE OF AN OLD WOMAN Beckett conceived Rockaby as a one-act play, which was first published in English in 1981, and later translated into French with the title Berceuse. The play was originally commissioned by Danielle Labeille to celebrate Beckett’s seventy-fifth birthday, and it premiered at the Center for Theater Research, at the State University of New York in Buffalo. The director was Alan Schneider, and despite what is commonly believed, the play was not originally written for Billie Whitelaw, who replaced Irene Worth, the female actor originally cast in the role (Ackerley and Gontarski 2004: 484). The London production followed in December 1982 at the Cottlesloe. D. A. Pennebaker and Chris Hegedus filmed the rehearsals and the premiere of the play in a video documentary, which is now available online to the wider public, while in Britain BBC2 adapted the piece for the small screen. This fifteen-minute performance is only apparently simple. The protagonist is a ‘prematurely old’ woman W (462), who sits in a rocking chair. When Beckett first directed Billie Whitelaw, who was forty-nine at the time, the female actor went through significant wig and makeup application to correspond to the playwright’s mental image of the protagonist. While the woman rocks in her chair, she listens to a recorded voice6 (V) that talks in fragments about her past. Beckett explained to Labeille that ‘the woman in no way initiates the rock. The memory initiates the rock’. He added that ‘it would be a good idea if perhaps she wore a ring to suggest a past engagement’, and the eyes should be ‘more closed than open as peace progresses’. Beckett also emphasized that the ‘rocker is mother’s – no richness, no ornateness’. The protagonist’s hat ‘must glitter … perhaps feathers’.7 The ghostly pallor of the woman’s face and hands and the greyness

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of her unkempt hair make her figure even more haunting.8 Her black dress looks like a funerary garb appropriate for the grave, and her appearance seems to be reminiscent of James McNeill Whistler’s 1891 painting Arrangement in Grey and Black: Portrait of the Painter’s Mother, also known as Whistler’s Mother (Knowlson 1996: 583). Beckett’s spectral protagonist in this play, with her mask-like face and her movement which seems to be almost ritualized, is suspended between life and death. In the initial scene, which opens in medias res, after a long pause the woman cries for ‘More’ (135), then the rocker is set in motion in unison with the recorded voice. This mechanism characterizes each of the four unlabelled “movements” of the play, which Brater accurately defines as ‘a performance poem in the shape of a play’ (169). The ageing woman sitting in her rocker is the central visual metaphor around which the play develops, as often happens in Beckett’s drama. Unlike Winnie in Happy Days, this prematurely aged woman does not have a husband to keep her company, no matter how brutish he might be. She is the embodiment of the vulnerability, solitude, and despair which frequently accompany old age. The audience apprehends through the recorded voice (V) that for a long time, in a sort of Gothic quest, she searched for ‘another creature like herself ’ (435), ‘another living soul’ (436). However, despite her search, she never reached her goal, because her ‘famished eyes’ (439), longing ‘to see / be seen’ (439) never crossed the gaze of another. There was a time when she could still go outside, as it is said that she ‘in the end went back in’ (436) to the room with the window, a confined space which in the 1981 production directed by Alan Schneider partly reminded the onlookers of a prison, partly of a mental asylum. In this enclosed, claustrophobic space resounds the voice (V), only echoed by the woman (W) and interrupted by the creaking sound of the chair, in the metaphysical silence which pervades the surrounding darkness. As in Beckett’s other plays, the use of a merciless spotlight prevents the woman from stopping both the rocking and the talking of the recorded voice. The voice must be played by the same female actor. The woman only speaks four words, ‘More’ and ‘time she stopped’ (435). As the chair rocks, the voice continues its unstoppable flow of words, and this fabling keeps the woman alive. Her search was not necessarily for another person, but merely for the sign of another presence, like ‘one blind up / no more / never mind a face / behind the pane’ (439). She has relinquished this desire, and the voice (V) has remained her only company. She has become her own other, as it were, directing her search inward, inside her own self. Sitting downstairs in the old rocker, she rocks ‘where mother rocked’ (440), and, as we may imagine, perhaps even her grandmother before her. Different generations of old or ageing women have abandoned themselves to the metronome-like to-and-fro rhythmical movement of the old chair. When the protagonist’s eyelids temporarily close, they become like closed windows, metaphorically keeping the onlookers outside. Billie Whitelaw, who played both W and V in Rockaby’s American premiere and was later directed by Beckett himself, spoke in an interview about an image which she thought about when she performed: ‘I have a picture in my mind – I think in pictures – of someone staring out a window at a skyscraper block. Perhaps there may be another person out there. How awful it must be to sit there waiting for death’ (Gussow 1984, in Groninger and Childress 2007: 268). Later, during rehearsals in London, Whitelaw said that the woman in Rockaby reminded her of her own mother, who died of Parkinson’s disease only a few months before she accepted the role. When interviewed at home, she said: ‘My mother used to sit here, in this chair like that … And you never knew what was going on in her head … And then she’d come out of it … and she’d be my darling mum again, you know’ (Pennebaker and Hedegus 1982).

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Whitelaw’s considerations about loneliness and her own mother’s illness are in line with the portrayal of the ageing woman in Rockaby. When the voice says she is ‘gone off her head / but harmless’ (440), Beckett seems to suggest that the woman shows signs of cognitive deterioration and possibly of dementia. In addition, the split between body and voice and the third person implied in the narrative suggest the idea of a fragmented identity and of alienation. When the ageing woman relinquishes the hope of finding ‘another like herself ’, she abandons herself to the voice’s ‘recorded poetic incantation’ (Van Badham 2015). This incantation is characterized by a repetitive structure, like a refrain or a spell, and by simple language, mostly monosyllabic, with broken syntax which effectively recalls a speaking subject who is running out of breath. These fragments of speech also evoke the convoluted thoughts in which the solitary ageing woman delves, like the protagonist of Footfalls, May, who never ceases ‘revolving it all’ in her ‘poor mind’ (403). The play stages a gradual movement from sentience (when the woman could still see and be seen) to senescence. The voice’s speaking and the unstoppable impulse to tell allow the woman to postpone the silence and the stasis which gradually envelope her cage-like room. When the disembodied voice repeats ‘time she stopped’ (435), it seems to imply that not only the rocker should stop, but also words, and therefore life, because in Beckett’s world, when words fail, life itself fails. When solitude and isolation become overwhelming, then follows the refusal to go on, summarized by the recorded voice’s words ‘no / done with that’, ‘rock her off ’ (442), followed by the brutal exclamation ‘fuck life’ (442), a repudiation of narrative, rocking, and ultimately of existence. In order to better grasp the complex implications of Beckett’s play, it is necessary to further speculate on the multiple symbolic meanings of the old rocker.9 The chair is a sort of personification, since its arms are like cradling arms, and the act of sitting in it metaphorically suggests the idea of taking age upon oneself, becoming old. Furthermore, with its rhythmical and monotonous movement, the chair ticks away the time. It seems to be controlled by an unseen force, like the fierce light in Play, which prompts the characters to speak. It is reassuring like the maternal womb, and yet it is also associated with death, like a grave. The French word berceuse adds further elements for interpretation, since besides ‘chair’ and ‘cradle’ it also means ‘lullaby’. This last meaning, which is confirmed by the play’s repetitive structure as in a cradlesong, is reinforced by the woman’s cry for ‘More’, which begins each of the four ‘movements’ in a gradual diminuendo until the end. The weakening voice’s request recalls the way children ask their parents to go on telling them a bedtime story, thus postponing the time when the light will be turned off, and they will be left alone to sleep in the dark. In this sense, the ageing woman of Rockaby is as ‘child-like’ as Winnie, asking for more words – and more memories – to keep her alive. Her outpouring also sounds like a tortured scream expressing all her suffering. The woman’s only four words, ‘More’ and ‘time she stopped’ (435) reflect her inner turmoil, the division of her consciousness between the wish to continue living and the temptation to let go. We may assume that the chair embraced the woman’s mother until her demise, and this final scenario is re-enacted by the daughter. The cradlesong therefore becomes a song of lamentation for the dead, a threnody, as the woman, robbed of her self-awareness, surrenders to bereavement and cancellation. How, therefore, should the end of Rockaby be interpreted? When, in the last scene, W and V echo in unison ‘rock her off ’ (442), and the rocker stops while the lights slowly fade out, will the woman simply fall asleep, or will she rather stop fabling and die? The director Alan Schneider suggested that the woman finally accepts death and the inevitability of dying, which does not necessarily imply that she actually dies. Billie Whitelaw, instead, insisted that the woman rocks

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herself to death, completing the arc of her existence and finally surrendering to silence. As the recorded voice echoes in the hollow space of the theatre, the woman’s eyes shut for the last time, and this powerful dramatic image might be visually influenced by ‘Jack Yeats’ painting of an old woman sitting by the window with her head drooping low onto her chest’, which has something of the ambiguity of Rockaby’s ending (Knowlson 1996: 583). In an online conversation with Asijit Datta10 (10 January 2021), S. E. Gontarski pointed out that Beckett’s imagination of old age was shaped by war, not only that closer to home, in his native Ireland, but also and more especially in the two world wars the playwright lived through. Moreover, Gontarski emphasized the role played by autobiographical elements in the playwright’s more intimate view of old age, illness, and death. In fact, the ageing female protagonist of Rockaby may partly be inspired by the figure of the dramatist’s maternal grandmother, Annie ‘Little Granny’ Roe, who used to sit all day by the window, all clad in black (Knowlson 1996: 3–5). Beckett was also traumatized by his brother Frank’s battle with terminal lung cancer, which, to quote Knowlson’s eloquent words, was ‘like waiting tied to a chair’ (363, emphasis added). Last but not least, Beckett’s own mother May, too, suffered from Parkinson’s disease, like Billie Whitelaw’s. In the final period of her life, she had greatly suffered, being bed-ridden and almost reduced to immobility. May’s illness and, later, her death left a huge imprint on Beckett’s life, inspiring some of the most original ageing female figures of his whole literary career.

CONCLUSION Although it would be tempting to read Beckett’s representation of ageing women mainly through an autobiographical lens, I agree with Chris Gilleard (2016), who analyzed the relationship between old age and Beckett’s late production, that this would also be misleading. In fact, out of the thirty-two plays which constitute Beckett’s dramatic corpus, twenty-three deal in different ways with ageing bodies. This confirms that throughout his literary career, Beckett conceived ageing as an inescapable condition we are all doomed to experience. Considering the two decades which separate Happy Days (1961) from Rockaby (1981), it seems appropriate to conclude that if in the first period of his dramatic production Beckett staged women beyond the age of fertility like the ‘child-like’, ‘bird-like’ creature Winnie, in whose existential situation we may find glimpses of the playwright’s ‘deriding smile at the human conditions’ (Chambon 2016: 172), a smile not devoid of pity; in the second part of his literary career the playwright abandoned that bitter irony, portraying the older people, like the unnamed woman in Rockaby, as preparing for and surrendering to death, while revolving in their poor minds the memories and mental images of their past. Beckett’s interest in the ageing body was a constant in his oeuvre, and to overlook it would imply missing a central component of his artistic vision. To quote from Ruby Cohn, in his radical portrayal of the vulnerability of old age, Beckett really created ‘a new stage metaphor for the old human condition’ (1962: 257), a metaphor which he explored in dramatic texts of extraordinary poetic intensity, whose words show his incantatory power, through voices which echo in a metaphysical silence.

NOTES 1 This definition is a quotation from Van Badham’s 2015 review in The Guardian of Lisa Dwan’s performance Not I, Footfalls, and Rockaby at Perth Festival in the same year.

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2 These words are uttered by Pozzo in Waiting for Godot: ‘They give birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it’s night once more’ (The Complete Dramatic Works, Beckett 2006: 83). 3 Beckett may have drawn inspiration from the 1929 silent surrealist film Un Chien Andalou, by Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí, at the end of which the lovers also appeared buried from waist down. 4 As specified in the stage directions, he is ‘hidden by mound’ (138). 5 For further references on Beckett and modern dance, see Clavier (2018). 6 This use of prosthetic memory also characterized the 1958 play Krapp’s Last Tape. 7 Beckett quoted by Labeille, 24 March 1984 (Brater 1987: 174). 8 Whitelaw’s own mother had died before the premiere of the play, and in her home the female actor found a jar of cold cream, which she later decided to bring with her in the dressing room and to put on her face before every performance of the play (Brater 1987: 174–5), partly for good luck, partly because this ritual allowed her to put on a sort of death mask. 9 The Japanese scholar Reiko Taniue rightly suggests that the chair moves from being a simple object to an existential symbol, like Lucky’s bones, Vladimir’s carrot and the tree, Winnie’s bag, and Krapp’s tapes (2005: 91). 10 The talk was significantly titled Samuel Beckett, Disabled Bodies and Impaired Language.

REFERENCES Ackerley, C. J., and S. E. Gontarski (eds) (2004), The Grove Companion to Samuel Beckett. A Reader’s Guide to His Work, Life and Thought, New York: Grove Press. Badham, V. (2015), ‘Not I, Footfalls, Rockaby Review – A Technical Masterclass in Beckett’, The Guardian on-line, https://www.theg​uard​ian.com/cult​ure/2015/feb/19/not-i-footfa​lls-rock​aby-rev​iew-a-techni​cal-mast​ ercl​ass-in-beck​ett (accessed 18 January 2021). Barry, E. (2016), ‘Samuel Beckett and the Contingency of Old Age’, Samuel Beckett Today / Aujourd’hui, 28 (2), Special Issue: Clinique et poétique du vieillir dans le théâtre de Beckett / Clinics and Poetics: Beckett’s Theatre and Aging: 205–17. Beckett, S. (2006), The Complete Dramatic Works, London: Faber and Faber. Benstock, S. (1990), ‘The Transformational Grammar of Gender in Beckett’s Dramas’, in Women in Beckett: Performance and Critical Perspectives, L. Ben-Zvi (ed.), Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 172–86. Bertinetti, P. ([1984] 2017), Invito alla lettura di Beckett, Milano: Mursia. Brater, E. (1987), Beyond Minimalism. Beckett’s Late Style in the Theater, New York: Oxford University Press. Chambon, J. (2016), ‘What Winnie Knew or Beckett’s Deriding Smile’, Samuel Beckett Today / Aujourd’hui, 28 (2), Special Issue: Clinique et poétique du vieillir dans le théâtre de Beckett / Clinics and Poetics: Beckett’s Theatre and Aging: 168–76. Clavier, E. (2018), ‘Samuel Beckett and Modern Dance’, in O. Belobodorova, D. Van Hulle, and P. Verhulst (eds), Beckett and Modernism, 193–205, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Cohn, R. (1962), Samuel Beckett: The Comic Gamut, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. De Beauvoir, S. (1972), The Coming of Age, New York: Putnam. Gilleard, C. (2016), ‘Old Age and Samuel Beckett’s Late Works, Age Culture Humanities. An Interdisciplinary Journal, 3, https://agecu​ltur​ehum​anit​ies.org/WP/old-age-and-sam​uel-becke​tts-late-works/ (accessed 18 January 2021).

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Groninger, H., and M. D. Childress (2007), ‘Samuel Beckett’s Rockaby: Dramatizing the Plight of the Solitary Elderly at Life’s End’, Perspectives in Biology and Medicine, 50 (2): 260–75. Gussow, M. (1984), ‘How Billie Whitelaw interprets Beckett’, New York Times, 14 February. Harmon, M. (ed.) (1998), No Author Better Served: The Correspondence of Samuel Beckett and Alan Schneider, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Knowlson, J. (1996), Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett, London: Bloomsbury. Mercier, V. (1977), Beckett / Beckett, New York: Oxford University Press. Murray, C. (2007), ‘Beckett and the Representation of Age on Stage’, The Princeton University Library Chronicle, 68 (1–2): 431–49. Pirandello, L. ([1908] 1998), L’umorismo e altri saggi, Milano: Giunti. Rockaby: The Documentary (1982), Dir. C. Hegedus and D. A. Pennebaker, USA: Pennebaker Hegedus Films. Taniue, R. (2005), ‘The Dying Woman in Beckett’s Rockaby’, Journal of Irish Studies, 20: 86–98. Whitelaw, B. (1995), … Who He?, London: Hodder and Stoughton.

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Affective-oriented time: Finitude and ageing in Jackie Kay’s border country MARTA CEREZO

INTRODUCTION Interviewed by Charles Henry Rowell on 27 March 2008, Jackie Kay stated: ‘I am really interested in the borders and the borderlines that exist between one state and another and one country and another, one state of mind and other. I write from that border country’ (2014: 268).1 Kay was born in 1961 to a Scottish mother and a Nigerian father. She was later adopted by white Scots parents, Helen and John Kay, and was raised in Glasgow. Her interracial background and existence have marked her as a writer deeply interested in the shifting nature of existence. Numerous critical studies have focused on the different shapes that Kay’s literary liminality takes and have delved into issues that her work develops such as ethnicity, sexuality, embodiment, mixed-race identity, interracial adoption, motherhood, African diasporic identity, traumatic memory, the relation between self and place, and music. This chapter focuses on the analysis of a major element in Kay’s border country which has not been explored in depth and that evokes what Carla Sasi calls the ‘affiliative power’ of liminality (2009: 145): the interrelation between affective orientation, finitude, and ageing. Through the analysis of a selection of poems from Fiere (2011), Bantam (2017a), and the poem ‘Equinox’ (2014) I will examine how Kay’s poetic liminal territory is also made up of descriptions of the lifecourse and the ageing process as fluid territories of vulnerability and, at the same time, human willingness to move on affectively towards the other in the face of life’s finitude. This affective orientation towards the other is enmeshed in Kay’s poetry with a sense of time as something that is embracing and heartwarming, not inexorable or relentless. It is a conceptualization of time that I will call ‘affective oriented time’: a time experience that is not perceived in isolation but in affective orientation towards the other and towards oneself. Awareness of life’s finitude is central for a self to fully sense the force of affective-oriented time. In this regard, Jan Baars’s consideration of time in ageing and his notion of ‘finitization’ will be central to the analysis of Kay’s poetic affective temporal articulations. Baars’s seminal works on ageing and time (1997, 2007, 2009, 2010a, 2010b, 2012, 2013) advocate for the creation of a dignified culture of ageing that integrates both the positive instrumental value of chronometric time with a more dynamic and creative approach that enhances the articulation of the unique inner experiences

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of ageing people about what living in time means. Chronometric time, Baars argues, is hegemonic in late modern societies and allows for scientific progress but its emphasis on innovation, acceleration, objectification, categorization, and measurement can lead to a reductive and prejudiced vision of ageing, even to an anti-ageing culture. Inspired by Augustine of Hippo’s temporal extensions of the present towards the past and the future, Henri Bergson’s notion of durée or the inner flow of time, Husserl’s phenomenological perception of time and Heidegger’s philosophy of finite existence and temporal living, Baars claims that only by giving voice to and learning from inner experiences of time will human ageing be fully understood (Baars 2012: 150–68). Time and life’s finitude are central aspects in Baars’s exploration of ageing as living in time. His belief that ‘th[e]‌preciousness of life is intrinsically related to its finitude’ (2013: 11) condenses the rich meaning of what he calls ‘finitization’ (2012: 236–8); that is, ‘living a finite life in all situations and phases … as an affirmation of life, not only in its glorious moments but also when life is difficult’ (2013: 13). The finite nature of life, argues Baars, is what should make us live every single moment of our life, ‘particularly in its seeming perfectly ordinary and everyday moments’ (24), with great intensity and value the other and every single encounter with the other as unique. Drawing on Hannah Arendt’s belief that the human condition is characterized by ‘natality’ and not mortality, Baars sees every day of the life of a human being as a rebirth, also during old age (2012: 241; 2013: 22). Despite looking back into the past to confront their past selves, older people ‘still live in the present and move into the future’ (Baars 2012: 241). Ageing is generally associated to finitude ‘in the limited sense of mortality’ (Baars 2012: 237) since the fact that finitude is a permanent condition of life, not a marker of old age, is mostly disregarded. During the lifecourse, and most especially during old age, because of the growing awareness of existence’s vulnerability, the sense of life’s finitude should be seen from a different and much more enriching perspective: ‘as a deepening of the understanding of life’ (Baars 2013: 15). The inter-human condition is central in this process of living in time. Not only does the sense of finitude enrich the older people’s perception of what life might mean, it also ‘drives [the rest of us] to develop humane responses’ (16), turning what can seem meaningless, such as suffering and vulnerability, into ‘affirmative answers’ (16) such as solidarity, love, and the recognition of the dignity and uniqueness of the ageing other. This humane response results in an ‘acknowledgement of a shared vulnerability’ (19) and in the encounter between human beings of the same or of different ages that can become life companions, learn from and take care of each other. Therefore, Baars avers, temporality, living in time, means living with others with whom we are sharing our time, our lived experiences, with whom ‘we are growing older together’ (2012: 163). Baars evokes here phenomenologist Alfred Schutz’s notion of ‘simultaneity’ in what he calls the ‘we-relationship’ in his exploration of the structures of the social world. Closely following Bergson’s notion of durée, Schutz identifies a simultaneous social temporal phenomenon, which he considers a central dimension of human experience, called ‘growing older together’: ‘Not only does each of us subjectively experience his own durée as an absolute reality in the Bergsonian sense, but the durée of each of us is given to the other as absolute reality. What we mean, then, by the simultaneity of two durations or streams of consciousness is simply this: the phenomenon of growing older together’ (1967: 103). In this essay Kay’s poetry will be analysed as a poetry of both finitude and simultaneity. That is, her poetry is an affirmation of life, also in old age, and is a vivid example of how human beings are oriented affectively towards each other by sharing the same temporal modes, by embracing the

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other’s unique temporal mode and even integrating it into their own finite existence. The temporal assimilation that Kay’s poetry evokes contributes to the creation of the dignified culture of ageing that both Baars and Kay advocate for. In 2015, she wrote: ‘We have the advances in medical science and technology that have kept people alive longer, but not the advances in how to treat our ageing population. Society is lagging behind the old, floundering and failing and falling’ (2015b). Literature is a powerful tool for social change and progress; Kay’s poetry’s exploration of human finitude and ageing evokes the possibility of an alternative society that succeeds in treating the older population with respect, admiration, and affection. The following pages reveal how Kay’s poetic exploration of concrete social and familial relations during the lifecourse – most especially during old age – presents affective-oriented time as necessary to advance into a new model of society. The first section of this analysis focuses on Kay’s poetic representation of friendship in relation to time, ageing, and finitude; the second part deals with the notion of ‘finitization’ in a selection of poems about Kay’s ageing birth mother and adoptive parents. The readings of the poems will reveal how the sense of finitude and simultaneity are two central aspects of the inner assimilation of the other’s temporal mode.

LIFELONG FRIENDSHIP ‘Fiere’, the old Scots word for friend, companion, and equal, is a poem about friendship, dedicated to Kay’s friend and author Ali Smith, as is the whole collection Fiere (2010) in which the poem is inserted. The resonances of the word ‘fiere’ came to Kay’s mind when one New Year’s Eve Ali Smith sang Robert Burns’s Auld Lang Syne to her over the phone and, pausing on fiere, reminded her that the word meant ‘friend’. Shortly after that epiphanic moment, Kay was asked by the Scottish Poetry Library to write her own version of her favourite poem by Burns. Kay wrote ‘Fiere’, inspired by Burns’s poem ‘John Anderson my Jo’, a poem of friendship within a lifetime’s marriage which ‘imagines a kind of togetherness in death’ (Kay 2012: n.p.). In ‘Fiere’ Kay joyfully and gently celebrates lifelong friendship and an integrated sense of shared time, of ‘growing old together’. The author imagines herself and Ali Smith as girls sharing companionship – ‘lassies laughing thegither’ – and envisions their ongoing future friendship during old age: ‘Oor hair it micht be silver noo, / oor walk a wee bit doddery, / but we’ve had a whirl and a blast, girl, / thru the cauld blast winter, thru spring, summer’ (Kay 2011: n.p.). Kay’s poem and the whole collection are reflecting on how identity is shaped by the friends we encounter along the way (Kay 2012: n.p.), how ‘they guide you and steer you’ states Kay (in Davidson 2013: n.p.), and how their love is unconditional over the lifecourse: ‘O’er a lifetime, my fiere, my bonnie lassie, / I’d defend you – you, me’ (Kay 2011: n.p.). Fiere – a poetic companion to the memoir Red Dust Road (2010) − is primarily about the human need to complete and make sense of one’s life story and about human connectedness. The poem ‘Fiere in the Middle’ is a poignant description of midlife crises and the force and reciprocity of friendship at that moment; it reflects Kay’s belief that ‘good friends are lifesavers’ and that ‘there’s something glorious and nourishing about a lifelong friend’ (Kay 2010: n.p.). Seven years after the publication of Fiere, Teddy Jamieson interviewed Kay. After quoting the opening line of the Divine Comedy he asked the author how she saw her own mid-fifties. Kay’s answer looks back to ‘Fiere in the Middle’: ‘your sense of time becomes really heightened in your middle years and it is possible to get lost in a Dante-esque way in the middle of the dark forest, because middle age is one of these times where you don’t actually see yourself ’ (in Jamieson 2017: n.p.). Also evoking the

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opening lines of Dante’s Divine Comedy (Davidson 2013; 2015: 142), the poetic voice in ‘Fiere in the Middle’ is initially presented as ‘lost in the middle of my life’, lost in the darkness of the wood, but it is finally rescued by a ‘fiere’ who ‘took the risk and cut through the forest’ and then ‘held my hand and led me out’ (Kay 2011: n.p.). In the second part of the poem the poetic voice addresses the ‘fiere’, now presented as also ‘lost in your middle years’ (n.p.). Acknowledging the present moment of her friend’s distress and affectively sharing the friend’s various temporal modes by intimately feeling the presence of her past and future life and the strength of friendship from childhood to old age – ‘I saw the girl you’d been; the old woman you’d be’ (n.p.) – the poetic voice finally comes to her rescue: ‘Should you be lost in the middle years … the true fieres appear: able, sound, equally good’ (n.p.). In Fiere, the reader is gifted with two poems addressed to Kay’s friends and authors Julia Darling and Edwin Morgan, where affective orientation alters the configuration of chronometric time after death and ‘finitization’ take the lead in the late phases of life. Kay wrote ‘The Bird’ as a homage to Darling after her death at the age of forty-eight in 2005. The author has praised Darling for the creation of poems of death that ‘end up turning to life, to life’s wonders and conundrums’ (Kay 2015a: n.p.). In the same vein, ‘The Bird’, far from having a mournful elegiac tone, ponders life still flourishing after death. Like a bird from its cage, Kay’s memories of her friend, once behind a ‘double-locked’ back door, are now ‘miraculously’ released (Kay 2011: n.p.). Time is reconfigured in the poem as it ‘strangely’ ‘got longer, and shorter’ after Darling’s death (n.p.); longer in chronological time, shorter in the friend’s mind. Though, on the one hand, the present perfect used in the poem – ‘Since you’ve been gone, you’ve become a grandmother’ (n.p.) – points to what has happened in the past and is now over, it also defies the finite nature of life and reveals how the past has an impact on the evolvement of the present – and on Kay’s writing itself. The affective orientation of the poetic voice towards her friend pictures Darling as still belonging to a lifecourse enriched with new lives, her own descendants. Therefore, death is poetically coupled with regeneration and family connections. Like Darling’s poetry, from which ‘the reader gets a sense of the freedom that the poems give Julia from the relentlessness of illness’ (Kay 2015a: n.p.), ‘The Bird’ also heals its author and its reader. It is a comforting and delicate poem about calmness and release after pain, and about the force of friendship to turn absence into presence, death into life: ‘And when once it hurt to think of you dead / now you move at ease around in my head’ (Kay 2011: n.p.). In Kay’s poem ‘Hereafter Julia’ (Bantam), written on the tenth anniversary of Darling’s death, the tone is brighter than in ‘The Bird’: ‘even dead, Julia, you’re still the life and soul’ (Kay 2017a: n.p.). Kay believes that the lost ones live within us: ‘They’re there in your life, they don’t go until you do. They’re still around in some sort of way’ (in Jamieson 2017: n.p.). Kay brings Darling back to life in ‘Hereafter Julia’ by writing a poem that evokes her friend’s attitude towards life and death, reflected in Darling’s own poetry. To Kay, her friend’s work is a clear poetic representation of ‘finitization’, that is, of ‘how to appreciate and live in the moment’, of ‘how not to waste time worrying, how to take delight in the simplest of things’, and ‘make us want to relish life at the same time as confront the inevitability of death’ (2015a: n.p.). Not long before Darling’s death, Kay and her friend used to hire a house in the English countryside for a week where they concentrated to read and work and where Kay enjoyed Darling’s ‘most uplifting and exhilarating of company’ (Kay 2005: n.p.). Darling used humour, wit, and art to face death, whose imminence did not stop her from living: ‘In the end, it seemed Julia had taken charge of her own life and death, those parts

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that she could manage. The body packed in on her, but she still had plans’ (Kay 2005: n.p.). Kay defines Darling’s poems as the work of ‘an inquisitive and enquiring human being who can manage to make the difficult subject of death entertaining and even ordinary’ (2015a: n.p.). In ‘Hereafter Julia’ friendship is once again celebrated, and death is presented by Kay as an affective moment, ‘entertaining and even ordinary’, as the poet imagines herself enjoying Darling’s cheerful company in the hereafter. The poem presents life after death as a place of reunion for the two friends who, despite the blatant presence of life’s finitude, relish a single, but very valuable, moment of shared joy: ‘There we’d be, hearing faraway Holiday. Splitting our sides, heaving with laughter. Sugaring a strawberry’ (Kay 2017a: n.p.). Death and lively shared moments like sugaring a strawberry blend in Kay’s poetry and movingly disrupt the perception of finitude by presenting it as conveying delight and friendship. Strawberries are also evocative in Kay’s poem ‘Strawberry Meringue’ (Fiere) dedicated to her friend and the first Scots Makar Edwin Morgan. The poem describes Kay’s remembrance of a past intimate moment around the poet’s bed at a care home where Kay, her mother, and Morgan had their ‘own wee tea party’ as they talked about literature, love, and friendship. The past tense of the first and second stanzas gives way to a present tense in the third that merges Kay’s remembrance of that personal moment with her present thoughts about him, being quite close to his death, on his ninetieth birthday: ‘You are ninety! Happy Birthday Edwin! / Your head is buzzing with Variations, / And what is age but another translation?’ (Kay 2011: n.p.). Morgan died on 17 August 2010, just a few months after his ninetieth birthday, marked by the publication of his last book Dreams and Other Nightmares (2010), where we find poems written months before his death that prove that Morgan’s ageing process was also a process of creative explosion. ‘Strawberry Meringue’ is a tender poem about ageing that pays homage to Morgan’s poetic excellence and intellectual brightness till the very end of his life and to the simplicity of the small but unique moments of friendship. Ageing is perceived as a ‘translation’, a transformation into a new language, a new medium of communication and human connectedness, a new variation in tone where love, in its different forms, is central and hardly anything else is essential. The poem is a clear example of ‘finitization’ as it makes us perceive age as ‘not so much a phase of life but especially a process enabling a perspective freed from many practical preoccupations, making it possible to gain a more detached vision of the crucial qualities of human life’ (Baars 2013: 10). Kay’s introduction to Love. Selected Poems, published in 2020 as part of a series of five selections of twenty poems in celebration of Morgan’s centenary, is in clear dialogue with ‘Strawberry Meringue’. The author remembers how a conversation she had with Morgan at his care home struck her: He was talking about being in love again, and all the feelings being just as fresh as anything. He talked about how liberating it is to have to choose only twelve of your books out of hundreds, and only a few paintings. ‘It’s good when you have to pare everything down’, he said, ‘because when it comes down to it, all that matters is love.’ There was something in him that welcomed this simplicity, this return to a certain kind of orderliness, as if his head had more freedom to think interesting thoughts without the clutter. (2020a: vii) We find in these lines clear resonances of ‘Strawberry Meringue’, a rememoration of a conversation between the two Scots Makars and, above all, friends, where ageing becomes a new rebirth, a starting point for love and a liberating phase of one’s life where simplicity allows for mental acuteness: ‘In

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your room today are perhaps a dozen books / and a few favoured paintings; life pared down, / clean as an uncluttered mind’ (Kay 2011: n.p.).

AGEING PARENTS Affective time and ‘finitization’ also prevail in Kay’s poetry about her ageing birth mother’s and adoptive parents’ experiences, where time ceases to be linear – as past, present, and future lose continuity – and temporal configurations celebrate the force of human connectedness. As seen in the previous section, in Kay’s poetic descriptions of friendship the poetic voice shares the same temporal mode with the friend and intellectual creation is stressed as an ability also during old age. However, in Kay’s poems about her birth mother and adoptive parents she embraces their temporal mode; thus, the poet inhabits a world ruled by dual time that allows her to make their experience of old age her own. Through such simultaneity she senses how mental decline defies time but also builds up affective connections, how shared memories fight against oblivion, and how the passing of time strengthens uniqueness in older people despite mental or bodily vulnerability. Dementia turns into a central aspect of Kay’s narrative and poetic portrayals of the encounters with her birth mother, where time dislocation is not merged with isolation and obliteration but with affective connection with oneself and the other. In the chapter entitled ‘Hilton Hotel, Milton Keynes’ in Red Dust Road (2010) – a memoir about Kay’s tracing her birth parents, her origins, and about her close relationship with her adoptive parents – Kay relates her search for her birth mother – referred to as Elizabeth, but named Margaret in real life – and describes four encounters between them from 1991 to 2009 in Milton Keynes, where her birth mother lived. In 2009 Elizabeth, suffering from dementia, urged Kay to meet with her, maybe fearing, concludes the author, that she would forget her own daughter. Despite the excruciating effects of the disease on her birth mother, Kay remarks how it also softens Elizabeth’s sad character making her ‘more open, more truthful’ (2017b: 86). Such authenticity, asserts Kay, is poetic: ‘There’s a kind of odd poetry in dementia that picks out jagged, glittering pieces of truth, and makes you have to reassemble them’ (86). In 2014 Kay writes the poem ‘Equinox’, which is in conversation with these reflections on dementia in the memoir. ‘I see things differently / My world is jagged poetry / A poem can make its own grammar’, says Margaret in ‘Equinox’, which illustrates that, as Raquel Medina argues, ‘[the] gradual loss of vocabulary and then of syntactic sequencing makes verbal expression by people living with dementia resemble poetic expression’ (2018: 11). ‘Equinox’ was composed after Kay was commissioned to write a poem inspired by Milton Keynes for the city’s International Festival: 2014. A sixty-line stanza of the poem was printed in sand across different venues in Milton Keynes by a robot called SKRYF, created by artist Gijs van Bon. As Nell Frizzell significantly remarks, Margaret’s memory loss was symbolically portrayed by the inexorable future of ‘Equinox’ as a sand poem, which was eventually ‘lost to the feet, buggies and shopping bags of the public’ (2014: n.p.). In ‘Equinox’ the repetition of the line ‘As soon as I speak I forget what I said’ evokes the most devastating effect of dementia: the erasure of one’s lived time. However, ‘Equinox’ counterbalances this erasure of memory by asserting the affirmative power of affectiveoriented time. In the poem Margaret is presented talking about herself in the third person when she contemplates a photograph of her wedding day: ‘She was happy with me that day.’ The past comes back to Margaret in the remembrance of an emotion provoked by an intense lived experience and not so much by self-recognition.

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Kay’s poetic rendering of her birth mother’s emotional memory illustrates Stephen Katz’s description of memory as ‘emotional as well as cerebral because our brains are centres of feeling as well as cognition; to separate the two means failing to understand memory as an “art” as well as a “science” ’ (2013: 311). ‘Equinox’ describes this emotional relationship to one’s lived time as a ‘small act of liberation’ and a ‘new equation’ that equals a new affective self-oriented temporal configuration.2 While observing the robot printing her poem on the floor of the same shopping centre where she met her birth mother for the second time, Kay remarked: ‘In The Adoption Papers, I wrote what I imagined [my birth mother’s] voice to be … Now I feel like I’m writing a voice that I hear, that I know’ (in Frizzell 2014: n.p.). Kay wrote The Adoption Papers (2007) in 1991, before she had met her birth mother. It is a partly autobiographical narrative poem where she presents the story of her adoption through three different voices: her birth mother’s, her adoptive mother’s, and her own voice as the adopted child. Whereas in 1991 she had to create a voice for an imaginary birth mother, in Red Dust Road her birth mother’s voice is constructed after they have already met several times. In the memoir, Kay grieves ‘the imaginary mother I’d had in my head’ (2017b: 67). Her imagined birth mother had no resemblance to the real one: ‘My birth mother was a sad and troubled figure; she’d had a hard life, been in and out of psychiatric hospital, had numerous breakdowns, and survived a son’s suicide. I felt a terrible sadness for her life’ (2017b: 67–8). In Red Dust Road, the voice of Kay’s birth mother is the voice of forgetting ‘fraught with a terrible anxiety, the kind that is filled with unknowable and unsayable things, a blazing, burning of everything, and finally maybe a complete forgetting of the self ’ (2017b: 88). In ‘Equinox’, however, Kay writes a voice of hope that eventually favours the present temporal mode over the past; despite the focus of the poem on the force of memory to constitute human identity and on the parallel force of forgetfulness to destroy it – ‘I’m only half real my memory is failing me’ − the poem ends by giving Margaret an agency that is not based on remembrance but on her use of a language that, despite its instability, gives her a solid presence in the present tense: ‘As soon as I speak I realize I am here.’ ‘Is it Christmas?’ (Bantam) is another example of ‘jagged poetry’ which, as Ian Macmillan avers, ‘rescues someone from the closed drawer of memory loss and celebrates their language, their creativity, their humanity’ (2017a: n.p.). The poem beautifully describes how people with dementia relate to a past that comes up close ‘like the sea in waves’, but also, like the sea, is suddenly perceived as ‘very far out’ (Kay 2017a: n.p.); it shows a desire to reconstruct and recover ‘things forgot’ out of familiar fragments – ‘photographs, letters, notes’ − that ‘jump round the house’, and that a ‘floating mind’ tries, unsuccessfully, to capture and gather together (n.p.). Kay reveals in her lines the painful recognition of forgetfulness: ‘I wrote myself a Post-it-Note. / Stuck it somewhere I forgot. / The moons came and the suns slid. / The names for things came, then hid’ (n.p.). Words go ‘astray’, but the poetic voice does not give in as she still ‘taste[s]‌words on [her] tongue: / Remember Jackie, don’t lose the head’ (n.p.). This poem is also in dialogue with Red Dust Road’s description of Kay’s meeting with her birth mother in 2009 at her house in Milton Keynes, where ‘A pink Post-it note, stuck to her sideboard, said Don’t forget Jackie’ (2017b: 86). Both in the memoir and in the poem, the post-it note turns into a poignant image of human interaction and signals the power of words to evoke the permanent and indelible nature of love in the face of erased time. The repetition of the line ‘April, September, November’ operates as the epicentre of ‘Is it Christmas?’ Then December comes, ‘and then, rains come. There’s Lent. / Easter, spring, summer, winter …’ (2017a: n.p.). December comes back again. Reality repeats itself, and time is presented

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as an incomplete sequence of phases which might seem chaotic or empty of meaning, but which is full of poetic harmony in a poem that focuses on the rapid passing of time but does not reflect on an inexorable end. On the contrary, awareness of time’s finitude gives this poem an increasing dynamic energy that one can sense as Kay recites it.3 This energy modulates the rhythm of a poem that opposes a rapid, repetitive sequence of months with the richness of small but momentous occasions that the poetic voice remembers sharing with ‘a nice lady’ that ‘takes [her] to the sea’s side’ and ‘puts an ice cream into [her] hand’ (2017a: n.p.). That lady, whom she does not recognize, is her daughter, who takes care of her, asks her if she is happy, calms her when she cannot find her notes, shares simple and enriching joyful moments − those ‘wee act[s]‌of kindness’ (Kay 2017a: n.p.) evoked in ‘Small’ (Bantam) − and wishes her merry Christmas. Christmas is a metaphor of simultaneity, companionship, beauty, and joy despite the rush of time and ‘things forgot’. Simultaneity is to Kay a reassuring way of fighting dementia. In ‘Mull’ − a moving chapter in Red Dust Road about ageing, shared memories and what Martha Nussbaum calls ‘retrospective joy’ and ‘backward-looking love’ (2017: 131) − Kay is sitting with her adoptive parents at the diningroom table in the extension of their house going over their past. Kay loves the way her parents tell these stories ‘in tandem’, both ‘remember[ing] slightly different things’, ‘keep[ing] each other’s memories; tend[ing] to them, like a lovely garden with freshly blooming broom’ (2017b: 117). This process of what Randall and McKim denominate ‘co-authoring’ (Miller 2011: 70), or the way the other can help the self to re-story his or her own life, is ‘a whole new way to tackle the potent danger of dementia or Alzheimer’s: my parents reinforce each other with memory’, we read in Kay’s memoir (2017b: 122). The ‘shared, swapped, strengthened and embellished’ (122) stories of her parents are perceived as a fortress that protects them from dementia and allows them to live on and on, changing still … for my parents their past is their future. Old age and illness threaten the walls of even the new extension, but they are still here, confirming again and again all the people they have ever been whilst the hands of the clock seem ever more fragile. (122) Kay’s parents’ co-authoring is an affirmation of their past, present, and future selves and of their everyday ‘natality’ and uniqueness in the face of finite time. Borrowing Kay’s lines from her wonderful poem ‘Threshold’ (Bantam), their shared life stories ‘open the door to the breathing past / The one [they] enliven over and over’ at ‘the exact moment when [they] might begin again’ (Kay 2017a: n.p.). Like her memoir, Fiere and Bantam celebrate Kay’s parents’ existence and work as a fortress that protects their life stories, love, and unique identities from oblivion in poems that dignify their ageing condition and keep their past alive ‘in the land of a permanent present’ (Kay 2017b: 118). In ‘Windows, Lakes’ (Fiere) Helen Kay’s following affirmation as an old woman: ‘I always wanted a house with a bay window’ (Kay 2011: n.p.) takes Kay back ‘to the houses of my mother’s imagination long ago’ (n.p.). The poem narrates the delightful excursion both, mother and daughter, make to the Lakes. After leaving her mother onto the train back to Glasgow, Kay drives back home ‘remembering the imaginary houses years ago: / the big bay window, bay horse and Play-Doh, / a half-open baby grand playing fah soh lah ti doh’ (n.p.). ‘Windows, Lakes’ is a moving example of affective-oriented time as Kay makes her mother’s memories of lifelong desires her own. Her parents’ love is celebrated in poems such as ‘My Mother Remembers Sri Lanka’ (Fiere), ‘Diamond

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Colonsay’ (Bantam) or ‘85th Birthday Poem for Dad’ (Fiere) where Kay also reflects on ‘how time is so fast and so slow’ as she recalls her father’s young energetic self, dancing ‘across the ballroom floor / like Fred Astaire’ and ‘climb[ing] the Munros’ (n.p.). John Kay’s love for hiking is also rememorated in ‘Rannoch Loop’ (Bantam) where Kay pictures the train tracks at Rannoch station as a crossing point between future and past and reconstructs the image of her father ‘here on the moor, / Years and years after he’s gone’ (Kay 2017a: n.p.) as she recalls the stories he used to tell her as a girl about his weekend vacations as a young man with his friends on Rannoch Moor, a landscape that, says Kay, ‘was already a story’ when she first came into it (‘Jackie Kay at Rannoch Station Tearoom’ 2016: n.p.). As a woman who has devoted her last years to the care of her parents, Kay has described old age as another kind of landscape: ‘the biggest shifting landscape out there’ (in Jamieson 2017: n.p.). The author has expressed her desire to be part of that landscape, which alters the sense of time for an individual. In 2015 her parents ended up in Glasgow Royal Infirmary. At that time Kay painfully described her mother’s delusions and sense of disorientation at the hospital and her own feelings of impotence and temporal dislocation: Nothing prepares you for being the daughter of ageing parents. You want to save them from their bodies letting them down faster than their heads, or from their heads going faster than their bodies … there’s no helping with your parents getting older, the super-loud clock. It seems that you live in two lives at once; the clock keeps dual time. (2015b: n.p.) Kay’s feelings of living in two lives at once as she cares for her parents is the ultimate illustration of affective-oriented time and simultaneity, of fully embracing the temporal mode of the other and making it one’s own. This assimilation of her parents’ ageing experience wholly affects Kay’s perception of time. In ‘Mull’ Kay expresses her dread over her parents’ death and an ‘acute relationship with time … tinged with not a remembrance of temps perdu, but a foreboding about lost future time’ (2017b: 122). But it is this sense of time’s finitude that urges Kay also to muse on the centrality of ‘finitization’, on the preciousness of life, by reflecting on the importance of ‘liv[ing] in the moment, enjoy[ing] the moment’ (122). Also, in the poem ‘Green House’ (Fiere), Helen Kay fully enjoys the pleasures of small things at the age of eighty: ‘And every day that she goes out’, writes Kay, ‘is another day on earth and hallelujah! / What joy, my tomatoes going from green to red / my mother says’ (Kay 2011: n.p.). Kay has publicly expressed her fascination with her parents’ ability to adapt to the changes that old age brings and her need ‘to spend as much time together as possible’ with them not to miss any of those changes (in Jamieson 2017: n.p.). The selected poems in this section are evocations of Kay’s profound experience of her parents’ ageing process and unique existence, of Kay’s ‘clock keeping dual time’. In Glasgow Royal Infirmary Helen Kay’s ward was number 35, which provides the name for the poem ‘Thirty-Five’ (Bantam). If Red Dust Road is a ‘love letter’ to John and Helen Kay (Sturgeon 2017: xi), ‘Thirty-Five’ is a love sonnet to Kay’s adoptive mother. The poem is inspired by Shakespeare’s Sonnet 11 ‘because of the idea of not let[ting] the copy die and of something unique and original passing’, explains the author (The Royal Society of Literature 2016: n.p.). Whereas in Shakespeare’s sonnet youth is extolled and must be reproduced in others, ‘Thirty Five’ honours Kay’s ageing mother’s unrepeatable exceptional self and elicits a strong feeling of shared vulnerability and of ‘growing older together’ in its last lines, which brilliantly alter the meaning of

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the rhymes between ‘cherish’ and ‘perish’ of the last quatrain of Shakespeare’s poem to stress Kay’s internalization of her mother’s suffering: The more you give the more you will have to cherish. If I could offer you my veins, I’d gladly use a knife. At times, it seems if you go, I too will perish. (Kay 2017a: n.p.) ‘Thirty Five’ acknowledges the uniqueness of Helen Kay who, says her daughter, was displaced and treated as ‘incapable of any individuality’ while at the hospital: ‘Nobody imagined my mother was a secretary of the Scottish peace movement, a primary teacher, a lifelong socialist, a witty woman’ (2015b: n.p.). In ‘April Sunshine’ (Bantam) Kay repeatedly laments that in Glasgow Royal Infirmary nobody cared to know about who her parents really were; they were seen as ‘just an old woman … just an old man’ (Kay 2017a: n.p.). The poem reveals Kay’s embracing and vindication of her parents’ temporal mode by recuperating their identities as political activists, not merely as a memory of their past, but as a forceful, present reality. The end of the poem gives voice to Kay’s parents’ impotence for not being able to participate in the march against Britain’s Trident nuclear weapons programme on 4 April 2015. It also shows time’s capacity, not to weaken their political convictions as they grow old, but to strengthen them. Their bodies may be weaker, but their minds are, Kay affirms, ‘engaged with the world’ (Jamieson 2017: n.p.) and as alive and determined as ever to fight for ideas oriented towards a collective other with the only purpose of ensuring humanity’s welfare: ‘You would have struggled there with your new grey stick! / You would have walked with your poppy red Zimmer. / What do we want? You say! Peace in society. / Time has not made your politics dimmer’ (Kay 2017a: n.p.).

CONCLUSION In times of crisis, we seem to try, says Kay, ‘to grasp, as we all get older, what time means, and particularly in these Covid-19 days and nights when we feel vulnerable, when we feel mortal’ (Kay 2020b: n.p.). This study has delved into the ways Kay’s poetry grasps time in a selection of poems from Fiere and Bantam, and in her poem ‘Equinox’, where ageing and finitude are movingly related to affective-oriented time. The human connectedness illustrated in the selected poems through friendship and family connections is the ultimate expression of Schutz’s notion of ‘growing older together’, as they disregard chronometric time and give primacy to an intimate affective-oriented time that ruptures the linear temporal continuity of present, past, and future and epitomizes the phenomenologist’s following statement about sheer simultaneity: ‘Whenever I have an experience of you, this is still my own experience’ (1967: 102). The poetic voice is always situated in a transitional space – Kay’s border country – that allows the passing from the self ’s time to the other’s time fostering therefore sites of affective affiliation. Kay’s poems of friendship differ in certain aspects from the poems focused on her birth mother and adoptive parents. In poems such as ‘Fiere’ or ‘Fiere in the Middle’ unconditional friendship is strengthened by the portrayal of the poetic voice’s sharing of the friend’s same temporal modes from childhood to old age, paying special attention to mutual care and a prospective future that both may still enjoy together. In the case of the poems dedicated to Julia Darling, affective orientation alters chronometric time as Kay’s memories bring Darling back to life, birth comes after death and the afterlife is movingly presented as a joyful site of reunion between Kay and her friend, portrayed

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as sharing unique moments of fellowship. ‘Strawberry Meringue’ celebrates friendship and ageing as a rich transformation of one’s life when the increasing sense of the simplicity of small things nourishes intellectual brightness and creativity. In the poems that Kay dedicates to her birth mother and adoptive parents the poetic voice is not, however, in an equal relationship of care and they do not focus on mental acuteness during old age. Kay, however, centres on the dangers of forgetting and on the importance of sharing memories to preserve her parents’ past lives and recollections. Instead of sharing the same temporal modes with them, she embraces theirs and lives two different lives at the same time. She merges ‘her middle-age time’ with ‘their old-age time’, which allows her to celebrate their uniqueness and leads her to a profound knowledge of the richness of old age. In all the poems that have been analysed, Kay’s poetic expressions of shared experiences throughout the lifecourse, and most especially during old age, evoke the preciousness of life and the uniqueness of the everyday encounters between the self and the other both despite of and because of life’s finitude. That is, Kay’s poems are reflections of what Baars conceptualizes as ‘finitization’. They are a celebration of the constant rebirth of the self and of every moment in life, also in the face of vulnerability. Kay’s poetry shows us personal experiences of time in the last phases of the lifecourse that are fully recognized by another human being. This recognition of the vulnerability of the other reveals in Kay’s poetry the power of empathy and love and the recognition of one’s own vulnerability. Kay’s poetic awareness of the finitude of life turns this shared vulnerability into a constant affirmation of life that contributes to creating a more respectful and dignified culture of ageing.

NOTES 1 I would like to express my thanks to the reviewers of the chapter for their valuable suggestions towards improving the manuscript. This work was supported by Research Project ‘Orientation: Towards a Dynamic Understanding of Contemporary Fiction and Culture’ (FFI2017-86417-P), funded by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness. 2 To listen to Kay reading ‘Equinox’ see Ifmiltonkeynes (2014). 3 To listen to Kay reading ‘Is It Christmas?’ see ‘Jackie Kay Poem “Is It Christmas?” ’ (2016).

REFERENCES Baars, J. (1997), ‘Concepts of Time and Narrative Temporality in the Study of Aging’, Journal of Aging Studies, 11: 283–96. Baars, J. (2007), ‘A Triple Temporality of Aging: Chronological Measurement, Personal Experience and Narrative Articulation’, in J. Baars and H. Visser (eds), Aging and Time: Multidisciplinary Perspectives, 15–42, Amityville: Baywood. Baars, J. (2009), ‘Problematic Foundations: Theorizing Time, Age, and Aging’, in Vern L. Bengtson, D. Gans, N. M. Putney, and M. Silverstein (eds), Handbook of Theories of Aging, 87–99, New York: Springer. Baars, J. (2010a), ‘Ageing as Increasing Vulnerability and Complexity: Towards a Philosophy of the Life Course’, in J. Bouwer (ed.), Successful Ageing, Spirituality, and Meaning, 39–52, Leuven: Peeters. Baars, J. (2010b), ‘Philosophy of Aging, Time, and Finitude’, in T. R. Cole, R. Ray, and R. Kastenbaum, A Guide to Humanistic Studies in Aging, 105–20, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Baars, J. (2012), Aging and the Art of Living, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.

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Baars, J. (2013), ‘A Deepening Involvement in Life with Others. Towards a Philosophy of Aging’, Research on Ageing and Social Policy, 1 (1): 6–26. Davidson, L. (2013), ‘Jackie Kay Talks Writing with Lynn Davidson’, Read NZ, 19 June. Available at: https:// www.read-nz.org/aotea​roa-reads-deta​ils/jac​kie-kay-talks-writ​ing-with-lynn-david​son (accessed 15 November 2020). Davidson, L. (2015), ‘Repetition as Revision: Explored through the Revision of Place in Jackie Kay’s Fiere, Kathleen Jamie’s The Tree House, and Crane, a Creative Composition by Lynn Davidson’, doctoral thesis, Massey University, Palmerston North. Frizzell, N. (2014), ‘Automatic for the People: Jackie Kay’s Robot Poem for Milton Keynes’, The Guardian, 16 July. Available at: https://www.theg​uard​ian.com/books/2014/jul/16/jac​kie-kay-equi​nox-mil​ton-key​nesintern​atio​nal-festi​val (accessed 15 November 2020). Ifmiltonkeynes (2014), ‘IF: 2014 – An Audience with Jackie Kay’, YouTube, 8 August. Available at: https:// www.yout​ube.com/watch?v=Vuo-lM0M​47c (accessed 15 November 2020). ‘Jackie Kay at Rannoch Station Tearoom’ (2016), YouTube, 8 September. Available at: https://www.yout​ube. com/watch?v=Drq2​cuuH​OZU&feat​ure=youtu.be (accessed 15 November 2020). ‘Jackie Kay Poem “Is It Christmas?” ’ (2016), Dementia Festival of Ideas. Available at: https://sou​ndcl​oud. com/fest​ival​ofid​eas/jac​kie-kay-poem-is-it-christ​mas (accessed 15 November 2020). Jamieson, T. (2017), ‘ “If Human Beings Don’t Have Hop Why Do We Live?” Jackie Kay on Poetry, Politics and Retaining Optimism in Dark Times’, The Herald, 21 October. Available at: https://www.her​alds​cotl​ and.com/arts_e​nts/15610​585.if-human-bei​ngs-dont-have-hope-then-why-do-we-live-jac​kie-kay-on-poe​ try-polit​ics-and-retain​ing-optim​ism-in-dark-times (accessed 15 November 2020). Katz, S. (2013), ‘Dementia, Personhood and Embodiment: What Can We Learn from the Medieval History of Memory?’ Dementia, 12 (3): 303–14. Kay, J. (2005), ‘Julia Darling’, The Guardian, 16 April. Available at: https://www.theg​uard​ian.com/ news/2005/apr/16/gua​rdia​nobi​tuar​ies.book​sobi​tuar​ies (accessed 15 November 2020). Kay, J. (2007), The Adoption Papers, in J. Kay, New and Selected Poems, Kindle edition, Northumberland: Bloodaxe Books. Kay, J. (2010), ‘How a Manucian Taxi Driver Taught Me the True Meaning of Friendship’, The Guardian, 26 December. Available at: https://www.theg​uard​ian.com/books/2010/dec/26/jac​kie-kay-new-year-fri​ends​hip (accessed 15 November 2020). Kay, J. (2011), Fiere, Kindle edition, London: Picador. Kay, J. (2012), ‘Jackie Kay on Fiere’, Pan Macmillan, 19 January. Available at: https://www.panma​cmil​lan. com/blogs/liter​ary/jac​kie-kay-on-fiere (accessed 15 November 2020). Kay, J. (2015a), ‘Introduction’, in B. Robinson (ed.), Indelible, Miraculous, Kindle edition, Todmorden: Arc Publications. Kay, J. (2015b), ‘Nothing Prepares You for Being the Daughter of Ageing Parents’, The Guardian, 2 August. Available at: https://www.theg​uard​ian.com/commen​tisf​ree/2015/aug/02/noth​ing-prepa​res-you-daugh​terage​ing-pare​nts-jac​kie-kay (accessed 15 November 2020). Kay, J. (2017a), Bantam, Kindle edition, London: Picador. Kay, J. (2017b), Red Dust Road, London: Picador. Kay, J. (2020a), ‘Introduction’, in E. Morgan (ed.), Love. Selected Poems, Edinburgh: Polygon. Kay, J. (2020b), ‘Missing Faces’, in The Lamplighter, Kindle edition, London: Picador.

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McMillan, I. (2015), ‘ “Is It Christmas?” Dementia at Christmas’, DSCD. The Dementia Centre, 18 December. Available at: https://demen​tia.stir.ac.uk/blogs/diamet​ric/2015-12-18/it-christ​mas (accessed 15 November 2020). Medina, R. (2018), Cinematic Representations of Alzheimer’s Disease, London: Palgrave Macmillan. Miller, B. (2011), ‘Narrative Gerontology: A Post-Modern Reading of the Latter Stage of Life: A Conversation with William Randall’, Journal of Systemic Therapies, 30 (4): 64–75. Morgan, E. (2010), Dreams and Other Nightmares, Edinburgh: Mariscat Press. Nussbaum, M. (2017), ‘Living the Past Forward’, in M. C. Nussbaum and S. Levmore (eds), Aging Thoughtfully, 125–43, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Rowell, C. (2014), ‘An Interview with Jackie Kay’, Callaloo, 37 (2): 268–80. The Royal Society of Literature (2016), ‘On Shakespeare’s Sonnets – Audio’, 11 February. Available at: https://rslit​erat​ure.org/libr​ary-arti​cle/5376/ (accessed 15 November 2020). Sasi, C. (2009), ‘The (B)order in Modern Scottish Literature’, in I. Brown and A. Riach (eds), The Edinburgh Companion to Twentieth-Century Scottish Literature, 145–55, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009. Schutz, A. (1967), The Phenomenology of the Social World, trans. G. Walsh and F. Lehnert, Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Sturgeon, N. (2017), ‘Introduction’, in J. Kay (ed.), Red Dust Road, ix–xiv, London: Picador Classic.

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CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

A seasoned, female Robinson Crusoe: Ageing, solitude, and resilience in Louise en hiver AAGJE SWINNEN

INTRODUCTION This chapter examines the French-Canadian animation film Louise en hiver (Louise by the Shore1) (2016) by Jean-François Laguionie as an adaptation of Daniel Defoe’s canonical novel The Life and Strange and Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1719; from now on referred to as Robinson Crusoe). The protagonist of the film is a contemporary older French woman who stays behind in the seaside resort Biligen-sur-Mer in Brittany after the holiday season is over. Louise en hiver ‘announces’ its ‘relationship’ (Hutcheon with O’Flynn 2013: 3) with Robinson Crusoe implicitly by opting for a ‘castaway’ character that lives in solitude on the beach where she builds a cabin, plants crops, and keeps a journal. Furthermore, the animation film gives a gentle nod to Robinson Crusoe by placing the classic in a chest that washes up on the beach for Louise to read.2 Few novels have been adapted so frequently as Robinson Crusoe, in a number of different media (Mayer 2018), ranging from film to reality television. Changes in the gender, race, class, and age of the protagonist – a quintessentially younger, white, male, middle-class hero – have secured the relevance of the tale for other times and contexts (Fallon 2018). Feminist and postcolonial rewritings in particular have raised the important question whose story is told or silenced in the narrative. It is in this context of a ‘web of connection’ (207) between different versions of Robinson Crusoe that Louise en hiver is to be positioned. There are plenty of retellings of Robinson Crusoe with a female character as well as versions in which Crusoe is an older man. To my knowledge, though, Louise en hiver is the only adaptation that brings Robinson Crusoe’s story of survival in extreme isolation to our contemporary context by focusing on the adventure of an older woman.

ROBINSON CRUSOE: CAPTURING THE SOURCE TEXT Before embarking on an analysis of the film itself, let me recapitulate what the source text is about, especially in relation to age and genre characteristics as well as to the interaction between the so-called non-human and human animals on Robinson’s Island. Robinson Crusoe is a frame narrative that begins with the protagonist looking back at the events that led to his twenty-eight-year isolation

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on a seemingly deserted Caribbean island. He presents his ordeal on the island as a punitive story caused by rebellion against his father who opposes his wish to travel overseas to engage in risky and incalculable trade (Moretti 2013: 26). Scholars such as Dennis Todd (2018: 15) connect Crusoe’s past rebelliousness with youth and so does the protagonist himself: I have since often observed, how incongruous and irrational the common temper of mankind is, especially of youth, to that reason which ought to guide them in such cases – viz. that they are not ashamed to sin, and yet are ashamed to repent; not ashamed of the action for which they ought justly to be esteemed fools, but are ashamed of the returning, which only can make them be esteemed wise men. (Defoe 1919: 30) Sins attributed to youth in the novel include impulsiveness, disobedience, recklessness, and wilfulness. When Crusoe arrives on the island after being shipwrecked, his first concern is to survive and all the actions that he undertakes contribute to this survival. Yet, when Crusoe has domesticated the island to such an extent that he can provide for himself, he continues these activities in agriculture and husbandry but in a more structured way (Watt 1957: 61–74). Ironically, it is not this hard labour that turns Crusoe into a wealthy man at the end of the novel. His financial wealth is rooted in the work of slaves on his plantation in Brazil. As such, there must lie meaning other than financial profit in the labour on the island. Franco Moretti (2013) argues that Crusoe works so much ‘because work has become the new principle of legitimation of social power’ (30) in the eighteenth century. In his view, the novel is internally split between a part full of shipwrecks, piracy, cannibals, and mutiny that is reminiscent of adventure novels and a core that points towards the development in Europe of a ‘rational bourgeois work ethic’ (35). Moretti points out that Robinson Crusoe’s development from ‘capitalist adventurer’ to ‘working master’ (33) on the island is what makes the novel stand out as ‘a great modern myth’ (28). Eventually, the stay on the island turns Robinson Crusoe from an adventure and punitive story into a story of growth: the protagonist develops from a reckless youth into a mature and hardworking man. Crusoe’s dedication to his tasks, his reflection on ‘his crime of rebelliousness’ (Todd 2018: 151) against both his father and God, and his cumulative experiences on the island lead to this development: as a young man, he [Robinson Crusoe] imposed his will on the world, trying to make it bend to his desires; as an older man, chastened by colonial experience, he has learned to govern his desires, not extirpating them, but channelling and shaping them to answer to the demands of a world he has closely observed. The imperial impulse, but masculine as defined in the early eighteenth century: rational and self-restrained. (Todd 2018: 154) In what ways, however, is Crusoe’s development entwined with the fate of other beings on the island? Postcolonial (Hulme 1986; Nederveen Pieterse 1995) and environmental approaches (Goldman 2013; Peterson 2014) to Robinson Crusoe have revealed how the novel engages in discourse that firmly establishes European sovereignty through the mastery of non-human and human Others. On the island, Crusoe feels like ‘king or emperor over the whole country … I had no competitor, none to dispute to sovereignty or command with me’ (Defoe [1719] 1919: 260). This changes the moment he discovers a footprint. It overwhelms him with fear and throws him into a state of animality that jeopardizes his sovereignty (Baumeister 2019). Killing and subjugating the

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so-called cannibal savages that frequent the island as well as enslaving the Caribbean islander Friday to a state of ‘perpetual servitude’ (Wheeler 2010: 55) plays a crucial role in Crusoe’s recovery of his human sovereignty. Friday is to become an Englishman like Crusoe through mimicry. Even though ‘the possibility of dissent … lies behind the parody of the colonial mask’ (Calder 2003: 173), Friday ultimately ‘occupies a categorically subordinate, sub-human position’ (Baumeister 2019: 179) in the novel. Crusoe occasionally refers to Friday as a ‘dog’ (Goldman 2013: section 17). This begs for a comparison between his treatment of his servant and his engagement with his non-human animal companions on the island, most notably dogs and the parrot Poll. Crusoe longs for one of his dogs to become a conversation partner: ‘I wanted nothing that he could fetch me, nor any company that he could make up to me; I only wanted to have him talk to me, but that would not do’ (Defoe [1719] 1919: 130–1). Because the dog’s inferiority is connected to his lack of speech, he cannot be a ‘trusty servant’ like the human animal Friday who acquires English (Goldman 2013: section 16). By contrast, Poll, the parrot, is a non-human animal that Crusoe has taught to speak and, one day, the bird gives Crusoe’s lamentation over his predicament back to him: ‘Robin, Robin, Robin Crusoe: poor Robin Crusoe! Where are you, Robin Crusoe? Where are you? Where have you been?’ (Defoe [1719] 1919: 131). Christopher Peterson calls the specific language interaction between Poll and Crusoe ‘interspecies echoing’; Crusoe does not recognize that a parrot may have linguistic agency beyond mere repetition (Peterson 2014: 86). For Jacques Derrida, this is what makes the parrot the ‘first victim of the humanist arrogance that thought it could give itself the right to speech, and therefore to the world as such’ (2011: 260). In the next sections of this chapter, I will show how the characteristic elements of Defoe’s novel that I have introduced here are transformed in the process of adapting them to the animation film Louise en hiver.

A PUNITIVE STORY OF MEMORY LOSS? Louise on hiver starts off as a frame narrative too (00:02:15–00:04:05) in which the protagonist is looking back from a future point. We see families with children enjoying their free time on the beach before Louise appears in the shot and we soon realize that we are looking through her eyes. Then, the focalizer Louise – the narrator on the visual track – becomes the narrator on the auditive track who voices the thoughts that she is capturing in her notebook. This is how we learn that Louise is astonished that none of the newly arrived summer guests in Biligen-sur-Mer seems to realize what happened to her: ‘As if nothing serious had happened … A misunderstanding … An adventure without importance … and yet.’3 Thereafter, the screen fades to black and the story of Louise’s adventure begins. The film adaptation turns out to be a kind of punitive story as well. Yet, in comparison to Robinson Crusoe, there is no clear interdiction installed by a paternal figure that Louise violated. Louise’s adventure starts when she misses the last train to the city and has to stay indoors in a holiday apartment because of a storm. She expects that people (possibly children and grandchildren but Louise’s past remains vague throughout the film) will come looking for her but to no avail. At a certain point in the narrative, after Louise has tried to capture the attention of a helicopter that flies over the village and beach, she writes ‘why’ in the sand, shown through a bird’s eye perspective (00:28:26–00:29:20). This existential cry seems to appeal directly to the viewer who is faced with the same mystery as Louise. Why is she left all by herself? There is something peculiar about

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Louise’s separation from other people in the deserted village over the course of a year in the film. This peculiarity begs the question how we are to read this narrative of grand isolation. A gloomy dream sequence (00:43:40–00:45:35) suggests a possible answer to the question how Louise ended up in isolation. In this sequence, Louise is brought to a court, consisting of angry birds, where it appears that she is on trial for having forgotten most of her life, including her name, address, parents, children, lovers, and husband. The whistling sound that accompanies the event, in which Louise is locked in a bird cage of steel, adds to the scene’s disturbing character. Louise insults the judge but admits to the facts. A defence lawyer argues that Louise has no memory because her life has been beautiful and happy, and ‘happy people have no history … therefore, they have no need for a memory’. Yet, the judge is appalled by Louise’s ‘crime’ of memory loss and sentences her to ‘eternal solitude’, which the prosecutor considers to be worse than decapitation. To better understand how memory loss has become a punitive story, it is crucial to situate Louise en hiver in its context of production. While Robinson Crusoe anticipates how labour (productivity) would come to be valued in bourgeois culture, this adaptation of the novel is a product of late modernity and consumer society. The original use value of goods that represented a quantity of human labour is today replaced by exchange value and a lifestyle of consumption as a measure for accomplishment (Featherstone 1991: 173). This change corresponds with the rise of a (middle) class of retirees who are to indulge in third-age lifestyles (cf. the beach setting in the frame narrative as signifier for the endless holiday that older people are supposed to enjoy). This is how the ageing body (that encloses a presumably eternally youthful mind) is disciplined in the service of regimes of ‘compulsory youthfulness’ (Gibbons 2016) ‘compulsory able-bodiedness’ (McRuer 2006) and ‘compulsory able-mindedness’ (Kafer 2016). As Sarah Lamb writes, health has now become ‘a super value … regarded as the moral duty of all individuals, fostering not only a healthy self but also a healthy and productive society’ (2017: 7, emphasis mine). This emphasis on health is part of the paradigm of successful ageing that capitalizes on the denial of changes that come with growing older by putting forward agency, control, independence, productivity, and permanent personhood as the ultimate ideals to strive for. Older people who are unable to live up to this specific understanding of success in ageing (Lamb 2017; Katz and Calasanti 2015) risk being relegated to the category of the fourth age, a social imaginary that groups together older people who have lost control and agency and are in need of long-term care (Gilleard and Higgs 2010). The person who lives with dementia in an institutionalized setting has become the epitome of this category and represents everything that people fear in our society. As a result, persons who live with memory problems are stigmatized through processes of Othering and abjection (Gilleard and Higgs 2010). The ‘punishment’ for having lost control and intention in the fourth age is to no longer be valued and recognized as a person. Is this what is at stake in Louise en hiver? Can we interpret its punitive narrative as an allegorical tale that almost poetically evokes the isolation of an older woman who has not only become invisible but also detached from society because she increasingly fails to embody the ideal of successful ageing and cognitive ableism? Forgetting is part and parcel of a healthy functioning mind but can also take on the form of a neurocognitive disorder. It is unclear where to situate Louise on this continuum of forgetting. Because we almost exclusively get to know the protagonist in the here-and-now of the story world with limited to no information about her adult life (except for flashbacks to her youth), there is little we can make of the extent or gravity of Louise’s presumed memory loss. Still, it seems that she is no longer able to fully indulge in memories of the people she loves / d. After the court

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scene, the theme of forgetfulness returns twice in the film: these recurrences provide insight into the ways in which Louise experiences the dream’s verdict and her presumed memory loss. The first time, Louise asks her dog companion Pépère whether he believes that a person can be punished for having forgotten half of her life (00:45:35–00:46:28). Her comment that eternal solitude ‘may risk being a little long’ as a sentence gives us a glimpse of her sturdy nature; Louise does not seem visibly upset about the nightmarish dream. Instead, she peacefully reads Robinson Crusoe to Pépère and the words appear on-screen: ‘My shadow follows me step by step, caressing the sand. But it was so pale and so light that, one day, I wondered if it was not my memory’ (Figure 33.1). I was unable to locate these sentences in Defoe’s source text, which indicates that they were modified or added. Louise tells Pépère that she loves the idea of the ‘lightness of memory’, which again signals that memory loss does not necessarily startle her. In another dream scene or partial flashback, Louise returns to young adulthood, specifically her time with another family in the countryside during the Second World War. She watches her younger self play a cat-and-mouse game with two boys (00:50:25–00:56:09). During this game, she leaves her childhood friend Pierre behind to kiss the other boy Rafael instead until he is scared off by the sight of the corpse of the British parachutist Tom hanging in the tree. The sudden recollection of her deception weighs on Louise. Yet, the cadaver – crossing the border between diegetic past and present, or dream and reality – fills in the gaps of her memory when he tells her how Pierre took revenge on her by pretending to commit suicide by jumping off the cliff near them. This filled Louise with agony at the time and made her promise Pierre that she would never forget him. The flashbacks to Louise’s youth, elicited by the months of isolation on the beach, show that Pierre is far from forgotten. The dream sequence leads us back to a moment in life when, for the first time, Louise appears as a desiring subject, firmly positioning herself in a heterosexual dynamic. Tom reminds Louise that she slept with Pierre the day after the latter’s fake suicide; it was the first time she was intimate with a man. Louise wonders why she has forgotten such an important event while more trivial things have stayed with her.

FIGURE 33.1  Louise reading from Robinson Crusoe. © JPL Films.

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Unlike the dog Pépère, Tom is capable of adding to her memory of Pierre which illustrates the relational quality of memory itself. Memory loss could, then, be interpreted as not just the cause but also the effect of seclusion because nobody on the beach or in the village could help Louise remember the web of social relations that she used to be part of.

A STORY OF CAPABILITY AND GROWTH WITH A DYSPHORIC ENDING? In later life, forgetfulness seems the opposite of becoming and growing (Hartung 2016). Interestingly, though, Louise en hiver is a story of forgetfulness and self-sufficiency, of punishment and resilience, as I will argue below. Unmistakably, Louise comes across as self-sufficient and able to organize her life on the beach. To her own surprise, she has skills such as building a shelter and catching fish. Where do these skills come from? Sarah Eron (2018) analyses the scene in Robinson Crusoe in which the protagonist recalls a moment from his youth when he witnessed and assisted basket makers in weaving. This memory ‘infused with details of both sight and feeling’ (231) tells Crusoe how to weave baskets in the novel’s diegetic present. Eron concludes, therefore, that ‘memory triggers the extension of mind into world, facilitating survival, Bildung, decision-making, and independent thought and action’ (230). Louise, by contrast, does not consciously bring past experiences with practical skills into memory. Instead, the film seems to propose that her capabilities are connected to embodied knowledge. Louise’s body is experienced and experiencing in that it carries her ability to build, fish, and produce – skills that are crucial to her survival on the beach. As such, it is through her body that Louise can exercise agency and have some form of control. In the context of memory loss, often equated with the loss of personhood and agency, it is essential to acknowledge that people not only relate to the world through their minds but also through their bodies (Kontos 2003). The image of the capable and entrepreneurial Louise contradicts the signs that the older woman is problematically forgetful. Moreover, even though Louise, like Robinson Crusoe, dedicates her time to activities needed for her survival and to the maintenance of a daily routine, the seemingly ‘unproductive’ moments in which she wanders about and explores the beach turn out to be equally if not more meaningful. Louise discovers that ‘life is everywhere’ now that the natural environment makes its presence felt in the absence of tourists (00:15:07–00:16:00). It is as if cyclical time, the time of the tides of the sea, has taken over from human time to define the rhythm of her life. Interestingly, at the narrative’s very beginning, Louise thinks she has plenty of time to catch her train; however, unknown to her, her clock stopped at 18.15 causing her to miss her train. The image of the clock that stands still multiplies itself in a first dream sequence in which clocks fly and pass by (00:10:30–00:12:04). Ironically, her time on the beach, in timeless idleness among other creatures, has more positive effects on her health than her productivity. Not only does she get her memory back (presuming that she is, indeed, forgetful to a certain degree), her sight also improves to such an extent that she no longer needs her glasses to see what is on the horizon. If we take the improved sight figuratively, it could refer to emerging insight as well as to a reconciliation with life and the peculiar situation she finds herself in. This would imply that there is growth to be discovered in Louise’s adventure. Amelia DeFalco argues that ‘idleness in later life can be a force of good, even a moral virtue’ (2016: 100). In her analysis of David Lynch’s The Straight Story and Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead, she connects instances of ‘imagining, dreaming, watching, and recollecting’ (106) to an ethics of

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care that builds on the quality of interpersonal relations. In Louise en hiver, however, all episodes of observation and recollection happen in isolation. Indeed, Louise’s adventure does not include exchanges with other people. Another dream sequence (00:01:37–00:23:35) implies that this may not be exclusive to Louise’s forced stay on the beach. In this sequence, Louise is walking past a long line of people facing her and occasionally greeting her but she never joins them (Figure 33.2). Later, she sits alone in a venue while listening to a piano player and watching couples dancing. Thereafter, she walks past a tennis court where couples are playing. In all these instances, Louise is positioned as an outsider observing other people’s lives. The main visible difference between her and them is that she is an older woman who apparently is no longer part of a couple or a family unit. At the end of the film, the topics of marginalization and isolation take an extreme turn when Louise walks into the sea to drown herself (00:58:35–01:00:09). What should come as a shock, is almost presented as something natural. In my view, this is partly because of the medium of animation film and the distinct quality of the colour palette and texture of the visuals. We can see the delicate pencil lines and the structure of the paper on which Laguionie made his original gouaches before digital techniques were applied. The softness of the pastels paired with the subtle symphonic music by Pierre Kelner and Pascal le Pennec almost ease the viewer into accepting suicide as the logical consequence of Louise’s fate. I propose, though, to resist this supposed logic behind the beautiful aesthetics of the animation. What elements leading up to Louise’s suicide attempt could have foreshadowed it? And, how plausible are these? As mentioned before, Louise comes across as sturdy, capable, and not particularly ponderous. Compared to Robinson Crusoe, who is constantly lamenting, comparing, and contrasting his good versus his bad fortunes, and calling on God to give him strength and a sense of equilibrium, Louise appears to be more balanced and stable. Louise does wonder why no one comes looking for her, and some dream sequences and an occasional sigh may hint at a certain degree of distress. Yet, overall, staying on the beach is doing her good.

FIGURE 33.2  Louise positioned as outsider. © JPL Films.

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Suicide in older age is a complex topic. Scarce research suggests that there is no close association between mental health problems, such as depression and anxiety, and older people’s death wishes (Corna, Cairney, and Streiner 2010). This implies that external circumstances could have an impact. One such circumstance could be age ideologies, like the successful ageing paradigm I already mentioned, that negatively impact on older people’s perceptions of self-worth. Research into the lived experiences of older persons who are not suffering from terminal illnesses but want to end their life proposes that unattainable ideals of independence, autonomy, and health prevent certain individuals from imagining their lives as valuable in older age (Van Wijngaarden, Leget, and Goossensen 2016). The fear of becoming a burden on family, friends, and society has convinced them that a self-chosen death is the only dignified way out, which Margaret Gullette (2011) has coined ‘the duty to die’ discourse. Louise en hiver does not give a clear insight into Louise’s decision-making process. It does not evoke an internal struggle, which leaves us in the dark as to what she suffers from the most. Is her solitude on the beach, which she may indeed experience as everlasting loneliness, the root cause of her suicide attempt? The film does not end ‘dysphoricly’ with Louise’s death (DuPlessis 1985) because her dog Pépère comes to her rescue (01:00:09–00:01:00). What to make of this intervention and of the film’s depiction of this interspecies relation?

BECOMING WITH: LOUISE AND HER DOG COMPANION PÉPÈRE One morning Louise senses another presence on the beach (00:33:50–00:38:03). This feeling intensifies when a distinct noise disturbs her exploration of a heap of stuff that has washed up on the shore (one of the items a radio with traces of human voices, adding to the sound scape of birds, insects, and the sea). The viewer first finds out that the other presence is of a dog, as he follows in Louise’s footsteps from a distance – at one point almost as if from an over-the-shoulder shot. The moment Louise discovers the dog on her improvised doorstep, the extra-diegetic symphonic music starts again, signalling that this is an important encounter. Even though Louise claims that she does not need a companion and comments on the dog’s old and ugly appearance, they quickly become inseparable. They share their meals, and the dog becomes a loyal friend on Louise’s beach wanderings. The dog carefully adjusts his pace to Louise and even helps her to get on top of the cliff to enjoy the view as she used to do as a young girl. Louise considers calling the dog Wednesday, after the day they met (cf. Crusoe’s servant Friday), but eventually settles for Pépère, a diminutive for grandfather. As mentioned before, Louise recounts her dreams to Pépère and wonders whether they are her memories. She tells Pépère that she could also entrust anything to her childhood friend Pierre (00:41:17–00:43:38). The resonance between the words Pierre and Pépère does, indeed, suggest that there is a continuity between both figures. Louise reminisces that ‘nothing followed’ her intimate bond with Pierre, just the typical life events of marriage, mother- and grandmotherhood (this is the only time in the film that she explicitly mentions this part of her past). Now, Louise adds, she has reached old age, which she calls ‘la vieillitude’ instead of ‘vieillesse’ in French, a state that non-human animals are indifferent to in her view. This statement apparently triggers the dog because he starts talking back at Louise and questions her knowledge about how animals perceive ageing. Louise replies rather laconically: ‘Ah, the beasts talk nowadays.’ Pépère explains

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that only dogs can talk; scientists gave up on cats (thereby re-establishing the superiority of dogs over cats also present in Robinson Crusoe). In Louise’s experience, she and Pépère look like an old couple together. Pépère is a rather taciturn character; he listens and tunes in to Louise and encourages her to share her concerns with him. The dog also comments on thoughts that Louise has not explicitly voiced. When Louise says that Easter approaches, for instance, Pépère declares that her family members will not show up and that she knows this all too well. Louise admits that she does not even want to see them but wishes to know why they are not coming to look for her. Pépère’s voice is unlike Poll’s or the servant’s in Robinson Crusoe. And the relation between Louise and her companion is not based on mastery or subjugation in whatever form. In the scenes that I have described thus far, the dog is anthropomorphized in that he sounds and acts like a human being, which is characteristic of many animation films featuring non-human animals. Yet, Pépère is a character with a remarkable caring disposition – possibly even making him superhuman. If we follow Joan Tronto’s (1993) understanding of care, Pépère’s presence in Louise en hiver is exemplary of the dimensions caring about and taking care. Caring about ‘involves the recognition in the first place that care is necessary … noting the existence of a need and making an assessment that this need should be met’ (Tronto 1993: 106). Taking care implies ‘assuming some responsibility for the identified need and determining how to respond to it’ (106). Pépère recognizes Louise’s need for company and solace and provides her with the loyal companionship that may relieve the situation that she is in. As such, two of Tronto’s ethical elements of care come to the fore in the narrative as well, namely, attentiveness (1993: 127) and responsibility (131). While the film initially presents the manner in which Pépère cares as rather human, this changes when spring arrives. Pépère starts disappearing until he no longer shows up one night. When Louise tries to find him on the beach in the heap of stuff where she sensed his presence for the first time, she is confronted with her mirror image that shows her white hair and facial wrinkles. This sight displeases her and makes her wonder whether her older appearance may be the reason why no one is coming to find her and what finally made Pépère desert her. It is in the absence of the dog’s companionship that Louise gives up on life and walks into the sea. When Pépère reappears to save her, we see him swimming like a rescue dog and hear light barking. We then get a shot of Louise’s face and a reverse shot of Pépère standing over and gazing at her. A two-shot follows to point out that they are reunited. We could read this rescue metaphorically as conveying the idea that one needs companionship to survive. Louise observes that the dog has lost his capacity to speak. She now believes that may have been the real reason why he left her; he did not want to disappoint her. It is of course an anthropocentric valuation to think that the dog would be ashamed of his loss of speech, a relapse into his animal state. Still, dialogue through speech does not seem to be essential to Louise and Pépère’s mutual understanding. Instead, it is the look that establishes their connectivity (Figure 33.3). In Louise’s words: ‘We look at each other and everything comes naturally.’ At first, Pépère’s support of Louise is through words and actions which makes him an ideal human caregiver. After his intervention as a rescue dog, he becomes more of a non-human animal in his own right enabling a more lateral ‘becoming-with’ (Haraway 2008). As Donna Haraway writes: ‘The truth or honesty of nonlinguistic embodied communication depends on looking back and greeting significant others, again and again’ (2008: 27). Therefore, I would argue that it is in the ways that Louise and Pépère affect each

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FIGURE 33.3  Louise and Pépère looking at each other. © JPL Films.

other that Louise en hiver comes close to a representation of an inspiring interspecies connection in which the non-human response is freed from human speech.

CONCLUSION When the summer guests have returned to Biligen-sur-Mer, Louise is again surrounded by human beings on the beach. She is sitting exactly as she did at the beginning of the film (01:03:35– 01:06:25). Her voice-over declares that the people ‘haven’t changed’ and ‘are kind to her.’ They ‘don’t seem scared of her anymore’ and even invite her to join a party planning committee, which she declines. It seems as if Louise accepts her outsider position and reconciles herself to the fact that there is no real place for her in vibrant communities of families and friends. In the final shot, we see her and Pépère walking on the beach from the back, already looking forward to the season of autumn. This suggests that she will not return to the city, to her relatives and acquaintances. The unity with silent Pépère is what ultimately prevails. This status quo of tranquil detachment (‘disengagement’ in gerontological terms) may not be the most uplifting finale to this Robinson Crusoe adaptation. Is this the older woman’s happy ending – remember that Crusoe himself ended up wealthy and with a family? In this Handbook to Contemporary Ageing in Literature and Film, we count on fictional narratives to expose ageist practices characteristic of our society and to find alternative, more inspiring stories of later life. Our hope is that representations can serve as vehicles for social change. Louise en hiver may only partially fulfil this promise. It not only painfully presents precariousness in older age as a social condition (Butler 2006), but also normalizes isolation and the lack of human care for the old by means of a beautiful aesthetics. The stay on the beach has altered Louise. She has grown and has found a new equilibrium. But the human animals in the film and the world at large are oblivious to this change and have not transformed at all. Instead, we have to turn to Louise’s interaction with dog companion Pépère to find inspiration for the interconnectivity that is essential to meaningfulness – possibly survival – in life. We will have to learn to look through Pépère’s eyes

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(adopting ‘the dog’s look’) to see Louise for who she really is: a forgetful yet capable and blunt resilient older woman.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank copy editor Christien Franken, colleague Roel van den Oever, and the editors of this book for their comments on the draft article.

NOTES 1 It is interesting to note that the English translation does not include a reference to winter, a common metaphor for the final stage of life. 2 I am not suggesting that there are no other intertexts to be discussed in reference to this film, such as Shakespeare’s The Tempest (1623) or Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) by Lewis Carroll. It is just that my focus will be on Robinson Crusoe. 3 All translations are mine.

REFERENCES Baumeister, D. (2019), ‘The Human / Animal Logic of Sovereignty: Derrida on Robinson Crusoe’, Environmental Philosophy, 16 (1): 161–80. Butler, J. (2006), Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence, New York: Verso. Calder, M. (2003), Encounters with the Other: A Journey to the Limits of Language through Works by Rousseau, Defoe, Prévost and Graffigny, Amsterdam: Rodopi. Corna, L. M., J. Cairney, and D. L. Streiner (2010), ‘Suicide Ideation in Older Adults: Relationship to Mental Health Problems and Service Use’, The Gerontologist, 50: 785–97. DeFalco, A. (2016), ‘In Praise of Idleness: Aging and the Morality of Inactivity’, Cultural Critique, 92: 84–113. Defoe, D. ([1719] 1919), The Life and Strange and Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, London: Seely. Available at: www.gutenb​erg.org (accessed 18 June 2020). Derrida, J. (2011), The Beast and the Sovereign, vol. II, trans. G. Bennington, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Duplessis, R. B. (1985), Writing beyond the Ending: Narrative Strategies of Twentieth-Century Women Writers, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Eron, S. (2018), ‘Why Memory Matters: Surviving Intentions’, Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, 47: 229–34. Fallon, M. F. (2018), ‘Anti-Crusoes, Alternative Crusoes: Revisions of the Island Story in the Twentieth Century’, in J. Richetti (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to ‘Robinson Crusoe’, 207–20, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Featherstone, M. (1991), ‘The Body in Consumer Culture’, in The Body: Social Process and Cultural Theory, 170–93, London: Sage. Gibbons, H. M. (2016), ‘Compulsory Youthfulness: Intersections of Ableism and Ageism in “Successful Aging” Discourses’, Review of Disability Studies: An International Journal, 12 (2–3): 70–88. Gilleard, C., and P. Higgs (2010), ‘Ageing Abjection and Embodiment in the Fourth Age’, Journal of Aging Studies, 25 (2): 135–42.

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Goldman, J. (2013), ‘Crusoe’s Dog(s): Woolf and Derrida (between Beast and Sovereign)’, Le Tour Critique, 2. Available at: http://let​ourc​riti​que.u-pari​s10.fr/index.php/let​ourc​riti​que/arti​cle/view/29/html (accessed 18 June 2020). Gullette, M. M. (2011), ‘The Mystery of Carolyn Heilbrun’s Suicide: Fear of Aging, Ageism, and the “Duty to Die” ’, in Agewise: Fighting the New Ageism in America, 42–61, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Haraway, D. J. (2008), When Species Meet, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Hartung, H. (2016), Ageing, Gender and Illness in Anglophone Literature: Narrating Age in the Bildungsroman, New York: Routledge. Hulme, P. (1986), Colonial Encounters: Europe and the Native Caribbean 1492–1797, London: Methuan. Hutcheon, L., with S. O’Flynn (2013), A Theory of Adaptation, New York: Routledge Kafer, A. (2013), Feminist Queer Crip, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Katz, S., and T. Calasanti (2015), ‘Critical Perspectives on Successful Aging: Does It “Appeal More Than It Illuminates?” ’, The Gerontologist, 55 (1): 26–33. Kontos, P. (2003), ‘“The Painterly Hand”: Embodied Consciousness and Alzheimer’s Disease’, Journal of Aging Studies, 17: 151–70. Lamb, S. (2017), ‘Introduction’, in S. Lamb (ed.), Successful Aging as a Contemporary Obsession: Global Perspectives, 1–26, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Mayer, R. (2018), ‘Robinson Crusoe in the Screen Age’, in J. Richetti (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to ‘Robinson Crusoe’, 221–33, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. McRuer, R. (2006), Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability, New York: New York University Press. Moretti, F. (2013), The Bourgeois: Between History and Literature, London: Verso. Neverdeen Pieterse, J. (2005), White on Black: Images of Africa and Blacks in Western Popular Culture, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Peterson, C. (2014), ‘The Monolingualism of the Human’, SubStance, 43 (2): 83–99. Todd, D. (2018), ‘Robinson Crusoe and Colonialism’, in J. Richetti (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to ‘Robinson Crusoe’, 142–56, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Tronto, J. C. (1993), Moral Boundaries: A Political Argument for an Ethic of Care, New York: Routledge. Watt, I. (1957), The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding, Berkeley: University of California Press. Wheeler, R. (2010), The Complexion of Race: Categories of Difference in Eighteenth-Century British Culture, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Wijngaarden, E. van, C. Leget, and A. Goossensen (2016), ‘Caught between Intending and Doing: Older People Ideating on a Self-chosen Death’, BMJ Open, 6: 1–11.

Filmography Louise en hiver (2016), Dir. J.-F. Laguionie, France: JPL Films.

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Ageing and narration in Huntington’s Disease memoirs PRAMOD K. NAYAR

INTRODUCTION ‘How could I cope with the knowledge that, unless a sufficient treatment came along soon, this disease was going to kill me in the not-too-distant future?’, asks Steven Beatty in the early pages of his memoir, In-Between Years: Life after a Positive Huntington’s Disease Test (2018: n.p.). ‘We smile and take a leap of faith through the treatment and into …’, writes Sarah Foster in Me and HD, leaving her sentence unfinished (2015: n.p.). These two excerpts from memoirs by those diagnosed with Huntington’s Disease (HD) represent two views of the prospects of ageing, and two foretellings. HD is produced by a genetic disorder – if one inherits the defective gene from a parent that person is certain to eventually develop the disease. First described by George Huntington as a ‘chorea’ (from the Greek, to dance, signifying the involuntary twitching movements of those who suffer from it) in the 1890s, the defective gene was identified in 1993, and a diagnostic test now exists (Wexler 2008). The symptoms appear between the ages of thirty and fifty, and the deterioration is irreversible. Often termed the ‘cruellest disease in the world’, for its slow intractable progression, HD has no cure, and treatments only work to control the symptoms. This chapter examines memoirs by those diagnosed with HD to show how diagnosis and / or early signs of HD work in these memoirs as narrative foretellings of the authors’ ageing or the ageing of those they care for. The analysis will focus on memoirs by those living with HD: Steven Beatty’s In-Between Years, Sarah Foster’s Me and HD (2015), and Susan Lawrence’s Just Move Forward (2011). In addition, I will consider memoirs by those who are caregivers to and family members of those with HD, such as Therese Crutcher-Marin’s Watching Their Dance (2017), Mona Gable’s Blood Brother (2014), Deborah Goodman’s Hummingbird (2015), and Jean Baréma’s The Test (2005). Beatty received his diagnosis in 2015 but had no symptoms at the time of writing and has since then been an advocate for HD. Beatty’s book is aimed at those who have not yet shown symptoms, but whose tests have revealed their HD future. Beatty terms the book a ‘handbook’ for HD and covers a range of topics, from staying positive, regular exercise, and the need for physical fitness to the sense of guilt that haunts parents like him who have inadvertently passed on HD, before concluding with ‘calls to action’. Foster’s HD and Me describes her everyday life from the time of the diagnosis: her mood swings, the discomfort of her own body, and her advocacy campaigns in

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which she encountered the hypocrisy of Hollywood stars and experienced frustration on a daily basis. Susan Lawrence in Just Move Forward, living with early signs of HD, emphasizes how her faith has helped her battle HD. She also proposes ways of dealing with the condition in the form of questions that potential and existing sufferers / caregivers may have, such as ‘What should be expected when I go for a neuropsychological evaluation?’ Crutcher-Marin’s Watching Their Dance is an account of a family she marries into, in which her husband’s three sisters over a period of time begin exhibiting the signs of HD. The memoir traces the history of the disease, from pre-HD through the onset and progression of the condition, even as Crutcher-Marin battles her own moral demons as to first, whether she should marry John; second, whether they should have children; and later whether they could invest in a house. Mona Gable’s Blood Brother begins with her brother’s death from HD. Gable battles her anxieties about the diagnostic test and tries to find ways of leading as near-normal a life as is possible with the fear of HD besetting her. Deborah Goodman’s Hummingbird is about ‘the suffering that myself and my family had endured over the past 30 years’ due to HD, and her own life living under the shadow of a ‘50 percent risk of developing a devastating and debilitating terminal illness’. The second part of her book is about her journey to India, China and Africa and her attempts to develop a positive attitude towards life, as she battles the suicide of her brother, who had HD. Finally, Jean Baréma’s memoir, The Test, leads up to his test, which he has deferred as long as he could. The memoir captures his intense worries, the suspense, and the support system that enables him to live with the possibility of a positive diagnosis. All memoirs by HD persons and their caregivers uniformly emphasize networks of care, the stresses on the family with the diagnosis, the heart-wrenching scenes of HD persons seeking to perform simple tasks, and the hopes that keep all of them alive. HD memoirs are the biographical construction of later life. In this, they have some parallels with fictional forms such as ‘the novel of completion’ or the novel of winding up, proposed by Constance Rooke (cited in Hartung 2011: 48). As Heike Hartung notes, ‘a concern with individual development and maturation to the unidirectionality of time’ (49) marks the genres of the comingof-age-novel and the novel of completion. There is, then, an implicit link in the time in the narrative with the time of the narrative, where the former is the temporality within the diegesis and the latter the time of scripting (corresponding to the two ‘I’s of autobiography: the ‘I’ doing the telling and the ‘I’ who is the subject of the telling). In the HD memoir, the time in the narrative hurtles towards HD ageing and its complications, while it is written in the present. It could be argued that HD memoirs are in effect narratives of ageing, but about ageing with(in) a particular medical condition. Examining the link between ageing and narrative, Maricel OróPiqueras and Sarah Falcus write: Conceiving ageing as a movement through time figures it as a narrative … Central, then, to the experience of ageing in gerontology and to English studies, narrative thus offers a way of capturing the complexity and the ambiguities of ageing across the life course, and of rethinking what ageing itself might mean. (2018: 3–4)1 Memoirs are thus imaginative renderings of a specific form of ageing, in these cases anticipating an HD senescence. That is, rather than an account of senescence per se, the HD memoir anticipates a certain mode of ageing, which also inflects the protagonist’s present. As an exercise in narrating ageing, the HD memoir is the biography of a disease whose symptoms appear, most frequently, in middle age and which conditions the protagonist’s future life. The HD memoir makes it clear

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that there is only HD ageing. This feature of the HD memoir does embody the risk that Elizabeth Caldwell and Sarah Falcus signalled about the stereotyping of dementia in children’s picture books: ‘by conflating ageing and illness the books may contribute to the binary between “normal” and pathological ageing’ (2020: n.p). In HD memoirs, as in the case of other illness memoirs, there is no normal ageing in the future: all senescence is HD senescence, and all subjects are (reduced to) HD subjects. In the process of anticipating a certain kind of ageing, some of the memoirs, akin to the conventions of the illness memoirs, also document the course of medical treatments, the options available for hospitalization and support, the financial and other implications. This notion of HD ageing leads to the four interrelated arguments that this chapter explores. First, the HD memoirs offer a narrative foreclosure where the narration will terminate in HD, and so all narrative is geared towards this decline-and-closure moment. Second, care for the person with HD requires a degree of knowledge not just about the aetiology of HD, its care, and medical complications but of how the future is likely to be. Third, with such knowledge of the shape of ageing-with-HD, the memoir undertakes what Mark Currie (2007) calls a ‘performative prolepsis’, wherein, imagining a future with HD produces a certain kind of present, which will of course terminate in a certain kind of future in a self-fulfilling prophecy. And fourth, the appearance or discovery of HD generates what Nikolas Rose terms ‘genetic responsibility’ in the HD persons, driving them to enact different roles, including one as an experimental subject (2008: 125).

NARRATIVE FORECLOSURE As Mark Freeman defines it, narrative foreclosure occurs when ‘people had gathered the conviction that the stories of their lives were essentially over … having internalized cultural narratives of decline’ (2011: 3). In the case of the HD memoir, narrative foreclosure is the assumption that one day, this narration of the self will terminate in HD, or HD may terminate all narration. The HD memoir emphasizes the narrative construction of future identity, of ‘possible selves’. Frits de Lange defines ‘possible selves’ as ‘future representations of the selves that are hoped for or feared’ (2011: 63). In the HD memoir, the possible self is an ageing self that requires at best a ‘rudimentary narrative, with a minimum of laborious imagination’ (de Lange 2011: 64), and one marked for HD-related destruction. Ageing, in other words, is HD ageing, and memoirists either carrying HD genes or caring for those with them, never therefore possess or imagine a possible self that includes ageing well. In the HD memoir, there is the admission of, or suspicion of, ‘having’ HD, either lying in wait in one’s genes or already visible in some small signs. An HD self is foregrounded even in the former case, where the signs have not yet manifest. That is, the HD memoir reveals the imminent arrival of the condition. At the early just-diagnosed stage in the form of genetic tests, the memoir forecloses the future narrative, and progress of life. There is, the HD memoirs suggest, only a very limited set of possible selves once the symptoms set in: progressive deterioration that will produce tantrums and distemper, depression, even more frightening spastic movements, inability to focus, among others. The narrative foreclosure in the HD memoir has to do with the minimal options to construct any possible self. The future for him, says Nigel to his mother in Goodman’s Hummingbird, is simple enough: ‘I’ll get worse and worse and eventually I won’t be able to do anything for myself. I’ll have years of this’ (98). Therese Crutcher-Marin wishes to keep her children away from their aunt, Marcia, because, in her biographical construction of Marcia, ‘it’s only going to get worse’ (215). Sarah Foster also speaks

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of her possible self: ‘it’s only going to get worse’. She ‘imagine[s]‌how much worse the people’ she loves will see her when she declines and says: ‘I don’t want to hate or be hated by my relatives’ (n.p.). In Baréma’s words his narrative plot of the future can be summarized as ‘slow, unbearable, unlivable’ (93). In other words, the HD memoir forecloses all possible selves other than an HD self, which as Baréma puts it, will be ‘unlivable’. The narrative of imminent decline is the first stage in the construction of the possible HD self, as Nigel, Crutcher-Marin, Foster, and Baréma all indicate. Alongside this narrative closure of possible selves at some point in the course of ageing and the future, the HD memoir undertakes a certain narrative anticipation of the future, of ageing and decline. I suggest that narrative foreclosure in the HD memoir results in the conflation of HD with ageing itself: there is no other ageing possible, suggests the memoir. As we shall see, the recognition of HD in the family is a key feature of these narratives and is instrumental in the making of a narrative foreclosure.

KNOWING SENESCENCE Beatty’s anxiety is about coping with the knowledge of HD, which translates into knowledge / foresight about his ageing process. In HD memoirs by carers, the caregivers’ responses are shaped by the cared-for’s HD. Caring for the person living with HD requires an engagement with the person, and this necessitates a certain knowledge on the carer’s part. Knowledge in memoirs by those with HD is a means of uncovering their own fears around their future condition and process of ageing. This knowledge, often proceeding from a genetic test report, a case history about a family member or a revelation of the true cause of a family member’s deterioration in the past, is tinged, inevitably, with the dawning fear that the disease will be passed on, affecting their own futures in terrible ways. This knowledge offers a different view of one’s genealogy and the future and generates an identity or selfhood whose ‘core’ is defined by a genetic anomaly, located in a wholly different genealogy. Offering an alternative genealogy, as Lock et al. (2006) have suggested, the HD memoir presents what Tim Ingold describes as a ‘narrative interweaving of present and past lives [where] retracing the lines of past lives is the way we proceed along our own’ (2007). Genetic markers, percentage of risk, the demographics of HD patients, and comparative statistics constitute genomic knowledge that also represents a wholly different level of the auto-biological (Harris, Kelley, and Wyatt 2014). Genomic knowledge of this kind generates an intense awareness – and fear – about the future, for themselves and others. The diagnostic report is therefore a blueprint of the route their ageing will inexorably take. It also embodies a certain self, or self-in-the-making: an HD self. Affective knowing is then connected to this genomic knowing in the form of anxieties and affections tethered to individuals and persons with HD diagnosis or symptoms, situated within the intimate circle of the family. It emerges in the context of care that is demanded and necessitated now, or at some point in the future. Care itself, María Puig de la Bellasca proposes, is a form of knowing. ‘Affectionate knowing’ (62) and ‘the caring dimensions of knowing’ (64), she argues, make affectivity a constituent of knowledge production. This is so because, the ‘caring politics in practices of knowing’ effects a ‘transformation of matters of fact into matters of care’ (65). In the HD memoir the genomic and the affective are intertwined, and the agonizing over genomic knowledge is a standard component of the HD memoir. Taken together, genomic and affective knowledge illuminates the past and anticipates the future. It portends a specific form of ageing: ageing with HD.

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A few weeks after the memorial service for her brother, and armed with the (affective) knowledge that he had suffered from, and eventually died of, HD, Gable begins to research the disease. She writes: ‘As I read, I tried to detach myself from the information … I needed to understand what I was dealing with. I needed to stay calm’ (2014: n.p.). What Gable discovers is that HD is genetic, but she is uncertain about how her brother had inherited it. She now proceeds to cast her eye back on the family tree: ‘Of my rangy Oklahoma family, none of my grandparents or cousins or uncles on my dad’s side had Huntington’s, or at least that I knew of ’ (2014: n.p). ‘There wasn’t’, she writes, a ‘family history of HD’ (2014: n.p). Similarly, ‘knowing’, writes Crutcher-Marin on hearing of a genetic test being finally made available, ‘was key … because only then could a plan be devised’ (105). Her partner, John, whose family has HD, is more sceptical about knowing: ‘what if I tested positive … I’m afraid it would destroy us’ (106). Jean Baréma wonders, ‘what good would it do to know? But now, terror. I must know’ (11). And later, ‘isn’t ignorance the same as hope?’ (49). Sarah Foster describes the need to and fear of knowing her genetic fate: ‘getting tested to break free from secrecy and unknowing’ (n.p.). That the test would confirm an ageing process informed, even determined, by HD is a fact of which memoirists are aware. Some, like Deborah Goodman, refuse to know with a degree of certainty whether they will age with HD or not. Goodman writes: ‘I couldn’t face being tested. I knew that testing positive for the gene would have completely destroyed me. I just knew I wouldn’t be able to bear it and I couldn’t take that chance’ (63). In the process of knowing, however, an alternative perception of one’s lineage also emerges. Mona Gable writes: ‘I had a 50 percent chance of having the disease’ (2014: n.p.). This was the expectation because if one has a CAG (C-A-G nucleotides in the HD gene) repeat of 40 or more, this person has developed Huntington’s (Gable 2014: n.p.). Genomic knowledge, in tandem with the ‘discovery’ of HD in the family via affective knowing, induces in the memoir a sort of narrative foreclosure although the narration continues.2 Jean Baréma’s The Test is an account of his anxieties leading up to his testing for the HD gene. The entire edifice of genetic inheritance, the research scientist tells Baréma, is a ‘lottery, a throw of the dice, a stroke of luck, a 50 percent chance’ (77). After he receives his test results, Baréma then has to deal with his brother and his sister, who have HD. His genomic knowledge begins to shade into an affective knowledge, as he is imbued with the fear that his own ageing process may take on the same qualities as that of his siblings. The scientist tells him to live well, and Baréma thinks to himself: ‘to live well, I have to block them out, my brother and my younger sister; block them out and that horrific beast that is eating away at them and that I fear may come and eat me as well’ (85). Here the disavowal of the fact that the genetic ‘lottery’ had determined his siblings’ lives, senescence, and eventual death but not his, is what enables Baréma to even consider a good life. In other texts, the knowledge gleaned from the observations of their loved ones or themselves is supplemented by the knowledge from science. For instance, Goodman cites from a textbook on HD (73–4) after stating baldly, ‘Nigel was finding increasingly difficult to control his behaviour’ (73). The genetic test, the blood work, the textbook are material instances of a self-in-the-making, even as they offer up genomic knowledge of a certain future. Stephen Cohn has argued in the case of brain scans of people with mental health issues such as bipolar disorder schizophrenia that for the patients ‘the motive to have a scan, and their hope to take home a copy in the form of a printout or a set of image files, is ostensibly one driven by a search for legitimacy’ (187). The scans are representations, but for the patients, they are also modes of explaining their selves, their symptoms, and conditions, ‘making it real’ (in Cohn’s phrase). The scans can disrupt their sense of illness and

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self, but also serve to elaborate a new self, to revise their ‘old’ one (191). For instance, Goodman reflects on scientific knowledge when stating ‘this [the textbook] explains the changing behaviour of people with HD’ (74). Susan Lawrence advises all HD subjects that the ‘neuropsychological assessment is one of the best pieces of forensic evidence linking you to your disease’ and adds: ‘DO NOT lose this information’ (n.p., emphasis in original). In each case the scientific documentation serves as evidence for not only their lineage but also their future. Since HD is most often a late-onset disease, genomic knowledge presents a definitive map of ageing for the individuals and the family, depending on whether they carry the defective gene or not. Further, the genomic knowledge is intertwined with the family’s history, recently discovered and analeptically (and affectively) recorded, in several cases. Together, affective and genomic knowledge make up an HD senescence. HD senescence and its knowing look simultaneously backward and forward: a retrospective recognition of HD in the family and a prospective knowing of things to come for themselves and their loved ones / siblings. Prospective knowledge of a certain pattern to their ageing process and a certain knowledge of the future also dawns on the memoirist. In terms of the narrative, the HD memoir works through the anterior moment – diagnosis, first signs – in order to make a biographical statement about ageing. This prospective knowledge derives in part from a retrospective knowledge, which may often be only nebulous. The HD person’s knowledge is a retrospective recognition of what her or his parent and / or sibling had suffered from. This is affective knowing in the sense it is above all else proximate and intimate knowing, even if the true biomedical knowledge of the illness, its teleology and progression were lacking. Knowledge of one’s family and its HD history arrives as an analeptic narrative segment in these texts. As the memoirs describe these ‘cases’ from their family’s past, the narrator, now re-examining the lives of grandparents, parents, and other family members, is forced to face up to the fact of HD. This is what haunts them as a family. Goodman’s mother, having dealt with her husband’s HD, only hopes that there will be a cure before her children are affected (she has discovered that two of her sons are destined to develop HD, which they do in the course of the memoir). Steven Beatty writes, after informing us that he has tested positive – the test being a marker and index of the future, and therefore, constitutive of his knowledge of the future – for HD: ‘I inherited the gene mutation from my father … its first arrival into my known genealogical tree was with my paternal grandmother … I only remember her being ill and living in a Psychiatric Hospital … In my mind, I can visualize her all scrunched up sitting in a chair and not interacting with anyone.’ Beatty, then addressing the reader, writes: ‘perhaps … you have similar memories of a grandparent’ (n.p.). Beatty lists how two of his uncles also had HD, but he ‘did not watch them progress through their HD journey’ (n.p.). Finally, Beatty turns to his father and observes ‘changes in him … changes in his personality … deconditioning in his muscles … weight loss’ (n.p.). He also notes that one of his two sisters has tested positive. Sarah Foster’s memoir narrates her mother’s battle with HD: the first involuntary movements, the paranoia, and other symptoms (n.p.). Deborah Goodman in Hummingbird recalls her father’s first symptoms, and her mother remembers how, when they had first met, he had informed her that his father had died in a psychiatric hospital. Affective and affectionate knowledge is the retrospective awareness of the causes of suffering in their loved ones. Beatty observes his father’s deterioration and now understands the reasons for this. His palpable anxiety over his own future is at once amplified and alleviated by the diagnosis that one of his siblings will inherit HD, and the other will not. Goodman discovers that the reference to the incarceration and death of

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her grandfather in a psychiatric hospital was a partial disclosure that was, perhaps, an attempt to mitigate the horror of HD that ran in the family on the father’s side. Goodman’s Hummingbird is about the burden of affective and affectionate knowledge that she and her mother acquire and carry. In the memoir, after the diagnosis of HD in her sons, her mother tries to plan the future: ‘Mum started to make plans for her son’s future by arranging funding for his care and trying to find the best care home that she could do for him. But she was just going through the motions, because she knew that Nigel had other plans’ (76). Nigel’s future plan was suicide, rather than be confined to his home or a care home. Sarah Foster describes how her youngest offspring deals with her progressive deterioration but imagines how he understands and speculates on his own future. In each of these texts the burden of knowledge about a family member’s HD, the concealment of the diagnosis (Goodman), the denial of the symptoms (Foster), is tinged with sadness about them, but also a horrified recognition at the prospect of their parent having passed on the gene. That is, affective knowing is also prospective: knowing what they themselves are in line for. Every HD protagonist is already subject to or is a potential subject of the inherited condition. HD in these memoirs is the ‘open sign’ that marks fungibility. Fungibility is about the substitutability of one family member with HD for another with HD or the likelihood of developing HD. Grandmothers are replaced by mothers, who in time, are replaced by siblings or the protagonists themselves as ‘HD subjects’. Susan Lawrence, for example, recalls her grandmother suffering from HD, and then recalls how her own mother began to experience the symptoms. One generation of HD subjects replaces another, and now it is her turn. Lawrence also documents the fungibility of the caregiver: ‘I began to get a taste of what my mother went through as a caregiver … My mother eventually became the caregiver for my grandmother who had Huntington’s disease’ (n.p.). The grandmother was sent away to a nursing home, where she was abused, raped, and eventually died alone. So, Lawrence’s mother, she records, is afraid of this fungibility of circumstances, where she (the mother) expects to be ‘sent away to die’. Sarah Foster wonders if her children will be next, after her, to experience HD (n.p.). Crutcher-Marin’s memoir of her husband’s family devotes considerable space to wondering if he is next in line, after his sisters, to have inherited the HD gene. Those now living with HD will replace with themselves, their siblings and parents with HD, who suffered and died painful deaths. Therefore, their individuality is erased in favour of an identity as the HD patient or subject. Fungibility, then, is ostensibly what marks the ageing-with-HD for all these memoirists. Fungibility reduces the protagonists to simply HD subjects or potential HD subjects. Ageing is almost entirely defined by symptoms appearing at some point in their lives. If at one level the fungibility narrative of genealogy evacuates the ageing individual of anything other than imminent HD, at another level, Sarah Foster, Deborah Goodman, and Susan Lawrence see their imminent HD subjecthood and ageing as potential. The form-of-life (which is life as potential, Agamben 2017) is open-ended, with multiple meanings and meaningful events: advocacy, activism, and genetic responsibility, to which I shall turn later in the chapter.

SENESCENCE AS PERFORMATIVE PROLEPSIS Anne Davis Basting argues that ‘through writing, people with dementia have the choice to reveal their illness rather than have their illness reveal them’ (2009: 146). The idea of ‘revealing’ one’s

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illness is about sharing the knowledge and information about one’s condition with the world, as a form of written admission about their future, and the form of ageing they can expect. I have elsewhere argued that the HD self, incipient, dormant but always already part of the self, presents a prospective teleology in these narratives (Nayar 2022). In the HD memoir, the narrative event is directed at the eventual and imminent appearance of HD symptoms. The HD and its symptoms, progress, and climax (death) are the teleology of the narrated event. The HD memoir is often structured around a narratological prolepsis. The imagining of a certain senescence is a proleptic strategy because it looks forward into the future. The traditional prolepsis is a narrative device calculated to generate suspense, especially by withholding vital information. According to Currie, ‘the anticipation of future events in a fiction counts as prolepsis only when that anticipation turns out to be true’ (Currie 2007: 39). But prolepsis is not the prerogative of fiction alone, especially in autobiographies and memoirs wherein the protagonist, aware of how the life has shaped up or will, looks into the future. Once HD has been diagnosed, the HD memoir undertakes a performative prolepsis. Forward looking in its scope, the HD memoir imagines a future today, and the imminent future then comes about in the form of signs and symptoms, and while HD is still in the future (and therefore could be termed ‘fictional’, being not yet here), the inevitability of HD is in the present, and this is a performative prolepsis. A performative prolepsis ‘takes an excursion into the future to envisage an event which produces the present in such a way that the envisaged future actually comes about’ (Currie 2007: 43–4). Often described as a ‘self-fulfilling prophecy’, ‘a performative prolepsis involves an imagined future which produces the present, and a present which, thus produced, produces the future’ (44). We discern an intensification of prolepsis in the HD memoir which performs, sustainedly, future ageing as it anticipates the events from the moment of diagnosis. The narrative describing the testing for the HD gene when belonging to a family with a history of HD is a performative prolepsis. When a person, first, self-identifies as a likely HD subject in future, and second, documents the testing process (with its attendant anxieties), they perform their future senescence. The present then is reconstructed as an HD present, since the gene is already present within. The future HD, that is, is always already present and revealed by testing today – and this therefore produces a specific (HD) senescence tomorrow. The memoir begins, from the moment of diagnosis (merging, as noted earlier, genomic and affective knowledge), to define and construct a self that is an imminent-HD self, or an HD self in the making. It constantly alerts us to the nature of the ageing self, in particular: this will be one kind of ageing only, an HD ageing. Steven Beatty advises everyone diagnosed with the HD gene to put their papers and finances in order (n.p.). The discovery of the HD gene in one sibling, writes Mona Gable, ‘split us [the family] into two camps: those who favoured testing, and those who didn’t’ (n.p.). Family behaviour, attitude, and practices are proleptically linked to their recognition of a certain kind of past and with the HD future. Later, Gable writes: ‘Knowing I might have HD felt like the opposite of when I was pregnant, when the secret I was carrying inside me was life and I wanted everyone in the world to know. This secret was dark and scary, a monster threatening to swallow me whole’ (n.p.). Invoking a comparison with pregnancy as a ‘secret’, Gable proleptically aligns her past, her present (which is marked by ‘knowing … [she] might have HD’) with an HD future. Rather than a future which will produce and bring forth a life, she expects it will produce HD, for herself and for others in her family.

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In the HD memoir, time as a linear progression of events is replaced by time as co-existence, where HD is already present in the body / genetic material of the narrator and ageing is a process of the manifestation of what is already here. The anticipation, then, is borne out by the certainty of the future. The recording of a future moment in the ageing process where HD will appear represents the event before it appears, and thereby produces the event in the form of a narrative. That is, the memoir by speaking of the HD within, even if not manifest yet, produces the person as an HD subject in the very act of documenting the genetic material. The narrative, unlike the traditional disease memoir, does not follow the event. It is in the representation of the genetic data today that the future event of HD is already produced. In Currie’s words, the ‘archive produces the event as much as it records it’ (42). Here narrative prolepsis is a present that already is the predicted, anticipated, and imminent future. Within this performative prolepsis the dominant mode and mood is fear. Fear inflects the protention, as we have seen in Gable, Baréma, Foster, and others. For instance, Foster says, ‘the knowledge that one day when I don’t expect it and am not prepared for it, the rain is going to pour down on me and wash the me away’ (n.p.). Later she would elaborate: ‘I fear that my dreams for the future are unrealistic and will not come true’ (n.p.). For Deborah Goodman, she can only see her personality (‘fun-loving and extrovert’, 25) and future through the lens of HD and the fear it brings on: Each visit to the hospital brought my fears to the surface as I was reminded of my potential fate. The feeling I tried to push as far down into my boots … an ocean of sadness and tears. That sadness became a part of my natural state and stayed with me for many, many years … Any clumsy movement would trigger an instant panic within me – was this a normal gesture or was it a sign of the onset of HD? (25) While the dominant mode of the HD memoir’s performative prolepsis is fear, a smaller but no less significant mode is of hope, and this hope manifests and drives the potential HD subjects describe about and in themselves in the memoirs.

HOPE AND RESPONSIBILITY IN THE HD MEMOIR The HD memoir’s evaluation of the future and the potential of HD research unsettles the performative prolepsis governed by fear and hopelessness. Therefore, people living with HD may participate in trials and experiments as a way of a fulfilling a genetic responsibility characterized as a future anterior to the time when, with ageing, symptoms of HD will certainly manifest. When Mona Gable visits a University of California, Los Angeles, laboratory where HD stem cells research is being undertaken, she is overwhelmed: ‘As I peered at the cells, I could feel my heart beating faster and I wondered, Was I seeing the holy grail for Huntington’s, and possibly Lou Gehrig’s disease and Parkinson’s too?’ (2014: n.p.). For Sarah Foster, being a part of drug trials is crucial because that way she believes that even though in the grip of HD she is doing something for a larger cause: ‘doing a drug trial to be a small part of large conclusions’ (n.p.). Their memoirs’ foretellings approximate to a narrative longing about a certain kind of ageing, if not for themselves, at least for their children in the future. The memoirs also foreground genetic responsibility, life strategies, and (attempts at) retaining a nominal and symbolic identity to the extent HD allows.

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CONCLUSION Martina Zimmermann has argued in the case of Alzheimer’s writing that ‘present-focused adapting supports coping with cognitive decline much more effectively than concentrating on the past as such’ (2012: 100). In the HD memoir a self is constructed in the present, almost as a responsibility, even when it looks to a future inhabited by an unrecognizable self. Life strategies and the biosocial are domains within which we see attempts at possible selves and self-creation being undertaken. Thus, Nigel plans his suicide in Goodman’s Hummingbird. Goodman herself takes to studying and practising healing techniques. Crutcher-Marin becomes an advocate-activist for HD and sets in motion biosocial networks founded on the experience of seeing her sisters-in-law suffering from HD. Foster plans a sign language for a time when she loses her ability to enunciate words. These may be read as instances of patient and caregiver attempts to provide a systematic, readable narrative of the present before the cognitive decline brought on by HD. In the HD memoir, even in the face of dwindling social and individual identities, we find the HD subject and / or carers positing and constructing in howsoever minimal a fashion, a personhood. We see the biological (or more specifically, genetic) and the biographical contesting, conflicting, and cooperating in order to present a sense of the HD self. Ageing, although determined in many ways by the onset of HD or the anticipation of HD, is not reducible to it.

NOTES 1 Noting that the decline / progress binary in narrative gerontology has been questioned, Oró-Piqueras and Falcus argue that critical gerontology has identified the ‘ambiguities and paradoxes … at the heart of our concern with successful ageing or ageing well’ (6). See also Falcus and El Madawi (2019). This emphasis on ageing and its narratives, or the narrative construction of ageing, is the overarching framework for this chapter as well. 2 I have elsewhere argued that we are in the age of the ‘autobiogenography’ in which the autobiography is constructed around genetic materials, particularly with the rise of personal genomics (Nayar 2016).

REFERENCES Baréma, J. (2005), The Test: Living in the Shadow of Huntington’s Disease, New York: Franklin Square. Basting, A. D. (2009), Forget Memory: Creating Better Lives for People with Dementia, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Beatty, S. (2018), In-Between Years: Life After a Positive Huntington’s Disease Test, Kindle Direct. Caldwell, E. F., S. Falcus and K. Sako (2020), ‘Depicting Dementia: Representations of Cognitive Health and Illness in Ten Picturebooks for Children’, Children’s Literature in Education. Crutcher-Marin, T. (2017), Watching Their Dance: Three Sisters, a Genetic Disease and Marrying into a Family at Risk for Huntington’s, Auburn: NorCal. Currie, M. (2007), About Time: Narrative, Fiction and the Philosophy of Time, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. De Lange, F. (2011), ‘Inventing Yourself: How Older Adults Deal with the Pressure of Late-Modern Identity Construction’, in G. Kenyon, E. Bohlmeijer, and W. L. Randall (eds), Storying Later Life: Issues, Investigations, and Interventions in Narrative Gerontology, 51–65, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Falcus, S. and S. El Madawi, S. (2019), ‘Decline and Progress Narrative’, in D. Gu and M. Dupre (eds), Encyclopedia of Gerontology and Population Aging, Cham: Springer, https://doi. org/10.1007/978-3-319-69892-2_262-1. Foster, S. P. (2015), Me and HD, vol. 1, No Publisher. Kindle edition. Freeman, M. (2011), ‘Narrative Foreclosure in Later Life: Possibilities and Limits’, in Gary Kenyon, Ernst Bohlmeijer and William L. Randall (eds), Storying Later Life: Issues, Investigations, and Interventions In Narrative Gerontology, 3–19, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gable, M. (2014), Blood Brother: The Gene That Rocked My Family, New York: Shebooks. Goodman, D. (2015), Hummingbird: A Heart-Felt Account of One Woman’s Emotional Journey through Life. From Loss, Fear and Risk to Self-Discovery and Joy. No Publisher. Kindle edition. Harris, A., S. E. Kelly, and S. Wyatt (2014), ‘Autobiologies on YouTube: Narratives of Direct-to-Consumer Genetic Testing’, New Genetics and Society, 33 (1): 60–78. Hartung, H. (2011), ‘The Limits of Development? Narratives of Growing Up / Growing Old in Narrative’, Amerikastudien / American Studies, 56 (1): 45–66. Ingold, T. (2007), Lines: A Brief History, Oxon: Routledge. Lawrence, S. E. (2011), Just Move Forward: The Simple Truth about Living with Huntington’s Disease, Baltimore, MD: PublishAmerica. Lock, M., J. Freeman, R. Sharples, and S. Lloyd (2006), ‘When It Runs in the Family: Putting Susceptibility Genes in Perspective’, Public Understanding of Science, 15 (3): 277–300. Nayar, P. K. (2016), ‘Autobiogenography: Genomes and Life Writing’, a / b: Auto / Biography Studies, 31 (3): 509–25. Nayar, P. K. (2022), ‘Toxic Nature: Narratives of Biocultural Precarity’, in S. Slovic and P. Remien (eds), Nature and Literary Studies, 355–71, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Oró-Piqueras, M., and S. Falcus (2018), ‘Approaches to Old Age: Perspectives from the Click Twenty-First Century’, European Journal of English Studies, 22 (1): 1–12. Rose, N. (2008), The Politics of Life Itself: Biomedicine, Power, and Subjectivity in the Twenty-First Century, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Wexler, A. (2008), The Woman Who Walked into the Sea: Huntington’s and the Making of a Genetic Disease, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Zimmermann, M. (2012), The Poetics and Politics of Alzheimer’s Disease Life-Writing, London: Palgrave Macmillan.

450

450

451

INDEX

abject 104–6, 109, 112, 167, 289 able-bodiedness 219, 282–3, 289, 319, 430 able-mindedness 282–3, 289, 430 activism 112, 121, 156–7, 162, 226–7, 445 adolescence 8, 51–2, 57–8, 85, 129–30, 158 adulthood 8, 19, 51–3, 55–7, 59, 109, 192, 295, 297, 300, 328, 337, 431 adventure 56, 66, 92, 119, 141, 151, 427–9, 432 affective knowledge 442–3, 446 affective oriented time 413 affective theory 311 affirmative ageing 257, 259, 262 affirmative old age 63, 66, 167, 258, 264, 309 African futurism 99 African-American 161, 229, 231, 310, 338–9, 342, 363–7, 369 African-American literature 365, 371 Afro-Amerindian 368 age effects 152, 203, 205, 207–9, 331 age identity 110 age norm 51, 57 age stereotypes 311 Age(ing) Studies 1–3, 151, 153, 158–9, 163, 309, 311, 325, 363, 365 age-appropriate casting 29, 332 age-effects 207, 332 ageing and gender 164, 179, 350 ageing as decline 2, 12 ageing bodies 77, 80, 170, 259, 275–6, 311, 345, 366, 404, 410 ageing criminal 116, 122 ageing detective 116, 122 ageing female protagonists 355 ageing femininity 122, 141, 152, 204, 328–31, 407 ageing in place 378 ageing masculinities 3, 140, 144 ageing masculinity 179 ageing studies 2, 7–8, 91, 94, 112, 126, 140, 151, 153, 155, 225, 227–31, 233–4, 255, 264, 269–70, 281, 286, 289, 309, 311, 337 ageing women 15, 130, 139, 142, 203, 258, 311, 350, 372, 403

ageism 2, 25, 27–8, 35, 43, 63, 88, 103, 107, 109, 115–16, 122, 171, 198, 215, 230, 232, 264, 270–2, 274, 281, 283, 285, 287, 289, 311, 357, 367, 379 agency 44, 57, 59, 99, 111, 141, 153, 159, 172, 206, 225, 228, 230, 232–4, 256, 263, 269, 284, 295, 329, 334, 370, 419, 429–30, 432 alienation 27–8, 31, 42, 96, 144, 195, 232, 409 alienation effect 27 alterity 247, 250, 393 Alzheimer 18, 77, 85, 104, 118, 259–60, 281–2, 284–5, 288, 313, 316, 341, 346, 420 Alzheimer’s Disease 104, 259–60, 284, 316, 341 Amerindian 233, 310, 365, 368 Amerindian ancestors 368, 372 analeptic narrative 444 ancestors 338, 342, 344, 346, 353, 359, 363–5, 367–9, 371–2, 384, 397, 403 animals 120, 205, 262, 300, 427, 434 anocriticism 152, 155, 158 apocalyptic 98–9, 104, 119, 269, 271, 273, 275 apocalyptic 98–9, 104, 119, 269, 271, 273, 275 aristotelian drama 27 asexuality 261 asociality 317 asociality / sociality 296, 317, 319 autobiographical 42, 52, 54–6, 297, 304, 329, 350, 372, 383, 394, 410, 419 autobiography 440 autoethnographical 152, 203 autonomy 17, 63, 67, 77–8, 118, 215, 228, 233, 260, 286, 294, 296, 298, 300, 344, 372, 434 bame 180, 184 Bantam 413, 416, 419 Bildungsroman 3, 7–8, 11–12, 14–18, 20, 168, 359, 371 black 18, 28, 44, 77, 81, 107, 110, 156, 161–4, 180, 225–7, 230–4, 259, 284, 286, 310, 318, 331, 342, 344–6, 359, 364–7, 370–2, 405, 408, 410, 429 Black female protagonist 310

452

Black women 44, 156, 161, 227, 230–4, 364–7, 370, 372 bodily and cognitive deterioration 405 body politic 249, 251, 272 border 98, 172, 413, 422, 431 burden narrative 153, 271 burden of care 94–5, 285 canonical dramas 152, 204, 208 care work 95, 213–16, 218–19, 314 caregivers 77, 86, 88, 215–16, 259, 285, 288, 439– 40, 442 caregiving 77–8, 85, 88, 215, 234, 282, 284–5, 289, 314 care-home narrative 332 caring about 435 changeling narrative 97 childhood 8, 16–19, 46, 51–5, 59, 78, 85, 92, 130, 180, 231, 263, 300, 311, 320, 337, 340–1, 343, 349, 351–2, 354–5, 358, 368, 395, 407, 416, 422, 431, 434 children’s literature 3, 8, 51–3, 55–7, 59 chrononormativity 261 chronotransgressive 261 cinema 125, 139, 172, 179, 191, 196, 205, 213, 215–17, 219, 221–2, 255–6, 258–61, 284, 313, 315, 317, 319, 321, 332 climate change 153, 269–73, 275 colonization 104, 170, 225–6, 228–32, 234 comedy 7, 117, 119, 128, 137–45, 183, 213, 219, 329, 331, 355, 399, 415 comic 8, 27, 35, 75–81, 83, 85–8, 107, 116, 119, 121, 128, 138–9, 144, 204, 301, 318, 320, 330, 334, 406 commercial cinema 258 compulsory youthfulness 282–3, 289, 430 contingency 40, 184, 193, 247, 295, 298–9, 301 continuity theory 378 COVID-19 77, 103, 108, 334, 422 creativity 14, 19, 39–41, 44, 128, 191–3, 195, 198, 214, 222, 333, 419 creativity in old age 193 crime fiction 115, 122 critical gerontology 225–30, 233–4, 378 cultural change 391, 394, 398 cultural gerontology 14, 20, 133, 159, 228, 256–7, 309 cultural representations 3, 138, 157–61, 213, 269, 311, 337 decline narrative 11–12, 20, 27–8, 39, 41, 43, 170, 298, 309–10, 350, 355

Index

decolonial 153, 169, 225, 227 degeneration 13, 92, 271, 350 dementia 2–3, 8, 20, 26, 63, 66, 69–70, 77, 85–6, 88, 104, 109, 116, 118–20, 122, 137, 153, 182, 184–5, 193–4, 229, 259–60, 281–2, 284–9, 310, 313–21, 329, 386, 409, 418–20, 430, 441, 445 demodystopia 93 demonized 107, 391 desire 16, 45, 52, 54, 67, 78, 104, 110–11, 128–31, 133, 143, 167, 171–2, 174–5, 193, 203–4, 207–9, 257, 259, 261–2, 275, 297, 328, 354–5, 357, 365, 369–70, 395, 398, 403, 408, 419, 421 detachment 384, 436 detective fiction 3, 7–8, 115–17, 119, 121 difference 1, 53, 57, 99, 103, 151, 158, 180–1, 227–8, 240, 242, 246–7, 257–8, 262, 269, 305, 311, 346, 397, 433 disability 3, 20, 51, 115, 120, 132, 138, 153, 161–2, 167, 215–20, 222, 228, 281–6, 289, 302, 319, 349, 385 disengagement 13, 246, 378–2, 436 disengagement theory 378 documentary theatre 8, 25, 27, 31 double standard of ageing 15, 131 drama 2, 25–29, 31–3, 35, 56–7, 91, 117, 140, 143–4, 197, 203, 205–9, 213, 222, 273, 311, 313, 315, 318, 320, 325, 331, 359, 398, 404, 408 dramatic comedies 325, 333 dramaturgies 333 dream 12, 14, 44, 67, 110, 174, 216–22, 359, 369, 430 dystopia 96, 108, 270 ecofeminism 259, 263 embodied 1, 3, 26, 83, 108, 151–3, 181–5, 205, 214, 227, 233, 246, 248, 294, 299, 315–18, 320, 341, 346, 370, 372, 385, 396, 432, 435 embodiment 32, 44, 94, 105, 151, 174, 182–3, 215, 233, 249, 257, 272, 295, 297, 300, 315, 343–4, 365, 408, 413 émigré literature 310, 393 emotions 2, 28, 56, 78, 119, 130, 142, 144, 209, 222, 260–1, 264, 310 end of life 13, 75, 77, 79, 81, 83, 85, 87–8, 180, 256, 294 entrapment 112, 231, 405 epic theatre 27 equinox 413, 418–19, 422 erectile dysfunction 183, 185 estrangement 27 eternal youth 92, 255

453

Index

ethnicity 3, 115, 122, 139, 153, 167, 225–7, 229, 255, 262, 309, 311, 379, 387, 413 ethno-psychiatry 380 family values 239 fantasy fiction 91, 93, 95, 97 feelings 13, 18, 53, 55–6, 59, 78, 95, 171–2, 260–1, 264, 269, 293, 327, 351–2, 354, 356, 358, 364–5, 393, 396, 417, 421 female ageing body 131, 406 female desire 130, 204, 328 female identity 230, 262, 264, 350, 365 femininities 128, 163 feminism 107, 152, 155–9, 161, 163, 255, 260, 366 feminist theory 155–7, 160, 164, 366 finitization 311, 413–18, 421 finitude 88, 295, 299–300, 302, 311, 413–15, 417, 420 forgetfulness 42–3, 314, 419, 431 forgetting 118, 259, 316, 320, 342–3, 382, 391, 395, 399, 419, 430 fourth age 233–4, 284, 430 friendship 16–18, 58, 107, 117, 128–33, 196–7, 221, 260, 329, 415–18, 422 gay men 139, 170–2, 175–6, 185 gaze 81, 99, 247, 250, 256–9, 261, 263–4, 359, 408 gender 2–3, 12, 20, 26, 52, 97, 99, 104, 115, 122, 128, 138–43, 151, 153, 155–64, 169–70, 176, 179–82, 204–5, 215, 229–30, 234, 239, 242, 244, 255–6, 259–60, 262, 309–11, 314, 327–8, 330, 350, 354–9, 363, 379, 427 generational conflict 261, 327 generational inheritance 174 generational time 91, 97, 270, 276 generations 17, 59, 109, 138, 157, 161, 182, 184, 227, 261–3, 270, 274–6, 314–16, 318, 337, 339, 342–3, 346, 349, 352–3, 363, 380–1, 383, 385, 396–7, 399, 408 genetic responsibility 441, 445, 447 genre 2, 7–8, 11–15, 20, 25, 64, 76, 91, 96, 103, 112, 138, 140–1, 143, 145, 179, 185, 192–3, 331, 364–5, 372, 386, 398, 427 geriaction 182 geronticide 108, 270–1, 274 gerotranscendent 39–40, 45 global ageing 2 global care chain 219 global north 12, 168, 170, 225, 234, 256, 259 global south 91, 93, 98–9, 169–70, 176, 229 gothic 7–8, 103–9, 111–12, 316, 408

grandchildren’s literature 396, 399 graphic narrative 75–7, 82–3, 88 growth 11–12, 14–16, 18, 20, 39, 44, 57, 104, 180, 240, 276, 298–9, 316, 350, 364, 428, 432 haptic 257–8, 262 health 15, 44, 64–7, 69–70, 82–3, 85, 95, 103, 108, 127, 132–3, 141, 167, 169, 215, 226, 271–3, 275, 283–5, 293, 301, 303–4, 310, 314, 326, 378–9, 395, 430, 432, 434, 443 hegemonic 2, 41, 144, 152, 162, 179–85, 226, 256, 258, 263–4, 414 heist 119, 121, 145 heteronormative 129, 153, 162, 167, 173–5, 180, 185, 255, 258–9, 264, 331 heteronormative family 167, 173–5, 185, 331 hindutva 246, 251 hollywood 127, 137, 139–40, 152, 179–80, 183, 185, 205–6, 255–8, 263, 440 home care 213–17, 219–22, 288 homosexuality 129, 176 horror 8, 26, 86, 91, 96, 105, 108–9, 191, 255, 259, 261, 281, 316, 343, 396, 445 horror cinema 261 humour 78, 112, 117, 128, 132–133, 138, 140, 142, 144–5, 183, 284, 287, 289, 331, 366, 384, 406, 416 Huntington’s Disease 310, 439, 443, 445, 447 illness 3, 8, 20, 63–7, 69–70, 78, 81, 85, 88, 94–5, 105, 129, 132–3, 228, 295–6, 299–301, 303–4, 313, 316, 330, 355, 379–80, 409–10, 416, 420, 440–1, 443 immobility 311, 404–5, 410 immortality 46, 92, 96, 98, 106, 392 improvement 182–5, 213, 215, 244 indianness 243, 246–7, 251 indigenous 77, 156, 225–6, 228–9, 231, 233, 242, 263, 370, 372, 377, 387 intergenerational 8, 16–17, 20, 51, 56, 58, 77, 82, 107–8, 111–12, 129, 152–3, 157, 161, 164, 173–5, 182–5, 228–34, 260–2, 264, 270–1, 273, 276, 310, 327, 338, 381, 383 intergenerational dialogue 8, 51 intergenerational justice 153 intergenerational reciprocity 173 intergenerational relations 153, 232, 234, 260, 276 intergenerational relationships 51, 58, 111–12, 185, 260, 264, 273, 310 internalized homophobia 171–3, 175 inter-racial 184

454

intersectional 1, 3, 152–3, 155, 157–61, 229–30, 255, 262, 309 intersectionality 156–62, 164, 227, 309 interspecies 429, 434, 436 intertextuality 52 invisibility 14, 98, 110, 121, 128, 161, 170, 174, 176, 311, 365, 396, 404, 407 isolation 19, 184, 283, 296, 305, 315, 381–2, 409, 413, 418, 427, 430–1, 433, 436 journey 12, 15–19, 54, 67, 137, 153, 172, 194, 206, 218, 320–1, 332, 351, 353, 364–5, 368–9, 383, 440, 444 kinship 53, 57–9, 228, 315, 319, 397 Künstlerroman 40, 42 late style 3, 39–40, 152, 191 lateness 98, 191–3, 195, 269 lesbian 65, 171, 173, 175 LGBT 139 lifecourse 1–2, 7–8, 20, 25, 27, 35, 41, 51–3, 103, 105, 133, 141, 145, 156–7, 226–7, 283, 289, 297, 303, 309, 332–3, 356, 413 life extension 91, 96 life review 2, 8, 13–14, 17–20, 46, 63–5, 67 linear progress 244 literary imagination 230, 339, 377 loneliness 65, 68–9, 96, 127, 132–3, 231, 263, 351, 356, 404–5, 409, 434 long-term care 213–15, 217, 222, 314, 430 mainstream cinema 139, 255–6, 258, 260 Māori 310, 377–84, 386 Māori renaissance 381–2, 384 marginalization 19, 185, 208, 226, 229, 286, 356, 404, 433 marriage 11–12, 14–16, 56–7, 122, 130, 132, 155, 168, 173, 217–18, 285, 318, 328, 341, 351–2, 354, 358–9, 363, 372, 415, 34 masculinities 3, 140, 144–5, 162–4, 176 masculinity 17, 108, 140–1, 144, 152, 158, 160, 162, 164, 179–85, 258, 350, 355 mask of ageing 395 maternal womb 409 maternity 261 meaningfulness 436 memoir 3, 8, 64, 68–70, 75, 77–85, 153, 294–6, 300, 303, 305, 386, 415, 418–20, 439 memories 13, 16–19, 27, 31, 52–5, 59, 118–19, 257, 259, 302, 310, 320, 327, 337, 339–43, 345–6,

Index

350–2, 354, 359, 365, 368, 371, 382, 391, 394–8, 406, 409–10, 416, 418, 420, 422, 430, 434, 444 memory 3, 14–15, 26–7, 31, 42–3, 46, 53–5, 77, 82, 98, 118–19, 122, 182, 229, 259, 264, 283, 286–8, 294, 310–11, 320–1, 327, 337, 339–45, 364–5, 367–8, 370–2, 382, 386, 394, 396–7, 405, 407, 413, 418–20, 422, 429 memory loss 26, 43, 118–19, 122, 259, 264, 283, 418–19, 429 memory narratives 394 menopause 99, 158, 180, 258, 363, 366, 406 metaphor 34, 42–3, 45–6, 151–3, 157, 173, 198, 206, 233, 239–40, 246, 248, 250, 264, 276, 285–6, 310, 408, 410, 420 metonymic 270 midlife progress novel 11–12, 359, 364–5, 372 mimicry 429 modernity 195, 225–8, 234, 242, 244–5, 298, 326, 393, 430 modernization theory 244, 246 monstrous 106–7, 112, 171 mother 13, 16–17, 28, 54–6, 70, 78, 80, 85–8, 99, 106, 108, 110, 128–30, 161–3, 217–18, 225, 231– 2, 239–40, 242–51, 260–2, 282, 286, 288, 318, 328, 330, 341–2, 350, 353, 384, 386, 392, 394, 397–8, 406–10, 413, 415, 417–22, 434, 441, 444 motherhood 12, 259, 261, 264, 392, 413 narrative 1–3, 7–8, 11–16, 18, 20, 26–8, 31, 33–5, 39, 41, 43–4, 46, 63–70, 75–78, 80–3, 85–6, 88, 97–8, 106–7, 112, 117, 121–2, 126–7, 133, 141–2, 152–3, 157, 159–61, 163, 167–70, 180, 182–3, 185, 194, 196, 206, 216–17, 241, 247, 256, 261, 271, 281, 285–286, 295, 297–8, 300, 304, 309–10, 315, 317, 319–21, 326, 329, 331–2, 340–6, 350, 355–6, 364, 366, 368, 370, 377, 379, 381, 383, 385–7, 394–6, 409, 418–19, 427, 429–30, 432, 435, 439 narrative foreclosure 441 narrative literature 377, 387 narrative of decline 26, 34, 41, 64, 167, 180, 182–3, 185, 206, 256, 297–8, 326, 329 narratives 1–3, 7–8, 11–12, 14–16, 18, 20, 26, 28–9, 33–34, 40, 43, 51, 63–7, 70, 75–9, 81, 83, 85, 87–8, 91, 97–9, 104–5, 111, 115–16, 118–22, 125, 139–41, 144–5, 153, 157–60, 164, 167, 170–3, 175, 195, 205, 215, 240, 243, 256, 260, 269–71, 273–6, 285, 310–11, 313, 317, 332–4, 338–9, 342–3, 345–6, 349–51, 358, 364–5, 367, 372, 383–4, 386, 394, 396, 436, 440–2, 446 national identity 349, 351–352, 354, 358 natural disaster 275

455

Index

nature 2, 8, 13–14, 16, 18–19, 25–6, 33–5, 42–3, 55, 103, 105–6, 153, 257, 262–4, 269, 276, 284, 294–5, 298, 300–1, 320, 332, 343, 370, 381, 392, 405, 413–14, 416, 419, 431, 446 neoliberal 40, 43–4, 77–8, 85, 95, 141, 225, 227–8, 230, 234, 256, 260–2, 283, 372 neoliberalism 78, 228 neuroscience 53, 205 new formalism 41 nomadic affectivity 262 non-human 262, 427–9, 434 nostalgia 14, 52, 55, 94, 111, 310, 313, 315, 383, 393 nursing homes 108, 175, 213–14, 271, 282, 286– 9, 329 old age style 40 old crone 120, 240, 242 older actors 116, 137, 139, 215, 325, 332 older women 12, 17, 42–3, 68, 70, 94, 107–8, 118, 127–8, 131, 137, 141–3, 159, 161, 164, 175, 229–30, 232, 258, 262, 264, 311, 328–9, 332, 350, 358, 364, 372, 391, 394 otherness 52, 167, 192, 195, 227–8, 370 parenthood 56, 82, 168 parents 54, 56, 75, 77–8, 81, 85, 95, 173, 175, 243, 314, 318–20, 328, 330, 338, 341, 386, 395, 397, 409, 413, 415, 418, 420–2, 430, 439, 444 Parkinson’s Disease 408, 410, 447 performance 19, 25–7, 31, 34, 67, 144, 152, 160–1, 191, 198, 203–7, 209, 250, 319, 328–9, 332, 334, 357, 359, 365, 387, 407–8, 410 performative prolepsis 310, 441, 445 performativity 3, 26–7, 204 personhood 43, 77, 330, 342, 430, 432 phallocentric 259 placenta 260 pleasure 13, 18, 51, 69, 93, 131, 219, 258–9, 263 poetry 2–3, 7–8, 16, 39–41, 43–5, 56–7, 70, 311, 359, 381, 386, 413–19, 422 positive ageing strategy 379 postcolonial 3, 115, 151–3, 225, 227–31, 233–4, 239–40, 242–4, 246–8, 250–1, 339, 345, 366, 427 postcolonial studies 3, 227 post-human 1, 260, 262 post-industrial 349, 355 precariousness 404, 436 predator 139, 143, 167, 171–2, 175 presboempathic 257–9, 262 presbyopic vision 257 prime-time 126–7, 141

productivity 63, 65, 67–8, 141, 192, 228, 261, 380, 430, 432 prospective teleology 446 punitive 428 queer ageing 3, 98, 152, 167–9, 171, 173, 175 queer community 167, 170, 172, 174 queer families 173 queer futures 174 queer invisibility 176 race 20, 44, 51, 115, 122, 139–40, 153, 156, 161–4, 167, 215, 225–7, 229–30, 234, 255, 262, 309, 311, 333, 338, 354, 371, 413, 427 racialized / racial / racialization 88, 153, 157, 180, 184, 217, 225–7, 229–34, 240, 338, 340, 343, 367, 369 recovery 12, 17–18, 64, 66, 70, 183, 315–17, 339–40, 343, 367, 369, 429 regeneration 260, 353, 357, 416 regression 297, 407 Reifung 12, 14–15, 17 Reifungsroman 11–14, 17, 20, 311, 350–1, 353, 364 reincarnation 18, 92 relational turn 152, 213, 215, 217, 219, 221 relationality 144, 152–3, 157, 162–4, 313, 315 re-memory 339, 343, 364–5, 367–8, 370 reminiscence 13–14, 17–20, 26, 64 reproductive futurism 94 resilience 8, 14, 55, 301, 304, 427, 432 resistance 41, 93, 95, 112, 142, 157, 159–61, 163, 184, 192, 225–7, 229, 243, 249, 269, 275, 365, 369, 406 retirement 15–16, 29, 85, 116–17, 121–2, 127–8, 168, 173, 181, 185, 271, 350–1, 355–8, 366, 378, 380 returns 29, 34, 52, 81–2, 207–8, 217, 311, 344, 349, 352, 355, 397, 407, 431 revenge 8, 119–20, 338, 343, 431 romantic comedies 137, 139–40, 183 rurality 313, 315, 320 science fiction 7–8, 91–2, 96, 99, 181 scopophilia 256, 259 second childhood 92, 407 selfhood 12, 242, 244, 298, 300, 317, 442 self-reliance 70, 144–5, 304–5, 338 senescence 51, 93, 106, 240, 364, 403, 409, 440 sex 33–4, 45, 103, 128, 130–1, 133, 143, 156, 159, 164, 169–70, 172, 179, 183, 203, 258, 327 sexism 115 sexual 14, 17, 45, 58, 69, 83, 104, 110, 128, 131, 139, 143–4, 155, 157, 167, 169–76, 183, 185, 203,

456

209, 232, 255, 258, 261, 264, 327, 330, 342, 351, 364–5, 367, 384, 392 sexual vigour 167, 170 sexuality 12, 20, 34, 45, 54, 57, 97, 107, 111, 115, 122, 127–31, 138–9, 141, 143, 155–6, 162–3, 167, 169–71, 175–6, 203–5, 209, 255, 258–9, 262, 264, 283, 309, 328, 330, 333, 344, 355, 359, 379, 413 shame 34, 93, 138, 170–1, 175, 183, 207, 214, 261, 303 shared vulnerability 414, 421 silence 168, 249–50, 275, 329, 384, 396, 405, 408 silvering of audiences 133 silvering screen 176, 216, 222, 281–5, 287, 289 social protest 8, 116 socialist realism 392 sociality 296, 317, 319 socio-cultural norms 139 solidarity 16, 83, 157, 261, 270, 365, 414 solitude 39, 69, 381, 408–9, 427, 430–1, 434 sovereignty 428 spectator 35, 205–6, 256, 259 speculative fiction 91–2, 96–7, 99, 112 speech 33, 76, 80, 161, 231, 233, 249, 319, 340, 379, 409, 429, 435 stars 54–5, 96, 138, 152, 179–85, 205, 257, 440 stereotypes 8, 11, 13, 15, 19, 25, 34–5, 45, 51, 64, 88, 122, 126–8, 138, 144–5, 156, 159, 161, 172, 185, 195, 216, 247, 311, 325, 363, 365 style icon 182 subversion 34, 41, 115, 159–61, 331 subversive 8, 15–16, 98, 138–41, 157, 160, 174, 229, 251, 258 successful ageing 2–3, 12, 15, 39, 44, 63–5, 68, 70, 129, 139, 152, 167, 173, 176, 181, 185, 228, 230, 256–7, 283–4, 298, 349–50, 356, 430, 434 suicide 17–19, 108, 119, 204, 208, 314, 356, 407, 419, 431, 433–4, 440, 445 survival 12, 231, 270, 285, 337, 380, 384, 397, 427–8, 432, 436 taking care 163, 435 television series 125–9, 133 the other 16, 26, 70, 81, 85, 96, 103, 105, 115, 131, 156–8, 161–2, 215, 227–8, 239, 241–2, 247, 250, 256, 261, 285, 301, 304, 310–11, 316, 320–1, 326–7, 332, 342, 368, 383, 385, 394, 398, 413–15, 418, 420–2, 431, 434, 444 theatre 8, 25–31, 35, 181, 204, 206–8, 304, 311, 325–9, 331–4, 403–4, 410 third age 116, 121

Index

time acquired 302 affective-oriented 311, 413, 415, 417, 419 agricultural 246 biological 246 borrowed 394 chronological 384, 416 chronometric 98, 413–14, 416, 422 cyclical 432 different 164 dual 418, 421 erased 419 finite 420 future 421 geological 1, 92, 246 harmonious 317 heteronormative 264 historical 246 human 97, 432 intergenerational 327 linear 98, 263 lived 263, 296, 418 mythical 246 prime 126 secondhand 398 space 343 teleological 263 transcend 338 unitary 242 trope 85, 92, 96, 104, 109, 167, 171–2, 174, 176, 183, 193, 219, 239–40, 250, 259, 262, 311, 332, 350, 352, 357–8, 404 uncanny 56, 108–9, 112, 395 vampire 103, 110, 255, 263 Verfremdungseffekt 28 vigilantism 116 village prose 391, 393–4, 399 violence 57–8, 112, 155, 168–70, 232, 248, 263, 286, 303, 339, 352 visibility 116, 133, 143, 152, 161, 328, 365, 372 visuality 82, 257–8, 263 Vollendungsroman 11 vulnerability 103, 105, 128, 132–3, 144, 183, 219–20, 259, 262, 269, 293–5, 304, 311, 334, 343, 385, 403–4, 407–8, 410, 413–14, 418, 421 whiteness 44, 77, 184–5, 226, 232 whitening 184

Index

widowhood 350, 354 wisdom 14, 39, 68, 99, 111, 121, 127–8, 198, 246, 328, 330, 333, 338, 344, 370, 380 writing 1, 51–8, 63–70, 91, 98–9, 122, 161, 168, 192, 194, 197, 203, 221, 233, 251, 269–70, 274, 293, 295–6, 301–2, 304, 349–55, 359, 366, 368, 382– 3, 386, 391, 396, 403–4, 407, 416, 419, 439, 445 xenophobia 251

457

young adult 56 young adulthood 295, 431 youth 12, 34–5, 46, 52–3, 58, 66, 86, 91–6, 107, 110, 115, 117, 153, 158, 161–2, 167–9, 171, 173, 181–2, 192, 209, 239–40, 244, 246–7, 250–1, 255–7, 260, 263, 274, 285, 331–2, 351, 357, 366, 392, 398, 407, 421, 428, 430 youth-centric 192, 255–7, 263 youthful structure of the look 35, 256–8, 263, 359

458

458