Literary Studies and Human Flourishing by James F. English

Author:James F. English
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2022-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

Language in Flight

Subtitled A Journey in Flight, Loncraine’s Skybound it is also a voyage through self-grieving, a voyage from illness to fraught recovery that sets the coordinates for the book’s twinned experiential and expressional exhibitions of uplift. Even as it becomes dramatically central to the events Loncraine recounts, uplift remains ontologically ephemeral. Yet for all its transience, uplift is arrestingly materialized in the book’s language: when viewed in this sense as an affordance of style, uplift acquires a kind of legibility for her reader, becoming cumulatively palpable across the memoir even as she testifies to its evanescence. In its stylistic guise, uplift reminds us, as Hannah Freed-Thall has persuasively done, that “affect” needn’t refer to “a single, structure-defying force or intensity” that evades representation, but may be analytically isolated in the sinews of literary form and therefore “must be read in all its specificities” (427n.12). With this mandate, I try to gauge the stakes of homing in on the formal particularities of uplift’s emotional positivity in a memoir born from agonizing recovery. To do so, I feel, is to take one step toward refusing not only the sanctimony of maintaining that amelioration has no place in a work of trauma, but also the self-gratification of dismissing as merely sentimental writers who seek to document and impart affective counterpoints to pain. For if anything, Skybound suggests that more accommodating accounts of sentimentalism’s contemporary conditions of critical and creative possibility are overdue.

Loncraine was no stranger to the promise of writing as a vehicle for rehabilitation. As an educator, she ran sessions for the charity Arts Alive Wales on “Creative Writing and Well-being.” As her mother, Trisha, observes in a moving postscript, where Rebecca “was working with schoolgirls who struggled with dyslexia, funding has been found to continue the creative writing workshops” (300). A teacher-practitioner attuned to literature’s role in human flourishing, Loncraine had to become instead the student of her own emotions, when debilitating treatment threatened the practice she loved. “I thought it had died during my illness”; but glider training revived the compulsion: “language cracks open again” and, “when I land, I’m itching to write while I can still feel the lift—flying and writing have become entwined” (91). Gliding becomes “a kind of writing into the sky, a surfacing of heart and head, a learning again” (92). It’s “as though the sky has moved through [her] on to the page,” where it motivates an “exhilarating” record of “sensations, physical and psychological,” across notebooks that subsequently became “the origins of this book” (91)—a book that simultaneously memorializes the unconventional path to reinvigoration it plots. For the cancer from which Loncraine was seeking aerial consolation would return all too soon (she died, aged forty-two, in September 2016), an outcome whose pathos, as we’ll see, returns acutely to the reader on the closing page.

Skybound thus compels us to read with a searing double vision. However immersive Loncraine’s chronicle of “both learning to fly and beginning to write again” becomes, we concurrently sense that this

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