Connecting a familiar object or space to death produces uncanny defamiliarisation, often with sinister and melancholic effect, but orientation is also involved. Sigmund Freud’s discussion of the uncanny not only suggests an obvious association with elegy-the ‘acme of the uncanny is represented by anything to do with death, dead bodies, revenants, spirits and ghosts’ (Freud 1919: 148) but also the idea that the ‘uncanny is that species of the frightening that goes back to something once well-known and had long been familiar’ (124).

Everyday devices and practices are charged with emotion, taking on uncanny significance through their contact with spaces of death and memory.

The environment of the pastoral elegy is a sympathetic, reactive surface similarly, mechanisms and objects can be melancholy markers of a world become unfamiliar and warped by absence. Locating, navigating, and orienting the relative positions of the dead and the living are not limited to the pastoral elegy these functions are central to the elegiac concern, and persist within the Western tradition from the classical origins of the genre to the multiple elegiac modes and preoccupations of the present.įor centuries, technology has frequently been crucial to measuring, marking and defining the subjective spatial and temporal borders of death and grief in elegy. After the ‘pathetic fallacy of nature’s lament’ (Sacks 21) has run its devastating course, the spirit faces an eternity of light and the world of the living is restored by springtime and sunshine. These attempts to exert control over space and time are evident in the unearthly perfection of the pastoral tradition, for example, where the dead are located in a space governed by the muses and ‘vegetation deities’ (Sacks 1985: 19) of the classical world, and the dead body and the living are left behind in a world shadowed and torn apart by grief. As a corollary to these spatial distortions, the passage of time in elegy can be stretched and hastened, made cyclical in accordance with the seasons, or circular through repetition a moment can be preserved forever and notions of eternity in memory or afterlife can be challenged.

The speaker’s emotion and memory shapes and inscribes the spaces of the elegy in melancholic sites, the natural environment becomes destructive, and man-made structures are crumbling and shadowed. The elegy can be read as a map that delineates the space of the living and the dead, and navigates the shifting and flexible space between past and present, memory and forgetting, consolation and grief.

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