A psychomanteum is a small dimly lit chamber, or lit only by a candle with a mirror angled so that it reflects nothing but darkness, intended to communicate with spirits of the dead. Developed by Raymond Moody (a psychiatrist), as a psychospiritual medium of expressing grief, the psychomanteum was used largely as a tool to help people struggling to deal with bereavement and loss. Subjects were asked to enter the chamber and gaze into the mirror to communicate with their deceased loved ones. More than the actual spirits talking to these people, Moody found the subjects’ own voices speaking to them — the alter ego. It wasn’t important for the deceased spirit to descend, enter the mirror and talk to these people through the darkness. The mirror proved to be a tool through which the subjects found their own alter psyche speaking to them, which most of them considered as the voice of the dead. In truth, they were speaking to themselves to resolve their grief.

Max Porter uses a similar technique in his debut novel, Grief Is the Thing With Feathers . Drawing inspiration from Ted Hughes’s famous collection of poems ‘Crow: From the Life and Songs of the Crow’, Porter brings the mythological character of the Crow to life. Beginning with Emily Dickinson’s “That Love is all there is, / Is all we know of Love;” as the epigraph where one word in each line is struck through and replaced by the word ‘Crow’, Porter establishes a strong cacophony of rhymes, lines and scattered narratives that runs through the novel.

Part novella, part poetry, part essay and part fable, Grief Is the Thing With Feathers is clearly without a linguistic form and structure — which, of course, becomes the USP of the book as one treads through the scattered narrative. Interspersed with large blank spaces, Porter tells the story of a grieving father, a Ted Hughes scholar, mourning the death of his wife, as his two sons cope to understand “that something was changed. We guessed and understood that this was a new life and Dad was a different type now and we were different boys, we were brave new boys without a Mum.” The husband of course expresses sparsely, and with restriction:

“Today I got back to work.

I managed half an hour then doodled.

I drew a picture of the funeral. Everybody had crow faces, except for the boys.”

When Sylvia Plath committed suicide, Hughes remained silent, at least in his work and poetry, for over 30 years. And then, in 1998, he published a collection of poems, Birthday Letters, in one of which he wrote to his son, Nicholas, that the only way he could deal with Plath’s death was by not writing about it directly but through other symbols, indirectly. Porter’s novel is an extrapolation of Hughes’s symbolism. The elemental crow finds expression as an intruder, as a therapist, as a loud cacophonous browbeater, and most importantly, as the writer’s parallel/alternate psyche. In Carl Jung’s words, the crow could be the unconscious speaking as fate; as the husband fails to express his grief in the longing for his freedom to write: “Put. Me. Down, I croaked and my piss warmed / the cradle of his wing”. “I do eat baby rabbits, plunder nests, swallow filth, cheat death,” replies Crow, boasting, “I’ve written hundred of memoirs. It’s necessary for big names like me, I believe it’s called the imperative.” The crow is stubborn, ugly and dominating as it refuses to leave until it feels it isn’t needed anymore. The bereaved husband, that way, can perhaps flip-flop between being the father and the writer; the weight of both being heavier now. So, to make it lighter and feather-like, Porter helps his character with the power of personification: The crow ringing the door bell and the husband forced to greet it properly, “Hello Crow, I said. Good to finally meet you.” By this, Porter reiterates an old saying: “Pain after all demands to be felt.”

Another feature that adds to the lightness of the book is the division of its voices and points of view. The narrative, though scattered, cleverly shifts through the voices of the Dad, the Boys and the Crow. As one talks of despair as an unbearable emptiness: “The house becomes as physical encyclopaedia, of no longer-hers”, the others strew humour, mockery and sometimes innocence into the idea of absence and death: “Dad has gone. Crow is in the bathroom, where he often is because he likes the acoustics….[…]….He says SUDDEN. He says TRAUMA. He says Induced … he coughs and spits and tries again, INDUCED.

At several places, on re-reading, one also realises the fairytale-like lightness of the book that everything would be fine by the end of it. Through exceptional metaphors and semantics, Max Porter successfully crafts Grief Is the Thing With Feathers as a brilliant psychoanalytic piece of fiction, and in most identifiable spaces, a metafiction too.

Gaurav Deka is a Delhi-based writer and psychotherapist

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