Elders: The Long Journey Home

Abstract

The term ‘elders’ has been used to refer to those who might once have been called ‘seniors’, ‘retirees’ or ‘OAPs’ (Old Age Pensioners). The Middle English eldre—connoting wisdom and experience—signals a discomfort-zone. ‘Elders’ are us, embarked on an unknowable end-of-life journey. Similarly, ‘elder-speak’ designates an artificial manner of speaking (reduced speed, simplified vocabulary, exaggerated diction), implying that those of advanced years have limited cognition and linguistic competence. The memory- and language-losses of later years challenge literary and visual representation. We risk becoming ventriloquists, eavesdroppers, or voyeurs in our efforts to accompany the old on their last journey. Listening with ‘the third ear’ (Theodor Reik’s term, borrowed from Nietzsche)—or seeing with the third eye—potentially allows for a non-intrusive mode of understanding the old, and also ourselves. Women are often care-partners. But sometimes they are the ones cared for—part of an aging couple. My three examples will be Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel, The Buried Giant (2015); later life seen through the lens of contemporary British Object Relations psychoanalysis; and Paddy Summerfield’s photographic essay about his elderly parents, Mother and Father (2014). Read together, they underline the role of aesthetics in understanding the meanings and losses of old age.

Keywords:

• Ishiguro
• object relations
• old age
• Summerfield
• third ear
• Reik

The term ‘elders’ has recently been adopted as a way to refer with dignity to those who might once have politely been called ‘seniors’, ‘retirees’ or, in the UK, ‘OAPs’ (Old Age Pensioners). A Middle English word in origin (eldre), it connotes wisdom and experience, with a hint of quaintness. Clearly, we are in a discomfort-zone. What are we to call ourselves as we grow older?—at increasing risk of memory-loss, our former selves becoming memories to our children, our workplaces, our friends, our homes, and even ourselves. ‘Elders’ are us, seen from a distance, embarked on an unknowable end-of-life journey. In much the same way, ‘elder-speak’ designates an artificially adopted manner of speaking (reduced speed, simplified vocabulary, exaggerated diction), implying that those of advanced years have limited cognition and linguistic competence. The memory- and language-losses of later years challenge literary and visual representation. We risk becoming ventriloquists, eavesdroppers, or voyeurs in our efforts to accompany the old on their last journey. I want to suggest that listening with ‘the third ear’ (Theodor Reik’s term, borrowed from Nietzsche)—or seeing with the third eye—may allow for a non-intrusive mode of understanding the old, and also ourselves.¹ Women are often care-partners. But sometimes they are the ones cared for—part of a couple aging in or out of place. My three examples will be Kazuo Ishiguro’s cumbersome yet strangely moving novel, The Buried Giant (2015); later life seen through the lens of contemporary British Object Relations psychoanalysis; and Paddy Summerfield’s unpretentious, decade-long photographic essay about his elderly parents, Mother and Father (2014). Read together, Ishiguro’s end-of-life narrative and Summerfield’s memorial to his elderly parents underline the role of aesthetics in understanding the meanings and losses of old age. Each employs a kind of tact, or rhythm, to portray the painful losses of old age: the long journey home, together or (as each example suggests) alone.

Memory Lane

… can one write a successful novel about people who can’t recall anything? (Wood 2015)

Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel, The Buried Giant (2015) was received with lukewarm perplexity (witness James Wood’s question) (Ishiguro 2015). Characters unable to recall anything much are the least of the novel’s problems. It includes creaking devices such as delayed recognition, along with an old buffer named Sir Gawain, a perverse monastic community, a singing boy in search of his dragon-mother, and a supine dragon on its last legs. The fictional landscape includes mythical beasts and spells—a torn limb borrowed from Beowulf, and a brutal inversion of the chivalric legend of King Arthur. The banal and reassuring rhythms of Ishiguro’s narrative sometimes appear to mimic the simplified speech of its characters, as if he had fallen into an archaic version of elder-speak. But there is no nostalgia for the distant past: ‘You would have searched a long time for the sort of winding lane or tranquil meadow for which England later became celebrated’ (Ishiguro 2015: 3). The novel’s opening sentence introduces a desolate landscape of upland and marsh, its broken roads and villas long abandoned by the Romans. Demons and ogres are credible hazards for the surviving Britons who huddle together in settlements dug into the hillside like rabbit warrens. These are the Dark Ages, ‘lost in the mists of time’—a metaphor literalized in the miasma of forgetfulness covering the land, apart from a few oases of culture and learning in castles and monasteries: ‘I am sorry to paint such a picture of our country at that time, but there you are’ (Ishiguro 2015: 5). So says our chronicler.

We are a long way from Tolkien’s bucolic Shire. The past is a tangle of half-forgotten ethnic conflicts, the present taken up with survival, the future fraught with uncertainty. ‘Perhaps’ is a word that recurs like a necessary caution. Narrator and characters are chary of committing themselves: ‘perhaps God is angry about something we’ve done’; ‘Perhaps God’s so deeply ashamed of us, of something we did, that he’s wishing himself to forget’ (Ishiguro 2015: 76). Or perhaps God has forgotten all about them, and the land and its people are literally god-forsaken. The novel’s main characters, an elderly couple named Axl and Beatrice, have been pushed to the outer fringes of their settlement, far from the fire of the central chamber. They sleep in the dark, without a candle, gnawed by a sense of indefinable loss. Axl struggles to recall fragmentary images from their previous lives: ‘Had they always lived like this, just the two of them, at the periphery of the community? Or had things once been quite different?’ (Ishiguro 2015: 6). Not just for Axl and Beatrice, but also for their community, the past ‘had somehow faded into a mist as dense as that which hung over the marshes’ (Ishiguro 2015: 7). The villagers seem unable to keep anything in mind for long: a missing child, the cause of an argument, matters of fact or fantasy. The boundaries of reality and superstition are blurred, the group’s thinking and beliefs confused despite a veneer of Christianity. Yet Axl hangs onto something: a half-formed decision to set out on a long-delayed journey. The halting progress of Ishiguro’s quest-narrative, with its picaresque digressions and breaks, will stem from this decision, based on an uncertain premise—that the old couple’s son will take care of them in the distant village where he lives.

Beatrice (arthritic and ailing, but purposeful) yearns to set out. Already in the first chapter we learn about the ways in which this couple talk (or don’t talk) of their shared past; about their mutual dependence, devotion, and guilelessness: ‘They think us a foolish pair, Axl’ (Ishiguro 2015: 23), sighs Beatrice of the heedless villagers. The two elderly travellers scarcely seem to know their real goal. With their walking sticks and bundles, they set out to cross an endless unmarked plain, concentrating on their footing, ever on the watch for unknown dangers. Beatrice walks ahead as they exchange their litany: ‘Are you still there, Axl?’ while Axl takes up the rear (‘Still here, Princess’). Their call and response yokes the two like a tenuous lifeline: Beatrice anxious, Axl reassuring; loss and attachment, attachment and loss—the rhythm that defines Ishiguro’s entire narrative. At the end, it will be Beatrice who eagerly goes ahead, while Axl lingers miserably behind. The incremental repetition sustains the couple like a mantra as they travel across the landscape of the great plain with its ancient barrows, until they reach a sunken Roman road and its Saxon travellers. As they take shelter from a storm in a ruined Roman villa, Axl half-recalls a time of wars and burning houses. Sheltering in the ruin with them are a boatman and, bearing a fierce grudge against him, an old woman—a wife separated from her husband when the boatman ferried him to an island but left her behind. This is the first time we have heard about couples impelled to undertake such journeys, or about the offshore island. We infer that the same ordeal of embarkation awaits our pair, and that they too long to be together even after their crossing.

Beatrice questions the ferryman, who tells them that every couple, however, strong their bond, must separately put before him their most treasured memories before they embark, or—as a special dispensation—before they are permitted to walk together afterwards. The ferrymen’s experience lets him see the resentment, anger, hatred, or barrenness that may lie beneath a couple’s claim to a unique bond of love. We soon realize that Ishiguro’s novel is a fable about memory; but one that works both ways. The landscape entombs long-ago betrayals and fierce destruction. Wounds ostensibly healed over by time still fester. Buried giants may lie beneath the barrows; mistrust underlies each encounter. Ishiguro implies that memory-loss enables Britons to cohabit with their Saxon neighbours. Meanwhile, his warrior-figures are driven by their seething enmities and thirst for revenge. The Saxon warrior Wistan uses Axl and Beatrice as cover for a revenge-plot that includes slaying the dragon Querig as a means to Saxon racial supremacy. Working against him, the ancient British Gawain—a Monty Python of the Round Table, with rusty chainmail and weary old nag—secretly guards the dragon in its dying sleep. Between them, they keep the old hostilities alive, feinting and fighting until Gawain crumples like cardboard beneath the sword of the younger warrior. Slowly, Wistan and Gawain recognize Axl as a former hero and peacekeeper, once working to create trust between British and Saxon villagers in an Arthurian past stained by treachery and violence. Successive disclosures chip away at the seeming banality of the couple’s exchanges about the past (long-ago jealousies, a green cloak); memories that Axl soothes and smothers whenever Beatrice retrieves a still faintly glowing coal.

Ishiguro’s meandering narrative is full of suspicion. Seemingly random encounters bring casual killings, contrivances and conspiracies litter the road where chivalry once supposedly ruled. Unexpected obstacles and missions send the old couple veering off-course. Somewhere in the mountains lies the dragon whose breath is identified as the cause of the universal memory-problem afflicting the population. Ishiguro’s explanations are as laborious as those of his characters and his narrative as stilted as their conversations; if a coracle floating down-river can get caught in the rushes, it will. Grotesque ogres and vermin-like pixies, sinister monks and canine monsters, meld into a texture as makeshift as the woven door that Beatrice had constructed for their dark and drafty room back in the warren-like village. Old wagons that speak, the hidden secrets of swordsmanship, obscure instruments of torture, a tower of fiery immolation, a subterranean passage: the grotesque assemblage drives events that are by turn gruesome, improbable, comical, and—unexpectedly—poignant. Motivation and direction prove as elusive as memory; volatile emotions flare like mob-rule. The puzzled reader experiences something resembling the memory-loss of the two old people on their haphazard journey. Forced to adopt their narrowed perspective, kept in the dark along with them, we lose our bearings: where are we headed? Only in the final pages of the novel is Ishiguro’s familiar terrain revealed to us as the archeology of separation and loss—unexamined lives faced up to at the last; death welcomed or postponed; but always experienced alone.

A love-story, or a tale of undying hatred? Underlying the ancient landscape are the unquiet memories of past slaughters and genocides that will again give rise to war. We learn of the ancient strife between Britons and Saxons that King Arthur had once brought to a brutal close. When the warrior Wistan recalls Axl as a hero, visiting Saxon villages to spread peace-treaties, he wonders aloud: ‘isn’t it a strange thing when a man calls another brother who only yesterday slaughtered his children?’ (Ishiguro 2015: 112). Ancient rancour surfaces in the archaic topography of a fortified monastery, where invaders and defenders had once died within sight of each other. Axl muses on pity and horror, but Wistan knows better: ‘I’ve seen dark hatred as bottomless as the sea on the faces of old women and tender children, and some days felt such hatred myself’ (Ishiguro 2015: 142). The monkish community remains cruel and divided—prayer and punishment, or confrontation with a disavowed past? Their persecutory religion turns unacknowledged hatred against their own brothers. Even the healer-monk, Jonas, whom Beatrice consults, has been exposed to the birds in a cruel contraption devised by the monks themselves. From him Beatrice learns that the cause of the universal forgetfulness is the dragon Querig. But the old monk asks: ‘Is it not better some things remain hidden from our minds?’ (Ishiguro 2015: 157). The mist covers the bad memories along with the good. But Beatrice thinks otherwise: ‘Axl and I would remember our life together, whatever its shape, for it’s been a thing dear to us’ (Ishiguro 2015: 157). She knows that their answers to the boatman’s questions will decide their fate. Ishiguro’s novel asks: is better to confront the past or to suffer the distorting effects of forgetfulness? Memory or repression?

Ishiguro’s fable abuts on modern wars and genocides, where the bones of the past lie buried just beneath the surface: ‘A fine green valley. A pleasant copse in the springtime. Dig its mold, and not far beneath the daisies and buttercups come the dead’ (Ishiguro 2015: 171). Later on, the narrator addresses us directly:

Some of you will have fine monuments by which the living may remember the evil done to you. Some of you will have only crude wooden crosses or painted rocks, while yet others of you must remain hidden in the shadows of history. You are in any case part of an ancient procession, and so it is always possible the giant’s cairn was erected to mark the site of some such tragedy long ago when young innocents were slaughtered in war. (Ishiguro 2015: 267)

The anticlimactic death of the torpid dragon (dispatched with a single sword-stroke) poses the same question. Merlin’s ancient spell at least produced a temporary peace. The superannuated Gawain reasons: ‘Without this she-dragon’s breath, would peace ever have come? Look how we live now, sir! Old foes as cousins, village by village’ (Ishiguro 2015: 285). Wistan, for whom wrongs forgotten are wrongs unpunished, asks in return (like the Kant of ‘Perpetual Peace’) ‘How can … a peace hold forever built on slaughter and a magician’s trickery?’ (Ishiguro 2015: 286). He prophesies a future emptied of Britons, ‘a Saxon land, with no more trace of your people’s time here than a flock or two of sheep wandering the hills untended’ (Ishiguro 2015: 297). While Beatrice objects that Britons and Saxons have hitherto lived peacefully side by side, Axl speculates: ‘Who knows what will come when quick-tongued men make ancient grievances rhyme with fresh desire for land and conquest?’ (Ishiguro 2015: 297). Emptied out after slaying both dragon and Sir Gawain, the feeble guardians of a previous order, Wistan is the melancholy harbinger of ethnic cleansing and territorial greed: ‘The giant, once well buried, now stirs’ (Ishiguro 2015: 297). The buried giant of Ishiguro’s title is as old as pre-history itself.

Freud uses the archeological metaphor to quarry the workings of repression; uncovering the past supposedly frees the psyche and allows it to turn towards life. Conservatism and repetition (the silent work of the death drive) together tend towards stasis and death. Ishiguro ambiguates the Freudian myth, just as he revises the legend of Arthurian chivalry in order to uncover treachery and slaughter. The alternative—that forgetting allows an uneasy truce with the past—renders the present banal and anemic. Diminished meaning and restricted affect (mimicked in Ishiguro’s flat prose) are the price paid for burying ancient hatreds. This turns out to be the case even with the devoted old couple, Axl with his courtly elder-speak (‘Princess’), Beatrice with her anxiety about losing him. Their too-considerate exchanges mask old wrongs that each has done the other. Memory-loss has enabled their wounds to heal. But beneath the scar tissue is a hidden site of trauma. Beatrice was once, briefly, unfaithful. Axl withdrew in bitterness. Their son left them in anger. Far from being alive in another village, he died in a plague. To punish Beatrice for her infidelity, Axl forbade her to visit their son’s grave, preventing each from grieving fully. He confesses:

A darker betrayal than the small infidelity cuckolded me a month or two. … a craving to punish, sir. I spoke and acted forgiveness, yet kept locked through long years some small chamber in my heart that yearned for vengeance. (Ishiguro 2015: 313)

In Axl’s craving to punish (compare the cruelty inflicted by the monks), we see the toxicity of failed mourning. Yet, ‘A wound that healed slowly, but heal it did’. As Axl himself declares about the flaws and breaks in their relationship: ‘God will know the slow tread of an old couple’s love for each other, and understand how black shadows make part of its whole’ (Ishiguro 2015: 313).

In the novel’s closing chapter, the boatman (perhaps the same one we met at the start, or another) is the only witness to their final separation. We see Axl and Beatrice through his eyes: a frail, rain-soaked pair slowly descending from their tired horse, Gawain’s ancient mount. Amplifying the narrator’s role, the boatman records the tender, troubled parting of two elderly people with undimmed yearnings and still-fiery passions. Beatrice is feverish, hearing the sea, talking of an island where she will find her son. During their journey, Axl has made Beatrice promise:

Should memories return, and among them of times I disappointed you. Or yet of dark deeds I may once have done … Promise me this at least. Promise, princess, you’ll not forget what you feel in your heart for me at this moment. (Ishiguro 2015: 258)

In turn, Beatrice confesses: ‘it came to me there were dark things I did to you once, husband’ (Ishiguro 2015: 282). Axl remembers ‘something at the far edge of his memory: a stormy night, a bitter hurt, a loneliness opening before him like unfathomed waters’. He asks: ‘What became of our son, princess?’ (Ishiguro 2015: 282). The boatman delicately probes their past. We learn at first only that Beatrice remembers walking with Axl, carefully carrying eggs back from market in a basket—an image of their exaggerated mutual care. But as Axl’s turn comes, the boatman gently lets him know that Beatrice too had alluded to their ancient breach, and told him the story of their estrangement (perhaps he knew it all along). Beatrice persists: ‘I heard it said a man and woman, after a lifetime shared, and with a bond of love unusually strong, may travel to the island with no need to roam it apart’ (Ishiguro 2015: 307). She goes first, having persuaded Axl (mistrustful and angry at the last) to wait his turn. ‘Could it be our love would never have grown so strong down the years had the mist not robbed us the way it did? Perhaps it allowed old wounds to heal’ (Ishiguro 2015: 316). Instead of their voices, we hear the boatman’s question: ‘Do they embrace now … ? I suppose they do, and for as long as the silence remains, I dare not turn’ (Ishiguro 2015: 317).

‘Where’s Home?’

The effects of psychoanalysis are, to a great extent, related to bringing to light what is buried in the depths. … What takes place subterraneously has a primitive and archaic character. (Reik 1949: 453, 454)

Reik’s comment has an unexpected bearing on Ishiguro’s persistent archaism, as well as the ‘buried’ metaphor in his title. In psychoanalytic terms, the problem for Axl and Beatrice is not so much memory-loss as the primitive fear of separation. In an essay with the Forsterian title ‘Only Connect,’ the psychoanalyst Margot Waddell writes that ‘fear of abandonment and inability to bear separateness are characteristic of dementia sufferers’ (Waddell 2007: 194). Although change is an inevitable part of each life-stage, old age and approaching death present exceptional challenges. Incapacity and dependence reawaken infantile fears of abandonment. The infant’s inevitable displacement poses an additional challenge: oedipal jealousy may return in old age. The capacity to bear separateness includes allowing another person, or interest, to triangulate the mother-infant bond. Although they are old and have lost their memories, neither Axl nor Beatrice are demented; and both yearn to be reunited with their son, the third ejected from their marriage. In the end, they regain the memories they need in order to face their past lives together, confronting the buried pain and bitterness of the past before their final parting. But for each of them, aging intensifies their anxieties about being alone. Axl wants Beatrice contained within the same vessel as himself (coracle or rowing-boat); he is reluctant to see her carried in anyone else’s arms. Beatrice wants them united in one place, where their son is buried (the island at their journey’s end). In preparation for their final separation, each must recover the painful experiences that they have previously forgotten: infidelity, jealousy, the un-mourned loss of their son. Only then—and perhaps only conditionally—can they let go of the past.

In Waddell’s ‘Only Connect’, we see Mr and Mrs Brown—an elderly and evidently devoted couple, still living together at home—as unique individuals, with their distinctive habits and personal histories: he, mildly forgetful, patient, loving; she, increasingly suffering from dementia, fraught with anxiety, jealousy, sorrow, and even rage. We witness Mrs Brown’s agitation when her husband briefly goes out of the room (hands clasped absent-mindedly behind his back, in what we are told is a characteristic stance). Like Beatrice, she is terrified of being abandoned: ‘When is he coming back? Where has he gone?’ (Waddell 2007: 195). Her daughter reassures her (‘I think he’s remembered something he wants in the kitchen. He’ll be back in a moment’). The analyst observes: ‘when the door shut, [Mr Brown’s] unexplained absence made his wife feel … as terrified as any infant registering loss of the object, and feeling, as a consequence, overwhelming abandonment and dread’ (Waddell 2007: 195). Later, distraught because of her husband’s absence for a hospital appointment, in the midst of a dramatic storm with its cracking branches and swaying trees, Mrs Brown says pleadingly to her daughter, ‘Home [long pause] … Where’s home? [another long pause] Take me home … please’. Rather than offering superficial reassurance (‘You are at home, Mum’), her daughter tries to understand Mrs Brown’s terror. Acting as her mother’s memory, she talks about a terrifying storm ten years earlier, and even before that, the recollected noise of war-time bombing in London associated with her mother’s former home:

As her daughter drew the curtains and talked to her mother about why the high wind in the trees felt so distressing, the old lady’s anxiety began to subside. It was as if the room became itself again in her mind—not an alien place where she was stranded and desolate. (Waddell 2007: 198–9)

In ‘Only Connect’, daughter and analyst converge, like the curtains, to contain the confusions of old age without erasing the accretions of meaning over the years. We infer that the analyst is observing her own parents, with privileged insight into their characters and past histories. The interpretive framework of British Object Relations psychoanalysis mediates her sympathetic observation. With exquisite sensitivity, the daughter-analyst unravels the tangled skeins of meaning in her mother’s unbearable states of mind—for instance, the jealousy aroused in her by a get-well card sent by a woman friend to her elderly husband: ‘Mrs Brown was to be observed staring at the card, opening and shutting it for quite long periods of time, and repeatedly muttering to herself, “Love from Lilly”—the words written in the card’ (Waddell 2007: 197). In the daughter-analyst, we see a capacity for reverie modelled on the mother’s ability to ‘contain’ and detoxify the infant’s unprocessed emotions. The daughter’s mind holds and makes manageable her mother’s terror and jealousy:

Care of the elderly—those so often lacking the capacity to speak, yet so intensely riven by extreme emotional states—requires a painful reversal of the original pattern of container-contained (the young now struggling to offer states of reverie to the old). (Waddell 2007: 199)

Seeming nonsense—what is the proper place to put rubbish, a dishcloth, or an old lady?—blurs domestic and psychic reality. Rather than consigning her mother’s confused mental states to the rubbish bin, the daughter-analyst contains and tries to make sense of them. The bin is where Mrs Brown fears that she might now belong: ‘her lifelong tendency to feel like rubbish had temporarily taken on a concrete reality for her’ (Waddell 2007: 198). Painful early experiences underlie her present fear of being unwanted or discarded and worthless in old age.

In Ishiguro’s novel, Merlin’s spell provides a companion even for the moribund dragon: ‘a solitary hawthorn bush’ is the only other living thing in her pit. Axl imagines, fancifully, that it ‘had become a source of great comfort to her, and that even now, in her mind’s eye, she was reaching for it’ (Ishiguro 2015: 294). Grotesquely, the dragon’s severed head swims to the bush, borne on a tide of blood, ‘the throat up to the sky’. Ishiguro’s uncomfortably concrete rendering of affect makes the world of the novel strangely credible—even draconian loneliness receives some slender comfort as life comes to an end. Waddell concludes that when it was possible to respond with understanding to a plea or demand, or to distinguish ‘a communication of affect in a situation of shared intimacy,’ something changed for Mrs Brown, stranded in her own lair-like domain:

it was as if mental pathways that had seemed to be totally overgrown, or mysteriously to diverge where once there had been a single track, had for a moment cleared or miraculously re-joined (and doubtless this was literally the case). (Waddell 2007: 200)

The same ‘as if’ (‘doubtless this was literally the case’) clings to the diverging pathways traversed by Axl and Beatrice, following the circuitous route that leads to recovered memory. ‘Only Connect’ ends with the death of Mrs Brown: ‘after so long a struggle in life, Mrs. Brown’s death seemed, to her loved ones, and almost certainly to herself, to be a matter of lesser importance, a comparatively easy thing’ (Waddell 2007: 200). She has been fortunate in the love of an understanding husband, and in children ‘experienced in the so-called caring professions’. But we are left with the reminder that even Mrs. Brown’s loving carers had something to bear: ‘They had to bear their own impatience, anger, even hatred, as part of their love’ (Waddell 2007: 200). With much the same gesture, Ishiguro brings into the light the darker emotions that shadow the achievement of a loving bond in old age. In each case, the therapeutic ending admits the mingling of hate and love. But we see too that persecutory fears bound up with death can be mitigated, and that impatience, anger, and hatred can be, if not overcome, at least endured.²

The boatman in The Buried Giant occupies the place of the third term, the missing son whom Axl and Beatrice imagine as the protector of their helpless old age. But their son is long dead, and (as we learn at the end of the novel) in circumstances of unresolved bitterness. Unlike Mrs Brown, they have no children ‘in the so-called caring professions’. The boatman becomes their surrogate carer, interpreter, and restorer of memory; perhaps he is also a surrogate for the omniscient narrator at the start of the story. Tactfully, he keeps his distance: ‘I move away, not wishing to intrude on their intimacy’ (Ishiguro 2015: 303). His reiterations of anxiety—‘how can I but intrude upon this intimacy?’; ‘For do I wish to intrude on them?’ (Ishiguro 2015: 306); ‘though I look to the shore and remain still as a rock, I find I again intrude on their intimacy’ (Ishiguro 2015: 315)—signals the intensity of the couple’s private bond at the end of their journey, while providing the narrative device by which we overhear their final, fraught conversations: ‘what am I to do? Step into the rain to be beyond their murmurings?’ (Ishiguro 2015: 303). Beatrice wonders: ‘How did we ever forget? Our son lives on an island. An island seen from a sheltered cove, and surely near us now’ (Ishiguro 2015: 303). When Axl tries to talk her out of it, the Boatman confirms the distant trees and rocks of the island. But while Beatrice gladly anticipates her departure, Axl feels only dread. The boatman tells us how it goes: ‘They watch me in silence, she with a weary happiness, he with mounting fear. Will they not say anything? Do they expect me to tell more?’ (Ishiguro 2015: 304). Beatrice questions the boatman again about whether the solitude of the island’s inhabitants can sometimes be commuted (‘after a lifetime shared, and with a bond of love unusually strong’). Can separation be mitigated?

The boatman’s job includes the private questioning of each couple, in preparation for their crossing: a non-judgemental reckoning with the past. But the boatman has his own rules to follow. In the end, each must cross alone. At the last Axl is unwilling to let Beatrice go alone, the fire in him blazing angrily: ‘I thought it well understood, boatman’, he says, ‘my wife and I would cross to the island unseparated’ (Ishiguro 2015: 314). We glimpse the once-fierce possessiveness underlying Axl’s solicitude. She has to reason with him; they may not find another boatman so sympathetic. We witness their final moments together: ‘Can it really be we’re talking of going our ways separately?’ (Ishiguro 2015: 316). Prolonging their last exchanges and final parting, Ishiguro transforms banality into an echo chamber for past feelings that spill over into the present: ‘Farewell then, Axl’. ‘Farewell, my one true love’. The last words in the novel are given to the boatman: ‘Wait for me on the shore, friend, I say quietly, but he does not hear and he wades on’ (Ishiguro 2015: 317). Will Axl loiter resentfully by the shore, nursing his grievance like the woman they met at the start of their journey? Or will the couple be reunited beyond the novel’s ending? Ishiguro’s readers have to bear the same uncertainty. All we are given by way of comfort is Beatrice’s readiness (compare Waddell: ‘after so long a struggle in life, Mrs Brown’s death seemed … a comparatively easy thing’). Like the daughter-analyst, the boatman-narrator (the third ear) mediates the unbearable separateness of later life.

In ‘Couples Therapy: separateness or separation?’ (‘An account of work with a couple entering later life’), Anne Amos and Andrew Balfour describe their work together as a therapeutic couple, based on ‘an understanding that couples share an unconscious phantasy’, one that often ‘centres on a shared infantile terror and … a shared system of defenses to deal with these fears and anxieties’ (Amos and Balfour 2007: 76). One form taken by this shared system of defenses may lead to a loss of individual identity, as each uses the other to avoid individual difficulties. Good things may be kept within the marriage, while bad things (such as infidelity or conflict) are projected outwards or else onto each other, so as to ward off troubled parts of the self. Mr and Mrs E, for instance, seem stuck in a claustrophobic marriage in which each lodges their depression and despair in the other. The emptiness at the heart of their marriage manifests itself in his chronic overwork and her underlying sense of grievance; anger simmers beneath a polite façade. In the fear that confronting the barrenness of their marriage might lead to an explosion—and their use of the therapeutic couple as a fire-blanket—we see the obverse of Axl’s and Beatrice’s ability to mourn the dark passages of their life together at the end of their journey. By contrast, Mr and Mrs E’s marriage ends with each partner going his or her own way, a separation that brings its own sadness. The analytic couple experience their separation as ‘a painful ending to bear’—‘we were left with a sense of the enormity of the loss involved, of a marriage that had lasted almost a lifetime that we could not, in some fairytale way, make a happy one’ (Amos and Balfour 2007: 87). That two people ‘experienced in the so-called caring professions’ must confront the limits of their own professional work echoes the boatman’s disclaimer: ‘We had to face our limitations just as Mr and Mrs E had to face theirs … ’ (Amos and Balfour 2007: 87). For this story, too, there can be no fairytale ending, only a better or a worse parting of the ways. We glimpse with hindsight the painful imbalance in the three-way negotiations between Axl, Beatrice, and the boatman. One member of the trio is left miserably alone, nursing his grievance at the end of his life as he had done long before.

The Third Eye

… a comparison with the act of vision is instructive; it is well known that we must be at a certain distance from an object in order to be able to see it. We can only see ourselves in a mirror or in the eyes of another person. (Reik 1949: 369)

Many of us see our parents’ end-of-life years as if through the wrong end of a telescope. Whether they are devoted or separate, together or alone, the story of their lives becomes the story we tell ourselves; a story that includes our own aging and approaching death—seen at a distance, or as if ‘in a mirror or in the eyes of another person’ (Reik 1949: 369). In Mother and Father (2014), Paddy Summerfield’s photographic memoir of his parents’ last decade, the photographer-son writes:

My father works the land, tends the garden, and cares for my mother, who is trapped in her illness. And here am I, photographing them, from the house windows and in the garden. I photograph them through the seasons, time and time again; there is a mystery and melancholy in these distant figures.

My parents become symbols in a drama of balance and tension which is both epic and domestic, a personal piece yet simultaneously universal. The changing scene vanishes day by day, as two individuals play out their lives of quiet moments, on the lawn at home and on holiday in North Wales, where the raven flies alongside them (Summerfield 2014: 7).

Summerfield’s restrained and level tone recalls the voice of Ishiguro’s boatman: its combination of distance and care, the sense of witnessing something intensely private from a distance (‘here am I, photographing them’), the melancholy sight of two figures seen mostly from the back or moving away. We become onlookers, seeing this epic yet domestic drama as if reflected through the eyes of the photographer-son, as he preserves and memorializes ‘something which was gradually disappearing’. Their story is also his story (‘knowing that … I would one day be in the garden without them’): ‘And here I still live, and think of my parents every day’ (Summerfield 2014: 7). The camera becomes his mode of remembering.

Summerfield’s camera functions as a third eye, its mediation signalled by the recurring use of windows as frame or aperture on to his parents’ garden world (see Figure 1).³ A well-maintained, shrub-surrounded North Oxford backgarden, with its carefully tended lawn and herbaceous borders, becomes gradually overgrown: ‘a wilderness, growing tall and ragged, under the rain and sun’. Mother becomes more frail and stooped, losing her memory to Alzheimer’s, then disappears altogether. Father carries on tending his garden to the end, until he too vanishes. The tall hedges enfold a habitus that represents years of daily work, shared affection, ‘quiet moments’ of enjoyment or loss. We see the lawn being mowed, raked, aerated, fertilized, and finally getting out of hand; but it is also a landscape of memory, bordered by the garden’s traditional associations with the bounded hortus conclusus. The secluded garden, according to a quotation in the afterward, ‘contains within its boundaries the family’s private sadnesses and joys, memories of childhood and pain worked through silently within its fastness’ (Summerfield 2014: 92). The aperture of the window becomes a scene of working-through; the photographer-son revisits and mourns his own past as well as his parents’ lives. His understated snapshots probe the boundaries of recovered memory, preserving the quiet doings and feelings glimpsed through open doors and windows, as each parent communes wordlessly with the other or with their own thoughts. Alone or together, hand in hand or arm in arm, we see them from above or behind: stooped, upright, kneeling; sitting or lying on the grass; carrying flowers, contemplating a profusion of flowers; sitting together in front of their cups of tea (see Figure 2).

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In his afterword, the photographer and critic Gerry Badger refers to the snapshot’s potential to ‘preserve, consecrate, memorialize, remember’ (Summerfield 2014: 91).⁴ The snapshot captures life ‘changing, slipping away’ (quoting Summerfield himself); the impulse behind the family snapshot is to make ‘a precious “memory trace”—to document relationships, to somehow confirm or solidify our somewhat perilous stance within this world’ (Summerfield 2014: 91). For the imagined onlooker, the present is continually slipping away, just as the two old people seem already to be turning their backs and leaving. The effect of distance, writes Badger, ‘is an incredibly warm, affirmative distancing, one of respect and love rather than curiosity … we are drawn in and welcomed to the pictures’ world rather than invited to gaze coldly and dispassionately’ (Summerfield 2014: 92). As in the final chapter of Ishiguro’s novel, we experience ‘not a psychological distancing, quite the reverse, for it is non-intrusive rather than intrusive’ (Summerfield 2014: 92). Not so much a close-up, then, as the intimate portrait of a private relationship. We recall the boatman’s anxiety about intruding on Axl’s and Beatrice’s intimacy, and his protectiveness of their last moments together (‘For do I wish to intrude on them?’). Badger writes that Summerfield’s snapshots document his mother’s dementia-induced decline and death in her mid-eighties. Ironically, his photographic memory-making records her progressive loss of memory.

So the photographer was documenting the final days of a long, more than sixty years’ marriage, which was being eroded not just by time but by a cruelly debilitating disease. He was bound to these two people but he also knew that they had a relationship with each other of which he was not a part. So he was content or rather compelled to keep his distance, and respect their precious moments together (Summerfield 2014: 92).

The family snapshot becomes the basis for an extended love-letter, between and to an elderly couple identified with their habitation or habitus, and at the same time a memorial to their long years together. Badger writes: ‘One of the hardest things to photograph is human love’ (Summerfield 2014: 93).

Mother and Father uses sequence to suggest how meanings change slowly over time. In the first section, the opening photograph has Mother hesitating, her back to us, poised to move through an open door into the garden. We see the two old people in moments of solitude or preoccupation, setting out to walk up the garden, hand in hand or heading away from each other; or seated at an empty table as if waiting for a performance to begin: working, resting, thinking, caught at playful or even heroic moments that suggest the resilience of their lives within the domestic frame of their garden. The couple appears oblivious of others, as if the garden is indeed their ‘fastness’—a private refuge from the encroaching world, protected by its natural boundaries. A single blackbird alighting on a table seems to herald the inevitability of change (see Figure 3).

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In the middle sequence, the record of a holiday on the North Wales coast, the domestic environment expands towards the sea, growing wild and wind-tossed: the couple (singly or together) look out to sea, hair or curtains blown by the wind, waves curling in from the horizon, the coastal weather changeable. We see two small figures negotiating a cliff, Father looking out to sea, or walking alone on the beach; a moment of shared affection; Mother looking out of the window or reading the paper indoors; the two viewed through the holiday cottage window (see Figure 4). The motif of birds runs through the entire sequence. The rhythm of the birds, alighting and taking off, hovering and perching, indicates temporarily arrested movement, as if alluding to the ephemeral moment briefly caught by each snapshot: here, then gone (see Figure 5). The snapshot’s emphasis on transience becomes a means of preserving the past, while the birds’ symbolism points to the inevitability of time’s passage, extending the boundaries of the North Oxford garden towards the unknown that lies beyond.

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Badger’s afterword specifically mentions Summerfield’s awareness of the ravens’ symbolic meaning in Celtic and other cultures, ‘including their reputation as harbingers of death’ (Summerfield 2014: 93). In Welsh mythology, the raven is the god of the sun, creator of arts and sciences (a Hermes-figure or messenger). In Norse mythology, the raven-god Odin is accompanied by two speaking ravens, Huginn (thought) and Muninn (memory), who serve as his eyes and ears. Like the ravens, the photographer becomes the bearer of his parents’ thoughts and memories as he records their gradual disappearance into the natural landscape that seems to mourn them by its wilding. His photographs capture two kinds of rhythm: that of repeated activity, with the seasonal chores that maintain a well-kept garden; and the rhythm of change—the ceaseless movement of tides and birds, and the gradual emptying out of the cultivated garden as it returns to a state of nature.

In the third sequence, Mother becomes more fraught, stricken, and isolated; we recognize that this decline is not seasonal, but tragic and terminal. Now there is only one left. A photograph of sun-dazzle seen through the trees, emptied of figures, marks the transition (see Figure 6). In the photographs that make up the remainder of the sequence, we see Father carrying on with the tasks of garden maintenance on his own; like Michael in Wordsworth’s poem, he pauses in his work, as if to remember the partner no longer with him: ‘many and many a day he thither went/And never lifted up a single stone’ (‘Michael’, ll. 467–8). In one photograph, he raises his hand as if to salute his absent wife along with the sunset (see Figure 7). The last we see of him is a small figure in a far-off hammock slung at the end of the garden. The final sequence shows a single hollyhock through rain-streaked windowpanes (see Figure 8), followed by a pair of shots of the overgrown garden, the lawn un-mown, the now-familiar plastic furniture abandoned in the long grass, a single blackbird returning to perch on the table in the final image (see Figure 9). The overgrown garden has become a private lieu de mémoire, emptied of its human inhabitants yet still saturated with the onlooker’s memories and private mourning.

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The camera, so often regarded as a prosthetic or mechanical eye, becomes in Mother and Father a kind of third ear, like that of Ishiguro’s boatman-narrator—a sensitive register of unexpressed feelings, including the photographer’s own. Reik’s ‘third ear’ has a dual function:

The analyst hears not only what is in the words; he hears also what the words do not say. He listens with the ‘third ear’, hearing not only what the patient speaks, but also his own inner voices, what emerges from his own unconscious depths. (Reik 1949: 125–6)

Listening with the third ear includes the ways in which ‘one mind speaks to another beyond words and in silence,’ registering ‘the secret messages that go from one unconscious to another’ (Reik 1949: 144, 145). The third ear allows one to hear ‘what is expressed almost noiselessly, what is said pianissimo’ (Reik 1949: 145). Reik emphasizes the importance of hearing one’s own unconscious inner voices—the fleeting impressions and emotions aroused within one person through the inter-subjective dialogue with another. In this sense, the camera makes accessible what is felt by an invisible third: like the boatman-son or the daughter-analyst, the photographer sees and hears more than his snapshots reveal. Reik’s account of ‘the third ear’ turns the lens on the analyst; rather than being ‘the pure mirror that reflects the image of the patient,’ he is ‘a human being like any other’ (Reik 1949: 154). Indeed, if he were not human, he could not receive his patients’ unconscious communications.⁵ The photographer has to be capable of experiencing love and loss, affection and anguish, tenderness and impatience, in order for his pictures to forge an affective connection with the viewer.

Reik’s account of ‘the psychological moment’ emphasizes the importance of timing in interpretation. He quotes Freud on the importance of ‘tact’ (German Takt), an attribute that ‘not only signifies “social feeling”, but is also synonymous with musical beat, time, measure, also “bar”’ (Reik 1949: 317). His phrase, ‘the third ear’, comes from Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil (1998), where it refers to the musicality of language and syntax:

there is ART in every good sentence—art which must be divined, if the sentence is to be understood! If there is a misunderstanding about its TEMPO, for instance, the sentence itself is misunderstood! … let us open up our keen, patient ears to every staccato, every rubato. (Nietzsche 1998: 138–9)

Tact relates to timing and interpretation; tempo and temporality; understanding and misunderstanding; and even to the tact of the boatman at the end of The Buried Giant. It also relates to aesthetics—the ‘art’ in every sentence or photograph, the capacity of words and images to reach out, touch, and memorialize. Reik asserts that the rhythms of expressive forms are those of instinctual and organic life: ‘Rhythm is a universal vital function, belonging to every living creature. … It governs our pulse and breath and extends from the vegetative system to the forms of expression of the more complex mental processes’ (Reik 1949: 326). He concludes: ‘Man’s affective expressions are partly governed by the rhythm of his instinctive processes’ (Reik 1949: 327). The tempo of the snapshot coincides with the monitory flight of the bird: here, then gone.

Reik’s appropriation of the ‘third ear’ for psychoanalytic interpretation and listening (dependent on the art and tempo of the sentence) provides an analogy for the third term that links narrator and reader, photographer and viewer.⁶ The third ear gives aesthetic and interpretive form to experiences that would otherwise remain inaccessible, lost to memory or buried in an unquiet landscape. The ‘elder’ in ‘elders’ and ‘elder-speak’ suggests that the representation of old age can function as a reminder of our own long-ago attachments, fears, and losses—whether lodged in unconscious memory, or part of our everyday habitus. Mediated by the third ear or eye, the representation of old age in The Buried Giant and Mother and Father allows us to hold in mind not only what we don’t want to forget, but what we don’t want to remember. The buried giant of Ishiguro’s novel, the overgrown garden of Summerfield’s photographs, summon a future in which we too will have become history, both to others and to ourselves.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 See Reik (1949). For an informative essay on Reik’s ‘third ear’, see Arnold (2006).

2 For a classic restatement of the Kleinian depressive position and reparation in later life, see Elliot Jaques, who writes:

Revived are the deep unconscious memories of hate, not denied but mitigated by love; of death and destruction mitigated by reparation and the will to live; of good things injured and damaged by hate, revived again and healed by loving grief; of spoiling envy mitigated by admiration and by gratitude, of confidence and hope, not through denial, but through the deep inner sense that the torment of grief and loss, of guilt and persecution, can be endured and overcome if faced by loving reparation (Jaques 1989: 202).

Jaques’s arduously achieved mid-life resolution is qualified by Ishiguro’s darker fable in which some wounds never heal.

3 The photographs reproduced throughout this essay are taken from Summerfield (2014), and printed with the kind permission of Paddy Summerfield and Patricia Baker-Cassidy.

4 For Badger’s most recent writings on Briish documentary photography, see Badger (2022).

5 Reik quotes Goethe’s saying: ‘If the eye were not something sunlike itself, it could never see the sun’ (Reik 1949: 154).

6 Compare Thomas Ogden’s ‘Analytic Third’, his term for the counter-transferential communication between analyst and analysand: ‘an ever-changing unconscious third subject (more verb than noun) which powerfully contributes to the structure of the analytic relationship.’ Ogden continues: ‘The task of the analyst is to create conditions in which the unconscious intersubjective analytic third … might be experienced, attached to words, and eventually spoken about with the analysand’ (see Ogden 1994).