RogueTaxidermy - Antennae The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture

T
here are many species of sadness, each with its
own particular weight and shadow – the gloom of
homesickness, the maudlin tears of self-pity, the
distress of grief or empathy with another’s loss – each
shifting the weight of sadness towards a place or person
which once was but is no longer or – more abstractly –
towards what might have been. But while sadness for a
failed dream (a failed marriage, a failed ambition) is bitter,
sadness is most acutely linked with the real physical loss
of a person, place, or thing which has passed from view.
With this loss comes remembrance, and with
remembrance, a longing for the departed and, in its
absence, a sentimental yearning for a token, an object,
something which can be felt and touched: a material
souvenir of what is no longer but which lingers
everlasting in memory. “After an emotional catastrophe,”
Susan Pearce notes, “it is always the sight of a scarf which
the absent lover used to wear which enables us to enter
more profoundly into our sense of loss, showing
ourselves to ourselves in ways which nothing else can
do.” Objects of remembrance are private things filled
with a personal and, at times, incommunicable
significance.
A souvenir which belonged to a departed loved
one is powerful, but a souvenir which once was a beloved
is intoxicating. Just how intoxicating? That explanation is
best left to Gustave Flaubert and his short, sad tale, Un
Simple Coeur published in 1877.
Flaubert’s tale recounts the series of deaths and
departures that compose the life of a simple housemaid
named Félicité. Her father dies, then her mother, and the
sisters are dispersed. She is beaten by a farmer who let
her keep cows in his fields. Her fiancé is harsh and
deceitful and leaves her heartbroken. She begins life again
as a servant for Madame Aubain and her two children -
Virginia and Paul - who she serves for half a century with
OBJECTS OF LOSS
AND REMEMBRANCE
Rachel Poliquin is currently working on the writing of her forthcoming book: ‘On Taxidermy
and Other Objects of Longing’. Here we publish an extract from her forthcoming publication.
Text by Rachel Poliquin
4
the unswerving devotion of a medieval nun. But one by
one they all leave her – her long-lost nephew, the
children, an old man living with cancer in a pigsty – they
all forget her or die, even Loulou, her beloved parrot.
But Loulou, Félicité has stuffed. Jauntily posed with one
foot in the air and a gilded nut in his beak, Loulou
becomes more than just a stuffed shell of Félicité’s
beloved bird.
Over the years Félicité transforms her little attic
room at the top of Madame Aubain’s house into a shrine
cluttered with religious icons and relics of all her
departed loves. Rosaries, holy virgins, a holy water basin
made out of a coconut, and a picture of the Holy Ghost
with flaming red wings; Virginia’s little plush hat, artificial
flowers, a box of shell from her nephew. Loulou, her only
real treasure, was the central figure. The difference
between religious objects and objects of remembrance
blurred together, and together they provoked a sad yet
rapturous passion in the housemaid. She began to suspect
that the Holy Ghost – the Giver of Tongues – had really
been a parrot not a dove as it is conventionally
represented. Logic is certainly on her side: parrots and
holy ghosts talk; doves only coo. And when Madame
Aubain dies and Félicité is completely alone in a
crumbling house, deaf, almost blind, and nearly mute, she
begins mumbling her daily prayers kneeling in front of the
parrot. After all, another name for the Holy Ghost is
Paraclete from the Greek for one who consoles or
comforter. The comforter, the giver of tongues: only the
lonely could understand the solace. When the glint of the
sun fell through the window on Loulou’s glass eye, it
seemed to ignite a spark in the bird that sent the simple
woman into ecstatic reveries. At this point, Loulou was
really no more than a mass of feathers with a broken
wing and batting sprouting from holes eaten by worms.
But none of that mattered to Félicité. As she finally