Jim Bartley's novel Drina Bridge is set in the former Yugoslavia during the Bosnian-Serb war. Its narrator is a gay man who has lost a lover. There is an intriguing passage on the nature of grief. The passage in question is conveyed in the voice not of the narrator and certainly not that of the author. This particular view on grief comes from a character who is a writer and also male (but not "gay"):

Grief and language do not intersect. What we can express is sadness or distress or some form of the tragic, but those who have known grief will not find it on a page.

A very Kantian approach explicating the passage would indicate that there is always a hiatus between the expression and the thing expressed. If grief cannot be expressed then neither can sadness or distress or even joy. Expressivity cannot be tied to intensity. Depth of feeling is not a necessary state to question the adequacy of expressive powers of verbal utterance for even the slight stirrings of some emotion by being very miniscule challenge the adequacy of expression. However the non-coincidence of the expression and the expressed is not a failure. For such a hypothesized cleavage opens the intersubjective space to the other, opens the space to spanning of a different sort. It is in that very non-coincidence that the listener or the reader can imaginatively project their experience. The space in language between the expressed and the means of expression is a space through which or into which experience moves. Perhaps not out from but in to or across. Of course experience or any named emotion is not found on the page. The page is a portal.

And yet the page is a surface.

In an almost Stein-like moment of reflection upon the difference between those who have know it and those that are knowing it some come to know that those who are knowing it will find it anywhere if not everywhere. The past perfect tense that ascribes a pastness to the grief, locks it into a condition of having been known, offers an escape for the careful reader from the "we", the defeatist "we" that would reify the trauma and make it unreachable. The character places the emotion as a completed object of experience in a time not now. Such a tactic blocks lucid access to the power of the past.

It is quite telling that the next paragraph in the novel, a continuation of the passage quoted above invokes a salvation motif:

I have delayed redemption too long. Let there be a glimmer. There remains hope of an escape, of a new life. In 1945 was born [...]

The reader as if trained by the gay narrator forgives the delusions of the character, indeed by this point in the novel, the reader is well acquainted with the feints that help the discourse unroll and the stories come forth. There is no redemption. No escape. No new life. There are stories. Our narrator is an unbeliever and it is through the narrator that the somewhat backward confession of faith professed through the inadequacies of language comes to the reader. The story in its being told offers connections -- bridges -- and that is where hope lies. The redemption is in the delay.

The cost of mourning is not in the loss of stories about the dead. The cost of mourning is about the risk of connecting with the living. There is no guarantee that each interpellation will find acknowledgement.

There is a cruising aspect to the expression of grief. So many connections not made. And some very intense grief encounters that remain anonymous.

In some ways it is not about the process of mourning it is about the question of the place of intensity in one's living. And intensity well-managed requires an exquiste sensitivity to audience.

On the page. Around the page. Off the page.

To become an audience to one's own reading is to again approach a linking motif, the theme of the migration of stories and their retelling and resetting in Jim Bartley's first novel, Drina Bridge. There is in this novel a character engaged in writing a memoir about wartime experiences. Key passages of the memoir are produced as succesions alternate versions. A story will be related and a second and third version immediately succeeded in the narration. The reader is situated as reading a typescript along with the narrator. The storyteller/writer is a 60-year old refugee raised in Bosnia and Serbia and through most of the novel an inmate in a Sarajevo hospital. The reader is constantly made aware that something has crossed a distance but the multiple versions problematize just what that something might be, if it is at all.

When three distinct versions of a similar tale succeed each other there is more to the strategy than avoidence of traumatic memories. There is a point about the interchangeable roles in the atrocities. Yet the technique does not result in a simple set of aloof remarks about perpetuation and the repetition of history. It touches the line between adaptation and adoption. There is a passage that seems to both comment on the technique and set up the reader for revelations:

Chance divides the actual from the true. The actual might avoid the true -- for a time. But truth lurks eternal. It's always there, hovering closer to here.

And though it is not explicitly stated in the novel, it becomes evident that stories are bridges. Not only between the true of the there and the actual of the here. But between the necessity of chance and the necessity of the temptation of life. The novel afterall ends with the meeting of writer Goran and narrator Chris and with the gentle ironic admonishment of the one to the other not to drink too much as he refills the other's glass. In the novel's final words one observes a secular sacrament: "He refilled my glass." The other being blessed here is the reader, always already there on the other side.