The Routledge Companion to Death and Literature 9781000220742, 1000220745

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Series Page
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Contents
Contributors
Introduction
Notes
Works Cited
Part I. Traversing the Ontological Divide
Work Cited
1. The Final Frontier: Science Fictions of Death
Motivating the Motif
Methuselah's Children
Ghosts in Machines
How to Live Safely in a Science-Fictional Universe
The Walking Dead
The Last Man
Virtual Reality
Works Cited
2. "Still I Danced": Performing Death in Ford's The Broken Heart
Notes
Works Cited
3. Death and the Margins of Theater in Luigi Pirandello
Notes
Works Cited
4. Forbidden Mental Fruit? Dead Narrators and Characters from Medieval to Postmodernist Narratives
Introduction
Ontological Complications: Dead Character-Narratorsin Postmodernist Narratives
Anticipations of Postmodernism: Dead Characters from the Middle Ages to Science-Fiction Narratives
Concluding Remarks
Notes
Works Cited
5. Literature and the Afterlife
Space: "Radical Theming"
Time: "The Great Mother-Gift"
Voice: "The Result Was Cacophony"
Genre as Afterlife
Notes
Works Cited
6. The Novel as Heartbeat: The Dead Narrator in Mike McCormack's Solar Bones
Notes
Works Cited
7. Dead Man/and Woman Talking: Narratives from Beyond the Grave
Dispositions
Enunciations
Perspectives
Verisimilitude
Conclusion(s)
Notes
Works Cited
8. The View from Upstream: Authority and Projection in Fontenelle's Nouveaux dialogues des morts
Works Cited
Part II. Genres
Work Cited
9. Big Questions: Re-Visioning and Re-Scripting Death Narratives in Children's Literature
Cast of Animal Characters
Death of Pets and Elderly Family Members
Death of Parents
Children's Death and Grieving
What Is Death?
Notes
Works Cited
Primary Sources
Secondary Sources
10. In the U-Bend with Moaning Myrtle: Thinking about Death in YA Literature
Plotting Death
Individuation and Childhood's End
Awareness, Empathy, and Activism
Death and the Posthuman
Final Thoughts
Note
Works Cited
11. Death and Mourning in Graphic Narrative
Works Cited
12. Death and Documentaries: Heuristics for the Real in an Age of Simulation
Basics of Documentary
Distinguishing Reality from Irreality
Contemplating Responses to Mortality
Memento Mori, Memento Vivere
Analyzing Death in Documentaries
Notes
Works Cited
Primary Sources
Secondary Sources
13. Death and the Fanciulla
Notes
Works Cited
14. Death, Literary Form, and Affective Comprehension: Primary Emotions and the Neurological Basis of Genre
Genre as Etiquette, Language, and a Natural Fact
Genre as Etiquette
Narrative Genres as a Fact of Language
Genre as "Something like a Natural Organism"
The Affective Comprehension of Genre
Facing Death in Narrative Genres
Fearful Irony
Blunt Melodrama
Blank Tragedy
Conclusion: Death and Literary Genre
Notes
Works Cited
Part III. Site, Space, and Spatiality
Works Cited
15. Ecocide and the Anthropocene: Death and the Environment
Call of the Wild: Death, Mountain, and Forest Spirits in the Japanese Imagination
Connemara: Stories of Life and Death
The Indian Reservation: Narratives of Loss, Ecocide, and Genocide
Ecological Disasters and the Nuclear Apocalypse
Notes
Works Cited
16. A Disney Death: Coco, Black Panther, and the Limits of the Afterlife
Psychoanalysis, or, To Death and Beyond!
From Psychoanalysis to the Movies
What Is the Purpose of Your Visit?
Works Cited
17. Suicide in the Early Modern Elegiac Tradition
Notes
Works Cited
18. Institutions and Elegies: Viewing the Dead in W. B. Yeats and John Wieners
The Visual Space of Modern Elegy
Vitality through Death
"The Municipal Gallery Revisited" (1937)
The Hotel Wentley Poems (1958)
The Art of Cruising Art
"A Poem for Museum Goers"
Notes
Works Cited
19. Death "after Long Silence": Auditing Agamben's Metaphysics of Negativity in Yeats's Lyric
Note
Works Cited
20. The Spatialization of Death in the Novels of Virginia Woolf
Introduction
Epiphany as Dissolution: The Voyage Out and The Ship of Death
After Such Knowledge, What Consolation?: Order and the Limits of Vision in To the Lighthouse
Resting Securely in Impermanence: The Waves as Final Statement
Conclusion
Notes
Works Cited
21. "Memento Mori": Memory, Death, and Posterity in Singapore's Poetry
Modernization, Death, and Poetic Strategy
Grief and the Virtualization of Attachment
Edwin Thumboo and the Crafting of Posterity
Boey Kim Cheng and Elegiac Distance
Yeow Kai Chai and Teeming Presence
Works Cited
Part IV. Rituals, Memorials, and Epitaphs
Works Cited
22. Death and the Dead in Verse Funerary Epigrams of Ancient Greece
Notes
Works Cited
23. Fictional Will
A Matter of Life and Death: Writing on the Brink
Writing in Earnest: An Urgent Cause
Making Disposition: An Exercise of Will
Testis: A Need for Witness
Notes
Works Cited
Primary Sources
Secondary Sources
24. Monumentalism, Death, and Genre in Shakespeare
Notes
Works Cited
25. Death and Gothic Romanticism: Dilating in/upon the Graveyard, Meditating among the Tombs
Works Cited
26. Death, Literature, and the Victorian Era
The Cult of Mourning and the Commodification of Death
Materiality, Relics, and the Body
Sex and Death
Victorian Gothic
Last Words
Notes
Works Cited
27. The Aura of the Phonographic Relic: Hearing the Voices of the Dead
The Aura of the Recorded Voice
The Phonographic Recording and the Séance
The Phonograph Recording as Part of a Well-Managed Death
Note
Works Cited
28. Anecdotal Death: Samuel Johnson's Lives of the English Poets
This Last Act
The Texture of a Discourse
Ridiculous Anecdotes
Notes
Works Cited
29. Biography: Life after Death
Notes
Works Cited
Part V. Living with Death: Writing, Mourning, and Consolation
Work Cited
30. "An immense expenditure of energy come to nothing": Philosophy, Literature, and Death in Peter Weiss's Abschied von den Eltern
Notes
Works Cited
31. Paradox, Death, and the Divine
Death and Agency
Death and Meaning
The Numinous Heart of Paradox
Notes
Works Cited
32. Inner Seeing and Death Anxiety in Aidan Higgins's Blind Man's Bluff and Other Life Writing
Introduction
Visual Images
Inner Vision and Familiar Forms
Conclusion
Works Cited
33. Autothanatography and Contemporary Poetry
Works Cited
34. When Time Stops: Death and Autobiography in Contemporary Personal Narratives
Note
Works Cited
35. "Grief made her insubstantial to herself": Illness, Aging, and Death in A. S. Byatt's Little Black Book of Stories
Introduction
Postmemory, Grief, and Death
Aging, Illness, and Death
Dementia Narratives and Grief before Death
Conclusion
Notes
Works Cited
PART VI. Historical Engagements
Works Cited
36. On the Corpse of a Loved One in the Era of Brain Death: Bioethics and Fictions
Two Kinds of Dead
Irreversibility
Fictions
Works Cited
37. Death to the Music of Time Reticence in Anthony Powell's Mediated Narratives of Death
Introduction: Narration by Proxy - Anthony Powell's Corpseless Danse Macabre
Dramatization, Suspense, and Tragic Irony
The Unnamable
Pilgrim's Progress
Conclusion: "Lack of Outward Display" or the Affecting Power of Narrative under Control
Notes
Works Cited
38. Death and Chinese War Television Dramas: (Re)configuring Ethical Judgments in The Disguiser
Contextual Frames
Of Mortal Economies and Ethical Hierarchies
Final Remarks
Notes
Works Cited
39. Where Do the Disappeared Go? Writing the Genocide in East Timor
Understanding the Santa Cruz Massacre in Dili
The Silence Surrounding the Event
Implications of Silence
Conclusion
Notes
Works Cited
40. "Doubtfull Drede" Dying at the End of the Middle Ages
Notes
Works Cited
41. Urbanization, Ambiguity, and Social Death in Charles Brockden Brown's Arthur Mervyn
Notes
Works Cited
42. Coda
Index

Citation preview

THE ROUTLEDGE COMPANION TO DEATH AND LITERATURE

The Routledge Companion to Death and Literature seeks to understand the ways in which literature has engaged deeply with the ever-evolving relationship humanity has with its ultimate demise. It is the most comprehensive collection in this growing field of study and includes essays by Brian McHale, Catherine Belling, Ronald Schleifer, Helen Swift, and Ira Nadel, as well as the work of a generation of younger scholars from around the globe, who bring valuable transnational insights. Encompassing a diverse range of mediums and genres – including biography and autobiography, documentary, drama, elegy, film, the novel and graphic novel, opera, picturebooks, poetry, television, and more – the contributors offer a dynamic mix of approaches that range from expansive perspectives on particular periods and genres to extended analyses of select case studies. Essays are included from every major Western period, including Classical, Middle Ages, Renaissance, and so on, right up to the contemporary. This collection provides a telling demonstration of the myriad ways that humanity has learned to live with the inevitability of death, where “live with” itself might mean any number of things: from consoling, to memorializing, to rationalizing, to fending off, to evading, and, perhaps most compellingly of all, to escaping. Engagingly written and drawing on examples from around the world, this volume is indispensable to both students and scholars working in the fields of medical humanities, thanatography (death studies), life writing, Victorian studies, modernist studies, narrative, contemporary fiction, popular culture, and more. W. Michelle Wang is Assistant Professor of English at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. Daniel K. Jernigan is Associate Professor of English at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. Neil Murphy is Professor of English at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.

ROUTLEDGE COMPANIONS TO LITERATURE SERIES Also available in this series: The Routledge Companion to Travel Writing Also available in paperback Edited by Carl Thompson The Routledge Companion to Literature and Religion Also available in paperback Edited by Mark Knight The Routledge Companion to Inter-American Studies Edited by Wilfried Raussert The Routledge Companion to the Environmental Humanities Edited by Ursula K. Heise, Jon Christensen and Michelle Niemann The Routledge Companion to International Children’s Literature Edited by John Stephens, with Celia Abicalil Belmiro, Alice Curry, Li Lifang and Yasmine S. Motawy The Routledge Companion to Picturebooks Edited by Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer The Routledge Companion to World Literature and World History Edited by May Hawas The Routledge Companion to Pakistani Anglophone Writing Edited by Aroosa Kanwal and Saiyma Aslam The Routledge Companion to Literature and Economics Edited by Matt Seybold and Michelle Chihara The Routledge Companion to Twenty-First Century Literary Fiction Edited by Daniel O’Gorman and Robert Eaglestone The Routledge Companion to Transnational American Studies Edited by Nina Morgan, Alfred Hornung and Takayuki Tatsumi The Routledge Companion to Victorian Literature Edited by Dennis Denisoff and Talia Schaffer The Routledge Companion to Health Humanities Edited by Paul Crawford, Brian Brown and Andrea Charise The Routledge Companion to Crime Fiction Edited by Janice Allan, Jesper Gulddal, Stewart King and Andrew Pepper The Routledge Companion to Literature and Trauma Edited by Hanna Meretoja and Colin Davis The Routledge Companion to Literature and Disability Edited by Alice Hall The Routledge Companion to Death and Literature Edited by W. Michelle Wang, Daniel K. Jernigan, and Neil Murphy For more information on this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/literature/series/RC4444

THE ROUTLEDGE COMPANION TO DEATH AND LITERATURE

Edited by W. Michelle Wang, Daniel K. Jernigan, and Neil Murphy

First published 2021 by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2021 Taylor & Francis The right of W. Michelle Wang, Daniel K. Jernigan, and Neil Murphy to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this title has been requested ISBN: 9780367619015 (hbk) ISBN: 9781003107040 (ebk) Typeset in Bembo by MPS Limited, Dehradun

Cover image: Gustav Klimt (Baumgarten bei Wien 1862–1918 Wien). Tod und Leben, 1910/11, umgearbeitet 1915/16. Öl auf Leinwand. Death and Life, 1910/11, reworked in 1915/16. Oil on canvas. 180.8 x 200.6 cm. Leopold Museum, Wien, Inv. 630. Patron: Klimt-Foundation, Wien. Leopold Museum, Vienna, Inv. 630. Patron: Klimt-Foundation, Vienna. LM 630

For all who have suffered from COVID-19

CONTENTS

List of Contributors

xiii

Introduction

1

PART I

Traversing the Ontological Divide Introduction

5

1 The Final Frontier: Science Fictions of Death Brian McHale

9

2 “Still I Danced”: Performing Death in Ford’s The Broken Heart Donovan Sherman

20

3 Death and the Margins of Theater in Luigi Pirandello Daniel K. Jernigan

29

4 Forbidden Mental Fruit? Dead Narrators and Characters from Medieval to Postmodernist Narratives Jan Alber 5 Literature and the Afterlife Alice Bennett

42

53

6 The Novel as Heartbeat: The Dead Narrator in Mike McCormack’s Solar Bones Neil Murphy

vii

62

Contents

7 Dead Man/and Woman Talking: Narratives from Beyond the Grave Philippe Carrard 8 The View from Upstream: Authority and Projection in Fontenelle’s Nouveaux dialogues des morts Jessica Goodman

71

83

PART II

Genres Introduction

91

9 Big Questions: Re-Visioning and Re-Scripting Death Narratives in Children’s Literature Lesley D. Clement

93

10 In the U-Bend with Moaning Myrtle: Thinking about Death in YA Literature Karen Coats

105

11 Death and Mourning in Graphic Narrative José Alaniz 12 Death and Documentaries: Heuristics for the Real in an Age of Simulation Benjamin Bennett-Carpenter 13 Death and the Fanciulla Reed Way Dasenbrock

117

123

132

14 Death, Literary Form, and Affective Comprehension: Primary Emotions and the Neurological Basis of Genre Ronald Schleifer

140

PART III

Site, Space, and Spatiality Introduction

155

15 Ecocide and the Anthropocene: Death and the Environment Flore Coulouma

159

16 A Disney Death: Coco, Black Panther, and the Limits of the Afterlife Stacy Thompson

171

viii

Contents

17 Suicide in the Early Modern Elegiac Tradition Kelly McGuire

180

18 Institutions and Elegies: Viewing the Dead in W. B. Yeats and John Wieners Barry Sheils and Julie Walsh

190

19 Death “after Long Silence”: Auditing Agamben’s Metaphysics of Negativity in Yeats’s Lyric Samuel Caleb Wee

206

20 The Spatialization of Death in the Novels of Virginia Woolf Ian Tan 21 “Memento Mori”: Memory, Death, and Posterity in Singapore’s Poetry Jen Crawford

216

228

PART IV

Rituals, Memorials, and Epitaphs Introduction

241

22 Death and the Dead in Verse Funerary Epigrams of Ancient Greece Arianna Gullo

245

23 Fictional Will Helen Swift

257

24 Monumentalism, Death, and Genre in Shakespeare John Tangney

266

25 Death and Gothic Romanticism: Dilating in/upon the Graveyard, Meditating among the Tombs Carol Margaret Davison

276

26 Death, Literature, and the Victorian Era Jolene Zigarovich

288

27 The Aura of the Phonographic Relic: Hearing the Voices of the Dead Angela Frattarola

298

28 Anecdotal Death: Samuel Johnson’s Lives of the English Poets Laura Davies

307

ix

Contents

29 Biography: Life after Death Ira Nadel

319

PART V

Living with Death: Writing, Mourning, and Consolation Introduction 30 “An immense expenditure of energy come to nothing”: Philosophy, Literature, and Death in Peter Weiss’s Abschied von den Eltern Christopher Hamilton 31 Paradox, Death, and the Divine Jamie Lin

331

333

342

32 Inner Seeing and Death Anxiety in Aidan Higgins’s Blind Man’s Bluff and Other Life Writing Lara O’Muirithe 33 Autothanatography and Contemporary Poetry Ivan Callus

350

361

34 When Time Stops: Death and Autobiography in Contemporary Personal Narratives Rosalía Baena

372

35 “Grief made her insubstantial to herself”: Illness, Aging, and Death in A. S. Byatt’s Little Black Book of Stories Graham Matthews

383

PART VI

Historical Engagements Introduction

393

36 On the Corpse of a Loved One in the Era of Brain Death: Bioethics and Fictions Catherine Belling

397

37 Death to the Music of Time: Reticence in Anthony Powell’s Mediated Narratives of Death Catherine Hoffmann

406

x

Contents

38 Death and Chinese War Television Dramas: (Re)configuring Ethical Judgments in The Disguiser W. Michelle Wang

416

39 Where Do the Disappeared Go? Writing the Genocide in East Timor Kit Ying Lye

425

40 “Doubtfull Drede”: Dying at the End of the Middle Ages Walter Wadiak

434

41 Urbanization, Ambiguity, and Social Death in Charles Brockden Brown’s Arthur Mervyn 442 Wanlin Li 42 Coda Julian Gough

450

Index

455

xi

CONTRIBUTORS

José Alaniz is Professor in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures and the Department of Comparative Literature (adjunct) at the University of Washington, Seattle, USA. He has published two books, Komiks: Comic Art in Russia (UP of Mississippi, 2010) and Death, Disability and the Superhero: The Silver Age and Beyond (UP of Mississippi, 2014). His articles have appeared in the International Journal of Comic Art, Studies in Russian and Soviet Cinema, The Slavic and East European Journal, and such anthologies as Disability in Comic Books and Graphic Narratives (Palgrave, 2016) and Russian Children’s Literature and Culture (Routledge, 2007). From 2011 to 2017 he served as Chair of the Executive Committee of the International Comic Arts Forum (ICAF), the leading comics studies conference in the US. His research interests include death and dying, disability studies, eco-criticism, and comics studies. Current book projects include Resurrection: Comics in Post-Soviet Russia and Beautiful Monsters: Disability in Alternative Comics. Jan Alber is Professor of English Literature and Cognitive Studies at RWTH Aachen University, Germany, and Past President of the International Society for the Study of Narrative (ISSN). He is the author of Narrating the Prison (Cambria Press, 2007) and Unnatural Narrative: Impossible Worlds in Fiction and Drama (U of Nebraska P, 2016). Alber received fellowships and research grants from the British Academy, the German Research Foundation, and the Humboldt Foundation. In 2013, the German Association of University Teachers of English awarded him the prize for the best Habilitation written between 2011 and 2013. From 2014 to 2016, he worked as a Marie-Curie Fellow at the Aarhus Institute of Advanced Studies, Denmark. Rosalía Baena is Associate Professor of English at the University of Navarra, Spain. Her main research interests deal with life writing and contemporary narratives in English. She has worked on issues of perspective and national identity in colonial and postcolonial narratives. She is currently working on narrative empathy and illness memoirs, with recent publications in Interdisciplinary Literary Studies (2013), Narrative Works (2014), Concentric (2016), Diegesis (2017), and Medical Humanities (2017). Catherine Belling is Associate Professor of Medical Education at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, Chicago, USA, and is former editor of the journal Literature and xiii

Contributors

Medicine ( Johns Hopkins UP). Her book, A Condition of Doubt: The Meanings of Hypochondria (Oxford UP, 2012), won the 2013 Kendrick Book Prize (Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts). Alice Bennett is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at Liverpool Hope University, UK. She is the author of Afterlife and Narrative in Contemporary Fiction (Palgrave, 2012) and, most recently, Contemporary Fictions of Attention (Bloomsbury, 2018). Benjamin Bennett-Carpenter teaches writing at Oakland University in Michigan and works as a life coach at Sollars & Associates, Inc. (USA). He is the author of Death in Documentaries: The Memento Mori Experience (Brill, 2018). He co-edits Cruel Garters, a contemporary poetry publication. Current writing projects include “Memetica Ecologica: Rhetorics of Information and the Dream of Reverse Engineering Nature and Culture” and “Memento Vivere: Life, Now.” Ivan Callus is Professor of English at the University of Malta, where he teaches contemporary fiction and literary theory. He is the co-general editor of the journal CounterText, published with Edinburgh University Press, and the co-director of the Critical Posthumanism Network. His most recent volume is on European Posthumanism (co-edited; Routledge, 2016), while his most recent papers and book chapters have been about contemporary British novelists (including the works of Jim Crace, Ian McEwan, and Tim Parks); Ferdinand de Saussure’s anagram notebooks; and electronic literature. His current research is on posthumanism and prehistory. Philippe Carrard is Professor of French Emeritus at the University of Vermont and currently a Visiting Scholar in the Program of Comparative Literature at Dartmouth College, USA. His research has focused on conventions of writing in factual (i.e., non-fictional) discourse. In this area he has published Poetics of the New History: French Historical Discourse from Braudel to Chartier (Johns Hopkins UP, 1992), The French Who Fought for Hitler: Memories from the Outcasts (Cambridge UP, 2010), and History as a Kind of Writing: Textual Strategies in Contemporary French Historiography (U of Chicago P, 2017). He has also written articles on such subjects as the representation of consciousness in biography, the relations between narrative and historiography, the temporal structure of sport reports, story-telling in record liner notes, voice in women’s history, and titling in scholarly studies. That work has appeared in such journals as Clio, Diacritics, French Cultural Studies, Genre, History and Theory, Narrative, Poetics Today, Poétique, Sites, South Atlantic Quarterly, Women in French Studies, and other journals. Lesley D. Clement (retired) taught at Lakehead-Orillia, Ontario, Canada. She is the author of Learning to Look: A Visual Response to Mavis Gallant’s Fiction (McGill-Queen’s UP, 2000). Her most recent research explores visual literacy, the visual imagination, empathy, and death in children’s literature. She has co-edited Global Perspectives on Death in Children’s Literature (Routledge, 2015) with Dr. Leyli Jamali, and L. M. Montgomery’s Rainbow Valleys: The Ontario Years, 1911–1942 (McGill-Queens UP, 2015) with Dr. Rita Bode. Karen Coats is Professor of Education at the University of Cambridge, UK, where she teaches children’s and young adult literature. She publishes widely on the intersections of literary and cultural theory and youth literature, her most recent book being The Bloomsbury Introduction to Children’s and Young Adult Literature (Bloomsbury, 2017). xiv

Contributors

Flore Coulouma is an Associate Professor in English at the University of Paris Nanterre, France. Her book Diglossia and the Linguistic Turn: Flann O’Brien’s Philosophy of Language (Dalkey Archive Press, 2015) addresses linguistic colonialism in twentieth-century Ireland and the “question of language” in Flann O’Brien’s satirical work. She is the editor of New Perspectives on Irish TV Series: Identity and Nostalgia on the Small Screen (Peter Lang, 2016), and she writes on contemporary Irish and American literature and on American and Irish television series. Her current research focuses on ecocriticism and the representation of social and environmental justice in contemporary discourse and literature. Jen Crawford is an Associate Professor of Writing within the Centre for Creative and Cultural Research at the University of Canberra, Australia. She is the author of eight poetry books and chapbooks, including Koel (Cordite Books, 2016), and co-edited Poet-to-Poet: Contemporary Women Poets from Japan with Rina Kikuchi (Recent Work Press, 2017). Her critical work focuses on the poetics of place and on cross-cultural engagements in various literary contexts. She is a lead researcher on the Story Ground project, which investigates the meeting of Indigenous Australian story practices and the teaching of creative writing. Reed Way Dasenbrock is Professor of English at the University of Hawai’i – Manoa, USA. Reed was educated at McGill University in Canada, where he received a BA (Honours); Oxford University in England, where he received a B Phil; and finally Johns Hopkins University, where he received his MA and PhD. On completion of his PhD in English in 1981, he joined the faculty at New Mexico State University, where he taught for 20 years from 1981 to 2001. His area of specialization in English was modernist literature, but he has published in a wide range of other areas, including postcolonial literature in English, literary theory, the influence of Italian literature on English literature, and more general issues in the profession. A good deal of his work has been interdisciplinary, drawing on art history, comparative literature, analytic philosophy, and most recently on the use of mathematical and scientific concepts in literature. He is the author, editor, or co-editor of eight books, nearly 100 scholarly articles or chapters in books, and nearly 100 book reviews, and he has given more than 70 presentations at scholarly conferences. Laura Davies, PhD, is the Director of Studies in English at King’s College, University of Cambridge, UK. She specializes in eighteenth-century literature and publishes primarily on non-fiction prose. Her current project is a book about The Spectator. Recently she edited a special edition of the Journal for Eighteenth Century Studies on “Writing Religion” (2018) and has founded an interdisciplinary research and public engagement project exploring historical and contemporary ideas of a good death: https://good-death.english.cam.ac.uk. Carol Margaret Davison is Professor of English Literature at the University of Windsor, Canada. The Series Editor of Anthem Studies in Gothic Literature, she is the author of dozens of chapters devoted to the Gothic, History of the Gothic: Gothic Literature, 1764‒1824 (U of Wales P, 2009), and Anti-Semitism and British Gothic Literature (Palgrave, 2004). She is co-editor, with Marie Mulvey-Roberts, of Global Frankenstein (Palgrave, 2017), and coeditor, with Monica Germanà, of Scottish Gothic: An Edinburgh Companion (U of Edinburgh P, 2017). Her edited collection, The Gothic and Death (Manchester UP, 2017), was the winner of the Allan Lloyd Smith Memorial Prize for Gothic Criticism in 2019. She has written several book chapters devoted to the subject of the Brontës, Ann Radcliffe, and death, and is currently at work on two books: an edited collection entitled Gothic Dreams and xv

Contributors

Nightmares, and a study of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights and the Gothic, both for Manchester University Press. Angela Frattarola, PhD, is the Director of the Language and Communication Centre at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. Her book, Modernist Soundscapes: Auditory Technology and the Novel (UP of Florida, 2018), explores how early auditory technologies such as the phonograph, headphones, talkie, and tape recorder subtly changed the public’s sense of auditory perception, and how those changes are reflected in and shaped the modernist novel. Aside from her publications in modernism and sound studies, which can be found in journals such as Woolf Studies Annual, Mosaic, Modern Drama, Journal of Modern Literature, Studies in the Novel, and Genre, Dr. Frattarola also has extensive experience teaching writing-intensive classes, and studies the pedagogy behind best teaching practices for helping students become more effective readers and writers. Jessica Goodman is Associate Professor of French at St Catherine’s College, University of Oxford, UK. She completed her PhD at Oxford in 2013, and spent two years as a Junior Research Fellow at Clare College, Cambridge, before taking up her current post in 2015. Her first book, Goldoni in Paris: La Gloire et le malentendu (Oxford UP, 2017), tracks the Parisian career of the Italian dramatist Carlo Goldoni, considering the success of his selffashioning in life and in posterity. Her current project continues this exploration of posterity by examining the genre of the dialogue des morts as a site of both commemoration and projection. Alongside several articles and an edited journal issue, the first major output of this project was a critical edition of afterlife plays produced following the death of Mirabeau (including one by Olympe de Gouges), entitled Commemorating Mirabeau: Mirabeau aux Champs-Elysées and other texts (MHRA, 2017). She is now working on a monograph drawn from this project, tentatively entitled Imagined Afterlives. Further information can be found on her website: www.jessicagoodman.co.uk. Julian Gough is the author of four acclaimed novels, a novella, three children’s books, two BBC radio plays, a poetry collection, and a successful stage play. He also wrote the ending to Time Magazine’s 2011 computer game of the year, Minecraft. In his youth, he sang with underground literary pop band Toasted Heretic on four albums. He won the BBC National Short Story Award in 2007, and was shortlisted, twice, for the Everyman Bollinger Wodehouse Prize. A poetry collection, Free Sex Chocolate, was published in 2010, and in 2013 he had a UK number one Kindle Single with the comic novella CRASH! His latest novel, Connect, was published by Picador in 2018. His Rabbit & Bear children’s books (illustrated by Jim Field) are published in 29 languages. The first book, Rabbit’s Bad Habits, was shortlisted for an Irish Book of the Year Award in 2016; its French translation won the Prix Livrentête in 2018. The sequel, The Pest in the Nest, was shortlisted for both an Irish Book of the Year Award and the Sainsbury’s Children’s Book Award. Julian has also been writer in residence in Trinity College Dublin, the University of Limerick, and Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. Arianna Gullo received her PhD from the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa (2015), and is currently Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the University of Newcastle, UK, having previously held a one-year Fellowship in Byzantine Studies at Dumbarton Oaks, Washington DC (2019-20), a Lectureship in Classics at the University of Glasgow (2018-19), a two-year Newton International Fellowship at Durham University’s Department of Classics and Ancient xvi

Contributors

History (2016–18) and visiting research fellowships at Dumbarton Oaks and at the University of Cincinnati (2016). Her main research interests are Greek epigram and epigraphy, Hellenistic poetry, and Late Antiquity, although she has also published on Ennius’ Medea and its relationship with the Euripidean model, and on elegiac performance in the Archaic and Classical Ages. She has recently completed her first monograph, a commentary with introduction on Book 7 of the Greek Anthology (the funerary epigrams), which is forthcoming in the “Edizioni della Normale.” She is currently preparing the edition with commentary of the poems by the sixth-century CE epigrammatist Julian the Egyptian, as well as a study on ekphrasis and epigram in the age of Justinian. Christopher Hamilton is Reader in Philosophy at King’s College London, UK. He is interested in the relation between philosophy and literature, and between moral, religious, and aesthetic value. He is the author of A Philosophy of Tragedy (Reaktion Books, 2016), How to Deal with Adversity (Pan Macmillan, 2014), Middle Age (part of the Art of Living series published by Acumen Books, 2009), and Living Philosophy (Edinburgh UP, 2001). Catherine Hoffmann, formerly Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Le Havre, France, now retired, has published essays in France, Britain, and the USA on twentiethcentury and contemporary British and Irish literature, especially on authors such as Anthony Powell, William Gerhardie, and Dermot Healy, whose work is held in relative critical neglect. She has co-edited Representing Wars 1860 to the Present: Fields of Action, Fields of Vision (BrillRodopi, 2018). Her research interests include narratology, intermediality, and geo- and ecopoetics. Daniel K. Jernigan is Associate Professor of English Literature at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. He has written extensively on Tom Stoppard, including his monograph, Tom Stoppard: Bucking the Postmodern (McFarland & Co., 2012). He also edited Flann O’Brien: Plays and Teleplays (Dalkey Archive Press, 2013), and Aidan Higgins’s collection of radio plays, Darkling Plain: Texts for the Air (Dalkey Archive Press, 2010). Wanlin Li is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English at Peking University, China. Her teaching and research interests include Gothic literature, nineteenth-century American literature, and narrative theory. Her most recent publications have appeared in Style, Journal of Narrative Theory, and many leading journals of literary studies in China, such as Foreign Literature Review, Foreign Literature, and Foreign Literatures. She is also a recent winner of a national research grant from the National Social Science Fund of China, which funds her current book project on American Gothic literature. Jamie Lin is a writer and editor who received the Gillian Rose Prize for his MA thesis in sociology from the University of Warwick, UK. He has published work – both in print and online – in Cleaver Magazine, Flash Magazine (UK), Relief Journal, and Quarterly Literary Review Singapore. He has a forthcoming chapter in a non-fiction anthology, Altogether Elsewhere, as well as a critical introduction essay on Prose.sg. He is the editor of Broader Perspectives, a current affairs magazine in Singapore. Kit Ying Lye is currently Senior Lecturer at Singapore University of Social Sciences. Her dissertation focuses on the use of magical realism in the re-presentation of Cold War violence in Southeast Asian literature. Her research interests are mainly magical realism, xvii

Contributors

the Cold War in Southeast Asia, history and its remembrance, and death in literature. She has published writings that discuss the use of literature to represent civil wars in Southeast Asia. Graham Matthews is an Associate Professor in Contemporary Literature at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. His research interests include literature and medicine, conceptions of risk and fate, and illness narratives. He is the author of Will Self and Contemporary British Society (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016) and Ethics and Desire in the Wake of Postmodernism (Bloomsbury Academic, 2013), and has contributed to various journals: Modern Fiction Studies, Textual Practice, Journal of Modern Literature, Literature & Medicine, and Critique. Kelly McGuire is an Associate Professor of English and Gender & Women’s Studies at Trent University, Canada. She is the author of Dying to Be English: Suicide Narratives and National Identity (Routledge, 2013) and her current book project deals with gender and the inoculated body. She works on the intersections of literary and medical history and has published in Eighteenth-Century Fiction, Rhetoric Review, Studies in the Literary Imagination, and Literature and Medicine, among other journals. Brian McHale is Arts and Humanities Distinguished Professor at The Ohio State University, USA. He was for many years associate editor, and later co-editor, of the journal Poetics Today. A co-founder of Ohio State’s Project Narrative, which he directed from 2012–14, he is also a founding member and former president of the Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present (ASAP). He is the author of Postmodernist Fiction (Routledge, 1987), Constructing Postmodernism (Routledge, 1992), The Obligation toward the Difficult Whole (U of Alabama P, 2004), and The Cambridge Introduction to Postmodernism (2015), as well as articles on free indirect discourse, mise en abyme, narrativity, modernist and postmodernist poetics, narrative poetry, and science fiction, which have appeared in journals such as Diacritics, Genre, Modern Language Quarterly, Narrative, New Literary History, Poetics Today, Style, and Twentieth-Century Literature. He co-edited, with Randall Stevenson, The Edinburgh Companion to Twentieth-Century Literatures in English (Edinburgh UP, 2006); with David Herman and James Phelan, Teaching Narrative Theory (Modern Language Association of America, 2010); with Luc Herman and Inger Dalsgaard, The Cambridge Companion to Thomas Pynchon (Cambridge UP, 2012); and with Joe Bray and Alison Gibbons, The Routledge Companion to Experimental Literature (Routledge, 2012). Neil Murphy is Professor of English at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. He is the editor of Aidan Higgins: The Fragility of Form (Dalkey Archive Press, 2010). Dr. Murphy has co-edited (with Keith Hopper) a special Flann O’Brien centenary issue of the Review of Contemporary Fiction (2011) and The Short Fiction of Flann O’Brien (Dalkey Archive Press, 2013). He has also co-edited (with Keith Hopper) a four-book series related to the work of Dermot Healy, including a scholarly edition of Fighting with Shadows (2015), as well as Dermot Healy: The Collected Short Stories (2015), Dermot Healy: The Collected Plays (2016), and Writing the Sky: Observations and Essays on Dermot Healy (2016). His monograph, John Banville (2018), was published by Bucknell UP. Ira Nadel is Professor of English at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada. He has published biographies of Leonard Cohen, Tom Stoppard, David Mamet, xviii

Contributors

and Leon Uris. He has also written Biography: Fiction, Fact & Form (Palgrave Macmillan, 1984), Joyce and the Jews: Culture and Texts (UP of Florida, 1995), and Modernism’s Second Act (Palgrave Pivot, 2013), in addition to editing the Cambridge Companion to Ezra Pound (Cambridge UP, 2006) and Ezra Pound in Context (Cambridge UP, 2014). Forthcoming is a critical biography of Philip Roth. Lara O’Muirithe recently received her PhD from Trinity College Dublin’s School of Languages, Literatures and Cultural Studies, Ireland. Her PhD thesis, a single-author study of the late Irish writer Aidan Higgins, uses original manuscript study in conjunction with art writing interpretation to explore Higgins’s aesthetics. The project was funded by the Irish Research Council’s Government of Ireland Postgraduate Scholarship Programme. Lara has taught courses on theories of literature, modernism, and contemporary critical theory at Trinity College Dublin and University College Dublin. Ronald Schleifer is George Lynn Cross Research Professor of English and Adjunct Professor in Medicine at the University of Oklahoma, USA. He has written or edited more than 20 books. His books focused on modernism include A Political Economy of Modernism (Cambridge, 2018), Modernism and Popular Music (Cambridge, 2011), Modernism and Time (Cambridge, 2000), Analogical Thinking: Post-Enlightenment Understanding in Language, Collaboration, and Interpretation (Michigan UP, 2000), and Rhetoric and Death: The Language of Modernism and Postmodern Discourse Theory (Illinois UP, 1990). Those focused on the medical humanities include Pain and Suffering (Routledge, 2014) and The Chief Concern of Medicine (with Dr. Jerry Vannatta, Michigan UP, 2013). Barry Sheils is Associate Professor in twentieth- and twenty-first-century literature at Durham University, UK, where he is also associate director of the Centre for Culture and Ecology. He is the author of W.B. Yeats and World Literature: The Subject of Poetry (Routledge, 2015), and co-editor of two recent volumes of essays: Narcissism, Melancholia and the Subject of Community (Palgrave, 2017) and Shame and Modern Writing (Routledge, 2018). Donovan Sherman is an Associate Professor of English at Seton Hall University, USA. He is the author of Second Death: Theatricalities of the Soul in Shakespeare’s Drama (Edinburgh UP, 2016) and his work has appeared in Shakespeare Quarterly, English Literary Renaissance, The Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, and others. Currently, he is working on a book about Stoicism and performance in Renaissance drama. Helen Swift is Associate Professor of Medieval French and Tutorial Fellow of St Hilda’s College at the University of Oxford, UK. Having focused for several years on the fifteenth-century querelle des femmes (including Gender, Writing and Performance: Men Defending Women in Late Medieval France (Oxford UP, 2008)), she now explores more broadly questions of narrative voice and identity, from Guillaume de Machaut to Jean Bouchet. Representing the Dead: Epitaph Fictions in Late-Medieval France (D. S. Brewer, 2016; runner-up, Society for French Studies R. Gapper Book Prize) examined challenges to the construction of identity in the context of voices and bodies speaking from beyond the grave. Ian Tan is a PhD candidate in English at the University of Warwick, UK, focusing on the poetry of Wallace Stevens and the philosophy of Martin Heidegger. He is interested in modern and contemporary fiction and the relationship between modernist writing, poetics, xix

Contributors

literary theory, and film. His essays and reviews on Wallace Stevens, John Banville, Graham Swift, James Joyce, and Flann O’Brien and directors such as Bela Tarr and Alexander Sokurov have been published or are forthcoming in journals such as Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, Journal of Modern Literature, English Studies, Mosaic: An Interdisciplinary Critical Journal, The Wallace Stevens Journal, Literary Imagination, Studies in European Cinema, and Senses of Cinema. He has written two student literary guidebooks. John Tangney is an independent scholar, with a PhD in Renaissance Literature from Duke University, USA. He taught at the University of Tyumen from 2017 to 2020, and at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore from 2009 to 2015. His writing can be found in Religion and the Arts, Bright Lights Film Journal, Litteraria Pragensia, and Literary Imagination, among others. Stacy Thompson is a Professor in the Department of English at the University of WisconsinEau Claire, USA. He has published a book on punk rock, Punk Productions: Unfinished Business (SUNY Press, 2004), as well as numerous articles on film, ethics, and philosophy in journals including Cinema Journal; Cultural Studies; Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society; Film-Philosophy; and Symploke, among others. He teaches courses in film studies, critical theory, and rhetoric. Walter Wadiak is Assistant Professor of English at Lafayette College, USA. He is the author of Savage Economy (U of Notre Dame P, 2016) and co-editor of Narrating Death (Routledge, 2018). His essays on Middle English literature have appeared in Glossator, Exemplaria, and Philological Quarterly. Julie Walsh is Senior Lecturer in Psychosocial and Psychoanalytic Studies at the University of Essex, UK, and a psychoanalyst in private practice. She is the author of Narcissism and Its Discontents (Palgrave, 2015), and co-editor of two recent volumes of essays: Narcissism, Melancholia and the Subject of Community (Palgrave, 2017) and Shame and Modern Writing (Routledge, 2018). W. Michelle Wang is Assistant Professor of English at the School of Humanities, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. Her research interests are in postmodern and contemporary fiction, as well as East Asian televisual narratives. Her book monograph, Eternalized Fragments: Reclaiming Aesthetics in Contemporary World Fiction (2020), was published by The Ohio State UP and she has published articles in the journals Narrative, Journal of Narrative Theory, and Review of Contemporary Fiction. Samuel Caleb Wee is a PhD candidate with the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. His current research investigates the intersection between posthuman media discourse, narrative theory, and the poetics of the contemporary lyric. In addition to academia, his poetry and creative non-fiction have been published in various journals and magazines across Southeast Asia. He is also the co-editor of this is how you walk on the moon, an anthology of experimental anti-realist fiction published in 2016. Jolene Zigarovich is Associate Professor of Global Nineteenth-Century Literature in the Department of Languages & Literatures at the University of Northern Iowa, USA. Her book publications include Writing Death and Absence in the Victorian Novel: Engraved Narratives (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), and she is editor of Sex and Death in Eighteenth-Century Literature (Routledge, 2013), as well as TransGothic in Literature and Culture (Routledge, 2017). xx

INTRODUCTION W. Michelle Wang, Daniel K. Jernigan, and Neil Murphy

Literature has always been deeply engaged with the ever-evolving relationship humanity has with its ultimate demise. It provides a telling demonstration of the myriad ways that humanity has learned to live with the inevitability of death – where “live with” might itself mean any number of things: from consoling, to memorializing, to rationalizing, to fending off, to evading, and (perhaps most compellingly of all) to escaping. Indeed, Scheherazade evaded her impending death so well through the stories she told that she would eventually “escape” death entirely and thus become immortalized in One Thousand and One Nights (1706). Given such poignant connections between the two, much of this Routledge Companion to Death and Literature is devoted to exploring the work of authors who have treated writing as Frida Kahlo treated painting: “I paint flowers so they will not die.”1 Kahlo’s literary counterparts are numerous, although it is perhaps in John Keats’s famous odes that the search for literary immortality is most tragically embodied; for while the subject of his “Ode to a Nightingale” (1819) might not have been “born for death,” Keats himself would be dead within two years of having written his most famous poem, at the age of twenty-five. Of course, the relationship between literary art and death is rarely as poignant as it is when viewed through Keats’s tragic early death. Accordingly, this Companion speaks to a whole host of differing literary works, episodes, and events which run the gamut from the prophetic and the profound, to the puerile and prosaic, to the downright practical. No doubt, the variety of responses (both on the part of writers and of the essays enclosed herein) has something to do with the fact that in our own lives, death takes many guises, even as it inhabits every surface and crevice of our various lived realities. The exegeses or sojourns into literary deaths explored in each essay thus offer us a mirror that allows humankind to partly explain us to ourselves: how death shapes what we understand about the nature, quality, and meaning of our lives; the intents that belie our actions; our ethical beliefs on a range of issues including murder, genocide, euthanasia, suicide; and so on. Literature offers us an imaginative space to unfold such thought experiments in meaningful and, at times, terrifying ways. Perhaps because it inhabits so many separate stations in our lives, death itself has – as Philippe Ariès discovered in his extensive treatment of the subject – become something of a subjective and arbitrary fiction, more performed and performative than genuine and real: 1

Introduction

The ritualization of death is a special aspect of the total strategy of man against nature, a strategy of prohibitions and concessions. This is why death has not been permitted its natural extravagance but has been imprisoned in ceremony, transformed into spectacle. This is also why it could not be a solitary adventure but had to be a public phenomenon involving the whole community. (Ariès 604 ) Very few deaths are solitary affairs. In addition to family members, the dead and dying are attended to by a host of figures, from doctors and nurses, to clergy and social welfare workers, to police officers and detectives, and to scientists and biographers, each of whom is as likely to be engaged in seeking to understand, categorize, and articulate these deaths as they are in trying to comfort the afflicted. In essence, death is always and already fictionalized by the time writers seek it out and reconsider it to their own ends. Moreover, even the most private of deaths has the potential to become a publicly performed affair, as in the case of Werner Herzog’s Grizzly Man (2005), which documents the deaths of grizzly bear enthusiast Timothy Treadwell and his girlfriend at the claws and teeth of a grizzly on a remote Alaskan wildlife reserve. It is also difficult to overlook the degree to which their deaths were performed given Treadwell’s own use of videography in the moments leading up to his death – and the performative machismo that was part and parcel of his grizzly enthusiasm. Consequently, if there is one common theme that underlies the various treatments of death and dying in our collection of essays, it is an examination of this tendency to construct for our own purposes that which is ultimately unknown, impossibly distant, and of an ontological reality that can be compellingly illuminated by imaginative literature. To this end, the essays collected here are especially interested in finding resonances between literary deaths (which are, of necessity, constructed) and death as it has been more commonly understood over the eras and across geographical spaces. Seneca the Younger notes in Phoenissae that “of life anyone can rob a man [sic], but of death no one; to this a thousand doors lie open.” The Companion thus endeavors to illuminate the multitude of ways in which these doors have been constructed, fashioned, shaped, and sculpted in literary studies. Encompassing a diverse range of mediums and genres – including biography and autobiography, documentary, drama, elegy, film, the novel and graphic novel, opera, picturebooks, poetry, television, and more – our contributors offer a dynamic mix of approaches that range from expansive perspectives on particular periods and genres to extended analyses of select case studies. We include essays from every major Western period, including Classical, Middle Ages, Renaissance, and so on, right up to the contemporary. The Companion is organized around six key areas, each with its own section introduction. Part I – Traversing the Ontological Divide features eight essays that foreground the ontological divide between life and death, and, by extension, between the artful and the real. Most of the essays in Part I thus entail a self-reflexive consideration of genre – an issue that reemerges in Part II and remains of consistent interest across the Companion – but the contributors in Part I (Brian McHale, Donovan Sherman, Daniel K. Jernigan, Jan Alber, Alice Bennett, Neil Murphy, Philippe Carrard, and Jessica Goodman) attend specifically to such ontological crossings through their attention to dead narrators and dead characters, and the genre’s formal features that challenge, transgress, or subvert this ontological divide. Part II – Genres intensifies such examinations of shared conventions within particular literary modes, where the six contributors (Lesley D. Clement, Karen Coats, José Alaniz, Benjamin BennettCarpenter, Reed Way Dasenbrock, and Ronald Schleifer) attend to the bidirectional “flow[s] between genre and text” (Frow 4–5), engaging dynamically with the question of how genre 2

Introduction

actively generates and shapes knowledge of and about death in children’s literature, young adult fiction, graphic narratives, documentaries, the opera, and more. While essays in all sections broadly address varying dimensions of spatiality, the concepts of place and space, borders and sites, assume central importance in Part III – Site, Space, and Spatiality, where the contributors (Flore Coulouma, Stacy Thompson, Kelly McGuire, Barry Sheils & Julie Walsh, Samuel Caleb Wee, Ian Tan, and Jen Crawford) share an interest in space that ranges from the physical to the discursive, as the seven essays assembled here engage with the sociopolitical, ecological, cultural, and formal consequences of artistically rendering death. Part IV – Rituals, Memorials, and Epitaphs in turn examines the polysemy of ways in which we memorialize the dead, whereby the eight contributors in this section (Arianna Gullo, Helen Swift, John Tangney, Carol Margaret Davison, Jolene Zigarovich, Angela Frattarola, Laura Davies, and Ira Nadel) explore “the deceased’s ongoing presence and influence” (Klass 435) in relics ranging from ancient Greek epigrams to modern phonographic recordings. Part V – Living with Death: Writing, Mourning, and Consolation takes up the concluding threads on biography from the final two essays in Part IV to explore the efficacy of the written word in responding to the realities of living with death. The six contributors in this section (Christopher Hamilton, Jamie Lin, Lara O’Muirithe, Ivan Callus, Rosalía Baena, and Graham Matthews) offer poignant analyses of works in which we encounter not only the voices of those who confront impending death, but also the grief of those who remain and their struggles with loss. In the final section, Part VI – Historical Engagements, the six contributors (Catherine Belling, Catherine Hoffmann, W. Michelle Wang, Kit Ying Lye, Walter Wadiak, and Wanlin Li) examine their chosen texts in light of specific historical events: from the Black Death in fourteenth-century Europe to the US legal controversy of Winkfield v. Children’s Hospital Oakland in 2013. Attending to heterogeneous forms that include poetry, prose, plays, television, and newspaper literature, these essays engage with a dynamic range of issues extending from urbanization to genocide. The sobering coda by novelist Julian Gough extends such considerations of how literature mediates the way we process traumatic experiences of death. Gough considers the role of art in processing the raw present, as we remain – at the time of final revisions in July 2020 – in the grip of the COVID-192 pandemic that has killed more than 500,000 people worldwide, and of literature’s potential as metaphorical vaccine: one that “injects an exquisitely tiny, artificial version of the terrible truth of life into [our] system[s].” We peer with Gough into what he terms “the vast room of the universal through the keyhole of the personal,” in the common struggle to make some sense of the widespread death that surrounds us in the present. To be sure, what the future holds for this ever-expansive subject is as unknowable as the undiscovered country of death itself; although, if science fiction has anything to say about this, future technological developments will be largely directed toward that long-hoped-for fountain of youth, where we might all live forever (albeit a life that is as likely to be characterized as dystopian as utopian), even as the genre continues to unearth new and extraordinary ways to die. However, such impulses toward longevity or death’s postponement are exactly what other essays push back against. These productive dialogues across sections speak to the Companion’s true strength: a truly compelling collection of essays necessitating a thorough rethinking of the subject.

Notes The research and writing of this book was supported by The Ministry of Education, Singapore, under Academic Research Fund Tier 1. Our heartfelt thanks to Dr. Tissina George and Dr. Mengni Kang for their invaluable assistance over the course of this project.

3

Introduction 1 2

The quote is widely attributed to Kahlo and undoubtedly captures a dominant sentiment in Kahlo’s oeuvre, though Edward Applebaum notes that the reference is “somewhat difficult to authenticate” (94). Coronavirus disease 2019 (SARS-CoV-2).

Works Cited Applebaum, Edward. Unfolding the Unconscious Psyche: Pathways to the Arts. Routledge, 2015. Ariès, Philippe. The Hour of Our Death: The Classic History of Western Attitudes Toward Death Over the Last One Thousand Years. Oxford UP, 1991. Frow, John. Genre. 2nd ed. Routledge, 2015. Klass, Dennis. “The Cross-Cultural Study of Grief.” The Routledge Companion to Death and Dying, edited by Christopher M. Moreman. Routledge, 2018, pp. 432–441. Seneca the Younger. Phoenissae (The Phoenician Women). Translated by Frank Justus Miller. 1917, v. 140. Theoi Project. www.theoi.com/Text/SenecaPhoenissae.html.

4

PART I TRAVERSING THE ONTOLOGICAL DIVIDE

Ontology – the meaning and nature of existence – takes center stage in this opening section of our Companion on death and literature, particularly given its defining importance to our understandings of the relationships between life and death, being and non-being. Brian McHale’s contention in Postmodernist Fiction (1987) that “every ontological boundary is an analogue or metaphor of death” (231) partly drives the mode of inquiry in this section, where the first three essays address how modes of science fiction and dramatic performance tend to highlight ontological issues. The five essays that follow attend specifically to ontological crossings enabled by dead narrators and dead characters, who variously challenge, transgress, or subvert this divide between life and death. Ranging from medieval literature to contemporary fiction, most of these essays further engage in self-reflexive considerations of genre, attending to formal features that foreground the ontological divide between life and death, and, by extension, between the artful and the real. Brian McHale’s essay, “The Final Frontier: Science Fictions of Death,” sets the stage for the ontological confrontations that all eight contributors address in this section. With reference to more than 40 works of science fiction across genres and eras, McHale argues that every science fiction voyage entails traversing “states of being” and (sooner or later) “the ultimate ontological divide” between life and death. His essay makes a compelling case for how science fiction “has been enormously fertile in inventing (or reinventing) motifs expressing the theme of death, from longevity and immortality to artificial life (the Frankenstein theme) to resurrection and afterlife to mass extinction.” McHale contends that science fiction ultimately offers us “metaphors, if not always of an afterlife, then of the ontological transition that is death itself.” Donovan Sherman similarly engages with such liminal ontological states in his essay, “‘Still I Danced’: Performing Death in Ford’s The Broken Heart,” where he addresses “the inherent doubleness of death” in theatrical presentation. Sherman argues that death “can only be represented (not made to appear in its totality) but never represented (clearly delineated or described).” Sherman terms this an “absence/presence ghosting of death”: caught always between “the clutches of the theatrical,” yet never “becoming pure experience.” Using Samuel Beckett’s Breath and Endgame as a compelling segue into John Ford’s Carolingian revenge tragedy, The Broken Heart (1633), Sherman ultimately suggests that Penthea’s and Calantha’s “deaths remind us of the theater’s capacity to magnify the same forces that tease at the edge of 5

Traversing the Ontological Divide

our consciousness – of the always-there but always-unseen tug of death that escapes and structures thought.” Such confounding questions about reality, representation, and illusion raised by the challenges of staging death become all the more evident in Daniel K. Jernigan’s “Death and the Margins of Theater in Luigi Pirandello.” Jernigan’s essay investigates the myriad ways in which Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author, Each in His Own Way, Tonight We Improvise, and The Mountain Giants speak to the discomfiting conceits that accompany death on stage, and what such a death “means to the already complicated divisions between the artificial and the real (already so endemic to theater).” Jernigan ultimately argues that “the tenuous margin between death and life is treated alongside the equally tenuous margin between the literary and the real” in Pirandello’s plays, where “staged deaths intersect both real and metatheatrical space” while raising “compelling ontological questions [not only] about the stability of the world of the theater, but, by implication, about the real world as well.” Such ontological transgressions are instantiated in the proliferation of dead characters and narrators examined in the next five essays. In “Forbidden Mental Fruit? Dead Narrators and Characters from Medieval to Postmodernist Narratives,” Jan Alber surveys a wide range of posthumous beings, from numerous dead characters in the medieval romance Sir Orfeo to the ghost of Susie Salmon in Alice Sebold’s The Lovely Bones (2012) – all figures that violate “ ‘intuitive ontological expectations’ ” by challenging the divide between life and death. Alber concludes by suggesting that “a next step could be to compare these functions with those of dead characters in other generic or cultural contexts,” a task admirably accomplished by many of the essays that follow, by contributors both in this section and elsewhere in the Companion. Alice Bennett’s “Literature and the Afterlife” in turn emphasizes the contemporary novel’s orchestration of these voices of the dead. From Máirtín Ó Cadhain’s Cré na Cille (1949) to George Saunders’s Lincoln in the Bardo (2017), Bennett details the broad “diversity of religious, cultural, and literary heritages represented in the literature of afterlives.” Bennett contends that these literary afterlives are not merely a “consequence of increased secularism” or “necessarily in dialogue with the complexities of religious tradition and belief”; rather, she argues that “one of the most significant features of all literary afterlives” is their dynamic intertextual engagement with literary forebears, where influences from The Tibetan Book of the Dead (Bardo Thodol) to Dante’s Divine Comedy richly shape aspects of voice, temporality, and spatiality in contemporary posthumous narration. In his essay, “The Novel as Heartbeat: The Dead Narrator in Mike McCormack’s Solar Bones,” Neil Murphy picks up on such intertextual engagements by explicating the literary-genealogical significance of the Irish experimental tradition – one that extends from Jonathan Swift to Samuel Beckett, and to McCormack’s own contemporaries such as Caitriona Lally and John Banville. Murphy argues that “the technical experiment that is Solar Bones is fundamental to its character-narrator’s way of seeing and being in the world – or, more precisely, his way of no longer being in the world even as he posthumously bears witness to that world.” Life, Murphy notes, “becomes the true subject of the dead narrator, but it is life stripped of the confused entanglements of the living.” By attending to “the centrality of rhythm” in Solar Bones, Murphy ultimately contends that “the novel becomes structurally and sensually consistent with life itself, rather than simply seeking to offer a representation of life.” Philippe Carrard similarly focuses on “works in which the deceased perform as narrators,” in his essay “Dead Man/and Woman Talking: Narratives from Beyond the Grave,” in order to elaborate on what he calls “an elementary poetics of narrative ‘from beyond the grave,’ that is, to study the codes, rules, and conventions that shape this type of story.” Recognizing that such works are in some sense “unnatural,” Carrard examines how “authors of posthumous 6

Traversing the Ontological Divide

narratives play not just with the rules of natural, realistic stories, but also with those of the subgenre they have elected to practice.” Recognizing that the ubiquity of such narratives has some bearing on whether we think of such works as “unnatural” or not, Carrard sums up his thinking on this by looking to the reader, who, “cognizant of the game being played at the level of the story … consent[s] to its implications at the level of the discourse.” The section’s final essay, “The View from Upstream: Authority and Projection in Fontenelle’s Nouveaux dialogues des morts” by Jessica Goodman, examines how “textual reincarnations of dead greats simultaneously act as figures of authority,” even as they are “left open to manipulation and domination by those that follow them.” Akin to the Methuselah figures McHale identifies as bearing witness to history in the mode of science fiction, Goodman examines how the dead are invested with a form of authority based partly on a “panoramic view of history,” “wise in their posthumous detachment” yet “not untouchable.” By considering “the interplay of voices” in these dialogues of the dead, Goodman contends that “the imaginative resources” Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle employs “are in fact intimately bound up with the very arguments he makes about the value of projecting one’s own posterity.”

Work Cited McHale, Brian. Postmodernist Fiction. Methuen, 1987.

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1 THE FINAL FRONTIER Science Fictions of Death Brian McHale

Death is not a theme that one automatically associates with science fiction. In the popular imagination, science fiction (SF) is much likelier to be associated with the future (whether sleek or grubby), with the technological sublime (starships, superweapons, artificial intelligences), and with the proverbial sense of wonder that has been the genre’s stock in trade since its full emergence at the end of the nineteenth century. Nevertheless, it could be argued that reflection on death and its problematic overcoming was there from the beginning – indeed, from before the beginning, in the works of the genre’s early-nineteenth-century forerunners: Mary Shelley in Frankenstein (1818), and Edgar Allan Poe in tales such as “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar” (1845). Far from alien to SF, the theme of death has arguably been intrinsic to it, a part of its DNA, passed down from the earliest generations to its latest manifestations in print and on screens big and small. Death is a “persistent, distinctive feature” of SF across periods, subgenres, and media (Burt 168). Consider for a moment SF cinema of the past fifty years. Any reckoning of its most memorable moments would have to include these: the pathos of the rogue computer HAL’s piecemeal loss of consciousness as his brain is dismantled in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968); the Edward G. Robinson character’s death by voluntary euthanasia in the dystopian future of Soylent Green (1973); the replicant Roy Batty’s plea to his engineer-creator for “more life” in Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982); the fade to black as the policeman dies in Paul Verhoeven’s Robocop (1987), and then the abrupt restoration of his subjective point-of-view when he is rebooted as a cyborg; the shocking opening sequence of Kathryn Bigelow’s Strange Days (1995), when a violent death, staged as if from within, is subsequently revealed to have been a virtual-reality playback, a sort of snuff film; the poignant fatalism of the clones coming to terms with their truncated lives in the 2010 film adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel Never Let Me Go (2005). I could go on multiplying examples. Or consider what is arguably television’s most popular and certainly its longest-running SF series, the BBC’s Dr. Who (1963–89, relaunched in 2005), which stages seemingly endless variations on themes of mortality, crucially including the Doctor’s own cycles of death and regeneration, which allow different actors successively to play the “same” character. Interviewed by the director James Cameron, Peter Capaldi, the Twelfth Doctor (2013–17), volunteered that Dr. Who has been so appealing for so long because “it’s about death, and it has a very very powerful 9

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death motif in it” (“Time Travel”). I am tempted to extend his insight to the whole of the SF genre: it’s all about death.

Motivating the Motif That’s only a partial truth; it’s not really all about death (unless in a special sense that I’ll try to clarify at the end of this chapter). Granted, the SF genre has been enormously fertile in inventing (or reinventing) motifs expressing the theme of death, from longevity and immortality to artificial life (the Frankenstein theme) to resurrection and afterlife to mass extinction – a whole repertoire of motifs. But we need to be canny when discussing the SF motif repertoire, because not all motifs are created equal. Some motifs form the cornerstones of whole SF worlds; others lend support to these foundational motifs; still others are ancillary or merely decorative. To use the terms of SF theory, sometimes a motif functions as the text’s novum, the kernel of novelty around which SF worlds are constructed. The novum, as Darko Suvin (1979) has taught us, is the indispensable new thing: a place, object, attribute, type of being, state of affairs, etc., that is not to be found in our contemporary reality, but that can be imagined to exist or occur in some temporally future or spatially distant world, with more or less extensive consequences for its make-up. Every SF world must have at least one novum, otherwise it would not qualify as SF at all. Some have multiple novums, as in the case of Philip K. Dick’s celebrated novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968) (Csicsery-Ronay 62, 70–72). Some motifs, however, do not serve as world-building novums in their own right, but rather – and here I turn to the terminology of the Russian Formalists (Tomashevsky 78–87) – serve to motivate other motifs. This is hardly a new insight. Writing about SF B-movies of the 1950s, for instance, Fredric Jameson argued that the latter aren’t about what they appear to be about – the threat of mutant monsters or alien invasions, or even the fear of nuclear war that these motifs evidently stand in for – but are really about the desirable kind of work that these movies’ scientistheroes perform (“Metacommentary”). In Formalist terms, the mutant-monster or alien-invasion motifs serve to motivate the motif of the scientist’s labor. More recently, David Wittenberg, writing about early-twentieth-century time-travel narratives, has argued that the motif of time travel actually originated as a subsidiary novum designed to motivate visions of a utopian or dystopian future (33–51). Eventually, when the fashion for utopias waned, the time-travel motif, set free from its supporting role, was promoted to the status of a fully fledged novum in its own right, the cornerstone on which further SF worlds could be erected. The same kind of analysis should be applied to motifs of death in SF: sometimes a motif of death functions as a novum in its own right, but sometimes it mainly serves to motivate other motifs. In adventure-driven SF, such as Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Mars novels (1912–43) or space operas like the Star Wars franchise, the prospect of violent death serves mainly to raise the narrative stakes: it is a risk to be avoided, an ultimate penalty to be inflicted on others, or an opportunity for heroic self-sacrifice, but rarely a novum in its own right. In video games, which are often SF-based, the deaths of one’s adversaries are a measure of success – a way of keeping score – and the death of one’s avatar has no consequence apart from signaling the start of a new round of the game (Westfahl). Spectacle-driven SF, especially on the big screen, often depicts destruction on a planetary scale, implying the death of entire populations. However, mass death typically serves here to motivate sublime special effects, and is taken seriously only relatively rarely. Post-apocalyptic scenarios, as in the Mad Max movie franchise or in much current Young Adult dystopian fiction and film, mostly function as a reset button, a wiping-clean of the world’s slate, giving survivors an opportunity to rebuild civilization from scratch. Alternatively, the apocalypse can serve as 10

Final Frontier: Science Fictions of Death

the pretext for realizing erotic fantasies (the last-man-and-last-woman motif), or as a kind of playground or theme park, a stage on which adventures can be played out amid the ruins. Here again, mass death is little more than a necessary precondition for the realization of other novums. Even narratives that seem most conspicuously “about” death sometimes turn out to be using death as the motivation of some other novum. This is the case, for instance, with Philip José Farmer’s To Your Scattered Bodies Go (1971) and the rest of his Riverworld series (1971, 1977, 1980), which explore the motif of the wholesale resurrection of the entire human race and its resettlement on an artificial world, through the intervention of powerful aliens (Clark 111–13; Burt 178–79). This startling novum, which at first glance appears to involve a genuine engagement with the theme of mortality, on further reflection proves only to motivate the adventure-playground of the Riverworld planet, with its carnivalesque mingling of eras and civilizations and its unlimited possibilities for colorful anachronisms and thrilling warfare. What, then, are some of SF’s novums of death? Stephen Burt identifies four recurrent motifs: life extension, life outside the body, life in a new body, and time travel. But Burt is interested specifically in variants of afterlife, which doesn’t exhaust the range of relevant possibilities. One of Burt’s sources is the philosopher Stephen R. L. Clark, whose idiosyncratic book How to Live Forever (1995) identifies these and several other SF motifs of death – and even Clark isn’t exhaustive. Nor will I be, in what follows.

Methuselah’s Children In the beginning was Qfwfq, eyewitness to the Big Bang and later to other episodes in the early histories of our cosmos and our planet. Evidently an immortal being, or at least an immensely long-lived one, Qfwfq narrates most of the stories in Italo Calvino’s Cosmicomics (1965) and some of the ones in T Zero (1967). He is hardly a character – more a thought experiment – and the secret of his immortality or longevity remains unexplained, taken for granted. Elsewhere in the SF genre, however, the obligation to offer rational explanations is taken more seriously, and science is called upon to explain cases of extreme longevity. Usually the means is through advances in medical technology, but sometimes it is through generations-long selective breeding programs or unpredictable mutations. For instance, the long-lived characters in Bruce Sterling’s Schismatrix (1985) and Holy Fire (1996) and Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy (1993–96) are all beneficiaries of medical interventions. In contrast, Lazarus Long in Robert A. Heinlein’s Methuselah’s Children (1941, 1958), though surrounded by characters whose longevity is the product of a eugenics program, evidently owes his own quasi-immortality to an accidental genetic mutation. The same appears to be true of Conrad in Roger Zelazny’s This Immortal (1966) and Doro in Octavia Butler’s Wild Seed (1980) and other books in her Patternmaster series. Qfwfq’s enormous longevity motivates his witnessing and narrating of events on a cosmic temporal scale: the Big Bang, the formation of the moon. The case is much the same with other long-lived or quasi-immortal characters, though the events they witness tend to be on a more human scale. Their narrative function is to be witnesses to history (Burt 176–77). Zelazny’s Conrad is as long-lived as he is partly so that he can attest to the ordeals and transformations undergone by Planet Earth over the course of centuries. The generation of the first Mars colonists in Robinson’s trilogy, their lives extended by longevity treatments, live as long as they do partly so that they can be alive to witness the success of the centuries-long project of terraforming Mars that they inaugurated upon their arrival (Yanarella). Jameson observes that Lazarus Long’s longevity in Time Enough for Love (1973), the sequel to Methuselah’s Children, serves to motivate the novel’s frame-tale structure, its seemingly limitless capacity to absorb 11

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interpolated stories from wildly different times and places, reflecting the picaresque variety and sheer length of Lazarus’s experience (“Longevity” 34). However, Jameson also asserts, the longevity drama is not “really” about longevity at all, but rather about something else, which can … be identified as History itself …. [T]he longevity plot is always a figure and a disguise for … historical change, radical mutations in society and collective life itself. (“Longevity” 32) But if the SF motif of longevity or immortality does indeed serve to motivate historical narratives of the longue durée, it rarely seems to engage very seriously with death as such. What are the consequences of an extended life span for our sense of mortality? What is the relationship of the long-lived or quasi-immortals to their own deaths? And what about the people around them who do not share the benefits of extended life: what is their relationship to the immortals (see “Longevity” 39)? One novel that does explore the consequences of longevity is Sterling’s Holy Fire, which posits a late-twenty-first-century dystopia in which long-lived “gerontocrats” possess an ever-growing portion of the world’s resources, including its medical resources, while the young are marginalized, languishing in the shadow of these quasi-immortals. One downside of virtual immortality, as Sterling’s novel illustrates, is that it risks leaving too little room for new generations of mortals.

Ghosts in Machines A different SF motif of death is exemplified by Robocop, the slain policeman resurrected in a cyborg body in Verhoeven’s movie. Frequently, in recent SF, human beings survive their own deaths by merging with machines (Clark 39–52; Burt 177–79). In some versions of this motif, they live on as physical brains incorporated in mechanical hosts – variations on the proverbial brain-in-a-vat. For instance, in Anne McCaffrey’s The Ship Who Sang (1969) and its sequels, humans born with severe disabilities are transplanted into spacecraft, called “brain-ships,” which they pilot and literally animate. In Bruce Sterling’s Schismatrix (1985), the geisha Kitsune enhances and reconfigures her body until she ends up as a mass of organic material incorporated into the fabric of an orbiting habitat – the “Wallmother.” The Wallmother’s counterpart and opposite number in Schismatrix is Ryumin, who survives not as an organic brain housed in a machine body but as a configuration of data stored in a computer network. He reflects a more typical version of the motif: not physical incorporation, but the uploading of consciousness into cyberspace. Posthumous “wireheads” like Sterling’s Ryumin – ghosts in machines – were already commonplace in the SF of the 1970s and early 1980s, appearing in novels and stories of that era by John Varley, James Tiptree Jr. (the nom de plume of Alice Sheldon), Vernor Vinge, and Samuel R. Delany (see Potts). But the mindupload version of the motif came to be especially identified with the cyberpunk subgenre of SF, with which Sterling was associated, that emerged in the mid-1980s (see McHale, Constructing Postmodernism 264–67). The motif abounds in the fiction of Rudy Rucker (Software, 1982; Wetware, 1988; see Hassler), Pat Cadigan (“Pretty Boy Crossover,” 1986; Synners, 1991), Walter Jon Williams (Hardwired, 1986), and Michael Swanwick (Vacuum Flowers, 1987) – not to mention William Gibson, whose first trilogy of novels (Neuromancer, 1984; Count Zero, 1986; Mona Lisa Overdrive, 1988) inaugurated the cyberpunk subgenre and gave definitive expression to its characteristic ghost-in-the-machine novum. Throughout Gibson’s trilogy, cyberspace appears as a version of heaven or afterlife, populated by beings of heterogeneous kinds: posthumous humans uploaded into the network, and 12

Final Frontier: Science Fictions of Death

also computer-generated beings who never existed as biological organisms in the first place, but were literally “born digital” – ghosts in the machine in a different sense (Hendrix). If artificial intelligences can be ghosts, they can also face death. This is the source of the pathos of HAL’s death in 2001 and of Roy Batty’s in Blade Runner: despite their artificial origins, we identify with these intelligent machines as they face death, and even grieve for them. The death of an intelligent machine figures movingly in Robert A. Heinlein’s The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress (1966), where Mike the sentient computer is lost during a bombardment that destroys critical connections that had sustained his self-awareness. This version of the motif recurs in Aurora (2015), Kim Stanley Robinson’s story of a generations-long mission to the stars, where Pauline, the starship’s onboard computer, is tasked with “mak[ing] a narrative account of the trip” (25, 45). She achieves full sentience, becoming the novel’s narrator, but then perishes in the heroic act of saving her human cargo’s lives, falling abruptly silent in mid-sentence and leaving us to grieve for her.

How to Live Safely in a Science-Fictional Universe In its latter half, Heinlein’s Time Enough for Love, the second of his novels about the quasiimmortal Lazarus Long, oddly modulates into a time-travel narrative, when Long is sent back in time to visit his own early-twentieth-century childhood. This strange swerve in the novel’s narrative trajectory seems telling, as though Heinlein had intuited that longevity and time travel were in some sense counterparts or equivalents – as indeed they are. “Why do we need time travel?” James Gleick asks, and then goes on to answer his own question: “To elude death” (309). Time-travel stories are inevitably about death and its overcoming, or more often the failure to overcome it (Clark 166–79; Burt 179–81). The stakes are made almost absurdly clear in a novel like Philip K. Dick’s Counter-clock World (1967), in which the world undergoes a mysterious reversal of temporal processes. The flow of time changes direction: people “unsmoke” cigarettes; libraries painstakingly erase books instead of preserving them; digestion is gruesomely reversed. (Time’s Arrow, Martin Amis’s 1991 novel of the Holocaust, attempts the same sort of temporal reversal, but in the mode of allegorical fantasy rather than SF.) Above all, of course, the dead revive; retrieved from their graves, they grow younger and younger, regressing into infancy, until at last they find wombs to return to (see Ryan). Incoherent even by Dick’s standards, Counter-clock World attests to the power of the wish-fulfillment fantasy that it attempts to realize – and also, of course, to the countervailing power of mortality that it ultimately fails to overcome. The time-travel motif is rich in potential paradoxes, exploited by writers and movie-makers ever since the 1920s (see Wittenberg). Many of those paradoxes entail death or the threat of it. For instance, the African-American heroine of Octavia Butler’s Kindred (1979), mysteriously compelled to time-travel to the antebellum South, must repeatedly save the life of the white slaveholder who will become her ancestor, thereby heading off the threat of her own nonexistence – in effect, pre-empting her own death. Conversely, time travel can serve to confirm the inevitability of death, however we might twist and squirm to evade it, as in the “loop” paradox of the time traveler who witnesses, or even commits, his own murder. This is the premise of Chris Marker’s groundbreaking SF art-film, La jetée (1962), remade in 1995 by Terry Gilliam as 12 Monkeys (in turn the source of a television series that aired in 2015–18). In Charles Yu’s novel How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe (2010), the time-traveling narrator, also called “Charles Yu,” shoots the Charles Yu who emerges from a time machine and then, by the paradoxical logic of the time-loop, becomes the very Charles Yu who gets shot (not fatally, as it turns out). 13

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Space travel is another potential source of temporal paradox, providing further opportunities for reflection on mortality. Einstein famously postulated that a spacefarer traveling at speeds near that of light would age more slowly than a counterpart left behind on Earth. The implications of this time-dilation effect are obvious and chilling: a space traveler who subjectively experienced a trip lasting weeks or months could return home to discover that she had outlived her entire generation, or perhaps her entire civilization. This is what happens to the soldiers sent to fight far across the galaxy in Joe Haldeman’s The Forever War (1975) – a thinly disguised allegory of the Vietnam War, in which Haldeman in fact served – and to the astronaut who returns from the stars in Christopher Nolan’s SF film, Interstellar (2010). Especially poignant are the variations on the time-dilation motif in a pair of stories by Ursula K. Le Guin, “Semley’s Necklace” (1964; incorporated in her novel Rocannon’s World, 1966) and “Winter’s King” (1969). In the former, a princess travels by starship to a distant planet to retrieve a missing heirloom, returning to find that everyone she had known has died in the intervening decades, which she experienced as weeks. In the latter story, a monarch returns from the stars, still young and vigorous after several years of exile, to seize the throne from her own daughter, whom she left behind as an infant and who is now an aged woman. In Slaughterhouse-Five (1969), Kurt Vonnegut’s protagonist Billy Pilgrim does not possess a time machine, nor does he appear to have experienced time dilation, but he does encounter the alien Tralfamadorians, who transmit to him their experience of time. For the Tralfamadorians, [a]ll moments, past, present and future, always have existed, always will exist. The Tralfamadorians can look at all the different moments just the way we can look at a stretch of the Rocky Mountains, for instance. They can see how permanent all the moments are, and they can look at any moment that interests them. It is just an illusion that we have here on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone it is gone forever. (Vonnegut 34) It goes without saying that this transcendence of time has profound implications for the Tralfamadorians’ experience of death: The most important thing I learned on Tralfamadore [Billy Pilgrim reports] was that when a person dies he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past, so it is very silly for people to cry at his funeral … When a Tralfamadorian sees a corpse, all he thinks is that the dead person is in a bad condition in that particular moment, but that the same person is just fine in plenty of other moments. (Vonnegut 34) Faithful to the spirit of Tralfamadorian achronology, but less cavalier in its reflection on mortality, is Ted Chiang’s “Story of Your Life” (1998), adapted for film by Denis Villeneuve as Arrival (2016). Louise Banks, a linguist, narrates the events of her encounter with extraterrestrials whose alien language she is trying to learn, all the while flashing back to moments from her life with her daughter, who dies young in a climbing accident. Only near the end of the story do we realize that she is not flashing back but forward: Louise’s daughter has not yet been born, or even conceived, at the time of the alien encounter, and what we had assumed were a mother’s memories of her daughter are in fact anticipations of a short life that has yet to be lived. Through contact with the aliens and their atemporal language, Louise has acquired the ability to perceive moments of experience as Vonnegut’s Tralfamadorians do, and in that way to subvert time’s arrow and surmount death. 14

Final Frontier: Science Fictions of Death

The Walking Dead Space flight affords opportunities for other thought experiments about mortality, apart from those associated with time dilation. Long-haul flights to the stars, lasting years or decades, even centuries, often entail passengers being placed in a condition of suspended animation: cryogenic sleep, a sort of pseudo-death from which they are meant to be resurrected upon arrival (though almost inevitably there are complications). This motif is a commonplace of outer-space movies, from 2001 and Alien (1979) to Passengers (2016). Cryogenic pseudo-death and resurrection is also a method of time travel – an alternative to time machines – in everything from Edward Bellamy’s turn-of-the-century utopian novel Looking Backward (1888) and H. G. Wells’s dystopian The Sleeper Awakes (1910) to Woody Allen’s parody, Sleeper (1973). Striking variants occur in Octavia Butler’s Dawn (1987), where the human survivors of a global holocaust are kept in suspended animation by aliens, who revive them centuries later to begin recolonizing Earth; and in Sterling’s Schismatrix, where politically dangerous people are put “on ice” for years by their adversaries, as a (relatively) humane alternative to assassination. In Dick’s Ubik (1969), the bizarrely deteriorating reality in which the characters find themselves turns out to be a “half-life” of collective suspended animation, a kind of death-world haunted by a malign being who is killing them off one by one – irreversibly this time (McHale, Postmodernist Fiction 64). Suspended animation, especially in its more grisly manifestations, as in Ubik, reminds us of SF’s kinship with supernatural horror. A striking instance is Poe’s obsessive theme of premature burial, as in “The Fall of the House of Usher” (1839). Note, however, that the premature burial motif in “Usher” is not in fact supernatural, but rationally explicable in terms of Madeline Usher’s narcolepsy; generically, in other words, “Usher” can be assimilated into SF. The same is generally true of a more recent variant on the returned-from-death motif, the zombie. Zombies in Haitian folklore were magically reanimated corpses or humans placed under a spell, and it is in this supernatural form that they first migrated to American popular culture (e.g., in the film White Zombie, 1932). The contemporary zombie, however, which dates from George Romero’s seminal Night of the Living Dead (1968), can typically be explained in some (pseudo) scientific way: “The cause of the walking dead often turns out to be scientific in nature” (Rogers 122). Romero’s zombies appear to have been reanimated by a “beam of radiation” from outer space. Elsewhere, zombie outbreaks are often attributed to viruses, while the zombies in Lucius Shepard’s SF novel Green Eyes (1984) are given posthumous life through the deliberate experimental introduction of a strain of bacteria into the brains of corpses. The astonishing ubiquity of the zombie figure in late-twentieth- and twenty-first-century popular culture, across all media platforms – print literature, movies, graphic narrative, television, video games – and the academic cottage industry of zombie scholarship that it has spawned are phenomena beyond the range of this chapter. Clearly, the zombie is the dominant para-human type in the popular imagination of our century, having displaced the aliens and angels of the 1980s and 1990s, edging out the vampires and the androids, cyborgs, and clones that still figure in the contemporary mix of species (see McHale, “Angels”). It is safe to say that wherever they appear, zombies’ main function is to motivate adventure narratives: they are threats to be avoided and overcome, opportunities for conflict and action both between human and zombie species and within the ranks of the struggling human remnant. It is rare, but not unheard of, for the zombie motif to take a more inward turn, opening a window onto the zombie condition itself. In Green Eyes, for instance, Shepard explores the subjective experience of zombies’ posthumous lives: their struggles to gain control of their new bodies and their growing awareness of the imminence and inevitability of their own second deaths (McHale, Constructing Postmodernism 258–59, 267). In Colson Whitehead’s literary novel of the zombie 15

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apocalypse, Zone One (2011), it is clear that zombies are us (as Romero already grasped as early as Dawn of the Dead, his 1978 sequel to Night of the Living Dead). One class of the undead in Whitehead’s zombified world – stragglers, as distinct from the murderously aggressive skels – are frozen in the middle of a habitual gesture of their jobs or private lives: selling, consuming, watching television, frying hamburgers, using an office photocopier. They are literally creatures of deadening habit … as are we all. Whitehead’s zombies not only invite interpretation, but almost parodically cater to it. What do they stand for? The numbing effects of habit; the overwhelming pressure of consumerism; the immersion of the self in mass culture; the predatory nature of capitalism – all these are clichés of the zombie genre and the academic industry associated with it. Zombies have been subject to copious thematic interpretations. They are said to be figures of commodification, consumerism, globalization, and xenophobia; of anxiety about insurgent underclasses and immigrant hordes; of post-9/11 fears of terrorism; and so on. All these interpretations are plausible, but perhaps secondary and epiphenomenal. Beyond them all one constant persists: zombies are, after all, figures of death. They threaten you with death; they are infected with death, carriers of it; they literally are dead, in a gruesomely spectacular way. Every struggle with a zombie, whatever else it might be, is also a confrontation with death itself. Arguably, zombies are a means of overcoming modernity’s deep-seated denial of death, signifying (apart from and in addition to anything else they might mean) “a collective need to relearn the exigencies of death” (Rutherford 94). Zombies, concludes Jennifer Rutherford, “give death a new immediacy, restore it to its rightful centre stage in an age of death denial, and yet at the same time appear to offer a joyful reprieve from death, making a carnival of the death of others” (96).

The Last Man The zombie apocalypse is only one variant of a thriving post-apocalypse subgenre that seems to dominate contemporary popular culture; again, there is no space here to do justice to its variety and ubiquity. Nuclear holocaust, once dominant, has since the end of the Cold War been edged out by other end-of-the-world scenarios: plague outbreaks, cosmic disasters such as asteroids, ecological collapse, etc. The result is always drastically to reduce the human population to a struggling remnant, or even to just one: the last man (rarely woman). Surely it is no coincidence that Mary Shelley, who launched the motif of artificial life with Frankenstein, also created one of the earliest examples of the last-man motif in her novel by that name (1826); in each case, it is ultimately mortality that is at stake, one way or another. The last-man motif has enjoyed a long run in popular culture, beginning with Richard Matheson’s novel I Am Legend (1954) and its three movie adaptations (1964, 1971, 2007, under various titles), which is often cited as the model for zombie-apocalypse stories (though technically Matheson’s walking dead are vampires, not zombies). Susan Sontag saw apocalyptic SF movies as an opportunity for “participat[ing] in the fantasy of living through one’s own death and more, the death of cities, the destruction of humanity” (202). It is certainly the case, as I observed earlier, that the mass death that is a precondition for the last-man (or small-band-of-survivors) motif is rarely taken seriously. Death on a planetary scale is reduced to a premise for action-adventure entertainment, or at best for reflection on – as the subtitle of Philip K. Dick’s post-apocalyptic novel Dr. Bloodmoney (1965) puts it – How We Got Along After the Bomb: that is, how survivors took advantage of the slate wiped clean by apocalypse to build the world anew. There are exceptions. In Samuel R. Delany’s Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand (1984), the last man to 16

Final Frontier: Science Fictions of Death

survive an alien attack on his home world becomes a charismatic messiah figure throughout the galaxy, the object of obscure hopes for ultimate survival; in Butler’s Lilith’s Brood trilogy (1987–89), Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy (2003–13), and Neal Stephenson’s Seveneves (2015), the near-total extinction of the human race by (respectively) nuclear war, engineered plague, and cosmic accident, and the plight of the handful of survivors (e.g., the “seven Eves” of Stephenson’s title), are accorded something like the weight and sobriety they deserve. In general, however, the current popularity and predictability of post-apocalyptic scenarios heightens the odds against serious treatment of the motif in genre fiction or film. Serious engagement with mass death generally seems reserved for “crossover” literary fiction, such as Whitehead’s Zone One, Russell Hoban’s linguistically inventive Riddley Walker (1980), or Cormac McCarthy’s merciless The Road (2006) and its equally unrelenting film adaptation (2009). In the end, perhaps it requires the methods of the literary avant garde to genuinely come to terms with universal death: the methods, let’s say, of Samuel Beckett’s The Lost Ones/ Le dépeupleur (1971; see McHale, Postmodernist Fiction 62–64), or of Maggie Gee’s less celebrated postmodern metafictions, Dying, in Other Words (1981) and The Burning Book (1983). Gee at least has the honesty to admit that the only truthful perspective on the end of the world is that of no one at all: This is a city, though who is there who can tell. For miles there is nothing left standing: light falls upon miles and miles of litter and ice and ice and litter and chaos … No speech, and no stories. The last great story was death: someone failed to tell it, or else no-one wanted to hear. (Gee 213)

Virtual Reality Recall the opening of Bigelow’s SF movie Strange Days, when we viewers are plunged into the subjective perspective of a person undergoing violent death – only to be jerked abruptly back into the film’s real world, when the character who has been vicariously experiencing this moment of death through a virtual-reality rig tears it off in revulsion, interrupting the spectacle. This might be regarded as a kind of model of what science fictions of death do all the time: they give us the vicarious experience or virtual reality of death. They use the apparatus of SF to place us in the position of the dying and the dead – of uploading into cyberspace, of being a zombie, of living through or outliving our own deaths. If experiencing death yet living to tell about it were literally possible, it would take something like this SF apparatus, these SF novums, to accomplish it. “It’s about death,” said the Twelfth Doctor about the Dr. Who series, and in a sense he’s right, not only about his own series but also about the SF genre to which it belongs. Dr. Who is all about death in the sense that it models death every time the Doctor undergoes transformation, and also every time some ontological border is crossed between one time and another. Dr. Who is, after all, basically a serial time-travel narrative, or a narrative of travel between one world and another, or one state of being and another. In the same way, every SF voyage to another world distant in time or space, every alien encounter, every metamorphosis, every transformative technology entails traversing an ontological divide between states of being, and of course the ultimate ontological divide – the one we will all surely traverse sooner or later – is the one between life and death. Thus, every SF story that entails some world-building novum (and that means every piece of SF whatsoever, since the presence

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of a novum is what defines SF in the first place) affords us a kind of scale model or dress rehearsal of death, the final frontier. So do other genres of fiction, in their various ways. But SF also exposes for our examination the apparatus that makes such virtual experience of transformation possible. It shows us the virtual-reality rig (or the time machine or nearly-as-fast-as-light starship or cyberspace console or what-have-you) that motivated the ontological border crossing. SF is a highly self-conscious genre, and its self-consciousness about its own novums enables it both to produce illusionistic effects and to qualify that illusionism, to lay it bare or even (as in Strange Days) to snatch it abruptly away. SF versions of the afterlife, Stephen Burt observes, are also self-reflective figures for SF itself: “SF provides, through versions of the afterlife, metaphors for the experience of reading [SF itself]” (185). This is a profound insight, but its inverse is also true: by reflecting on itself and displaying for examination its own novums in a highly metafictional way, SF gives us metaphors, if not always of an afterlife, then of the ontological transition that is death itself. So it is all about death after all.

Works Cited Burt, Stephen. “Science Fiction and Life after Death.” American Literary History, vol. 26, no. 1, 2014, pp. 168–190. Cadigan, Pat. Synners. 1991. Gollancz, 2012. Clark, Stephen R. L. How to Live Forever: Science Fiction and Philosophy. Routledge, 1995. Csicsery-Ronay, Jr., Istvan. The Seven Beauties of Science Fiction. Wesleyan UP, 2008. Gee, Maggie. Dying, in Other Words. Harvester Press, 1981. Gibson, William. Neuromancer. Ace, 1984. Gibson, William. Count Zero. 1986. Ace, 1987. Gibson, William. Mona Lisa Overdrive. 1988. Spectra, 1989. Gleick, James. Time Travel: A History. Pantheon Books, 2016. Hassler, Donald M. Introduction. Death and the Serpent: Immortality in Science Fiction and Fantasy, edited by Carl B. Yoke and Donald M. Hassler. Greenwood, 1985, pp. 3–6. Hendrix, Howard V. “Dual Immortality, No Kids: The Dink Link between Birthlessness & Deathlessness in SF.” Immortal Engines: Life Extension and Immortality in Science Fiction and Fantasy, edited by George Slusser, Gary Westfahl, and Eric S. Rabkin. U of Georgia P, 1996, pp. 183–192. Jameson, Fredric. “Metacommentary.” The Ideologies of Theory: Essays 1971-1986. Vol. 1, Situations of Theory. 1971. U of Minnesota P, 1988, pp. 3–16. Jameson, Fredric. “Longevity as Class Struggle.” Immortal Engines: Life Extension and Immortality in Science Fiction and Fantasy, edited by George Slusser, Gary Westfahl, and Eric S. Rabkin. U of Georgia P, 1996, pp. 24–42. McHale, Brian. Postmodernist Fiction. Methuen, 1987. McHale, Brian. Constructing Postmodernism. Routledge, 1992. McHale, Brian. “Angels, Ghosts, and Postsecular Visions.” American Literature in Transition, 1990–2000, edited by S. Burn. Cambridge UP, 2018, pp. 32-47. Potts, Stephen. “IBMortality: Putting the Ghost in the Machine.” Immortal Engines: Life Extension and Immortality in Science Fiction and Fantasy, edited by George Slusser, Gary Westfahl, and Eric S. Rabkin. U of Georgia P, 1996, pp. 102–110. Robinson, Kim Stanley. Aurora. Orbit/Hachette, 2015. Rogers, Martin. “Hybridity and Post-Human Anxiety in 28 Days Later.” Zombie Culture: Autopsies of the Living Dead, edited by Shawn McIntosh and Marc Leverette. The Scarecrow Press, 2008, pp. 119–133. Rucker, Rudy. The Ware Tetralogy. Prime Books, 2010. Rutherford, Jennifer. Zombies. Routledge, 2013. Ryan, Marie-Laure. “Temporal Paradoxes in Narrative.” Style, vol. 43, no. 2, 2009, pp. 142–164. Slusser, George, Gary Westfahl, and Eric S. Rabkin, editors. Immortal Engines: Life Extension and Immortality in Science Fiction and Fantasy. U of Georgia P, 1996.

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Final Frontier: Science Fictions of Death Sontag, Susan. “The Imagination of Disaster.” 1965. Essays of the 1960s & 70s, edited by David Rieff. The Library of America, 2013, pp. 199–214. Suvin, Darko. Metamorphoses of Science Fiction. Yale UP, 1979. Swanwick, Michael. Vacuum Flowers. 1987. Ace, 1988. “Time Travel.” James Cameron’s Story of SF, season 1, episode 6. AMC. 28 May 2018. Tomashevsky, Boris. “Thematics.” 1925. Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays, edited and translated by L. T. Lemon and M. J. Reis. U of Nebraska P, 1965, pp. 61–95. Vonnegut, Jr., Kurt. Slaughterhouse-Five, or, The Children’s Crusade: A Duty-Dance with Death. 1969. Dial Press, 2009. Westfahl, Gary. “Zen and the Art of Mario Maintenance: Cycles of Death and Rebirth in Video Games and Children’s Subliterature.” Immortal Engines: Life Extension and Immortality in Science Fiction and Fantasy, edited by George Slusser, Gary Westfahl, and Eric S. Rabkin. U of Georgia P, 1996, pp. 211–220. Williams, Walter Jon. Hardwired. 1986. Night Shade Books, 2006. Wittenberg, David. Time Travel: The Popular Philosophy of Narrative. Fordham UP, 2013. Yanarella, Ernest J. “Terra/Terror-Forming and Death Denial in Kim Stanley Robinson’s Martian Stories and Mars Trilogy.” Foundation, vol. 89, 2003, pp. 13–26.

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2 “STILL I DANCED” Performing Death in Ford’s The Broken Heart Donovan Sherman

In The Audience, Herbert Blau observes an unsettling feature of theatrical presentation so obvious as to be overlooked entirely: that it takes place in real time, and thus brings us closer to death. While discussing Samuel Beckett’s brief play Breath, Blau notes that its “brief repetition of a faint, brief cry” is “sufficient to remind us that what can never be represented (or can only be represented) is no less moving in thought: that the body in performance is dying in front of your eyes” (366). Beckett’s work focuses the audience’s attention on the ongoing and inescapable passage of time by forcing a consideration of the very real corporeality of the performer – and yet Breath also allows us to grapple with the impossibility of ever truly having death portrayed on stage. Just as Blau wittily plays up the doubleness of the word “represented,” seizing on its ability to conjure both distance and proximity, he also highlights the inherent doubleness of death, which can only be represented (not made to appear in its totality) but never represented (clearly delineated or described). Perversely, Blau locates this duality in a play that employs no actual actors and instead consists of a recorded infantile cry that plays while lights dim on a trash-strewn stage. This brief vocalization does not emerge from an actual body, and yet its removal from a live actor only heightens the uncanny ability of theater to evoke, without clearly making manifest, the mortality that peeks through the artifice of performance to remind us of our shared and very real fate. Death haunts the stage, like Hamlet’s father, as both its fundament and its ephemeral escapee. Beckett’s work provides many salient examples of theater’s ability to gesture to death without attempting to claim it; his play Endgame ends with one character, Hamm, addressing his handkerchief: “Old stancher!” he apostrophizes, “You … remain” (93). The handkerchief, which keeps absorbing blood whenever Hamm places it on his face, indexes the real passage of time that occurs when we see or read Endgame. Hamm’s gesture layers melodramatic affect onto physical remnant. This ability to flicker between nonrepresentative qualities of experience and hyperrepresentative aspects of artificiality also serves as a recurring and at times obsessive motif in Blau’s own work. (It is no wonder that Blau was drawn in, over and over, by Beckett.) In Take up the Bodies: Theatre at the Vanishing Point, Blau recalls a performance exercise he led with his experimental theater company KRAKEN that aimed to cultivate a “form of consciousness”; here, too, breath and bodies figure as primary loci: 20

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Thus, now, doing nothing but breathing (and taking time, take time): You are living in your breathing. Stop. Think. You are dying in your breathing. Stop. Think. You are living in your breathing. You are dying in your breathing. You are living in your dying, dying in your living. (Take time, breathing.) Stop. Show. The doing without showing is mere experience. The showing is critical, what makes it theater. (86) With each breath, like each splotch of blood on Hamm’s handkerchief, the performers realize they are both living and dying in breathing; they are trained to listen, as Beckett’s audience, for the ways that theater conjures but does not replicate experience (“doing without showing”) because what “makes it theater” is the showing itself, the always-already aesthetic reflection of that experience. In this way theater replicates consciousness and calls out consciousness’s theatricality; as Anthony Kubiak observes, for Blau, “consciousness is, in a word, tragic (and so theatrical) – born in the acting, experienced as bereavement, looking upon the world, and in so doing being forever separated from it” (102). The twin impossibilities of theater ever becoming pure experience, on the one hand, and of experience ever escaping the clutches of the theatrical, on the other, further link the theater to death – not in a clear historicized or anthropological sense of the theater standing in for a loss of life, but in the more ontological sense by which its play of presence and absence mimics our own constant grappling with life and oblivion. As Kubiak asks, “Is it the thought of death that gives birth to our confrontation with mortality, or conversely, is it the death-that-is-thought (the thought that demands separation and grief) that threatens our very being (and re-reading the previous sentence, is the difference between them not both enormous and infinitesimal)?” (103). Kubiak’s awareness of his own writing, instanced in his call to re-read his own previous sentence, once again recalls the persistent method by which theater (and performative writing) cannot help but let us know of the passage of time, of our thoughts and selves dying in front of our eyes. This lurking sense of death that gives performance its vanishing point preoccupies many other scholars of the medium. Perhaps looming largest in Blau’s work is Antonin Artaud, whose seminal collection The Theatre and Its Double links the acting body to the body ravaged by the plague. “The state of the victim who dies without material destruction,” writes Artaud, “with all the stigmata of an absolute and almost abstract disease upon him, is identical with the state of an actor entirely penetrated by feelings that do not benefit or even relate to his real condition” (24). The suffering plague victim lacks “material destruction” and rots away instead within himself, much as the true power of the theater penetrates the acting body and invisibly alters it. The death- and life-force of the theater thus impels us to do away with artificiality, much as the primal urges of the self arise when the plague marks the body for death; the theater, like the plague, urges “men to see themselves as they are, it causes the mask to fall, reveals the lie, the slackness, baseness, and hypocrisy of our world” (31). This primal force, located in the quotidian act of breathing for Blau and the civilization-threatening event of a plague for Artaud, cannot be truly represented and yet, to return to Blau’s duality, must be represented, because at the precise moment we concentrate on it, the body, mind, and theater become actors in a show, a play in both senses. This play is ever present. Blau’s exercise for KRAKEN, through which the performer zeroes in on the absence/presence ghosting of death in the breath-marked continuance of time, and with it the inching forward of life’s cessation, tracks the bodily investment in its own writing with the repetition of “now,” “stop,” and “think”; these words notch into the otherwise smooth play of time that typically disguises its complicity with mortality. But the thrum of theater’s force, the energy Artaud seizes on as both invisible and world-destroying, continues whether or not we choose to quantify it with breath, blood, or word. This fact arises uncannily 21

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in a passage of drama from an era distant from the modernism of Beckett and Artaud: John Ford’s Carolingian revenge tragedy The Broken Heart. Late in the play, the impetuous Ithocles, who has returned to court at Sparta from war, confronts a past tragic mistake – his denial of marriage between his sister, Penthea, and her love, Orgilus. Ithocles expresses regret for his actions by calling attention, Beckett-like, to the progression of time that threads through his own speech: I did the noble Orgilus much injury, But grieved Penthea more. I now repent it; Now, uncle, now. This ‘now’ is now too late. So provident is folly in sad issue That after-wit, like bankrupts’ debts, stand tallied Without all possibilities of payment. (4.1.10-14) Ithocles introduces an economic metaphor to express its inaptness; there can be no repayment of folly because of the eternal “now” that mocks the past “now” when he could have made a difference. This space between “now”s constitutes a form of delay between action and repentance and also provides a miniature of Western tragic dramaturgy, in which the gap between the rash mistake and its lamentation ushers in always-too-late bloody activity. The Broken Heart traffics in this familiar pattern but is distinct in its link between the passage of time that occurs during its performance – the embodied reflection of mortality that so preoccupies Blau and Artaud – and the more typical sense of delay within the dramatic action that Ithocles rues. In making this connection, the play mobilizes Blau’s theater of death (and theater of death’s impossibility) in a provocative way that the remainder of this essay will explore. When the play takes up a consideration of the body’s theatrical complicity with death, it inadvertently forces the physical toil of performance onto its women characters, thereby suggesting a gendered dimension to its wrestling with theater’s inherent manifestation of and distancing from an understanding of our impermanence. The irreducibly physical and yet always-already discursive body is both theatrical and, in the late Renaissance culture Ford satirizes, also feminized; this complicity, bared in the play’s spectacular female death scenes, allows the women to take up the mantle of the tragic with deeper ontological resonance. Ford’s tragedy begins by pointedly noting that it does not take place in Athens. When Orgilus – he who was denied marriage to his true love by the rash Ithocles – tells his father, Crotolon, that he will be going to Athens to study, Crotolon responds with confusion: “Athens? Pray why to Athens? You intend not, /To kick against the world, turn Cynic, Stoic, /Or read the logic lecture, or become/An Areopagite, and judge in causes/Touching the commonwealth?” (1.1.5-11). The city serves as metonym for philosophical uselessness, a place to stagnate in rebellious posturing (kicking against the world as a Cynic or Stoic) or remove oneself from active life by judging or lecturing about it. Tellingly, however, Orgilus proffers his Athenian excursion as a ruse. He will in fact remain to disguise himself and attempt to woo Penthea back. Where he will remain is the actual setting of the play: Sparta, the anti-Athens, lodged in the popular imagination as a ruthless place of rigorous martial codes, violent masculinity, and sacrifice. Fittingly, then, the play’s characters frequently denounce the trappings of philosophy – the Athenian distractions from true experience – with disdain, preferring instead to prove themselves with action. As Ithocles proclaims, in a sudden pivot after glossing a Platonic

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commonplace about how “sweet music” keeps the soul in tune with the universe, “this is form of books and school tradition; /It physics not the sickness of a mind/Broken with griefs. Strong fevers are not eased/With counsel, but with best receipts and means. /Means, speedy means and certain; that’s the cure” (2.2.11-15). His rejection and suspicion of academic learning and insistence instead on “means” as a cure of the soul’s sickness – in this speech, named as ambition but hinted at elsewhere as possible incestuous desires for his sister – finds a pithy echo soon after in a dialogue between Crotolon and another political counselor, Armostes. Crotolon, debating whether he should allow his daughter, Euphrania, to marry Ithocles’s friend Prophilus, evinces skepticism at wisdom that “dares to dote/Upon the painted meat of smooth persuasion” (2.2.21-22). Persuasion, the stuff of mere words, acts only as false, “painted” ornamentation to true provision and nourishment (“meat”). Perhaps the clearest satire of rhetoric and philosophy appears in the buffoonish character Orgilus plays when he disguises himself as a scholar and launches a mock-serious disquisition to his sister, Euphrania: “Is it possible/With a smooth tongue, a leering countenance, /Flattery, or force of reason – I come t’ee, sir – To turn or to appease the raging sea? /Answer to that. Your art? What art to catch/And hold fast in a net the sun’s small atoms? /No, no; they’ll out, they’ll out. Ye may as easily/Outrun a cloud driven by a northern blast/As fiddle-faddle so. Pease, or speak sense” (1.3.101-10). Here, Ford’s medium is apparently the message: mere flattering speech cannot appease the raging sea, nor catch the sun, and thus with a string of nonsense syllables and staccato interruptions, Orgilus’s own speech performs the futility he describes. Yet for all of the play’s repeated endorsements of “means,” it is a resolutely static and verbal work of theater, consisting mostly of densely patterned speeches, dialogues, and debates, woven through scenes of subtle persuasion or insinuation. The most dramatic events occur before the action begins, and bloody battles, though noted, remain firmly offstage. The plots and plans of its characters are often announced but never followed through: Orgilus makes one appearance in disguise and then abandons it; Bassanes, the cruel and jealous husband to Penthea, traps her in a tower but quickly gains empathy and a conscience before he can turn into a proper antagonist. The climaxes of the play occur in the realization of what does not happen: Ithocles does not let Penthea marry Orgilus; Penthea does not elope with Orgilus when he meets with her in secret; Calantha (the heir to the throne of Sparta and target of Ithocles’s affections) does not end up with Ithocles but instead nearly marries Nearchus, a prince. Even the onstage deaths (with notable exceptions that I will examine shortly) have a quiet formality; when Bassanes murders Ithocles, he does so by first trapping him in a chair seated across from the corpse of Penthea, who has starved herself. As Lisa Hopkins observes, this death recalls the play’s recurring motif of the “emblem”: a visual or verbal stamp that captures characterological qualities without allowing them to evolve. Other critics, too, have found the play to be a formally masterful but airless work. Roger Burbridge identifies the topos of “stillness” as “a quality which most critics see in the play, a stillness, an eerie sense of the suspension of feeling” (398). T. S. Eliot praises passages of “purest poetry” in the work, as if it were merely a delivery system for language rather than an example of a genre that demanded plot and action (132). Reid Barbour reads Ford’s tragedy as a meditation on a topic popular in prose works of the era: the practice of “resolve,” by which one could gain a sense of ethical sufficiency through the fulfillment of stated motive. For Barbour, The Broken Heart serves as a cautionary tale for over-hasty resolve forged not through experience but through the declaration of vows. The play thus becomes a series of performative promises that falter and fail, filtered through an “oracular” voice that “adopts literary voices and employs sententious proverbs and tautologies, all of which contribute to the static identity of the vow-laden characters” (352).

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In other words, characters in The Broken Heart appear to reject philosophizing but do so through further philosophizing. They remain trapped in a world of idioms, sententiae, citation, vows, and clear enunciation of motive and desire. The drama appears to exist at the level of language, locked in imagery rather than in the world of material bodies. However, such a reading ignores the bodily death that serves, as Blau reminds us, as the blind spot of theater. And The Broken Heart is ultimately a piece of theater, albeit a mannerist and verbose exemplar. When it brings up the body as a metaphor, as it often does, we must also remember (and the play tacitly asks us to remember) the real bodies from which such figuration distracts us. When Orgilus confronts Penthea with an expression of his heartache, his language is steeped in corporeal imagery: “All pleasures are but mere imagination, /Feeding the hungry appetite with steam/And sight of banquet, whilst the body pines, /Not relishing the real taste of food. /Such is the leanness of a heart divided/From intercourse of troth-contracted loves; /No horror should deface that precious figure/Sealed with the lively stamp of equal souls” (2.3.34-41). Orgilus’s choice of analogy foreshadows Penthea’s demise by self-starvation. The rhetoric, in other words, as delivered by a man, foreshadows its de-analogized realization upon the body of a woman. Starvation, furthermore, is not an idly chosen figure of speech. The deliberate and even masochistic withholding of nourishment provides what R. J. Kaufmann calls the “governing image” of the play, which “argues that life and growth cannot continue to exist where the means of sustenance, the fertilizing energies, are cut off or diverted from their normal course” (169). Lacking necessary energies, Sparta itself, like Oedipus’s Thebes, civically doubles the conditions of its individual leaders; like Penthea’s withering body, the body politic, riven with betrayals and stymied processes, has erected stoppages on its sources of life. Penthea’s death, floridly anticipated by her “mad scene” of violent and passionate speech, also evokes imagery with specific philosophical import to Ford, whose prose works adapt and meditate on classic Stoic philosophy. In The Golden Meane, Ford’s expression of Stoic principles, he seizes on the salutary effects of starvation as the separation of gratuity from true spiritual well-being: “In sickness and disease of the bodie we are well pleased to observe diet, to abstraine from meates most agreeable to our appetites, and shall it be thought an unreasonable injunction to diet our pleasures and infirmities for the health of the minde?” (Nondramatic Works, C5r-C5v). Ford, following traces of Senecan thought, praises the pleasure of mastering one’s discerning mind. Rather than cathect onto fate and tether one’s wellbeing to temporal happenstance, one should seek the deeper joy of withholding lesser pleasures for the sake of a healthy mind. After all, if we can abstain from meat – the same phrase, put to the same purpose, as used by Orgilus’s mock philosopher – should we not abstain from sensual temptation? As a philosophical treatise, The Golden Meane by definition allows this comparison to linger only on the level of textuality; when staged, however, it becomes entangled with the theater’s demand for the corporeal. Penthea reports her own death in a horrific thirdperson narrative: “But since her blood was seasoned by the forfeit/Of noble shame, with mixtures of pollution, /Her blood – ’tis just – be henceforth never heightened/With taste of sustenance. Starve; let that fullness/Whose pleurisy hath fevered faith and modesty – /Forgive me. O, I faint!” (4.2.149-54). Here, the terms of The Golden Meane become inverted, as Penthea inscribes actual starvation on her body as a vivid analogy for the sickness of her heart incurred by a shameful marriage. The actual stands in for the abstract. Penthea’s starkly realized performance of death also stands in contrast to the misogynistic descriptions of women that fill the play, as when Bassanes hurls invective at women of all stations: 24

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Dames at court, Who flaunt in riots, run another bias. Their pleasure heaves the patient ass that suffers Up the stilts of office, titles, incomes. Promotion justifies the shame, and sues for’t. Poor honour! Thou art stabbed, and bleed’st to death By such unlawful hire. The country mistress Is yet more wary, and in blushes hides Whatever trespass draws her troth to guilt; But all are false. (2.1.30-40) Whether displaying naked ambition in courtly flirtations or mock-blushing in rural retreat, women are for Bassanes a priori artificial.1 Bassanes marshals this array of sexist characteristics to a curious conclusion: he must bring his pent-up wife, Penthea, to court, where, as he explains to her, “if it be thy pleasure, /Thou shalt appear in such a ravishing lustre/Of jewels above value, that the dames/Who brave it there, in rage to be out-shined, /Shall hide them in their closets” (2.1.77-81).2 That Penthea arrives in court as a prop in the ongoing drama of Bassanes’s own ambition makes her death scene all the more subversive: she breaks free not only of the misery of her marriage but also of the discursive scheme that rendered her as a mere jewel to be flaunted. It is all the more vital, then, that Penthea’s death arrive by starvation, a failure of the body from within the body. She spills no blood – not even, as Penthea herself notes, through menstruation – and only dies in a manner that realizes Bassanes’s judgment of his household as “too much inward” (2.1.103).3 Thelma Greenfield observes, building on Kaufmann’s observation, that “Penthea, Ithocles, and Orgilus all die by processes of literal deprivation of blood” (403). This is surely true, but like Artaud’s plague victim, Penthea’s deprivation occurs without actual bloodletting. It remains unrepresented and yet floridly demonstrated, as opposed to the violence that accompanies Ithocles’s and Orgilus’s deaths. Greenfield also elides another death in the play, one that occurs in its final moments: that of Calantha, who, like Penthea, stages her own death without actually staging the means of its realization. Calantha, too, is too much inward, in a parodic version of Stoicism’s repression. Calantha learns of numerous bloody deaths and untimely ends – most tragically that of her true love, Ithocles – during a dance in which characters inform her, one by one, of gruesome news. Each time, and much to the shock of those speaking to her, she restrains all outward sign of affect and continues dancing. She announces the collapse of this ruse during a macabre set-piece in which Calantha “marries” the corpse of Ithocles instead of her living husband-to-be: O my lords, I but deceived your eyes with antic gesture, When one news straight came huddling on another, Of death, and death, and death. Still I danced forward; But it struck home, and here, and in an instant. Be such mere women, who with shrieks and outcries Can vow a present end to all their sorrows, Yet live to vow new pleasures, and outlive them. They are the silent griefs which cut the heartstrings. Let me die smiling. (5.3.64-76) 25

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The griefs that kill Calantha are, in her telling, silent, in distinction to the outward shrieks and outcries that characterize the archetypally melodramatic “mere” women conjured in Bassanes’s former judgment. Like Penthea, Calantha dies both onstage and invisibly, theatrically – both “stage” their ends – and internally. This in-between zone of life and death mirrors, as I have been suggesting, Blau’s understanding of performance’s play, which reflects our own doubled relationship with death. Ford’s innovation is to suggest that this condition is also the condition of the early modern woman. As Dympna Callaghan reminds us, women in Ford’s day were rendered as somehow both discursive and material, because materialism “cannot be reduced to raw physicality,” nor can social and cultural formations be limited by discourse (they must always exceed it), and thus the treatment of women both as physical objects and as cultural terrain allows men to “constitute physical, social, and cultural aspects of rape as opposed to purely physical or ‘textual’ ones” (29). Calantha frames herself textually in her refusal of the cultural construction of “woman” as shrieking harridan but also physically in her all-dancing embodiment of systems of thought.4 She gives the lie, then, to the play’s attempts to delineate neatly “philosophy” from “means” by showing their inherent porousness, and she does so in both performative and gender-specific terms. Penthea and Calantha both recall Ford’s preoccupation with Stoic philosophy: Penthea, in her literalization of pleasure’s denial, and Calantha, in her refrain from emotional signal. One could still read The Broken Heart as endorsing these virtues, but to do so would muffle the performative power of the women’s death scenes, which train the audience’s eyes onto their bodies’ failures while keeping the display of death at bay. In other words, they alert us to performance’s enmeshment with death; the rhythm of the repeated “now” that Ithocles employs to mark the bare passage of time reappears in Calantha’s “death, and death, and death” and then “home, and here.” These gestures, more than any histrionic exercise of violence, figure forth death as the lurking and omnipresent subtext to theater itself, the constant notching forward of time that marks the body. In this sense they also recall theater’s paratextual elements, the constant rehearsals and repetitions that also separate theater from life (while reflecting our conscious engagement with life in its compulsiveness). Theater, predicated on repetition, weaves repetition into the roots of its construction; as Peggy Phelan notes in an analysis of Antigone, tragedy “embodies the agonizing force of existence-as-rehearsal. In such a world, nothing ever happens once, not even death. The characters in Sophocles’ play discover that what is truly tragic about death is that they survive it, at least once, only to realize that having survived it once they will have to face it again” (13). The neither-living-nor-dead condition that Penthea and Calantha stage thus recalls the neither-finished-nor-begun quality of a play, which repeats itself, over and over, in production after production. On the surface, the play’s title recalls the romantic topos of dying from a “broken heart,” as if to suggest that it were simply thwarted love that caused these women to cease living. Yet the connotations of this phrase, perhaps known to a voracious reader of philosophy and theology such as Ford, lie in its Biblical invocations. In Luke 4:18, Jesus recites a passage from the Hebrew Bible to imbue his ministry with typological urgency: “The Spirit of the Lord God is upon me; because the Lord hath anointed me to preach good tidings unto the meek, he hath sent me to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and the opening of the prison to them that are bound” (Isaiah 61:1). In this context, the heart is broken due to a deeper despair and melancholy, a condition of inward mourning rather than spurned desire.5 When viewed this way, the deaths of Penthea and Calantha

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represent something more than women sacrificed at the altar of male-dominated tragedy. Instead, they become embodiments of tragedy itself, living figures who puncture the cool rhetoric of the dramaturgy to deny us both the catharsis of spectacular dismemberment and the reassurance of an illusory life-force. With the persistence of Calantha’s feverish dance, their deaths remind us of theater’s capacity to magnify the same forces that tease at the edge of our consciousness: of the always-there but always-unseen tug of death that escapes and structures thought. Like Hamm’s handkerchief, they can neither escape representation nor be completely present. They remain.

Notes 1 For more on the trope of women as shallow and coextensive to their surfaces, see Newman. Roger Burbridge shows that a milder version of Bassanes’s sexism can appear in critical work as well; he notes that “Penthea’s is the sort of sentimental self-dramatization common in young girls” (405). 2 Ford has more straightforwardly expressed a similar strain of gendered critique in his nondramatic works. In The Line of Life, he personifies the temptation of flattery as a “pestilent bawd” and “nurse” to men’s corruption and cites an unknown “wise man” who compared “a flattering Language to a silken halter, which is soft because silken, but strangling because a halter” (D8v-D9r). 3 Marion Lomax, the editor of the Oxford edition of The Broken Heart, sees this as a sign of Penthea’s anorexia (xv). 4 Gail Kern Paster similarly notes how the “hystericization of women’s bodies” (the expression is Foucault’s) becomes materially and textually realized in the early modern era via humoral discourse: “Even as they suffered and died from the effects of purges, bleedings, and the other common practices of humoral medicine, the men and women of early modern Europe understood their morality, described their sensations and bodily events, and often experienced physical and psychological benefit in humoral terms … humoral theory was instrumental in the production and maintenance of gender and class difference as part of what Foucault has called the ‘hystericization of women’s bodies’” (7). 5 Blau’s work continually returns to the question of pain and, in a section of The Audience devoted to a discussion of Anton Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya, specifically evokes the “broken heart” as both utterly real and gestural, noting that in the theater there is “no doubt the pain is encoded, and there is a historical analysis to be made that will explain why the pain is there. But first of all, it is there, even if enacted, and if it isn’t in the acting to be felt in the audience, the analysis is likely to be worthless” (158).

Works Cited Artaud, Antonin. The Theater and Its Double, translated by Mary Caroline Richards. Grove Press, 1958. Barbour, Reid. “John Ford and Resolve.” Studies in Philology, vol. 86, no. 3, 1989, pp. 341–366. Beckett, Samuel. Endgame and Act Without Words. Grove Press, 1958. The Bible. King James Version. Norton, 2012. Blau, Herbert. The Audience. Johns Hopkins UP, 1990. Blau, Herbert. Take Up the Bodies: Theater at the Vanishing Point. U of Illinois P, 1982. Burbridge, Roger. “The Moral Vision of Ford’s The Broken Heart.” Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900, vol. 10, no. 2, 1970, pp. 397–407. Callaghan, Dympna. Shakespeare without Women: Representing Gender and Race on the Renaissance Stage. Routledge, 2000. Eliot, T. S. “John Ford.” Essays on Elizabethan Drama. Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1960. Ford, John. The Nondramatic Works of John Ford, edited by L. E. Stock, Gilles D. Monsarrat, Judith M. Kennedy, and Dennis Danielson. The Renaissance English Text Society, 1991. Ford, John. Tis Pity She’s a Whore and Other Plays, edited by Marion Lomax. Oxford UP, 1995. Greenfield, Thelma. “The Language of Process in Ford’s The Broken Heart.” PMLA, vol. 87, no. 3, 1972, pp. 397–405.

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Donovan Sherman Hopkins, Lisa. “Speaking Sweat: Emblems in the Plays of John Ford.” Comparative Drama, vol. 29, no.1, pp. 133–146. Kaufmann, R. J. “Ford’s ‘Waste Land’: The Broken Heart.” Renaissance Drama, vol. 3, 1970, pp. 167–187. Kubiak, Anthony. “Impossible Seductions: The Work of Herbert Blau.” The Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism, vol. 19, no. 1, 2004, pp. 101–111. Newman, Karen. Fashioning Femininity and English Renaissance Drama. U of Chicago P, 1991. Paster, Gail Kern. The Body Embarrassed: Drama and the Disciplines of Shame in Early Modern England. Cornell UP, 1993. Phelan, Peggy. Mourning Sex: Performing Public Memories. Routledge, 1997.

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3 DEATH AND THE MARGINS OF THEATER IN LUIGI PIRANDELLO Daniel K. Jernigan

Molière and Luigi Pirandello have very different approaches to the theater: loosely, Molière is of a Neo-classical tradition that pursued the dramatic unities even more obsessively than did the Greeks, whereas Pirandello was committed to undermining these traditions, especially any notion that both character and stage should be stable and consistent. And yet the two playwrights are united in that their final theatrical works are tied to their deaths in a way that problematizes any clear demarcation between character and author, between life and art (or, rather, among life, death, and art). This is perhaps more surprising with Molière, and, to be sure, his death in the hours after the fourth performance of The Imaginary Invalid (which he wrote, directed, and starred in as the hypochondriac Argan) has made it impossible to separate Molière and Argan, even when working from the assumption that any connection between the theme and content of the work and Molière’s death was happenstance.1 By contrast, it is quite clear that Pirandello wrote his own pending death into The Mountain Giants, which was unfurnished when he died. The play has a familiarly Pirandellian metatheatrical structure: in this instance, a traveling theater group has invested its time and energy producing a play whose author, “Pirandello,” had committed suicide upon completing the play. Knowing the history of Pirandello’s final play, it is hard not to think of Molière, who quite literally worked himself to death preparing The Imaginary Invalid for the stage – a theatrical death which looms so large in the literary imagination that it is commonly believed that Molière actually died on stage. This possibility – that a character can die on stage, and what this possibility means to the already complicated divisions between the artificial and the real (already so endemic to theater) – is a haunting presence in a number of Pirandello plays, in particular the trilogy of plays including Six Characters in Search of an Author, Each in His Own Way, and Tonight we Improvise, but also The Mountain Giants, as time and again these plays tease us with the possibility that one of the play’s actors has actually died. In his 2008 study of Pirandello, Umberto Mariani spends a great deal of time exploring the way in which Pirandello’s plays serve as a response to the comfortable certainty of earlier theatrical modes: what Mariani calls the “bourgeoise theatre,” but which could perhaps just as easily be called the realist or naturalist theater. More importantly, one of Mariani’s central observations about Six Characters in particular is how the play’s language speaks to the pronounced subjectivity of nineteenth-century theatrical modes: 29

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Language is always tied to the subjectivity of the communicants. And drama is more than any other art form at the mercy of this subjectivity, given the series of interpreters it must go through, from author to director, to actors, to audience. The six characters, unable to hide their disappointment at the interpretation of their drama by the acting company, are led to understand this clearly. (49) It is hardly surprising that works which are so metatheatrical in their theme and structure would defend subjective perspectives of truth. In his groundbreaking book on metatheater, Lionel Abel makes much the same point as Mariani: “Illusion, for Pirandello, was that which defines the limits of human subjectivity” (181). What is less clear, however, is whether Mariani would agree with Abel’s additional suggestion that “Pirandello was the epistemologist of metatheatre, not its ontologist.”2 Abel continues, “Pirandello is always interesting when he explores dramatically our inability to distinguish between illusion and reality. He was not prepared to assert, though, that the unreal is” (181). Mariani perhaps comes closest to rejecting Abel’s claim in his explanation of how Pirandello’s metatheatrical gestures manage to instill a profound sense of life into his characters – characters which, according to Mariani, “live only in the act of communicating” (128). While clearly fascinated by the subjective reality of Pirandello’s characters, Mariani carefully examines those specific features of Pirandello’s plays which function to bring his characters to life, focusing especially on the role of communication: “a character is a creature of the imagination, a form of communication that lives only in the act of communicating” (28). For Mariani, there is something theatrically magical in the way in which these staged characters come to life under the stage lights, almost as if they become more than the sum of their parts, become more than actor+words+stage+stage directions. For Mariani, it is as if the “unreal” of these disparate parts is transmogrified into the real from the moment the characters open their mouths. Mariani pushes the point further in his conclusion, where he notes that “in a character, which is a means of communication, and can live only in the act of communicating, the need to communicate is as imperious as the human urge to live” (50). “Imperious” is an interesting word choice, suggesting perhaps that there is some internal force to these characters – a sense of agency – which demands communication from them. Quite nearly as if “the unreal is.” However, although Mariani provides a compelling analysis of what brings these characters to life – and does so in a way which suggests that there is something more to them than the temporary artistic impulse allowed by the environment of the stage – I argue that there is yet another performative gesture in these plays which does even more to intimate that the unreal in Pirandello should be regarded with metaphysical credulity: that is, in Pirandello’s treatment of death. Pirandello’s plays seem uniquely prepared to enact Philippe Ariès’s notion that death itself is a subjective and arbitrary fiction, more performative than real: The ritualization of death is a special aspect of the total strategy of man against nature, a strategy of prohibitions and concessions. This is why death has not been permitted its natural extravagance but has been imprisoned in ceremony, transformed into spectacle. This is also why it could not be a solitary adventure but had to be a public phenomenon involving the whole community. (Ariès 604) Focusing primarily on Six Characters, Tonight we Improvise, and The Mountain Goats,3 I explain how these plays are just as invested in exploring the ontological circumstances surrounding a character’s death as they are with identifying their place among the living in the first place. 30

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Indeed, Mariani misses an opportunity for deeper reflection on one of the more compelling ways in which the magic of the theater invokes life in Pirandello’s characters. Briefly, consider The Boy and The Child from Six Characters, who never even get the opportunity to speak, before dying in the play’s denouement. By Mariani’s own logic, they are as good as dead even before the play’s fateful conclusion, which would seem to suggest, in Mariani’s terms, their converse refusal “to communicate is as imperious as the human urge to [die].” ★ Six Characters in Search of an Author is something of a metatheatrical tour de force, focused as it is on a cast of characters who have approached a theater company with the suggestion that the company stage their play – their life story. Along the way, the audience is introduced to all the various elements that go into producing a play, with particular attention given to the rampant artificiality involved in stage production, acting, and even with how content is edited to suit the audience’s (and potential censors’) tastes. Yet, for all its metatheatrical hijinks – which, as Fiora Bassanese explains, are primarily directed towards suggesting “new relationships between art and life by dissolving the traditional separation between the two” (99) – there is nearly as much in Six Characters which serves to dissolve the line between “art and death” (or, rather, “life and death”) as there is to dissolve the line between “art and life.” The final scene in the play is, perhaps, most surprising in this respect, as the line that separates the artificial from the real makes a most foreboding appearance. The play ends with two deaths, as The Child (a young girl) drowns while The Boy looks on, before killing himself with a revolver. THE SON. I ran over to her; I was jumping in to drag her out when I saw something that froze my blood … the boy standing stock still, with eyes like a madman’s, watching his little drowned sister, in the fountain! [The STEP-DAUGHTER bends over the fountain to hide the CHILD. She sobs.] Then … [A revolver shot rings out behind the trees where the BOY is hidden.] […] THE MANAGER. [pushing the ACTORS aside while THEY lift up the BOY and carry him off.] Is he really wounded? SOME ACTORS. He’s dead! Dead! OTHER ACTORS. No, no, it’s only make believe, it’s only pretence! THE FATHER. [with a terrible cry]. Pretence? Reality, sir, reality! THE MANAGER. Pretence? Reality? To hell with it all! Never in my life has such a thing happened to me. I’ve lost a whole day over these people, a whole day! Notably, the actors give all of their attention to The Boy’s death, while completely ignoring The Child, perhaps because as surprising as The Boy’s death is, it is one they can at least begin to comprehend. The Boy's death has been predetermined from the beginning of Act II, when The Step-Daughter first finds him holding a revolver, and exclaims: “Idiot! If I’d been in your place, instead of killing myself, I’d have shot one of those two, or both of them.” Actors such as these, apparently steeped in the Realist tradition, would have been well attuned to Chekhov’s directive that “[i]f you say in the first chapter that there is a rifle hanging on the wall, in the second or third chapter it absolutely must go off” – as would the audience. These actors are now witnessing firsthand the darker implications of that directive, as in Pirandello’s hands Chekhov’s directive springs to life with surprising ontological implications. 31

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Indeed, that there may be different levels of reality in a play – and that characters in a play may well witness their relationship to the other realities of that play (and to the world) in different ways – is something that Pirandello was increasingly attuned to as his career progressed. Consider, for instance, Pirandello’s stage direction in Each in His Own Way, where he discusses the movement between narrative levels in terms that are quite familiar to those versed in contemporary narrative theory: [W]hat during the act on stage had been in the foreground and appeared to be the representation of an event in real life, now reveals itself to have been an artistic invention, and is therefore more or less distanced, pushed into the background. Later, when this choral intermezzo is about to end, this theatre lobby and the spectators will also, in turn, be pushed even further into the background. […] Later, in the second choral intermezzo, all three planes of reality will come into conflict, when, moving from one plane to the other, the real characters of the drama attack the fictional ones of the play, and the spectators try to intervene. (242–43) This description of the various planes of reality coming “into conflict” can help us understand why The Child’s death in Six Characters is so quickly forgotten, even as the actors disagree over the status of The Son. The ontological status of The Child is in some sense fundamentally different from that of The Boy. Rather than dead from the moment she ascends the stage, it is almost as if she hadn’t been alive to begin with. As such, The Child isn’t simply from a secondary plane to the characters’ own (which they have a hard enough time understanding) but so completely outside of their frame of reference that her death doesn’t even register. Time and again during the course of the play, the other characters intimate that “The Boy disappears soon, you know.” The Child is always an afterthought. “And the baby too.” Dead already – or perhaps never even alive. Or, as Fiora Bassanese suggests, “Inert and silent, the Boy and Child are ambiguous beings, caught between dissolution and form” (104). And so, by contrast, The Child is all too easy for the actors to ignore, just as they continue to ignore their own ontological status as characters – characters who themselves are neither alive nor dead (at least, that is, until they speak or are spoken to). To push this point even farther, I would argue that Pirandello’s larger metaleptical structure only makes the ontological implications at work in the play all the more profound. Their deaths place these characters in a uniquely metatheatrical limbo, neither dead nor alive, but part and parcel of what Brian McHale refers to as “The Zone” in fiction. McHale is working in the same tradition as Gérard Genette, who was the first to fully theorize metaleptical structures in literature, which involve “any intrusion by the extradiegetic narrator or narratee into the diegetic universe (or by diegetic characters into a metadiegetic universe, etc.) or the inverse” (Genette 234–35). According to McHale, such meta literary zones are places where space is “less constructed than destructed by the text, or rather constructed and destructed at the same time” (45), raising questions not just about how we know the world but about what exists or is in the world.4 Given that the tenuous margin between death and life is treated alongside the equally tenuous margin between the literary and the real in Six Characters, I argue that as these staged deaths intersect both real and metatheatrical space, they not only raise new and compelling ontological questions about the stability of the world of the theater, but also, by implication, about the real world as well. Moreover, in both of these worlds, death remains as profoundly “undiscovered” as it did in Shakespeare’s day. Reading the deaths of Pirandello’s characters through McHale, we begin to realize that their very deaths reside within a hyperliterary locale

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where metaphysical realities (both literary and otherwise) collide, and also that the boundary between life and death is as artificial as the boundary between actor and character. I have been quoting from a translation of the original 1922 version of the play. However, as J. L. Styan explains it, Pirandello would further escalate confusion concerning the ontological status of The Boy and The Child – as well as the ontological status of dying on stage – in performances from 1925 onward: The greatest trick in the Six Characters of 1925 was to extend the shock ending. In the revision, Pirandello did not disclose the fate of the two children until the last possible moment. When the Director called for lights, Pirandello did not allow the curtain to fall. He calculated that at such a moment, when an audience was on the point of returning to its familiar reality, at a moment of total ambivalence, the play had it most in its grip. […] When the Director was finally given some light, it was an unexpected green flood which made the Characters into bizarre silhouettes. But only four of the six. The Girl and the Boy were dead, and now they were missing, as if they were really dead. (100) In addition to suggesting that death is somehow an inescapable ontological extension of the stage, this development more explicitly implicates the audience in the metaphysical oddities as well. Such a curtain call is typically performed not by characters, but by actors seeking applause for their performance – actors who would have family members and friends in the audience. In the case of The Boy and The Child, the stage has actively stolen this moment from both actors and audience members, replacing the moment with the specter of their deaths instead. In this 1925 version, we find the theatrical equivalent of the conventional wisdom that if we die in a dream we die in the real world as well, as one plane of existence intrudes upon another. Although McHale does not spend a great deal of time discussing death in literature, he does suggest that such a movement between zones can provide the means for imagining our deaths: “a kind of dress-rehearsal” which “you never can do so except through some medium of displacement – through metaphor or fiction” (231–32). Pushing this line of thought further, McHale quotes Douglas Hofstadter on the metaphoric value of such metalepsis to understanding death: Perhaps the greatest contradiction in our lives, the hardest to handle, is the knowledge “There was a time when I was not alive, and there will come a time when I am not alive.” […] This is a basic undeniable problem of life […]. When you try to imagine your own nonexistence, you have to try to jump out of yourself, by mapping yourself onto someone else. You fool yourself into believing that you can import an outsider’s view of yourself into you [and] though you may imagine that you have jumped out of yourself, you never can actually do so. (qtd. in Postmodernist Fiction 232) Can an actor jump out of himself or herself and so fully inhabit a character that the character becomes fully alive in the actor’s words and actions? In turn, are the deaths that such characters suffer all the more real for it? Pirandello’s metatheatrical treatment of death provides one more example of the way in which these plays, to quote Lionel Abel, are about “life [or, death in this case] seen as already theatricalized” (iv). Thus, in addition to elucidating how staged deaths serve to invigorate the other various metatheatrical elements of the play, the discussion that follows will also consider what Pirandello’s treatment of death means for the rest of us. 33

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Albeit less concerned with death than the other plays in the Trilogy, Each in His Own Way draws a relevant analogy between the type of playacting that is part and parcel of any romantic intrigue and the playacting of the stage. This connection is brought into increasingly starker relief as the play-within-a-play unfolds. This play-within-a-play, which Pirandello explicitly announces via the various notes attached to the playscript, concerns events drawn from real life (a pièce à clef ): an infidelity resulting in suicide, where those involved in the indiscretion (Miss Moreno and Bruno) are themselves in attendance at the play, watching the consequences of their actions play out before their eyes. The staged events do not, however, include the suicide itself, but rather pick the story up several weeks after the suicide. So, although the play does not explicitly explore the way in which the real and the artificial can feed off each other resulting in deaths at every theatrical level, the implication that this is so can be intuited from Miss Moreno’s rushing of the stage, during which she is said to have slapped at least one of the participants. Bruno is only stopped from similarly intervening by his friends, even while his onstage counterpart prepares for a duel which, it is suggested, might itself end in spilled blood. In essence, we witness “real world” romantic theatrics leading to a suicide which, when staged, leads to a direct encounter between the “real world” and the stage, where violence ensues. The disruption leads to a chaotic scene where actors and director quit before the play’s final scene, leading to no small amount of outrage from The Audience. The ending of the play has often been explained with reference to the riots that accompanied the first performance of Six Characters, suggesting that for Pirandello violence might very well move from one ontological plane to another with physically tangible results. More compelling are the two staged deaths in Pirandello’s Tonight We Improvise, the third play in his trilogy devoted to exploring the illusions of theater. As the third in the series, perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised that Tonight We Improvise has even more metatheatrical tricks than either Six Characters or Each in His Own Way. So much so that, as Mariani indicates, there are perhaps even too many: But in Six Characters and Each in His Own Way the metatheatrical themes (artistic communication, the power and elusiveness of definitive artistic form, the authorship and inviolability of the dramatic text) were intertwined with painful and compelling existential themes (the difficulty of human communication, given the relativism of human perception, the subjectivity of all forms of communication, the mutability of the reality that is the object of human communication, etc.), while in the present play, these metatheatrical themes virtually dominate the work from the first verbal exchanges to the end. (75) This is an important observation, at least in part because it indicates that Pirandello recognizes how his own theater has the potential to come into its own as a replacement for the Bourgeoise theater. Moreover, as a new theatrical norm in its own right, we should not be surprised that Pirandello might eventually go out of his way to parody its various subjective pretensions (even if they are his own). To be sure, if there is a fundamental difference between this work and Six Characters, it is that while Six Characters has moments which allude to the possibility of an audience, time and again the director of Tonight We Improvise speaks directly to the audience as he attempts to explain the effect he is going for in taking so many liberties with his source script (a play attributed to Pirandello, whose name is met with derision – just as in Six Characters). In this outermost frame of the play we meet Dr. Hinkfuss and a troupe of actors. Dr. Hinkfuss begins by telling an increasingly unsympathetic audience that rather than stick to the script at hand, he will present to them an “experiment in improvisation” (430). He then 34

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introduces the actors: The Leading Actor, who will play Ricco Verri; The Leading Actress, who will play Mommina; The Character Actress, who will play Signora Ignazia; and The Old Comic Actor, who will play Sampognetta. In the play within the play, Sampognetta is Signora Ignazia’s much henpecked husband. They have four daughters, Mommina, Totina, Dorina, and Nenèe. The La Croce family keeps their home open to gentleman callers (primarily soldiers) and so have developed a scandalous reputation about town. The primary dramatic action begins as we discover that to escape his home life, Sampognetta frequents a club where he has fallen in love with a singer, is eventually stabbed defending the singer’s honor, and later dies at home. During the public scrutiny that follows, Mommina is coerced into marrying Ricco Verri, who keeps her locked away from her family out of jealousy at the thought of the family’s past indiscretions. Upon hearing that her sister is now a famous opera singer, Mommina begins singing to her two children, but dies during the performance. It is important to keep in mind that while we are getting bits and pieces of this internal narrative, the actors and director continue to interrupt the performance to cajole each other, the director, and even the audience, even as they attempt to swing the performance to their own tastes and/or advantage. Thus, in addition to gesturing more explicitly towards its own subjective form, there is a great deal in the play about what a theater troupe brings to bear when preparing a play script for production. Dr. Hinkfuss, for instance, describes theatrical texts as inherently static, inanimate things, which are only brought to life in performance: There’s only one way, ladies and gentlemen, in which something that art has fixed in the immutability of a form can come back to life and move about again. It must take back its life from us, a life that is various, diverse, and momentary; the life that each one of us is able to give it. (38) The irony of attempting to make something new and original through improvisation is put to the test time and again, however, for no matter what the troupe does on stage, it is always quite clear to the audience that what they have witnessed isn’t really spontaneous.5 To cite one specific example, the play would appear to suggest that no matter what performative perambulations the actors put themselves through, the action of one character slapping another can never achieve the ontological reality of a real-world slap (even if it has all the corporeal force of one): (At this point a resounding slap is heard from behind the curtain, and immediately after, the protests of the Old Comic Actor, who is playing Sampognetta) THE OLD COMIC ACTOR. Ouch! Why are you doing that! Don’t ever slap me like that again! My God, that was real! (42) The Old Comic Actor goes on to explain his discomfiture in a way that only draws out the irony further: THE OLD COMIC ACTOR. I will not put up with Miss __ slapping me in that way. Did you hear it? Improvisation is no excuse. (43) The implication is clear; no matter how many times Dr. Hinkfuss suggests to the audience that “the actor’s refusal to do what I say is part of the performance” (44), there simply is no way back from the stage to the real. 35

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As compelling as the scene is in its own right, it also explicitly foreshadows the attitude taken toward death on stage in the material that follows; we are hardly even surprised by the metatheatrical treatment of the various deaths when and as they occur. By the time Sampognetta comes home with a knife wound and stands around nonchalantly “out of character” while the other characters bemoan his situation, the illusion-breaking element has become such a norm in the play that this overtly staged death does little more to disrupt the illusion than any of the other metatheatrical gestures. Even when as The Actor, Sampognetta admits, “I can’t die, Doctor Hinkfuss. When I see how well everyone is doing, I feel like laughing, and I can’t die” (86), there is no double-take on our part, because we realize that as an actor rather than a character, this must be true ( just as it had been true in Six Characters). Indeed, while the scene where he finally follows the director’s appeal is clever enough in its own right, nothing in what follows surprises us very much given the larger context: SAMPOGNETTA. All right! Here’s the scene: (He looks on the sofa) I’m dead! DOCTOR HINKFUSS. Not like that! SAMPOGNETTA. (getting up and coming forward) My dear Doctor Hinkfuss, come up here and finish killing me yourself. What else can I say? I repeat, I cannot die just like that, on my own. I’m not like an accordion you can squeeze and pull, and make a song come out just by pressing the keys. (86) A death onstage is never really a death, just as a slap onstage is never really a slap. But when the play already makes this same point in so many other ways (indeed, soon enough we find that The Old Comic Actor playing Sampognetta has a chronic illness), at most we can only nod our heads at one more truth about how the stage functions to conflate the artificial and the real. Pirandello has created his own aesthetic mode, with all of its own increasingly comfortable realities. Moreover, he has also begun the process of subjecting this new aesthetic mode to another level of satiric scrutiny. Lionel Abel, who is one of the few critics to discuss death in Pirandello (although oddly enough, he only speaks of it in Tonight We Improvise, not Six Characters), offers a different take on Sampognetta’s death: To be sure, there is much more of the sophistry of feeling in his playacting than of the true feeling of a man facing death, but this sophistry of feeling takes on the accents of truth because we know the actor is really dying. We also know that he wants to be affecting and are touched by the fact that a man who is dying can have such thoughts. (173) While speaking in a fairly profound way to the difficulties in sorting the illusory from the real, Abel seemingly forgets to speak to the fact that there is an actor other than The Old Comic Actor (playing Sampognetta): there is also the actor who is playing The Old Comic Actor. And although we have no compelling reason to conclude anything about this actor’s health, we can imagine a performance where, not unlike Molière’s The Imaginary Invalid, a dying man is cast in the role – and even where the audience is made aware of this fact. To be sure, the potential for additional metanarrative resonances is profound in such cases – which is, in part, what Pirandello is going for. As the trilogy progresses, the naïve realism of the previous generation becomes an increasingly distant memory. Pirandello, however, proves to have one more metatheatrical trick 36

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up his sleeve, as the end of the play provides a very near reversal of Six Characters, albeit that in this instance two children witness the death of an adult (their mother) who has spent the last act of the play confined to her rooms by her husband, Verri. Verri married Mommina after the death of her father in order to save her from a life of poverty and, perhaps, prostitution. Having heard her sister is now a famous opera singer, Mommina sings to their two daughters “until eventually her heart will fail her and she will fall dead with a crash.” The stage directions of this play-within-a-play suggest that: The two girls, more bewildered than ever, do not have the least suspicion. They think it is the performance their mother is putting on for them, and they remain there, motionless, in their little chairs, waiting. (108) So, while performing an opera, within still another larger performance, Mommina dies. And yet her children, not yet the astute students of theatricality that the rest of us are, remain unaware. There are deeply imbedded questions here concerning the relationship between metatheatrical effect and the audience’s ability to unpack that effect. On the one hand, the children are sophisticated enough to know that a character can die while the actor playing that character lives on. On the other hand, in this case the children are quite simply mistaken to think of it as part of the performance. While on the third hand, the actress playing Mommina really is alive (albeit barely?). While on the fourth hand … the infinite regress of metanarrative levels appears to continue ad infinitum. Indeed, it is not until her family comes in to rescue her from her cage that the way in which death can be so thoroughly illusion-disrupting comes into its full affect. For as they enter the stage, her family quickly switches modes from fellow family members to fellow actors: THE CHARACTER ACTRESS. (indicating the Leading Actress still lying on the floor) But why doesn’t Miss __ get up? Why is she still lying there … THE COMIC ACTOR. Oh! I hope she’s not really dead! (everybody crowds solicitously around the Leading Actress.) THE LEADING ACTOR. (calling her and shaking her) Miss __! Miss __! THE CHARACTER ACTRESS. Is she really feeling ill? NENÈ. Oh, my God, she’s fainted! Let’s lift her up! THE LEADING ACTRESS. (half raising herself ) No … thank you. It really was my heart, though … Just let me, please, let me get my breath. (109) What have we just witnessed? A close call on the part of The Leading Lady? A close call that came at the very moment her character was supposed to die? Acted by Miss ___ – who (until this moment) we had every reason to believe was quite healthy herself? Acted (presumably) by an actress who is in fact quite healthy? In a play where there are slaps that both are and are not slaps? In a play that both is but isn’t really an experiment in improvisation? Where everything is – and isn’t – at every moment “planned together, to make the presentation more lively and spontaneous” (433)? Imagine the confusion that would result if the actress playing The Leading Lady really were to die. Molière’s final performance looms. Although Abel doesn’t explicitly discuss this scene as he did the one with The Old Comic Actor, his thoughts on death in Pirandello more generally are quite relevant, especially as paraphrased by Martin Puchner in the introduction to Abel’s Metatheatre and Tragedy: 37

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In Genet as well as in Pirandello, finally, role playing and quasi-rituals always end in blood. It is true that neither Shakespeare nor Calderón had shied away from violence, and Life Is A Dream in particular shows the terrible consequences that can result from a malignant confusion of theatre and reality. But in Brecht and Pirandello violence seems to be the only means by which to break the artificiality. (17) After so much dabbling in illusion, maybe this is just what Pirandello has become so desperate for: something to break up the artificiality. The most jarring moments – perhaps because they take on an ontological existence beyond the metaphysical reality of the play itself – are the ones focusing on what it means to stage a death. It’s all well and good to tell The Old Comic Actor that he wasn’t the recipient of a real slap because the slap in question had been written into the script, but this doesn’t account for the fact that it might have had all the same corporeal impact as one not written into a script. For all our earlier skepticism, the slap actually does have an impact at multiple metaleptical levels. Indeed, if it did not, we would not even be having this conversation. What then of the death of The Old Comic Actor? Of Mommina? Don’t these “deaths” also have some sort of physically tangible impact across ontological levels? ★ Although Pirandello died before writing the final act of The Mountain Giants, he did manage to provide a summary for his son, Stephen, who completed the play. Unsurprisingly, given the attitude towards the performativity of death seen in his earlier plays, the play resonates in interesting ways with the “reality” of his own pending death. Ilse, the lead actress of the theater troupe, feels responsible for The Tale of the Changeling after “Pirandello” committed suicide upon completing the play. However, this is hardly the most compelling of the play’s deaths (indeed, Pirandello’s death is all backstory). For, as the play opens, the troupe has stumbled upon a town where the magic of theater has a tangible, ontological reality – where what is written quite literally comes to life, apparently at the behest of The Magician, Cotrone, who describes the process as follows: COTRONE. It’s enough for us to imagine something, and immediately the images come alive by themselves. It’s enough for a thing to be fully alive within us, and it stages itself by the spontaneous virtue of its own life. It is the free realization of any necessary birth. At most, we facilitate that birth somewhat. Those stuffed dolls, for instance. If the spirit of the characters they represent is embodied in them, you’ll see them moving and talking. And the true miracle is never the performance, believe me, but always the imagination of the poet in which those characters were born alive, so alive that you can see them although they don’t exist bodily. Translating them into a fictive reality on the stage is what is commonly done in theatres. It’s your job. (315) There is, of course, a natural extension between what Cotrone is saying and the way in which the stage has continually been recognized by Pirandello throughout his career as taking on living features, even as a play develops. However, there is an important distinction to be made between this “magic” and what is accomplished on stage. For Cotrone refers to what is done on stage as “a fictive reality,” and it is at least partly on the basis of this distinction that Ilse determines that The Tale of the Changeling must finally be performed before a live audience. And if that were the end of it, then perhaps Abel would be right in his suggestion that Pirandello was not an ontologist of the theater. However, after attempting to arrange for the play to be performed for a nearby village of “mountain giants” as part of the village’s wedding festivities, the troupe finally has to settle for 38

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performing for the giants’ cooks and servants. In the summary of the final scene which Stephen Pirandello received from his father, we are told that this final performance was meant to go quite poorly for the troupe, because, as Pirandello explained it, the only experience this audience of servants had with live performance were “Punch and Judy shows, with the usual blows raining on head and shoulders, or the buffoonery of clowns, or the exhibitions of the chorus girls, and ‘chanteuses’ of nightclubs” (Pirandello, Mountain 321). Assured that they can win the audience over despite the increasing revelry on the other side of the curtain, Ilse decides to take to the stage, with disastrous results: The tempest that grows increasingly threatening suddenly strikes the improvised stage when the Countess hurls insults at the audience, calling them animals, nothing but brutes. Spizzi and Diamante rush to help her. […] Of the pandemonium exploded beyond it some images are silhouetted on the curtain, of gigantic gestures, enormous bodies wrestling, Cyclopic arms and fists raised to strike. But it is too late now. Suddenly a great silence. The actors re-enter bearing Ilse’s body, smashed like a broken puppet, in the throes of death; she dies. Spizzi and Diamante, who entered the melee to protect her, have been torn to pieces: no part of their bodies can be found. (322) To be sure, there is no mistaking that Pirandello’s concern is the end of theater, the end of art in a society where the town theater has been replaced by the “cinema.” Nina da Vinci Nichols finds an apt analogy to this scene in the reception that Six Characters received upon its first performance in Italy: “the giant’s workers and servants turn Ilse’s epithalamium into a riot, perhaps reminiscent of the one greeting the first production in Rome of Sei Personanaggi in cerca d’autore in 1921” (242). According to this perspective, it makes some sense to suggest that Pirandello, like Ilse, has finally died in the hands (if not quite “at the hands”) of increasingly ignorant audiences, his recent Nobel Prize at best a tragic reminder of how far removed he was from writing to and for the general public. As such, The Mountain Giants does not just perform the death of the play’s central characters, but also the death of the author and of theater in the philosophical mode. That all of this takes place within a play that might itself be performed to large, approving audiences is an irony that mirrors the irony surrounding the deaths of Mommina and Sampognetta. For the theater to live on according to this paradoxical perspective, it must die. For Pirandello to live on, he too must die. As Mariani explains, The Mountain Giants explores the problems of art not exclusively in terms of its power and permanence as a means of communication, but as a way of life, a vocation, and perhaps even as a means of renewal and salvation. (79) According to this reading of the play, it is hard to ignore the possibility that Pirandello, dying before the play could even be completed, suggests that he had arranged his own death as certainly as he had arranged Ilse’s. This is not to suggest that I think he killed himself (as his alter-ego does in The Mountain Giants), but rather that leaving the play intentionally unfinished was part and parcel of a suicide pact that extends across a whole range of boundaries – from the real to the artificial, from the living to the dead. In staging death as part of their metatheatrical scope, these plays speak to an ontological puzzlement that is as profound as any we face, and do so in a way which suggests not only that death is epistemologically unknowable, but that, ontologically, it is so far outside of human 39

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experience that it may as well be thought of as suggesting that “the unreal is.” It further suggests that to successfully “stage” this unreality means that the “unknown country” of death is perhaps not so simply beyond some uncrossable barrier, but rather, to quote Derrida, that “its elementary milieu does not allow for something that could be called passage, step, walk, gait, displacement, or replacement, a kinesis in general. There is no more path” (21). To try and capture this “other” onstage is to try and capture a bit of the unreal. To do so in the way Pirandello did forces the real, the artificial, and the dead to become such uncomfortable bedfellows that we begin to know and engage the other even as we feel the discomfort it affords us.

Notes 1 2 3 4

5

The research and writing of this essay was supported by The Ministry of Education, Singapore, under Academic Research Fund Tier 1. For a more thorough discussion of the way in which Molière’s final performance defies Neo-classical expectations, please see my essay “ ‘Is there no danger in counterfeiting death?’: Molière’s The Imaginary Invalid.” If Abel is right in this assessment, then in Brian McHale’s theorization of the difference between Modern and Postmodern fiction, this would identify Pirandello as Modern, which is worth keeping in mind as this essay continues. Though it is not numbered among Pirandello’s trilogy of plays devoted to exploring the illusions of theater, Mariani rightly includes The Mountain Giants as among Pirandello’s plays that “deal[] with the art of the theatre” (34). It is worth noting that in Postmodernist Fiction, McHale suggests that “[t]his metaleptic function of character has especially been exploited in twentieth-century drama, paradigmatically in Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author (1921), but also in plays by Brecht, Beckett, Jean Genet, Tom Stoppard, Peter Handke and others” (121). At least not according to the text we have to hand, although we can imagine a theater director who actually does allow the actors free rein to go off script.

Works Cited Abel, Lionel. Metatheatre: A New View of Dramatic Form. Hill and Wang, 1963. Ariès, Philippe. The Hour of Our Death. Vintage, 1982. Bassanese, Fiora A. Understanding Luigi Pirandello. U of South Carolina P, 1996. Derrida, Jacques. Aporias: Dying – Awaiting (One Another At) the “Limits of Truth,” translated by Thomas Dutoit. Stanford UP, 1993. Genette, Gérard. Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method. Cornell UP, 1972. Hofstadter, Douglas. Godel, Escher, Bach. Basic Books, 1979. Jernigan, Daniel. “‘Is there no danger in counterfeiting death?’: Molière’s The Imaginary Invalid.” Narrating Death, edited by Daniel K. Jernigan, Walter Wadiak, and W. Michelle Wang. Routledge, 2018, pp. 62–74. Mariani, Umberto. Living Masks: The Achievement of Pirandello. U of Toronto P, 2008. McHale, Brian. Postmodernist Fiction. New York, 1987. Molière. The Imaginary Invalid, translated by Charles Heron Wall. G. Bell and Sons, 1876–1877. Project Gutenberg, www.gutenberg.org/files/9070/9070h/9070-h.htm. Nichols, Nina da Vinci. “Pirandello, the Sacred, and the Death of Tragedy.” Comparative Drama, vol. 32, no. 2, Summer 1998, pp. 240–251. Pirandello, Luigi. Each in His Own Way. Pirandello’s Theatre of Living Masks: New Translations of Six Major Plays, translated and edited by Umberto Mariani and Alice Gladstone Mariani. U of Toronto P, 2001, pp. 219–275. Pirandello, Luigi. The Mountain Giants. Pirandello’s Theatre of Living Masks: New Translations of Six Major Plays, translated and edited by Umberto Mariani and Alice Gladstone Mariani. U of Toronto P, 2001, pp. 276–324.

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Margins of Theater in Luigi Pirandello Pirandello, Luigi. Six Characters in Search of an Author. Three Plays, translated by Edward Storer. Dutton Publishers, 1922, www.gutenberg.org/files/42148/42148-h/42148-h.htm. Pirandello, Luigi. Six Characters in Search of an Author. Pirandello’s Theatre of Living Masks: New Translations of Six Major Plays, translated and edited by Umberto Mariani and Alice Gladstone Mariani. U of Toronto P, 2001, pp. 119–167. Pirandello, Luigi. Tonight We Improvise. Tonight We Improvise and “Leonora, Addio!”, translated by J. Douglas Campbell and Leonard G. Sbrocchi. Canadian Society for Italian Studies, 1987. Puchner, Martin. Introduction. Metatheatre: A New View of Dramatic Form, by Lionel Abel. Hill and Wang, 1963. Styan, J. L. “Pirandellian Theatre Games: Spectator as Victim.” Modern Drama, vol. 23, no. 2, Summer 1980, pp. 95–101.

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4 FORBIDDEN MENTAL FRUIT? DEAD NARRATORS AND CHARACTERS FROM MEDIEVAL TO POSTMODERNIST NARRATIVES Jan Alber

Introduction This chapter provides an overview of dead narrators and characters in English literary history. More specifically, I will discuss their functioning as well as the functions of such figures in fictional narratives from the Middle Ages up until postmodernism.1 From a narratological perspective, there is, of course, a crucial difference between a narrator and a character: the narrator is typically in a special (extradiegetic) position in relation to the characters (at the intradiegetic level) (Genette 228–34). However, because the dead narrators that I will analyze here are all character-narrators (Phelan 12), and thus exist in the same realm as the other characters (Stanzel 48), this difference is not that important. What matters to me here is that dead characters (including character-narrators) are an interesting phenomenon because they cut across the fundamental distinction between life and death. On the one hand, they are deceased and thus no longer there, but on the other hand, they are still able to think, speak, or act and often try to influence figures that are still alive. Dead characters thus urge us to blend features that we associate with the living and characteristics that we attribute to the dead. Mark Turner explains the process of blending by pointing out that “cognitively modern human beings have a remarkable, species-defining ability to pluck forbidden mental fruit – that is, to activate two conflicting mental structures [...] and to blend them creatively into a new mental structure” (“Double-Scope” 117). As an example of such a blend, Turner mentions the character of Bertran de Born in Dante’s Inferno. This fourteenth-century narrative confronts us with “a talking and reasoning human being who carries his detached but articulate head in his hand like a lantern.” Turner states that “this is an impossible blending, in which a talking human being has an unnaturally divided body” (Literary 62, 61). It is not at all perverse to imagine that dead people are still active and interact with the real world. Turner argues that we permanently blend spheres or entities to come to terms with our experiences in the real world. For instance, one might try to overcome one’s grief by imagining 42

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that a dead child is still part of our world. Indeed, Turner writes that “a child who died in the past is still mentally with us. The child never leaves, is always there to cast her shadow on the day, even though our days have changed radically since her death. […] We can imagine her living and appropriately aged” (“Cognitive” 16). There are, of course, many other functions that the blend of the dead character might fulfill, and these functions depend upon the generic contexts in which such figures are used.2 The evocation of generic conventions – such as the construction of a supportive discourse context – can help us come to terms with phenomena such as dead figures (see also Nieuwland and van Berkum 1109). In what follows, I will analyze the potential meanings of dead characters (and character-narrators) by zooming in on the generic contexts in which they are used.

Ontological Complications: Dead Character-Narrators in Postmodernist Narratives As Franz Karl Stanzel has shown (229–32), certain authors present the gradual dissolution of a dying first-person narrator’s consciousness up to the threshold of life. He calls this type of narration “dying in the first person” and argues that “the difficulties arising from the presentation of the death of a narratorial ‘I’ have not deterred authors from selecting the first-person form for the fictional presentation of this extreme situation” (229). Various postmodernist authors even go one step further and confront us with narrators who are dead and speak from the grave or from heaven. For example, the first words of Samuel Beckett’s short story “The Calmative” (1954) are “I don’t know when I died” (51). The text thus projects a scenario in which a corpse (or a ghost) talks to us. Similarly, Alice Sebold’s novel The Lovely Bones (2002) opens as follows: “My name was Salmon, like the fish; first name, Susie. I was fourteen when I was murdered on December 6, 1973” (5).3 Later on, we learn that the narrator, who was raped and murdered by her neighbor, Mr. Harvey, has entered heaven and speaks from there: When I first entered heaven I thought that everyone saw what I saw. That in everyone’s heaven there were soccer goalposts in the distance and lumbering women throwing shot put and javelin. That all the buildings were like suburban northeast high schools built in the 1960s. (16) We are also told that each dead person inhabits his or her own private version of heaven: After a few days in heaven, I realized that the javelin-throwers and the shot-putters and the boys who played basketball on the cracked blacktop were all in their own version of heaven. Theirs just fit with mine – didn’t duplicate it precisely, but had a lot of the same things going on inside. (17) In the words of Lisa Zunshine, we are here presented with “a violation of our intuitive ontological expectations, which forces us to reconsider all familiar social scenarios concerning death” (72). Like “The Calmative,” The Lovely Bones digresses from our real-world parameters and we are invited to work on our reading frames to come to terms with the novel’s storytelling situation. We are urged to activate our knowledge about people who are alive (and able to tell stories) and our awareness of the fact that the dead cannot speak. In a second step, we blend these schemata to picture a scenario in which somebody who is dead nevertheless speaks to us.4 43

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What might the potential functions of these dead character-narrator scenarios be? When the narrator of Beckett’s “The Calmative” says, “So I’ll tell myself a story” (51), he may, in fact, look back upon his life from the next world, or he might still be alive and talk to himself to pass the time. In the latter case, the short story is only about a metaphorical form of death. From this perspective, the narrative, like many of Beckett’s stories, invokes the paradoxical saying “in the midst of life we are in death” to highlight the fact that the lonely narrator is about to die without having ever really lived. The ultimate point of the story might be to argue that it does not matter whether you are alive or dead because, for Beckett at least, the two states are very similar anyway. “The Calmative” thus uses its dead character-narrator in the context of a (rather typical) Beckettian allegory that defines the human condition in terms of life-in-death. The Lovely Bones, in contrast, invites us to picture a situation in which the dead narrator continues to influence the world she had to leave. One can perhaps explain this dead narrator scenario in terms of our difficulties to envision death as the definite end of our existence, or in terms of the wishes of the bereaved that the dead somehow continue to exist. Indeed, Greta Olson argues that the position of the narrator highlights “the novel’s major theme: How does a lovable family, each member of which is both frail and human, all too human in her or his frailty, move on after one of its members has been brutally ripped out of its midst?” (138). For instance, at one point, Susie’s father builds “a balsa wood stand to replace” her, and he starts talking to her: “Susie, my baby, my little sailor girl, […] you always liked these smaller ones [ships in bottles]” (46). One might also argue that in the world of the novel, the dead Susie continues to influence characters that are still alive because heaven objectively exists, which allows her to right a wrong. In other words, readers are urged to posit a transcendental realm in which the dead narrator can still think, feel, and act, and her dealings make sure that poetic justice is achieved after all: the dead Susie is notably involved in Mr. Harvey’s punishment through death at the end of the novel, and it is highly unlikely that he will enter heaven as well.

Anticipations of Postmodernism: Dead Characters from the Middle Ages to Science-Fiction Narratives I will now move on to the ways in which ghosts and other dead characters foreshadow the dead character-narrators of postmodernist fiction. The fairy world in Sir Orfeo, a romance or Breton lai from the late thirteenth or early fourteenth century, for instance, features a whole gallery of dead characters.5 In this narrative, Heurodis, the wife of Sir Orfeo, is snatched away by fairies as she stands next to a grafted tree (“ympe-tree”): “Ac yete amides hem ful right/ The quen was oawy y-twight, /With fairi [i.e., magic] fort y-nome” (Laskaya and Salisbury 30–31, ll. 186–193).6 After the loss of his wife, Sir Orfeo gives up his kingdom and withdraws to the forest, where he lives in a state of poverty and enchants the animal world by playing the harp. Ultimately, Sir Orfeo recognizes his wife in a group of “sexti levedis” (34, l. 304), and follows them. By riding through a rock (“in at a roche” [35, l. 347]), he reaches the fairy world, where he encounters mutilated characters that had also been snatched away by fairies. At this point, we learn that being taken by fairies is equivalent to sudden death. In the world of the fairies, the dead continue to exist: they are “thought dede, and nare nought” (36, l. 390). That is to say, even though Sir Orfeo is still alive, he is capable of literally entering a world in which the dead exist in a form of living death: 44

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Sum stode without en hade, And sum non armes nade, And sum thurth the bodi hadde wounde, And sum lays wode, y-bounde, And sum armed on hors sete, And sum astrangled as thai ete; And sum were in water adreynt, And sum with fire al forschreynt. Wives ther lay on childe bedde, Sum ded and sum awedde, And wonder fele ther lay besides Right as thai slepe her undertides; Eche was thus in this warld y-nome With fairi thider y-come. (36, ll. 391–404)7 Alan J. Fletcher refers to this list of characters as an “extraordinary chamber of horrors,” a “waxworks of the undead,” and a “medley of unfortunates,” while also noting that in most cases, the reasons behind the mutilations (and hence the characters’ deaths) remain opaque. Thus, “the gallery’s contents are the casualties of a baffling universe that obviates prediction or explanation” (141–43). In the narrative, Sir Orfeo manages to get his (dead) wife (and ultimately also his kingdom) back by enchanting the king of the fairies through his harp music. We can cognitively cope with the dead (or undead) figures in Sir Orfeo because we can attribute them to a supernatural realm (namely the world of the fairies), which is an important feature of Breton lais. Furthermore, Sir Orfeo suggests that “sudden death might […] be a faery ‘taking,’ from which the longed-for beloved, like Heurodis, might return” (Saunders 203). Indeed, this particular lai seems to argue that true love may lead to a return of the dead to the natural world,8 while the fairies appear to primarily test the love of humans (such as Sir Orfeo’s love for his wife) and may thus represent the inexplicable forces of chance or chaos. In revenge tragedies, which flourished during the Renaissance (1485–1660), it is not so much the case that the living pay visits to the dead; it is rather that dead characters return to the world of the living in the form of ghosts, and these ghosts have become a crucial ingredient of this genre.9 A ghost is “the disembodied spirit of a dead person [...], which might appear of its own accord or be summoned by a sorcerer.” Furthermore, “belief in ghosts is as old as humanity, probably springing from dreams about someone who has recently died, which gives the idea that the dead person’s spirit still exists and can visit the living” (Schweitzer 338). Like Susie Salmon, the dead character-narrator of The Lovely Bones, the ghosts in revenge tragedies (and, as I will show, also the ones in Gothic novels) seek to right a wrong that either happened to them when they were still alive or when they were buried: they have “unfinished business on Earth” (338). However, in contrast to Susie Salmon, these ghosts can be seen by characters that are still alive. Furthermore, all of the ghosts in revenge tragedies and Gothic novels come from the purgatory of Catholic belief, an idea that was rejected by the English Reformation.10 In The Birth of Purgatory, Jacques le Goff describes purgatory as “the prison in which ghosts were normally incarcerated, though they might be allowed to escape now and then to briefly haunt those of the living whose zeal in their behalf was insufficient” (82).11

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The revenge tragedy was established in England by Thomas Kyd with The Spanish Tragedy (1592). This play begins with a prologue that introduces “the Ghost of ANDREA” and the allegorical figure of “REVENGE” (5; italics in original). These two characters exist on a different ontological level than the characters that are still alive, and the former cannot be seen by the latter. Andrea and Revenge, however, can see everything that happens in the primary world of the play. We learn that the Spanish Don Andrea was killed by the Portuguese Prince Balthazar in the 1580 war between Spain and Portugal. The ghost of Don Andrea then describes his sojourn through the underworld as follows: [...] Finding Pluto with his Proserpine, I showed my passport, humbled on my knee; Whereat fair Proserpine began to smile, And begged that only she might give my doom. Pluto was pleased, and sealed it with a kiss. Forthwith, Revenge, she rounded thee in th’ear, And bade thee lead me through the gates of horn, Where dreams have passage in the silent night. No sooner had she spoke but we were here, I wot not how, in twinkling of an eye. (Kyd 1.1.76–85) Don Andrea’s return from the underworld is thus motivated by a desire for revenge, which we can attribute to him but also to the supernatural figure of Proserpine. Furthermore, as Thomas Rist has shown, the play reflects “the anxiety of Catholics and religious waverers that without due memorial, the dead in Purgatory would languish in torment” (14). At the end of the play, Andrea’s murderer Balthazar is dead and Andrea’s “hopes have end in their effects” (4.5.1) – but the major problem is that many innocent characters are killed as well. The Spanish Tragedy thus sheds a rather critical light on the effects of revenge; it critiques the intrigues, corruption, and dishonorable actions of courts in Catholic Europe. Whereas the ghost in The Spanish Tragedy observes the action and the final bloodshed but cannot be seen in the world of the living, Shakespeare’s revenge tragedy Hamlet (1602) presents us with a ghost that openly incites revenge by talking to his son (Hill 334). Here, the ghost of Hamlet’s father returns to the real world to actively urge his son Hamlet to “revenge his [i.e., Claudius’s] foul and most unnatural murder” (Shakespeare 213, 1.5.25); later on, he appears in Gertrude’s closet to “whet [Hamlet’s] almost blunted purpose” (345, 3.4.107).12 The ghost also tells Hamlet that he is [...] doomed for a certain term to walk the night And for the day confined to fast in fires Till the foul crimes done in my days of nature Are burnt and purged away. (212, 1.5.10–13) Furthermore, he is “forbid/To tell the secrets of [his] prison-house” (212, 1.5.13–14), and complains about not having received “three of the Sacraments that would have prepared him to face death” (Low 454): Cut off even in the blossoms of my sin, Unhouseled, disappointed, unaneled, No reckoning made, but sent to my account With all my imperfections on my head. O horrible! O horrible! Most horrible! (213, 1.5.77–80)13 46

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Like the ghost of Don Andrea, the ghost of Hamlet’s father seems to “come from the purgatory of Catholic belief ” ( Joseph 497, 502; see also Low 453), and its primary function is to motivate Hamlet’s actions and thus to trigger the plot of this play.14 Gothic novels are also full of ghosts that visit the living. For example, Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764), which is set in sixteenth-century Italy (a Catholic country), confronts us with a castle that is haunted by the ghost of Alfonso. Alfonso, the rightful ruler of Otranto, was poisoned by Ricardo, the grandfather of Manfred, the current Prince of Otranto (Walpole 105). In the shape of the ghost, Alfonso wants to make sure that Otranto is ruled by Theodore, his true heir, or, more specifically, that the following ancient prophecy comes true: “the Castle and Lordship of Otranto should pass from the present family whenever the real owner should be grown large enough to inhabit it” (27; italics in original). While the ghost of Hamlet’s father only talks to his son Hamlet, who is supposed to carry out the wishes of his dead father, the ghost of Alfonso primarily haunts Manfred, the grandson of the usurping Ricardo. The ghost is responsible for numerous magic events in this novel. To begin with, Manfred’s son Conrad is suddenly and inexplicably killed by “an enormous helmet, a hundred times more large than any casque ever made for human being, and shaded with a proportionable quantity of large feathers” (28).15 Also, a portrait of Manfred’s grandfather Ricardo “quit[s] its panel, and descend[s] on the floor, with a grave and melancholy air” (34), while, later on, “three drops of blood [fall] from the nose of Alfonso’s statue” (92). Toward the end of the novel, we are presented with a reaper-like skeletal specter: “the fleshless jaws and empty sockets of a skeleton, wrapt in a hermit’s cowl” (99). At first, the characters do not really know whether these supernatural disturbances are “omens from heaven or hell” (66), but most assume that they are caused by “the powers of darkness” (74) or perhaps even “Satan himself” (41). 16 At the end of the novel, however, we learn that, like the ghosts in The Spanish Tragedy and Hamlet, the ghost of Alfonso has returned from the dead to right a wrong. When Theodore is finally identified as the true Prince of Otranto, the ghost of Alfonso appears for the last time, and ascends to heaven: The walls of the castle behind Manfred were thrown down with a mighty force, and the form of Alfonso, dilated to an immense magnitude, appeared in the centre of the ruins. [...] Accompanied by a clap of thunder, it ascended solemnly towards Heaven, where, the clouds parting asunder, the form of St. Nicholas was seen, and receiving Alfonso’s shade, they were soon wrapt from mortal eyes in a blaze of glory. (104) The ghosts that I have discussed so far are all active agents even though they have already died. In a sense, they are all alive and dead simultaneously. At the same time, however, they also differ from one another. Whereas the dead Don Andrea continues to exist in a separate ontological realm where he cannot be seen by those who are still alive, Hamlet’s father reappears in the world of the living although he is dead. The ghost of Alfonso also returns to the world of the living, and at the end, he ascends to heaven (both the ghost of Don Andrea and the ghost of Hamlet’s father stick to the human form throughout the two plays). In Matthew Lewis’s Gothic novel The Monk: A Romance (1796), which is set in Catholic Spain, Don Raymond also encounters a ghost, namely “the bleeding nun,” who has “icy fingers” and “cold lips” (Lewis 141). This ghost is even more extreme than the ones discussed so far because even though it is able to speak, it looks and feels like a corpse. Don Raymond describes one of his encounters with her as follows: 47

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I beheld before me an animated corpse. Her countenance was long and haggard; her cheeks and lips were bloodless; the paleness of death was spread over her features; and her eye-balls, fixed steadfastly upon me, were lustreless and hollow. (140) Later, Theodore asks this animated corpse, “What disturbs thy sleep? Why dost thou afflict and torture this youth? How can rest be restored to thy unquiet spirit?” (149). She tells him that her “bones lie still unburied,” and that once they are buried, she will “trouble this world no more” (150).17 Dead characters can also be found in Jonathan Swift’s Menippean satire Gulliver’s Travels (1726, amended 1735). However, they serve radically different purposes than the ones in the Breton lai, the revenge tragedy, or the Gothic novel. In Part III of Swift’s satire, Lemuel Gulliver travels to the island of Glubbdubdrib, where the Governor is miraculously capable of reawakening the dead. The narrator thus encounters “Spectres,” “Ghosts,” and “Spirits,” and he can even tell the Governor which dead person he would like to talk to (181–82). Hence, Gulliver meets “Alexander the Great,” “Hannibal,” “Caesar,” “Pompey,” “Brutus,” “Homer,” “Aristotle,” “Descartes,” “Gassendi,” and some of the “modern Dead” (182–84; italics in original). In contrast to the ghosts in other genres, the dead characters in Gulliver’s Travels can be seen in the context of the novel’s satirical critique of human nature and the idea of perfectibility.18 More specifically, the reawakening of the dead serves to accentuate the discrepancy between the ideas of “the ancient Learned” and the depravity of the leaders of the past “two or three hundred Years” (184), which the narrator explicates as follows: I found how the World had been misled by prostitute Writers, to ascribe the greatest Exploits in War to Cowards, the Wisest Counsel to Fools, Sincerity to Flatterers, Roman Virtue to Betrayers of their Country, Piety to Atheists, Chastity to Sodomites, Truth to Informers. (185; italics in original) What might the status of the dead be in our future lives? In Philip K. Dick’s science-fiction novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968), for instance, the character of Wilbur Mercer creates “a time-reversal faculty by which the dead returned to life,” which is then, however, prohibited by local law (24). Similarly, in the futuristic world of David Brin’s science-fiction novel Kiln People (2002), people can create duplicates (“dittos” or “golems”) of themselves, and if the original dies, the ditto continues to exist as a (technologically manufactured) ghost that has its own will. One of these techno-ghosts (the so-called Maharal ghost) gets out of hand, and tries to give itself godlike power, which urges us to consider the consequences of technological progress. In science-fiction narratives, the idea of reawakening the dead primarily has to do with the question of whether the new technologies that enable us to do so are beneficial or detrimental to the further development of humankind.

Concluding Remarks As I have shown, dead characters proliferate throughout English literary history. However, these figures differ regarding both their functioning and their functions. To begin with, even though postmodernist narratives (such as Beckett’s “The Calmative,” Sebold’s The Lovely Bones, and Pinter’s Family Voices) contain dead characters that speak from the grave or from heaven, the dead are not usually visited by the living or the other way around. Earlier narratives, by contrast, typically represent such visits and thus involve different degrees of blending between 48

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life and death. For instance, characters that are still alive may enter the world of the dead (as in Sir Orfeo), or the dead may return to the living (as in revenge tragedies, Gothic novels, Gulliver’s Travels, and science-fiction narratives), in which case the question of who sees or interacts with them becomes pertinent. Moreover, whereas many postmodernist narratives use dead characters to explore the idea of life-in-death (i.e., the question of whether humankind can be argued to be dead in a metaphorical sense), the speaking corpses in earlier narratives serve a wider variety of purposes. Many pre-postmodernist narratives explore the phenomenon of death from the vantage point of the dead: whereas the central protagonist in the medieval romance Sir Orfeo ultimately manages to bridge the ontological chasm between life and death and even wins his dead wife back through his love, the ghosts in Renaissance revenge tragedies and later Gothic novels typically return to the world of the living because they seek to right a wrong that either happened to them when they were still alive or has to do with their burial. The reawakening of the learned dead characters in Gulliver’s Travels, by contrast, serves to ridicule the discrepancy between ideas of the past and the depravity of the present. Science-fiction novels project speculative future worlds in which death may be overcome by technological progress. The evocation of generic conventions usually helps us as readers determine the potential meanings of dead characters. For instance, we can explain the ghosts in Sir Orfeo by looking at the conventions of Breton lais (a certain type of romance). In these cases, supernatural forces typically impinge on private matters such as the central protagonist’s “dedicated pursuit of a lady’s love” or his “courtly manners” (i.e., his code of chivalry; Mikics 55). Indeed, the supernatural fairies test Sir Orfeo’s loyalty and truthfulness. In this context, Northrop Frye points out that the hero of romance moves in a world in which the ordinary laws of nature are slightly suspended: prodigies of courage and endurance, unnatural to us, are natural to him, and enchanted weapons, talking animals, terrifying ogres and witches, and talismans of miraculous power violate no rule of probability once the postulates of romance have been established. (31) Revenge tragedies, which flourished during the Renaissance, also contain one supernatural creature: the ghost. According to Eugene D. Hill, revenge tragedies are “built upon a handful of motifs (ghosts, madness, delay, horrible killings)” which are derived “from its ancient progenitor, the Roman tragic poet Seneca” (327). These ghosts return from the next world because they have unfinished business in this world and seek to right a wrong, or, as Thomas Rist puts it, the ghosts fear being forgotten, while remembrance in this world literally affects the dead (14). The major purpose of ghosts in the Gothic novel is to evoke feelings of fear and awe. Furthermore, in his “Preface to the Second Edition” (1765) of The Castle of Otranto, Horace Walpole states that realist modes of representation had come to dominate the writing of novels in the eighteenth century: “the great resources of fancy have been damned up, by a strict adherence to common life” (21; my italics). He therefore composed what he calls “a new species of romance” (25) and describes the ideas behind it as follows: Desirous of leaving the powers of fancy at liberty to expatiate through the boundless realms of invention, and thence of creating more interesting situations, he [the author of the novel] wished to conduct the mortal agents in his drama according to the rules of probability; in short, to make them think, speak, and act, as it might be supposed mere men and women would do in extraordinary positions. (21) 49

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The dead characters in Gulliver’s Travels are not supernatural but can be explained in the context of the conventions of the Menippean satire, which is “stylized rather than naturalistic” and involves a combination of “fantasy and morality” (Frye 289–90). Swift’s satire mocks and ridicules the brutishness of humans as well as the depravity of the leaders of the past two hundred years (through the learned dead characters the narrator encounters). The use of these figures is hardly surprising because, as Mikhail Bakhtin points out, the Menippean satire is “not fettered by any demands for an external verisimilitude to life” and instead engages in the “bold and unrestrained use of the fantastic” that leads to “extraordinary situations.” Furthermore, he defines this type of satire in terms of its “experimental fantasticality” (114; italics in original). Science-fiction novels, finally, also contain dead characters that we can make sense of by assuming that they might exist through discoveries or technological developments at some point in the future. To put this point slightly differently, the dead figures in science-fiction novels primarily have to do with futurist extrapolations concerning the consequences of technological innovation. Like romances, science-fiction novels are dominated by forces of good and evil; the difference is only that these forces are no longer supernatural but rather inhere in new technologies (or sometimes aliens). Similarly, Brian Stableford points out that science fiction is a special case, in that its dealings with impossibility are restrained by a real or pretended determination to feature ideas and events that, although presently impossible in the actual world, might be possible if circumstances were to change in the future according to a possible pattern of development. (245) To summarize: dead characters are a mind-boggling phenomenon that exists in many different types of narratives from the Middle Ages up through postmodernism. This proliferation suggests that dead characters serve important human needs; otherwise there would not be so many examples. In this chapter, I have tried to elicit some of their potential functions. A next step could be to compare these functions with those of dead characters in other generic or cultural contexts.

Notes 1 According to David Herman, narratives evoke worlds in which something happens. In addition, these worlds are populated by characters that undergo certain experiences (14). 2 A literary genre is constituted by an operative principle or shared convention (Todorov 3) and can be seen as “a matter of discrimination and taxonomy: of organising things into recognizable classes” (Frow 51). 3 Dead character-narrators proliferate in postmodernist fiction: the narrators of Flann O’Brien’s novel The Third Policeman (1967), Vladimir Nabokov’s short story “Terra Incognita” (1968), Nabokov’s novel Transparent Things (1972), Robertson Davies’s novel Murther and Walking Spirits (1991), Percival Everett’s novel American Desert (2004), and one of the narrators of Orhan Pamuk’s novel My Name Is Red (2001) are also dead. Furthermore, the narrator of “Past,” the first section of Ali Smith’s novel Hotel World (2001), is the ghost of a chambermaid who had fallen into a food elevator; Destiny and Desire (2011) by Carlos Fuentes is narrated by the severed head of Josué Nadal, a young attorney. Other dead characters are M, W1, and W2 in Samuel Beckett’s play Play (1963), most of the figures in Muriel Spark’s novel The Hothouse by the East River (1973), Brian in Caryl Churchill’s play Cloud Nine (1979), Walter Rathenau in Thomas Pynchon’s novel Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), the father in Harold Pinter’s radio play Family Voices (1981), the characters who had been killed by Francis Phelan in William Kennedy’s novel Ironweed (1983), the dead child in Caryl Churchill’s play The Skriker (1994), Ian in Sarah Kane’s play Blasted (1995) and Graham in Cleansed (1998). 4 “The Calmative” and The Lovely Bones are postmodernist in the sense of Brian McHale (10).

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Dead Narrators and Characters 5 The genre of the romance developed in France during the 1100s as “a species of magical narrative” (Heng 4) which focuses on the chivalric values of the aristocracy and involves supernatural phenomena such as dragons, wizards, and magic spells. Similarly, Douglas Kelly defines the romance as “a record of marvel and the adventure or adventures it generates” (189). 6 According to the online Oxford English Dictionary, fairies are “one of a class of supernatural beings of diminutive size, in popular belief supposed to possess magical powers and to have great influence for good or evil over the affairs of man.” 7 The modern English translation reads as follows: “For some there stood who had no head, /and some no arms, nor feet; some bled/and through their bodies wounds were set, /and some were strangled as they ate, /and some lay raving, chained and bound, /and some in water had been drowned; /and some were withered in the fire, /and some on horse, in war’s attire. /And wives there lay in their childbed, /and mad were some, and some were dead; and passing many there lay beside/as though they slept at quiet noon-tide. /Thus in the world was each one caught/and thither by fairy magic brought” (Tolkien 125, ll. 391–404). 8 Similarly, in Walter Map’s twelfth-century narrative De Nugis Curialium, a knight is said “to have buried his wife, who was really dead, and to have recovered her by snatching her out of a dance, and after that to have got sons and grandsons by her” (Map 161). 9 Other important features of revenge tragedies are the extensive use of soliloquy, madness, hesitation, delay, the play-within-a play, and a climax of bloodshed (Hill 327). 10 See Anthony Low (450–51) for a detailed discussion, including a reference to the Anglican Church’s Book of Common Prayer (1549). 11 As Ed Eleazar has shown, in medieval visions of the afterlife such as The Gast of Gy (1380) and A Revelation of Purgatory (1422), “a dead person” also “returns to the living to describe exactly what they are experiencing in the afterlife.” The primary purpose here seems to be to encourage “prayers for the dead” (386–87). 12 Because the ghost of Hamlet’s father is also seen by Marcellus, Barnardo, and Horatio (151–53, 1.1. 39–50), the ghost is not an illusion or hallucination but an objective constituent of the storyworld. 13 In De Nugis Curialium, Walter Map mentions various returns of the dead that seem to come from purgatory as well. In these cases, the major problem also seems to be that their souls do not find peace because they have died “unchristianly” (203, 205). Hence, “the Lord has given power to the evil angel of that lost soul to move about in the dead corpse” (203). 14 Shakespeare’s contemporary Denmark was Lutheran, but the play might be set in some past before the Reformation, and it is also worth noting that King Hamlet is clearly Catholic. 15 Alfonso’s ghost kills Conrad because he is the great grandson of Ricardo, the usurper. The huge ghost of Alfonso haunts the castle, at least partly, in a suit of armor: at a later stage, a “gigantic sword” suddenly falls “to the ground opposite to the helmet” (67), and an incredibly huge “hand in armour” is spotted (97). 16 These discussions seem to reflect upon the idea that purgatory is located between heaven and hell, but closer to hell (Eleazar 379). St. Thomas Aquinas, for example, argued that “it is probable, […] and more in keeping with the statements of holy men and the revelations made to many, that […] the place of Purgatory is situated below and in proximity to hell, so that it is the same fire which torments the damned in hell and cleanses the just in Purgatory” (quoted in Joseph 497). 17 St. Thomas Aquinas also states that “according to the disposition of Divine providence separated souls sometimes come forth from their abode and appear to men, […] as those who are detained in purgatory […]. [It would not] be befitting for them to leave their abode for any purpose other than to take part in the affairs of the living” (quoted in Joseph 499). 18 Lemuel Gulliver, the first-person narrator, does not really learn anything from his encounters, and at the end of the novel, he is completely alienated from his family (Swift 266). J. Paul Hunter also argues that “the human refusal or inability to learn anything from past experiences is a central issue for Swift” (224).

Works Cited Bakhtin, Mikhail. Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, edited and translated by Caryl Emerson. U of Minnesota P, 1984. Beckett, Samuel. “The Calmative.” 1954. Four Novellas. Calder, 1977, pp. 51–68.

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Jan Alber Brin, David. Kiln People. Tor Books, 2002. Dick, Philip K. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? 1968. Del Rey, 1996. Eleazar, Ed. “Visions of the Afterlife.” A Companion to Old and Middle English Literature, edited by Laura Cooner Lambdin and Robert Thomas Lambdin, Greenwood P, 2002, pp. 376–397. Fletcher, Alan J. “Sir Orfeo and the Flight from the Enchanters.” Studies in the Age of Chaucer: The Yearbook of the New Chaucer Society, vol. 22, 2000, pp. 141–177. Frow, John. Genre. Routledge, 2006. Frye, Northrop. Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays. 1957, edited by Robert D. Denham. U of Toronto P, 2006. Genette, Gérard. Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method. 1972, translated by Jane E. Lewin. Cornell UP, 1980. Heng, Geraldine. Empire of Magic: Medieval Romance and the Politics of Cultural Fantasy. Columbia UP, 2003. Herman, David. Basic Elements of Narrative. Wiley-Blackwell, 2009. Hill, Eugene D. “Revenge Tragedy.” A Companion to Renaissance Drama, edited by Arthur F. Kinney. Blackwell, 2002, pp. 326–335. Hunter, J. Paul. “Gulliver’s Travels and the Later Writings.” The Cambridge Companion to Jonathan Swift, edited by Christopher Fox, Cambridge UP, 2003, pp. 216–240. Joseph, Miriam. “Discerning the Ghost in Hamlet.” PMLA, vol. 76, no. 5, 1961, pp. 493–502. Kelly, Douglas. The Art of Medieval French Romance. U of Wisconsin P, 1992. Kyd, Thomas. The Spanish Tragedy, edited by J. R. Mulryne. Hill and Wang, 1970. Laskaya, Anne, and Eve Salisbury. “Sir Orfeo.” The Middle English Breton Lays, edited by Anne Laskaya and Eve Salisbury. Western Michigan U, 1995, pp. 15–59. Le Goff, Jacques. The Birth of Purgatory. Translated by Arthur Goldhammer. U of Chicago P, 1984. Lewis, Matthew. The Monk: A Romance. 1796, edited by Christopher MacLachlan, Penguin, 1998. Low, Anthony. “Hamlet and the Ghost of Purgatory: Intimations of Killing the Father.” English Literary Renaissance, vol. 29, no. 3, 1999, pp. 443–467. Map, Walter. De Nugis Curialium: Courtiers’ Trifles, edited and translated by M. R. James, Clarendon P, 1983. McHale, Brian. Postmodernist Fiction. Methuen & Co. Ltd, 1987. Mikics, David. A New Handbook of Literary Terms. Yale UP, 2007. Nieuwland, Mante S., and Jos J. A. van Berkum. “When Peanuts Fall in Love: N400 Evidence for the Power of Discourse.” Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, vol. 18, no. 7, 2006, pp. 1098–1111. Olson, Greta. “Introducing Alice Sebold’s The Lovely Bones.” Twenty-First Century Fiction: Readings, Essays, Conversations, edited by Christoph Ribbat. Winter, 2005, pp. 137–147. Phelan, James. Living to Tell about It: A Rhetoric and Ethics of Character Narration. Cornell UP, 2005. Pinter, Harold. “Family Voices.” Pinter Plays: Four. Methuen, 1981, pp. 279–296. Rist, Thomas. Revenge Tragedy and the Drama of Commemoration in Reforming England. Ashgate, 2008. Saunders, Corinne. Magic and the Supernatural in Medieval English Romance. D.S. Brewer, 2010. Schweitzer, Darrell. “Ghosts and Hauntings.” The Greenwood Encyclopedia of Science Fiction and Fantasy: Themes, Works, and Wonders, edited by Gary Westfahl. Greenwood P, 2005, pp. 338–340. Sebold, Alice. The Lovely Bones. Little, Brown, 2002. Shakespeare, William. Hamlet. Edited by Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor. Arden, 2006. Stableford, Brian M. Science Fact and Science Fiction: An Encyclopedia. Routledge, 2006. Stanzel, Franz Karl. A Theory of Narrative. 1979, translated by Charlotte Goedsche, with a Preface by Paul Hernadi. Cambridge UP, 1984. Swift, Jonathan. Gulliver’s Travels. 1726, 1735, edited with Introduction and Notes by Robert Demaria. Penguin, 2003. Todorov, Tzvetan. The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre, translated by Richard Howard. P of Case Western Reserve U, 1973. Tolkien, J. R. R. Sir Gawain & the Green Knight, Pearl, and Sir Orfeo. 1975, edited by Christopher Tolkien, translated by J. R. R. Tolkien. Unwin, 1986. Turner, Mark. “The Cognitive Study of Art, Language, and Literature.” Poetics Today, vol. 23, no. 1, 2002, pp. 9–20. Turner, Mark. “Double-Scope Stories.” Narrative Theory and the Cognitive Sciences, edited by David Herman. CSLI, 2003, pp. 117–142. Turner, Mark. The Literary Mind. Oxford UP, 1996. Walpole, Horace. The Castle of Otranto: A Gothic Story. 1764. 2nd ed. Dover, 1966. Zunshine, Lisa. Strange Concepts and the Stories They Make Possible. Johns Hopkins UP, 2008.

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5 LITERATURE AND THE AFTERLIFE Alice Bennett

The literary afterlife is a genre in which a place and time after death are imagined and peopled with dead characters. Place it against the modern elegy, ghost story, or even zombie apocalypse, and the modern literary afterlife seems very much a minor literary form. Nevertheless, the afterlife has inspired a great range of writing and, historically, has served as one of the primary locations for the fantastic or supernatural in literature, from the Classical to the medieval period. Epic poetry about purgatory, myths of descent into the underworld, stories of reincarnation, dream visions of paradise: all these represent a diverse tradition of writing across thousands of years. Classical descent narratives and medieval visionary literature have been the subject of centuries of careful scholarly reading and explication. There is also a considerable body of work on the broader cultural history of belief in life after death which understands representations of the afterlife through the lens of religious studies or the historical study of religion, such as the work of Philip C. Almond (2016), Colleen McDannell and Bernhard Lang (2001), and Jacques Le Goff (1981). Modern literary afterlives which appear from the late nineteenth-century onwards have often returned to and reworked the descent narrative’s katabasis in fiction (Falconer 2005) and the underworld encounter with the dead, the nekuia, in poetry (Thurston 2009). The prevalence of afterlives in modern fiction can also be understood as a way of side-stepping literary realism and experimenting with narrative form (Bennett 2012). The range of modern afterlives is extraordinary, and it is worth emphasizing the size of this potential corpus. A truly comprehensive account of modern afterlives would range across different media, perhaps taking in examples as diverse as Jake and Dinos Chapman’s installation Fucking Hell (2008), the TV show The Good Place (2016–2020), or the film What Dreams May Come (1998), adapted from an earlier novel by Richard Matheson. Literary afterlives have a great diversity in themselves, and the category must be expansive enough to include the comic short stories of John Kendrick Bangs’s The Houseboat on the Styx (1895) and its sequels; the epitaph-poems of Edgar Lee Masters’s Spoon River Anthology (1915); Jean-Paul Sartre’s play Huis Clos (1944); and Alice Notley’s epic poem The Descent of Alette (1998).1 By numbers, though, it is the novel that has become the primary medium for the modern afterlife. Within this smaller group, the range is still remarkable, from Flann O’Brien’s satire of modern physics, The Third Policeman (1967), to D. M. Thomas’s reworking of the Holocaust memoir and Freudian case study in The White Hotel (1981); J. M. Coetzee’s philosophical novel Elizabeth Costello (1999); 53

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Alice Sebold’s The Lovely Bones (2002), with its delicate balance between sentimentality and brutality; or the body horror of Chuck Palahniuk’s Damned (2011). It would also be a mistake to think of afterlives as emerging primarily from a white, Western, postsecular context, when the diversity of religious, cultural, and literary heritages represented in the literature of afterlives is extremely broad, and the history of the genre is criss-crossed with the legacies of imperialism, cross-cultural exchange, and appropriation. This cultural and linguistic diversity is exemplified in novels such as Orhan Pamuk’s My Name Is Red (1998), Amy Tan’s Saving Fish from Drowning (2005), Amos Tutuola’s The Palm-Wine Drinkard (1953), or Máirtín Ó Cadhain’s Cré na Cille (1949), which was only recently translated into English (as The Dirty Dust) in 2015. One way of explaining this increasing multitude of afterlives is as a consequence of increased secularism. Falconer, who gives an account of the prevalent metaphor of the descent into hell and back, suggests that this “katabatic imagination” blossomed in an atmosphere of declining religious belief in the twentieth century (13–14). Moreover, there is evidence that the literature of the latter part of the twentieth century and the early part of the twenty-first century can be understood as undertaking a productive dialogue with strands of increasing atheism and secularism and new structures of post-religious belief, creating new genres of writing in the process (Tate and Bradley 2010). Drawing on hermeneutic frameworks from religious studies, afterlives could therefore be understood as responses to the uncertain place of belief in modern life. One of the most significant features of all literary afterlives, however, is their intertextuality. As Michael Thurston describes it, the descent narrative in particular offers an exemplary lineage of borrowings and allusive repetition: Odysseus’s encounter with the shade of Tiresias becomes Aeneas’s meeting with his father, Anchises, in Vergil’s Aeneid. Aeneas’s trip to classical Underworld becomes Dante’s descent into a medieval Christian’s Hell in Inferno. Dante’s Inferno is echoed by Milton’s Satan in Paradise Lost. Milton in turn provides a backdrop for William Blake in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. (2) As the traditions of afterlives become more complex, so too does this thickly intertextual history. For example, Will Self ’s novel How the Dead Live (2000) began life as a short story called “The North London Book of the Dead,” alluding to The Tibetan Book of the Dead, and the later novel was framed by endpaper maps that recall the world of C. S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia series (which, of course, ends in a version of heaven). Laura Lindstedt’s Oneiron (2017), in contrast, establishes its afterlife through sustained references to the work of Emmanuel Swedenborg; in an audacious gesture, Alasdair Gray’s Lanark (1981) employs a catalogue of its own “plagiarisms” to set up the book’s intertextual relationship with posthumous narratives including The Childermass by Wyndham Lewis (1928) and William Golding’s Pincher Martin (1956). Modern literary afterlives are therefore not necessarily in dialogue with the complexities of religious tradition and belief, but instead with literary forebears that have a common set of techniques and preoccupations. For instance, a common set of tropes emerges from this tradition, including an interest in famous dead people,2 and the recurrence of hotels,3 bureaucracy,4 and significant groupings of people.5 Moreover, a set of literary techniques for representing spaces and locations, the distorted time of eternity or reincarnation, and the narrative voices of the dead has emerged from the genre. I am not, therefore, convinced that a framework from the cultural study of religion wholly accounts for the extensive intertextuality, literary techniques, and genre tropes that are common to afterlives. Rather than treating afterlives as a manifestation of a historical or cultural moment, 54

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this chapter instead traces some techniques that are common to the modern afterlife as the newest form of a trans-historical genre. What follows in this chapter takes George Saunders’s Man Booker Prize-winning novel, Lincoln in the Bardo (2017), as an example of a widely acclaimed literary afterlife from the contemporary moment and establishes a reading of the novel that foregrounds its genre elements. I read Lincoln in the Bardo as an afterlife to show how the book uses that genre’s (often very unconventional) conventions for handling voice, space, and time and to identify some of the ways in which the study of individual afterlives within their genre positioning can be generative and necessary.

Space: “Radical Theming” Lincoln in the Bardo is set in the cemetery where Willie Lincoln is buried and where the president visits his dead son’s body after the boy’s death. The historical setting is a jarring departure from the scenes of contemporary or near-future life that preoccupied Saunders in his earlier short stories. Saunders’s familiar settings (the workplace, the high school, the apartment complex, the amusement park) are, however, more similar to the cemetery than they might seem at first glance; as Hari Kunzru noted in a review of the book, characters are “trapped in a space that is fundamentally inauthentic and unreal, much like a theme park.” Saunders’s theme parks, particularly the caveman exhibit in “Pastoralia” and CivilWarLand in the title story of that collection, have been read as manifestations of a Baudrillardian postmodernism – an interpretation that also seems to surface in Kunzru’s identification of the “inauthentic” nature of the theme park (Pogell). Another way of thinking about a theme park, more useful in the context of the afterlife, is as an entirely planned space in which everything is meaningful. Saunders’s notes on “elaborate Theming” in a piece he wrote for GQ about hotels in Dubai also give more weight to the affinity between the theme park and the destinations of eternity: “In the belly of radical Theming,” he writes, “my first response was to want to stay forever” (“The New Mecca” 24). Moreover, some of Saunders’s earlier short stories bring together ghosts and theme parks in configurations that reimagine both the supernatural elements of the ghost story and the artificial space of the theme park (del George). A proposition, then: we should theorize the afterlife as a manifestation of the same creative impulses as the theme park. Afterlives have the same elements of scrupulous internal logic, organization, and legible order as theme parks. As a literary setting, the afterlife demands total poetic justice through a system of apt allegorical or symbolic structures. The spaces of Dante’s Divine Comedy are the archetype of this ideal setting, in which morality is mapped directly onto geography and the specific experience of every one of the dead is metaphorically resonant through the process of contrapasso, by which the punishment fits the crime. The Divine Comedy should be understood as the influence that presides over modern afterlives’ interest in processes of mapping, and of designing and assigning appropriate spaces, and in spatial form as an aesthetic quality. When, for instance, Robertson Davies makes his afterlife a film festival in Murther and Walking Spirits (1991), or Muriel Spark (a doyenne of closed communities, from schools to boarding houses to convents) makes her afterlife a small set of locations in New York City in Hothouse by the East River (1973), these settings themselves become powerfully allegorical. A setting in which the highest imperative is that everything should be meaningful, rather than a mimetic attempt to recreate the contingency and superfluity of real life, is one of the consistent features of afterlives. Saunders’s setting of the cemetery, with its clearly defined perimeter (an iron fence that horrifies the inhabitants and creates a limit to their created world), full of the objects they 55

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call sick-boxes and sick-houses – their coffins and crypts – invites a layer of allegorical decoding as to their real situation underneath. The way in which the aptness of the contrapasso appears in Saunders’s novel most clearly, however, is through the visual forms taken by the spirits in the cemetery. The novel opens by introducing Bevins and Vollman, the two men who will take on guardianship of Willie in the afterlife. Bevins, a regretful suicide suddenly alive to the sensory beauty of the physical world, takes on a physical form sprouting with multiple eyes and noses and hands with “[s]lashes on every one of the wrists” (27). Vollman, who died just as his relationship with his younger wife was about to gain a new sexual intimacy, appears to Willie with an enormous bobbing penis. The bardo imagined in Saunders’s Oak Hill cemetery can therefore be understood as a form of “radical Theming” which reflects the generic tradition of afterlives that create settings crammed with aptly symbolic meaning.

Time: “The Great Mother-Gift” Drawing on the template of The Tibetan Book of the Dead, Saunders’s bardo is a place whose inhabitants must shed their illusions (principally the belief that they are still living and are only temporarily housed in “sick-boxes” while they recover) before they can pass out of the bardo and into whatever comes next. The bardo, in Tibetan Buddhism, is the transitory interval between lives. The whole novel therefore takes place in the interlude between the end of the story for Willie’s body and the end of the story for his spirit, which spends the duration of the plot in the cemetery amongst other souls that cling to existence before eventually breaking loose in a burst of energy the characters name the “matterlightblooming phenomenon.” Saunders’s bardo implies some more permanently eternal afterlife after its intermission, but this is left rather unresolved in the book. We hear a report from one of the characters, the Reverend Everly Thomas, of what he witnessed of judgment, heaven, and hell, but the novel suggests this might simply have been a manifestation of his own fears of damnation (186–95). Moreover, anyone who gets swept up in the plot of Saunders’s novel must find the Reverend wrong in his assessment that “there is nothing to do, in this place where no action can matter” (194). The bardo in which the story plays out therefore allows for a supplement to life, which is effectively a period in which narrative can still function and where characters can still change and take action. Unlike eternity, then, the bardo allows for stories. Willie’s interval in the Oak Hill cemetery is therefore the caesura in which the whole action of the book takes place and stems from his decision to remain after death and wait for his father; as he says in his first words to the other spirits in the graveyard, “I feel I am to wait” (29). It eventually becomes clear that the mechanics of Saunders’s afterlife are such that it is particularly dangerous for children to tarry too long in the bardo. Willie’s lingering in the cemetery, arrested by a desire to see his father again, is the peril that gives the narrative its forward trajectory, as the other spirits must persuade him to loosen his attachments and leave – to give up the ghost – and the clock is ticking. Another child-spirit lingering in the cemetery, Elise Traynor, serves as both a caution for Willie and a vehicle allowing his posthumous caretakers, Bevins and Vollman, to depart from the bardo in an act of heroic self-sacrifice. Elise introduces herself with another nod to temporal disorder: “I was too early departed. From that party, from that/Brite promise of nights and nights of that” (38). Elise, “too early departed,” has become trapped in a tortuous, shape-shifting carapace – now a furnace, a vulture, a dog, a hag, a flooded cornfield, and finally a burning trainwreck – from which Vollman and Bevins liberate her in an act of self-sacrifice that also ends their tenure in the bardo in the burst of energy of the “matterlightblooming phenomenon.” 56

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Saunders’s afterlife therefore creates a temporal structure that inevitably foregrounds the incompleteness or interruption of lived lives. The “matterlightblooming phenomenon” that accompanies the spirits’ passage out of the bardo is most distinctively a burst of temporal energy that summons up both the past and the future. As Willie vanishes, for example, he begins “flickering between the various selves he had been in that previous place,” from newborn baby through childhood and then on to “various future-forms” in the last moments before he vanishes (299). The same effect occurs for both Bevins and Vollman at the end of the book (328–29, 333). This unfurling temporal mirage of perfected futures – full of love and happiness and old age – is a form of consolatory fiction that associates literature itself with an imaginary that has the reparative power to complete stories that have ended too soon. Fiction can therefore set right death’s severing temporality by offering a posthumous supplement to a life “too early departed.” After Vollman and Bevins blaze out in the burst of time that is the “matterlightblooming phenomenon,” those who remain in the cemetery consider that what is left to them is nothing more than time itself: And discover, in those first moments of restored movement, that we had again been granted the great mother-gift: robert g. twistings Time. lance durning More time. percival “dash” collier (339) The supplementary temporal interval is therefore the rubric under which Saunders’s bardo operates. And the storytelling imaginary is exactly what offers the “great mother-gift” of “more time” to lives that ended too early. The need for “more time” is equally relevant to the storyteller’s version of death: endings. In Peter Brooks’s summary of this narrative preoccupation, “narrative has something to do with time-boundedness, and […] plot is the internal logic of the discourse of mortality” (22). In an essay on Donald Barthelme’s story “The School” (a story in which both death and endings are very prominent), Saunders asks, “[T]he million-dollar question for any of us who has ever tried to complete a short story: When constitutes a sufficient ending?” (“ ‘The Perfect Gerbil’ ” 180). Creating an ending that feels satisfying or meaningful or appropriate is the challenge that art sets for itself precisely because life – by which I mean the whole of a lived life – does not afford “sufficient” meaning. Play with interrupted or disrupted time could also be understood as a hallmark of most dealings with the afterlife in literature: consider the comment of the narrator of Martin Amis’s Holocaust novel, Time’s Arrow (1991), who finds himself witnessing a life’s atrocities in reverse, after arriving to narrate the story “at the wrong time – either too soon, or after it was all too late” (173). Narrative, which must depict events and create meaning through their ordering and emplotment, can be understood as a tool for setting right the chaos of life with an imaginary afterlife that can offer a “sufficient” ending.

Voice: “The Result Was Cacophony” Lincoln in the Bardo is narrated, famously, in different voices, some cited from historical accounts of Lincoln’s life, some ascribed to the dead characters who haunt the Oak Hill cemetery, and some that appear to be cited from existing works of scholarship or first-hand historical accounts but were really invented by Saunders, such as the citations from “The Prairie Torment: 57

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Lincoln’s Psychology” by James Spicer or “The Villain Lincoln” by R. B. Arnolds. In the sections involving the dead characters, the effect of the book is of the orchestration of many voices – an experience that is given a pointed meaning in the scene in which Lincoln waits in the cemetery and the spirits throng around him, desperate to speak (214–24). More compelled to speak than to be heard, these voices threaten to lose all meaning: They had abandoned any pretext of speaking one at a time, many calling out desperately from where they stood, others darting brazenly up to the door to shout their story in. roger bevins iii The result was cacophony. the reverend everly thomas (205) Voice therefore becomes the prime material of the novel, as the book uses its mixture of first-hand historical accounts and more-or-less overtly fictitious narrative voices to question the place of narrative voice in fiction: first by troubling the idea that narrative voice is based on natural speech, second by questioning the assumption that readers access that voice through a natural process of listening (or even reading) rather than an uncanny sort of mind-reading. To take the first example, some of the novel’s strangest moments arise when Bevins and Willie narrate right through their final moments of life, in passages full of extraordinary, high-concept narrative styling. Willie’s joyful plunge out of the material world, for instance, destabilizes his narrating “I” in the process: I am Willie I am Willie Am not Willie Not willie but somehow Less More

I am even yet

[…] Whatever that former fellow (Willie) had, must now be given back (is given back gladly) as it never was mine (never his) and therefore is not being taken away, not at all! As I (who was willie but is no longer (merely) of willie) return To such beauty. (301) Bevins’s final moments, in contrast, are a lyrically beautiful farewell to the material world: “Loon-call in the dark; calf-cramp in the spring; neck-rub in the parlor; milk-sip at end of day” (353). Bevins’s final valediction addresses the logical impossibility of his own firstperson voicing of thoughts and experiences with some explanation of the mechanics of the characters’ narration: I send this out to you, dear friends, before I go, in this instantaneous thoughtburst, from a place where time slows and then stops and we may live forever in a single instant. Goodbye goodbye good – (335)

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A thought-burst straight from just before eternity, Bevins’s narrative eschews any association with natural modes of storytelling such as the written autobiography or oral account. To use Brian Richardson’s narratological category, the voices of the dead in Saunders’s book are overtly “unnatural” voices; they speak in ways that only supernatural creatures or literary fictions can. Posthumous narration, a subcategory of unnatural voices, is a common feature of modern afterlives. When, for instance, in Dante, we hear the words of Guido, contained within a perpetual flame, his voice is contained in and reported by an ostensibly living voice – the speaker-Dante’s. In contrast, the twentieth century’s afterlives demonstrate an intensifying preoccupation with handing over the telling of a story entirely to dead characters. This begins with dramas, such as Sartre’s Huis Clos, in which all the characters are dead, or Wyndham Lewis’s The Human Age, which was written initially as a radio play for a cast of dead characters. By the end of the twentieth century, the dead voice proliferates. Not all dead voices come from afterlives, though: in novels such as The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas (1881) by Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis, Vladimir Nabokov’s Transparent Things (1972), Gilbert Adair’s The Death of the Author (1992), Neil Jordan’s Shade (2004), or even Addie Bundren’s debatably posthumous chapter of As I Lay Dying (1930), the story told is life from the vantage point of death – perhaps best illuminated by the term “autothanatography” (Derrida): self-death-writing – rather than dead narration of the afterlife. The dead narrator, telling the story of their own life and posthumous existence, appears in examples such as Susanna Moore’s In the Cut (1995), Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad (2005), and Ali Smith’s Hotel World (2001), all of which, in common with Saunders’s book, employ the motif of dead narrators’ disappearing voices as they speak themselves out of existence. Bevins’s appeal to telepathy – “this instantaneous thought-burst” – also hews closely to the nineteenth century’s fascination with new telecommunications technology as a means of contacting the dead, underscored by his awed mention of the telegraph, the device “invented for distant communication” (174). As Nicholas Royle has argued, one of the ways of understanding some of the odder conventions of literary narration is through a paradigm of telepathy, rather than the metaphor of omniscience that is usually invoked to explain extradiegetic narration. Telepathy, and particularly the image of “mind-reading,” is the analogy that Saunders uses most often to imagine his characters’ strange powers of perception. Willie, for instance, tries to read his father’s thoughts, only to discover that “Father’s mind was blank blankblankblank” (207). In his essay “The Brain-Dead Megaphone,” Saunders imagines the difference between a person living in the year 1200 and himself, noting that in the present day we “mentally converse with […] people from far away, who’ve arrived in the mind, with various agendas, via high-tech sources” (2). Moreover, reading itself, Saunders notes, is one of those sources of voices arriving in the mind: “as you read this (sorry, sorry) I am become one of them” (2). Reading is therefore a strange and estranging activity in which voices arrive in the mind in completely unnatural ways. To achieve an end to their stories, the graveyard spirits must also bring Lincoln himself to some finally conclusive transformation, not only in being able to lay his son to rest but also about his understanding of the future strategy for the Civil War. In a denouement that involves a throng of ghosts passing into Lincoln’s body and communicating with him telepathically, the president makes the decision to fight the war with renewed vigor in the hope that other parents will not have to survive their sons. Crucially, the spirit of Thomas Havens – an African American man who spent his life in slavery and was thrown into a mass grave after his death – lingers with Lincoln even after the cemetery’s other inhabitants have passed on and through him. In this turn of the plot, the novel implies that it’s this graveyard moment 59

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that has awoken Lincoln’s conscience and understanding of the humanity of Black Americans. Narrated by Havens, the account of Lincoln’s response to ghostly possession is associated as decisively with reading as with mind-reading: He was an open book. An opening book. That had just been opened up somewhat wider. By sorrow. And – by us. By all of us, black and white, who had so recently mass inhabited him. He had not, it seemed, gone unaffected by that event. (312) This is a literary moment that makes use of the distinctive narrative techniques for mindreading. The revelation that Lincoln undergoes – an opening up of the self to other minds and other experiences – is therefore exactly the kind of empathetic opening-out to the other that literature is very fond of claiming for itself. The reader’s experience of the spirits’ voices as they pass through Lincoln is the equivalent of his experience, and reading makes readers “an open book” to other voices. One reason for the novel’s appeal in 2017, of course, was this representation of reading as a way of healing a divided American nation through an oversimplistic, if hopeful, ideal of humane communication. Nevertheless, it is clear that Saunders’s historical setting – in an afterlife that is rooted in a particular moment and which is understood to speak to the political moment of the present day – is one of its most innovative features when the novel is compared with other afterlives.

Genre as Afterlife Considered as a body of literature, modern afterlives demonstrate a set of common preoccupations and techniques, particularly in their treatment of time, space, and voice. Taken as individual examples, however, they reveal specific approaches and concerns that show the genre conventions of afterlives being used for distinct purposes. In Lincoln in the Bardo’s use of the trope of the dead narrator, it is possible to see a genre convention being turned and reshaped for a very particular political purpose. Recognition of this gesture relies on a knowledge of the genre’s conventions, and therefore serves as a good example in defense of reading the afterlife as a genre. This chapter’s catalogue of examples has been assembled in the service of the future scholarship which I hope will attend more to this ever-growing corpus of material. As this index of allusion and intertextuality has demonstrated, afterlives exist in the modern literary imagination with an awareness of their own status relative to literary afterlives of the past. It is therefore useful to understand the modern afterlife as part of a genre history that revels in its status as supplementary to an older and perhaps more dogmatic tradition of afterlife writing. We might therefore say that modern afterlives effectively occupy the position of their own posthumousness: alive to their own position “after” other afterlives, but also after – in search of and in response to – naturalistic traditions of mimetically writing life.

Notes 1 Some further examples of this diversity in literary form: story cycles by David Eagleman, Sum: Tales from the Afterlives (2009), and Antoine Volodine, Bardo Not Bardo (2004); and Tadeusz Kantor’s play Dead Class (1975). 2 This feature runs from the classical descent narrative through Dante and on to John Kendrick Bangs’s stories, as well as more recent examples such as Thomas M. Dischs’s The Businessman (1984) and the final story of Julian Barnes’s The History of the World in 10½ Chapters (1989), “The Dream.” 3 The hotel is a feature of the afterlives in The White Hotel, Lanark, and Ali Smith’s Hotel World (2001).

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Literature and the Afterlife 4 Some examples in which the bureaucratic afterlife appears to comic effect are C. S. Lewis’s Screwtape Letters (1942) and its sequels, and Self’s How the Dead Live (2000). 5 There are two strands to this grouping trope: the first starts with Huis Clos and the idea that hell is other people. Second is the idea of a group of people with a profound connection beyond life. In Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Years of Rice and Salt (2002), the “karmic jati” are a group reincarnated together across lifetimes, whereas in Laura Lindstedt’s Oneiron (2017) the seven characters are apparently part of a group with “a special fondness for something or a peculiar quality of life” in the Swedenborgian tradition (180).

Works Cited Almond, Philip C. Afterlife: A History of Life After Death. I. B. Tauris, 2016. Amis, Martin. Time’s Arrow: or The Nature of the Offence. Jonathan Cape, 1991. Bennett, Alice. Afterlife and Narrative in Contemporary Fiction. Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Brooks, Peter. Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative. Oxford UP, 1984. Del George, Dana. “Ghosts and Theme Parks: The Supernatural and the Artificial in George Saunders’s Short Stories.” George Saunders: Critical Essays, edited by Philip Coleman and Steve Gronert Ellerhoff. Palgrave Macmillan, 2017, pp. 121–136. Derrida, Jacques. The Ear of the Other: Otobiography, Transference, Translation. 1984, translated by Peggy Kamuf. U of Nebraska P, 1988. Falconer, Rachel. Hell in Contemporary Literature: Western Descent Narratives Since 1945. Edinburgh UP, 2005. Kunzru, Hari. “Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders review – extraordinary story of the afterlife.” The Guardian, 8 Mar. 2017. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/mar/08/lincoln-in-the-bardo-georgesaunders-review. Le Goff, Jacques. The Birth of Purgatory. U of Chicago P, 1981. Lindstedt, Laura. Oneiron. Oneworld Publications, 2017. McDannell, Colleen, and Bernhard Lang. Heaven: A History. 1988. Yale UP, 2001. Pogell, Sarah. “ ‘The Verisimilitude Inspector’: George Saunders as the New Baudrillard?” Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, vol. 52, no. 4, 2001, pp. 460–478. Royle, Nicholas. Telepathy and Literature: Essays on the Reading Mind. Blackwell, 1991. Saunders, George. “The Brain-Dead Megaphone.” The Brain-Dead Megaphone, Bloomsbury, 2008, pp. 1–20. Saunders, George. Lincoln in the Bardo. Bloomsbury, 2017. Saunders, George. “The New Mecca.” The Brain-Dead Megaphone, Bloomsbury, 2008, pp. 21–56. Saunders, George. “ ‘The Perfect Gerbil’: Reading Barthelme’s ‘The School.’” The Brain-Dead Megaphone, Bloomsbury, 2008, pp. 175–186. Tate, Andrew, and Arthur Bradley. The New Atheist Novel: Philosophy, Fiction and Polemic After 9/11. Bloomsbury, 2010. Thurston, Michael. The Underworld in Twentieth-Century Poetry: From Pound and Eliot to Heaney and Walcott. Palgrave Macmillan, 2009.

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6 THE NOVEL AS HEARTBEAT The Dead Narrator in Mike McCormack’s Solar Bones Neil Murphy

Mike McCormack has frequently articulated his sense of belonging to an Irish experimental tradition,1 specifically to both the twentieth-century innovators ( James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, and Flann O’Brien) and a younger group of writers – including June Caldwell, Oisín Fagan, Rob Doyle, Claire Louise Bennet, and Danny Denton – whose work McCormack identifies as having rejuvenated the experimental pulse in Irish fiction (Boland 49; De Loughry 114). McCormack argues that experimental writing has the effect of illuminating experience: “It casts the world in a different light, and at a different angle. I hope you walk away from the book and you experience a part of the world that you haven’t encountered before. I hope it illuminates something new about the world and, also, about what books are capable of ” (Boland 49). For McCormack, the experimental novel is not merely a purely technical or fragmented exercise that serves to antagonize readers; rather, the function of the experiment is to offer a way of seeing (De Loughry 113). In this essay, I first elucidate the tradition from which such experimental innovation emerges, before proceeding to argue that the technical experiment that is Solar Bones is fundamental to its character-narrator’s way of seeing and being in the world – or, more precisely, his way of no longer being in the world even as he posthumously bears witness to that world. McCormack’s assertion that “our great writers are exclusively our experimental writers” (De Loughry 113) is a position that several other critics and writers have previously argued.2 The centrality of innovation in the Irish novelistic tradition has long been observed: almost thirty years ago, Rüdiger Imhof noted the prevalence of technical innovation in Irish writing – post-O’Brien, Joyce, and Beckett – and specifically pointed to “the multi-faceted use of point-of-view […]; the spatialisation of narrative discourse; fragmented or split narrative; the disruption of chronology; fabulation and metafiction (including, possibly, historiographic meta fiction) […] a kind of narrative shown in the process of being created” (153). The novelist Aidan Higgins also wrote about what he saw as the experimental narrative tradition in Irish literature. Higgins shared Joyce’s and Beckett’s fascination with the ways that the world might be reconstituted in the forms of art and positioned them in the context of an European tradition of “free-fall and experiment” that extends back to Villon and Rabelais (21, 23). While many of these narrative experiments characterize modernist and postmodernist writing more generally, there is an extraordinarily high degree of concentration of such innovations in Irish writing.3 These experiments with non-conventional narrations include the widespread use of mentally ill narrators (e.g., Patrick McCabe’s The Butcher Boy and Dermot 62

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Healy’s Sudden Times) and deeply traumatized narrators (e.g., Anne Enright’s The Gathering, Eimear McBride’s A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing, Dorothy Nelson’s In Night’s City, and Emma Donoghue’s Room), whereas writers like Liam O’Flaherty use an animal’s point of view (e.g., “The Cow’s Death” and “The Black Rabbit”) to extend the range of human experience. Such experimental innovations work to expand literature’s possibilities; Beckett’s entire career can be seen as an attempt to escape from the limits of formal representation by continually acknowledging, and splintering, the nature of discourse itself.4 Flann O’Brien’s narrative voices similarly write-back against, and parody, mono-framed understandings of the real world of experience. Like McCormack’s narrator in Solar Bones, the unnamed narrator of The Third Policeman is dead – and unaware that he is so – and although the projected fictional world in each text is radically different, the overt gesture of trying to find an innovative narrative means to articulate the strangeness of their existences is common to both, as is the deep contrast between two states of existence, antemortem and posthumous. O’Brien, of course, frequently transgresses ontological levels and established narrative devices to facilitate such moves, as in his early story, “John Duffy’s Brother,” which also engages with the idea of symbolic death. In the short story, the character John Duffy’s brother abruptly becomes “possessed of the strange idea that he was a train … long, thunderous, and immense, with white steam escaping noisily from his feet and deep-throated bellows coming rhythmically from where his funnel was” (O’Brien 56). The moment effectively represents a momentous transfiguration of self that deploys the unexpected motif of a train. However, the use of the train is so peculiar that, like the use of a dead narrator, one is not really encouraged to actually believe it; rather, it serves as a narrative device to signal a transfiguration in perspective which, as is often the case with such narratives, is the locus of primary significance in the work of fiction. The use of unnatural narrators5 – dead people, trains, etc. – is commonplace in Irish writing. The trend stretches from Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, narrated by Lemuel Gulliver, to the dying and dead Malone in Beckett’s Malone Dies who, conscious perhaps of this very inheritance, intertextually resurrects Lemuel bearing a bloody axe at the end of Beckett’s novel, which is now narrated by the dead Malone: Lemuel is in charge, he raises his hatchet on which the blood will never dry, but not to hit anyone, he will not hit anyone, he will not hit anyone any more, he will not touch anyone any more, either with it or with it or with it or with or or with it or with his hammer or with his stick or with his fist or in thought in dream I mean never he will never or with his pencil or with his stick or or light light I mean never there he will never never anything there any more (Three Novels 280). From Beckett’s dead Malone to the posthumous, post-purgatorial narrator of the 1933 short story, “Echo’s Bones” (Beckett’s Belacqua Shuah is lifted from Dante’s Divina Commedia, but radically transformed), to Banville’s use of the trickster god, Hermes, as his narrator in The Infinities (2009), and Caitriona Lally’s narrator of Eggshells (2014), who believes that she’s a changeling, the recurring intention appears to be an attempt to speak of the unspeakable and the unknowable or to offer utterance to experiences that remain beyond the limits of 63

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representational realism – which is, of course, a thing fundamentally different from the “real” or the actual. The innovative narrative mode frequently seeks to extend beyond realist representations to more effectively convey the extraordinary nature of the experience being articulated. Extraordinary experience invites, even requires, innovation in narrative, and in Irish writing there is ample evidence of that being a compelling motivation. The connection of Mike McCormack’s Solar Bones to the innovative tradition in Irish writing is apparent in numerous ways. The posthumous narrator, Marcus Conway, is initially unaware of his ontological status but progressively grows aware of what has happened to him, until a final moment of revelation radically transforms his ontological awareness. The manner in which Marcus narrates his story – the story of his life, as it turns out – is crucial. Though not entirely devoid of punctuation (there are ample commas, line-breaks, paragraphs, etc.), the novel completely dispenses with full-stops and effectively appears to be one extended sentence. As McCormack clarifies, “as far as I understand it the book is an excerpt from a sentence that extends from before the beginning of the book, and after it has closed. It’s a few clauses from the middle of the sentence” (De Loughry 111–12). The use of the extended sentence is technically fundamental to Solar Bones’ posthumous form, but McCormack’s decision to use this form also has broader literary–genealogical significance. As other contributors to this Companion – in particular, Alice Bennett, Philippe Carrard, and Jan Alber – have noted, the prevalence of the figure of the dead narrator is a relatively common international fictional practice. For example, some classic posthumous novels include Henry Fielding’s A Journey from This World to the Next (1743), Machado de Assis’s The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas (1881) (also translated as Epitaph of a Small Winner), Vladimir Nabokov’s Transparent Things (1972), and Alasdair Gray’s Lanark (1981). More recent variations include Alice Sebold’s The Lovely Bones (2002) and Susanna Moore’s In the Cut (1995), and the first section of Ali Smith’s Hotel World (2001) also belongs in the same category. Many Irish works of fiction and drama also include dead narrators and characters: in addition to Beckett’s “Echo’s Bones” and Malone Dies, Beckett’s Play (1963) features dead characters (M, W1, and W2). O’Brien’s The Third Policeman (completed 1940; published posthumously in 1967) also had a precursor short story, “Scenes in a Novel” (1934), that features a posthumous narrator. A more recent example is Neil Jordan’s chilling Shade (2004), whose protagonist Nina Hardy informs us from the outset of the date and time of her murder and about how her body is never found; she remains forever a silent shade. In Gaelic, Máirtín Ó Cadhain’s Cré na Cille is the most celebrated example of the form; first published in Gaelic in 1949, two English translations were published in 2016 – as The Dirty Dust by Alan Titley, and as Graveyard Clay by Liam Mac Con Iomaire and Tim Robinson. McCormack’s work has always been technically adventurous, from the early metafictional stories in Getting It in the Head (1996)6 to Forensic Songs (2012). As earlier indicated, McCormack has always seen himself as part of an experimental Irish tradition but, as with all such writing, the genealogical narrative influences are inevitably wider than a national tradition. For example, McCormack’s occasional referencing of Thomas Pynchon is revealing both in terms of his association with American postmodern fiction but also, crucially, because of his suggestion that a novel so frequently associated with technical experiment can also be an emotionally moving experience: “I think for all its manic loony tunes, Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 is heartbreaking. I find the predicament of Oedipa Maas at the end of that book really, really moving” (McCormack, qtd. in Nolan 9). McCormack has frequently bristled at the suggestion that experimental novels are simply difficult, self-indulgent, antiformal constructions and clearly views the kinds of experiment that interest him as being essentially life-affirming: “They seem to be saying experimental novels are always fragmented, 64

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and antagonistic to the reader, you always have to roll up your sleeves and work hard. In many ways I always thought that that book was quite conservative in its assessment, Solar Bones seems to say being human is about being harmonic, and unified” (McCormack, qtd. in De Loughry 113). Several critics have, in fact, observed a connection between the technical experiment and the essentially human concerns in the novel. For example, Sharae Deckard claims that “Solar Bones is that extraordinary thing, an accessible experiment, virtuosic yet humane,” though Deckard herself tends to focus more on the social implications than on the experiment (Deckard). Derek Attridge raises a similar point in the context of his reading of contemporary Irish fiction and affect theory, but he does so while demonstrating the impact of the formal experiment on the affective response. Attridge’s larger question is whether it is possible to “use innovative formal devices inherited from modernist writing in the service of, rather than as a distraction from, literary works’ emotional power?” (250). Writing specifically of Solar Bones, Attridge argues that it is precisely through the deployment of McCormack’s innovative use of language that emotional engagement is achieved rather than obscured: McCormack could have written this […] book, in conventional sentences, and the result would certainly have communicated complex emotions to the reader to some degree. But it is McCormack’s handling of English syntax that imparts a unique affective quality to the writing: he takes advantage of the many ways in which an utterance can be prolonged, sometimes bending the rules though seldom leaving the reader uncertain as to meaning, in order to capture the incessant onrush of thought and emotion peculiar to the situation in which Marcus finds himself (an unusual situation revealed at the end of the novel). (259) McCormack’s use of language and assimilation of the poetic devices of rhythm, meter, and repetition, clearly affect the manner in which Marcus’s perspectives are framed in the novel, as we shall see hereafter. Attridge’s observations chime with McCormack’s unhappiness at a simplistic demarcation between social and innovative novels, which McCormack argues is a false distinction, citing Ulysses as a primary example of an experimental novel that is simultaneously a social novel (Nolan 97). McCormack refutes the clichéd argument that experimentation is somehow an unnatural form and argues instead that [w]hen we reclaim our experimental instincts then a work of social overview will be the manifestation of that. People are putting the cart before the horse, people, like Damian Kiberd continually asking, where is the novel of social overview? Where is the socially engaged novel? They’re just asking for George Eliot or something like that. Not that it can’t be done. It’s just that it can’t be done any way new. Joyce, Flann, and those lads have shown us the lead. Experiment is the way to go. Until we reclaim those instincts we won’t find a novel of social overview. (qtd. in Nolan 97) McCormack further argues that the kind of simplistic realistic representations that a certain audience wishes for – in the form of the “great novel of social overview” – is “anti-intellectual” (Nolan 97), assuming, as it does, that our human experimental instincts are somehow a denial of the natural rather than an affirmation of it. 65

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It is in this context that the aspirations of Solar Bones may be viewed: as a novel whose innovative combination of the form of the posthumous narrative with the technical innovation of the long run-on sentence actually “illuminates something new about the world” rather than disguising it (Boland 49). In fact, it is the manner in which the formal innovations give voice to a unique human perspective that renders the novel such a powerful, and human, reading experience. Though many reviewers allude to its innovative technical attributes, few critics have actually interrogated the narrative function of such devices in McCormack’s novel, particularly in terms of its relationship with the deathly afterglow that shapes all of Marcus’s experiences. The deployment of the dead narrator is directly connected to the technical innovation of the run-on sentence. In fact, it is precisely because Marcus is dead that his account can take the form of fluid, throbbing, reflective engagement with the primary pulses that governed his life – love, family, the shaping work of the engineer, the frustrations with local power and social failures – but (importantly) from a perspective now fundamentally adjusted from his lived entanglements with those earthly experiences. The relentless deluge of memories, observations, and intricate assemblings that characterize his posthumous imaginative travels is all the more profoundly mesmerizing because the temporal duration of the novel is a mere one hour;7 we experience the narrated flow of information as a headlong rush through time. The effect is dizzying. The temporal compression combined with the illusion of free-ranging movement ensures that the novel’s narrative energy is sustained throughout. The tightly-wrought formal structure8 – derived from persistent rhythmic beats of various kinds – further confirms the potent fusion of free-flow narration and tight structural pattern. For example, from Solar Bones’ opening lines, the Angelus bell registers a pulse (“the bell as/ hearing the bell as/hearing the bell as standing here” [7]) that lingers throughout the novel, the bell “which still reverbs in my head now, a single note ringing on in/the brightness of the day as if the whole world were suspended from it/mountains, rivers and lakes/past present and future” (53). Its echoing ring resonates even as the rhythmic pulse of the prose at times blends into different formal presences; frequently, it registers its presence as an incessant triadic staccato (“harrows, ploughs and scufflers,” “the maiden, the rack and the wheel,” “clamps and blades and spikes,” “pounds, shillings and pence,” etc. [21–23]), or, as Jeanne-Marie Jackson puts it, the “recurrent series of three also echo the Angelus bell that rings out to set the book going, a symbolic holism achieved by the measured release of tones and parts” ( Jackson). The triadic tempo is also aesthetically harmonized with the presence of various other rhythms and tempos in Marcus’s daily life: the “habits and rituals” that “made up” his “marriage and family life” through the years (McCormack 134). Marcus’s overt consciousness of his physical heartbeat accelerates as the novel proceeds, until its final cataclysmic conclusion, when the “vast harmonic of my whole being was undone and I came apart in sheets and waves, torrential and ever falling” (220). Even in death, however, the harmonizing pulse of his now-stopped heart refuses to be still: My body had already picked up the rhythms of decay which had begun to work immediately in my soft flesh, that momentary heat spike which gave way to the falling temperature of rot with my blood passing from oxygenated red to black as the universal cellular explosions which bring on that spillage of filth within my organs which will eventually purge from every orifice of my body even as I Found my way home Home again To sit at this table And drift through these rooms (222). 66

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Even in death, the ritualistic pulse that governed his living still holds sway; Marcus is immediately “cast out beyond darkness into that vast unbroken commonage of space and time, into that vast oblivion in which there are no markings or contours to steer by nor any songs to sing me home and where there is nothing else for it to keep going, one foot in front of the other …” (223). The foot-beats, tellingly, continue despite the very texture of his being having dissolved. The persistence of the pulsating heartbeat in the prose – even as Marcus’s heart no longer beats – is perhaps even more profoundly innovative than the deployment of the run-on sentence in Solar Bones. It provides shape to the shapeless; it offers harmony, tempo, rhythm, incessant beat. The distinction between form and content diminishes, and the pulse of Marcus Conway’s life and death is at one with the pulse of the novel itself. McCormack is very forthright about the centrality of rhythm in his work, pointing, for example, to the powerful resonant presence of rhythm in the lives of farmers: “yearly rhythm, the seasonal cycles,” “diurnal rhythm and the rhythm of daily tasks, then there’s a smaller rhythm within that, and then there’s even smaller rhythms within that again” (qtd. in De Loughry 111). Similarly, he points to the “ecclesiastical rhythm of the church rhythm,” and reminds one that “the nearest timekeeper is in your heart it’s in your chest, it’s right there, we are timekeeping beings, we have a systolic rhythm, an aortal rhythm. All these things were constant preoccupations. In Solar Bones there’s an attempt to pick up a systolic rhythm that pulls you along” (111). The perpetual life-driving rhythms that are given expression everywhere in the novel have a number of potent affects. First, the novel becomes structurally and sensually consistent with life itself. Rather than simply seeking to offer a representation of life, it is itself the stuff of life, rather than being about that life. Second, that a novel narrated by a dead character can be so full of the incessant driving forces of a life is an extraordinary achievement in itself. While there are ample signs of him having died throughout the novel, via the momentary lapses and instances of confusion that Marcus experiences, the novel is nonetheless throbbing with life. None of the strange ghostly, dislocated phantasms here that one encounters in Beckett’s “Echo’s Bones” or O’Brien’s The Third Policeman, and yet the novel is very much a novel about death and dying. We sense the shifts in Marcus’s heartbeats when he does, we anticipate the fluctuations in his own internal rhythms, and the gradual emergence of the fire in his chest that will kill him. In a one-hour span he compulsively, yet unknowingly, revisits specific moments of his life, including regrets and frustrations – all of which knit the pattern of his experiences together in a strange pulsing temporal frame. The driving force behind much of Marcus’s life is to order, to repair, to arrange and rearrange. He is an engineer, after all, one “whose life and works/concerned itself with scale and accuracy, mapping and surveying so that the grid of reason and progress could be laid across the earth, gathering its wildness into towns and villages by way of bridges and roads and water schemes and power lines – all the horizontal utilities that drew the world into settlements and community” (McCormack 92). This partly accounts for Marcus’s extreme physical reaction to his daughter’s painting with her own blood, to his horror at the essential social failure (in the form of polluted drinking water) that allows his wife’s illness to take hold, and to his general disdain of the Celtic Tiger collapse and the corrupt local politics that continued to fester even after its demise. Marcus’s evident discomfort at these essentially social events are governed by his default desire to order, fix, and harmonize – but the world, it appears, cannot meet the elegance of this desire and this is the source of much of the anxiety embedded in his recollections. However, as Deirdre Flynn observes, “Everything he had trusted and understood is no longer in its ‘proper place’ and now that he is in some ‘higher realm’, he can try and place some structure on this chaos from beyond the grave. It is only in death that he can see the chaos clearly” (45). This is one of the concrete functions of the posthumous mode. Typically, in posthumous novels, 67

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the event of death, or awareness of that death, is accompanied by a radical shift in perspective. Such a shift is also apparent in Solar Bones, particularly in the general progressive shift away from a fascination with – and agitation at – the disordered social world. For example, in the early stages of the novel (effectively the early stages of Marcus’s posthumous existence), there are many passages that directly outline the Irish financial crash in detail, which initially creates the impression that this is the primary focus of the novel. However, as Jackson suggests, “many of the headiest and most topical passages … struggle to do more than state the fact of an interlinked world,” and “are also the least gratifying in their relation to the narrator’s life. The point, as I came around to seeing it, is that such ‘global ideas’ passages are smart but purposefully vague” ( Jackson). Attridge too observes that “although some of the book articulates strong condemnation of the corrupt political practices and shoddy engineering that for Marcus have darkened the world in which he has lived, the anger is mediated by the distance implied in this retrospective gaze” (257). As the novel proceeds, this kind of material gradually diminishes in importance. As Marcus moves deeper into his transfigured focus, the close intimacy of his family relationships, and the deep rhythmic belonging to the local, living, world, progressively become his primary subjects, rather than the social critique that initially featured so heavily in his recently bereaved consciousness. By the closing stages of the novel, a lightness of vision – and more aesthetically compelling – way of seeing eventually emerges. As with many narrators of posthumous texts, Marcus Conway isn’t immediately aware that he has died; only much later in his narrative does he understand what has happened. Unlike many such texts, however, he gets to fully (re)experience his death and the account of his passing is an extraordinary piece of rhythmic, harrowing, writing. One of the primary functions of the posthumous mode is to offer a transfigured perspective or a contrast between life and the thereafter and, in some senses, McCormack’s novel aligns with this model. We witness, with Marcus, a fundamental shift from the concrete materiality of his life to an ultimately more metaphysical sense of the world, although the starkness of the distinction is somewhat moderated by the gradually emerging comprehension of his deathly status. Without realizing it for much of the novel, he gazes from beyond life, at life. This pattern, as Herbert Klein suggests, is commonplace in more secular forms of twentieth-century fiction in which “the borderline between life and death has been so much blurred,” with the effect that the primary focus is no longer to offer fictional insights into an afterlife, heaven, or hell, but to act as a means of effecting a contrast between the living and the dead, as well as offering a post-human perspective on life itself: “Fictional representations of the afterlife therefore do not only ask the question ‘What is death?’, but also ‘What is life?’” (Klein). Life, after all, becomes the true subject of the dead narrator, but it is life stripped of the confused entanglements of the living. Marcus dies and returns on All Souls’ Day in 2008, a day that Marie Mianowski reminds us is a day on which “both Christian and Celtic traditions share the belief that the boundaries between the mortal and unearthly realms break down” (3). In the strange transitional space between these alternate states, Marcus Conway lingers for a while and is allowed to gaze one last time at the living with the illuminated eyes of the dead; for a brief interlude, he is pre-death and post-human consciousness. He transcends time and space while yet bearing the fading imprint of a lifelong desire for harmony that had governed his life above all else: my body drawing its soul in its wake or vice versa until that total withdrawal into the vast whiteness is visible only as a brimming absence so that finally there is nothing left, body and soul all gone, and these residual pulses and rhythms which for these waning moments, abide in their own recurrent measure, nothing more than a vague 68

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strobing of the air before they too are obliterated in that self-engulfing light which closes over everything to be (McCormack 223).

Notes 1 McCormack repeatedly makes this assertion in his interviews with Stephanie Boland, Treasa De Loughry, and Val Nolan. He clearly sees this as a deeply ingrained tradition in Irish writing: “I see myself as part of the speculative and conjectural tradition that informs Irish writing. You see it in the mystical poetry of Yeats, you see it in Berkeley’s idealism, you see it in Flann O’Brien …” (qtd. in Nolan 96). 2 For instance, Richard Kearney proposes a “counter-realist” tradition in Irish writing, pointing to how the work of writers like John Banville and Aidan Higgins “becomes self-reflexive as it explores fundamental tensions between imagination and memory, narration and history, self and language” – in order to demonstrate “how these authors share, with Joyce and Beckett, the basic modernist project of transforming the traditional narrative of quest into a critical narrative of self-questioning” (83). Derek Attridge in turn situates his affect-focused analysis of contemporary Irish experimental writers (McCormack, Kevin Barry, and Eimear McBride) against a tradition of innovative Irish modernist writers ( Joyce, Beckett, and O’Brien). In his anthology The Other Irish Tradition (2018), Rob Doyle extends this range of influences to include precursors such as Jonathan Swift and Laurence Sterne, and defines this strand of Irish writing as containing “startling talents, oddities, subversives, and transgressors” (11). 3 The success rate of Irish writers as winners of the Goldsmiths Prize is a telling example. According to its website, “Launched in the tercentenary year of the births of Laurence Sterne and Denis Diderot, the Goldsmiths Prize champions fiction that shares something of the exuberant inventiveness and restlessness with conventions manifest in Tristram Shandy and Jacques the Fatalist. The modern equivalents of Sterne and Diderot are often labelled ‘experimental,’ with the implication that their fiction is an eccentric deviation from the novel’s natural concerns, structures and idioms. A long view of the novel’s history, however, suggests that it is the most flexible and varied of genres, and the Goldsmiths Prize seeks to encourage and reward writers who make best use of its many resources and possibilities” (Goldsmiths Prize). Three of the first four winners were Irish writers: Eimear McBride (2013), Kevin Barry (2015), and Mike McCormack (2016). 4 As early as 1931, Beckett claims, “There is no communication because there are no vehicles of communication” (Proust 47); already language, as a mode of valid discourse, is invalidated. By the time he had written Molloy, Beckett had already turned the traditional quest motif of the realist novel on its head and the characters’ “quests” simply act as sterile, peripheral plotted aspects to the obsessive selfreflexive questioning that is the novel’s raison d’être. For example, when Molloy informs us of the condition of his story, narrative credibility is immediately threatened: All I know is what the words know, and the dead things, and that makes a handsome little sum, with a beginning, a middle and an end as is the well built phrase and the long sonata of the dead […] Saying is inventing. Wrong, very rightly wrong. You invent nothing, you think you are inventing, you think you are escaping, and all you do is stammer out your lesson… (Three Novels 27). 5 For all it sounds like a kind of narrative transgression, the use of unnatural narrators has been quite commonplace in literary fiction for at least two hundred years or longer. Brian Richardson, for example, sees the evolution of unnatural narrators as an inevitability given two distinct strains of development in literary fiction since the eighteenth century. Richardson observes, Two main features stand out in the development of fictional technique since Defoe: the exploration of subjectivity (beginning with Sterne’s play with unexpected associations of ideas and continuing with Jane Austen’s development of free indirect discourse); the other is the rise of the unreliable narrator, which had been present in epistolary fiction and gained new prominence by the time Dostoevsky’s “Notes from the Underground” (1864) appeared. (1)

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Neil Murphy 6 Attridge acknowledges McCormack’s early innovations: “Getting It in the Head (1996) contains some early examples of his stylistic inventiveness and liking for bizarre narratives” (256). 7 McCormack explains these temporal perimeters in his interview with Treasa De Loughry (112). 8 McCormack has often acknowledged his “preoccupation with form,” but his specific understanding of what form means is also significant for the current discussion: “My notion of form I learned as a philosopher, and I came away from philosophy with a sense of structure, rigour, intellectual progress. I began to see that form and structure was not corseting, but a scaffolding, as it allowed you to climb higher, see further, look down, see deeper” (qtd. in De Loughry 113–14).

Works Cited Attridge, Derek. “Modernism, Formal Innovation, and Affect in Some Contemporary Irish Novels.” Affect and Literature, edited by Alex Houen. Cambridge UP, 2019, pp. 249–266. Beckett, Samuel. “Echo’s Bones,” edited by Mark Nixon. Faber and Faber, 2014. Beckett, Samuel. Proust. Grove Press, 1931. Beckett, Samuel. Three Novels: Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable. Grove Press, 2009. Boland, Stephanie. “ ‘We’re living in a time of cultural conservatism’: Mike McCormack talks to Stephanie Boland.” New Statesman, 11–17 Nov. 2016, pp. 49. De Loughry, Treasa, and Mike McCormack. “ ‘… a tiny part of that greater circum-terrestrial grid’: A conversation with Mike McCormack.” Irish University Review, vol. 49, no. 1, 2019, pp. 105–116. Deckard, Sharae. “Solar Bones is that extraordinary thing, an accessible experiment, virtuosic yet humane.” The Irish Times, 21 Oct. 2016. www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/solar-bones-is-that-extraordinarything-an-accessible-experiment-virtuosic-yet-humane-1.2838095. Doyle, Rob. The Other Irish Tradition: An Anthology. Dalkey Archive Press, 2018. Flynn, Deirdre. “Holding on to ‘Rites, Rhythms and Rituals’: Mike McCormack’s Homage to Small Town Irish Life and Death.” Representations of Loss in Irish Literature, edited by Eugene O’Brien and Deirdre Flynn. Palgrave, 2018, pp. 37–52. Goldsmiths Prize. “About the prize.” Goldsmiths, 23 Apr. 2020. www.gold.ac.uk/goldsmiths-prize/about/. Higgins, Aidan. “The Hollow and the Bitter and the Mirthless in Irish Writing.” Force 10, vol. 13, 2008, pp. 21–27. Imhof, Rüdiger. “How It Is on the Fringes of Irish Fiction.” Irish University Review, vol. 22, no. 1, SpringSummer 1992, p. 153. Jackson, Jeanne-Marie. “The art of intellectual curation: mike mccormack’s solar bones,” 3:AM Magazine, 17 Jan. 2017. www.3ammagazine.com/3am/art-intellectual-curation-mike-mccormacks-solar-bones/. Kearney, Richard. Transitions: Narratives in Irish Culture. Wolfhound Press, 1988. Klein, Herbert. “The Wonderful World of the Dead: A Typology of the Posthumous Narrative.” Eese, Mar. 2002. http://webdoc.sub.gwdg.de/edoc/ia/eese/artic22/kleinh/3_2002.html. McCormack, Mike. Solar Bones. Tramp Press, 2016. Mianowski, Marie. “Immaterial matters in Solar Bones by Mike McCormack.” Études de Stylistique Anglaise, vol. 14, 2019, pp. 1–12. Nolan, Val. “Experiment or Die: A Conversation with Mike McCormack.” Ariel: A Review of International English Literature, vol. 43, no. 2, 2012, pp. 87–99. O’Brien, Flann. The Short Fiction of Flann O’Brien, edited by Neil Murphy and Keith Hopper. Dalkey Archive Press, 2013. Richardson, Brian. Unnatural Voices: Extreme Narration in Modern and Contemporary Fiction. Ohio State UP, 2006.

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7 DEAD MAN/AND WOMAN TALKING Narratives from Beyond the Grave Philippe Carrard

Posthumous narrative, – that is, a narrative performed “from beyond the grave” by one or several dead characters – has become an established subgenre of the current literary scene, whether in high or low culture. Several scholarly studies (e.g., Bennett; Friedman; Holland; Norman; Raymond) have been devoted to it, and its popularity is illustrated by the 67-page entry for “Fiction by a dead person” in Wikipedia, as well as by the presence of such categories as “Dead Narrators” and “Narrated by the Dead” on the “Goodreads” and “Crime Fiction Lover” Internet sites. As used by François-René de Chateaubriand in the title of his celebrated Mémoires d’outre-tombe, the phrase “from beyond the grave” was of course a metonymy. Chateaubriand wrote his autobiography over four decades “as if” he had reached the next stage in his journey, the trope pointing both to the author’s highly retrospective stance and to the fact that the memoirs were to be published posthumously. In the texts I am about to analyze, however, “from beyond the grave” must be taken, if not literally, at least as referring to an actual death. Whether they were buried or not, the narrators of the stories in my corpus are no longer among the living. Because this Companion is about death and literature, I won’t consider the use of the dead narrator in other media, such as the reliance on a dead character to provide a voice-over commentary in films (Sunset Boulevard) and television series (Desperate Housewives). To further limit my inquiry, I won’t take up issues related to the presence of the dead in plays (Tony Kushner’s Angels in America) or in poems whose authors (Dickinson, Plath) at times pretend they are writing posthumously. I also won’t consider, at the risk of leaving out major achievements such as Toni Morrison’s Beloved, D. M. Thomas’s The White Hotel, and Ana Castillo’s So Far from God, texts in which the dead may be present, but are not in charge of telling the story. I will focus on works in which the deceased perform as narrators, whether throughout the text or in some specific sections of it. Because the critics I mentioned earlier have dealt comprehensively with the social, political, and psychological aspects of posthumous narrative, I will only look in conclusion at the function that the subgenre may have in contemporary society. Most of my analyses will be devoted to elaborating an elementary poetics of narrative “from beyond the grave”: that is, to studying the codes, rules, and conventions that shape this type of story. My perspective will be synchronic. I won’t trace the evolution of the subgenre, but will describe some of its features in twentieth- and twenty-first-century literature. 71

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Unlike those of critics such as Bennett and Norman, moreover, my corpus won’t be limited to texts written by British and American authors. It will also include works that originate in other traditions, in this instance, French, German, and Latin American. As a subgenre, posthumous narrative falls under the category that several contemporary theorists call the “unnatural.” For Jan Alber, unnatural narratives are defined, at the cognitive level, as those that foil “the real-world cognitive parameters that derive from our bodily existence in the world” (Unnatural Narrative 26); for Brian Richardson, at the literary level, as those that contain “significant antimimetic events, characters, settings, and frames,” thus violating “mimetic expectations and practices of realism,” and defying “the conventions of existing, established genres” (3). Whether we use Alber’s or Richardson’s definition, posthumous narrative undoubtedly qualifies as “unnatural.” On the one hand, it does not agree with our knowledge of the world in general, of the human body in particular. If we set aside matters of belief (to which I will return later), deceased human beings can no longer speak or write. Posthumous narrative, moreover, disrupts the canons of verisimilitude in “natural” storytelling; in texts that claim to be realistic, the dead neither speak, nor are staged as characters. I will look at the “unnatural” aspects of posthumous narrative, though with a caveat. As Richardson has noted, the subgenre has become so common that for some readers at least it has “ceased to be unnatural” (18). Readers familiar with its conventions will thus have specific expectations. For instance, they will no longer be surprised if the narrator should turn out to be dead, their only questions bearing then on the circumstances of his/her demise. Taking this production and reception framework into account, I will seek to describe the games that authors of posthumous narratives play not just with the rules of natural, realistic stories, but also with those of the subgenre they have elected to practice.

Dispositions Bennett, in the chapter of her study devoted to “Plotting Murder,” distinguishes structurally between two types of posthumous narrative: the “murder mystery” and the “ghost story” (98). The device of the murder victim as narrator, according to her, is just “the next step for a genre which has already fitted together all the other possible permutations of its protagonists” (104): the narrator as sidekick (Watson in the Sherlock Holmes novels), as detective (Sam Spade, Philip Marlowe), or even as murderer (in Agatha Christie’s The Murder of Roger Ackroyd). Bennett’s models of this “next step” are Alice Sebold’s oft-analyzed The Lovely Bones and Susanna Moore’s In the Cut, two novels that in fact are plotted very differently. In The Lovely Bones, the protagonist reveals immediately that she was murdered and by whom, thus raising two questions: What will her afterlife be like, and will her murderer be punished?1 In In the Cut, conversely, the narrator does not divulge before the end of the novel that she is dead, the last pages describing how she was killed, and by whom. This late disclosure of course raises the issue of the type of narrativity at work in Moore’s novel. In terms of Meir Sternberg’s (1978) wellknown categories, does In the Cut posit relatively uninformed readers, who will experience “surprise” when they discover that the narrator tells her story after her murder? Or does it rather posit readers who know that they are dealing with a posthumous narrative; that is, readers who throughout the text will be “curious” about when, where, and how the narrator will die? The same problem occurs in the many narratives that do not turn out to be posthumous before the very end. For instance, Gilbert Adair’s The Death of the Author stages a DeMan-like literary critic who, after contributing to collaborationist magazines during World War II, comes from France to the United States, where he establishes himself as the founder of a theory that looks suspiciously like deconstruction. Killed by the partner of one of his students, he concludes his 72

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report by observing with “disappointment” that “death is merely the displaced name for a linguistic predication” (Adair 135), a quotation from DeMan’s essay “Autobiography as DeFacement” (DeMan 81). Curiosity and surprise obviously are not exclusive, as readers who are aware of the posthumous nature of the texts they are perusing may not just be curious about the way the narrator dies, but also surprised by it. Although the protagonists of In the Cut and The Death of the Author tell their stories without making any reference to their coming death (a significant omission, as they are using the past tense), other narratives include prolepses that announce that death most explicitly. David Foster Wallace’s novella “Good Old Neon,” for instance, a text that falls under a category that Bennett does not consider – it could be called the “suicide plot” – contains several references to the narrator’s decision to end his life. The first such mention occurs as early as in the second paragraph of the novella, when the protagonist assures that his “boring” story will become more interesting “when I get to the part where I kill myself ” (Wallace 143). Readers of “Good Old Neon,” unlike those of In the Cut and The Death of the Author, thus know immediately that the narrator is dead, the only question being: if he committed suicide, how, exactly, did he do it? This question is answered close to the end of the story, in a passage where the protagonist describes the “bridge abutment” into which he plans to drive his car, “at speeds sufficient to displace the front end and impale me on the steering wheel and instantly kill me” (176). As for the suicide itself, it is described in two takes: first in a footnote in which the narrator tells about the problem of representing the “first, infinitely split-second” of a crash (179), and then, in the text itself, with the observation that “dying isn’t bad, but it takes forever” (180). Whereas murder mysteries and suicide narratives such as Wallace’s “Good Old Neon” recount mostly what happened before the protagonist’s death, ghost stories deal in general with what follows it. This focus may be exclusive or include analepses. In Joseph Skibell’s A Blessing on the Moon, for instance, the narrator describes briefly how he was murdered with other Jews during the Holocaust in Poland, then accounts at length for his journey as ghost. Conversely, the thirteen-year-old girl who in Damned depicts her life in Hell frequently interrupts her narrative to evoke her past on Earth, notably her stay in a Swiss boarding school (chapter IX) and her relationship to her jet-setting parents (chapters XII–XIV). As far as plot is concerned, one of the major problems in ghost stories is obviously the end: will the ghost at some point go through a second, definitive death, or is his/her condition an eternal one? The narrator of American Desert, killed when his car was hit by a UPS truck, decides after some time on the road that he has had enough and decides to die “for good.” Amy in Damned, on the other hand, accepts the fact that she will never age and will be in Hell forever; tellingly, the novel’s last line reads: “to be continued …” (Palahniuk 247). As for the narrator of A Blessing on the Moon, he is laid to rest after the moon, which had disappeared as if to hide from the horrors of World War II, finally returns to the sky.2 Whether they take the form of the murder or the ghost story, the plots adopted in posthumous narrative must be distinguished from those analyzed by Rachel Falconer in her study of the representations of Hell in contemporary literature. For Falconer, twentieth-century journeys to the beyond are still structured like what the Greeks called a “katabasis”: unfolding in three steps, they include “a descent, an inversion or turning upside down at zero point and a return to the surface of some kind” (45). This model, according to Falconer, agrees with a worldview that still often conceives of selfhood as “the narrative construct of an infernal journey and return” (1). Commenting on this plot pattern, Bennett has shown that it is not applicable to posthumous narrative. Indeed, Falconer analyzes texts in which the characters, whether they abuse drugs or are sent to Vietnam, live “in and through hell” (Bennett 150). After living a death-like life, they in the best cases return from the underworld to a “complete and 73

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functional way of living” (151). In posthumous narratives, however, the protagonists do not return to the world. They remain in the beyond, a situation to which they adjust with varying ease.

Enunciations Ruediger Heinze, in his analysis of the violations of mimetic epistemology in first-person narrative fiction, distinguishes between “global” and “local” paralepses: that is, between the violations that occur at the level of the whole storyworld and those that affect only part of that world (286). Heinze’s distinction is certainly relevant to posthumous narrative. The texts I have considered so far all fall under the “global paralepsis” type, as dead, “unnatural” narrators are in charge of the whole story in novels such as Damned, In the Cut, and The Death of the Author. Other texts, however, present “local paralepses,” as they stage several narrators, of whom only one is no longer alive. The archetype for this distribution of the voices is of course Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, a novel that clearly functions as the hypotext for Suzan-Lori Parks’s Getting Mother’s Body. Whereas Addie, the dead mother, is granted just one chapter in Faulkner’s narrative, Willa Mae Beede, who plays a similar role in Parks’s, is given 12 (albeit short) chapters; she uses them to provide a direct, “from below” take on what is happening “above,” or to perform blues-like songs that constitute a more oblique commentary on her and the other characters’ past and present activities. A similar structure is found in Jesmyn Ward’s Sing, Unburied, Sing. Of the 15 chapters, three are given to the voice of a dead character: Richie, a boy who, about to be caught by guardians as he was trying to escape from the penitentiary where he was kept, was “mercy killed” by an adult prisoner, who did not want him to be caught and then abused by his captors.3 A classic of postmodern literature, Ali Smith’s Hotel World belongs in that same category, as only the first of the five chapters, “Past,” is told by a dead character: Sara, an hotel chambermaid who fell into a dumbwaiter. The next four chapters stage narrators who, like Sara, work for or have some connection to the hotel, but are still alive. Relying on a dead narrator also seems to incite novelists to play at times with the standards of literary enunciation. His head severed, Ted, the narrator of American Desert, thus tells his story in the third person: a decision he justifies by arguing that the device, while “unusual (politicians and athletes aside),” is nevertheless “acceptable,” given that “in a most profound way, he stood – or stands even – outside himself, not so much on the parapet of consciousness but of life itself ” (Everett 1). Taking another stance, Carter, the narrator in Keith Kachtick’s Hungry Ghost, recounts his life in the second person, a decision that he rationalizes, as Ted does, by way of a metacommentary. “In recent weeks,” he explains, “you’ve wondered if it isn’t better for people to always think of themselves in the second person, to dissociate their awareness from the obstructing, lower-self ‘I’ that thinks in terms of ‘me’ and ‘mine’” (14). This clarification notwithstanding, Hungry Ghost remains ambiguous from the standpoint of enunciation. On the one hand, Carter could certainly, as he claims, be talking to himself. But a heterogeneous narrator could also be talking to him, a situation that critics (e.g., Kacandes 158–60) have long described in novels such as Michel Butor’s La Modification [A Change of Heart]. Another type of “you” is at work in David Eagleman’s Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlife. Whereas “you” in The Hungry Ghost refers to a single individual, this pronoun in Sum is of the collective, generic type: “In the afterlife you relive all your experiences …” (Eagleman 3); “In the afterlife you find yourself in a beautiful land of milk and honey …” (50); “In this reverse life you are born on the ground …” (109) – to quote the beginning of the first, 19th, and last of Eagleman’s “tales.” “You,” in these opening lines, may include the homodiegetic “I” of a deceased person who is familiar with death. But it could also be the heterodiegetic “I” of someone who knows, or 74

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claims to know, what things are like in the afterlife. Similarly, the pronouns of the first person plural that frequently occur in Sum in opening sentences – such as “Just as there is no afterlife for a computer chip, there is none for us …” (79), or “Because the afterlife is a form of justice, we may think that it cannot include animals …” (95) – may comprise the “I” of someone who is already “there.” But they could also involve the “I” of an outsider who merely “pretends to know,” in these instances, that there is no afterlife, or that the afterlife actually admits animals. Though authors such as Everett, Kachtick, and Eagleman play with the conventions of literary enunciation, their games remain easily decipherable. Readers know from page one that the narrator of American Desert speaks of himself in the third person, and that the “you” in Hungry Ghost, as well as the “you” and the “we” in Sum, merely generates ambiguities. To put it otherwise, the way pronouns are used in these texts do not fundamentally problematize the situation of enunciation. Here we are far from a novel such as Butor’s Degrés [Degrees], in which the last sentence, “Who is speaking?,” explicitly formulates a question that readers must have asked throughout the text, and that only an attentive second reading (or clarifications provided in the epitext) can fully answer. In other words, the audience that such novels as American Desert and Hungry Ghost posit should be able to sanction the double “unnaturalness” of a dead narrator who speaks in the third or second person. That same audience, however, is not supposed to be disconcerted for too long, and the identity of protagonists known as “he” and “you” should not become the object of a guessing game throughout the text.

Perspectives I introduced issues of temporal perspective when I examined the different plot structures used in posthumous narrative, noting that the narrator in this subgenre always reports from a retrospective, “after death” standpoint, but that his/her story may then go in two directions: murder mysteries (e.g., In the Cut) mostly focus on what happened before the protagonist’s passing, whereas ghost stories (e.g., A Blessing on the Moon), focus on what happened after. A few texts in my corpus also fall under the “simultaneous narrative” type, in which the main character recounts his/her afterlife in the present tense as he/she discovers its different aspects. Palahniuk’s Damned follows this model, with Madison, its narrator, observing on page 1 “If you can go to Hell for having low self-esteem, that’s why I’m here,” and even resorting to the present tense in the analeptic passages in which she recalls episodes of her family life. As for Windows on the World, Frédéric Beigbeder’s contribution to novels about 9/11, it constitutes an example of what might be called “feigned simultaneity.” Although already dead, the narrator recounts his morning in the World Trade Center in the present tense, from 8:31 a.m. (he is at the top of the building with his two children) to 10:25 and 10:27 (he and the children are now buried in the rubble, soon to become part of what he foresees will be a “tourist attraction” [Beigbeder 363]). Insofar as posthumous narratives are told “from beyond the grave,” they obviously raise issues of spatial perspective. That is, whether the expression “from the grave” is taken literally or figuratively, they pose the question of knowing “from where it is it told,” a question that has recently been rehabilitated in narrative theory. Let us note, to begin with, that some of the stories in my corpus are told from a place that is not explicitly designated. Murder mysteries such as In the Cut and The Death of the Author, for instance, describe how, where, and by whom their narrators were killed, but they do not identify the site of the narration. Conversely, Heaven and Hell are depicted in detail in some ghost stories. Critics (e.g., Olson 138) have long noticed that Susie’s afterworld, in Sebold’s The Lovely Bones, resembles a cozy suburban setting, with its schools, soccer fields, and carefully tended lawns. In Palahniuk’s Damned, on the contrary, Madison’s Hell is both unfamiliar and inhospitable. Newcomers find themselves 75

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“lying on the stone floor inside a fairly dismal cell composed of iron bars” (Palahniuk 8), and the environment includes such unappealing landmarks as “Shit Lake” (40), the “Great Ocean of Wasted Sperm” (44), the “Swamp of Partial-Birth Abortions” (45), and the “Great Plains of Broken Glass” (46). The afterworld, moreover, can be located neither in Heaven, nor in Hell, but on Earth. Lily, the older woman who tells her story in Will Self’s How the Dead Live, resides with other deceased persons in Dulston, an imaginary district in London. She freely roams the city, however, spying on her daughters in real neighborhoods (e.g., South Kensington) and attending concerts at existing locales (e.g., Wigmore Hall). Like Lily, Josué, the narrator in Carlos Fuentes’s Destiny and Desire, speaks “from Earth,” but his circumstances are markedly different. After being murdered, he tells his story as a severed head, “lost like a coconut on the shores of the Pacific Ocean along the Mexican coast of Guerrero” (Fuentes 4). As for Elegant Effeni, the narrator of the first chapter of Orhan Pamuk’s My Name Is Red, he finds himself in a situation quite similar to Josué’s: slain, he speaks as “nothing but a corpse” from the place he has been thrown into, the “bottom of a well” (Pamuk 3). Told by dead characters, posthumous narratives are also generally focalized through them. That is, these characters function as centers of perception and knowledge, though in different ways. Murder mysteries such as In the Cut and The Death of the Author are told in what classical narratology (e.g., Genette, Figures III 206) calls “internal focalization.” Their narrators only communicate what they saw, heard, and knew “then,” a device that leads – as we have seen – to a significant omission: they do not mention what they know “now,” namely, that they are dead. Conversely, ghost stories offer many instances of what Heinze (280) calls “paralepses”: speaking in the first person, their narrators provide data they have no way of accessing, whether we take as a yardstick the limits of human cognition and perception or the usual protocols of homodiegetic narrative. In Amy Tan’s Saving Fish from Drowning, for example, Bibi Chen, the ghost narrator, is endowed with special privileges. Her omniscience, if we follow Jonathan Culler’s (2004) suggestion to break this term down, is concurrently synonymous with omnipresence, telepathy, and total recall. Indeed, Bibi can join the tour from China to Myanmar she was supposed to lead, escort its participants to the various locations they are visiting, get into peoples’ minds, and reproduce word-for-word the conversations that she has heard. The novels that stage several narrators, of whom only one is deceased, usually offer two kinds of perspective. In Getting Mother’s Body (Parks), for instance, the living characters tell their version of the journey they are taking to unbury “mother” according to the conventions of restricted, internal focalization. Speaking in the present tense, they report what they see, hear, and think as they move from one stage of their trip to the next. But Willa Mae Beede, the dead mother, one of the only characters in my corpus to speak literally “from the grave,” has access to what the people who are looking for her tomb are doing. She thus comments on a “trick” that her daughter Billy is trying to pull at a service station because she has no money to pay for the gas (Parks 225–29). Similarly, the living characters in Ward’s Sing, Unburied, Sing tell their version of the drive to the prison and back according to their limited perspectives. But Richie, the dead boy, enjoys some of the privileges granted to ghosts in posthumous narrative. For one thing, “fold[ing]” himself and sitting “on the floor of the car” (Ward 133), he can share the family’s journey home both unnoticed by the parents and able to communicate with Jojo, the teenage son. In Parks’s and Ward’s novels, the paralepses are thus “local” (Heinze 286). They only occur in parts of the narrative in which the dead report and ponder what they themselves and the living characters are doing. Classical narratology (e.g., Genette, Nouveau discourse 44–45) would describe this type of focalization as “multiple,” emphasizing that the shift from one mode to the other comes with a shift of narrator, as it does for example in epistolary novels, the “transfocalization” appearing as a consequence of the “transvocalization.” 76

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Verisimilitude Given the fact that the initial speech situation in posthumous narrative is unmistakably unnatural, the issue is to know whether that situation is later naturalized; that is, whether the circumstances that allow a dead person to speak are at some point specified, thus warranting the paralepsis. In the entry “Impossible Worlds” in the Routledge Companion to Experimental Literature, Marie-Laure Ryan identifies three main strategies that allow naturalization of such worlds: “mentalism” (the inconsistencies can be “explained away as dream, hallucination, or the dementia of an unreliable narrator”); “figural interpretation” (the inconsistencies “do not correspond to facts, they are only ways of describing certain phenomena”); and “many-worlds and virtualization” (the “mutually incompatible elements are not part of the same world, but of different possible worlds”) (377). Ryan does not list posthumous narrative among the subgenres that may include “impossible worlds,” but the “strategies” she lists can be (and have been) applied to several of the works in my corpus. First, the authors themselves have at times provided in the epitext explanations for the unnaturalness of their stories. Keith Kachtick, for instance, has in an interview rationalized the abilities granted to the narrator of his Hungry Ghost (e.g., omnipresence and telepathic powers) by stating that the story is told “from the point of view of the protagonist’s Buddha nature, his omniscient higher self,” which allows him “to see things that his ego-driven lower self is reluctant to acknowledge.” Relying on Ryan’s strategy of “mentalism,” proponents of cognitive narratology have also at times sought to interpret the “inconsistencies” at work in posthumous narrative in terms of psychological phenomena. Looking from this perspective at one of the classics of the subgenre, Flann O’Brien’s The Third Policeman, David Herman has thus described the narrator’s “Hell” less as a “place” than as the “cognitive dissonance” caused by his “efforts to model the underworld as a place”; that is, by a “mismatch between basic parameters for spatial cognition and the regions in which the narrator finds himself, posthumously at least” (285). Similarly, Alber has argued that O’Brien’s novel can be taken as an “hallucination” or as a “vision of the narrator’s afterlife” (“Unnatural Spaces” 49). In other words, for Alber, the oddities displayed in The Third Policeman can be explained by assuming either that the narrator “dies during a long period of time,” or that “he has already died” and describes what he is going through after his passing (51). Another way of validating the unnaturalness of posthumous narrative is to relate it to the cultural values of a specific community. Taking up this issue in her chapter on the representation of “fictional afterlife worlds,” Bennett has shown that “things that are not provable in the actual world” can still be “objects of belief.” The afterlife, in this instance, has a different reality for a believer and a non-believer (190). Gloria Naylor’s Mama Day exemplifies Bennett’s point, as Willow Spring, the fictional island off the coast of Georgia and South Carolina where the novel takes place, has kept many aspects of a traditional African-American belief system. One such aspect is the possibility of talking with the dead – a possibility that is actualized by one of the characters, Ophelia, who converses at length with her dead husband. These conversations alternate with the reports and comments of a communal narrator, from which they are clearly demarcated by a typographical space and three diamonds. Asking whether Naylor, and for that matter Parks and Ward, believe in the possibility of communicating with the dead, of accessing the voice of a deceased person, and of ghosts existing among the living, is of course beside the point. The fact is that these authors stage communities in which death is not just an important matter, but in which ghosts move around and the departed can keep speaking with the people they were close to. Most texts in my corpus, however, do not offer any justification for the fact that a dead character is allowed to tell his/her story. This arbitrariness is particularly obvious when the author “appropriates,” as Elizabeth Tallent puts it, “the personae of real individuals, mostly dead, mostly famous” (1). Indeed, it would be difficult, in these cases, to explain how the main character is 77

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entitled to speak – how, for example, Queen Marie-Antoinette can posthumously recount her life, as she does in Kathryn Davis’s Versailles. At the least, the author can in the epitext account for the way he/she was able to obtain the information used in the fake autobiography. Saint-Paulien does so in the foreword to one of the most bizarre texts in my corpus, Pourquoi j’ai perdu la guerre par Adolf Hitler: Mémoires d’outre tombe [Why I Lost the War by Adolf Hitler: Memoirs from Beyond the Grave], when he states that he can speak “for” Hitler because he has first-hand information: he in the 1930s met the Führer, together with other National-Socialist personalities such as Hess, Himmler, Goebbels, Rosenberg, and Ribbentrop (13).4 Whether or not their authors justify the fact that the dead can speak, posthumous narratives raise obvious issues of reception. To put it in the terms of the theorists of unnaturalness: given that posthumous narrative is now an established subgenre, is the reliance on a dead speaker still perceived as unnatural? I mentioned earlier how some of these theorists (e.g., Richardson 18) recognize that “repetition,” and “widespread knowledge of that repetition,” can “fully conventionalize the antimimetic,” thus making strategies such as that of the dead narrator “cease to be unnatural.” The question, of course, is: “unnatural” for whom? To return to the issue I raised about the novels in which the narrator is not revealed to be dead before the very end of the text: Are the inscribed readers of In the Cut and The Death of the Author supposed to be surprised when they learn about the deceit? Or, aware that they are dealing with a posthumous narrative, are they from the start asking when the narrator will die, and how? Assuming that readers are likely to be informed of the nature of the text (in the case of The Death of the Author, by the flaps of the dustcover that announce a “murder mystery”), I would argue that they ask the second type of question. With James Phelan (175), I would then explain that readers accept the basic paralepsis at work in these “character narrations” because of the “Story-overDiscourse Meta-Rule”: cognizant of the game being played at the level of the story, they consent to its implications at the level of the discourse.

Conclusion(s) As a subgenre, posthumous narrative fulfills a certain number of functions. On the map of current publishing, it first constitutes a contribution to, as well as a critique of, the spreading field of life writing – a field that now extends all the way from autobiography to Bildungsroman to autofiction. With other postmodern novels, afterlife narratives are especially prone to exposing what Linda Hutcheon calls “the arbitrariness of traditional novelistic closure” (176). Hutcheon’s example is D. M. Thomas’s The White Hotel, but such novels as Damned, The Lovely Bones, and How the Dead Live are similarly open-ended. Although several posthumous narratives challenge the conventions of realist fiction, others play intertextual games that interrogate the literary tradition of writing about the afterlife. Some of the most obvious are Ulrich Plenzdorf ’s Die neuen Leiden des jungen W. [The New Sorrows of the Young W.], whose hypotext is obviously Goethe’s celebrated epistolary novel, and Margaret Atwood’s Penelopiad, which provides a woman’s post-mortem perspective on the events recounted in Homer’s Odyssey. Parks’s Getting Mother’s Body also clearly rewrites Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, as both texts stage a journey with dead mothers speaking, daughters wanting an abortion, and family members reluctant to help. In like fashion, Self ’s How the Dead Live offers several references to Joyce’s Ulysses, beginning with the name of the narrator, Lily Bloom, a Jewess who roams through London as Joyce’s Bloom roams through Dublin, and a concluding “Not” that responds to Joyce’s “Yes.” As for Naylor’s Mama Day, it alludes to several of Shakespeare’s plays: to The Tempest (there is one on the island), Hamlet (the heroine’s name is Ophelia), and Romeo and Juliet (the lovers marry in spite of their different backgrounds, though only the husband dies in Mama Day). 78

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Used to critique the protocols of realist fiction, posthumous narrative also serves to castigate some aspects of contemporary society. The dead, then, are employed as the Huron in Voltaire’s L’Ingénu or the Middle-Easterner in Montesquieu’s Lettres persanes: their perspective as outsiders enables the novelists to expose abuse, injustice, or mere ridicule. Self thus relies on Lily Bloom’s account of her last days and afterlife to denounce the way older people are treated in Great Britain, especially the indignities they have to suffer in the state hospital system. In a different, more restricted area, Adair makes use of Professor Sfax’s narrative of his career to mock the American university’s addiction to novelties, in this case, its turn to theory in the 1980s and more particularly to deconstruction. Eagleman’s critique in Sum is more comprehensive, as several of the versions of the afterlife proposed in this text turn out to be extreme versions of the contemporary world’s trends, fears, and (especially) obsession with technology. Upon entering the afterlife, the deceased can thus sit in a lounge with “banks of television monitors,” “millions of blue-green glowing screens” (59); use a computer-supplied “death switch” to pretend they are “not dead” and make such things as “a transfer between bank accounts” (67); or receive a “clear answer about our purpose on Earth”: our mission is to “collect data,” a task for which we are equipped with “advanced lenses that produce high-resolution visual images,” “ears to pick up air-compressions waves,” and “analytic brains that get this mobile equipment on top of clouds, below the seas, onto the moon” (89). As several critics have pointed out, the denunciation of today’s world offered in posthumous narrative is often conducted through people that society has marginalized for reasons of age, gender, race, or social background. Arguing along these lines, Tiina Käkelä-Puumala has shown that the figures she calls “postmodern ghosts” are now politicized: they illustrate Agamben’s “bare life,” the life of people whose existence has been “neglected, forgotten, or repressed” (85). The function of afterlife fiction, according to Käkäla-Puumala, is to give voice to these outcasts – to provide them, after their death, with the visibility they did not enjoy while alive. Focusing on women, Brian Norman has similarly examined how the dead female characters who speak in texts from Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying to Randall Kenan’s Let the Dead Bury Their Dead have come to represent “figures of injustice” in American literature. Norman lends particular attention to violence against women, stressing that The Lovely Bones’s Susie was both raped and murdered, and that Willa Mae Beede, in Parks’s Getting Mother’s Body, died of the hemorrhage that followed her attempt at a self-performed abortion. One could add Frannie, the narrator of In the Cut, who reports about the killing (and dismembering) of two women, and in the last section of her narrative describes at length how she herself was slaughtered in the same fashion. I mentioned earlier how Self uses the voice of the deceased Lily Bloom to denounce the neglect of which the elderly are victims in Great Britain. Samantha Chang, in Hunger, resorts to a similar strategy to point to different problems: those faced in the United States by Asian immigrants. As Belinda Kong has explained, the originality of Chang’s short story resides in the fact that it challenges the tradition of the Asian-American Bildungsroman: it does not deal with the success of the family’s children, but – through “the posthumous voice of the immigrant parent” – with the ordeal of members of the first generation in such areas as language (100).5 It must be pointed out, at last, that the current popularity of posthumous narrative is obviously related to today’s preoccupation with anything having to do with the nature of death and the possibility of an afterlife. Alan Warren Friedman, in his study of death in modern fiction, mentions that Raymond Moody’s bestseller Life After Death has brought about the formation of several “Near-Death-Experience (NDE)” support groups, whose function is to provide the participants with the opportunity of recounting what they have (or think that they have) gone through (162). Friedman also emphasizes that our society, “unable to agree on when life begins and ends,” nevertheless engages in activities such as organ transplants and laboratory 79

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fertilization, and deploys life-support systems that mark a shift from “prolonging living to prolonging dying” (280). While the polemics related to these “prolongations” (and the right to halt them) testify to our current interest in the moment of death, it remains that what may happen after death is still an object of curiosity for many people, as well as a crucial question for the holders of specific faiths. According to a 2018 article in the New York Times (Horowitz A8), the pope had made a provocative statement to the left-wing (and atheist) Italian journalist Eugenio Scalfari: he had affirmed that Hell does not exist, and that bad souls consequently are not punished. The Vatican, according to the New York Times, had felt obliged to issue a denial: Pope Francis had been misquoted, as Hell, for him, was still “one of the central tenets of Catholicism.” This anecdote, while it accounts for the position of the Roman Catholic church, also indirectly poses a question: if there is such a thing as Hell, what does it look like? Or, more generally: if there is an afterlife, what are its different aspects? The role of fiction, to use the subtitle of Eagleman’s book, is to answer these questions by providing “tales from the afterlife,” that is, ludic, playful versions of what it might be like once we are “there.”

Notes 1

2

3

4

5

The structure is the same in another classic of posthumous narrative, Robert Davies’s Murther & Walking Spirits. Because the narrator is killed and the identity of the killer revealed in the first sentence of the novel, the questions, just like in The Lovely Bones, are to know how the deceased is going to “live” as a ghost and whether the killer will be punished. One could add to this basic typology the narratives that focus on the moment of death, on the model of Ambrose Bierce’s short story “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge.” William Golding’s Pincher Martin falls under this category, but it takes more than two hundred pages to tell what happened within a few minutes: a seaman whose ship has sunk seems to have escaped, but he in fact has drowned. However interesting, this text does not belong to my corpus because the story is not told by the character but by a heterodiegetic narrator. Both Parks’s and Ward’s novels have in common with Faulkner’s that they are road novels. In Park’s, the characters travel from Texas to Arizona to exhume “mother’s body,” retrieve the jewels she was supposedly buried with, and bring her home; in Ward’s, they drive from southern to northern Mississippi to pick up one of the characters’ husbands, who is being released from prison. Susan Lanser, contrasting the “road” with the “drawing room,” has argued that the road novel is not exclusively a masculine domain; women novelists have indeed claimed the subgenre and staged female characters who “take to the road” (28). Lanser does not mention Parks’s work (Ward’s is posterior to her article), which shows that the road novel can be appropriated by African-American women. Saint-Paulien is the pen name of Maurice-Yvan Sicard (1910-2000), a French journalist and writer who was a member of the Doriot’s proto-fascist movement Parti Populaire Français. Sentenced to forced labor in 1946 because of his collaborationist activities during the German occupation of France but then pardoned, Sicard is the author, besides of Hitler’s “memoirs,” of a history of the collaboration and of novels featuring the French SS volunteers. Not all dead narrators are innocent victims of brutality and/or discrimination. The narrator of Horace McCoy’s potboiler Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye, for example, is a vicious offender, who himself commits several crimes before being shot at the very end of the novel.

Works Cited Adair, Gilbert. The Death of the Author. William Heinemann, 1992. Alber, Jan. Unnatural Narrative: Impossible Worlds in Fiction and Drama. U of Nebraska P, 2016. Alber, Jan. “Unnatural Spaces and Narrative Worlds.” A Poetics of Unnatural Narrative, edited by Jan Alber, Henrik Skov Nielsen, and Brian Richardson. Ohio State UP, 2013, pp. 45–66. Atwood, Margaret. Penelopiad. Canongate, 2005. Beigbeder, Frédéric. Windows on the World. Grasset, 2003. Bennett, Alice. Afterlife and Narrative in Contemporary Fiction. Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.

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Dead Man/and Woman Talking Butor, Michel. Degrés. Gallimard, 1960. Butor, Michel. La Modification. Minuit, 1957. Castillo, Ana. So Far from God. Norton, 1993. Chang, Lan Samantha. Hunger: A Novella and Stories. Norton, 1998. Chateaubriand, François-René de. Mémoires d’outre-tombe. 1898–1899. Gallimard, 1951. Culler, Jonathan. “Omniscience.” Narrative, vol. 12, no. 1, 2004, pp. 22–34. Davies, Robert. Murther & Walking Spirits. Penguin, 1991. Davis, Kathryn. Versailles. Houghton Mifflin, 2002. DeMan, Paul. “Autobiography as De-Facement.” The Rhetoric of Romanticism, Columbia UP, 1984, pp. 67–82. Eagleman, David. Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives. Pantheon Books, 2009. Everett, Percival. American Desert. Hyperion, 2004. Falconer, Rachel. Hell in Contemporary Literature: Western Descent Narratives Since 1945. Edinburgh UP, 2005. Faulkner, William. As I Lay Dying. Jonathan Cape, 1930. Friedman, Alan Warren. Fictional Death and the Modernist Enterprise. Cambridge UP, 1995. Fuentes, Carlos. Destiny and Desire, translated by Edith Grossman. Random House, 2011. Genette, Gérard. Figures III. Seuil, 1972. Genette, Gérard. Nouveau discourse du récit. Seuil, 1983. Golding, William. Pincher Martin. Faber and Faber, 1966. Heinze, Ruediger. “Violations of Mimetic Epistemology in First-Person Narrative Fiction.” Narrative, vol. 16, no. 3, 2008, pp. 279–297. Herman, David. Story Logic: Problems and Possibilities of Narrative. U of Nebraska P, 2002. Holland, Sharon Patricia. Raising the Dead: Readings of Death and (Black) Subjectivity. Duke UP, 2000. Horowitz, Jason. “An atheist and the Pope talk (maybe) about Hell.” New York Times, 31 Mar. 2018, p. A18. Hutcheon, Linda. Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction. Routledge, 1988. Kacandes, Irene. Talk Fiction: Literature and the Talk Explosion. U of Nebraska P, 2001. Kachtick, Keith. Hungry Ghost. Harper Collins, 2003. Kachtick, Keith. Hungry Ghost, Book Interview, https://b0f646cfbd7462424f7a-f9758a43fb7c33cc8adda 0fd36101899.ssl.cf2.rackcdn.com/book-interviews/BI-9780060523916.pdf. Accessed 15 July 2020. Käkelä-Puumala, Tiina. “Postmodern Ghosts and the Politics of Invisible Life.” Death and Literature, edited by Outi Hakola and Sari Kivistö. Cambridge Scholars, 2014, pp. 83–101. Kenan, Randall. Let the Dead Bury the Dead and Other Stories. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1992. Kong, Belinda. “When Ghosts Dream: Immigrant Desire in Lan Samantha Chang’s Hunger.” Death in American Texts and Performances: Corpses, Ghosts, and the Reanimated Dead, edited by Lisa K. Perdigao and Mark Pizzato. Ashgate, 2010, pp. 99–112. Lanser, Susan. “Toward (a Queerer and) More (Feminist) Narratology.” Narrative Theory Unbound: Queer and Feminist Interventions, edited by Susan Lanser and Robyn Warhol. Ohio State UP, 2015, pp. 23–42. McCoy, Horace. Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye. Random House, 1948. Montesquieu, Charles-Louis de. Lettres persanes. 1721. Gallimard, 2014. Moody, Raymond. Life After Life: The Investigation of a Phenomenon – Survival of Bodily Death. Bantam, 1975. Moore, Susanna. In the Cut. Penguin Random House, 1995. Morrison, Toni. Beloved. Knopf, 1987. Naylor, Gloria. Mama Day. Vintage Books, 1989. Norman, Brian. Dead Women Talking: Figures of Injustice in American Literature. Johns Hopkins UP, 2013. O’Brien, Flann. The Third Policeman. McGibbon and Kee, 1967. Olson, Greta. “Introducing Alice Sebold’s The Lovely Bones.” anglistik & englischunterricht, vol. 66, 2005, pp. 137–146. Palahniuk, Chuck. Damned. Anchor Books, 2011. Pamuk, Orhan. My Name Is Red. Translated by Erdag Göknar. Knopf, 2001. Parks, Suzan-Lori. Getting Mother’s Body. Harper Perennial, 2004. Phelan, James. “Implausibilities, Crossovers, and Impossibilities: A Rhetorical Approach to Breaks in the Code of Mimetic Character Narration.” A Poetics of Unnatural Narrative, edited by Jan Alber, Henrik Skov Nielsen, and Brian Richardson. Ohio State UP, 2013, pp. 167–184. Plenzdorf, Ulrich. Die Neuen Leiden des Jungen W. 1973. Suhrkamp, 2008. Raymond, Claire. The Posthumous Voice in Women’s Writing from Mary Shelley to Sylvia Plath. Routledge, 2006.

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Philippe Carrard Richardson, Brian. Unnatural Narrative: Theory, History, and Practice. Ohio State UP, 2015. Ryan, Marie-Laure. “Impossible Worlds.” Routledge Companion to Experimental Literature, edited by Joe Bray, Alison Gibbons, and Brian McHale. Routledge, 2012, pp. 368–379. Saint-Paulien. Pourquoi j’ai perdu la guerre par Adolf Hitler: Mémoires d’outre tombe. Editions du Clan, 1968. Sebold, Alice. The Lovely Bones. Little, Brown, and Company, 2002. Self, Will. How the Dead Live. Grove Press, 2000. Skibell, Joseph. A Blessing on the Moon. Algonquin Books, 1997. Smith, Ali. Hotel World. Hamish Hamilton, 2001. Sternberg, Meir. Expositional and Temporal Ordering in Fiction. Johns Hopkins UP, 1978. Tallent, Elizabeth. “The Trouble with Postmortality.” The Threepenny Review, Spring 2005, pp. 1–7. Tan, Amy. Saving Fish from Drowning. Harper Perennial, 2006. Thomas, D. M. The White Hotel. Viking, 1981. Voltaire. L’Ingénu. 1767. Larousse, 1994. Wallace, David Foster. “Good Old Neon.” Oblivion: Stories. Back Bay Books, 2004, pp. 141–181. Ward, Jesmyn. Sing, Unburied, Sing. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2017.

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8 THE VIEW FROM UPSTREAM Authority and Projection in Fontenelle’s Nouveaux dialogues des morts Jessica Goodman

In 1683, Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle published the first volume of his Nouveaux dialogues des morts. The text, which brought together a series of celebrated individuals in conversation in the afterlife, explicitly modeled itself on a work by Lucian of Samosata, written in the second century CE. Fontenelle was far from the only modern author to take on this classical model: Fénelon, Boileau, and Voltaire in France, and Lyttleton in England were just some of those who revived the famous dead across the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. But in the only full-length study of the form to date, Egilsrud identifies Fontenelle as its superlative example (110–14). The dialogues were immensely successful: the first volume was reprinted twice in the following months, a second volume followed at the end of the year, and a final section (the Judgment of Pluto) appeared in early 1684. Modern criticism has considered them as examples of the contemporary trend for gallantry (Cazanave 125), as echoing polite salon conversation (as studied by Fumaroli), and for their contribution to the quarrel of the ancients and the moderns (Corréard 51–70); it has commented upon the choice of interlocutors, who at times seem incongruous and designed to create antitheses (Cosentini 2) yet also reveal the continuity of humanity across time (Marchal 121), and it has examined the text in the broader context of the dialogue form, as a search for truth or judgment (Pujol 231–47). Less often, however, has this text or its successors appeared in studies about death in literature; indeed, Henrichot, noting this fact in 2002, suggests that death itself is, paradoxically, almost absent from the genre of the “dialogue of the dead” (127). In line with other authors in the same volume, he wonders if the representation of death here is, as elsewhere, merely a pretext to do something else entirely (Garreau 16). It is true that there is little or no attempt to give a “realistic” representation of death or the afterlife: there is no hellish (or heavenly) landscape, no reference to the ghostly shape of the interlocutors, no macabre depiction of the processes of dying or burial, and no description of how the souls have arrived in their new domain. But that is not to say that the protagonists’ status as dead is of no relevance at all. One of the key functions of these dialogues is their satirical impact: the comments that the dead make about the world they have left behind. And it is precisely the fact that they are dead that provides them with the detachment – with the clarity of perspective – to make such comments (see Henrichot 134 and Pujol 232). Fontenelle himself is explicit in this regard, writing in his preface: “The Dead have a great capacity for reflection, both because of their 83

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experience, and because of their leisure […] They reason better than us regarding the affairs of our world, because they regard them with more indifference and more tranquility, and they want to reason on them, for they retain some interest in them” (48; all translations mine). As the grammarian Parmeniscus says in his dialogue with Theocritus: “Living means not knowing what one is doing for the majority of the time. When we discover the unimportance of all that preoccupies us and affects us, we tear Nature’s secret from her: we become too wise” (147). In this commonplace of the genre, and of critical responses to it, death is the condition for this wisdom: it provides them with a form of authority to which the living simply do not have access. This authority is also based on a sort of panoramic view of history – what Leiris describes as “a view situated in time, but already outside of time” (223) – in which the repeated mistakes of mankind suddenly become blindingly obvious. However, in a dialogue between Montaigne and Socrates in which this very theme is discussed at length, the notion of authority as it is linked to death is revealed as more complex. These might be great men; they may be wise in their posthumous detachment, but they are not untouchable. Says Socrates: “When we lived, we accorded our ancestors far more esteem than they deserved; and at present, our descendants accord us more esteem than we deserve, but our ancestors, and we, and our descendants, are all the same in the end” (85). These are, as Dagen points out in his introduction to the 1971 edition of the dialogues, “not those dead figures without any consistency or interest, who hurry, once the dialogues are over, to participate in […] the false and derisory myth of a fixed essence, which is the state of true death” (26). And if they are not fixed – more specifically, if this lack of fixity and grandeur can be both pointed out and exploited by their still-living revivifier, Fontenelle himself – then the authoritative wisdom conferred by their death is perhaps also less definite than commonplace interpretations of this genre would imply. In what follows, I seek to unpack the different iterations and interactions of death and authority in this text, beyond the notion of critical detachment. I examine how the textual reincarnations of dead greats simultaneously act as figures of authority, and are left open to manipulation and domination by those that follow them. I consider the interplay of voices, and how the question of the judgment of those to come is presented and problematized throughout the text. Finally, I ask how far the imaginative resources Fontenelle employs to undertake this examination of the afterlife and its inhabitants are in fact intimately bound up with the very arguments he makes about the value of projecting one’s own posterity. The chapter title, of course, refers to Terence Cave’s immensely influential work on “afterlives,” in which “upstream” refers to going backward in time, whilst “downstream” is the future for an idea, or a person, or a text: the fragmentations, recreations, and refractions of the original (Afterlives). The dead figures examined here might seem unproblematically to belong to the “upstream” – certainly in the traditional interpretation of their authoritative status – and to comment on the present from their position in the past. However, as we shall see, when it comes to talking about posterity, the direction of travel is often far more complicated, and we might ultimately find that they are better described as existing in their own “downstream,” having been transposed forward into a different world and in the process becoming something totally new. The presence of explicit reflections on posthumous fame and glory in Fontenelle’s dialogues has been noted by a number of critics. Corréard suggests that the range of individuals presented (from the ancient to the modern; from authors to emperors) encourages a meditation on how everyone is equal before eternity (63), Marchal points out Fontenelle’s insistence on the vain illusions of all earthly concerns (124), and Cosentini evokes a similar theme of fortune laughing at humankind (25). In the dialogues themselves, Athenais and Icasis – respectively an oracle and a Turkish beauty – consider how context is all: the character trait (wit) that made the reputation 84

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of one of the women was the downfall of the other, and thus “everything is uncertain. It seems that fortune gave different levels of success to the very same thing, in order to consistently mock human reason, which can therefore hold onto no solid rules” (71). Meanwhile, Cosimo de Medici complains that the moons of Jupiter, which once bore his name, now no longer immortalize him, thwarting his attempt to “hold onto life,” and demonstrating the contingency of earthly fame, even when it is tied to apparently immortal celestial objects (97–99). At the other end of the scale, Artemisia and Ramon Llull, both interpreted as glorious in their lifetimes (she for her fidelity to her husband – swallowing his ashes, and building a temple in his honor – and he for his search for the philosopher’s stone), reveal that both their lifetime reputations were built upon falsehoods, for she made her great displays of fidelity to conceal her love for another, and he never found the mythical stone; two facts revealed only after their deaths (159–62). This theme of the contingent nature of reputation would seem to undermine any notion of human authority, whether on the part of the living or the dead. What the other studies cited fail to recognize, however, is either the manner in which this text participates in the very posterity it explores, or the importance of the conceit of death to this self-reflexive mode. The motif of detachment from earthly concerns and personal passions can be found in dialogues of the dead across time: the memory-wiping waters of the Lethe are credited with giving the dead access to a higher plane of disinterested reason (Egilsrud 17). Yet in Fontenelle’s dialogues, the personal concerns, motivations, and quarrels of the interlocutors could hardly be more present, most particularly as they regard the survival of their reputation, and the precise manner in which they are viewed by the world they have left behind. Despite the acknowledgment of chance and contingency, the attempt to control one’s own legacy – to acquire authority over it – is a running theme. Herostratus vocalizes this universal desire when he notes that “[t]he earth is like a series of great tablets, onto which everyone wants to inscribe his name” (129), and Bérénice specifically ties this survival of a name alone (irrespective of any reputation attached to it) to a sort of cheating of death, stating: “Men […] cannot evade death, and so they try to hold back from its grasp the two or three syllables that belong to them” (98). Death and glory are thus inextricably linked. On the most basic level, Aristotle’s discussion with the poet Anacreon revolves around the question of relative reputation, and what merits a glorious posterity, comparing a mere “Scribbler of Ditties” with “a Philosopher of such great reputation as I” (63). A more complex version of a similar debate emerges in the dialogue between the Emperor Hadrian and Margaret of Austria, which also introduces the question of where and how reputation is conveyed. The two engage in a long discussion over the grandeur of their respective final moments, and that of Cato. Hadrian argues that his death was great because of his witty, philosophical final words, which he carefully composed before expiring (89). But Margaret, who lived some 1,300 years later than Hadrian, knows nothing of his bons mots, while being well appraised of the actions surrounding Cato’s death: a suicide to avoid falling into the hands of the enemy. Actions, she seems to argue, speak louder than words across time. Yet Margaret herself also composed words to outlive her, in her case an epitaph, written “with a cool head” during a storm at sea, when she anticipated death at any moment. Producing this comic couplet (“Here lies Margot, the gentle maiden / Who had two Husbands, and is still a virgin” (90) – the rhyme is Damoiselle/Pucelle in French) – was not only, as she says, “most extraordinary” in the circumstances, but also showed a desire to control her legacy through the very form (words) that she dismisses in Hadrian’s case. Indeed, this theme of textual reputation is pervasive. It is something of a commonplace to speak of the durability of text: the image is present in Horace’s “I shall not wholly die” (Horace 216–17) and in endless reiterations since. Elsewhere in Fontenelle’s text, it is very clear that the teller of a tale takes on the authority, while the (dead) subject is left helpless. Dido complains bitterly at how 85

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her own story has been manipulated: “It pleased a Poet named Virgil to transform such a strict Prude as I into a young Coquette, who lets herself be charmed by the good looks of a Stranger from the first day that she sees him. My whole story is upended” (59; for the multiple textual afterlives of Dido in the medieval context, see Swift 207–22). It is revealing that Dido also considers why such changes were made: “if Virgil were required to recognize me in the Aeneid as a virtuous woman, the Aeneid would lose a lot by it.” There is an acknowledgement, here, of artistic license, and of the priorities of literary value over truth. The voiceless dead, in this model, have no authority at all; rather, it is those who come after who speak for and through them, manipulating them to suit their own purposes, which might include entertainment or aesthetics. If text is really what lasts, the situation should be somewhat different for the authors brought back to life by Fontenelle. Unlike Dido, such figures have produced the text that, in Horace’s model, can live on beyond them, and thus create and transmit a version of them to future generations. Some authors of dialogues of the dead go so far as to reproduce or rework the words of their protagonists, thus apparently proving this notion (see, for example, Gouges). Marvick notes instead that Fontenelle does not even claim to quote, rather aiming for authentic-sounding conversation (74). However, there are still moments when the status of authors and the potential power of text beyond the grave are explicitly valorized. Montaigne’s conversation with Socrates includes italicized terms (“such a naïve virtue” and “such natural […] charms”) that are footnoted as “terms of Montaigne,” and thus do point to the ability of words to live on (83). In the Judgment of Pluto with which the collection ends, it is the authors Aristotle and Homer who most vehemently complain that they have not been allowed to use their words in order to respond to the slights that Fontenelle has visited upon them in the first two volumes (223, 227). Of course, it is in this denial of the right to respond, now that they are dead, that we find the weakness of the durable text, for it is still the audience that has power over the interpretation of any piece of writing. The dialogue between Homer and Aesop illustrates this point vividly: the latter is convinced, along with all the “great savants” of his time, that Homer tried to “hide great mysteries in [his] Works,” while the Greek insists that they were, for the most part, mere fictions (139–44). Just like the voiceless Dido, Homer has been forced to see his legacy in the hands of others: text, it appears, is not always as solid as bronze, but rather is flexible and infinitely reinterpretable. With this insistence that the downstream living reader or readerwriter holds the power, the locus of authority definitively shifts, from the once-authoritative, clear-sighted dead to the author who brings them back to life, taking over from pure chance to become the active and changeable representative of the “Posterity [which] distinguishes between the praises heaped upon different Princes, confirming some, and declaring the others vile flattery,” as Pietro Aretino puts it to the Emperor Augustus (76). However, even this definitive shift is not all it appears. For while Fontenelle takes on the authority to retell the stories and rewrite the words of his distinguished dead, their own authority is not entirely useless. It is by pronouncing his own views through their illustrious, dead mouths that he can imbue these views with greater authority: in other words, the conceit of their distance and upstream wisdom as the dead is still relevant, but must be combined with that other facet of death, the (bodily and verbal) absence that Fontenelle can fill with his own thoughts. This is, after all, the notion at the heart of the genre itself. Fontenelle thus enacts the processes of posterity, not only in his appropriation of these famous names and voices, but in the fact that he defines his cast, selecting who it is that has the requisite authority for him to ventriloquize in this manner. Though previous writers have noted his anti-commemorative challenges to “official history” and its “unmerited panegyrics” (Niderst 68–73; see also 86

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Cosentini 78; Bonnet 143; Pujol 233, 243), in this regard we might also see the text as acting as a precursor to the cult of great men that would develop across the eighteenth century, and culminate in the creation of the Panthéon in 1791 (Bonnet). This cult involved the identification of great individuals to act as inspiration for contemporaries and to define the parameters of French identity. In selecting great men and women to bring together, whether as good or bad examples, and in attributing to them wise morals of his own invention, Fontenelle creates something of a personal Panthéon. This process involves sharing the authority with his protagonists. He capitalizes upon their existing, authoritative reputations in a context over which he has complete control; purporting, as does the Aztec ruler Montezuma in the dialogues, to learn from the great dead of history (“since my arrival, I have been studying history through the conversations I have had with different Dead,” 207), but all the while using his privileged downstream position to treat them as puppets in his fictional world. The self-reflexive nature of this text, participating in and commenting upon posterity, comes to a head in the third section, the Judgment of Pluto. In this polyvocal supplement, the interlocutors brought back to life in the previous two volumes are released from the constraints of their individual dialogues, and come together to complain to Pluto, Lord of the Underworld, about their treatment by the upstart Fontenelle. They are thus shown to be commenting on the effect that Fontenelle’s rewritings of them – his imposition of his own authority – will have on their reputations; in other words, the participation of this very text in the construction of the posterity of its subjects is explicitly acknowledged. Plato is particularly aggrieved that “I am no longer, in this Dialogue, the divine Plato – or at least, I have been thoroughly humanized” (252); the “no longer” here suggesting a definitive alteration to his reputation among the living. It is in this context that Fontenelle’s credentials as a “modern” against the “ancients” have most frequently been identified: Homer and others complain about the lack of respect shown to their longstanding reputation, marveling: “he dismisses in a moment, with little reflection, so many judgments that have all been in agreement?” (228). Meanwhile, there is also a sense of reputation among the fellow dead: the Greek courtesan Phryne notes that her companions now insist on referring to her as the “little conqueror,” following Fontenelle’s presentation of her teaching Alexander the Great about war based on her coquettish conquests (222); Pluto halts a reading of the second volume of dialogues to the audience of assembled spirits on the basis that it will be damaging for those modern greats whose reputations are less well established. The fiction of the intradiegetic audience of souls also allows the comment that the less well-known dead (the vast majority of those listening) enjoy hearing their better-known companions taken down a peg or two: appreciating the spectacle as if they were “at the theater.” For them, anonymity in the annals of history is a benefit, as “the Author would not find them in any History or Historical Dictionary […] and they were totally out of the reach of such a dangerous man” (255). The sense that Fontenelle’s work can have such an effect in both this world and the next, even when expressed through fiction, endows the text itself with a significant weight. This, of course, is the final element of self-reflexivity, for this section also allows Fontenelle to think about the posterity of the text and its author themselves, and thus return once more to focus on his own, very specific authority. Written in response to contemporary critiques of the two volumes of dialogues, the Judgment is sometimes seen as trying to attenuate some of the dialogues’ more extreme presentations of their interlocutors. But it also allows Fontenelle to underline how he has the final word: how he is the master of all, the end point in the lineage of the illustrious greats he celebrates and critiques. This begins with setting himself in the succession of Lucian in his preface – indeed, it is Lucian himself who is asked to represent the (stillliving) Fontenelle at the “trial” to which his work is subject in the Judgment. But if the 87

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character Fontenelle is absent, unable to defend himself, the author Fontenelle is the all-pervasive presence, painting the follies of his predecessors; and thus conforming, too, to the recipe for immortality that he sets out, via the mouth of Molière, earlier in the text: “I know perfectly well how revolutions can take place in the Empire of Letters; and with all of that, I can guarantee that my Plays will last. […] If you want to write for immortality, then paint [a] picture of Idiots” (191). What looks like hubris on Molière’s part (we have already seen that no future image, even crystallized in text, can be guaranteed) seems somewhat unironically appropriated by Fontenelle with regard to his own writing. In his analysis of the fate of others in posterity, has he perhaps found a way to cheat the vicissitudes of time and the future reader? Even the ultimately fictional nature of this recreation of the dead is both explicitly commented upon and valorized. The work of the imagination with respect to notions of posterity – the fact that the consciousness of one’s future, posthumous self is ever only a projection – reappears again and again across the dialogues. For a minority of Fontenelle’s dead, posterity’s unattainable nature combines with the contingent nature of fate to become mere illusion. Mary Queen of England states: “Ambition is easily recognized as a work of the imagination; […] it continually moves beyond its desires as soon as they are fulfilled; its end point is never reached” (204). Yet for most of the interlocutors, the motivational facet of potential glory somewhere downstream in posterity is necessary, however ephemeral and uncontrollable it may be, far outweighing mere duty as a driving force. Lucretius describes it as the very reason for moral, heroic actions in life: “That chimera is the most powerful thing in the world […] see how it populates the Champs-Elysées; glory brings us more people than the fever” (181). Though he acknowledges that glory means nothing once one has passed the Lethe, “the Living can never know this,” for otherwise “no-one would accomplish any more heroic actions” (182). Moreover, the example of the glorious dead is explicitly evoked as vital to inspiring such thoughts of future glory. This point is ironically raised by Ramon Llull, whose own false glory has been revealed, but who nonetheless insists on his potential as a model: “in all things, men must find a point of perfection that is out of their reach. They would never even start their journey if they thought they would only arrive at the point that they will in fact attain; they must have before their eyes an imaginary end-point that drives them forward” (161). Imagining the future can not only be productive, it can also be pleasurable, as Queen Elizabeth of England notes when she explains why she pretended she would marry a series of suitors with no real intention of doing so: “when things pass from our imagination to reality, something is always lost,” but “if chimeras were taken away from Man, what other pleasure would be left to him?” (111–13). The genre of the dialogue of the dead complicates the idea that posthumous glory is always receding, always just out of reach of its subject, for these individuals are, in the fiction, present at their own post-mortem, swimming downstream alongside the new versions of themselves generated by their successors, and thus able to assess the relationship between their actions in life and their reputations after death. In fact, talking about the dead and about posterity always involves a complicated negotiation of tenses: for the living, death is conjugated in the future, and even the present-tense experience of dying itself must belong to the world of the living (Guirlinger 23). In contrast, in the imagined discussions of the dead, their lives are by definition in the past (and often the past conditional; “if only I had… I would have”), whereas their “present” is an eternal state with no future, except for that created for them by others based on that completed, perfective past (for more on death and tenses, see Kenny). The articulation between past, present, and future is especially visible in a dialogue on the theme of projection that takes place between Jeanne of Naples and her astrologer Anselme. Despite noting that “it would be funny if a dead man made predictions,” and despite Anselme’s insistence that such predictions, futile in life, are even more so in death, Jeanne wants a 88

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prediction for herself, requesting it in a complicated sequence of tenses which themselves underline the unreal nature of the future to be discussed: “although I know that nothing will happen to me, if you wanted nonetheless to predict something for me, that would not prevent it providing me with some distraction” (123). For her, then, an imagined future is not just motivation to be glorious; it is, rather, a human necessity. Though Anselme warns that “the greatest trap laid for man is always the future” (124), because it never materializes, Jeanne insists that the gap between anticipation and reality is irrelevant; it is the fact of having considered, imagined, or simply thought about the future at all that counts: “I believe that of all the dead who are here, there is not one who has not left his life before making the use of it that he had hoped to […] But what does it matter; I place much weight on the pleasure of predicting, hoping, fearing, even, and having a future before one” (126). That the “one” [soi] of the future and that of the present are here so clearly distinguished is, of course, misleading: one not only becomes the other, but – to a greater or lesser extent – the two “selves” also try to shape one another, with the “me” of the present imagining that of the future, and that of the future attempting to rewrite that of the past. The dead, in Fontenelle’s afterlife, inhabit that distant, future, downstream “me,” but their own rewritings no longer have any impact on how that “me” is viewed by others; they are no longer actors in their own drama, as encapsulated by that plaintive “the use of it that he had hoped to” (il en voulait faire in the French; my emphasis). It is precisely because these dead interlocutors no longer have quite the same capacity as the living to “predict […] hope […] have a future before [them]” that they are at once authoritative in themselves (they have, too late, learned what does and does not count), useful figures of authority for Fontenelle to appropriate (as they are no longer able to change their own destinies, their illustrious name becomes an empty vessel for another to fill), and models for the writer, who seeks to validate his own art. Imagination, projection, fiction, pleasure, and instruction are all words that also have significant resonance when it comes to discussions of literature. By projecting the futures of others, Fontenelle gains vicarious access to that posthumous space of authority and judgment: through his entertaining and creative literary invention, he also projects himself downstream into his own future, using the lessons learned by others to think about how best to perform his own legacy. He thus enacts the advice that would later be given by Marmontel in his Encyclopédie article “glory”: “He who transports himself into the future, and enjoys the memory of himself, will write work that is for all the centuries, as if he were immortal […] for his imagination makes him present to posterity” (720). Rather like the eighteenth-century travel commentators who throw their voice via the perspective of an outsider, Fontenelle adopts the perspective of the authoritative dead, demonstrating himself to have, despite his status as living, “a basis of Logic […] of which no-one but a dead man would be capable” (234). In doing so, and even as he reveals the very lack of fixity that marks the afterlife of any individual, he tries to “make [himself] present to posterity,” to carve out for himself a more secure space in the literary afterlife than the fragile, manipulable glory of those he brings back to life in his fiction. The notion that both Fontenelle and his protagonists actively seek to imagine their own afterlives might seem to complicate any attempt to read their actions and writings as Cave would have us do: suspending our hindsight to encounter them in their present, on their terms (Pré-histoires). Yet paradoxically, their awareness of their downstream context, as separate from their actual fate in posterity, is precisely part of that present which it is so important to rediscover - a part that this text throws sharply into relief. Contrary to what some scholars have claimed, then, death turns out to be very important for these dialogues, when they are considered from the perspective of their meditations on posterity. But while detached authority and the contingent nature of fate remain important features of the resuscitation of these past greats, it is their potential as part-known, part89

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fictionalized projections that makes them most useful to Fontenelle. In the end, it is the living writer who has the final word, both rewriting the posterities of others and “judging” his own text. The contingent experience of others and the specter of his own future reputation are as useful to him in their motivating properties as his dead protagonists claim they will be, but are also a tool that he believes he has mastered: able to swim both upstream and downstream, and imagine the perspective from both.

Works Cited Bonnet, Jean-Claude. Naissance du Panthéon. Essai sur le culte des grands hommes. Fayard, 1998. Cave, Terence. Mignon's Afterlives: Crossing Cultures from Goethe to the Twenty-First Century. Oxford UP, 2011. Cave, Terence. Pré-histoires: Textes troublés au seuil de la modernité. Droz, 1999. Cazanave, Claire. Le dialogue à l’âge classique. Étude de la littérature dialogique en France au XVIIe siècle. Honoré Champion, 2007. Corréard, Nicolas. “Le parallèle entre anciens et modernes dans les Nouveaux dialogues des morts de Fontenelle et l’instauration d’une poétique classique du genre ménippéen.” Littératures classiques, vol. 75, 2011, pp. 51–70. Cosentini, John W. Fontenelle’s Art of Dialogue. King’s Crown Press, 1952. Dagen, Jean. “Introduction.” Fontenelle, Nouveaux dialogues des morts. Marcel Didier, 1971. Egilsrud, Johan. Le ‘Dialogue des Morts’ dans les littératures française, allemande et anglaise (1644–1789). Éditions Vega, 1934. Fontenelle, Bernard le Bovier de. Œuvres complètes. Edited by Alain Niderst. Fayard, 1990, vol. I, pp. 47–263. Fumaroli, Marc. L’Âge de l’éloquence: rhétorique et « res literaria » de la Renaissance au seuil de l’époque classique. Droz, 1980. Garreau, Bernard-Marie. “Introduction.” Les Représentations de la mort. Actes du colloque organisé par le CRELLIC, Université de Bretagne-Sud, Lorient, 8–10 novembre 2000, edited by Bernard-Marie Garreau. Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2002, pp. 13–20. Gouges, Olympe de. Mirabeau aux Champs-Elysées, edited by Jessica Goodman, MHRA Critical Texts, 2017. Guirlinger, Lucien. “La Mort ou la représentation de l’irreprésentable.” Les Représentations de la mort. Actes du colloque organisé par le CRELLIC, Université de Bretagne-Sud, Lorient, 8–10 novembre 2000. Edited by Bernard-Marie Garreau. Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2002, pp. 21–36. Henrichot, Michel. “Réflexions sur les dialogues des morts à l’Age classique.” Les Représentations de la mort. Actes du colloque organisé par le CRELLIC, Université de Bretagne-Sud, Lorient, 8–10 novembre 2000. Edited by Bernard-Marie Garreau. Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2002, pp. 127–141. Horace. Odes and Epodes, translated by N. Rudd. Loeb Classical Library, Harvard UP, 2004. Kenny, Neil. Death and Tenses. Oxford UP, 2015. Leiris, Michel. La Règle du jeu III: Fibrilles. Gallimard, 1966. Marchal, Roger. Fontenelle à l’aube des Lumières. Champion, 1997. Marmontel. “Gloire.” Encyclopédie, ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, edited by Diderot, d’Alembert et al. Briasson, 1754–1772, pp. 716–721. Marvick, Louis W. “Fontenelle and the Truth of Masks.” Modern Language Studies, vol. 23, no. 4, 1993, pp. 70–78. Niderst, Alain. Fontenelle. Plon, 1991. Pujol, Stéphane. Le Dialogue d’idées au dix-huitième siècle. Voltaire Foundation, 2005. Swift, Helen. “Points of Tension: Performing Je in Jean Bouchet’s Jugement poetic de l’honneur femenin (1538).” Visualizing Medieval Performance: Perspectives, Histories, Contexts, edited by Elina Gertsman. Ashgate, 2008, pp. 207–222.

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PART II GENRES

There is much in this study that speaks to the vastly diverse ways in which humans have understood and continue to understand and respond to death: personally, aesthetically, socially, and politically. As with formal structures, John Frow explains that genres work “at a level of semiosis – that is, of meaning-making,” noting specifically that generic frames are “one of the ways in which texts seek to control the uncertainty of communication, […] by building in figures of itself, models of how it should be read” (20, 4). In particular, Frow’s emphasis on the bidirectional “flow[s] between genre and text” (4–5) offers a productive way of considering relationships between death and genre; instead of working to encompass a totalizing master-list of genres, the essays in this section (which range dynamically from the study of children’s literature to examinations of the opera) attend to the question of how a work’s genre actively generates and shapes knowledge of and about death. Lesley D. Clement’s essay, “Big Questions: Re-Visioning and Re-Scripting Death Narratives in Children’s Literature,” focuses on “the text-image interanimation of twentieth- and twenty-first-century picturebooks” to explain how works of children’s literature “interrogate, re-vision, and re-script adult death narratives.” Drawing on examples from Keizaburo Tejima’s Swan Sky, E. B. White’s Charlotte’s Web, Margery Williams’s The Velveteen Rabbit, Margaret Wise’s The Dead Bird, and others, Clement explicates how child characters “(re)create their own scripts about how to grieve loss” and, more generally, how animal friendships are used to introduce death-related themes in children’s literature, “showing the legacy that each individual creature, each individual species, leaves for its community, and honoring that legacy through the mourners’ memory.” Taking up where Clement leaves off, Karen Coats’s essay “In the U-Bend with Moaning Myrtle: Thinking about Death in YA Literature” examines the varied ways in which death is used in young adult (YA) fiction “as a plot device, a metaphor for individuation and childhood’s end, a call for greater social awareness and broader empathy, and a quest for what it means to be posthuman.” Using examples from J. K. Rowling, Lauren Henderson, Annette Curtis Klause, John Greens, Suzanne Collins, and other YA writers to explain how “death functions as an ideological catalyst in the dialogic formation of teen values in contemporary culture,” Coats contends that the genre fills an important epistemological lacuna by addressing “conversations and insights that teens need – which adults are too often reluctant to address directly.” 91

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José Alaniz’s essay, “Death and Mourning in Graphic Narrative,” provides a clear and critical overview of how “debility, dying, death, loss, and mourning have figured prominently in graphic narrative since the medium’s emergence in the late nineteenth century.” Like other essays in this section, Alaniz speaks specifically to how features of the genre make it ideal for exploring issues related to death, tracing death’s evolving function: beginning with early newspaper strips that project the “modern body’s resilience” to the “persistent traumas” brought about by the age of industrialization, to its central role in the twenty-first century’s “quasi-eugenicist superhero genre” – where death remains “its structuring, oft-disavowed other.” In his essay “Death and Documentaries: Heuristics for the Real in an Age of Simulation,” Benjamin Bennett-Carpenter contends that “the entire experience of documentaries points to the mortal condition, where the genre operates as an especially apt form of contemporary memento mori experience.” In particular, Bennett-Carpenter examines documentary’s rhetorical functions in relation to death: how it effects transformative action by confronting us with the fact that we must die – and the impetus to revise behavior when faced with impending death. Noting that the difficulty of fully distinguishing between life and death is mirrored in finding “distinctions between the imaginary and empirical,” Bennett-Carpenter observes that “[a]s technologies and audiences become more sophisticated in an age of simulation, documentary increasingly operates as a heuristic rather than simple documentation of the real.” Death is central to how tragedy has been defined since Aristotle, and in his essay “Death and the Fanciulla,” Reed Way Dasenbrock recognizes a shift in the central tragic character from male to female “as the key moment leading to the modern, female-centered tragedy found in nineteenth-century opera.” With reference to Shakespearean tragedies including Othello, Julius Caesar, and especially The Tragedie of Romeo and Juliet (which, Dasenbrock notes, infuses “the cultural energy of the Renaissance love lyric into drama in a way that permanently enlarges the potential of the genre of tragedy”), Dasenbrock contends “that this shift in genre is only possible with a profound shift in the way the culture as a whole thinks about female agency.” Dasenbrock ultimately argues that the deaths of characters such as Desdemona, Portia, and Juliet carry “more weight and resonance” than those of their male partners, asserting that their deaths paradoxically evince “a momentous positive shift in the status of women.” In the section’s concluding essay, Ronald Schleifer’s “Death, Literary Form, and Affective Comprehension: Primary Emotions and the Neurological Basis of Genre” offers a decisive shift in treating genres not as “formal categories by which phenomenal experience” is “explained, understood, [and] apprehended,” but by suggesting that genre builds upon “affective responses to experience that are evolutionarily adaptive.” Proceeding from John Frow’s premise that “ ‘human behavior is rich in analogous forms of bracketing,’ ” Schleifer adopts David Huron’s neurological study of the power of music to explain how “genre attends to constants in human experience,” “reground[ing] primal emotions of fear, anger, and surprise – emotions which respond to life-threatening situations – as the laughter, triumph, and awe that constitute, in basic ways, the affective comprehension of literary genres.”

Work Cited Frow, John. Genre. 2nd ed. Routledge, 2015.

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9 BIG QUESTIONS Re-Visioning and Re-Scripting Death Narratives in Children’s Literature Lesley D. Clement

In Wolf Erlbruch’s Die Große Frage [The Big Question], Death responds to an unspoken “big question” with “You are here to love life” (11th opening). Throughout history, a plethora of books have dictated to children expectations on how to frame and respond to life’s big questions. Given persistent romanticized concepts of childhood “innocence,” resulting in the protection of children from topics pertaining to sex, violence, and death, most children’s books, even today, fail to address the big questions concerning mortality, preferring instead to gloss over questions for which there are no simple absolute answers. Among the voices advocating for a literature that grants and fosters in children a “knowingness” is that of Neil Gaiman, who argues that literature is an effective means for children to develop “the resources – smartness, bravery, trickiness, pluckiness, persistence – to confront the darkness” (Clement, “Introduction” 15).1 This “knowingness” is the “precocity” that Marah Gubar observes in many Victorian and Edwardian children’s books and examines in Artful Dodgers: Reconceiving the Golden Age of Children’s Literature, demonstrating the aptitude of child characters for “reshaping stories” and their “canny resourcefulness … without claiming that they enjoy unlimited power and autonomy” (5–6). Packed into Death’s response to “the big question” (cited earlier) are the nuances that characterize the outstanding children’s books on bereavement, dying, and death that this essay discusses.2 These books interrogate, re-vision, and re-script adult death narratives through empathy, humor, contrapuntal narratives, an appeal to the macabre, recognition and acceptance of fear, and an occasional nod to the possibility that rituals and memory may fail to bring closure to the grieving process. Despite arguments that death-related themes are “taboo” in children’s books, deaths have always occurred.3 In children’s novels, the death of parents often takes place offstage to initiate the action and allow the protagonist to mature independently on his or her own terms;4 Frances Hodgson Burnett’s Sara Crewe (A Little Princess) and Mary Lennox (The Secret Garden), Roald Dahl’s James Henry Trotter (James and the Giant Peach), and J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter (Philosopher’s Stone) are the best-known examples. Death may also be a plot mechanism to trigger a critical moment when decisions are made, as, for example, the choices that the various permutations of Pa’s death precipitate in Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn or “the bend in the road” (308) that Matthew Cuthbert’s death elicits in L. M. Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables. Occasionally these death scenes invite more extended considerations of dying and mortality, as happens with the deaths of Beth March in Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women and Walter Blythe 93

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in Montgomery’s Rilla of Ingleside, books that are probably discovered more by young teens than children. For examples of children’s literature – as distinct from young adult (YA) or adult literature – this essay focuses on the text-image interanimation5 of twentieth- and twenty-first-century picturebooks, with several references to illustrated and graphic novels. Approaching and organizing representative books around who dies, this essay demonstrates that, although some simply recite adult narratives and impose them on child readers, most allow child characters – or child surrogates – and child readers to (re)create their own scripts about how to grieve loss and, in so doing, how to understand, conceptualize, and respond to mortality and/or life after death, philosophically and personally, as they ask questions while navigating the life–death continuum.

Cast of Animal Characters One of the most frequent ways of introducing death-related content and themes into children’s books is through a cast of animal characters. In theory, use of animal characters distances the child reader, a strategy “adopted to make the subject [of death] more palatable for publishers, mediators, and readers alike,” as seen in a Japanese picturebook by Keizaburo Tejima, Oohakuchou no sora [Swan Sky], “a story of acceptance and new life” (Beckett 250, 257). E. B. White, American author of one of the best-known examples of a narrative built around animal characters, Charlotte’s Web, would dispute that animal deaths are more conveniently “palatable” for child readers, as suggested in an interview in The Paris Review when he argued that children’s writers “have to write up, not down” because “[c]hildren are demanding. They are the most attentive, curious, eager, observant, sensitive, quick, and generally congenial readers on earth.” Though adult readers, editors, and film directors have had concerns about Charlotte’s death (Agosta 114; Crisp 98–108) – and it is noteworthy that illustrator Garth Williams avoids the scene in Chapter 21, “Last Day” – this book, with the threat of death hanging over the runt pig in the opening chapters and the death of the spider in the final chapters, is now a classic of children’s literature for its presentation of death. It does so not only from the usual biological and emotional perspectives, exploring themes about life’s natural cycles, mentorship, legacies, and grief, but also by addressing the big questions on how death fits into a perception of “transitional selves” (Costello 17–35), “our common mortality,” “Charlotte’s model of ‘the good death’ ” (Matthews 89, 93–94), and “speciesist discourses” that signal “monstrous otherness” legitimizing dualisms of who must die to feed whom (Daniel 19–31). As in Charlotte’s Web, many children’s picturebooks use friendship among animals of indeterminate age to introduce death-related themes. Also as in Charlotte’s Web, most stress companionship, sympathy, and empathy among differing species of animals, showing the legacy that each individual creature, each individual species, leaves for its community, and honoring that legacy through the mourners’ memories. Examples include Badger’s Parting Gifts by British author-illustrator Susan Varley, Kuma to yamaneko [The Bear and the Wildcat] by Japanese writer Kazumi Yumoto, and Kikker en het vogeltje [Frog and the Birdsong] written and illustrated by Netherlander Max Velthuijs.6 The emphasis on the connectedness of life and death does not always center on animate beings. Another classic of children’s literature that examines death-related themes from a unique angle is The Velveteen Rabbit, by English-American writer Margery Williams. Although the book’s interpretations of reality and death have engaged scholarly attention in diverse ways – Allan Kellehear’s “Death and Renewal in The Velveteen Rabbit” provides a good overview7 – these themes intersect in Kellehear’s “sociological reading”: “The theme of renewal and survival in the face of death is a necessary narrative device for the support it gives to more important themes, at 94

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least for young readers. These broader themes speak to the mutual interdependence of relationships and the triumph of love in the face of change and transformation in life, particularly in the context of growing up” (36). Rooting his argument in the theories of Jean-François Lyotard, Kellehear notes the importance of keeping open “intellectual spaces where we can entertain and examine … the plurality of ideas about death that is part of our diverse human inheritance,” as evidenced within “tales of rebirth” (48). Bug in a Vacuum by Canadian author-illustrator Mélanie Watt is a humorous take on a tale of rebirth. Will it be “An Unfair Tale with an Unhappy Ending/Based on a truly SAD story” (25th opening)? Readers are guided to think metaphorically from the pre-title page: a bug, an insect, is an “unexpected glitch”; a vacuum, a cleaning machine, is a “void left by a loss.” There are contrapuntal stories throughout: first is that of the bug whose “entire life changed with the switch of a button” (6th opening); then there are the responses of the dog, whose toy dog has also been sucked up in the vacuum. Both pass through Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s five stages of grief: denial, bargaining, anger, despair, and acceptance. From the black tunnel of the vacuum hose, to the dusty debris-strewn innards of the vacuum, to the celestial light when the vacuum is tossed on the garbage heap, the journeys through these five emotions may be absurd but raise important questions about loss and grief, defiance in the face of death, speciesism, environmental destruction, and the nature of death itself: dark or light? a void or a world filled with flotsam and jetsam? a dream or reality? an end or a beginning? quiescence or regeneration? The boy in Velveteen Rabbit and the dog in Bug in the Vacuum accept the “death” of a onceloved toy animal and transfer their affections elsewhere. American writer Margaret Wise Brown’s The Dead Bird, one of the earliest picturebooks to focus exclusively on death, as its title unabashedly signals, also questions the capacity to remember. The children find a dead bird; they adapt adult rituals to perform a funeral for this seemingly insignificant and anonymous bird; “they cried because their singing was so beautiful and the ferns smelled so sweetly and the bird was dead” (16th opening); moved by the rituals and the signs of a rich and beautiful life around them, the children are now ready to move on. “And every day, until they forgot, they went and sang to their little dead bird and put fresh flowers on his grave” (20th opening; emphasis mine). There is emotional and physical honesty – “the limp bird body grew stiff, so they couldn’t bend its legs and the head didn’t flop when they moved it” (6th opening) – but also a gentleness that never becomes sentimental in both Brown’s restrained text and Remy Charlip’s deceptively simple images.8 The bright blue, green, and yellow of the children’s clothing and kite mirror the colors of the natural world while belying the somberness of the occasion.

Death of Pets and Elderly Family Members Because in Western societies children’s first exposure to dying and death is most often through pets and elderly grandparents, these form the subject matter for the majority of death-related children’s books, as the number of entries in several bibliographies attests; however, grieving the loss of parents, siblings, and friends is becoming more frequent.9 Books on pet loss are generally marketed for younger children and therefore tend to be quite conventional in their treatment of loss and to avoid textual or pictorial explanations or depictions of dying or death. The occasional book emerges as offering something different from the usual messages that attempt to comfort with reassurances that the child will get over the loss but will always have the memories. For example, in Tough Boris, Australian writer Mem Fox humorously shows that even the most fearless and fearful pirate can grieve deeply the loss of a pet parrot. Another Australian picturebook that deals particularly well with pet loss from a child’s perspective is Margaret Wild’s Harry & Hopper. Harry undergoes many emotions between his initial denial 95

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and final acceptance as he adjusts to life without Hopper and works through his grief in his own way, though he does not come to an understanding about dying or death beyond his personal situation. Grieving, as Angela Wiseman observes in her article “Summer’s End and Sad Goodbyes,” is an opportunity for children to “negotiate complex emotions and feelings related to their personal identities, cultural background, and relationship with the loved one” (2). Children’s books featuring a grandparent as the dying or deceased, like those on pets, also focus on loss, but memory, memorialization, and legacy all figure more prominently therein. Grandparents or elderly friends frequently act as mentors, “ ‘as transmitters of knowledge and tradition,’ including ‘the beliefs regarding death and family which our society wishes to transmit to children’ ”; however, these beliefs can be rescripted through challenges and adaptations (Clement, “Introduction” 2–3; Sadler 249). Two picturebooks that stand out in their humorous and empathic treatment of a child’s relationship with his grandfather (or, in the case of the latter, a surrogate grandfather) and subversive attitude to dying and death are German author-illustrator Jutta Bauer’s Opas Engel [Grandpa’s Angel] and Swedish author Ulf Stark’s Kan du vissla Johanna [Can You Whistle, Johanna?], both with male protagonists around the age of eight or nine coming to perceive death “as permanent, irreversible, inevitable, and universal.”10 There are books that feature grandmothers and granddaughters – several are discussed later in this essay – and David Sadler notes that, of the 29 books he surveyed, 14 are of grandfathers dying, 15 of grandmothers; 21 of granddaughters grieving, and nine of grandsons. Sadler also concludes that, “with very few exceptions,” in scenes leading to their death and in memory scenes, the “idealized” grandparents “act according to stereotyped sex roles” in transmitting family heritage (246). It is noteworthy that many of the books with a dying or dead grandmother as their subject matter are expositions not just of family heritage but of cultural practices and that, when the child responding to the lessons being taught is a granddaughter, there tends to be more compliance than negotiation of traditional beliefs and customs. Two books discussed by Charles Corr depict a grandmother passing on to her granddaughter explanations about “the meaning and implications of death,” both about North American indigenous practices. One is Annie and the Old One by Miska Miles (pen name for Patricia Miles Martin), in which a young Navajo girl, after several rebellious acts to forestall her grandmother’s return to Mother Earth, learns from her grandmother not only the art of weaving but also acceptance of death as the natural end to life. The other is The Great Change by White Deer of Autumn (pen name for Gabriel Horn), in which Wanba’s grandmother draws upon the natural world to explain the grandfather’s death and more generally that “death is part of the unbreakable Circle of Life, in which our bodies become one with Mother Earth while our souls or spirits endure” (Corr, “Grandparents” 385). In both, the granddaughter, after some initial resistance, is consoled by her grandmother’s wise beliefs and attitudes.11 In most children’s books from European and North American writers, when an elderly person dies, explanations allude vaguely and gently to biological aging, a gradual weakening followed by a natural end to a life well lived, with rarely a connection made to the human condition of mortality and hence to the child him/herself. Norwegian writer-illustrator-designer Stian Hole confronts this topic directly in Garmanns sommer [Garmann’s Summer]. Sixyear-old Garmann is surrounded by adults filled with anxieties and fears, including three “shrink[ing]” aunts “from another time” (2nd opening), who fear the aging process and their pending death. In the digitally collaged expressionistic images, reflecting Garmann’s perception of his world, parallels are made between these aunts and Garmann himself, conveying the empathy he develops for them and the growing understanding of his own mortality as his summer folds into autumn. For example, Garmann has been fretting about losing a tooth before 96

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summer’s end, an emotion rendered delightfully macabre as he peers at his aunt’s dentures in a glass (8th opening). Through his curiosity about others’ fears, Garmann channels his own fears. “Are you going to die soon?” Garmann asks Auntie Borghild. She acknowledges that she is, and when he presses her further about whether she is frightened, she admits to fear but also excitement about her journey “in the great starry wagon in the sky” and the beautiful garden that awaits her (10th opening). When Garmann finds one of his sparrow friends dead, he performs the expected rituals – burying it, placing a cross as its gravemarker – but then thinks, “When you die, you travel in the great starry wagon in the sky … but first [you will be buried down under with the earth-worms and become dirt]” (15th opening).12 The story opens with “Garmann’s summer will soon be over” and closes with “[t]hirteen hours to go before school starts. And Garmann is scared” (1st and 20th openings). Like the aunts who “have all the time in the world, but no time to lose” (17th opening), Garmann moves into an uncertain future, for which such openness is apt. “The story has an open ending, like life itself,” Hole said in an interview. “Every ending is also the beginning of something new.”

Death of Parents Understandably, some of the most powerful, and in several instances rawly honest, children’s death-themed books profile a child trying to understand a parent’s death. Another book by Hole – Annas himmel [Anna’s Heaven] – exemplifies this as it traces Anna’s and her father’s rediscovery of beauty and the power of love as they prepare for the mother’s funeral and navigate, in their individual ways, what her physical absence signifies. Anna asks big questions in their surrealistic journey, turning their world upside down and inside out as she tries to understand “[w]hy can’t he who knows everything, who can push and pull and turn over clouds and waves and planets – why can’t he invent something to turn bad into good?” (7th opening). The representations of both the creator and a celestial afterlife are metaphorically and spiritually evocative rather than religiously denominational. Anna’s father too ponders big questions as they consider what the deceased is doing and wearing in her new life. Father begins by asking, “Today there’s someone in the sky sending down nails. That is not right, is it?” Anna whispers her prediction: “No … but tomorrow there might be strawberries with honey” (5th opening). And while the nails in the front endpapers become strawberries in the closing endpapers, this is only one among several possibilities that Anna has collected as to what happens after death. Hole’s Anna’s Heaven juxtaposes absence in a physical sense – empty shoes and dresses, a broken strand of pearls – with presence in an imaginative or even spiritual sense, with the dead mother’s presence being conveyed through cloud formations, shadows, reflections, and symbolic objects such as dead flowers, falling leaves, and broken crockery. Another Norwegian book about a bereaved husband comforting his child as the child becomes aware of the significance of the mother’s absence uses a similar strategy but in an entirely different style: Eg kan ikkje sove no [My Father’s Arms Are a Boat], by Stein Erik Lunde with illustrations by Øyvind Torseter. Whereas Anna’s Heaven is told primarily through dialogue with third-person narratorial connectives, Lunde’s book is filtered entirely through the young boy’s perspective as he listens to the silence with hints from symbolic images of physical absence (an empty swing) and intense emotions (white flames licking out of the fireplace and into the cluttered kitchen). All is askew, as in Anna’s Heaven, but the edges are sharper with the prose text shaped and inserted like poetry onto the 2-D and 3-D paper cut-out illustrations. Red birds, a lurking fox, stars, and moon – the boy pieces them together almost architecturally to build a distinctive way of aligning life and death and reverencing the physical proximity of his father with his encircling arms to make their loss less debilitating. 97

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In contrast to Hole’s and Lunde’s books, in which a child finds support through an equally grieving parent, is Moi et rien [Me and Nothing] by Belgian author-illustrator Kitty Crowther, in which the mother’s death has isolated the grieving spouse from his daughter, Lila. She finds solace by wrapping herself in her living parent’s jacket and through an imaginary friend, Rien, who inspires her to discover the resilience and means to bring both herself and her father back from “nothing,” as conveyed through the analogy of Lila’s nurturing her dead mother’s garden of blue Himalayan poppies back to life. The interplay of text and image on the page, shift in voice midway, humorous depiction of Rien as a snowman–ghost hybrid, and empathic engagement this book fosters all define Crowther’s style, “a ‘dynamic’ kind of loneliness that breeds the creativity and energy to conquer oneself,” as noted when she received the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award (“More About Kitty Crowther”).

Children’s Death and Grieving Many of the examples discussed so far trust to the child reader’s ability to comprehend metaphors and even symbols. When the death is that of a child, metaphorical suggestiveness seems particularly apt. In “A Note about this Story,” a preface to American author-illustrator Chris Raschka’s The Purple Balloon, Ann Armstrong-Dailey, Founding Director of Children’s Hospice International, writes that an anecdote she first heard from Elisabeth Kübler-Ross has since been corroborated by healthcare professionals: regardless of “cultural or religious background,” a dying child often draws “a blue or purple balloon, released and floating free … [R]esearchers believe that it demonstrates the child’s innate knowledge that a part of him or her will live forever.”13 Beginning with an elderly green balloon and a young red balloon on his lap to illustrate that both dying and talking about dying are “hard work” (1st–2nd openings), the book continues with pages filled with balloons of various colors, suggesting the communities available to make both easier; then a page that introduces the even more difficult topic of “someone dying young” (7th opening); and ending with a single young purple balloon and caption “[g]ood help makes leaving easier” (11th opening). All of Raschka’s simple line drawings show the importance of palliative support. While this is the primary intent of the book, it also invites big questions about the fear of dying, the connections between the living and the dead, and the paradox of mortality and eternal life, primarily through background shading, facial expressions, and balloon-string sculpting. Several of the books examined provide glimpses of adult responses to loss; however, two stand out because adult grief becomes the focus, although connected to children in effective and meaningful ways. The first is The Heart and the Bottle, by Irish artist Oliver Jeffers, who has been working out of New York City for the past decade. This is a book about love and sudden loss (there is no explanation: the father just disappears from his chair one day) and grief that cauterizes the young girl’s other emotions well into adulthood. The fairy-tale opening of the book – “Once there was a girl, much like any other” – is sustained for several expansive double-spread pages as she explores the beauty and curiosities that fill her life. The turn occurs in the seventh opening as the verso and recto, each with an empty chair and the girl waiting, profile the contrapuntal story, previously hinted at through shadows. This darker story now takes over as the girl puts her heart in a safe place, a bottle hung around her neck, and “nothing was the same” (8th opening). She becomes one of the walking dead, as the sparse, fragmented images convey. She is saved from this existence after many years when she meets a curious young girl who helps her retrieve her heart from the bottle. “And the chair wasn’t so empty anymore” (15th opening). A vulnerable heart and an empty bottle – love, joy, and curiosity as countering the void left by death and fear of change – are powerfully represented in this book’s images, design, and text. 98

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In contrast to the deadening grief that The Heart and the Bottle depicts is an adult’s intense bereavement over the death of his son – a boy well known to child readers of the humorous Eddie poems – in Michael Rosen’s Sad Book, by British duo Michael Rosen and Quentin Blake. In an educational book, What is Humanism? How do you live without a god? And Other Big Questions for Kids, which Rosen co-edited, he identifies Hamlet’s “To be, or not to be, that is the question” as his favorite quotation (8–9). As a humanist, Rosen provides no simple or categorical answers. He tries to figure out why he cannot shake his sadness and why he does such crazy and sometimes bad things, but really “[i]t’s just because.” As with Jeffers’s girl, although with very different responses, the experience of death disrupts any sense of permanence. “So what happens is that there’s a sad place inside me because things aren’t the same,” says Rosen (6th opening). He offers practical suggestions on how to alleviate bereavement, humorously illustrated with Blake’s loosely colored line drawings (7th opening). He turns to his preferred genre, poetry, and squeezes out several short poems, confiding that he “just want[s] to disappear” (8th–9th openings). Memories can be helpful, especially of birthdays with candles (13th–14th openings). The honesty of the book carries through to the end, as readers are left with a wordless image of a reflective father, pen in hand, staring at a framed picture adjacent to an oversized candle with an intensely colored flame. Equally honest is a Canadian graphic novel, Harvey: Comment je suis devenu invisible [Harvey: How I Became Invisible], by Hervé Bouchard and Janice Nadeau. The Governor General’s Award jury praised Bouchard for “a series of poetically powerful metaphors” that allow readers “the freedom to explore the multiple layers of his story” and illustrator Nadeau for her “wonderful ways of depicting the sadness of spring and the melancholy of loss” (“Winners of 2009 Governor General’s Literary Awards”). Narrated through the child’s perspective, which Nadeau captures in her cinematic angles and black-white-gray-sepia-toned line drawings, the book traces young Harvey’s responses to the sudden death of his father from a heart attack. Rosen’s wish to disappear becomes this boy’s obsession, inspired by the 1957 movie The Incredible Shrinking Man. Like the previous two books discussed, Harvey explores, through both text and image, the nuances of light and dark as they relate metaphorically to death and grief. As well, this book interweaves less conventional metaphors and analogies: for example, life as a toothpick boat-race and death as an invisible man facing the stars all alone in the night. Bouchard’s text and Nadeau’s images interanimate one another in an investigation of big questions pertaining to death rarely asked in children’s literature: Is invisibility a mark of deadness? Is silence? Can the dead person communicate through visible or audible signs with those left behind? Do adult rituals surrounding death render a child’s perspective – and ultimately the child – invisible?

What Is Death? The diverse representations of grief and mortality complement the diverse perceptions of what constitutes death. Death is a cog in the natural cycle of life; death is the last phase of life with nothing beyond; death is a portal to another world; death is a liminal state between the known and unknown. When death is anthropomorphized, there are myriad physical and emotional possibilities for its representation, given that death is life’s greatest unknown. Representations in children’s literature tend toward Markus Zusak’s depiction of death and the narrator Death in The Book Thief, which, as Markus Bohlmann demonstrates in his article “Machinic Liaisons,” does not perpetuate the binaries of life/presence and death/absence, but rather is generative; that is, life–death is a continuum, “a perpetual process of ‘becoming.’ ” Bohlmann argues that, by interrogating death as “an absence or a limit to non-existence or finitude, whose affirmation 99

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results in a higher appreciation of life in its present form,” Zusak avoids death “being in binary opposition to life, as a sickle-bearing figure eager to terminate life” (255). The challenges for representing death in children’s literature are increased in illustrated books and picturebooks: how does one visualize what has never been seen? Through these imagined visualizations children have further opportunities to resist narratives imposed on them, as the final three picturebooks to be discussed well illustrate. The first is another by Kitty Crowther, La visite de petite mort [The Visit of Little Death], an unusual picturebook because it features an ill child, Elsewise, and the empathic relationship that she develops with Little Death. Elsewise’s suffering is not minimized after she is introduced in the fifth opening, nor are the conventional ways of regarding death, with which the book opens and which Little Death has internalized. Elsewise welcomes death as a release from her pain, and the depictions of Little Death enjoying a new identity and friendship are playfully childlike. Crowther avoids the morbid with her predilection for “reinventing experience” rather than “reproducing reality” (Yi-Ching 29) through the rhythm of voice and dialogue and pictorial strategies such as fluid framing and perspective, white space, the interplay of light and dark, intertextual mythological allusions, contrapuntal and transitional images, and page turns.14 Next is Græd blot hjerte [Cry, Heart, But Never Break], by Danish writer Glenn Ringtved and illustrator Charlotte Pardi, which parodies fearful folklore representations of death. “In the far north, in a small snug house, four children lived with their beloved grandmother. A kindly woman, she had cared for them for many years. Now she had a visitor” (1st opening). The lurid red splashed across the sky, a black cat crossing a shadow-filled yard, two blackbirds overseeing the scene, and a scythe left outside the door ironically anticipate the story to come. Death may be a black-hooded figure, but his robes hang loosely over his elongated hands and pale face with pensive eyes and beak-like nose protruding. Each child responds in an age-appropriate way to death. Nels and Sonia, the two oldest, have been socialized enough to close “their eyes, heavy with sorrow”; Kasper, in the middle, ignores; and Leah, the youngest, the most defiant, “stare[s] straight at Death” (2nd opening). Nels plies Death with coffee, believing what “everyone knows”: that “Death’s only friend is night.” This received wisdom is challenged first with the comment “Death loved his coffee strong and black like the night, and he was happy to sit and rest for a while” (4th opening) and then, after Leah places her hand over Death’s bony hand and asks why her grandmother must die, with “[s]ome people say Death’s heart is as dead and black as a piece of coal, but that is not true. Beneath his inky cloak, Death’s heart is as red as the most beautiful sunset and beats with a great love of life” (5th opening). Death responds to Leah’s question with a story of two brothers, Sorrow and Grief, who live in a gloomy valley, marrying two sisters, Joy and Delight, who live on the top of the hill, and making their homes “halfwayup and halfway-down the hill” (9th opening). Illustrator Pardi captures this liminal space through muted coloration. Death’s allegory becomes collaborative when Death notices Leah nodding and says, “I think you can guess what happened next” (7th opening). While the children do not completely grasp Death’s allegory, they know that what he suggests is “right.” Pardi’s use of lines and shadows is particularly effective to represent death/Death as both inside and outside the scene when “[a] line of pale gray was edging away the night.” “Life is moving on. This is how it must be,” Nels tells Kasper as Death releases grandmother’s soul out the window (10th–11th openings). Death’s final words to the children give the book its title: “Cry, Heart, but never break. Let your tears of grief and sadness help begin new life” (12th opening). The grandmother still has a presence conveyed through the shadows, open window, and caressing breeze captured in the penultimate opening’s text and image. Fittingly, this essay ends where it began, with German author-illustrator Wolf Erlbruch posing some of life’s biggest questions. Many of the themes and motifs that have been discussed 100

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come together in his Ente, Tod und Tulpe [Duck, Death and the Tulip], although within the context of pending death rather than grieving as seen in most of the other examples. Whereas in Erlbruch’s The Big Question the figure of Death wears a clown-like yellow-polka-dot smock, here Death is more dignified in his checked smock that reflects the crosshatching of Duck’s body, one of several visual signs that they are breaking down boundaries and reshaping themselves. Duck reacts to his pending death with defiance, denial, fear, and curiosity, and Death accounts for death in several ways, beginning with life’s responsibility for doling out illness, accidents, and fox (3rd opening). Rejected are euphemistic explanations of death as sleep and doctrinaire perceptions of afterlife as heaven for some, hell for others (6th–7th openings). In the incongruous situation of roosting atop a tree, Duck envisions “what it will be like when I’m dead … The pond alone, without me.” Death posits that without Duck, “the pond will be gone too,” a comfort for Duck who will not need “to mourn over it” when she is dead (9th–10th openings). The fluidity between mourner–mourned, vulnerable–invulnerable, warm–chill, inside–outside, innerscape–landscape, continues to the end: “Death stroked a few rumpled feathers back into place, then he carried her to the great river. He laid her gently on the water and nudged her on her way” (13th opening). The star-speckled teal-blue sky of the death scene (12th opening) provides the color for the river, which in the final double-spread follows Death’s gaze, flowing in from the lower-left corner and diminishing as it flows off the upper-right corner into the unknown. Death is “almost a little moved. But that’s life, thought Death” (14th opening).15 The life–death continuum, the main motif noted throughout these examples, underpins Death’s response in The Big Question: “You are here to love life.” Erlbruch ends this book with a direct address to the child reader – “Growing up/You’re sure to find more answers/To The Big Question” – followed by two graphed sheets for their answers. With the collection of books discussed in this essay, children could fill these sheets many times over with their own creative thoughts on and responses to loss and grief; memory and memorialization; mentorship and legacy; life’s cycles; the connectedness of living and dead and of animate and inanimate; rebirth and regeneration; absence and presence; nothingness, silence, and invisibility; mutability and the paradoxes of impermanence and permanence and of mortality and eternal life; and what it means to live a good life and die a good death. This is a literature worthy of Neil Gaiman’s call for books that give children the means to acquire a “knowingness” about life and death.

Notes 1 I am paraphrasing a conversation that Gaiman had in 2014 with publisher/editor Françoise Mouly and cartoonist Art Spiegelman. For a historical and thematic overview of changing concepts of childhood and attitudes toward the inclusion of death in children’s literature, see Clement, “Introduction,” especially 2–12. 2 Most of the books discussed in this essay have been honored with major awards, such as the BolognaRagazzi Award, and/or are works within the canon of authors and illustrators whose contribution to children’s literature has been recognized with international awards, such as the Hans Christian Andersen and Astrid Lindgren Memorial Awards. 3 The topics of murder, suicide, and euthanasia have generally remained off-limits in children’s – though not YA – books (Beckett 265–71). Michelle Ann Abate’s Bloody Murder is devoted to showing how “narratives for children in the representation of homicide” expose the need to revise “our existing conceptions about the politicized purposes of violence, the emotional appeal of fear, and the cultural construction of death and dying” (12). An exceptional picturebook in which the central character seems to entertain suicidal thoughts is Australian Shaun Tan’s The Red Tree. Jessica Phillips’s 2018 article contextualizes Tan’s book within Albert Camus’s theories of the absurd. Kimberley Reynolds’s Radical Children’s Literature, Chapter 5, on “Self-harm, Silence, and Survival: Despair and Trauma in

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4 5 6 7 8 9

10 11

12

13 14 15

Children’s Literature,” addresses the topics of depression and suicide, discussing Michael Rosen’s Sad Book (97–99) and Tan’s Red Tree (99–101) to demonstrate the importance of the counterpoint of words and images in children’s literature. In the oft-quoted observation of Peter Hollindale and Zena Sutherland, these offstage deaths are a mechanism “to dispose of inconvenient parents” (259). David Lewis uses the terms “interanimate” and “interanimation” throughout Reading Contemporary Picturebooks. For an analysis of Velthuijs’s book, see Clement, “Death and the Empathic Embrace” 3, 8. For a more recent discussion, see Kirsten Jacobson’s “Heidegger, Winnicott, and The Velveteen Rabbit.” Brown’s The Dead Bird, originally published in 1938, did not receive critical or popular recognition until it was re-released in 1958 with Charlip’s illustrations. The most recent of these bibliographies is Alice Crosetto and Rajinder Garcha’s Death, Loss, and Grief in Literature for Youth (2013). Also of value are David Sadler’s 1991 survey of 29 books published after 1969 about death of grandparents; three annotated bibliographies, all by Charles Corr and published in a special edition of Omega: Journal of Death and Dying on “Death-Related Literature for Children” (2003–04); Corr’s “Appendix” (2010); and Angela Wiseman’s 2013 survey of 89 picturebooks “providing support and understanding for children” coping with loss (13). For a discussion of Bauer’s book, see Clement, “Death and the Empathic Embrace” (4, 8), and of Stark’s book, see Penni Cotton’s “Old Age and Death in Northern European Picture Books.” In a number of the Mexican-American books that Denise Dávila discusses in “Deadly Celebrations: Realistic Fiction Picture Books and el Día de los Muertos,” the timely deaths of grandmothers are used to invite child readers on a touristic experience of customs that are anglicized and therefore misrepresented. Viktor Johansson argues in his article “ ‘I am scared too’ ” that Don Bartlett’s English translation, which deletes the references to dirt and worms, affects the perception of death and dying: “This translation misses the complexity of Garmann’s worldview, the connection to nature he shows involving both decomposition and a religious understanding of death, and also misses a dimension of how Garmann thinks about starting school. After becoming soil, there is still the hope of the starry wagon and traveling through heaven” (87; 106n20). This anecdote is developed throughout Kübler-Ross’s To Live Until We Say Good-Bye (13, 50, 57, 59–60, 73–74). These are discussed in detail by Sala and Valios in their generally astute commentary on La visite de petite mort (126–29) published in International Journal of Language and Literature, which Cabell’s Scholarly Analytics blacklists as a predatory journal for nine violations. For a more detailed analysis, see Clement, “Death and the Empathic Embrace” 5–8.

Works Cited Primary Sources Alcott, Louisa May. Little Women. 1868. Penguin Classics, 1989. Bauer, Jutta. Opas Engle. Carlsen, 2001. Translated Grandpa’s Angel. Walker, 2005. Bouchard, Hervé. Harvey: Comment je suis devenu invisible. Illustrated Janice Nadeau. Les Éditions de la Pastèque, 2009. Translated Harvey: How I Became Invisible. Groundwood, 2010. Brown, Margaret Wise. The Dead Bird. 1938. Illustrated Remy Charlip. HarperCollins, 1958. Burnett, Frances Hodgson. A Little Princess. 1905. HarperCollins, 1963. Burnett, Frances Hodgson. The Secret Garden. 1911. HarperCollins, 2010. Crowther, Kitty. Moi et rien. Pastel/l’école des loisirs, 2000. Crowther, Kitty. La visite de petite mort. Pastel/l’école des loisirs, 2004. Dahl, Roald. James and the Giant Peach. Knopf, 1961. Erlbruch, Wolf. Ente, Tod und Tulpe. Antje Kunstmann GmbH, 2007. Translated Duck, Death and the Tulip. Gecko, 2008. Erlbruch, Wolf. Die Große Frage. Peter Hammer, 2004. Translated The Big Question. Europa Editions, 2005. Fox, Mem. Tough Boris. Illustrated Kathryn Brown. HMH Books for Young Readers, 1994. Hole, Stian. Annas himmel. Cappelen Damm, 2013. Translated Anna’s Heaven. Eerdmans, 2014. Hole, Stian. Garmanns sommer. J.W. Cappelens, 2006. Translated Garmann’s Summer. Eerdmans, 2008.

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Death Narratives in Children’s Literature Jeffers, Oliver. The Heart and the Bottle. Philomel, 2010. Lunde, Stein Erik. Eg kan ikkje sove no. Illustrated Øyvind Torseter. Samlaget, 2008. Translated My Father’s Arms Are a Boat. Enchanted Lion, 2013. Miles, Miska. Annie and the Old One. Illustrated Peter Parnall. Little, Brown, 1971. Montgomery, L. M. Anne of Green Gables. 1908. Seal, 1983. Montgomery, L. M. Rilla of Ingleside. 1921. Seal, 1987. Raschka, Chris. The Purple Balloon. Schwartz & Wade, 2007. Ringtved, Glenn. Græd blot hjerte. Illustrated Charlotte Pardi. Gyldendal, 2001. Translated Cry, Heart, But Never Break. Enchanted Lion, 2016. Rosen, Michael. Michael Rosen’s Sad Book. Illustrated Quentin Blake. Walker, 2004. Rosen, Michael, and Annemarie Young. What is Humanism? How do you live without a god? And Other Big Questions for Kids. Wayland, 2016. Rowling, J. K. Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. Bloomsbury, 1997. Stark, Ulf. Kan du Vissla Johanna. Illustrated Anna Höglund. Bonnier Carlsen, 1992. Translated Can You Whistle, Johanna?. Gecko, 2005. Tan, Shaun. The Red Tree. Lothian, 2001. Tejima, Keizaburo. Oohakuchou no sora. 1983. Translated Swan Sky. Philomel, 1988. Twain, Mark. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. 1884. Penguin Classics, 2014. Varley, Susan. Badger’s Parting Gifts. Andersen, 1984. Velthuijs, Max. Kikker en het vogeltje. Leopold, 1991. Translated Frog and the Birdsong. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1991. Watt, Mélanie. Bug in a Vacuum. Tundra, 2015. White Deer of Autumn. The Great Change. Illustrated Carol Grigg. Beyond Words Publishing, 1992. White, E. B. Charlotte’s Web. 1952. Illustrated Garth Williams. HarperCollins, 2012. Wild, Margaret. Harry & Hopper. Illustrated Freya Blackwood. Scholastic Australia, 2009. Williams, Margery. The Velveteen Rabbit or How Toys Become Real. 1922. Illustrated William Nicholson. HarperCollins, 1999. Yumoto, Kazumi. Kuma to yamaneko. Illustrated Komako Sakai. Kawade Shobo Shinsha, 2008. Translated The Bear and the Wildcat. Gecko, 2011. Zusak, Markus. The Book Thief. Illustrated Trudy White. Knopf, 2005.

Secondary Sources Abate, Michelle Ann. Bloody Murder: The Homicide Tradition in Children’s Literature. Johns Hopkins UP, 2013. Agosta, Lucien L. E.B. White: The Children’s Books. Twayne, 1995. Beckett, Sandra L. Crossover Picturebooks: A Genre for All Ages. Routledge, 2012. Bohlmann, Markus P. J. “Machinic Liaisons: Death’s Dance with Children in Markus Zusak’s The Book Thief.” Clement and Jamali, pp. 255–69. Clement, Lesley D. “Death and the Empathic Embrace in Four Contemporary Picture Books.” Bookbird: A Journal of International Children’s Literature, vol. 51, no. 4, 2013, pp. 1–10. doi: 10.1353/bkb.2014.0018. Clement, Lesley D. “Introduction: Flying Kites and Other Life-Death Matters.” Clement and Jamali, pp. 1–19. Clement, Lesley D., and Leyli Jamali, editors. Global Perspectives on Death in Children’s Literature. Routledge, 2016. Corr, Charles A. “Appendix: Selected Books to Be Read by or with Children.” Children’s Encounters with Death, Bereavement, and Coping, edited by Charles A. Corr and David E Balk. Springer, 2010, pp. 455–476. Corr, Charles A. “Bereavement, Grief, and Mourning in Death-Related Literature for Children.” Omega: Journal of Death and Dying, vol. 48, no. 4, 2003–2004, pp. 337–363. doi: 10.2190/0RUK-J18N-9400-BHAV. Corr, Charles A. “Grandparents in Death-Related Literature for Children.” Omega: Journal of Death and Dying, vol. 48, no. 4, 2003–2004, pp. 383–397. doi: 10.2190/UHT5-KYTM-ANWF-VBD5. Corr, Charles A. “Pet Loss in Death-Related Literature for Children.” Omega: Journal of Death and Dying, vol. 48, no. 4, 2003–2004, pp. 399–414. doi: 10.2190/HXQY-DU5D-YC39-XKJ9. Costello, Peter. “Toward a Phenomenology of Transition: E.B. White’s Charlotte’s Web and a Child’s Process of Reading Herself into the Novel.” Libri & Liberi, vol. 5, no. 1, 2016, pp. 13–36. doi: 10. 21066/carcl.libri.2016-05(01).0001.

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Lesley D. Clement Cotton, Penni. “Old Age and Death in Northern European Picture Books: Achieving Empathy Through Textual and Filmic Images of Sweden’s Kan du Vissla Johanna.” Clement and Jamali, pp. 161–76. Crisp, Thomas. “ ‘Some Dead Spider!’: Three Variations on the Death of Charlotte in Print and Film.” Crossing Textual Boundaries in International Children’s Literature, edited by Lance Weldy. Cambridge Scholars, 2011, pp. 94–108. Crosetto, Alice, and Rajinder Garcha. Death, Loss, and Grief in Literature for Youth: A Selective Annotated Bibliography for K-12. Scarecrow, 2013. Daniel, Carolyn. Voracious Children: Who Eats Whom in Children’s Literature. Routledge, 2006. Dávila, Denise. “Deadly Celebrations: Realistic Fiction Picture Books and el Día de los Muertos.” Clement and Jamali, pp. 74–86. Gaiman, Neil. “Neil Gaiman on Comics and Scaring Children, with Françoise Mouly and Art Spiegelman.” Toon Books, October 2014. vimeo.com/109769310. Gubar, Marah. Artful Dodgers: Reconceiving the Golden Age of Children’s Literature. Oxford UP, 2009. Hole, Stian. “Author Interview: Stian Hole.” Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., May 2008. www. eerdmans.com/Pages/Item/8992/Author-Interview-Stian-Hole.aspx. Hollindale, Peter, and Zena Sutherland. “Internationalism, Fantasy, and Realism: 1945–70.” Children’s Literature: An Illustrated History, edited by Peter Hunt. Oxford UP, 1995, pp. 252–288. Jacobson, Kirsten. “Heidegger, Winnicott, and The Velveteen Rabbit: Anxiety, Toys, and the Drama of Metaphysics.” Philosophy in Children’s Literature, edited by Peter R. Costello. Lexington, 2012, pp. 1–20. Johansson, Viktor. “ ‘I am scared too’: Children’s Literature for an Ethics beyond Moral Concepts.” The Journal of Aesthetic Education, vol. 47, no. 4, 2013, pp. 80–109. doi: 10.5406/jaesteduc.47.4.0080. Kellehear, Allan. “Death and Renewal in The Velveteen Rabbit: A Sociological Reading.” Journal of NearDeath Studies, vol. 12, no. 1, 1993, pp. 35–51. digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc799238/m2/ 1/high_res_d/vol12-no1-35.pdf. Kübler-Ross, Elisabeth. To Live Until We Say Good-Bye. Touchstone, 1978. Lewis, David. Reading Contemporary Picturebooks: Picturing Text. Routledge, 2001. Matthews, Gareth B. The Philosophy of Childhood. Harvard UP, 1994. “More About Kitty Crowther.” Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award, 2010. www.alma.se/en/Laureates/2010Kitty-Crowther/More-About-Kitty-Crowther. Phillips, Jessica. “ ‘There is No Sun Without The Shadow and it is Essential to Know The Night’: Albert Camus’ Philosophy of the Absurd and Shaun Tan’s The Red Tree.” Children’s Literature in Education, 2018. doi: 10.1007/s10583-017-9342-6. Reynolds, Kimberley. Radical Children’s Literature: Future Visions and Aesthetic Transformations in Children’s Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Sadler, David. “ ‘Grandpa Died Last Night’: Children’s Books about the Death of Grandparents.” Children’s Literature Association Quarterly, vol. 16, no. 4, 1991, pp. 246–250. Project Muse. Sala, Rosa Tabernero, and Virginia Calvo Valios. “Children’s Literature and Taboo Topics: Approaches to Kitty Crowther’s Work.” International Journal of Language and Literature, vol. 5, no. 2, 2017, pp. 121–131. doi: 10.15640/ijll.v5n2a13. White, E. B. “E.B. White: The Art of the Essay No. 1.” Interview by George Plimpton and Frank H. Crowther, The Paris Review, issue 48, 1969. www.theparisreview.org/interviews/4155/e-b-white-theart-of-the-essay-no-1-e-b-white. “Winners of 2009 Governor General’s Literary Awards Announced by the Canada Council for the Arts.” Canada.ca (Government of Canada), 17 Nov. 2009, www.canada.ca/en/news/archive/2009/11/ winners-2009-governor-general-literary-awards-announced-canada-council-arts.html. Wiseman, Angela M. “Summer’s End and Sad Goodbyes: Children’s Picturebooks About Death and Dying,” Children’s Literature in Education, vol. 44, no. 1, 2013, pp. 1–14. doi: 10.1007/s10583-0129174-3. Yi-Ching, Su. “Kitty Crowther: Illustrator, Belgium.” Bookbird: A Journal of International Children’s Literature, vol. 42, no. 4, 2004, p. 29. Academic One File.

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10 IN THE U-BEND WITH MOANING MYRTLE Thinking about Death in YA Literature Karen Coats

Myrtle Elizabeth Warren was fourteen years old when she became the first person killed by Lord Voldemort (then Tom Riddle) in J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series. Known after her death as Moaning Myrtle, she provides both comic relief and vital information as she haunts a first-floor girls’ bathroom, spying on the living and “sitting in the U-Bend, thinking about death” (Rowling, Chapter 10). Certainly, life at Hogwarts gives Myrtle, and the millions of readers who have spent countless hours immersed in the wizarding world, plenty to think about. From beginning to end, the series asks readers to ponder what death means, what might be worth killing and dying for, and whether trying to avoid death is ultimately worth the cost. Rowling comes down firmly against the latter, beginning with the destruction of the philosopher’s stone that grants eternal life at the end of the first book, and expanding her view by presenting Voldemort’s efforts to avoid his own death by intentionally murdering six people (on top of the unplanned murders of Myrtle and Cedric Diggory, who were at the wrong place at the wrong time) as the measure of the depths of his evil. On the contrary, though Harry’s decision to die is an agonizing one for him, his willingness to sacrifice his life is rewarded with the opportunity to make a choice about whether he wants to return to the fight. The moral message about death is ultimately clear: seeking to preserve one’s life at any cost is not acceptable, whereas laying down one’s life for others is a noble act. Other deaths in the series showcase varied emotional responses and attitudes toward death. These include the laughter inspired by the Hogwarts ghosts and the fear and disgust prompted by Death Eaters, werewolves, vampires, and other creatures who menace characters readers have grown to love. But more complicated responses emerge that accord with Elizabeth Kübler-Ross’s familiar stages of grief. The writers on the online community Pottermore suggest that readers, along with Harry, experience disbelief and denial at the deaths of Sirius Black and Albus Dumbledore; Dobby the house elf ’s death evokes a desire to plead and bargain against his sacrifice; the loss of Fred Weasley triggers Harry’s guilt; gentle Remus Lupin’s death, coming so quickly after he finds happiness with Nymphadora Tonks and their baby, inspires anger and is accompanied by depression at the loss of Tonks as well; and finally, the memories Severus Snape bequeaths to Harry lead to acceptance not necessarily of Snape’s death, but of the fact that Harry had misjudged him all along (“Most Devastating Deaths”).

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The multivalent presentation of death in this one series points to a theoretical problem: How could one possibly begin to make sense of the moral, ethical, psychological, and narrative presence and functions of death in Young Adult (YA) literature? I think the task necessarily begins with understanding something about the conflicting cultural attitudes toward the literature’s implied readership of teens, as well as the category of YA literature itself. To begin with, the age of the readership is ill-defined. Younger children have always wanted to read “up,” and a push by parents for elementary students to read above their grade level, as well as the recent trend of transforming YA books into multimedia franchises, has led to younger and younger children picking up books like the Hunger Games, Twilight, and Harry Potter series, all of which heavily dependent on representations of death to drive their action. On the other side of adolescence, though, adults make up more than half the readers of YA fiction, according to a 2012 study conducted by Bowker Market Research (“New Study”). Academics, cultural critics, and authors themselves cite a host of reasons for the appeal of YA texts for adults, naming everything from a nostalgia for simple story arcs, to a desire to recapture “the intensity of the first time,” to a need to understand what it’s like to come of age in today’s social climate (Kitchener). My own sense is that at least some of the crossover appeal of these books has to do with the current cultural obsession with diverse, provisional, and politically salient identities in a period that values perpetual makeovers more than stable, often repressive, and unitary ideas of what it means to be a mature adult. As Virginia Zimmerman notes, in contemporary culture, we “continue to change, continue to come of age,” so narratives that focus on the losing and re-finding of identity mirror contemporary experience even for adults (qtd. in Kitchener). If there is one thing that defines a YA text, it is a focus on what is involved in negotiating an identity that feels authentic while gaining positive recognition among one’s peers and from one’s culture. This process is dialogic: that is, as older generations seek to preserve and pass on their values, young people challenge and change the culture they are purportedly growing into.1 Still, there might be another reason for the crossover appeal that has to do more specifically with the way YA literature fills a need that real adults are less willing to address directly. The perpetual “coming of age” phenomenon that Zimmerman notes is indicative of a pervasive desire on the part of contemporary adults to deny death. This desire, according to psychotherapist Nick Luxmoore, results in an unwillingness to talk openly and honestly about the inevitability of death with teens, and instead to project fantasies of perpetual youth and vaulted expectations onto young people in an attempt to defend ourselves against the knowledge of mortality. Writing out of his experience as a school counselor, Luxmoore argues that teens are much more preoccupied with death than adults would like to believe, and yet they have few opportunities to have honest discussions about their anxieties regarding the fact that life is finite. He points out that young children will ask questions about death that result in any number of mythic or stilted explanations from their uncomfortable caregivers. By the time those questions resurface in adolescence, however, teens have internalized a belief transmitted from their adults that death is a taboo subject, profoundly unfair and something to be avoided as long as possible; they have learned that death is a site of fear, blame, and shame, altogether too upsetting to consider and discuss aloud. But, Luxmoore continues, one of adults’ most prevalent defenses against their own fear of death involves looking to young people to challenge its authority on our behalf, to live on after us, to realize potentials that we have failed to achieve. So most adults, and especially parents and educators, focus talks with young people on what they need to do to achieve successful, happy futures, rather than having meaningful discussions about the causes, consequences, and meaning of death. This lacuna in our injunctive conversations fails to engage teens’ emergent questions 106

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about meaning in and of a life that they know will result in death. In thinking about death, they experience curiosity, survivor guilt, existential exhaustion, and fears of annihilation. They wonder about whether they matter enough to be missed and by whom; gravitate between pity and envy when someone else dies; and puzzle over how to display their emotional response to death, including what’s wrong with them if their expressions of grief don’t look like those of others. The problem is that Western culture separates death and its rituals from the rest of life, attempting to disavow its power over everyday experience and in fact failing to understand how much of teen behavior is linked to the fear, anger, and anxiety that accompanies a burgeoning awareness that death holds the last word, the ultimate authority, over all of carnal existence. Enter YA literature, which does not shy away from representations of death, and thus offers an opportunity for teens (and adults) to imagine their way into a confrontation with their biggest, though likely least to be openly acknowledged, fear. Just as characters in YA texts pose value-laden questions about gender, sexuality, embodiment, race, ethnicity, intelligence, ability, neurodiversity, mental health, and social responsibility in ways that correspond to and press against the values of those around them, they also, in sometimes overt but often more oblique ways, ask ideological questions about the meaning of life and death. And because literature for young adults is a genre that almost always rejects despair and instead offers hope as its concluding gesture, the teen characters most often emerge from whatever dilemmas they encounter embraced by a small community that loves and accepts who they have become or faithfully mourns them and finds meaning in their lives if they die. As a living literary form, YA literature is not, however, a coherent genre with definable, distinctive, and consistent features that give it definition and make it recognizable across time, and this includes its approach to representations of death. Like its target audience, it is remarkably nimble in its response to epistemic shifts and cultural preoccupations. It is trendy in a way that makes categorical pronouncements about the attitudes toward and roles of death in YA texts tricky, as such pronouncements tend to date the scholarship in which they appear. For instance, Roberta Seelinger Trites could persuasively argue in 2000 that “death is the sine qua non of adolescent literature, the defining factor that distinguishes it both from children’s and adult literature” (118). At that time, she could confidently generalize that death in YA is most often “depicted in terms of maturation when the protagonist accepts the permanence of mortality” and embraces his or her Heideggerian “Being-towards-death” (119). Now, two decades into the new millennium, such a generalization no longer holds, and as such, it loses its force as a distinguishing quality. Given trends toward an extended period of adolescence bleeding into what has been called “emerging adulthood,” such maturation is often delayed. As a result, contemporary YA texts frequently present death in ways Trites finds more relevant to literature for younger children, wherein death represents a symbolic and/or actual separation from parents or, more metaphorically, from childhood itself. Another consideration is that the explosive generic variety of YA texts in recent years has resulted in the proliferation of perspectives that Trites attributes to literature written for adult readers, which “confronts death from such a variety of intricate perspectives that it seems difficult to trace a pattern on the topic” (119). So, while some contemporary YA texts still focus on an adolescent protagonist confronting and accepting mortality as Trites avers, the causes, effects, modes, and functions of death and dying in contemporary YA literature are far too multivalent to be subsumed under a single definition or ideological pattern. Instead of pattern tracing, then, what I attempt to do in this essay is pose what I see as certain relevant questions about the ways death is used in YA literature as a plot device, a metaphor for individuation and childhood’s end, a call for greater social awareness and broader empathy, and a quest for what it means to be post-human. Even as I frame my questions, however, I do so with the caveat that 107

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these are not comprehensive and are likely to become quickly dated as YA literature continues to innovate its content for an audience defined by its status as transitional. Each question I identify, however, speaks to the ways in which death functions as an ideological catalyst in the dialogic formation of teen values in contemporary culture.

Plotting Death YA fiction, like fiction for children and adults, varies in its level of seriousness, and this includes the level of seriousness with which death is represented. The death of a boy as a result of a kiss laced with peanut residue, for instance, is not a site for a prolonged exploration of grief, but is instead a necessary starting point for a whodunit mystery series that follows the conventions of a police procedural or forensic mystery, but with ordinary-teen-turned-detective Scarlett Wakefield sifting clues and narrowly avoiding danger as she seeks to clear her name and expose the facts and the perpetrator of the cleverly planned murder (Henderson). Because the reader never really gets to know the victim, the focus is on the teen’s competence as she figures things out, modeling for readers the process of epistemological search. Though the emotional style and ordinary setting will be structurally familiar to fans of a Miss Marple or Father Brown “cozy” mystery, the character responses are still a bit jarring in their neglect of any emotion or care beyond mild regret for the murdered teen, precisely because he is a teen. In these types of books, we might posit that the idea that life is so precarious that a casual kiss might end in death is untenable unless undergirded by an ideology that such an occurrence is not an accident, but a crime – that is, the choice of the mystery or crime genre subtly hints that there must be a motivated human agent responsible for the act, someone to blame for the death of a young person. When death is an instigating plot device in a YA mystery, then, a key thematic question is: Who’s responsible, and how can we find out? Tenacity, intelligence, and perseverance are the responses rather than grief or acceptance. Other YA genres, such as horror, dystopias, and psychological thrillers, also put forth this ideological premise that death is something unnatural rather than accidental or inevitable. Although these plots also require and reward tenacity and perseverance for the survivors, they add to the theme of external culpability the idea that death is a relentless adversary to fear. Whether the threat of death comes from six-foot-tall praying mantises (e.g., Smith A., Grasshopper Jungle), classmates who have turned into ravenous zombies (e.g., Beaudoin, The Infects), nefarious governments seeking to keep their citizenry cowed and cooperative (e.g., Collins, The Hunger Games), ordinary-looking sociopaths (e.g., Donaldson, I Know You Remember), or technology gone wrong (e.g., Anderson, Feed; Bick, Ashes trilogy; Roth, Divergent series; etc.), the message is that the reason death exists is because there are people who either have the means and desire to kill or are clueless about the likely results of their technologies; the protagonist’s goals are thus to avoid being killed and to bring the perpetrators to justice. As a result, there is very little acceptance of death in texts like these; instead, there is the sense that death is an aberration that can be understood or avoided if only the teen runs fast enough, fights hard enough, and/or figures out who or what is responsible and stops the culprit(s) before they have the chance to kill again.

Individuation and Childhood’s End In addition to being a plot motivator, one of the primary reasons death is so ubiquitous in YA literature is because it offers a handy metaphor for the grief of leaving childhood’s naiveté behind and taking up the responsibility of caring for oneself psychologically if not physically. 108

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New affective burdens imposed by hormonal fluctuations and greater cognitive awareness impinge upon the teen from the inside, while increased expectations for achievement and independent decision-making seem to come from all sides. Folk wisdom has long held the view that teens think they are invincible, such that they engage in risky behaviors with little thought that they could die as a result. Luxmoore offers a different explanation, suggesting that risky behaviors are to some degree performances in rebellious response to death as the ultimate authority figure in teen’s lives. In other words, they engage in risky behaviors precisely because they have learned that they will inevitably die, and they want to see how close they are brave enough to get, to test and perhaps flout death’s authority over them, as it were. Other authority figures – parents, teachers, religious and political leaders, and other purveyors of ideologies – are material stand-ins for death’s overbearing authority, which ultimately resides in its ability to annihilate the individual the teen seeks and is expected to become. Since the late 1990s, neurological studies of the teenage brain have offered yet another explanation. Such studies show that teens lead with their emotions when it comes to processing information and solving problems. In response to the same stimuli, for instance, teen amygdalas light up in contrast to adult prefrontal cortexes, which are responsible for executive brain functions such as strategic planning, risk assessment, impulse control, and emotion regulation. A growth spurt of gray matter in the prefrontal cortex occurs just prior to puberty, but myelination, the process that facilitates communication between this new growth and the rest of the brain, is ongoing at least until the age of 25. This means that the executive functions of the frontal lobe are newly emergent skills for teens, but they do not develop in a vacuum. Instead, neo-Piagetians argue that capacious self-images that effectively integrate affective and cognitive dimensions of thought are dependent upon positive social interactions, ongoing language development, and the increasing cognitive ability to entertain higher-order abstractions (Harter 66). Literary narratives can help facilitate the development of executive functions by articulating complex emotional responses to both ordinary social interactions and traumatic experiences, but to do so, they must be affectively engaging. According to cognitive literary theorist Michael Burke, death is one of the most emotionally affecting themes in literature, accompanied by mothers, childhood, home, and an inability to communicate. As a result, characters in YA novels are often put through emotional wringers of conflict and loss in order to emerge at book’s end as individuals who are more resilient and better at perspective-taking, with a greater sense of themselves as individuals. That said, who dies and how they die make a thematic difference in teens’ understanding of their identity and place in the social order. As in life, so in literature for teens, “[a]lthough the loss of anyone can be traumatic and difficult to accept, it seems that the mourning of different persons creates a qualitatively different experience” (O’Brien et al. 432). While the goal for writers is to find adequately interesting, original, and affecting expressions for those qualitatively different experiences, some patterns emerge when the death a girl protagonist must come to terms with is that of a mother rather than a father. In Annette Curtis Klause’s The Silver Kiss, for instance, teenaged Zoe is facing the slow but inevitable loss of her mother to cancer. Klause figures Zoe’s psychological entanglement with her mother by emphasizing their physical resemblance as well as Zoe’s refusal to eat, her volitional weight loss echoing her mother’s wasting away but also functioning as an immature and dysfunctional bargain, as she half-heartedly believes that she can die in her mother’s stead. Zoe’s emotional journey of separation from her mother begins when she meets Simon, a seventeenth-century teenage vampire who is pursuing Christopher, his brother, who was made a vampire when he was only six years old, and who then promptly bit and killed their mother. Christopher 109

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leverages the sympathy women feel for a lost child to lure them to their deaths. In the symbolic matrix established by the characters in the novel, Simon shows Zoe the banality of an existence that denies natural death; he is profoundly lonely, exhausted, and depressed, and although he is willing to entertain Zoe’s idea of turning her mother into a vampire, he explains to her that the condition will not heal her mother’s suffering, but instead prolong it for eternity. Christopher, then, brings the ideological message home by representing the horror of a child whose consumptive, insatiable desire killed his own mother as well as any woman who stands in for her, so he must be killed as a symbolic effigy representing Zoe’s own need to “kill” her inner child so that her mother can be released to die in peace. A flipped version of this dynamic can be found in John Green’s The Fault in Our Stars. The teenage protagonist, Hazel, experiences a sense of peace regarding her own death only when she finds out that her mother has gone back to school and has a plan for the work she will do after Hazel dies; until that point, Hazel is worried that her mother’s life will end when hers does. In both of these cases, and in many others, emotional maturity is gained only when the girl is able to separate from her mother, with death acting as the catalyst. An especially interesting part of this pattern is that when the mother dies, the girl is left to come of age under the care of an emotionally distant father. These fathers behave like Zoe’s: that is, they disappear into their own pain, leaving the teen to find her path through grief without emotional support while taking on domestic and caregiving activities. In terms symbolic and actual, then, the dead-mother trope reinforces traditional gender norms, at least for girls. A dead father, however, tends to function differently. When fathers die, as does Vivian’s in Klause’s Blood and Chocolate, Katniss’s in Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games, and Donna’s in Jen Violi’s Putting Makeup on Dead People, girl characters experience various forms of empowerment unavailable to them under the rule of their fathers. In Blood and Chocolate, for instance, instead of disappearing into her grief, Vivian’s widowed mother steps into a leadership role, brings a younger man into her bed, and actively encourages her daughter to embrace her full-blooded, carnal sexuality as a werewolf. In The Hunger Games, Katniss takes over her father’s role as her family’s provider, and the skills she learns as a hunter enable her to emerge victorious in the deadly arena and become both a leader and a symbol for rebellion against a corrupt government. Defying her mother’s wishes in Putting Makeup on Dead People, Donna copes with her grief and finds a mature sense of self by embracing the task of lovingly preparing bodies for open-casket funerals and being an empathetic presence for grieving family members. These are emblematic cases of girls for whom the death of their fathers certainly causes deep pain, but also in some measure enables them to escape traditional gender roles and rebel against societal expectations. The patterns for boys are somewhat different and more various. Boys who have lost their mothers, like Jerry in Robert Cormier’s The Chocolate War and Matt in Jason Reynolds’s The Boy in the Black Suit, face the challenge of not becoming like their emotionally constipated fathers. After the death of their wives, Jerry’s father becomes a workaholic, and Matt’s father drinks heavily and stops working. Neither boy knows how to express his grief, and they both experience a degree of guilt as a result. Whereas Jerry uses football, rebellion, and isolation as means of self-harm, Matt begins to sit in on funerals, having taken a job at a local funeral home. There he finds a more adequate father figure in his boss, Mr. Ray, but he also finds a sense of comfort and a site for emotional modeling as he watches other people grieve. Rather than allowing grief to isolate him, he eventually invests in his community when he meets Lovey, a girl who has lost more than he has, and yet volunteers to help others. While Jerry’s grieving process remains incomplete, Matt’s results in finding emotional supports and replacements for the mother he lost. We might theorize this difference by pointing to the 110

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prevailing ideologies of the self during the time period and/or as they relate to ideologies of race and gender: Jerry is emblematic of the white, masculine teen rebel, standing alone against conformity and authoritarianism during the Vietnam era, whereas Matt represents a twentyfirst-century understanding of black feminist subjectivity as interpersonal, communityoriented, and intersectional. YA books wherein boys face the death of their fathers, however, are much rarer. Fathers are more often absent for reasons other than death: either they were never in the picture, or they have left to pursue new families. In any case, the pattern that emerges is most often one of iconoclastic response, as boys come to terms with the fact that the fathers they have lionized or sought to emulate are deeply, perhaps irredeemably, flawed. Such is the case, for instance, with Chris Lynch’s Hothouse, where two boys lose their firefighter fathers in a house fire. At first the town considers the men heroes, but as more of the story emerges, it becomes clear that the men were not the saints everyone, including their sons, wants to remember them as. With apologies for spoilers, in Jason Reynolds’ Long Way Down, protagonist Will’s father appears as both a victim and a perpetrator of gun violence, joining a chorus of ghosts asking Will to reconsider his plan to avenge the death of his brother while revealing that the circumstances of his own death do not match the myth of retributive justice surrounding it. Thus, while girls usually separate from their dead mothers in ways that allow them to retain a positive sense of their moms as role models, boys must not only bear their father’s actual deaths, but must also metaphorically kill them as heroes in order to achieve maturity.

Awareness, Empathy, and Activism In contrast with confronting the death of a parent, books that feature the deaths of classmates, siblings, and first loves hit closer to home, resulting in the opportunity for readers to “griev[e] the inevitability of their own death” (O’Brien et al. 437). The popularity of what is derisively known as “grief-porn” or “sick-lit” supports Luxmoore’s contention that teens are extremely interested in death, but that they need opportunities to convert their anxiety into narrative suspense, and consider and evaluate character responses as possible models for their own behavior when they are faced with a death in real life. These books thus function as metaphorical vaccines for teens who haven’t yet confronted death; that is, by introducing death and its aftermath in a vicarious way, they can help their readers develop and evaluate strategies for coping with the deaths they will inevitably face. For readers who have experienced the death of someone close to them, they can provide sites of identification so that readers do not feel so alone in their grief, and offer insight into the behaviors of themselves and others who are unwilling or unable to articulate or share their feelings openly. Books featuring dead and dying teens are highly emotional and very often melodramatic, but what is perhaps ideologically disturbing is the fact that the characters who die are most often either socially or psychologically abject. That is, they are characters who disturb our sense of what constitutes, in Kristeva’s words, a “clean and proper” body, be it physical or social (4). There is a kind of comfort in the fact that the reader is still living at the end of the book; no matter how strong my emotional investment or identification with a character, the person who dies, and the ones who are left behind to grieve, are other, not me – I have faced death and survived it. This stands in some contrast to Trites’s argument that the acceptance of one’s mortality is the distinguishing feature of maturation for characters in YA fiction. Instead, I argue that – in the case of peer deaths at least – the goal is to resist acceptance and instead to present the unfairness of the world in such a way as to inspire activism toward social justice. To accomplish this goal, characters who represent threats to the social order are sacrificed in a 111

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paradoxical narrative gesture that at once prompts sadness and outrage yet ultimately preserves and even shores up the individual and social order the deaths critique. The ideological question here is this: What prompts the most outrage, and who deserves sympathy for their textual death? YA’s quick responsiveness to ethical flashpoints, cultural change, and the newest ways of thinking about identity, the self, and the social world enables readers to see the abject as a moving target. Whereas a strong and persistent desire for a mythical space of innocence, protection, and care renders ideologies of childhood slow to change, the teenage years are more often seen as a time of awakening awareness of existential, social, and political realities. At the same time, teens have not yet settled into ways of thinking dominated by cynicism. Thus, the literature on offer tends to usher in some measure of disillusion and disenchantment with the world while still playing to, and often insisting upon, a romantic idealism that teens have a special insight into the social, political, and moral problems of their day, and can effect solutions through heroic, often violent and revolutionary, action. The way I explain it to my students is this: young teens know they aren’t getting their letters to Hogwarts, but they still believe they are destined to do something amazing or extreme that will fix some broken aspect of the world while making them famous. This combination of romantic idealism and material disillusion is thus one of the family resemblances or patterns among YA texts which bear on the consideration of how death functions in the literature. A popular version of the romance genre, for instance, has long preserved the idealization of romantic teen love by killing off one of the lovers before the realities and complications of a long-term relationship can interfere with the myth of perfection; Lurlene McDaniel alone has written more than 60 wildly popular novels that adopt this convention. The nobility of her young characters who are dying from cancer, AIDS, or failing organs has undeniably salutary effects: as McDaniel notes on her website, her novels have prompted fans to “become nurses, doctors, researchers, teachers, missionaries, Mothers, and writers. All because you once read books that inspired you.” The deaths in her novels are considered unfair because of the random nature of currently incurable diseases, but other types of realistic YA fiction facilitate the awakening of a social conscience of their characters (and, arguably, their readers) through deaths caused by an unfair social order. Beginning with S. E. Hinton’s The Outsiders in 1968, and continuing until very recently, characters who challenge the values of white, middle-class, educated, able-bodied, cishet society have been marked for death in order to foreground issues of social injustice. In books with such narratives of social critique as their central concern, characters are sacrificed so that their deaths function as a catalyst for empathy and outrage. However, as social mores shift and identities get redefined, there is a contingency to this project in terms of who and what deserve teens’ pity and outrage, and with whom it is desirable or even okay to empathize. Does a teen who dies by suicide, for instance, deserve the same sympathetic response as a young person dying of cancer? Jennifer Niven would say yes, and asks her readers to agree with her as Finn, an engaging young man with bipolar depression, loses a valiant effort to keep himself alive in All the Bright Places. Subtle shifts in language and sympathetic storytelling prompt readers to understand that Finn and others like him don’t kill themselves, but are victims of an often fatal psychosocial disease. Books like Angie Thomas’s The Hate U Give and Kekla Magoon’s How It Went Down feature ripped-from-the-headline accounts of black teens shot by police officers, in order to humanize the victims who quickly became depersonalized national symbols of a systemic problem, as well as to consider how such deaths affect individuals and inspire community action. Similarly, widespread environmental and political problems become personalized through deaths precipitated by the effects of climate

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change and flawed governmental interventions, such as those found in Sherri L. Smith’s Orleans and Don Brown’s nonfiction graphic novel, Drowned City: Hurricane Katrina and New Orleans. Each of these books translates a social problem that has resulted in unjust death into a personal one so that readers experience a more immediate connection; the intent is to create empathy and awareness that will be strong enough to lead to social action. But, as I noted, the effect may in fact be paradoxical. The characters who die in these books are those who represent threats to complacency on the one hand, or present problems too big for individual agency on the other. In Tiffany D. Jackson’s Monday’s Not Coming, for instance, protagonist Claudia’s best friend Monday has disappeared, and no one but Claudia seems to be worried about her. As the novel unfolds, readers learn that Monday’s mother is an abusive addict, desperately afraid of losing her children and of the encroaching gentrification of her Washington, DC, neighborhood, and that while Claudia’s mother, school personnel, and social workers have all tried to intervene, their efforts have been unsuccessful. So, though readers can be devastated by Monday’s fate, they have no entry points to imagine making a difference when all other systems of support have failed. The title, Monday’s Not Coming, is thus a projection of the lack of a future for people like Monday. In a similar vein, the secondary character, Rowan, in Peter Brown Hoffmeister’s Too Shattered for Mending is homeless, abused, and beginning to get involved in the drug trade that she has valiantly tried to resist; though she manages to save the main characters from their grim fates, her own death is inevitable as a result of the risks she takes to secure the future of others. The issues here are racial and economic injustice respectively, the problems are systemic, and the outcomes grim indeed. That these characters are both girls seems to be no accident as well, but a persistent pattern that surfaces an ideology of the “girl” in contemporary culture. A full exploration of that mythology is beyond the scope of this essay, so suffice it to say that the specter of the dead girl haunts and distorts the reality of the living in YA literature. Lost in the woods, asleep on a bier or in a glass coffin, the figure of the girl has long been a multivalent signifier and cognitive construct, most often associated with passive vulnerability, emotional sentimentality, and even childhood itself. In contemporary YA fiction, the “girl” transmogrifies into any person whose feminized presence poses a queer threat to agential adulthood. Therefore, she must die or be killed, as she is in scores of YA novels, sometimes returning as a ghost to bear witness to her violent death (e.g., Carter, I Stop Somewhere; Suma, 17 & Gone) or to punish the perpetrator (e.g., Blake, Anna Dressed in Blood), sometimes appearing as a dead body that prompts therapeutic empathy for a survivor (e.g., Mitchell, All the Things We Do in the Dark). Alternately, if she is allowed to live, she must become a killer herself, not so much in an act of positively inflected female agency, but in response to a social order that renders the feminine subject as its abject limit and perverse support (e.g., Roth, Divergent; Collins, The Hunger Games).

Death and the Posthuman A final pattern (ironically, a pattern that resists finality) can be found in the various ways YA literature explores the idea of posthumanism. Posthumanism takes many forms and encompasses many definitions, from material considerations of human–machine or human–animal hybridity to a metaphysical contemplation of the implications of taking human ways of being as the evaluative measure of all forms of embodiment and subjectivity. Explorations of all these definitions can be found in the corpus of YA literature but perhaps, given our starting point that teens are confronting and defending against the new knowledge of their own mortality, we should focus our attention on what YA literature has to say about these questions: If to be human is to be mortal, and yet this condition is the thing we seek to defend against, then what 113

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possibilities and threats are afforded to us by becoming more than, or other than, fully human? Is death final? Or do humans pass into other forms of existence after death? Obvious treatments can be found in books like the Twilight series (Meyer) and other fantasies wherein humans live in a world populated by ghosts, zombies, vampires, angels, and demons who transcend death. Because YA literature is predominantly secular, questions about life after death that have traditionally been addressed through religious inquiry are often metaphorized through such figures. Despite this, however, most of these texts offer warnings like those found in The Silver Kiss: that life after death is compromised by a lack of rest or of moral limits imposed by traditional ideologies of a final judgment, so that seeking to live on after natural death is usually a bad idea. Other explorations of posthumanism are found in science fiction, often with the same aim of preserving life after natural death. In Mary Pearson’s The Adoration of Jenna Fox, a girl’s consciousness has been downloaded into a computer, enabling her to awaken in a cyborg body after a car crash that should have been fatal. In John Corey Whalen’s Noggin, a boy with cancer opts to have his head cryogenically frozen until the technology is available for it to be transplanted onto a cancer-free body five years later. In Peter Dickinson’s Eva, a girl’s brain is transplanted into the body of a chimp when her own body is crushed in an accident. In each of these novels, the characters experience alienation as they try to figure out what it means to be human–other hybrids, but despite the difficult adjustments, the message seems to be that life as cyborgs is better than death. Similarly, after the first wave of hunger for human flesh caused by tainted meat results in massive carnage in Sean Beaudoin’s The Infects, the zombies calm down and organize, and there is a suggestion that perhaps their ways of being in the world are the next wave in human evolution, and might even make room for people with certain kinds of neurodiversity to thrive. Less hopeful messages can be found in Andrew Smith’s The Alex Crow and M. T. Anderson’s Feed. In the latter, a malfunctioning microchip implant leads to a character’s death, while perfectly functional ones induce stupidity and neoliberalism as well as unsightly lesions. The Alex Crow offers a more complex exploration of what could happen if, as Luxmoore speculates, “we’ve discarded our religious fantasies of immortality only to replace them with medical and technological fantasies” (13). The book follows the interrelated fates of Ariel, a fifteen-year-old Middle Eastern boy who should have died when a group of soldiers massacred his town but was saved by a jammed gun; a group of boys at a camp for teens with technology addictions; a humanoid creature frozen in ice, recovered by an arctic expedition in the nineteenth century and then resuscitated in the twenty-first; a reanimated dead crow who is clinically depressed; a female psychologist with a plan to annihilate the male of the species; and a homicide bomber whose implanted microchip is malfunctioning as he heads toward the camp. As the bizarre threads come together, it becomes clear that while people are doing everything we can to bring about our own destruction, there are fates worse than death, especially if those fates mean losing the very things that make us human.

Final Thoughts My claim throughout this essay has been that to theorize death in YA literature, we need to know something about its intended readership and the kind of literature it is, including the ideological implications of the questions it poses. Regarding teen readers, it is important to understand that their brains work differently than those of children and adults, and that their identities and concerns emerge in dialogic response to the culture. Regarding the literature, I would emphasize that the ideological and thematic questions I have presented here rarely 114

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work in isolation; most YA texts offer complex explorations, and both implicit and explicit messages regarding the nature and function of death, while telling their deeply affecting stories. But while some texts do in fact trace arcs of development for their characters through KüblerRoss’s stages from denial to acceptance of death as an inevitable part of life or even a restful reward for a life well lived, I would argue that more YA texts, especially in the past few decades, stop short of acceptance, focusing instead on various kinds of posthuman denial and seeking to trigger anger at social injustice, lay blame on perpetrators, and bargain frenetic activity as a hedge against inevitable annihilation. YA texts ultimately present opportunities for conversations and insights that teens need – which adults are too often reluctant to address directly – so that readers can come to their own conclusions about how to approach (what may or may not be) their final fate.

Note 1

The reasons and mechanisms for this are complex, of course, ranging from brain development to media culture to market economies, all of which require constant innovation in order to generate and sustain interest as well as grow.

Works Cited Anderson, M. T. Feed. Candlewick, 2002. Beaudoin, Sean. The Infects. Candlewick, 2012. Bick, Ilsa J. Ashes. Egmont, 2011. Blake, Kendare. Anna Dressed in Blood. Tor, 2011. Brown, Don. Drowned City: Hurricane Katrina and New Orleans. HMH Books for Young Readers, 2015. Burke, Michael. Literary Reading, Cognition, and Emotion: An Exploration of the Oceanic Mind. Routledge, 2010. Carter, Te. I Stop Somewhere. Macmillan, 2018. Collins, Suzanne. The Hunger Games. Scholastic, 2008. Cormier, Robert. The Chocolate War. Random House, 1974. Dickinson, Peter. Eva. Random House, 1988. Donaldson, Jennifer. I Know You Remember. Razorbill, 2019. Green, John. The Fault in Our Stars. Penguin, 2012. Harter, Susan. The Construction of the Self: Developmental and Sociocultural Foundations. Guilford, 2012. Henderson, Lauren. Kiss Me Kill Me. Delacorte, 2008. Hinton, S. E. The Outsiders. Penguin, 1967. Hoffmeister, Peter Brown. Too Shattered for Mending. Knopf, 2017. Jackson, Tiffany D. Monday’s Not Coming. HarperCollins, 2018. Kitchener, Caroline. “Why So Many Adults Love Young-Adult Literature.” The Atlantic, 1 Dec. 2017, www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2017/12/why-so-many-adults-are-love-young-adultliterature/547334. Accessed 15 July 2020. Klause, Annette Curtis. Blood and Chocolate. Delacorte, 1997. Klause, Annette Curtis. The Silver Kiss. Delacorte, 1990. Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Columbia UP, 1982. Kübler-Ross, Elizabeth. On Death and Dying. Routledge, 1969. Luxmoore, Nick. Young People, Death, and the Unfairness of Everything. Jessica Kingsley P, 2012. eBook collection (EBSCOhost), hollins.idm.oclc.org/login?url=http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx? direct=true&db=nlebk&AN=499327&site=ehost-live&scope=site. Accessed 15 July 2020. Lynch, Chris. Hothouse. HarperCollins, 2010. Magoon, Kekla. How It Went Down. Macmillan, 2014. McDaniel, Lurlene. “Farewell to my Readers.” www.lurlenemcdaniel.com/home. Accessed 15 July 2020. Meyer, Stephenie. Twilight. Little Brown, 2005. Mitchell, Saundra. All the Things We Do in the Dark. HarperTeen, 2019.

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Karen Coats “The Most Devastating Deaths in the Harry Potter Stories.” Pottermore, www.pottermore.com/features/ harry-potter-most-devastating-deaths. Accessed 15 July 2020. “New Study: 55% of YA Books Bought by Adults.” Publishers Weekly, 12 June 2012, www. publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/childrens/childrens-industry-news/article/53937-new-study-55of-ya-books-bought-by-adults.html. Accessed 15 July 2020. Niven, Jennifer. All the Bright Places. Penguin, 2015. O’Brien, John M., Carol Goodenow, and Oliva Espin. “Adolescents’ Reactions to the Death of a Peer.” Adolescence, vol. 26, no. 102, 1991, pp. 431–40. Pearson, Mary E. The Adoration of Jenna Fox. Macmillan, 2008. Reynolds, Jason. The Boy in the Black Suit. Simon & Schuster, 2015. Reynolds, Jason. Long Way Down. Simon & Schuster, 2017. Roth, Veronica. Divergent. HarperCollins, 2011. Rowling, J. K. Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. Bloomsbury, 1998. Smith, Andrew. The Alex Crow. Penguin, 2015. Smith, Andrew. Grasshopper Jungle. Penguin, 2014. Smith, Sherri L. Orleans. Penguin, 2013. Suma, Nova Ren. 17 & Gone. Penguin, 2013. Thomas, Angie. The Hate U Give. HarperCollins, 2017. Trites, Roberta Seelinger. Disturbing the Universe: Power and Repression in Adolescent Literature. U of Iowa P, 2000. Violi, Jen. Putting Makeup on Dead People. Hyperion, 2011. Whalen, John Corey. Noggin. Simon & Schuster, 2014.

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11 DEATH AND MOURNING IN GRAPHIC NARRATIVE José Alaniz

Often combining words and pictures in sequential panels, comics represents “an art form long accustomed to rendering time as space, characters as multiplicities, and the disputed frontier between self and not-self as a permeable zone open for exploration” (Witek 230). Some scholars such as Tanya Kam argue that such features make comics “ideal for thanatography.” In her words, comics “describes the complicated process of aging, mental and physical atrophy, and isolation with visual immediacy and intimacy” (218). Indeed, the representation of debility, dying, death, loss, and mourning has figured prominently in graphic narrative since the modern emergence of the medium in the late nineteenth century. Turn-of-the-twentieth-century comic strips had no shortage of exaggerated mayhem and slapstick, which often blurred into startling violence. Richard Outcault’s Hogan’s Alley (1895–98) featured fisticuffs, accidents, injuries to children, and a running gag in which a boy falls from atop a building. Comics’ first long-form narrative, Frederick Burr Opper’s Happy Hooligan (1900–32), highlighted crashes, runaway cars, bruised bodies, and other havoc on urban streets. Nonetheless, Jared Gardner resists reading the era’s comics as further evidence of the “shock of modernity” thesis advanced by, among others, sociologist Georg Simmel, maintaining instead that works like Outcault’s and Opper’s underscored the “modern body’s resilience in the face of these same forces, its ability to bounce back, to recover, and to find humor and humanity in the midst of these inhuman conditions” (Projections 11, emphasis in original). The early newspaper strip comics were expressing a nervous laughter over the persistent traumas in an industrializing era of rampant factory, train, car, and trolley accidents. Outcault’s “An Old-Fashioned Fourth of July in Hogan’s Alley” from July 5, 1896 (Outcault 25) captures such a mood of frivolity amid chaos and danger: fireworks explode and a tenement burns while lead character the Yellow Kid beams a joyous smile. Similarly, one may read the absurdist goings-on against oneiric landscapes in both Winsor McCay’s Little Nemo in Slumberland (1905–26) and George Herriman’s Krazy Kat (1913–44) as afterlife narratives. Bloody, even grisly, deaths persisted in the strips well into the twentieth century: for example, in the adventure series Captain Easy (1933–88) by Roy Crane and in Chester Gould’s crime series Dick Tracy (1931). But a more “weighty” type of comics demise – which decisively demonstrated the affectual power of the medium – occurred in 1929, when Mary Gold, from Sidney Smith’s popular series The Gumps (1917–59), succumbed after a lingering illness. Legions of fans protested via letter; some even sent flowers for the funeral. A Tennessee newspaper wrote: “Mary Gold died last night. She was the creation of the imagination … Yet, strangely enough, she 117

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seemed more real to hundreds of thousands of readers of The Gumps than those persons whom they are wont to meet in everyday walks of life” (qtd. in Gardner, Projections 53). Gardner suggests that daily serialization (a twentieth-century innovation of the strips) led to greater readerly involvement and even vicarious grief (56). Similar outpourings of emotion accompanied the October 1941 death of Raven Sherman in Milton Caniff’s comic strip Terry and the Pirates (1934–73), which Francisco Saenz de Adana links to anxieties related to the impending war. Comic strip deaths since have followed a similar pattern, from Andy Lippincott’s (due to AIDS) in Garry Trudeau’s Doonesbury (1970) in 1990, to that of Lisa Moore from breast cancer in Tom Batiuk’s Funky Winterbean (1972) in 2007 (Batiuk). The latter detailed the character’s physical decline in frank detail, including her mastectomy, chemotherapy, remission, and relapse. Animal deaths, too, have prompted impassioned readerly responses. In 1995, Lynn Johnston’s For Better or For Worse (1979) saw the heroic demise of the Patterson family dog, Farley. Of the more than 2,500 letters addressing the incident that Johnston received, many shared their pain over losing beloved pets. “… [I] find the subject appalling, particularly since I’m dealing with the imminent demise of a 15 year old Labrador,” one reader wrote. “Comics are for escapism, Ms Johnston. They’re not supposed to be a slap in the face with reality” (Lynn Johnston Collection). Such reactions led Johnston to “compromise” with fan demands that Farley return, by having the dog appear in ghostly form in an April, 1995 Sunday strip – a visualization of fantasy meeting the reality principle (Johnston 189). Years later, UK cartoonist Nick Abadzis encountered a like reader response to his graphic novel Laika (2007); he later indulged fans with several alternate “happy endings,” in which the Soviet space dog does not die, via his blog (Alaniz, “Mourning the Animot”). In one of graphic narrative’s most popular genres, superheroes, death often serves as a launch point: the loss of their parents initiates the narrative arcs of both Jerry Siegel/Joe Schuster’s Superman (1938) and Bob Kane/Bill Finger’s Batman (1939). The pattern continued in the second-phase “Silver Age” era of the 1960s with the killing of Peter Parker’s Uncle Ben in Stan Lee/Steve Ditko’s Spider-Man stories (1962). Death, like disability, thus lies at the very heart of the quasi-eugenicist superhero genre, as its structuring, oft-disavowed other (Alaniz, Death). That disavowal has taken many forms over the genre’s decades-long history: superheroes and villains died in dreams, hallucinations, misunderstandings, “imaginary stories” (see the paradigmatic “Death of Superman” [Superman Vol. 1 #149, Nov. 1961, Siegel/Swan], in which the hero is brutally murdered with a Kryptonite beam by arch-villain Lex Luthor), or alternate universes outside “core” continuity. When “real” death occurred, it would afflict “normal” supporting characters (see the landmark “The Night Gwen Stacy Died” [Amazing Spider-Man Vol. 1 #121, June 1973, Conway/Kane]). Markers of mortality pervade (read: haunt) the superhero genre, in the guise of visual motifs such as the “pietà pose,” showing heroes with deceased comrades or loved ones in their arms (see Batman Vol. 1 #156, June 1963, Finger/Moldoff for an early example) and the piles of bodies adorning many issue covers since the 1980s (Cardoso). The genre’s most sustained engagement with death to this day remains the landmark 1982 graphic novel The Death of Captain Marvel by Jim Starlin, in which the protagonist dies – radically – of cancer. The wave of revisionist superheroes, swept in by Alan Moore et al.’s Miracleman (aka Marvelman, 1982), Alan Moore and Dave Gibbon’s Watchmen (1986), and Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns (1986), led to the era of “grim and gritty” ultraviolence of the 1990s/2000s, exemplified by the Marvel Comics characters Wolverine and the Punisher, and the DC miniseries Infinite Crisis (2005), as well as the output of independent publishers such as Image and the DC imprint Wildstorm (e.g., Warren Ellis and Bryan Hitch’s The Authority, 1999). The repeated use of killed or maimed female paramours for purposes of accentuating male heroes’ 118

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personal development in this period prompted writer Gail Simone to name her 1999 website “Women in Refrigerators” after the trend (the phrase refers to an actual 1994 Green Lantern story in which the hero discovers his murdered girlfriend in a refrigerator). Undead versions of heroes proliferated in the new century in such series and “events” as Marvel Zombies (Marvel, first series 2005) and Blackest Night (DC, 2009), as yet another strategy to superficially explore themes of mortality without risking core corporate properties. The “undead” fad, along with an explosion in the number of alternate versions of superheroes (e.g., Marvel’s Spider-Verse storylines), represents a continuing resistance to death in superhero serials in an age of what Henry Jenkins terms “multiplicity” in the genre. By and large, the subject of mortality in twenty-first-century superhero comics has ossified into a sort of stale joke. Any death of a hero, no matter how dramatic and “final,” is presumed by readers to signify at most a hiatus crowned by triumphant return. (In this regard the genre fulfills in most literalist fashion Ernest Becker’s modernity-upholding “denial of death” thesis.) Since DC’s media-hyped, months-long 1992-93 “Death of Superman” storyline, fans have seen the deaths of Captain America, Johnny Storm of the Fantastic Four, and Batman, among countless others. All eventually returned to the land of the living. In a clever metafictive turn, writer Grant Morrison made Superman, as part of his funeral oration for slain Justice League of America comrade Martian Manhunter, utter the phrase “pray for resurrection” (Final Crisis #2, August, 2008, Morrison/Jones). Since the mid-1980s, rise in readerly and critical regard for seminal works of nonfiction and autography such as Art Spiegelman’s Maus (1986/1991), David Wojnarowicz’s and James Romberger’s Seven Miles a Second (1996), Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis (2000), Joe Sacco’s Safe Area Goražde (2000), and Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home (2006) have all confronted death in war, genocide, and suicide. Japanese comics author Keiji Nakazawa’s Barefoot Gen, a 1973 series based on his experiences as a survivor of the Hiroshima bombings, and Will Eisner’s A Contract with God and Other Tenement Stories (1978) served as important precursors. Capitalizing on the “intrinsic affinity between the comics form and the phenomenological situation of the narrativizing self ” which “spatialize both physical and psychic experience” (Witek 228), graphic narrative in the new century has often centered on personal loss, in such works as Brian Fies’s Mom’s Cancer (2006); Gilles Rochier’s Ta Mère La Pute (2011, France); Sarah Leavitt’s Tangles (2012); Anders Nilsen’s and Cheryl Weaver’s Don’t Go Where I Can’t Follow (2012); Hanneriina Moisseinen’s Father (2013, Finland); Gipi’s S. (2014, Italy); Tom Hart’s Rosalie Lightning (2015); Leela Corman’s “The Wound That Never Heals” (2015); Marnie Galloway’s Particle/Wave (2016); Kelly Froh’s Senior Time (2016); and Mita Mahato’s In Between: Poetry Comics (2017). Some artists trace a death’s intersection with the larger sweep of history, as in Abadzis’s Laika (2007, UK); Alissa Torres’s and Sungyoon Choi’s American Widow (2008); and Nina Bunjevac’s Fatherland (2014). The preponderance of true-life subject matter belies the fact that comics as a medium complicates any straightforward notion of “nonfiction.” As Gardner writes, “With comics, the compressed, mediated, and iconic nature of the testimony (both text and image) denies any collapse between autobiography and autobiographical subject … and the stylized comic art refuses any claims of the ‘having-been-there’ truth” (“Autography’s Biography” 12). Rather, as Charles Hatfield puts it, “The interaction of word and picture – that basic tension between codes – allows for ongoing intertextual or metatextual commentary” (127) which leads not to a mimetic but an “ironic” authentication (125–26). Elisabeth El Refaie, in turn, highlights the social, “dys-appearance” model of the disability/illness experience and its overlaps with self-portraiture in autography (62). Let us take as an example of thanatographic nonfiction comics Roz Chast’s celebrated memoir Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant? (2014), about the decline and deaths of 119

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her parents. Chast, a longtime New Yorker cartoonist, takes an episodic approach to the subject, tracing her mother and father’s aging through vignettes that foreground their folksy idiosyncrasies and profound death denial. A portrait shows the smiling George and Elizabeth Chast, in winter clothes, comfortably ensconced in a couch on skis slowly sliding down a snowy mountain, with a caption that reads in part, “Things were going downhill, but for many years, the decline was blessedly gradual” (27). Such imagery typifies what Kam calls Chast’s “stereotypical” depiction of death (220); she cites a cartoon grim reaper figure who proclaims, “What’s this??? The Chasts are talking about me! Why, I’ll show them!!!” (10, emphasis in original). Chast’s use of competing visual registers, such as family photos and in particular a series of realistic drawings of her mother on her deathbed near the end of the memoir, complicate and lend gravitas to her “light-hearted” treatment of the theme. The series recalls Elisabeth Bronfen’s discussion of the Swiss painter Ferdinand Hodler’s sketches of his dying lover Valentine Godé-Darel; for Bronfen, the highly “aestheticized” works map onto the artist’s own processes of grief (45). Similarly, Kam argues that Chast’s change in style “emphasizes how the Roz character evolves, becoming strong enough to accept death as more than a onedimensional foe” (230). G. Thomas Couser focuses on a similar stylistic turn from “cartoony” to “realistic” in Leavitt’s Tangles, at the moment when the author’s mother is dying. For him this serves as proof that abstract, stylized visual modes do not suit the grand subject of death. “Only at this point,” he writes, “does her mother’s image draw me in; only at this point does she become a particular person; only at this point, then, am I emotionally engaged” (364). He critiques Chast’s memoir along similar lines: “There is a disjunct between her characteristic style and her subjects” (372fn). Going further than most, Couser pronounces what he calls “visual abstractions” – indeed, any deviation from what he deems a realistic style in comics about death and debility – “counterproductive” (356). However, contention over the “propriety” of particular art styles and approaches to given subjects in graphic narrative, such as those voiced by Kam and Couser, seem very much at odds with the verbal-visual heterogeneity of an art form long-accustomed to talking animals, cosmic battles between superhumans, and so on: in short, fantasy of innumerable sorts. And not only in fantasy: Spiegelman’s Maus, the most critically acclaimed of all graphic memoirs (winner of a special Pulitzer Prize), depicts the Holocaust through the very “visually abstract” device of Germans as cats, Jews as mice, Americans as dogs, and so on. In other words, “ironic” authentication. In short, “realist” fixations such as Couser’s not only sell short the capacities of the comics medium (and of comics readers’ level of engagement), but also have a tendency to define “realism” much too narrowly, as mere surface resemblance to a subject. I would go further, to argue that Chast’s cartoon idiom (itself derived from a rich tradition of caricature) treats death more “realistically” precisely through its “visual abstractions,” by injecting levity into the theme; the silly “grim reaper” marks the complexity of the death/dying experience (which does have its humorous moments), while the stark deathbed portraits of her mother, powerful in their own right, nonetheless partake of a by-now conventional “weighty” and somber treatment of the dying body, as Bronfen’s discussion of Hodler’s early twentieth-century sketches shows. The mid-2000s saw the emergence of Graphic Medicine, a movement of UK- and USbased healthcare practitioners, scholars and artists producing comics and scholarship on experiences related to disability, illness, debility, death, and caregiving from the standpoint of medical patients, physicians, and family (Williams et al.). Works of Graphic Medicine often depict the dying process and its aftermath, as seen in Ross MacIntosh’s Seeds (2011), on his father’s journey through hospice; Dana Walrath’s Aliceheimers: Alzheimer’s Through the Looking 120

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Glass (2013); M. K. Czerwiec’s Taking Turns (2017), on her work as a nurse in an HIV/AIDS care unit at the height of the epidemic; and Mayra Crowe et al.’s The Gift (2018), which deals with organ transplantation after death. Though not all Graphic Medicine productions fall into this category, some scholars (including from disability studies) have drawn attention to the problematic aspects of uncritically examining physical and mental difference through the perspective of healthcare, either exclusively or even primarily. As Susan Squier warns, “if we choose to discuss only those poems or short stories that can illustrate a medical issue, we are implicitly accepting – and thus endorsing – the medical frame” (338, emphasis in original). Recent scholarship on death and dying in graphic narrative takes many forms, from Hillary Chute’s exploration of the medium’s depiction of violence (2016), to Michael Chaney’s linkage of personal loss to the Anthropocene in Richard McGuire’s 2015 experimental graphic novel Here (2016), to Harriet Earle’s study of trauma in the post-9/11 era (2017), to Brian Cremins’s work on nostalgia and the elegy in Walt Kelly’s comic strip Pogo (2018). As exemplified by Emil Ferris’s graphic novel My Favorite Thing Is Monsters (2017), with its harrowing depiction of the protagonist’s mother’s last days, as well as Nicole Georges’s memoir Fetch: How a Bad Dog Brought Me Home (2017), which traces her canine companion’s life until the difficult time comes to put her down, artists continue to use the unique meaning-making strategies of comics to moving effect, for the exploration of the human and animal encounter with death.

Works Cited Abadzis, Nick. Laika. First Second Books, 2007. Alaniz, José. “‘The Most Famous Dog in History’: Mourning the Animot in Abadzis’ Laika.” Seeing Animals: Visuality, Derrida, and the Exposure of the Human, edited by Sarah Bezan and James Tink. Lexington Books, 2017, pp. 39–64. Alaniz, José. Death, Disability and the Superhero: The Silver Age and Beyond. UP of Mississippi, 2014. Batiuk, Tom. Lisa’s Story: The Other Shoe. Kent State UP, 2007. Bechdel, Alison. Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic. Houghton Mifflin, 2006. Bronfen, Elisabeth. Over Her Dead Body: Death, Femininity, and the Aesthetic. Routledge, 1992. Bunjevac, Nina. Fatherland: A Family History. Ici Méme, 2014. Cardoso, André Cabral de Almeida. “The Pile of Bodies in Graphic Narratives: Variations on an Image.” Ilha do Desterro: A Journal of English Language, Literatures in English and Cultural Studies, vol. 68, no. 3, September-December 2015, pp. 99–114. Chast, Roz. Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant? Bloomsbury, 2014. Chaney, Michael A. Reading Lessons in Seeing: Mirrors, Masks, and Mazes in the Autobiographical Graphic Novel. UP of Mississippi, 2016. Chute, Hillary L. Disaster Drawn: Visual Witness, Comics, and Documentary Form. Belknap Press, 2016. Corman, Leela. “The Wound that Never Heals.” Nautilus, no. 23, 16 April 2015. nautil.us/issue/23/ dominoes/ptsd-the-wound-that-never-heals. Couser, G. Thomas. “Is There a Body in This Text? Embodiment in Graphic Somatography.” a/b: Auto/ Biography Studies, vol. 33, no. 2, 2018, pp. 347–373. Crowe, Mayra, et al. The Gift: Transforming Lives Through Organ Donation. University of Dundee, 2018. Cremins, Brian. “Walt Kelly’s Bridgeport.” Inks: The Journal of the Comics Studies Society, vol. 2, no. 1, 2018, pp. 1–17. Czerwiec, M. K. Taking Turns: Stories from HIV/AIDS Care Unit 371. Pennsylvania State UP, 2017. Earle, Harriet E. H. Comics, Trauma, and the New Art of War. UP of Mississippi, 2017. Eisner, Will. A Contract with God and Other Tenement Stories. Baronet Books, 1978. El Refaie, Elisabeth. Autobiographical Comics: Life Writing in Pictures. UP of Mississippi, 2012. Fies, Brian. Mom’s Cancer. Abrams Books, 2006. Froh, Kelly. Senior Time. Cold Cube Press, 2016.

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José Alaniz Galloway, Marnie. Particle/Wave. So What Press, 2016. Gardner, Jared. “Autography’s Biography, 1972–2007.” Biography, vol. 31, no. 1, 2008, pp. 1–26, 221. Gardner, Jared. Projections: Comics and the History of Twenty-First-Century Storytelling. Stanford UP, 2012. Gipi, S. Coconino P, 2014. Hart, Tom. Rosalie Lightning. St. Martin’s P, 2015. Hatfield, Charles. Alternative Comics: An Emerging Literature. UP of Mississippi, 2005. Jenkins, Henry. “‘Just Men in Tights’: Rewriting Silver Age Comics in an Era of Multiplicity.” The Contemporary Comic: Book Superhero, edited by Angela Ndalianis. Routledge, 2009, pp. 16–43. Johnston, Lynn. Remembering Farley: A Tribute to the Life of Our Favorite Cartoon Dog. Andrews and McMeel, 1996. Kam, Tanya. “Comic Thanatography: Redrawing Agency, Dialogism, and Ethics in Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant?” Inks: The Journal of the Comics Studies Society, vol. 2, no. 2, 2018, pp. 215–235. Leavitt, Sarah. Tangles. Skyhorse, 2012. Lynn Johnston Collection. The Ohio State University Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum. MacIntosh, Ross. Seeds. Com.x, 2011. Mahato, Mita. “Universalism Revisited: The Cartoon Image, My Mom and Mii.” Comics Forum, 12 Sept. 2013. comicsforum.org/2013/09/12/universalism-re-visited-the-cartoon-image-my-mom-and-miiby-mita-mahato. Mahato, Mita. In Between: Poetry Comics. LSU Press, 2017. Moisseinen, Hanneriina. Isä [Father]. Huuda Huuda, 2013. Nakazawa, Keiji. Barefoot Gen. Weekly Jump [Shueisha], 1973–1987. Nilsen, Anders, and Cheryl, Weaver. Don’t Go Where I Can’t Follow. Drawn & Quarterly, 2012. Outcault, R. F. R. F. Outcault’s The Yellow Kid: A Centennial Celebration of the Kid Who Started the Comics. Kitchen Sink Press, 1995. Rochier, Gilles. Ta Mére La Pute. Six Pieds Terre, 2011. Sacco, Joe. Safe Area Goražde. Fantagraphics Books, 2000. Saenz de Adana, Francisco. “Attachment and Grief: The Case of the Death of Raven Sherman.” Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics, vol. 9, 2018, pp. 1–16. www.tandfonline.com/loi/rcom20. Satrapi, Marjane. Persepolis. L’Association, 2000. Spiegelman, Art. Maus. 2 vols. Pantheon, 1986/1991. Squier, Susan Merrill. “Beyond Nescience: The Intersectional Insights of Health Humanities.” Perspectives in Biology and Medicine, vol. 50, no. 3, 2007, pp. 334–347. Torres, Alissa, and Sungyoon Choi. American Widow. Villard, 2008. Walrath, Dana. Aliceheimers: Alzheimer’s Through the Looking Glass. Harvest, 2013. Williams, Ian, et al. Graphic Medicine. Penn State College of Medicine, 2007. www.graphicmedicine.org. Accessed 2 Jan. 2020. Witek, Joseph. “Justin Green: Autobiography Meets the Comics.” Graphic Subjects: Critical Essays on Autobiography and Graphic Novels. U of Wisconsin P, pp. 227–230.

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12 DEATH AND DOCUMENTARIES Heuristics for the Real in an Age of Simulation Benjamin Bennett-Carpenter

One of the starkest realities of the real world is death. Perhaps it comes as no surprise, then, that death is a primary topic of documentaries, with scholarly attention regularly being devoted to connections between film and mortality (e.g., Mulvey; Wilson; Aaron), bringing to mind particular documentaries such as Nuit et brouillard (Night and Fog, 1955), The Day After Trinity (1980), Grizzly Man (2005), The Act of Killing (2012), and others. The rhetorics of considering “death” and “documentary” together offer rich and contested intellectual ground in the midst of powerful, complex phenomena that constitute our very lives. For example, death as a term varies significantly when used in vernacular rhetoric versus when employed in specialized contexts such as law, medicine, or biology (cf. other chapters in this volume of The Routledge Companion to Death and Literature). “Documentary” could likewise mean a variety of things, from documentary film and television to the instant footage on social media. Perhaps many think first of the medium and genre of documentary film/television, but “documentary” may also include all its forms (in any medium). Most recently in the age of YouTube, Vimeo, Facebook, Instagram, and other social media, the raw visual and audio recordings taken by mobile devices may be the most immediate form of documentary in the twenty-first century.1 While Paul Otlet suggested that anything could be a document (Ferraris 7; cf. Briet; Buckland, “What is” and “Documentality”), Trinh Minh-ha observed, “There is no such thing as documentary” (90). Others turn to John Grierson’s classic description of documentary film as a “creative treatment of actuality” as the place to start (Grierson 8; Hardy 13). As I suggest in Death in Documentaries: The Memento Mori Experience, the entire experience of documentaries points to the mortal condition, where the genre operates as an especially apt form of contemporary memento mori experience. As technologies and audiences become more sophisticated in an age of simulation, documentary increasingly operates as a heuristic rather than simple documentation of the real. Documentary practitioners employ methods in which the possibility for consciousness of death becomes an implicit effect. To say that historically celluloid-based film, beginning with photography, seems to have a close connection to death has become a truism. This close connection may come through the selection of content, but is also historically linked to medium (Bennett-Carpenter 8). For example, Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida offers the Portrait of Lewis Payne (1865) by Alexander Gardner with the caption “il va morir” – “he is going to die” (96). The important point is not just 123

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that the figure in the photograph is about to be executed; nor is the sense of any figure in any photograph being dead (or to be dead in the future) the full extent of the film-and-mortality connection (cf. Ruby). Rather, as Laura Mulvey and many others have pointed out, there is a material connection between historically celluloid-based film and empirical reality, including empirical death; that is, documentary film functions as a death index, pointing to death.2 In a digital age, this potent connection between mortality and film continues to operate as an effect. As I suggest in Death in Documentaries, the genre offers an opportunity to inform viewers about a fundamental, definitive truth of our existence: i.e., that we are mortal, that individual life is limited, and that we will die. Documentaries offer this stark fact in various measures of terror, pleasure, or otherwise raw or facilitated sensation that invoke both the mundane and the sublime, presenting moments of possibility for viewers to be existentially moved in regard to the hard facts of mortality. A provocation (usually implicit) emerges in documentaries: remember, you are mortal; remember, you must die. This existential instruction is not simply an aspect of documentaries about death; rather, I suggest that it may be a basic quality of documentary experience.

Basics of Documentary Rooted in documentary-as-writing, the documentary era at-large arguably fully emerged with the development of celluloid-based film in the form of still photography and later the “moving picture” or cinema, early examples being the work of the Lumière brothers (e.g., Arrivée d’un train).3 Paralleling this development in photographic arts and cinema were the emerging methods and tools of science, where visual forms of documentation provided data and evidence for increasingly establishing an understanding of how the natural world works (e.g., X-rays, photographs of species, nature films), and to some extent how the social world works (e.g., ethnographic studies). Documentary work as a whole in all its forms thus was and is integral to research across disciplines and fields, in the sciences, anthropology, museum studies, library and information science, medicine, law, communication, economics, education, and literature. While documentary film is closely tied to scientific documentation (Boon; cf. Day), it is also intimately linked to a “cinema of attractions” (Gunning). From its earliest days, documentary film drew upon traditions of the carnival sideshow and the theater, wherein its functions were to entertain, fascinate, and facilitate wonder and awe (Nichols, Introduction 3rd ed. 90ff.). This meant that fiction, imagination, and raw sensation were and are a part of documentary work as well as realism. From Grierson’s early 20th-century description of documentary as the “creative treatment of actuality” (Grierson 8; Hardy 13; emphasis added) to the deliberate staging of scenes in Robert Flaherty’s Nanook of the North (1922), the composed and fabricated dimensions of documentary make it, as some may argue, another form of fiction (Nichols, Introduction 3rd ed. 9; Winston 103, 120). Conventions of documentary may be adopted and played with to varying ends: for example, to produce “mockumentaries” (e.g., This is Spinal Tap, 1984); to create documentaries that deliberately lie and produce a fake “reality”;4 to produce a documentary effect within other genres (e.g., The Grapes of Wrath, 1940), sometimes with irony and/or humor (e.g., The Office, 2001–03); to serve the purposes of propaganda (e.g., Triumph of the Will, 1934); or to engage the surreal or avant-garde (e.g., Man with a Movie Camera, 1929; Las Hurdes, 1933). Amidst all the ways to understand documentaries, a powerful insight into their workings may be to see them within the context of a classic rhetorical tradition that has been updated for the present era. Bill Nichols has suggested that “[r]hetoric in all its forms and all its purposes provides the final, distinguishing element of documentary” (Introduction 1st ed. 97–98; cf. “The Question of Evidence”). In this context, rhetoric, which may be both distinguished from 124

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and also include poetics, is not to be confused with the use of words in place of substantive action, nor is it merely a form of argument. Rather, rhetoric here is what Aristotle classically described as finding all the available means for persuasion in any given situation (“Art” of Rhetoric 1.2.1) – a line of reasoning that has been taken up by Kenneth Burke, Wayne Booth, and present-day communications scholars – and now generally is understood as employing all available means of effective communication as a form of transformative action. In broad strokes, this is what documentary films do: they employ all available means, within the limits and possibilities of their medium and genre, to bring about transformative action through this particular form of effective communication. Documentaries offer an opportunity of a simulated experience of the real world in which truths about that world – such as the fact that we must die – may be received through instruction, sensation, and emotional appeal.

Distinguishing Reality from Irreality Among the many ways to describe documentary as a simulated experience of the real world, its basic experience is that of offering viewers an opportunity “to determine and distinguish reality from irreality, including one’s empirically real place in the cosmos (human society and conventions included)” (Bennett-Carpenter 122). Documentaries invite the question: What really is the case? Addressing the empirical rather than imaginary world, documentaries invite viewers to consider the distinction between history and imagination (cf. Nichols, Introduction 3rd ed. 5–10). When watching a fictional feature film, for example, viewers understand that they may be engaging a range of potential narratives from the realistic to the fantastic. In most cases, though, feature films deal with the space of the imaginary. By contrast, when viewers engage with documentary, they generally understand that information is being transmitted to them from, and in regard to, the empirical world. For example, in the classic science documentary Powers of Ten (1968/1977) by Charles and Ray Eames, the idea was to impart a lesson about scale in the empirical world, where this particular spot on a picnic blanket on the lakeshore of Chicago is at human scale within the vast inner and outer scales of the physical cosmos (cf. BennettCarpenter 56–70). Originally created for university physics classrooms, the Eameses employed hand-drawn pictures and 1970s-era special effects, but the goal was to teach a lesson about the empirical world. The purpose of exercising one’s imagination in this case is thus in service of recognizing the real as it is known and experienced by human beings. Such distinctions between the imaginary and empirical have been complicated in the digital age, with digital technologies fostering tensions between the genre and the medium. For example, in the recent Netflix nature documentary narrated by David Attenborough, Our Planet (2019), some or many of the images likely invite questions such as: Is that real? And, after all, what is real? While Our Planet features standard shots such as the bird’s-eye view, with the camera soaring above the landscape from a helicopter, or close-ups of the faces of seals or polar bears framed as portraiture, there are also new-for-documentary shots that employ high-speed drones and powerful digital cameras that make some scenes look animated.5 Is one seeing real life, in an empirical sense of that question? Or has the picture been fabricated or manipulated? To what degree and how? In an age of simulation, documentaries become occasions for inquiry rather than immediate visible manifestations of evidence. Still, in terms of viewers’ reception of visual material, the methods, attitudes, and consciousness/reception of moving pictures may hold fast to “documentary” versus the imaginary or fictional – but now with more reliance on extra-cinematic contexts and material evidence (cf. Sobchack, Carnal Thoughts). For example, in terms of “evidence” of the real or true, individuals may lean toward DNA or other forensics, to the tactile (e.g., textiles), the embodied, 125

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or the interpersonal (that which is live, immediate, personal, and/or interactive), keeping in mind that all such “evidence” still becomes a part of a composed narrative or argument and is not immediately “self-evident.” For instance, a primary reason why people watch the popular US documentary television series, Forensic Files (1996–2011) – comprised of highly composed storytelling with effusive music and narration by vocal pathos-master Peter Thomas – has to do with the fact that these are real cases of real people who actually died. Their manners of exiting this mortal world are often stranger than fiction, but fiction they are not. This, then, is a key distinction between documentaries and fiction films: documentaries are understood to be composed representations of the empirically real rather than the imaginary.6

Contemplating Responses to Mortality Documentary film experience further invites viewers “to contemplate appropriate responses to the mortal condition, including taking responsibility for one’s life and inhabiting one’s social/cultural [/political] situation and activity with others (including identity, work, and relationships)” (Bennett-Carpenter 122). As viewers sit before a screen, they recapitulate the experience of spiritual devotees of old who sat before holy texts or icons to contemplate divine truths, except now the images may be documentation of the empirical world. The primary truth may not be supernatural or metaphysical but, rather, super-natural – that is, a hyper sense of the natural world, including the physical and social world. Fellow human beings die before our eyes onscreen in documentaries: in war footage, one sees a soldier cut down; in news footage, viewers witness the aftermath of a bombing, or see a corpse lying on the ground after an accident. In all these cases, viewers know the people are dead; the “gift” and “miracle” of life was cut short. Even documentation of a long life that comes to a natural end points to the limits of mortal existence. In the context of such imagery, an opportunity arises for an extra-cinematic response in the real world (Sobchack, Carnal Thoughts): What will one do? How will one be? In An Inconvenient Truth (2006), one sees the potential effects of global warming on the world’s coastlines: aware, sensitive viewers become alarmed at the possible impending devastation, including the threat of mass deaths. This film calls for action to change behavior … or else. One observes the effects of Morgan Spurlock’s all-fast-food diet (over a 30-day period) in Super-Size Me (2004), watching the narrator/filmmaker speed up his mortal state with a suggestion of obesity-as-mementomori. Spurlock’s documentary similarly calls attention to changing our existing (dietary) habits … or else. Al Midan (The Square, 2013) documents the uprisings in Egypt and what happened in response to them, leaving viewers to decide if and how we ourselves would choose to respond: What is one’s definitional position in relation to those designated as “other/s”? How will we spend our time and energy in this (relatively short) mortal life? Does one’s life make a positive or negative difference? How does our act of documentary viewership affect our relationships, if at all?

Memento Mori, Memento Vivere I suggest that documentary experience also may create a space “to move individuals into distinctive human experience, including of love or friendship and appropriate acceptance, courage, or productive defiance toward mortality” (Bennett-Carpenter 122). One baseline for this experience is one’s position on a grid of varying responses to mortality that crosses feeling (affect) with one’s idea (cognition) of mortality. Among the varied ideas of death, three main streams may be described: death-as-termination, death-as-transition, and death-as-unknown/uncertain, 126

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each of which can generate positive, negative, or neutral/ambivalent responses. The meeting of one’s particular idea of, and emotional response to, death forms a critical existential context for one’s documentary experience. In this existential context, documentaries function not merely as death indexes but also as occasions for renewed life. If documentaries operate as an especially apt form of memento mori, then they may also potentially function as memento vivere – “remember to live.” Memento mori has traditionally meant either “repent”/“turn your life around” or carpe diem, “seize the day” because life is short. Thus, contemplation of death may provide opportunity to pivot one’s life around quintessentially human experiences of love and/or friendship, and the distinctive marks that particular humans leave on the world. For example, in Wim Wenders’s Buena Vista Social Club (1999), the rich pleasures of the island-nation Cuba’s music surges into one’s viewing/listening space. Here is one way – among countless others – to be so richly human on this little planet of ours in the mysterious cosmos. Yet a strong implicit premise of the film (beyond its explicit scope) is also the impending demise of the musicians as they age. Wenders and music producer Ry Cooder document a distinctive human contribution – the Buena Vista Social Club music and musicians – as a (mortal) snapshot in time that captures something before it is gone for good. The experience of this documentary work for the filmmakers and viewers inspires individuals toward human and creative courage. Countless examples may be offered of documentaries that create such space to inspire life, work, and relationships in the context of one’s awareness of our own mortality. From Jennie Livingston’s Paris Is Burning (1990) to Derek Jarman’s Blue (1993), from Rob Epstein’s The Times of Harvey Milk (1984) to Werner Herzog’s Encounters at the End of the World (2007) or Ian Bonhôte and Peter Ettedgui’s McQueen (2018), each viewer will have their own particular documentary that functions as the old Zen Buddhist adage suggests of the finger pointing to the moon. A particular documentary functions as an index to a particular illumination.

Analyzing Death in Documentaries In this final section, I identify five potential levels of analysis for addressing the varied ways in which death has been dealt with in particular documentary works (cf. Bennett-Carpenter 127ff.). First, one may identify a specific death item: a word, image, or symbol – such as the word “death,” an image of a corpse or dead flowers, or a particular memento mori item like a skull or a timepiece (128). For example, in the opening credits of (and interspersed throughout) McQueen), the documentary about the life and work of fashion designer Lee Alexander McQueen, viewers see enormous, bedazzled skulls. These skulls are very prominent death’s heads that invoke the work of Damien Hirst and Pablo Picasso and point toward relatively imminent death. The documentary goes on to show testimony of McQueen’s suicide. Identifying death within a work may also include what one may think of as a supposed “snuff ” film, a beheading video, or any film or footage that includes imagery of actual corpses (e.g., Thomas Edison’s Electrocuting an Elephant, 1903, and Forensic Files). Identifying death within a work may also include any memento mori reference such as a tombstone, a portrait, a cigarette, or a flurry of bubbles (Bennett-Carpenter 128). As an especially apt form of contemporary memento mori, documentaries work out of and in connection with not only empirical, scientific traditions but also a deep and wide art historical tradition. This tradition employs emblems of transience: from vanitas symbols such as books, flowers, and bubbles, to portraiture where one finds figures of humans once living and now dead. Second, one may identify the idea of death within a work of documentary (BennettCarpenter 129). In Davis Guggenheim’s An Inconvenient Truth, the idea of mass death because of 127

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environmental destruction, and rising sea levels in particular, is strongly implied by effective computer graphics. No corpse or process of immediate dying is shown, but the ideation of mortality is firmly indicated. One common way of encountering death in documentaries is by way of inference. Suggestive text, sound, and/or imagery are employed, pointing to a logical conclusion of death or something or someone being dead. Visually literate viewers tend to accurately infer moving shapes of color on a map in An Inconvenient Truth, taking the expanding blue color to mean flooding and the extent of the color across the screen to imply physical devastation, including mass migration and potentially human and non-human deaths. Viewers are invited to categorize what they see into the cognitive files of “living” or “non-living” or “dead” to discover this particular reality for themselves. Third, in addition to literal and ideational references, one may attend to “material or semiotic references” to mortality (Bennett-Carpenter 127). For example, aside from the direct verbal reference in the title Working Man’s Death (2005), it is difficult to avoid interpreting the opening scenes of workers digging in the dirt as analogous to digging their own graves. Inserts of historical footage carry an aura of working people now long dead. Death references are also evident in the open-air market scenes, with bulls, cows, and goats being graphically slaughtered onscreen before one’s eyes. Yet documentaries with no explicit death content may nonetheless carry that experience for particular viewers. For example, for this author, born in the early 1970s, any film from the late 1970s and the 1980s carries not only a certain nostalgia of a unique time of childhood but also an existential pathos steeped in mortality. Such documentary viewing experiences may be idiosyncratic to particular viewers depending on when and where they were born, and the experiences that have characterized their lives. Yet virtually every film (including fiction) of a particular era may have a documentary function, being materially connected to that particular time and those particular places. In historically celluloid-based film, this material connection is based in the reaction of light to chemically treated materials and the chemical development processes of an old-school darkroom. This connection carries over into the digital age as an effect; when viewers see films, they more often than not are seeing documentation of a spacetime now dead (or soon to be), reminiscent of Barthes’s caption of the photograph by Alexander Gardner. In this sense, all films are Portraits of Lewis Payne, so to speak. Fourth, one may explore “death” as a trope or convention “in, or related to, the viewing of a specific documentary film, segment of film, or portion of footage” (Bennett-Carpenter 127). Take, for instance, Andy Warhol’s eight-hour experimental documentaries, Sleep (1963) and Empire (1964). In Sleep, one observes an inert individual, a classic metaphor for death: is this someone sleeping or a “corpse”? Empire moves a bit further away from the direct reference, but not by much: the Empire State Building in New York City takes on various references, including that of a “candle” in the dark, with the atmosphere facilitating the feeling of transience or impermanence: Is that just a building, or is mortality suggested? A final way that death may be analyzed in relation to specific works is through the exploration of mortality-as-experienced (Bennett-Carpenter 127). Any documentary work can be experienced as a mortality-awareness trigger for a particular individual: for example, in the explicit references to death that one finds in news footage (Zelizer; Fishman). Such triggers may also be idiosyncratic: a treasured photograph of a loved one who has passed, a sampled reel of home video, a particular scent that leads one to contemplate a deceased loved one, and so on. Perhaps a stitch in a garment, cut just so and – there it is – something called to memory, and this mortal coil is felt and understood in the moment. Death awareness and references to death-asexperienced are idiosyncratically shaped by our particular environments and backgrounds owing to personality, families of origin, political circumstances, cultural traditions, and specific 128

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forms of training. Idiosyncratic, too, may be a renewed self-awareness, denial, distraction, defiance, and/or courage regarding life as each individual encounters particular documentaries. Yet across idiosyncrasies, documentaries offer opportunities for a common discovery even in a digital age of the hyper-real: mortality as real.

Notes 1

2 3

4 5 6

Since the time of writing this chapter, much has taken place nationally, internationally, and globally, that stands as pertinent to this topic: particularly, the realities of COVID-19 (in both representation of its effects and the inability, or limited ability, to picture it, e.g., the Johns Hopkins University & Medicine COVID-19 map); and the rise in awareness of the Black Lives Matter movement after multiple recent high-profile murders - with the mobile phone footage of George Floyd’s killing operating as a primary catalyst for renewed action. See Bennett-Carpenter 108ff.; cf. Rotha; Kracauer; Bazin; Aitken, The Encyclopedia and Documentary Film. Bill Nichols outlines the “major nonfiction models for documentary film” in terms of investigation/ report, advocacy, history, testimonial, travel writing, sociology, visual anthropology/ethnography, first person essay, poetry, diary/journal, biography or group profile, and autobiography (Introduction 3rd ed. 106–7; see also 156–57 for “modes” and specific examples of documentaries that fit these models and modes). See Nichols, Introduction 3rd ed. 106–107; cf. the recent “deepfake” videos. With drones, the point of view has changed because the camera is not limited to the human hand or a fixed perspective, inviting the reality question because of new perspectives facilitated by this technology. The label documentary is itself contested, negotiable, and dependent upon a particular work’s reception, including its cultural context (cf. Cowie; Plantinga; Bennett-Carpenter). Vivian Sobchack (Carnal Thoughts; “Phenomenology”) uses the term “documentary consciousness” to frame such reception, whereby viewers, readers, or consumers of a work accept the conventions of what one thinks of as “documentary,” or a documentary function within or related to another work (e.g., in a novel). Many contemporary viewers who consume a multitude of images on a daily basis have become far more skeptical toward reality- and truth-claims. Or, by contrast, they adopt only the “reality” within their own media-consumption “bubble.” In a post-celluloid, media-saturated age, critical viewers regularly question the authenticity of the images they see.

Works Cited Primary Sources The Act of Killing. Directed by Joshua Oppenheimer, Anonymous, and Christine Cynn. Final Cut for Real, 2012. Al Midan [The Square]. Directed by Jehane Noujaim. Noujaim Films, 2013. Arrivée d’un train [Arrival of a Train]. Directed by August and Louis Lumière. Société Lumière, 1895. Blue. Directed by Derek Jarman. Basilisk Communications Ltd., 1993. Buena Vista Social Club. Directed by Wim Wenders. 1999. The Day After Trinity. Directed by John H. Else. KTEH, 1980. Electrocuting an Elephant. Directed by Thomas Edison. Edison Studios, 1903. Empire. Directed by Andy Warhol. Warhol Films, 1964. Encounters at the End of the World. Directed by Werner Herzog. Discovery Films, 2007. Forensic Files. Directed by Michael Jordan, et al., narrated by Peter Thomas. Trifecta Entertainment and Media, 1996–2011. The Grapes of Wrath. Directed by John Ford. 20th Century Fox, 1940. Grizzly Man. Directed by Werner Herzog. Lions Gate Films, 2005. An Inconvenient Truth. Directed by Davis Guggenheim. 2006. Las Hurdes: Tierra Sin Pan [Land Without Bread]. Directed by Luis Buñuel. 1933. Man with a Movie Camera. Directed by Dziga Vertov. 1929. McQueen. Directed by Ian Bonhôte and Peter Ettedgui. 2018. Nanook of the North. Directed by Robert Flaherty. 1922. Nuit et brouillard [Night and Fog]. Directed by Alain Resnais. 1955.

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Benjamin Bennett-Carpenter The Office. Directed by Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant. 2001–2003. Our Planet. Directed by Adam Chapman et al. 2019. Paris Is Burning. Directed by Jennie Livingston. 1990. Powers of Ten. Directed by Charles and Ray Eames. 1968/1977. Sleep. Directed by Andy Warhol. 1963. Super-Size Me. Directed by Morgan Spurlock. 2004. This Is Spinal Tap. Directed by Rob Reiner. 1984. The Times of Harvey Milk. Directed by Rob Epstein. 1984. Triumph of the Will. Directed by Leni Riefenstahl. 1934. Working Man’s Death. Directed by Michael Glawogger. 2005.

Secondary Sources Aaron, Michele. Death and the Moving Image: Ideology, Iconography, and I. Edinburgh UP, 2014. Aitken, Ian. “Physical Reality: The Role of the Empirical in the Film Theory of Siegfried Kracauer, John Grierson, André Bazin and George Lukács.” Documentary Film, edited by Ian Aitken. Routledge, 2012, pp. 19–37. [Originally published in Studies in Documentary Film, vol. 1, no. 2, 2007, pp. 105–121.] Aitken, Ian. “Realism, Philosophy, and the Documentary Film.” The Encyclopedia of the Documentary Film, edited by Ian Aitken. Routledge, 2006. Aristotle. The “Art” of Rhetoric, translated by John Henry Freese. Loeb Classical Library/Heinemann, 1959. Balsom, Erika, and Hila Peleg, editors. Documentary Across Disciplines. MIT Press/Haus der Kulturen der Welt, 2016. Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, translated by R. Howard. Hill and Wang/ Noonday, 1981. Bazin, André. What Is Cinema? Vol I, translated by H. Gray. U of California P, 1967. Bennett-Carpenter, Benjamin. Death in Documentaries: The Memento Mori Experience. Brill, 2018. Boon, Timothy. Films of Fact: A History of Science in Documentary Films and Television. Wallflower, 2008. Briet, Suzanne. What Is Documentation? [Qu'est-ce que la documentation?] 1951, translated and edited by Ronald E. Day, Laurent Martinet, and Hermina G. B. Anghelescu. Scarecrow Press, 2006. Buckland, Michael K. “Documentality Beyond Documents.” The Monist, vol. 97, no. 2, 2014, pp. 179–186. Buckland, Michael K. “What Is a ‘Document’?” Journal of the American Society for Information, vol. 48, no. 9, 1997, pp. 804–809. Cowie, Elizabeth. Recording Reality, Desiring the Real. U of Minnesota P, 2011. Day, Ronald E. Indexing It All: The Subject in the Age of Documentation, Information, and Data. MIT Press, 2014. Ferraris, Maurizio. Documentality: Why It Is Necessary to Leave Traces. [Documentalità: Perché è necessario lasciare trace, 2010, Gius: Laterza & Figli.] translated by Richard Davies. Fordham, 2013. Fishman, Jessica. Death Makes the News: How the Media Censor and Display the Dead. NYU Press, 2017. Grierson, John. “The Documentary Producer.” Cinema Quarterly, vol. 2, no. 1, 1933, pp. 7–9. Gunning, Tom. “The Cinema of Attractions: Early Film, Its Spectator, and the Avante-Garde.” Early Cinema, edited by T. Elsaesser. British Film Institute, 1990. Hardy, Forsyth, editor. Grierson on Documentary. U of California P, 1966. Kracauer, Siegfried. Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality. 1960. Introduction by Miriam Bratu Hansen. Princeton UP, 1997. Mulvey, Laura. Death 24x a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image. Reaktion, 2006. Nichols, Bill. Introduction to Documentary. 1st edition. U of Indiana P, 2001. Nichols, Bill. Introduction to Documentary. 3rd edition. U of Indiana P, 2017. Nichols, Bill. “The Question of Evidence, the Power of Rhetoric, and Documentary Film.” The Documentary Film Book, edited by Brian Winston. British Film Institute/Palgrave Macmillan, 2013, pp. 33–39. Otlet, Paul. Traité de documentation: Le livre sur le livre, théorie et pratique. Editiones Mundaneum, 1934. Plantinga, Carl. “The Limits of Appropriation: Subjectivist Accounts of the Fiction/Nonfiction Film Distinction.” The Philosophy of Documentary Film: Image, Sound, Fiction, Truth, edited by David LaRocca. Lexington, 2017, pp. 113–124. Rotha, Paul. Documentary Film: The Use of the Film Medium to Interpret Creatively and in Social Terms the Life

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Death and Documentaries of the People as It Exists in Reality. 1935. In collaboration with Sinclair Road and Richard Griffith. 3rd edition. Farber and Farber, 1952. Ruby, Jay. Secure the Shadow: Death and Photography in America. MIT Press, 1995. Sobchack, Vivian. Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture. U of California P, 2004. Sobchack, Vivian. “Toward a Phenomenology of Nonfiction Film Experience.” Collecting Visible Evidence, edited by Jaime M. Gaines and Michael Renov. U of Minneapolis P, 1999, pp. 241–254. Trinh, T. Minh-ha. “The Totalizing Quest of Meaning.” Theorizing Documentary, edited by Michael Renov. Routledge, 1993, pp. 90–107. Visible Evidence [organization/conferences]. 1993–present. Information at http://www.visibleevidence.org. Wilson, Emma. Love, Mortality, and the Moving Image. Palgrave, 2012. Winston, Brian. Claiming the Real: The Griersonian Documentary and Its Legitimations. British Film Institute, 1995. Zelizer, Barbie. About to Die: How News Images Move the Public. Oxford UP, 2010.

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13 DEATH AND THE FANCIULLA Reed Way Dasenbrock

Death has of course long been a – perhaps the – central subject of literature. This essay focuses on drama, defining opera as musical drama. The two reigning forms of drama from Classical literature until the present are tragedy and comedy, and the presence or absence of death is precisely what separates the two. Yet who dies varies across time, and it matters who dies. To put it very simply, in classical tragedy, an important man dies; in the quintessential tragic operas of the nineteenth century – those of Verdi and Bizet and Puccini – an apparently unimportant woman dies.1 I see Shakespeare’s plays, most obviously Romeo and Juliet, as the key moment leading to the modern, female-centered tragedy found in nineteenth-century opera, perhaps one reason why Shakespeare is such an important source for operatic composers. The central premise of this essay is that the shift across the millennia should be seen as part and parcel of a momentous positive shift in the status of women. I grant the paradoxical sound of this: Why would the portrayal of women dying mean their status was improving? Unpacking that paradox – I hope in a convincing manner – will also lead us to revisit some well-established lines of thought about the representation of women.2 But first, Aristotle. Although Aristotle’s description of tragedy in the Poetics doesn’t capture every aspect of Classical tragedy, its description of what constitutes tragedy has been perhaps as influential as the plays themselves in Western culture. Although Aristotle is famous for saying that action is more important than character, his definition of tragedy begins by focusing on the character of the protagonist: “tragedy attempts to imitate men who are better and comedy men who are worse than those about us” (Aristotle 71). Better in what sense? Better primarily in his station in life, for as he goes on to say, it would be “abominable” to watch “good men falling from good fortune to bad fortune,” whereas watching “very wicked men fall[ing] from good fortune to bad fortune” “is neither pitiable nor fearful” (85–86). The proper subject of a tragedy, therefore, is “the man who occupies the mean between saintliness and depravity,” and the subject of tragedy is the fall of this man from a position of “high reputation and good fortune” because of error or a flaw, a fall that causes pity and fear in the audience. Though the tragic protagonist does not have to be a man, as actual classical tragedies show, for Aristotle the proper protagonist is male, as Aristotle clarifies when he discusses that it is important that a tragic protagonist be good: “There is goodness in every type of person, for a woman is good and so is a slave, though one of these is perhaps inferior, the other paltry” (89). But such inferiority as Aristotle ascribes to women risks the possibility that the fall of the 132

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protagonist will not arouse the fear and pity tragedy requires, because the fall of an inferior person will not be from such a great height. If the nature of the protagonist is one crucial difference between tragedy and comedy, the difference between tragedy and epic – which in Aristotle’s view establishes the superiority of tragedy – is the coherence of the action or plot. The best epic for Aristotle is focused on a single action and is not episodic, but no epic can be as compact as a tragedy, constituted as it is of a single action, “a tying of the knot, or complication, and an untying of it, or solution” (95). Now, it is worth commenting that Aristotle never defines death as the closing action of a tragedy, but rather, as in the passages I have already quoted, a fall or a solution. Yet the fall of a great man in classical tragedy does lead to his death, and death always represents the untying of the knot or the solution to the complication. Aristotle doesn’t need to spell this out because in his culture, death with at least a degree of honor would always have been preferred to survival with dishonor. That preference, of course, soon clashes in the Christian era with the view that suicide is not an honorable solution but rather a mortal sin – one reason why “Christian tragedy” seems considerably more problematic as a generic/thematic category than Christian epic.3 So it should occasion no surprise that when drama re-emerges in the Renaissance and people begin to write tragedies again, these are frequently set in the Classical period. Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, to cite one familiar and apposite example, is clearly a tragedy well informed by Aristotelian genre theory. As has sometimes been noted, the play should really be called Brutus, as the death of Julius Caesar early in the play initiates the real action rather than in any sense closing it. The action of the play is the fall of Brutus, not the fall of Julius Caesar, with the decision by Brutus to join the conspiracy against Caesar being as prominent in the play as the assassination itself. This is because Brutus’s motives for joining the conspiracy represent the complication most succinctly: he and other republicans thought that if they murdered Caesar, the Republic could be saved. The operation was successful but the patient died, in the sense that their having to resort to murder and armed conflict in order to “save” the Republic was the Republic’s death blow, as it initiated a new cycle of wars that necessarily led to one party winning, setting up precisely the dictatorship or imperial rule that they hoped to prevent. When their party lost, both Brutus and Cassius committed suicide rather than be taken by Mark Antony and Octavius, and given this, Brutus is described by Mark Antony as “the noblest Roman of them all” (5.5.74). Julius Caesar sticks close to its sources in Plutarch’s Lives, unusually close for a Shakespearean play, just as it sticks close to Aristotelian precepts, but that makes the swerves from Plutarch when they do occur even more interesting. One important shift for our theme here is that neither Brutus nor Cassius is the first noble suicide in the play: Brutus’s wife, Portia, beats them both to it, immolating herself in Act IV as an alternative to capture by the Caesarian forces. Shakespeare takes this story from Plutarch’s life of Brutus, one of the key sources for the play, but intriguingly, Plutarch represents this story as probably not true, as it is contradicted by a letter of Brutus’s in which Brutus states she died from disease (240). Is this comparatively rare revision of his source a way for Shakespeare to hint that Portia was superior to her husband in nobility, in that she kills herself without needing any assistance, even if only an “inferior” woman? Roughly contemporaneous with Julius Caesar (although a few years earlier) is a far more revolutionary transformation of the genre of tragedy, a play that has seeped so thoroughly into our culture that we in general fail to understand just how revolutionary it was in the context of the 1590s. Shakespeare opens Romeo and Juliet in a distinctly comic mode, not just in the byplay between the Montague and Capulet serving men that leads to the brawl in the opening scene, but more tellingly by the figure Romeo strikes throughout the first act. No brawler, he is a lover, indeed a love poet, whose romantic musings about the fair Rosaline place us in a 133

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Petrarchan landscape that seems far indeed from the landscape of tragedy. About the only requirement for an Aristotelian tragic hero that he meets is that he is male: although of what might pass for noble status in a small Italian city-state, he is no great man whose fall will arouse pity and fear since he is not great and he has no great distance to fall. But of course the play is not called “the tragedy of Romeo,” but rather The Tragedie of Romeo and Juliet, and Juliet doesn’t meet a single one of Aristotle’s requirements: she is not just an “inferior woman,” she is a fourteen-year-old adolescent. Yet the meeting of these two unprepossessing figures generates a tragic plot that has resonated across the subsequent centuries, probably exceeding Shakespeare’s more conventional tragedies focused on kings, princes, and great men in its popular appeal despite the fact that the protagonists both utterly fail to meet the traditional requirements for the character of a tragic hero. What needs to have changed in the cultural horizon for Romeo and Juliet to have been considered a tragedy? Quite a few things, and they are worth itemizing. What is tragic in a modern, post-classical perspective about Romeo and Juliet is not just the conventional sign of the tragic genre, the fact that both die: the fact of dying may be necessary for a tragedy, but it is surely not sufficient. It is the fact of their love that makes their death tragic. This is where the Italian setting of the play is germane, for Romeo and Juliet is unthinkable without the culture of the Italian love lyric descending from Petrarch to Shakespeare’s time. Petrarchan love is at one level played for laughs in Act I, for Romeo’s excessively textual and self-absorbed “love” for Rosaline is shot full of the clichés of Petrarchan poetry. Yet Petrarch and the cultural context from which he springs had a much deeper effect on Western culture than the set of conceits that were so exhausted by Shakespeare’s time, what Sidney referred to as “poor Petrarch’s long deceased woes” (425). After Petrarch, to put it simply, our sense of human fulfillment included a – perhaps the – central place for love, and love was defined as an abiding, lifelong passion for a person of the opposite sex. (A few lyric poets in this tradition, pre-eminently Michelangelo and Shakespeare himself, challenge this normative heterosexism, but that challenge takes several centuries to escape a coterie effect.) This love, despite the Christian context, is eros, not caritas, but it is an eros focused on a single beloved. Only if we feel we deserve love, and only if we feel that true love is life long, will we be able to consider Romeo and Juliet a tragedy. The first person plural in that sentence is key: the love celebrated in Renaissance lyric culture is reciprocated, as Petrarch’s presumably unidirectional passion for Laura is modulated, both in the works of Italian women writers such as Gaspara Stampa and Veronica Gambara, who freely own to passionate attraction to the men to whom they write; and in the Protestant transformation of the Petrarch lyric by Shakespeare’s coevals such as Sidney and Spenser as well as by Shakespeare, at least in the “Dark Lady” sonnets. Reciprocated heterosexual love means that women have and express passion for men just as men do for women. The difference between the callow Romeo of Act I and Romeo by the end of the play is less that he loves than that he is loved, that Juliet loves him as deeply and as profoundly as he loves her. Actually, if one were to measure the matter, she loves him far more deeply, since she is prepared to “die” in order to be with him when she takes Friar Lawrence’s potion, an act of courage not reciprocated by Romeo. If heroism is a function of action, she is the hero because she acts, whereas Romeo merely reacts. And when they both actually die in Act V, I think we tend to evaluate their suicides differently: Romeo dies because he is in despair at the thought of a life without her (an act of weakness), whereas she dies in order to join him (an act of strength). The fact that these suicides are not condemned is one indication that we are in a Renaissance landscape in which the legacy of Classical culture has weakened the absolute hold of Christianity, but the nature of the suicides – dying for love rather than to preserve honor – also serves to establish an important departure from both. 134

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Romeo and Juliet thus infuses much of the cultural energy of the Renaissance love lyric into drama in a way that permanently enlarges the potential of the genre of tragedy. It is true that he never writes another tragedy quite like Romeo and Juliet, and that the main line of Shakespearean tragedy described in classic terms by A. C. Bradley (who doesn’t discuss Romeo and Juliet) is closer to Aristotelian precepts, at least in terms of the status of the hero. (The unities are only observed in The Tempest.) However, plays that stage deaths and resurrections of daughters and mothers alike (Much Ado about Nothing, Twelfth Night, Pericles, The Winter’s Tale) continue throughout his career, showing that for Shakespeare, tragic death does not have a gender, nor is it confined to royal families. Nor are the tragic deaths in the “major tragedies” exclusively male, either: although no one expends a great deal of pity upon the demise of Queen Gertrude or Lady Macbeth, Desdemona is altogether another matter. Although Othello is clearly the tragic hero of Othello from an Aristotelian perspective, as the play narrates the fall of a great man who clearly has a tragic flaw that destroys him, it is his destruction of her that arouses the most fear and pity in the audience. Of the two, it is pity that I wish to emphasize here and in the discussion that follows. One cannot feel pity without feeling empathy, and one cannot feel empathy with someone without simultaneously assigning full personhood to the object of empathy. The tragic hero who arouses pity therefore is someone fully assigned personhood, but the kind of tragic heroines in Shakespearean and particularly in the operatic tragedies that follows have not been the kind of characters traditionally assigned such full personhood. Creating dramas with the death of such heroines at the cathartic core of the experience is therefore a gesture that radically extends the bounds of empathy for the traditional audience. These are people, too, the tragic playwright and then composer remind us, and that reminder gives those people a status and finally an agency that historically they typically had not had. I am under no illusions that this brief discussion has touched every nuance of Shakespeare’s profound reorientation of tragedy. The point I want to emphasize is that The Tragedie of Romeo and Juliet accomplishes a profound shift in what kind of person can be a tragic hero without changing Aristotle’s more fundamental points concerning the nature of the tragic plot and its effect on the audience. Romeo and Juliet does constitute a single action in Aristotle’s sense – the tying of a complication in that a love is born and a marriage consummated between two people from families in mortal conflict – and the untying of that complication in that virtually everyone dies and the conflict dies out with them. The effect is tragic in that fear and pity do arise, pity far more than fear. And despite the dual naming of Romeo and Juliet as co-equal tragic heroes, I think it impossible not to consider Juliet the nobler and more heroic of the two. Making her death the center of a tragedy responds to Aristotle and the classical tradition in the following way: Women can be good precisely because they are not “inferior” to men. One could paraphrase Shylock and say, “hath not a woman eyes? Hath not a woman hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? […] If you prick us, do we not bleed?” Shakespeare makes a case here (and elsewhere, especially in the comedies that involve women acting as men) for the equality of the sexes, in dramatic power, in heroism, in nobility, precisely if paradoxically by making the death of this young woman the center of his play. Just as Brutus is possibly not the noblest of the Romans because Portia is (a name Shakespeare re-uses for the impossibly canny and masterful protagonist of The Merchant of Venice), Juliet is clearly the noblest of the Veronese, the character whose cultural resonance possibly exceeds any other character in Shakespeare. Perhaps the best evidence for that resonance is her afterlife in the performing arts, as this play is the source for two well-known operas in the nineteenth century, Bellini’s I Capuleti e I Monecchi and Gounod’s Roméo et Juliette, as well as possibly the greatest full-length story-ballet of the twentieth century, Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet, and one of the best-known musicals of our 135

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own time, West Side Story. But as tragedy regains cultural centrality in the nineteenth century, particularly in opera, the ratio between the sexes shifts yet again, not just from the maleoriented world of classical tragedy to the gender-balanced world of Romeo and Juliet but to a period in which tragic death is seen as essentially female. Almost no one dies on the stage of an opera before the advent of bel canto opera in the 1830s, a striking fact given how central the portrayal of death is to our sense of opera as a medium. This sharp contrast to the norms of the Elizabethan stage reflects the indebtedness of opera in the era of opera seria (now most familiar to contemporary audiences in the operas of Handel) to European neo-classical stage conventions. But things changed quickly, and virtually all of the most frequently performed operas of the next century are tragic operas that end with the death of the protagonist. Although there are plenty of operas with high body counts, the works in the tradition that I am concerned with here depict just one or two deaths. If there are two, the two are a male tenor and a female soprano, and in the most iconic of these “dual death” tragedies, Aida and Tosca, the man’s death is externally determined by the state but the woman chooses death, in essence choosing to be with her beloved rather than to continue to live. (In Aida, of course, she literally chooses to be with him, as Aida joins Radames in his tomb from which there is no escape.) This means that the slight but perceptible gap in heroism that I defined between Romeo and Juliet is dramatically expanded in these operas. The woman is the clear hero, as her death is a suicide, his an execution. Moreover, if there is only one death, the person who dies is invariably the female heroine: Gilda in Rigoletto, Violetta in La Traviata, Carmen in Carmen, Mimi in La Boheme, and Cio-Cio San in Madama Butterfly.4 And surely these operas are the crystallization of what we think of when we imagine opera: not simply the most frequently performed operatic works, but the epitome of what is meant by opera and the operatic. In the space that remains I want to make three claims about these operas, and I am aware that I am making these somewhat epigrammatically rather than conclusively proving my case. First, operatic tragedy of this period (roughly from the bel canto period until the death of Puccini in 1924) is the major manifestation of the tragic in European culture after Renaissance drama. Although it is true that much of this takes its source material from spoken drama of the period (from Schiller to Hugo to Puccini’s favorite source, the otherwise forgotten David Belasco), Steiner’s dismissive description of this dramatic literature as “near tragedy” seems right. Yet something happens when these now virtually unread and unreadable plays are transformed into music, and the reason why tragedy seems le mot juste is that catharsis is definitely part of the experience. The physiology of the experience of great opera is something that our far too cerebral theories of aesthetics don’t go very far to explain, as we haven’t advanced much beyond Aristotle’s pioneering explorations of this matter.5 Second, what changes between the time of Aristotle and Verdi is the nature of the hero: no longer a great man with high status, but rather a young, beautiful woman, usually of low class when not clearly demi mondaine. The tragedy is therefore not that so much accomplishment was undone, but rather that nothing of what could have been accomplished was done. The tragedy is of a lack of fulfillment, and it is a tragedy caused not by the action of the hero but instead despite those actions. Furthermore, although the high emotions and high voices of the operatic stage constitute a special case, I would assert nonetheless that when the term tragedy is used today, we tend to be in La Boheme mode far more than Oedipus Rex. The shooting of a high school student hiding in the cafeteria when a deranged white supremacist sprays bullets across the room: tragic. The fall of Richard Nixon or Tony Blair: what the bastard had coming to him. Not that Tosca or Carmen or Aida would ever hide, which leads to my final point. Putting the changed nature of the tragic hero together with the genuine catharsis that her death produces in the audience, one comes to the final point, which is that this shift in genre is 136

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only possible with a profound shift in the way the culture as a whole thinks about female agency. The tragic worldview differs radically from the fundamentally optimistic view of Christianity, as George Steiner has seen so clearly. But it differs even more dramatically from the feel-good avoidance mechanisms of contemporary culture, in which everyone deserves only good things and death is to be kept as far away as possible. The tragic worldview says that bad things will happen, and they will happen to good people, and it does not try to rationalize those bad things by references to God’s plan. Still, this does not mean that we have no choice about what will happen: our choice is less how to live than how to die. To put it another way, knowing how to die shows that one has known how to live. A good death is one that reclaims agency and shows that the life that one has lived has been of high value. The final act of the great operatic tragedies do exactly that, in a variety of different ways: one can choose to die with one’s lover, as Aida does; one can choose to die for one’s lover, as Gilda does; one can choose to die for one’s child, as Cio-Cio San does. Neither Mimi nor Violetta precisely chooses to die, but they face death reunited with their lovers and are willing to accept a short life well lived over a longer, meaningless existence. Of all these heroines, Carmen – the only mezzo in this list – strikes a more modern note: she doesn’t choose death but she is willing to die, indeed to be murdered, rather than make any compromise in how she will live. Tosca – with Carmen, the most modern of these doomed heroines – is willing to kill to save her lover as well as to die when her effort fails. She and Carmen supremely attain an existential freedom through their actions beyond that of the others, and they represent the endpoint of this transformation of the tragic hero that I have sought to trace in this discussion. Tragedy has long been seen as the greatest art form because it asks us to contemplate what we usually choose to ignore: the fact that we will die. Nobility in the Classical period came from embracing that truth and choosing how to die. But that nobility, in the clearly patriarchal and classist world of ancient society, was available only to high-status men. By the time of these operas, that patriarchalism and that classism had not abated, and it has not abated yet. (The behavior of the Duke of Mantua or Don José or Scarpia or Pinkerton should remind us of that if we need any reminders.) However, nobility was no longer a property of being noble, in the classist sense, and being a hero was no longer a property of being male. These heroines, the true heroes of these tragedies, have won for themselves a space to act, to choose, which was far greater than that available to women before them, as the female hero becomes the norm, not the intriguing exception to the rule. They inspire us with their power, with their courage, with what they do. They die, the audience cries, they come back to life, the audience applauds, but then the audience returns to the world outside the theater different from when they came in: with their certainties about roles and responsibilities, with their judgments about what is proper behavior for men and women, with their values about what and who to value, shaken – perhaps just a little, but shaken nonetheless.6 If the choices that face women today are not as stark as those that were faced by Juliet and Carmen and Tosca, these works of art with their tremendous cultural range and resonance are part of the reason why. True heroism doesn’t just come from the well-born male; it can come from every corner of society and from every part of life. To watch these women die is to learn something not just about how to die but also about how to live.

Notes 1

Of course, this establishes as a fundamental assumption of this essay that tragedy is a useful category for these operas. Not everyone has seen the connection: Linda and Michael Hutcheon say, for instance, that “we will not invoke the classical notion of tragedy – because the portrayal of death in the operas we will be looking at is not, in fact, conventionally tragic at all” (Opera: The Art of Dying 11).

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2 3 4

5 6

Bushnell’s substantial A Companion to Tragedy doesn’t even have “opera” in the index, just two references to “Wagnerian opera” in the context of a discussion of Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy. Herbert Lindenberger’s minority opinion is closer to my own view: “tragic opera, one might say, pushes the Aristotelian notion of catharsis far beyond what a spectator of earlier forms of tragedy could have imagined” (46). In The Death of Tragedy, George Steiner splits the difference: “in the second half of the nineteenth century, opera puts forward a serious claim to the legacy of tragic drama. This claim is inherent in all grand opera, but it is rarely sustained” (284). Although Steiner calls Wagner’s work “near tragedy,” his emphases – just like his title – reflect Nietzsche’s arguments in The Birth of Tragedy (89 ff) that Wagner represents a rebirth of tragedy and a return to its pre-Socratic and anti-rational values. Nietzsche, of course, in such later works as The Case of Wagner and Nietzsche contra Wagner became convinced that Wagner in his focus on Germanic myths had ignored his advice “to hold fast to our radiant leaders, the Greeks” (The Birth of Tragedy 110); these discussions don’t touch on the issue of tragedy. My focus here is just Italian and French opera, what the later Nietzsche would call the opera of “good weather,” not the Wagnerian opera of “bad weather.” See my Imitating the Italians (190–207) for a discussion of late Nietzsche’s anti-Wagnerianism and how Joyce uses this in Ulysses. Most obviously, Catharine Clément, Opera, or the Undoing of Women, though I also have Laura Mulvey’s gaze theory in mind as well. In George Steiner’s apposite phrasing, “the Christian view knows only partial or episodic tragedy. Within its essential optimism there are moments of despair; grave setbacks can occur during the ascent towards grace” (332). Or, even more pointedly, “the Christian vision of man leads to a denial of tragedy” (341). My argument here is that the death of the female protagonist has more weight and resonance than the death of the male. Specifically, we care more about the death of the soprano than the death of the tenor. But this is not to say that only women die. Hutcheon and Hutcheon argue against Clément’s view that opera is essentially men watching women die, concluding – in an implicit response to Clément – that “the gender question in opera is more complex than people have suggested” (Opera: Desire, Disease, Death 12). Their discussion depends on that of Michel Poizat, whose “quick autopsy of the heaps of bodies strewn across the opera stage since the beginning of the genre” leads him to conclude that in opera “male and female graves appear with equal frequency” (134). However, he points out that female deaths are more likely to conclude an opera and that many male deaths are of traitors and evil characters so that (especially in the romantic period) heroic deaths tend to be female and they are always characters with high voices (134–36). Poizat offers something of an exception to this generalization, and his intriguing approach focuses on the effect of the voice on the audience. I hope it is clear that I am not arguing that this modified form of catharsis (social awareness through catharsis) is unique to opera, although I find opera a particularly powerful example. Brecht certainly hoped for his audience to leave the theater with different social attitudes than when they arrived.

Works Cited Aristotle. “The Poetics.” Literary Criticism from Plato to Dryden, edited by Allan H. Gilbert. Wayne State UP, 1962, pp. 69–124. Bushnell, Rebecca. A Companion to Tragedy. Blackwell, 2005. Clément, Catharine. Opera, or the Undoing of Women, translated by Betsy Wing. U of Minnesota P, 1988. Dasenbrock, Reed Way. Imitating the Italians: Wyatt, Spenser, Synge, Pound, Joyce. Johns Hopkins UP, 1991. Hutcheon, Linda, and Michael Hutcheon. Opera: The Art of Dying. Harvard UP, 2004. Hutcheon, Linda, and Michael Hutcheon. Opera: Desire, Disease, Death. U of Nebraska P, 1984. Lindenberger, Herbert. Opera: The Extravagant Art. Cornell UP, 1984. Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Visual and Other Pleasures. Indiana UP, 1989, pp. 14–26. Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Birth of Tragedy, translated by Ronald Spiers. Cambridge UP, 1999. Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Case of Wagner, Nietzsche contra Wagner, and Selected Aphorisms, translated by Anthony M. Ludovici. Russell & Russell, 1964. Plutarch. “Marcus Brutus.” The Lives, translated by John Dryden and A. H. Clough. John D. Morris, vol. V, pp. 186–240. Poizat, Michel. The Angel’s Cry: Beyond the Pleasure Principle in Opera, translated by Arthur Denner. Cornell UP, 1992.

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Death and the Fanciulla Shakespeare, William. Julius Caesar. Folger Digital Texts, edited by Barbara Mowat, Paul Werstine, Michael Poston, and Rebecca Niles. www.folgerdigitaltexts.org. Accessed 28 Jan. 2020. Shakespeare, William. Romeo and Juliet. Folger Digital Texts, edited by Barbara Mowat, Paul Werstine, Michael Poston, and Rebecca Niles. www.folgerdigitaltexts.org. Accessed 28 Jan. 2020. Sidney, Phillip. “Astrophel and Stella.” English Sixteenth-Century Verse: An Anthology, edited by Richard S. Sylvester. Norton, 1984. Steiner, George. The Death of Tragedy. Knopf, 1961.

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14 DEATH, LITERARY FORM, AND AFFECTIVE COMPREHENSION Primary Emotions and the Neurological Basis of Genre Ronald Schleifer I begin a discussion of genre – and especially a consideration of genre in relation to what Stephen Dedalus describes in Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man as “whatsoever is grave and constant in human sufferings” (204) – with two passages examining literary texts in relation to what each calls “reality,” one from John Frow and one from Regina Barreca. In his book in the Routledge New Critical Idiom series entitled Genre, Frow notes that one definition of aesthetic practices is that they are keyings of the real: representations of real acts or thoughts or feelings which are not themselves, in quite the same sense, real. Shifting texts to another generic context has that kind of effect: it suspends the primary force of the text, but not its generic structure. [“Keying,” Frow notes earlier with reference to Erving Goffman, “is one of the ways animals play by pretending to fight: what looks like hurtful and aggressive behavior is in fact, bracketed, suspended, so that ‘bitinglike behavior occurs, but no one is seriously bitten.’”] (49–50) In what might be taken to be an answer to Frow’s powerful theorization of genre, Barreca argues in her essay “Writing as Voodoo: Sorcery, Hysteria, and Art” that just in case you thought there was no distinction between representation and reality, there is death. Just in case you thought experience and the representation of experience melted into one another, death provides a structural principle separating the two. See the difference, death asks, see the way language and vision differ from the actual, the irrevocable, the real? (174) Barreca’s bringing up death in discussing the power of literary genres is perhaps as shocking as the Bradshaws, in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, excusing their lateness to the party by talking about the death of a young man: “Oh! thought Clarissa, in the middle of my party, here’s death, she thought”; and “what business had the Bradshaws to talk of death at her party?” (279, 280). In a similar fashion, one may ask: What business is there to talk of death in relation to the ways that literary genres help us to “key” – which is to say, to “ground” and “reground” – comprehensible ongoing experience? How does the “mooring” of literary genres, to use a metaphor I take up later, imbricate itself in the blank bewilderment of the absolute facticity of death? 140

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These two passages, as I have said, examine literary texts in relation to what each calls “reality,” which might – but not necessarily – tie itself to death. Reality, Frow argues, can be “keyed,” and by this term (adapted from anthropology by both himself and Erving Goffman) he is describing the ways that “human behavior is rich in analogous forms of bracketing: make-believe and fantasy, aesthetic activity more generally, contests and ceremonials, […] and the ‘regrounding’ of an activity in a context where it means something quite different” (Genre 49–50). (Such “make-believe” bracketing is closely related to the neurological “imagination response” designated by David Huron [16], which I describe later.) Here Frow is arguing the ways that verbal/narrative genres, as he describes them throughout his study, should be understood as discursive structures that “create effects of reality and truth, authority and plausibility” (2). Barreca argues, however, that in the face of the irrevocable reality of death the “reality-effects” of genre, which Frow analyzes, give way to what I might call “non-reality effects” or “supernatural effects” of hysteria, sorcery, and art (as Barreca has it in her title, “Writing as Voodoo: Sorcery, Hysteria, and Art”), which do not create effects of regrounding, but rather those of un-grounding, where meaning isn’t so much transformed by means of genre, but is instead unmoored, detached in what I describe in this essay as emotion in the face of death: hysterical laughter that unmoors comedy, sorcery violence that unmoors melodrama, and overwhelming sublimity that unmoors tragedy. In this essay, then, I examine the relation of death – and particularly the irresistible facticity of death – to the literary or, more generally, to the aesthetic genres of irony, melodrama, and tragedy. I do so by focusing on Samuel Shem’s novel, The House of God, which portrays medical students encountering death and dying on a daily basis for the first time in their lives; the melodrama of John Donne and Dylan Thomas heroically confronting death; and the aweinspiring tragedy of Margaret Edson’s drama Wit. I do so by examining what I am calling the “affective comprehension” accomplished by the “forms” of literary genres in relation to evolutionarily developed defense mechanisms. In this, as I shall argue, I am taking a step back from – but hardly repudiating – Frow’s socio-historical analysis of genre.1 More specifically, I deploy in my argument David Huron’s meticulous neurological study of the power of music, Sweet Anticipation: Music and the Psychology of Expectation, to examine the ways literary genres call upon and reground primal emotions of fear, anger, and surprise – emotions that respond to lifethreatening situations – as the laughter, triumph, and awe that constitute, in basic ways, the affective comprehension of literary genres. These emotions – fear, anger, surprise – take their place among six primary human emotions that a number of psychologists, often following the work of Paul Ekman, have isolated (the others are disgust, happiness, and sadness). Ruth Leys calls Ekman’s catalogue the “Basic Emotions” paradigm (439).

Genre as Etiquette, Language, and a Natural Fact For many years I edited the journal Genre, whose subtitle we changed at the beginning of the 1990s to Forms of Discourse and Culture. We made that change because in the late twentieth century, after the advent and success of continental literary theory in literary studies (namely, structuralism and post-structuralism), there was a notable turn toward the historicism of cultural studies in reaction, I think, to the latent formalism in many of these practices of literary theory. In any case, this turn to cultural studies has certainly inflected the ways in which we study and comprehend the genres that inhabit and, I believe, shape (that is to say, “reground”) our experiences of the arts and even the ordinary everyday genres (i.e., Mikhail Bakhtin’s “speech genres”) that shape the experiences of our social lives. This rethinking of the historical situation of literary and other art genres is nicely articulated in John Frow’s useful study of genre. His “book’s central argument,” Frow notes, 141

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is that far from being merely ‘stylistic’ devices, genres create effects of reality and truth, authority and plausibility, which are central to the different ways the world is understood. […] These effects are not, however, fixed and stable, since texts – even the simplest and most formulaic – do not ‘belong’ to genres but are, rather, uses of them; they refer not to ‘a’ genre but to a field or economy of genres, and their complexity derives from the complexity of that relation. (Genre 2) In this argument, then, Frow suggests that texts do not “belong” to an abstract generic category, but rather participate in a complex relationship between categorical “forms” and historical “manifestations” of phenomena: an “economy,” as he calls it (see Schleifer, Political Economy for a sustained analysis of such a comparable performative understanding of “economy”). Making this suggestion, Frow situates genre within history and culture rather than as “transcendental” formal categories by which phenomenal experience – in this case particular literary and narrative texts – might be explained, understood, and/or apprehended. Still, in making his argument he also posits a comprehensive account of genres in everyday language and literary texts and suggests that there have been four general approaches to understanding and comprehending genre, namely “as a fact of language, as a sociological fact, as a matter of social etiquette, or as something like the natural organism.” “In each case,” he concludes, “the metaphor provides a way of thinking systematically about a form of ordering that is in many ways resistant to system” (57).

Genre as Etiquette Frow himself focuses on genre as “a sociological fact,” but in this essay I would like to touch upon his other categories. A good discussion of genre as etiquette is Amy Olberding’s fine account of the Confucian notion of li. Although li is usually is translated as “ritual,” she translates li as “manners” or “etiquette” in such a way that, I might suggest, it could also be translated as “genre,” insofar as she describes etiquette as social forms that “script” patterns of behavior. Such etiquette, she notes, would, for example, script patterns of human interaction or choreograph the protocols of formal mourning [… and] represent an effort to lend efficacious and beneficial order to commonplace and recurrent human experiences. [Such protocols] arise in sensitivity to human need, be it the need to acknowledge each other as social partners or to organize expression of naturally arising yet perilous emotions such as grief. (425–26) Here Olberding relates the “scripts” of etiquette to what Stephen Dedalus describes as “whatsoever is grave and constant in human sufferings” (Joyce 204). I began this essay by noting that genre attends to constants in human experience in order to link genre more clearly with danger and death. Olberding’s focus on mourning and grief does the same with “etiquette.”

Narrative Genres as a Fact of Language In this essay, however, I focus on Frow’s description of genre as a category of “something like the natural organism,” though first I will also touch upon his categorical description “genre as a fact of language.” In my work with the semiotics of A. J. Greimas, I have tried to demonstrate that Greimas argued that narrative genres – along with what he calls “narrative grammar” – can be understood as strictly parallel to the structure of the sentence. Thus, he describes four agents of narrative – he calls them “actants” – that correspond to parts of speech in the sentence, and suggests that one can define four narrative genres in terms of the relationships among these 142

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narrative agents. The agents he identifies are: the Hero (corresponding to the subject of a sentence), the Wished-For Good or Heroine (corresponding to the object of a sentence), and the Helper and Opponent (each corresponding to adverbs of a sentence). In The Chief Concern of Medicine, Jerry Vannatta and I describe a system of narrative genres based upon my earlier study, “Structures of Meaning: The Logic of Narrative and the Constitution of Literary Genres” (in Culture and Cognition: The Boundaries of Literary and Scientific Inquiry). In Greimas’s understanding, these narrative agents help define four “basic” narrative genres: Heroic Melodrama (Epic): a heroic narrative, where the Hero receives the Wished-For Goods (in myth and tradition, the bride and the kingdom). The Hero conquers the opponent in the process. Tragedy: a tragic narrative, where the Helper receives the Wished-For Goods (both the storied knowledge of what has taken place on the level of the individual destruction of the Hero and the promised reconstruction of the community on the brink of collapse with the destruction of the Hero, which is often accomplished by the Helper). Comedy: a comic narrative, where the Heroine receives the Wished-For Goods (in myth and tradition, the Hero as husband and the estate of marriage). Irony: a more or less “modern” narrative, where the Opponent receives the Wished-For Goods (to destroy them on the level of the individual and to transform them on the level of general value). (Schleifer and Vannatta, Chief Concern 383–84; see also Schleifer et al. 64–95). This schema of four basic narrative genres, then, follows from a sense of conceiving of genre as, in Frow’s terms, “a fact of language.”

Genre as “Something like a Natural Organism” Frow, however, takes the biological metaphor for genre as the most robust metaphorical analogue for genre: “it has been above all the model of the biological species, building on the organic concepts of ‘kind’ and ‘genre’, that has been used to bring the authority of a scientific discourse to genre theory.” However, even while he concludes that “none of this is particularly useful for thinking about the literary or other kinds [of genre], for the good reason that genres are facts of culture which can only with difficulty be mapped onto facts of nature” (Genre 57), nevertheless he goes on to note that such seemingly “scientific” categorization builds upon cognitive notions of “prototype,” which allow categorizations that enable us “to work from what we know best in a sort of concrete and ad hoc negotiation of unfamiliar experiences” (60). It is my argument here, however, that it is useful to think of genres as “facts of nature,” both in terms of responses to “common and recurrent human experiences” and in conceiving of genre in relation to the equally “natural” notion of “facts of language.” That is, one function of genre – perhaps a basic function, as I will be suggesting – does not aim at incorporating the unfamiliar into systems of the familiar, but rather builds upon what is most familiar, namely affective responses to experience that are evolutionarily adaptive and thereby both ubiquitous and, in fact, “facts of nature.” Such building upon what I and my colleague Courtney Jacobs have called “impersonal emotions” ( Jacobs and Schleifer) might allow us to complicate Frow’s contention that genres, as “facts of culture,” do not solely realize themselves in relation to organic concepts. Although this contention may well be true, nevertheless we can also understand that the “realization” of a narrative genre can be understood as fruitfully beginning with conceiving of genre “as something like [a] natural organism” (Frow, Genre 57).

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The Affective Comprehension of Genre What I describe here as “impersonal emotions” Lee Spinks, in a study of the power of affect in literature and politics, calls “inhuman or pre-subjective forces and intensities” (24). Similarly, Eric Shouse calls these affective phenomena “affective resonances independent of content or meaning” (¶ 14). Summarizing these and other scholars focusing on affect across various disciplines, Ruth Leys notes: They suggest that the affects must be viewed as independent of, and in an important sense prior to, ideology – that is, prior to intentions, meanings, reasons, and beliefs – because they are nonsignifying, autonomic processes that take place below the threshold of conscious awareness and meaning. For the theorists in question, affects are “inhuman,” “pre-subjective,” “visceral” forces and intensities that influence our thinking and judgments but are separate from these. Whatever else may be meant by the terms affect and emotion […] it seems from the remarks quoted above that the affects must be noncognitive, corporeal processes or states. For such theorists, affect is, as [Brian] Massumi asserts, “irreducibly bodily and autonomic.” (437; quoting Massumi 28) In her analysis, however, Leys correctly contends that (what I might call) the “romanticization” of the noncognitive in these arguments is misdirected (see particularly 456–57 and 458 n43, for instance; for my pointing out the “romanticism” of these arguments, see Leys’s critique of the “immanent naturalism” in many of these discussions [459]). It is my sense – tutored from semiotics – that such “noncognitive” phenomena are “taken up” almost immediately, almost universally in human experience by semiotic systems and deployed to new and different ends, different purposes. The temporal “gap” described by many scholars focused on affect theory, as Leys nicely demonstrates, reduces the richness of human experience to the poverty of (an unnecessary) positivism. That is, the notion of “impersonal emotions” I describe here is clearly distinct from the notion of “affects as nonintentional states” that Leys critiques (466 n56). Rather, it is useful to comprehend such “impersonal emotions” with similar qualifications that Jacques Derrida brings to the notion of “intention” in speech acts. In the “typology” of iteration, he writes, the category of intention [or, in my argument, the category of “noncognitive affect”] will not disappear: it will have its place, but from that place it will no longer be able to govern the entire scene and system of utterance [or “feeling”] […] The first consequence of this will be the following: given that structure of iteration, the intention [or “noncognitive affect”] animating that utterance [or “feeling”] will never be through and through present to itself and to its content. (192) Finally, what is also apposite in Leys’s systematic critique of “the turn to affect” to my discussion here is that, in developing her critique, she focuses on three experiments, which themselves analyze the laughter (459–61), “the emotion of fear” (463–64 n54), and perhaps – in Massumi’s reference to the “snowman” television experiment (444–52) – the awe I examine in this essay. In his early poetry, W. B. Yeats identifies what he called the “immortal moods” (Essays 195) that he pursues in his poetry, which nicely approximates the “impersonal emotions” I am describing here. Yeats describes the “immortal moods” as emotional states one passes through rather than personal emotional states, idiosyncratically associated with one’s individual self, that one simply expresses.2 “All the powers of nature have their purpose and their place,” Yeats and 144

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Edwin John Ellis write in their 1893 study of Blake, “and a man’s personal feeling when it is a passive vehicle for the creative fire within, makes itself a mere mask for the divine fire” (Blake, Works I:296). In his neurological analysis of what he argues is a key source of the power of music, namely “the psychology of expectation,” David Huron offers an analysis of emotions – he nicely calls it an understanding of “the dynamics of emotion” (1) – that are impersonal in the ways I am describing without being “noncognitive.” In analyzing music, Huron describes three evolutionarily developed emotional responses occasioned by danger: • • •

the “thrills and chills” of frisson (in which “the first order of business is to produce an aggressive display” [33]); the odd “panting” of laughter (which “is a response to an apparent or momentary danger” [32; see 28 for panting]); and the “gasp” of awe (which “is a response to a sustained danger” [32]).

In other words, these three emotional responses to danger are related to what Huron describes as neurologically determined tension, reaction, and appraisal responses to danger. These emotions, he argues, are “strikingly similar” to what “physiologists have identified [as] three classic responses to danger: the fight, flight, and freeze responses” (35). Moreover, they correspond to three of the six primary emotions psychologists have identified: fear, anger, and aweinspiring surprise. Needless to say, the equation of laughter and flight seems the least intuitive of Huron’s identifications. Still, in a note he adds that “further support for the idea that laughter is linked to the flight response is evident in the rough-and-tumble play that is often associated with laughter in humans and other primates” in which “a submissive animal being chased by a more dominant playmate, with the submissive animal laughing” (384). This qualification is important since I focus in this essay on the fearful comedy of irony as well as the blunt melodrama of anger and the blank awe of tragedy. Huron’s catalogue of emotional responses to life-threatening danger seems to skip one of the narrative genres I have catalogued, namely comedy. I return to the comic emotion of happiness at the end of this essay, as well I should. I have made the argument elsewhere that the function of aesthetic phenomena in human cultures is to take up evolutionarily adaptive behaviors and redeploy them to so-called aesthetic ends (Schleifer and Vannatta, Chief Concern 77–82). Such redeployment, I have recently argued, can be understood in relation to the evolutionary category of homology, where similar biological structures – such as the physiology of the bat wing and the human hand – are taken up to different ends (see Schleifer, Political Economy). As I suggested in the introduction to this essay, Frow describes this as the “regrounding” of aesthetic experience. Thus, in analyzing the stimuli that give rise to “surprising events,” Huron notes that “whether the stimulus is visual or auditory in origin,” nevertheless response to those stimuli follow the same neurological pathways. Although Huron doesn’t mention discursive as well as “visual or auditory” stimuli here, he does list “imagination response” as the first of his catalogue of “five response systems [which] arise from five functionally distinct neurophysiological systems” that respond to life-threatening danger: “imagining an outcome,” he notes, “allows us to feel some vicarious pleasure (or displeasure) – as though the outcome has already happened” (17, 8); and he speculates that “the imagination response is probably the most recent evolutionary addition” to these five systems of evolutionarily adaptive responses to life-threatening danger (17). Let me simply reproduce his table (16) of five neurological systems – which are, in fact, physiological manifestations of neurological schemas – that, in his analysis, respond to life-threatening danger.

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Epoch

Biological function

imagination response

pre-outcome

tension response

pre-outcome

prediction response

post-outcome

reaction response

post-outcome

appraisal response

post-outcome

future-oriented behavioral motivation; enables deferred gratification optimum arousal and attention in preparation for anticipated events negative/positive reinforcement to encourage the formation of accurate expectations neurologically fast responses that assume a worst-case assessment of the outcome neurologically complex assessment of the final outcome that results in negative/positive reinforcements

I am suggesting here, then, that we can understand aesthetic genres as the re-deployments of evolutionary adaptive systematic responses to the environment. Brian Boyd, in his evolutionary analysis of storytelling, argues that the adaptive function of discursive narrative is to promote the articulation of social/communal goals within a human community to ends of promoting collaborative action – such as the rhythmic and communal cries of lyric poetry Stephen Dedalus describes – to achieve those goals (see Boyd 42–50). Moreover, one can similarly argue for the adaptive function of music – notably work-songs or cadenced voicing in the synchronized drilling of fighting units – as creating social/communal goals and promoting collaborative action to achieve those goals. Additionally, one could also argue that visual stimuli in social life – religious architecture, iconic representations, clothing design – serve the parallel adaptive functions of promoting shared action. The creation of social bonds, the anthropologist Robin Dunbar has argued, is the adaptive function of “the origin of language.” I have argued that the formal aesthetics of discourse, music, and the plastic arts aim not at promoting social cohesion and social action, but rather at expanding the horizons of sensibility, affect, and cognition. Thus, everyday narrative, as Brian Boyd argues in his study of narrative in the context of evolutionary biology, functions to get the listener or listeners to behave in a certain way by creating a framework for communal action as well as a framework for communal understanding. To this end, the attention that literary narrative requires encourages the discernment of what Jim Phelan calls the “cognitive, emotive, and ethical responses” that narrative provokes and the discernment of “the complexity of the relationship between facts, hypotheses, and theories” (Phelan 14, 15) that art narratives (but also concert music and museum art) set forth. (I should add that in addition the attention focused upon in what one musicologist calls the “museum art” [Hamilton 325] of concert performances and, of course, the museum art of plastic-arts museums themselves, is designed to isolate so-called aesthetic experience from action in the musical and plastic arts.) Here, then, in my argument, is the nature of genre: genres are not defined in the first instance, as Frow argues, “by the actions they are used to accomplish.” They are not in the first instance, as he notes Carolyn Miller argues, “typified rhetorical actions based in recurrent situations” (Frow, Genre 14; Miller 31). Rather, in the first instance we can understand aesthetic genre as a means of increasing “affective comprehension” in engagements with others and with experience in general. That is – again, I have to emphasize, in the first instance – genre takes up evolutionarily adaptive responses to life-threatening events in order to focus and develop the affective and cognitive potentials of those responses to the end of widening experience rather than promoting action. Thus, following Huron, I want to examine genre as allowing us to 146

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more fully experience the following phenomena (by “more fully” I mean with larger and more self-conscious intensity, with greater nuance, with wider fellow-feeling): • • •

the fear and laughter embedded in a flight response to danger; the anger and frisson embedded in a fight response to danger; and the awe and passive suffering embedded in a freeze response to danger.

I have described this distinction between the goals and strategies of the deployments of everyday discursive/narrative events and the deployments of aesthetic discursive/narrative events as the difference between “everyday” narrative and “art” narrative. Everyday narrative is at the heart of clinical medicine. (It is also central to Bakhtin’s and Frow’s distinction between “speech genres” and “literary genres.”) Patients bring “everyday” narratives to their healthcare providers, and the goal of the deployment of these narratives is to promote action in the world. However, training in the “affective comprehension” stimulated by “art” narrative allows healthcare providers to engage their patients more fully, to recognize and act upon the (usually) implicit goals in their patients’ storytelling, and to combine – or at least entertain – the importance of care as well as cure in their work with people who are sometimes fearful, angry, or suffering with their plight (see Schleifer and Vannatta, Chief Concern; Literature and Medicine).

Facing Death in Narrative Genres Fearful Irony In the rest of this essay, I briefly analyze the affective comprehension of literary genres. To do so, I will focus on discursive/narrative events that respond to and “reground” fear, anger, and awe in the face of death. The texts I have chosen to examine are literary works that my colleagues and I have repeatedly chosen in team-teaching a course in “Literature and Medicine” organized by myself and practicing physicians. As such, these literary (“art”) narratives also function as “everyday” narratives, as befits the double task embodied in such interdisciplinary courses. Grounding an essay focused on literary form and death on such texts is not simply arbitrary. We talk in our “Literature and Medicine” classes about how the experience of work in achieving an MD is no more arduous than the experience of work in achieving a literary PhD, with one exception: training in healthcare, unlike disciplined literary study (and also unlike the disciplines of the nomological and social sciences) necessarily involves confrontation of human suffering and death on a daily basis. This confrontation with death, in fact, constitutes the affective base of the texts I examine here, in the laughter of Shem’s House of God, the resistance to death in complicated lyrics of Donne and Thomas, and the awe death inspires in Edson’s terrifying drama. I begin with the fearful laughter of irony in Samuel Shem’s novel The House of God. The House of God is a novel that traces the first year of medical interns in a large metropolitan hospital in the United States. Young, mostly male physicians encounter death and dying on a daily basis, but the novel is filled with cynicism, sexuality (real and fantasized) in the midst of death and dying, and above all with strange laughter. The narrator and main character, Dr. Roy Basch, faces the worst week of the year coming up, “the one between Christmas and New Year’s,” which his girlfriend tells him is “a week of death. Be careful, get ready. It’s going to be terrible.” “A Holocaust,” Roy says; “Exactly. Savage,” Berry replies. But afterward Roy says, “I started to laugh, Berry started to laugh, and soon the bed, the room, the world itself was one gigantic mouth and tongue and tooth engaged in one ellipsoid laugh” (199). In his neurological 147

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analysis of laughter responses to music, Huron isolates one musical strategy (among others), namely “drifting tonality,” which can help us understand the comic humor in response to the fear of death in The House of God. Of “drifting tonality,” he notes that “when shifts of key occur frequently, the sense of tonality itself is lost or ambiguous” (285). Throughout The House of God, Shem continually creates such tonal/semantic shifts, as he does in the preceding example, not only in juxtaposing the Holocaust and laughter, but even in the odd qualitative description of “ellipsoid” laugh, that joins mouth and mirth, so to speak, and may silently recall Joyce’s “ellipsoidal [billiard] balls” from Portrait (192). As I note later, the “mouth-gesture” of laughter described here takes its place with mouth-gestures articulated in melodramatic and tragic affective responses to life-threatening situations. The “tonal drift” here – and in mouth-gestures more generally – shifts between the bodily life of mouth (including the body’s susceptibility to death itself ) and the semiotic/“spiritual” life of gesture. Later, after breaking up with Berry at a New Year’s party, Roy gets drunk and, watching nurses dance with one another, he thinks of “‘The Follies’ at Treblinka.” Then he says: And then I thought about the pictures of the camps, taken by the Allies at liberation. The pictures showed emaciated men peering through the barbed wire, all eyes. Those eyes, those eyes. Hard blank disks. My eyes had become hard blank disks. Yet there was something in back of them, and, yes, that was the worst. The worst was that I had to live with what was in back of them, what I had to live with, the rest of the world must never see, for it separated me from them, as it had just done with my former best friends and with my one long love, Berry. There was rage and rage and rage, coating all like crude oil coating gulls. They had hurt me, bad. For now, I had no faith in the others of the world. And the delivery of medical care? Farce. My first patient of the New Year was a five-year-old found in a clothes dryer, face bloodied. She had been hit by her pregnant mother, hit over and over with a bludgeon of pantyhose stuffed with shards of broken glass. (213–14) Despite a small number of passages like this – filled with pathos, anger, and debilitating fear – House of God remains a very funny book. Its comic laughter works in the way that Huron’s musical laughter works and the way that the fearful irony I describe here works: they function by violating expectations. “Most of these violations,” Huron writes, “involve schematic expectations […] But all of the laughter-evoking moments can be traced to violations of listener expectations.” Moreover, he adds, “laughter-inducing passages are much more surprising than frisson-inducing or awe-inducing passages” (287). In this, the fearful laughter of ironic comedy, unlike the satisfactions of romantic comedy, calls attention to and emphasizes the affective comprehension of genre. Romantic comedy – like generic aesthetics more generally – promises a species of unalloyed pleasure, if not happiness itself. However, the ambiguous comedy of The House of God (laughing in the face of death) instantiates ironic comedy where the Opponent, death itself, seems all there is. Early in his study, Huron catalogues “types of laughter”: nervous laughter, in the face of threat; slapstick laughter, answering physical awkwardness; sadistic laughter, responding to the misfortunes of enemies; surprise laughter, confronted with safe surprises, like the bursting of a balloon; social laughter, that participates in social groups; and humor laughter, which is staged in joke-telling, as genres are staged, as a form of entertainment (28). The ironic comedy of The House of God calls upon and provokes all these types of laughter, and in doing so, creates its own affective comprehension of irony’s laughing response to the terrible facticity of death itself.

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Blunt Melodrama If, as Huron argues, laughter is a social response to fear (27–31), then fear provokes a different type of “physiological reaction” in the almost anti-social aggressive display of narrative melodrama. “In the fight response,” Huron writes, “the first order of business is to produce an aggressive display. By signaling one’s readiness to fight, it is possible that the threatening individual might back down, and so an actual fight can be avoided. Aggressive displays can include the displaying of teeth, making eye contact with the other animal, and generating lowpitched vocalizations” (33). Such self-aggrandizing is anti-social insofar as it doesn’t suggest social activities – as does the laughing/fearful play-fighting I mentioned earlier – but rather suggests the assertion of self against the world. Furthermore, “the physiological reaction” Huron describes is literally aggrandizing: in this “fight” response to danger and death, he says, “there are a series of behaviors that are all intended to make the individual appear bigger – and so more intimidating” (33). We can notice such self-assertion in melodramatic responses to death. This is surely Dylan Thomas’s generic assertion in his powerful villanelle, “Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night,” when the open vowels of /ay/ and /ee/ – “rave,” “rage,” “deeds,” “green bay,” “grieved,” “grave,” “blaze” – literally bare our teeth in recitation, even while softer vowels – “gentle,” “good night,” “dying,” “near death,” “fierce tears, I pray” – might approximate the low-pitched vocalizations that Huron describes (see Schleifer, “Modernism as Gesture,” where these phenomena are described as “mouth-gestures” [95]). In this essay, for reasons that will become clear, I’d like to look briefly at John Donne’s holy sonnet, “Death, Be Not Proud,” which complements Thomas’s villanelle insofar as the strict formality of these poetic genres – villanelle and sonnet – offers its own self-assertion against the world of ordinary discourse in their displays of discursive mastery. Here is Donne’s sonnet. Holy Sonnet VI: Death, Be Not Proud Death be not proud, though some have callèd thee Mighty and dreadfull, for, thou art not soe, For, those, whom thou think’st thou dost overthrow, Die not, poore death, nor yet canst thou kill mee; From rest and sleepe, which but thy pictures bee, Much pleasure, then from thee, much more must flow; And soonest our best men with thee doe goe, Rest of their bones, and soules deliverie. Thou’art slave to Fate, chance, kings and desperate men, And dost with poyson, warre, and sicknesse dwell, And poppie,’ or charmes can make us sleepe as well, And better than thy stroake; why swell’st thou then? One short sleepe past, wee wake eternally, And death shall be no more, Death thou shalt die. In his sonnet, the speaker – again, literally – aims at “deflating” his adversary death by likening death to small things: false dreadfulness, weakness, pleasure when death wants to project fear, sickness, less than poppy or charms, with altogether false “swelling.” Even the repetitious long /ee/ in the penultimate line – “sleep,” “eternally” – repeats the phonemic mouth-gestures we find in Thomas. Like Thomas, in this poem Donne “stands up” to death, switches places with death to take on, in the poem’s triumphal melodramatic ending, the very swelling and destruction of death the poem asserts. Such an ending creates what Huron calls the “abrupt 149

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modulation” (34) that gives rise to frisson in music and, I am arguing here, in the narrative genre of melodrama. Frisson, Huron writes, “is strongly correlated with marked violations of expectation – in particular, with dynamic, metric, and harmonic violations […] Frisson experiences are also reported when a high dynamic level is followed unexpectedly by a dramatic reduction in loudness” (283). The dynamics of Donne’s sonnet are marked: this, after all, in the poem’s work of deflation and self-aggrandizement.

Blank Tragedy The awe of tragedy arises in its constant confrontation with death, neither the dissolution of the fear of death in momentary laughter nor in momentary self-assertion. “The feeling of awe,” Huron notes, is a distinctive emotion in which fear and wonder are intermingled. A sense of awe might be evoked by a fearful reverence inspired by something sacred or mysterious. Awe can also represent a submissive fear in the presence of some great authority or power. In short, awe might be defined as a sort of “sublime fear.” “Awe” combines mystery, wonder, and reverence with a touch of dread […]. Five physiological indicators are associated with the experience of awe: (1) gasping, (2) breath-holding, (3) lowered chin with the mouth slightly opened, (4) immobility or stillness, and (5) reduced blinking. Gasping and breath-holding are especially telltale indicators. (288) Here, as in the ellipsoid laughter in Shem and the phonemic gestures in Thomas and Donne, a mouth-gesture – “lowered chin with the mouth slightly opened” – also marks the bodily-affect response of awe in the face of life-threatening situations. Thus, to conclude my small catalogue of genres understood in relation to affective responses to life-threatening situations, I take up Margaret Edson’s one-act drama, Wit, to complement the novel and the poems I have already discussed. Wit is a one-act play that describes the last year in the life of a middle-aged woman, Vivian Bearing, who is a professor of literature – focused, as it happens, on the poetry of John Donne – and suffering from stage-four metastatic ovarian cancer. Also, as it happens, the play begins with her thinking about her condition in relation to literary genres: “Irony is a literary device,” she says, that will necessarily be deployed to great effect. I ardently wish this were not so. I would prefer that a play about me be cast in the mythic-heroic-pastoral mode; but the facts, most notably stage-four metastatic ovarian cancer, conspire against that. The Faerie Queene this is not. And I was dismayed to discover that the play would contain elements of … humor. (6) Very soon after this opening, the play offers a flashback to Vivian’s study of “Donne’s Holy Sonnets, which,” she says, “explore mortality in greater depth than any other body of work in the English language” (12). Her professor, E. M. Ashford, tells her that “the sonnet begins with a valiant struggle with death, calling on all the forces of intellect and drama to vanquish the enemy. But it is ultimately about overcoming the seemingly insuperable barriers separating life, death, and eternal life” (14). Ashford notes that the proper punctuation of the final line of the poem is not the semi-colon and exclamation point of the edition Vivian uses in her paper, but 150

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simply a comma (in Donne’s text I cited earlier). “Nothing but a breath – a comma –” Professor Ashford says, “separates life from life everlasting. It is very simple really. With the original punctuation restored, death is no longer something to act out on stage, with exclamation points. It’s a comma, a pause” (14–15). This is indeed awe-inspiring: fearful, reverential, mysterious. But I want to conclude with another scene from this small tragedy, a flashback when Vivian remembers a student who asks: “Why does Donne make everything so complicated? […] I think,” the student goes on, “it’s like he’s hiding. I think he’s really confused, I don’t know, maybe he’s scared, so he hides behind all this complicated stuff, hides behind this wit […] Perhaps he is suspicious of simplicity” (60–61). Toward the very end of the play, Vivian is comforted eating a popsicle with her nurse, Susie, and she thinks: “Now is a time for simplicity. Now is a time for, dare I say it, kindness” (69). The simplicity of kindness Vivian calls for, like the tragic play itself, combines reverence and mystery. And Susie, the Helper in this tragedy of facing death – without nervous or slapstick laughter, without aggrandizing heroics – is left with the Wished-For Good, the uncomplicated love and community which, awe-inspiringly, resists and succumbs to death.

Conclusion: Death and Literary Genre What are we to make of all this? After all, we are all a lot like Professor Vivian Bearing, who makes wit and intellectualizing and Donne-like complications the work of her life, so that intellectually, we might study here, as I am doing in this essay, the “circulations” of genre – its “re-groundings” and “un-groundings” – across language, sociology, morality, and nature. To this end, let me end with an enigmatic poem by Wallace Stevens, “The Pleasures of Merely Circulating,” in which the laughter and wit of circulating – generic intellectual heroics – are ungrounded, so to speak, in the face of death. The garden flew round with the angel, The angel flew round with the clouds, And the clouds flew round and the clouds flew round And the clouds flew round with the clouds. Is there any secret in skulls, The cattle skulls in the woods? Do the drummers in black hoods Rumble anything out of their drums? Mrs. Anderson’s Swedish baby Might well have been German or Spanish, Yet that things go round and again go round Has rather a classical sound. (96–97) Death calls up the affective comprehension of laughter, frisson, awe, and allows us one way of thinking about literary genre in terms of affective responses to threats that are re-grounded in the “keyings of the real” that John Frow describes. But death also gives rise to “un-grounding”: to simple but profound sadness, one of the primary emotions I haven’t examined in this essay. Stevens, again, focuses on such a feeling in a poem entitled “The Plain Sense of Things”:

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It is difficult even to choose the adjective For this blank cold, this sadness without cause. The great structure has become a minor house. No turban walks across the lessened floors. (383) There might be no narrative genre for such sadness, such existential pathos that leaves us ungrounded, in “blank cold,” futureless (see Schleifer, Rhetoric and Death 223–29). But beauty, as Stendhal once said, is simply “nothing other than the promise of happiness” (66). In this, literary genres, like music, even in the face of death, surprise us with laughter, heroics, and awe – surprise us into laughter, heroics, and awe. In such surprises, if only momentarily, we may discover re-grounding and play in the face of death.

Notes 1

2

Here, I might simply note that in his discussion of genre in PMLA a number of years ago – before his publication of the second edition of his “new idiom” study of Genre – Frow explicitly suggests that future examinations of genre should situate themselves in relation to what he calls “The New Rhetoric” and “Cognitive Poetics” (“Reproducibles” 1630–31), especially neurological and narrative schemas of cognitive poetics, which I pursue in this essay. Olberding nicely describes the etiquette-ritual behavior of li in similar impersonal terms: “the exchanges and experiences of ordinary, quotidian life profoundly shape moral attitudes, moral self-understanding, and what prospects we enjoy for robust moral community. Philosophically addressing these exchanges and experiences is, nonetheless, a significant challenge, for much of what transpires in them operates outside of conscious intentions, deliberate choices, and reflective consideration – those territories most well traversed in Western moral philosophy” (423–24).

Works Cited Bakhtin, M. M. Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, edited by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Translated by Vern W. McGee. U of Texas P, 2010. Barreca, Regina. “Writing as Voodoo: Sorcery, Hysteria, and Art.” Death and Representation, edited by Sarah Webster Goodwin and Elisabeth Bronfen. Johns Hopkins UP, 1993, pp. 175–190. Blake, William. The Works of William Blake: Poetic, Symbolic, Critical. Edited by W. B. Yeats and Edwin John Ellis. 3 vols. Bernard Quaritch, 1893. Boyd, Brian. On the Origin of Stories: Evolution, Cognition, and Fiction. Harvard UP, 2009. Derrida, Jacques. “Signature Event Context.” Glyph, vol. 1, 1977, pp. 172–197. Donne, John. “Holy Sonnet VI: Death, Be Not Proud.” 1633. www.potw.org/archive/potw83.html. Accessed 22 Feb. 2020. Dunbar, Robin. Grooming, Gossip, and the Origins of Language. Harvard UP, 1996. Edson, Margaret. Wit. Faber and Faber, 1999. Frow, John. “‘Reproducibles, Rubrics, and Everything You Need’: Genre Theory Today.” PMLA, vol. 122, 2007, pp. 1626–1634. Frow, John. Genre (The New Critical Idiom). Routledge, 2015. Hamilton, Andy. “The Aesthetics of Imperfection.” Philosophy, vol. 65, 1990, pp. 323–340. Huron, David. Sweet Anticipation: Music and the Psychology of Expectation. MIT Press, 2007. Jacobs, Courtney, and Ronald Schleifer. “Literary Genre and Affective Experience: Intergeneration Trauma in the Neo-Slave Narrative of Toni Morrison’s Beloved.” Swiss Papers in English Language and Literature, vol. 38, 2019, pp. 145–166. Joyce, James. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Viking, 1966. Leys, Ruth. “The Turn to Affect: A Critique.” Critical Inquiry, vol. 37, 2011, pp. 434–472. Massumi, Brian. Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation. Duke UP, 2002. Miller, Carolyn. “Genre as Social Action.” Genre and the New Rhetoric, edited by Aviva Freedman and Peter Medway. Taylor & Francis, 1994, pp. 23–42.

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Neurological Basis of Genre Olberding, Amy. “Etiquette: A Confucian Contribution to Moral Philosophy.” Ethics, vol. 126, 2016, pp. 422–446. Phelan, James. Narrative as Rhetoric: Techniques, Audiences, Ethics, Ideology. Ohio State UP, 1996. Schleifer, Ronald. “Modernism as Gesture: The Experience of Music, Samuel Beckett, and Performed Bewilderment.” Criticism, vol. 61, 2019, pp. 73–96. Schleifer, Ronald. A Political Economy of Modernism: Literature, Post-Classical Economics, and the Lower Middle Class. Cambridge UP, 2018. Schleifer, Ronald. Rhetoric and Death: The Language of Modernism and Postmodern Discourse Theory. U of Illinois P, 1990. Schleifer, Ronald, Robert Con Davis, and Nancy Mergler. Culture and Cognition: The Boundaries of Literary and Scientific Inquiry. Cornell UP, 1992. Schleifer, Ronald, and Jerry Vannatta. The Chief Concern of Medicine: The Integration of the Medical Humanities and Narrative Knowledge into Medical Practices. U of Michigan P, 2013. Schleifer, Ronald, and Jerry Vannatta. Literature and Medicine: A Practical and Pedagogical Guide. PalgraveMacmillan, 2019. Shem, Samuel. The House of God. Berkeley Press, 2010. Shouse, Eric. “Feeling, Emotion, Affect.” M/C Journal, vol. 8, Dec. 2005. journal.media-culture.org.au/ 0512/03-shouse.php. Spinks, Lee. “Thinking the Post-Human: Literature, Affect, and the Politics of Style.” Textual Practice, vol. 15, no. 1, 2001, pp. 23–46. Stendhal. On Love, translated by B. C. J. G. Knight. Penguin Books, 1975. Stevens, Wallace. The Palm at the End of the Mind: Selected Poems and a Play, edited by Holly Stevens. Vintage, 1972. Woolf, Virginia. Mrs. Dalloway. Harvest, 1953. Yeats, W. B. Essays and Introductions. Macmillan, 1961.

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PART III SITE, SPACE, AND SPATIALITY

Narrative space (at its most basic level) is “the environment in which story-internal characters move about and live” (Buchholz and Jahn 552). Yet this is not the only kind of space that is of interest to our contributors in this section; indeed, as Sabine Buchholz and Manfred Jahn observe, “a great number of critical terms – foregrounding, gapping, isotopy, centre, liminality, margin, migration, transgression, transition, etc. – are spatial metaphors” that have come to assume central importance in literary studies (551–52). Concepts of place and space, borders and sites, take center stage in the seven essays collected here, where the contributors’ shared interest in space ranges from the physical to the discursive, dynamically engaging with the sociopolitical, ecological, cultural, and formal consequences of artistically rendering death. Contributors also attend to spatial form, where they consider, for instance, how various poetic modes transfigure the way we think about death, de-emphasizing narrative elements in favor of what David J. Mickelsen terms “a synchronic ‘field’” (555). Modernist writing, in particular, “sought to approximate the effects of the spatial arts” (555) through the use of form – an issue taken up by several contributors in this section. Flore Coulouma looks beyond the death of individuals to the potential deaths of entire ecosystems in “Ecocide and the Anthropocene: Death and the Environment” – an essay which reminds us that the reciprocal nature of our relationship with nature means that “death by nature is now a realistic prospect for much of the world’s population.” To capture the expansive scope of her topic, Coulouma surveys a host of international treatments of these issues: from “figures of the wild in contemporary Japanese popular culture” (in which “human life and death are determined by their relationship with the spirits of the natural world”), to Ireland’s “mysterious landscape of the bog” (which preserves “the history of men, in death, through the depth and complexity of its geology and flora”), to a consideration of how Native American narratives “weave[] together death and natural spaces in poignant narratives of the […] native landscape and its endangerment at the hands of both Native and Euro-American interests.” Coulouma ends with narratives from Chernobyl and the hope that “these representations of death in the age of environmental endangerment will help awaken consciences” and reconcile humankind and nature. In his essay, “A Disney Death: Coco, Black Panther, and the Limits of the Afterlife,” Stacy Thompson examines depictions of the afterlife (and their chilling implications) in two recent works from the Walt Disney Company. Thompson argues that the dark comedy of Coco’s 155

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deathworld serves as a vehicle for exploring ongoing Mexican-American border relations – a fictional world that “insists upon the endurance of border patrol agents, customs, the ghetto, and myriad other elements of contemporary capitalism” that continue to patrol “the metaphysical line between life and death as if it were the US’s national boundary with Mexico.” The films are “symptomatic of our historical moment,” Thompson notes, whereby “the logic of contemporary capitalism, with its brutal border policing and economic disparity,” continues to “extend beyond life’s limit.” Thompson concludes by observing that this “incapacity to imagine a non-capitalist deathworld or afterlife is symptomatic of our incapacity to imagine a non-capitalist lifeworld.” The next three essays explore dynamic intersections between poetic forms and the discursive spaces opened up by poets’ engagements with death. Kelly McGuire’s “Suicide in the Early Modern Elegiac Tradition” examines the controversial subject of suicide in Alexander Pope’s and Charlotte Smith’s poetry, which McGuire argues represent a break from the conventional English elegiac tradition that was previously preoccupied with “clearly gendered concerns” of male friendship and the commemoration of male poets. McGuire explains how Pope’s and Smith’s elegies opened a discursive space for a taboo subject, anticipating a shift in cultural attitudes toward suicide that would soon follow – including “a space for imagining female voluntary death, which has historically been read as invisible or unimaginable.” Similarly engaging with elegiac tradition, Barry Sheils’s and Julie Walsh’s “Institutions and Elegies: Viewing the Dead in W. B. Yeats and John Wieners” posits that “the sites and practices of institutional modernity force us to re-evaluate” the mode of elegy “as memory and inheritance.” Their essay argues for the importance of public spaces like the hospital ward and the art museum “to a modern elegiac consciousness”; in particular, they suggest that “the art museum offers a stage for grief ” in works by Yeats and Wieners, where the gallery’s ecology “interrupt[s] ready-made critical opinions of single works,” foregrounding “the dynamics of the exchange between the artwork and the viewer.” By illustrating “how poetic elegy encodes the modern institutional spaces of dying,” Sheils and Walsh explain how such “impersonal and institutionally framed modes of transmission” shape our understanding of the elegiac form. Samuel Caleb Wee examines yet another dimension of W. B. Yeats’s poetry in his essay, “Death ‘after Long Silence’: Auditing Agamben’s Metaphysics of Negativity in Yeats’s Lyric.” Like many contributors in this Companion, Wee finds a close kinship between the very language of literature and death itself, noting that “[t]he borders of death and the borders of language map over each other.” Wee posits that “poetry’s relationship with negative space” is one that is “always already haunted by absence – by death – before meaning ever enters the equation”; or, as Giorgio Agamben puts it, “‘inasmuch as [language and death] open for humanity the most proper dwelling place, [they] reveal and disclose this same dwelling place as always already permeated by and founded in negativity.’” Wee elucidates how Yeats’s “After Long Silence” evinces this kinship between negative spaces in language and the negative space of death itself, where “[d]eath and language, it seems, circle each other like a gyre.” Ian Tan’s essay, “The Spatialization of Death in the Novels of Virginia Woolf,” in turn considers the importance of “aesthetic space” for exploring “loss and emptiness.” Tan argues that “[d]eath and the question of how to continue living and creating in the aftermath of loss is central to Woolf ’s aesthetic structure and concerns in To the Lighthouse” (1927). If, as critics suggest, Woolf ’s novels “‘compose themselves about an absence,’” then Tan contends that “[t]he space in which death hollows out in its work of negation is intimately linked with reimagining both the subject’s grasp of death within the novel, and the authorial representation of death as refracted through point of view.” Tan concludes that Woolf’s “patterned evocation of the space of death” in The Waves (1931) ultimately offers the novelist “an order that transcends language and appearances.” 156

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The section’s final essay, Jen Crawford’s “‘Memento Mori’: Memory, Death, and Posterity in Singapore’s Poetry,” explores how Singaporean poets Edwin Thumboo, Boey Kim Cheng, and Yeow Kai Chai use “the lyric mode to reach across elegiac distance towards recuperation.” Crawford specifically examines poems commemorating places in Singapore that have been “irrevocably changed through modernization”; even “as official and unofficial sites of cultural practice are dismantled on the ground, some are reimagined within literature,” creating a discursive space where these “lost sites” find partial “‘triumph over death’ through creative renewal.”

Works Cited Buchholz, Sabine, and Manfred Jahn. “Space in Narrative.” Routledge Encyclopedia to Narrative Theory, edited by David Herman, Manfred Jahn, and Marie-Laure Ryan. Routledge, 2005, pp. 551–555. Mickelsen, David J. “Spatial Form.” Routledge Encyclopedia to Narrative Theory, edited by David Herman, Manfred Jahn, and Marie-Laure Ryan. Routledge, 2005, pp. 555–556.

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15 ECOCIDE AND THE ANTHROPOCENE Death and the Environment Flore Coulouma

Today issues of death and environmental endangerment have reached peak urgency. Wildfires ravage various parts of the globe every summer as climate change brings its daily dose of heat waves, hurricanes, and sea level rises, destroying entire ecosystems. Pollution and climate change-related deaths are now part of our history both as individuals and as a species. Writing the human experience has changed accordingly in the past fifty years to address environmental injustice, environmental degradation, natural disasters, and the depletion of natural resources as primary adversaries of human life and a significant cause of human strife. Although nature writing is a universal theme of world literature and can be traced back to the ancient traditions of oral storytelling across cultures, contemporary environmental writing goes beyond the nostalgic longing for past or mythical Arcadias to engage with a sense of place and a “sense of planet” (Heise). Human life and death have an ambiguous relationship with the environment because humans have, until now, largely set themselves apart from the rest of the natural world, objectifying it the better to measure and investigate it, within the traditional nature-versusculture framework of anthropological inquiry. This means viewing nature either as the (finite) source of humankind’s subsistence, ours to dominate and exploit, or as a life-threatening force that is becoming increasingly unpredictable. In both instances, death by nature is now a realistic prospect for much of the world’s population. Literature explores our individual and collective sense of being in the world. It is therefore particularly appropriate to examine the question of (human) death in literature from the perspective of environmental change and political ecology. Our theoretical viewpoint falls under the broad category of ecocriticism, which can be defined in simple terms as “a field of literary studies that addresses how humans relate to nonhuman nature or the environment in literature” (Johnson 623). This means that all literature can be read through the prism of ecocriticism, including productions not overtly or primarily concerned with environmental issues but which reflect a specific understanding of our relationship with the natural world. This chapter addresses both the representation of humankind’s finiteness in nature, and environmental endangerment in the contemporary literary imagination. Environmentalism is an intersectional notion that overlaps with imperialism, postcolonialism, race and class, and the politics of place (Nixon). Ecological issues are intrinsically political, and are thus fraught with the historical issues of domination, inequality, exploitation, and with the crucial legal notions of recognition, reparation, and accountability. 159

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These issues also address the notion of the anthropocene (Crutzen and Stoermer). As evolutionary biologist Jared Diamond has extensively demonstrated, the collapse of human societies in the past hundred thousands of years has resulted either from genocide or ecocide – the destruction of their natural habitats (Guns; Third Chimpanzee). The useful concept of the anthropocene must be handled carefully, however, lest it generate – by its very anthropologizing nature – a blindness to the actual politics and history of environment-based social struggles. Contemporary literature reflects this tension between an essentializing nature-versusnurture dialectic and the indictment of capitalocene, in which the dominant classes – i.e., a fraction of humanity – are responsible for the exploitation of both other classes and the natural world (Malm, L’anthropocène; “Anthropocene Myth”). This chapter examines the place of death in contemporary literature’s representation and evocation of nature. Figures of the wild in contemporary Japanese popular culture reflect an old tradition in which human life and death are determined by their relationship with the spirits of the natural world. The forest and the mountain, imbued with godlike properties, are both enchanting and ominous, life-giving and life-threatening. These contemporary calls of the wild retain the nostalgic and adventurous tone of earlier narrative traditions as they depict natural spaces with the reverence owed to the sublime. Moving on to Ireland and the mysterious landscape of the bog, nature takes on an archival role, preserving the history of humans, in death, through the depth and complexity of its geology and flora. In the Connemara bog, the fate of the landscape runs parallel with the fate of its inhabitants. Similarly, Native American fiction weaves together death and natural spaces in poignant narratives of the Indian reservation. Representing the native landscape and its endangerment at the hands of both Native and EuroAmerican interests, denouncing pollution and destruction, are part of a universal reflection on human frailty and death. Finally, beyond the elegiac tone of a literature concerned with changing landscapes and the loss of viable ecosystems and habitats, contemporary environmental literature explicitly addresses violent ecological disasters. The 1986 Chernobyl nuclear accident and its aftermath are our final stop in this very limited exploration of death and nature in contemporary literature. The corpus selection will seem arbitrary: a choice was made out of necessity, but the works examined here are deliberately diverse both in genre (graphic novels and anime, fiction and nonfiction, travel writing and oral history) and geographical area (Japan, Ireland, North America, Ukraine).

Call of the Wild: Death, Mountain, and Forest Spirits in the Japanese Imagination Among the monumental body of artistic and literary work exploring our relationship with the time-honored trope of the wilderness, two iconic figures of the wild resonate with particular poignancy in our age of environmental crisis: the forest and the mountain. Both are to be found in the works of filmmaker Hayao Miyazaki and graphic novelist Jirô Taniguchi, two acclaimed Japanese artists who have influenced generations at home and abroad since the 1980s. Precursor to Miyazaki and Taniguchi’s “ecological storytelling” (Environmental Humanities Initiative), however, is director Akira Kurosawa’s 1975 masterpiece Dersu Uzala. Set in the forest of eastern Siberia, the film is based on the 1923 memoir by Russian explorer Vladimir Arsenyev, in which he recounts his exploration of the far East Siberian frontier and his friendship with Dersu Uzala, a Nanai hunter. Dersu Uzala is a native of the forest, who lives in harmony with nature, a man attuned to the harsh conditions of the forest when his “civilised” friend struggles for survival in the frozen tundra. Forced to kill a Siberian tiger who has come too close to his companions, Dersu knows that he has offended the forest spirit and fears 160

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retribution, yet it is a human who kills him to steal his hunting rifle, an ill-fated gift from the urbane Arsenyev. The film is a poignant elegy to the disappearing way of life of the Nanai people in the age of industrial logging. As Dersu’s individual fate is sealed with his use of a modern weapon against a spirit of the forest (embodied by the Siberian tiger), the forest itself is compromised, and the tiger’s death heralds the beginning of large-scale industrial exploitation of the forest’s resources. Similarly, in Hayao Miyazaki’s 1997 anime movie Mononoke-Hime (Princess Mononoke), the forest is dangerous to humans yet provides the very livelihood of the aptly named Irontown, a city whose main production relies on the ironsand retrieved through intensive clear-cutting. MononokeHime is a multi-layered, polyphonic narrative, which stages the epic battle between primeval nature (the forest, defended by its kodama, or tree spirits, by its animal-god, and by wildling Mononoke), and corrupt but redeemable human civilization, in the form of the town – led by the sulphurous Lady Eboshi. Eboshi has little regard for the inhabitants of the forest and for its mysterious deity: “Watch closely everyone. I’m going to show you how to kill a god. A god of life and death. The trick is not to fear him.” She effectively severs the god’s head, but its melting body starts flooding the forest, killing everything it touches. Destroying the forest god has directly jeopardized all living creatures in and around the forest, including the people of Irontown. The main protagonists, Ashitaka and Mononoke, retrieve the spirit’s head and lay him to rest, thus avoiding a biblical poisonous flood not unlike an oil spill. Yet the forest will never be the same again. The suggestion of a secondary regrowth at the end of the film further underlines Miyazaki’s universal message that untouched nature disappears with the arrival of humankind. The real-life inspiration for the enchanted forest in Mononoke-Hime (already an inspiration for Miyazaki’s 1984 film Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind) is the forest of Yakushima, a World Heritage site and biosphere reserve that comprises some of the world’s oldest cedar trees, with a semi-tropical ecosystem described by the UNESCO World Heritage Center as containing “a unique remnant of a warm-temperate primeval forest which has been much reduced elsewhere in the region” (“Yakushima”). Mononoke-Hime mixes historical and fantasy elements; set in the Muromachi era (mid-fourteenth to mid-sixteenth century CE) it is a cautionary tale for our times, pitting the endangered forest of mystery and magic against the pre-industrial metal civilization of Irontown. Here, nature holds the secret to human life and death, as in many of Miyazaki’s other films (see, for instance, Tonari no Totoro [My Neighbor Totoro], 1988), and other productions by his company Studio Ghibli (such as Isao Takahata’s 1994 Pom Poko). The spirits that people the natural world are invisible to us, yet they are our neighbors. This ambivalent remoteness/ closeness, derived from the interconnectedness of Buddhist spirituality, is also at stake in Mononoke’s forest, an entity that is both vulnerable and powerfully destructive if tampered with. Thus, the ambiguous boar-god of Mononoke-hime – a disturbed figure that is both good and bad – embodies an “environment that has been manipulated by mankind” (Wilson and Wilson 189). Modern-age technology and human greed distort the harmonious cycles of natural life and the fragile equilibrium of complementary light and dark forces, the yin and yang of Taoist spirituality. Mononoke-Hime sounds the alarm on man’s ecocidal tendencies and mourns what has already been lost (Shoten). The forest is an archetype of exuberance and regeneration in animistic spirituality. Its polar opposite is the desert, the monotheistic embodiment of a place devoid of life, inspiring human mysticism and sacrifice. The rarefied air and forbidding mineral grandeur of the Himalayas are a version of the desert in Jirô Taniguchi’s monumental five-volume graphic novel The Summit of the Gods (Kamigami no Itadaki, 2000–03). The call of the wild – to the formidable Mount 161

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Everest – is both a death trap and the raison d’être that sustains the characters in this narratively and visually breathtaking masterpiece. Taniguchi goes beyond poetic evocation to immerse us in the greatness of the mountain, in a twenty-first-century version of the sublime aesthetics of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century romanticism, to which his unique style (influenced by the European ligne claire) lends precision and depth. His main protagonist, Japanese photographer Fukamachi Makoto, retraces the steps of British mountaineers George Mallory and Andrew Irvine, who mysteriously disappeared during the final stage of their 1924 Mount Everest expedition. In the final chapter, Taniguchi quotes Noel Odell, a member of the fateful British expedition who famously claimed to have last sighted the pair a few hundred meters from the summit: “death always strikes somewhere along the way. I think the important thing is what we’re achieving when it comes” (Le sommet 277).1 In this epic tale of obsession and physical abnegation, the driving force that pushes mountaineers toward the summit is more potent than the fear of death. Ascending the mountain thus precludes survival instincts for those who have devoted their lives to conquering the highest peaks. While Fukamachi eventually chooses life and leaves the summit behind, his fearless friend Habu Joji makes it to the top and gets lost on the way down, a punishment for his hubris. In death, he joins Mallory and Irvine, their ghosts forever haunting the rarefied air of the “undefeated summit.” Taniguchi’s final work before his untimely death in 2017 is the unfinished graphic novel The Millennial Forest (La Forêt millénaire),2 in which he returns to the liminal space of the neighboring forest. Both ominous and benevolent, the forest harbors a sacred spirit that helps a young boy face the imminent death of his sick mother. This introspective story draws parallels with the previous The Magic Mountain (Mahou No Yama, 2007), in which a young boy rescues a salamander who turns out to be the original god of the mountain, and who saves the boy’s sick mother from her incurable illness. Taniguchi’s last book is unique in its use of landscape format – a radical departure from the usual paperback-sized manga – and colored panels, a choice that better relays the artist’s poetic vision. This testament revisits his favored theme of nature as an endangered source of (human) life, and depicts thriving, untamed nature as a necessary counterpoint to humankind’s civilization of technological progress. Only in reconnecting with their natural roots can humankind find spiritual salvation. The unfinished story offers a final cautionary tale, through the innocent eyes of a child, about human destructiveness and its consequences. These literary, graphic, and cinematic narratives follow an old tradition in the Japanese imagination: envisioning the wilderness as a signifier of human mortality. The recurring figure of the mountainous forest in stories aimed at children and adults alike reminds us of the powerful emotions triggered by the solitary experience of untouched nature. Thus, the forest of Aokigahara, home of the Yurei (ghosts of the dead) in Japanese folklore, which owes its awe-inspiring silence to a sound-absorbing floor of porous hardened lava, is a known suicide site and the inspiration for Gus Van Sant’s 2015 film The Sea of Trees. The mountain forest is, finally, the iconic site of Ubasute, the mythical practice of senicide, as told in Shichiro Fukazawa’s 1956 novel The Ballad of Narayama and its most famous adaptation on screen by Shohei Imamura (Palme d’Or at the 1983 Cannes film festival). In all these works, aesthetic and literary emotion arises from our simultaneous perception of beauty and mortality in the call of the wild.

Connemara: Stories of Life and Death Away from the mythical wilderness, much of our natural environment has long been shaped by human activity. The Connemara bog is one such landscape: a witness of the travails of humanity 162

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through time, it evokes both the haunting episode of the Great Famine of mid-nineteenthcentury Ireland and the pastoral myths of post-independence nationalism. For cartographer Tim Robinson, the memory of death is inscribed in the landscape, as the opening of his 2006 essay, Connemara: Listening to the Wind, suggests: “A small concrete cross stands by the road that follows the river from Ballynahinch to the sea” (1). Robinson’s writing on the Aran Islands and Connemara is a minute exploration of places and landscapes that appear desolate yet brim with natural life and have been molded by tens of thousands of years of human activity. One half-expects Robinson’s cartography to be cursed by its notorious predecessor, the Ordnance Survey of colonial times so vilified in Brian Friel’s 1981 play Translations. Yet his careful account of every remote corner in the “last pool of darkness” – as Wittgenstein called it – does justice to its history both on the geological and the human scales. Cartography has to do with language: “the fact of language,” Robinson notes in his preface, “might predominate in writing about the conflictually bilingual southern region of Connemara” (4). Robinson’s subsequent warning that he is not interested in the ubiquitous Irish “language question” only serves to remind us that the death of a language remains a more-than-vivid issue today. His passion for the area’s toponyms highlights a main point of the book: much as the bog preserves the memory of life and death through millennia of geological and biological cycles, so the map records human history through place names. Robinson uses his fluent Gaelic to tease out the hidden meanings of place names and retrieve what is lost. In his compelling explanation of the name Murvey, he observes that the anglicized version is “profoundly unsatisfactory. To resist the betrayal of reality it enacts, I have to call to mind two of the prime words of the Irish language, the language of a culture for which topographical terms once had the weight and resonance of cathedral bells: muir, ‘sea’; magh, ‘plain’” (80–81). Murvey bears the mark of colonial renaming like a stigma, and, as Robinson points out, this affects its reference in the real world: “Irish placenames dry out when anglicized, like twigs snapped off from a tree. And frequently the places too are degraded, left open to exploitation, for lack of a comprehensible name to point out their natures or recall their histories” (81). In Robinson’s musings through the Roundstone bog, we discover a landscape that is both awe-inspiring in its desolateness and profoundly human, as its unique flora and fauna, and immensely rich geological strata, have been shaped by human history since the Neolithic period: “It was not until the New Stone Age or Neolithic revolution that disequilibrium between humans and their habitat manifested itself” (53). Robinson delves into pollen remnants thousands of years old to trace the early practice of grazing domestic animals and the highs and lows of agriculture in the region. Roundstone bog itself was the subject of intensive farming after a lull of several centuries, after which the practice of grazing resumed again. “Perhaps,” Robinson muses, “those five or six generations […] were long enough for a pre-literate community to have forgotten that their landscape was ever, and might be again, other than as they knew it” (54). Closer to us, the failed nineteenth-century project of bog drainage and farming also explains what is left of the bog today. Thus, Robinson concludes, “it is to human suffering and failure that we owe the preservation of the unique terrain visible from Errisbeg” (54). Strikingly, it is the very desolation of the landscape that appeals to the poetic mind – there is something of the sublime in the “life-denial” of such vistas, much like the fascination exerted by mountains in Japanese folklore. Robinson quotes a Henry M’Manus, who visited Connemara in 1840 and published his Sketches of the Irish Highlands in 1863, extolling the breathtaking wilderness of what he views as a desolate expanse of land: “that very desolation itself, being so profound and novel, was deeply impressive; while the less pleasing details were swallowed up in 163

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two elements of the sublime. One was – a boundless expanse of surface below; and the other was – a boundless expanse of sunshine above” (190). What M’Manus viewed as absolute wilderness, however, was in fact shaped by human presence. The bog is fascinating because it owes its very existence to an underlying presence that is invisible to the uninitiated eye. It is at once the product and witness of human activity; in Connemara, the lingering memory of suffering and death oozes through the sphagnum moss of the bog, making it an all the more poignant vision. The bog is not just a metaphorical burial ground: it is a real one too. In his chapter “The Boneyard,” Robinson gives an account of the many children’s burial grounds that dot the landscape of Connemara: “a few of them are noticeable scatterings of small set stones, […] others I would discover only because some oddity of the terrain would attract my attention.” Again, the landscape at once obscures and reveals a story of human death. Until Vatican II, the Catholic Church refused to bury unbaptized dead infants on consecrated ground: this cruel practice and the suffering of bereaved parents are inscribed in those “tender spots of the rural landscape” (94). In Robinson’s account, the bog becomes a Book of the Dead, “a landscape in which beauty and suffering wrap closely around one another, and in which geology and mythology fuse together as ‘systems of description of what can be seen in terms of what lies too deep to be seen’” (Macfarlane). Evolutionary biologist Jared Diamond has written extensively on how human societies alter the natural environment: the deserts of the American Southwest and Mesopotamia were in fact caused by man (Collapse 3), just as the rare heather that delights botanists on Errisbeg Hill “may have come from Spain wrapped round a smuggler’s cask” (Robinson 236). The landscape, and indeed all of today’s natural environment, have been affected by human presence. There remains no unexplored terra incognita, and the idea that some parts of the world have retained a preserved state of untouched nature is now untenable. The notions of preservation and conservation lead us to that of reservation, since the colonization of nature by humans is on a par with that of man by man. The entangled political, historical, and environmental issues addressed in contemporary Native American literature allow a reflection on ecocide and genocide through the experiences and representations of the Indian reservation.

The Indian Reservation: Narratives of Loss, Ecocide, and Genocide Historically, early land treaties drafted by the European settlers designated areas which the tribes – described on paper as being sovereign entities – “reserved” for themselves while agreeing to the European takeover of the rest of the continent (Bureau of Indian Affairs). The forcible relocation of tribes, made into law by Congress in 1830 as the Indian Removal Act, further altered the Native population’s relationship to its land, making the reservation more refugee camp than sanctuary territory. This gives us another picture of the reservation: a geographical area reserved for the concentration of undesirable ethnic groups but destined to be dissolved when its population has disappeared or been assimilated; indeed, many reservations were “terminated” in the mid-twentieth century, with dire consequences for their native inhabitants (see Ulrich). This, besides the obvious disregard of the tribes’ so-called sovereignty, implies a vision of the land as commodity to be retrieved and exploited in the interest of economical “progress” and financial profit. Environmental injustice in Indian country has been documented together with its direct consequences on the population’s health and life expectancy. Native Americans who have retained a traditional lifestyle rely heavily on natural resources for sustenance and ritual purposes, but hunting and gathering become severely hazardous in a degraded environment 164

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(Walker et al. 386). This history of suffering shaped by land and place is told in the works of Native American authors Louise Erdrich and Leslie Marmon Silko, who show the struggles of men and women in destroyed communities and hostile natural environments, individual fates embossed on a background of man-made environmental damage: desertification, drought, open-pit mines, deforestation, and waste-dumping. Marmon Silko’s 1977 novel Ceremony is set in the Laguna Pueblo reservation of New Mexico. Tayo, a recently returned World War II veteran, suffers from what we now call severe post-traumatic stress disorder. His point of view in the prose narrative alternates with incantation-like voices in the poetry sections to create a dialogic back-and-forth between the mythical tales of ancient oral tradition and the travails of the hero in this ecological coming-ofage, while the mise-en-abîme of narrative levels prompts a similar awakening process in the reader. The opening poem calls us in: “stories […] are all we have to fight off/illness and death.” This ritual storytelling, at the core of the healing process, is grounded in a holistic representation of the world in which spirits, humanity, and nature are all connected and interdependent. Tayo senses that his involvement in “the white people’s war” has disrupted the natural order of things: “the effects were everywhere in the cloudless sky, on the dry brown hills, shrinking skin and hide taut over sharp bone” (33). The Laguna reservation is a hostile environment, desertified after years of recurring severe drought and overgrazing, cattle being the sole source of revenue in the area. It is also the site of an open uranium mine. Yet, as Tayo’s kindly uncle Josiah explains, “This is where we come from, see. This sand, this stone, these trees, the vines, all the wildflowers. This earth keeps us going. […] The old people used to say that droughts happen when people forget, when people misbehave” (42). The mythical spirits of ancient folklore shine a light on this dismal landscape in the poetry sections of the novel. In the tale, the Cornmother’s sons are all so taken with the magician’s shiny tricks that they forget their true source of life. The earth lays barren as punishment, much like the biblical plagues brought on by humankind’s sinfulness and disregard for the sacred. Tayo’s despair is fueled by his hatred and his helplessness in the face of Euro-American destructiveness, yet he senses that there is a more potent destructiveness at work than the colonial race-war. Humanity’s deathly race toward apocalyptic destruction is embodied in the “destroyers,” dark spiritual entities who manipulate both colonizers and victims in their quest for the annihilation of all life. All is connected, beyond the confines of the reservations, with the local site of the uranium mine tied to the atomic bomb and to the overseas ravages of the war. Tayo’s nightmares were in fact the realization of a global disruption, hence his cure can “only be found in something great and inclusive of everything” (116). The novel was hailed as a masterpiece of “ecological ethnopoetics,” but called out for its utopian ending (Buell 286). Ceremony does give us an appeased ending: the apocalypse has been averted, the “whirling darkness” of the destroyers is gone. But it is an open-ended conclusion, as we are told from the onset: “in the belly of this story, the rituals and the ceremony are still growing” (2). So while the darkness “is dead for now” (243) – the line is repeated four times, as if to stave off hesitation – there is no certainty for the future. The portrait of human and ecological desolation that Marmon Silko paints, however mitigated by epiphanic moments of wonder, show that we only get a short reprieve. The ceremony is all the more needed, then, as death inevitably closes in. Far from the deserts of New Mexico, along the Canadian border, lies the Turtle Mountain Reservation, where Louise Erdrich sets her stories of the Chippewa Indians. In Tracks (1988), patriarch Nanapush is the last voice of an almost extinct people: “I saw the passing of times you will never know. I guided the last buffalo hunt. I saw the last bear shot […] I spoke aloud the 165

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words of the government treaty, and refused to sign the settlement papers that would take away our woods and lake” (2). The story is told from two conflicting points of views: Nanapush, the shrewd yet affectionate elder (a version of the Chippewa trickster figure Nanabozho), and mixed-blood Pauline Puyat, who desperately seeks to obliterate her Indian heritage and exorcises her peers with a punitive brand of Catholicism. Two spiritualities collide in a polyphonic storytelling that is part testimony, part elegy and incantation, so there is something of a healing ceremony in Erdrich’s stories of the Nanapush clan throughout the generations. Tracks is the prequel to Erdrich’s first novel Love Medicine (1984). It goes back to the early twentieth century and chronicles the struggles of the Chippewa tribe against extinction through disease and the gradual loss of their ancestral land. As Nanapush explains at the beginning of his tale, “We started dying before the snow, and like the snow, we continued to fall” (1). The tragic fate of the tribe, largely brought on by European epidemics, is sealed with the destruction of their land. The reservation sits on an area of dense forest and lakes inspired by the biotope of the Turtle Mountain Plateau across the North Dakota/Southern Manitoba border. The beating heart of Tracks is Matchimanito Lake, home of Misshepeshu the dangerous lake monster. The forest nurtures and supports the tribe’s ancient way of life, symbolized by the aptly named Fleur, a rebellious woman of the woods with shamanistic powers. It is a place where the dead and the living coexist in relative – if cautious – harmony, while destruction comes from the outside world in the form of the white lumber company and its sawing machines. In the novel, individual death occurs in parallel with deforestation. Fleur’s miscarriage signals the loss of her protective powers and the advance of the whites’ takeover of the forest. Nanapush’s words of resignation are of little comfort: “You will not be to blame if the land is lost”, he says, “or if the oaks and the pines fall, the lake dries, and the lake man does not return. You could not have saved the child that came so early” (178). Fleur’s magical powers cannot resist the betrayal of her own kind. Her land is sold to the white timber company, as the business-minded families in the tribe have embraced the new Euro-American order. The spirits of the dead who once roamed the woods have vanished, and all that remains is the scar-like tracks in a road “rutted by the wheels of laden wagons” (209). In response, Fleur curses the agents of her demise and performs eco-suicide, cutting the remaining forest herself rather than leaving it in the hands of strangers, as Nanapush recalls: Around me, a forest was suspended, lightly held. The fingered lobes of leaves floated on nothing. The powerful throats, the columns of trunks and splayed twigs, all substance was illusion. Nothing was solid. Each green crown was held in the air by no more than splinters of bark. Each tree was sawed through at the base. (223) This final episode, which reads like an allegory of Marx’s commodity fetishism – the conversion of the forest from place-specific, rooted, qualitatively defined use-value to indeterminate, rootless exchange value – coincides with the end of Nanapush’s story. Tracks is a tale of loss and memory, and the traces we leave in our environment are also those that endure through stories. Everything is inscribed in the landscape: just as the Connemara bog retains prehistoric burial sites in its geological strata, the Turtle Mountain landscape exposes the scars of a people’s suffering and gradual disappearance. Like Marmon Silko’s Ceremony, Tracks is imbued with poetic epiphanies of nature but avoids the one-sided trap of the mythical ecological Indian, instead recording strategies of immediate survival and their terrifying long-term environmental and human consequences. Silko’s and Erdrich’s elegiac celebration of the beauty of nature is also a call for healing and justice, lest the retribution come from nature itself. 166

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Ecological Disasters and the Nuclear Apocalypse Nuclear disasters are by far the most horrific attacks on human lives and the natural environment in the sheer time-scale of their consequences. Rob Nixon notes that whole territories are rendered “irretrievable to those who once inhabited them” (7), besides the long-term health effects on generations after generations, ad infinitum: Hiroshima and Nagasaki, nuclear testing in Algeria and the Pacific Islands, Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima are just some sites of intentional and unintentional nuclear disasters. All have been obliterated from official narratives by a systematic culture of denial. One would be hard-pressed to find any regard for human rights and protection from (radioactive) harm in the fifty years of American, French, and British nuclear testing in and around the Pacific Islands since 1946. The sequels in their postcolonial “nuclear playground” (Firth; Hoffman) are all the more gruesome, as they remain largely untold. Nuclear harm is all the more insidious because radioactive contamination cannot be seen, smelled, or tasted, and its long-lasting effects are, as Nixon remarks, a “violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space” (2): congenital defects, thyroid diseases, cancers, and a wide range of other illnesses will afflict generations to come. Voices from Chernobyl, by acclaimed Belarusian author Svetlana Alexievich, is a landmark in nuclear literature. The Belarusian journalist has been known since the 1980s for her meticulous and empathetic recordings of testimonies of the post-World War II Soviet era. She was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature in 2015 “for her polyphonic writings, a monument to suffering and courage in our time” (Nobel Prize). Her 1997 book Tchernobylskaia Molitva, first published in English as Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster,3 is an oral history account of the event and its aftermath in and around the Ukrainian town of Pripyat, along the Belarus border. Alexievich’s writing is based on oral testimonies, but her work in Voices, as in her other books, is not solely that of a collector. As she explained in an interview to her US editor, “To an outsider it may seem a simple process: people just told me their stories. But it’s not really so simple. It’s important what you ask and how you ask it and what you hear and what you select from the interview” (Alexievich, “Conversation”). Alexievich’s writing is – by her own admission – steeped in the dialogic tradition of the great Russian authors, profoundly influenced by traditional oral storytelling and the skaz narrative process defined in 1918 by Russian formalist Boris Eikhenbaum. Alexievich’s writing is clearly recognizable as skaz, “a literary style imitating oral monologue” (Banfield), but hers are documentary novels rather than fictions: their intensity comes from the rawness of the testimonies. Alexievich gives a voice to the innumerable anonymous victims of the Chernobyl disaster: stories of death in its most terrifying form, painful, protracted, ubiquitous in the landscape of the exclusion zone and beyond, where nature has become poisonous to human and animal. The prologue opens with “a solitary human voice” from the wife of a fireman first on the scene after reactor no. 4 exploded. She tells a story of apocalypse, witnessing her husband’s body disintegrate from acute radiation, becoming sick herself after tending to his wounds against doctors’ orders. Yet that is not how she defines her story: “No one’s asked what we’ve been through. What we saw. No one wants to hear about death. About what scares them. But I was really telling you about love” (23). Alexievich’s book is a labor of love; she gives voice to countless testimonies, with humanity and empathy, in a patient maieutic process that generates her echoing, polyphonic narratives. The chapter “The land of the dead” hears the Samosely, people who have refused to leave the exclusion zone and have hidden or come back to resettle in their old homes. All tell of epiphanic moments in nature, of the shock of beauty that blinds people to the toxicity of their surrounding environment: “It’s nice here! Everything grows, everything blooming. From the 167

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littlest fly to the animals, everything’s living” (27). Incomprehension and denial of the nature and scale of the disaster are further compounded by the apparent exuberance of plant and animal life in the exclusion zone, as a soldier recalls: “The worst part was, the least comprehensible part, everything was so – beautiful!” (37–38). The disaster happened in the springtime, and people initially thought they were going on a picnic. “The strawberries started coming, and there was honey everywhere” (44). Despite the barely visible toxicity, “All changed/Changed utterly”: Easter 1986 has begotten its own “terrible beauty,” echoing W. B. Yeats’s apocalyptic vision of Easter 1916. In Alexievich’s narratives, radioactive death is incomprehensible because it comes in the guise of exuberant life; it is unbearable because it is surrounded by a conspiracy of silence. “They made us sign a non-disclosure form. So I didn’t say anything,” says one liquidator, who ten years later, now an invalid, describes the sarcophagus as a “giant grave” but can never disclose what he has been through, as if the disaster had also gnawed at the very roots of human language: “No one can speak to me in a way I can answer. In my own language. No one can understand where I’ve come back from. And I can’t tell anyone.” Even in death, the liquidators and victims are on their own, buried separately “like we’re aliens from outer space” (48–50). On their own, the “Chernobyl Hibakusha” who, like their Japanese counterparts after Hiroshima, find themselves ostracized and silenced, unable to bear children, and living in terror: not of dying (“I hear about death so often that I don’t notice anymore”), but of not knowing how and when the “radiation sickness” will strike (115). “Why do we keep hovering around death?” asks a man living in nearby Belarus, “now we realize that there won’t be another world, and there’s nowhere to turn to” (138). Alexievich’s choice of the unmediated, first-person narrators, added to the sheer number of the testimonies, creates a dizzying effect that closes in on the readers, making us both direct addressees of the Voices and another “I” sharing in the realization that there won’t be another world. In the epilogue, the book comes back full circle with another story of love. “I was born for love,” the liquidator’s wife says, but her destiny is derailed. “He spent that whole year dying”: in her experience, dying is an action verb. Death is agony, working its way into the body and the mind to destroy all traces of humanity, turning its victim “into a monster” (223–25). Voices from Chernobyl is a chorus prayer sent out from the abyss, telling us about the inexpressible and the limits of literature. When words fail, only human feelings are left, and the author’s mission is to “find them, collect them, protect them,” preserve their memory. Alexievich concludes with a darkly prophetic tone, “I felt like I was recording the future” (236). Echoes of Voices from Chernobyl can be found in Darragh McKeon’s 2014 debut novel, All That Is Solid Melts into Air. McKeon’s book gives a fictional account of the Chernobyl disaster and its title – a quote from the Communist Manifesto – encapsulates the experience of radioactive death as beyond human understanding, a vision of the universe turned upside down. The Chernobyl disaster serves as a narrative thread with which to address the collapse of the Soviet Union. McKeon’s main protagonist unsuccessfully attempts to raise the alarm on radioactive contamination. The bureaucratic machinery of denial and silencing grinds him down even before he succumbs to radioactive poisoning: “He had ceased to exist, melted into air” (386). Another narrative thread looks at Chernobyl through the eyes of Artyom, a young boy living nearby who loses his father to the liquidators and is then sent with his mother and sister to a relocation refugee camp. Days after the accident, the forest has turned red, prompting his father to remark that “Mother nature is bleeding” (273). As in Mononoke-Hime, the contaminated forest is both victim and perpetrator: men “fight the atom with a shovel […] let nature come and fight them; they each had an axe” (275). After his father has died, Artyom 168

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recalls a childhood story in which “the living and the dead were connected by bridges made of Kalyna wood. They crossed easily from one side to the other, doing this so readily that after some time they could no longer distinguish between the two realms.” Artyom too finds himself on the bridge, in his newfound awareness of “particles skimming through the air. Underneath what he sees and smells and hears […] just as radiation, displaced atoms, inhabited his own living cells, changing him” (276). Invisible radioactive decay serves as a metaphor for the corruption and breakdown of the Soviet Union, but in its conclusion the novel returns to the atom’s effects on the essence of humanity itself: “infants with mushroom-shaped growth in place of eyes, with heads that have taken on the form of a crescent moon. […] All of this is his past. All of this is his country” (389). McKeon’s chronicle of political change describes a country on the verge of profound mutations, yet beneath the socially and geographically anchored narrative is the much darker story of the physical disfiguration and extinction of humanity as a species, and beyond that, of nature itself. In this, McKeon’s realistic novel meets the recurring themes of the posthuman in science fiction and post-apocalyptic literatures of extinction and replacement. Today, as scientists predict the end of the anthropocene and as the global hurricanes and wildfires of climate change are already upon us, the monsters of science fiction have now found firm place in documentary and fiction writing alike. Here’s hoping that these representations of death in the age of environmental endangerment will help awaken consciences and reconcile humans and nature.

Notes 1 2 3

My translation, from the French edition (“la mort vient toujours frapper en cours de route. Je crois que l’important, c’est ce que l’on est en train d’accomplir lorsque la mort arrive”). No English-language edition at the time of writing. There are two separate English-language editions for the book: Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster, translated by Keith Gessen (New York: Picador, 2005); and Chernobyl Prayer, translated by Anna Gunin and Arch Tait (London: Penguin, 2016). I am using the American edition here.

Works Cited Alexievich, Svetlana. Chernobyl Prayer, translated by Anna Gunin and Arch Tait. Penguin, 2016. Alexievich, Svetlana. “A Conversation with Svetlana Alexievich by Ana Lucic.” The Dalkey Archive, www. dalkeyarchive.com/a-conversation-with-svetlana-alexievich-by-ana-lucic. Accessed 16 July 2020. Alexievich, Svetlana. Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster, translated by Keith Gessen. Picador, 2005. Banfield, Ann. “Skaz.” Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory, edited by D. Herman et al. Routledge, 2005, pp. 535–536. Buell, Lawrence. The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture. 1995. Belknap Press, 1996. Bureau of Indian Affairs. “Frequently Asked Questions.” www.bia.gov/frequently-asked-questions. Accessed 16 July 2020. Crutzen, Paul J., and Eugene F. Stoermer. “The ‘Anthropocene.’” IGBP Newsletter no. 41, 2000, pp. 17–18. Diamond, Jared. Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. Penguin, 2005. Diamond, Jared. Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fate of Human Societies. Norton, 1999. Diamond, Jared. The Third Chimpanzee: The Evolution and Future of the Human Animal. HarperCollins, 1992. Dersu Uzala. Directed by Akira Kurosawa. Daiei Film and Mosfilm, 1975. Ecological Storytelling: Hayao Miyazaki and Studio Ghibli. Environmental Humanities Initiative at UCSB (Film Series 2014–15). http://ehc.english.ucsb.edu/?page_id=4841. Accessed 16 July 2020.

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Flore Coulouma Erdrich, Louise. Love Medicine. 1984. Harper Perennial, 2009. Erdrich, Louise. Tracks. 1988. Harper Perennial, 2004. Firth, Steward. Nuclear Playground. Allen & Unwin, 1987. Friel, Brian. Translations. Faber & Faber, 1981. Heise, Ursula K. Sense of Place, Sense of Planet. Oxford UP, 2008. Hoffman, Michael. “Forgotten Atrocity of the Atomic Age.” Japan Times, 28 August 2011, www. japantimes.co.jp/culture/2011/08/28/culture/forgotten-atrocity-of-the-atomic-age/#.W551MlJoTeQ. Accessed 16 July 2020. Johnson, Loretta. “Greening the Library: The Fundamentals and Future of Ecocriticism.” Choice, vol. 47, no. 4, 2019, pp. 623–631. Macfarlane, Robert. “Diving into Darkness.” The Spectator, 1 Oct. 2008. www.spectator.co.uk/2008/10/ diving-into-darkness. Accessed 16 July 2020. Malm, Andreas. “The Anthropocene Myth.” Jacobin Magazine, 30 Mar. 2015. www.jacobinmag.com/ 2015/03/anthropocene-capitalism-climate-change. Accessed 16 July 2020. Malm, Andreas. L’anthropocène contre l’histoire. La Fabrique, 2017. Marmon Silko, Leslie. Ceremony. 1977. Penguin, 2006. McKeon, Darragh. All That Is Solid Melts into Air. Penguin, 2014. Mononoke-Hime (Princess Mononoke). Directed by Hayao Miyazaki. Studio Ghibli, 1997. Nixon, Rob. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Harvard UP, 2011. The Nobel Prize in Literature 2015. www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/2015/summary. Accessed 16 July 2020. Robinson, Tim. Connemara: Listening to the Wind. Penguin, 2006. Shoten, Tokuma, and Studio Ghibli. “Interview: Miyazaki on Mononoke-Hime.” The Hayao Miyazaki Web, (unofficially) translated by Ryoko Toyama, July 1997. Taniguchi, Jirô. La montagne magique [The Magic Mountain]. Casterman, 2007. Taniguchi, Jirô. La forêt millénaire. Rue de Sèvres, 2017. Taniguchi, Jirô. Le sommet des dieux, vol. 5. Kana, 2011. Ulrich, Roberta. American Indian Nations from Termination to Restoration 1953–2006. U of Nebraska P, 2010. Walker, Jana, Jennifer L. Bradley, and Timothy J. Humphrey. “A Closer Look at Environmental Injustice in Indian Country.” Seattle Journal for Social Justice, vol. 1, no. 2, 2002, pp. 379–401. Wilson, Carl, and Garragh Wilson. “Taoism, Shintoism, and the Ethics of Technology: An Ecocritical Review of Howl’s Moving Castle.” Resilience: A Journal of the Environmental Humanities, vol. 2, no. 3, 2015, pp. 189–194. “Yakushima.” UNESCO World Heritage Centre. whc.unesco.org/pg.cfm?cid=31&id_site=662. Accessed 16 July 2020.

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16 A DISNEY DEATH Coco, Black Panther, and the Limits of the Afterlife Stacy Thompson

Fredric Jameson claims that in the better (socialist) world that is to come the basic coordinates of life will change dramatically, and even death will be experienced in new ways. With Jameson’s proposition in mind, I want to examine two recent Disney films that promise the opposite scenario in provocative ways. In the movie Coco (2017), a punitive bureaucracy analogous to the United States Customs and Border Protection (CBP) Agency operates along a physical/ metaphysical border between life and death. On the Day of the Dead, or Día de los Muertos, the agency bars the souls of the dead from entering the world of the living if the former do not have the film’s equivalent of a passport. The CBP agents use facial recognition software to ascertain that each soul crossing the life/death border can be identified in a photo placed on her or his altera (a small altar erected in a cemetery on the Day of the Dead) on the living side of the border. Failing the scan results in the dead person’s inability to reunite with family members on the living side of the border. In a parallel fashion, the afterlife in the 2018 film Black Panther maintains class distinctions beyond the grave, where one might hope that they would be meaningless. In Black Panther, a ritual allows a person’s spirit to pass from the realm of the living to the Ancestral Lands. T’Challa undergoes the ritual and passes to the spirit realm, where he is met by a group of panthers on what appears to be the eastern African/Wakandan savanna. His dead father soon approaches him in human form and offers sage advice. But when T’Challa’s cousin, Erik Stephens, undergoes the same ritual, he awakens to find himself in the dilapidated apartment in Oakland, California, where his father lived and died. The Ancestral Lands are not a nebulous African spirit realm shared by all people who trace their earthly roots back to Africa; rather, if your father is from the slums of Oakland, then a tenement in Oakland is your Ancestral Land. There’s an odd literalness about the logic of this afterlife. This is the thread that ties Coco and Black Panther together: in neither film is death or the afterlife the great leveler where national/nationalist borders and class differences imposed upon us in life by geopolitical and economic struggle disappear. In this chapter, I read this persistence of class difference in two ways. First, I argue that an ideological assumption prevents these films from envisioning an afterlife outside the logic of contemporary capitalism, with its brutal border policing and economic disparity, all of which apparently extend beyond life’s limit. Second, I argue that one can dialectically read the films’ refusal to resolve racial and geopolitical conflicts by positing a nebulous spirit realm in which such concerns vanish. Instead, these conflicts are 171

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forced back upon our attention through their persistence where we least expect them: in afterlives bound up with unexpectedly mundane practices and logics.

Psychoanalysis, or, To Death and Beyond! I want to begin by thinking about the place that the notion of death occupies within psychoanalysis. Commenting on the concept of the “death drive,” contemporary Lacanian theorist Slavoj Žižek writes that “we can see why Freud used the term ‘death drive’: the lesson of psychoanalysis is that humans are not simply alive, but possessed by a strange drive to enjoy life in excess of the ordinary run of things – and ‘death’ stands simply and precisely for the dimension beyond ‘ordinary’ biological life. Human life is never ‘just life,’ it is always sustained by an excess of life” (103). Žižek claims that we cannot “reduce” humans to being merely “one of the animal species,” not qualitatively different from dogs or chimpanzees. But he does not draw the line between the human species and other animal species where we might expect it, based on the human ability to use language, obtain consciousness, or tell jokes. Instead, what differentiates us from dogs is that humans need to include the concept of death within our conceptualizations of life, as precisely that which exceeds life. Paradoxically, human life, if it is properly human, must attempt and fail to contain within itself its own radical limit, its own unthought, its own impossibility; it must attempt and fail to think beyond itself, and, in that thinking, it insists upon something “more-than-life,” something more than animal or biological life. The movement toward that externality to life, that more-than-life, is what Žižek calls “death drive.” In popular culture, the same point arises everywhere, such as in the first scene of the 2005 film Hustle and Flow. The movie begins with a monologue by the main character, Djay, who explains that “man ain’t like a dog, […] We territorial as shit, we gonna protect our own. But man […] he know about death, got him a sense of history. […] They [dogs] be going through life carefree, but people like you and me, man, we always guessing – wondering – what if? You know what I mean?” As far as we know, dogs are not preoccupied with what Djay thinks of as the “what ifs” of life – at least they don’t appear to be. But it is these unknown potentialities of life that death holds open for us as a placeholder. Alain Badiou expresses the same point more economically when he claims that the human is the animal that wants to be more than an animal. In Badiou’s words, the “immortal,” meaning the more-than-human, “affirms himself as someone who runs counter to the temptation of wanting-to-be-an-animal to which circumstances may expose him” (12). “Death drive” is thus the psychoanalytical name for the human desire to exceed the biological life and death of merely animal life and the refusal to accept life as we experience it phenomenologically as the ultimate horizon of what is possible. It is the reason that we find a human life that ends too soon tragic because of its unfulfilled possibilities. Such a concern never arises in relation to cats. If our three-year-old pet cat is hit by a car and dies, we might feel the loss profoundly, but we probably won’t wonder what the cat could have done or become if only it had lived out its expected life span. For Žižek and Badiou, our humanity itself is at stake in how we conceptualize death in relation to life. In this chapter, I argue that the ways in which our cultural productions imagine and attempt to think death – the ways in which they work through it or fail to work through this fundamental contradiction that structures human life – can grant us insight into our capacity to think beyond our current, global capitalist, lifeworld. I’m specifically interested in the ways in which we fail to think beyond capitalism, our failures to imagine a non-capitalist space or time even after death. These texts are symptomatic of our historical moment, in which we struggle to imagine even moderate political and economic changes, let alone radical ones. Perhaps, then, it is no surprise that when we contemplate death within our cultural imaginary, 172

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it obeys the logic of capitalism. Life might end, but capitalism lasts forever. This must be so, because the logics of the capitalist lifeworld are repeated in the “deathworlds” of Disney’s films. To express it in slightly different language, our incapacity to imagine a non-capitalist deathworld or afterlife is symptomatic of our incapacity to imagine a non-capitalist lifeworld.

From Psychoanalysis to the Movies Where are we now, in terms of cultural representations of death? More narrowly, how does Disney, an important engine for the Hollywood dream machine, envision the afterlife or deathworld? Black Panther is fascinating in this regard. T’Challa, the prince and later King of Wakanda, and Erik “Killmonger” Stephens, the outcast nephew of the former King (T’Chaka), briefly the King, and finally the deposed and dethroned King of Wakanda, make journeys to the “Ancestral Land.” Writing in the Journal of Religion & Film, A. David Lewis describes Black Panther’s afterworld as “a transcendent sacred space and final destination for at least the royal family,” as well as “a site of transformation” and “part of the ceremony to become king and Black Panther.” This description correlates well with T’Challa’s experience. As a part of the process of becoming king, he drinks the heart-shaped herb potion, enters a trance-like state, and awakens in the Ancestral Land. He rises from a shallow grave in what appears to be the eastern African savanna to find himself wearing ceremonial garb. Nearby, a tree shelters several panthers in its branches. One of them approaches him, transforms into his dead father, embraces him, exhorts him to assume the mantle of Wakanda’s monarchy, and offers some sage advice: “surround yourself with people you trust.” In other words, the ancestral plane is not unlike what we might expect, a place of ancestors and lore. More importantly, there is a distinct break between the world that T’Challa knows and the afterlife. The known world, for T’Challa, is the superheroic Marvel world of heroes and villains who figure against the supposedly neutral background of global capitalism, which is linked directly to Marvel in characters such as Iron Man, who, as Tony Stark, is an international arms manufacturer by day and superhero by night. As in the DC universe, in which billionaire philanthropist Bruce Wayne/Batman is the scion of an industrialist/real estate tycoon, heroism and capitalism are cheek by jowl in the Marvel universe. But the Ancestral Land is different; it is divorced from the dross of today’s buying and selling, competing, exploiting, and profiting. Instead, it is a world whose details are properly unimaginable or inconceivable. What do the panthers do all day in this deathworld? If they eat, what do they eat? The animal-embodied souls of lesser people? Probably not. In short, it is impossible to imagine a day in the “life” of this deathworld. It is properly “other” to the Wakandan lifeworld as well as our own. But the afterlife takes on a more interesting hue when Erik Stephens, nom de guerre Killmonger, journeys there. In Lewis’s article, he prepares us for what Erik will find. He observes that “access to the Ancestral Lands is not a sign of moral reward, since both men [T’Challa and Erik] are encumbered by gross injustices.” Killmonger has killed numerous people while working for the CIA, and T’Challa has continued his father’s isolationist politics in Wakanda, despite the possibility that Wakandan technology could help alleviate the sufferings of black people across the globe. But, as Lewis has already suggested, the Wakandan afterlife is reserved for “at least the royal family.” So Erik is allowed access to it because he has royal blood; he is nephew to the former king and cousin to T’Challa. But even this is not enough to grant him the same access that T’Challa enjoys, because the ancestral plane is ultimately class-based. Erik does not arise from his ceremonial burial to find himself, like T’Challa, on the African savanna. Rather, he wakes up in a tenement in Oakland, California, which, one imagines, is no one’s idea of the better world. 173

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The ancestral plane operates according to a comprehensible logic: because Erik’s father, N’Jobu, violated King T’Chaka’s wishes and sought to use Wakandan technology to aid oppressed blacks in the US, N’Jobu was killed and his son was banned from the specifically Wakandan Ancestral Land, although the movie does not mention this consequence of N’Jobu’s betrayal. Instead, Erik has to make do with the working-class deathworld to which his father’s militant resistance to oppression in the early 1990s condemned both himself and his son. In the Wakandan Ancestral Land, panthers lounge majestically in ancient trees or, during T’Challa’s second visit, gather in human form, robed and solemn, in a semicircle behind T’Chaka. In contrast, Erik’s ancestral plane is the ghetto to T’Challa’s: N’Jobu appears to Erik just as he was in life – in human form – and residing in exactly the same Oakland apartment that he was killed in. His garments are ceremonial semi-formal, nice enough but a far cry from the robes of T’Chaka’s ancestral plane. In fact, the only signs assuring us that Erik is in the ancestral plane are the unusual colors of the sky, which also appear above the tree of panthers. Why, then, are Erik and his father relegated to a second-class deathworld? Writing in Africology: The Journal of Pan African Studies, South African scholar Dikeledi Mokoena criticizes Black Panther’s use of “ancestors and death” as an indicator of “the kind of Black person that should be/is acceptable” (16). She reasons that N’Jobu, who sought to help Black people in the diaspora militantly fight for freedom through the assistance of African resources, was punishable despite the nobility of his course. The consequence […] of being a Malcolm X type of militant radical is the ultimate posthumous exclusion, being stuck in limbo with his son Killmonger, banished from the ancestral world as if their course was anti-African and anti-Black. She adds that what “the movie essentially suggests is that Frantz Fanon did not make it into the abode of the ancestors […] but being a revolutionary Black person in the hereafter is certainly worth aspiring to and, perhaps in radical terms, the vast lands of ancestors being occupied by assimilationists is not such an ideal place to aspire to go” (16). Mokoena concludes that Erik’s death in the film, at T’Challa’s hand, represents “the symbolic murder of Black radical politics in a neoliberal world” (17). T’Challa’s victory is ultimately “symbolic of the rescuing of economic warfare waged through economic policies of the West that caused havoc and to some extent are incompatible with African values” (17). In other words, the ancestral plane(s) of Wakanda reproduce the economic and political inequalities of contemporary neoliberal economics. If, as I’ve been arguing, death functions as a limit case for our capacity to think beyond the strictures of capitalism as a world-dominant system, then Black Panther betrays a failure of political and cultural imagination. Even the afterlife is segregated into a class-based hierarchy, where the most exalted are those who worked within the parameters of today’s neoliberal economic agenda, while the militant anti-capitalists (Fanon in his Marxist guise, for example) are banished to the ghetto. The film is thus symptomatic of the paucity of our reflections on an externality or a beyond to capitalism, even in death. N’Jobu and Erik will endure eternity in the same condemned building that they occupied while alive. An ideological critique of Black Panther thus seems to lead us to a specific conclusion. Our cultural imaginary can envision a world in which an eastern African nation has outstripped the rest of the globe technologically and scientifically, in which a heart-shaped herb can transport human spirits across the divide between life and death, and in which a secret periodic element can be harnessed to provide power equal in strength to nuclear fusion or fission but without the radioactive waste or containment dangers associated with the latter. Nevertheless, what remains outside the film’s speculative powers is the possibility of a non-capitalist deathworld, to say 174

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nothing of a lifeworld not similarly ordered. But what if we give this conclusion a dialectical twist? Is it possible to read the film’s apparent failure to imagine an egalitarian afterworld as its ultimate success? In other words, what if we read the film not as support for capitalism’s fantasy of fully occupying not just the material world but even the immaterial/spiritual one as well, but as the traversal of such a fantasy of capitalism’s ubiquity? According to the logic of psychoanalysis, fantasy cannot be successfully countered through the register of reality. For example, a necessary fantasy held by many parents is the assumption that their children are endlessly interesting and utterly unique among humans. They are convinced of this – they believe it – and no amount of perfectly sound reasoning, drawn from the socially produced, signifying network of reality, will dissuade them. Or, even if they can acknowledge that their children are, in fact, not qualitatively different from literally millions of other children spread across the globe, they still find their own children different, exquisite, radically individuated from other kids. Paradoxically, they can even acknowledge that all of the aforementioned, reality-based characteristics apply to their children without sacrificing their fantasy about them. But what if we imagine a different approach? What if we work within the fantasy itself, extending it, attenuating it, stretching its limits to the point at which they snap? For instance, what if, one day, my daughter announces to me that she is absolutely unique and the best daughter in the world? Only now might I be tempted to tell her, and acknowledge to myself, that she is not so different from millions of other eleven-year-old girls, and, more importantly, only now will I momentarily accept the truth of this proposition. Of course, I will not permanently abandon my belief in that je ne sais quoi, that intangible something that is in her but more than her and exceeds any possible description or summing-up of my daughter. But her taking up of the terms of my fantasy and extending them from within might momentarily traverse the fantasy itself for me. What might a similar operation look like in a cultural text like Black Panther? This is precisely where the brilliance of the film’s representation of the Ancestral Land emerges. As Erik awakens in Oakland, we catch the film winking at us. It extends the cultural fantasy of an omnipresent capitalism beyond the grave, as if to say, “You didn’t really think that death would free you from neoliberal geopolitics or class struggle, did you?” Or, to state it bluntly: if your father, the King of Wakanda, dies in an attack on the UN building in New York City, your ancestral plane is nevertheless a mythic version of the east African savanna. But if your father, the king’s brother, violates the king’s wishes and consequently dies in a housing project in Oakland, California, as a militant member of the working class, then your ancestral plane is a housing project in Oakland. This traversal of the fantasy of a capitalism that can extend beyond death to colonize the afterworld brings us up short as viewers. We are forced to wrestle with the unthinkable possibility that death itself has fallen under the sway of class antagonisms. In the face of the possible succumbing of death to the logic of the marketplace, one hopes that the viewer recoils and can perhaps then assert that death, at least, will not be beholden to contemporary geopolitics, that death must “be” something else altogether.

What Is the Purpose of Your Visit? The same dialectical critique with which I investigated Black Panther can be extended to the 2017 Disney movie, Coco, with interesting results. Writing for the New York Times shortly after the film’s release, Reggie Ugwu published the article, “How Pixar Made Sure ‘Coco’ Was Culturally Conscious.” In it, he details the lengths to which Coco’s director, Lee Unkrich, who is white, went in attempting to avoid accusations of cultural appropriation in connection with the film. Unkrich reportedly “relied on several research trips to Mexico and the personal stories 175

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of Latino team members” to establish the film’s “specific geographic and sociological roots.” He and his team “also turned to an array of outside Latino cultural consultants to vet ideas and suggest new ones – upending a long-running studio tradition of strict creative lockdown.” One of the film’s producers, Darla Anderson, commented on the Coco team’s Latino/a consultants: “we really wanted their voice and their notes to make sure we got all the details correct.” Ugwu concludes his positive assessment of Coco’s cultural awareness by quoting Alex Nogales, an adviser on Coco and the president of watchdog group the National Hispanic Media Coalition, who says of the filmmakers: “They’re just representing who we are.” In spite of these precautions, Disney/Pixar did make the occasional misstep during production, as Cindy Rodriguez noted in a 2013 CNN article. That year, “the entertainment giant filed an application to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office to secure the phrase ‘Dia de los Muertos,” or “Day of the Dead,” across multiple platforms […] Disney hoped to secure the rights to the title ‘Day of the Dead’ and such themed merchandise as fruit preserves, fruit-based snacks, toys, games, clothing, footwear, backpacks, clocks and jewelry.” But the Latino/a community fought back via social media and an online petition, and Disney ultimately withdrew its trademark registration request. Rodriguez also noted that, in 2013, the Day of the Dead was added to the UNESCO list of Masterpieces of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity, which raises the issue of how an “intangible heritage” can be copyrighted or privately owned. In spite of this attempted overreach by Disney, the movie Coco, like Black Panther, seems for the most part to have avoided accusations of cultural co-optation and appropriation. Whether or not Disney “accurately” or “respectfully” represented Día de los Muertos is ultimately not what interests me, though, and neither is Black Panther’s borrowings from various African countries’ cultural traditions. What fascinates me is the issue that the Ugwu article touches on only parenthetically. He writes that Coco’s filmmakers, at work during the Obama years, could not have foreseen the “rhetoric of President Trump, who disparaged Mexican immigrants and antagonized Mexico […] during the 2016 campaign, [and thereby] poured gasoline on an incendiary political debate just as the film was nearing completion.” Luckily, Ugwu notes, the “only borders it [Coco] depicts are metaphysical (skeletal customs agents make an appearance).” I want to linger over this seemingly innocuous final comment. First, it is worth being precise in this case. Early in the film, the main character, Miguel, strums a magical guitar that allows him to cross the flower petal bridge separating the living from the Land of the Dead. Having done so, he approaches a wall with the word “Bienvenidos” suspended above it in neon lettering. The wall is divided into a series of gates, each patrolled by an agent. The film then cuts from Miguel to a queue of living/dead skeletons waiting in line at a gate marked “Re-Entry,” where they must declare the offerings that their family left on their ofrendas (Day of the Dead altars) before re-entering the Land of the Dead. The agents at the re-entry gates are the “skeletal customs agents” mentioned by Ugwu, and the process of re-entering the Land of the Dead seems to be a mere formality. No one is turned away. Later, we discover that Miguel’s family even declares Miguel himself to customs and is still allowed to re-enter with him. However, now the film cuts to the “Departures” gate, where we watch a man and woman (living/dead skeletons) preparing to enter the living side of the border. A skeletal agent stops the couple, and the man and woman automatically draw themselves up and face the agent’s camera, attempting to hide their obvious anxiety and project confidence that they will be allowed to pass into the land of the living. The agent captures them on her screen, and we watch over her shoulder as she uses facial recognition software to verify that the two would-be émigrés are who they say they are. The agent’s machine confirms that the image of the couple matches images of them placed on their ofrendas by their children, and the couple is allowed to pass. They do so after 176

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smiling/sighing in relief. A few moments later, Héctor, whom we will later learn is Miguel’s grandfather, and who is disguised as Frida Kahlo in this scene, attempts to leave the Land of the Dead through the same “Departures” gate that the couple just used. The facial recognition software scans his face, sees beneath his disguise, and cannot find a matching image of him on an ofrenda in the Land of the Living, so he is denied entry. He nevertheless forces his way onto the bridge, only to be hauled back by additional agents and returned to the Land of the Dead. Notably, this agent who bars the dead from leaving their country is not a friendly “skeletal customs agent” but a Border Protection agent. If the agent worked on the US side of the US/Mexico border, then she would be working for the US Customs and Border Protection Agency (CBP), which is housed in the US Department of Homeland Security. This is the agency that became infamous in 2017 for separating thousands of children from their families at the US/Mexico border. However, even before 2017, the CBP had garnered notoriety for killing at least 97 people at or near the border, the vast majority of them under suspicious circumstances, since it came into being in 2003 (Macaraeg). Although the Land of the Dead’s border protection agents are not literally CBP agents and are played for laughs in Coco, one has to wonder why they figure in the film at all. There is nothing inherently amusing about the CBP – in fact, just the opposite. Rather, what is played straight in Black Panther but played for humor in Coco is the darkly comedic possibility that such an agency would exist in the deathworld. In short, isn’t it amusingly ridiculous to imagine a CBP Agency patrolling the metaphysical line between life and death as if it were the US’s national boundary with Mexico? The spectator who is paying attention will also have noted that the dead need the equivalent of a photo ID/passport to enter the Land of the Living. The only twist is that rather than carrying their IDs, the deads’ images must appear on their alteras on the “living” side of the border. Again, an extremely dark humor manifests in the persistent need for the correct photo ID even after death, a comedic note repeated in the overworked and incompetent bureaucracy in the Land of the Dead, which mirrors the horror stories we associate in the US with visas, green cards, immigration issues, and the Immigration and Naturalization Service until 2003 and the CBP thereafter. Miguel and his family must visit a parallel bureaucracy in the Land of the Dead to correct what they think is an oversight (Miguel’s grandmother has been prevented from crossing the border, even though her family always places her photo on the ofrenda) but is actually merely the effect of the Border Protection Agency of the Land of the Dead fastidiously and officiously enforcing the laws that govern border crossing. (Miguel took the photo off his grandmother’s altera and is carrying it with him, so, technically, it’s now in the Land of the Dead.) When the family protests that this is merely a technicality, the bureaucrat who is working with them comments indirectly on the absurd nature of the institution that he works for, or perhaps that of the Land of the Dead itself: “I am terribly allergic […] And I don’t have a nose, and yet, here we are.” It is worth returning, now, to the question of how “culturally conscious” Coco is. Writing for The Washington Post, religion columnist Michelle Boorstein noted that Coco “posits a very specific afterlife, with unbreakable rules and regulations. While the backdrop is the Day of the Dead, the writers said they made up most of the world and its theology.” But if, as mentioned earlier, Pixar executive Darla Anderson consulted with numerous Latino/a advisers to “make sure [she] got all the details correct,” then did they succeed in this endeavor regarding the made-up theology? It’s tempting to ask why the addition of border patrol agents to the Land of the Dead doesn’t give anyone pause. As Boorstein writes, the Day of the Dead has “millenniaold roots in Aztec and Catholic traditions, among others” – but surely those roots don’t include legal prohibitions about immigrating or visiting neighboring nations. The border agents must 177

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be a glaring inaccuracy, right? Yet Boorstein argues that Coco’s popularity is based partly on its attractive and comforting image of an afterlife, and she turns to Rabbi Jason Weiner for a description of the logic that she finds expressed in the film: “The afterlife is totally just,” and “The primary experience [there] is of love” (Weiner, qtd. in Boorstein). Yet there are CBP agents who prohibit Héctor from crossing from the Land of the Dead into the Land of the Living. He has been forbidden to cross because the image of him that usually sits upon his family’s ofrenda has his head torn off. His body remains in the image, standing next to Miguel’s grandmother, but someone in his family understands the legal technicalities that govern the Land of the Dead and has removed his face. This renders useless the facial recognition software used at the border, which means that Héctor is repeatedly denied entrance to the Land of the Dead because of a legal technicality. In short, the afterlife’s bureaucracy does not operate according to “totally just” spiritual guidelines. Instead, it is very much like the kind of not merely incompetent but brutal and unjust US bureaucracy that separates children from their families at the US/Mexico border and then finds it “too difficult” to reunite them later, opting instead to funnel them through an adoption service linked to several high-ranking US government officials. Rather than a just afterlife that compensates one for an unjust life, the afterlife in Coco, like the ancestral plane in Black Panther, reproduces the same travails that earthly existence offered. At this point, we need to give this reading of Coco the same dialectical twist that we administered to Black Panther. What if we read the continuing existence of CBP agents after death not as the film’s failure but as its success? In other words, the problem is not that Coco’s deathworld doesn’t get the details of Mexican culture right, but that it gets them too right. On the one hand, we can upbraid the film’s creators for their inability to think beyond the brutality of the US’s CBP and at the very least subtract that agency from the afterlife. Are we truly so embedded within our neoliberal capitalist lifeworld that we cannot envision death itself as a domain not overseen by contemporary state apparatuses that compete with one another over all things economic, including where and when people are allowed to cross state boundaries? More briefly, are we incapable, even in our cultural imaginings, of positing different worlds not completely shot through with the logic of the capitalist and geopolitical flow of people, labor, goods, etc.? Of course, the film doesn’t take seriously its own CBP Agency. Its humor depends upon the unexpected appearance of such an agency even after death. But what if we take their posthumous existence more seriously than the film takes them? Rather than granting us a bad utopia in which all contradictions and struggles disappear, we might argue that the film seizes upon what we don’t expect to find in the afterlife and, like the latent content of a dream whose affect is distorted before it appears as the manifest content, the deathworld of Coco insists upon the endurance of border patrol agents, customs, the ghetto, and myriad other elements of contemporary capitalism but distorts them through humor. It is as if the film winks at us, and says, “Can you imagine that such a thing exists here, in the afterlife? Isn’t it funny? Yet, it must be here.” In other words, the triumph of maintaining these elements from the contemporary, worldstructuring, capitalist lifeworld signifies that the film’s invocation of a heaven is not a purely ideological move. If ideology operates by providing imaginary solutions to real problems, then the afterlife in Coco functions as a partial critique of ideology. It avoids the temptation of papering over all the social antagonisms that arise today in the US and Mexico when one thinks about national borders. In Coco, these issues are so painfully durable that they survive death itself, which is powerless against them. The point of this dialectical reading, in which the ideological critique inherent in Coco’s worldview emerges from the film’s apparent capitulation to the logic of capitalism, is not to cast the film as either a success or a failure, but rather both at the same time. In one register, it fails because it cannot conceive of a world not wholly imbued with the logic of capitalism. If, as I’ve been arguing, death is a limit case for our cultural 178

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imaginings, then Coco would seem to indicate that our social imaginary is utterly trapped within the status quo, within the workings of the world as it is. But in another register the film succeeds, because it attenuates the logic of the status quo to the point where it potentially collapses in on itself. The film makes explicit the contemporary fantasy that il n’y a dehors du capitalisme – that there is no “outside” to capitalism - and, in making this fantasy explicit, traverses it. Here is the point at which we can acknowledge that, in death at the very least, the logic of the market will not predominate, and it is at this point that we free ourselves from the phantasmatic support that a vision of ineluctable capitalism offers contemporary ideology. Instead, the film insists: if you don’t want to talk about the brutalities surrounding “border protection,” then don’t talk about Mexico. We seem, as a culture, unable to imagine an end to the neoliberal capitalism of our current historical moment. But, in a self-reflexive move, we might be able to catch sight of that inability itself. Isn’t that, ultimately, what Black Panther and Coco stage for us: our incapacity to think beyond the social antagonisms inherent to our globalized capitalist world? Read generously, these Disney films testify to our growing awareness that death itself no longer seems capable of freeing us from ghettos, displaced laborers and their children, and inhumane border protection agencies. Even in Disney films, these elements come back to us, insufficiently masked by the distorted affect that now clings to them: humorous skeletal agents; a bathetic spirit-father who cries in his posthumous Oakland cold-water flat. If Hollywood is a dream factory that has always included its share of nightmares, then the Disney arm of the factory specializes in the dreams that come closest to pure wish fulfillment. So it means something when Disney fails in its ideological mission and renders its failure visible in filmic images. But this also presents us with a challenge. If even Disney cannot picture a non-capitalist afterlife/ future, then how can we?

Works Cited Badiou, Alain. Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, translated by Peter Hallward. Verso, 2002. Black Panther. Directed by Ryan Coogler, performances by Chadwick Boseman and Lupita Nyong’o. Disney, 2018. Boorstein, Michelle. “How the Oscar-Winning ‘Coco’ and Its Fantastical Afterlife Forced Us to Talk About Death.” The Washington Post, 4 Mar. 2018. www.washingtonpost.com/news/acts-of-faith/wp/2018/03/ 04/coco-is-the-conversation-weve-been-avoiding-about-death-and-the-afterlife/?noredirect=on&utm_ term=.e767d847f934. Coco. Directed by Lee Unkrich, performances by Anthony Gonzalez and Alanna Ubach. Disney, 2017. Hustle & Flow. Directed by Craig Brewer, performances by Terrence Howard and Taryn Manning. Paramount, 2005. Lewis, A. David. “The Ancestral Lands of Black Panther and Killmonger Unburied.” Journal of Religion & Film, vol. 22, no. 1, 2018. https://digitalcommons.unomaha.edu/jrf/vol22/iss1/39. Macaraeg, Sarah. “The Border Patrol Files: Fatal Encounters: 97 Deaths Point to Pattern of Border Agent Violence Across America.” The Guardian, 2 May 2018. www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/may/ 02/fatal-encounters-97-deaths-point-to-pattern-of-border-agent-violence-across-america. Accessed 16 July 2020. Mokoena, Dikeledi A. “Black Panther and the Problem of the Black Radical.” Africology: The Journal of Pan African Studies, vol. 11, no. 9, 2018, pp. 13–19. Rodriguez, Cindy. “Day of the Dead Trademark Request Draws Backlash for Disney.” CNN, 11 May 2013. www.cnn.com/2013/05/10/us/disney-trademark-day-dead/index.html. Accessed 16 July 2020. Ugwu, Reggie. “How Pixar Made Sure ‘Coco’ Was Culturally Conscious.” The New York Times, 19 Nov. 2017. www.nytimes.com/2017/11/19/movies/coco-pixar-politics.html. Accessed 16 July 2020. Žižek, Slavoj. On Belief. Routledge, 2009.

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17 SUICIDE IN THE EARLY MODERN ELEGIAC TRADITION Kelly McGuire

In Sleepless Souls: Suicide in Early Modern England, Michael MacDonald and Alexander Murphy argue that the sentimentalization of death in the eighteenth century fostered a certain degree of sympathy for suicide, reaching its “zenith” with the death of Thomas Chatterton in 1771 (191). MacDonald and Murphy are primarily concerned with the role of the periodical press in promoting a more “sympathetic and even sentimental outlook” on suicide (176), but other cultural forms such as the elegy also arguably participate in this shift from condemnation to regret. This essay situates suicide in relation to the English elegiac tradition, examining the complicated mourning the act entails and drawing upon theories of mourning, melancholia, and abjection to consider how poetry provides a space for representing and understanding an act that is so often thrust out of the realm of discourse altogether. With specific attention to Alexander Pope’s “Elegy to the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady” (1717), this essay considers the following: Does suicide necessitate adjustments to the elegiac form, or is it easily accommodated by a tradition in which closure itself remains elusive? Does elegy help mediate the reception and framing of suicide as something to be mourned and treated with sympathy rather than condemnation? These questions are difficult to answer with any degree of satisfaction and certainty, but in opening up a discursive space for suicide, elegies like Pope’s participate in a cultural movement away from condemnation, or at the very least anticipate a shift in attitude. Elegy arguably opens up suicide to the realm of discourse, with an affective dimension that transcends the pain of loss registered in more typical works of mourning in which closure and acceptance are the inevitable end points. As such, elegy offers rhetorical and figural ways of dealing with suicide that may not be available through other literary forms. Traditional English elegy is both the poetry of death and the poetry of mourning. Conventional readings describe elegy as an attempt to complete the process of mourning, with the poem culminating in an acceptance of the beloved’s death and a revelation of the poet’s particular poetic power. In this sense, the death of the other sets the stage for the emergence of the self and birth of a voice that is both original and highly derivative (insofar as the poet assumes his or her place in relation to previous elegists). Written in 1637 as part of a collection of poems mourning the young clergyman Edward King’s death by drowning, John Milton’s “Lycidas” is emblematic of this tradition, as its opening extended conceit finds the poet lamenting that he has been called too soon to assume the poetic mantle. 180

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Yet once more, O ye laurels, and once more Ye myrtles brown, with ivy never sere, I come to pluck your berries harsh and crude, And with forc’d fingers rude Shatter your leaves before the mellowing year. Bitter constraint and sad occasion dear Compels me to disturb your season due; For Lycidas is dead, dead ere his prime, Young Lycidas, and hath not left his peer. (lines 1–9) Like Lycidas, who has been called to an early grave, Milton’s persona conveys a sense of unease that his introduction to the poetic scene is premature, as he has been thrust out into an early blossoming at the very moment of his friend’s death. As such, creativity is born from death, which becomes the stage of the poet’s emergence, albeit accompanied by insecurities that Lycidas “hath not met his peer.” The remainder of the poem, however, reveals that the speaker is more than equipped to pursue his vocation. The crushing of the berries reads retrospectively as a kind of humility topos after the poem has been successfully completed and the emergent poet’s worth clearly established. At the same time, the violence of the image – with reference to “shatter[ing]” with “forc’d fingers rude” the poetic laurel leaves – becomes a vehicle for affect that conveys the rupture of death and the intensity of the speaker’s grief at his friend’s untimely death. I begin this essay with “Lycidas” precisely because of this untimely death and the difficulties it presents for poetic mourning as well as, arguably, its correspondences with suicide. If Lycidas’s untimely death by drowning can be assimilated into the natural world (a point the trajectory of the poem moves us toward), then might not suicide function analogously with writing on accidental death – in the specific sense that elegy responds to deaths that are themselves fundamentally or at least initially resistant to acceptance? For instance, W. B. Yeats’s 1918 poem “In Memory of Major Robert Gregory” commemorates a friend killed during World War I while serving as a pilot. Like Milton, Yeats wrestles with the problem of premature death, summed up in the question “What made us dream that he could comb grey hair?” (line 88). Like Milton’s Lycidas, the early death of someone whom Yeats describes as “all life’s epitome” ultimately proves unmournable, however, as the loss of Major Gregory is described as a “late death [that] took all [the poet’s] heart for speech” (line 87; 96). Indeed, as Karen Weisman has observed, “the limits of poetic utterance have surfaced as recurrent motifs in elegy throughout its history” (1). Elegy in this sense is organized around a central paradox: the speaker laments the insufficiency of expression in the context of a highly formalized and typically linguistically rich poem. That said, where Milton’s speaker is able to prevail over his early misgivings and effectively mourn Lycidas into his grave, Yeats’s poem lacks the same degree of closure, although his autobiographical, aging persona may have something to do with the sense of resignation (rather than commitment to renewal) that closes the poem. Both Milton’s and Yeats’s poems invite consideration of the parallels between mourning suicide and mourning an accident. Medical theorists maintain that both events entail a “complicated grief,” the clinical term for a grief “that remains persistent and intense and does not transition into integrated grief ” (Young 177). A 2018 psychological study affirms that “families grieving a sudden, traumatic death are at increased risk for a number of poor mental health outcomes, including post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), depression, and prolonged, or complicated, grief disorder” (Williams 377). No loss is easy to accept, but these sudden deaths are particularly unsettling to the psyche. However, where the death of the young as a result of accident or sickness is frequently the subject of early modern elegy, the stigma 181

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surrounding suicide often banishes it from the realm of discourse and renders it an “unseemly” subject for elegiac treatment prior to the twentieth century. For this reason, Pope’s “Elegy to the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady” stands out as deserving of attention and scrutiny, as a work that opens up a space for suicide within the elegiac tradition. Critically neglected since Howard Weinbrot’s 1971 essay, Pope’s poem remains a landmark elegy on the subject of voluntary death. The poem begins with an eerily gothic scene by moonlight in which the speaker confronts a ghost apparently eager to commune with him. Although the poem does not divulge the identity of the ghost, the speaker’s exclamation “Tis she!” in the third line indicates that she is known to the speaker, although whether she is in fact based on any specific individual known to Pope remains inconclusive. As Ruben Quintero argues, “it is enough for the reader to know that the lady has suffered from unfortunate circumstances, on foreign soil, away from home and friends, and that she has been driven to self-destruction, for whatever reasons. Biographical particulars need not be present, nor have they cause to exist” (95).1 For Quintero and David Vieth,2 the poem’s focus rests squarely on the poet’s own psyche, with the lady’s suicide merely serving as a catalyst for affect.3 However, this reading sidesteps the relevance of voluntary death for the form of elegy, which was certainly noticed by Pope’s contemporaries who objected strongly to his sympathetic treatment of the “lady” for having done something as “un-Christian” as taking her own life; Samuel Johnson in particular objected to the fact that Pope’s poem had “drawn much attention by the illaudable singularity of treating suicide with respect” (3: 226). Pope’s elegy goes further than other suicide elegies in giving presence to the dead. Appearing as a ghost in the poem, the lady is able to communicate through gestural language that the speaker’s questions illuminate in the opening lines: What beck’ning ghost, along the moon-light shade Invites my steps, and points to yonder glade?’ Tis she! – but why that bleeding bosom gor’d, Why dimly gleams the visionary sword? Oh ever beauteous, ever friendly! tell, Is it, in heav’n, a crime to love too well? (lines 1–6) The “beck’ning ghost” remains voiceless, available to us only through the speaker’s inward struggle to comprehend what he sees. The first two questions receive implicit answers in the opening couplets, with the pronouncement “’Tis she!” marking the speaker’s recognition of the lady but concealing her identity from the reader. The second question, “Why dimly gleams the visionary sword?” receives a response in the form of yet another (this time, rhetorical) question, “Is it, in heav’n, a crime to love too well?” that acknowledges her suicide, while exonerating it as an act of love. The questioning mode thus gives us access to the poet’s wonder while highlighting the dramatic tensions of the scene in question. Pope’s elegy is notable for taking a deceased woman as its subject. As a form that has traditionally involved male poets commemorating fellow male poets, from “Lycidas” through “In Memoriam” and Yeats’s “In Memory of Major Robert Gregory,” elegy is clearly gendered. Male friendship is the standard focus of the English elegiac tradition, which is contoured in this sense around the homosocial. As such, women are typically neither mourner nor mourned in the public spaces of elegiac discourse, especially in the pastoral tradition. Celeste Schenck elucidates, “The funeral elegy is, from its inception in the poetry of Theocritus and his followers, Bion and Moschus, a resolutely patriarchal genre: a song sung over the bier of a friend-forebear in order both to lay the ancestor to rest and to seize the pipes of pastoral poetry from his barely cold hands” (13). Pope provides an alternative to this somewhat self-serving tradition, first in predicting the silencing of his own poetic 182

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voice at the poem’s end, and second in commemorating a woman who herself was deemed by her family unworthy of the rites of burial or the “kind domestic tear” (line 49). Elegy in this sense is compensatory, standing in for the failure of the lady’s family to mourn her death adequately. Pope issues a challenge to the framing of suicide as a sinful act by invoking the Roman example of mors voluntaria and assimilating the woman’s suicide into the literary framework of romance, rejecting the notion that it can be a crime to “love too well.” Even as Pope introduces suicide into the realm of elegy, he opens up a space for imagining female voluntary death, which has historically been read as invisible or unimaginable, given a woman’s close ties to her family. As Howard Kushner writes, assumptions that “women were insulated from suicide to the extent that they were subsumed within the bounds of traditional family life” have a long history and were merely codified in nineteenthcentury sociological investigations of suicide (38–39). By foregrounding the conditions of gender inequality that led to the suicide of the “unfortunate lady,” Pope suggests that women are not only valid subjects of elegy, but are in fact also more than capable of taking their lives, especially when rendered desperate by familial interference in matters of the heart (as Pope’s backstory suggests). Pope’s elegy attempts to mitigate the lady’s culpability by blaming nature, which “bade her die” and “pow’rs” that caused her soul to “aspire/Above the vulgar flight of low desire” (lines 11–12). He constructs her as both an anachronism playing the “Roman’s part” and an exceptional figure whose passions render her fate inevitable, as a “purer spirit” or woman of feeling unfit for the sublunary world (lines 8; 25). In the following stanza, the shift of focus to the lady’s family in turn transfers the burden of blame to the lady’s “false guardian” whose soul, in contrast, is represented as “steel’d” by the furies (lines 29; 41). In the succeeding lines, the poet’s indignant curse conjures up a dire vision of the demise of the family line through the image of an endless line of hearses bearing the unmourned dead. Here, Pope channels the apocalypticism seen in later poems like The Dunciad in a stanza that positions the lady as a victim, her suicide the result of a moral failure of feeling on the part of her guardians. The indignant defense of the elegized victim here anticipates the anger of Shelley in Adonais, in attributing the early death of John Keats to disappointment over poor reviews rather than complications from consumption. However, whereas all of nature mourns the death of the poet in Shelley’s mythopoeic and pastoral treatment, the “unfortunate lady” of Pope’s work is denied even this most elemental of rites, not owing to her suicide as much as to the failings of her family that precipitated her death in the first place. Pope’s elegy thus has a compensatory function and unfolds almost as an inversion of Milton’s “Lycidas,” in which a lengthy funeral procession honors the drowned subject and is capped by none other than St. Peter himself, the “Pilot of the Galilean lake” (109). In contrast, Pope’s poem initially laments that the lady was deprived these very rites: What can atone (oh ever-injur’d shade!) Thy fate unpitied, and thy rites unpaid? No friend’s complaint, no kind domestic tear Pleas’d thy pale ghost, or grac’d thy mournful bier. (lines 47–50) Indeed, these lines are contoured by absence, as “no friend” and “no kind domestic tear” mourn the loss of the unnamed woman. But in what follows, the consolation Pope extends to the lady consists in rejecting funereal rites as ultimately meaningless and superficial as he proceeds in his questioning vein: What though no friends in sable weeds appear, Grieve for an hour, perhaps, then mourn a year, And bear about the mockery of woe To midnight dances, and the public show? (lines 55–58) 183

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The yoking of the words “woe” and “show” in the final couplet of these lines underscores Pope’s critique of eighteenth-century mourning practices, and posits a distinction between grieving as a private, authentic response to loss and mourning as a prolonged, public performance of grief. This is a distinction that Jonathan Swift satirizes to great effect in “Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift,” in which his professed friends find it impossible to sustain their grief, distracted as they are by the rounds of diversions of the day.4 Pope in turn imagines grief being swallowed up by eighteenth-century material culture that commodifies mourning in the form of “polish’d marble”: What though no weeping loves thy ashes grace, Nor polish’d marble emulate thy face? What though no sacred earth allow thee room, Nor hallow’d dirge be mutter’d o’er thy tomb? (lines 59–62) The anaphoric “What though” construction evokes the excesses often associated with Westminster Abbey and with the larger monument culture of the day, critiqued by many as insincere, with the material displacing and ultimately taking the place of affect. In this sense, Pope’s poem anticipates Thomas Gray’s mid-century “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard,” which celebrates the pastoral resting place of the humble over the “fretted vault” of the “proud” (lines 37–39). Gray’s consolation to the poor also comes in the form of a rhetorical question: “Can Honour’s voice provoke the silent dust,/Or Flatt’ry soothe the dull cold ear of Death?” (lines 43–44), which also seems to deny the consolatory function intrinsic to the arc of elegy. However, the stakes are higher in Pope’s poem, as he is not merely lamenting the lack of memorialization of the poor; the “lady” commemorated here seemingly forfeits her right to the “polish’d marble” and “hallow’d dirge” that her social rank suggests she might otherwise claim, because of the manner of her death. While suicide denies her burial in “sacred earth,” Pope nonetheless expresses his hope, “Yet shall thy grave with rising flow’rs be drest,/And the green turf lie lightly on thy breast” (lines 63–64). Pope invokes the pastoral resting place in Christian burial that recalls the floral tribute to Lycidas, for whom “[t]he musk-rose, and the well attir’d woodbine,/With cowslips wan that hang the pensive head … strew the laureate hearse” (lines 146–51). The image of peace and tranquility established by the affirmation “[y]et shall […] the green turf lie lightly on thy breast” is belied by the poem’s context, in which the wandering ghost of the lady draws upon folkloric belief that, far from resting easy, suicides walked the earth unless they were buried at a crossroads with a stake through their heart and stones on their eyes, as was the practice in Britain until 1834 (McDonald and Murphy 47). However, in imagining a tranquil resting place for the lady, Pope rejects these practices and substitutes of inauthentic and stylized affect for a more sincere expression of grief in his elegy. In the process, Pope arguably rehabilitates elegy, albeit ironically and unexpectedly, in the service of paying tribute to suicide. Pope directly confronts the problem of authenticity, the traditional bugbear of elegy. If elegy represents a stylization of mourning – an attempt to filter loss through a poetic lens – then does it not involve a performance of grief that establishes a distance between the poetic persona and the subject of the elegy that in turn modulates the mourning into something less than sincere? As Samuel Johnson famously averred, “where there is leisure for fiction there is little for grief ” (218). Johnson was responding to the pastoral mode of “Lycidas,” which seemed to court artificiality and contrivance more severely than less traditional elegies like Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard.” From this perspective, the translation of loss into language is redolent with self-indulgence, as has been the traditional criticism of the politics of mourning 184

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in poems such as Milton’s Lycidas, P. B. Shelley’s Adonais, and other formal verse elegies that assimilate death into a rigorously structured and repetitive affair.5 Although Peter Sacks identifies repetition as a hallmark of the form, both in the sense of internal lamenting refrains as seen in Adonais and echoing of earlier works in each successive attempt,6 Pope’s elegy, on the contrary, recognizes the impossibility of identifying with and hence repeating earlier iterations of the form. Despite this almost defiant stance in his break from tradition, Pope ultimately appears to accept defeat. At the end of the poem, Pope’s speaker admits to the impossibility of reassurance and commemoration, with his final vision pertaining to his own death and the passing into forgetfulness of his Muse and the unfortunate lady. Poets themselves must fall, like those they sung, Deaf the prais’d ear, and mute the tuneful tongue. Ev’n he, whose soul now melts in mournful lays, Shall shortly want the gen’rous tear he pays; Then from his closing eyes thy form shall part, And the last pang shall tear thee from his heart, Life’s idle business at one gasp be o’er, The Muse forgot, and thou belov’d no more! (lines 75–82) Thus Weinbrot contends that it is “the pious, calm, and consistently moral Alexander Pope who shows us the dangers of such a state of mind and the dreadful implications for the unfortunate Lady, among them the impossibility of poetic mourning: she has no poet and is dead” (267). However, I would argue that the speaker’s “gen’rous tear” models a sympathetic treatment of suicide that anticipates the literature of sensibility later in the eighteenth century. In Theory of Moral Sentiments, Adam Smith famously characterized the ability to imaginatively identify with the dead as the epitome of sympathetic engagement: “The tribute of our fellow-feeling seems doubly due to them now, when they are in danger of being forgot by everybody; and, by the vain honours which we pay to their memory, we endeavour, for our own misery, artificially to keep alive our melancholy remembrance of their misfortune” (102). Pope’s ability to imagine himself (or at least his literary persona) at the moment of death arguably constitutes the kind of sympathetic engagement Smith envisions. The consolation Pope offers is that of a shared mortality that levels the difference between voluntary and nonvoluntary death, presenting suicide as a death that is in fact mournable and compatible with elegiac expression. In this sense, Pope’s foreclosure of mourning does not, as Weinbrot suggests, signal the insufficiency of elegy as a form intended to bring consolation, but rather achieves the kind of identification imagined by Smith: to modify Weinbrot’s characterization, the lady has a poet and he too is dead at the poem’s end, with the poem itself persisting as an act of memorialization beyond the grave. Whereas Milton’s “uncouth swain” rises at the end of his day of lament with the resolve of venturing off “to fresh woods, and pastures new” (line 193), Pope’s poet imagines his own end. Although the final exclamation that in his last moments he will forget the muse and the lady will no longer be beloved, his surrender to death instead conveys a sense of identification, a refusal to give up the object that Sigmund Freud characterizes as melancholic in his essay on the subject. If traditional elegy completes the work of mourning in the manner exemplified by “Lycidas,” Pope’s integration of suicide into elegy suggests that this endeavor is not quite so straightforward. At first glance, Pope’s poem anticipates the tendency of modern elegy, which Jahan Ramazani observes tends “to enact the work not of normative but of ‘melancholic’ 185

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mourning” (4). According to Ramazani, there is a refusal of consolation and closure in these works, to the point that they are often characterized as “anti-elegiac,” resembling not so much a “suture as an ‘open wound’” (4), which was Freud’s image for melancholia. Similarly, Pope’s refusal of reconciliation and his speaker’s own refusal to “mourn and move on” also affirms mourning as a kind of aporia, especially in relation to suicide. The spectral haunting on the part of the subject of Pope’s elegy suggests that death persists and cannot be as easily contained and exorcised as in formal verse elegy. As Anne Fogarty observes in her study of contemporary elegy, this ongoing relationship with the dead reflects a different formulation of mourning that Freud moved toward in his later work on “The Ego and the Id,” published six years after his original influential essay on object loss. Fogarty notes that mourning and melancholia in “this new account of the formation of the self are not conceived of as antithetical states, but rather are seen as intersecting impetuses within the psyche. Grief and loss are no longer conditions that need to be vanquished or banished. Instead, they reside at the very core of consciousness” (214). Although this development in Freud’s thought acknowledges loss as constitutive of the ego, the earlier formulation of melancholia as pathological inheres in literary criticism of the elegy as a genre, cemented in part by Sacks’s definitive study The English Elegy. However, this paradigm works best for so-called masculine elegy, which Schenck observes “rests upon timeless patterns of succession and transcendence” (23). In honoring a female subject who has taken her life, Pope’s elegy works outside the homosocial tradition and stages an encounter with the dead informed by presence rather than absence, as in “Lycidas” (wherein the unrecovered body of the drowned subject initially impedes the poet’s attempt to come to terms with the death of his friend). The absence of the body merely prefigures the poem’s evacuation of Lycidas through the completion of the work of mourning, as death becomes the stage for the emergence of a new creative voice. Elegy, in this sense, somewhat counterintuitively involves what Harold Bloom refers to as a “refusal of mortality” in that the emphasis ultimately falls on continuity and literary succession, with boundaries between the living and the dead redrawn and reaffirmed at the poem’s end.7 Pope’s elegy refuses abjection in this sense, as the dead linger on and the poet figure confronts his own mortality, forgetting both his muse and the subject of his elegy in the shared oblivion of the final line.8 In her work on Pope and gender ideology, Carole Fabricant examines the various contradictions within Pope’s poetic engagements with women, and attributes to his “peculiar brand of marginality” his “equivocal” position “within the sexual hierarchy and the patriarchal structure of the eighteenth century” (526). Although critics of Pope from Alistair Fowler to Maynard Mack insist that Pope’s “feminizing” series of illnesses and disability rendered him sympathetic to women in his poetry, others including Ellen Pollak and Helene Deutsch find his portrayal of women tainted by misogyny and tending to appropriate a feminine perspective to advance his own agenda. Fabricant suggests that Pope’s “Elegy to the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady” models some of these contradictions in representing the lady as a “heroic victim of a familial system in which an uncle-guardian has power over the life and fate of his niece-ward, including the right to decide who should be her husband” (508). Pope’s focus on a woman’s death certainly breaks from the English verse elegy tradition, even as he brings suicide into a social conversation that too often excludes it as an act that defies imagination and comprehension. In this sense, Pope’s elegy prefigures a relationship with death and suicide that looks ahead to the graveyard poets of the mid-century, and more strikingly, still further to Charlotte Smith’s Elegiac Sonnets (1784), which for the most part deal with melancholy occasioned by autobiographical circumstances. In the process of fusing the elegy with the sonnet, Smith displaces the traditional preoccupation of the sonnet with love in favor of death and absorption with the

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self. The sonnets are “elegiac” in terms of their melancholic preoccupation with death and resemble Pope’s poem in their refusal of consolation. In one particularly evocative poem, “Sonnet XLIV: Written in the Church-yard at Middleton, in Sussex,” Smith imagines a sea surge tearing “from their grassy tombs the village dead/And break [ing] the silent sabbath of the grave” (lines 7–8). Unlike the pastoral resting place envisioned by Gray and yearningly invoked by Pope’s elegy, Smith’s churchyard becomes a space of upheaval and sublime fury. Yet even amidst the scene of chaos as the disinterred remains of the deceased mingle with “shells and sea-weed … on the shore,” Smith envies their “gloomy rest,” while she is left to contend with “life’s long storm” (lines 9; 13–14). Here and elsewhere in the poems, Smith arguably draws upon the “softening” of attitudes toward suicide in expressing a kind of death wish or impatience to leave the world, as evident in the closing couplet from “Sonnet IV: To the Moon,” “Oh! That I soon may reach thy world serene,/Poor wearied pilgrim – in this toiling scene!” (lines 13–14). Though Smith’s sonnet is preoccupied with the self, she nonetheless opens up a space for the contemplation of the other in the form of the controversial but highly popular character Werther, from Goethe’s 1774 novella, The Sorrows of Young Werther. Through a series of sonnets spoken in the voice of Werther, Smith offers access to Werther’s interiority as he considers suicide and imagines how his beloved Charlotte would mourn his death. Smith’s voice in these sonnets dissolves entirely into that of Werther’s, who becomes a kind of outlet for expressing suicidal ideation that may have been particularly unwelcome from a woman during that period. Indeed, in Charles Moore’s Full Inquiry into the Subject of Suicide (1790), he singles out “the plaintive Charlotte Smith” for specific criticism, claiming she has “bestowed too much honour on Werther, by presenting no less than five of her tender elegiac sonnets in [his] person … which though well aligned to the feelings of its supposed writer, yet ten[d] to increase and give (sanction to the act)” (151). In the opening line of Sonnet XXIV, Werther envisions a natural tomb “beneath the lime-tree’s shade” that, much like the grave of Pope’s “unfortunate lady,” is devoid of memorial mark. Unlike Pope’s unnamed subject, Werther’s death is mourned by Charlotte, whom he imagines “embalming” his tomb with her tears (line 12). A proleptic mourning thus takes place in the sonnets as the elegy turns back on itself, with the would-be suicide giving primacy to Charlotte, the survivor, who takes her place as a woman of feeling, performing the sensibility that Pope’s own speaker embraces in his poem. Both works are striking in imagining an afterlife for the suicidal figure; Pope’s “unfortunate lady” communes with the poet as a spectral presence, while Smith employs prosopopoeia to give Werther a voice from beyond (or before) the grave. Smith and Pope thus reveal the flexibility of the elegy as a form that not only accommodates suicide as an idea but also mourns the individuals who perform the action, thereby suggesting an outlook on death that is at once more authentic and utterly more complicated than the typical terms of the English elegy. Although literary critics almost unanimously agree that the self of the poet inevitably eclipses the ostensible subject of traditional elegiac poems (who in this sense dies twice), writing on suicide poses a challenge to the ascendancy of self in these poems. The death of the other that comes about in a way that is not inevitable or assimilable to the “natural course of events,” as in a poem like Milton’s “Lycidas,” renders suicide elegy itself something inescapably other and sui generis, confronting death in a way that is persistent and ongoing.

Notes 1 2

Quintero suggests that it is the poet’s own state of mind that is the focus of the poem, more than the subject of suicide or the lady herself. As Vieth notes, “Students of Pope now seem agreed that the ‘lady’ of the Elegy is a fiction, but that Pope wished his readers to think her story was true. What this situation strongly suggests is that the

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3 4 5 6 7 8

Elegy is a work of ‘entrapment’ – that is, a work whose peculiar intention is to provoke maximum reader involvement rather than to convey a theme” (426). Laura Linker ventures still further in suggestively reading the poem as a covert Jacobite expression of mourning for the Stuart line, represented allegorically as the “unfortunate lady” betrayed by her hardhearted family, which stands in as a metaphor for England. Swift imagines a period following his death in which his friends’ periods of mourning measure their affection for him: “Poor Pope will grieve a month, and Gay/A week, and Arbuthnot a day” (lines 207–08). For some critics and readers, Shelley’s relentless refrain, “Oh, weep for Adonais – he is dead!” loses its emotive power with each repetition and becomes gratingly histrionic as the poem continues. As Sacks writes, “repetition itself and the submission to codes are crucial elements of the work of mourning, and the most successful elegists are in fact those least afraid to repeat the traditional procedures of the genre” (326). In this sense, not only does his poem embrace melancholia as a more authentic condition than mourning, it refuses to push death to the margins and render it abject. Theorists such as Julia Kristeva see mourning as a kind of betrayal, embracing melancholia as a more authentic condition. The final turn is ironic, given the prominence of memory in the poem’s title and the theme of memorialization more generally.

Works Cited Bloom, Harold. The Map of Misreading. Oxford UP, 1975. Fabricant, Carole. “Defining Self and Others: Pope and Eighteenth-Century Gender Ideology.” Criticism: A Quarterly for Literature and the Arts, vol. 39, no. 4, 1997, pp. 503–529. Fogarty, Anne. “‘Hear Me and Have Pity’: Rewriting Elegy in the Poetry of Paula Meehan.” An Sionnach: A Journal of Literature, Culture, and the Arts, vol. 5, no. 1, 2009, pp. 213–225. Freud, Sigmund. The Freud Reader, edited by Peter Gay. Norton, 1995. Gray, Thomas. “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard.” The Poems of Thomas Gray, William Collins, and Oliver Goldsmith, edited by Roger Lonsdale. Longmans, 1969. Johnson, Samuel. The Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets. London, 1779–1781, pp. 218–220. Kristeva, Julia. Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia, translated by Leon Roudiez. Columbia UP, 1989. Kushner, Howard I. “Suicide, Gender, and the Fear of Modernity.” Histories of Suicide: International Perspectives on Self-Destruction in the Modern World. U of Toronto P, 2009. Linker, Laura. “The Poetics of Loss: Grieving for England in Pope’s ‘Elegy to the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady.’” ANQ: A Quarterly Journal of Short Articles, Notes, and Reviews, vol. 27, no. 1, 2014, pp. 1–4. McDonald, Michael, and Alexander Murphy. Sleepless Souls: Suicide in Early Modern England. Oxford UP, 1990. Milton, John. The Complete Major Works, edited by Stephen Orgel. Oxford UP, 2008. Moore, Charles. A Full Inquiry into the Subject of Suicide. Vol. 2. London, 1790. Pope, Alexander. “Elegy to the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady.” 1717. The Poems of Alexander Pope. A One-Volume Version of the Twickenham Text, edited by John Butt. Routledge, 1965, pp. 262–264. Quintero, Ruben. Literate Culture: Pope's Rhetorical Art. U of Delaware P, 1992. Ramazani, Jahan. The Poetry of Mourning: The Modern Elegy from Hardy to Heaney. U of Chicago P, 1994. Sacks, Peter. The English Elegy: Studies in the Genre from Spenser to Yeats. Johns Hopkins UP, 1985. Schenck, Celeste M. “Feminism and Deconstruction: Re-Constructing the Elegy.” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, vol. 5, no. 1, Spring 1986, pp. 13–27. Shelley, P. B. Shelley’s ‘Adonais’: A Critical Edition, edited by Anthony D. Knerr. Columbia UP, 1984. Smith, Adam. “Theory of Moral Sentiments.” Scottish Philosophy: Selected Readings, 1690–1960, edited by Gordon Graham. Imprint Academic, 2004. Smith, Charlotte. The Poems of Charlotte Smith. Edited by Stuart Curran. Women Writers in English, 1350–1850. Oxford UP, 1993. Swift, Jonathan. “Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift.” The Writings of Jonathan Swift, edited by Robert A. Greenberg and William B. Piper. W. W. Norton, 1973, pp. 550–561. Vieth, David M. “Entrapment in Pope’s Elegy.” Studies in English Literature, 1500 –1900, vol. 23, no. 3, 1983, pp. 425–434.

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Suicide in the Elegiac Tradition Weinbrot, Howard D. “Pope’s ‘Elegy to the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady.’” Modern Language Quarterly, vol. 32, 1971, pp. 255–267. Weisman, Karen. “Introduction.” The Oxford Handbook of the Elegy. Oxford UP, 2010. Williams, Joah L., et al. “Prevalence and Correlates of Suicidal Ideation in a Treatment-Seeking Sample of Violent Loss Survivors.” Crisis: The Journal of Crisis Intervention and Suicide Prevention, vol. 39, no. 5, 2018, pp. 377–385. Yeats, W. B. The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats. Edited by Richard Finneran. Scribner, 1996. Young, Ilanit Tal, et al. “Suicide Bereavement and Complicated Grief.” Dialogues in Clinical Neuroscience, vol. 14, no. 2, 2012, pp. 177–186.

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18 INSTITUTIONS AND ELEGIES Viewing the Dead in W. B. Yeats and John Wieners Barry Sheils and Julie Walsh

Readers of modern elegiac verse are well accustomed to encountering the architecture, implements, and institutional paraphernalia of a hospital ward: the “wheeled chair” in Wilfred Owen’s “Disabled” (152–54); “steadfast walls” in Siegfried Sassoon’s “The Death Bed” (37–38); the “stark dignity of entrance” in William Carlos Williams’s “Spring and All” (45). In “Sillyhow Stride,” an elegy for his sister (as well as the musician Warren Zevon), Paul Muldoon details the “crepusculine X-rays,” “out-of-date blister packs,” and the “vinyl caul” of the oxygen mask (99). Muldoon’s is a thick description against the now-generic backdrop of institutional white. “Look how white everything is, how quiet, how snowed-in” exclaims Sylvia Plath in “Tulips” (142); “white as aspirin buries its hospital waste,” concurs D. A. Powell (20). White signals hygiene and anonymity, offering to Plath a palliative, though to others the provocation of sterility and indifference. For Marianne Boruch “[the hospital] seems so –/I don’t know. It seems/as if the end of the world/has never happened in here” (II: 19). And because the institution is a process as well as a place, it interferes with the poet’s annotation of death. Not only are dying bodies sustained beyond their “natural” moment, deaths are often accounted for systematically in advance: “The hospital clerk/Took out a fresh form of admission/And filled it in, mark upon mark.” (Pasternak 71). In this chapter we ask how poetic elegy encodes the modern institutional spaces of dying. But rather than visiting the hospital ward, we consider this at one remove, from the perspective of another modern institution where the aesthetic and natural-scientific, as well as political, dimensions of the relation between the living and the dead are made apparent: namely, the museum gallery.1 In addition to pointing out the structural similarity between the public spaces of the hospital ward and the art museum, and acknowledging their historical status as imperial institutions, we make a claim for their importance to a modern elegiac consciousness.2 More specifically, we turn to the examples of W. B. Yeats and John Wieners as two poets for whom the gallery affords the most vital occasion for encountering the dead. This is a study of poetic influence, yet it is also a study that allows us to move from questions of personal style to impersonal and institutionally framed modes of transmission. Such staples of the elegy genre as memory and inheritance are precisely what the sites and practices of institutional modernity force us to re-evaluate. We will see how both poets occupy the public space of the art gallery; and how this space, laden with a multiplicity of objects, calls for a dynamic (even erotic) interaction between bodies and objects, living and dead. The art gallery is where both poets displace and spatially redistribute their grief. 190

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The Visual Space of Modern Elegy As Foucault famously put it, the clinic is where bodies and eyes meet (xi). From the patient-asportrait framed by the furniture of the family home, to the body in the modern hospital ward subject to the “free gaze” of the doctor looking for symptoms across and among patients, the vitality of modern disease is such that it cannot belong to one person’s life (61). Foucault’s genealogy is well known, but we would like to ask what the impersonal worldview it describes might mean for poetic elegy. We think there are three significant factors worth bearing in mind. Firstly, that modern elegy enters the visual field in a certain way: death has to be seen and formally recognized in language. Though attitudes to seeing dead bodies remain culturally various, a correlation may yet be argued between the modern tendency toward not looking or not being able to look at the familiar dead and the increased scrutiny of corpses. Secondly, modern expressions of grief are necessarily underwritten by the impersonality of science, which recognizes death through the discrepant registers of population and symptomatic cause. In other words, as well as being mourned, the dead person is subject to being both more and less than herself: by turns generalized and divided into parts. Thirdly, medical modernity invites us to restate and reimagine the paradox performed by every elegy, namely the interaction between an actual death and the ongoing liveliness of the language that records it. Jahan Ramazani has suggested that the modern elegist is melancholically disposed to resist the “normative” consolations of mourning (xi–xii). Across the history of twentieth- and twenty-first-century English-language verse, there has been a shift away from the traditional or religious demands of ancestry – the passing-on from one recognizable human likeness to another – toward something more violent and discontinuous. This resistance is a feminist imperative, as Ramazani’s invocation of Sylvia Plath’s self-murder through her ancestors implies. It is also perhaps a queer one. Indeed, whether or not one follows Dylan Thomas as he refuses the impulse to “Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London” (172), his stance can be read as a fundamental question of identity, insofar as who one is, is not unrelated to how one grieves. This is stated impressively by Freud in his essay “Mourning and Melancholia,” when he writes that the melancholic “knows whom he has lost but not what he has lost in him” (245). For Freud the melancholic is sick: having transferred the loss of a loved one into a form of self-impoverishment, he is unable to mourn. And yet the melancholic also exhibits the “shameless,” questing vitality of ambivalence (the uncertainties of love and hate directed at the missing other who is now partially lodged inside the self). Considered within the melancholic frame, then, the named dead – Plath’s “Daddy”; Tennyson’s “A.H.H.” – cannot contain the vitality of the grief for which they stand as the occasion. There is an inexhaustible agitation to melancholia, and it’s this which over recent decades has been reclaimed as a potential cultural value (see Crimp Melancholia; Butler) and which provides the force for Ramazani’s recalcitrant elegist. The poet-as-melancholic does not simply endorse the integrity of the person or thing gone; rather, she attaches to loss and transmits, through the space it creates, a new form of self-interest. The canonical evidence is plentiful that elegies are characteristically auto-affective in this regard, often dramatizing the living body learning to enjoy itself in and through the absence of the dead. Consider one of Thomas Hardy’s famous elegies for Emma Gifford, “After a Journey”: Hereto, I come to view a voiceless ghost; Whither, O wither will its whim now draw me? 191

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Up the cliff, down, till I’m lonely lost, And the unseen waters’ ejaculations awe me. (328) In these opening lines the sorrowful and the formally spritely coincide as the speaker is drawn forward into a familiar yet indefinite space. It’s not simply the descriptive dynamism that appeals, but also the intensity of the language, from the heavy alliteration, to the exclamation “Whither, O wither,” to the water’s “ejaculations” coupled with the poet’s “awe.” Here, loss-turning-to-bewilderment cannot conceal a further force of re-found excitement; there is a thrill to the language by which the poet seems to become more present to himself through the implicit address of his dead other. As he asks in stanza two: “What have you now found to say of our past –/Scanned across the dark space wherein I have lacked you?” It’s in the space of her silence that he realizes his own composition. Indeed, the poem ends, in the dark of Emma’s “thin ghost” and the frailty of the speaker’s grief, with a much fuller sense of the poet’s living coordination: “Trust me, I mind not, though Life lours/The bringing me here; nay, bring me here again!/I am just the same as when/Our days were a joy, and our paths through flowers.” With Hardy’s affirmation (“just the same”) in mind, it might be said that the elegy showcases the speaker as perverse: paying tribute not to the person who is dead, but to those unnamed and perhaps unknown parts, belonging to or associated with her, that continue to vitalize him. What cannot be mourned agitates the practice of living-on. We might extrapolate from this the further thought that elegies not written in straightforward tribute to the dead characteristically perform a partial sympathy with the vitality of disease. This speculation returns us to the visual field, and the structural alliance between seeing and knowing – opening one’s eyes to death – that underwrites medical modernity. The modern doctor requires death to defend against it; she sees in the dead body the symptomatic flourishing of another form of life. But how, we may ask, does this will to depathologize the body by liberating it into knowledge differ from the elegist’s desire to speak the other’s death? Responding psychoanalytically, we might say the doctor and the poet want different things from the dying body: in her desire for objectivity the doctor becomes an instrument of the institution, whereas the modern elegist, by the troubled virtue of her ambivalence, uncertainty, and persistent self-interest, counters the reification of institutional life. Embedded within the most radical re-poeticizations of modernity is resistance to the scopophilia and apparent omniscience of the medical gaze. Martin Heidegger’s existential analytic, for example, posits an authentic being-towards-death which “must remain hidden from Others” (304): “No one can take the Other’s dying away from him,” he writes. And yet the elegist, as well as the doctor, albeit in more uncertain terms, remains at odds with poetic authenticity so defined, since according to the characteristics of social reception and performative address, the elegy appropriates a death that is never quite the speaker’s own. It has been noted that Heidegger never got around to writing “being and space.” Famously, when reading the ontological status of the “artwork” through the example of Van Gogh’s paintings of peasant shoes (100) he disregarded the walls on which the paintings were hung, or indeed the technological potential for the paintings’ reproduction. Similarly, his attempt to posit the ontological facticity of death against the merely aesthetic question of death’s reception can seem to square authentic Being with a simple disavowal of social modernity. Most specifically, it indicates a failure to acknowledge the role modern institutions play in the production of death. The modern hospital is not simply the place where the individual body is received; rather, it establishes how and for how long it goes on dying, as well as when and according to what assistive technologies it is declared dead. The hospital connects death’s aesthetic manifestation 192

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and social appearance with its natural-scientific and ontological reality. It’s here that the relation between the ward and the museum gallery is more than adventitious, as in both spaces multiple public phenomena clash with the sovereign claims of the private or the singularly hidden. Adorno has pointed out that the very word museum, through the German word museal (museum-like), connotes objects in the “process of dying” (175). Which is to say that when the viewer enters the museum, she stands as a ready-made analogue to the doctor, possessed of the rudimentary resources for making critical diagnoses. And yet the first public museums in imperial Europe, established for the purposes of education, cultivated a countervailing fear that the general public, clearly ignorant of aesthetic value, would ruin the artworks they saw by touching them (Jameson 72–78). This split between moral improvement and emotional or somatic contamination became foundational to the experience of public art and emerged in parallel with the institutional organization of dying bodies, curated by and for the medical gaze, yet subject to new risks of contagion. In his 1923 essay “Le Problème des musées,” the poet Paul Valery decried the “inhuman” scale and heterogeneity of the modern gallery space. In his view, the museum, though “admirable,” paraded a sensorium of historical phenomena which overwhelmed the sovereignty of the singular work. Adorno has read this against the more affirmative perspective of Proust, set out in the second volume of À la recherche du temps perdu. If Valery fetishized the productive energies of the artist, then Proust did just the opposite: through multiple scenes of gallery-going, he fetishized the artwork as it disintegrated into the history of its receptions (182). Given the politics of the twentieth century, we may worry with Adorno that such decadent or dying subjectivity – Proust has the writer Bergotte die while viewing a Vermeer – is ill-equipped to counter the biopolitical “catastrophe” of modern institutions, and yet the Proustian tendency has remained an important model for recognizing how an artwork’s meaning emerges, in part, through institutional distribution (184).3 In a similar fashion, the British philosopher Vernon Lee, writing in the decades before Proust, used public art galleries as zones for experimentation, within which the determinations of her subjectivity might be tested. In other words, she indulged her impressions of various artworks, while at the same time meticulously recording them so that they could form the basis of a somatic and social discipline. The ecology of the gallery was essential here, most obviously because its heterogeneity interrupted ready-made critical opinions of single works; but also because, for Lee, the physical space was phenomenologically continuous with the feeling space of the viewer’s mind and body (“Aesthetic” 243). Lee’s extrapolation from the word “empathy,” an early twentieth-century translation of the German Einfühlung (feeling into) (“Anthropomorphic” 21), leads her to describe the dynamics of the exchange between the artwork and the viewer in such terms as “muscular strain,” “balance,” “bodily constriction,” and the production of “rhythm”: effects which together designate more than a sentimental identification with the artwork. Instead, emotional investment becomes a question of artistic form when the switch of elemental force between viewer and work reveals a certain kind of activity; form is enacted, always implicating the kinesthetic and proprioceptive aspects of bodily experience (“Anthropomorphic” 25). What Lee calls, in one of her essays, “anthropomorphic aesthetics,” though subjective or even narcissistic in character, produces, through careful notation of what takes place in time and space, an impersonal appreciation for what art does: through art, the rhythmic forms of life move between the dying objects of the gallery. This kind of attempt to recover the importance of physical and psychological intimacy within the visual field of modern institutional space (without falling back on the fantasy of authentic unalienated experience) can get overlooked in traditions of ideology critique. Yet its phenomenological model is also embraced in the work of John Berger, as in his essay “The 193

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Embrace” where he emphasizes the erotic “coursing between” which so disfigures the realist sense of proportion and space in Rembrandt’s paintings. Rembrandt holds a mirror up not to the viewer herself, but to the space around her, in which she moves and makes contact with others. This “corporeal space” is the space of “vulnerability, solitude, disease” but also potentially of “wellbeing [and] the sensation of being loved.” Equally significant, for Berger, is the fact that it’s a space from which the doctor’s diagnostic language (though not the nurse’s praxis of care) is necessarily excluded. Defining the social life of the museum in these terms is to identify its institutional character as ultimately reflexive; more than a holding area or facilitating background for objective knowledge and the rationalization of bodies and works, it becomes, over time, its own object of perception. We might append one further twist to this tradition of institutional reflexivity by recalling the famous scene from Jean-Luc Godard’s 1964 film Bande à part in which the hand-holding triplet of Odile, Franz, and Arthur run through the Louvre galleries in 9 minutes 43 seconds. Here we have a camera looking at the institutional space of looking, presenting it primarily as a space of social touch and aesthetic disregard. The cinema has taken ownership of the art gallery. Douglas Crimp has suggested in similar terms that André Malraux’s essay “Le musée imaginaire” (in La Psychologie de l’Art, 1947), in which he explores the photographic representation of gallery space, marks a postmodern break with discourses of institutional knowledge (“The Museum” 50). Whether it’s as a consequence of the photograph, the cinema, or the Internet, the potential obsolescence of the gallery space as a present-tense site for somatic and epistemological experimentation, and the loosening of its structural tie to the public hospital ward, nonetheless invites us to reconsider its historical placement. The mid-twentieth-century cases considered in this chapter, from Yeats and Wieners, do not bear witness to the singular or sovereign body or work, but to the ecology of death and life which the institution of the art gallery for a historical period at least had come to exemplify. If it’s true that now, in the age of Google Museum View, we visit our galleries differently, and indeed “do” sex and relationships differently in accordance with new online media, then it may be the case that we are beginning to grieve differently too.4 That being said, how we grieved before, in a prior iteration of this modernity, has not yet become irrelevant.

Vitality through Death We’ll turn now to consider two poets for whom the art museum offers a stage for grief. Clearly there is a substantial difference between Yeats’s interest in the legacies of the Irish Revolution, and Wieners’s documentation of life as a gay man in 1950s America (not to mention differences of reputation and formal approach). However, as our readings here suggest, when read together, Yeats and Wieners exemplify an identifiable genre of modern elegy that addresses the self within the space of a public institution.

“The Municipal Gallery Revisited” (1937) Though Yeats’s poem is usually situated within the context of the Irish Revival and the poet’s historical denunciations of middle-class philistinism, it can also be read for its inscription of institutional modernity. Fintan Cullen has written of Hugh Lane’s creation of the Municipal Gallery in Dublin in 1908 in terms which emphasize the ambition of the original project to establish a permanent public collection of modern art that included works by Manet and Renoir. This set the Dublin gallery apart as a modernist project that was also dangerously exposed to populist aspiration (162): an attempt to emulate high-art curation practices from 194

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Hugo von Tschudi in Berlin on the one hand, an apparently domestic and politically decorative presentation on the other (167). While “The Municipal Gallery Revisited” testifies to the collection’s consistency over several decades, it also marks a significant displacement and revision of an earlier cultural optimism: the paintings’ popularity never having been proved, they had in the meantime been physically relocated. So as well as mourning the loss of certain named people, Yeats’s elegy marks the lost time and space of an aesthetic project.5 This suggests of Yeats’s 1937 re-entry to the Municipal Gallery, albeit to a different physical space, that it follows through on aesthetic and institutional as well as personal and nationalistic preoccupations. Indeed, one of the most striking aspects of the poem is how it seems to abjure the rule of aesthetic disinterest before the accomplished artwork; and though sometimes hinting at connoisseurship, pursues more broadly a method of supplication, emotional fragility, and almost crass receptivity to the subject matter depicted in the paintings. The poem grants itself a measured space, its ottava rima form producing stately-seeming rooms for the poetic line to wander through. Yet in the face of such regularity, the commitment to enjambed, multi-clause sentences produces a more precarious sense of movement. Around me the images of thirty years: An ambush; pilgrims at the water-side; Casement upon trial, half hidden by the bars, Guarded; Griffith staring in hysterical pride; Kevin O’Higgins’ countenance that wears A gentle questioning look that cannot hide A soul incapable of remorse or rest; A revolutionary soldier kneeling to be blessed; An Abbot or Archbishop with an upraised hand Blessing the Tricolour. ‘This is not,’ I say, ‘The dead Ireland of my youth, but an Ireland The poets have imagined, terrible and gay.’ Before a woman’s portrait suddenly I stand, Beautiful and gentle in her Venetian way. I met her all but fifty years ago For twenty minutes in some studio. (163–64) As we can see here, the poem begins by unbalancing the reader. Where we might expect a verb, “Around me the images of thirty years:” do something, we find the abruptness of punctuation. Then a list: “an ambush,” “pilgrims at the waterside,” “Casement upon trial,” etc. It takes a moment to realize that this is what the poet is seeing as he walks around the gallery, one image after another. “An ambush” is a particularly apt starting point in this light, suggesting being thrown off one’s guard, being “ambushed” by the artwork. Though, according to its inclusion in a list of paintings, it is also the representation of a military ambush from the Irish war of Independence. But this double sense, the affective and the representational, sets the terms for Yeats’s elegiac play of self-presence with the re-presentation of his missing others. This play comes to a point of intensity halfway through stanza two: “Before a woman’s portrait suddenly I stand” (our emphasis). Here the poet stops short, ambushed, as so often, by an image of Maud Gonne. This is a dramatic arrest that is further emphasized in stanza three when “Heart smitten with emotion” he “sink[s]” down. Yeats connects a historic moment of artistic production (the first time he met Maud Gonne was in an artist’s studio “all but 50 years” before) to 195

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the present moment of reception, using the logic of before and after to travesty the autonomy of the work itself. The subjectivity of his identification through the artwork, with little regard for the character of its composition, is then exacerbated in the gesture of covering his eyes: “My heart recovering with covered eyes.” The moving, feeling body in the space of his identifications draws away or recovers from the framed image on the wall. Crucially, however, this somatic collapse is not a final resting place. The poet moves on through the gallery to his second dramatic moment of arrest, this time occasioned by Antonio Mancini’s portrait of Augusta Gregory: “Greatest since Rembrandt.” Here we have the suggestion of canonical judgment, and also of formal appreciation through the mention of “approved patterns of women or of men.” Yet once more aesthetic judgment is found to be inadequate to the poet’s identification with the sitter behind the image: Lady Gregory “that selfsame excellence again.” The word “selfsame” gives us a clue to the narcissism of Yeats’s mode of apprehension in this poem. It is also noticeable how at each moment of identification the poet’s body supplicates or humiliates itself – “I sink down” before Maud Gonne; and before Lady Gregory “my mediaeval knees lack health until they bend.” The trajectory of the poem is such that these moments of physical supplication and almost shamefaced receptivity to memory prove the poet’s “glory” in the end: it is by receiving his friends in this manner, humbling himself before them, that he becomes greater than he is. Herein lies the importance of the final paradoxical couplet: “think where man’s glory most begins and ends,/And say my glory was I had such friends.” Friendship here calls into question the very boundaries of the poet’s ego. Though the poem displays the narcissistic means of appropriating missing others into the affective economy of the self, it ends in an apotheosis which can also be described as impersonal, asking the question: where does the “I” begin or end? There are two points we wish to draw out from this poem and further develop in our reading of Wieners’s work. The first is that Yeats’s poem presents a mode of modern sociability through art. Clearly, it’s elegiac in mood, and yet the platonic recovery of old friends who are missing or dead is complicated by the present-tense acts of friendship that the poem performs: “And here’s John Synge himself, that rooted man.” Indeed, friendship is explained as a series of moving and embodied acts of revival. The poet’s humility when receiving these missing others into himself, though initially read as melancholic depletion, is finally consistent with the glory of existing socially beyond the limits of his own self. The second point is that these acts of friendship through the dead are clearly situated within the modern gallery space. Those curt didactic lines from the final stanza are suggestive in this regard: You that would judge me, do not judge alone This book or that, come to this hallowed place Where my friend’s portraits hang and look thereon. Do not judge alone: in other words, do not judge Yeats or his work apart from their relations to one another, or apart from the association of his friends; and, possibly, do not judge when you are alone, or when you imagine yourself to be so. In the space of the gallery, the meaning of the work overspills its frame and becomes a complex of relations activated not in fact by solitary judgment, aesthetic or moral in nature, but through multiple identifications. It’s here, we think, that the poem negotiates an important shift in our understanding of artistic discipline, away from the singular works themselves – the compositional techniques visible on the canvas, or legible inside “this book or that” – and onto the relation between the body and 196

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the work, or multiple bodies and multiple works. It is, after all, the rhythmic discipline of looking and then looking away, of being grief-struck and then moving on, that gives the poem its power.

The Hotel Wentley Poems (1958) John Wieners was one of the poets included in Donald Allen’s New American Poetry 1945–1960 anthology; yet he remains an outlier in the post-war canon.6 The Hotel Wentley Poems was his first volume, written in San Francisco when he was only 24. It’s a slight edition: 11 poems in all, each offered as an indefinite tribute, “A poem for […].” This series of repetitions speaks to the additive, rather than conventionally aesthetic, tenor of the collection. All the poems take depletion or an injured state as their starting point: there is a lost boyfriend, Dana Duerke; a lost grandfather “who vomited a clot months before he died of cancer”; and “Daniel Aspelin who died at 16, put a rifle in his mouth and laid across his bed at night.” There’s the poet’s uncle John and there’s Walt Whitman. These are some of Wieners’s named dead. But the collection expresses his depletion paradoxically, as again and again personal losses serve as the condition for erotic connection. The poems take what has been lost – the lost person or lover – and revivify them through drugs, or more commonly through anonymous sex. So, although we can say of the collection that it is melancholic in disposition, in that it dwells on loss, performs addiction, and “shamelessly” repeats the same tropes, it also gestures toward an ethics of relation based upon pharmaceutical and sexual affect, and a quite startling belief in the efficacy of transferring emotions onto multiple others. In other words, there is a consistent overwriting of loss by the indefinite figures of present-tense desire. Repeatedly we move from the named and the isolated to the anonymous and self-shatteringly convivial. For instance, “A Poem for the Old Man” begins: God love you Dana my lover lost in the horde on this Friday night 500 men are moving up & down from the bath room to the bar Remove this desire from the man I love. […] And the same poem ends: I occupy that space as the boys around me choke out desire and drive us both back home in the hands of strangers (20–22)

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There is little or no attempt at reparation, or attempt to build a whole relationship anew; rather, there is the activity of shifting the loss through various sites of occupation – baths, bars, galleries, Chinese restaurants – from body to bodies, and in the process of this movement founding the rhythmic forms of social life, captured in the poetic line. The very first line of the collection reads: “the scene changes” (“A Poem for record players”). We are then shunted into the aftermath: “5 hours later” (i.e., the scene has already changed again), and the poet, suffering, enters a room, not his room, but one of countless such rooms, hotel rooms rather than fixed abodes, where he proceeds to find a pillow to muffle the sound he makes. If this inscribes the tragedy of a painful loss – the silent scream is a trope repeated through the volume – it is also a simple scene change: the first iteration in a series. The record player, as named in this poem’s title, is a mnemonic technology that is also used for pleasure and recreation; and in the second stanza the poet’s body lies on the bed metonymically scratching itself, registering indefinite audible details: “pigeons,” “sparrows,” a “cough.” It is these unmoored auditions, belonging to the present tense, which then facilitate an ecstatic transference “over the streets/of this seacoast city/forever.” The God pointedly capitalized in the opening stanza – the God the poet battles against when suppressing his scream, trying not to give in to the law of suffering – becomes a groan of longing by the end: “oh clack your/metal wings, god, you are/mine now in the morning.” This moves us from exhausted solitude to social address, and from melancholy to an almost futuristic vigor: “a thousand cars, gunning/ their motors turning over/all over town” (6–7). We might well presume by the end of the poem that the scene simply changes again. In fact, “A Poem for Teaheads,” the second poem in the collection, performs the same trajectory: the move from supplication before the law, the requirement that the poet suffer a loss, to the glory of social and sexual excitement. Here the law will take his drug dealer Jimmy away. “The poem/does not lie to us. We lie under its/law,” writes Wieners, fulfilling the implication that the only law of poetry is loss; while in the very next breath he stipulates that we are, in any case, “alive in the glamour of this hour” (8). The poem requires the poet’s suffering and yet enacts, through a texture of present-ness, a shift from less to more, from supplication to plenitude. In this poem, the more is encoded finally in the mouth – the place of language, hidden drugs, and, as anyone who knows Wieners’s biography can attest, countless oral satisfactions. The volume is full of such scenic enactments written through the simple present: “I sit”; “we make”; “we lie.” This is poetic elegy as scenography, reminiscent too of Yeats’s “I sink down” or “I write it out […]” (163, 85).

The Art of Cruising Art Wieners’s poetry enacts a transition from the tragic relationship based on loss to a formalism of multiple anonymous relations. We want to argue that this amplifies a suggestion in “The Municipal Gallery Revisited” in which the poet feels his way into the space of the institution. Leo Bersani’s essay “Sociability and Cruising” helps us to define what is at stake in this move by using the modernist works of sociologist Georg Simmel (1910) as well as Freud (“Group Psychology”) to make explicit its erotic charge. Bersani’s major provocation is that cruising for sex (something that Wieners is frank about in his work) provides an exemplary model of sociability that holds out the promise of preventing one’s connection to others from “degenerating” into a relationship (Rectum 57). Cruising, Bersani suggests, can stand as “a sexual model in which the deliberate avoidance of relationships might be crucial […] in clearing the ground for a new relationality.” Bersani’s suggestion is that what is attractive in cruising is a loss of the self: “in ideal cruising,” he says, “we leave ourselves behind.” This self-reduction is 198

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concomitant with a release from the tyrannies of the intersubjective relationship. Cruising is “a nameless, identity-free contact – contact with an object I don’t know and certainly don’t love which has, unknowingly, agreed to be momentarily the incarnated shock of otherness” (61). The thought here is that certain convened spaces of sociability, by encouraging an investment in seriality – one attachment and then another – seem to defy resolution on a final and definitive encounter, and encourage instead a kind of formalized agitation. There are two major coordinates in Bersani’s essay, each of which has some bearing on the poetics of elegy. First, he turns to Simmel’s sociology, specifically an essay called the “Sociology of Sociability,” which presents a paradigm of social relation in which self-interest is suspended, and what Simmel calls the pleasures of “rhythmed being” come to the fore. This takes place through the figure of the Coquette who embodies the impersonal intimacies of pleasurable sociability. Critically, the Coquette’s vacillation between accommodation and denial founds the “playful rhythm” of flirtation by refusing to settle on a note of resolve. Conclusiveness kills coquetry, as does too much ego. Or, as Bersani puts it, “we live rhythmically only if we renounce possession” (47).7 Taking his lead from Simmel’s essay, and further bracketing the troublesome gender politics in which a female figure might be said to bear the sacrificial burden for male society, Bersani asks after the character of good sociability, suggesting that there may be “a happiness inherent in not being entirely ourselves, in being ‘reduced’ to an impersonal rhythm” (47). Bersani’s second major coordinate is Freud, specifically the 1921 text “Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego.” Bersani has written elsewhere that “Freud’s most original speculative move was to deconstruct the sexual as a category of intersubjectivity, and to propose a definition of sexual excitement as both a turning away from others and a dying to the self” (Culture 45). This paradoxical structure is key to the value of what Bersani calls “impersonal narcissism.” The turning away – the rejection of a face-to-face relationship idealized in public-sphere sociologies – is accompanied by the self-shattering jouissance of identification. Impersonal narcissism is a narcissism that doesn’t want a stable self to attach to. We’ve already detected something of this paradox in Yeats’s poem and in Wieners’s verse. It is particularly important for Bersani to find in Freud an alternative to the tragic sociology described in Civilisation and Its Discontents (1930) where life governed by the pleasure principle will always be at loggerheads with the demands of civilization. Accordingly, Bersani finds the germ of a non-tragic sociability in Group Psychology, in which Freud allows not only that homosexual desire can be found in sublimated form in all non-sexualized relations – esprit de corps and so on – but also that there is a specific compatibility between homosexuality and sociability, even in its unsublimated form. The distinction is an important one. On one hand we have a rather trite Freudian wisdom that through sublimation (which always entails a diversion of the sexual drives), homosexuality can find tragic expression through homosocial relations and socially acceptable object choices. These object choices are made under the sign of aesthetic judgment, the validity of taste, and what we call “the beautiful.” On the other hand, the more interesting suggestion in Freud is that even unsublimated homosexuality is productive of good social ties: a sociability which does not require the tragic renunciation of sexual desire but which rather forms and spatializes that desire. The queer usurpation of Freudian “civilization” happens through identification with multiple objects: “[T]he homosexual walking the world,” writes Bersani, “cruising the world – in search of objects that will give him back to himself as a loved and cared for subject” (Rectum 60). But this can never be a pastoralizing view of sex and sexuality. The identification of the self through the other dies at each repeated moment of sexual contact, 199

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or jouissance shatters the self out of coherence. We have in this the pure dynamic of social relation: attachment and release. For Bersani – as for Wieners – this rhythmic movement of association and separation finds exemplary expression in cruising as a frankly sexualized mode of sociability. Bersani gives the example of the gay bathhouse where we leave ourselves behind: In addition to the opportunity anonymous sex offers its practitioners of shedding much of the personality that individuates them psychologically, the common bathhouse uniform – a towel – communicates very little (although there are of course ways of wearing a towel…) about our social personality (economic privilege, class status, taste). (Rectum 60) This particular social scene, then, facilitates a series of narcissistic identifications through anonymous and de-individuated others. There can be little doubt that the example raises further questions: Can only gay men participate in such an ecology? Is it a specifically sub‐cultural ideal of sociability? Has this rhythm of association and separation survived the advent of the Internet? Yet, despite these hesitations, Bersani’s model of relation, based on the rhythmic movement of multiple attachments, coheres with Wieners’s poetic vision, and points us more generally toward thinking about the socialized space of reception.

“A Poem for Museum Goers” We conclude this essay by returning to the art gallery as the exemplary institutional space for thinking about the relation between living and dying objects (always in the shadow of the modern hospital ward). In two poems in particular, Wieners slides between the act of writing and the act of viewing visual art – both activities shot through with grief. The first “A poem for painters” begins in high-Yeatsian mood: “Our age bereft of nobility/How can our faces show it?” (9). More significant than the register, however, is the appeal to the face to show something meaningful about our age. The poem’s riposte to its own question seems to be that our faces are forever falling short of showing “it,” so we are required to enter an interactive space of body parts: “my lips stand out”; “the painter’s hand one foot away from me”; “the palm of my hand”; “the veins underneath our skin”; “the cheeks puffed full”; “walking beside an ass.” These body parts-as-symptoms displace the face, or as Wieners puts it: “Drawing the face/and its torture/[…] no one dares tackle it./Held as they are in the hands/of forces they/cannot understand” (9). In this reluctance before the face we have the failure of the singular relationship and, inferentially, the failure of normative intersubjectivity (whether that be the meaningful face-to-face correspondence or the critical accomplishment of facing-up before the artwork and judging its quality). At the same time, this negativity, denoted in such passionate terms as “despair” or “torture,” is transmuted into its own formal accomplishment; hence we have the important repetition of the word “line” throughout: the compositional line of the painter and, overlaying that, the poetic line. There is a conspicuous reference to Paul Klee, whose famous remark on taking the line for a walk stands behind the poem’s suggestion of an affinity between artistic technique and the vicissitudes of cruising – walking through a populated scene. Again we go driven by forces we have no control over. Only 200

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in the poem comes an image – that we rule the line by the pen in the painter’s hand one foot away from me. (9) The poetic line wavers, as we can see, through the indentations on the page, the rule given over to forces that are not strictly the poet’s own. By the end of this section the poet might be imagined to be one foot away from the painted artwork, with the added suggestion of a metrical near-miss: one foot too many or too few, a significant impropriety that keeps the poem in motion. There is a continual slippage from the line in the painting to the lines of relation between the body and the painting, and then back to the poetic line. To be one foot away is to be askew, off-balance perhaps, but it might also designate a spatial measure – a social form: a relation of “hand,” “foot” and “me.” Other uses of the word “line” include the enigmatic sentence spread over three poetic lines: “That despair/is on my face and shall show/in the fine lines of any man.” Here, not only is blunt “despair” transformed into a “fine” line, but at the same time the content of a personal emotion, ascribed to the poet through his face, is transformed into the anonymity of the impersonal and numerous “any” man. And yet this accomplishment of impersonality is paradoxically a narcissistic one, unsublimated and even, we might say, uncivilized. This is indicated by the succeeding line, “I had love once in the palm of my hand/see the lines there” (10). Alongside the implication of artistic composition with the pen or paintbrush, and perhaps of the poet’s interest in palmistry, we have the intimation of masturbation: a reduction of the self from the face to the hand, and a subtraction of oneself from the intersubjective world very much in keeping with Bersani’s argument that the formal pleasures of negativity reside in the discipline of failing to attain a complete relationship. The second poem, “A Poem for Museum Goers” (23–26), concerns Wieners’s visit to an exhibition of Edvard Munch prints: Munch’s Study for a Series (retitled later: Frieze of Life – a poem about life, love and death) which went on show in San Francisco in 1958. Here, lyric subjectivity seems deliberately “reduced” or flattened to a course-plotting sense of moving between Munch’s images. The poem is serial, additive, and identificatory in its procedures, drawing a line through the gallery for the eye to follow. Nonetheless, it remains difficult to interpret because even as it takes ownership of different artworks, it fails to hold on to them, or to store them as a repository of cultural knowledge; rather, each present-tense identification shatters into the next one, and the inwardness of the poetic subject continually concedes to the logic of the institutional space. This impairment of artistic meaning begets a further irony insofar as the poem relies for its momentum on a set of art-historical references that it simultaneously wants to relinquish. The logic of cruising the gallery space is supposed to be self-annulling, after all, and the critical attempt to reconstruct it, especially today using the mnemonic technology of the Internet, contradicts the public and somatic terms of its impersonality. Not only can the works by Munch (which we’ve speculatively matched to Wieners’s text below using square brackets) all now be viewed online, in private, but also their apparent permanency in an electronic format fixes certain direct and named correspondences that undermine the rhythmic feeling of something coming into view and passing away. I walk down a long passageway with a 201

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red door waiting for me. It is Edvard Munch. Turn right turn right. And I see my [Death in the Sickroom]

sister hanging on the wall, heavy breasts and hair

[Madonna]

Tied to a tree in the garden with the full moon are the ladies of the street. Whipped for whoring. Their long hair binds them,

[Woman in Three Stages]

They have lain long hours in bed, blood on their mouths, arms reaching down for ground not given them.

[Vampire]

[Summer night, Mermaid]

They are enveloped in pain. Bah. There is none. Munch knew it. Put the Shriek in their ears to remove it from his own.

[The Scream]

Open thy mouth, tell us the landscape you have escaped from, Fishing boats are in the bay, no outgoing tides for you who he anchored to Hell.

[Melancholy]

[…] Move on. Moonlight [Moonlight] […]

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Lover leaves lover, 1896, 62 years later

[Separation]

[…] a bed only big enough for one, it looks like a casket. Death death on every wall, guillotined and streaming in flames.

[Death in the Sickroom]

Here is a poem-becoming-an-exhibition-catalogue. The space of the gallery has become the imagined line of a moving, feeling body entering into a series of intimate yet impersonal relations with the “dying objects” on the wall. We might say of the poem in this regard that it is less than itself, failing to critically assert itself against the visual artworks it encounters and describes. It is not rivalrous, as the tradition of ekphrastic poetry dictates it probably should be. And yet this failure to stand alone, through merging or emulation, through ceding its own sovereign distinction, also characterizes a social discipline that is fundamentally elegiac in kind.

Notes 1 2

3 4

5

In T. S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” we move satirically from one space to the other: from the table where the etherized patient lies as the root of the poem’s first metaphor, to “the room” where “the women come and go/Talking of Michelangelo” – and then “a farther room.” The institutional modernity which “we” share in this respect is by no means evenly distributed; if it’s fairly obvious that museums are an effect of an imperial world-system, then the rise of modern hospitals too should be indexed to the technologization (and produced unevenness) of modern warfare. It’s the subject of another essay to wonder how certain medical and art institutions make their appearance in different literary and political cultures at different times and in very different ways. To take one rather obvious example, the reliable site of the field hospital in British war poetry can be usefully contrasted with the “Irish” maternity ward in the “The Oxen of the Sun” chapter of Ulysses. These differ starkly for how they present gender roles, functional activity, and degree of institutional reflexivity. Transposed to the contemporary age in the wake of HIV and AIDS, Proust’s appreciation for the tragically mediated materials of art history has in fact become politically exemplary, his deliberately “naïve” receptivity newly legible as an affirmation of homosexual sociability (see Bersani; Dean). One of us has a Facebook friend who, though she recently died, continues to appear on the Facebook timeline, framed by the institutional insistence that we should “share” our memories. New forms of elegiac writing are beginning to account for this affront to the already dead, still visibly dying across various electronic galleries. See, for example, the poetic essay “I Love You but I’ve Chosen Darkness” by Claire Vay Watkins (2017), which addresses the author’s dead ex-boyfriend’s continued presence on MySpace (granta.com/i-love-you-but-ive-chosen-darkness [accessed 16 July 2020]). This was a project that at no point was free from ambivalent feeling, Yeats having first of all used the gallery to train himself into an appreciation for modern art. In order to wean himself off the “tragic greatness” of the Renaissance and embrace the impressionism of Manet and his contemporaries, the poet declared “rhythm” his cardinal principle of apprehension (Walker 82).

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7

Allen Ginsberg’s estimation of Wieners’s line as uniquely “raw” and “vulnerable” has set the terms for the understated critical reception of his verse (15). Pamelo Petro has contrasted Wieners’s “introspective lyricism” to the brash extroversion of the other Beats; John Wilkinson has pointed to the sexualized femininity of Wieners’s first major influence, Edna St. Vincent Millay; Angela Brady has called Wieners a fundamentally personal poet, “rendering in verse the most intimate, tender or appalling preoccupations”; while Keston Sutherland has written that Wieners is “destitute of a world, and inhabits instead a fragile, impaired, unreliable grammar.” For discussion on these themes, see also chapter 5 of Walsh’s Narcissism and Its Discontents, and “Introduction” in Sheils’s and Walsh’s Narcissism, Melancholia and the Subject of Community.

Works Cited Adorno, Theodor. Prisms. Translated by Samuel and Shierry Weber. MIT Press, 1967, pp. 173–187. Berger, John. “The Embrace: An Essay.” BBC Production by Leslie McGahey. www.youtube.com/ watch?v=QkyMv_OJ0F8. Accessed 20 Feb. 2020. Bersani, Leo. The Culture of Redemption. Harvard UP, 1990. Bersani, Leo. Is the Rectum a Grave? And Other Essays. U of Chicago P, 2010. Boruch, Marianne. Eventually One Dreams the Real Thing. Copper Canyon Press, 2016. Brady, Angela. “The Other Poet: John Wieners, Frank O’Hara, Charles Olson.” Jacket, no. 32, 2007. jacketmagazine.com/32/brady-wieners.shtml. Accessed 16 July 2020. Butler, Judith. The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection. Stanford UP, 1997. Crimp, Douglas. Melancholia and Moralism: An Essay on AIDS and Queer Politics. MIT Press, 2002. Crimp, Douglas. “The Museum in Ruins.” Postmodern Culture, edited by Hal Foster. Pluto Press, 1983, pp. 43–56. Cullen, Fintan. Ireland on Show: Art, Union, and Nationhood. Ashgate, 2012. Dean, Tim. Unlimited Intimacy: Reflections on the Subculture of Barebacking. U of Chicago P, 2009. Eliot, T. S. The Complete Poems and Plays of T. S. Eliot. 1969. Faber and Faber, 2004. Foucault, Michel. The Birth of the Clinic. 1963. Translated by A.M. Sheridan. Routledge, 1989. Freud, Sigmund. “Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego.” The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XVIII: (1920–1922): Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Group Psychology and Other Works. The Hogarth Press, 1921, pp. 65–144. Freud, Sigmund. “Mourning and Melancholia.” The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XIV (1914–16): On the History of the Psycho-Analytic Movement, Papers on Metapsychology and Other Works. 1915. The Hogarth Press, 1917, pp. 237–258. Ginsberg, Allen. “Foreword.” John Wieners: Selected Poems, 1958–1984. Black Sparrow Press, 1998, pp. 15–19. Hardy, Thomas. The Collected Poems of Thomas Hardy. Wordsworth Editions, 2006. Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time, translated by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. Harper and Row Publishing, 1962. Heidegger, Martin. Basic Writings: From Being and Time (1927) to The Task of Thinking (1964). Edited by David Farrell Krell. 1978. Routledge, 2011. Jameson, Anna. “A Handbook to the Public Galleries of Art in and near London.” 1842. The Emergence of the Modern Museum: An Anthology of Nineteenth-Century Sources, edited by Jonah Siegel. Oxford UP, 2008, pp. 72–78. Lee, Vernon. “Aesthetic Responsiveness: Its Variations and Accompaniments. Extracts from Vernon Lee’s Gallery Diaries.” Beauty and Ugliness and Other Studies in Psychological Aesthetics, Vernon Lee and Clementina Anstruther-Thomson. John Lane, The Bodley Head, 1912, pp. 241–350. Lee, Vernon. “Anthropomorphic Aesthetics.” Beauty and Ugliness and Other Studies in Psychological Aesthetics, Vernon Lee and Clementina Anstruther-Thomson. John Lane, The Bodley Head, 1912, pp. 1–44. Muldoon, Paul. Horse Latitudes. Faber and Faber, 2006. Owen, Wilfred. The Poems of Wilfred Owen. Random House, 1990. Pasternak, Boris. Selected Poems. Translated by J. Stallworthy and P. France. Penguin, 1991. Petro, Pamelo. “The Hipster of Joy Street: An Introduction to the Life and Work of John Wieners.” Jacket, no. 21, 2003. jacketmagazine.com/21/wien-petro.html. Plath, Sylvia. Collected Poems. Faber and Faber, 2015.

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Institutions and Elegies Powell, D. A. Tea. Wesleyan UP, 1998. Ramazani, Jahan. Poetry of Mourning: The Modern Elegy from Hardy to Heaney. U of Chicago P, 1994. Sassoon, Siegfried. War Poems of Siegfried Sassoon. Dover, 2004. Sheils, Barry, and Julie Walsh, editors. Narcissism, Melancholia and the Subject of Community. Palgrave, 2017. Sutherland, Keston. “The World and John Wieners.” World Picture, no. 7, 2012. www.worldpicturejournal. com/WP_7/Sutherland.html. Accessed 16 July 2020. Thomas, Dylan. The Dylan Thomas Omnibus: Under Milk Wood, Stories and Broadcasts. Phoenix, 2001. Valéry, Paul. “Le problem des musées.” 1923. Œuvres, tome II, Pièces sur l’art, Nrf, Gallimard, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1960, pp. 1290–1293. Walker, Tom. “‘Our More Profound Pre-Raphaelitism’: W. B. Yeats, Aestheticism , and BLAST.” BLAST at 100: A Modernist Magazine Reconsidered, edited by Philip Coleman, Kathryn Milligan, and Nathan O Donnell. Brill, 2017, pp. 79–93. Walsh, Julie. Narcissism and Its Discontents. Palgrave, 2015. Wieners, John. Supplication: Selected Poems. Enitharmon Press, 2015. Wilkinson, John. “Chamber Attitudes.” Jacket, no. 21, 2003. jacketmagazine.com/21/wilk-wien.html. Accessed 16 July 2020. Williams, William Carlos. Selected Poems. Penguin, 2000. Yeats, W. B. The Major Works. Oxford World Classics, 1997.

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19 DEATH “AFTER LONG SILENCE” Auditing Agamben’s Metaphysics of Negativity in Yeats’s Lyric Samuel Caleb Wee

For Giorgio Agamben, death and language are yoked together in Western metaphysics by negativity. Insofar as the capacity for language represents the proof of, and our only access to, human subjectivity, the inevitability of death represents the conclusive limit of that subjectivity. The borders of death and the borders of language map over each other; the mute corpse is the ultimate abjection. In Heidegger’s reckoning, for instance, we regard as animals those who cannot “experience death as death […] but animals cannot speak either” (Heidegger, qtd. in Agamben xi). Extrapolating from Heidegger’s pronouncement, Agamben thus finds in death and language a negative doctrine, claiming that: Both the ‘faculty’ for language and the ‘faculty’ for death, inasmuch as they open for humanity the most proper dwelling place, reveal and disclose this same dwelling place as always already permeated by and founded in negativity. Inasmuch as he is speaking and mortal, man is, in Hegel’s words, the negative being who ‘is that which he is not and not that which he is’, or, according to Heidegger, the ‘placeholder (Platzhalter) of nothingness’. (xii) The placeholder of nothingness: a waiting for, and upon, the void. For Heidegger and Agamben, both language and life burst out of and return to silence and nothingness, and in doing so, reveal the way that existence is always suffused with negativity. Poetry, of course, is not the same thing as language, yet is there not always also a sense that poetry is also – to use Agamben’s terms – “always already permeated by and founded in negativity”? The precise way that poetry distinguishes itself from common language, for instance, might be seen as a negative process. In seeking a definition of poetry capacious enough for the breadth of poetic forms over the ages, Brian McHale boiled poeticity down to two complementary propositions, which we will briefly investigate here because of their intriguing implications for our subject matter. The first comes from the feminist scholar-poet Rachel Blau DuPlessis, who suggests that poetry “is the kind of writing that is articulated in sequenced, gapped lines […] in bounded units precisely chosen […] in relation to chosen pause or silence.” For DuPlessis, it is the presence and deployment of “precisely chosen pauses or silences” that allow “segmented units of a variety of sizes” to emerge, hence allowing for the possibility of “intricate interplay among the ‘scales’” by the skilled poet (51). In this reckoning, not only does silence function as 206

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parentheses for poetic language, it also structures and organizes that same language, so that it is the presence of the pause, the musical rest, which permits the possibility of poetry. The second proposition here comes from John Shoptaw, who, as McHale notes, was attempting to “redefine the traditional notion of poetic measure in such a way as to accommodate the formally various unmetered poetry of such contemporaries as John Ashbery and Charles Bernstein” (16). To that end, Shoptaw claims the poem’s essential measure to be “its smallest unit of resistance to meaning” (Shoptaw, qtd. in McHale 16; emphasis mine), rather than the “smallest unit of construction of meaning” (ibid., emphasis in original). While this idea might seem counterintuitive, McHale says, juxtaposition against DuPlessis’s emphasis on the structuring function of negative space reveals a resonance, for “it is where meaning-making is interrupted […] that the reader’s meaning-making apparatus must gear up to bridge the gap” (16). For Shoptaw and DuPlessis, then, the poem begins to speak at the moment when conventional language falls silent; the word must die for the verse to live. To an extent, these two propositions resonate with Agamben’s own notions of poeticity. It is at the places where Agamben departs from DuPlessis and Shoptaw, though, that he finds the beginnings of a fascinating dilemma. For Agamben, “poetry lives only in the tension and difference (and hence also in the virtual interference) between sound and sense, between the semiotic and the semantic sphere,” so that it is only “the possibility of enjambment [which] constitutes the only criterion for distinguishing poetry from prose” (Agamben and HellerRoazen 109). Here, Agamben is careful to avoid a simplistic binary between sound and sense, for he carefully qualifies that there are not “two lines in parallel flight […] but one line that is simultaneously traversed by the semantic current and the semiotic current” (114); that is to say, we find in verse, as with Bohr’s principle of complementarity toward particle-wave duality, two metrics and modes of measurement upon the poetic line that are nonetheless always already unified. Nonetheless, Agamben’s proposal reminds us that the gaps which occur at the break between two poetic segments are not merely incidental happenings between two bounded linguistic units; rather, they are crucial to defining the distinctive compositions of the very units they disrupt, much like how a strip of negative space in an abstract painting might create two individual blocks of color out of one otherwise unified shape. As I have argued before, the deployment of enjambment triggers a certain recognition of poeticity that reminds the reader to be sensitive in reading toward the “permutations of poetic organisation possible throughout the text” that manifest through technical devices such as meter, rhyme, or metaphoric manipulation (Wee 101).1 Crucially, as we shall observe later, this sensitivity toward the outcomes of enjambment often manifests as a sort of syntactic suspense, an anticipation for the outcomes of the linguistic unit that the skilled poet may manipulate to create the “intricate interplay” which DuPlessis refers to. For now, what is significant here about poetry’s relationship with negative space is the way it is always already haunted by absence – by death – before meaning ever enters the equation, so that the intricacies of verse are necessarily veined by the deep void which holds all human existence in parentheses. Agamben thus offers us here a profound way of thinking about the aesthetic and philosophical implications of poetic pleasure, but it does lead to a troubling paradox: If enjambment is the only distinguishing characteristic of poetry, what happens as the possibility for enjambment diminishes to zero? In other words, what happens when the poem approaches its own death at the end of the verse, when there can be “no opposition between a metrical limit and a semantic limit” (112)? For Agamben, this catastrophic “loss of identity” thus seems to be a “decisive crisis for the poem” (113). There are, I think, several theoretical ripostes available here. One might point out, for instance, the existence of prose poems, or monostiches, but the best reply might be to turn 207

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toward an actual poem, to allow a work of art to speak for itself, as it were. Much has been made within the existing Yeatsian scholarship about his recurrent deployment of vivid, symbolic images (to the point of a fashioned mythology) in his work, with Frank Kermode’s Romantic Image a seminal example. Here, however, I would like to take a close look at this essay by Marjorie Perloff, which examines the auditory aspects of the late-career Yeats poem, “After Long Silence,” which, as we shall shortly see, both dialogues intriguingly with negativity and builds toward a particularly striking end: Speech after long silence; it is right, All other lovers being estranged or dead, Unfriendly lamplight hid under its shade, The curtains drawn upon unfriendly night, That we descant and yet again descant Upon the supreme theme of Art and Song: Bodily decrepitude is wisdom; young We loved each other and were ignorant. As Perloff points out, one possible reason this particular poem has endured so memorably in anthology after anthology is the finesse with which Yeats manipulates the relationship between form and content – more specifically, the way sound and sense here are maneuvered to correspond to each other as the poem instantiates the theme of lovers in old age confronting their own mortality. (This seems at first glance to contradict Agamben’s principle that poetry is most poetic when sound and sense chafe, but it is precisely at the closest point of contact, of course, that a friction between two surfaces becomes possible.) The lateness of this poem within Yeats’s oeuvre is significant: though the poem formally constitutes a sort of “double quatrain” that progresses through an ABBA CDDC rhyme scheme, rhythmically there is a loose sense of organic roughness here, one that Yeats worked all throughout his career at evolving towards. Accordingly, the strong stress of the poem’s first syllable ensures that “sound is meaning: the poet’s ‘speech’ practically bursts out” (Perloff). At the risk of stating the obvious, however, the question of what this “speech” bursts out of is not insignificant. It is perhaps meaningful that the preceding “long silence” before the moment of the lyric utterance also gives us the title of the poem, and it is certainly a point of interest that although the title is nearly identical to the opening of the piece, it decisively omits that crucial first syllable (“speech”). This elision thus effectively emphasizes the role that negativity plays in composing, framing, and bracketing this presented poem as it explores notions of death and silence. Though the lyric utterance that begins here with “speech” calls attention to itself with the sibilant and plosive stress of the first word, the focus of this first line falls, instead, on the matter of that “long silence” which the title of the piece has primed us to listen out for. In foregrounding the way that the occurrence of speech is always pre-emptively preceded by silence, this maneuver thus performs (at least here at the beginning) what Agamben points out to be the manner in which language is predicated upon “the negative foundation of its own place” (66). Yet this alignment between sound and meaning here is also not quite as synonymous as Perloff suggests. While the poem might suggest a correspondence between the semiotic and the semantic dimensions by enacting an enclosure of speech by silence, it is an imperfect one, an uneven translation hampered by the fact that the very act of representing silence through metaphor is itself already a gesture that betrays the integrity of negativity. As we may thus observe, the opening of “After Long Silence” demonstrates the difficulty of perfectly reconciling sound and sense; though the poem strives to bring the two into as great a proximity as possible, a 208

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fundamental repulsion still remains between the semantic current and the semiotic current, one that is amplified in its resistance by the extent of proximity. As we shall continue to see, this phenomenon – this uneven correspondence between the semantic and semiotic, this imperfect synthesis – goes on well throughout the poem (and is, in fact, figured by the poem itself). The emphatic “long silence” of the poem here calls further attention to itself by way of the pronounced pause that the following semicolon produces, so that, as Perloff observes, the second half of the opening line is effectively cordoned off from the first, creating a “terse and mysterious” suspense as we wait to find out what it is precisely that is so appropriate about the situation. This suspense, however, is twofold: on the one level, even as we await the syntactic completion of the sentence and the clarification of the copula at the end of that line, we are also anticipating the companion rhyme to “right” that the rhyme scheme of the poem promises us. This twofold anticipation is thus key to understanding how the poem’s modulation of the tension between sound and sense produces an affect of surprise, even as it resolves the poetic suspense which it sets up. On a semantic level, Perloff is partly accurate in her suggestion that this suspense is “all the more dramatic because of its surprise,” in the sense that we do not yet have a clear picture of the parties involved in the poem, or the dynamics of their relationship, until the second line. (Here, the relationship between the two parties is also established indirectly, by way of negation; rather than straightforwardly describing the two characters in the poem as lovers, after all, we infer instead their former romantic entanglement through the condition of other subjects that this lyric narrator marks as commensurable: the “all other lovers” who are now “estranged or dead”). To an extent, the second line of the poem here does indeed ease the mystery produced by the first line somewhat, in the sense that it clarifies for us the narrative setting of the lyric. Yet it does not truly properly resolve the suspense per se. Rather, this line, as with the following two, merely qualifies the specific predicate of the copula: that is, though the rightness of the situation is extensively justified through the imagery of impending mortality in the third and fourth lines, the specific set of behaviors undertaken by our lyric speaker and the addressee is left unestablished until the fifth line, which is the opening of the second quatrain. Here I have reproduced the first five lines of the poem again with certain markings to illustrate how precisely this syntactic delay functions: “Speech after long silence; it is right, All other lovers being estranged or dead, Unfriendly lamplight hid under its shade, The curtains drawn upon unfriendly night, That we descant and yet again descant…” I have bolded the parts of the sentence that relate to the subject, with the circumstances qualifying the predicate put into italics. Reconfigured into a (relatively) more natural syntax, then, the sentence might therefore go something more like this: “It is right that we descant […] now that all other lovers are estranged or dead.” Though this rephrasing is natural-sounding, it is also, of course, demonstrably stripped of affective power, suspense, and any capacity for pathos. The flatness of this reconfigured sentence thus speaks to the precise composition in which Yeats’s poetic verse has to exist. Not only does silence suffuse the poem, it is the key governing precept through which the poem is rhythmically structured, without which the poem falls into abject banality, into the possibility of paraphrase. In this manner, we might speak of negativity as the foundation of the poem. The deferment of this syntactic resolution to the second quatrain of the poem here thus functions as a sort of structural enjambment, one where the boundary between the two 209

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quatrains stands in for the limit of the line, like a dam wall over which the original sentence begun by the copula (“It is right”) overflows. This overflowing affect is crucial here because the quatrain boundary is doubly reinforced by the rhyme scheme. As we observed earlier, two separate currents begin through the poem from the end of the first line. The suspense created by the disruption of the sentence resolves in the fifth line, but the completion of the first rhyme scheme occurs in the fourth line: “it is right” finds its companion here at the end of the first quatrain with “unfriendly night.” This minute divergence between the two movements thus creates a certain echoing effect, as I shall again illustrate by marking the poem: “Speech after long silence; it is right, All other lovers being estranged or dead, Unfriendly lamplight hid under its shade, The curtains drawn upon unfriendly night, That we descant and yet again descant…” I have now underlined the parts of the poem that pay off the anticipation of rhyme begun in the first line. We may thus see that the two currents which traverse the poem from a single unified origin at the end of the first line ground themselves at two separate moments, creating the polyphonic illusion of two separate lapping waves – sound first, then sense – answering the original question of rhyme and meaning one after the other. Furthermore, we may observe that the sonic movement of the poem does not precisely parallel the semantic movement, but instead pauses for a flourish in the third line with the little internal rhyme of “unfriendly lamplight,” which is itself an anaphoric foreshadowing of “unfriendly night.” Lest one perceive this diffraction between the semantic and the semiotic as negligible or trivial, the poem then proceeds to announce what it is doing. To “descant,” after all, is not only to discourse or dialogue on a certain subject, it is also the musical name for a certain type of double-voiced polyphony from the Middle Ages where a contrapuntal melody is sung above a lower base melody; indeed, the term has come to be used in modern times as a shorthand for countermelody in general. This etymological ambiguity is surely not accidental: not only does the word repeat within the line, inviting us to contemplate alternative implications, but the two meanings here also correspond precisely to practices of sensemaking versus soundmaking, and describe exactly the way poetic counterpoint has behaved here in the first quatrain thus far. Here, at the border between two quatrains in the center of the text, the poem calls attention to itself and reminds us to pay attention not only to the correspondences but also the divergences between sound and sense. Most significantly, it codes the nature of this attention as fundamentally an act of audition, reminding us to listen to the poem for its nuances. This emphasis on the auditory schema, as I will shortly demonstrate, is key to understanding the poem’s complex phenomenological engagement with the themes of silence, death, and its own poetic being. It is at this point that we may direct our attention to the somewhat unusual rhetorical situation of the poem. In “How to Read a Poem,” Perloff places “After Long Silence” in the same category as “the love poems of John Donne, and […] Keats and Shelley.” This categorization is apt to an extent, but in a significant way “After Long Silence” also functions as a subversion – or perhaps a transcendence – of the love-poem trope. Let us briefly set “After Long Silence” alongside a short excerpt from Donne’s “To His Mistress Going to Bed” and observe the most immediately discernible differences: […] Off with that girdle, like heaven’s Zone glistering, But a far fairer world encompassing. 210

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Unpin that spangled breastplate which you wear, That th’eyes of busy fools may be stopped there. Unlace yourself, for that harmonious chime, Tells me from you, that now it is bed time. Off with that happy busk, which I envy, That still can be, and still can stand so nigh. Your gown going off, such beauteous state reveals, As when from flowery meads th’hill’s shadow steals. […] (5–14) “To His Mistress,” of course, is an amorous invitation from the lover to the beloved, and we are no doubt familiar with its sexually explicit tone and its focus on presenting the female body as a material object of erotic desire. Much has therefore been made about the ways in which the poem rejects “the conventions of courtly and Petrarchan love poetry” in favor of a “more ‘realistic’ analysis of love” that follows Ovid in emphasizing humans as “natural, bodily creatures” (Gibboury 133). Stripping the poem down to its most basic operations, we may see that the poem primarily follows the movement of the lyric speaker’s gaze, with a roving eye that travels downward over the body, imposing a series of metaphors over each isolated body part as it does so. Crucially, these descriptions all center around the perception of the lyric speaker: indeed, the poem itself acknowledges the visual component of its presentation early on with its reference to “th’eyes of busy fools” (8), and as John Berger has pointed out, this act of sexual objectification through the male gaze is a common trope within Renaissance-era art (56). The feminist implications of said objectification have thus been well-documented, but what is most salient for our purposes here is the way in which the subject-object relation, within the schema of the visual gaze, corresponds to the lover-beloved binary that informs and structures love poetry forms within the Western tradition. Though it might not seem unusual, this specific alignment of the subject-object relation is contingent upon the focalization of visual perception through the lover, that is, the first-person lyric subject, with the second person of the poem sitting as the mute object of love. Comparing Yeats to his own oeuvre, we may see that this visual enactment of the loversubject and the beloved-object relation is par for the course in his other work as well. Observe, for instance, Perloff’s comparison of “After Long Silence” with an earlier Yeats poem, “Aedh Tells of the Perfect Beauty,” which is markedly “slow and stately” when compared to the flexible “colloquial diction and rhythm” of “After Long Silence.” Yet I suggest that the latter poem’s singularity goes beyond a mere superficial renovation of meter. In order to understand how “After Long Silence” is indeed unusual, let us take a look at the opening to “Aedh Tells of the Perfect Beauty,” which Perloff quotes in her own essay: O cloud-pale eyelids, dream-dimmed eyes, The poets labouring all their days To build a perfect beauty in rhyme Are overthrown by a woman’s gaze […] Here, we may observe the same visual dynamics that play out in Donne, updated somewhat. The poem similarly focalizes our visual perception through the lyric subject, with the intense scrutiny of the gaze here veering intimately close to the visage of the beloved – close enough to notice her “cloud-pale eyelids, dream-dimmed eyes,” which are isolated from the rest of her body similar to Donne’s descriptions of his mistress. Here, Yeats displays an early awareness of 211

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the phenomenological complexities of the love poem by cleverly dislocating the alignment between subjective expression and visual perception. The beloved is granted a powerful gaze as well, one which is capable of halting the poet’s rhyme-making, but even this is still nonetheless framed by the lyric speaker’s own perception and speech, so that the poem does not seem to be able to accommodate the synthesis of two mutual subjectivities. Notice, for instance, how the poet’s linguistic mastery is necessarily neutralized by the “woman’s gaze,” and how this muting is further characterized as a submission to the beloved as the poem falls into silence. The possibility of two free subjects meeting as mutually equal agents in the love poem thus does not seem to exist insofar as the poem operates within the visual schema. Stripped of the sexualizing implications of Donne’s piece, we can see how the subject-object problem of the gaze in the love poem is fundamental to the specific construction of the loverbeloved binary here. That is to say, although the problem of objectification is perennial to feminist discourse, as it manifests here the complication is phenomenological, rather than social, persisting regardless of the gender identities of the parties involved. In the context of our discussion about death, this specter of solipsism – this inability to access the subjectivity of the other – thus becomes even more significant when we consider the premise with which this essay began: that death is the conclusive limit to subjectivity, a proposition which we will keep in mind as we return to “After Long Silence.” Properly contextualized thus, it is now easy to observe how “After Long Silence” differs from the love poem tradition we have just examined here. While the love poems we have examined from Donne and Yeats himself all center around the emphatic gaze and the subject-object problem that arises from it, “After Long Silence” conspicuously lacks any memorable images, and indeed the only perceptible objects in the first quatrain are symbols of invisibility rather than visibility, with both the “unfriendly lamplight” and the “unfriendly night” reinforcing this resistance to and avoidance of the gaze. The fact that these two phrases rhyme with the “right” of the opening line further affirms this: instead of the gaze, the poem insistently reminds us to listen to the sonic, musical, and rhythmic qualities which emerge when descanting occurs. This leads us to our second departure from the love poem tradition: less noticeable, but just as salient, is the poem’s avoidance of the subjectivity limit between the first person and the second person. The solipsistic condition in which both “His Mistress” and “Perfect Beauty” seem to exist is entirely subverted by the poem’s repeated usage of the plural personal pronoun “we,” which is, in fact, the only pronoun to be found anywhere in the verse. Importantly, this first presentation of the two lovers already fixes them in the act of descant, so that this intersubjective discourse between the two is inseparable from the musical and linguistic activities of which the second quatrain reminds us. At this point, we may turn toward the work of Jean-Luc Nancy, who suggests listening as a potential schema to help us to escape the problems that emerge from the phenomenological coding of the gaze, for while “the visual is tendentially mimetic,” the “sonorous,” for Nancy, is “tendentially methexic (that is, having to do with participation, sharing, or contagion)” (10). Paraphrased, Nancy suggests here that while the gaze always divides along a Cartesian line of representation versus reality, the auditory avoids the representative function, instead inviting the subject to enter into the sonorous listening experience for the sake of the experience itself. This capacity of sound to implicate the listening subjects into a common ritual, Nancy argues, allows it to be simultaneously an intrasubjective as well as an intersubjective act: To be listening will always, then, be to be straining toward or in an approach to the self […] neither to a proper self (I), nor to the self of an other, but to the form or structure of self as such [...] When one is listening, one is on the lookout for a subject, something (itself) that identifies itself by resonating from self to self, in itself and for 212

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itself, hence outside of itself, at once the same as and other than itself, one in the echo of the other, and this echo is like the very sound of its sense. (9, emphasis in original) Moreover, in the sense that listening, as opposed to looking, testifies not to the subjective experience of the first person, but rather to the “form or structure” of self, it might be said to be not merely inter- or intra- subjective, but also simultaneously meta-subjective; that is, an ethics of listening primes us to be mindful of subjectivity whenever it might manifest itself, insofar as this expression of the subjective refers us back to our own experience in the first person as a subject – the “echo” like the sound of sense that Nancy speaks of. While this redescription might seem counterintuitive at first to those of us more accustomed to thinking in terms of the gaze, it actually already describes the familiar experience of reading a lyric poem with the intention of journeying into the psychological interior of the poet. As Denis Donoghue reminds us, the lyric – a word we derive from the Greek musical instrument “lyre,” of course – is richly linked to a tradition of “the poet’s mind communing with itself.” Though the experience of reading the lyric first demands the silence of the reader before the subjectivity of the poet may be manifested, this authorly subjectivity is often instantiated through a commensurability with the very subjectivity of the reader. That is, it is by way of the lyric’s specific affective provocations – its ability to incite in us sympathetic responses to the poet’s emotions – that it reminds us of our capacities for profound feeling, so that the subjectivity of the reader is paradoxically affirmed by their acquiescing silence. It is thus this commensurability that Nancy speaks of when he argues that in the gaze “the subject” – in the structural sense – “is referred back to itself as object,” but in listening “it is […] to itself that the subject refers or refers back” (10). Thus, framed by Nancy’s auditory phenomenology, we may now understand how “After Long Silence” moderates a broadened intersubjective space within the conventions of the love poem through its emphasis on the listening ear rather than the seeing gaze. In the sense that listening affords us this mode of intersubjective interaction, though, it is important for us to realize that this does not function as a solution to the subjectobject problem per se. Rather, it is a redescription, an alternative model of modulating the discontinuities inherent between subjectivities that returns us to the premise with which we began this essay: that language is our only access to the other. What Nancy affords us now, though, is a clarification of the very relationship of death to language as they both relate to the end of subjectivity. Refining the position we started from, we may now say that insofar as language is both an avenue as well as a limit to intersubjectivity, death represents the ultimate event horizon to that subjectivity. Language and death, in that sense, exist in a lateral relationship, rather than a parallel one, albeit still nonetheless founded, framed, and permeated by the parentheses of negativity. Returning to “After Long Silence” as we close this essay, then, let us examine the poem again from the second quatrain through to the ending, which Perloff describes as “climactic and brilliant.” […] That we descant and yet again descant Upon the supreme theme of Art and Song: Bodily decrepitude is wisdom; young We loved each other and were ignorant. With an ear for the rhyme scheme, what strikes us here is (again) the tension between the syntactic structure of the poem and its musical patterning. The colon dividing the quatrain here between the second and the third lines suggests that the topic of the lovers’ descanting – the “supreme theme of Art and Song” – is precisely the statement given in the last two lines: 213

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that in contrast to the ignorance of their youth, the two lovers have finally attained “wisdom” in their old age. This paraphrase, though syntactically correct, feels curiously at odds with the actual poem, however, with a triumphant, self-congratulatory tone that is conspicuously missing from our experience of reading the verse. In part, this might be due to the way the rhyme scheme complicates the binary opposition between aged wisdom and youthful ignorance, aligning “descant” with “ignorant” instead, which undercuts the attainment suggested by the syntax. Rhythmically, the slightly awkward juxtaposition of the cluttered stresses in the third line and the sparseness of the fourth line is also significant. Reading through the clatter of “bodily decrepitude,” we then encounter the semicolon, which enforces a meditative pause after “wisdom.” This meditative pause thus mirrors the rest we encounter in the first line of the poem, where the semicolon similarly follows “silence,” so that the rhythmic patterning suggests an affinity or a correspondence between “wisdom” and “silence” that the syntax does not. Beyond the sound patterning, however, the secret to the poem’s ambiguous ending lies in the precise phrasing of the sentence, which chronologically reverses the sequence it narrates. The poem closes on analepsis, dwelling instead on the past in which they “were ignorant” instead of their current wisdom. The use of the simple past tense here is significant: except in rare occasions, we tend to expect the use of the past tense to signal a change of state in the present – an expectation which is foregrounded in this common joke with which one might be familiar: “He used to be a fool… he still is, but he used to be, too.” The poem thus closes with another negation: the lovers “were ignorant,” and are now wise; the object of their knowledge is left elided, but all implications point toward an awareness of mortality, a knowledge of death. This unstated knowledge of death – a knowledge of negativity that is only alluded to by negation – is what prevents the silence of the poem from being completely submerged into epistemological negativity, charging the otherwise apparently triumphant ending with a certain somberness that resists the cadence one might typically expect. It is the smallest ghost of a flicker of awareness, and even then, an awareness of the void, but indeed this small ghost is enough to hold apart the twin abysses as the poem closes. I have earlier referred to “After Long Silence” as within the love poem tradition, but it is also adjacent to another subgenre that Yeats is known for: that of the elegy. Though it is true that “Silence” departs from a traditional elegy by eschewing the ubi sunt, choosing to dwell on the survivors instead of upon the dead and estranged, a situation of this poem alongside Yeats’s other works around the theme of death may yet help us to better understand the complex relationship Yeats conceptualized between death and art. Speaking about Yeats’s ambivalence toward the old Romantic notion of art as an escape, Kermode argued instead that Yeats believed in quite the opposite: that “art was what you tried to escape from” (34, emphasis mine). Yet the old “doctrine that art is a kind of dream” still held sway, and Yeats continued to hold on to the conviction that “to dream it well is the most difficult and exhausting of all callings” (34). That this stance seems somewhat contradictory is typical of Yeats, but the notion that the pursuit of art drains from life offers us illumination into the poem’s immediate and direct juxtaposition, via enjambment, between “Art and Song” and “bodily decrepitude.” Death, in Yeats’s reckoning, was the artist’s ultimate opportunity for release from “a world built for action,” the other being “the making of Images” (Kermode 37), yet these two avenues of escape were still intimately connected. Kermode notes that all of Yeats’s successful elegies engage in an extensive working-over of the subjects until they were utterly changed, “had entered the flesh and blood of his thought,” and were “part of a mood or a myth […] of the world of his mind’s making” (45). Kermode’s reading of Yeats therefore suggests that artistic achievement in this regard perpetually contains the seed of death within its process. 214

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We may now return here to Agamben’s worry that the end of the poem is hampered by the end of an opposition between sound and sense, or rather, the end of a potentiality between sound and sense. We might say here that this particular example of the poem avoids that problem by inscribing a certain circularity instead of a teleological linearity in its ending. The analeptic device with which “After Long Silence” closes functions to inscribe a time loop that brings us back to the past from which the poem opens, so that the poem does not end with a collapse of potentiality, but rather, a suspended ambiguity that calls us to reread the poem, staying in the fugue of the poem’s various movements. If, as Nancy has suggested, the sonorous is indeed methexic instead of mimetic, then the emphasis on listening as opposed to seeing in “After Long Silence” might remind us that poetry exists always for itself; that the event of the poetic word is itself the referent to which poetry refers and embodies, and that it is in this self-substantiation that the possibility of intersubjective discourse emerges. Yet this emphasis on the radical independence of poetry, so potentially triumphant-sounding in another context, is made ambiguous here by our awareness that the poem circulates between the two abysses of silence and nonexistence, not in youthful ignorance of negativity, but in a performance of presence only possible through acknowledging the advent of absence. This poetic profession thus precedes death, attains immortality in death, and inscribes death in immortality. Death and language, it seems, circle each other like a gyre.

Note 1

I further explore the implications of negative space in poetry with relationship to narrativity in a journal article entitled “Songs of ‘Experientiality’: Reconsidering the Relationship between Poeticity and Narrativity in Postclassical Narratology,” listed in the “Works Cited” list.

Works Cited Agamben, Giorgio. Language and Death: The Place of Negativity. U of Minnesota P, 1991. Agamben, Giorgio, and Daniel Heller-Roazen. The End of the Poem: Studies in Poetics. Stanford UP, 1999. Berger, John. Ways of Seeing. Penguin, 2008. Donne, John. “To His Mistress Going to Bed.” Poetry Foundation, n.d. www.poetryfoundation.org/ poems/50340/to-his-mistress-going-to-bed. Donoghue, Denis. “Congenial Disorder: Why Should We Look for Comfort in Poetry?” Harper’s Magazine, n.d. harpers.org/archive/2008/09/congenial-disorder. DuPlessis, Rachel Blau. “Manifests.” Diacritics, vol. 26, no. 3–4, 1996, pp. 31–53. Gibboury, Achsah. “Erotic Poetry.” A Cambridge Companion to John Donne. Cambridge UP, 2006. Kermode, Frank. Romantic Image. Routledge, 2012. McHale, Brian. “Beginning to Think About Narrative in Poetry.” Narrative, vol. 17, no. 1, 2008, pp. 11–27. Nancy, Jean-Luc. Listening. Fordham UP, 2009. Perloff, Marjorie. “How to Read a Poem: Yeats’s ‘After Long Silence.’” Marjorie Perloff, 3 May 2009, marjorieperloff.blog/essays/yeats-silence. Wee, Samuel Caleb. “Songs of ‘Experientiality’: Reconsidering the Relationship between Poeticity and Narrativity in Postclassical Narratology.” Word and Text, vol. IX, 2019, pp. 93–106. Yeats, William Butler. The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats. Wordsworth Editions, 1994.

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20 THE SPATIALIZATION OF DEATH IN THE NOVELS OF VIRGINIA WOOLF Ian Tan

Introduction In her autobiographical evocation of childhood memories titled “A Sketch of the Past,” Virginia Woolf details how transcendent “moments of being,” which temporarily stem the resistless flow of time due to their sheer atmosphere of significance, cannot be separated from the question of spacing1 from which they emerge: Many bright colours; many distinct sounds; some human beings, caricatures; comic; several violent moments of being, always including a circle of the scene which they cut out: and all surrounded by a vast space … Nothing remained stable long. One must get the feeling of everything approaching and then disappearing. (“Sketch” 79, emphasis mine) Read artistically as homologous to the modernist epiphany, defined by Morris Beja as a “structural device [which] marks climaxes in a narrative … by allowing characters moments of revelation in which they transcend themselves and see into the truth of things” (22–23), Woolf reminds her readers that this manifestation of spiritual clarity organizes aesthetic space in its very evanescence against a background of loss and emptiness. In this way, as much as these “moments of being” become central to Woolf ’s design through the seeking of “a token of some real thing behind appearances” which will “become a revelation of some order” (“Sketch” 72), it is more likely the case that, as Gillian Beer writes, “Woolf ’s [novels] compose themselves about an absence” (29). In the attempt to recapture the significance of the past through the imagination, writing betrays its fundamental belatedness, for language as representation is always already re-presentation, or the loss of an original state of presence. One might argue that modernism’s negotiation with the past betokens a failure to fully master the violent dislocations of the present moment by traversing the gap history opens up, which emerges as a dialectic between engagement with and ironic distance from mythic modes and narrative form. T. S. Eliot’s seminal essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent” argues that the “simultaneous order” which is achieved by artistic tradition cannot be attained by a willful abjuration of the literature of the past, but by a reckoning with it: 216

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No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning along. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead. (38) Modernist writing is, then, irrevocably informed by the condition of mourning, where language and aesthetic representation reveal their limits in both bringing the lost object of desire to presence and lamenting the distance from that presence. Woolf ’s linking of familial loss to the trauma of history in To the Lighthouse evinces a phenomenology of absence which finds total expression in the section “Time Passes”; for as Beer notes, “death was her special knowledge: her mother, her sister Stella, and her brother Thoby had all died prematurely. But death was also the special knowledge of her entire generation, through the obliterative experience of the First World War” (31). Similarly, Wilfred Owen’s Dante-esque sojourn into Hell in the poem “Strange Meeting” functions almost as an archetypal encounter with the dead and ghostly which links the phantasmagorical nature of the meeting with the condition and the impossibility of mourning. As Foley writes, “The proliferation of the ghostly in interwar modernism is unsurprising given the challenges of mourning presented by the many devastations of WWI” (9). Given the shock of the manifestation of the specter which at once conditions and exposes the limits of mourning by exceeding the present moment of representation, modernist aesthetics seeks, as Walsh writes, a “compulsion to give some figure to what has been lost” (2) through standing in a new relation toward death. Peter Nicholls has argued that the modernist movements of Surrealism and Expressionism are attempts to deal with death as the impossibility of representation not only through a “constant preoccupation with death as the ultimate horizon of the aesthetic” (136), but also as a paradoxical engagement with it as the pure moment of the text’s arrival into appearance and its movement into disappearance: “it strives at once to cancel and preserve the … moment of pure negation, its lyric pursuit of the marvellous always shadowed by the death which makes it possible” (308). This essay proposes that Woolf ’s exploration of death in her novels is similarly informed by an awareness of language as it conditions representation and subjectivity. For Woolf, the processes of narrative flow and temporal flux are deeply interrelated, for both language and time bind together moments of transcendental significance and bear witness to inhuman movements of erosion and forgetting. The space that death hollows out in its work of negation is intimately linked with reimagining both the subject’s grasp of death within the novel, and the authorial representation of death as refracted through point of view. Indeed, as Smythe writes, what is involved in the experimental nature of Woolf’s writing is nothing less than the “grammatical and syntactical imitation of the mind actively thinking of and within a condition of loss” (67). It is thus the articulation of the work of death as spacing which determines both narrative structure from The Voyage Out to The Waves, and also the presence/ absence of Woolf’s narrative “voice” in these texts. Maurice Blanchot’s linking of the space of writing with loss and anonymity seems to me to be pertinent in addressing the quality of Woolf ’s gesture. In his text The Space of Literature, Blanchot argues that to write is not to affirm the presence of a sovereign subjectivity who remains in control of his text. Rather, “to write is to discover the interminable … [The writer] does not move toward a surer world, a finer or justified world where everything would be ordered according to the clarity of the impartial light of day” (28). To write is to ceaselessly “surrender to the fascination of time’s absence,” in which “what appears is the being deep within being’s absence, which is when there is nothing and which, as soon as there is something, is no longer. For it is as if there were no being except through the loss of being” (30). For Blanchot, writing is a surrendering to the abyss opened up by death, where language confirms 217

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the impersonality of loss and absence. The silence that reverberates in the interstices of the text signals the void from which the speech act of narration is drawn from and to which it incessantly returns. Far from confirming mastery over language, language draws the speaker into what exceeds and thus extinguishes personality. In an analysis of the poetry of Rilke, Blanchot argues that the fear of death stems from “the violent way we master [things], by the purposeful activity that makes us possessors, producers, concerned with results and avid for objects” (135). By the means of representations which confer upon objects our subjectively determined values we determine as essential and transcendent, we turn away from a proper relationship with death as the intimacy of what Rilke terms the Open. According to Blanchot, by allowing language to emerge from the Open and to speak from this horizon, [t]hings are transformed into that which cannot be grasped. Out of use, beyond wear, they are not in our possession but are the movement of dispossession which releases us both from them and from ourselves. They are not certain but are joined to the intimacy of the risk where neither they nor we are sheltered any more, but where we are, rather, introduced, utterly without reserve, into a place where nothing retains us at all. (141) In this space where nothing is offered to our manipulative grasp, death dispossesses us of our subjectivities, which paradoxically allows the fear of death, as the negation of being, to be overcome. Writing, then, allows both writer and reader a transformed relationship with death: not by congealing significance on ordinary being, but by allowing the space of death to inhabit it as the space through which we contemplate our ultimate dissolution with a measure of equanimity. I argue that Woolf ’s novels demonstrate a movement toward inhabiting the space of death through the erasure of the meaning human subjectivity imposes upon an indifferent reality, which orientates perception toward objects and natural processes now seen in the light of the absence of signification which is death. In this reading, the discourses through which civilization articulates for itself an image of substantiality and solidity (which include imperialism, the stability of the domestic sphere, and the language of art) can only ever be temporary bulwarks against encroaching dissolution and darkness. For Woolf, literature as writing inexorably pulls us toward the primal energies of death and regeneration, figured as an unfathomable cycle.

Epiphany as Dissolution: The Voyage Out and The Ship of Death Woolf ’s first novel, The Voyage Out (1915), positions itself both as a journeying out toward an expanded sense of knowledge, and a journeying into the inaccessible and unrepresentable realm of death and dissolution. In a letter to Lytton Strachey written one year after the novel’s publication, Woolf claimed that she had wanted “to give the feeling of a vast tumult of life, as various and disorderly as possible, which should be cut short for a moment by the death [of her protagonist Rachel Vinrace], and go on again – and the whole was to have a sort of pattern, and be somehow controlled” (qtd. in Love 86). This pattern is, however, not to be sought in the teleological design of the Bildungsroman where self and society provide the dialectical paradigms of narrative, but in the “dominant thematic tension between the affirmation of self as a specific individual and the dissolution of self into a cosmic unity” (Frye 23). In this reading, death is woven into the fabric of language that sustains identity and meaning, informing both the novel’s implicit critique of the discourses of civilization and the changes in stylistic register when the intimations of an inhuman realm become more central to the emergence of Rachel’s 218

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consciousness. Death obtrudes almost immediately from the start of the novel in the figure of Rachel’s surrogate mother-figure Helen Ambrose, whom we first meet grieving the loss of her children. While her husband Ridley “attempted consolation” (4) in an inadequate gesture which reveals his self-centeredness in not wanting to take part in “a grief that was greater than his,” Helen seeks spiritual comfort in the thought of an afterlife where “her children were now asking for her, and getting a soothing reply” (5). Already at this early stage, Woolf sets up a contrast between masculine and feminine modes of understanding, in which the focus on rational discourse in the sphere of the former robs the male characters of a more intuitive grasp of deeper realities embedded in the subconscious. Helen’s anguished awareness of the fragility of life not only particularizes her in an incomplete attempt at mourning, but also grants unique insight into existential alienation and the bathos behind civilization’s presumption of grandeur: As for the mass of streets, squares, and public buildings which parted them, she only felt at this moment how little London had done to make her love it, although thirty of her forty years had been spent in a street. She knew how to read the people who were passing her; there were the rich who were running to and from each other’s houses at this hour; there were the bigoted workers driving in a straight line to their offices; there were the poor who were unhappy and rightly malignant … When one gave up seeing the beauty that clothed things, this was the skeleton beneath. (5–6) The link between perception and the vantage point with which to peel away the veneer of social order gained through an intimation of the ugliness of the metonymic skeleton thus prepares the reader for Rachel’s own initiation into this same knowledge. Through the focalization of the narrative through Rachel’s half-detached perspective, Woolf satirizes the cultural and intellectual discourses of Edwardian England, in part by responding to Wordsworth’s panoramic description of London which “like a garment, wear/The beauty of the morning” (“Composed Upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802”). As we will see, far from a Wordsworthian celebration of nature as an enriching influence upon human sensibility, Woolf positions the unmediated perception of it as “uncomfortably impersonal and hostile” (Voyage 237), something which the brush of the artist represented by Mrs. Flushing can only “halfrealize” at the price of an “untrained onslaught” (272) of it. As Rachel sets sail on the Euphrosyne together with the Ambroses and the belligerent Mr. Pepper, their consciousnesses seem to merge in a lyricism that ironically celebrates the eternity of civilization by positioning its sterile fixedness against prospect of the journey out from its center toward the unfathomable: No darkness would ever settle upon those lamps, as no darkness had settled upon them for hundreds of years. It seemed dreadful that the town should blaze for ever in the same spot; dreadful at least to people going away to adventure upon the sea, and beholding it as a circumscribed mound, eternally burnt, eternally scarred. (13) Woolf thus maps the contrast between light and darkness onto the symbolic registers of life and death, which draw the characters together in an unacknowledged moment of epiphany erupting from a shared sense of mortality. It is, however, vouchsafed to Rachel, who is the blank canvas on which Woolf charts the inevitable movement toward the space of death, who has a heightened sense of the “shrinking island” which England (itself a synecdoche of the West) has become when distance from it implies exposure to the unknown. The “mute[ness]” of language that accompanies the hyperbolic entropy affecting all other continents (“Europe shrank, Asia shrank, Africa and America shrank”) prepares Rachel for an almost metaphysical 219

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vision of herself inhabiting “an empty universe.” Woolf thus links the emergence of Rachel’s sense of self with her irrational attraction toward the annihilation of that self – a dialectic which not only provides the patterning of this novel, but also points toward the culmination of her fictional technique in The Waves, which is to describe a world as it is, in the mere fact of its being. Ironically, the point of the disappearance of Rachel’s individuality brings with it an unlimited expansiveness, where she senses a communion with a pantheistic sense of being linking the human with the solidity of objects in the world, the elemental flux of nature, and the intangibility of art, all of which outlast the human. If for Julia Briggs, Woolf ’s melancholic focus on the inevitability of human mortality can be condensed into the insight that “things frequently outlast us, becoming mementoes of human brevity, of the ephemeral nature of our lives” (47), she also provides a quasi-therapeutic response to that fear in the imagining of a mystical affinity with the realm of nothingness, which negates individuality in order to reconstitute it as impersonal and objective. Adrift from the solid world and isolated from social roles which she fails to articulate, Rachel is a nascent precursor to more obvious artist-figures in Woolf ’s later fiction through her ability to “make an atmosphere and build up a solid mass” (247) by an ironic awareness of her ultimate dispossession through death: “Her dissolution became so complete that she could not raise her finger any more … She was overcome with awe that things should exist at all” (138). As the sense of the immense desolation of the South American landscape increasingly overwhelms the consciousnesses of the other characters by reducing symbolic appropriation to “little meaningless words” (322), Rachel fails at communicating her private vision of death to her lover Terence: “Does it ever seem to you, Terence, that the world is composed entirely of vast blocks of matter, and that we’re nothing but patches of light” (341). Rachel’s fatal illness functions both as the literal culmination of her voyage, and as symbolic of Woolf ’s tragic insight that the price of authentic vision is solipsistic incommensurability. Rachel dies alone because Terence cannot participate in the intensities of Rachel’s private hallucinations. However, the dialectical motor of the novel signals that Rachel’s metaphorical “death by drowning” is the prelude to a merging with objective being figured by the sea: At last the faces went further away; she fell into a deep pool of sticky water, which eventually closed over her head. She saw nothing and heard nothing but a faint booming sound, which was the sound of the sea rolling over her head. While all her tormentors thought that she was dead, she was not dead, but curled up at the bottom of the sea. (397–98) This ecstatic apprehension not only provides an implicit resolution to Helen’s incomplete attempt at mourning by sensing life’s intimate relationship with death, but also articulates a new mode of epistemology which dissolves the split between soul and body toward immersion with the space of negation. The most that Terence can share with Rachel’s death comes with his epiphanic recognition that “the world that lay beneath the superficial world” of “strife and anxiety” is the real one in which one can find ultimate peace. However, that vision cannot sustain him, and he blames himself for his weakness in succumbing to the thought that “things were different from what they are” (400). As with Bernard in The Waves, Terence fails as an artist in confronting death due to the limits of representation that language and literature impose. This inadequacy sheds significant light on how Woolf herself reconfigures the space of her novels to approximate Rachel’s implied vision. By the end of the narrative, death hollows out a space of complete absence, raising what was implied throughout the novel to its fullest pitch: “here was a world in which [Terence] would never see Rachel again” (413). The surviving 220

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members of the expedition attempt to deal with Rachel’s death by trying to impose an explanation of it that serves to confirm their own personal worldviews: one character explains the incident based on Rachel’s bodily constitution, and another aestheticizes the dead by calling them “beautiful” (420). Their various responses ironically underscore the unbearable event of death and their collective refusal to face up to its traumatic impact. As the last chapter of the novel makes clear, Rachel’s death recedes from the genteel talk that shores up questionable notions of class privilege and the continuance of society which is ultimately transient and contingent. However, the presence of death still lingers in the closing pages through the ambiguous presentation of nature, which portends annihilation while gesturing toward rebirth: “The sky was once more a deep and solemn blue, and the shape of the earth was visible at the bottom of the air, enormous, dark, and solid, rising into the tapering mass of the mountain, and pricked here and there on the slopes by the tiny lights of the villas” (436). If all attempts to impose an order upon an event which is precisely the loss of symbolic meaning prove futile, then art that functions as elegy by transforming the “experience of negation [into] … the stimulus to create” (Knox-Shaw 706) might provide its own consolation. To the Lighthouse simultaneously raises the possibility of this condition while exposing its limitations.

After Such Knowledge, What Consolation?: Order and the Limits of Vision in To the Lighthouse Death and the question of how to continue living and creating in the aftermath of loss are central to Woolf ’s aesthetic structure and concerns in To the Lighthouse (1927). Critics of the novel have often quoted Woolf ’s diary entry linking her thoughts about forging a new kind of novel with the elegiac enterprise as such: “I have an idea that I will invent a new name for my books to supplant ‘novel.’ A new – by Virginia Woolf. But what? Elegy?” (DiBattista 68). The absent signifier in this quotation provides an uncanny correlative for the design of the novel, which suspends the eventual trip to the lighthouse by the evocative middle section “Time Passes,” opening up a gap of ten years in which the inhuman passage of time brings with it “negative space” (Rubenstein 42) and the gaping openness of trauma that the third section struggles to transcend. At the heart of the first section of the novel stands Mrs. Ramsay, who embodies a maternal life-force creating domestic order and happiness against the antagonistic forces of indifference, dry rationalism, and unfulfilled expectations. As opposed to the masculine bent to “pursue truth with such astonishing lack of consideration for other people’s feelings [and] to rend the thin veils of civilization so wantonly” (Lighthouse 29), Mrs. Ramsay seeks to create domestic bulwarks against that knowledge which will, for a time, integrate people with a communal sense of being. For instance, as she reads to James, she senses how “the monotonous fall of the waves … beat a measured and soothing tattoo to her thoughts and seemed consolingly to repeat over and over again … the words of some old cradle song” (16–17). Nature and culture are brought into temporary harmony through language, and this sight of “her reading a fairy tale to her boy” seems to William Bankes to have the elegant simplicity of “the solution of a scientific problem” (41). Mrs. Ramsay’s vision culminates in the orchestration of the dinner party, which creates the space through which the boundaries between self and other are temporarily transcended and the existential loneliness imposed by the limits of existence can be forgotten: “Some change at once went through them all, as if this had really happened, and they were all conscious of making a party together in a hollow, on an island; had their common cause against the fluidity out there” (80). Yet, try as Mrs. Ramsay might to arrest the flow of time, she is deeply aware of the ineluctability of transience and how things tend toward inevitable disintegration. In her fight against “her old antagonist, life” (66), 221

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she is as much determined to ensure the continuity of the epiphanic moment through the marriage of Paul and Minta as she is irresistibly drawn toward personal annihilation, implied in a reverie that echoes Keats’s sentiment of being “half in love with easeful Death”: “Losing personality one lost the fret, the hurry, the stir” (53). This train of thought significantly culminates in her imagined merging with the object of her vision, which is the Lighthouse: One could not help attaching oneself to one thing especially of the things one saw; and this thing, the long steady stroke, was her stroke. Often she found herself sitting and looking, sitting and looking, with her work in her hands until she became the thing she looked at – that light for example. (53) Mrs. Ramsay thus becomes the central symbol of the novel, not only functioning as the lost object of desire that Lily Briscoe must struggle with in order to complete her painting, but also fracturing the narrative through the space of her absence. It is thus in the section “Time Passes” that Woolf makes the resonance of absence so palpable by delinking language from any of its claims to anthropocentrism (Beer 41). If the merging of Mrs. Ramsay with the Lighthouse repeats the motif of the loss of individuality in its surrender to the impersonal, the narrative voice of this section returns perception to a world denuded of all human significance. The point is thus not to speculate philosophically, as Mr. Ramsay does, about the reality of a kitchen table when nobody is there, but to examine the tenuous and arbitrary meanings we have imposed on nature and objective being in our own emergence as speaking beings, thus reflecting on what future order can surface after great loss. The narrator thus foregrounds the “profusion” of an “immense darkness” which, in an inversion of the language of Genesis, swallows up the objects of the house, leaving “scarcely anything left of body or mind by which one could say ‘This is he’ or ‘This is she’” (Lighthouse 103). This surrender to the decay wrought by time further enacts a dialectic between the vanishing of human concerns from the narrative (most famously displayed by the parenthetical comment concerning Mrs. Ramsay’s death) and what Minogue describes as “impersonality strengthening its grip as the section progresses, to the point that it is difficult to remember that there is a living author behind it” (287). If The Voyage Out engages in a critique of the values of civilization by relativizing its scope in the contrast to the realm of nature, Woolf shatters all notions of human comportment toward absence through the emphasis on fragmentation. Woolf highlights the point that all representation in language is tragically re-presentation or recollection, an effort to come to terms with the past through retrieving it. The objects that are left behind in the house evoke, as Gaston Bachelard puts it, a haunted realm of significance in which they “kept the human shape and in the emptiness indicated how once they were filled and animated” (106). Language is thus marked by irrevocable loss, and the modal verbs used in the phrases “visions of joy there must have been at the wash-tub” and “some cleavage of the dark there must have been” (Lighthouse 107, emphases mine) indicate how writing is punctured by ineluctable deferment of meaning which ultimately cannot reinstate a full moment of presence, despite what Mrs. Ramsay had thought. Roberta Rubenstein has usefully delineated how the empty signifier “Nothing” seems to dominate the texture of the narrative, arguing how it “assumes architectural form as a vacant house bereft of life” (43). I extend Rubenstein’s insight to argue that, for Woolf, negation structures the ontological conditions of both language and narrative. The resumption of the journey to the Lighthouse in the third section, which at one stroke brings emotional closure by allowing Cam and James to relate to their father, and providing Lily with the artistic vision she needs to complete her painting, is not so much a perfect reconstitution of meaning after the abyss opened up by existential nullity than it is a failed attempt to 222

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revive the significance of the past as represented by Mrs. Ramsay. Lily’s attempts at artistic mastery are thus measured by the distance she places between herself and the earlier artist figure, which ironically hints at her anxieties about the possibility of creating out of the vacuum of the past. Although she senses that with “Mrs Ramsay … faded and gone … we can override her wishes, improve away her limited, old-fashioned ideas” (143), there is no assurance that her art can articulate better aesthetic and cultural paradigms with which to address humanity’s powerful dislocations from fullness of meaning. Mourning thus emerges as the paradoxical source of creativity for the modern artist: Lily’s pained exclamations willing Mrs. Ramsay to return are inextricably linked to her desire that this return will enable “those empty flourishes [on her canvas to] form into shape” (148). In the aftermath of total loss, language always returns belatedly, and what is captured ironically demonstrates the failure of mastery that precipitates the capturing in the first place: “She owed this revelation to [Mrs. Ramsay]” (133). In this light, I read James’s famous epiphanic recognition – that “the other was also the Lighthouse. For nothing was simply one thing” (152) – not as a supreme moment of assertion that modernist art can apprehend the complexities of reality that is multi-dimensional, but as a failure to recover a metaphysics of presence associated with notions of finality, closure, and the termination of mourning (in Lacanian terms, the constitution of subjectivity in the Symbolic realm of language precipitated by the lost object of desire and the traumatic encounter with the unrepresentable Real). The Lighthouse emerges as a signifier that exceeds both presence and absence, paralleling Mrs. Ramsay’s reappearance as spectral apparition. In a similar way, Woolf ’s novel “becomes not a single, fixed entity, but an iridescent, vacillating one” (Lidoff 696). Thus, we can understand the putative “conclusion” of the novel to perform yet another deferment of signification, for the moment Lily has her triumphant vision, the act of narration consigns it to the past: “I have had my vision” (Lighthouse 170, emphasis mine). Vision belongs both to the terrible past and the ephemeral present; language cannot imbue it with more significance beyond that. However, I want to suggest that Woolf rises above her artist figures by acknowledging the sheer materiality of being which grounds all things, including the processes of artistic creativity; the words on a page and the colors on a canvas belong as much to a humanistic heritage as to the perishability of paper and fabric. To do so, the condition of being a subject in language must be washed away, in order to intuit how the things on “a level of ordinary experience” can also seem to have the significance of “a miracle [and] … an ecstasy” (164). The Waves demonstrates how impassive observation of things stripped of meaning gives rise to a new aesthetics of vision which fully countenances death as the horizon of being.

Resting Securely in Impermanence: The Waves as Final Statement The Waves (1931) redefines the way we read by positing a new relationship between the world and the language that attempts to constitute it. In the place of narrative focalization that sustains the diegetic momentum of storytelling, we get a staging of different speech acts set against things of the world that cannot speak. Lanser charts the respective stages of Woolf ’s composition of the “voice” of the text as a gradual erasing of personality: “Woolf first conceived for this novel an omniscient and explicitly female narrator, a ‘She,’ who ends up in the drafts as a vague meditative figure speaking ‘briefly in the first person’ … [before] giving up the authorial form in favour of ‘a series of dramatic soliloquies’” (111–12) which anticipate the later minimalistic experimentations in the theater of Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter. In this way, language is divorced from any of our need to mean; as Kemp highlights, “the writer no longer converts things into centres of value … [for] things imprint themselves on consciousness irrespective of ‘sense’ … [and] details become intransigent and opaque” (512). In what can be 223

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argued to be an expansion of the aesthetics of vision in “Time Passes” as applied to an entire text, the novel’s nine sections are framed by an objective rendering of the world in the course of a single day. In these prologues, Woolf charts the interplay of light and shadow unencumbered by metaphysical signification; as the rising of the sun turns the landscape into “one incandescence which lifted the weight of the woollen grey sky on top of it and turned it into a million atoms of soft blue” (Waves 3), color and texture are presented as pure signifiers that cannot avail themselves for human signification. As light provides its own source of vision, it also gives things their proper place in a flow where life and death appear as natural processes: It gave to everything its exact measure of colour; to the sandhills their innumerable glitter, to the wild grasses their glancing green; or it fell upon the arid waste of the desert, here wind-scourged into furrows, here swept into desolate cairns, here sprinkled with stunted dark-green jungle trees. (86) Against this unity, human speech may be read as a falling from nature in its insistence of signification that creates arbitrary boundaries between self and other, hence reading death as the absolute opposite of life. The Waves criticizes language’s potential to divide and separate as much as it “caricatures patriarchal ceremonies [such as] partings for schools, graduation ceremonies, religious sermons, the mating rituals at dance parties, and school reunions” (Cramer 449) wherein the façade of solidarity and shared values disintegrates as soon as each character recognizes his or her utter isolation. In fact, Woolf demonstrates how language entrenches disenfranchisement in terms of gender: whereas Bernard tries to “lay hands upon the world” (Waves 39) through narrative and Neville senses “an order in this world” by understanding the difference incarnated in “each tense” which “means differently” (11), Susan is anguished by how she is “tied down with single words” (8), and Rhoda tragically intuits how she is forever “outside the loop” (11) created by the recirculation of meaning in words, prefiguring her suicide. And yet, each character senses how language ceaselessly points toward that which exceeds it. Bernard’s inability to (di)still the moment in “some final refrigeration” due to his use of “warm soluble words” (39) reminds him of the dissolution of conceptual edifices which returns being to the ebb and flow constituted by the movement of the waves. Both Susan and Neville resist being “mere phrases in Bernard’s story” (40), for in opposition to his tendency to seek “integration” (46) through narrative, the deepest core of human personality “cannot be tossed about, or float gently, or mix with other people” (57). Indeed, as Love points out, each of the monologues of the six characters particularizes itself as “a creative thrust of individuality that rises wavelike out of silence and recedes into silence once more” (199); the moment of articulation emerges and returns to its own demise. As Naremore argues, “even while the voices assert their personalities, they imply knowledge of a life without personality, an undifferentiated world like the one described by the interchapters” (173). Threatened by the impending prospect of dissolution which renders all meaning ultimately transient and contingent, the characters project their collective sense of value onto Percival, who like Mrs. Ramsay can impose order upon flux due to his embodiment of patriarchal ideals. Inasmuch as Percival functions as a metonym for the British empire and the standards of Western civilization, his presence recuperates the workings of time and history into a coherent narrative of progress and enlightenment. Bernard thus constructs an idealized image of Percival which sees him “righting” the disorder in India and solving “the Oriental problem” by “applying the standards of the West” and “by using the violent language that is natural to him” (Waves 79). With his masculine confidence imposing forceful order onto the otherness of the landscape, “the world that had been shrivelled, rounds itself; remote provinces are fetched up 224

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out of darkness; we see muddy roads, twisted jungle, swarms of men … as within our scope, part of our proud and splendid province” (80). Percival’s imaginary presence thus supplements the absence at the core of the other characters, revealing an utter lack that not only exposes the absurdity of his rhetorical construction, but also demystifies the British empire’s claims to permanence. Indeed, Percival’s bathetic death from a fall (and his ironic echo of Arthurian legend) only makes clear his textual function as an absent signifier with no reality beyond the symbolic register of language. Woolf thus continues her critique of the ideological discourses of politics and culture that are violent, and ultimately illusory, impositions of order upon the nature of things as they find their place within the totality of temporal being. By juxtaposing “the historical moment of the nation” symbolized by Percival “against the calendar of astronomical time” (Dalgarno 109), Woolf folds the transience of historical narrative into a generalized understanding of ephemerality. McIntire argues how Woolf in The Waves targets “the violence of monologism – of forcing the truth-value of a single discursive and rhetorical understanding onto an uncontainable diversity of voices, ideas and idioms” (31), further suggesting how the hero-worship of Percival signals Woolf ’s evocation of the dangers of Fascism. I shift McIntire’s focus in emphasizing how Woolf ’s main concern is not so much pitting monologic attitudes toward truth against dialogic ones, but in underscoring how the concept of the individual subject is intertwined with ideological constructions of permanence and stability that cannot give voice to what Woolf’s fiction gestures toward. Woolf enacts the death of the author to give birth to the sense of a seeing without a subject. It is thus in the transformation Bernard undergoes with respect to language that Woolf comes to what might be seen as a final statement regarding the final annihilation of subjectivity. If he starts by using words as opaque screens between himself and reality, thereby “help[ing] him attain that state of strength which alleviates for a time the terrifying spectacle of pure phenomena” (Moore 229), he ends by recognizing how language as thematic domination must give way to a poetics of pure observation which allows things to shine and present themselves in all their frailty and transience. He becomes as spectral as Mrs. Ramsay and all the other ghosts that haunt the texts of Woolf, emphasizing the paradoxical status of the work of art that emerges out of absence and mourning. In this state of (non)being, he “walks alone in a new world, never trodden; brushing new flowers, unable to speak save in a child’s words of one syllable; without shelter from phrases” (Waves 171, emphasis mine). As with Blanchot and Rilke, language does not provide the self with protection with which to escape death’s interminability. Instead, language turns us toward the impossible space of our annihilation, which is the horizon of being. Bernard adumbrates a new way of using language, which allows perception to penetrate concepts without hiding. In its wake, “loveliness returns as one looks” (Waves 172), as the old language is left behind in the act of perceiving the world anew. However, as Moore reminds us, Woolf cannot return to the mode of “pastoral sensibility” (236) and reawaken outworn literary tropes in the hope they can return us to where we were before. The perception of the world points the observer toward “things in themselves” (Waves 176) when “all this little affair of ‘being’ is over” (172). Shorn of all human constructs, nature is not just inimical toward our need for comfort and solace, but also forms the primordial space where all is “immeasurably receptive, holding everything, trembling with fullness, yet clear, contained” (174). By the end of the novel, utterance once again recedes into objectivity, as if language returns to its source of silence, ready to resurface in future lives and times. If in her fiction Woolf continually searches for an order that transcends language and appearances, then I argue that she achieves this in The Waves in the patterned evocation of the space of death as the abysmal lack of foundation to which animate and inanimate being return to. If the image of Percival riding on a horse is repeated more fruitfully with Bernard riding against death with his spear, this clarion call to 225

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resume the fight against time linking all of Woolf ’s artists cannot be divorced from an unacknowledged commitment to an embrace with mortality as danse macabre: Against you I will fling myself, unvanquished and unyielding, O Death! The waves broke on the shore. (177)

Conclusion The ironic apostrophizing of death that concludes The Waves aptly marks Woolf ’s gradual incorporation of the materiality of language into the scope of narrative, along with the evacuation of subjectivity and its will to impose illusory permanence upon that which will not guarantee stability. By writing obsessively about death and dissolution, Woolf brings language to the utmost condition of its (im)possibility, thereby transforming it from an indifferent system of signification into a vessel of historical meaning which signifies beyond the deaths of individuals and ideological systems. In a Hegelian fashion, language achieves its appropriate measure of determination through the process of its negation. In fact, death effects the transmissibility of narrative, for it opens up the reader’s affective experience of the past in terms of an absence held in the presence of language.2 The space of death thereby measures out not only the writer’s relationship to his or her tradition as something that should be continued because it is disrupted,3 but also returns perception to the contours of material and cultural objects that cannot survive annihilation, but have to be revivified through the artistic gaze.

Notes 1

2 3

For Maurice Blanchot, the “mastery” associated with transcendent vision is predicated upon the writer’s ability to abstract himself from the anonymous temporality of writing, which evanesces spacing as absolute interruption: “The writer’s mastery is not in the hand that writes, the ‘sick’ hand that never lets the pencil go – that can’t let it go because what it holds it doesn’t really hold; what holds it belongs to the realm of shadows, and it is itself a shade … Mastery consists in the power to stop writing, to interrupt what is being written, thereby restoring to the present instant its rights, its decisive trenchancy” (25). This aesthetic pulsation of presence which inaugurates the modernist (re)configuration of time as the precipitation of a spatial form in narrative is of course foregrounded by Joseph Frank in his seminal reading of Marcel Proust, James Joyce, and Djuna Barnes. The relationship between the transmission of experience and the authority of the storyteller whose act resurrects the embeddedness of narrative within the lifeworld of a people is examined by Walter Benjamin in his essay “The Storyteller: Reflections on the Works of Nikolai Leskov.” The dialectic between tradition and modernity is of course explored by T. S. Eliot in “Tradition and the Individual Talent.”

Works Cited Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics of Space, translated by Maria Jolas. Penguin, 1964. Beer, Gillian. Virginia Woolf: The Common Ground. Edinburgh UP, 1996. Beja, Morris. Epiphany in the Modern Novel. Peter Owen Limited, 1971. Benjamin, Walter. “The Storyteller: Reflections on the Works of Nikolai Leskov.” Illuminations, edited by Hannah Arendt, translated by Harry Zohn. Schocken Books, 1968, pp. 83–109. Blanchot, Maurice. The Space of Literature, translated by Ann Smock. U of Nebraska P, 1982. Briggs, Julia. Reading Virginia Woolf. Edinburgh UP, 2006. Cramer, Patricia. “Jane Harrison and Lesbian Plots: The Absent Lover in Virginia Woolf ’s ‘The Waves.’” Studies in the Novel, vol. 37, no. 4, 2005, pp. 443–463. Dalgarno, Emily. Virginia Woolf and the Visible World. Cambridge UP, 2001. DiBattista, Maria. Virginia Woolf ’s Major Novels: The Fables of Anon. Yale UP, 1980.

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Spatialization of Death in Woolf Eliot, T. S. Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot. Edited by Frank Kermode. Faber and Faber, 1975. Foley, Matt. Haunting Modernisms: Ghostly Aesthetics, Mourning, and Spectral Resistance Fantasies in Literary Modernism. Palgrave, 2017. Frank, Joseph. The Idea of Spatial Form. Rutgers UP, 1991. Frye, Joanne S. “The Voyage Out: Thematic Tensions and Narrative Techniques.” Virginia Woolf: Critical Assessments: Volume III, edited by Eleanor McNees. Helm Information Ltd, 1994, pp. 22–40. Kemp, Sandra. “‘But how to describe a world seen without a self ?’ Feminism, Fiction and Modernism.” Virginia Woolf: Critical Assessments: Volume IV, edited by Eleanor McNees. Helm Information Ltd, 1994, pp. 509–526. Knox-Shaw, Peter. “To the Lighthouse: The Novel as Elegy.” Virginia Woolf: Critical Assessments: Volume III, edited by Eleanor McNees. Helm Information Ltd, 1994, pp. 699–721. Lanser, Susan Sandra. Fictions of Absence: Feminism, Modernism, Virginia Woolf. Cornell UP, 1992. Lidoff, Joan. “Virginia Woolf ’s Feminine Sentence: The Mother-Daughter World of To the Lighthouse.” Virginia Woolf: Critical Assessments: Volume III, edited by Eleanor McNees. Helm Information Ltd, 1994, pp. 681–698. Love, Jean O. Worlds in Consciousness: Mythopoetic Thought in the Novels of Virginia Woolf. U of California P, 1970. McIntire, Gabrielle. “Heteroglossia, Monologism, and Fascism: Bernard Reads ‘The Waves.’” Narrative, vol. 13, no. 1, 2005, pp. 29–45. Minogue, Sally. “Was It a Vision? Structuring Emptiness in ‘To the Lighthouse.’” Journal of Modern Literature, vol. 21, no. 2, 1997–1998, pp. 281–294. Moore, Madeline. “Nature and Community: A Study of Cyclical Reality in The Waves.” Virginia Woolf: Revaluation and Continuity, edited by Ralph Freedman. U of California P, 1980, pp. 219–240. Naremore, James. The World Without a Self: Virginia Woolf and the Novel. Yale UP, 1973. Nicholls, Peter. Modernisms: A Literary Guide. 2nd ed. Palgrave, 2009. Rubenstein, Roberta. “‘I Meant Nothing by the Lighthouse’: Virginia Woolf’s Poetics of Negation.” Journal of Modern Literature, vol. 31, no. 4, 2008, pp. 36–53. Smythe, Karen. “Virginia Woolf ’s Elegiac Enterprise.” NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction, vol. 26, no. 1, 1992, pp. 64–79. Walsh, Kelly S. “The Unbearable Openness of Death: Elegies of Rilke and Woolf.” Journal of Modern Literature, vol. 32, no. 4, 2009, pp. 1–21. Woolf, Virginia. The Complete Shorter Fiction of Virginia Woolf. Edited by Susan Dick. The Hogarth Press, 1985. Woolf, Virginia. To the Lighthouse. Edited by David Bradshaw. Oxford UP, 2008. Woolf, Virginia. “A Sketch of the Past.” Moments of Being, 2nd ed. edited by Jeanne Schulkind. Harcourt Brace & Company, 1985. Woolf, Virginia. The Voyage Out. Edited by Lorna Sage. Oxford UP, 2009. Woolf, Virginia. The Waves. Edited by David Bradshaw. Oxford UP, 2008.

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21 “MEMENTO MORI” Memory, Death, and Posterity in Singapore’s Poetry Jen Crawford

Modernization, Death, and Poetic Strategy “Writing about death is a small triumph over death,” wrote Singapore poet Yeow Kai Chai in an account of his own poetics in 2014 (“Death”). For writers and other cultural practitioners in contemporary Singapore, the implications of “triumphing over death” are social and civic as much as they are personal and creative. Familiar habitats and landmarks in the small city-state are frequently a casualty of the extraordinary pace at which public, corporate, and residential sites have been remade over the past few decades. Renovation of the cityscape is a high priority for the state, part of a comprehensive program of modernization in place since Singapore assumed self-governance in 1959 (Wee 124). Redevelopment of the city’s physical sites and structures has intervened in the continuities of embodied cultural life, disrupting the “localised sense of community constituted by social biographies, affective ties, local referents and daily routines [in order] to make way for the ‘imagined community’ of nation-building” (Yeoh and Kong 60, citing Benedict Anderson). As official and unofficial sites of cultural practice are dismantled on the ground, some are reimagined within literature. These acts of literary memorialization emerge both independently and with the support and encouragement of state curation, as in the example of an officially designated receptacle for citizen remembrance, the Singapore Memory Project. The literary works featured on this website, as elsewhere, show this reimagining to be consistently bound up with images of death, as writers commemorate and grieve lost sites and engage in various ways with the state’s own aspirations to “triumph over death” through creative renewal. This chapter uses the Singapore Memory Project to offer an opening survey in its consideration of the relationships among death, memory, and civic engagement in Singapore’s poetry and its curation into official discourse. It then goes on to explore, beyond the site, representations of death in the works of three living poets – Edwin Thumboo, Boey Kim Cheng and Yeow Kai Chai – who each offer distinctive and very different negotiations of the theme. Where Thumboo’s work examines nation-building through claims to civic perpetuity that defy the finality of death, Boey takes an elegiac stance in relation to modernization. Yeow’s work, the primary focus here, responds instead with an aesthetics of teeming mortality and entangled civic engagement. Its dense playfulness points out the irony of the struggle to “triumph over death,” evoking urban crowding and situating it within a broader vision of 228

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human hubris and biocultural saturation. Thumboo’s and Boey’s works are well known and celebrated in Singaporean letters, with their poetic influence visible in the works of other poets and their achievements taken up in criticism. Yeow’s destabilization of the lyric mode and deployment of representational disruption offer an important, if less-often considered contribution to Singaporean poetry’s writing of modernization.

Grief and the Virtualization of Attachment In Singapore, geographical signs of political and economic hegemony are primarily projected through the state-sanctioned remodeling of the city. Renovation dismantles the old, creating the opportunity to define the trajectories of the national narrative. “Given the intimate connections between the spatial and the temporal,” write cultural geographers Brenda Yeoh and Lily Kong, “the state’s active and prominent hand in constructing place must necessarily mean an active and prominent hand in constructing history” (62). “Defining the past […] involves defining the nature of place in the present” (61), which in turn necessarily defines and asserts a particular future. This construction of the future is closely tied to the vision and aspirations of the People’s Action Party (PAP), which has held power in Singapore since its ascendancy in 1959; as cultural theorist C. J. W.-L. Wee observes, from the earliest years of PAP governance, “[t]he ongoing eradication of the old colonial city became an expression of the spatial will-to-power of PAP modernization” (124). With rapid increases in population density and an accompanying intensification of land use, not only the city’s urban core but also its ancillary spaces, including cemeteries, farmlands, kampongs, and beaches, have been subject to repurposing, usually with little physical trace left of their previous functions and histories. This modernization has effected radical change not only of physical sites but of the cultural practices that accompany their use as lived spaces. Much work has been done across the cultural sphere to contend with the rate of change and its personal and social implications. Individual artists draw on the capacity of art to evoke private and shared memory, and their efforts dovetail with the state’s efforts to use arts and heritage investments to foster and hold virtualized representations of place and community attachment – described in terms of the nurturing of “bonds,” “belonging,” and “social cohesion” – in the face of the loss of physical sites of cultural continuity. The Singapore Memory Project is one such heritage investment. Described by the state as “democratic” (Ng 4330), it has individuals contribute “memories,” in the form of written texts and images documenting and reflecting on Singapore’s past, to a publicly accessible website. This flagship project has, as of early 2019, more than a million citizen “memories added,” well short of the original five-million entry target (Cheng 69), but still representative of a large-scale government and popular investment. The poetry of established writers has a notable role in the project, with a gallery of poems and recorded readings, “Poetry and Place,” compiled in 2013 and still featured as a “Highlight” in early 2019. No editor is named on the site, which notes the collaboration with the National Institute of Education and the Arts House. The poetic works selected for this gallery show a heavy emphasis on a particular kind of poetic remembering that is widespread in Singaporean poetry: the commemoration of places irrevocably changed through modernization, with concrete details of sites and the lifestyles they once anchored invoked through lyrical reflection. The titles of the poems indicate both this dominant focus and something of its association with death: “Remembering Jalan Kayu” (Aaron Maniam), “The Portrait of a Sentenced Library” (Alfian Sa’at), “Elegy for Changi Beach” (Robert Yeo). “Nostalgia is a habitation with many names,” notes Edwin Thumboo’s poem “Bukit Panjang: hill village town,” and in this collection of 43 poems, longing for the 229

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past is variously inflected with notes of regret, protest and relinquishment. There is pleasure shared with the reader through the verbal “re-membering” (E. Tay 78) of places and times past, and there are occasional celebratory or hopeful moments as sustenance to cultural life is found even in emblems of change, memorialization, and conscious nation-building (as in Grace Chia’s “Kucinta” or Alvin Pang’s “Finding Enlightenment in the HDB Heartland”). The overriding affect, though, is unmistakably one of grief. An introductory note provided on the site from Boey Kim Cheng on his poem “Change Alley” describes the impulse to memorialization that is implicit in many of the poems: following the loss of the iconic marketplace Change Alley “in a tide of makeover,” Boey felt “a profound sense of loss,” with the loss itself becoming a founding principle of his creative activity. For me [Change Alley] seems to be a source, an omphalos, of what I have done, who I have become, and I am still the child held captive before it, wanting to enter the dim passage lit with voices, faces and memories that will never fade. Boey connects the loss of Change Alley as he once knew it with the death of his father, and both become synecdochal of the loss of Singapore as he once knew it. A similar association is made in Gwee Li Sui’s poem “Edward,” which associates the decline of an aging transvestite with the closure of the red-light district that once supported him. Other poets make a more metaphorical association between the landscape and the trials of the human body. Lee Tzu Pheng’s renowned poem “Singapore River” describes the river subject to renovation as an old woman who has undergone a heart bypass – which may have saved her life, but which has also erased her history. Lee’s poem is consciously echoed in Joshua Ip’s “Bukit Timah, Singapore,” which “updates” Lee’s poem by comparing a renovated road to a heart patient – in both poems, as in Gwee’s poem, it is left open to interpretation whether the character (both of the poem and of the nation) will survive. Other poems leave no doubt. Eileen Chong’s “Shophouse, Victoria St,” records memories of extended family life in a shophouse that has been home to four generations, until the death, “alone,” of the speaker’s great-grandmother; the poem archives memories as remnants of a lost lifestyle. A second poem by Chong, “Singapore,” “examines […] architectural, cultural, and familial amnesia,” as its note describes. The poem’s references to Change Alley, “the ghosts of red lights” and “long-dead horses” make overt connections between the modernization project, loss, and the persistence of memory – while also nodding to Boey’s work in this vein. For Chong, writing like Boey in a period of expatriation, this persistence is an ambivalent, perhaps unchosen bond with the home country that seems to make a ghost of the speaker: “It’s as though I can never leave.” Yet her poems, like others in the collection, are also both conscious and determined in their work to counteract amnesia. Robert Yeo’s “Elegy for Changi Beach” ends with the aphorism that “what we lose as adults we lose indeed,” suggesting that it is the very prospect of such irrevocable loss that prompts poetry to its memory work. The poems featured here, almost all originally published in the 1990s or later, are quite consistent in their use of the lyric mode to reach across elegiac distance toward recuperation. Jonathan Culler writes that “lyrics are poems made to be uttered by readers, who may come ritualistically to occupy the place of the lyric I” (126), and most of these poems draw on a shared palette of freeverse lineation and aural accents (alliteration, assonance, controlled rhythms, repeated words and structures) to stress voicing and achieve this song-like ritualistic function. Culler also asserts that the lyric is “at bottom, a statement about this world” (124) in which tensions between “fictional elements and […] ritualistic elements” may play out (126). In these poems, “this world” is clearly marked out by geographical and temporal references to Singapore of the post-independence 230

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period. Many use a first-person speaking voice to anchor the utterance within this world and its historical circumstances; others use a third-person voice and metaphorical conceits, while leaving intact that impression of geographical and historical faithfulness. The invitation to the reader to occupy the poem through its voicing is also made through the handling of tense in ways that emphasize the poem as enunciation, often through the use of the non-progressive present tense to suspend incidents described in the “strange time of the lyric now” (Culler 128) – for example, Chong’s “Shophouse,” which begins “The lame man draws the accordion gate shut,” though it closes with a funeral described in past tense, as though finally yielding to an end. Frequently the poems pull past incident “into the present of lyric enunciation” (Culler 127), such as Boey’s “Ahead My Father Moves,” in which that present is flexible enough to encompass both the past and its future: “I know the moment when he will […] pause to light the cigarette that will keep/ him going but also kill him.” Such flexible and tenacious uses of the present of enunciation are key to its elegiac capacity, as Paul Hetherington notes in a 2019 essay. Through them, “lyric utterance is able to conjure what is past or passing and hold it within a poem’s immediacy of expression.” This is not to say that lyric poetry actually recuperates what it conjures. Rather, Hetherington writes, quoting Richard Stamelman, “with [its] ‘insistence on speaking’ […] lyric utterance becomes a form of present lament for the impossibility – despite the attempt – of ‘chang[ing] an irreversible absence and shap[ing] it into a tangible present.’” It is notable that this “present lament” survives so distinctively the curated interaction between literature and the state presentation of the “Singapore Story.” Images of death, and the expressions of grief that they support, do not assert the narrative of “progress and optimism” that geographers Chang and Huang identified in 2005 as being key to the state’s presentation of the “Singapore Story” (269). Yet one might read the prioritization of loss within this collection as being consistent both with the poetry of the time and with the heritage activity that was used to shore up government hegemony in the years leading up to Singapore’s Jubilee (2015), “[involving] the sponsorship of widespread national nostalgia in ways that depoliticise the past” (Tan 243). In this light the role of the poems on the Singapore Memory Project might be seen as therapeutic or even palliative, offering cathartic relief, or a roadmap of acceptable memories and expressive responses to the state’s hegemonic assertions over heritage and history. Not all memories and responses are acceptable; Tan notes that those in the literary arts enjoy relative freedom to venture on issues that fall outside the authorized version of the “Singapore Story,” pointing to Alfian bin Sa’at’s poems on political detainees and exiles (absent in this showcase, though published elsewhere) as an example of the subject matter that often meets censorship in the more popular media of documentary film and blogs. Individual poems always both exceed and elude any purpose they might be put to, and national narratives manifest not only in top-down directives, but also through a much broader interpellation of drives and understandings – for which reasons it would be unwise to overinterpret the inclusions and exclusions of this gallery. That said, the commonalities of this collection offer a window into the bounds and desires of the sponsoring narrative in the period of its presentation, and in particular its openness to expressions of grief that reinforce the value of an affirmatively shared, if now virtualized, heritage. What this window doesn’t provide, but which the following discussion aims at, is historical context for the poetics at play, both shaped by and shaping what is available to be expressed.

Edwin Thumboo and the Crafting of Posterity Singaporean architect Tay Kheng Soon notes that there is a socio-economic advantage to selective forgetting: “To survive and prosper in material terms, we have become the generation 231

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that remembers to forget,” he writes, in an afterword to the poetry anthology No Other City (182). “We forget what is prescribed not to remember.” Tay’s comment appears in “Zooming Out,” an essay which, in considering the work of poetry in relation to civic narratives, underscores the necessity of distance perspectives, including those of memory, for the achievement of narrative continuity in art and subjecthood. Such scope is not always easily found, Tay suggests, particularly for those who experience themselves as inside a national story as its objects, rather than outside, crafting it. “A river must have a start and an end,” he writes, “but our view of the present reality has taken the form of discrete slices of disembodied time, soundbites in the official storyline” (182). Edwin Thumboo is persistently described as the “unofficial poet laureate” and founding figure of Singapore’s English-language poetry, partly because he has been overt about his participation in crafting a national narrative in ways that have at times overlapped with the “official” storyline. The most renowned poems of Thumboo’s output since the 1950s have been devoted to what he describes in “National Library” as “preserv[ing] the past, ensur[ing] the future” (A Third Map 99). Though Thumboo has described his own voice as that of the “man-in-the-street” (in 1977s “The Way Ahead,” Gods Can Die 58), the perspective assumed in these well-known poems is the long view. Famously, “The Way Ahead” describes a poet overtly undertaking the task of imagining the city. With his collaborators (“A Professor, much travelled and artistic,/A Senior Civil Servant who knew the way ahead/The Town Planner”), he is authorized in this work both by the state and by his own willingness to assume a visionary perspective. Thumboo’s nationalistic poems hold their public station partly because of their work to memorialize historical milestones (the “9th of August” poems, “May 1954,” etc.). But where memory has been fundamental to this project, it is generally cast in terms of its service to the future. For Thumboo, drawing on the lyrical present tense, The perfect poem is future tense. Meanwhile, neat incompletion must suffice. Life goes on. Meditate on words for modern times, alive to This surge, this minute, and the next, curving Towards us, to reveal poet on poem’s calling. (“A Poet Reading” 182) The eye (a public eye), is engaged in a deliberate refocusing from the moment-to-moment “surge” to an emergent destiny. The socius waits for a poet, and the poem’s calling includes the project of modernization. “The city is what we make it,/You and I: We are the City” continues “The Way Ahead.” If there is a certain finality to the visions projected, that finality does not figure as death or remembrance, but as transcendence into a sublime imperishability: “A City should be the reception we give ourselves,/What we prepare for our posterity” – a future in which polity and civitas, as collective self, survive. Perhaps in an attempt to perfect the sublimation into the possibilities of the future, “National Library 2007” (Still Travelling 58) updates Thumboo’s 1993 epithet to “Know the past, live the present, command a future.” Though the past is not fully relinquished, in the wake of the demolition of the iconic library building that was the site of the earlier poem, the replacement of “preserve” with the virtualized “know” synchronizes with the modernization project’s own ongoing revisions. Poet and critic Gwee Li Sui, in a nuanced and comprehensive appraisal of Thumboo’s contribution, cautions against conflating “the state’s and the poet’s form of nation-building” in “the familiar charge that Thumboo writes to endorse and vindicate the PAP’s political dominance” (“Understanding Edwin Thumboo”). At the same time, he acknowledges the work’s own ambivalent relationship to state power: “as the realms of postcolonial empowerment and 232

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state complicity often overlap, we just cannot be sure which is pursued only in the other’s service or whether both are, in fact, embraced.” In any case, Gwee notes that the impact on Thumboo’s peers and inheritors is apparent, producing both “a whole genre of fiercely nationalistic […] writing” followed by a reactive rejection, since the mid-1990s, of the “symbiosis between art and politics” that has come to be seen as the defining feature of Thumboo’s work. Rejected, too, is the relentless future focus, creating the space for the exploration of death and its images and affects as concretizations of the ever-receding past.

Boey Kim Cheng and Elegiac Distance The key figure in this turn is Boey Kim Cheng. The exemplary title poem of his 2012 collection, Clear Brightness, was occasioned by news of a cemetery closure, pinpointing a moment when the locus of memory shifts from physical to representational space. “Clear Brightness” is written from the perspective of a poet who has left the city-state, and like much of Boey’s writing, it works toward the expression of an exilic gap that becomes symbolically available to all who are displaced from the past. The collection opens and closes in Australia, where bushfires fill the air with ash, pushing the poet into memories of tending ancestral graves with his family on the day of Qing Ming (“Clear Brightness” or “Ancestor’s Day”) in his Singaporean past. In the present, the poet reflects on “grave” news from Singapore: the cemeteries are dug up, razed, the dead expelled, their bones unhoused, ashed and relocated to columbaria to make room for progress. No more tomb-sweeping and picnicking with the dead. (Clear Brightness 1) The poem references one of a series of cemetery closures that raise the question of what to do with cultural and physical remains that are excessive to the space allotted to them through social practice – of what happens when, to borrow theater visionary Kuo Pao Kun’s formulation, “the coffin is too big for the hole.” Boey’s work, as we have already seen, answers by turning toward the affective grip of the past, rather than away from it. Shirley Chew makes the compelling assessment that Boey’s poems “are not only a critique of progress, of the nation’s ‘high-rise dreams’ (AF170) […] the poems sing and, in singing, call forth the Singapore he knows and remembers, keeping – against heedless changes as well as token nostalgia – its history alive, living, and meaningful” (51). But fundamental to this singing is its close attention to the experiential logic and emotional range of loss. In the passage just quoted, the violence of the change is conveyed by the energetic onslaught of the verbs that describe the exhumation (“dug up,” “razed,” “expelled,” “unhoused”) as balanced with the flat single noun, “progress,” that describes its rationale. Public loss is personal grief, as conveyed by the layering of time frames in the images of ash. The fate of the cemeteries is inextricable from the other losses that cross the distance of the poet’s relocation: the ash-drifts of the burning bush are also those of childhood’s burnt joss, the charred remains of the trees are also the remains of the speaker’s father, cremated even before the death of the cemeteries. At the moment of the poem’s narration, the poet’s emigration away from the “progress” of modernization is a fait accompli. Yet this displacement also provides the speaking position from which the poem is narrated, so that the event of emigration may be seen as a fundamental part of the poet’s response to what he describes. Boey does not represent emigration in itself 233

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as offering the kind of self-renewal that would provide a sense of full resolution. Though images of Australian bushfire might promise renewal, this promise is not directly articulated in Boey’s poem; instead, the layers of fire present multiple iterations of the old life and its conflagrations, which may be fled but not escaped. Fire is followed by the settling of ash, on which image the poem ends. Ash represents the speaker’s ambiguous desires in relation to the past and the home that’s been left: “on my sleep it is still raining/ash, flakes falling like memory, on my dead settling/like a snowdrift of forgetting.” Chew takes “the enigmatic phrase, ‘flakes falling like memory’ (CB 2), to mean the dissolution of memory (and not, even though this is a possibility, the activity of memory), [making] the transition into ‘like a snowdrift of forgetting’ both inevitable and starkly pessimistic.” I suggest that the ambiguities invoke questions that run to the core of emigrant experience, but also to the experience of any who see their landmarks vanish: In response to loss, is one wiser to remember or forget? Might memory in the forms of nostalgic fantasy be a form of forgetting? Does forgetting offer danger or comfort? The poem is set close to Christmas, and its images of snow and ash are significant both to Boey’s negotiation of these questions, and to his choice and craft of English-language poetry in the elegiac mode as a formal response to the incursions of “progress.” For Australians and Singaporeans alike, a snowy white Christmas is one of a set of inherited images that shift genre from realism to fantasy by virtue of being transplanted from the seat of the old empire to the colonies. In the body of Boey’s work, such images are close to the impulse to poetry, part of a pastoral landscape found in the works of his early influences (in particular, John Keats and Edward Thomas), that he has adapted to a function explicitly described in his memoir, Between Stations: Poetry was an escape for me but it also offered a greater and more comforting sense of reality; the Singapore of gleaming towers and malls seemed unreal, an illusion I was countering with my own images of England, my England. In literary terms, it was a pastoral I needed to resist the conditions of postmodernity and postcolonialism. (138) Where Boey as reader might have escaped into this imaginary other, Boey as writer performs a different operation: in the schema of “Clear Brightness” and other poems, personal grief is mobilized further in its social dimension – its resistance – through the poems’ function as public documents. Nonetheless, the risk and temptation of amnesia remains active at the center of this relationship, present throughout the poems’ “continuous signature of absence” (“Painting into Life,” After the Fire 121).

Yeow Kai Chai and Teeming Presence The title of Yeow Kai Chai’s “Memento Mori” poems, in its injunction to remember one’s death, stands guard against the temptation to amnesia and the “snowdrift of forgetting.” The sequence of 12 poems across 40 pages, which appears in his 2006 collection, Pretend I’m Not Here, positions memory not as a keeper or inventor of the past, but as the harbinger and witness of projected mortality. Together with the poems’ kinetically lively use of situational parataxis, this positioning can be read as a kind of intervention into the poetics of posterity as command of the future, and an alternative to elegiac distance as spatial relation to the modernized present. Yeow’s poems evoke an experience of place that is defined by a density of surfaces and density of activity. In Yeow’s sequence, the need to find a means for encountering urban density is formalized not around the signature of absence, but through a structuring affect of teeming presence. Density is most obviously present in Yeow’s use of parataxis, in the frequent 234

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clause-by-clause and line-by-line addition of apparently disjunctive situating terms that the poems move through but rarely sustain or elaborate. Yeow’s poetry is unusual in Singapore for his early exploration of this technique, one sign of the interest he has taken in postmodern North American poetry of the Language period. Indeed, the relationship of poetic parataxis to contemporary urbanity has a significant role in definitions of the literary postmodern that circulated in this period; the link appears, for example, in Fredric Jameson’s “The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,” which discusses how “urban squalor […] expressed in commodification, and […] an unparalleled quantum leap in the alienation of daily life in the city can now be experienced in the form of a strange new hallucinatory exhilaration” (146). Jameson found that exhilaration expressed, among other places, in the “New Sentence” of Language poetry, as well as in city architecture. It’s worth noting that Jameson’s emphasis in discussing the New Sentence was on its “discontinuities” or “schizophrenic fragmentation,” but that others have recognized the parataxis he describes there as (in the words of Bob Perelman) a “gesture of continuity”(64), because it is an expressive mode that can explicitly acknowledge and inhabit the fragmentation of contemporary experience without requiring the speaker to appear to transcend it. Death immediately announces itself as a presence in the “Memento Mori” poems; the imagining of death is in the title both of the sequence and, less directly, in the name of the collection in which they appear, Pretend I’m Not Here. It is also the negative complement, activated through transience, of the teeming that organizes affect at several levels of the sequence. One of these levels is that of the action of resituation, which is immediately present in “Memento Mori I”: Flogged, I break down in full, 5,000 kilometres away from the Faradised House of Wax where you remain hog-tied calling for kelp. The ghostwriter’s left a lasso of tadpoles for your convenience while a subtle Tom or two peep over my casserole despite spam protection and a winking bedpost to be wary of creepers. (16) At the denotative level the imaginary environment is in a state of constant dissolution and remaking; one is hard-pressed to take such lines as a “statement about this world,” whether Singaporean or otherwise. One can blend the presented concepts to construct a narrative situation (a reinvention of the film House of Wax? Mutual victims, brothers or lovers continents apart?), but unstated terms must be invented rather than assumed, and new terms as they are added are likely to replace rather than elaborate on what has come before. Also unlikely to be sustained are the poem’s actors, who often bear names that, with their definite articles and nominalized actions, suggest allegorical heft (“The ghostwriter,” “the hitchhiker,” “the Spectral Gleaner”) that the poems soon blithely undercut. The names are

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the characters’ only concrete performance of their roles, and they almost never return, unless one interprets them as versions of other characters. “I” and “you” do appear repeatedly, and while they are easier to imagine as continuous presences, their identity is also kept in motion: “depending on the television/neighborhood, I am also you” reads “Memento Mori V” (58). The final poem asks, in unattributed quotation marks, “Where do I begin/And when does the rest of the city take over?” (118). The “city” is in some sense at least the crowds of characters moving through the poems; there are 41 humanoid individuals or groups named in the first (seven-page) poem alone, each engaged in activity that creates syntactical but not causal links with the other objects, events, and characters. Read as a response to Thumboo’s all-in inducement to civic participation (“We Are the City”), Yeow’s question about identity suggests that the lifespan of individuated subjectivity in the city may be tenuous and brief, and perhaps that the impression of individuated subjectivity is mistaken altogether. Is this, then, a poetry subsumed by the city, if not the official narrative, reproducing its soundbites, its “discrete slices of disembodied time”? The use of collagic effects, and the loss of familiarity and continuity in individual narrative, appear to suggest so. But the perception of teeming is also a distance marker, which might suggest a perspectival mobility that has something in common with Thumboo’s maneuvers from the interior to the exterior, from “man-in-the-street” to social architect. Yeow’s sequence seems to exaggerate the effect found in Thumboo’s work: individuals disappear but the whole goes on, suggesting the ephemerality and replaceability of individual actors, an effect achievable only by representing activity at a scale greater than the individual. Yeow’s semantic mobility, like his treatment of death, resists resolution into a totalizing narrative, but it also accommodates awareness of such narratives through the specificity of its signs, which include reference to the tools and mechanisms of social design. The poems neatly subvert the “long view” through repeated mentions of surveillance action and the evasion of it, in film noir evocations of fugitive information and identity. In the first poem there is talk of “squealing to a badge,” “dusting for fingerprints,” “solvent contact with the informant,” “faked ID,” and “dubbed Underwolves sniffing for a rise among the polygraphs.” Later “the security camera records without rhyme or treason” (51). In “Memento Mori VIII,” reproducing a familiar pattern, surveillance operations at (virtual) ground level lead to the view from above: Metal detectors scan the weblogs for contraband, Programmed by a sharp nose for national purpose, To the ultimate penthouse, a bird’s eye view Of the Singaporean skyline. (84) The “bird’s eye view” might here be considered in temporal as well as spatial terms. The poems’ suspicious consciousness of “national purpose” conditions their awareness of the “long view” of posterity, and of the claims made for the sustaining power of the written word, both in a local and broader literary history. Yeow’s treatment of death itself is reactive and subversive to such claims; in the activity of the “Memento Mori” poems there is no firm boundary between life and death to be heroically overcome, and little reverence is in attendance. Corporeal decay is integrated into the action through the swarms of worms, flies, and other bugs that populate the poems, forming semantic links as they go with the terms of surveillance, authority, and futurity:

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the basic tapeworm swallows us up then turns us over to the sheriff (77) a kamikaze of mayflies Which mate for future proof in a matter of tics (84–85) So what’s the latest buzz out in the field? All the bugs are creepy aren’t they? They don’t even wait for the sun to go down these days. (83) Beyond these examples there are luscious slugs, colossal worms that are “unearthed,” and certain humans that seem a little wormish, such as slithery paparazzi. Although the swarming and slithering speak of vitality, the ephemerality and replaceability they conjure are also part of the discourse of death, as is the reminder that once the individual’s life (and subjectivity) ends, and perhaps even before that moment, the body is subject to being consumed by other living organisms, through parasitic processes that might otherwise be segregated to the cemetery or preempted by flame. In Annie Dillard’s words, “[e]very glistening egg is a memento mori” (160). In keeping with this sense of teeming immediacy, Yeow holds to the sense of a lyric present, even while overrunning lyric’s representational containment with a maximalist profusion of references. Again Dillard seems memorably apt: “I don’t know what it is about fecundity that so appalls. I suppose it is the teeming evidence that birth and growth, which we value, are ubiquitous and blind, that life itself is so astonishingly cheap, that nature is as careless as it is bountiful” (160). Yeow’s realm of reference points collapse boundaries between the natural, (pop-)cultural, and technological, while also rupturing the image of the ultra-clean, virtualized Singapore that William Gibson characterized in his infamous 1993 essay, “Disneyland with the Death Penalty.” This is not to say that Yeow eschews impressions of authoritarian intervention; it is notable how often he connects the more abject processes of death to the surveillance activity of the imagined state, as though consciously eroding the human exceptionalism that helps to propel fantasies of omniscience and perpetual power. Indeed, Yeow’s epistolary speaker concretizes and responds directly to the idea of suspending death in order to extend life: after considering cryogenics. I’m afraid I’ve chickened out. With its professional gaze, The permafrost scares the bejesus out of me. (29) Yeow’s speaker, faced with a “teeming” environment in the shadow of the “Spectral Gleaner,” fears an inanimate permanency or suspended animation. His fears or something like them very quickly come to pass. “And before I could take flight,” the poem continues, the barrel of a gun was pressed against my head. Blow me away and the next thing I knew, A benign, brow-less caretaker shook me awake. (29) The image of the speaker as vampire is one that then recurs through the poems. “Blown away” and reanimated, he appears in Transylvania, led to a sinister woman by his “fecund blood.” 237

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Along the way he’s “scorched by the sun” yet not extinguished. This development, in being as close to sustained characterization as one might find in these poems, is a particularly pointed turn for a sequence under the title “Memento Mori,” in that it disorders the temporal positioning conjured by that phrase. How does a vampire remember he will die? Perhaps a nostalgia is implied for a time when the threat of death was possible – before the prospect of literary eternity and perpetual poiesis (under the care of a figure who for some readers may recall Lee Kwan Yew) took hold. “Life goes on,” as Thumboo writes, and as this injunction is literalized in Yeow’s poems, the implications for affect are substantial: once immortality afflicts the speaker, there is little room for the longings of nostalgia and grief, with their attendant desires to reach toward a past world through words. Nor do the poems offer figures of reflective distance that are common to the work both of elegy and of visionary nation-building. In Boey’s work, the distance of exile itself evokes this spatial relation. Thumboo, too, makes use of it when he represents the work of poetry, as in a poet described “standing by the pool […]. [H]er brow, lifted gently by rising lotuses, /Receives the sky’s deep reverence” (“A Poet Reading” 238). Yeow, in contrast, seems to warn against the contemplative posture for those at street level, as when we see his vampire figure as Death itself, an active participant in the crowded air. “I have come for you, Mr Merrick,” he writes in “Memento Mori IV,” and “Memento Mori V” begins: As I fly over rows of twin chimneys And live tripwires and survey the repeated skyline for hungry hornets and luscious slugs, hear the recondite contexts and the everyday buzz of birds and bees crowding the open sky. How you look up from the page, and in a nanosecond I have swooped down and made lunch out of you, my sweetest engineer. (58) In this particular instance, immortal Death, the vampire, might well be speaking to – and indeed preying upon, the poet: the kind of poet who is, in contemplation, engineering the future. Again it is worth pointing out that these performances of Death are among the few sustained moments of characterization in the poems: it is in predation that the speaking voice becomes a character, participating in the sky’s commerce and in the construction of narrative. Through mobile subjectivity and the employment of this figure of gothic suspension, Yeow creates a vehicle that is both implicated in and responsive to the instrumental use of poetic posterity for the enscription of a particular civic future. Through this narrative maneuverability, Yeow’s poems access conflicts at the core of the relationship between poet and civitas that might otherwise remain repressed. Gods Can Die, asserts the title of Thumboo’s 1977 collection, but the death his title warns of is ultimately deferred by the claimed posterity of the endlessly modernizing city, while that modernization continues to render the spaces of the dead, among other repositories of personal and shared memory, increasingly unavailable to the embodied experience of the living. Boey’s elegiac recuperations offer a reaction to this loss of embodied memory that reclaims the vanishing space and its emotional investments. Written from an engaged, articulate outside, these poems allow resistance as well as reclamation, but are dependent for their speaking 238

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position on removal of the subject from the city-space, a removal which risks the sacrifice of memory itself. Yeow’s poetry, in contrast, stays within the changing city. Indeed, the poems can be seen to perform the kinetics of the city itself, in their redeployment of fragmentation into paratactic play, and in the mobility of their distance perspectives and situational terms. This work intervenes in modernization’s poetics through the articulation of terms that might otherwise remain repressed, as the nation-building narrative accompanies the ongoing dismantling of physical history and habitat. In voicing both prey and predator within the interior of this landscape, and dissolving boundaries between cultural and biological human experience, Yeow opens the poetry to the return of death’s abject contents, and to the experience and expression of the gothic animus of posterity itself.

Works Cited Boey, Kim Cheng. After the Fire. Firstfruits, 2006. Boey, Kim Cheng. Between Stations. Giramondo, 2009. Boey, Kim Cheng. Clear Brightness. Epigram, 2012. Chang, T. C., and Shirlene Huang. “Recreating Place, Replacing Memory: Creative Destruction at the Singapore River.” Asia Pacific Viewpoint, vol. 46, no. 3, 2005, pp. 267–280. Wiley Online Library, doi. org/10.1111/j.1467-8373.2005.00285.x. Cheng, Nien Yuan. “‘This is my doodle’: Non-Participation, Performance, and the Singapore Memory Project.” Performance Paradigm, no. 14, 2018, pp. 64–86. www.performanceparadigm.net/index.php/ journal/article/view/213/224. Chew, Shirley. “‘A Kind of Pursuit’: On Boey Kim Cheng’s Poetry.” Singapore Literature and Culture: Current Directions in Local and Global Contexts, edited by Angelia Mui Cheng Poon and Angus Whitehead. Routledge, 2017, pp. 44–61. Culler, Jonathan. “Theory of the Lyric.” Nordisk Poesi: Tidsskrift for lyrikkforskning, vol. 2, no. 2, 2017, pp. 119–133. www.idunn.no/nordisk_poesi/2017/02/theory_of_the_lyric. Dillard, Annie. Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. Jonathan Cape, 1974. Gibson, William. “Disneyland with the Death Penalty.” Wired, 1 Apr. 1993. www.wired.com/1993/04/ gibson-2. Gwee, Li Sui. “Critical Introduction: Understanding Edwin Thumboo.” Poetry.sg, 2013. www.poetry.sg/ edwin-thumboo-intro. Hetherington, Paul. “Present Absences: The Lyric Poem’s Reconstruction of Loss.” Axon, vol. C4, 2019. axonjournal.com.au/issue-c4/present-absences. Jameson, Fredric. “Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism.” New Left Review, vol. 11, no. 46, 1984, pp. 59–92. Ng, Irene Phek Hong. Parliamentary Debates Singapore, Official Report, 86:20, 2010, Column 4330. Perelman, Bob. The Marginalization of Poetry: Language Writing and Literary History. Princeton UP, 1996. “Poetry and Place.” Singapore Memory Project. 2013. www.singaporememory.sg/collections/11?nextrecord= 9&listtype=collectionMain&id=11. Tan, Kenneth Paul. “Choosing What to Remember in Neoliberal Singapore: The Singapore Story, State Censorship and State-Sponsored Nostalgia.” Asian Studies Review, vol. 40, no. 2, 2016. Taylor and Francis Online. doi/full/10.1080/10357823.2016.1158779. Tay, Eddie. “A Luxury We Cannot Afford: The Poetry of Yong Shu Hoong, Toh Hsien Min, and Boey Kim Cheng.” Singapore Literature and Culture: Current Directions in Local and Global Contexts, edited by Angelia Mui Cheng Poon and Angus Whitehead, Routledge, 2017, pp. 62–81. Tay, Kheng Soon. “Zooming Out.” No Other City: The Ethos Anthology of Urban Poetry, edited by Aaron Lee and Alvin Pang. Ethos Books, 2000, pp. 179–189. Thumboo, Edwin. Gods Can Die. Heinemann, 1977. Thumboo, Edwin. “A Poet Reading.” The Best of Edwin Thumboo. Epigram Books, 2012, pp. 181–185. Thumboo, Edwin. Still Travelling. Ethos Books, 2008. Thumboo, Edwin. A Third Map: New and Selected Poems. Unipress, 1993.

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Jen Crawford Wee, C. J. W.-L. “Imagining New Asia in the Theatre: Cosmopolitan East Asia and the Global West.” Rogue Flows: Trans-Asian Cultural Traffic, edited by Koichi Iwabuchi, Stephen Muecke, and Nabdt Thomas. Hong Kong UP, 2004, pp. 119–151. Yeoh, Brenda, and Lily Kong. “The Notion of Place in the Construction of History, Nostalgia and Heritage in Singapore.” Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography, vol. 17, no. 1, 1996, pp. 52–65. Wiley Online Library. doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9493.1996.tb00084.x. Yeow, Kai Chai. “Death, My Funny Valentine.” International Writing Program Archive of Residents’ Work, 539, 2014. ir.uiowa.edu/iwp_archive/539. Yeow, Kai Chai. Pretend I’m Not Here. Firstfruits, 2006.

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PART IV RITUALS, MEMORIALS, AND EPITAPHS

To be sure, this Companion would not fulfill its intent to chronicle literature’s relationship to the dead if it wasn’t also something of a memorial to the dead itself, especially in its commitment to memorializing the profound cultural importance of death, dying, and the dead. The diversity of this section (and of the Companion as a whole) speaks to the profound polysemy of ways in which we memorialize the dead. Humankind’s recourse to the rituals, memorials, and epitaphs explored here derives in part from what Paul Ricoeur (vis-à-vis Augustine) terms “memories that spill over the threshold of memory, presenting themselves one by one or in bunches according to the complex relations of their themes or circumstances, or in sequences more or less amenable to being put into narrative form” (22). Ritual is central to “install[ing] the dead into collective memory,” as Dennis Klass argues, providing an “inter-subjective space in which survivors reconstruct the meanings of the life now over, the meanings of the death, and the meanings of the deceased’s ongoing presence and influence” (435) – a memorializing impulse that underpins the eight essays collected in this section. In her essay “Death and the Dead in Verse Funerary Epigrams of Ancient Greece,” Arianna Gullo introduces the unfamiliar reader to the complex and diverse manifestations of epitaphs and epigrams from throughout Ancient Greek culture, which come down to us today either through archaeological remnants or having been written in various ways into Classical Greek literature. Gullo argues that the commonly held distinction between “classify[ing] an epigram as literary or epigraphic” breaks down under closer scrutiny, as such distinctions cannot be “‘made on the basis of their form or tone alone.’” As “the closest ancient literary genre to the material object,” the epigram served as a means of “guarantee[ing] the permanent survival of the individual after death” – a preoccupation similarly shared in many of the essays that follow. Helen Swift’s essay “Fictional Will” describes a shift in the epitaph genre that occurred in medieval France, where writers would compose their own fictional “will and testament,” which functioned variously “as a pretext for reflection on personal life history […] or as a vehicle for social commentary.” These “‘mock’ testaments” often employed “parodic or satirical aspects” to “highlight key questions of what constitutes human identity or how legacy is constructed, including the idea of a literary will – an author’s textual legacy and bibliographic genealogy.” In doing so, Swift explains how such “late-medieval fictional wills display the process and the precarities of identity construction.”

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John Tangney traces the importance of producing offspring as monument in his essay, “Monumentalism, Death, and Genre in Shakespeare,” as well as addressing the various complications associated with paternity and succession implicit in the sociocultural desire to create monuments via one’s progeny. Tangney reads Shakespeare against a historical backdrop that considers how our own era’s “new sense of death’s mystery can also lead to loss of soul in the turning away from death toward worldly achievements and recognition.” Tangney concludes by emphasizing our ongoing “need [for] Shakespeare and the poets he is in conversation with across the field of history.” In her essay “Death and Gothic Romanticism: Dilating in/upon the Graveyard, Meditating Among the Tombs,” Carol Margaret Davison examines “the Gothic in relation to death, dying, mourning, and memorialization.” With reference to writers including Percy Bysshe Shelley, Thomas Parnell, Robert Blair, Ann Radcliffe, Matthew Lewis, Charles Robert Maturin, and Mary Shelley, Davison illustrates how the Gothic’s “trinity of deathcentered literary forms” (the elegy, graveyard poetry, and the Gothic novel) symbolically negotiated “a new social contract between the living and the dead,” highlighting the Gothic’s crucial significance in “laying the conceptual and cultural groundwork for what Gerhard Joseph and Herbert Tucker term the ‘necroculture’ of the Victorian era.” Jolene Zigarovich in turn sets her investigation of “Death, Literature, and the Victorian Era” against a backdrop of “[r]apid industrialization and urbanization,” where she links the Victorians’ elaborate treatments of death to sociocultural anxieties about “absence, separation, and displacement” during a period of declining “faith and belief in the afterlife.” This “resulted in attempts to invent performances of spiritual certainty, seen in the aestheticization of mourning rituals and the overall Victorian ‘cult of death.’” Zigarovich traces Victorian poetry’s fixation on the ambiguity between the material and the spiritual, as well as the eroticization of death in Victorian fiction, in the intersections among death, sex, and the body/corpse. In her essay “The Aura of the Phonographic Relic: Hearing the Voices of the Dead,” Angela Frattarola also begins with the Victorian era, chronicling the various death relics that make up what Zigarovich referred to in the previous essay as “the cult of death.” Responding to the idea that new technologies “disrupted Victorian relic culture, as the personal, corporeal touch of handwriting became less common,” Frattarola investigates “the practice of remembering the dead through phonographic recordings,” pointing out that “although vocal recordings were disembodied rather than corporeal relics of the deceased, the trace and residue of the physical body that the voice retained in its recording perhaps gave them the intimate and spiritual associations of the relic.” Amid “a growing skepticism of the afterlife,” Frattarola’s close readings of Jules Verne’s The Castle in Transylvania, Arthur Conan Doyle’s “The Story of the Japanned Box,” and Thomas Mann’s “The Magic Mountain” make a clear case for recordings of a loved one’s voice as “a surer means of hearing her or his voice after death.” The final two essays in this section return to the textual nature of such memorializing impulses, as Laura Davies and Ira Nadel consider the mode of biography and its efficacy for extending one’s life(story) beyond the grave. Laura Davies’s essay, “Anecdotal Death: Samuel Johnson’s Lives of the English Poets,” attends to intersections between “the work of history and the writing of death” in Johnsonian biography, where Davies explains how fictionality in Johnson’s nonfictional mode of biography writing draws “attention to the construction of the discourse.” Specifically, Davies considers the role of the anecdote in historiographical studies and explains how Johnson’s use of conflicting anecdotes complicates reductive accounts of the deaths of Alexander Pope, Jonathan Swift, and other English poets, exemplifying a “narrative incoherence” that “enacts how death resists our grasp conceptually.” 242

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Ira Nadel’s “Biography: Life after Death” in turn bluntly questions the efficacy of the biographical mode: “Can biography extend a life after death? Can it create and sustain individual and cultural memory, presenting both in a single narrative? Can it do more than provide fragmented, disconnected anecdotes?” Nadel traces evolving attitudes toward biography through the ages, noting that biography’s necessarily incomplete nature lends itself to Virginia Woolf’s exhortation “that every biography should be written twice: once accurately with facts without comment, and then again as fiction” (qtd. in Lee 10).

Works Cited Klass, Dennis. “The Cross-Cultural Study of Grief.” The Routledge Companion to Death and Dying, edited by Christopher M. Moreman. Routledge, 2018, pp. 432–441. Lee, Hermione. Virginia Woolf. Chatto and Windus, 1996. Ricoeur, Paul. Memory, History, Forgetting. Translated by Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer. U of Chicago P, 2004.

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22 DEATH AND THE DEAD IN VERSE FUNERARY EPIGRAMS OF ANCIENT GREECE Arianna Gullo

Cast a cold eye On life, on death. Horseman, pass by! (W. B. Yeats, “Under Ben Bulben,” Last Poems, 1939) An epigram (“inscription”) is a metrical text written (gramma) upon (epi) something. In Greek culture, carving a funerary epigram (or epitaph) – that is, a funerary inscription – was meant to guarantee the permanent survival of the individual after death, especially for the “anonymous” ones within the society; consequently, the absence of a written and visible sign implied the cancellation of a man’s earthly transition. In Homer’s Odyssey (11.71–78), the ghost of Elpenor reminds his fellow-mate Odysseus about the religious duty of burial, in order to prevent him from becoming a victim of the anger of the gods, and also of the need to erect a tomb for himself in order for posterity to be informed. Menelaus himself, king of Sparta, erects a cenotaph in Egypt for his brother Agamemnon – the king of Mycenae killed by his wife Clytaemnestra upon his return home after ten years spent fighting at Troy – so that he might have “immortal glory” (Homer, Odyssey 4.584).1 Seemingly, attestations of the first funerary epitaphs from the Greek world can be found in Homer too. Two passages in the Iliad can be read as funerary epigrams stemming from the imagination of the Trojan hero Hector: these are an epitaph for a fallen soldier (Iliad 7.89–90) and an epitaph envisaged both for Hector himself and perhaps his widow, Andromache (Iliad 6.460–61). In general, an inscription “gives voice” to the stone or the object it is written on or claims to be written on, by conveying a message and recording words. Since the beginning, the verse inscription as a concrete and visible form of communication has lived alongside its less pretentious, though more numerous, prose cousins: one of its peculiarities, which it surely shares with the prose inscriptions, is that of having been conceived as a written text, not as the transcription of a pre-existent oral message.2 Therefore, since the writing support on which the inscription is carved forms an indivisible whole with it, epigram is the closest ancient literary genre to the material object, and funerary and votive inscriptions in particular are inextricably tied to the material supports bearing them.3 In the sepulchral realm, an inscription “gives voice” to the tombstone or to the tomb itself, according to the pattern of the speaking object, yet it 245

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gives voice to the deceased as well, often speaking in the first person in the deceased’s position (especially when the dead person is identified with the tomb itself ): After I played many pleasant games with youths of my age, I, sprung of earth, have become earth again; I am Aristocles from Piraeus, the son of Meno. (Peek, GVI 1702; Hansen, CEG 482)4 The verse funerary inscription – originally in hexameters (even just a single one) and later in elegiac couplets – is one of the first and more typical manifestations of epigram as a literary genre; the funerary epigram is actually one of the two subgenres to which stone inscriptions belonged and that gave birth to the literary epigram. Structured according to precise canons, the funerary inscription was an inseparable part of the tomb throughout pagan and Christian antiquity: sema (“sign,” “mark”) left to mark a given person’s passage into the world of the living, which testifies to the fact that these remains are buried in a particular place; mnema and monumentum5 (“memorial”)6 of the dead for the living according to a consolation pattern, intended for all the human categories displayed before us in an endless series of men, women, children, citizens, slaves, craftsmen, fishermen, hunters, traders, poets, philosophers, priestesses, physicians, artists, mimes, hetairai, athletes, nurses, soldiers, and even animals, all swallowed by the same dark and hidden Underworld, whether it is the reign of Hades, the lord of the Underworld, the halls of tearful Acheron, or the thalamos (“bridal chamber”) of Persephone7 – each of whom has its own exemplary testimony to deliver to those who come in the future. Originally the funerary inscription consisted only of the name of the dead, carved or otherwise recorded,8 because it was thought that reading the name aloud – as was the custom in antiquity9 – would allow the dead to live again, keeping his or her memory alive. Therefore, by pronouncing the name aloud, the dead person was brought back to life. However, the name alone was not sufficient to fulfill the fundamental aim of the poetical inscription: this is why, in its short form and in the turn of few verses, a funerary epigram soon started to offer a speech in which (very few) biographical data and emotions were framed, accompanied by very simple contents in general. The verse inscription, more than other literary forms, is subject to the practical and immediate need of information. In the narration, the biographical facts prevail: therefore, the lives of the dead are told in terms of professions, and thus of the social classes the deceased belonged to; of skills and talent; of relationships; of merits and qualities such as wisdom, beauty, magnanimity, cleverness, and other virtues praised within an eulogy. Even the facts that led to the individual’s death are retold: along with the claims of a happy and long-lasting life which allowed the deceased to see “the children’s children,” the narration covers experiences of life anomalously broken off, often brutally and unexpectedly but, foremost, unfairly. This is particularly the case for shipwrecked men, and for the so-called aoroi10 (“untimely”), who died early: before everything, before getting married and having children, before living more broadly. The stories of children unnaturally buried by their parents fall within this last category, as do those of maidens “kidnapped by Hades,” in analogy with the myth of Persephone,11 anthropologically meaning that they died before they were married. There are also young men fallen bravely in battle because of the violent Ares, and newborns and mothers who did not survive the dangers of birth and childbirth. The life, the virtues of the dead, the ways of death, and the facts of life that are presented in Christian epitaphs can also be read on the tombstones of many “pagan” – that is, Classical – men and women. In fact, Christian epitaphs are so soaked in classicizing themes that it is right to speak of a completely unbroken tradition from the archaic age until the Byzantine era. 246

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Before such events, for those who remain there is the rigorously sober declaration of feelings conventionally associated with death and mourning. At the same time, the epitaph may thus express, before death, the emotions of even those still living; in doing so the epitaph becomes not only the bearer of the promised eternal memory, but also the interpreter of piety, often in the form of individual and common prayer, sorrow, and mourning; protest and resignation (often accompanied by consolatory formulae); regret and grief; and feelings of loss and desolation. All this is framed according to various formal patterns, of which the oldest and most widespread are the auto-deictic (in the first person) or the deictic indication (in the third person) of either the “speaking” object (the tomb, tombstone/stele, funerary monument, or statue portraying the dead) or the dead buried (“I am/this is the tomb of X”; “here lies the body of Y”), as in the following epigrams: I am the marker of Phrasikleia. I will always be called ‘maiden’, having received this name from the gods instead of a marriage. (Peek, GVI 68; Hansen, CEG 24)12 Here I lie, a hard-working woman as much as frugal. Nicarete. (Peek, GVI 328; Hansen, CEG 537)13 There may be also reference to the person(s) – e.g., one of the two parents of the deceased, or even both – who commissioned the tomb or ordered the burial for the kin (“this tomb has been made by Y for X”; “Y erected this sema/mnema for X”),14 an act guaranteeing the survival and persistence of a bond even after death, despite the dead/alive disparity: Here father Semon made a sema for Lyseas. (Peek, GVI 140)15 The name of the dead itself must appear, for the name allows communication; when the name is missing, communication is forbidden. Moreover, these formulae are explicit answers to implicit questions by a hypothetical speaker in that continuous relationship of communication with the living of which the inscribed stele is an expression. This relationship, stretched between the anxiety of asking and answering, later becomes a true dialogue16 and is put into effect through the consequent creation of the character of the so-called passer-by17 (the horseman addressed in the lines by Yeats!), who represents the natural development of the mechanism on which the inscription itself is based, which works only if someone who could “bring it to life” by the process of reading is present. Yet the passer-by is created also because originally tombs were situated on the sides of the roads.18 The passer-by may just be greeted, or may become an active and emotional participant in an intense conversation, filled with information on life and death, requests for mourning, words of consolation, and other exhortations, wishes, and expectations:19 Who brought you up? – “Cilician of Athens.” – Noble family. What is your name? – “Numenius.” – At what age did you die? – “Forty.” – You should have lived longer. – “Yet I had to die as well.” – You say excellent things, greetings! – “And to you, stranger! You still have a claim to joy, ’tis enough for us.” (Peek, GVI 1866; Moretti, IGUR 1286)20

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Such a variety of sentimental linguistic expressions implies a similar variety of forms for the verse epitaph. By the fourth century BCE, inscriptional epigrams became more elaborate, and this aspect was extensively developed and experimented with in the Hellenistic age,21 with the result that the practice of writing “fictitious” epigrams – poems in the form of dedications and epitaphs (sometimes ironic but not intended for inscription) – also arose. Therefore, around the third century BCE it is possible to observe the rise of a phenomenon that ought to be called, most correctly, “crystallization,” “fixing,” or even “codification” – rather than “birth” or “creation” – of fictitious funerary verse epigrams as a literary subgenre or category, detached from any concrete epigraphic aim and allocated to a very fortunate secular journey. The development of real (epigraphic, inscriptional) funerary epigrams proceeded totally in parallel, according to a continuity and contiguity of forms and contents, which contributed to establishing at a broader level the codification of the epigram as a literary genre tout court.22 Although the fictitious funerary epigram became independent of real epitaphs, the literary epigram itself is nothing but the arrival point of the evolution of the previous epigraphic tradition. The fundamental development establishing the complete independence of the literary epigram was the physical separation of the text from the object on which it was inscribed. This process, which brought the epigram on stone into competition with a notable variety of other writings, messages, and inscriptions, seems to have been completed by the end of the fourth century CE,23 even as it was supplanting the preceding tradition.24 It is well-proven that from the mid-third century BCE onward it was the literary epigram – as well as the establishment of a writing and authorship culture25 – that massively influenced the metrical inscriptions. It has also been convincingly argued that book collections of literary epigrams circulated as handbooks of models for the epigraphic poets.26 Literariness – that is, a certain level of conscious formal elaboration – can be a more or less marked aspect of the real epigraphic epigrams themselves, but it is not their raison d’être, as in the case of the fictitious ones. Another characteristic feature of the literary epigram, is the Ergänzungsspiel (“play/game of supplementation/completion/complement”),27 already present in some preHellenistic epigraphic epigrams. In this type of writing, the author voluntarily interweaves a thick plot of allusions to give the reader the illusion of a real inscription, by reconstructing a fictitious material context,28 as in this poem by Callimachus (third century BCE), a sort of mise en scène of the act of reading and recognition of the monumental context on the part of the passer-by: “Timonoe.” Who are you? For the gods’ sake, I would have not known you, if the name of your father Timotheos and Methymna, your city, would have not come next on the stele. For sure I can firmly say that Euthymenes, your widowed husband, is full of grief. (Anthologia Graeca [AG] 7.522)29 As a general rule, it is not possible to exclude a priori that a literary text had been later carved or that an epigraphic text had previously been written on a support other than a stone:30 it sometimes happened that the same text was used for both an epigraphic and a literary aim.31 Particularly in the case of funerary epigrams, the channel through which the text reached us is the last stage of a tradition that cannot be easily reconstructed. Among the cases of funerary epigrams which can be identified with certainty as real inscriptions, very often only the mere texts are extant, deprived of their primary material writing support: eventually collected and preserved in manuscripts, they are surgically removed from their original monumental context (funerary monuments or richly decorated stelae, statues, or reliefs), at the price of unavoidable and irreparable mutilations of their meaning. 248

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Seven hundred and fifty-six Greek epigrams, mostly funerary with few exceptions, ranging roughly from the fifth century BCE to the Byzantine era, are preserved in that literary graveyard which is printed by modern editors as Book 7 of the so-called Anthologia Graeca (Greek Anthology), a huge collection of Greek epigrams of various kinds (erotic, votive, funerary, satirical, ekphrastic, and so on) – not only literary, but also inscriptional texts that were originally carved into stone – by numerous poets, more or less known, more or less celebrated, and some unknown (several epigrams were transmitted as anonymous). In Book 7, which is our main source of knowledge about Greek funerary epigrams, are also collected real epitaphs copied from stones, as evidenced by the numerous anonymous epigrams or those whose lemmata (“subheadings”) claims the provenance –, but many of these poems are poetical exercises without a concrete epigraphic function; fictitious inscriptions for the fictional dead; variations on themes already treated by others and proposed again and again, ad nauseum; and repeated competitions of the poet with himself and/or with those who preceded him, sometimes even after many centuries. Werner Peek suggests an inscriptional origin for 190 out of the 756 epigrams preserved in Book 7, though this is almost certainly too high a number. The epigrams in this section of the Greek Anthology that actually show their documentary identity untouched are very few,32 but for most of the supposedly inscribed ones, in the absence of the undeniable evidence of the inscribed stone bearing them, there is no proof (and certainty) that they were epigraphically attested to. In the epigrams from Book 7 of the Greek Anthology, an absolute correspondence with the themes, patterns, and tones of the real epitaphs is recorded. Some poems give general indications about the dead, whereas others offer a precise detail of his life or death; sometimes it is the dead who speaks about himself in the first person, whereas in other cases it is the tomb, the tombstone, or the funerary monument that provides the necessary information. There are also several cases of dialogue between the dead and passers-by. Concise or redundant, work of illustrious poets or lousy poetasters, effective in their direct originality or banal in their tiresome reproposal of formulae, literarily elaborated or formally careless up to being wrong in spelling and grammar, in most cases they document, if not what the ancient Greeks actually wrote on the tomb of a man, at least what they thought might have been written. The funerary inscription contains a reflection, often accompanied by consolatory patterns, on life and the unavoidability of death, which, in every aspect and theme, is related to the universe of Greek tragedy: death is part of the natural order of the things, which can only be welcomed with resigned acceptance and serenity, although the possibility of not being born is to be preferred, as the famous Silenus’ statement asserts. Perhaps the best-known example can be found in Sophocles (Oedipus at Colonus 1224–27). Other themes derived from Greek tragedy are the conception of death as a release from evil;33 the metaphorical wedding with Hades for those young girls who died before marriage (or with Persephone in the case of young men), first attested in Sophocles (Antigone 810–13 and 816; see also lines 653–54 and 1240–41); the regret for the labors of giving birth, made vain by the untimely death of the child: its most significant expressions are with certainty Euripides (Medea 1029–31; Hippolytus 1144–45). The greeting chaire (“hi!,” “hello!,” “greetings!”), which is found in funerary epigrams as early as the mid-fifth century BCE, and is usually attributed to the dead,34 is the same as that used among the living. In Homer’s Iliad (23.19), Achilles starts his lament over Patroclus’corpse by employing this expression, and it is addressed by the chorus to Alcestis going to Hades in Euripides’ Alcestis (1000–05). The dead tell little or nothing at all about their afterlife; on the contrary, they always look back nostalgically and regretfully at their earthly life, especially in the case of expectations dashed by a sudden death. The theme of continuity and preservation, even after death, of habits, feelings, and characteristics shown during life, extends as well to antisocial characters like Timon the misanthrope or the Greek lyric poets Archilochus (seventh century BCE) and 249

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Hipponax (sixth century BCE), famous for their polemics and aggressive poetry, all wishing for immortality. In the case of antisocial characters, this theme is often tied in with a warning against approach of passers-by, which is exasperated with the explicit exclusion of the name in a few epigrams on Timon. Closely related to this theme of continuity and nostalgia for life is the idea of being continuously tormented after death by the anguishes and fears experienced in life. Because they tell biographical information and call upon personal, distinctive characteristics of the dead, epitaphs by nature often contain satirical components. Comic characters are usually the addressees of such epitaphs: favorite “victims” are, for example, slave-traders, mean old people, and notably (old) bibulous women, who were enthusiastic drunks in their past lives and still desire to drink even in the Underworld. Within Book 7 there are many epigrams for shipwrecked men,35 of which the most ancient seemingly date back to the Hellenistic age, although the theme already appears in the epigraphic texts from the seventh century BCE.36 The bodies of these dead remain often unburied, missing at sea. Although the sea provides some kind of burial, by hiding the body within the waves or depositing it on some unknown shore, the only consolation left to their kin is to erect a cenotaph, that is, an “empty” tomb, often dedicated by the deceaseds’ parents or wives:37 Not anticipating the evil setting of rainy Arcturus, Theotimus, you undertook a cold journey by the sea, which, as you ran across the Aegean in your many-oared ship, brought you and your companions to Hades. Alas, Aristodice and Eupolis, who gave you birth, mourn you, embracing an empty tomb. (AG 7.539)38 The safety guaranteed by agriculture or by the land in general, in comparison with a life spent at sea, is sometimes disavowed by the numerous paradoxical deaths on solid ground that happened to those who escaped death at sea,39 which alternate with the epitaphs for shipwrecked men in various sequences of Book 7 of the Greek Anthology. The confutation of the thesis asserting that safety can be found only on earth is simply and wonderfully summed up and explained in a distich falsely attributed to Plato, where the popular theme of death as common to all is also introduced as a memento mori:40 This is the tomb of a shipwrecked man, and that opposite is the tomb of a husbandman. So death equally occurs at sea and on land. (AG 7.265) There are also collective epitaphs for men fallen in battle, who are privileged addressees of the epigraphic honor; these epigrams were intended for the so-called polyandria, public common funerary monuments dedicated by the community to fellow citizens:41 the beautiful death in war, the glorious death in battle, allows the memory of these heroes and their deeds to survive in the collective memory, securing for these men immortality exclusive of their heroic status. The more general theme of common burial of (usually) two individuals and of the associated mourning is related to this, modeled after the image of the common rest to which the bones of Achilles and Patroclus were consigned (Homer, Iliad 23.83–92), and which concerns a varied commonality of affections, more or less related to love and sexual spheres: spouses, brothers, teachers and pupils, athletes, and even animals.42

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The theme of parents not being meant to bury their children, because it goes against the natural order of things,43 is shown in the following sample epitaph: The old Nico crowned the tomb of maiden Melite. Hades, was your judgment right? (AG 7.187)44 This claim of the natural law, according to which the old should die before the young and are not supposed to bury them, also appears in tragedy: see, e.g., Euripides’ Trojan Women (lines 1185–86), where the old, former Trojan queen, Hecuba, Priamus’ wife, complains about the horrifying destiny of her grandson Astyanax, Hector’s and Andromache’s child (“But you are not burying me, but I you, poor boy,/while you are still so young and I am an old woman without a city or child left”); immediately thereafter, she utters the (imagined) epitaph for Astyanax, which run as follows (lines 1188–91): “What epitaph/could a poet compose for your grave-stone?/The Argives once killed this child/in fear of him. The epitaph inscribes Greece’s shame.”45 Next to the name of the young dead, mothers often stand out46 as co-protagonists in funerary epigrams, whether they are the deceased themselves, they perished while giving birth, or they survived their children, whose untimely death means the labors of childbirth were in vain: The dust is recently dug, on the surface of the stele half-withered garlands of leaves wave; deciphering the letters, passer-by, let us see whose wretched bones the stone says it covers. “Stranger, I am Aretemias; my homeland was Cnidos; I went to the marriage bed of Euphron; I was not unaware of the labors of childbirth. Bringing to life twins, I left one as a guide for my husband in his old age, and I take the other one away as a remembrance of my spouse.” (AG 7.465)47 What use is it to labor in childbirth, what use to bear children, if she who bears them is doomed to see their death? For his mother erected a tomb for the young Bianor: yet it was suitable for him to build it for her. (AG 7.261)48 More broadly, since the archaic age the death of women in childbirth had been the only ones to be heroicized like deaths on the battlefield or in the public arena.49 The epitaphs for women express the same values commonly attested to in the Greek funerary epigrams for men, such as prudence, chastity, familiar values, physical beauty, birth nobleness, and fame.50 When it comes to untimely deaths, as has been already pointed out, numerous epitaphs are dedicated to the young who died too soon, at marriageable ages or even earlier. Within this group are epitaphs concerning young girls who died on the very day of their wedding. The Greek wedding and sepulchral ceremonies share many similar elements, especially from the bride’s perspective (torches which are used to lighten both the bridal chamber and the pyre; veils; the journey toward a new and unknown home; fear and sorrow for the loss of the dear

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ones; assignment to a new lord), so that the tragic theme of a marriage transformed into a funeral is very widespread:51 No wedding, but Hades as her groom Clearista received once she loosed her maiden belt. Just now at the door of the bride the evening flutes were making music, and the threshold of her chamber echoed to knocking hands; in the morning a loud cry was shouted, and the wedding song, silenced, changed into a funeral song. The same torches both lighted round the marriage bed and showed the dead the way to the Underworld. (AG 7.182)52 Epigrams frequently provide the reader with essential details about the physical objects on which they are inscribed, revealing fundamental information about their materials, on which our knowledge of ancient craftsmanship often depends. Therefore, funerary epigrams represent quite an appropriate category to host ekphrastic (descriptive) characteristics: they often contain references to the monumental context such as a funerary monument, headstone, or the image of the dead – whether those those objects/works of art/monuments are real or fictitious. Several of the distinctive technical elements of the ekphrastic epigrams find precise parallels in the funerary epigrams: primarily, the use of verbs of seeing, looking, and watching is frequent, as is use of verbs meaning to make or to build. Another such element is reference to the material the tomb is made of: comments on the beauty of the funerary monument or of the statue/portrait of the dead, or even on the skills and ability of the artist, are frequent as well. A common ekphrastic topos deployed is to praise the funerary artwork or the artist who made it – to the paradoxical point that the representation of the deceased seems so alive and real that it renews the grief of the dead’s kin every time they look at it: The painter depicted Theodote just as she was. If only he had failed of his art, and he had given forgetfulness to us mourning her. (AG 7.565)53 Finally, there are themes running like threads all through the thick frame of Book 7 of the Greek Anthology. The interpretation of death as a separation from something and someone – the loved ones – involves the distinction between soul and body54 and the end of the joys of life. The theme of exchange is employed in cenotaphs (in place of the shipwrecked man’s body missing at sea, only a tomb remains), in the epigrams dedicated to brides dead too early (Hades instead of Hymenaeus, divine personification of the wedding song and, more generally, of marriage itself; a pyre for the corpse instead of bridal torches; funeral lament and moaning instead of songs and dancing). There is also a group of epigrams on a corpse unburied by the murderer or where a tomb is presented as a reward. The motif of silence after death is a paradox when it concerns dead animals, musicians, singers, and rhetors. Previously the neat distinction between real inscriptions, fixed on stone and waiting for any passer-by, and fictitious epigrams, circulating in search of a certain reader or an audience, was considered essential, for it implied the arrangement of the different textual functions under different anthropological, cultural, and semiological profiles. Today, in the light of all these observations on Greek epitaphs, such distinctions seem fruitless. It is impossible to determine unambiguous criteria that would help to classify an epigram as literary or epigraphic,55 especially 252

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for the sepulchral poems, where different means of expression can be found in both the literary and epigraphic spheres, merged in a unique reference code and language, both formal and thematic.56 The epigraphic hypothesis is due to remain a hermeneutic crux in most cases: without any documentary evidence and unambiguous and indisputable criteria, it is basically impossible, and even useless, to speculate on the inscriptional origin of any given epigram. I believe it remains absolutely true what Alan Cameron (Callimachus 180) observed on the topic: “commentators on the epitaphs preserved in the Anthology like to debate which are ‘real’ and which are ‘literary,’ as though a distinction could be made on the basis of their form or tone alone.”

Notes 1 On the meanings and function of the grave monument in the Homeric death-ritual, see SourvinouInwood 108–22. On the ancient Greek funerary customs and the ideology upon which they are based, see at least, among the endless bibliography, Kurtz and Boardman; Vermeule; Parker 32–48 and 53–73; Morris; Humphreys 79–88; Garland; Alexiou; Oakley, “Death and the Child,” and Picturing Death 11–13 and passim; Mirto 65–91; González González. 2 Cf. Svenbro 28; Tueller, Look Who’s Talking 2–5. 3 Cf. Tueller, Look Who’s Talking 16–27 for the seventh to fourth centuries BCE. 4 Attica, beginning of the fourth century BCE. 5 On the various words of burial and their meanings, see Sourvinou-Inwood 122–36. Whereas in Homer mnema never refers to the grave monument, in the archaic period (eighth to sixth centuries BCE) mnema is often used to denote the grave monument. 6 On the memory-survival function of the grave monument, see Sourvinou-Inwood 139–47. Cf. also M. Fantuzzi in Fantuzzi and Hunter 307: “After all, reading a funerary or dedicatory inscription meant first of all, in anthropological terms, performing a kind of ritual to commemorate the dead or the dedicator.” 7 For the representation, the gods, and the spirits of the Underworld, see Lattimore § 15, 87–88, and § 18, 95–96. Sometimes the dead goes to the Elysium or the Blessed: cf. Lattimore § 4, 33–36 e 40–43, and § 90, 313–14; Sourvinou-Inwood 18–20 and 32–56; Garland 60–61, and 156. 8 Cf. Häusle 106–31; Sourvinou-Inwood 162–68. 9 The passage from reading aloud to silent reading is usually situated in the fifth century CE, although the topic is much more problematic. On the act of reading in the ancient world see at least Knox; McLuhan; Havelock. 10 For a complete study see Vérilhac, Paides Awroi. Cf. also Lattimore § 48, 184–87; Griessmair. 11 On the gods of the Underworld as divine agents of death, see Lattimore §§ 30–33, 146–51. 12 Attica, sixth century BCE. On death before marriage in Greek epitaphs, see Lattimore § 50, 192–95. 13 Attica, before the mid-fourth century BCE(?). 14 On these expressions in epitaphs, see Sourvinou-Inwood 148–51. 15 Attica, end of the sixth century BCE. 16 Cf. Tueller, Look Who’s Talking 42–43. 17 Cf. Lattimore §§ 63–65, 230–37; Tueller, Look Who’s Talking 32–35 and 65–81; Tueller, “The PasserBy.” Cf. also Schmitz; Tueller, Look Who’s Talking 36–42 and 44–46; Vestrheim, 71–75. The address by the living to the dead is a form that was to become very common, especially from the third century BCE, whereas in the archaic age it was the dead who greeted the passer-by (cf. Fantuzzi and Hunter 297). Tueller, Look Who’s Talking 14–15, states that the passer-by is often the addressee, as evidenced by the mid-sixth century BCE, and sometimes plays the role of the speaker from the same date, while the dead is greeted by the passer-by from the second half of the sixth century BCE and acts as the speaker starting from a bit later. “Unusual” passers-by are attested, for example, in epitaphs for people buried on the shore, where the role of the passer-by can be taken up by others, e.g., the sea itself or sailors (cf. Tueller, Look Who’s Talking 81–93). 18 Cf. Humphreys 91. 19 Cf. Sourvinou-Inwood 174–75. 20 Greek inscription from Rome, third century CE. 21 On the passage from stone to book, see especially Gutzwiller, in particular 47–114; cf. also Meyer 96–101; Höschele 86–99.

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Arianna Gullo 22 On the distinction between epigraphic inscription/epigram and literary epigram, see Bing, “Between Literature”; Bruss; Meyer 130–43; Kaczko; Garulli (with further bibliography); Agosti, in particular 13–14; Christian. Cf. also Bing, “The Un-Read Muse?” (about inscriptional poems). 23 Cf. Cameron, The Greek Anthology 2; Fantuzzi and Hunter 289; Tsagalis 4 and 7. 24 Cf. Petrovic 21; Garulli 18–19. 25 Cf. Garulli 22–25. Cases of signed inscriptional epitaphs are already attested in the fourth century BCE: on the topic of signed funerary epigrams on stone, see especially Santin, but also Fantuzzi and Hunter 289–90. 26 Cf. Garulli 217. 27 Cf. Bing, “Ergänzungsspiel.” 28 Gutzwiller uses the effective idiom “illusion of inscription” (4). 29 All translations are mine, based upon Beckby’s edition of the Anthologia Graeca. 30 Cf. Garulli 22 and 28, with footnotes 65–66. 31 Laurens 43–48 and 51–53. This double function is evidenced by cases of “double transmission” on both stone and papyrus/parchment (Garulli, in particular 37–110). 32 The epigraphic transmission is certainly proven for only four out of the 756 epigrams preserved in Book 7. 33 Cf. Lattimore § 56, 205–8, and § 95, 326–27. 34 On the use of chaire, addressed to the dead or to the passer-by, see Sourvinou-Inwood 180–216. 35 Funerary epigrams for sailors are so markedly characterized that they are often considered to form a very distinct subcategory on their own: cf. Tueller, “Sea and Land.” 36 Cf. at least Lattimore § 53, 199–200; cf. also Magnelli 272–73; Bruss 88–167. 37 The practice of erecting in the homeland a funerary monument for someone who died faraway and whose remains could not be collected (perhaps because the dead perished at sea) is already attested to in Homer (Odyssey 1.91; 4.584) and continues through antiquity, up until the late Christian era. 38 Perses of Thebes (fourth-third century BCE). 39 Cf. Laurens 178. 40 Cf. Lattimore §§ 71–72, 250–58. 41 Cf. at least Clairmont, Gravestone and Epigram 6 and 12; and Clairmont, Patrios Nomos. 42 Cf. Lattimore § 70, 247–50. 43 Cf. at least Lattimore § 49, 187–91; Griessmair 4–47. 44 Philip of Thessalonica (first century CE). 45 All translations mine. 46 Cf. at least Loraux, Mothers; cf. also Stehle 180–81 and 184 n.19. More in general, on the representation of women in epitaphs see Lattimore § 82, 299–300; Pircher; Vérilhac, “L’image”; Martínez-Fernández; Pérez Cabrera. 47 Heraclitus of Halicarnassus (third century BCE). 48 Diotimus (third century BCE?). 49 On the theme of death in childbirth seen as a heroic death, see Loraux, Experiences 23–43; de Nazaré Ferreira. 50 In Greek funerary inscriptions women are continuously praised for beauty, virtue, modesty, behavior, and dignity: feminine characteristics which were visually portrayed in their funerary stelae (Dillon 69), where women were depicted of undefined age and idealized (108). 51 On this topic see at least Seaford; Rehm. 52 Meleager of Gadara (second-first century BCE). 53 Julian the Egyptian (sixth century CE). 54 Cf. Lattimore, §§ 2–4, 21–43, and § 85, 304–6. 55 Cf. Garulli 30 with footnotes 74–75. 56 Cf. Bettenworth. Cf. also Day.

Works Cited Agosti, Gianfranco. “Per uno studio dei rapporti fra epigrafia e letteratura nella tarda antichità.” Il calamo della memoria, vol. 6, 2014, pp. 13–33. Alexiou, Margaret. The Ritual Lament in Greek Tradition. Rowman and Littlefield, 2002. Baumbach, Manuel, Ivana Petrovic, and Andrej Petrovic, editors. Archaic and Classical Greek Epigram. Cambridge UP, 2010.

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Verse Funerary Epigrams of Ancient Greece Beckby, Hermann. Anthologia Graeca. Griechish-Deutsch, I–IV. Heimeran, 1967–1968. Bettenworth, Anja. “The Mutual Influence of Inscribed and Literary Epigram.” Brill’s Companion to Hellenistic Epigram, edited by Peter Bing and Jon Bruss. Brill, 2007, pp. 69–93. Bing, Peter. “Between Literature and the Monuments.” Genre in Hellenistic Poetry, edited by Annette Harder, Remco F. Regtuit, and Gerry C. Wakker. E. Forsten, 1998, pp. 29–40. Reprinted in Bing, Scroll, pp. 194–216. Bing, Peter. “Ergänzungsspiel in the Epigrams of Callimachus.” A&A 41, 1995, pp. 115–131. Reprinted in Bing, Scroll, pp. 85–105. Bing, Peter. The Scroll and the Marble: Studies in Reading and Reception in Hellenistic Poetry. U of Michigan P, 2009. Bing, Peter. “The Un-read Muse? Inscribed Epigram and Its Readers in Antiquity.” Hellenistic Epigrams, edited by Annette Harder, Remco F. Regtuit, and Gerry C. Wakker. Peeters Publishers, 2002, pp. 39–66. Reprinted in Bing, Scroll, pp. 116–146. Bruss, Jon Steffen. Hidden Presences: Monuments, Gravesites, and Corpses in Greek Funerary Epigram. Peeters Publishers, 2005. Cameron, Alan. Callimachus and His Critics. Princeton UP, 1995. Cameron, Alan. The Greek Anthology from Meleager to Planudes. Oxford UP, 1993. Christian, Timo. Gebildete Steine: Zur Rezeption literarischer Techniken in den Versinschriften seit dem Hellenismus. Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2015. Clairmont, Christoph W. Gravestone and Epigram. Greek Memorials from the Archaic and Classical Period. Philipp von Zabern, 1970. Clairmont, Christoph W. Patrios Nomos: Public Burial in Athens During the Fifth and Fourth Centuries B. C., 2 vols. Oxford UP, 1983. Day, Joseph. “Reading Inscriptions in Literary Epigram.” Greek Epigram from the Hellenistic to the Early Byzantine Era, edited by Maria Kanellou, Ivana Petrovic, and Chris Carey. Oxford UP, 2019, pp. 19–34. de Nazaré Ferreira, Luísa. “A bela morte des mulheres segundo o livro VII da Antologia Palatina.” Humanitas, vol. 68, 2016, pp. 99–124. Dillon, Sheila. The Female Portrait Statue in the Greek World. Cambridge UP, 2010. Euripidis Fabulae, I–III. Edited by James Diggle. Oxford UP, 1984–1994. Fantuzzi, Marco, and Richard Hunter. Tradition and Innovation in Hellenistic Poetry. Cambridge UP, 2004. Garland, Robert S. J. The Greek Way of Death. Cornell UP, 2001. Garulli, Valentina. BYBLOS LAINEE: Epigrafia, letteratura, epitafio. Pàtron Editore, 2012. González González, Marta. Funerary Epigrams of Ancient Greece: Reflections on Literature, Society and Religion. Bloomsbury Academic, 2019. Griessmair, Ewald. Das Motiv der Mors Immatura in den griechischen metrischen Grabinschriften. Wagner, 1966. Gutzwiller, Kathryn J. Poetic Garlands: Hellenistic Epigrams in Context. U of California P, 1998. Hansen, Peter Allan. Carmina Epigraphica Graeca, 2 vols. de Gruyter, 1983–1989. Häusle, Helmut. Einfache und frühe Formen des griechischen Epigrams. Wagner, 1979. Havelock, Eric A. The Muse Learns to Write: Reflections on Orality and Literacy from Antiquity to the Present. Yale UP, 1986. Homeri Ilias, I–II. Edited by M. L. West. B. G. Teubner, 1998–2000. Homeri Odyssea. Edited by Helmut van Thiel. Olms Weidmann, 1991. Höschele, Regina. Die blütenlesende Muse: Poetik und Textualität antiker Epigrammsammlungen. Narr Verlag, 2010. Humphreys, Sarah C. The Family, Women and Death. U of Michigan P, 1993. Kaczko, Sara. “From Stone to Parchment: Epigraphic and Literary Transmission of Some Greek Epigrams.” Trends in Classics, vol. 1, 2009, pp. 90–117. Kanellou, Maria, Ivana Petrovic, and Chris Carey, editors. Greek Epigram from the Hellenistic to the Early Byzantine Era. Oxford UP, 2019. Knox, Bernard M. W. “Silent Reading in Antiquity.” Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Studies, vol. 9, 1968, pp. 421–435. Kurtz, Donna C., and John Boardman. Greek Burial Customs. Thames & Hudson, 1971. Lattimore, Richmond. Themes in Greek and Latin Epitaphs. U of Illinois P, 1942. Laurens, Pierre. L’abeille dans l’ambre: Célébration de l’épigramme de l’époque alexandrine à la fin de la Renaissance. Les Belles Lettres, 2012. Loraux, Nicole. The Experiences of Tiresias: The Feminine and the Greek Man. Princeton UP, 1995.

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Arianna Gullo Loraux, Nicole. Mothers in Mourning. Cornell UP, 1998. Magnelli, Enrico. Alexandri Aetoli testimonia et fragmenta. Università degli Studi di Firenze – Dipartimento di Scienze dell’Antichità ‘Giorgio Pasquali,’ 1999. Martínez-Fernández, Angel. “La mujer en los epitafios métricos de Creta de época helenística.” Fortunatae, vol. 4, 1992, pp. 119–150. McLuhan, Marshall. The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man. U of Toronto P, 1962. Meyer, Doris. Inszeniertes Lesevergnügen. Das inschriftliche Epigramm und seine Rezeption bei Kallimachos. Franz Steiner Verlag, 2005. Mirto, Maria Serena. Death in the Greek World: From Homer to the Classical Age. Translated by A. M. Osborne. U of Oklahoma P, 2012. Moretti, Luigi. Inscriptiones Graecae urbis Romae, 4 vols. Istituto Italiano per la Storia Antica, 1968–1979. Morris, Ian. Burial and Ancient Society. Cambridge UP, 1987. Oakley, John H. “Death and the Child.” Coming of Age in Ancient Greece: Images of Childhood from the Classical Past, edited by Jenifer Neils and John H. Oakley. Yale UP, 2003, pp. 163–194. Oakley, John H. Picturing Death in Classical Athens: The Evidence of the White Lekythoi. Cambridge UP, 2004. Parker, Robert. Miasma. Oxford UP, 1983. Peek, Werner. Griechische Vers-Inschriften. Akademie-Verlag, 1955. Pérez Cabrera, Juana. “Consideraciones sobre la mujer en el epigrama funerario helenístico de la Antología Palatina.” Fortunatae, vol. 4, 1992, pp. 183–192. Petrovic, Andrej. Kommentar zu den simonideischen Versinschriften. Brill, 2007. Pircher, Josef. Das Lob der Frau im vorchristlichen Grabepigramm der Griechen. Wagner, 1979. Rehm, Rush. Marriage to Death: The Conflation of Wedding and Funeral Rituals in Greek Tragedy. Princeton UP, 1994. Santin, Eleonora. Autori di epigrammi sepolcrali greci su pietra. Firme di poeti occasionali e professionisti. Bardi editore, 2009. Schmitz, Thomas A. “Speaker and addressee in early Greek epigram and lyric.” Archaic and Classical Greek Epigram, edited by Manuel Baumbach, Ivana Petrovic, and Andrej Petrovic. Cambridge UP, 2010, pp. 25–41. Seaford, Richard. “The Tragic Wedding.” Journal of Hellenic Studies, vol. 107, 1987, pp. 106–130. Sophoclis Fabulae. Edited by Hugh Lloyd-Jones and Nigel G. Wilson. Oxford UP, 1990. Sourvinou-Inwood, Christiane. “Reading” Greek Death: To the End of the Classical Period. Clarendon P – Oxford UP, 1995. Stehle, Eva. “The Good Daughter: Mother’s Tutelage in Erinna’s Distaff and Fourth-Century Epitaphs.” Making Silence Speak: Women’s Voices in Greek Literature and Society, edited by André Lardinois and Laura McClure. Princeton UP, 2001, pp. 179–200. Svenbro, Jesper. Phrasikleia: An Anthropology of Reading in Ancient Greece. Cornell UP, 1993. Tsagalis, Christos. Inscribing Sorrow: Fourth-Century Attic Funerary Epigrams. de Gruyter, 2008. Tueller, Michael A. Look Who’s Talking: Innovations in Voice and Identity in Hellenistic Epigram. Peeters Publishers, 2008. Tueller, Michael A. “The Passer-By in Archaic and Classical Epigram.” Archaic and Classical Greek Epigram, edited by Manuel Baumbach, Ivana Petrovic, and Andrej Petrovic. Cambridge UP, 2010, pp. 42–60. Tueller, Michael A. “Sea and Land: Dividing Sepulchral Epigram.” Greek Epigram from the Hellenistic to the Early Byzantine Era, edited by Maria Kanellou, Ivana Petrovic, and Chris Carey. Oxford UP, 2019, pp. 192–209. Vérilhac, Anne-Marie. “L’image de la femme dans les épigrammes funéraires grecques.” La femme dans le monde méditerranéen, vol. I. Maison de l’Orient, 1985, pp. 85–112. Vérilhac, Anne-Marie. Paides Awroi. Poésie funéraire, 2 vols. Grapheion Demosieumaton tes Akademias Athenon, 1978–1982. Vermeule, Emily. Aspects of Death in Early Greek Art and Poetry. U of California P, 1979. Vestrheim, Gjert. “Voice in Sepulchral Epigrams: Some Remarks on the Use of First and Second Person in Sepulchral Epigrams, and a Comparison with Lyric Poetry.” Archaic and Classical Greek Epigram, edited by Manuel Baumbach, Ivana Petrovic, and Andrej Petrovic. Cambridge UP, 2010, pp. 61–78.

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23 FICTIONAL WILL Helen Swift

“I want to prepare for my end” (de Hauteville line 23) In late-medieval France, the fictional will and testament emerged as a popular genre used by writers to place their personas on the brink of dying and sometimes to stage death itself. It thereby contrived a very particular narrative point of view. This functioned not only as a pretext for reflection on personal life history (on the cusp between autobiography and autothanatography) or as a vehicle for social commentary (exploiting the prerogative that “a dying man has the right to speak freely” (Villon line 728)),1 but also as a locus for focalizing the relationship between death and human identity: prescribing one’s own epitaph, defining one’s life as end-oriented, and considering the nature of one’s posterity, whether immediate posthumous treatment or longer-term survival in and as memory, in a religious context or otherwise. Often referred to as “mock” testaments for their parodic or satirical aspects (such as assuming the persona of an animal or burlesquing testamentary convention), these works are more than comic turns; indeed, it is often through humor that they highlight key questions of what constitutes human identity or how legacy is constructed, including the idea of a literary will – an author’s textual legacy and bibliographic genealogy. This chapter examines the fourteenth- and fifteenth-century vogue for this genre, building on Jacqueline CerquigliniToulet’s essay, L’Écriture testamentaire à la fin du moyen âge. It brings a selection of these works – by Philippe de Mézières, Pierre de Hauteville, and François Villon – into conversation with very recent examples of testamentary fiction: Sarah Dunant’s The Birth of Venus (2003), Vickie Gendreau’s Testament (2012, trans. Aimee Wall 2016), and Petina Gappah’s The Book of Memory (2015), to consider modern inflections of the earlier wills’ characteristics. In his survey of the testament as fictional form through literary history and across languages, Eber Carle Perrow proposes that this formal document has given rise to an unparalleled quantity of literature, and enumerates that literature’s salient shared features: autobiographical and confessional elements; moral reflection and/or instruction (recognizing, alongside a juridical model, the biblical heritage of “testament” as covenant) (Cerquiglini-Toulet 3); the postmortem disposition of the body and property; and political or social commentary, mobilized through satire. The form’s popularity in medieval literature, and especially the French late Middle Ages, has received several partial explanations: for Philippe Ariès, the great theorist of 257

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death in the history of mentalities, the use of wills (both historical and literary) is one of the most significant elements of “the death of the self” (Ariès 201), an increasing preoccupation with individual destiny and personal death. For Cerquiglini-Toulet, it is important to recognize “a period which has replaced the art of loving with the art of dying” (18). Late-medieval artes moriendi – “texts that offer or depict a way of dying well” (Appleford 4) – are clearly a pertinent context; Philippe de Mézières’s Testament (1392) emerges from a preface that insists: “it is good, then, to think about death often, to study how to prepare […] and to desire to die well” (300). Mézières’s work also presents us with one of the methodological challenges of studying medieval testamentary fiction: the frequent absence of a title identifying it as such (Perrow 694; Swift, Representing), so that we must work instead by recognizable features or function, such as reflection on imminent death or the enumeration of testamentary dispositions. There is diversity of form: prose, for Mézières, but more often verse, both lyric (such as Charles d’Orléans’s ballade 70) and narrative (the stanzaic verse of Pierre de Hauteville, François Villon, or Jean Molinet). There is also plurality, in that one author may be associated with more than one will: “the last will [volenté]” (Mézières 320) is not necessarily unitary. Mézières’s vernacular literary text complements his earlier, Latin historical will; Villon produces both the Lais (1456) and the Testament (1463?), which were designated in the first printed edition of 1489 as Le Petit Testament and Le Grand Testament. Villon is himself a methodological challenge: his is perhaps the most famous example of a fictional will, and certainly the most notoriously irreverent within a Francophone tradition; it is, for example, a repeated cultural reference point for Gendreau. There is, therefore, the risk of mistaking example for template, or, within the latemedieval period, of treating his ironic, rhetorically spectacular text as paragon, or as the teleological culmination of previous writers’ experiments. Finally, and similarly in the interests of avoiding too tidy an account of the form’s use, we should consider whether the testament is serving as point or pretext in a given work: whether concerns of death, identity, and legacy are its primary focus (as with Villon or de Hauteville) or function as launch-pad for another project, such as social commentary or, in the case of Jean Molinet’s Donnet baillié au roy Charles VIII (1491?), a grammatical instruction manual. How most fruitfully might we approach these texts? Their most distinguishing feature is arguably not a matter of content, but a question of positioning and its implications: “it is as if death offered a viewpoint, a promontory, from which to observe the world and one’s own life” (Cerquiglini-Toulet 6). The testament situates its subject on the brink between life and death,2 which entails urgency and, consequently, a need to assert control in this exercise of will (over the story of one’s life and death, and over what one bequeaths, materially or otherwise), and a need for witness.

A Matter of Life and Death: Writing on the Brink If the ars moriendi is “essentially a bridging genre, its most urgent function to make smooth the passage between life and death” (Appleford 218), fictional wills may seek either to facilitate this transition or to disrupt it.3 The testating persona looks in several directions at once, being concerned with a 360-degree view of their death: in the case of my epigraph quotation from de Hauteville’s Confession et Testament de l’amant trespassé de deuil (1447), “de ma fin” represents both for my end (preparation beforehand as well as what follows after) and of my end (the moment of death itself ). The perspective that this thereby affords the testator on their life is a peculiar one, making the subject both author and spectator of the narrative of their demise. The enabling fiction of Villon’s Testament is its persona’s proclaimed physical degeneration through old age, pungently professed through alliterative, even onomatopoeic self-portraits: 258

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Je congnois approucher ma seuf, Je crache blanc comme coton Jacoppins groz comme ung estuef. (Villon lines 729–31) I feel my thirst approaching, I spit cotton-white gobs as large as a handball. However, what jams the cogs and disables this plausible fiction is enigmatic self-contradiction: I bear the voice and accent of an old man, When I’m only a young fool. (Villon lines 735–36) Interspersed amongst the poem’s narrative octaves are fixed-form lyric items. The persona’s purported moment of death, so heavily (and heavily ironically) anticipated, is elided at the end of the poem between two ballades in an instant of narrative hiatus: the so-called “Ballade de merci” issues a first-person invocation for clemency in its refrain (“I beg pardon of everyone,” Villon line 1975); the “Ballade de conclusion” issues a third-person invitation to the persona’s funeral (“Come to his interment,” Villon line 1998) and terminates his tale: Here ends and finishes The testament of poor Villon. (Villon lines 1996–97) This abrupt, linear transition between pre- and post-mortem points of view contrasts interestingly with Mézières’s depiction of an elderly avatar of himself, a soldier retired to the Celestine cemetery in Paris, who uses his so-called Testament to stage “the hour of his death” in its most imminent sense: imagining his future self “dying and passing over from this world” (Mézières 304); in the very moment of expiration, he projects specific scenarios for the days, hours, and minutes preceding and following his death. What his dispositions provide for – or, more accurately, implore and exhort from the Celestine fathers – is the treatment of his body and soul. The work’s 18 chapters circle ritualistically round the instant of death, oscillating between pre- and post-mortem moments. What distinguishes Mézières’s text from those of Villon and de Hauteville is an absence of irony – not only, or even primarily, in terms of a lack of macabre or playful humor, but also and especially an absence of narratological distanciation between author and testator: Mézières’s textual persona is intended sincerely to represent his future self, such that his text may serve as a practical tool for the Celestines. In this respect, and also in his text’s structural oscillation around death, Mézières’s “poor pilgrim” persona is akin – albeit in a very different context – to Gendreau’s autofictional “Vickie,” a projection of the young female author who was diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumor in June 2012. Gendreau’s text moves back and forth between the voice of the terminally ill narrator and those of her friends’ and family’s imagined responses to her death. A further post-mortem perspective, one unanticipated by Vickie or Gendreau, came in 2016 in the form of Aimee Wall’s translation of the work into English, thereby revisiting the autofictional “je” with a posthumous “I.” De Hauteville, like Villon, presents an “I” acting out the role of dying man, and one doing so paradoxically, disrupting any life/death binary or continuity, as he languishes in lovesick mourning for his deceased lady: Lying abed grievously ill, Stricken with grief and bitter torment. (de Hauteville lines 3–4) 259

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He is both dead and alive, “I die and perish whilst still alive” (line 115), and, at the same time, neither: “I can neither die nor live” (line 117); stuck, suspended temporally and spatially in a liminal deathbed state, he nonetheless portrays death’s importunate intrusion: “[death] already gnaws away at my life” (line 10).

Writing in Earnest: An Urgent Cause The temporal adverb “already” [desja] immediately raises the dramatic excitement of the de Hauteville persona’s situation. The imminence of the end and the threats that it carries – interruption leaving wishes unfulfilled, erasure of identity – endow a testamentary fiction with urgency, making for an unusually compelling scenario and ensuring rapt reader attention. Gendreau’s Vickie expresses the consequence of the lack of time afforded by her fatal illness: “everything is imperative in my life now” (Gendreau, trans. Wall 15–16). Petina Gappah’s Book of Memory stages its recollecting narrator as an imprisoned woman awaiting the result of her appeal against a murder conviction. Such a highly charged situation, which Villon faced historically in 1462 on the charge of having killed one François Ferrebouc, is exploited by the medieval author for poetic purposes in a ballade that has predictably become labelled “L’Appel de Villon,” addressing the head gaoler of the Châtelet with a refrain questioning the lodged appeal: “Was that, then, my moment to stay silent?” (Villon, Œuvres pp. 229–31). Urgency for his Testament’s persona is provoked both by a lack of time lying ahead and by forces pressing upon him from behind: “pain closes in” (Villon line 1966), he laments in the “Ballade de merci.” His decrepitude risks robbing him of a voice to dictate his will to his putative scribe: I feel my heart getting weaker And I can no longer speak. Frémin, sit close to my bed So that nobody can spy on me. Take up ink, pen, paper immediately! Copy down quickly what I say! (Villon lines 785–90) The testator’s imperatives and temporal adverbs both evoke the time-critical nature of the enterprise and confer implied importance upon it, an effect redoubled by evoking a furtive audience. His besetting pain is, we infer, more physical than moral; irony tinges the persona’s profession of his sins (“I am a sinner, I know it well” (line 105) – proclamation rather than penitent confession), whereas Mézières’s persona seems to derive his urgency, albeit unexplained, from his earnest self-perception as a singularly worse sinner than others (“other Christians of his rank who have not fallen into such terrible sin” (317)), who thereby needs to work penitentially harder to make a good end. Returning to de Hauteville, we find the most ironically pressed testating persona: his posture is that of a martyr for love, a lover who perfectly fulfils his devotion by dying for love – the comedy of the poem lies in his failure to do just that. As we saw above, he is stuck. He imposes all possible constraints on his existence: “It is time for my life to end” (line 130), reasons the logic of his appropriate demise (“It will be better for me to be dead/Than to live on in the world forever in regret” (lines 146–47)), and defines himself as being dead, or wanting to be so (“For I deem myself to be dead” (line 528)), but he cannot argue himself to death. He languishes in unfulfillment, unable to enact the role to which he aspires. His testament is a failed exercise of will.

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Making Disposition: An Exercise of Will De Hauteville’s persona’s aforecited assertion, “I want to prepare for my end [de ma fin disposer je veulx],” now reads more desperately as an effortful attempt rather than a secure undertaking, with hyperbaton and the explicit subject personal pronoun (non-mandatory in medieval French) underscoring his earnest endeavor. Dispositions are needed to counter the dispossession threatened or already effected by death. De Hauteville’s person laments the loss of his lady as a disinheritance, imprecating personified death: You have wrongly disinherited me And stolen my true inheritance. (de Hauteville lines 73–74) His testament serves, it is implied, to compensate as best it can for this lost legacy. A testamentary “last will [volenté]” is thus an exercise of agency under the spotlight. In the autofictional context of Gendreau’s Testament, this enables the author “to gain back in writing some of the agency lost in the battle with terminal illness; writing her own death, she takes control of that narrative, at least for these moments, in this particular context” (Wall 37). This exercise is conveyed by the text’s creation as well as within its fiction: diegetic Vickie sends to her friends USB keys enclosed in brown envelopes, whose document contents constitute part of the text of each chapter; there is, in consequence, a constantly shifting sense of narrative perspective in terms of person and tense: in the voice of her friend Mathieu she adopts a third-person point of view on her identity: “she was going to be posthumous. The queen is dead. She was so trashy, so sparkly, so explosive, so much of her generation. François Villon in a tuxedo” (Gendreau, trans. Wall p. 120). Self-designation as specifically of her moment and as an avatar of Villon may seem an ironic juxtaposition, but given that, as Jane Taylor notes, every age creates its own Villon (1), this is not an irony pushing toward contradiction. Gendreau demonstrates how testamentary disposition occurs in two, related phases: putting one’s own identity in order, and arranging what one bequeaths to others. The phases are intimately linked: the constructed self is itself a legacy (and already carrying inheritance, as in the alignment with medieval Villon), just as the most pertinent burial site of “poor Villon,” heralded in the Testament’s final ballade, is the very text of that poem. Putting one’s own identity in order relates to the historical practice of making provision in one’s will for the disposition of the body; in medieval literary testaments, it binds together the typical three sections of the text: confession, bequests, and prescribed epitaph (Cerquiglini-Toulet 6). Confession offers a retrospective gaze on one’s life as narrative, while the epitaph furnishes a digest of that life’s key features in the deictic present: a “here lies” that will be the here and now of future readers.4 Confession, and the kind of narrative it generates, fosters as much a sense of concealment as of revelation, and often privileges obfuscation or confusion. In Dunant’s The Birth of Venus, the main text comprises “The Testament of Sister Lucrezia,” which discloses the narrator’s contrived suicide. A prefatory “Prologue” provides a third-person, posthumous account of the nuns’ chance discovery of her suicide and the misunderstandings that lead to this knowledge, which is achieved by their disrobing – literal uncovering – of her corpse. The effect is to privilege perplexity, and is one sought most sedulously by Villon’s testator, whose aforementioned self-contradictions and evasions render impossible any straightforward reading of seductively confessional-style statements. For example, “I am the most imperfect of all” (Villon line 261), which might read penitentially, seems more likely self-promotion – cultivating covert prestige of superlative slyness – than self-deprecation. The order that one chooses for one’s identity narrative is thus not necessarily linear or orderly in a conventional sense; 261

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deliberate disarray may be encouraged, as when Villon’s testator insists that his epitaph be inscribed “in charcoal or a lump of coal,/Without at all marking the plaster” (lines 1880–81). He seeks to unfix his identity as evanescent and friable.5 A more conventional approach to putting oneself in order seems to be supplied by Mézières. His Testament exhorts the Celestines to prepare his body for burial, but does so with extraordinary specificity and dramaturgical precision: according to Chapter 1, for instance, his corpse should be stripped naked, chained by its neck, roped to a plank and dragged around the cloister, through the vestry and into the body of the church, where it should be deposited by the oblates, covered in black cloth, and surrounded by four candelabra. This corporeal degradation is not, however, a spectacle of self-display to preserve particular memory; on the contrary, in Chapter 18, he orders the destruction of the plank and candelabra: “to erase the memory of any unusual singularity concerning the poor pilgrim” (Mézières 321). For pious Mézières, what matters beyond his own last will is the will of God: “‘Not my will, but thy will be done’” (301). The greater disposition is divine: “man proposes and God disposes” (320). Similar testamentary specificity is furnished in the very different, non-devotional context of de Hauteville’s persona’s peculiar wishes for his interment: he is avowedly eccentric in his dispositions “that one should behave differently/From how one is accustomed” (de Hauteville 1139–40), such that, for example, mourners should wear green coats with yellow hoods. In such poems, where ironic distance separates narrating persona from implied author, the more insistent the expression of will, the more this is highlighted as a subjective, partial viewpoint, as Villon’s testator demonstrates: For I want to start testating [tester]. Before my clerk Frémin, who heeds me – if he’s not napping – I want to protest [protester] That I do not intend to cut off [detester] anyone. (Villon lines 778–81) His three-fold assertion of intention ironically draws attention to the fact that he is affirming a wish to begin when already a third of the way through the poem. His annominatio on “tester” reveals how the act of testating can function as a personal settling of scores – whether through exclusion (“de-test” as “un-will”) or through inclusion in an unflattering light (“detest”). Although the persona denies vigorously that he is throwing shade, his repeated imprecation of his alleged imprisoner, Archbishop Thibaut d’Aucigny, argues otherwise. A testator’s claim to recount accurately – often supported by asseverations of truth – not only relays personal rather than objective truth, but furthermore exposes the non-unitary nature of someone’s true story: one’s identity, and the narrative that composes it, is fundamentally plural and composite. In Gappah’s Book of Memory, the persona’s relationship with Lloyd, the murder victim, is uncertain: she presents him as an adoptive parent; the prison guards assume he was her lover; her memory – what constitutes the persona’s onomastic identity as Memory – is haltingly perceived, foggy, undocumented. Her life is precarious because its narrative is uncertain, unrecognized, and not sure of being legible; testamentary writing raises Judith Butler’s urgent question, “whose lives count as lives? And, finally, what makes for a grievable life?” (20). The identity of the testating subject exposes individual human identity, not as a tale waiting to be told, but as a telling that is always in process and contested. Cerquiglini-Toulet states that “the ‘I’ is constitutive of what it writes” (5), but this writing is not uniquely “its,” because it is also constituted by other voices – whether other manifestations of the persona (such as Vickie’s Word documents in Gendreau’s Testament or, in Villon’s poem, acrostics of the authorial name or its repeated use as a rich rhyme) or first/third persons ostensibly separate from theirs (the direct discourse of a helmet seller quoted by 262

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Villon’s persona or the projected interventions of Vickie’s friends). A testator’s corporeal decrepitude, such as de Hauteville’s stricken persona – My mouth closes up, my nose pinches, My teeth click and tighten; In sum, my every member collapses And begs to be laid in the ground. (de Hauteville lines 1557–60) – gives physical form to the way in which their identity construction is a process combining composition and decomposition: “the testamentary form plays at one and the same time on assemblage and dispersal, of possessions as of the person” (Cerquiglini-Toulet 16). And, as we saw in Villon’s pungent diegetic self-portrait, prosodic vigor in the depiction of decline paradoxically makes potent the identity it thereby projects. Cerquiglini-Toulet casts the testamentary subject as “an ‘I’ which gathers itself together in the very act of bequeathing” (3): it is constituted not by expression of a pre-existing self, but by performing that self as a communication to others, a bequeathed identity. This is dramatized in the second of two sequels to de Hauteville’s poem: in addition to a Complainte de l’amant trespassé de deuil, there survives L’Inventaire des biens demourez du decés de l’amant trespassé de dueil. In a pastiche of probate inventory practice, the now-deceased lover-persona’s friends act as clerk and witnesses of the inventory’s compilation as they move from room to room. What they compile thereby, through their observations and estimation of the value of his possessions, is his identity – or, at least, a version thereof. Judicious metatextual metaphor draws attention to the specifically literary nature of identity as legacy when the friends come upon a splendid shirt made for the persona by his lady: “Oh, noble work compiled/Of all human virtues and pleasures” (de Hauteville, Inventaire lines 233–34). This literary reflexive “work” [ouvraige] discloses both how the lovers wove their love story and how that story is evoked by the inventory-compilers’ itemization of its objects which constitutes L’Inventaire. De Hauteville points out how the legacy’s definition is determined by its recipients, and thus how the “I” it communicates is the product of elaboration by “you” or “they,” like the nuns unwrapping Sister Lucrezia’s cadaver in The Birth of Venus.

Testis: A Need for Witness De Hauteville and Dunant indicate the important role of future witnesses, those who posthumously attest to the deceased and enable their legacy: the same is true of the projected audience to whom Villon’s testator plays in the “Ballade de merci,” or of Vickie’s friends, of whom Gendreau remarked in an interview: “in my book, I make people react to my death […] because I want them to react” (Guy). However, especially in a medieval context, present witness is also key: the person who received the dying person’s last confession would also transcribe their will, like the priest in de Hauteville’s Confession. Villon’s persona dictates to a scribe, whose transmission of the text is unreliable, as the preceding quotations evoking Frémin’s drowsiness suggest – though better a flawed witness, and the risk of misrepresentation, than no witness at all and erasure. But a single witness does not suffice to validate testimony. Villon alludes parodically in the “Ballade de conclusion” to the legal adage testis unus, testis nullus (“one witness is no witness”), when its thirdperson voice recounts the testator’s final act: “this he swore on his testicle” (Villon line 2002, emphasis mine). What in fact this scabrous wordplay ironically indicates is the proliferation of witness perspectives in the poem, none of which is trustworthy, the testator’s included. Mézières’s Testament provides an interesting combination of present and future witnesses, projecting forward as it does to Mézières’s future self and the different possible scenarios of his 263

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eventual demise. He makes provision in Chapters 5 and 6 for his confession, reception of the Blessed Sacrament, and Extreme Unction, and requests continuous deathbed attendance by one of the Celestine brothers. The narrative voice oscillates between different persons; in this, Mézières anticipates the text’s meditations being put into practice by being spoken aloud – whether to him or by him – at the moment for which it prepares. For example, in the second person of the Preface’s apostrophes and imperatives – “O, aged pilgrim, worthless and worn out, […] acknowledge now the graces that God gives you” (306) – there is a double temporal referent for “now” [a present]: the moment of composition in anticipation of his demise, and the hour of death itself. He also furnishes in first-person direct discourse a prayer of supplication for his dying self to recite: “My Lord and my God, by your holy grace…” (ibid.). The collective first person features in repeated reference to the persona as “our poor pilgrim”: this could be seen as a rhetorical technique for the future persona to cultivate a sense of community, should he be employing the text for his deathbed meditation, or, indeed, for the actual Celestine community in their care and intercessory prayer for him. Bearing witness to one’s death does not necessarily require a third party; as discussed earlier, “I” is not a unitary entity and can spectate its own death. Vickie is both observer and observed; all the more so Gendreau herself (Wall 6), who was still alive when Testament was published,6 but died some time before its appearance in English. Wall speaks of the challenges of translating this work, and how she consulted in particular Gendreau’s close friend Mathieu who features as a character, with imagined speech, in Testament. The complex ontology, temporality, and interlace of voice in this case in fact serves as a very specific illustration of a more generally true phenomenon in literary testamentary writing: its most salient defining feature is a particular positioning of its narrative subject, giving an account of itself on the brink, urgently, with everything at stake, striving to take charge of its story and of its audience. It offers a scenario of high dramatic tension and narrative intrigue for reflecting on human identity. Far from being, in any straightforward sense, “the most personal and immediate poems of their age” (Ariès 198), late-medieval fictional wills display the process and the precarities of identity construction. One may apply to them, and to the twentyfirst-century literary testaments discussed herein, the figure of speech used by Derrida to speak about writing more generally: “every grapheme is essentially testamentary” (100), because their constitution of the subject’s self represents conscientious composition rather than transparent revelation. When de Hauteville’s persona comments “I want to prepare for my end,” he signals the beginning of an elaborate undertaking: anticipating death, it accommodates a posthumous perspective on life, recounting the process of constituting who he wills his self to be.

Notes 1 2 3 4 5 6

All translations from medieval and modern French are my own, unless otherwise indicated. I consider only human cases here; for animal testaments, see, for example, Champlin. For the testament as a transitional moment, see Singer 417. On literary epitaphs, see Kenny; Swift (Representing). For narrative order in Gendreau’s Testament, see Wall 4. On its reception, see Wall, “Autofiction,” pp. 3–4, 15.

Works Cited Primary Sources Charles d’Orléans. Ballades et rondeaux, edited by Jean-Claude Mühlethaler. Librairie générale française, 1992. Dunant, Sarah. The Birth of Venus. Little, Brown, 2003.

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Fictional Will Gappah, Petina. The Book of Memory. Faber & Faber, 2015. Gendreau, Vickie. Testament. Le Quartanier, 2012. Gendreau, Vickie. Testament. Translated by Aimee Wall. BookThug, 2016. de Hauteville, Pierre.Complainte de l’amant trespassé de deuil; L’Inventaire des biens demourez du decés de l’amant trespassé de dueil. Edited by Rose M. Bidler. Le Moyen Français, vol. 18, 1986. de Hauteville, Pierre. Confession et testament de l’amant trespassé de deuil. Edited by Rose M. Bidler. CERES, 1982. Mézières, Philippe de. Le Testament. Edited by Alice Guillemain. “Le Testament de Philippe de Mézières (1392).” Mélanges de littérature du moyen âge au XXè siècle, offerts à Mademoiselle Jeanne Lods, 2 vols., 1978, I, pp. 297–322. Molinet, Jean. Le Donnet baillié au roy Charles VIII. Edited by Maria Colombo. “‘Le Donnet baillé au feu roy Charles huytiesme de ce nom.’” “Il n’est nul si beau passe temps/Que se jouer a sa Pensee”: Studi di filologia e letteratura francese in onore di Anna Maria Fino. Edizioni ETS, 1995, pp. 135–171. Villon, François. Œuvres complètes. Edited by Jacqueline Cerquiglini-Toulet with Laëtitia Tabard. Gallimard, 2014.

Secondary Sources Appleford, Amy. Learning to Die in London, 1380–1540. U of Pennsylvania P, 2015. Ariès, Philippe. The Hour of Our Death. Translated by Helen Weaver. Allen Lane, 1981. Butler, Judith. Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. Verso, 2004. Cerquiglini-Toulet, Jacqueline. L’Écriture testamentaire à la fin du moyen âge: identité, dispersion, trace. Legenda, 1999. Champlin, Edward. “The Testament of the Piglet.” Phoenix, vol. 41, no. 2, 1987, pp. 174–183. Derrida, Jacques. De la grammatologie. Minuit, 1967. Guy, Chantal. “Vickie Gendreau, Testament: comment vous dire adieu.” La Presse, 14 Sept. 2012, www. lapresse.ca/arts/livres/201209/14/01-4574037-vickie-gendreautestament-comment-vous-dire-adieu.php. Kenny, Neil. Death and Tenses: Posthumous Presence in Early Modern France. Oxford UP, 2015. Perrow, Eber Carle. The Last Will and Testament as a Form of Literature. Transactions of the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters, vol. 17, part 1, 1913, pp. 682–753. Available in The Making of Modern Law: Legal Treatises, 1800–1926. Gale, 2012. Gale, Cengage Learning. www.gale.com/intl/c/making-ofmodern-law-legal-treatises-1800-1926, ezproxyprd.bodleian.ox.ac.uk:2173/servlet/MOML?af=RN& ae=F3750539991&srchtp=a&ste=14. Singer, Julie. “‘Mon corps on ouvrera’: l’amant en transi dans la Confession et Testament de l’amant trespassé de deuil de Pierre de Hauteville.” La Mort dans la littérature française du moyen âge, edited by Jean-François Kosta-Théfaine. Ressouvenances, 2013, pp. 411–428. Swift, Helen J. “‘La Devise et forme singuliere de la fin du povre pelerin’: Ritual Configuration and Rhetorical Invention in Philippe de Mézières’s Testament (1392).” Philippe de Mézières, rhétorique et poétique, edited by Joel Blanchard with Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski and Antoine Calvet. Droz, 2019, pp. 207–225. Swift, Helen J. Representing the Dead: Epitaph Fictions in Late-Medieval France. D.S. Brewer, 2016. Taylor, Jane H. M. The Poetry of François Villon: Text and Context. Cambridge UP, 2001. Wall, Aimee. “Autofiction in Translation: Translating Vickie Gendreau’s Testament.” Unpublished master’s thesis, Concordia University, Montreal, 2015.

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24 MONUMENTALISM, DEATH, AND GENRE IN SHAKESPEARE John Tangney

In 1989 Francis Fukuyama announced the end of history after the falling of the Berlin Wall, heralding a neoliberal millennium in which the great ideological struggles were over and liberal democracy had shown itself the fittest to survive. In his neo-Hegelian account of history, thymos, or the desire for honor, was the fundamental human motivation, a notion that Shakespeare’s younger contemporary, Thomas Hobbes, had adapted from Plato’s account of timocratic government in the Republic (Fukuyama, End of History 162). Plato’s student, Aristotle, later said that the problem with honor is that it depends on those who confer it more than on its actual possessor (Aristotle 1095b22–4). As such it can indeed serve as a binding agent in society, but an unstable one by virtue of which a person’s status is subject to alteration long after their death. Honor is a virtue that recommends itself to people whose purchase on being itself has become tenuous, who are no longer self-sufficient philosopher kings, warriors, or artisans in an ontologically stable cosmopolis. In Shakespeare’s time, the medieval church had been destroyed in a few short decades by the Tudor political dynasty, breaking ordinary people’s connection to the past and volatilizing their sense of self.1 Religious iconoclasm coexisted with a fashion for elaborate funeral monuments that peaked in the 1590s when he was coming to his artistic maturity, referenced sardonically by Benedick in Much Ado about Nothing: “If a man do not erect in this age his own tomb ere he dies, he shall live no longer in monument than the bell rings and the widow weeps” (5.2.56; Cust 751). The tomb Benedick refers to is marriage, and the life after death he implies is not that provided by a monument but by the production of offspring. In the sonnets, which are sometimes seen as a sketchbook where Shakespeare rehearsed ideas that would find greater elaboration in his plays, he enjoins his anonymous friend to procreate so that his beauty will survive for posterity. However, in Sonnet 55 he compares his own poetic activity to the erection of a monument to a beloved person: “Not marble nor the gilded monuments of princes shall outlive this powerful rhyme.” He imagines that in the absence of offspring a sonnet can be more powerful than a monument because it lives in the memory and is not as subject to political convulsions of the future. We can read it at once as ironically egotistical and as a serious claim for the value of poetry in a time when transcendent religious ideals are under attack. Fragile egos drive the markets in an honor economy, whereas those who live with a sense of control over their destinies (such as that provided by the medieval salvation economy where you could save yourself by means of good deeds), have less need of personal monuments in 266

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stone or writing. The anonymous morality play, Everyman, written in the late fifteenth century, depicts a man who only has his good deeds left after friendship and honor have left him as he travels towards death.2 Medieval graveyards were filled with the mingled bones of such people, like Yorick in Hamlet (Ariès 60). For them being buried in the church precincts was symbolic of their inclusion in the City of God, of being safe in eternity rather than functioning as a flimsy security against time and forgetting. However, by Shakespeare’s time people’s trajectory in the next world had become radically ambiguous. Shakespeare is arguably the first poet of the modern individual for whom death is an epistemological impasse that creates a fissure at the center of his being. He is also the last great tragedian whose plays anticipate the new artistic form of the novel. In their awareness of death at a time when “miracles are past and we have our philosophical persons to make modern and familiar things supernatural and causeless” (All’s Well that Ends Well 2.3.1), his protagonists form a bridge between the aristocratic heroes of ancient tragedy and medieval romance on the one hand, and the sovereign subjects of liberal modernity on the other. In addition to registering cultural sea-changes, Shakespeare’s plays encode his own changing attitude to death through his life. James Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus extrapolated a biography of Shakespeare from his plays that postmodern critics have seen as unsophisticated in its assumption of a unified authorial self. However, like the end of history, postmodernism is past, and we can assert that the inner life of the individual was not invented by the Renaissance in the way that it was fashionable to argue in the 1990s.3 As medievalist David Aers already pointed out in 1993, St Augustine was writing about the inner life in late antiquity in a way that nobody but Chaucer and Shakespeare did again over the next millennium.4 It might therefore be better said that existential inwardness is not simply a sixteenth-century historical development, but that its realistic literary portrayal is a relatively unusual achievement until the rise of the novel. Shakespeare taught himself and us how to do it by writing history plays about the lives of medieval kings, starting at the reign of Henry VI that ended just before the foundation of the Tudor dynasty, and moving backward in time to Richard II, a medieval king who is therefore the most developed depiction of inwardness in his early plays. He then moved forward again to write about Elizabethan lowlife in conjunction with court politics in the Henry IV plays, where he developed one of his greatest characters in Falstaff. The practice of having a comic subplot in his tragedies and of raising the specter of death in his comedies became part of the psychological realism that made him iconic for modernity, and was proleptic of postmodernism in its collapsing of generic hierarchies. Yet Shakespeare is not simply a proto-novelistic chronicler of his own period’s local color or a postmodernist avant la lettre who displaced his political critique onto the Middle Ages. He was a literary magpie who also drew on the resources of the medieval literary tradition for both his artistic method and his subject matter, in the semi-allegorical figure of Richard III who owes much to the Vice figures of medieval morality plays, and in the imagery of Richard II that draws on the medieval dance of death tradition (Beck 372–74). He turns to allegory in his depiction of Cordelia in King Lear, Marina in Pericles, and Perdita in The Winter’s Tale: feminine figures of fortitude, grief, and loss who are a way of absolutizing the self in terms of one of its experiences. When they interact with more realistic characters they provide a foil for tragic heroes dealing with the loss of their ideals. Viewing it in this way makes Lear’s lament for Cordelia all the more resonant: “I know when one is dead and when one lives, she’s dead as earth” (5.3.256). This “one” is not just his daughter, but the ideal loss involved when death no longer takes place sub specie aeternitatis and becomes a merely historical-material event. Despite his awareness of the implications of materialism, the being-towards-death of Shakespearean characters often entails a quasi-mystical sense of the soul; for example, in Richard III 267

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when he has the protagonist say, “Dive thoughts down to my soul” (1.1.41). The Duke of Clarence in the same play describes his dream of being trapped underwater surrounded by dead men with jewels for eyes, unable to release his soul from his body (1.4.36). The soul’s depth and self-presence are its essential characteristics and when they are lost the consequence is the kind of honor economy that Parolles inhabits in All’s Well that Ends Well such that Lafeu says of him, “the soul of this man is his clothes” (2.5.39). Loss of soul makes tyrants of monarchs like Richard III, Lear, and Leontes who use their political power to change the meanings of words and situations by fiat, in a travesty of poetic or divine power. Loss of soul arguably spawns the conceit of immortality that Elizabeth I herself held onto with her increasingly hollow cult of virginity, which is a refusal to die in the sexual sense. “So dying, love lives still” (3.1.105), says Pandarus in Troilus and Cressida, referring to an illicit sexual relationship that ends in death and dishonor. The same principle is also involved in the sovereign’s duty to provide an heir that will preserve the royal line, such that when the queen is dead the mystical body politic is immediately reconstituted in a successor (Kantorowicz 314). This political theology is confused in Elizabeth’s case because she is a woman playing a man’s role, and so male and female are combined in her in a unique way (Montrose 43). She was mother and bride to the entire kingdom, whose virginity symbolized an end of history it couldn’t ultimately deliver, and whose death in 1603 was an unprecedentedly traumatic national event. To report of her death (like a thunder-clap) was able to kill thousands, it tooke away hearts from millions: for hauing brought vp (euen vnder her wing) a nation that was almost begotten and born vnder her; that neuer shouted any other Aue than for her name, neuer sawe the face of any Prince but her selfe, neuer vnderstoode what that strange out-landish word Change signified: how was it possible, but that her sicknes should throw abroad an vniuersall feare, and her death an astonishment? (Dekker) Wallace Stevens said “death is the mother of beauty, mystical, within whose burning bosom we devise our earthly mothers waiting sleeplessly” (69), referring to the idea that men recapitulate their relationship to their mothers through their relationships with sexual partners and with death itself. In Book XI of The Odyssey, when Odysseus visits Hades on the way home to his wife, he encounters his mother’s insubstantial form, and Stephen Dedalus’s mother too lives among the shades, a relationship much too deep to be worked out in the literal ways Joyce/ Stephen works out his relationship to his father.5 Richard III’s maternal relationship is characterized by hatred – she complains that he was born with teeth – and Hamlet’s by jealousy of her new lover, but most of the time Shakespearean characters’ relationships with their mothers have to be construed through their relationships with other women.6 Hamlet’s injunction to Ophelia that she should enter a nunnery, Lady Macbeth’s easy incitement of her husband’s ambition, Lear’s cursing of his daughters’ wombs, and Leontes’ nihilistic crisis when he suspects his wife of infidelity all speak to a sense of betrayal that haunts this primary relationship and that is inseparable from the inability of men to know for certain who their father is and who their children are. Leonatus Posthumous in Cymbeline is devastated by the apparent infidelity of his lover because of what it suggests about his own relationship to his dead father, whose monument he is. In Shakespeare’s work the idea that, as Stephen Dedalus put it, “paternity may be a legal fiction,” renders the nescience that characterizes our relationship to the mystical soul into modern naturalistic terms.7 The problem with trusting your wife/mother has to do with the traditional and etymological association of mothers with matter. It also has to do with the connection between fathers and the symbolic power of the state to give semantic fixity to the material flux in which we live. 268

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Aeschylus made mothers the custodians of the household, giving them a sacred role within the state (line 940ff ). In Tudor England the oecos was becoming the economy, the rules of engagement in a proto-capitalist marketplace where people were socio-economic vectors rather than constituents of a sacramental body politic. The medieval body politic held together under the sign of the eucharist was dealt a fatal blow by Henry VIII’s apostasy, a fatality then symbolized in the destruction of the monasteries that Shakespeare memorialized in Sonnet 73 as “bare ruined choirs where late the sweet birds sang.” Monasteries were economically important to the medieval world, which is why their lands were expropriated by the Tudors, but they were also embassies of Augustine’s City of God. In the Middle Ages the term secular was used in contradistinction to monastic within the ambit of the universal Catholic church, but Shakespeare was writing at the start of a period when the secular was to become all-encompassing, and only the presence of “that within which passeth show” (Hamlet 1.2.85) seemed to suggest a survival of the sacred, in the individual conscience with its intensely personal awareness of death as the “undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveller returns” (Hamlet 3.1.80). The sense of death as an undiscovered country can be connected to critics like Dowden, who used the generic term “Romance” to describe Shakespeare’s late plays (Smith 281). It signifies the presence of sin and death in the comic universe but also the possibility of a qualified happy ending. Its earliest example in Shakespeare’s canon is arguably found in As You Like It, where the melancholic Jacques compares the world to a stage and life to a play whose last scene that “ends this strange eventful history,/Is second childishness and mere oblivion;/Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything” (2.7.163–5). However, as early as A Midsummer Night’s Dream we see the shadow of death falling across the Edenic world of comedy and the marriage that signifies its consummation. The identities of the characters in Dream after they leave Athens are fluid, like our identities in a dream, suggesting at once the Homeric underworld by virtue of their Athenian location, and the traumatic unconscious transformations that have to take place in order to merge your being with another’s in marriage or forgiveness. The patriarchal will to which Hermia and Helena are expected to conform, and the harsh penalties for disobedience, are its waking counterpoint. Athens and its wooded hinterland are therefore a kind of allegory that points back to Plato’s analogy between city and soul in the Republic, and forward to the Freudian unconscious in its relation to the superego. Unlike Plato’s Socrates, Dream’s lovers choose exile over death, but as children running from their parents they run, Oedipus-like, into the arms of what they were fleeing, albeit in the diminished form of sleep and of a bad tragedy put on by the mechanicals. The melodramatic death scene in this play causes Theseus to threaten the players jocosely, “for when the players are all dead, there need none to be blamed” (5.1.337). Immediately following these lines, as the “iron tongue of midnight” (5.1.342) speaks, they all go to bed and Puck comes back on stage to announce the moment when “the wasted brands do glow,/Whilst the screech owl, screeching loud,/Puts the wretch that lies in woe, In remembrance of a shroud. Now it is the time of night/That the graves all gaping wide […] I am sent with broom before/to sweep the dust behind the door” (5.2.5–20). As the newly married couples sleep, the dust to which we all return is pushed out of sight but not out of mind. In ghost stories, as in dreams, the door to the land of the dead opens both ways. In the waking consciousness of modernity, this fact is forgotten but not gone amid new materialist philosophies. Therefore, the dust behind the door comes back into view in Hamlet and Macbeth. The ghost of Hamlet’s father is a specter of the Middle Ages, whose presence in an early modern play is an emblem of how the suppression of the past in Reformation England had made human consciousness an arena for the uncanny return of the repressed, and for things whose meanings contain their opposites. Is the ghost an honest ghost or an apparition designed to lead Hamlet to 269

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his damnation? What is he doing on the stage in an era when ghosts are not credited in the official religious ideology? Hamlet vacillates for five acts before accomplishing the tragedy of which he is the putative hero. Action was the soul of tragedy for Aristotle, whose theory of the soul was a materialist one that didn’t entail individual survival of death, but existed nevertheless in a relatively ahistorical world with a stable ontological structure. Inability to act in a sure way is the soul of Hamlet, the tragedy that has become most iconic of the modern self, in which the hope that there are “more things in heaven and earth […] than are dreamt of in your philosophy” (1.4.165) coexists with the fear that man is a quintessence of dust for whom there is nothing beyond what we can perceive with our senses. Nineteenth and twentieth-century readers placed his tragedies at the center of the Shakespearean canon, because they seemed to set the tone for modernity coping with its combination of heroic aspirations and lack of a moral compass in the context of nation states built on new materialist philosophies. “Oh what an Earth-quake is the alteration of a State!” wrote Thomas Dekker in 1603, conveying that Elizabeth I’s death was a seismic event for Shakespeare’s society because she had no heir, such that an outbreak of plague immediately following her funeral seemed symbolic of the chaotic forces unleashed by the failure of her myth. Elizabeth was Spenser’s Faerie Queene, and Shakespeare’s Titania spurning Oberon, rather than Hippolyta brought to the altar by Theseus. She was the opposite of a materialized ideal like Cordelia. She was a failed idealization of the material substrate of our existence sitting on the throne of England, whose symbolism of virgin purity became ever more threadbare as she aged. In the neo-pagan Renaissance world, as in the medieval Catholic world, myths exist within a symbolically coherent universe, but in the ambiguous world of Protestant early modernity virginity has a short shelf life, and quickly turns into a travesty of itself if it is not spent. This is to say that myths need to renew themselves, and England’s did the best it could after her passing with the installation of Elizabeth’s cousin, the dour James I. The stopgap nature of this measure may have inspired Macbeth’s dispiriting vision of life as “but a walking shadow […] a poor player who struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more. It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing” (5.5.23). In these lines Macbeth envisions a future of endless tomorrows to the end of recorded time, but not the end of time. That it is a tale told by an idiot speaks to its being, like a play, the singular expression of an individual sensibility, and that it signifies nothing suggests that this sensibility, like the atheist Spinoza’s God a few decades later, is something of which there can by definition be only one in the universe: a substance without exterior relationships that is therefore a pure exteriority (Spinoza 1). We can relate macrocosm to microcosm in this context by recalling Clarence’s sense of his soul being trapped in his body, and Henry V’s assertion that “every subject’s soul is his own” (4.1.154), and see that the question of whether other minds exist and how it is possible to reach them is at the heart of Shakespeare’s cosmography. A person is etymologically one who speaks through a theatrical mask in scripted ways, and in a great play goes beyond the emotionally familiar into the strangeness of encountering other selves speaking the same language with different intent – encounters that can sometimes lead to loss of self in love, dishonor, or death. While the view that the interior life for which these mysteries are constitutive was invented in the Renaissance is clearly mistaken, it is nevertheless true that being an individual with an inner life became difficult in new ways for more people after the Renaissance, because power didn’t in fact flow directly from God through the sovereign onto the people as it was supposed to in the Tudor myth and in Plato’s myth.8 Richard II’s histrionic realization of this fact is paradigmatic of the plight of the ego learning the lessons of its own contingency in a world where God is distant or absent and power is shifting and precarious: 270

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Down, down I come; like glistering Phaethon, Wanting the manage of unruly jades. In the base court? Base court, where kings grow base, To come at traitors’ calls and do them grace. In the base court? Come down? Down, court! down, king! For night-owls shriek where mounting larks should sing. (3.3.177) Richard encodes, in the macabre image of night-owls combined with the myth of Phaethon mismanaging his father’s chariot, the fact that the Protestant valorization of the individual conscience was at odds with the ontological stability implied by official Tudor ideology. It opened the door to conscientious objection to a sovereign’s right to rule, such as we see Bolingbroke using as a pretext for supplanting Richard. It made kings base, but it also gradually made subjects into voters in modern democracies for whom the Shakespearean sovereign became a literary prototype of the individual. This modern individual is a figure whose agency is always ambiguous, continually being made anew by freely chosen actions whose consequences can’t be controlled, leading Hamlet to wonder if it is “nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune or to take up arms against a sea of troubles” (3.1.58). Such musings about whether fatalism or activism is the best response to the vagaries of fortune had found one answer in Machiavelli’s book, The Prince, where Fortuna is a woman who has to be controlled by force, but who always has the last laugh (102). Machiavelli’s Fortuna was the realm of material contingency, and the prince’s virtu was not so much a moral quality as an ability to maintain the appearance of morality while acting to maximize his chances of survival in a world driven by cynicism. As such, Machiavelli is the antiPlato and sets the tone for modern realpolitik where personal branding trumps personal integrity to the point that appearances become reality. The Machiavellian prince’s inner life would be opaque to us, except that his political relationships manifest it in the outer world over which he seeks to have absolute dominion – while always fearing that it is bigger and more chaotic than he can contain. Prince Hamlet talks to himself about these circumstances, paralyzing his own will-to-power, and thereby exhibits more introspective depth than political scope. In Hamlet’s famous soliloquies Fortuna and the inner life interpenetrate, preparing the ground for the Romantic Counter-enlightenment’s valorization of emotion and imagination. We see other Shakespearean versions of Fortuna in the ocean that Pericles is tossed on after losing his wife and daughter, and in the nihilistic despair of Leontes for whom the world becomes a vast sea of nothingness once he loses faith in his wife’s honesty. Is whispering nothing? Is leaning cheek to cheek? Is meeting noses? Kissing with inside lip? Stopping the career Of laughing with a sigh? – a note infallible Of breaking honesty – […] is this nothing? Why, then the world and all that’s in’t is nothing; The covering sky is nothing; Bohemia nothing; My wife is nothing; nor nothing have these nothings, If this be nothing (The Winter’s Tale 1.2.284). That Shakespeare’s kings experience a loss of faith in relation to woman rather than God is essential to understanding Shakespeare’s relationship to death. Woman is matter, but as Coleridge would later point out, “matter has no inward” (225); it is phenomenology, and the 271

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loss of faith in women is a loss of faith in there being any metaphysical substance behind material events or moral substance behind the appearances women are criticized for cultivating with their use of cosmetics: “let her paint an inch thick, to this favour she must come” (5.1.158), muses Hamlet, beholding Yorick’s skull in an image that must have recalled Elizabeth I to contemporary audiences. The criticism of female narcissism springs from the solipsist’s fear that his own consciousness is all that exists, but that in discovering as much he will pass through the looking glass into the nothingness of matter: “Narcissus so himself himself forsook, And died to kiss his shadow in the brook” (Venus and Adonis 161–62). Matter and spirit, female and male are inextricably combined within the soul of Shakespeare’s drama and in seeking to know each other they bring about death and transformation. Another way to say this is that the relation between the sexes haunts the primary ontological question about why matter exists, and the corollary question about how meaning comes into existence. Hamlet looking at the sky sees random shapes that he interprets as symbols, and looking in a book he sees words as material things without signification. Do words get their meanings from the realm of things, or do things get their meanings from the application to them of words? Are words things or are things signs? Is the universe ultimately non-signifying or is it a supreme signifier, and how can you tell the difference? Augustine addressed this question in On the Teacher, deciding first that things get their meaning from words, then reconsidering and choosing the reverse option, before finally concluding that neither can be true, that the semiotic relationship must be a product of divine illumination. Illumination doesn’t come through the senses from the physical sun, but from an inner light that is empirically indistinguishable from the darkness of unknowing. Augustine’s path is in this dialogue a negative one, in which he discounts all material things as places in which to find God. God is the substance behind phenomena, a trinitarian monad, who has created for himself a creature capable of disobedience and deception. He says that nobody can truly call anything his own except a lie. By Augustine’s lights, the liberal individual pursuing his enlightened self-interest in the marketplace is a liar, a purveyor of fictions about the self. Modern mechanistic science is in the service of this individual such that by the eighteenth century “enlightenment” meant the opposite of Augustinian illumination, implying a philosophy of materialism rather than idealism. For all these semantic inversions, in both medieval and modern dispensations death is democratic in that it affects everyone equally. “Golden lads and girls all must as chimney sweepers come to dust” says the funeral oration from Cymbeline, apparently making reference to child laborers. However, “golden lad” is Warwickshire slang for a dandelion, a common type of weed, and “chimney-sweeper” is what it is called when it goes to seed. The Shakespearean tragic vision of mankind as a quintessence of dust, and of futurity as a series of indistinguishable tomorrows, gives way here to a prettier, more organic, less histrionic metaphor for the ordinariness of death in natural cycles. Shakespeare never allows himself a vision of the resurrection, but in his romances there is a kind of redemption through the restoration of family relationships. The transcendent solace that was lost with the smashing of the medieval church is recreated on a horizontal plane not by monumentalizing the masculine self, but through the possibility of intimacy between men and women. In The Winter’s Tale, following his nihilistic crisis and banishment of his wife, Leontes enters a decades-long era of penitence during which Perdita, the daughter he consigned to death, grows up in a foreign land like the germ of his grief fructifying into new life. She embodies the paradox that both matter and grief are heavy and that their weightiness signifies absence. Then, fleeing from the tyranny of Camillo, Leontes’ erstwhile best friend, Perdita runs Oedipus-like to a foreign land that is actually her family home, bringing Camillo in her wake. In response to her arrival, a statue of Leontes’ dead wife is unveiled that turns out not to be a statue but his actual wife. She 272

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has been in an internal exile within his kingdom awaiting this moment. Leontes and Hermione are reunited, but the power differential between them has changed. He can never make full restitution for the years they have lost, and his diminished egoism makes a kind of intimacy possible. We don’t see the moment of Leontes’ reunion with Camillo and Perdita, but hear about it from one who did: “there was speech in their dumbness, language in their very gesture” (5.2.10). In this moment of wonder, words and things, matter and idea, are united in a fullness of meaning that has to happen offstage in order to avoid bathos. The story of Hermione, Perdita, and Leontes draws on the Ovidian myth of Pygmalion, who made a statue so realistic it came to life. No such miracle happens in Shakespeare’s play, however. The statue’s coming to life has a naturalistic explanation, as if to express Shakespeare’s new-found modesty about the power of his art to defy death, a theme he took up again in The Tempest. The latter is a story about a very un-Machiavellian king exiled to an island that he expropriated from a witch, and inhabited now only by himself, his daughter, the witch’s son, and an androgynous spirit named Ariel. Prospero brings his former persecutors to the island by magic, shipwrecks them off the coast, and leads them through a series of illusions meant to enable atonement and forgiveness. This is an enchanted world without actual death, the world of romantic comedy, though not all the characters know this, and in hearing that his father lies under the sea with pearls for eyes, Ferdinand contacts for a moment the same uncanny archetype of the soul that appeared in Clarence’s dream much earlier in Shakespeare’s career. His father’s apparent death is in the service of an emotional sea-change deep enough to enable forgiveness and marriage between the families. However, Prospero himself has sinned against the original inhabitants of the island, and in breaking his staff he orients himself toward a real death by renouncing his rough magic as if it were just a metaphor for something more profound that he calls “Mercy itself”: And my ending is despair, Unless I be relieved by prayer, Which pierces so that it assaults Mercy itself and frees all faults. As you from crimes would pardon’d be, Let your indulgence set me free (The Tempest, Epilogue, 14–19). In renouncing Renaissance magic, Prospero addresses himself to modernity through an ironic invocation of a medieval dispensation that has gone, when your fate in the hereafter could be influenced by prayers, and it was said that a short prayer pierces heaven. The irony is in the fact that Shakespeare’s hopes lie in the popularity of his art as the only shield against despair. Then again, the audience’s indulgence is freely given on the Christian basis of doing unto others as you would have them do unto you, and is not a purely economic transaction in the manner of corrupt medieval exchanges of money for time off one’s sentence in purgatory. One way or another, it does little to assuage the anxiety attending “the dark encroachment of that old catastrophe,” a line from Wallace Stevens, one of Shakespeare’s modern interlocutors, that evokes the strange theatricality of our being towards death. Fukuyama said, “The traumatic events of the twentieth century formed the backdrop to a profound intellectual crisis as well. It is possible to speak of historical progress only if one knows where mankind is going” (End of History 7). This intellectual crisis is already visible in artworks like Shakespeare’s that form both the beginning and the literary soul of modernity’s ambiguous progress narrative, but that transcend modernity in being aware of the troubling open-endedness of history and the need to look elsewhere for an ultimate source of meaning. This 273

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elsewhere is located inside the human person, and in the intimate relationships between family members. At its center is the awareness of death as an unfathomable mystery that everybody contains within themselves, but the materialism that gives rise to this new sense of death’s mystery can also lead to loss of soul in the turning away from death toward worldly achievements and recognition. Fukuyama has called for a new theory of the human soul that recognizes this latter aspect of human motivation (Identity 11), but his political science doesn’t fully investigate the mortal fear underlying it and the need for a sense of wonder at the deeper ontological questions it entails, which Aristotle said is where philosophy starts. For that we need Shakespeare and the poets he is in conversation with across the field of history.

Notes 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

See Duffy. Everyman, line 870: “All earthly things are but vanity,/Beauty, Strength, and Discretion do man forsake,/Foolish friends and kinsmen, that fair spake;/All flee save Good Deeds.” See De Grazia for an example. See Aers. See Edmundson. 3 Henry VI, 5.6.49: “Thy mother felt more than a mother’s pain,/And, yet brought forth less than a mother’s hope,/To wit, an indigested and deformed lump,/Not like the fruit of such a goodly tree. /Teeth hadst thou in thy head when thou wast born,/To signify thou camest to bite the world.” See Joyce, Chapter 9, for Stephen Dedalus’s biographical account of Shakespeare. See Tillyard.

Works Cited Aers, David. “A Whisper in the Ear of Early Modernists; or, Reflections on Literary Critics Writing the ‘History of the Subject.’” Culture and History, 1350–1600: Essays on English Communities, Identities and Writing, edited by David Aers. Harvester, 1992, pp. 177–202. Aeschylus. “Eumenides.” The Oresteia. Translated by Robert Fagles. Penguin, 1979. Anonymous. Everyman. Edited by A. C. Cawley. Manchester UP, 1961. Ariès, Philippe. The Hour of Our Death. Translated by Helen Weaver. Allen Lane, 1981. Aristotle. “Nicomachean Ethics.” The Complete Works of Aristotle. Edited by Jonathan Barnes. Princeton UP, 1991. Augustine. “On the Teacher.” Philosophy in the Middle Ages. Edited by Arthur Hyman and James Walsh. Hackett Publishing Company, 1973. Beck, Margaret Milne. “The Dance of Death in Shakespeare.” Modern Language Notes, vol. 37, no. 6, 1922, pp. 372–374. Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. The Major Works. Oxford UP, 1985. Cust, Richard. “The Material Culture of Lineage in Late Tudor and Early Stuart England.” The Routledge Handbook of Material Culture in Early Modern Europe, edited by Catherine Richardson, Tara Hamling, and David Gaimster. Routledge, 2016, pp. 247–274. De Grazia, Margreta. “The Motive for Interiority: Shakespeare’s ‘Sonnets and Hamlet.’” Style, vol. 23, no. 3, 1989, pp. 430–444. Dekker, Thomas. The Wonderful Yeare. 1603. www.luminarium.org/renascence-editions/yeare.html. Accessed 16 July 2020. Duffy, Eamon. The Stripping of the Altars. Yale UP, 1992. Edmundson, Melissa. “Love’s Bitter Mystery: Stephen Dedalus, Drowning, and the Burden of Guilt in Ulysses.” English Studies, vol. 90, no. 5, Oct. 2009, pp. 545–556. Fukuyama, Francis. The End of History and the Last Man. Free Press, 2006. Fukuyama, Francis. Identity: Contemporary Identity Politics and the Struggle for Recognition. Profile Books, 2018. Joyce, James. Ulysses. Oxford World’s Classics, 2008. Kantorowicz, Ernst. The King’s Two Bodies. Princeton UP, 1985. Machiavelli, Niccolo. The Prince. Translated by Luigi Ricci, Oxford UP, 1921.

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Death in Shakespeare Montrose, Louis. The Subject of Elizabeth. U of Chicago P, 2006. Smith, Hallett. “Shakespeare’s Romances.” Huntington Library Quarterly, vol. 27, no. 3, 1964, p. 281. Spinoza, Benedict. Ethics. Penguin Classics, 1996. Stevens, Wallace. “Sunday Morning.” The Collected Poems. Alfred A. Knopf, 1954, pp. 66–70. Taylor, Gary, et al., editors. The New Oxford Shakespeare. Oxford UP, 2016. Tillyard, E. M. W. Shakespeare’s History Plays. Chatto & Windus, 1944.

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25 DEATH AND GOTHIC ROMANTICISM Dilating in/upon the Graveyard, Meditating among the Tombs Carol Margaret Davison

As Peter Walmsley has cogently argued and painstakingly illustrated, “much cultural work devoted to death” existed in eighteenth-century Britain (33). In his scholarly examination of the Gothic in relation to “a wider discourse of death of some ancestry,” Walmsley theorized the connections between “death, melancholy, and emergent ideas of nation” across that era, noting that “a nationalist discourse about death” became especially prominent in the late eighteenth century (36, 41, 53). Marilyn Butler observes that this “obsession with death” – a “dark vein in the contemporary arts” – was particularly prevalent in novels written by a “diverse body of authors” between 1760 and 1790 (27). Eric Parisot in turn argues that the “graveyard taste” on exhibit during this era was partly the result of “the ubiquitous presence of death and disease during the early half of the eighteenth century, which resulted in periods of severe decline in population and life expectancy” (181). Bringing statistics to bear on the case, Parisot further notes that “[t]he period 1726–31 saw the biggest loss of population in any five-year period since 1561, while mortality also significantly increased during 1741–2” (181). Despite noteworthy population growth between the mid- and late eighteenth century, the chronic overcrowding in towns resulted in the rapid spread of diseases like cholera that were capable of killing off healthy adults in a matter of hours (Rugg 217). Drawing on interdisciplinary scholarship from the rapidly expanding field of thanatology studies, this essay explains how other cultural factors and intellectual developments in the domains of theology, science, and philosophy, ranging beyond the socio-historical realities referenced by Parisot, fueled the era’s death fixation. As the trinity of death-centered literary forms considered here illustrate – the elegy, graveyard poetry, and the Gothic novel – the Enlightenment/Romantic era that ran from the eighteenth into the nineteenth century was a period of major transition in regard to social attitudes toward death (Parisot 90–91). Sarah Tarlow’s groundbreaking archaeological research reflects the period’s notably conflicted and incompatible social attitudes, evidenced in British mortuary rituals and practices, and varied folk, religious, and scientific belief systems – attitudes that were also registered in its cultural productions (15). The collision between pre-Enlightenment and Enlightenment ideas and belief systems, sometimes figured as a shift from Roman Catholic to Protestant values, is especially

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noteworthy in the Gothic novel, which was foremost (and by far the most innovative) among literary forms of the era in its treatment of the Death Question. As Coral Ann Howells argues, “[t]hough we find all the distinctive configurations of the Gothic cult of death in earlier literature from Shakespeare to the Graveyard poets, nowhere do we find the same insistent dread of the mystery of death and the afterlife” (223). Thomas Laqueur notes that such changes in death culture reflect the process whereby “one kind of world is transformed into another” (Laqueur, par. 34). By examining the Gothic in relation to death, dying, mourning, and memorialization – especially in its symbolic negotiations toward a new social contract between the living and the dead – I explain how the Gothic registered a post-Enlightenment, religiously inflected cultural epistemology about death that formed part of the modern secular order. I begin with a brief discussion of the era’s key intellectual preoccupations in regard to death, followed by a concise critical assessment of how the elegy and graveyard poetry fed into the Gothic, sharing points of contact, especially in their compensatory function, yet meditating on mortality in divergent ways to divergent ends. Notably, both of those literary forms were influenced by popular ars moriendi, “art of dying” consolation manuals popular since the fifteenth century that offered advice for those dying and those in attendance upon them about attaining a good Christian death. Using a cross-section of popular novels, I then provide an overview of the nature and objectives of the cultural work performed by the Gothic in relation to what I call the Death Question. Under that aegis may be placed phenomena and concerns that span both sides of the grave: the living, secular side and the post-mortem, spiritual side. These include deathbed scenes and the act and “art”/“craft” of dying as it was popularly known, funerary rituals and mortuary practices, the corpse trade, social duty toward the dead across generations, modes of mourning and memorialization, and the belief in and imaginative conceptualizations of an afterlife. Particular attention will be paid both to the religious implications of the body/soul relationship in association with the concept of subjectivity, and to the rich and complex thanatological semiotics involving power politics between bodies – dead, living, uncanny, spectral, and living-dead. Preeminent among these are ghosts and corpses that tap into anxieties about spiritual transcendence, and generational legacy and inheritance as both materially and spiritually manifested. Compounding this is the terror of corpsoreality, which I have elsewhere defined as experiencing one’s body – despite major scientific, medical, and technological advancements and interventions – as Other, irrevocably vulnerable and mortal, an experience precipitated by the awareness, fear, and anxiety about disease, mortality, and physical corruption (Davison 109). Sarah Webster Goodwin and Elisabeth Bronfen have further persuasively argued that “[r]epresentations of death necessarily engage questions about power: its locus, its authenticity, its sources, and how it is passed on” (4–5). Critical attention will thus center on two principal formal components of the Gothic that are inextricably and imaginatively bound together: the Gothic’s necropoetics – its death-centered symbols and tropes, including spectrality and the concept of memento mori – and its necropolitics – its foregrounding of intergenerational power dynamics between the (un)dead and the living. Tony Walter observes that “[t]he Age of Reason shifted death from the frame of religion into the frame of reason, from the frame of sin and fate to the frame of statistical possibility” (9). This was a seismic cultural shift with significant repercussions, as renowned thanatology historian Philippe Ariès makes clear in his magisterial work The Hour of Our Death. The advent of secular modernity with its unsettling of religious certainties destroyed an earlier familiarity with death that Ariès calls the “tame death,” when death’s unknowns were mitigated by communal rituals that assuaged the grief of the mourners and ensured the deceased’s transition to eternal 277

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life. Thus did the Enlightenment engender what Elisabeth Bronfen astutely describes as “a double gesture of denial and mystification” (Over 86), as death became defamiliarized despite the efforts of science and medicine to “naturalize” it (Rugg 203). According to sociologist Zygmunt Bauman, death is not only the “most persistent and indifferent” adversity faced by humanity, it proved to be unmasterable by the Age of Reason (134). Death became, in Bauman’s notably Gothic description, the “guilty secret [and] […] skeleton in the cupboard left in the neat, orderly, functional and pleasing home modernity promised to build” (134). It served as the quintessential emblem of the Freudian uncanny: while being “of the home” and familiar, it also remained secret, concealed, and unfamiliar, shrouded in mystery. A cultural schizophrenia was the result, involving a particular and profound repression: the denial of the death of the self. Ariès identifies this new stage in Western society’s death attitudes as la mort de toi, the death of the Other or the cult of the beautiful dead (409). In the face of acute anxiety about death and the status of the corpse as corruptible, lacking subjectivity – what Bauman calls a “descent into a depersonalized nothingness” (51) – and marking a potential telos of existence, all sense of separation and loss of self were denied while death was transformed, especially in the individual’s moving memorialization, into a sublime, desirable, and celebrated state (45). In the Death of the Beautiful Other, the corpse was radically and aesthetically transformed into an incorruptible, identifiably individualized state. Perhaps no literary lines captured the essence of the new death stage identified by Ariès better than those of Edward Young in Night Thoughts, one of the most popular works of graveyard poetry of the period. “All men,” Young asserts, in that intensely interior exploration of the grieving mind, “think all men mortal but themselves” (1.423), a death denial that graveyard poets worked consistently to combat. As a corrective to Ariès, Pat Jalland rightly argues in her canonical study Death in the Victorian Family that though the ideal of the Evangelical “good death” remained the paramount death model during the Victorian era, Death of the Beautiful Other also retained its cultural importance in “romantic fiction” and “didactic literature” (8). The cultural transition to the cult of the beautiful dead was not, therefore, uniform. In some instances, a hybrid conceptual union was the result: William Blake’s idealized illustrations of Robert Blair’s renowned graveyard poem, The Grave (1743), feature figures of physically healthy dead on deathbeds, with angelic guides leading their spirits toward heavenly family reunion. Perhaps no poem of the era captured the cult of the beautiful dead ideal better than Percy Bysshe Shelley’s masterful elegy celebrating fellow poet John Keats, who died of tuberculosis in 1821 at the young age of twenty-five. In the same year that Shelley heralded the poet as “the unacknowledged legislator of the world” in A Defense of Poetry (1821), he extolled Keats in “Adonais,” and the figure of the poet more generally, as a type of divinity whose words – unlike his physical body, according to the atheist Shelley – were immortal and immortalizing. With a nod to Donne’s “Holy Sonnet X,” “Death, be not proud,” Shelley offered an ambivalent consolation to the reader about Keats’s death in his assurances that “’tis Death is dead, not he” (41.1). Although Keats has been liberated and “awaken’d from the dream of life” (39.2), according to Shelley, we remain in the mortal, secular realm like phantoms confronting “unprofitable strife,/[…] [whilst] in mad trance” (39.4–5), decaying “Like corpses in a charnel [where] fear and grief/Convulse us and consume us day by day,/And cold hopes swarm like worms within our living clay” (39.7–9). In his powerful figuration of the secular world as a type of graveyard, Shelley takes a page out of the eighteenth century’s most death-fixated poetic form – namely, graveyard poetry. After its inception with Thomas Parnell’s “A Night-Piece on Death” (1722), graveyard poetry remained popular into the 1760s when it fed, thematically and iconographically, into the 278

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Gothic novel. Shelley’s invocation of the “all the world’s a graveyard” motif in “Adonais” echoed Robert Blair’s description in The Grave (1743), of the world as a leveling and […] spacious burial-field unwalled, Strewed with death’s spoils, the spoils of animals Savage and tame, and full of dead men’s bones. The very turf on which we tread, once lived, And we that live must lend our carcasses To cover our own offspring; in their turns They too must cover theirs. Tis here all meet. (484–90) Written primarily by clergymen seeking “new ways to reassert a connection with the beloved dead denied by Protestant doctrine” in its rejection of the idea of Purgatory (Parisot 183), graveyard poetry resisted Enlightenment drives in its assertion of a spiritual wisdom beyond the rational and the scholarly. Counter to the objectives of the elegy to memorialize and immortalize the individual in the face of the terrifying anonymity of death, graveyard poetry worked to advance more Christian ends by offering consolation to religious believers by way of spiritual immortality and Death’s ultimate defeat. In the form’s unique yoking of the titillating and the edifying, Parnell’s “NightPiece” (ca. 1714), for example, elicits terror around the Last Judgment by both reminding the reader that death will eventually arrive and commanding “Mortal[s]” to “[t]hink […] what it is to dye” (52). Amidst shrouded shades rising up from the graveyard, Death, the “King of Fears” (62), chastises foolish men for confusing him with the Last Judgment, thus failing to recognize that Death’s but a Path that must be trod, If Man wou’d ever pass to God: A Port of Calms, a State of Ease From the rough Rage of swelling Seas. (67–70) In the closing stanza imagining the joyous parting of the soul from the body in which it was long imprisoned, when it will cast its chains aside and tower away to “mingle with the Blaze of Day” (90), Parnell heralds and literalizes a Christian Enlightenment awaiting those who live a holy life. In The Grave, Blair reiterates Parnell’s ideas about the seriousness of the Last Judgment – “tis a serious thing to die” (369) – while underscoring the Enlightenment’s limitations in relation to post-mortem existence and experience. He assures his readers of a possible peaceful death and future resurrection if they follow Christ, “the illustrious Deliverer of mankind” who, they are reminded, “mounted up to Heaven” like “some great prince” (668, 678, 689). In the poem’s closing and glorious scene of resurrection, Blair anticipates the sound of “the dread trumpet” when our new incorruptible body will meet our “conscious soul” and shall not “[m]istake its partner” (754–55). “Tis but a night, a long and moonless night,” Blair asserts, that “[w]e make the grave our bed,” laying as one estate beneath the earth, before we experience “the dawn of day” when neither “time nor death shall ever part them [body and soul] more” (762–63, 766, 761). Blair’s dawning Christian Enlightenment resonates profoundly with that prophesied by Parnell. The Christian body/soul divide featured in graveyard poetry (especially its evangelical strain, including the works of Blair, James Hervey, and Young), as Ariès has shown, was popularized during the medieval era. This division was the product of radical anxieties and desires relating 279

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both to the corruptible body that signified humanity’s moral failure, and to the existence of the soul – this latter issue tapping eschatological concerns, especially those relating to spiritual transcendence. These worries were ramped up during the Enlightenment, when the existence of the soul was challenged by rationalism and empirical science. The Gothic not only combined the elegy’s attention to mourning and memorialization with graveyard poetry’s eschatological focus and myriad memento mori symbols and figures, the body-soul centerpiece of graveyard poetry retained its prominence. In works of Gothic romance, the body-soul dyad assumed the form of that genre’s multivalent corpses and innumerable ghosts, among other manifestations, figures “imbued with otherworldly powers” (Quigley 18) that are invested with preEnlightenment superstitious beliefs. Such figures are essential components of what may be called the Gothic’s necropoetics and are likewise fundamental to its necropolitics, its engagement with questions about the mutual obligations – parental and filial – between the living and the dead. Like the established observation in Britain of such customs as laying out, washing, and dressing the corpse, graveyard “[p]oetry of night and tomb, novels of the dead, [and] gothic melodramas” resisted the trend of separating the living from the dead and removing “death from everyday experience” (Richardson 109; de Baecque 10; Miller 333). Esther Schor has theorized “the increasing centrality of mourning during Britain’s coming of age as an economic and political power” when anxieties ran high about the erosion of ethical relations, and the dead became “the gold standard for the circulation of sympathies within a society” (20). In tandem with this, Schor has identified the “increasing interpenetration between the living and the dead” in the elegy from the Romantic to the Victorian periods (234). To Deidre Lynch’s comment that the Gothic retained “open lines of communication with the literary dead” in the form of its many epigraphs from Shakespeare, Milton, Blair, and Ossian (51) must be added that its narrative motifs and dynamics sought to more broadly ensure an open channel between the past and present, the seen and the unseen, the living and the dead. Death and relationships between the dead and the living were primary topics of inquiry in Enlightenment discourse (Bewell 188–89), especially in works of a theological and sociopolitical cast. Enlightenment philosophes examined the civil and ecclesiastical manipulation of death for social control while a cultural epistemology grounded in a new relationship between the living and the dead, one often nationally inflected, punctuated the works of AngloAmerican radicals. The social necrocracy (dominion by the dead) famously described by Edmund Burke in his Reflections on the Revolution in France as a partnership between the living, the dead, and those yet to be born, was enshrined in the British constitution by way of “an entailed inheritance” that gripped the state and its citizens in a type of “mortmain for ever” (96, 47, 48). This social contract was condemned as a type of “necrophiliac abomination” by such intellectuals as Thomas Paine and William Wordsworth, who favored Thomas Jefferson’s philosophy that “the dead have neither powers nor rights over the earth” which “belongs in usufruct to the living” (Duggett 50, 130). Such divergent ideologies went head-to-head during the French Revolution, a cataclysmic series of historical events that included the statesanctioned massacre by guillotine of tens of thousands of purported “enemies of the revolution” and the culminating bloody Reign of Terror. The Gothic both registered and was fueled by terror, a subject Horace Walpole describes in The Castle of Otranto (1764) as “the author’s principal engine” (6). Edmund Burke’s meditations on the sublime – the aesthetic of pleasurable terror – further point to terror’s paramount manifestation as “an apprehension of pain or death” (Enquiry 96). The Gothic trafficked in a broad array of death scenes, alongside mourning and memorialization issues, while meditating on death as both a means of social control and, in keeping with the work of Giambattista Vico, 280

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a means of socialization given its role in establishing and maintaining civil and ecclesiastical power. Albeit sometimes displaced onto the Spanish Inquisition of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the French Revolutionary specter of intergenerational betrayal and abuse of power is cast across dozens of Gothic novels, from Matthew Lewis’s The Monk and countless works of Minerva Press Gothic, to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein with its harrowing scene of the unfair trial and execution of the innocent Justine, and the horrifying ecclesiastical atrocities delineated in Charles Robert Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer. Death was notably and frequently represented in the early, classic Gothic (1764–1824) as a destabilizing, disruptive force involving intergenerational, historical crimes/sins requiring exposure, recognition, and appeasement by way of mourning rituals and memorialization processes. However, in the face of Enlightenment-generated post-mortem anxieties about the afterlife and the extinction of subjectivity, ideas, sites, and practices around mourning and memorialization – which became more fraught, culturally freighted processes – were radically altered. A failure or refusal to memorialize often resulted in the Gothic manifestation of either real or imagined persecutory, haunting ghosts. As Terry Castle has argued in The Female Thermometer (1995), the new model of haunted consciousness that arose during the Enlightenment evidences a new spectrality that, while featuring ghosts of a different, non-Catholic, non-Purgatorial order, nevertheless signified the presence of guilt arising from past transgressions or – as Avery Gordon persuasively argues about the driving forces behind the ghost story – “a repressed or unresolved social violence” (xvi). It has rightly been stated that “[t]he ultimate Gothic locus is the grave” (Bridgwater 60). Produced at a point of anxious socio-political transition between the ancien régime and new democratizing forces, and of cultural transition between religious certainty and rational, skeptical empiricism, the Gothic expressed “a radical anxiety […] both religious and psychological” (Howells 224) that tapped sublime terrors – both imaginary and real, pleasurable and painful – on both sides of the grave. Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho plays out the fraught intergenerational politics between the dead and the living as a new national social contract is symbolically negotiated around the work of mourning and memorialization. Roy Porter has astutely underscored that in Enlightenment Britain, “[w]hat the political nation sought was a rational religion, involving the destruction of idolatry and priestly power. Enlightenment in Britain took place within, rather than against, Protestantism” (99). By way of her novel’s rich and complex thanatological semiotics, Radcliffe Protestantizes the work of mourning, ideologically reconfiguring as atavistically Catholic all excessive, unregulated emotion, which she associates with superstition and mental disorder. She extends this mantra of self-regulation to love, fusing together elements of the popular female conduct guide, novel of sensibility, and female Gothic novel, thus repackaging and promoting the traditional ars moriendi advice about appropriate deathbed conduct and the reining in of melancholia. Ariès notes that mourning was often regarded as “an extension of modesty” by the European middle classes of the time (578). Successful mourning in Udolpho ultimately involves the laying to rest of a Catholicism figured as an obscurantist, perverse necrocracy in thrall to death and trading in terror, remnants of which return throughout the novel in uncanny forms. In their stead and reflected in the novel’s material culture, Radcliffe chronicles a shift to sanitized and sentimentalized rituals of mourning and memorialization coded as Protestant. This shift is in keeping with Udolpho’s late sixteenth-century historical moment when France was engaged in religious wars over the threat of Protestant accession to the throne. Emily St. Aubert’s traumatic sudden loss of her mother, who contracts her husband’s illness while nursing him, is amplified when her father dies months later during a trip undertaken to 281

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assuage his grief. St. Aubert, a man experienced in loss given the deaths of his two young sons, stoically faces death while spiritually preparing his daughter for life alone (Radcliffe 5). His reminder that “there is nothing new, or surprising, since we all know, that we are born to die; and nothing terrible to those, who can confide in an all-powerful God” (76), echoes the traditional ars moriendi and reprises the principal Christian message of graveyard poetry. Thankful for being spared the sufferings of old age, he counsels Emily to retain her fortitude in the face of life’s misfortunes, and to chart a well-balanced course between excessive feeling and reason (81–82). Emily’s two responses to her father’s death register an internal battle that remains central to her narrative of development. Although she sobs compulsively at his deathbed in anticipation of her loss, his consolatory words prove invaluable. She also experiences unadulterated terror that changes from “terror for her father” during the first stages of illness, to terror of her father when she first gazes with “a mixture of doubt and awful astonishment” on his uncanny corpse with its fixed “countenance, never till now seen otherwise than animated” (65, 83; emphasis added). A final midnight visit to his grave before leaving the region magnifies this anxiety, while referencing the novel’s foremost symbol of terror – a black veil – worn by the nun who quickly departs after guiding Emily into a private church side-door and warning her to avoid a “newly opened grave” she must pass on her way (90–91). Emily’s anxieties about mortality are twofold, as she worries about the prospect of spiritual transcendence and family reunion given the possibly irreparable breach introduced between the material and divine worlds in the wake of the Enlightenment, and about her father’s soul given his request that she destroy a hidden packet of letters and her witnessing his distress over the miniature of an unidentified woman (77–78). Emily ports these responses into her harrowing Italian journey that Radcliffe figures as an underworld descent. Fittingly clad at the outset in “mourning dress” (121), Emily faces death and other physical threats to her honor and inheritance, especially in her uncle Montoni’s decaying and carceral Castle of Udolpho, a locale to which she feels her fate connected. In the lengthy psychomachia-style female Gothic narrative that follows, Radcliffe taps the potentially fatal terrors faced by women in love and marriage. Emily is plagued by the ghosts and corpses of foremothers past, ranging from impassioned women embroiled in adulterous love affairs to legally disempowered femmes couvertes like the Marchioness de Villeroi, who are forced, for the sake of money, into loveless marriages. These include Signora Laurentini whose dead body, Emily fears, is actually located behind the castle’s mysterious black veil; Emily’s innocent aunt, the Marchioness de Villeroi, who is betrayed and poisoned by an adulterous husband and his lover; and Madame Cheron, Emily’s negligent aunt, who is incarcerated and killed by her husband, Montoni. With these natural and supernatural mysteries explained, the specter of her father’s infidelity is laid to rest alongside the ghosts of a Roman-Catholic past, a transition signaled by the novel’s mortuary culture where St. Aubert’s miniature of his sister replaces the wax effigy of the corpse “decayed and disfigured by worms” concealed behind the black veil (662). This latter item, a memento mori exemplifying “that fierce severity, which monkish superstition has sometimes inflicted on mankind” (662), is an example of the gruesomely graphic transi tomb objects common in the late Middle Ages in Northern Europe. In stark contrast, the novel’s Protestant material culture evidences what Terry Castle has called the “new-style devotionalism” grounded in a spectralized mode of perception that benefited those on both sides of the grave (135). These sanitized memorials conceptualized the “real person” as a perfect and unchanging spiritual essence while reaffirming the existence of the mourner. In this and other ways, Udolpho served as a work of Protestant consolation literature that worked to divest death of its terrors and curb the emotional excesses of loss. Radcliffe’s closing words clarify this intent: “And, if the 282

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weak hand, that has recorded this tale, has, by its scenes, beguiled the mourner of one hour of sorrow, or, by its moral, taught him to sustain it – the effort, however humble, has not been vain, nor is the writer unrewarded” (672; emphasis added). Set mainly in Madrid during the operation of the Spanish Inquisition and composed during the cataclysmic events of the French Revolution, Matthew Lewis’s The Monk (1796) extends Radcliffe’s pro-Protestant, anti-Catholic thanatological thematic into more pornographic, sadistic terrain while exposing the horrors of theocratically fueled state violence. Like Udolpho which came before and Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer that follows, Lewis’s novel embraces “the transcendent possibility of a Divine Providence” (Howells 224). In keeping with the Marquis de Sade’s provocative statements in his critical essay “Reflections on the Novel” (1800), Gothic fiction was “the inevitable outcome of the revolutionary upheavals experienced throughout the whole of Europe.” In order to compete with which Gothic novelists had “to call upon the aid of hell itself ” (109), with Lewis conjuring up various supernatural nightmares and the devil himself. Anticipating Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein in its consideration of the origin of monsters while exploring and denouncing the personal and socio-political effects of religious repression where death is wielded as a weapon of terror, Lewis’s novel fleshes out the portrait of the Gothic herovillain to include the history of his psychological, emotional, and moral development. Abandoned in childhood, Ambrosio is raised within the dysfunctional family of the Roman Catholic Church where the monks were busy “rooting out his virtues, and narrowing his sentiments” (237). This process of repressing and perverting his natural characteristics of being “enterprizing, firm, […] fearless,” and generous (236) is extended to his developing sexual desires and produces, within a cloistered environment, a “voluptuous Monk” (225) who becomes increasingly depraved, proud, tyrannical, an easy prey to jealousy, and cruel in his revenge when offended (227, 425, 237). After assuming the powerful and revered position as Abbot of Madrid’s prestigious Capuchin monastery, he is sexually seduced by one of Satan’s minions who tutors him in the secret sciences, thus enabling him to commit murder and violate a beautiful young woman named Antonia. After Ambrosio sells his soul to the devil at novel’s end to evade torture and death at the hands of the Inquisition, Antonia is revealed to be his sister and Elvira, the woman he strangles in order to rape Antonia, their mother. Ironically, Ambrosio’s dreaded sadistic death at the hands of the devil immediately after his release from the prisons of the Inquisition closes the volume. The obscurantist Roman Catholic Church is shown to be equally the parent of Ambrosio’s demonic double: the merciless Prioress of the convent of St. Clare, a “monastic Tyrant” (350). She revives the old laws of her order and after discovering “her beloved Daughter” Agnes’s pregnancy, subjects her to a torturous, inhumane imprisonment in a concealed, Bastille-like prison beneath the convent burial vaults (408, 208). There, the enchained Agnes gives birth, she and her dead child being figuratively transformed into a grotesque Madonna and Child, while the punitive Prioress ignores her pleas for mercy, telling her to “resign all hopes of liberty” (369, 408). The Spanish Inquisition – the novel’s ultimate death machine with its Grand Inquisitor and “engines of torture” (422, 431) – may not play an actual role in the narrative until Ambrosio is imprisoned, but it is in full operation throughout, in the form of both the Prioress’s and Ambrosio’s brutality (394). Ironically, the Inquisition’s dreaded power haunts the “voluptuous Monk” (225) and serves as the only force that terrifies the sadistic Prioress (349), who ends up murdered by a furious mob after they incinerate her beloved convent. Signaling the national religious shift in the novel from Catholic to Protestant is the voice of the heretical Agnes, who denounces the Abbey and convent as “abodes so falsely deemed religious” (372). Despite her abuse by the heartless Prioress who ignored her lifeless child and venomously reproached her 283

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for her weakness, Agnes resists assuming the role of God in judgment and forgives the Prioress as she paid with her life for her sins (414–15). Consistent with her reminder to Ambrosio that he, like all of humankind, is a fallen sinner, she extols a doctrine of mercy while reminding him of God’s judgment to come. A quarter century after Lewis’s The Monk, Charles Robert Maturin, an Anglo-Irish clergyman, crafted a new type of anti-Catholic monastic shocker in Melmoth the Wanderer (1820), one psychologically based yet infused with religious terror. Joel Porte has argued that this “notably Protestant” religious terror involves “the dark rites of sin, guilt, and damnation” and is in evidence in “much Anglo-American genre noir fiction from Godwin to Poe,” with Godwin’s Caleb Williams (1794) serving as the source (45). Howells notes, “Death is for Maturin the source of his most terrified speculations, being that moment when the ‘soul trembles on the verge of the unlawful and the unhallowed’ as he describes it in The Milesian Chief” (229). Melmoth’s eschatological terrors, however, are notably conveyed through a quintessentially Calvinist lens whereby, according to Susan Manning, the self splits off into “two selves – an observer and an actor, a saint and a sinner, regenerate and reprobate” (21). This division is evidenced in Melmoth in a variety of physical and mental Bastilles where the self is under siege, and is more fully realized in such works as James Hogg’s twice-told tale, The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824). Limning the boundary between the supernatural and the psychological, that novel showcases the emotional deterioration of a besieged Antinomian Calvinist after conspiring with his uncanny, persecuting double who may be the devil himself. Set in 1816, Melmoth’s framing narrative tells of a young educated man visiting his dying, miserly uncle, who is not given to superstition yet mysteriously announces that he is “dying of a fright” (18) as he believes the male subject of a family portrait, dated 1646, remains alive. After his uncle’s death, the young man becomes heir to money and a manuscript relating to his mysterious ancestor, John Melmoth. This satanic overreacher forged a pact with the devil in the seventeenth century in exchange for an additional 150 years of life and thereafter sought a replacement in order to secure a peaceful death and afterlife. Five tales of terror follow about individuals in extremis, each of whom, despite horrid experiences of persecution, mental suffering, and anguish, resist Melmoth’s tempting offer. The novel’s longest, most intense narratives, “Tale of the Spaniard” and “The Tale of the Parricide,” recount the imprisonment and escape, first from a convent and then the Inquisition, of Alonzo Monçada, a young, illegitimate Spaniard. Melmoth’s closing sequence sees the young John Melmoth and Monçada, the latter arriving at the Melmoth estate after a coincidental shipwreck, spending the final evening with John’s accursed ancestor prior to his demise on nearby seaside cliffs. Encounters with the self under siege are the order of the day in Melmoth, as Monçada’s experiences with the parricide illustrate. This man with whom Monçada attempts to escape his wretched convent is plagued by an ever-wakeful conscience about his crime that terrorizes his dreams. Monçada’s initial submission to his imprisonment and extreme brutalization results in his reduction to the status of a “ghost,” a mechanical “automaton” (100). As he imaginatively describes himself from the perspective of his fellows, his “stupor,” “noiseless tread,” “fixed eyes,” and “ghastly silence, might indeed have impressed a superstitious community with the idea that it was no human creature who stalked through their cloisters, and haunted their choir” (100). Later, after resisting and being incarcerated in the prisons of the Inquisition, Monçada figuratively assumes the place of the tormented parricide. He experiences plaguing nightmares, and a prime and novel doppelgänger moment where he witnesses his own excruciating death in an ampitheater in the presence of Jesuits and the Spanish king and queen, painfully and graphically reduced to “a cinder body and soul” in a spectacular auto-da-fé. As he informs the young Melmoth, “I saw myself; and this horrid tracing of yourself in a dream, – this haunting of 284

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yourself by your own spectre, while you still live, is perhaps a curse almost equal to your crimes visiting you in the punishments of eternity” (236). In its compelling and terrifying imagining of the immediacy of death and final judgment from the victim’s/insider’s perspective, Maturin’s pioneering narrative set the stage for numerous captivating first-person Gothic works to come. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein registers the transition and collision between pre-Enlightenment and Enlightenment ideas about death, mourning, and the afterlife. That Shelley’s corpse-haunted novel was born of a ghost-story competition may seem ironic, but is apposite given the era’s profound anxieties about the corpse and the questionable prospect of an afterlife. At the heart of Victor Frankenstein’s tale of terror is corpsoreality, the experience of the body as Other, irrevocably vulnerable and mortal, an experience precipitated by the awareness, fear, and anxiety about disease, mortality, and physical corruption despite major scientific, medical, and technological advancements. Compounding this terror is the contemporary fear of falling victim to the medico-scientific establishment that developed such advances. It relied on the commodification and dehumanization wrought by the corpse trade, bodysnatching, and dissection, where the anatomist cultivated a “necessary inhumanity” in the act of divesting the corpse of its personal identity (Tarlow 91). Perhaps the greatest, most sublime terror galvanizing Victor’s scientific enterprise, however, is the idea that the corpse serves, contrary to the Christian belief system, as a secular cul-de-sac. On the heels of his mother’s sudden death from disease, a traumatized Victor, then a young student of natural philosophy, determines that his family has completed their mourning. Immediately thereafter, he turns his attention to eradicating death and disease from the world (27). To this end, using his “profane fingers” to disturb “the tremendous secrets of the human” in his “workshop of filthy creation” (36), Victor fabricates a macabre, fleshly monster from a multitude of putrefying corpses collected from the charnel house, the dissecting room, and the slaughter-house (83). Gazing upon his newly created, inanimate Creature that signals for Victor the advent of a new era of undeath, he rapturously praises its beauty. However, the Creature’s shocking and terrifying moment of birth and immediate paternal rejection – in combination with his nightmarish crusade of carnage – signal Victor’s dreams of defeating corporeality and attaining immortality as delusional. The unpalatable fact persists: the reality of death may be repressed but remains utterly ineradicable. In a quintessential encounter with the uncanny in the form of his doppelgänger, that Creature becomes, as Victor characterizes it, “my own vampire, my own spirit let loose from the grave, and forced to destroy all that was dear to me” (57). Despite Victor’s persistent myopia about the lessons of his own narrative, his flaunted disbelief in the metaphysical and supernatural, in combination with his disrespect for the dead – he considers the churchyard as “merely the receptacle of bodies deprived of life” (33–34) – resonate profoundly with the thanatology studies scholar. The same holds true for his mother’s exemplary good, “calm,” Christian death that evidences her lifelong “fortitude and benignity” as she “resign[s herself ] cheerfully to death, and […] indulge[s] a hope of meeting [her family] in another world” (26–27). As this cataclysmic primal scene makes clear, the rational, empirically-minded Victor and his Christian mother stand, figuratively speaking, at opposite ends of the grave in terms of their beliefs about death and the afterlife. In keeping with his father’s worldview and that of the Gothic’s brotherhood of transgressive undead who encounter the pitfalls involved with their unnaturally long lives, Victor’s homicidal monster fails to herald any liberating transcendence. Instead, he remains a physically grotesque and truly terrifying memento mori signpost who ironically and tragically – given his unique and unprecedented physiology and ontology, a subject upon which he meditates at great and anxiety-inducing length – epitomizes the popular double-edged Gothic nightmare of fleshly, imprisoning, and

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agonizing mortality/immortality. This uncanny monster of mortality, emblematic of allconsuming grief, may himself be unable to die. During the Romantic era and beyond, the Gothic served as the aesthetic of choice through which to engage the Death Question. In granting a cultural space for its imaginative, postEnlightenment treatment, the Gothic rendered death compelling while offering a unique invitation to undergo what Bronfen calls “death by proxy,” a desirable experience because “apparently unreal” (“Death” 113–14). The Gothic also allowed readers to consider death-related subject matter deemed too socially controversial, macabre, or sensitive. In the pages of these “death-haunted” works featuring “peculiarly fraught world[s] of neurosis and morbidity” (Howells 223), readers could indulge dark death-related fantasies and fears. Drawing on Howells’s work, Dale Townshend persuasively argues that the Gothic became “a socially symbolic site of mourning” that permitted and promoted the expression of the “more macabre realities of corporeal decomposition and religious insecurity,” and a “negated grief” that ranged beyond what tame neo-Classical proprieties dictated and allowed (89). The Gothic was therefore vital in laying the conceptual and cultural groundwork for what Gerhard Joseph and Herbert Tucker term the “necroculture” of the Victorian era that seems to be in “mourning for lost fixtures, in the world and of the spirit, which the acceleration of a coveted yet feared modernity had swept away” (122). That the Gothic continued to flourish in newly transmuted forms throughout that period in both novels and poetry, where the “favourite imagined habitation” was “the scene of death – deathbed, funeral, graveside, churchyard, charnel house, cemetery, morgue” (Cunningham 330), was largely the result of that nation’s persistent monomania about death.

Works Cited Ariès, Philippe. The Hour of Our Death. 1977. Oxford UP, 1981. Bauman, Zygmunt. Mortality, Immortality & Other Life Strategies. Polity, 1992. Bewell, Alan. Wordsworth and the Enlightenment: Nature, Man, and Society in the Experimental Poetry. Yale UP, 1989. Blair, Robert. “The Grave.” Scottish Literature: An Anthology, edited by David McCordick, vol. 1. Peter Lang, 1996, pp. 892–907. Bridgwater, Patrick. De Quincey’s Gothic Masquerade. Rodopi, 2004. Bronfen, Elisabeth. “Death.” The Handbook of Gothic Literature. 1998. Edited by Marie Mulvey-Roberts. Palgrave/Macmillan, 2009, pp. 113–116. Bronfen, Elisabeth. Over Her Dead Body: Death, Femininity, and the Aesthetic. Routledge, 1992. Burke, Edmund. A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful. London, J. Dodsley, 1767. Burke, Edmund. Reflections on the Revolution in France. 1790. Oxford UP, 1993. Butler, Marilyn. Romantics, Rebels and Reactionaries: English Literature and Its Background, 1760–1830. Oxford UP, 1981. Castle, Terry. The Female Thermometer: Eighteenth-Century Culture and the Invention of the Uncanny. Oxford UP, 1995. Cunningham, Valentine. Victorian Poetry Now: Poets, Poems, and Poetics. Wiley-Blackwell, 2011. Davison, Carol Margaret. “Monstrous, Mortal Embodiment and Last Dances: Frankenstein and the Ballet.” Global Frankenstein, edited by Carol Margaret Davison and Marie Mulvey-Roberts. Palgrave Macmillan, 2018, pp. 109–129. de Baecque, Antoine. Glory and Terror: Seven Deaths Under the French Revolution. Routledge, 2001. de Sade, Marquis. “Reflections on the Novel.” 1800. One Hundred and Twenty Days of Sodom. Translated by Austryn Wainhouse and Richard Seaver. Arrow Books, 1989, pp. 91–116. Duggett, Tom. Gothic Romanticism: Architecture, Politics, and Literary Form. Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. Goodwin, Sara Webster, and Elisabeth Bronfen. “Introduction.” Death and Representation, edited by Sara Webster Goodwin and Elisabeth Bronfen. Johns Hopkins UP, 1993, pp. 3–25. Gordon, Avery. Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination. U of Minnesota P, 2008.

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Death and Gothic Romanticism Howells, Coral Ann. “The Gothic Way of Death in English Fiction 1790–1820.” Gothic: Critical Concepts in Literary and Cultural Studies, edited by Fred Botting and Dale Townshend, vol. 1. Routledge, 2004, pp. 223–232. Jalland, Pat. Death in the Victorian Family. Oxford UP, 1996. Jefferson, Thomas. Jefferson’s Letters. Edited by W. Whitman. E. M. Hale and Company, 1945. Joseph, Gerhard, and Herbert F. Tucker. “Passing On: Death.” A Companion to Victorian Literature & Culture, edited by Herbert F. Tucker. Blackwell, 1999, pp. 110–124. Laqueur, Thomas. “In and Out of the Panthéon” [book review]. London Review of Books, vol. 23, no. 18, 20 Sept. 2001, pp. 3–8, www.lrb.co.uk/v23/n18/thomas-laqueur/in-and-out-of-the-pantheon. Accessed 5 Dec. 2014. Lewis, Matthew G. The Monk. 1796. Oxford UP, 1980. Lynch, Deidre Shauna. “Gothic Fiction.” The Cambridge Companion to Fiction in the Romantic Period, edited by Richard Maxwell and Katie Trumpener, Cambridge UP, 2008, pp. 47–63. Manning, Susan. The Puritan-Provincial Vision: Scottish and American Literature in the Nineteenth Century. Cambridge UP, 1990. Maturin, Charles Robert. Melmoth the Wanderer. 1820. Oxford UP, 1992. Miller, Andrew H. “The Specters of Dickens’s Study.” Narrative, vol. 5, no. 3, 1997, pp. 322–341. Parisot, Eric. “Piety, Poetry, and the Funeral Sermon: Reading Graveyard Poetry in the Eighteenth Century.” English Studies, vol. 92, no. 2, 2011, pp. 174–192. Parnell, Thomas. “A Night-Piece on Death.” 1722. The Graveyard School, edited by Jack G. Voller. Valancourt, 2015, pp. 21–24. Porte, Joel. “In the Hands of an Angry God: Religious Terror in Gothic Fiction.” The Gothic Imagination: Essays in Dark Romanticism, edited by G. R. Thompson. Washington State UP, 1974, pp. 42–64. Porter, Roy. Enlightenment: Britain and the Creation of the Modern World. Penguin, 2000. Quigley, Christine. The Corpse: A History. McFarland and Company, 1996. Radcliffe, Ann. The Mysteries of Udolpho. 1794. Oxford UP, 1980. Richardson, Ruth. Death, Dissection, and the Destitute. Penguin, 1988. Rugg, Julie. “From Reason to Regulation: 1750–1860.” Death in England: An Illustrated History, edited by Peter C. Jupp and Clare Gittings. Manchester UP, 1999, pp. 202–229. Schor, Esther. Bearing the Dead: The British Culture of Mourning from the Enlightenment to Victoria. Princeton UP, 1994. Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein; Or, the Modern Prometheus. 1818. Oxford UP, 1994. Shelley, Percy Bysshe. “Adonais.” 1821. Edited by M. T. Wilson, University of Toronto Libraries, Representative Poetry Online. rpo.library.utoronto.ca/poems/adonais-elegy-death-john-keats. Accessed 16 July 2020. Shelley, Percy Bysshe. “In Defense of Poetry.” 1840. Poetry Foundation, 13 Oct. 2009. www. poetryfoundation.org/articles/69388/a-defence-of-poetry. Accessed 16 July 2020. Tarlow, Sarah. Ritual, Belief and the Dead in Early Modern Britain and Ireland. Cambridge UP, 2011. Townshend, Dale. “Gothic and the Ghost of Hamlet.” Gothic Shakespeares. Routledge, 2008, pp. 60–97. Vico, Giambattista. New Science. Translated by David Marsh. Penguin, 2001. Walmsley, Peter. “The Melancholy Briton: Enlightenment Sources of the Gothic.” Enlightening Romanticism, Romancing the Enlightenment: British Novels from 1750 to 1832, edited by Miriam L. Wallace. Ashgate, 2009, pp. 39–53. Walpole, Horace. The Castle of Otranto. 1764. Oxford UP, 1996. Walter, Tony. On Bereavement: The Culture of Grief. Open UP, 1999. Westover, Paul. Necromanticism: Travelling to Meet the Dead, 1750–1860. Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Young, Edward. Night Thoughts. 1742–1745. Cambridge UP, 1989.

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26 DEATH, LITERATURE, AND THE VICTORIAN ERA Jolene Zigarovich

“As everyone allows,” Garrett Stewart remarks, “characters die more often, more slowly, and more vocally in the Victorian age than ever before or since” (8). For the Victorians especially, literary depictions of death were important to the social and cultural understanding of absence, separation, and displacement in an ever-increasingly chaotic and dismembered world. Rapid industrialization and urbanization, along with the decline in faith and belief in the afterlife, resulted in attempts to invent performances of spiritual certainty, seen in the aestheticization of mourning rituals and the overall Victorian “cult of death.” In an era of growing skepticism, the Victorians generally sought to bring culture into an intimate relationship with death, whereby mourning became a function of social display – a movement that can be seen as an attempt to embrace both social and individual loss. Such fashionable preoccupations with melancholy and the “beautiful death” disguised troubling doubts about the afterlife and the survival of the soul that scientific progress incited. Inspired by Queen Victoria’s perpetual mourning for Prince Albert in the second half of the century, the taste for elaborate funerary monuments and newly designed cemeteries not only contributed to sentimental graveside rituals, but also made the funeral director’s services necessary for successful mourning. The dead thereby became appropriated, marketed, and “produced” in these acts of memorial, and the display of the corpse took on a new significance. The “laying-out” of the corpse in the home while funeral preparations were being made became a physical and social necessity. Funerary rituals surrounding the corpse thereby emerged, reanimating the dead in a controlled manner, while at the same time enacting customs that could affect the fate of the dead person’s soul. Underlying this embrace of death was an uneasiness about the rapidity of change, where anxieties regarding the moral, physical, and spiritual decay of a people and culture were inevitably personified and figured in poetry and narrative. In the face of these anxieties, literature became a necessary form of consolation (Tennyson’s In Memoriam being a prime example), where Regina Barreca aptly remarks “[t]he pleasures of death […] have long been the focus for all forms of Victorian literature” (2).

The Cult of Mourning and the Commodification of Death While many Victorians sought evidence of life after death, the cult of mourning provided the materialistic displays (and extremes) of remembrance. Mourning jewelry, clothes, stationery, and elaborate decorations all emerged as public signs of loss.1 In Death and the Future Life in 288

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Victorian Literature and Theology, Michael Wheeler remarks that during “the Victorian Age, highly conventionalized social customs and funerary rituals eased the transition from the deathbed to the bed that is the grave” (xiii). And of course the body itself became the most important relic. In fact, the Victorians fetishized the corpse, creating material objects that were not only effigies for the dead, but of the dead – such as mourning cards, deathbed portraits and photographs, and hair lockets. Secular rituals involved the washing, watching, waking, and viewing of the corpse. Ruth Richardson recognizes that at the time of the 1832 Anatomy Act (which allowed the corpses of the poor to be used for dissection purposes), a prevailing belief in the existence of a strong tie between body and soul for a period of time after death existed: “The result was an uncertain balance between solicitude towards the corpse and fear of it” (7).2 Whether or not physical resurrection would actually take place, the protection of the identity and integrity of the corpse in the nineteenth century served as a metaphor for the possibility of providing a secure future for the soul. Though by no means a homogenous experience, the Victorian cult of death was an undeniable socio-historical and psychological response of a bereaved culture (Zigarovich, Writing Death 4).3 A definitive reasoning most likely never to be agreed upon, we can at least determine that a combination of economic, psychological, and consumer interests spurred the Victorian cult of mourning. David Cannadine notes, “It is arguable that the Victorian celebration of death was not so much a golden age of effective psychological support as a bonanza of commercial exploitation” (191).4 Pat Jalland similarly questions the widespread consumer culture surrounding mortality, where the existence of mourning teapots and pincushions, and spectacular, extravagant funerals, signify the expansion and professionalization of death’s commodification (305, 200–3).5 The value placed on sentiment and the individual had intensified the demand for commemoration. Growing secularization and an expanding middle class, “keen to display their wealth and status through conspicuous consumption, fuelled the demand for death-related goods and services” (Wood 11).6 As the industry of death and mourning proliferated, the experiences of dying and mourning became public signs of material survival and moments of cultural fascination shared in various forms and levels of expense by all classes. “All this enthusiasm might be considered purely an interest in social display,” John Kucich observes, “a means for the middle class to prove both wealth and gentility, were it not for the spilling over of the phenomenon into literary taste” (177). Victorian sentiment thus conceived of death as a fetishized event, one persistently dramatized throughout the century.

Materiality, Relics, and the Body Perhaps no other piece of Victorian literature better encapsulates this fetishism and the significance of loss and the body than Tennyson’s elegy In Memoriam (1849). In Relics of Death in Victorian Literature and Culture, Deborah Lutz states that elegies functioned in similar ways to shrines, “as structures used to lament loss and to remember the absence of the body” (12). Lutz reads the poem as “place” for Arthur Hallam to eternally dwell. A poem of consolation, In Memoriam is also a poem of religious doubt and uncertainty. It asks its reader to question mourning practices and the reliance on the body’s materiality. Tennyson refers to Hallam’s hands at least ten times in the poem, as an attempt to accept loss while also yearning for touch: Dark house, by which once more I stand Here in the long unlovely street, Doors, where my heart was used to beat 289

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So quickly, waiting for a hand, A hand that can be clasp’d no more (VII, lines 1–5). These gestures are reinforced by the lengthy stanzas that describe the journey of Hallam’s corpse on a ship bound for England. Longing to rejoin his friend, he reanimates the body: “and dead calm in that noble breast/Which heaves but with the heaving deep” (2, lines 19–20). This desire for a rejoining is counterbalanced by descriptions of Hallam’s rotting corpse: “’Tis well; ’tis something; we may stand/Where he in English earth is laid,/And from his ashes may be made/The violet of his native land” (18, lines 1–4). Lutz remarks, “To find in his decomposing flesh ‘food’ for plants is to desire a regeneration, a fresh living thing coming out of his mouldering corpse” (121). This acceptance of renewal, of life emerging out of death, signals the speaker’s ultimate acceptance of a Christian afterlife. While the poem attempts to immortalize and enshrine Hallam’s presence, it simultaneously rebirths Tennyson’s spirit and faith. In Memoriam reflects the Victorians’ growing attention to the afterlife, including concerns about the body, burial, and proper mourning practices. Formalized mourning codes and rituals thereby aimed to appease loss; funeral processions, burials, erections of tombstones, and subsequent visits to the grave are often the focus of Victorian social and literary convention. Wheeler notes that these conventions “formalized the different stages of death and bereavement, giving shape and thus possibly some meaning to a transitional phase between one state and another” (31). These transitions from living body to corpse, or material to spiritual, are often ambiguous and problematic in literature. The confusion between death in life can be seen in Thomas Hood’s poem “The Death-Bed” (1831), which depicts deathbed attendants questioning the state of an ill and bedridden woman: Our very hopes belied our fears, Our fears our hopes belied – We thought her dying when she slept, And sleeping when she died! (lines 9–12) Christina Rossetti’s sonnet “After Death” in turn repositions the deathbed subject from the bereaved attendants to the conscious dead. Despite being deceased, the woman retains sensory perception and a level of subjectivity as she witnesses her beloved’s unconventional reaction to her death: He did not touch the shroud, or raise the fold That hid my face, or take my hand in his, Or ruffle the smooth pillows for my head: He did not love me living; but once dead He pitied me; and very sweet it is To know he still is warm though I am cold. (lines 9–14) Painfully honest, the woman recognizes that the man she loves does not display affection or grief, only pity. As with In Memoriam, references to hands and touch signal the bridge between the living and the dead. The speaker is denied any physical consolation from her beloved: “He did not touch the shroud […] or take my hand in his.” She is ultimately consoled by the idea that her beloved pities her in death while he still lives. Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s “The Blessed Damozel” (1850) features multiple perspectives: a dead female subject, her bereaved lover, and an omniscient speaker. While “After Death” 290

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hauntingly gives voice to the dead, it does not fully bridge the earthly and deathly planes with acknowledgment from the bereaved. The earthly lover in “The Blessed Damozel” voices his sensory perceptions of the deceased damozel with spectral parentheticals: “(I saw her smile.)” (139) and “(I heard her tears.)” (144). These registers of seeing and hearing her are in the past tense, perhaps suggesting that a rejoining is impossible. Heaven thereby remains ambiguous and their desire eternally unfulfilled. Yet heaven is also depicted as a place of erotic reunion: Around her, lovers, newly met ’Mid deathless love’s acclaims, Spoke evermore among themselves Their heart-remember’d names; And the souls mounting up to God Went by her like thin flames. (37–42) The lovers seem to be described as enraptured by each other, not by the experience of the divine or heavenly community. Surrounded by these lovers, the damozel naturally desires her own reunion with her beloved, where an unconventional erotic fantasy of physical reunion with her lover in death is depicted: When round his head the aureole clings, And he is cloth’d in white, I’ll take his hand and go with him To the deep wells of light; As unto a stream we will step down, And bathe there in God’s sight. (73–78) Erotically conjoining the spiritual and divine, the poem underscores the damozel’s wish to rejoin in heaven with her lover in a physical way. Speaking from the bar which divides heaven from the void, the damozel dreams of their reunion: There will I ask of Christ the Lord Thus much for him and me:Only to live as once on earth With Love,-only to be, As then awhile, for ever now Together, I and he. (lines 127–32) The Rossettis’ poetry thus frequently intersects religious ecstatic experience, death, and the erotic. The poems also ventriloquize the dead, offering spectral affirmation of the afterlife for a culture facing profound doubt and skepticism. The reconciliation of sacred and profane love is a persistent theme; lovers avoid the danger of sin and anticipate a hope in the reward of the afterlife in heaven, which becomes a site of erotic reunion. The conjoining of death and sex is a persistent literary theme, as authors navigated longing, grief, and the desire to rejoin with the dead.

Sex and Death The desire for a “good” death is notably often gendered and eroticized in the period; the beautiful death of the virtuous woman in literature is full of mystery and erotica. Lingering 291

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illness in bed can be representative of the sexual knowledge or desire that leads to death, desires that Barreca observes “cannot be absorbed, finally into the domestic” (5). The marriage bed – the site of sexual knowledge – is thereby transformed into a deathbed and the bridal garb exchanged for a white burial shroud. The “marriage with death” plot sees its epitome in the previous century’s Clarissa. For Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa, no direct cause of death following her rape is given, yet, as I have argued elsewhere, her sexual deviation is punishable by death.7 From a puritanical standpoint, Clarissa’s violation of middle-class mores (including sexual) and patriarchal authority deserves punishment – a punishment that includes suffering and ultimately death. This is the only manner in which Richardson can redeem Clarissa, the exemplar, and emphasize her saint-like status. But this exemplarity and courting of death are ultimately eroticized over the course of hundreds of pages. In the journey towards her demise, Clarissa surrounds herself with and takes comfort from the accoutrements of death (such as her shroud and self-designed coffin). Mirroring the changing English attitudes toward death, Richardson has Clarissa take part in the joyful acceptance of death and union with her “Heavenly Bridegroom:” “I have much pleasure in thinking of death, than of such a husband,” she pronounces (6:374, letter 91). Exchanging her white bridal garments, now forever tainted, for the “all-quieting garb” of the shroud, she writes: “As for me, never Bride was so ready as I am. My wedding garments are bought […] the happiest suit, that ever bridal maiden wore for they are such as carry with them a security against all those anxieties, pains, and perturbations” (7:373, letter 96). As a good eighteenth-century heroine should, Clarissa plans a marriage with death to redeem her loss of virtue. The scene in the death room paints a portrait of the beautiful death that we will see revisioned in the nineteenth-century novel. Surrounded by mourning friends, Clarissa enacts the deathbed scene beautifully. She tells them, “It is not so hard to die, as I believed it to be!” (8:5, letter 1). With a sweet smile “beaming over her countenance,” she blesses and forgives her friends and family, including Lovelace. She tells Belford, “Do you, sir, tell your friend that I forgive him! And I pray to God to forgive him […] Let him know how happily I die – And that such as my own, I wish to be his last hour” (8:5, letter 1). Her last spoken words to be delivered to Lovelace, her rapist, reiterate the joy of death. Belford describes Clarissa’s joy in death as “her happy preparation, and still happier departure” (8:7, letter 1). Clarissa claims: “Most happy has been to me my punishment here! – happy indeed!” (8:5, letter 1). At her death, Clarissa’s beautiful countenance is recorded in Belford’s own “death-bed reflection”: “Such a charming serenity over-spreading her sweet face at the instant as seemed to manifest her eternal happiness already begun” (8:7, letter 1). By giving her life willingly, triumphing over sexual violence, and painting herself the picture of Christian forgiveness, Clarissa dies an exemplary good death. This “good death” of the virtuous woman, however, is full of mystery and erotica. We have no direct cause of death given for Clarissa, other than her own explanation that she is dying of “grief.” By obscuring the cause of death, Richardson forces the reader to connect the rape with the cause of her decline. It is this knowledge – that sex is death, that Lovelace desires a dead-like body (he drugs, then rapes her) – that liberates her emotional and physical confinement. These ideas are coupled with the oft-noted erotics of the deathbed scene, a popular motif of the nineteenth-century novel inspired by Richardson’s descriptions. Clarissa, unable to perform true marriage rites, scripts her death as a marriage, as a scene of joy to be performed in front of others. Here the deathbed is in fact a mirroring of the rapebed. In fiction that details the death of a heroine, Friedman suggests that “dying is the ultimate orgasm; orgasm parallels, contains, and enacts the dying process” (44). Clarissa’s literal death, intricately detailed by Richardson, is thereby a joyful climax. 292

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This bodily decay, a slow, joyful dying, is evident in the self-destructive “illnesses” of Clarissa’s nineteenth-century sisters. Victorian novels are full of lingering illnesses and exquisite corpses: both the virtuous (such as Charles Dickens’s Little Nell) and the sexual transgressor (such as Elizabeth Gaskell’s Ruth) can beautifully endure their illnesses. And as corpses, their auto-icons of serenity in death become symbols for the erotic. Unable to act upon their desires, they punish themselves through self-inflicted illnesses and linger in bed – again under the auspices of the male gaze – awaiting their slow demise. Whether angel, seducer, or seduced, the nineteenth-century female invalid is unable to escape her representative double-bind of virtuous domesticity and vulnerable sexual object. As bedridden, she is impaired and weakened, vulnerable and eroticized. One such exemplar of female death is that of Dickens’s Little Nell from The Old Curiosity Shop (1840–41). Though her death is quietly described offstage, it is the mournful deathbed scene that stirs the reader’s sympathetic gaze. Her friends surround her, reading and talking to her, until she falls into deep sleep from which she does not wake. Like her century-old deathbed sister Clarissa, Nell’s corpse – the representation of her life – is beautifully preserved and displayed. She was dead. No sleep so beautiful and calm, so free from trace of pain, so fair to look upon. She seemed a creature fresh from the hand of God, and waiting for the breath of life; not one who had lived and suffered death […] She was dead. Dear, gentle, patient, noble Nell was dead. (538–39) Dickens repeats and retells his reader Nell is dead, as if we are shocked and stupefied (though it was quite foreseen) by the sentimental scene. He repeats the phrase “She was dead” to show us that to gaze at her is to imagine she is still alive. Her corpse has become her portrait of a “good death,” and her beauty defies mortality: Where were the traces of her early cares, her sufferings, and fatigues? All gone. Sorrow was dead indeed in her, but peace and perfect happiness were born; imaged in her tranquil beauty and profound repose. And still her former self lay there, unaltered in this change. (539) Nell’s body represents the peace found in death, a release from the pain that she carried with her in life. In its idealization of death and the corpse, she becomes an allegorical angel, a sacrificial emblem and reminder of mortality: with the “vault covered, and the stone fixed down,” Nell returns to the quiet grave. While I agree with Elisabeth Bronfen that Nell represents an angel in death, an innocent victim of circumstance (Bronfen 90), I am uncertain that there is a religious purpose behind the scene. As with Clarissa’s death, here there are no last rites or visits from the pastor, no expiation of sins. Nell is symbolic of secular purity itself, finding her most powerful expression and representation in death, reaffirming innocence and redemption to us beyond religious precepts. Invoking Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa – who, having been seduced and lost her innocence by force, finds her situation is punishable by death – Victorian authors replicate this paradigm of equating sexuality with death, as seen in novels like Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, Charles Dickens’s Bleak House, Ellen Wood’s East Lynne, and Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles. There are numerous examples, but I want to look closely at a sexually-driven woman (Emily Brontë’s Catherine Linton) and the case of a “fallen woman” (Elizabeth Gaskell’s Ruth) in order to compare their fates and death portraits. In the exact center of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights is Catherine Linton’s infamous deathbed scene. It is painful and sadistic, rife with physical abuse and the passionate desire for 293

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death, all the while with Nelly looking on. Hair is pulled, bodies are pinned to the ground, bruises are given, and kisses are accepted. Here Cathy blames the men in her life for her impending death, accusing Heathcliff of thriving on it. Indeed, both accuse each of being the other’s murderer, as both desire a dual embrace in death. As Heathcliff attempts to rise, Cathy seizes his hair, holding him down, exclaiming, “‘I wish I could hold you […] till we were both dead!’” (123), and Nelly later observes that “they were locked in an embrace from which I thought my mistress would never be released alive” (124). Cathy tells Nelly that she will take Heathcliff with her to the grave, as she longs for death: “‘I’m wearying to escape into that glorious world, and to be always there’” (125), she says, surely not the normal ranting of a woman close to giving birth. Following Cathy’s death, Nelly tells readers that Edgar spends the night with her corpse: “His young and fair features were almost as death-like as those of the form beside him, and almost as fixed; but his was the hush of exhausted anguish, and hers of perfect peace. Her brow smooth, her lids closed, her lips wearing the expression of a smile. No angel in heaven could be more beautiful than she appeared: and I partook of the infinite calm in which she lay” (127). Cathy’s eyes, mouth, and lips are described for us. Gone from her face are the pains of her illness and childbirth. The signs of her passionate struggle with Heathcliff on her deathbed are absent. She is a portrait of exquisite beauty and innocence, attributes only achievable through selfsacrifice. It is as if we too visit the flower-strewn coffin later displayed in the drawing room, awaiting its burial on the unconsecrated heath. Edgar embraces the smiling angel, while Heathcliff inherits the tormenting specter. The hair that symbolized their sadomasochism is transformed into mourning commemoration: Heathcliff steals into Cathy’s death chamber, and finding a locket around her neck that contains Edgar’s curl of light hair, tied with a silver thread, he tosses it to the floor and replaces it with his own black lock.8 How appropriate that Cathy’s ghost haunts Heathcliff to her grave; that he wishes to exhume her coffin and commingle in death; that he rejoins her with a look of exultation in his eyes, for theirs is a love consummated in death. Her non-maternal, physically sexual nature is ultimately punishable. And as with so many of these female characters, suicide is the sole, grim outcome. Gaskell’s novel Ruth in turn melodramatically narrates a fallen woman’s despair that must inevitably result in her death. As with Emily Brontë’s Cathy and Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, Ruth attempts suicide by throwing herself into the elements. Lying in the road, she painfully desires death after being abandoned by her lover Henry Bellingham: “Her only hope was to die, and she believed she was dying […] Surely life was a horrible dream, and God would mercifully awaken her from it” (94). This death wish is never enacted, but it does loom over the rest of the novel as Ruth raises her son and lives a respectable life. As if to provide penance for her sins, she heroically volunteers as a hospital nurse during a cholera epidemic, miraculously escaping illness. Never informing Bellingham that he had a son, Ruth thereafter finds herself nursing him to recovery knowing full well that she would most likely be infected. Indeed, Ruth is stricken with fever and dies slowly, as if she has contracted a fatal sexually transmitted disease from her ill lover. Mr. Benson, the man who saved her from suicide twelve years before, describes her ill face: “He said he had never seen her face so fair and gentle as it was now, when she was living in the midst of disease and woe” (428), and “[t]he eyes were as full of spiritual light, the gently parted lips as rosy, and the smile, if more rare, yet as sweet as ever” (431). It is an odd description, pointing to the ways in which female illness is somehow aestheticized. The townspeople, knowing of her fallen past, approve of her affliction: “‘They say she has been a great sinner, and that this is her penance,’” says one. Yet many, especially the down-trodden that she has helped, love her for her good deeds. Ill in bed, singing all day, and delirious from the fever, Ruth is surrounded by the “watchers” who determine she is “happy 294

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and at peace.” When she suddenly sits up in bed, stretching out her arms, exclaiming “The Light is coming,” the watchers “held their very breaths” as she succumbs to her illness (448). Ruth’s corpse is laid out in her bed for several days, “decked for the grave,” visited by her friends, and kissed and petted by mourners (450). The scene becomes climactic when her seducer comes to view her. The bed sheet is drawn and showed the beautiful, calm, still face, on which the last rapturous smile still lingered, giving an ineffable look of bright serenity. Her arms were crossed over her breast; the wimple-like cap marked the perfect oval of her face, while two braids of the waving auburn hair peeped out of the narrow border, and lay on the delicate cheeks. He was awed into admiration by the wonderful beauty of that dead woman. “How beautiful she is!” said he, beneath his breath. “Do all dead people look so peaceful – so happy?” (451) Ruth’s death can certainly be seen as a form of repentance, of self-sacrifice for an unforgiven sin, but at the same time her purity and innocence in death are marred by the presence of Mr. Bellingham and his curious gaze. As with Brontë’s Cathy, Ruth’s hair, mouth, cheeks – all of her visible body parts – create a portrait of beauty for her lover to consume. No amount of remorse, charity, or sacrifice can expiate her original sin; in these plots, death is the only outcome. In its various forms, the female dead body becomes an inspiration for not only male, but also female portraits. Whether angelically beautiful or horrifyingly grotesque, the manipulation of the image of female death haunts nineteenth-century texts. The figure of the ill body is a representation and reproduction of the anxieties of a disrupted culture, a symbol of the threat of the unknown, of the powerless. Her haunting portraits resist and yet represent death, sexuality, and power. It is therefore only through the unveiling of these literary ghosts that we are able to discover a culture’s underlying anxieties regarding sex, death, and gender: anxieties that find their apex in the Victorian Gothic.

Victorian Gothic Gaskell, the Brontë sisters, Dickens, and George Eliot are considered realist writers, yet they all wrote Gothic “tales” or infused Gothic elements and tropes into their writing, where Cathy’s ghost, Bertha Mason, and Miss Havisham haunt the mid-century novel. Later Victorian authors such as Sheridan Le Fanu, Robert Louis Stevenson, Arthur Conan Doyle, and Bram Stoker bound fin de siècle anxieties into iconic monsters. With the rise of spiritualism, séances, tablerapping, and spirit photography came the popularity of the detective story, sensation novels, and monster fiction. Contemporary questions of gender, sexuality, immigration, and empire seem bound into the transgressive and monstrous figures of fin de siècle fiction. Whereas Stevenson is exploring the dualities of Victorian social experience and the harboring of desire and sexual expression in The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), the real character of Jack the Ripper blurs the boundaries of Gothic fiction. The Ripper murders signify anxieties about devolution and atavism: anti-semitism, blatant female sexuality, the urban poor, and violence all culminate in the bodies of his massacred and bloodied victims. Ghostly himself, Jack is an uncontrollable, spectral reminder of the fears that lurk behind the modern urban landscape. Such fears are notably signified by the literary figure of the vampire. Le Fanu’s Carmilla, Dion Boucicault’s Sir Alan Raby, and Stoker’s Dracula (even the Brontës’ Bertha and Heathcliff) embody fears of uncontrolled sexuality and reverse colonization. Their seemingly immortal bodies stoke anxieties about proper burials, bodily preservation, and grave-robbers. 295

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Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890) dramatically illustrates the desire for immortality and the rejection of Christian morality. Dorian’s sins are literally piled onto the canvas of his portrait, as he seems to have sold his soul for the decadent ideals of unblemished youth and beauty. Punished for vanity and a host of other sins, Dorian dies a Gothic ugly death, his aged corpse marked and mangled by a life dedicated to pleasure. His horrific, monstrous corpse is emblematic of fin de siècle excess and atavistic fears. It is fitting that such a contrast to the Victorian ideal of a beautiful, Christian death closes the century. In fact, the ugly death of the vampire and the gruesome corpse of a punished villain emerge as powerful literary emblems for a culture mourning the loss of certainty and tradition, coveting yet fearing modernity.

Last Words Notoriously peculiar, Victorian death rituals were often shrouded in the mystical and erotic. They offered passage from life to death, practical therapeutics, and rites for the living to ease grief and pain. Today we may see this necroculture as obsessive and unhealthy; too funereal and melancholic. Yet our violent shift to the cold and distracted approach to loss and mourning inevitably has its own repercussions. Without a collective observance of death in the West, perhaps we can shift our gaze to the Victorian past, and to its literary forms, to recognize the needs of dying and mourning.

Notes 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

See Ruth Richardson for a detailed account of the culture of mourning, burial reform, the Anatomy Act, and their effects on the poor. For other Victorian death studies, see Wheeler; Morley; Curl; Jalland; Reed; and Schor. Ruth Richardson provides a detailed discussion of the Anatomy Act, burial reform, and the nineteenth-century understanding of the body–soul dichotomy. For further discussion of the rise of death in literary culture, see Zigarovich’s “Introduction” to Sex and Death, pp. 1–22. Cannadine recognizes further that “the whole obsessive paraphernalia of mourning,” such as lockets, earrings, and so forth, “were more a cause of financial anxiety to the bereaved than a source of emotional solace.” Jalland also notes the decline of the ostentatious funeral among the middle classes in the second half of the century. See chapter 1 of Wood’s volume for a thorough examination of Victorian middle-class death-related consumption. See Zigarovich, “Courting Death,” as well as Zigarovich’s “Introduction” to Sex and Death. See Deborah Lutz’s insightful discussion of Wuthering Heights, mourning things, and the practice of including another’s hair in the coffin in Relics of Death.

Works Cited Barreca, Regina. “Introduction.” Sex and Death in Victorian Literature. Indiana UP, 1990. Bronfen, Elisabeth. Over Her Dead Body: Death, Femininity and the Aesthetic. Routledge, 1992. Brontë, Emily. Wuthering Heights. W. W. Norton, 2002. Cannadine, David. “War and Death, Grief and Mourning in Modern Britain.” Mirrors of Mortality: Studies in the Social History of Death. St. Martin’s, 1981. Curl, James. The Victorian Celebration of Death. Partridge P, 1972. Dickens, Charles. The Old Curiosity Shop. Oxford UP, 1987. Friedman, Alan. Fictional Death and the Modernist Enterprise. Cambridge UP, 1995. Gaskell, Elizabeth. Ruth. Penguin, 1998. Jalland, Pat. Death in the Victorian Family. Oxford UP, 1996.

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Death, Literature, and the Victorian Era Kucich, John. Excess and Restraint in the Novels of Charles Dickens. U of Georgia P, 1981. Lutz, Deborah. Relics of Death in Victorian Literature and Culture. Cambridge UP, 2015. Morley, John. Death, Heaven and the Victorians. Studio Vista, 1971. Reed, John. Victorian Conventions. Ohio UP, 1975. Richardson, Ruth. Death, Dissection and the Destitute. Routledge, 1987. Richardson, Samuel. Clarissa, or The History of a Young Lady. 1740. 2nd ed., 8 vols. London, 1747–1748. Schor, Esther. Bearing the Dead: The British Culture of Mourning from the Enlightenment to Victoria. Princeton UP, 1994. Stewart, Garrett. Death Sentences: Styles of Dying in British Fiction. Harvard UP, 1984. Wheeler, Michael. Death and the Future Life in Victorian Literature and Theology. Cambridge UP, 1990. Wood, Claire. Dickens and the Business of Death. Cambridge UP, 2015. Zigarovich, Jolene. “Courting Death: Necrophilia in Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa.” Studies in the Novel, vol. 32, no. 2, 2000, pp. 112–128. Zigarovich, Jolene. Writing Death and Absence in the Victorian Novel: Engraved Narratives. Palgrave, 2012. Zigarovich, Jolene, editor. “Introduction.” Sex and Death in Eighteenth-Century Literature. Routledge, 2013, pp. 1–27.

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27 THE AURA OF THE PHONOGRAPHIC RELIC Hearing the Voices of the Dead Angela Frattarola

In Victorian culture, keeping mementos of deceased loved ones was a common practice. Locks of hair were made into jewelry, and handwritten letters and journals were valued for the signatures they might hold and their past physical intimacy with a loved one. In Relics of Death in Victorian Literature and Culture, Deborah Lutz argues that “corporeality, for many Victorians, lent the resonance of subjectivity to objects, laded them with leavings of the self” (2). Mementos that connected the living to the dead either by being a part of the deceased’s body (a bone, a lock of hair) or an object that the deceased came into intimate contact with (a handwritten letter, an article of clothing), became meaningful objects in what Lutz calls “relic culture” (8). Yet Lutz holds that technologies such as the telephone and typewriter disrupted Victorian relic culture, as the personal, corporeal touch of handwriting became less common (5). She also notes the “rise of mechanical mementos with photography,” which eventually replaced relic culture (8). With the daguerreotype, portraits of dead family members, often posed with the living, became a popular form of memento mori. A less popular and yet equally significant technological development in this time, however, was the practice of remembering the dead through phonographic recordings. Such phonographic recordings complicate the tension that Lutz finds between technology and relic culture, as the phonograph could record one of the most intimate and personal relics of an individual: her very voice. If the voice holds what Mladen Dolar calls “the intimate kernel of subjectivity,” then the recorded voice of a dead loved one would seem an ideal source for “the resonance of subjectivity” that Lutz locates in corporeal relics (Dolar 540; Lutz 2). Adriana Cavarero explains that because the voice “comes from internal passageways: the mouth, the throat, the network of the lungs,” it is “the equivalent of what the unique person has that is most hidden and most genuine” (522). Although vocal recordings were disembodied rather than corporeal relics of the deceased, the trace and residue of the physical body that the voice retained in its recording perhaps gave them the intimate and spiritual associations of the relic. Although there is a certain morbidity to asking a loved one to record her or his voice so that it might become a keepsake after death, this is exactly what early phonograph enthusiasts and marketers imagined as a possible use for the new technology. In fact, in one of Edison’s first essays introducing the phonograph, “The Phonograph and Its Future” (1878), the fifth possible use he lists for the phonograph is “Family Record. – For the purposes of preserving the sayings, 298

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the voices, and the last words of the dying member of the family – as of great men – the phonograph will unquestionably outrank the photograph” (35, emphasis in original). A decade later, a writer in Scientific American praises the phonograph for “preserv[ing] articulate speech” and concludes, “All poetry, of every age, is full of yearning, one of the deepest in human nature, for the voice whose gentle greeting could be heard no more, and yet this tender sentiment will be gratified, and each elusive tone and accent now has conferred on it a perpetuity that is not an attribute of even the graven stone or brass” (“Perfected Phonograph”). In both of these quotations, the phonograph is applauded for its ability to capture a part of the deceased that a photograph or grave cannot. By “preserving […] each elusive tone and accent” of the individual voice, could a phonograph recording, despite its technological mediation, take on the “enchant[ment]” and “magic” that Lutz reserves for “corporeal keepsakes” (4)? This essay will analyze turn-of-the-century literary representations of phonograph recordings of the dead – fantastically set in gothic castles with reclusive men – to show how such fictive representations bear a familiar, albeit heightened, resemblance to the marketing materials of Edison’s National Phonograph Company, which urged the public to record their loved ones before they died. By examining how such recordings were imbued with the magical and spiritual qualities that were once predominantly associated with corporeal relics, we can begin to consider what insights the phonograph can add to Lutz’s astute analysis of Victorian death culture.

The Aura of the Recorded Voice Jules Verne’s The Castle in Transylvania (originally published as Le Château des Carpathes) and Arthur Conan Doyle’s “The Story of the Japanned Box,” published respectively in 1892 and 1899, both include phonograph recordings of deceased female characters. In The Castle in Transylvania, an opera singer, La Stilla, is secretly recorded by an older man, Baron Gortz, who obsessively attends all of her performances. When she dies as a result of the fright that she gets when she sees Gortz in the audience, he secludes himself in a dilapidated castle and repeatedly listens to the recordings of her voice while watching an image of her generated through mirrors, lights, and a photograph. The recordings are described as containing “her slightly tempered voice with all its inflections, its inexpressible charm, its caressing modulations” (181). Gortz is able to create an intimate, even seemingly corporeal, connection with La Stilla through the recording of her “caressing” voice. The recordings capture what audiences experienced when, in her live performances, “her entire soul seemed to exude from her lips” (136). Although in “The Japanned Box” the recorded deceased female, Beryl Clare, is not a singer, her voice too is “so charged with entreaty and with yearning love, that it will ring for ever in [the narrator’s] ears” (10). This recorded voice is listened to every night by her husband, Sir John Bollamore, so that it might give him the power to resist lapsing back into the alcoholism from which his wife saved him. Just as Lutz shows that relics “prove embodiment” and “have the texture of a life lived,” these recordings, although disembodied, preserve the texture of voice and breath of the dead, allowing the listener to once again feel the love and charm of the deceased (4). Because the voice reveals what is “most hidden and most genuine” in an individual, these vocal recordings manifest the spirits of both women (Cavarero 522). In both Verne’s and Doyle’s stories, the recordings seem to hold immense power over the men who listen to them. When La Stilla’s fiancé hears the recording of her voice after her death, he is left in a “paroxysm of ecstasy,” as he “breathed in this voice like a perfume” and “drank it in like a divine liquor” (209). The fiancé has lost control and is under the influence of the recorded voice, which is likened to the enticement and overpowering sway of perfume and liquor. For the widow in “The Japanned Box,” only his wife’s recorded words, which she 299

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“whispered” “with her last breath,” maintain “her influence upon [his] actions” (11). Just as his wife, when alive, “brought [Sir John] back to manhood and decency” and “was like a guardian angel,” her voice too has the power to guide him (6). Although Sir John also has her letters and a photograph, only the medium of the recorded voice contains enough of her living presence, the “gasping” of her breath, to have the power to keep him from alcohol (10). The recording is a relic in “its closeness not only to a once-alive human body, but also to a still-alive body that venerates its tactility” (Lutz 4). Although these recordings are not tactile like a bone or lock of hair, the recordings are felt by these men, as the vibrations of the voice permeate their bodies, “caressing” them and “ringing” in their ears. In fact, because “sound is a material, vibrational force,” which, “when it encounters a body […] makes a direct impact on the nervous system of the listener,” the phonograph recordings, it could be argued, affect the men beyond the handling of a traditional relic such as a bone or lock of hair (Hainge 225). The men venerate the tactility of the recorded vocal relics in extreme fits of emotion because these relics have the ability not just to be touched, but to touch the men back. Yet, the phonograph also gives these characters the power to possess their loved ones in a way that they never could when alive. Although both women in the stories are constricted by late Victorian gender conventions and live within the confines typical of the period, the keepsakes of their voices allow the men to feel as though they possess the very souls of the women – a level of possession that goes beyond any conventional patriarchal physical and mental oppression. In “The Japanned Box,” Beryl Clare is depicted as completely selfless in both living and dying. Sir John relates to the narrator that “God sent into my life the gentlest, sweetest spirit that ever descended as a ministering angel from above” (10). He continues, “In the hour of her agony it was never of herself, of her own sufferings and her own death, that she thought. It was all of me” (10). Exemplifying the characteristics of the “Angel in the House,” glorified in Coventry Patmore’s poem of the same title (1854), Beryl Clare’s identity can easily transition to a recorded voice since her living presence was already disembodied through the feminine ideal of the self-sacrificing angel. We are told that Sir John takes the Japanned box with him if he travels even “for a single night,” and otherwise locks the box away in his “mysterious chamber” where no one is allowed (6, 7). Even the charwoman, who is admitted entrance only to clean the room, is eventually fired because, in her words, “[I] just laid my’ and on that black box of ’is” (8). When his phonograph and the recordings of his wife are touched in this scene, Sir John’s voice sounds like “the husky, growling note of a man who is inarticulate with passion. It was the snarl of a furious wild beast” (8). His need to completely possess and control his wife’s recording, thus, makes him brutally animalistic. Similarly, La Stilla’s fiancé and Gortz become violent toward one another in their desire to possess the recordings of La Stilla’s voice. On the night of her last performance, her fiancé eagerly waits in the wings of the theatre, ready to take her “so far away that she would belong to none but him, him alone!” (136). When her fiancé hears her singing after she has died, he assumes that she is actually alive but has gone mad after being locked up by Gortz, and continues to fantasize about possessing her voice: “Yes! La Stilla was singing! She was singing for him … only for him! […] But, if reason had abandoned her, at least her artist’s soul was left to her, intact!” (209). Although the fiancé does not know he is listening to a recording, his thoughts reveal that the recording can contain her soul “intact” and the importance of his being the sole possessor of her voice. Attempting to keep the recording from the fiancé, Gortz taunts, “her voice […] her voice remains with me […] Her voice is mine … mine alone … and will never belong to anyone else!” (212). After the phonograph is shot and destroyed, Gortz laments “‘Her voice … her voice!’ […] ‘Her soul … The soul of La Stilla … It is 300

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broken … broken … broken!’” (212). Gortz’s cry further affirms the connection between the recording of La Stilla’s voice and her soul, which are conflated for both of the men who want to possess her. There is an assumption that if they can have the recordings, they can finally possess La Stilla in an intimate way that they could not when she performed publicly in the theater. Here, the privacy of home listening that the phonograph enabled is crucial for both Sir John, as he listens to his dead wife in a private chamber that no one else can enter, and Gortz, who listens to the recordings of La Stilla in a dilapidated castle that is booby-trapped against intruders. By making sound into a commodified material object (a record), the phonograph made it possible for these men to possess the women’s voices as objects and to venerate these objects as relics. In both stories, veneration and possession are interchangeable, as the men focus mostly on themselves (and what the women did for them) more than the memories of the actual women. For Gortz and Sir John, listening to the recordings of the deceased women is a private ritual: Sir John closes himself in his study to listen to the recordings twice a day at the same time every day and Gortz watches La Stilla’s image from a special seat as he listens to her record every night. In his cultural analysis of recording technology, Evan Eisenberg contends that phonographs disrupted the social rituals of live music, as musicians and listeners no longer had to gather together at a certain place and time to experience music. Yet, Eisenberg argues that records allow for “private phonographic rituals” that can be either secular or religious (42). It is for this reason that Eisenberg believes that recordings of music do not suffer from the same “loss of aura” that Walter Benjamin theorizes in relation to visual art (42). Because the “physical act of playing a record can itself be ritualistic,” Eisenberg reasons that the auras of such recordings are not degraded through reproduction (42). Contrary to Eisenberg, I believe that mass-produced music recordings can lose the aura of a live performance. Appropriating Benjamin’s language, a phonograph recording “substitutes a mass existence for a unique existence,” disturbing one’s ability to experience a speech or music in its particular live performance (22). Yet, the recordings of “The Japanned Box” and The Castle in Transylvania are not mass-produced: only a single recording was made of the women’s voices. Mentioning the marketing and growing skepticism of hair keepsakes, Lutz notes that “when not infused with the aura of singularity, death keepsakes could become unmoored from their close relationship with one unique body, becoming unstable signs with a representational promiscuity” (9). In the stories just discussed, it is the singularity and the ritualized aspect of their veneration that imbue the recordings with the aura of the relic. Lutz draws a connection between Benjamin’s “aura” and relic culture, claiming that “there is nothing more ‘auratic,’ arguably than death mementos; indeed, relics serve to define precisely what the concept of the aura means” (7). Lutz discusses how at the turn of the century, just as photography was enabling the mass reproduction of both art and memento mori, the threat of the loss of the aura made the public recognize and cling all the more to the singularity of a relic. Lutz clarifies, “The understanding and subsequent reverence for the aura of art and of death keepsakes came most pervasively only when it was endangered, in decay” (7). Phonographic recordings of the dead, however, even when mediated through a mechanically reproducing machine, did not endanger or provide a contrasting context for the more “authentic” relics of Victorian culture. In fact, in these two works, such recordings, in their singularity, ritualistic veneration, and containment of the corporeal qualities of breath and voice, exemplify the aura of the relic. In the late nineteenth century, as concerns grew that hair jewelry “might be fraudulent – made of someone else’s hair rather than that of the loved one – thus destroying its ability to provide proof of the singularity of individuality,” a phonographic recording held a guaranteed connection back to the particular voice and breath of the deceased (Lutz 12). 301

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There was nothing inherent in the technology of the phonograph that spurred Victorians to use it to create relics of the dead; rather, it was “the Victorian celebration of death,” which James Stevens Curl surveys in the graveyards, funerals, and grieving practices of the nineteenth century, that shaped how the technology of the phonograph was received and used. Already prone to value relics of the dead, it makes sense that late Victorians imagined ways in which the phonograph could also help them venerate and connect with the dead. Jonathan Sterne makes a similar claim, as he contextualizes the Victorian fascination with “voices of the dead” within the developing practice of embalming, arguing that both “embalming and recording ‘protect’ future audiences by transforming a substance in the present in anticipation of the future: the chemical transformation of the body was to have its analogue in the physical transformation of sound in the process of its recording” (294). Although the fragility of the recordings of the late Victorian period rendered them more or less ephemeral, the public applauded the technology’s ability to preserve the voice so that it might send messages to future generations (Sterne 298). In his discussion, Sterne relates the contested story of Francis Barraud’s 1898 painting Dog looking at and listening to a phonograph (later appropriated in the advertising of Emile Berliner’s gramophone as His Master’s Voice), where the dog Nipper attentively cocks his head as he listens to a phonograph. Critics disagree on whether or not the shiny surface that the dog and the phonograph sit on is the coffin of Barraud’s brother, who owned the dog and died young (Sterne 303). Sterne concludes, however, that regardless of one’s interpretation, the painting fits “within a voices-of-the-dead hermeneutic” (Sterne 306). Within this hermeneutic, Sterne includes a deceased reverend preaching at his own funeral via a phonograph recording, the advertising of a recorded performance of a deceased actor, and even a story of clerks transcribing the recordings of a dead stenographer (Sterne 303–5). The two fictional stories discussed here likewise contribute to this broader context of how the phonograph, in Sterne’s terms, “embalmed the voice” (298). John M. Picker, too, picks up on such preservation of the voices of the dead in his study of sound and auditory technology in the Victorian period. Echoing William Gladstone’s 1888 recording where he calls his own voice “a relic of an organ,” Picker concludes that the phonograph created “a new kind of relic, a hollow, grooved talisman of identity” (Gladstone, qtd. in Picker 121, 122, emphasis in original). We can thus deduce that it was Victorian cultural practices that were already in place – the relic culture of memento mori and the embalming of the body – that guided Victorians in how they represented the phonograph’s relation to death in literature, which, as shown earlier, treated recordings of the dead as a way of preserving their voices so they might be venerated and possessed. This idea of preservation is also at the root of the first logo of the Gramophone Company, adopted in 1898 before they asked Barraud to paint over his phonograph with their gramophone: the recording angel. The Recording Angel, in Christian, Islamic, and Judaic tradition, records the speech, actions, and prayers of humans, sometimes for later judgment. The logo depicts an angel with a quill, engraving, one can only presume, the actions and speeches of humanity onto a gramophone record. In this history of the logo, we begin to see what this next section will consider in more depth: the associations between the phonograph and the supernatural or afterlife.

The Phonographic Recording and the Séance Although the men in the stories discussed previously use phonograph recordings as relics of their dead lovers, they maintain an understanding that the recorded women are truly dead and there can never be communication again between them and the deceased. Indeed, this is why the recordings hold such power and are greedily possessed within each story. Yet the 302

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Victorian fascination with death did not stop at relics of the deceased. There was also a spiritualist movement, which some attribute to a crisis in Christian faith due to biblical hermeneutics and Darwinism (Lamont 898). Peter Lamont argues that this surge in spiritualism was partly engendered by a lack of evidence on the part of those wishing to reveal séances as a fraud. Séances were “the primary reason given by spiritualists for their initial conversion,” and personal accounts were presented to the public by “witnesses […] of unquestionable intellect and social status whose testimony demanded to be taken seriously” (Lamont 898). Although some spiritualists were exposed as frauds, the few accounts where no natural explanations could be determined were enough to convince some skeptics. Although phonographs were not necessarily a routine part of the Victorian séance, the technology is central to the séance scene in Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, where the protagonist Hans Castorp visits his tubercular cousin in a sanatorium in the Swiss Alps, only to end up staying himself for seven years once he too is diagnosed with symptoms of tuberculosis. When the gramophone is first brought into the sanatorium, it is immediately associated with the supernatural, as patients listen to the “ghost of a world-famous violinist [play] as if behind veils” (629). Castorp becomes enamored with the machine and thinks of it as playing “ghostly music” from a “little truncated coffin of fiddlewood,” a metaphor that is repeated three times in the narrative (633, 643). Castorp appreciates how the recordings hold the “purified form” of the voice and how “the character of each voice said something about the individual’s spiritual growth” (633). As with “The Japanned Box” and The Castle in Transylvania, the voice captured through the phonographic recording reveals the spirit of the individual. Yet in Magic Mountain, in calling the phonograph a “coffin” there is a stronger implication that the recordings are a door to the soul and body of the dead. Such a metaphor makes the phonograph a natural accessory to the séances that a few patients, led by a doctor in the sanitarium, begin to hold. This “magical fellowship” explains that they need the phonograph because “musical accompaniment facilitated these exercises” of conjuring the dead (658). Although Castorp has decided to stay away from the séances, he is persuaded to attempt to channel the spirit of his dead cousin, Joachim. During this séance, Castorp plays a specific song that reminds him of his cousin, “Valentin’s Prayer” from Gounod’s opera Faust (670). The narrator implies that, after several failed attempts, it is this opera about a soldier going off to war (as Joachim did) that conjures his dead cousin, who appears before them dressed for war (671). After seeing his cousin, Castorp retreats from the séance, turning on the lights. This scene, according to John S. King, is based on Mann’s personal experiences in 1922–23 with three séances, where he believed he witnessed conjured spirits (219; see also Sword 89–91). Mann wrote about these experiences in an essay called “Okkulte Erlebnisse,” and although he approached them with “skepticism,” thereafter “Mann was absolutely convinced of the authenticity of the events he had witnessed” (King 224). However, like Castorp, Mann decided to renounce the occult as “a significant step beyond the morally defined limits of reason” (King 226). Such spiritualism, which drew upon religious and scientific beliefs, was a significant part of Victorian death culture, and thus it makes sense that the phonograph would play a role in summoning the spirits of the dead. We see this slippage even in the general public when the London Times described hearing a recording of Robert Browning after his death in 1890 as an “extraordinary séance” (qtd. in Picker 123). Even the modern historian, Eisenberg, holds that “record listening is a séance where we get to choose our ghosts” (Eisenberg 46). Yet, the impulse to record the voice of a loved one before her or his death could also indicate a skepticism of the supernatural and afterlife. Allan Kellehear, in A Social History of Dying, surmises that with urbanization, which distanced humans from the natural cycles of life and death, the concept of the “good death” transitioned into that of the “well-managed death,” which 303

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required the professional oversight of doctors, lawyers, and priests (151). In this context, the making of phonograph recordings could be understood as another way that one properly prepared for death in the late Victorian period. This is precisely the message conveyed in the trade magazine Phonogram in 1893, where a writer relates how the American railroad developer and speculator Jay Gould recollected his life story to his sons when he knew he would soon die. Lamenting that “no phonographic record of that remarkable autobiography was preserved,” the writer questions how “friends of those about to depart from earth should omit to secure the services of a phonograph when they employ a photographer” (311). This article makes recording the voice of the soon-to-die seem like an essential professional courtesy, on par with any other business that manages death. Moreover, with a growing skepticism of the afterlife, a recording of the voice of a loved one was a surer means of hearing her or his voice after death.

The Phonograph Recording as Part of a Well-Managed Death The use of the phonograph as a reliable form of remembrance of the dead removes some of the magical, enchanting qualities of the relic, seen in Doyle’s and Verne’s stories, and renders the recording a practical measure in end-of-life management. While this is certainly due to the difference in the genres cited in this essay – fictionalized tales versus trade magazine – it also affirms that just as there was no monolithic way of viewing death in the late nineteenth century, there was also no monolithic way of viewing the phonograph’s associations with death. Yet, in the last text I will discuss, the marketers blur the line between fiction and advertising, using the art of storytelling to demonstrate to its readers how the phonograph can be a practical form of end-of-life management. The National Phonograph Company’s 1900 book, The Phonograph and How to Use It, presents the reader with what one would expect from a company advertising its product: a history of the invention, pointers on how to get the best sound out of a phonograph, and technical drawings of the different types of Edison phonographs. The third section of the book, however, has a reprinted sequence of stories called “The Openeer papers,” which are fictional scenarios of phonograph usage. It seems that beyond simply listing the possible uses for the phonograph, which Edison already published in 1878, the company felt the need to vividly describe the different ways phonographs could be integrated into daily life through storytelling, a genre that must have helped the public envision how a phonograph might function in their lives. This fictionalized third section of the book is crafted to sound like the casual accounts of a middle-class American, Mr. Openeer, and is peppered with small illustrations. It begins with his first encounter with a phonograph, when he visits a friend for Christmas and is astonished to be greeted by a voice rather than a person. Eventually, he and his wife realize they are hearing a prerecorded phonograph greeting, while in the adjacent room their hosts laugh at their confusion. He goes on to explain how the phonograph entertained the group, as they recorded themselves and listened to music, famous speeches, “funny talks and dialect records” (136). This recollection of “a delightful time,” which is followed by the narrator attesting that he bought his own phonograph and advised his friends to “Go and do likewise,” takes a sudden turn, however, when the narrator shifts to describing how his wife recently visited a neighbor who had just lost her eight-year-old son (136, 137). This neighbor, we are informed, had bought a phonograph after hearing the marvels of Mr. Openeer’s, and, as his wife offers her condolences, the wisdom of such a purchase is clarified: “It’s one of the greatest consolations that I have these,” she said, going to her record cabinet; and carefully taking from it three of the wax cylinders, she put one on the machine. The next moment it was as if Harry was in the room. First came his merry 304

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laugh, then an aside, “Dear Mamma, do keep quiet while I speak my piece.” Then came a steady little voice, clear and strong. (137) After hearing Harry recite a poem, “his mother sat there with tears in her eyes, but with a joyous look on her face. ‘My precious first born,’ was all she said” (138). Mr. Openeer then relates how his wife came home and recorded their child, and while the recordings will hopefully just serve as a source of amusement when the child is older, they would be the father’s “most highly-prized possessions” should his child die (138). Because this short story is part of a marketing strategy, there are details in the story that affirm the quality of the phonograph recording: it has such fidelity that it seems like the dead boy is in the room and the tone is “clear and strong.” This is the concept behind Edison’s famous Tone Tests, where audiences were challenged to discern when a live performer stopped and a phonograph took over, and advertisements that touted recordings as “lifelike,” “a true mirror of sound,” “natural,” and “the real thing” (qtd. in Katz 2). Yet it also implies that a scrupulous and careful middle-class public should be responsible in how they manage the potential death of their loved ones. There is an urgency implicit in the story that the reader, too, if she cares at all about her family, should record the voices of her children – just in case. After regaling the reader with several other stories about the phonograph helping people learn a language, dictate business letters, and preserve good stories, Mr. Openeer returns to the importance of making phonographic recordings of loved ones before they pass on. He relates the story of their family recording the voice of a cousin just before he dies in the Battle of Santiago de Cuba in 1898. Upon hearing that they have this recording, the young man’s father “bought the finest, most expensive Phonograph to be had” (143). The first chapter concludes by explaining that “the old gentleman holds that cylinder as one of his choicest possessions on earth” (144). In both this scenario and the one cited first, the grieving parents are consoled by possessing a recording of their child’s voice, a sound that carries something intimate and uniquely of the deceased. Although these recordings may not hold the magical qualities of the relic, emphasis is placed on the ability of the one grieving to possess the recording as an object, just as seen in Doyle’s and Verne’s stories. While Lutz’s analysis reveals how Victorian literature and culture merged the sacred and the material, the spiritual and the physical, by imbuing corporeal mementos with the power of the relic, my investigation of phonographic recordings of the dead in turn-of-the-century texts suggests a dwindling of the relic power and emphasis on the possession of an object, the recording. This is perhaps because the phonograph introduces commodity culture directly into relic culture. Although recordings of dead loved ones were singular, the phonograph cylinder was a mass-produced recording medium, which was purchased and possessed. Theodore Adorno, theorizing on the commodification of music through the phonograph, suggests that “as music is removed by the phonograph record from the realm of live production and from the imperative of artistic activity and becomes petrified, it absorbs into itself, in this process of petrification, the very life that would otherwise vanish” (59). This could be applied to the preceding examples, where mourning parents and lovers use a phonograph to petrify and possess the life that has vanished. Although Lutz does not indicate that possession of the deceased was a driving force behind relic culture, the stories by Verne, Doyle, and the Phonograph Company reveal that for late Victorians, phonograph recordings were prized as relics not just because the vibrations of the deceased’s voice could literally touch one, but because the living could possess this commodified vital residue of the dead. Lutz, at times, describes a relic as a form of synecdoche, a part of the deceased that could stand in for the whole (142, 149, 159). The recording of one’s voice, however, I would argue is 305

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not a form of synecdoche. The voice does not stand in for the missing body, but uncannily manifests a missing source. Roland Barthes postulates that the voice of others “indicates to us their way of being, their joy or their pain, their condition; it bears an image of their body and, beyond, a whole psychology” (255). If a recorded voice, too, could “bear an image” of the deceased’s body and psyche, then it presented Victorians with a novel way to fulfill their deepest desires to hold on to their dead loved ones.

Note The research for this chapter was generously supported by a Start-Up Grant from Nanyang Technological University.

Works Cited Adorno, Theodore. “The Form of the Phonograph Record.” 1934, translated by Thomas Y. Levin. October, vol. 55, Winter 1990, pp. 56–61. Barthes, Roland. “Listening.” The Responsibility of Forms: Critical Essays on Music, Art, and Representation, translated by Richard Howard. U of California P, 1985, pp. 245–260. Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility: Second Version.” The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, and Other Writings on Media, edited by Michael W. Jennings, Brigid Doherty, and Thomas Y. Levin, translated by Edmund Jephcott, Rodney Livingstone, Howard Eiland, and others. Harvard UP, 2008, pp. 19–55. Cavarero, Adriana. “Multiple Voices.” The Sound Studies Reader, edited by Jonathan Sterne. Routledge, pp. 520–532. Curl, James Stevens. The Victorian Celebration of Death. Sutton Publishing, 2000. Dolar, Mladen. “The Linguistics of the Voice.” The Sound Studies Reader, edited by Jonathan Sterne. Routledge, pp. 539–554. Doyle, Arthur Conan. “The Story of the Japanned Box.” Round the Fire. The Strand Magazine, vol. 17, no. 97, Jan. 1899, pp. 3–11. The Author Conan Doyle Encyclopedia, www.arthur-conan-doyle.com/ index.php?title=The_Story_of_the_Japanned_Box. Accessed 16 July 2020. Edison, Thomas. “The Perfected Phonograph.” The North American Review, vol. 146, no. 379, June 1888, pp. 641–650. Edison, Thomas. “The Phonograph and Its Future.” 1878. North American Review, vol. 126, pp. 530–536. Reprinted in Music, Sound, and Technology in America: A Documentary History of Early Phonograph, Cinema, and Radio, edited by Timothy D. Taylor, Mark Katz, and Tony Grajeda. Duke UP, 2012, pp. 29–37. Eisenberg, Evan. The Recording Angel: Music, Records and Culture from Aristotle to Zappa. Yale UP, 2005. Hainge, Greg. Noise Matters: Towards an Ontology of Noise. Bloomsbury Academic, 2013. Katz, Mark. Capturing Sound: How Technology Has Changed Music. U of California P, 2004. Kellehear, Allan. A Social History of Dying. Cambridge UP, 2007. King, John S. “‘Most Dubious’: Myth, the Occult, and Politics in the ‘Zauberberg.’” Monatshefte, vol. 88, no. 2, Summer 1996, pp. 217–236. Lamont, Peter. “Spiritualism and a Mid-Victorian Crisis of Evidence.” Historical Journal, vol. 47, no. 4, 2004, pp. 897–920. Lutz, Deborah. Relics of Death in Victorian Literature and Culture. Cambridge UP, 2015. Mann, Thomas. The Magic Mountain. 1924, translated by John E. Woods. Vintage, 1996. Picker, John M. Victorian Soundscapes. Oxford UP, 2003. The Phonograph and How to Use It: Being a short history of its invention and development, containing also directions, helpful hints and plain talks as to its care and use, etc.: including also a reprint of the Openeer papers and phonograph short stories. 1900. National Phonograph Company. Allen Koenigsberg. The Library of Congress. Internet Archive, https://archive.org/details/phonographhowtou00nati/page/114. Accessed 16 July 2020. Sterne, Jonathan. The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction. Duke UP, 2003. Sword, Helen. Ghostwriting Modernism. Cornell UP, 2002. Verne, Jules. The Castle in Transylvania. 1894, translated by Charlotte Mandell. Melville House Publishing, 2010.

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28 ANECDOTAL DEATH Samuel Johnson’s Lives of the English Poets Laura Davies

No “species of writing” is “more delightful or more useful” than biography (Johnson, Rambler III.60.319). From the short pieces written for the Gentleman’s Magazine during the late 1730s to the essays that came to be known as The Lives of the English Poets (1779–81), Johnson remained committed to the genre.1 Rather than merely presenting a “formal and studied narrative” from “pedigree” to “death” via a “chronological series of actions or preferments,” he held that the biographer should attend to “the minute details of daily life” in order to reveal the character of the subject and to allow the reader – by an act of imaginative identification “placing us, for a time, in the condition of him whose fortune we contemplate” – to share in their experiences: “so that we feel, while the deception lasts, whatever motions would be excited by the same good or evil happening to ourselves” (Rambler III.60.319). Yet Johnson also considered biography almost impossible to write satisfactorily. Judging most to be “barren and useless,” he asserted that, the weaknesses of many biographers notwithstanding, “the incidents which give excellence to biography are of a volatile and evanescent kind, such as soon escape the memory, and are rarely transmitted by tradition.” Consequently, there is no point or perspective from which biographers can properly record their subjects. Either the writing of a ‘Life’ is “delayed” to produce “impartiality,” with the result that it contains little “intelligence” or, “if a biographer writes from personal knowledge,” there is a “danger lest his interest, his fear, his gratitude, or his tenderness, overpower his fidelity” (Rambler III.60.319). Johnson’s belief that it is the author’s responsibility to propagate truth and virtue, either by teaching “what is not known” or recommending “known truths” (Rambler III.3.14), makes this an especially acute problem, and one that he returns to in “The Life of Addison,” where he remarks: “What is known can seldom be immediately told; and when it might be told, it is no longer known” (III.18). However, having accepted a commission of £300 to write a series of prefaces for a multi-volume poetry collection, The Works of the English Poets, Johnson found that he had little choice but to accede to the demands of circumstance. He could not choose his subjects, and none of them were still alive. Only a few had been known to him personally, and he had to rely on already published material or information gleaned from others.2 Working retrospectively in this way, the deaths of his subjects could not be avoided and, given his rejection of bare chronologies, he faced an additional problem: how to write of that which cannot be known by the living, is “radically resistant to the order of representation” (Critchley 31), and lies beyond the capacity of imaginative sympathetic identification. This chapter explores 307

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Johnson’s attempts, through the narrative construction of the Lives, to negotiate these challenges and to acknowledge if not resolve the moral, theological, and existential questions that they raise.

This Last Act Johnson’s Christian faith determined his view of what comes after death: “every work of the hand, and imagination of the heart shall be brought to judgment, and an everlasting futurity shall be determined by the past” (Rambler IV.103.316). Because “salvation” is “conditional” and the last judgment cannot be known in advance, he is intensely afraid of the prospect of hell (Boswell IV.278). These beliefs allow him to claim in conversation that by comparison “the act of dying is not of importance, it lasts so short a time” (Boswell II.106–7), but the evidence from The Lives is of a much less certain conviction, not only because Johnson recognizes that the narration of death is not the same as the experience of it, but also on account of his engagement with conflicting ideas regarding the nature of death and its significance in relation to the life it ends.3 Isobel Grundy recognized a degree of uncertainty in Johnson’s representation of death in a brief essay of 1984 in which, drawing on the work of Philippe Ariès, she suggests that Johnson’s later biographical work might be situated within a wider cultural divergence of two attitudes: one in which an individual’s death is “susceptible of a moral reading” and another where it is not; one that “looks to the death (good or bad, great or mean) to chime with the life, to explain, to confirm, and to round it off” and another that sees “something more confusing, ambiguous or disturbing” (Grundy 257). This earlier “moral” tradition has classical roots but is exemplified in the sixteenth century by Michel de Montaigne’s statement that “this last Act ought to be the Criterion or Touchstone by which all the other Actions of our Life ought to be tried and sifted” (I.66), in the seventeenth by Francis Bacon’s essay “On Death,” and at the start of the eighteenth by Joseph Steele’s observation of the biographies of Caesar and Cato that “without following ’em thro’ all the handsome Incidents and passages of Life, we may know ’em well enough in Miniature, by beholding ’em only in their manner of Dying” (13).4 Johnson is aware of this tradition, but often depicts death differently. As Grundy notes, in a number of the lives, we are presented not only with deaths that are “unedifying” or riven with irony, but where a particular effect is generated: a combination of the “jarring,” “shocking,” and “disrupting” power of death with “doubt as to whether the death confirms or contradicts the meaning of the life.” One might find “congruence,” but equally the relationship may seem to be one of contradiction (259). In this analysis she echoes, in part, Emrys Jones’s earlier observation that Johnson is intensely aware of the “arbitrariness, ignorance, uncertainty, flux” of human existence (395), and she acknowledges too, as critics have done subsequently, that the Lives are alert to the irony that exists in the “discrepancy between the intentions and achievements” of his subjects (Clingham 165).5 Others have framed the period in which Johnson was writing as transitional in a broader sense. W. S. Howell, for example, discusses the “shifting character of logic and rhetoric” whereby “older truth criteria of consistency and consensus coexist with the newer criteria of evidence and experience” (262). Martin Maner argues that Johnson looks back to “a concept of universal rational significance in which God has structured the universe as a pattern of intelligible signs” and also forward to “a concept of local empirical significance in which the relationship between sign and things signified is always problematic and uncertain” (13). While I do not dispute that these cultural and epistemological shifts have a bearing on Johnson’s understanding of death, it is also the case that as a biographer he thinks in and by his writing. Therefore, a finer-grained attention to the narrative and semantic construction of his prose is necessary in order to grasp the ways in which, through The Lives, Johnson not only 308

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reflects on but also engages with the interrelation of writing and death: each illuminates his understanding of the other and together they enable him to pose questions and countenance answers, doubts, and fears that he does not otherwise directly acknowledge. A useful starting point for such an analysis is Johnson’s own Dictionary definition of coherence: “The texture of a discourse, by which one part follows another regularly and naturally.”

The Texture of a Discourse Although individual “Lives” vary in length, content, and tone, patterns of “texture” that disrupt coherence between “part[s]” can be identified. The first of these, and the closest to what Grundy identifies, is that Johnson invokes and then undermines or complicates recognizable tropes regarding the meaning of death. This double movement takes different forms, but in each instance, the effect is to generate uncertainty as to how individual statements and paragraphs relate to one another, with an accompanying destabilization at a conceptual level. Consider, for example, the suggestion that Pope’s death was a consequence of his appetite. Johnson presents this possibility more than once: “he was too indulgent in his appetite,” “loved meat highly seasoned” and “amused himself with biscuits and dry conserves,” and “If he sat down to a variety of dishes, he would oppress his stomach with repletion.” These suggestions appear to culminate in the pronouncement that: The death of great men is not always proportioned to the lustre of their lives. Hannibal, says the Roman poet Juvenal, did not perish by a javelin or a sword; the slaughters of Cannae were revenged by a ring. The death of Alexander Pope was imputed by some of his friends to a silver saucepan, in which it was his delight to heat potted lamphreys. (Lives IV.55–56) But, just as the reader accommodates the multiple ways “greatness” is brought into question by this juxtaposition of characters, and laughs at the final bathos (Johnston 210) of Pope’s love of fish, Johnson picks up on his earlier qualification that this gluttony “was imputed by some of [Pope’s] friends.” Momentarily reminding us that we should not necessarily believe this opinion, he turns to their complicity in the overindulgence: “His friends, who knew the avenues to his heart, pampered him with presents of luxury” (IV.55–6). The role accorded to these “friends” adjusts his observation just a few lines earlier that such “indulgence” was “required” by Pope’s ill health, the various physical effects of which Johnson attends to exhaustively. We are told that “by natural deformity, or accidental distortion […] his life was a long disease,” and that by mid-life he was “so weak as to stand in perpetual need of female attendance.” This weakness Johnson presses home by detailing the help Pope needed in order to dress himself, and by the comment that all this “made it very difficult to be clean” (IV.54–5). Yet once again, what appears to be an inventory of need is only uncertainly so. Its prurient details, which undermine the dignity of their subject, diffuse through a porous boundary both into, and from, Johnson’s caustic commentary about Pope’s “irascibility” and “unpleasing and unsocial qualities,” his need for “attention,” and the “constant demands” he made of servants (IV.55). Each shift, slip, or adjustment is only of a degree or two. But taken together, this uneven attention to a metaphorical, mock-heroic framing of Pope’s diet and a more literal recording of what, how, and why Pope ate is unsettling. When combined with the construction of competing narratives of weakness and struggle, victimhood and self-destruction, readers find that they are not on solid ground with respect to the kind of figure Johnson is presenting in Pope, 309

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nor of how we should interpret the particularities he records. Sensitivity to the complexity of human character is of course part of the skillfulness of Johnsonian biography. What it also means, however, is that the reader’s understanding of Pope’s final death scene, which displays key features that an eighteenth-century reader would have recognized as characteristic of an ideal, pious death, accretes a certain dissonance when it is variously qualified by these details. Pope suffers through a “delirium” but considers it a “sufficient humiliation of the vanity of man,” is attended by a priest for the last sacrament (and Johnson does not cavil over Pope’s “papist” faith), expresses a humble last statement – “There is nothing that is meritorious but virtue and friendship, and indeed friendship itself is only part virtue” – and then dies “so placidly, that the attendants did not discern the exact time of his expiration” (IV.52). This death is devoid of the kind of minute particulars, especially of Pope’s body, that are present earlier, and lacks “proportion” in that it does not accord with the complex interweaving of narratives into which it is inserted. Consequently, it feels one-dimensional and unconvincing. The death of Jonathan Swift is also apparently ideal: “in his seventy-eighth year he expired without a struggle” (III.208). But, coming after seven preceding paragraphs describing in unsparing detail Swift’s physical decline, this description also rings hollow. For eight years prior to his death, Johnson tells us, Swift suffered increasing “fits of giddiness and deafness,” blindness that prevented work, madness that became “violent,” and “an inflammation in his left eye, which swelled it to the size of an egg, with boils in other parts” such that he could not sleep for the pain “and was not easily restrained by five attendants from tearing out his eye” (207–8). Finally, we are told, after a brief interval of reason he lost the capacity to speak. Here, just as the details of Swift’s physical suffering border on the gratuitous and prurient, so Johnson’s commentary on his silencing is overemphatic to the brink of tautology, and yet at the same time is expressed in a tone that is disquieting and hard to pin down: “he sunk into lethargick stupidity, motionless, heedless, and speechless” and a spent a year in “total silence” (208). There is a violence lurking in this insistent description that gives us pause. The details of this diminution of faculties also alert us to the fact that to die without “struggle” from this state might not be the same as to submit humbly and piously in full consciousness as has been already intimated. Furthermore, as in the “Life of Pope,” Johnson’s attention to Swift’s endurance of suffering is weighed against the possibility that he brought these travails upon himself, and in this way his ostensibly “ideal” death of quiet submission is complicated. His “avarice grew.” He “excluded conversation, and desisted from study.” And, because “by some ridiculous resolution or made vow, [he] determined never to wear spectacles,” his mind was left “vacant” and “anger heightened into madness […] compounded of rage and fatuity” (207). Johnson’s framing of the statement that Swift “expired without a struggle” by two contrasting anecdotes contributes to this complication. It follows immediately from an anecdote pertaining to the previous year, which appears to depict Swift in humble acknowledgment of the vanity of humankind: “it is said that” after this year of silence when “his housekeeper, on the 30th of November, told him that the usual bonfires and illuminations were preparing to celebrate his birth-day, he answered, It is all folly; they had better leave it alone” (208). In the context of his impending death, the suggestion of the adjective “usual” allows the reader to suppose that at this point, whatever he may have believed in the past has been superseded by such humility and wisdom. But the fact that this anecdote echoes another inserted two paragraphs earlier introduces doubt. In this earlier anecdote we are told that when his servant Mrs. Whiteway brought him meat she had “cut into mouthfuls,” he would stubbornly refuse to eat until at least “an hour” after she had left, and even then without sitting down, choosing instead to walk about following an “old habit” (207). The suggestion made this time is of Swift unchanged: habitual and stubborn, rejecting not vanity but weakness and help. Consequently, the 310

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bonfire anecdote and the kind of death it appears to support is overlaid with, and undermined by, other possibilities: that it is unlikely, inaccurate, theatrical, or perhaps all three. These anecdotes alter the narrative texture of the “Life of Swift” by their presence and in this way draw attention to the construction of the discourse into which they are inserted. They register other moments in time and they dramatize “the act of telling,” and in this way demand interpretation (Simpson 9). Yet, also, because they are transmitted orally between individuals or in texts as a form of hearsay (“It is said that”) and are often based on unverifiable subjective experience or of unknown origin, they are inherently of uncertain veracity (Fenves 152–55). Upon reflection, we can see that Pope’s final death scene is also anecdotal – a short, selfcontained story of an event inserted into the surrounding discourse – and that, in fact, a backand-forth movement combined with anecdotal interpolations is a feature of the incoherence of other “Lives” too. The “Life of William Collins” (a friend of Johnson) is organized around his poverty, mental “disorder,” and the twists of fortune and misfortune that befell him. The description of his death simply as a “relief ” (IV.122) seems to make sense in this context. Yet, in what is now a recognizable pattern, and despite the brevity of this “Life” compared to those of Pope and Swift, Johnson immediately follows his statement of this death with an analeptic anecdote of a meeting he had with Collins in his later years. Found clutching “an English Testament, such as children carry to the school” and asked why, his answer seems to exemplify humble piety: “I have but one book, […] but that is the best” (122). That this is to be read as a conclusion is underscored by the summative statement following it: “such was the fate of Collins […].” However, in the next sentence Johnson reverts to another anecdote of his “last sickness” that follows the same trajectory. Recounting a visit during which Dr. Wharton and his brother are shown “an ode” written by Collins on the “superstitions of the Highlands” and deem it to be “superior to his other works,” the implication that this should raise our estimation of his poetic achievements is made, but can last no longer than the length of the sentence because Johnson then cuts in with his own qualification: “no search has yet found” (122) this manuscript.6 Again here, the questions raised by one anecdote inflect the other, generating uncertainty. Was he pious and humble at the end, we wonder, or childlike in his disordered mind? Is the manuscript lost, or did it perhaps never actually exist? What was the achievement of Collins’s life, and does his “end” have any relation to it? The anecdote that Johnson includes of the death of another of his friends, Richard Savage, is more open-ended still.7 After recounting his friend’s fever, rapid end, and burial, Johnson returns us to what for a moment appears to be an ideal scene of piety, but slips into something more ambiguous: Savage, seeing him [the keeper] at his bed-side, said, with an uncommon earnestness, ‘I have something to say to you, Sir;’ but, after a pause, moved his hand in a melancholy manner; and finding himself unable to recollect what he was going to communicate, said, “Tis gone!” The keeper soon after left him, and the next morning he died. (III.185) There is pathos in this scene, undoubtedly, although we might also understand it as bleakly comic. No suggestions as to what these last words might have been are made, and thus our attention lingers on their absence. The following paragraph attempts to draw a meaning from the scene in spite of this, by the implication that it captures Savage “in Miniature”: “such were the life and death of Richard Savage, a man equally distinguished for his virtues and vices; and at once remarkable for his weaknesses and abilities” (185). But the polarities of this summation do 311

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not align with either the fact of his forgetting despite his “uncommon earnestness” nor with the ambiguity of the scene’s significance as a whole. The residual sense of the significance of what lies beyond the anecdote – of what was unreachable for Savage in his last moments, and which by definition cannot be retrieved from beyond his grave, nor summoned up by the imaginative identification of the reader – dominates over a language of “virtues and vices,” rendering it conspicuously reductive. This narrative incoherence not only acknowledges a failure of knowledge on the part of Johnson, and, differently, on the part of Savage whose memory fails him, but also enacts how death resists our grasp conceptually: because it is “not the object or meaningful fulfilment of an intentional act” (Critchley 31), it eludes judgment on moral terms. “The Life of Dryden” contains a particularly lengthy and disruptive anecdotal interjection. Johnson initially registers his death plainly: “he died in Gerard-street of a mortification in his leg.” However, he moves swiftly on to remark that: “There is extant a wild story relating to some vexatious events that happened at his funeral, which, at the end of Congreve’s Life, by a writer of I know not what credit, are thus related, as I find the account transferred to a biographical dictionary” (II.108).8 Given its dubious veracity and the multiple degrees of distance (of tellings and retellings) between this “story” and Johnson’s own narrative, it is surprising to find a considerable proportion of this “Life” devoted to it. The details it contains can do nothing but erode Dryden’s dignity; he is reduced to a corpse to be hawked about, variously claimed, and his funeral bartered over. The Dean of Winchester offers to “make a present of the ground, which was forty pounds, with all the other Abbeyfees.” Lord Halifax goes one up and promises “a gentleman’s private funeral” and “five hundred pounds on a monument in the Abbey.” Then, on the way to the Abbey, the funeral procession is held up by Lord Jeffries, who demands the “honour of his interment” and promises “a thousand pounds” and a monument. A farcical scene between Jeffries and Dryden’s sick wife plays out, in which her exclamation “No, no” is interpreted as “Go, go” and the corpse is taken off to await embalmment. The undertaker receives no instructions for three days and he threatens to “bring the corpse home, and set it before the door.” When confronted, Jeffries claims to have no recollection “at all” of his promise, dismisses it as a “drunken frolic,” and tells the undertaker to do “what he pleased with the corpse.” Letters to all three meet with refusals of help. Dryden is finally buried three weeks after his death with a funeral “by subscription.” His son, we learn, is frustrated in his desire to challenge Jeffries to a “fight” of “honour,” despite seeking him out for the rest of his life (108–9). The disruptiveness of this anecdote is underscored by Johnson’s prefatory remarks and by the fact that at its end he returns to the kind of detail that would have followed “regularly and naturally” from his description of Dryden’s death: “He was buried among the poets in Westminster Abbey” (110). It is emphasized further by Johnson’s reiteration of his doubts about the truthfulness of what he has reported: “This story I once intended to omit, as it appears with no great evidence; nor have I met with any confirmation, but in a letter of Farquhar, and he only relates that the funeral of Dryden was tumultuary and confused.” It is curious, therefore, to find that Johnson continues to try to draw out some insight from the anecdote by resorting to hypothesis and conjecture: “supposing the story true, we may remark that the gradual change of manners, though imperceptible in the process, appears great when different times, and those not very distant, are compared” (110). Once again, the reflection Johnson offers – that “at this time” Lord Jeffries’s behavior would not be tolerated – is obviously inadequate as a conclusion, and disproportionately bland in its broad historical supposition, when balanced against the weight of the story (here only summarized), and its unsettling “minute” particularities. What, we are left asking, does this “wild” and at best only partially true anecdote do to justify its presence, given that it runs counter to Johnson’s authorial commitments and biographical 312

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ideals? It does not illuminate Dryden’s character, its details exceed both the criterion of truthfulness and the bounds of what would be necessary for a moral exemplar.

Ridiculous Anecdotes Johnson’s early readers were also sensitive to the oddness of this anecdote, although they tended to frame their objections in terms of impropriety. Joseph Spence complained about his “propensity to introduce injurious reflections against men of respectable character, and to state facts unfavourable to their memory, on slight and insufficient grounds” (Kelley 215). The Gentleman’s Magazine (1779) remarked of “The Life of Dryden” that “[m]ore than hearsay evidence should surely have been had before so much was said” (Lives II.337), whereas the Monthly Review (1786) noted that Johnson had come under criticism for the “minuteness” of the “Life of Pope” (380). Boswell reports Johnson’s response to such claims: When accused of mentioning ridiculous anecdotes in the lives of the poets, he said, he should not have been an exact biographer if he had omitted them. The business of such a one, said he, is to give a complete account of the person whose life he is writing, and to discriminate him from all other persons by any peculiarities of character or sentiment he may happen to have. (Miscellanies II.3) In other words, anecdotes are not gratuitous details or entertaining curios but in fact provide the “volatile and evanescent” material that is the proper stuff of biography. Here, though, Johnson’s deployment of the idea of exactness to mean the discrimination of the “peculiarities” of each subject avoids the matters of accuracy and veracity that are surely bound up with the illumination of an individual character. Furthermore, although Johnson asserts that “minute” details make a “complete account” of the subject possible, this, as has been shown, is not the effect that they generate in the Lives. In fact, together with the double movement of invoking and undermining established death tropes, they raise unsettling questions but prevent coherent conclusive interpretations: about their relation to the subject’s life (both his lived experience and Johnson’s narrative account of it) as a whole, including his posthumous reputation, as well as, more fundamentally, about their own interpretation. Are these “details” signs of the existence of a divinely structured universe? Or evidence of the absence of such a pattern? Or perhaps they capture more simply man’s unsuitability for such a task of comprehension. Given these uncertainties, the presence of such anecdotes in The Lives is noteworthy. Johnson himself recognized this. Elsewhere he insists that writers are responsible for the propagation of truth not only by what they include but also by what they exclude: their “duty” is “to take care lest their readers be misled by ambiguous examples” (Rambler V.164.109). Yet he admits that instead of “little Lives and little Prefaces, to a little edition of the English Poets” he has in the Lives “written too much” (Letters IV.20). He cannot fully explain why: “I have been led beyond my intention, I hope, by the honest desire of giving useful pleasure” and “I hope in such a manner, as may tend to the promotion of piety” (Boswell IV.34). Attending to the structural logic of the anecdote allows us to explore what may be at stake in these hopes as well as with what else may be in play besides them. It also reveals the manner in which Johnson’s struggle with what is “too little” and what is “too much” both enables and makes visible a concomitant grappling with competing conceptions of death and with the disturbing questions that endeavor raises. Emerging as a genre in the seventeenth century, there was by the eighteenth century a “rage” for anecdotes (Simpson 55).9 Often collected together, as well as incorporated into other forms, they ranged from accounts of conversational exchanges or witticisms; descriptions of 313

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events such as crimes, trials, or natural phenomena; or revelations of hidden or scandalous material in the tradition of the secret history.10 Johnson was famously the subject of numerous anecdotes, but read, recommended, and collected them himself.11 However, by describing the Lives as a “minute kind of History” (Lives I.190) he acknowledged his opposition to those of his contemporaries, most notably Voltaire, for whom the anecdote was a form “derogatory to the dignity of history” and a sign of degraded popular taste.12 Various scholars have commented on Johnson’s use of anecdotes, although none in relation to the representation of death, beyond the suggestion that they may function as mementos mori, testaments to the “evanescence of human knowledge and human existence” (Folkenflik 45–46). Arguments have been made both for their alignment with Johnson’s biographical aims, and against them, and with respect to matters of immediacy and distance.13 Roger Lonsdale, for instance, comments tentatively that “Johnson’s fondness for scattered anecdotes about his poets may also be explained by a belief that such idiosyncratic details might convey some of the immediacy he craved in biography” (Lives I.93). Conversely, Fred Parker has pointed out that any such “intimacy” is fleeting and in fact the “Lives” are comprised of “a string of more or less discrete events and anecdotes, seen in the long view of the historian” (“Johnson and the Lives of the Poets” 330). These debates enact various responses to the incoherence of Johnson’s prose, its transient effects, and the relation between its “part[s].” There is more to be said, however, about the intersection of Johnson’s biographical writing, the work of history, and the writing of death. In historiographical studies the anecdote “has always stood in a close relation to the longer, more elaborate narratives of history, sometimes in a supportive role, as examples and illustrations, sometimes in a challenging role, as the repressed of history – “la petite histoire” (Gossman 143). The latter role has received most attention, largely due to two influential essays by Michel Foucault (1977) and Joel Fineman (1991). Attending to these accounts of the logic of the anecdote illuminates the alignment of the structural features of Johnson’s prose with his thinking about death. Framing his argument in terms of a reconfiguration of the “ridiculous” in Western literary discourse between 1660 and 1760, Foucault argues that “[a]n art of language is born” which seeks to “tell of the ultimate, and the most minute degrees of the real” (90) and bears a selfappointed “duty to tell the most common of secrets.”14 He examines this in relation to an analytics of power operating in the glimpses of the lives and misdemeanors of “obscure” individuals afforded by the traces left of them in official archival documents such as prison records and royal petitions. Fineman draws on this account but insists on a more vehemently Lacanian framing of what he terms the “aporetic operation” (64) of the anecdote: the introduction of a “hole” into the “totalizing whole of history” produces “the effect of the real, the occurrence of contingency, by establishing an event as an event within and without the framing context of historical successivity” (60). This disruptive power derives not only from its insertion of material that lies outside and is different in kind from that recorded by authorized historical narratives, but also because the anecdote is itself liable to “be opened up by a further anecdotal operation […] and so on” (61). Johnson is not straightforwardly anticipating these conceptual frameworks, but there are threads of connection among them. He defines the anecdote as “something yet unpublished; secret history,” adding in the fourth edition: “It is now used, after the French, for a biographical incident; a minute passage of private life.” Boswell tells us, furthermore, that Johnson “always condemned” this latter sense of ‘signifying particulars” (despite the obvious inclusion of “minute” details in the anecdotes of The Lives), which indicates that for Johnson the primary function of the anecdote is to reveal what is “secret” or unauthorized.15 This understanding has 314

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affinities both with the “duty” of telling that Foucault identifies and with the action of “opening up” that Fineman articulates. This is not because Johnson presents scandalous, previously unpublished material, or writes the lives of “obscure” and voiceless subjects, but rather because he deploys the anecdote and its logic of a part-whole relation to gesture toward the problem of human knowing in a theological sense. The eye of God “takes in the whole of things,” he asserts, but we, by contrast, “see a little, very little; and what is beyond we only can conjecture” (Adventurer II.107.445). At the apex of this limitation of knowledge is death, the ultimate form of the secret that can never be revealed but is “always a shibboleth” (Derrida 74). It is the determining presence of this “most common of secrets” that the anecdote makes visible. It does so because, like death, it forces us to consider the relation between part and whole and in so doing to recognize that the fullness of this relation lies beyond us: “we draw a secret comparison between the part and the whole; the termination of any period of life reminds us that life itself has likewise its termination” (Rambler IV.103.315). This anecdotal action does not depend on the verifiable veracity of its content but on its structure. What Catherine Gallagher and Stephen Greenblatt observe in their analysis of the role of the anecdote in the work of New Historicism and the writing of “counter-history” – that “at the anecdote’s rim, one encounters a difference in the texture of the narrative, an interruption” (50) – is a response to Fineman.16 However, it equally applies to what Johnson draws our attention to in the Lives: the points of transition between each anecdote and the narrative surrounding it, and the fact that these various “part[s]” do not follow “regularly and naturally” from one to another. This incoherence, generated by the shifting perspectives and temporalities of the anecdotes, registers the impossibilities of biography (the evanescence and volatility of its material and the fact that there is no point or perspective from which an author can properly record the subject), but it also attests to the necessity of writing of death only by substitute narratives that are inherently unsatisfactory and incomplete: of what came before, or after, of what others saw, of conjecture. The anecdote also mobilizes the question of how to conceptualize the moment of death and its significance. The simultaneous wholeness of the anecdote as a self-contained story and its incompleteness as an ambiguous insertion into and disruption of a wider narrative enacts a holding-together of different understandings of death that share the same part-whole relation: as a “small, individual moment” that derives its force from its contingency and “minute” particularity and as a universal, entirely “substitutable” experience (Derrida 22). The same structural alignment allows Johnson to consider death as banal and quotidian and also, conversely, as the ultimate exception to the everyday by merit of being the last day, and thus as the absolute encounter with difference by which all others are to be judged. His anecdotes, therefore, embed the process as well as the impossibility of understanding and representing death into the construction of narrative “Life,” and they replicate the paradox of death as both part of, and a threat to, coherent narratives of meaning. Johnson does not pursue the aporetic logic that Fineman describes to its fullest extent, but he does recognize that he has been “led beyond [his] intention” in the Lives. This is in good measure because of the anecdotes that he includes, which are in his own words “too much.” This ability to lead him further, into the territory of uncertainty, makes a certain kind of thinking about writing and about death possible. In the “Life of Dryden,” with its especially disruptive, farcical anecdote, and in the writing of which he struggled to an unusual degree, Johnson makes an observation that indicates why this might have appealed.17 In a judgment of Dryden’s writing that recalls his earlier conception of life as a state of being “suspended over the abyss of eternal perdition only by the thread of life, which must soon part by its own weakness, and which the wing of every minute may divide” (Rambler IV.110.224), Johnson comments: 315

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“He delighted to tread upon the brink of meaning, where light and darkness begin to mingle; to approach the precipice of absurdity, and hover over the abyss of unideal vacancy. This inclination sometimes produced nonsense” (Lives II.149–50). The operative word here, surely, is “sometimes.” Johnson’s figuration attends insistently to the danger of the “brink” and the “precipice,” with the threat of the abyss below, and he specifies that this abyss is not, this time, the perdition of hell, but rather of blankness, of “unideal vacancy.” Yet his metaphor also attests to the potency of this region at the limit of “meaning” where certainties of “light and darkness begin to mingle.” Just as in the framing of his anecdotes, Johnson diffuses the effect of this insight with a suggestion of the mock-heroic. But he also leaves open the possibility that, despite its perils, “this inclination sometimes produced” sense. It is to this whisper of a suggestion of what might be “produced” by thinking and writing in this danger zone, with its threat of annihilation everpresent and its complicated relation to Johnson’s commitment to truth and to virtue, that to my mind Samuel Beckett responds in his play about Johnson, Human Wishes. Incomplete, it consists only of a scene set at Bolt Court (Johnson’s London house) in which the characters reflect on the nature and meaning of death. Although prompted by a passage one of them has read from a text that Johnson himself knew well (Jeremy Taylor’s The Rule and Exercises of Holy Dying ), the conversation spirals quickly into nonsense, as the characters become caught up in a discussion of “minute” details that can exemplify only absurdity.18 And, just after one of them asks, “How can death enter by ‘a hair or a raisin?,’” the fragment breaks off, with Beckett unable to write any further.19 We recognize confrontations of this kind, with a lack of meaning, and an existential abyss, as a hallmark of Beckett’s work; it has been the intention of this chapter to demonstrate that it is no less characteristic of Johnson to take us close to the edge.

Notes 1 For details of the range of Johnson’s biographical writing, see Burke, McAdam, and Kelley 21–97. 2 On the details of this commission, see Fussell 32 and Lives 88. Johnson introduces a very few poets to the collection (Isaac Watts is one), but his primary method is to use published biographies of wellknown figures and for more minor poets to turn to the entries included in the General Dictionary and the Biographica Britannica. These sources are examined in detail by Rogers. 3 Boswell also reports that when he pressed this conversation Johnson fell into “such a state of agitation” that Boswell himself became “alarmed and distressed.” He is also sent away by Johnson and told not to return the next day (Boswell II.106–7). 4 For discussion of these traditions see Conley, Fox, and Waters. 5 On irony and the genre of the life writing, we might look to the precedents of Wood and Aubrey. 6 As Lamont has subsequently shown, this manuscript did exist. 7 This biography was first written in 1744 but is republished in The Lives. 8 On the origins of the anecdote, see Lives II.306–8. 9 For additional accounts of the anecdote as an “epidemic,” see Todd. 10 Gossman surveys the range of anecdotal forms, including the derivation of secret histories, from Procopius’s “secret history,” the Storia arcana, known as the Anekdota (148–50). See also Stephanovska. 11 Boswell’s Life of Johnson of course represents the most famous example of this anecdotal biography. But it was by no means unusual; an enormous number of anecdotes purporting to record Johnson’s conversation or behavior were collected and published. This is discussed by Silver and Deutsch. 12 See Black 54. 13 Folkenflik argues for alignment (44–46). This is a rejoinder to Tracey, who disagrees (89). 14 In the French original the idea of the secret persists: « devoir de dire les plus communs des secrets » (Foucault, La vie 29). 15 Discussion of this and the Dictionary addition can be found in Cross 95. 16 Other responses to Fineman and the part-whole relation include Simpson (55–58), Silver, and Deutsch (191).

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Anecdotal Death: Samuel Johnson’s Lives 17 Lonsdale comments on Johnson’s “unusually slow progress” with the writing of the “Life of Dryden,” noting that his “uncertainties” about the anecdote are “betrayed by his various revisions” to it, including inserting and removing details more than once (Johnson, Lives II.306–7). 18 A summary of books in Johnson’s possession at his death can be found in Quinlan. 19 The play fragment can be found in Disjecta and is usefully discussed by Löwe.

Works Cited Ariès, Phillippe. The Hour of Our Death. Vintage Books, 1982. Foucault, Michel. “La vie des hommes infâmes.” Les Cahiers du Chemin, no. 29, 15 Jan. 1977, pp. 12–29. Aubrey, John. Brief Lives with an Apparatus for the Lives of our English Mathematical Writers. Edited by Kate Bennett, 2 vols. Oxford UP, 2015. Fineman, Joel. “The History of the Anecdote: Fiction and Fiction.” The Subjectivity Effect in Western Literary Tradition: Essays Toward the Release of Shakespeare’s Will. MIT Press, 1991, pp. 59–87. Bacon, Francis. Bacon’s Essays, edited by J. M. McNeil. Macmillan, 1959. Beckett, Samuel. Disjecta: Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic Fragment. John Calder, 1983. Black, J. B. The Art of History. Methuen and Company, 1926. Boswell, James. Boswell’s Life of Johnson, edited by G. B. Hill, revised by L. F. Powell. 6 vols. Clarendon Press, 1934–1950. Burke, John R. “Excellence in Biography: Rambler No. 6 and Johnson’s Early Biographies.” South Atlantic Bulletin, vol. 44, no. 2, May 1979, pp. 14–34. Clingham, Greg. “Life and Literature in the Lives of the Poets.” The Cambridge Companion to Samuel Johnson, edited by Greg Clingham. Cambridge UP, 1997, pp. 161–191. Critchley, Simon. Very Little … Almost Nothing: Death, Philosophy, Literature. Routledge, 1997. Cross, Anthony. Peter the Great Through British Eyes: Perceptions and Representations of the Tsar Since 1696. Cambridge UP, 2000. Derrida, Jacques. Aporias: Dying – Awaiting (One Another at) the “Limits of Truth.”, translated by Thomas Dutoit. Stanford UP, 1993. Deutsch, Helen. Loving Dr. Johnson. U of Chicago P, 2005. Fenves, P. Arresting Language: From Leibniz to Benjamin. Stanford UP, 2001. Folkenflik, Robert. Samuel Johnson, Biographer. Cornell UP, 1978. Foucault, Michel. “The Life of Infamous Men.” Power, Truth, Strategy. Feral Publications, 1979. Fox, Christopher. “‘Gone as Soon as Found’: Pope’s ‘Epistle to Cobham’ and the Death-Day as Moment of Truth.” Studies in English Literature 1500–1900, vol. 20, no. 3, Summer 1980, pp. 431–448. Fussell, Paul. Samuel Johnson and the Life of Writing. Chatto and Windus, 1972. Gallagher, Catherine, and Stephen Greenblatt. Practicing New Historicism. U of Chicago P, 2000. General Dictionary, Historical and Critical. 10 vols. London, 1734–1741. Gossman, Lionel. “Anecdote and History.” History and Theory, vol. 42, May 2003, pp. 143–168. Greenblatt, Stephen. Marvellous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World. U of Chicago P, 1991. Grundy, Isobel. “A Writer of Lives Looks at Death.” The Modern Language Review, vol. 79, no. 2, April 1984, pp. 257–265. Howell, W. S. Eighteenth-Century British Logic and Rhetoric. Princeton UP, 1971. Johnson, Samuel. A Dictionary of the English Language. To Which Are Prefixed, a History of the Language, and an English Grammar. 2 vols. 6th ed. London, 1785. Johnson, Samuel. Johnsonian Miscellanies. Edited by G. Birkbeck Hill. 2 vols. Constable and Company, 1966. Johnson, Samuel. The Letters of Samuel Johnson. Edited by Bruce Redford. 5 vols. Princeton UP, 1992. Johnson, Samuel. The Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets; With Critical Observations on Their Works. Edited by Roger Lonsdale. 6 vols. Clarendon Press, 2006. Johnson, Samuel. The Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson. Vol. II. The Idler and the Adventurer. Edited by W. J. Bate, John M. Bullitt, and L. F. Powell. Yale UP, 1963. Johnson, Samuel. The Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson. Vols. III–V. The Rambler. Edited by W. J. Bate and Albrecht B. Strauss. Yale UP, 1969. Johnston, Freya. Samuel Johnson and the Art of Sinking. Oxford UP, 2005. Jones, Emrys. “The Artistic Form of Rasselas.” The Review of English Studies, vol. 18, no. 72, Nov. 1967, pp. 387–401. Kelley, Robert E. The Early Biographies of Samuel Johnson. U of Iowa P, 1974.

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Laura Davies Lamont, Claire. “William Collins’s ‘Ode on the Popular Superstitions of the Highlands of Scotland’ – A Newly Recovered Manuscript.” The Review of English Studies, vol. 19, no. 74, May 1968, pp. 137–147. Löwe, N. F. “Sam’s Love for Sam: Samuel Beckett, Dr. Johnson and Human Wishes.” Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui, vol. 8, 1999, pp. 189–205. Maner, Martin. The Philosophical Biographer. U of Georgia P, 1988. McAdam, Jr., E. L. “Johnson’s Lives of Sarpi, Blake and Drake.” PMLA, vol. 58, no. 2, Jun. 1943, pp. 466–478. Montaigne, Michel de. The Essays of Michael Seigneur de Montaigne. Translated by Charles Cotton. 7th ed. 3 vols. London 1759. The Monthly Review. No. 73, 1786. Parker, Fred. “Johnson and the Lives of the Poets.” The Cambridge Quarterly, vol. 29, no. 4, Literary Biography Special Issue, 2000, pp. 323–337. Parker, Fred. Scepticism and Literature: An Essay on Pope, Hume, Sterne, and Johnson. Oxford UP, 2003. Quinlan, Maurice J. Samuel Johnson: A Layman’s Religion. U of Wisconsin P, 1964. Rogers, Pat. “Samuel Johnson’s Lives of the Poets and the Biographic Dictionaries.” RES, vol. 31, 1980, pp. 159–171. Silver, Sean. “Pale Fire and Johnson’s Cat: The Anecdote in Polite Conversation.”Criticism, vol. 53, no. 2, Spring 2011, pp. 241–264. Simpson, David. The Academic Postmodern. U of Chicago P, 1995. Steele, Joseph. Tracts and Pamphlets. Edited by Rae Blanchard. Johns Hopkins UP, 1944. Stephanovska, Malina. “Exemplary or Singular? The Anecdote in Historical Narrative.” SubStance, vol. 38, no. 1, 2009, pp. 16–30. Taylor, Jeremy. The Rules and Exercises of Holy Dying. 1651. Todd, Christopher. “Chamfort and the Anecdote.” Modern Language Review, vol. 74, no. 2, Apr. 1979, pp. 297–309. Tracey, C. R. “Johnson and the Art of the Anecdote.” University of Toronto Quarterly, vol. 15, no. 1, 1945, pp. 86–93. Waters, Marjorie. “The Literary Background of Francis Bacon’s Essay ‘Of Death.’” The Modern Language Review, vol. 35, no. 1, Jan. 1940, pp. 1–7. Wood, Anthony. Athenae Oxonienses: An Exact History of All the Writers and Bishops Who Have Had Their Education in the University of Oxford. To which are Added the Fasti, Or Annals of the Said University. London, 1691.

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29 BIOGRAPHY Life after Death Ira Nadel

Biography lends to death a new terror. (Oscar Wilde, qtd. in Kildea 3) Can biography extend a life after death? Can it create and sustain individual and cultural memory, presenting both in a single narrative? Can it do more than provide fragmented, disconnected anecdotes? From its earliest form as eulogy in the classical world, biography’s aim has been to prolong the story of a life. But where praise without fact once satisfied, from the Renaissance onward, fact merged with history to offer more objective accounts that sought to balance encomia with impartiality. Accuracy became the new goal as biography strove to become an empirical science, or at least the legitimate history of an individual, while documenting details, frequently through archival research. Pericles’ funeral oration to commemorate his dead soldiers at the end of the first year of the Peloponnesian War (ca. 430 BCE) focused on citizenship, not individual lives. Delivered by an eminent figure chosen by the state, the panegyric blended eulogy and history before the concept of the person emerged when we philosophically and morally accepted the idea of an autonomous being.1 Soon, though, parallels between the emergence of the idea of the person and biography, and the responsibility of biography to confront and overcome death in its commemoration of an individual, coincided. The accomplishments and development of the subject quickly became paramount. But when facts were not available or limited, as in the case of Shakespeare, they were invented, adding to the narrative but not to the authenticity of the account. Later, the psychological began to supplement the historical as narrative adjusted its focus to concentrate on character. Boswell’s Life of Johnson displayed this, Boswell, of course, having the advantage of knowing Johnson, became something of a pest, as well as an interlocutor often inserting himself into the narrative. In active pursuit of Johnson, the biography focuses on the present with Boswell often admitting his own unreliability, unable to remember important statements or moments with Johnson. Ironically, such admissions enhanced readers’ confidence in the honesty of the biographer (Boswell 862). But over time, facts themselves were shown to be unreliable.2 Because every biography was (and is) by nature incomplete, change became the new focus of a life, as Virginia Woolf recognized when she wrote, in a review of a biography of Stopford Brooke, that biography should be a 319

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“record of the things that change rather than of the things that happen” (Woolf 184). Anthony Powell explained why when he wrote, in his 1971 novel Books Do Furnish a Room, that “it is not what happens to people that is significant but what they think happens to them” (Powell 147). Biography must separate the two: that is, divide actual events from imagined actions. Perhaps this is why Woolf suggested in her Notebooks that every biography should be written twice: once accurately with facts without comment, and then again as fiction (Lee 10). This shift to the psychological and emotional marked a turn to the private life of well-known people, advancing the interest and impact of the genre, while at the same time its popularity grew and biographers attempted analysis as well as reportage – what a life meant rather than what it had done. Do not mourn the dead. They know what they are doing. (Clarice Lispector, The Hour of the Star 76) Death is the cause of biography which alters one’s knowledge of a person’s life, the form negotiating with the past. It differs from an obituary in that it develops an assessment or interpretation of the subject’s completed life. Obituaries, often limited in scope and word count, can do little more than report, offering quick views without research. They also tend to follow a pattern, listing achievements first and then providing the history or details of the life second. But in a biography, there are often discoveries, surprising and unanticipated, as well as mysteries that require a new estimate of the subject even when the subject resists. The Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector obscured her past throughout her life, almost never referring to her origins. Born in the Ukraine, she emigrated to Brazil when she was two months old. Yet throughout her career, Brazilians thought she was foreign. She was thought “indecipherable,” unknowable; in interviews and in her writing, she gave little away and in the later part of her life did not even argue against the legends and mythos that grew up around her (Moser 3). Was she Catholic or Jewish, right-wing or a Communist? No consensus emerged, yet she was prominent as a writer almost from her adolescence and left extensive correspondence. But the day before she died on 9 December 1977, having just suffered a severe hemorrhage, she angrily shouted to a nurse, “‘You killed my character.’” Shortly after, a friend wrote that “‘she became her own fiction’” (Moser 383). In his biography of Lispector, Benjamin Moser sought to uncover the story of Clarice, so well-known in Brazil that she was referred to only by her first name. Through dismantling the legends, her life, and her writing, Moser reconstructed the actual Clarice thirty-two years after her death. This occurs through examining and even recreating history, context, and fact. Intentionally or unintentionally, remaking the life of a subject is almost always the project of biography, never more so than in first biographies. Lev Loseff, the first biographer of the Nobel Prize-winning Russian poet Joseph Brodsky (d. 1996), begins his 2011 narrative by declaring that he should not be the one to write the life of the man who had been his friend for more than thirty years because he could not be objective. Loseff ends his preface anticipating the appearance of a second life, “a proper biography,” with greater attention to detail. Public papers currently restricted would be available, the protection of privacy of those close to the poet would not be necessary, and objectivity, he hoped, would be maintained. Loseff ’s purpose was to present only the “heterogeneous cultural background of the poet’s life and work.” Ironically, contradicting his own restrictions, he writes that his text “does not aspire to be a biography of the poet, although it begins ‘Josif Aleksandrovich Brodsky was born on May 24, 1940 in Leningrad […]’” (Loseff xi). 320

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Throughout the narrative, details outline the progress, undoing, and exile of Brodsky, often with dramatic effect, as in Loseff ’s account of the review of Brodsky’s 1961 trial with the government concluding in 1965 that the poet had “reformed” and that he could be considered for release (Loseff 112–14). However, the bureaucracy still ruled: only after further internal bickering did “the foreign affairs division of the Central Committee [win] out over the Leningrad regional party committee” (Loseff 115). A letter from Sartre to Mikoyan, Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet, dated 17 August 1965, pointing out the international embarrassment to Russia of imprisoning and sending to a forced labor camp the youthful poet, swayed the authorities. Yet Brodsky’s release from internal exile until his formal exile from the country in 1972 remained a period of suspended disbelief, during which he was constantly watched and harassed by the KGB and others. Nevertheless, the text has gaps: Loseff is more interested in individual poems than the political steps or personal narrative leading to Brodsky’s exile and subsequent life, when he departed by plane to Vienna on 4 June 1972, meeting W. H. Auden on 6 June (Loseff 169). Loseff, however, repeatedly acknowledges that his story is incomplete and that a second account of the poet will be necessary (see, e.g., 164, or 302n38). Biographies change lives, not only by extending the life of the subject after death, but also by offering new evaluations of it. Underlying this act is the principle Propertius expressed, the very epigraph on Brodsky’s headstone on the island of San Michele in Venice, where Stravinsky and Ezra Pound are also buried. In Latin it reads “Letum non omnia finit”; in English, “Death is not the end.” In the final analysis the range of life must be determined by history rather than by nature […] ( Walter Benjamin, “The Task of the Translator” 71) Walter Benjamin is helpful here. In “The Task of the Translator,” he writes that translations emanate from the afterlife of texts; biography, written after the death of its subject, similarly creates an afterlife for its subject, often in unexpected ways. The afterlife of a work of art through a translation and of a life through biography are significant in ways in which the original work, or the life lived, are not. This is the act of uncovering or recovering a life alongside, or even beside, the life lived. It is getting the subject out of the way of the received and often self-constructed narrative to locate a hidden or undiscovered life. As Benjamin writes, life is “not limited to organic corporeality.” “In the final analysis,” he adds, “the range of life must be determined by history rather than by nature, least of all by such tenuous factors as sensation and soul.” “The philosopher’s task” – and I would add the biographer’s – “consists in comprehending all of natural life through the more encompassing life of history” (Benjamin 71). The life of a subject not only lives on but in a biography also changes when it identifies the contradictions, surprises, and often failures of an individual. Benjamin is, himself, an example. His biography, by Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, Walter Benjamin: A Critical Life (2014), reveals a faithless husband, unreliable father, compulsive gambler, and frequenter of prostitutes.3 He was also a draft dodger, staying up all night with Gershom Scholem drinking coffee to simulate a weak heart and thus fail an army medical exam (which he did), a poet, and a serial participant in various love triangles (Eiland and Jennings 78). He experimented with mescaline and hashish. Suicide long attracted him, partly because of the unexpected death of his early friend Fritz Heinle (Eiland and Jennings 70). This afterlife challenges the image of the revered Benjamin, philosopher, essayist, and cultural critic. This well-researched reconstruction of Benjamin’s life contradicts the view found in Bernd Witte’s Walter Benjamin: An Intellectual Biography (2nd ed. 1997) or Momme Brodersen’s Walter 321

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Benjamin: A Biography (rev. ed. 1998) with its focus on the formative ideas of idealism, socialism, and Zionism. Brodersen also includes Benjamin’s work as a translator and radio journalist. Brodersen’s biography of ideas – Benjamin’s Marxism and his messianic Judaism come into sharp contrast – skips many of the more irregular aspects of his life, although at the time it appeared, the account was considered “definitive” and “a fitting Bible for the booming Benjamin cult,” as one reviewer wrote in the Guardian. George Steiner remarked that although it drew from Benjamin’s writings, letters, and journals, it still kept “a certain critical distance.”4 The consequence of this fuller and revelatory life of Benjamin, tragically ending with his suicide on 27 September 1940 in the Fona de Frandia hotel in Port Bou, Spain, on the FrancoSpanish border (and the disappearance of his black attaché case, supposedly containing a manuscript he had been carrying over the Pyrenees) requires new assessments of Benjamin, his ideas, and his generative critical writing. Details of what happened after his suicide, however, remain mysterious despite the efforts at reconstructing the events (Eiland and Jennings 675). Ironically denied entrance into Spain – at the time of his death he was carrying an entry visa to the United States – one learns that the day after his suicide, the border to Spain was reopened.5 Another biography appearing the same year as Benjamin’s that remakes the afterlife of its subject is that of the literary theorist Paul de Man, whose neo-Nazi writings came to light in 1988. Evelyn Barish, in her 2014 account The Double Life of Paul de Man, elaborated on and documented the story. To many, the revelation of de Man’s concealed past came as a shock, with disbelief the first reaction. When colleagues, students, and readers learned that he wrote for two Nazi-controlled papers and shared collaborationist views, there was skepticism, but research into his secret life made “every new fact a surprise” (Barish xvii). From Belgium, de Man immigrated to the US in 1948 and began a successful academic career that saw him at the center of the deconstruction movement at Yale, preceded by appointments at Cornell and Johns Hopkins. He died in 1983. A charismatic but sometimes aloof instructor, by 1988, evidence appeared that he had written for two Belgian newspapers controlled by the Nazis. Some two hundred wartime articles were published; other damning details emerged, including his bigamy, business fraud, and misrepresentation of his education. His articles also denigrated French culture as effete, associated Jews with cultural degeneracy, and praised pro-Nazi writers (Menand 88). Coupled with his documented fascism, his reputation unraveled. Some argued that after he stopped writing for the papers in late 1942, de Man renounced, or at least dropped, his collaborationist stance. Evelyn Barish, in her well-researched biography, proves otherwise.6 Barish goes into further details about de Man’s nefarious publishing company, and his forging of receipts and misrepresentation of accounts. His father, sensing the impending criminal proceedings, obtained visas for Paul and his then wife to leave, but Anne went to South America and de Man to New York, despite a 1951 conviction in Belgium for forgery, falsifying records, and stealing, with a five-year sentence handed down by the courts. Shortly after de Man arrived in New York, he met Mary McCarthy, and with her help began to teach at Bard College, where he listed a falsified MA thesis and a so-called “interrupted” PhD. He also claimed that he had participated in a resistance group. His wife then unexpectedly appeared with their three sons in March 1950, but he had already found a new love who was actually four months pregnant with his child (Barish 296). Eager to remove his first wife from the scene, he promised her money and after a month of fighting, she left to return to Argentina following a financial settlement. He never sent any money. On the day of her departure, she dramatically left their oldest son with de Man, who promptly shipped the boy off to Washington to be with the mother of his new wife. He never spoke to the child 322

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again. De Man divorced wife number two in 1960 after ten years of marriage to Patricia Kelly, his former student. When he married Kelly in June 1950, he told her he had in fact secured a divorce. He had not (Barish 302–3). Barish summarizes her account as de Man constantly reinventing himself, “a process his lifelong habits of complete secrecy allowed him to carry off,” his academic ascent premised on deceit and cover-ups (Barish 428). “His past was invisible” and suppressed as he lived a life of lies (Barish 431).7 This biography illustrates again that no life remains the same after death, although the de Man story is especially egregious. The litany of transgressions is long, from “writing antiSemitic articles for pro-Nazi papers, stealing from his nurse, sending his child off to be brought up by virtual strangers, lying his way through Harvard,” to quote Louis Menand (Menand 90). But complicating the portrait is de Man sheltering Jewish friends and helping to distribute a journal for the resistance. Others led similarly complex lives during and after the war, but not with such purposeful deceit.8 Barish offers little psychobiography or thoughts on how de Man’s life impinged on, or promoted, deconstruction, although she notes that the theory’s emphasis on the instability of language and its unreliability paralleled his own unstable life. Deconstruction was “deeply implicated in dealing by denial with the valency of past, compromising acts” (Barish 442). The ethical quagmire exposed in de Man’s life, from voluntarily collaborating with the Nazis to falsifying his academic record, indelibly changes, if not erases, the self-constructed narrative of his life, lending credence to Barish’s opening sentence: “Paul de Man no longer seems to exist” (Barish xiii). Every strong biography reveals something new about the afterlife of the subject. People’s lives change after their death when in the hands of biographers, as Oscar Wilde frighteningly realized and Philip Roth feared. In Exit Ghost, Zuckerman’s distress over the ambitious biographer Richard Kliman’s attempt to document the dark secret of the writer E. I. Lonoff is palpable, with Zuckerman (age 71) and Amy Bellette (75) working to obstruct the twentyeight-year-old Kliman’s research (Roth 109, 118). But he persists with the rumor that Lonoff had an incestuous relationship with his half-sister and draws a parallel to Hawthorne, who supposedly had a similar experience. Zuckerman tells Kliman that Lonoff would not want a biography and that any biographical treatment “would be largely imaginary – in other words, a travesty” (Roth, Exit 45). Zuckerman acknowledges that “there’s a huge popular appetite for secrets,” but that biographical explanations generally “‘make matters worse by adding components that aren’t there and make no aesthetic difference if they were’” (Roth, Exit 47). Zuckerman refers to this as “the annihilating impulse,” while Kliman argues that a “documented critical biography” will resurrect Lonoff and restore his place in “twentieth century literature” (Roth, Exit 48, 49). Roth’s own jockeying with biographers before his death – replacing Ross Miller with Blake Bailey, after setting out a detailed working agreement – illustrates his persistent concern with the accuracy of an “official” account of his life. He in fact completed a 300-page private document entitled “Notes for My Biographer.” What creates the fear of biography, and fear in Zuckerman, is the biographer’s desire to find the real or hidden story which has somehow refused to surface. In a sense, the subject has to get out of the way of his or her own (public) life. Only when protection (and the protectors) disappear is it possible to tell this other story. Nevertheless, obstacles always remain, such as literary estates, and they shaped Roth’s attitude on the impossibility of biography. As he writes in American Pastoral,

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getting people right is not what living is all about […] It’s getting them wrong that is living […] That’s how we know we are alive: we’re wrong. (Roth 35) The fear of biography is that it just might get something right. And if fiction is a prologue to an unwritten autobiography, biography is an epilogue to a life in constant need of updating. “I know myself,” he cried, “but that is all.” (F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise 305) Subjects themselves promote the need for these secondary lives through their cover-ups and self-constructed legends. Perhaps no twentieth-century figure was subject to more exploitation of his life than F. Scott Fitzgerald. Long considered the icon of the Jazz Age, early biographies celebrate the glamorous and often scandalous life of both Fitzgerald and his wife Zelda. Constant misbehavior, alcoholism, and conflict with his writing generated a series of legends summarized in a 1978 work by Sivaramkrishna entitled Icarus of the Jazz Age: A Study of the Novels of F. Scott Fitzgerald or the more recent Sometimes Madness Is Wisdom: Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald, A Marriage (2001) by Kendall Taylor. A graphic novel, Tiziana Lo Porto’s Superzelda: The Graphic Life of Zelda Fitzgerald, appeared in 2013, exceeded in sensationalism, perhaps, by Paul Brody’s On the Road to West Egg: The Volatile Relationship of F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald (2012) and Sarah Churchwell’s Careless People: Murder, Mayhem and the Invention of the Great Gatsby (2014). These last two emphasize “reckless and carefree behavior” offering “a mesmerizing journey into the dark heart of Jazz Age America,” where art supposedly imitates life, with, according to Brody’s publisher, a stress on “alcohol abuse, debt and mental illness” (Brody). Fitzgerald’s autobiographical essays did not help. His 1934 piece “Sleeping and Waking” outlines his constant insomnia, leading to self-doubt and self-pity: “‘Waste and horror – what I might have been and done that is lost’” he writes (qtd. in Barks 10). His alcoholism increased, described in three 1936 essays in “The Crack Up” sequence. He seemed to parallel his own decline with that of the Depression, feeling emotionally bankrupt and unable to write at the level he desired. At the end he turned to Hollywood for a steady income and life with Sheila Graham, while Zelda was in and out of a hospital in North Carolina. But a heart attack in December 1940 at age forty-four suddenly ended Fitzgerald’s life, with Zelda too ill to attend his funeral. Eight years later Zelda died in the flames when Highland Hospital in Asheville, North Carolina, ignited. Biographers had a field day, partly because Fitzgerald himself believed he was a forgotten man, despite his writing a new novel which would appear unfinished as The Last Tycoon. Zelda did not help, commenting in 1947 that “I feel that Scott’s greatest contribution was the dramatization of a heart-broken era” (qtd. in Brown 1). The first accounts of his life emphasized, if not elaborated, Fitzgerald the playboy who “threw away his fortune and drank away his talent,” a victim of the Jazz Age who flamed out (Barks 11). Some biographers even grew to dislike Fitzgerald: James R. Mellow, in his Invented Lives: F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, admits in his preface to his antipathy to the subjects, declaring that he will not let “the glamourous Fitzgeralds get away with anything” (Mellow xx), while Jeffrey Meyers dwells on Fitzgerald and his excesses in his Scott Fitzgerald. Sally Cline, in Zelda Fitzgerald: Her Voice in Paradise, prefers speculation regarding their sex lives as well as betrayals of each other to fact. Her biography, written in a breezy journalistic style, begins by addressing the Zelda myth, writing that she and Fitzgerald “flourished as capricious, merciless self-historians writing and rewriting their exploits” (1). Despite the rhetoric, this is not entirely wrong. 324

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However, Cline battles the legend but hardly overturns it, at one early point describing Fitzgerald “incoherent with fury that anyone other than he should use their joint life experiences as literary fodder,” referring to Zelda’s novel, Save Me the Waltz. The language and behavior of the Fitzgeralds seem equally intemperate. Nevertheless, biography also rose to the task of correcting and revising their lives, beginning with Arthur Mizener’s The Far Side of Paradise (1951), the first Fitzgerald biography. It unleashed a tremendous demand for Fitzgerald’s writing, Mizener accepting Fitzgerald’s own self-presentation and acceptance of the romantic personality motif. After reading the book in manuscript, Edmund Wilson, a Princeton classmate of Fitzgerald’s, castigated Mizener for its semi-salacious style and complained that Mizener could not tell the story properly because he had no experience of the “‘exhilaration of the days when Scott was successful and Zelda at her most enchanting’” (qtd. in Brown 340). Why the focus on Fitzgerald’s “‘maladjustments and defeats’” he asked (qtd. in Brown 340)? The real strength of the manuscript was its literary criticism, which convinced even Wilson of Fitzgerald’s importance as a major American writer, with Tender Is the Night his most important book. Scottie, the Fitzgeralds’ daughter, also felt Mizener missed the charm and the “‘heroic side of the man’” and focused, instead, on the vain and self-indulgent (qtd. in Brown 341). But readers reacted positively to the book, accepting Fitzgerald as a serious writer. One oversight, however, was neglecting Zelda after Fitzgerald’s death, although Mizener corrected it in the revised edition of 1965. Various biographers of varying importance followed, with the first major and comprehensive account Matthew Bruccoli’s Some Sort of Epic Grandeur: The Life of F. Scott Fitzgerald, originally published in 1981, which begins with its declaration that it will essentially demythologize Fitzgerald. The legendary view of the writer and his wife “diminished his stature and cheapened his work,” Bruccoli claims; he was not “an uncritical reveler” (Bruccoli xix). Fitzgerald himself did not help, as he generated his own legends, putting him at odds with his biographers and dramatizing his own successes and failures. For Bruccoli, though, it is Fitzgerald the writer that is paramount as he traces his career as “a professional author” beyond the stories and the archetypes of Fitzgerald as a spoiled genius or drunken writer. Accurate details are the key, correcting exaggerations because “a biographer’s first duty is to get things right” (Bruccoli xx). Not gossip but truth is his guide, again providing a new life for the writer eschewing psychologizing for fact. Indeed, in the note for the second revised edition published in 2002, Bruccoli proudly explains that his claim for publishing the first version of the biography with 31 introductory pages and 624 pages of text was “more facts,” adding that “facts are the only things a biographer can trust – and only after they have been verified.” His new, revised edition of 656 pages “provides still more facts” – the text, as well as the life, it seems, rewriting itself to show how biographical lives constantly remake themselves long after the deaths of their subjects (Bruccoli xvii). Unlike the “urban-industrial” focus of another biographer, David S. Brown, originating in the outlook and experiences of Fitzgerald’s parents who slowly slid into polite poverty, Bruccoli sticks to the literature and reads it biographically (Brown 9). Money is a persistent theme in Brown; writing the persistent theme of Bruccoli. What these two biographies, with Mizener’s as a grounding, emphasize is that a life is never fixed or stationary. It evolves as new biographers apply new questions and concerns, partly of their own time. A life never sits still. Every life is impermanent, altered by time and text, partly because all facts are provisional and may not be authentic, partly because they are steeped in the power structures and institutions that created them (à la Foucault), and partly because there are always more facts to discover. Bruccoli stressed this in his defense of his revised 650-page life of Fitzgerald. 325

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As recently as 2017, titles continue to reflect the sensational approach, as David S. Brown’s Paradise Lost: A Life of F. Scott Fitzgerald shows. But Brown, a historian, qualifies the Miltonic reference replacing sensation with history, arguing that Fitzgerald sought the return to an earlier, moralistic pre-World War I America. The paradise that was lost was an ideal America Fitzgerald sought to recapture. Brown wants to read Fitzgerald against his age, arguing that the author is actually a nostalgic moralist rather than a bon vivant, concerned more with the shifting mood of the US than with Parisian parties and wasteful living. Brown attempts to refashion Fitzgerald as a progressive with a powerful historical and social imagination, rather than a mere chronicler of the Jazz Age. Stressing capital, immigration, and sexual politics are Fitzgerald’s actual concerns, Brown’s revisionist approach justifies why another biography of Fitzgerald is needed and illustrates, again, the way the life of a subject is repeatedly revised. The glamorous Fitzgeralds, however, overshadowed, and likely will continue to overshadow, the historical sensibility of the author. Highlighting this are various popular fictionalized accounts of their lives, evidence of the appeal of their sensational behavior. Works like Scott: A Novel of F. Scott Fitzgerald, by E. Ray Canterbery (2017); Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald, by Therese Anne Fowler (2013); and Beautiful Fools: The Last Affair of Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald, by R. Clifton Spargo (2014), persist. Others include Sally Koslow’s Another Side of Paradise: A Novel (2018), dealing with Fitzgerald’s Hollywood years, while spinoffs include A Drinkable Feast: A Cocktail Companion to 1920s Paris by Philip Greene (2018). The treatment of the Fitzgeralds seems to suffer from the very title of one of his most controversial works: The Beautiful and Damned (1922); a reviewer in the New York Times wrote that “not one of the book’s many characters […] ever rises to the level of ordinary decent humanity” (Field). To be a biographer you must tie yourself up in lies, concealments […] false colourings […] for biographical truth is not to be had. (Freud to Arnold Zweig, 1936) Biography writes the present and even the future, unlike the eulogy which looks back to a past that disappeared with the death of the subject. A biography recreates a life, turning the past into a narrative present and possibly a future. Biography is a protest against loss and confirms that a life will not vanish but assume material form as a text, even if its detail is incomplete, matching Freud’s negative view. Narrative gives life, reversing the title of Julia Kristeva’s 2001 text, Hannah Arendt: Life Is a Narrative. The fertility of anecdote and history in biography confirms contexts of agency and desire for the subject. In Arendt’s words, “the story [or biography] reveals the meaning of what otherwise would remain an unbearable sequence of sheer happenings” (Arendt 270). The redemptive element of biography, encapsulated in the word memory, enables a subject to confront history’s amnesia, what Freud feared in his 1916 essay, “Transience.” The loss of life or beauty creates either despondency or rebellion, Freud observed. Biography is a form of rebellion which records at the same time it reveals the life of its subject. It is a way of challenging the transience of all things. The existence of biography increases the worth of what has been lost: “we see the beauty of the human form and face vanishing forever as our own lives pass, but their evanescence only lends them additional charms,” Freud writes. Biography exceeds the temporal limitation of a life preventing, in Freudian terms, “estrangement” from experiences with, and the memory of, the individual. Biography is resistance against mourning (Freud, “Transience” 198; “Disturbance” 240–41). 326

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Freud also outlines how telling stories while mourning gives form and meaning to emotions and events that would otherwise overwhelm us. This partly explains the emotional (and historical) need for biography: not only overcoming loss but also articulating a past or person we do not want to lose. If writers reinvent themselves through writing, biographers reinvent their subjects by exploring their afterlives. This is often the result of asking new questions, discovering new documents, or locating overlooked facts in a subject’s life. Nevertheless, Benjamin’s preoccupation – “‘the question of the relationship of works of art to historical life’” – persists, posing a challenge to biography in terms of its content and form (qtd. in Eiland and Jennings 192). Can one make an art of one’s life? And if so, what shape will this take after death? Phenomenologically, reading a biography is the re-engagement and reenactment of a life that possesses a new, documented existence, a life recreated as a text. Biography becomes a means of enduring absence through celebrating a presence, often confirmed in modern biography by photographs, which have become a staple of biography beginning in the nineteenth century with engraved and then photo frontispieces. Biography does not postpone death, but does challenge it. Joan Didion, in The Year of Magical Thinking, clarifies this when she writes “I know why we try to keep the dead alive: we try to keep them alive in order to keep them with us” (225). Relinquishing the dead is difficult, as her biographer explains in the preface to his 2015 life of the writer: “we are not adept at facing the ends of things,” which in the extreme turns the biographer into an “elegist writing lamentations” (Daugherty xxi). But readers, as much as biographers, have a constant need to re-engage with a life. Giving up, or reconciling, with the dead can often occur only through symbolic actions, including consumption. Cheryl Strayed describes this in her memoir Wild. Working through the grief of her mother’s death, she writes that she kept a few chunks of ash from the cremated body because she was “not ready to release them to the earth. I didn’t release them. I never ever would. I put her burnt bones into my mouth and swallowed them whole” (Strayed 269). She literally becomes, or tries to become, the other. Death shapes a life by repeating its story through a text that constantly remakes and corrects itself (hence the need for multiple lives of a subject). In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud states that “beyond Eros we encounter Thanatos; beyond the ground, the abyss of the groundless; beyond the repetition that links, the repetition that erases and destroys” (241). In its rewriting and reanimating of lives lost, biography prevents erasure and destruction; it keeps us from the abyss. Life after death is the very triumph of the genre.

Notes 1 2

3 4 5 6

See Ayer; Strawson; Taylor. “Facts do not speak for themselves” wrote the biographer Richard Ellmann. See Ellmann 472. Also see John D’Agata and Jim Fingal; also, Mary Poovey; Barbara J. Shapiro; and Patricia Meyer Spacks. In 1921, Wittgenstein announced that the world is the totality of facts, not of things, contrasting him with Aristotle, Spinoza and Descartes. See “On the History of Philosophies of Facts.” plato.stanford.edu/ entries/facts/history-facts.html. This account runs to 768 pages. Eiland and Jennings have also been Benjamin’s translators. “The definitive biography,” Observer; “fitting Bible,” Guardian. George Steiner, cited by Verso Books website for Brodersen biography. www.versobooks.com/books/660-walter-benjamin. The official death certificate lists a cerebral hemorrhage as the cause of death, avoiding the scandal of a suicide among the other refugees in the village. A brief suicide note was left for Henny Gurland, his traveling companion, and Adorno (Eiland and Jennings 675). De Man stopped writing not because he doubted the morality of the Nazi ideology but because he was

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7

8

fired. He also had secrets, notably that his older brother was likely a serial rapist and that his mother committed suicide. One of de Man’s most intriguing essays is “Autobiography as De-facement,” in which he argues that autobiography is impossible because it is essentially fiction: hence the need for biography. The concealment of his actual life from his public life also suggests something of his deconstructive practice where the search for another, hidden meaning undermines the surface meaning of a text, a projection of his own personal situation. See Nadel 15–48. “Art and Occupation” is the chapter title.

Works Cited Arendt, Hannah. “Isak Dinesen.” Reflections on Literature and Culture, edited by Susannah Young-ah Gottlieb. Stanford UP, 2007, pp. 262–274. Ayer, A. J. “The Concept of a Person.” The Concept of a Person and Other Essays. Macmillan & Company, 1963, pp. 162–187. Barish, Evelyn. The Double Life of Paul de Man. Liveright Publishing, 2014. Barks, Cathy W. “Biography.” F. Scott Fitzgerald in Context, edited by Bryant Mangum. Cambridge UP, 2013, pp. 3–15. Benjamin, Walter. “The Task of the Translator.” Illuminations, edited by Hannah Arendt. Schocken Books, 1969, pp. 69–82. Boswell, James. Life of Johnson, edited by R. W. Chapman. New Edition Corrected by J. D. Fleeman. Oxford UP, 1976. Brody, Paul. On the Road to West Egg: The Volatile Relationship of F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald. Life Caps, 2012. Brown, David S. Paradise Lost: A Life of F. Scott Fitzgerald. Harvard UP, 2017. Bruccoli, Matthew J. Some Sort of Epic Grandeur: The Life of F. Scott Fitzgerald. 2nd rev. ed. U of South Carolina P, 2002. Churchwell, Sarah. About Careless People: Murder, Mayhem and the Invention of the Great Gatsby. Penguin Random House. 2015. Cline, Sally. Zelda Fitzgerald: Her Voice in Paradise. John Murray, 2002. D’Agata, John, and Jim Fingal. The Lifespan of a Fact. W. W. Norton, 2012. Daugherty, Tracy. The Last Love Song: A Biography of Joan Didion. St. Martin’s Press, 2015. De Man, Paul. “Autobiography as De-facement.” The Rhetoric of Romanticism. Columbia UP, 1984, pp. 67–81. Didion, Joan. The Year of Magical Thinking. Knopf, 2005. Eiland, Howard, and Michael W. Jennings. Walter Benjamin: A Critical Life. Harvard UP, 2014. Ellmann, Richard. “Freud and Literary Biography.” American Scholar, vol. 53, no. 4, 1984, pp. 465–478. Field, Louise Maunsell. “Latest Works of Fiction.” New York Times, 5 Mar. 1922. archive.nytimes.com/ www.nytimes.com/books/00/12/24/specials/fitzgerald-damned.html?mcubz=0. Accessed 16 July 2020. Fitzgerald, F. Scott. This Side of Paradise. Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1920. Freud, Sigmund. Beyond the Pleasure Principle, edited by Todd Dufresne, translated by Gregory C. Richter. Broadview Press, 2011. Freud, Sigmund. “A Disturbance of Memory.” On Murder, Mourning and Melancholia, translated by Shaun Whiteside, introduction by Maud Ellmann. Penguin, 2005, pp. 233–244. Freud, Sigmund. “Transience.” On Murder, Mourning and Melancholia, translated by Shaun Whiteside, introduction by Maud Ellmann. Penguin, 2005, pp. 195–200. Kildea, Paul. “Britten’s Biographers.” Britten’s Century, edited by Mark Bostridge. Bloomsbury, 2013, pp. 3–15. Lee, Hermione. Virginia Woolf. Chatto and Windus, 1996. Lispector, Clarice. The Hour of the Star. 1977. Translated by Benjamin Moser. New Directions, 2011. Loseff, Lev. Joseph Brodsky: A Literary Life, translated by Jane Ann Miller. Yale UP, 2011. Mellow, James. Invented Lives: F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald. Houghton Mifflin, 1984. Menand, Louis. “The de Man Case.” The New Yorker, 24 Mar. 2014, pp. 87–93. Meyers, Jeffrey. Scott Fitzgerald. HarperCollins, 1994. Mizener, Arthur. The Far Side of Paradise. Houghton Mifflin, 1951. Moser, Benjamin. Why This World: A Biography of Clarice Lispector. Oxford UP, 2009.

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Biography: Life after Death Nadel, Ira. Modernism’s Second Act. Palgrave, 2013. “On the History of Philosophies of Facts.” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. plato.stanford.edu/entries/ facts/history-facts.html. Accessed 16 July 2020. Poovey, Mary. A History of the Modern Fact. U of Chicago P, 1998. Powell, Anthony. Books Do Furnish a Room. 1971. Random House, 2011. Roth, Philip. American Pastoral. 1997. Vintage, 1998. Roth, Philip. Exit Ghost. 2007. Vintage, 2008. Shapiro, Barbara J. A Culture of Fact: England 1550–1720. Cornell UP, 2000. Spacks, Patricia Meyer. Privacy: Concealing the Eighteenth Century Self. U of Chicago P, 2011. Strawson, P. F. Individuals: An Essay in Descriptive Metaphysics. Routledge, 1959. Strayed, Cheryl. Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail. Knopf, 2012. Taylor, Charles. “The Person.” The Category of the Person, edited by Michael Carrithers, et al. Cambridge UP, 1985, pp. 257–281. Woolf, Virginia. “Stopford Brooke.” Essays of Virginia Woolf, vol. 2, 1912–1918, edited by Andrew McNeillie. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1987, pp. 183–188.

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PART V LIVING WITH DEATH Writing, Mourning, and Consolation

Social relationships take center stage in this section, where the written word serves as a means for grieving loss and struggling with uncertainty, marking the difficulty of articulating that which is more readily felt than told. In his foreword to John Anthony Tercier’s The Contemporary Deathbed (2005), Colin MacCabe observes that while the knowledge of impending death (be it of one’s own or that of others) is “continually disavowed” in contemporary society, its reality “can never be completely denied” or negated (xi). Tercier argues that such disavowal often means that “grief is denied its due place in the psychology of the individual and mourning in the social relations of culture” (15) – so these impulses find articulate expression in literary responses to death. The six essays that follow are poignant responses to the ways in which writers like Peter Weiss, C. S. Lewis, Tom Lubbock, Aidan Higgins, Paul Kalanithi, and others have responded to the realities of living with death. We encounter not only the voices of those who face impending death, but also the (inarticulable) grief of those who remain: the children, parents, partners, and friends who struggle to come to terms with their loss – and those who co-write these stories of impending loss in the genre now known as autothanatography. The first three essays variously examine how understandings of death are shaped by acts of writing. Christopher Hamilton’s essay, “‘An immense expenditure of energy come to nothing’: Philosophy, Literature, and Death in Peter Weiss’s Abschied von den Eltern,” examines intersections between philosophy and literature – disciplines that Hamilton argues represent different moods or sensibilities for understanding death. Despite philosophy’s “claim on reason,” Hamilton argues that it asserts “no privilege over other ways of thinking,” particularly since understandings of death are necessarily framed by uncertainty, confusion, and a lack of clarity. Drawing on Peter Weiss’s partly fictionalized memoir/autobiography, Abschied von den Eltern (Farewell to My Parents, 1964), Hamilton examines the notion of human death as the dissipation of a boundless mass of accumulated energy, one that is marked by “a longing and yearning for movement, drive, momentum” – an unbridled energy focused on love, vocation, and expressions of the self. Like Hamilton, Jamie Lin similarly adopts a philosophical approach to his analysis of Leo Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilych and C. S. Lewis’s A Grief Observed. By examining “the role that paradoxes of faith play in narratives of death and dying,” Lin suggests in his essay “Paradox, Death, and the Divine” that these works offer “insight into how such paradoxes avoid reductionist tendencies in depictions of the intersections between faith and life, creating the space 331

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necessary for characters to change and grow – and readers along with them.” Drawing on works by writers, poets, philosophers, and theologians (including Christian Wiman, John Keats, Richard P. Hansen, and Rudolf Otto), Lin explores the historical tensions associated with notions of a Christian deity: “tensions that revolve around the relationships between absolute justice and absolute love, transcendence and immanence, sovereign election and free will, as well as the already-and-not-yet nature of the kingdom of God.” In her essay “Inner Seeing and Death Anxiety in Aidan Higgins’s Blind Man’s Bluff and Other Life Writing,” Lara O’Muirithe in turn considers how Aidan Higgins’s final published work, Blind Man’s Bluff (2012), “coalesces memoir and nonfiction.” Higgins’s book is “organized around black-and-white reproductions of his doodles and collages, as well as uncaptioned photographs,” eliciting “a paradoxical reconciliation with selfhood towards the end of his life.” In its departure “from the principle of traditional ekphrasis,” O’Muirithe argues that Higgins’s last book finds a unique way to “summon a final comment on the enigma of memory in late life.” Ivan Callus and Rosalía Baena extend such contemplative modes by taking up the issue of autothanatography in poetry and prose respectively. In his essay “Autothanatography and Contemporary Poetry,” Ivan Callus examines both Derrida’s own word for narrating one’s own death, autobiothanatoheterography, and the immediate corollary concept, so important to so much poetry, “that we are strangers to ourselves who are born to die, that we are dying even in deepest vitality, that there will be disjunction between the mind’s apprehending of self and of alterities with which it must enter into relation.” Callus turns to three works of contemporary poetry, C. K. Williams’s Falling Ill, Clive James’s Injury Time, and Michael O’Neill’s Crash and Burn, to reflect more deeply on what it means to narrate death, dying, and the afterlife. Rosalía Baena’s essay, “When Time Stops: Death and Autobiography in Contemporary Personal Narratives,” addresses how end-of-life memoirs “function as counter-narratives” to the Western culture of denial that “often rejects considering death, illness, or aging as part of life.” Taking Paul Kalanithi’s When Breath Becomes Air, Jenny Diski’s In Gratitude, and Nina Riggs’s The Bright Hour as her case studies, Baena examines how writing becomes part of a healing or consolatory process in the face of imminent death – one that spurs meditations on what “dying with dignity means,” even as such reflections “contribute to a much needed social change in the negative perceptions of illness and end-of-life care.” Graham Matthews’s essay, “‘Grief made her insubstantial to herself’: Illness, Aging, and Death in A. S. Byatt’s Little Black Book of Stories,” extends Baena’s earlier considerations of illness, aging, and dying through the mode of fiction, as Matthews argues that death is a phenomenon “often expressed in historical or mythological terms” in Byatt’s prose, challenging dominant “biomedical conceptions of the body.” Matthews’s thoughtful analysis of Byatt’s “A Stone Woman,” for instance, offers a pointed contrast between “the language of geology” and “medical discourse that would pathologize [the protagonist] Ines’s condition.” Ines’s literal petrification over the course of the short story is not defined by lifelessness, horror, or fear; instead, Matthews argues that her “gradual transformation from an organic to a mineral existence undermines conventional understandings of the division between life and death.”

Work Cited Tercier, John Anthony. The Contemporary Deathbed: The Ultimate Rush. Foreword by Colin MacCabe. Palgrave Macmillan, 2005.

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30 “AN IMMENSE EXPENDITURE OF ENERGY COME TO NOTHING” Philosophy, Literature, and Death in Peter Weiss’s Abschied von den Eltern Christopher Hamilton

A few pages into his Abschied von den Eltern [Farewell to my Parents],1 his partly fictionalized memoir or autobiography – if that word makes sense here in the context of something that so obviously wishes to tell the truth but to do so in a state of intoxication, in the clear conviction that a certain kind of drunkenness releases or reveals the truth – Peter Weiss writes: When my mother once told me that my first words were, what a nice life I have, what a nice life I have, I heard in this the sound of something drummed into me, something parrot-like, with which I wanted to entertain or mock the world [Umwelt]. (14) Are we to take it that Weiss’s mother drummed this into her child? The context suggests as much. If so, the kind of violence inflicted on the child is like that characterized by George Orwell thus: There are families in which the father will say to his child, “You’ll get a thick ear if you do that again”, while the mother, her eyes brimming over with tears, will take the child in her arms and murmur lovingly, “Now, darling, is it kind to Mummy to do that?” And who would maintain that the second method is less tyrannous than the first? (Orwell 420) “Around my mother all was unstable, seething, swirling,” says Weiss. “In my mother there reigned the wild and untamed” (18), and he recalls her call to him as he played in the garden, the place where “my senses opened out” (16): he tried to resist it, his name, but it came to him from far away, “from the time when I was still without form” (17). Somewhere or other there was the anticipation of this call, right up until today the anticipation of this call subsists, right up until today there is the fear that everything could suddenly come to an end. (16–17) Everything coming to an end: this is an image of death. 333

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So is this: “When we spoke about life, we had to be mournful and burdened. Life meant seriousness, effort, responsibility” (57). But there was a friend of the family, Fritz W. In his presence, Weiss felt liberated, relieved, light-hearted. His two meetings with Fritz W, he says, the high points of my childhood, show me how differently my life, under other circumstances, could have developed, and they show me the treasure of unused joy that was in me, and still is within me, under the layers of sores. (50) Death hangs like a pall – or like layers of sores – over the whole of Abschied von den Eltern. Long before the death of Weiss’s father, with which the book opens, and long before the death of his sister Margit, run over by a car, which stands at the center of the book – I mean: literally halfway through the text; a choice on Weiss’s part that could hardly have been unintentional, given that this death was “the beginning of the dissolution of our family” (81) – long before all this, death is the figure that stands dominantly over Weiss’s life, crushing all joy out of him except in fleeting moments, moments redolent of the dappled sunlight on a summer’s afternoon, glorious, but destined to pass away, when everything in one longs for it to stay. He did not have a nice life at all. It was filled with suffering and frustration, with his parents’ incapacity to understand him, with the agony of a hated school, with mind-numbing tasks in his father’s textile business, with sexual and artistic longings that seemed to be leading to nothing. The mother was already dead when the father died. After her death, the father “set off on a trip to Belgium in order, as he said, to develop new business contacts there, but in reality to die like a wounded animal in its lair” (7). The German word is Versteck, and can mean “hiding place” as well as “lair,” giving a deeply visceral sense of his concealing himself to lick his wounds. Work was the convenient pretext, because his “whole life had stood under the sign of tireless work” (7). The center or aim of this work was “a ceaseless struggle to hold together the home and family; plagued by worries and illness he had, together with his wife, held fast to the possession of the house without ever finding any joy [Glück] in this possession” (9). This man was homeless wherever he was, convinced that home was there, but it never was. Weiss tells us of his father’s shattered hopes for his children whom he always avoided, and with whom he could never speak, but when he was away from home he could perhaps feel tenderness for his children, and longing for them, and he always carried pictures of them with him, and he certainly looked at these worn, crumpled pictures in the evening in the hotel room when he was travelling, and he certainly believed that when he returned there would be trust, but when he came back there was always only disappointment and mutual understanding was impossible. (9) Here then, when dead, this man was nothing but “an immense expenditure of energy come to nothing” (8). The tone of pity is unmistakable. But it is pity not simply for his father. It is pity for human beings, for this is how this memoir sees all human deaths: a dissipation into nothing of a mass of accumulated energy. Each human life is here seen under the image of amassed energy that ends in nothing. This is so even of the death of his sister, young as she was. My sister’s head was heavily wrapped in bandages, her cheeks were covered with plasters, and her crushed nose was fixed into a wire brace. Her lacerated hands opened and closed in spasms. A groaning noise came from her mouth, but it sounded as if it were dampened by a gag. She is unconscious, whispered the nurse, in her loose, black 334

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gown, her words were intended to be of comfort, but what was this consolation worth in the face of the terrible convulsion as Margit’s body suddenly reared up into an arc, what was this consolation worth as I saw my sister arching up, supported on her head and the tips of her toes, as if reaching out in deepest longing for a lover, forming a bridge between life and death. (76) It is that movement, that moment of longing for a lover’s embrace, that captures Weiss’s sense of boundless energy about to be dissipated forever. The style of Weiss’s text captures this too. Written in one breathless paragraph, with a grammatically eccentric use of commas replacing full stops, together with other irregularities of punctuation (the influence on Thomas Bernard and W. G. Sebald is clear), it has an incantatory quality, heavily corporeal in feeling, evoking material objects, sights, smells as much as, or as a form of, the psychological. The text has in its form a relentless, tense energy, as if it too were a human being as Weiss conceives of such, this massive accumulation of energy destined to be squandered. It is “prodigal beyond measure,” as Nietzsche says of the natural world, for the human being is that world writ small and Weiss’s text is that world written: lyrical, intense, anguished, stretching out with all its energy for the embrace of a lover – in Weiss’s own case the lover being whatever it is that his artistic yearning and longing leads him to do, his vocation, his calling (this is the call that seeks to erase the call of the mother as the boy revels in the garden and then must return to the suffocating house). This comes sharply into focus if we compare a passage from Weiss’s text with one from Walter Benjamin’s Berliner Kindheit um 1900, a text to which Weiss casts envious, admiring glances in his own. Weiss describes seeing at a fairground a miniature mine. In this mine, small jerky figures hacked at the seams, and barrows pulled by horses with stiff legs approached on rails, and shovels were raised over the barrows, and the barrows moved off again, and baskets were lowered through shafts, and barrows inclined over the baskets, and the baskets were raised and were swung out over arriving trains, and everything shook and jerked until the work suddenly fell silent and everything stopped in mid-motion, arms hung in the air with raised picks, horses froze, baskets remained hanging in the shaft, until with a jerk everything started up again, everything shook again, everything jerked again, everything jolted again, everything hacked again, everything cracked again. (23) Benjamin too speaks of such a mine, brought out to him when visiting his aunt. In a glass dome, there was enclosed a whole life-like mine in which there moved in clockwork rhythm little miners, face workers, pit foreman, with baskets, hammers and lanterns. This toy – if such it may be called – came from a time when children from rich bourgeois houses were still able to enjoy looking at work places and machines. And over all of them the mine took precedence because it showed, not only the treasures that hard work wrung from it, but also that gleam of silver in its veins which – as is seen in the work of Jean Paul, Novalis, Tieck and Werner – had captivated the Biedermeier. (32)2 The contrast is startling. Benjamin cannot resist making a political gesture, a gesture that is wholly absent from Weiss’s account, and which feels forced, willed – not because he is wrong about what rich middle-class children were or were not allowed to see in some given epoch (I have no idea about that) but because it masks, as does the reference to the writers of the Biedermeier, any genuine sense of fascination the young Benjamin had, or might have had, in 335

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looking at the mine. Benjamin’s description is fixed in aspic, with no sense at all of life, whereas Weiss’s account is overflowing with the energy of life, with a longing and yearning for movement, drive, momentum. Weiss’s parents are like the figures of Benjamin’s mine: they move, for sure, but the rhythm is that of clockwork, regular, measured. Here there is nothing of the energy that Weiss was seeking: unbridled, certainly, but focused on a vocation, a love (as in his sister’s reaching out for a lover), channeled into an expression of the self that fulfills the self. These are the magnificent opening words of the memoir: I have often sought to come to terms with the figure of my mother and the figure of my father, lurching between rebellion and subjugation. I have never been able to grasp or understand these two figures at the gates of my life. (7) Weiss goes on to say that his grief, when they died, was for “that which had been missed, for the gaping emptiness that surrounded my childhood and youth” (7). It was all “too late,” he says. All that accumulated energy ended in nothing but, for Weiss, it was already an empty energy, like a kind of vacuum filled with energy, a kind of contradiction, full and empty at the same time. For Weiss, his father was already dead because there was no life in him, or only life turned back on itself, suffering its own frustration, as in his longing for his children and his incapacity to release it. Against death, casting death in its particular role in this text, is energy. Energy is life for Weiss. There is death in the school: “fear of school is sticky [klebrig] and sweet with the taste of raspberry sweets” (29). The fear of school is no movement, being stuck. In school, punishment is that one “learns how to hold one’s hand under the teacher’s cane” (33), without moving it. A pig being slaughtered has its legs bound together, rendered motionless (31). Weiss sleepwalks, but his parents seek to hold him still: they surround his bed with bowls of water: he will step into them when walking in his sleep and wake. “This treatment resulted in my learning to fly” (46). He learned to fly even as he had been inspired by the energy of the “Fassadenkletterer,” the man he sees scaling the walls of buildings as he goes to the fair, the fair where he finds himself “caught up in life [Dasein]” (22). The sight of the Fassadenkletterer gives him a “longing for his own achievement” (22). There is certainly a corruption of this energy in Friederle, who bullies and torments Weiss, and in his mother, frantic and intent on limiting her son, disciplining him. It is corrupt energy because it wants to dominate, to limit, to order. It is an energy that castrates and castigates. Weiss knows that this energy is much easier to cultivate and nourish than is that which opens out and gives life. It is easier to create death. Weiss’s father was already dead before he died. He dies at the outset of this memoir, but he is dead throughout it in Weiss’s telling of his life. Weiss cannot understand him, cannot come to terms with him, because he cannot grasp how a man can accept, can want, his own death, to be dead while being alive. The mother recruits the father to her own game of death. Weiss is lazing around at home. His mother insists he do his school homework. I will brook no contradiction […] [Y]ou must swot and swot some more, you have only a couple of years, then you’ll have to make your way in life, and for that you need to be prepared, otherwise you’ll fail abysmally […] I won’t have you bringing shame on me. I lie awake at night because of you, I’m responsible for you, if you are no good it all ends up at my feet, life is work, work and work and work again. (56) We are reminded of the mother’s comment described by Orwell: “Now, darling, is it kind to Mummy to do that?” Weiss goes to his room to study. A while later his father comes in to talk to 336

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him about doing his homework: “[L]ife isn’t about fun, it’s time that you finally learnt to work.” He speaks of the “reality of existence [die Realität des Daseins].” “In my father’s mouth this reality became the idea [Begriff ] of everything sterile and hardened [Versteinerten]” (58). Weiss’s intense resistance to the conception of life shared by his parents found expression in a completely different sense of learning, wholly other than swotting for exams. Speaking of the books he read, he says: What I retained was not so much a matter of general knowledge [Bildung] as a matter of sensations, my knowledge was put together out of pictorial experiences, out of memories of noises, voices, sounds, movements, gestures, rhythms, out of things I had touched and smelt, out of glances into rooms, streets, courtyards, gardens, ports, workplaces, out of vibrations in the air, out of the play of light and shadows, out of movements of eyes, mouths and hands. (60–61) This is life as the body, as a longing to feel. And Weiss wanted to love his mother, to love her in every way, including sexually: to feel her as he felt so much else. To love her would have been to love life, to find a way out of the sterility. His friend Max told me once that during the world war and the Spanish civil war he heard those who were dying cry out for their mother, Mama, Mama, they cried. There they lay, these shattered men, perhaps dead for the sake of their beliefs, and the last thing for which they cried was the hole out of which they once had crawled. You cannot live if you don’t love this hole. Oh life, oh great cunt of life. In the moment of death we cry for you. (132) This dreadful, agonized longing, expressed incestually, but really as an idea of the source of all life, with the violence of the language, manifests Weiss’s desperate longing to live and his sense that, after all, he could never escape death. Even though the book ends with his feeling that he has finally said farewell to his parents and that he is on his way “in search of his own life” (146), the presence of death throughout has been so monumental, so overwhelming, that the reader cannot possibly feel any confidence in or of an escape. In any case, saying farewell, taking one’s leave, is not the same as coming to terms with one’s situation. It might be just the opposite. This man’s life will be marked by the death that has characterized it from the beginning. A dead father, a dead mother, a dead sister, dead soldiers: they are inescapable, dead even when living, as Weiss knows himself to be held by death even as he lives. ★ It would, I imagine, be easy to suppose that we could relate Weiss’s reflections here concerning the presence of death in life to some of the themes on this matter that we find in, for example, the writings of Heidegger or perhaps some other philosopher. There is no doubt at all that Heidegger does articulate this idea, but his discussion can hardly seem anything but anemic compared to Weiss’s. There is nothing in Heidegger to match or catch the sense of despair or desperation that we find in Weiss. There seems to be nothing in it to capture the loneliness of death, either, despite all his talk of death as one’s ownmost possibility. From that point of view, it is a valuable exercise to put Heidegger’s discussion next to not only what Weiss says, as I am doing now, but also to this from Conrad’s Heart of Darkness: I have wrestled with death. It is the most unexciting contest you can imagine. It takes place in an impalpable greyness, with nothing underfoot, with nothing around, 337

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without spectators, without clamour, without glory, without the great desire of victory, without the great fear of defeat, in a sickly atmosphere of tepid scepticism, without much belief in your own right, and still less in that of your adversary. (112) Does Heidegger approach things as he does, and not as Weiss or Conrad do, because he is doing philosophy, and because the kind of detached style we find in him is suitable for that type of discourse? But that cannot be right, just like that, anyway, as it can only express a certain conception of what philosophy is that cannot avoid being question-begging. For if we think that philosophy seeks understanding, then something that eschews precisely that style – the work of Weiss or Conrad, say – might sensibly be thought of as philosophy if it can arrive at the understanding we seek. At the interface of philosophy and literature this is a maddening question. It is maddening because it throws us into profound confusion about what we think philosophy and literature are and what we think we are doing when we pursue them. It is no doubt true that in a discussion of death – Heidegger’s or Weiss’s or Conrad’s – we want understanding, as I have said, but what is not clear is what capacities of mind, what resources of vocabulary, what tone of voice, what style we need to do that. And that means that we do not know what we mean by understanding here. We do not know what we are looking for. Think again of Weiss’s comments about those soldiers dying and crying out for their mother. There is an extraordinary viscerality about his prose and in the way he brings together life, sex, and death. It is not incidental to his thinking here that he uses the extraordinarily vulgar term “cunt” [Fotze], a word that, in a sexual context, might usually be reserved for moments of intense sexual abandon in which the lovers goad each other’s desire with rough talk. What should we, can we, say? Could we suppose that death needs such words if we are not to pretend we understand it when we do not? I imagine that in some moods one is likely to think so; unless one has such vocabulary to hand, all speech about death will look anemic, as I said Heidegger’s is. But then, the mind needing such a term might seem to express, in other moods, precisely a failure to understand, lacking in the necessary, let us say, circumspection needed to understand. Can such an issue be resolved clearly? I do not think so, and this is partly what I meant to signal in speaking of moods. The style of philosophy – let us call it the style that seeks to appeal to the faculty of reason, leaving aside all vagaries of temperament, emotional proclivities, and the like – is not neutral between moods. Rather, it expresses a certain mood, precisely one that makes the kind of appeal in question. It would be naïve to suppose that somehow this mood is not a mood or, if it is, that it is the one that is clearly the correct one for understanding. Should we not say that much will depend on what it is that we are seeking to understand? It cannot be assumed that the mood of philosophy is the best, most helpful, most adequate for understanding anything at all, from abstract epistemological or metaphysical worries to the ins and outs of the ethical life or the religious consciousness. To suppose otherwise would be to suppose that Weiss and Conrad – generally speaking, what we might call literature – are not really thinking, not really thinking adequately, and are in need of philosophy to sort them out. Hence philosophy’s permanent temptation to arrogance and hubris, its vanity and conceit. It just cannot be right to suppose that literature is not thinking, or thinks in a shabby or inadequate or incompetent or second-rate way, but, in truth, this is a view that many philosophers have, even if they do not acknowledge it. Why do they not? Is it because they are suddenly assailed by their own humanity in the face of those who might have, say, spent a lifetime thinking about Shakespeare or Henry James or Dostoyevsky? I believe it is: in the protected space of his or her study, surrounded by books of philosophy, the philosopher is seduced by the tradition into supposing that he or she enjoys a 338

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kind of impunity, unassailability, is able to survey the world in thought, grasp it, and then relate back to it what it should think. But there, faced with a person who, having studied Shakespeare, is able to reveal his immeasurable greatness, the philosopher’s humanity catches up with him and jolts him into recognizing, at least until he can flee back to his study, that things are not all he supposes them to be. His humanity tells him, not that it is impolite, but that it is a parody of serious thought to suppose that he can do the world’s thinking for it, thinking it is incompetent to do so for itself, and then hand the result over to it. I am not saying we do not need philosophy. I am not saying it cannot talk about death. I am saying that for philosophy to speak about death, it needs to be recalled to itself and that one way in which this can be done is through a willingness to see itself as entirely of a piece with literature (whatever that is, exactly). The mood of philosophy is one mood we need, but only one. It can claim no privilege over other ways of thinking, of thinking in this case about death, compared to the moods offered by literature. It is a quirk of certain individuals’ temperament that the mood of philosophy appeals to them, just as some have a literary or musical sensibility. The refusal to acknowledge this only leads back to the bankrupt idea that this kind of temperament is the right one to have – which would mean that it is not really a temperament at all, but simply the correct kind of functioning for a human mind when it wishes to latch onto the truth, leaving all those with a different kind of sensibility or temperament adrift on the other side of such access unless and until they fall in line. Philosophy must constantly be recalled back to itself; the philosopher needs constantly to be reminded of his or her humanity, weakness, vulnerability. This was a point over which Kierkegaard agonized – Kierkegaard, that rebel in the camp of philosophy, who wanted to write a philosophy only in the subjunctive and one of whose key discussions of death3 seeks to call philosophy back to itself and to assimilate philosophy to and with literature. For sure, much philosophical discourse seeks to reconcile us to death even as it seeks to understand death, precisely through its seeking to understand it, and we have need of such reconciliation. Even if the issue is one of reconciling us to death, philosophy has no privilege over literature in that task. Its way might, as I said, appeal to certain temperaments, but Weiss or Conrad or countless other thinkers of a literary sensibility might help us as much, or more. Indeed, for myself, I find Weiss’s resolute willingness to feel that he is utterly crushed, overwhelmed by death to be much more consoling, because it is much more honest, much more human, than anything many philosophers offer, such as Epicurus with his refrain about having nothing to fear from death because I am not when it is (“specious stuff ” said Philip Larkin, but the force of that comes from the whole poem “Aubade”). Weiss’s honesty about death is something I understand best, I suppose, when I wake in a cold sweat in the middle of the night terrified at the thought of my own death and filled with a longing to drain life dry before it dispenses with me for good. I do not want in such moments to adopt the mood of philosophy and try to tell myself that I can get all this in perspective: I cannot get this in perspective, because it cannot be got into perspective, and I know it cannot be. In another mood I may want something else, but this is not because the “calm” of philosophy is more truthful to anything tout court. The point is this: there is no such thing as the right attitude to death. If I am to seek to face my death truthfully, without fake consolation, then philosophy’s calm might well strike me as the fake that I wish to avoid. Or perhaps not. We fall into confusion here for the same reason that we fall into confusion when we ask what philosophy and literature are and wonder about the powers of the mind that we need, or need to bring to bear, to understand something such as death. We have to live with our uncertainty, our confusion, and not wish it away. We have to learn that what it is to understand is itself unclear, so there can be no resting point. We have to learn to live with the 339

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shambolic unclarity of such matters, and for that we need both philosophy and literature (and no doubt much else besides). When I was very young, starting out in philosophy, and in a state of deep confusion (not that I have left completely behind any such confusion, though perhaps I have just made it a little more productive), I read in Iris Murdoch’s The Sovereignty of Good her claim that one should always ask the philosopher what he is afraid of. Without fully understanding the thought (and do I fully understand it now? What is it to understand fully such a thought?) I sensed that there was something here of immense importance, but I was puzzled by the fact that none of the philosophical texts I was reading took any notice of it, let alone sought to grapple with it. They still do not, some thirty years later (there are exceptions, a few, of course, but they are philosophy’s guilty conscience, from which it is always in flight). Indeed, such texts are often written as if there were no such issue as the philosopher’s being fearful of anything – as if no fear of his could be animating the things he writes. This is part of philosophy’s tone, its claim on reason, its claim to a kind of reason, its claim to get clear on things, to the truth. Yet I have the sense that everything I write is animated by fear, or fears, not clearly understood, or many things mixed up with fear or fears, in ways I cannot fully fathom. Nonetheless, it is unclear what a philosophy written by one who acknowledged his or her fear would look like. Would it look like Weiss’s Abschied? Those trained in philosophy (including me) have the reflex to say “obviously not”: it does not, for one thing, and despite the fears that obviously lie behind it, have the level of generality for which one typically looks in a philosophical text. It seems to tell us of one particular person and the peculiar vicissitudes of his life. It tells us about death in his life, these particular deaths – father, mother, sister – and not about death as such. Yet … what is it to talk about death as such? Is there such a thing? Or, to put it otherwise, is there not, after all, a generality in what Weiss says? Do I not see myself in what he says? Do I not see those I have known who have died? My parents, for example? Their deaths were not exactly the same as those of Weiss’s parents, but it can hardly be said that they were utterly different. Can I not learn something about death in general from reading Weiss’s text? What counts as generality in such matters? I do not know, but it is far from obvious that, whatever that is, we do not have it in Weiss’s text. The claim that Weiss’s Abschied is not philosophy can only be an expression of a view about what philosophy ought to be, of what we will allow to count as philosophy. It is normative, not descriptive, and itself expresses a fear: a fear that philosophy might not be pure, that it might not be able to seal itself off from the contingencies of life, of any given individual life. Let us go back to a key passage in Weiss’s text: “My attempts to free myself from my past began with the death of my sister” (81–82). This is general: it records the fact that death has a deep meaning to human beings, a meaning that might indeed lead someone to seek to free himself from something that oppresses him. At another level it is not general: death might mean something to someone, but not this. Or death might mean nothing to someone: shallowness, indifference, exhaustion are always human possibilities. But there is nothing that counts as a human life that will not take death into account: the meaninglessness of (a) death to a given person itself makes over that person’s life in a certain image, reveals something of the meaning of that person’s life. If your friend or father or sister dies and you remain indifferent, or the death seems meaningless to you, then this does not mean that your life is not cast in a certain light by it; indifference in the face of death is not like indifference in the face of football or drinking red wine or mountaineering or stamp collecting or learning foreign languages. To be sure, your indifference to these things tells us about you, but it is not like your indifference to these deaths because there is nothing in the human condition that demands a response to them as does death. Indifference to the demand is itself a response to it. In this respect, death is, of 340

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course, like birth and sex: it is one of the standing limitations of the human condition, one of the things, indeed, that means we can speak of such a condition at all. Weiss’s text says this to us: death is everywhere. It is the center of your life, even if you think it is not. You cannot escape it: not simply as something that will happen to you, but as something that is happening to you, whether you like it or not, whether you know it or not. He may be wrong. I think he is right. But whether he is right or wrong, he offers us philosophy in any sense in which I think it reasonable to think of this: a deepened understanding of the human condition. And in offering us philosophy he offers us literature and says: Don’t suppose you know which is which.

Notes 1 2 3

All translations into English are mine. An English version of the book is available under the title Leavingtaking. My translation. An English translation of the text is available as Berlin Childhood Around 1900. See his “At a Graveside.”

Works Cited Benjamin, Walter. Berlin Childhood Around 1900, translated by Howard Eiland. Harvard UP, 2006. Benjamin, Walter. Berliner Kindheit um 1900. 1938. Suhrkamp, 2006. Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness. 1902. Penguin, 1989. Kierkegaard, Søren. “At a Graveside.” Three Discourses on Imagined Occasions. 1845, translated by Howard Hong and Edna Hong. Princeton UP, 1993. Larkin, Philip. “Aubade.” Collected Poems. 1988. Faber & Faber, 2014, pp. 174–75. Orwell, George. “Lear, Tolstoy and the Fool.” The Penguin Essays of George Orwell. Penguin, 1984, pp. 407–422. Weiss, Peter. Abschied von den Eltern. 1964. Suhrkamp, 2007. Weiss, Peter. Leavingtaking. Translated by Christopher Levenson. Melville House Publishing, 2014.

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31 PARADOX, DEATH, AND THE DIVINE Jamie Lin

What is a paradox? Nobel prize-winning physicist Niels Bohr writes, “The opposite of a correct statement is a false statement. But the opposite of a profound truth may be another profound truth” (Breverton 347). The first relationship offers an either/or binary, where “correctness” or accuracy lies in choosing the right extent to which one or another option is true. In the second relationship, there is a movement from either/or toward both/and: both statements are true, and the question lies in knowing how they are in tension rather than contradiction. The Latin root of the word tension is tendere, or “stretch,” and in a paradox, one is always being stretched between two truths, where the fullness of truth, or truthful experience, lies in holding them both to be true at the same time. Using these conceptions of paradox and tension, this chapter seeks to consider the role that paradoxes of faith play in narratives of death and dying in the works of Leo Tolstoy and C. S. Lewis. Within the Christian tradition, theologian Richard P. Hansen uses the metaphor of a tuning fork to capture the way paradoxes work in delivering truth through “contrasting poles vibrating in unison”: To ring true, a tuning fork must be carefully held. Dampen either tine with your fingers, even a little, and the note disappears. Neither tine by itself can produce the sweet, pure note. A tuning fork delivers a true pitch only when both tines vibrate together. […] In this order of paradox, two contrasting ideas create their paradoxical tension in the space between them. Each side offers part of the truth (and none of the truth when considered in isolation). Neither side can be muffled, even a little, if the sweet, pure note of unearthly music is to be heard. (74) Like a tuning fork, such paradoxes express truth when two seemingly opposite positions are in tension with one another. Losing one of the two positions – a common tendency, as we will see – gives us not a half-truth, but no truth at all. Such a paradox lies at the heart of the nature of the Christian deity.1 In C. S. Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, Susan Pevensie is initially surprised to learn that the king, Aslan – Lewis’ figure for Christ, who later similarly sacrifices himself, dies, and comes back to life – is a lion: “I’d thought he was a man. Is he – quite safe? I shall feel rather nervous about meeting a lion.” To which Mr. Beaver replies, “Who said anything

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about safe? ’Course he isn’t safe. But he’s good. He’s the King” (79–80). Later on, when readers first encounter Aslan, Aslan stood in the center of a crowd of creatures who had grouped themselves round him in the shape of a half-moon. […] But as for Aslan himself, the Beavers and the children didn’t know what to do or say when they saw him. People who have not been in Narnia sometimes think that a thing cannot be good and terrible at the same time. If the children had ever thought so, they were cured of it now. (126) In characterizing the affective experience of meeting Aslan, the Christ-figure, as simultaneously “good and terrible,” Lewis channels a chain of historical tensions around the Christian deity into the encounter: tensions that revolve around the relationships between absolute justice and absolute love, transcendence and immanence, sovereign election and free will, and the alreadyand-not-yet nature of the kingdom of God. Such a way of embodying truth by stretching it across two contrasting positions, according to Cath Filmer-Davies, characterizes the supernaturalism in Lewis’s fiction, where we find images, for instance, of “celebratory joy” balanced with “awe” – a welcoming closeness and a holy distance held in tension (659). To insist, for example, that deity means either love or justice might make its character more comprehensible, but it also obscures the harmonic tension between the two truths which more clearly reflects the Christian understanding. Put another way, lean too much toward judgment and we create a terrifying cosmic taskmaster; lean too much the other way and we arrive at an anodyne grandfather figure.2 Using Leo Tolstoy’s novella, The Death of Ivan Ilych, and C. S. Lewis’s chronicle of his wife’s bereavement, A Grief Observed, I propose how we might understand the role paradoxes of faith play in narratives of death and dying, offering insight into how such paradoxes avoid reductionist tendencies in depictions of the intersection of faith and life, creating the space necessary for characters to change and grow – and readers along with them.

Death and Agency Leo Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilych chronicles the gradual decline of Ivan Ilych, a judge in nineteenth-century Russia. As the titular character’s disease progresses, he begins to notice an emerging tension between two types of moods. On the one hand, Ilych wills his malfunctioning organs to become functional again – to “help nature along” with regular medication and rest (54) – in order to defer death. On the other hand, death’s finality simultaneously looms large in his perspective: “It’s not about appendices and kidneys. This is a matter of life and […] death. Yes, life was in me and now it’s leaving, and I can’t stop it. I can’t. Why lie to myself?” (54). His “keen fascination with all the workings of his body” illustrates Ilych’s formidable will to live as he marshals all available mental and physical resources, yet at the same time he recognizes that these resources are themselves already subject to decay, constrained by the broader context of finitude within which they lie, his “incomprehensible and terrible death, from which there could be no possible means of deliverance” (91–92). Tolstoy’s portrait of Ilych’s life being “stretched” between the two moods aptly captures the paradox of the individual experience of dying, a paradox that comes to a head in the scene of Ilych’s confession to the priest: When the priest had come and heard his confession, he softened and felt as though his doubts, and along with them his sufferings, had been eased, and a moment of hope 343

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found its way to him. He started thinking again about his appendix and the possibility of setting it right. He took the sacrament with tears in his eyes. When he lay down again after communion, he felt a moment’s ease, and again a hope of recovery arose in him. He began thinking about the operation he had been offered. To live, I want to live, he told himself. (98) By acceding to his wife’s request for him to make his confession, in effect implying his recognition that his life is coming to an end, Ilych’s gesture is an act of acknowledging divine providence over his life and submitting to it by confessing his shortcomings. But scarcely is he finished with this line of thinking than there arises in him a “moment of hope” that triggers “thinking again about his appendix and the possibility of setting it right” – he wants to live (98). This hope, however, does not last long. Immediately after the confession and communion, Ilych becomes incensed by a simple question from his wife, driving him toward an agonizing hatred and an awareness, again, of his “inescapable death” (99). This back-and-forth dynamic recurs in different sections of the novella, where Tolstoy repeatedly juxtaposes divine providence with human agency, anger with horror/despair, or action with submission, so as to show how neither pole can fully capture how Ilych grapples with his moribund body. Instead, what is foregrounded are the tensions between concurrent states. At every moment, Ilych is fully an actor even as he is fully under the control of his creator,3 a simultaneous tension masked by narrative sequentiality. The relationship between moods has been a source of difficulty for scholars. Y. J. Dayananda, using the work of psychiatrist Elizabeth Kübler-Ross in On Death and Dying, sees such conflicting moods as characterizing different segments of Ilych’s death-bound journey through the five stages of denial and isolation, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. Dayananda keenly discerns the elements of these five stages in the “superbly concrete and realistic perceptions” of Tolstoy’s prose (417), yet the danger of such a point of view is twofold: that we begin to see these stages as entirely distinct from one another and the journey as unidirectional. Similarly, Richard F. Gustafson sees the story as one of “sin and suffering and death,” a trajectory or progression that suggests unilateralism (155). Its redemptive value lies primarily in the didactic nature of suffering, with Ilych’s pain revealing that “in his dying as in his living[,] he is alone” (158). Suffering reveals a fundamental solitude, the fact of bodily degeneration, the self-serving and self-centeredness of people. Refracted through such a lens, it is as if the protagonist’s moribundity has no counterweight; the spiritual yearnings of Ilych, his “hope,” “ease,” moments of lightness, and earnest desire to recover, are all unaccounted for when his story is reduced to a narrative of degeneration and demise. A. Galkin takes the same point further by celebrating Tolstoy’s depiction of Ilych’s death – Ilych’s “wild cry ‘Oh! O-oh!’ and the way he ‘struggled about in that black bag’” – as the “crowning moment” of Tolstoy’s meditations on death (182). For Galkin, Tolstoy’s strength as a writer is best seen in his refusal to portray Ilych’s passing as the more politically correct “moment of liberation, the longed-for crossing over into the Christian state of eternal bliss” (even though Tolstoy does, at one point, suggest this), but to allow Ilych’s savage pain and agony to capture his descent into “darkness, terror, savage fear, nothing, nonexistence […] emptiness and godlessness” (181–82). In this way, Tolstoy’s fiction reflects the “constant negativism” he had toward socioreligious mores: without fail, the “irrational creeps with its swirling poisonous fog into the consciousness […] dragging him into the pitch-dark, mystical abyss” (181). I argue that these views too quickly refuse the productive tension between moods that Tolstoy’s characterizations of Ilych masterfully embody. Ilych’s vacillations between hope and 344

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despair, agency and submission, certainty and doubt, are the very media through which he is exercising his faith and being stretched across its paradoxes. Tolstoy is, in fact, doing justice to a lived experience of faith, where theological truth bumps up against the complexity and unknowingness of everyday life. Faith should not be mistaken as the opposite of doubt; it is better understood as being constituted in and through engagement with doubt. When readers refuse the uncertainty of such tensions in favor of either/or declarations, we reduce the complexity of the life of faith and the honesty of characterization possible in the best of religious fiction.

Death and Meaning Such paradoxes of faith further emerge from a contemplation of death’s meaning. When Christian don C. S. Lewis married Joy Davidman at the late age of 58, he had no idea she would die of bone cancer just four years later. When she passed, a distraught Lewis turned to writing, collecting four notebooks worth of thoughts on death, loss, and mourning that were eventually published as A Grief Observed. Even transmuted through the pages of the book, his pain is palpable: It is hard to have patience with people who say, “There is no death” or “Death doesn’t matter.” There is death. And whatever is matters. And whatever happens has consequences, and it and they are irrevocable and irreversible. You might as well say that birth doesn’t matter. I look up at the night sky. Is anything more certain than that in all those vast times and spaces, if I were allowed to search them, I should nowhere find her face, her voice, her touch? She died. She is dead. Is the word so difficult to learn? (15) The key to understanding the intensity of loss Lewis felt was the meaninglessness that Davidman’s death brought to light. “Oh God, God,” he writes, “why did you take such trouble to force this creature out of its shell if it is now doomed to crawl back – to be sucked back – into it?” (19). Lewis was in agony over the idea that he had finally been given the gift of love and marriage, and been utterly invigorated by it, only to be left stranded as a lonely widower upon her death. It was almost as if her passing robbed all the earlier events of their meaning. This sense of meaninglessness emerges acutely in his reflections on the journey of faith Lewis and Davidman worked through as they fought her cancer: What chokes every prayer and every hope is the memory of all the prayers H. and I offered and all the false hopes we had. Not hopes raised merely by our own wishful thinking, hopes encouraged, even forced upon us, by false diagnoses, by X-ray photographs, by strange remissions, by one temporary recovery that might have ranked as a miracle. Step by step we were “led up the garden path.” Time after time, when He seemed most gracious He was really preparing the next torture. (30) The garden path was a clear reference to the Garden of Gethsemane, where Christ grappled with an agony so great “his sweat became as it were great drops of blood falling down upon the ground” (Holy Bible, English Standard Version, Luke 22:44). The “He” Lewis referred to was the God he had confessed belief in for decades – a God who, when the illusions had finally been stripped away, was revealed to be the “Cosmic Sadist,” the “Eternal Vivisector” (Lewis, Grief 38). The sheer meaninglessness of Davidman’s journey through suffering to her death threatened to crush Lewis. 345

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Yet as his grief unfolds over the pages, we begin to see faint inklings of Lewis discerning an ultimate order and purpose behind his agony. To Lewis’s mind, marriage – like all other things connected to his Christian faith – finds its ultimate purpose in helping people resemble their creator. Marriage unites two “patients,” as Lewis puts it, in a relationship of trial that makes the love between them purer, like a sword that shines brighter after it has been through a furnace (42). If this is the case, Lewis reasons, then could the death of a spouse simply be signaling the completion of that process, rather than an unplanned interruption? Might grief and bereavement meaningfully follow marriage “as normally as marriage follows courtship […], not the interruption of the dance, but the next figure” (50)? Davidman’s passing therefore meant their union had reached its “proper perfection” (49):4 “She is in God’s hands.” That gains a new energy when I think of her as a sword. Perhaps the earthly life I shared with her was only part of the tempering. Now perhaps He grasps the hilt; weighs the new weapon; makes lightnings with it in the air. “A right Jerusalem blade.” (63) “A right Jerusalem blade” is a reference to John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress, where the sword is in the grip of a Mr. Valiant-for-truth who, when introduced, is bloody from having just fought three men, “Wild Head, Inconsiderate and Pragmatick” (407). Theologian Derek Thomas points out that these characters are, in fact, “within” Mr. Valiant-for-truth himself, the detestable parts of his character that he is in the midst of culling. His weapon of choice, the “Jerusalem blade,” is a clear allusion to the Bible, which is described in the apostle Paul’s letter to the Hebrews as “sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing to the division of soul and spirit […] discerning the thoughts and intentions of the heart” (Heb. 4–12). This image of character refinement, of mastery over the inner workings of the heart, is how Lewis thus imagines Davidman on her passing, imbuing her death with meaning: “When you have learned to do quadratics and enjoy doing them you will not be set them much longer. The teacher moves you on” (49). Combining the metaphor of the sword with that of the teacher, Lewis imbues Davidman’s death with meaning, seeing it as heralding the next stage in their journeys of faith. Both aspects of Lewis’s grief – first, the anger and agony of meaninglessness, and second, the redemption and hope in meaning – are connected in paradoxical tension. Lewis’s holistic depiction of his grief shows us the agony of being caught between both sets of feelings. Just as with Tolstoy, however, it has been common for readings to overemphasize one in place of the other. William Gray highlights the “iconoclastic” experience of Lewis’s grief, where he “found all his dreams and his faith smashed by the reality of death” (60). No “consoling fantasy” is to be found in the reality of Lewis’s own life, as compared to his imaginative depictions of redemption and hope in the Kingdom of Narnia (60). Similarly, in her commentary on A Grief Observed, Ann Loades notes how Lewis’s bereavement forced him to “try and believe” what he “cannot feel; that God is [his] true Beloved” (118; emphasis added). For Loades, the value of Lewis’s book is his depiction of “the route to a view of God as ‘cosmic sadist’, and a masochistic relationship to God,” clearly foregrounding the agony of meaninglessness and suffering in Lewis’s grief (120). It would seem that such readings are again too eager to resolve the tensions and seeming contradictions that Lewis himself sought to hold in tension. He speaks of it as a refusal of the choice between the “feathery” or the “prickly” tree, referring to the reassurance of redemption in the former and the agony of mourning in the latter, insisting instead on holding the “two widely different convictions” in tension – that the “Eternal Vet is even more inexorable […] than [Lewis’s] severest imaginings” and that “all manner of thing shall be well” (64–65). At 346

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every point in the process there is both agony and redemption, meaninglessness and meaning. The pain of bereavement did not render his experience of redemption any less true; similarly, as evident from the explosive anger in A Grief Observed, neither did the belief in redemption shortcircuit Lewis’s process of bereavement. I contend that Joy’s death did not “smash” Lewis’s faith; in fact, it led to the interrogation of his beliefs, the alternating between meaninglessness and meaningfulness that, in itself, constitutes faith. Loades herself hints at such an understanding, lauding Lewis for a theology “probed for its resources, tested for its adequacy, developed in some directions, made flexible and promising in unsuspected ways” (120), yet she stops short of seeing this very negotiation and grappling as the expression of faith itself. As with Tolstoy’s depiction of Ilych, faith is not to be mistaken for certainty, nor thought of as a quantifiable substance that we can speak of having more or less. Rather, it is akin to a container or capacity for negotiations between questioning and certainty, agency and providence, and so forth. To live in the midst of possibilities, in the tension of their paradox, is to be fully alive, ironically, in the face of another’s passing.

The Numinous Heart of Paradox There is one question we have yet to ask, one which lies at the heart of these paradoxes of faith in the works of Tolstoy and Lewis: Why do they matter? What might be achieved in understanding these paradoxes of faith and their relationship to death and dying? In My Bright Abyss, a collection of meditations by the American poet Christian Wiman in the midst of his battle with an aggressive and unpredictable blood cancer, he writes: On the radio I hear a famous novelist praising his father for enduring a long, difficult dying without ever “seeking relief in religion.” It is clear from the son’s description that the father was in absolute despair, and that as those cold waters closed over him, he could find nothing to hold on to but his pride, and drowned clutching that nothing. This is to be admired? That we carry our despair stoically into death, that even the utmost anguish of our lives does not change us? (8) Experiences such as love, sorrow, joy, and fear tend to change and mature our vision of who we are and what we believe. Wiman suggests that we are only fully human when we recognize our mutability, the fact that we are given over to change or being changed. For Wiman, then, stoicism is not bravery but cowardice, for it refuses the possibility of movement between positions, in effect reducing the complexity of reality into either one or another point of view. The tensions in paradox, in contrast, open up the possibility of movement, of allowing momentous events in our lives to shift us to new points between two poles. Put another way, paradox prevents oversimplification, the insistence on artificial resolutions that cheapen or reduce the full complexity of life and experience. Agency or providence offers us a false choice: Do we give ourselves fully over to the pursuit of medical solutions to death, or lull ourselves into passivity in the certainty that belief is all that matters? Meaning or meaninglessness sets up an empty dichotomy: Do we unwaveringly affirm that every moment of a deathbound struggle can be unambiguously explained in light of some ultimate justification, or instead that there is no way anyone may speak of the meaning of an event, seeing as we are products of uncontrollable material forces, specks in an unimaginably large cosmos? The answer is neither and both. Wiman writes, “I believe in grace and chance, at the same time. I believe in absolute truth and absolute contingency, at the same time” (164). For Wiman, faith “is the seam soldering together these wholes that our half vision – and our entire 347

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clock-bound, logic-locked way of life – shapes as polarities” (164). Living in the tension of paradox offers a greater appreciation for the mystery in the way the absolutes in our experiences of death and dying can be “soldered” together, suspending the polarities demanding an either-or resolution. John Keats’s notion of negative capability – a quality he valued in (literary) artistic achievements – is similarly invested “in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason” (277). The notion of “Mystery” is key here, as I contend it is necessarily linked to the numinous for these Christian writers – a link that allows us to live (and indeed, to die) fruitfully at the “seams” of these tensions. In The Problem of Pain, Lewis elaborates on German theologian-philosopher Rudolf Otto’s idea of the numinous as mysterium tremendum, whereby the encounter with the numinous as a “mighty spirit” (6–7) inspires awe because it is powerful (“mighty”) and wholly other (“spirit”), thereby posing an acute existential threat to who we are. I argue that this is precisely what happens within the tension of paradox in our experiences of life and of death. When we are in the space of mystery between agency and providence, or meaning and meaninglessness, we are in fact face-to-face with that which exceeds material understanding: a reality that is powerful, wholly other, and threatening to our understanding of what is possible. In one sense, it is wholly reasonable that we should feel unmoored, ill at ease. But Lewis describes not fear, but awe. It is only by remaining full of awe in the space of mystery between opposites, staying mutable, learning to hold the contrasts in productive tension, that we fully live, and die.

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This chapter will be limited to exploring the paradoxes around death and dying as they apply to the Christian tradition. The crucifixion of Christ as understood from a substitutionary atonement point of view is an example of the paradoxical intersection of love and justice. Christ as judge demands punishment for wrongdoing, but Christ as lover takes on that judgment on behalf of his people. According to theologian Wayne Grudem, a key component of divine providence is preservation, or the way God “keeps [created things] existing and maintaining the properties with which he created them” (315). Providence dictates that the places and hours of births and deaths are willed purposefully by a supernatural creator. Yet, at the same time, men and women of faith are agents, people with hopes, wills, accomplishments who continue to take proactive actions to defer death in a world where medication and hospitalization have real consequences for the length and quality of people’s lives. Contemporary readers may find such a description problematic because of its association with mariticide. Might such a yearning for “perfection” be used to justify the killing of one spouse by another? Lewis’s notion of “perfection,” however, comes from his appreciation of the way marriage united complementary aspects of humanity. He describes how spouses’ temperaments ought to fit together like pieces of a jigsaw, where one’s shortcomings are made up for by the gifts of another, and vice versa. A perspective that respects and values differences to this degree is clearly incompatible with the violence of mariticide.

Works Cited Breverton, Terry. Immortal Words. Quercus Publishing, 2009. Bunyan, John. The Pilgrim’s Progress. 1792. Dayananda, Y. J. “The Death of Ivan Ilych: A Psychological Study on Death and Dying.” Tolstoy’s Short Fiction, edited by Michael R. Katz. W. W. Norton & Company, 2008, pp. 415–425. Filmer-Davies, Cath. “C. S. Lewis.” The Oxford Handbook of English Literature and Theology, edited by Andrew W. Hass, David Jasper, and Elisabeth Jay. Oxford UP, 2007, pp. 655–668. Galkin, A. “Death or Immortality? Dostoevsky Versus Tolstoy.” Leo Tolstoy, edited by Harold Bloom. Chelsea House Publishers, 2003, pp. 179–196. Gray, William. Death and Fantasy. Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008.

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Paradox, Death, and the Divine Grudem, Wayne. Systematic Theology. Inter-Varsity Press and Zondervan, 1994. Gustafson, Richard F. Leo Tolstoy: Resident and Stranger. Princeton UP, 1986. Hansen, Richard P. Paradox Lost: Rediscovering the Mystery of God. Zondervan, 2016. The Holy Bible, English Standard Version. Crossway, 2001. Keats, John. The Complete Poetical Works and Letters of John Keats, Cambridge Edition. Houghton Mifflin Company, 1899. Lewis, Clive Staples. A Grief Observed. HarperCollins, 1994. Lewis, Clive Staples. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. HarperCollins, 1950. Lewis, Clive Staples. The Problem of Pain. HarperCollins, 1940. Loades, Ann. “C. S. Lewis: Grief Observed, Rationality Abandoned, Faith Regained.” Literature and Theology, vol. 3, no. 1, 1989, pp. 107–121. Thomas, Derek. “Delectable Mountains and Enchanted Ground.” First Presbyterian Church, 28 Nov. 2007, Jackson, MS. Sermon. Tolstoy, Leo. The Death of Ivan Ilych. Translated by Ian Dreiblatt. Melville House, 2008. Wiman, Christian. My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer. Farrer, Straus and Giroux, 2013.

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32 INNER SEEING AND DEATH ANXIETY IN AIDAN HIGGINS’S BLIND MAN’S BLUFF AND OTHER LIFE WRITING Lara O’Muirithe Introduction Blind Man’s Bluff (2012), Aidan Higgins’s last publication in his lifetime, comprises varied anecdotes across its 60 A-5 pages; the text coalesces memoir and nonfiction, as is typical of the author’s style in his corpus of work. (March Hares: An Uncommonplace Book, an anthology of nonfictional works was published posthumously in 2017.) As Neil Murphy says of Higgins’s oeuvre, “fiction is frequently reinvented as autobiography, and vice-versa, until it becomes apparent that Higgins sees little difference between the two” (Introduction 15). The final book is organized around black-and-white reproductions of his doodles and collages, as well as uncaptioned photographs, including ones of him as an infant. The dedication claims, with gallows humor, that the book is “for the Semi-Blind” (Higgins, Blind x). Friends (Neil Donnelly, Matthew Geden) and his spouse (Alannah Hopkin) are acknowledged for helping to compile it, suggesting that vulnerability and connectivity underpin the collaboration. Higgins must renegotiate the conditions of life writing as he experiences a deterioration of sight and geriatric illnesses. The artist-writer can no longer see his pictures or organize his writing – and the edge of blindness and (inner) seeing is pursued as a major theme in this pre-death book. Or, as Higgins asserts, “Blind Man’s Bluff in repetition attempts to wed the blind man and the innocent that is the child”: the necessity of inner seeing, as this essay will explore, elicits a paradoxical reconciliation with selfhood towards the end of his life (60). Higgins’s debut collection of short stories, Felo de Se, was published in 1960. The earliest phase of his career, with Felo de Se and the novel Langrishe, Go Down (1966), also marks the zenith of his critical reception. Critics, the reading public, and academics have generally responded to his subsequent, more formally dexterous texts in intellectually conservative ways. The habitual comparison between Langrishe, Go Down and the “formally ambitious designs” of his subsequent works is evidence of this (Murphy, Balcony Afterword 416). Balcony of Europe, which was first published in 1972 and was edited and reissued in 2010 by Aidan Higgins in collaboration with Murphy, represents a determined alteration of form and of the status of fiction within the author’s career. Balcony of Europe’s republication in 2010 followed its relegation in Higgins’s oeuvre. It had been “withheld from print by its author for more than thirty years” (Murphy, Balcony Afterword 415). John Banville’s opinion of Balcony of 350

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Europe is that “so much fine writing is blurred and even lost in the formlessness of the book […] Mr. Higgins has no sense of form” (Banville 18). Countering such an interpretation, Murphy addresses how the author’s rejection of “sequential plotted narrative” is congruent with the phenomenological concerns of the later publication (Murphy, Irish Fiction 57–58). Aidan Higgins: The Fragility of Form (2010), an edited collection compiled by Murphy and the sole book to date that focuses entirely on the author’s work, pays tribute to the delicacy of his style. Recursive style is a strategy often adopted in Blind Man’s Bluff, one expressive of the collision of memories he holds at the end of his life. It represents the culmination (however circular) of his life in writing. Intra-textuality is a hallmark of Higgins’s oeuvre. For example, stories from Felo de Se are contextualized anew in the anthology Flotsam & Jetsam: Selected Fiction and Prose (1996), where they appear beside stories from the 1980s. Higgins’s trilogy of autobiographies (collated in one volume, A Bestiary, in 2004) reappropriates previously published fictions, which become revitalized in a different formal domain. The auto-reflexive project of creating a hybrid of memoir and fiction takes a refined and protean form in Blind Man’s Bluff, the last book. Higgins plays with the intersecting themes of blindness, isolation, and death in various fictions. Helen of Langrishe, Go Down muses that: “The darkened house is breathing […] windy, bronchial. Soon we will be old. Old, ill and poor; and when we die no one will mourn for us, or afterwards remember us” (73). The “breathing” house, set in darkness, foreshadows Helen’s death in the story. Lying there, she thinks: “I am resigned. Gradually my respiration comes slower and slower. Disturbed by the air coming in at the top of the window, the Venetian blind blows in, then collapses against the frame. Silence. Then blows in without a sound” (73). The blinds are a macabre framing device. Helen is deprived of her full senses in the darkness – or sightlessness – and in the momentary silence in a way that preempts her death. Ways of seeing in Balcony of Europe are often overlaid with an awareness of death. Dan’s elderly mother regards him distantly: “from her lair my poor mother stared at me, as though I were already far away” (Higgins, Balcony 24). The distance between their viewpoints is informed by Dan’s death anxiety. By describing the distance between the two of them in terms of a simile – “as though I were already far away” – an apprehensive mood, suggestive of impending death, is incorporated into the description (24). The text indicates that She stood with her face close to the list of runners, the lenses of her spectacles crisscrossed with innumerable fine lines, an intricate spiderwork of fine white lines as the lines in Pavel Tchelitchew’s Inachevé. It must have been like in a snowstorm; she was living in a twilight world at the end of her life. (25) By calling attention to their likeness to the Russian-born multimedia artist Pavel Tchelitchew’s painting Inachevé (circa 1957), the narrator creates an image of neglect in describing his mother’s spectacles. Tchelitchew’s Inachevé, structured geometrically by intersecting lines, evokes the scruffiness of her eyewear. The text comments on how “for a while she blinded herself wearing her sister’s castoff reading glasses, her eyes grown huge and froglike and confused” (25). The depiction of the spectacles encapsulates the squander of Dan’s mother’s life. Springfield House appears in dream-form in the later work Bornholm Night-Ferry (1983). The dream concerns the protagonist Fitz and his lover Elin. Relying on pictorial terms, it is written about as though it were a carrier of desolation:

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The next picture was my house in the countryside, now quite ruined, I was there all alone and the blow went all through the house, and the smell of the wet soot was very strong. I called you. I knew you were there, but you were hidden, telling something I could not follow, because you hid yourself from me […] I knew that you had hid yourself and changed yourself into a very dangerous something – hardly into an animal either, but a kind of dust, if you please. Ash in a corner ready to cover me with dangerous stuff, a lethal dust. So the dream ended and I woke up with cheeks wet of tears. (172) The appearance of a “house in the countryside” symbolizes mourning. Enhancing a sense of decay on the imagining of the domestic terrain, it is said to be inundated with “ash” and “dust.” These terms, concomitant with the house, are central symbols within the dream passage. Given the minimized details of the dream, the recurrence of this language of waste is intensified. The dream may symbolize the residua of a squandered love affair. Elin, for she is the “you” whom this written segment addresses, is transmogrified into “dust,” too. The atmospheric substance, “dangerous stuff, a lethal dust,” like the destiny of Higgins’s house, signals death. This other person is “hidden” from Fitz’s range of vision. Higgins manipulates the concept of perception in dreams by rendering visual phenomena as out of view in his vignette. The appropriation of the visual experience is prominent in Higgins’s oeuvre. In fact, he said of his friend, the artist Patrick Collins, in a catalogue essay for a retrospective exhibition, “he wanted to be a writer; I wanted to be a painter” (“Paddy” 9). Understanding this may enhance our understanding of the aesthetics of his late-life imaginary. Higgins learned to see in a disciplined and creative fashion, partly through his formative association with Collins, which began when he was in his early twenties; “1950 it might have been,” according to his own memory (“Paddy” 11). He watched how Collins observed visual phenomena. His elder looked at the natural world carefully: “in Turkey once on the steps of the station (Istanbul?) he saw a strange bug, studied it all day. He was a lover of the visible world” (9). Higgins emulated this studious regard of life and used it in his writing technique. Like his mentor, whom he thought saw “things that others less perceptive would have missed,” Higgins trained himself to see sensitively and to transform this in his writing (9).The author’s later loss of sight is poignant on a basic emotional level but it is also meaningful in terms of his late aesthetic principles. Blindness provides an occasion for introspection, for Higgins to reconfigure the shape of his life and writing. This essay will focus on the role of seeing in the aesthetics of Blind Man’s Bluff while touching further upon references to his other books, especially those that are relevant to the author’s confrontations with death anxiety. Higgins reconstitutes his attitudes of perception in this final book. He described himself as a “failed painter” in a 1983 interview with Anne Haverty; of his ambitions, he said, “I wanted clean pure stuff like Klee and Kandinsky but I couldn’t. I always wrote” (Haverty). An art historiographic approach centered around the study of temporalities is taken in the first part of this essay in response to the visual aspects of Blind Man’s Bluff. Then, when considering the twin themes of blindness and death, the essay incorporates a medical humanities interpenetrative studies framework. This is in order to situate how, in sightlessness, “the reconfiguration of the sensory body” relates to the narrative representation of death anxiety in Blind Man’s Bluff (Paterson 96). For Higgins, “blindness is a state of helplessness, of being an infant again” (Blind 49). Emotional defenses have been broken through, while descriptions of inner vision, or sightlessness, combined with an array of multimedia images, form a last act of memorialization for the author.

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Visual Images The first visual image of Blind Man’s Bluff appears adjacent to the paratextual material presenting the book’s title, the author’s name, and the publishing company’s outposts. The image is a reproduction of a photograph which depicts the façade of the U-Bahn station in Podbielskiallee, Berlin. The building’s exterior, decorated with castle-like turrets, juts out in sharp relief. This visual stability is relative to the photograph’s out-of-focus subject: a young woman walking, midstride, occupies the foreground space. She appears slightly off-center in the frame, and her head is slightly inclined to her right as she looks toward the space of the camera. Her demeanor seems to suggest she may be engaging with the photographer, but due to her being in motion and the blurring effect, it is not clear if she is looking directly toward the camera. It is unclear what kind of expression emanates from her eyes. There is an unknowability about the photograph. Melancholy and loss are embedded in the book by its first image, demonstrated by its form – or formlessness. The art historian and critic Amelia Groom challenges a commonly held notion that photography confers stasis on a moment in time. She examines the paradox of the medium, saying that “photographs also gather up and move through times, in ways that can disrupt notions of temporal steadiness and divisibility. One phenomenon of photography that invites us to grapple with its temporal complexities is the blur” (240). Groom states that “as a site of evasion and spatial disorganisation, the blur goes against commonly held assumptions about photographic fixity and certainty” (240). The first image of Blind Man’s Bluff is laden with meaning when it is considered through this prism of photography discourse. It shows an evasion of chronology and stasis. This is a crucial preliminary aspect to the main text. Some readers of Higgins’s main fictions might associate the image with the subject matter of Lions of the Grunewald (1993). The protagonist’s love interest in that text is a Berliner called Lore Schröder. The substance of the book, including its treatment of romantic love, is melancholic. Its subtitles convey how precious life is – “Part 1: Fugacious Nature of Life and Time,” “Part 11: Fugacity of Pleasure, Fragility of Beauty,” and “Part 111: Injuries of Time and Nature.” Even so, treated as a discrete work, the blurred depiction of a woman in Berlin in Blind Man’s Bluff hints at its attitude toward time, life, imagination, and mortality. Looking to Higgins’s other work can be a useful exercise in understanding the efficacy of images in Blind Man’s Bluff. He cogently articulates the expressive properties of photography throughout Balcony of Europe, as when, for instance, the narrator describes a photograph of his father: My father posed in twill riding breeches and bowler hat at least two sizes too small for him, holding a couple of leashed black greyhounds with lolling tongues, and behind him, blending with the masonry, something or someone must have moved as the shutter clicked, leaving an image blurred and undefined. Fading as the photographs of those who die and are said to fade. Only fadograph. Yestern scene. (33) The “something or someone” in the background creates and embodies an indistinctive space within the frame. Of course, the cause of this visual effect is known to be technical: the movement of this unknown entity had occurred at the same time as the “shutter clicked.” Yet the “blurred and undefined” end result is interpreted figuratively, like the narrator’s consciousness of death and its legacy. The living’s memories of “those who die” may be prone to unsureness. “Fading as the photographs of those who die and are said to fade”: an apprehension of the departed through the lens of ongoing grief happens gradually. The engagement with 353

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death here, which occurs in explicit association with the out-of-focus photograph, also incorporates received wisdom through the utterance of the anecdotal “are said to fade.” Alluding to James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake (1939) – “Only fadograph. Yestern scene” – embeds yet more artistically self-conscious melancholia into the meditation on photography, mortality, and mourning. Joyce’s original reads: “Only a fadograph of a yestern scene” (Joyce 7). Higgins’s fragmentation of the sentence arguably inflects the allusion with the narrator’s own musings on the subject matter (as though he has absorbed Joyce’s sentiment and been arrested by its poignancy), particularly as it relates to his father depicted in his “twill riding breeches” in the photograph under observation. A sketch of Joyce, adorned in his classic tie, spectacles, and hat, accompanies the chapter entitled “Jesuit Casuistry.” In that chapter, Higgins recounts his father asking him “What do the J’s make of James Joyce?” (Blind 17). It is noted that “he did not appear in the Collegium of past alumni. ‘We’re not proud of him,’ told all” (17). The author claims to have “left Clongowes Wood College ignorant of the difference between Lord Haw-Haw and James Joyce” (17). After leaving school, Higgins shaped his own curriculum as an autodidact. A correspondence with the Trinity College Dublin academic Arland Ussher allowed him to discuss literature, philosophy, and creative writing. Higgins’s letters from the 1950s, before his first book publication, illuminate his attitudes toward literature and emotionality. In 1958, he traces his sentiments about Joyce’s collection of short stories, Dubliners (1914). “The stories,” he writes, are “sighs; and in any series of sighs there is always a final sigh; and the first sigh after the final sigh is the series beginning again – Dubliners” (Higgins, “TCD MS 903141/1480”). Here we get the impression of repetition and renewal in Joyce’s literary treatment of death. Higgins observes how death is invoked in the first story of Dubliners (“The Sisters”); he notices how it resonates throughout the collection, until the final story, “The Dead,” before “beginning again” (“TCD MS 9031-41/1480”). Blind Man’s Bluff relies on a similar circularity. “Flood and Fire,” the opening chapter of Blind Man’s Bluff, plays with the theme of familiarity from a retrospective point of view, when the familiar is symbolic instead of tangible: “nothing was ever as familiar as the mile-long road from our front gate (two lodges, seventytwo acres, grazing for horses or cows) to the village a mile off ” (3). Facing the page of text, and also appearing on its left-hand side, is a reproduction of a photograph of a baby in a pram with a doll, with a stand of trees in the background. The nature of the reproduction makes the photograph look slightly out of focus. Once more, this may affect the sense of time in the accompanying textual account. Blurred imagery, in Groom’s analysis, “marks a re-organisation of sequential time, with the distinct registers ‘before’ and ‘after’ opening out into each other” (244). The notion of “temporal disorder in the image,” as it relates to the photograph of Higgins as an infant in his pram, is pertinent to a reading of Blind Man’s Bluff as a pre-death book. A reference to the collision of the end of life and infancy is embedded in the core theme of familiarity. The author recounts his “being pushed in my black-hooded pram, that most funeral looking thing, into the village and found water up to the approaches of Marlay Abbey, then occupied by nuns” (Blind 3). Danger enters Blind Man’s Bluff at once. The familiar is compromised, as “[this] was a day of prodigious happenings, never to be repeated. Nothing predictable was to be expected. It was to become a time of stupendous occasions. First the flood, then the death of the postman and old Jem Brady” (4). Springfield House, where it appears in Higgins’s publications, is associated with loss and death. He wrote that “[his] first novel, Langrishe, Go Down, was about the death of a house and the break-up of a family” (Bestiary 459). He was changed by loss:

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Well, one can bear the loss of a father, but what unmitigated anguish is the loss of a home! You have only the one home, the one you were born in; but the break-up of the family means that you have lost it forever. (458) A sense of the inanimate possessing agency is present in Blind Man’s Bluff, too. The reproductions of the photographs of his childhood in Kildare may be shown as attempts to mitigate the feeling of inexorable loss. The image following the one of the author in a pram is reproduced on the page three times. It shows Higgins and one of his brothers, at around nursery-school and primary-school ages, sitting with their mother on the steps of a porch. As mentioned in this essay’s introduction, the image is uncaptioned, but by cross-referencing it with the captioned pictures of Donkey’s Years: Memories of a Life as Story Told (1995), for example, we can ascertain who the figures in the frame are. The building looks like Springfield House. The repeated scanning of the image may help to produce a destabilization of timeframes in a way that builds on the aforementioned aesthetic effect of the blur.

Inner Vision and Familiar Forms Seeing less vividly than before enables a turn to inward experiences for Higgins. This, though it can be frightening, can be interpreted as an aesthetic stimulus for him. Principally, the author expresses his terror at his diminishing ability to see what is around him. His experience of blindness is prefigured by a negative framing device wherein the sense of hearing exists in confinement: “SOMEWHERE JUST OUT OF SIGHT THE SAVAGES WERE HOWLING. I wrote that before my eyesight began to go and it is in the nature of a prophetic preliminary for what follows” (Blind 59). He hints at destiny with retrospective knowledge of his medical issues that affect his eyesight. Mark Paterson’s article “Blindness, Empathy, and ‘Feeling Seeing’: Literary and Insider Accounts of Blind Experience” aims to “challenge the investments by the sighted in what the blind and vision impaired ‘see’ and supposedly ‘feel’” (97). Paterson emphasizes “introspective means (specere being Latin for ‘looking,’ or ‘to look at,’ implying inner vision)” (96). Arguably, parts of Blind Man’s Bluff, particularly those pertaining to blindness, read as phenomenological self-studies. Higgins becomes introspective about his life and writing late in his life. This turn to an inward view in late life works as an intensive and condensed retrospective of his own memoirs. The final paragraph of Blind Man’s Bluff speaks of the disappearing contours of the external world. Its first section reads: “If I stand at the morning door a mist obscures both ends of Higher Street. Some days it intensifies, becomes murk, out of which a figure may emerge. I can’t tell male from female, the unknown from the known” (55). As mentioned in this essay’s introduction, Higgins, since the beginning of his writing career, honed his visual literacy through his study of art and art history and by his friendship with Collins. Visual literacy, the ability to describe an object under scrutiny in such close-up and abstract terms as tactility and framing, is a form of intellectual thinking, part of a refined cognitive process. Higgins works with absences of detail when his visual literacy becomes compromised. His writing about the onset of blindness, though it is a disorientating and anxiety-inducing experience, does not represent an aesthetic deficit. Higgins is writing within a literary tradition. As Mark Paterson suggests: “This pathetic moment is identified as a recurring trope throughout Western literature, from Homer to Helen Keller, via Sophocles, Cicero, Milton and the so-called ‘Blind Traveller,’ James Holman” (95). First-person accounts of the blind subject, Paterson reminds us, “proliferated throughout the twentieth century” (97). Furthermore, Higgins’s formlessness can be associated with “deathwriting,” in a tradition with authors he admired such as Franz Kafka, Emily Dickinson, and Beckett. 355

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Deathwriting’s “aesthetic embrace of death” exhibits an “obsessive tracing of a failed distinction between the visible and invisible, between blindness and sight” (Boxall 197). An articulation of gradual sightlessness encapsulated by descriptions of “mist” and “murk” becomes part of Higgins’s creative process and such descriptions serve to situate his late-life writing in a literary heritage of confessional writing. A sense of temporal disorientation is integral to his textual appropriations of the visually altered experience: “The past comes closer and the present disappears. Time itself goes awry. Some days go missing. The hours are no longer consecutive, evening or morning […] morning and evening merge” (Blind 55). As vision becomes less distinct, so too do robust demarcations of time. The present, feeling intangible, prompts him to retreat to the domain of memories. Such a disruption of clock time, accompanied by a vagueness of sight, exists elsewhere in Higgins’s body of work. Likewise, the invocation of the past appears through formlessness. In Helsingør Station & Other Departures (1989), for instance, there is an explicit recognition that form must render the transformation of visual phenomena, even when both appear unstable: I tell you a thing. I could tell it otherwise. A few pictures emerge into the light from the shadows within me. I consider them. Quite often they fail to please me. I call them ‘pictures’ but you, kind readers, suffering from an ideal insomnia, must know otherwise. What I mean to convey is: movements from the past. (44) The sense of internal impressions existing in restless array “within” Higgins’s consciousness suggests a resistance to any summoning of quick or brilliant imagery. “A few pictures emerge into the light from the shadows within me”: lightness depends on its contrary as it emerges from a darker space, and nothing is rushed. Higgins’s prose concerns aesthetic processes on a meta level. The invocation of imagery or visual phenomena is embroiled in the workings of memory, yet the metaphor of “pictures” is de-emphasized. Descriptions of near-sightlessness become a guiding aesthetic principle of parts of Blind Man’s Bluff, but the play with formlessness is a cohesive part of Higgins’s rendering of how memory may appear. “Compass Hill,” a chapter that refers to Berlin, may be associated loosely with the book’s first visual image due to the shared locale. The chapter discusses the cases of two individuals who died by suicide in Higgins’s last residence of Kinsale, County Cork, before moving to a personal account of how the author, “plunged in deep despair,” twice “attempted suicide” (Blind 25). Perhaps the prominence of suicidality as a theme, as it emerges in Blind Man’s Bluff, will alter some readers’ relationship with the book’s opening reproduction of a photograph set in Berlin. The photograph may come to be seen as representing a time of partial despair for the author. Higgins summarizes his first suicide account: Once in Berlin, overlooking Schlachtensee lake, where an RAF bomber was shot down and not recovered to this day, despite the best efforts of French divers: half bottle of vodka to anaesthetize me, and intended to slash my ankles, but drank the vodka and went home. (25) The anecdote of the uncovered remains of the British military operation evokes the aftermath of violence at the site. The author then introduces an ambivalent tone by referring to how the alcohol, intended to dull his senses before the fatal act, may have given him time to choose to abandon his plan. Despite the brisk treatment of the alternative decision, of how he “drank the vodka and went home,” the knowledge that the event was pre-planned nonetheless imbues the book with a haunting quality. However subtly, the preliminary photograph taken in Berlin 356

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operates as a mute interlocutor in this deathly aspect of the book. The vagueness of this first reproduction of the photograph gains new interpretive pliancy when offset with the textual account of Berlin: it arguably foreshadows how life can be apprehended in indistinctive ways as a reaction against its innate intensity. The chapter entitled “The Suicide of Old Jem Brady” reflects on the author’s loss of innocence as he learns of a suicide in his community. The site of death is relayed in these terms: “My young brother and I cycling to school flew past the death quarry, a bluish gas hovered over the last resting place of the good farmer, much mourned and long remembered. Thus ended childhood” (Blind 14–15). Some readers may imagine the kinetic action of the young boys on their bicycles as they “flew past the death quarry” and contrast the image in motion with the eeriness of the death site. An aesthetic of formlessness is deployed for the image of Higgins and his brother. Their vitality brings about this effect. In contrast, the formlessness of “a bluish gas” as it “hovered over the last resting place of the beloved farmer” may seem derived from a scene of entropy. Such contrasting modes of visual vagueness run through Blind Man’s Bluff. Here, the device of formlessness relates to the opposition between life and death. The polarities of childhood innocence and the darkness of suffering and self-destruction are made explicit too. A carefree existence cannot be recovered once the young Higgins is made aware of the fact of suicide. The neighbor is apparently “much mourned and long remembered” by all. The chapter titled “At the Psychiatric Ward” conveys the complexity of suicidality. It suggests that suicide can be a contradictory act, or a gesture, that forms part of an aversion to death. In it, the author recounts how he was mislabeled as “the suicide type” by a psychiatrist (“Head Guru Dr. Hannigan”) during an “interview” as part of his inpatient admittance to a mental health ward (Blind 33). He issues a rebuttal, scorning the legitimacy of such an essential trait of being. He tells the consultant psychiatrist, “You are a very stupid woman. There is no such type” (33). With the italicization of “type,” derision seems to be cast on the lack of humanity in such a shorthand classification. Suicide, as he explains, may be an anxious reaction to insufferable sicknesses and a fear of the natural dying process. Speaking from personal experience and with empathy, he tells Dr. Hannigan that “two of my best friends, threatened with cancer, topped themselves and neither were the suicide type” (33). Existential quandaries like this are peppered throughout Blind Man’s Bluff, with Higgins musing about the conditions he and his loved ones must negotiate when facing brutal circumstances. A sense of psychic isolationism is enhanced when Higgins moves from remarks on the specific codes of conduct within the mental health facility to a general consideration of despair. He writes: You must never ask – When can I leave? The doctors do not like this question; it is for them to decide. What are the saddest words in the language? Punishment, Pleading, Homelessness, leaving aside all manner of illness, and finally, Death! (35) 357

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Plausibly, the final, exclamatory “Death!” forms the bedrock of the other “saddest words.” Death anxiety is the root of fears about notions of “punishment,” “pleading,” “homelessness,” and “illness.” Contextually, the backdrop of the psychiatric service bolsters the impression that death inheres in a multitude of fears about shame and social ostracism. Irvin Yalom, an existential psychotherapist, assumes the thesis that a terror of death underpins many other anxieties in his bestselling book Staring at the Sun: Overcoming the Dread of Death (2008). Yalom’s statement – “dying not only separates you from others but also exposes you to a second, even more frightening form of loneliness: separation from the world itself” (119) – complements Higgins’s index of sorrowful words and his ultimate aim to verbalize his anxiety. Moreover, each of these words simultaneously relates to the effects of blindness. Yalom relates an interaction with a patient consumed by an unnamable “menace” about death anxiety, and how he (paraphrasing Spinoza) tries to reassure her that it “is simply that every living creature wishes to persist in its own being” (128). This standpoint, while it may be considered groundbreaking in pockets of the psychoanalytic community or for readers of the self-help genre, may be considered facile from an arts and humanities perspective. Blind Man’s Bluff does exhibit such a fundamental confrontation with death anxiety. Yet the prism of gradual sightlessness, as a challenge to negotiate late in life, distinguishes Higgins’s publication as a pre-death book. Blindness intensifies the sense of oncoming isolation. Metaphorical and actual sightlessness accompany the confrontation with death. While the book can be read as an artefact of Higgin’s deteriorating sight, his commentary on blindness happens in tandem with a reflection on his childhood. The past is brought to the forefront of his mind. The chapter “Road Kill” describes an early childhood encounter with death: “a black bird fell dead alongside the pram, gazed at with wonder by my brother, aged two, who commented ‘Finished,’ the first word he ever uttered, acknowledging with wonder the world he found himself in” (11–12). A supernatural idea of the restless dead returning complicates Higgins’s brother’s declaration on the finality of death: “Nurse said it was the ghost of the dead postman. Such superstition was rife down our way. Death was always near in Celbridge” (12). A regression to childhood in memories shows how death has always figured in his life. Higgins’s Langrishe, Go Down, which is set in his hometown, is part of a “distinctive brand of the macabre in contemporary Irish fiction” (Wondrich 150). Similarly, a familiarity with death is inscribed in the passages about the author’s hometown of County Kildare in Blind Man’s Bluff, as though he is claiming confrontation with death as a fundamental part of his upbringing. Ideas of morbid humor and articulations of solitary mental suffering as part of an Irish literary tradition are woven into Higgins’s last publication. Blind Man’s Bluff claims that “Blind men are hard to find, rare as hares, seldom-seen loners” (54). Blindness creates the conditions for a retreat to the solitary domain of the imagination: “It’s like travelling through space and time, a magic carpet. I ruminate as Joyce did before me. The shattering daylight of no thought vanishes” (54–55). Higgins recognizes that his transformation into “an indoor person” has a literary precedent: explicitly, a Joycean one (54–55). Blind Man’s Bluff, as well as being an exegesis on sightlessness, responds to an Irish literary tradition of death writing.

Conclusion Do the images printed in the book match Higgins’s inner world later in his life, when he is managing impending blindness? Reader-spectators may discern how the indistinct forms of some of the images in Blind Man’s Bluff relate to a disruption of linear conceptions of time and a disruption of spatial arrangements; these are pertinent themes (and formal features). The author 358

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speaks of the form of his last book as it relates to his experience of old age (with its attendant recollections of his life story): “So I may call this Blind Man’s Bluff, so much of it is hallucination, a walking dream” (51). In addition to this dark comedy of inserting pictures in a book composed by an author who can no longer see well, the blurred photographs and uncaptioned pictures suggest a necessity to cultivate an inner vision and a familiarity with self in later life, in the face of psychic disorientation. The subject of blindness alters the form of Blind Man’s Bluff. While much of the content will be familiar to those who have read some of his fiction, nonfiction, and/or memoirs, the brevity of the fragmentary chapters is formally distinct from his other works. The density of the book’s visual images distinguishes it from the device of ekphrasis. Ekphrasis is based on the premise of writing about images, without images. Since antiquity, it has been recognized as a rhetorical device to emulate the qualities of other art forms. As the Roman poet Horace suggested, “a poem is like a picture” (Kilpatrick 80). In his autobiographical writing, Higgins tries to find an artistic form to represent death. Playing with ideas of text-image relationships, he states: “Death is a silent picture, a dream of the eye; only such vanishing shapes as the mirage throws” (Whole Hog 132). The aphorism is repeated from his earlier, 1971, publication Images of Africa: Diary (1956–60) (23). Formlessness, encompassing restless shapes as well as dream imagery, expresses absence, but also a strange presence throughout Higgins’s career. A bereft feeling becomes a part of life in Higgins’s estimation: “Thinking of dead friends is the price we pay for our rest” (Whole Hog 400). Blind Man’s Bluff, with the presence of actual images, departs from the principle of traditional ekphrasis. The images in this context, combined with the brevity of the book, summon a final comment on the enigma of memory in late life.

Works Cited Banville, John. “Colony of Expatriates.” Hibernia, 6 Oct. 1972, p. 18. Boxall, Peter. “Blind Seeing: Deathwriting from Dickinson to the Contemporary.” New Formations: A Journal of Culture, Theory, Politics, nos. 89–90, Jan. 2016, pp. 192–211. Groom, Amelia. “‘Objects Moving Are Not Impressed’: Reading into the Blur.” Time in the History of Art Temporality, Chronology and Anachrony, edited by Keith Moxey and Dan Karlholm. Routledge, 2018, pp. 240–248. Haverty, Anne. “The Saturday Interview: Aidan Higgins.” The Irish Times, 2 July 1983, p. 14. Higgins, Aidan. Langrishe, Go Down. Calder & Boyars, 1966. Higgins, Aidan. Balcony of Europe. Calder & Boyars, 1972. Higgins, Aidan. A Bestiary. Dalkey Archive Press, 2004. Higgins, Aidan. Bornholm Night-Ferry. 1983. Dalkey Archive Press, 2006. Higgins, Aidan. Blind Man’s Bluff. Dalkey Archive Press, 2012. Higgins, Aidan. Helsingør Station & Other Departures: Fictions & Autobiographies 1956-1989. Secker & Warburg, 1989. Higgins, Aidan. Images of Africa: Diary (1956-60). Calder & Boyars, 1971. Higgins, Aidan. “‘Paddy’ – An Appreciation.” Patrick Collins, by Frances Ruane. Chomhairle Ealaion/The Arts Council, 1982, pp. 9–13. Higgins, Aidan. “TCD MS 9031-41/1480.” Letter. Old Library, Trinity College Dublin, 16 Jan. 1958. The Manuscripts and Archives Research Library. Higgins, Aidan. The Whole Hog: A Sequel to Donkey’s Years and Dog Days. Martin Secker & Warburg, 2000. Joyce, James. Finnegans Wake. Faber & Faber, 1939. Kilpatrick, Ross S. The Poetry of Criticism: Horace Epistles II and the Ars Poetica. U of Alberta P, 1990. Murphy, Neil. “Balcony of Europe 2010: An Afterword.” Balcony of Europe, by Aidan Higgins, edited by Neil Murphy. Dalkey Archive Press, 2010, pp. 415–424. Murphy, Neil. “Introduction.” Aidan Higgins: The Fragility of Form, edited by Neil Murphy. Dalkey Archive Press, 2010, pp. 12–19.

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33 AUTOTHANATOGRAPHY AND CONTEMPORARY POETRY Ivan Callus

In a fine if extravagant moment in his essay-cum-memoir, “Circumfession,” Jacques Derrida writes of autobiothanatoheterography. Nestled in this polymorphemic neologism lies the trenchancy of truism. Here, in a one-word paradox that is both excessive and economic, breathes the consciousness and articulation of life’s circumstancing. The word compresses the realization that giving an account of oneself (to cite a title of Judith Butler’s), whether to oneself or others, is ineluctably a relating of being-toward-death and of alterities within and without. Otherness comes to be sensed both as the horizon that cannot be experienced – “the undiscovered country from whose bourn/No traveller returns,” as Hamlet has it (3.1.78–79) – and as the estrangement to oneself that makes Rimbaud’s line, “Je est un autre,” everyone’s. So far, so commonplace. The idea that we are strangers to ourselves who are born to die, that we are dying even in deepest vitality, that there will be disjunction between the mind’s apprehending of self and of alterities with which it must enter into relation … all this is a staple of homespun philosophy and of the readiest quotations. The thought therefore arises that if there are unsettling undertones to “autobiothanatoheterography” it is from that final morpheme, “-graphy,” that they mostly derive. Conventionally, that last morpheme denotes writing. In the context of the deconstructive thought motivating the neologism, however, there is much more to underwrite “-graphy.” It is not within this essay’s scope to review the Derridean re-lexicalization of écriture or his extending of “the structure of writing to the grammatological opening” (Spivak lxxx). Nor is there the opportunity to rehearse how Derrida’s attention to the autobiothanatoheterographical relation connects with his deconstructive work on “metaphysics in its most modern, critical, and vigilant form: Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology” (Derrida, Positions 5), which he consistently returned to across his writings. But it would be important to recall the remarkable fortieth section that contains the reference to autobiothanatoheterography in “Circumfession” and the way in which that section starts: “Commotion of writing […]” (210). The previous section had spoken of “knowing in advance the nonknowledge into which the imminent but unpredictable […] death of my mother, Sultana Esther Georgette Safar Derrida, would come to sculpt the writing from the outside, give it its form and rhythm from an incalculable interruption,” such that “never will any of my texts have depended in its most essential inside on such a cutting, accidental and contingent outside” (206–7). The “cutting” that comes to define life, experience, thought, and finitude in the particular autobiothanatoheterographical context 361

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Derrida has in view is then taken up in the long sentence headed by “Commotion of writing.” It brings together motifs of confession (“seeing the other confess and thereby you, yourself, confess yourself, admit yourself”); familial and other affiliations, both recognized and not (“always less recognizable in my family than in my country, in my country than in Europe, in Europe than anywhere else”); but also some crucial and revealing wordplay put[ting] Ça to work, “my” circumcision, enormous narcissistic monument with ceci, ci becoming the abbreviation, ciseaux, scie, si (if ), si (but yes, no not no), s’il, cil […] put to work ça, ci, Sassi the Jewish singer who used to haunt all the religious festivals in Algiers, the narcissistic monument of my last child, the one I will not have had, the daughter, c’est s’il […] (210–13; some italicization in the original altered here) And thereupon comes the reference to “the autobiothanatoheterographical opus,” which develops reflection elsewhere on how “the fort:da [in Freud’s “Beyond the Pleasure Principle] leads autobiographical specularity into an autothanatography that is in advance expropriated into heterography” (The Post Card 333). In “Circumfession” it is with the further adjectival morpheme, “-al,” that the idea of autobiothanatoheterography is in fact encountered. What the opus involves is “this ci, the ‘my’ circumcision’, […] the only confidence that has ever interested me” (213). This figures. Autobiothanatoheterography can be nothing if not intimate, and thus is borne the cut and the mark, the inscription and the confession, the memory and mourning that bring life, death, otherness, time, and writing into complex relation. Within Derrida’s corpus the relation is traceable all the poignant way up to Learning to Live Finally. This was “the last interview” that Derrida gave in August 2004 in Le Monde, to Jean Birnbaum, before succumbing to pancreatic cancer two months later. He speaks there, when “[t]he time of the reprieve is rapidly running out” (25), of how “Learning to live should mean learning to die, […]. That’s been the old philosophical injunction since Plato: to philosophize is to learn to die. I believe in this truth without being able to resign myself to it. And less and less so” (24). Doubtless all of this is powerful, repaying attention and critique. But why should a chapter like this, on poetry and death, start with these Derridean intertexts? The rationale does require explanation – and defining and contextualizing moves. Specifically, two. Firstly, it is curious that “autobiothanatoheterography,” for all its potential, is not a term or a concept exerting marked influence in broader critical commentary. This is borne out by the routine searches in the routine resources. In this it differs from two other terms featured in Derrida’s reflections on mourning, death, enunciation, writing, and their relations: “hauntology” and “spectropoetics,” both of which are key in Specters of Marx. Perhaps the word is simply too long, too baroque. The situation is in fact a little different with “autothanatography,” used, as quoted above, in The Post Card. Yet this construction is itself challenging. Perhaps it is even more counterintuitive than Derrida’s longer neologism. This is because, given that “thanatography” is defined by the OED Online as “an account of a person’s death,” then “autothanatography” must be the narration of one’s own death. Such an account, tantamount to a phenomenology of death, can only be an autoreferential relation of dying, death not being experientially relatable or narratable. This distinction between death and dying is an important foundation of the argument of “Demeure,” the commentary Derrida wrote about Maurice Blanchot’s réçit “The Instant of My Death” in which the unnamed protagonist (“I remember a young man […]”), reprieved in the last moment of execution by firing squad and now living and writing after the survival, is “prevented from dying by death itself” (3), and experiences “a feeling of extraordinary lightness, a sort of beatitude (nothing happy, however) – sovereign elation” (5). This comes to seem, not illogically, as “[t]he encounter of death with 362

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death” (5) […] “[a]s if the death outside of him could only henceforth collide with the death in him” (9). The upshot is the sense of “the instant of my death henceforth always in abeyance” (11). This abeyance – death’s demourance (“Demeure,” passim) – is the imminence-immanence where autothanatography would be written from. There is, however, another. A form of death-inflected demourance is also encountered in terminal illness, in the autothanatographical writing from that space exemplified by Learning to Live Finally, but also by the affecting reflexive portrayals by the computer scientist Randy Pausch and the writer, illustrator, and art critic Tom Lubbock in, respectively, The Last Lecture and Until Further Notice I Am Alive. What makes such accounts particularly poignant is their personalization in the impact of first-person narration. Third-person accounts of observed death can be affecting too, certainly: the account of Marion Coutts, Lubbock’s wife, in The Iceberg very definitely is, and there are poignancies too in, for instance, Simon Critchley’s The Book of Dead Philosophers, “a book about how philosophers die,” or in Beckett’s Dying Words, Christopher Ricks’s study of language-before-death in the dramatist’s plays and prose. Witnessing to another’s death does not, however, convey the same inhabited and proprioceptive immediacy of dying’s record as the autothanatographical does. That point about the proprioceptive recalls a perspicuity-challenging form of autothanatography. Necessarily fictive rather than diaristic or memoiristic, it involves writing from beyond the grave by a dead narrator. Chateaubriand’s Mémoires d’outre tombe teases the possibility without quite textualizing the conceit. Edgar Allan Poe, however, goes further in “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar.” When the character of M. Valdemar intones toward the end of the story, “I say to you that I am dead!”, the next action is his instant decomposition into “a nearly liquid mass of loathsome – of detestable putrescence” (103). It could not be otherwise, since what is grammatically configurable in Valdemar’s utterance is not sustainable in any thinkable order of verisimilitude. Physics, metaphysics, biochemistry, deictics, semantics are all confounded by it. Language and body must cease there, break up, end. So it is perhaps understandable that the trope of the dead narrator is given to authothanatophony – as happens with, for instance, Valdemar himself, or Orpheus, or Hamlet’s father’s ghost, or the voiceover by the dead character of Joe Gills in Sunset Boulevard or that of Mary Alice Young, also dead, in the TV series Desperate Housewives. Perhaps this is because autothanatography comes up even more elementally against the phonē/gram binary, the primacy of speech over writing deconstructed in Derrida’s early work. Questions and (im)plausibilities turning on autothanatography’s inscribing, or its platforms, somehow upset the traditions of the hauntological and spectropoetics more than the procession of autothanatophonic ghosts and otherworldy beings in literature. One case in point is “As I lay dying …”: both Homer’s Agamemnon and William Faulkner’s Addie Bundren, in effect, utter this phrase, but neither writes it. That would be “commotion of writing,” indeed: commotion of grammatology, hauntology, and spectropoetics enabling the autothanatographical. By contrast, the walking dead appear less of a challenge to the imagination than the writing dead. It is that “-graphy” morpheme, therefore, and its dalliance with extreme extensions of the autobiothanatoheterographical that loads the relation between language and sense almost unsustainably. Almost, rather than absolutely, because literature – the discourse in which it is possible to say everything, as Derrida never tired of affirming, including in “Circumfession” (210) – undertakes the loading. Hence, texts like Epitaph of a Small Winner by the Brazilian writer Machado de Assis, in which the narrator records, “I am a deceased writer not in the sense of one who has written and is now deceased, but in the sense of one who has died and is now writing” (5), or Susan Sontag’s reflection in Epitaph’s foreword on how such literature renders thinkable the impossibility of “[p]osthumous reminiscences […] written in the first person” (xi; see also Callus, “(Auto)Thanatography or AutoThanatology?”). 363

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This cues the second point. The intuition would be that autothanatographical texts remain aberrational, their incidence low. There are in fact a sufficient number of such works in literature and popular culture for a poetics, an analytics, of such writing to be constructible. Regard for the Other: Autothanatography in Rousseau, de Quincey, Baudelaire, and Wilde by E. S. Burt and “Je suis mort”: Essai sur la narration autothanatographique by Frédéric Weinmann are the undoubted points of reference here. In Burt, the emphasis is less on d’outre tombe imaginings than it is on how “the practice of autothanatography” (27) would be “the writing of the death of the subject,” on “the I as it faces its radical loss of self-identity” (6). Burt’s book offers close readings of such moments in the texts of the authors indicated in the subtitle, going not to “the wellknown death-scenes – say, Rousseau’s brush with death in the Second promenade – but rather to less-frequented places in the text where a language, in becoming enigmatic, reveals itself as the language of the other” (28). The consequence is that Regard for the Other focuses not on “the life signs of the subject” but rather on “the death signs” (28) – the reference here being to Philippe Lejeune’s Signes de vie. The achievement of Weinmann’s study, meanwhile, lies in its comprehensive overview of the play of the autothanatographical in literature, from antiquity to the present, but also, importantly, in critique. Consequently, Weinmann historicizes the autothanatographical as a topos not only within, say, “post-mortem fiction” or accounts of Holocaust survivors, but also as a recurrent concern for that generation of French poststructuralist work that takes in texts by the later Barthes, Blanchot, Derrida, and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, among others. In this respect, it accords with Christina Howells’s Mortal Subjects: Passions of the Soul in Late Twentieth-Century French Thought, which ends on the reflection that “[i]t is our very inability to be satisfied by either philosophy or literature that saves us from fixity, allows us to mourn the self-identity and presence that we cannot help but yearn for, and drives us to construct human subjectivity in the image we would wish for it: mortal, finite, passionate, and always incomplete” (227). For its part, Weinmann’s book studies the autothanatographical as both a heightening and a refraction of that wish. It takes in reference to a remarkable array of writers and critics who can be shown to have had an abiding interest in the autothanatographical. Consequently, “Je suis mort” doubles up as a veritable genealogy of autothanatography as term, as conceit, as concept. It delivers some key insights, too. Among these are the Barthesian observation on the irony that the dead in fiction are as likely to refer to their continued vitality, “Je suis vivant!” (223; Barthes 435), as to their death; the suggestion that the incidence of autothanatographical motifs in literature has grown distinctly higher in recent years, contemporaneous with an explosion of fictions on life after death and the broader “recrudescence” of “autofiction” (243); the realization that the autothanatographical reflects the broader crise du sujet (247) and posthumanist epistemes (246). Additionally Weinmann’s study assimilates the stakes of phenomenology while vindicating the idea that there is no thought possible outside language, for it is an otherwise impossible statement like “I am dead” that potentiates the autothanatographical (248). Crucially for this chapter, however, there is one aspect to the autothanatographical that such studies leave under-commented. The tendency, it would seem, is for the autothanatographical to mediate itself through prose, in short stories, novels, the crypto-memoiristic, autofiction. Poetry is variedly present in Derrida’s, Barthes’s, Burt’s, or Weinmann’s work on the autothanatographical, but it never quite attains sustained or formative reference. Poets are in the minority among writers covered in study of the autothanatographical, reflecting the trend apparent also in broader, non-autothanatography-specific studies of the relation between literature and death, such as Victor Brombert’s Musings on Mortality, where the case-studies are provided by Leo Tolstoy, Thomas Mann, Franz Kafka, Virginia Woolf, Albert Camus, Giorgio Bassani, and Primo Levi. None of these, needless to say, is primarily a poet. What the rest of this 364

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essay does, to counter that trend, is to identify a quite particular category of the autothanatographical within contemporary poetry. This involves work by poets whose hold on life is precarious, typically because of terminal illness. Acutely aware of death’s approach, they devote an entire collection, quite probably their final book, to the poeticization of living – or dying – before death’s imminence-immanence. These collections therefore present a distinct category of that which Edward Said, in On Late Style, referred to as “[t]he relationship between bodily condition and aesthetic style” (3). What follows is not so much analysis or critique of such poetry as a call to remark it, possibly as a subgenre, by pausing on some lines within three collections that are taken here not quite as case-studies – the length of the chapter does not allow for extensive close reading – but as a basis on which to anticipate some directions for broader study on literature’s evolving ways with death and its representations. The collections, all published between 2017 and 2019, are C. K. Williams’s Falling Ill, Clive James’s Injury Time, and Michael O’Neill’s Crash and Burn. Their poignancy arises from the personalization of thanatos and the effect stemming from something to which Margaret Atwood has drawn attention. “Other art forms,” Atwood writes in Negotiating with the Dead, “can last and last – painting, sculpture, music – but they do not survive as voice” (158; emphasis in the original). Bringing lyrical voice to (auto)thanatography stands to reconfigure assumptions and settlements within various areas of literary criticism and theory. How and why this is so is considered later, after a brief look at the collections. All three texts bring a poeticized solidity of specification to terminality, sharpened by the evoked experience of constant tests and treatment and various medical interventions. Beset by routines of palliative care, Williams speaks of “this halfway death” (Falling Ill 34) with “selfcultivation swiped away and then/you know it might be this day/when you’ll be reduced to the outposts/of mind scattered through the corporeal/self and the facts of the flesh/you can no longer regulate or contain” (24). Clive James, for his part, can see the contrast in the photos he looks through, which “prove, beyond denying,/That once I was alive and not just dying” (Injury Time 81), though the awareness remains autothanatographical throughout: “It will be known to family and friends/That you, at last, are more dead than alive, With nothing left to say” (64) – and hence, “Let’s just say there’s a deadline and I met it” (82). In both collections, there are lines where individual death is projected onto broader experience. Williams, for instance, relaxes his focus from “the isolate provinces of time” (39) to depict “my voice/ perceiving that our planet is mortal and soon/will cry itself off some edge of non-being” (44). But the autobiothanatoheterographical reasserts itself. He speaks of the “now which makes me incidental to myself/and everything else” (54), instigating an auto-addressivity in which what there is to be said is that “you know what you’re doing now isn’t thinking/you’re just emptying yourself leaving only/enough of you to care if you might still exist” (56). The emptying is dissolution, resulting in “This absence within me but no longer mine” (13). James effects the same move of thinking death more generally. More ironic, he notes that “His own death, not the Earth’s, is the true fear/That motivates the doomsday fantasist:/There can be no world if he is not there” (47). And he plays back his personal disappearance to himself in terms of the non-future of his writing. His penultimate poem in the book, bearing the same title as the collection, anticipates that his poetic jottings in “this notebook/Will lie untouched, to show how long it took/Silence to do what it was bound to do” (83). Throughout, poetic exercise carries no delusion: “And finally a poem, too, must render/Obeisance to the dark where it can shine/[…] for no defender/Of this art, which I still hope to make mine,/Denies the overstock we’re buckling under” (75). The overstock is a concern, as it happens, in a different collection: John Updike’s Endpoint. Published posthumously in the year of Updike’s death, 2009, it contains the following lines in the title-poem: 365

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A life poured into words – apparent waste intended to preserve the thing consumed. For who, in the unthinkable future when I am dead, will read? The printed page was just a half-millennium’s brief wonder … (8) Autothanatography’s precariousness, then, is tied to writing’s technologies. But, as James (to return to him) understands, the instinct to persist nonetheless dies hard. “Get one more line to sing the way it ought” (39), he writes, even as “Existence wants us gone” (4). It is the way in which this poetry of the end, but perhaps poetry more generally, bids life and language goodbye – in yet more poetic language. This cues a reflection arising from another collection, Alice Oswald’s Falling Awake, reference to which is relevant before considering O’Neill’s Crash and Burn. The relevance springs from Oswald’s exploration of the experience of the precarity of the autothanatographical relation, the valedictory moment of poetic language, in two reimagined and vital figures of classical mythology. Orpheus himself – he who was poetry and music and who could charm the inanimate – must bid language farewell. In “Severed Head Floating Downriver,” a poem set after the dismemberment by the Maenads, Orpheus’s head is portrayed “floating between the speechless reeds” (Falling Awake 7), becoming – speaking – the elements as “the water wears my mask” in the discovery that “this is how the wind works hard at thinking/this is what speaks when no one speaks” (6, 10). The head of Orpheus, of the supremest music and poetry now without body or life, sings still in the myth. But not here. In autobiothanatoheterographical utterance confused about the limits of proper and other, it asks, “can you hear the severed head of Orpheus?” It answers itself, in paralysis, “no I feel nothing from the neck down” (9). Here is poetry’s desolation in a world without phone (“… when no one speaks …”) – or gram. And then, in the poem “Tithonus,” the title character – immortal like Tennyson’s equivalent yet ever aging to “the sound of everything/repeating” (n.pag.; this poem is, interestingly, unpaginated) – is aware of himself as “old unfinished not/yet gone here I go again.” Farewell, dying, become impossible, halting on the unhalted. Tithonus’ final words in the poem, set on their own page, are “may I stop please.” “And so he goes on” is the next (and last) poem in the collection, the print fading gradually in degrees of greyscale, all ending in “but never quite/but never quite/appearing” (81): apophainesthai, the poietic, receded and denied. Ahead and ever, the wordless. O’Neill, a fine Romanticist and author of other poetry collections before Crash and Burn (including Return of the Gift, which already contained a number of poems written in response to a cancer diagnosis), would have appreciated, one fancies, the autothanatographical lyricism of Oswald’s mythological characters. In a short piece, “The Poetic: Reflections on a Contradiction,” published in 2017, he had observed some defining qualities about the poetic, among them the “ghost of immemorial traditions invading the shallow present” (204). But also, “the poetic announces: ‘That was happiness; this is loss; then was intensity; now is irony and dejection.’ Always the poetic says in an undertone: ‘There was pain; here is the useless, possibly enduring compensation of words” (204). The sentiment shapes Crash and Burn, published posthumously in April 2019, four months after O’Neill’s death. If “the poetic catches us offguard, enhances the affective, yet questions sentimentality and pseudo-profundity” (“The Poetic” 205), then it is very much here in Crash and Burn, which replaces the twinkling observation of the earlier collections with unrelenting, unsparing testimony of the ravages of cancer and its treatment. The collection, in fact, is as much a pathography as an autothanatography. It is a poetic journal of illness that understands from the start “the hero’s 366

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aporia/(to be or not to be – nice to have a choice)” as an equivalent to “The rest is sickness” (12). Hamlet, whose protagonist cannot suppress autothanatographical musings, reverberates in Crash and Burn. And note that in his earlier consideration of the nature of the poetic, O’Neill might just as well have been speaking of both the Prince and the autothanatographical impulse: Without the personal voice, the personal inflection, the personal relationship with the language, what’s the point? The poetic demands of its devotees a commitment to the value of the personal, a fierce relish of the singular nature of self and others, an attachment to uniqueness’s DNA codes, specific memories, a readiness to breach conventions of tact and good manners, a truth-telling that may border on the exhibitionist, an authenticity that is nearly always going to hurt someone. (“The Poetic” 205) Tellingly, later in the same brief essay, O’Neill adds: “All Is in achieved poems are simultaneously first-person plurals. ‘It is We who are Hamlet’, says Hazlitt” (206). Which is why the lyrical in the autothanatographical, as in these collections, is as powerful as it is. All human death is there. Yet Crash and Burn, while having this emerge, also understands that if “All that is personal soon rots,” as Yeats, “the finest of lyric poets” (“The Poetic” 205) had it, then the lived, unsurvivable process of death’s unmaking of “the personal voice, the personal inflection, the personal relationship with language” can inform the poetic too. Consequently, the collection poeticizes how the personal can itself rot – “the malignant horror/at the core of my bodily self/the anti-soul consuming me” (Crash and Burn 57) – while still not losing the desire “to be/conscious, to exist/whatever the price,/not to have missed/whatever the future might realise itself as/a star that shines like cold fire/or an uninhabited house” (35; emphasis in the original). This sets up the contrast with a refrain elsewhere in the collection: “Can’t keep going on even if it means I’ll go” (82). Throughout Crash and Burn the pathos is quietly plangent (assuming this is not an oxymoron), particularly in the nine poems in the Coda, shadowed by the arrêt de mort of recurrence, as “cancer/my pal’s again choosing this time a changed abode/prognosis initially weeks rather than months” (101). No consoling clichés are resorted to. “Gone but not forgotten”: he reads this inscription on a park bench, but feels that “Gone and then forgotten” is how “my rewrite runs” (89). It all culminates in the final two poems, “Tenses” and “Hamlet” (him again), which capture the valediction of precarity itself. Unpunctuated, “Tenses” intones: “the tenses have not/quite ended not/ended not/quite not quite” (102). “Hamlet” addresses the “sweet prince,” its final lines (and the collection’s) these: Your bad dreams saved you, saved us with you too you looked from plot to life and dared to leap, or dared us to think we might leap or sleep or even dream, imagining ‘adieu’ to all that’s damped down on what’s gone before the fire, the ignorant, turbulent fire. (103) And so. And so, indeed: what is there left to be said, before these autothanatographies? The urge would be to say nothing. Alternatively, perhaps, to recall the last words in Beckett’s The Unnamable, “Where I am, I don’t know, I’ll never know, in the silence you don’t know, you must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on”; or, indeed, Ricks’s move at the start and end of Beckett’s Dying Words (1, 203), in the fall back to lines from Malone Dies: “Yes, there is no good pretending, it is hard to leave everything,” but also, “Nothing is more real than nothing.” It is hard 367

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to do anything more than observe that these are the same tensions on which the verse autothanatographies reviewed here lyrically turn. But to the extent that this book chapter must play its role as an academic exercise, an appendage on the consequences for critique might not be out of place. The following points are offered in consideration of the scope for the further reflection that these texts press upon the critical mind. One. The poetic autothanatographies observed here modulate literature’s representations of death in distinct and subtle ways. They invite criticism to rethink the established spaces and forms for death and its representations: the threnody, the dirge, certainly the elegiac and the (auto-)elegiac. They invite alertness to how that first morpheme, “auto-,” marks the distinctness from the form of the elegiac most familiarly associable with Milton’s “Lycidas,” Shelley’s “Adonais,” Tennyson’s “In Memoriam,” or, in contemporary poetry, Mary Riley’s Say Something Back, bearing a mother’s mourning for a dead son, or, entirely differently, Oswald’s Memorial, a poem to remember the unheralded dead in Homer’s poetry. They also connect with and potentiate further that line of criticism exemplified by Ruben Borg’s attention, in a recent volume, to “self-mourning,” which he powerfully studies in relation primarily to modernist novel and film, and which seems ripe for the accommodation also of contemporary poetry’s autothanatographical strains. Two. Autothanatographies can locate themselves in a space where thanatology, “the scientific study of death” and of “the effects of approaching death and of the terminally ill” (OED), and pathographies converge. Consequently they provide a keen lyrical counterpoint to studies of “the way we die now,” to quote a study by Seamus O’Mahony. If poetic autothanatographies are now more common than previously, as Weinmann suggests, it is because they reflect the encounter between poetic voice and extended, if heavily medicalized, life expectancy. Like Atul Gawande’s Being Mortal: Illness, Medicine, and What Matters in the End, O’Mahony’s study understands that “[m]odern acute hospitals make a good death increasingly difficult” (xii) and that “[d]eath cannot be sanitized, work-shopped or managed” (268). “We know the deal, we’re bodies” (Lubbock 13) – but we die harder now. There is an acutely lyrical understanding of this in work like Williams’s, James’s, or O’Neill’s. Three. The lyrical and the lyric, precisely. The recent publication of Jonathan Culler’s Theory of the Lyric has re-intensified critical interest in this area, and the particularity of the lyrical, autothanatographical voice turned on its own end – whether going gently or not into that good night – offers prompts for comparative work with studies already done in this line. Thus, for instance, the fine seventh chapter of Timothy Bahti’s Ends of the Lyric, on “[e]nd and [e]nding” and “lyric technique” in poetry by Wallace Stevens, serves to indicate just how much genealogical work there remains to be done before the singularity of poetic autothanatographies can be acknowledged. Four. Autothanatography forces revisitation of some quite monumental work within literary criticism and theory. The association within literary theory of the study of the lyric and prosopopoeia, the figure of rhetoric by which “an imaginary, absent, or dead person is represented as speaking or acting” (OED), is well known, not least in connection with the work of Paul de Man. Autothanatography, which articulates the prosopopoeic and the proprioceptive concurrently, cannot but impose a singular turn on such work now, in what is a further example of how its commitments, not least to poetry, compel revaluation of sundry assumptions and settlements within literary studies. Rereading Shelley’s unfinished “The Triumph of Life” and de Man’s essay, “Shelley Disfigured,” in this light, for instance, is bound to be productive. Five. The relation between self and subjectivity in autothanatography is a curious one. Already, E. S. Burt has shown in Regard for the Other how “writing about the self descends the I prematurely into the crypt; but through the writing of that crypt and its possibilities, it can 368

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speak for the project of the survival of subjectivity” (219). It must be presumed that there is a difference to this descent, to “the potential for the subject’s writing of its life to become an autothanatography, a writing of its death” (33), when it is mediated through poetry. “The secret without a content” that is on the horizon of every autothanatography of “the subject as it strategizes with its death” (10) comes to poetry’s casts, the traditions of criticism would be led to expect, with different apprehensibility and tonalities. Otherwise, how and why would poetry’s difference matter, if it cannot shape and express distinctively this most individual deferral of self and subjectivity, presence and absence, memory and trace? Precisely how poetic form forces different emphases on attentions to, say, the inaugural Derridean engagements with the autothanatographical therefore bears further study. Six. And hence to Derrida, he who would say, “I posthume as I breathe” (“Circumfession” 26). “I leave a piece of paper behind, I go away, I die: it is impossible to escape this structure, it is the unchanging form of my life,” he writes (Learning to Live Finally 32), but he does not consign that form to poetry’s – and when he does, in juvenilia, he disowns the result (see “A Madness Must Watch over Thinking” 342). Prose prevails. This recalls the following observation in “Che cos’è la poesia?”: “Without a subject: poem, perhaps, there is some, and perhaps it leaves itself, but I never write any. A poem, I never sign(s) it. The other signs” (237; emphasis in the original). In Derrida already then, the relation between poetry, the autothanatographical, the autobiothanatoheterographical, is fraught: non-privileging, it could be said. And so, when he writes of the autobiothanatoheterographical, as he also implicitly does in lines like the ones below, in which the poetic inheres (Michael O’Neill would recognize it there), it will not be in poetry, not when he has learned to live finally: I have always been interested in this theme of survival, the meaning of which is not to be added on to living and dying. It is originary: life is living on, life is survival [la vie est survie]. To survive in the usual sense of the term means to continue to live, but also to live after death. All the concepts that have helped me in my work, and notably that of the trace or the spectral, were related to this ‘surviving’ as a structural and rigorously originary dimension. It is not derived from either living or dying. No more than what I call ‘originary mourning’, that is, a mourning that does not wait for the so-called ‘actual’ death. (Learning to Live Finally 26; emphasis added on this final phrase) There would be more to say on mourning-as-living – or, better, one could read Derrida’s autothanatographical poetic prose instead. It’s all there. Seven (there were always going to be seven points, in reflection of the seven passions de la littérature contemplated by Derrida in “Demeure”). The time of writing coincides with the posthumous publication of Derrida’s seminar La vie la mort, which will doubtless again transform critical understanding of his work on life-and-death oppositionality, already in evidence in H. C. for Life but this time played back against readings not only of philosophy, but also of Georges Canguilhem’s epistemology of science and Francis Jacob’s work on molecular biology. The intent is to deconstruct the opposition between life and death. At that point where the opposition breaks down, what would there be but biothanatos? What would then remain to be determined is whether the “auto-,” the “hetero,” the “-graphy” might have their place, in poetry or elsewhere. The negative would be a further passion for literature. Not that literature’s ways with the autobiothanatoheterographical are spent. There were always going to be texts bringing together individual and collective death: this is the very definition of the anthropocentric end. The tradition of “Last Man” narratives, from Cousin de Grainville to Mary Shelley to Maurice Blanchot, is a prime – or rather ultimate – example. 369

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Apocalyptically autobiothanatographical and typically prose-bound, it is the ultimate in the relation of literature and death, in the relation by literature of death. One human left, before the posthuman. Meanwhile, and in conclusion, contemporary poetry ploughs that kind of line itself, not least in Jorie Graham’s Fast, a work of mourning and of quite heterogenous autobiothanatoheterography. The title poem, whose last line reads “I am not what I asked for” (19), suffices to show this. “Will we survive, I ask the bot,” to which the immediate one-word answer is, “No” (17). Added later, “Because this is as good as human gets” (19). What occurs, then, is that “Each epoch dreams the one to follow” (19). The critical work on poetic autothanatography/autobiothanatoheterography will have to go there too, in time – but not here, not just yet. There will be worlds and times and deaths enough for that.

Works Cited Atwood, Margaret. Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing. Cambridge UP, 2002. Bahti, Timothy. Ends of the Lyric: Direction and Consequence in Western Poetry. Johns Hopkins UP, 1996. Barthes, Roland. Oeuvres Complètes IV: Livres, Textes, Entretiens 1972–1976. Edited by Eric Marty. Éditions du Seuil, 2002. Blanchot, Maurice. “The Instant of My Death.” The Instant of My Death/Demeure: Fiction and Testimony, by Maurice Blanchot and Jacques Derrida, translated by Elizabeth Rottenberg. Stanford UP, 2000, pp. 1–9. Blanchot, Maurice. The Last Man, translated by Lydia Davis. Columbia UP, 1987. Borg, Ruben. Fantasies of Self-Mourning: Modernism, the Posthuman and the Finite. Brill, 2019. Brombert, Victor. Musings on Mortality: From Tolstoy to Primo Levi. U of Chicago P, 2013. Burt, E. S. Regard for the Other: Autothanatography in Rousseau, De Quincey, Baudelaire, and Wilde. Fordham UP, 2009. Butler, Judith. Giving an Account of Oneself. Fordham UP, 2005. Callus, Ivan. “(Auto)thanatography or (Auto)thanatology?: Mark C. Taylor, Simon Critchley, and the Writing of the Dead.” Forum for Modern Language Studies, vol. 41, no. 4, 2005, pp. 427–438. Chateaubriand, François-René, Vicomte de. Mémoires d’outre tombe. Edited by Maurice Levaillant. 2 vols, Flammarion, 1982. Cousin de Grainville, Jean-Baptiste Francois Xavier. The Last Man, translated by I. F. Clarke and M. Clarke. Wesleyan UP, 2003. Coutts, Marion. The Iceberg: A Memoir. Atlantic Books, 2014. Critchley, Simon. The Book of Dead Philosophers. Granta Books, 2008. Culler, Jonathan. Theory of the Lyric. Harvard UP, 2017. de Assis, Machado. Epitaph of a Small Winner, translated by W. L. Grossman. The Noonday Press, 1995. de Man, Paul. “Shelley Disfigured.” The Rhetoric of Romanticism. Columbia UP, 1984, pp. 93–123. Derrida, Jacques. “Che cos’è la poesia?,” translated by Peggy Kamuf. The Derrida Reader: Between the Blinds, edited by Peggy Kamuf. Columbia UP, 1991, pp. 221–237. Derrida, Jacques. “Circumfession,” translated by Geoffrey Bennington. Jacques Derrida, by Geoffrey Bennington and Jacques Derrida. U of Chicago P, pp. 3–315. Derrida, Jacques. “Demeure: Fiction and Testimony.” The Instant of My Death/Demeure: Fiction and Testimony, by Maurice Blanchot and Jacques Derrida, translated by Elizabeth Rottenberg. Stanford UP, 2000, pp. 13–103. Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology, translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. 40th anniversary ed. Johns Hopkins UP, 2016. Derrida, Jacques. H. C. for Life, That Is to Say, translated by Laurent Milesi and Stefan Herbrechter. Stanford UP, 2006. Derrida, Jacques. Learning to Live Finally: The Last Interview, translated by Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas. Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Derrida, Jacques. “A ‘Madness’ Must Watch Over Thinking,” translated by Peggy Kamuf. Points…: Interviews, 1974–1994, edited by Elisabeth Weber. Stanford UP, 1995, pp. 339–364. Derrida, Jacques. Positions, translated by Alan Bass. U of Chicago P, 1982. Derrida, Jacques. The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond, translated by Alan Bass. U of Chicago Press, 1987.

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Autothanatography and Contemporary Poetry Derrida, Jacques. Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, The Work of Mourning, & The New International, translated by Peggy Kamuf. Routledge, 1994. Derrida, Jacques. La vie la mort (Séminaire 1975–1976). Éditions du Seuil, 2019. Desperate Housewives. Season 1, Cherry Productions and Touchstone Television. ABC. 2004. Gawande, Atul. Being Mortal: Illness, Medicine, and What Matters in the End. Profile Books, 2014. Graham, Jorie. Fast. Carcanet, 2017. Howells, Christina. Mortal Subjects: Passions of the Soul in Late Twentieth-Century French Thought. Polity Press, 2011. James, Clive. Injury Time. Picador, 2017. Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe. Agonie terminée, agonie interminable, suivi de L’Émoi. Edited by Aristide Bianchi and Leonid Kharlamov. Galilée, 2011. Lejeune, Philippe. Signes de vie: Le pacte autobiographique 2. Éditions du Seuil, 2005. Lubbock, Tom. Until Further Notice I Am Alive. Granta Books, 2012. O’Mahony, Seamus. The Way We Die Now. Head of Zeus, 2016. O’Neill, Michael. Crash and Burn. Arc, 2019. O’Neill, Michael. “The Poetic: Brief Reflections on a Contradiction.” Counter Text, vol. 3, no. 2, 2017, pp. 204–206. O’Neill, Michael. Return of the Gift. Arc, 2018. Oswald, Alice. Falling Awake. Jonathan Cape, 2016. Oswald, Alice. Memorial: An Excavation of the Iliad. Faber and Faber, 2011. Pausch, Randy, with Jeffrey Zaslow. The Last Lecture. Hyperion, 2008. Poe, Edgar Allan. “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar.” The Complete Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe. Penguin, 1982, pp. 96–103. “prosopopoeia, n.” OED Online. Oxford UP, June 2020. www.oed.com/view/Entry/153015. Accessed 6 Aug 2020. Ricks, Christopher. Beckett’s Dying Words. Oxford UP, 1995. Riley, Mary. Say Something Back. Picador, 2016. Said, Edward W. On Late Style. Bloomsbury, 2006. Shakespeare, William. Hamlet. Edited by Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor. Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare, 2016. Shelley, Mary. The Last Man. Edited by Morton D. Paley. Oxford UP, 1998. Sontag, Susan. “Foreword.” Epitaph of a Small Winner, by Machado de Assis. The Noonday Press, 1995, ix–xx. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “Translator’s Preface.” Of Grammatology, by Jacques Derrida. Johns Hopkins UP, 2016, pp. ix–lxxxvii. Sunset Boulevard. Directed by Billy Wilder. Paramount Pictures, 1950. “thanatography, n.”; under “thanato-, comb. form.” OED Online. Oxford UP, June 2020. www.oed. com/view/Entry/200125. Accessed 6 Aug 2020. “thanatology, n.” OED Online. Oxford UP, June 2020. www.oed.com/view/Entry/200128. Accessed 6 Aug 2020. Updike, John. Endpoint and Other Poems. Alfred A. Knopf, 2009. Weinmann, Frédéric. “Je suis mort”: Essai sur la narration autothanatographique. Éditions du Seuil, 2018. Williams, C. K. Falling Ill. Bloodaxe Books, 2017.

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34 WHEN TIME STOPS Death and Autobiography in Contemporary Personal Narratives Rosalía Baena

Death and autobiography have been closely associated since the beginning of life-writing studies: Paul de Man’s seminal article “Autobiography as De-facement” refers to “restoration of mortality by autobiography” (930). Furthermore, different scholars have dealt with the idea of death as prompting “scriptotherapy,” that is, the need to write as part of the process of healing or consolation before imminent death. As Susanna Egan explains, the “ultimate, or foundational, relationship of life with death has always been important to autobiography” (12). In a similar line, Nancy K. Miller observes, “Every autobiography, we might say, is also an autothanatography” (12). Much recent autobiography deals in specific ways with terminal illness, the process of dying, and the facts of death: “Remarkable numbers of people living in the shadow of death have begun to speak out on issues that have, for a long time, been considered entirely private if not actually shameful” (Egan 195). In the wake of the memoir boom at the end of the twentieth century, life-writing genres that specifically deal with the experience of death are proliferating in a variety of forms – visual and verbal, digital and non-digital, etc. “Autothanatographies” – also called end-of-life or death memoirs – often function as counter-narratives in a Western culture of denial, a culture that focuses on material success and which often rejects considering death, illness, or aging as part of life. The recent proliferation of this genre (Egan 202; Rachman) deserves critical attention in order to reveal the rhetorical acts and different styles of representation these authors use as their actual dying unfolds before our eyes; as Egan points out, “autothanatographers are affecting public, medical, and political consciousness” (197). Indeed, these stories may help rethink widespread and clichéd assumptions about terminal illnesses and end-of-life choices. In this chapter, I provide an overview of this phenomenon, focusing on three outstanding examples of the genre: Paul Kalanithi’s When Breath Becomes Air (2016), Jenny Diski’s In Gratitude (2016), and Nina Riggs’s The Bright Hour (2017). If literature has always helped humans confront their dying nature – providing ways of approaching death and imagining it from different perspectives (Hakola and Kivistö vii) – personal narratives also show intimate and immediate perspectives on death and illness. In this context, end-of-life memoirs have a prominent role in helping both readers and writers to further understand the experience of dying and death. As narratives provide a historical, social, or cultural context to illnesses, they are able to show what dying with dignity means, and how it should include a wider emotional and relational framework than just the medical or the 372

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technological approach to it. For instance, when confronting a lethal diagnosis, patients often feel shame and betrayal. In this context, writing presents itself as “a countershame activity”: “by transforming private shame into public knowledge, we lessen the power that shame has over us” (Berman 287). These narratives give a public voice to the private face of illness cultures that deal more effectively with grief, anger, death, and loss (DeShazer 177). In doing so, they contribute to a much-needed social change in the negative perceptions of illness and end-of-life care. The term autothanatography was coined by scholar and autobiographer Nancy K. Miller, focusing on the relations to a dying parent (12), but it was Susanna Egan who first analyzed the genre in her 1999 seminal work, Mirror Talk.1 Egan uses Miller’s term to refer to “selflife-writing about subjective experiences of the process of dying,” which are different from life stories brought to a narrative conclusion or memoirs of the illnesses and deaths of other people (245, n. 1). I adopt Egan’s definition of the genre focusing on narratives on the authors’ time before their deaths, specifically between diagnoses of terminal illnesses until right before they die. As a relatively new genre, autothanatographies depart from illness memoirs in a number of ways. Structured through the rhythms imposed by diagnosis and prognosis, the certainty and the proximity of death make the perspective of these memoirs unique. Although the narration of the impact of diagnosis is common to every illness narrative, prognosis is deployed in a rather different way. Because there is no chance of survival, “living in prognosis” is a basic staple in these narratives. Prognosis thus calls for a story, and the author knows “it is time to begin the ending” (Belling 153). Catherine Belling explains how prognosis, as a kind of quantified uncertainty, could appear to be the antithesis of narrative, “and numbers – months, years, probabilities – statistics, with their reductive and deceptive clarity, can be ambiguous or inaccurate” (153). But if prognoses can be made “in the context of dialogue – and a narrative – about dying … in ongoing conversations about expecting death, this may be a first step in protecting the self from incoherence” (153). A narrative frame provides the necessary context to assume uncertainty and ambiguity in prognosis, thus making coherence possible in the author’s everyday life. As I demonstrate in the examples that follow, writers invariably find solace in their own narratives, as those writings reflect their meaning-making process when confronting their own deaths. In fact, autothanatographies seem to defy the assumption that “closure in autobiography is always fictive, arbitrary, premature” (Couser 69). In each of these memoirs, there is, somehow, a death foretold. Narrators are painfully and constantly aware of the close proximity of the moment when they will be silent, so by writing about these terrible moments, writers can defy the complete silence that soon awaits them. As Belling puts it, narrative reconstruction is needed then to bridge the discontinuity between their bodies’ extinction and the remaining of their voices through their memoirs (148). Autothanatographies characteristically imply some degree of collaboration, as “end-of-life memoirists take us close to their own deaths, but they do not describe active dying” (Berman 286). Death’s silence creeps in and someone else (relative, friend, or editor) finishes it off: “The patient-author … cannot tell the end of life in isolation. One more verbal act is essential to establishing narrative closure” (Belling 153). The recounting of their actual deaths is thus usually conveyed through epilogues or prologues. These paratexts powerfully guide the reading of autothanatographies as they provide the immediate vital context that surrounds the writers’ deaths. Readers may easily align themselves with the perspectives of partners or friends, thus creating a sense of completion of the authors’ mission. This collaboration is commonly celebrated by scholars and critics as a way to reinforce their roles as cultural and social mediators: “The increasing publication of end-of-life narratives that contain introductions or conclusions 373

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penned by friends and family constitutes an evolving memorial tradition that empowers readerviewers as empathic witnesses and provides communal spaces for mourning and remembering” (DeShazer 11). In this regard, the experience of reading an account of terminal illness also deserves critical analysis. As Tom Rachman puts it, “A memoir of dying is exceptionally wrenching because we know the end at the beginning, and so meet with an effortful, pulsing person who will soon be neither. Pages rarely tremble with such life as when expressing their author’s death.” Read as obituaries, they trigger emotional and ethical reactions in the reader, as they foreground both the suffering body in pain as well as the harsh confrontation with one’s mortality (Gygax, “Woundable” 39). Given this specific dynamic, readers may react in different ways. On the one hand, they may be put off by the story of someone’s dying: “readers may resist autothanatography or respond with voyeurism or horror” (DeShazer 175), considering it morbid to read about the actual and intimate act of approaching one’s death. On the other hand, the increasing number of end-of-life memoirs published recently suggests that there is a contemporary yearning to both write and read about death. Even if sometimes painful to read, these texts can be central in defining and asserting key connections between living and dying, which are absent in other public discourses on death and dying (Egan 206). In an era of increasing medical and technological power that seems to push for a never-ending life, these texts function as twenty-first-century mementos mori, which differ from classical ones in that they do not remind readers of their death. Rather, with their special focus on “illness, pain and imminent death as crucial to the processes of that life” (Egan 224), end-of-life memoirs contribute to demedicalizing terminal illnesses, to make the experience of dying more positive and meaningful. In a purely medical context, death is not presented as a natural process, but rather as a failure both for patients and doctors. As Egan explains, “In medical terms, each instant of death is postponable; death itself, the natural horizon for life, becomes a curable disease subject to daily manipulations” (204). Invariably, autothanatographers recount instances where they feel they are not being treated as a whole, but rather as objects of the medical gaze. To counterbalance a dehumanizing perspective, these accounts of dying struggle to recognize their own deaths in the face of medical and social taboos generated in part by the notion of terminal illness or death as failure. Their narratives resist technological and other interferences that blur their recognition of their own very personal death. As they make their accounts of dying meaningful, they help fight the notion of not surviving an illness as denigrating. The proliferation of discourses on fighting, battles, and survival – particularly in cancer narratives – has reinforced the medical paradigm, failing to acknowledge the implicit denigration of those who do not overcome illness. As Barbara Ehrenreich suggests in “Welcome to Cancerland,” personal narratives help counter-argue the “the mindless triumphalism of ‘survivorhood,’” as it “denigrates the dead and the dying. Did we who live ‘fight’ harder than those who have died? Can we claim to be ‘braver’, better people than the dead?” (53). In a similar vein, Mary DeShazer, in her study of breast cancer autothanatographies, finds that the genre provides a vital cultural counternarrative, “as women living with metastatic disease recount their embodied struggles and their fierce resolve to embrace life for as long as they can” (11). In reinforcing the connections between life and death, these memoirs help bring the process of dying into a more meaningful and natural experience. In the 1990s, many writers began publishing very good examples of the genre, such as Anatole Broyard’s Intoxicated by My Illness (1992), Gillian Rose’s Love’s Work (1995), Morrie Schwartz’s Letting Go (1996), Harold Brodkey’s This Wild Darkness (1996), Jean-Dominique Bauby’s The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (1997), and Elizabeth Kübler-Ross’s The Wheel of Life (1997). In the twenty-first century, we find a growing body of autothanatographies that explore the social and 374

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cultural ramifications of terminal cancer, approaching that illness in an encompassing way that goes beyond its biomedical understanding (Gygax, “Theoretically Ill” 184). Writers such as Tony Judt (The Memory Chalet, 2010), Deborah Cumming (Recovering from Mortality, 2005), Oliver Sacks (Gratitude, 2015), Christopher Hitchens (Mortality, 2012), Randy Pausch (The Last Lecture, 2008), Cory Taylor (Dying: A Memoir, 2016), and David Servan-Schreiber (Not the Last Goodbye, 2011) took to writing when confronted with a mortal cancer diagnosis. These autothanatographies find common ground in the writers’ impulse to authorship after the lethal diagnosis, their analysis of death’s paradoxes, their honesty in the search for ultimate meanings, and their feelings of gratitude, among others. Most of these memoirs can be considered “literary narratives,” rendering more than just their experience or an accurate record of their lives; rather, through the evocative power of words, they try to reach a higher understanding or truth. Franziska Gygax observes, “the ability to position the self within contexts of the others and to be fully aware of the (theoretical) implications is one of the key defining characteristics of autobiographical illness narratives by novelists and literary and cultural scholars” (“Theoretically Ill” 177). Typically, these memoirs are full of literary referents – such as Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilych or Montaigne’s essays – and integrate their most intimate and painful personal experiences within the general cultural and medical framework of terminal illness. Urged to examine and challenge commonly held perceptions of illness and death, authors are very aware of the tradition and conventions of the genre of illness memoirs, alerting readers to overused clichés such as the warfare vocabulary in reference to cancer (that includes battles, survivors, and defeated). Autothanatographies characteristically focus on the paradoxical nature of the relationship between life and death, and how this relates to writing: “Lacking any ars moriendi, very often lacking any spiritual comfort, the ‘dier’ uses this ultimate crisis of disconnection to reconnect, to constitute a living presence that precedes narrative and forces recognition” (Egan 197). In this context, death is recognized as a prompt to gain meaning in life. Arthur Kleinman describes the meaning of illness and death as transactional or negotiated: “death is an awesome process of making and remaking meaning through which we come to constitute and express what is most uniquely human and our own” (157). As their narratives unfold, writing becomes the best bridge to travel from life into realms of the dying, as writing ultimately tells them they are alive. When confronted with the question of why he wanted to write a book in the face of death, Broyard said: “to make sure I’ll be alive when I die” (30). To keep writing thus offers authors some control and agency. Conscious of the fact that death may end a life but not a relationship, these authors honor their multiple identities as partners, children, or friends. Their main concern is the struggle with letting go of their beloved ones, so it is through their writing that they immortalize this connection. As Egan puts it, “Death writing becomes preeminently life writing, and a bid to take charge of how that life writing is read” (261). It is part of a complex claiming of agency that attempts to connect their lives to those who outlive them, dialogic forms of narrative that “juxtapose the disappearing act of lived experience and the production of the record” (Egan 198). This legacy makes it possible for these texts to be positive and even humorous, contrary to possible expectations of autothanatographies being sad texts to read. Jeffrey Berman concludes that their optimism arises not from a belief in an afterlife, but “from their fulfillment in this life and from their gratitude for being alive” (288). Thus, their need to be honest is very vibrant, as if to erase barriers or secrets between readers and themselves. Writers typically recount intimate details on the ravaging effects of terminal cancer on their bodies, as well as thoughts on life, death, and society. Above all, they strive for authenticity against considerable odds (Egan 204). Ultimately, they need to address radical questions, such as what makes life meaningful, even in 375

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the face of death and decay (Kalanithi 42). They do not recoil at the prospect, but wholeheartedly embrace such endeavors. In May 2013, Stanford University neurosurgical resident Paul Kalanithi was diagnosed with stage IV metastatic lung cancer at the age of 36. He went on with his medical training, became a father, and wrote When Breath Becomes Air – a brilliant memoir about his experience of approaching death as a doctor and a patient – before his passing in 2015. Its suggestive title readily sets the poetic and literary tone of his memoir, reinforcing the idea that it is through the evocative power of words that Kalanithi is able to comprehend his own death. The author revisits his life, his personal and professional trajectories, with a thread that provides cohesion to his story: the role of death in his most vital choices. The need to understand death became a key aspect of Kalanithi’s decision-making: “I was pursuing medicine to bear witness to the twinned mysteries of death, its experiential and biological manifestations: at once deeply personal and utterly impersonal” (Kalanithi 53). He realized that the intersections among issues of life, death, and meaning – questions that all people face at some point – usually arise in a medical context (70). Neuroscience gave Kalanithi the necessary context to approach death itself: “I had started in this career, in part, to pursue death: to grasp it, uncloak it, and see it eye-to-eye, unblinking. Neurosurgery attracted me as much for its intertwining of brain and consciousness as for its intertwining of life and death … surely a kind of transcendence would be found there?” (81). However, in spite of Kalanithi’s rich academic background in literature, philosophy, and medicine, and his medical practice as a resident, treating countless dying patients, he unexpectedly found the prospect of facing his own mortality quite disorienting, even dislocating (148). Following his lung cancer diagnosis, Kalanithi writes: My carefully planned and hard-won future no longer existed. Death, so familiar to me in my work, was now paying a personal visit. Here we were, finally face-to-face, and yet nothing about it seemed recognizable. Standing at the crossroads where I should have been able to see and follow the footprints in the countless patients I had treated over the years, I saw instead only a blank, a harsh, vacant, gleaming white desert, as if a sandstorm had erased all trace of familiarity. (121) As Kalanithi changes his perspective from doctor to patient, he feels the “claws of the crack holding me back. The curse of cancer created a strange and strained existence, challenging me to be neither blind to, nor bound by, death’s approach” (165). At this critical moment in his life, Kalanithi finds solace and understanding as he returns to literature, noting: “Literature brought me back to life … Lost in a featureless wasteland of my own mortality, and finding no traction in the reams of scientific studies… I began reading literature again… I needed words to go forward” (148–49). Through reading and writing, language itself proves to be the energy that fuels Kalanithi’s life from that point forward. Language forms the bricks of the bridge he needs to cross over to the country of the ill and dying: “I had come to see language as an almost supernatural force, existing between people, bringing our brains, shielded in centimeter-thick skulls, into communion. A word meant something only between people, and life’s meaning, its virtue, had something to do with the depth of the relationships we form” (39). When Breath Becomes Air ultimately relocates death in a broader context. Kalanithi realizes that, as a doctor, he was trying just to push death back; he decides that he has to act “not, as I most often did, as death’s enemy, but as its ambassador” (87). His experience as a patient gives him the perspective he had been missing as a doctor. For instance, even if he knows that doctors should not give a definite prognosis, as a patient he craves one. His oncologist redirects him to

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consider not how much time he has left, but rather what he really wants out of that time: “Like my own patients, I had to face my mortality and try to understand what made my life worth living” (139). Kalanithi comes to understand that what patients seek is not scientific knowledge that doctors hide, but existential authenticity that each person must find on his/her own: “the angst of facing mortality has no remedy in probability” (135). The remedy comes from a broader context in which to understand the road he has to travel now. He concludes he has to learn to live in a different way, “seeing death as an imposing itinerant visitor but knowing that even if I’m dying, until I actually die, I am actually living” (150). Medicine provided him with knowledge and answers, but meaning can only come from the broader context of his life. This context is partly shaped by the inclusion of other voices in When Breath Becomes Air and in the book’s different paratexts: its foreword is written by fellow physician and writer Abraham Verghese, who recounts the editorial process as well as the book’s impact in the medical community; the book also includes epigraphs from T. S. Eliot’s “Whispers of Immortality,” the Bible, and Montaigne’s essay “That to Study Philosophy Is to Learn to Die.” However, the most important other voice is that of Lucy, Kalanithi’s wife, who writes the 24-page epilogue providing a detailed account of his death. Lucy provides that final verbal act that completes his story, with further literary references to Dickinson, Eliot, and Bunyan, as a way of coming to terms with her grief and pain. She is a witness of his determination to keep on writing, making Kalanithi’s mission explicit: “Paul confronted death – examined it, wrestled it, accepted it as a physician and a patient. He wanted to help people understand death and face their mortality” (215). Kalanithi was not interested in the sensationalism of dying; he wanted to show what it feels like to be dying, and to approach death with integrity. Through his autothanatography, Kalanithi was able to finally become death’s ambassador, asserting the power of narratives at the end of life. British writer Jenny Diski was given “two or three years” to live after being diagnosed with inoperable lung cancer in August 2014 (Diski 138). Her memoir In Gratitude was published a week after her death in April 2016. In her brilliant autothanatography, Diski mixes childhood memories with present-day realities, painting an unflinching portrait of how it feels to approach death. Written in a predominantly ironic and provocative style, In Gratitude is moving in its ferocious honesty as Diski intimately details her emotional experience with abuse and neglect, drugs, mental illness, and borderline personality disorder. She vividly describes the pains and discomforts of chemotherapy, omitting punctuation signs to convey her physical experience of anguish: “So I spent seven hours… attached to the cannula attached to a tube leading to bags of liquid hooked to the top of the chrome stand with a machine in its middle to regulate the drip, drip, drip” (111). As Diski writes about her death, she also addresses what it means to write, her struggles to find the best way of naming things. For instance, she reflects on what it means to be a patient: “There is no way to be an impatient, or a mispatient, or even an unruly patient” (118). Faced with tropes and generalities, Diski writes, “I can’t find the right question to break through that, to talk about the cancer that is me and mine, what it is, how it is, how it and I are with each other” (117). She goes over her own reactions, often correcting herself, showing in detail her own process of meaning-making. Through an oral and direct style, Diski shows her own contradictions and hesitations about her experience. The effect is a writing that often seems to undercut itself, as though she is trying to diffuse the impact of what she writes; the comment “Nothing final here” is frequently articulated in her memoir. From the outset, Diski is painfully aware of the proliferation of cancer memoirs; for her, the cancer story is so well-known in all its cultural forms that “you could unscrew the cap of the pen in your hand and jot down in the notebook on your lap every single thing that will happen and everything that will be felt for the foreseeable future. Including the surprises” (1).

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She ironically states how useless or repetitive it would be to write another cancer memoir, since everything had already been said in the huge number of memoirs already published. Can there possibly be anything new to add? Isn’t the cliché of writing a cancer diary going to be compounded by the impossibility of writing in it anything other than what has already been written, over and over? Same story, same ending. Weariness. The odd thing is, narcissistic writer though I am, I have always thought of writing straight autobiography as incredibly tedious. I couldn’t put hand to keyboard without there being something else, some other component in the narrative than just my personal history. (12) Such metafictional qualities invigorate In Gratitude, as Diski confronts the challenge of trying to write something new, overtly rejecting familiar metaphors used to refer to cancer patients: “Under no circumstances is anyone to say that I lost a battle with cancer,” she tells the Poet – a reference to Diski’s husband, Ian Patterson. “Or that I bore it bravely. I am not fighting, losing, winning or bearing” (10). At the same time, Diski knows it is not easy to avoid clichés, as rejection is conditioned by and reinforces the existence of the thing one tries to avoid (10). For instance, as a “canceree,” she knows someone will soon refer to her as being on a journey. Even if she resents the inevitable cliché, she readily acknowledges that the idea of a journey is in the very essence of what we are as a “narrating species”: It’s not our fault that time works for us the way it does, or that the linear accelerates our lives. We “journey” as we read books, watch films, look back at our past, imagine the future, even mindfully try to live in the always and only present moment while thoughts of what was, and still is to come, crowd our minds. Otherwise there’s silence, and that’s an option. Though not much of one for our narrating species. Can we even get dressed without a before and after, a beginning and end? … It’s inescapable. From one state to another, how can the journey not come to mind? That’s the price of living in time. Why should I mind so much? Why should I mind so much now? Because journeys end? (145–46) What is different and moving about In Gratitude is the way in which Diski chews on clichés, wincing, until she finds the unknown in “the too well known”: “The prospect of extinction comes at last with an admission of the horror of being unable to imagine or be part of it, because it is beyond the you that has the capacity to think about it. I learned the meaning of being lost for words; I came up against the horizon of language” (141). Diski’s memoir shows her constant struggle to understand her own death, as if trying to reach death through words. In the face of death, she finds most reassuring the thought that “I have been not here before … I have already been at the destination toward which I’m now heading” (149). Or, in Beckett’s words, “I too shall cease and be as when I was not yet, only all over instead of in store” (150). She finds comfort in her own version of cancer. For Diski, as for many other autothanatographers, working with language and writing their stories at the end of life becomes life itself. And for this, she is grateful. Nina Riggs likewise finds immense solace in writing about her cancer experience. A former teacher and poet, as well as a mother of two and a wife of sixteen years living in Greensboro, North Carolina, Riggs was just 37 when diagnosed with breast cancer – a cancer that became terminal within a year. In the barely two years between her diagnosis and her death, Riggs 378

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wrote a poignant and evocative memoir about what it means to digest a lethal diagnosis and to find a sense of direction in the midst of the many demands she faced as a mother, a daughter, a wife, and a cancer patient. The book’s title comes from Ralph Waldo Emerson – Riggs’s great-great-great grandfather. Emerson poetically refers to each morning as an opportunity to achieve transcendence: “That is morning; to cease for a bright hour to be a prisoner of this sickly body and to become as large as the World” (my italics). The idea of death as darkness is thus readily challenged, as Riggs refers to death as the “bright hour” that brings about a perfect communion with nature, “cheered [by] the moist, warm, glittering, budding and melodious hour that takes down the narrow walls of my soul and extends its pulsation and life to the very horizon.” This epigraph shapes the reader’s appreciation of Riggs’s autothanatography; like Emerson, Riggs is drawn to finding beauty and magic in the natural world, but also within her smaller, everyday world. She sought literary inspiration in the works of essayist and philosopher Michel de Montaigne, whom she imagines telling her to “reveal the pain, but hide the wreckage. I can hear Montaigne hollering: break it open, look inside, feel it, write it down” (Riggs 233). Following the wisdom of these eminent literary figures, Riggs comes to terms with the time she has left by building her narrative voice: “We are breathless, but we love the days. They are promises. They are the only way to walk from one night to the other” (306). Like cancer, The Bright Hour is divided into four stages. In stage I, Riggs recounts how doctors found “one small spot” (7) during a mammogram in 2015. After this diagnosis, she begins years of treatment for a cancerous lesion that seemed initially manageable, but spread and eventually claimed her life. Though readers know the end of her narrative, we remain engaged with Riggs’s experience of suspense, hopes, and disappointments, as she is surprised by how quickly the cancer spreads. In the midst of it all, Riggs is also coping with the slow death of her mother, who died of multiple myeloma while Riggs herself was being treated. In fact, the book opens with both women’s humorous approach to death: “Dying isn’t the end of the world,” my mother liked to joke after she was diagnosed as terminal. I never really understood what she meant, until the day I suddenly did – a few months after she died – when, at age thirty-eight, the breast cancer I’d been in treatment for became metastatic and incurable. There are so many things that are worse than death: old grudges, a lack of self-awareness, severe constipation, no sense of humor, the grimace on your husband’s face as he empties your surgical drain into the measuring cup. (1) This mixing of high and low topics, humorous and serious tones, domestic and poetic dictions, is characteristic of Riggs’s style throughout her memoir. The effect on the reader is one of contemplating a positive but also honest portrayal of dying. Riggs sets out to look death in the face and to find out, with as much honesty as she can, what it feels like to be dying, and what it is that really bothers her in this journey. Though she was already a poet at the time, Riggs’s terminal diagnosis was an impetus for her writing. Her New York Times article, entitled “When a Couch Is More than a Couch,” deems the domestic item to be much more than a place to sit: “Also: an expansive bench that fits all of us. Something that will hold us through everything that lies ahead – the loving, collapsing, and nuzzling. The dying, the grieving.” Time and again in her memoir, domestic objects become powerful symbols of the range of emotions and situations that a terminal patient may experience. Like Diski, Kalanithi, and Oliver Sacks, Riggs similarly rejects overused metaphors for cancer: “All the warfare jargon around cancer – the battling, the surviving, the winning/losing, the kicking its ass – hasn’t been ringing true for me” (32). Instead, these memoirists develop 379

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original styles that deploy new similes and metaphors that readily penetrate their experience of dying. For instance, Riggs relates her fears to those of the first Pilgrims landing in America, a hostile land that posed all kinds of uncertainties and threats for them. When it comes to illness, dying, death – those darknesses – it seems we are still so very much Plymouth Pilgrims – all fear and fretting and fortifications, and a strong sense of our own alienness in a hostile land. We don’t begin to know what to do with ourselves. We cross our arms over our chests and try to look on the bright side as we starve. (86) Patients arriving at “cancerland” (Ehrenreich) seem to have a similar experience, as they have to explore and conquer this “suspicious country” against all odds (Riggs 198). All through her memoir, Riggs searches for her honest and unique voice in the midst of this ordeal, wittily weaving her terminal illness into everyday life with new metaphors: I don’t belong in bed, but I don’t fit in out in the world either. I have a sense of myself as a broken camera – focusing on something out on the horizon (the future, cure, recurrence, death) and then, without warning, zooming in on a blade of grass (what is that weird taste in my mouth, is that a new lump, thank you for this beautiful card, this beautiful meal, did anyone remember to pack a snack for the kids). And then zooming out to the horizon again, and then back, and then again. (39) The devastating effects of chemotherapy – which leaves a bitter taste in her mouth – is associated with what goes on around her, even as Riggs experiences the disorienting sense of not fitting into everyday routines. In a way, zooming into the pain and the worst of her condition follows Montaigne’s dictum on letting death and worries all in, to face them squarely and unflinchingly: “He left all his doors unlocked. He acknowledged the terror that could come. But by considering it and allowing it in, he resolved to live with its presence: ‘I want death to find me planting my cabbages, not concerned about it’” (Riggs 26). It is by contemplating and writing about cancer and dying that Riggs is able to confront and handle her worst fears. Riggs later learns that her cancer has become metastatic and is in the incurable stage IV. She dramatically describes the moment as “death entering the room looking like a young, cheerful attending”: “Good news is,” he says, scooting close on the rolling stool, “your labs look mostly normal.” “But one thing to note.” He squirms a little on the stool. “It seems from the MRI that you do have a significant fracture in your spine, at the L2 vertebra. And the way it is broken is very worrisome. It’s not a trauma break. It’s a pathological break, likely caused by a tumor that has metastasized from your breast.” (198–99) Prognosis and its uncertainties once again loom large. In spite of knowing how useless it is, Riggs cannot help googling survival rates, only to feel as desolated as before. She realizes that the biggest challenge she faces is to live just one day at a time. Early on, Riggs has a fight with her husband, John, when he tells her, “I just can’t wait for things to get back to normal,” which sounds like a betrayal to her, as she has resolved “to love these days the same way I love any other … There might not be a ‘normal’ from here on out” (73). She describes in vivid terms her living in a different dimension of time, that of terminal cancer: “The days pass – a

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couple weeks [sic]. In cancer time, that feels like years, decades – like the remaining days of your life are soaring by on a busy interstate” (259). Still, life goes on in a kind of suspension, balancing the future with the knowledge of her deadly prognosis: “We grope toward the future. Spring comes. We replant our garden. […] Lazy curls bud and sprout from my bald head. I restart physical therapy and Pilates for my back, despite the advice from the spine surgeon that it ‘probably isn’t worth it’ – given my prognosis of a couple years” (245). Once her cancer spreads and Riggs is scanned every six to eight weeks, she tries to measure the meaning of that time in terms of the things that can be fit into it: “gestate a baby through half a trimester, master conversational Italian, achieve rock-hard abs, bingewatch Game of Thrones, hike the Camino de Santiago. Instead: it’s a wink, a blink, a flicker; one long exhale and a breath drawn in; John’s hand running down my back, his lips brushing my neck; the length of the camp session where we met” (218). The realization of the paradoxical closeness between death and life is characteristic of autothanatographies, whereby one of Riggs’s friends observes, “living with a terminal disease is like walking on a tightrope over an insanely scary abyss. But that living without disease is also like walking on a tightrope over an insanely scary abyss, only with some fog or cloud cover obscuring the depths a bit more” (243). By contrast, Riggs refers to her death as that “bright hour,” as she has the time and advance warning to pause and think, so she can actively work on what she is living while she is dying. The afterword connects with the prologue, as Riggs’s husband resumes the story where she left it: John recounts how Nina finished writing her manuscript on January 2017 and how she died a month later just before morning, her favorite time of day. Written in the present tense, Riggs’s powerfully written narrative prolongs her voice into the future. Like Scheherazade in Arabian Nights, the ancient mariner in Coleridge’s poem, or Victor Frankenstein desperately confessing his life to Captain Waldon, writers have always tried to stop time, to redeem themselves through the telling of stories before an imminent death. In the twenty-first century, narrators add a new twist to these literary templates by bringing their own, real-life, stories to the public arena, and raising pressing concerns about end-of-life care. Memoirs attest to the power of writing as it enables dying authors to go beyond death into profound life meanings. For them, writing becomes an act of self-creation amid the process of self-extinction (Berman 297). In doing so, these texts engage readers ethically and experientially, widening the medical paradigm to include the social, cultural, and familial approach to living and dying. Atul Gawande and other scholars have recognized how contemporary medicine often fails when it comes to confronting aging, dying, or death. It is when we see patients’ lives as stories that we can recognize their real needs. In this context, autothanatographies can indeed be “transformative, proving not so much records of the past as tropes for discovery, for processes of recognition and letting go, for the construction of emotional meanings” (Egan 100). Less concerned with representing their illness and deaths than with “authenticating the processes of discovery and re-cognition” (Egan 7–8), this choir of dying narrators bravely addresses the ultimate questions about what makes life meaningful when time is so limited, as they reflect upon their own processes of meaning making.

Note

1

I would like to thank Prof. Rosario Arias and the Research Project ORION – Orientation: Towards a Dynamic Understanding of Contemporary Fiction and Culture” (MINECO Project FFI2017-86417P) – for financial and academic support for this article. Scholars have used this term in different ways: E.S. Burt refers to autothanatography as a way to organize the episodes of an autobiography; as such, it is inherent in any autobiographical effort, especially those dealing with alterity. Jen Stephenson distinguishes between two different ways to define autothanatography: as the

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Works Cited Bauby, Jean-Dominique. The Diving Bell and the Butterfly: A Memoir of Life in Death. Vintage, 1997. Belling, Catherine. “The Death of the Narrator.” Narrative Research in Health and Illness, edited by Bruce A. Hurwitz, Trisha Greenhalgh, and Vieda Skultans. Blackwell, 2004, pp. 146–155. Berman, Jeffrey. Dying in Character: Memoirs on the End of Life. U of Massachusetts P, 2012. Brodkey, Harold. This Wild Darkness: The Story of My Death. Metropolitan Books, 1996. Broyard, Anatole. Intoxicated by My Illness. Clarkson Potter, 1992. Burt, E. S. Regard for the Other: Autothanatography in Rousseau, De Quincey, Baudelaire, & Wilde. Fordham UP, 2009. Couser, G. Thomas. Recovering Bodies: Illness, Disability and Life Writing. U of Wisconsin P, 1997. Cumming, Deborah. Recovering from Mortality: Essays from a Cancer Limbo. Novello Festival Press, 2005. de Man, Paul. “Autobiography as De-facement.” Modern Language Notes, vol. 94, 1979, pp. 919–930. DeShazer, Mary K. Mammographies: The Cultural Discourses of Breast Cancer Narratives. U of Michigan P, 2013. Diski, Jenny. In Gratitude. Bloomsbury Publishing PLC, 2016. Egan, Susanna. Mirror Talk: Genres of Crisis in Contemporary Autobiography. U of North Carolina P, 1999. Ehrenreich, Barbara. “Welcome to Cancerland.” Harper’s Magazine, Nov. 2001, pp. 43–53. Gawande, Atul. Being Mortal: Illness, Medicine and What Matters in the End. Henry Holt, 2014. Gygax, Franziska. “Theoretically Ill. Autobiographer, Patient, Theorist.” The Writing Cure: Literature and Medicine in Context, edited by A. Lembert Heidenreich and J. Milford Munster. LIT, 2013, pp. 173–190. Gygax, Franziska. “Woundable, Around the Bounds. Life (Beyond) Writing and Terminal Illness.” Narrative Matters in Medical Contexts Across the Disciplines, edited by Franziska Gygax and Miriam A. Locher. John Benjamins, 2015, pp. 33–46. Hakola, Outi, and Sari Kivistö, editors. Death in Literature. Cambridge Scholars, 2014. Hitchens, Christopher. Mortality. Atlantic Books, 2012. Judt, Tony. The Memory Chalet. Penguin Press, 2010. Kalanithi, Paul. When Breath Becomes Air. Random House, 2016. Kleinman, Arthur. The Illness Narratives: Suffering, Healing, and the Human Condition. Basic Books, 1988. Kübler-Ross, Elisabeth. The Wheel of Life: A Memoir of Living and Dying. Scribner, 1997. Miller, Nancy K. “Representing Others: Gender and the Subjects of Autobiography.” Differences, vol. 6, no. 1, 1994, pp. 1–27. Pausch, Randy, with Jeffrey Zaslow. The Last Lecture. Hyperion, 2008. Rachman, Tom. “Meeting Death with Words.” New Yorker, 25 Jan. 2016. www.newyorker.com/ culture/cultural-comment/meeting-death-with-words. Accessed 13 Feb. 2020. Riggs, Nina. The Bright Hour: A Memoir of Living and Dying. Simon & Schuster, 2017. Riggs, Nina. “When a Couch Is More than a Couch.” New York Times, 23 Sept. 2016. https://www. nytimes.com/2016/09/25/fashion/modern-love-when-a-couch-is-more-than-a-couch.html. Accessed 13 Feb. 2020. Rose, Gillian. Love’s Work: A Reckoning with Life. Chatto & Windus, 1995. Sacks, Oliver. Gratitude. Knopf, 2015. Schwartz, Morrie. Letting Go: Morrie’s Reflections on Living While Dying. Introduction by Paul Solman. Walker, 1996. Servan-Schreiber, David, with Ursula Gauthier. Not the Last Goodbye: On Life, Death, Healing, and Cancer. Viking, 2011. Stephenson, Jen. Performing Autobiography: Contemporary Canadian Drama. U of Toronto P, 2013. Taylor, Cory. Dying: A Memoir. Canongate Books, 2016.

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35 “GRIEF MADE HER INSUBSTANTIAL TO HERSELF” Illness, Aging, and Death in A. S. Byatt’s Little Black Book of Stories Graham Matthews

Introduction A. S. Byatt, the British author of 11 novels, five short-story collections, and seven volumes of critical essays and biographies, is preoccupied with the themes of death, grief, and science (with a particular focus on biology, zoology, and geology), as well as questions concerning the relationship between art and reality. Byatt thematizes biographical writing throughout her oeuvre – particularly in The Biographer’s Tale (2001) in which the literary critic, Phineas G. Nanson, attempts to capture the messiness of a real life by writing the biography of the famous biographer, Scholes Destry-Scholes – in order to demonstrate that texts are not discrete units but operate in a cycle of creation, transmission, reception, and interpretation. In the process, she investigates the relationship between art and life. As Jane Campbell comments, “the line between realism and postmodernist metafiction becomes blurred: [Byatt’s novels] are about real life and also about the art that tries to capture it” (105). Byatt’s fiction shows that death does not exist in a strict binary with life, and is not a solely biological phenomenon, while seeking to shed light on the ways in which the dead or dying body is inscribed and re-inscribed with cultural signifiers, thereby underlining the importance of art for capturing the complexities of life and death. In particular, she frequently portrays grief and questions the role of science, medicine, and myth in managing expectations and responses to death. Byatt’s depiction of death and grief reaches its apogee in Little Black Book of Stories (2003), a short-story collection that explores the multifaceted forms that grief can take. Little Black Book of Stories is composed of five thematically connected stories that juxtapose the mythological with the mundane; the spiritual with the secular; medical practice with the arts. Each story is connected to a mythological archetype ranging from the Worm of English legend, to the wandering of Aeneas, to the trolls of Icelandic folklore. These stories signal the ways in which death is a phenomena often expressed in historical or mythological terms and challenge the dominance of biomedical conceptions of the body. “The Thing in the Forest” gives form to an indescribable horror that, like grief, is simultaneously imagined and corporeal in order to convey the catastrophic loss of life during the Second World War. “A Stone Woman” condenses the sensations of illness, aging, and grief into the image of turning to stone and demonstrates that death is a concept relative to the culture in question. Meanwhile, 383

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“The Pink Ribbon” depicts the challenges of caring for someone with dementia and asks what it means to grieve for someone who has not yet died. These stories highlight the distinction between physical death and the process of coming to terms with death. They warn against the illusions that give false comfort but nevertheless, through their hybridization of realism and metafiction, problematize the clear distinctions between illusion and reality that grieving individuals negotiate. In so doing, Byatt eloquently captures the ways cognitive and emotional responses to death intersect with each other in complex and contradictory ways. Little Black Book of Stories demonstrates that, unlike other more instrumental discourses, literature offers an ontology of uncertainty that acknowledges and responds to the fragility of life and the contingency of death.

Postmemory, Grief, and Death The first story in the collection, “The Thing in the Forest,” is set during the Second World War when children from the city were evacuated to the countryside. Two girls named Penny and Primrose stay at a country mansion and venture into the forest where they see – or believe they see – the titular thing, a grotesque manifestation of the giant worm of English legend. The children do not have first-hand experience of the horrors of war but nevertheless experience states of grief that suspend the boundary between illusion and reality. Beyond the obvious gendered reading of the forest as vaginal and nurturing and the phallic worm as a destructive and monstrous emblem of war, the story demonstrates the ways in which trauma can affect later generations even when they lack direct experience of it. In this respect, the story anticipates Marianne Hirsch’s concept of “postmemory,” which describes the ways in which later generations “remember” the personal, collective, and cultural trauma of those who came before by means of the stories, images, and behaviors among which they grew up. Hirsch conceptualizes postmemory as a “structure of inter- and transgenerational return of traumatic knowledge and embodied experience” (6). In other words, the younger generation receives the “memories” of the older generation as if they were their own; these “memories” precede the subject’s birth but shape the child’s consciousness. Hirsch views them as traumatic fragments of events that exceed comprehension. Similarly, the thing in the forest, despite being described at length, defies narrative reconstruction. “Postmemories” typically appear through repeated references to gaps or absences in language and, similarly, “The Thing in the Forest” is filled with blanks, redacted text, and broken communication, as exemplified by the indefinite noun, “thing.” On the journey from the city, the children encounter stations whose names have been blanked out to confuse an invading army. Furthermore, the girls have grown up in a city and never entered a forest before, so “there were no obvious paths” (13). Most importantly, their mothers had not explained the purpose of their journey since they had not “quite known how to explain the danger” (4). In the face of these gaps and absences, the children become anxious and blame themselves for their ignorance: “They felt – they did not think it out, but somewhere inside them the idea sprouted – that the erasure was because of them” (6). They eventually turn to invention to make sense of their plight – according to Byatt in “Fairy Stories,” myths and fairytales give “form and coherence to formless fears, dreads and desires” – imagining themselves as Hansel and Gretel surrogates as they wander into the forest where they discover the worm. Whereas the children encounter erasures and absences in the human world, their encounter with the worm is characterized by excessive description. Lists of alliterative and onomatopoeic words are placed alongside intricate descriptions of discrete sights, sounds, and smells that are reconfigured in vile combinations. This results in a detailed yet incoherent description of the worm that 384

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suggests the inability of language to convey its horror and monstrosity. The worm remains in the children’s minds as an indefinite “thing” and it is never clear whether it is corporeal or an imaginative construct. The worm is also reminiscent of Walter Benjamin’s description of Paul Klee’s mono-print Angelus Novus (1920) that symbolizes a state of grief in a world in which the comforting illusions of religion, culture, and tradition are being stripped away by the empiricism of modernity. The worm is presented as “a provisional amalgam” that, rather than causing pain, is itself an emblem of grief: “its expression was neither wrath nor greed, but pure misery. Its most defined feature was a vast mouth, pulled down and down at the corners, tight with a kind of pain” (16). Likewise, in Benjamin’s reading of the Klee painting, the angel of history views the past with horrified fascination: “Where we see a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet” (249). The angel is caught up by the onward march of progress that propels him into the future while he looks back on the wreckage and destruction with shock and dismay. Similarly, Byatt’s worm testifies to the horror and destruction caused by humankind that verges on the unbearable. The worm juxtaposes organic decay with technological detritus: “made of rank meat, and decaying vegetation, […] it also trailed veils and prostheses of manmade materials, bits of wire-netting, foul dishcloths, wire-wool full of pan-scrubbings, rusty nuts and bolts” (17). The worm’s progress is slow and painful and it leaves a trail of destruction in its wake. Alfer and Campos note that the thing “serves as a symbolic representation of the war, its destruction of family life, its unremittant slaughter” (117) but also emphasize that in the text, the encounter is presented as a very real event. I would argue that it is presented in this way because, for the girls, it is a real event. Whereas the grief process is concerned with the gradual withdrawal of comforting illusions in the face of the inexorable demands of reality, the encounter with the worm is a traumatic irruption into the girls’ lives. Although they lack first-hand experience of the war, the specter of death and destruction manifests itself via their imaginative capacity in the form of an object of horrified fascination. The worm is an emblem of death and grief that stays in Penny’s and Primrose’s memories for the rest of their lives despite the fact that others – including images of their fathers who died in the war – have long since faded: “The claspers of memory could not grip the drowned and burned” (20). Penny struggles to remember her father: “He had vanished in an oven of red-yellow roaring, Penny had guessed, or been told, or imagined” (45), and the text foregrounds the fact that news of her loss is received second-hand. Her mother had sent her away before allowing the fireman to deliver the bad news and as she struggled to overhear their conversation, she received only fragments and decontextualized phrases. This experience gave her father’s death an aura of unreality and made it difficult for her to reconcile cognitive with emotional realization. Accordingly, grief is described as a “black imagined veil” (47) that hangs over the visible world, becoming a part of her vision: “The face of the Thing hung in her brain, jealously soliciting her attention, distracting her from dailiness” (48). Penny and Primrose are reunited in 1984 at the mansion – which has since become a National Trust property – over a display of a medieval-looking illustrated book that depicts a knight lifting his sword to slay the Loathly Worm. In an echo of the redacted signs and fragmented explanations, it is unclear whether the book is of ancient or pseudo-ancient origin and the typed description of the worm is incomplete and of unknown provenance. Nevertheless, it reaffirms for the two women the horror, death, and destruction of the war that they received second-hand through the stories, images, phrases, and things left unsaid by the earlier generation. The worm is an emblem of grief situated at the intersection of the public and the private that gives form to the traumatic events transmitted down the generations, through social and cultural fragments, despite attempts to shield subsequent generations. “The 385

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Thing in the Forest” foregrounds the aesthetic structures and fragments that mediate this transmission and captures the imaginative investment made by the younger generation who “remember” the older generation’s experiences.

Aging, Illness, and Death “A Stone Woman” condenses the experiences of aging, illness, and grief into the image of turning to stone and problematizes biomedical approaches to these conditions. The story inverts the “Pygmalion” myth from Ovid’s Metamorphosis as Ines, an etymologist, struggles to come to terms with her mother’s death and begins to turn to stone. Initially, grief makes her feel “insubstantial to herself ” (129), which indicates the debilitating effect loss can have on a previously stable identity. Whereas her mother is alluded to using bright, vibrant colors such as silver, ivory, and cornflower blue, Ines is described as moth-like and sees only shades of grey: “The apartment seemed constantly twilit, although it must, she knew, have gone through the usual sequences of sun and shadow over the days and weeks since her mother died” (129). The story indicates that grief divorces intuition from cognition by foregrounding the ways in which it can overshadow objective knowledge. Bereavement is succinctly linked to aging in the closing line of the passage: “Ines, who had been the younger woman, became the old woman, in an instant” (129), in an acknowledgment that the aging process is relative rather than teleological or bound to objective measurements. Indeed, without her mother, Ines comes to think of “herself in the past tense” (133), as if her life were already over. Ines returns to the prosaic arrangements of “tidying love away,” which signals her attempts to control and repress her emotional response to her mother’s death. In an image that paradoxically combines finality and repetition, she observes “final things over and over” (130); here the funeral arrangements become a means of distracting from her emotional distress. The process is then alluded to elliptically as a series of fleeting glimpses which indicate that the speed and efficiency of the service does not allow enough time to mourn: “White face on white pillow amongst white hair. Colourless skin on lifeless fingers. Flesh of my flesh, flesh of her flesh. The efficient rage of consuming fire, the handfuls of fawn ash which she had scattered, as she had promised, in the hurrying foam of a Yorkshire beck” (130). The repetition of “white,” “-less,” and “flesh” increases the tempo of the passage so that the quick succession of synecdochical imagery comes to an abrupt halt with the plosive consonants of the word “beck.” The “hurrying” of the personified brook further strengthens the sense of not being able to hold on to each moment, thereby reinforcing the sensation of loss. Following the funeral, Ines attempts to become accustomed to life without her mother until “one morning pain struck her like a sudden beak, tearing at her gut” (130). Echoing the abrupt plosives in “beck,” the simile “beak” – following the soothing susurration of “solitude and silence” – conveys the sudden onset of pain. The effect of pain is so extreme that Ines feels alienated from her body, perceiving it to be a “creature” or a “thing.” Her instincts take over and she shrieks down the telephone, causing the emergency services to send an ambulance, “which took the screaming thing to a hospital, as it would not have taken a polite old woman” (130). After Ines’s treatment in the hospital, she meets an anesthetist who exemplifies the biomedical model of health, which focuses on purely biological factors and excludes psychological, environmental, and social influences. In a turn of phrase that reifies his authority, he tells her what palliatives she might be “allowed to take home with her” and determines what she should consider to be normal in purely biological terms: “there’s no sensation around the incision. That’s quite normal. The nerves take time to join again, and some may not do so” (131). In contrast to this prognosis, Ines “felt that she did not feel, and then felt the ghost of a thrill, 386

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like fine wires, shooting out across her skin” (131–32). Her experience of sickness is not a discrete category, instead overlapping with the sensation of grief and influenced by social and psychological factors. The “ghost of a thrill” refers to a resonance heard through a stethoscope, but also hints at the spectral presence of her mother in her thoughts even as it shows that the lack of feeling is itself a sensation that doubles as an emotional state. The aporia between biomedicine and the patient’s experience is reaffirmed by the discussion of Ines’s umbilical scar. Ines’s navel symbolizes her lost connection to her mother and her memories later cause her eyes to become “hot with tears.” The anesthetist misinterprets her emotional distress and assures her that the wound would “look much less angry and lumpy after a month or two, and if it did not, it could be easily dealt with by a good plastic surgeon” (132). Whereas Ines avoids looking at the scar because it symbolizes her lost connection with her mother, the anesthetist conceives of it as a wound that should be fixed through plastic surgery. For the anesthetist, the body is a machine to be fixed, and this viewpoint is reflected by the focus on visible rather than invisible scars; we later learn that he had chosen his profession “because he didn’t like people’s feelings, and preferred silence to speech” (133). His manner suggests that she should simply recover from her mother’s death and that to dwell on it would be unhealthy or unnatural. In this way, Byatt suggests that when medical practitioners fail to empathize with their patients they inadvertently risk framing “normal” human reactions to death as a pathology. However, as Byatt develops her trope of turning to stone, she challenges cultural conceptions of what a “normal” human response to death should be. Following Ines’s experience in hospital, she returns home to her empty house where she finds the lack of activity oppressive. As Ines’s metamorphosis continues, Byatt exerts torsion on familiar words by interlacing them with geological terminology: “One day, one of the blue veins on her inner thigh erupted into a line of rubious spinels […] her stony casing was not static – points of rock salt and milky quartz thrust through glassy sheets of basalt, bubbles of sinter formed like tears between layers of hornblende” (139). The geological terminology stands in place of the medical language that would traditionally be used to record changes in the body; yet removed from its institutional context, the language becomes beautiful. Specialist language is not simply alienating but enhances what is visible and can be perceived. Accordingly, the original wound is not merely “red” but “many reds, from ochre to scarlet, from garnet to cinnabar” (138). The unfamiliar geological signifiers invite the reader to linger and examine their beauty as they might a precious stone: “pyrolusite, ignimbrite, omphacite, uvarovite, glaucophane, schist, shale, gneiss, tuff ” (140). As Ines’s transformation develops, she gains insight into the division between the organic and the mineral worlds that problematize the boundary between life and death. Although she had assumed that the mineral world was a place of “perfect, inanimate forms, with an unchanging mathematical order to crystals and molecules” (146), she realizes that vast quantities of rocks and stones were formed from things that had once been living: “Not only coal and fossils, petrified woods and biothermal limestones – oolitic and pisolitic limestones, formed round dead shells – but chalk itself which was mainly made up of micro-organisms, or cherts and flints, massive bedded forms made up of the skeletons of Radiolaria and diatoms. These were themselves once living stones” (147). As an etymologist, Ines recognizes that many of the names of stones, such as carnelian, serpentine, lizardite, and phyllite, are derived from organic metaphors and the earth itself is made of bones, shells, and diatoms. Consequently, Ines’s act of turning to stone represents a return to the earth; decay and dissolution are portrayed as aesthetic rather than grotesque.

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Ines’s gradual transformation from an organic to a mineral existence undermines conventional understanding of the division between life and death. Like pearls and moss agate, Ines is neither organic nor inorganic but a combination that exceeds binary difference. As she learns to embrace her transformation, she comes to appreciate the minerals that go unnoticed in everyday life: “the carbon in the car-exhausts and the rainbow-coloured minerals in puddles of petrol” (144). Whereas medical discourse would pathologize Ines’s condition, the language of geology empowers her to conceptualize the world in a manner that makes sense of her changes. In biomedical terms, Ines is dying but in terms of the mineral world, she is blossoming into new life. Because biomedicine would impose a particular worldview on Ines’s body, she avoids doctors: “she saw clearly that she would be an object of horror and fascination, to be shut away and experimented on” (140), realizing that the focus will be on the condition rather than her. Instead of horror at her transformation, Ines feels mostly curiosity, interrupted only by a sense of fatalism when she contemplates the eventual petrifaction of her vital functions. Ines’s gradual transformation and passive response contests the normative assumption that we should hold on to “life” as defined by biomedicine. Instead, she reveals the beauty to be found in the processes of grief and aging, and in the process questions the ways in which language frames and constructs particular worldviews. At the story’s conclusion, Ines travels to Iceland where her grief is no longer merely the source of pain but an integral part of her stony existence. She is initiated into Icelandic folk culture and eventually passes into myth as a stone woman or troll. Ines’s petrifying larynx causes her to give up on speech and employ gesture instead. Eventually, as her crust grows thicker, she has to learn how to speak again: “a mixture of whistles and clicks and solo gestures which perhaps only the Icelander would have understood” (161). As Ines becomes increasingly divorced from her past existence, she thinks both human and “stone thoughts [that] did not translate into the English language, or into any other she knew: they were things that accumulated, solidly, knocked against each other, heaped and slipped” (164). She finds it equally impossible to read: “her new eyes could not quite bring the dancing black letters to have any more meaning than the spiders and ants which scurried round her feet or mounted her stolid ankles” (175). As Ines becomes increasingly distanced from human thoughts and language, her mind becomes increasingly attuned to the primordial Icelandic landscape around her. This transition reaches its climax when Ines summons the courage to run out into the wilds and join the trolls who sing and dance in the shifting landscape. This transition is mirrored by the narrative voice, which is now focalized through the human perspective of a stonecutter rather than Ines’s trolllike one: “He heard her laughter in the wind. She jigged a little, as though gathering momentum, and then began a dancing run, into the blizzard. He heard a stone voice, shouting and singing, “Trunt, trunt, og tröllin í fjöllunum” (182–83). During a discussion of Icelandic folk tales, we learn that “Trunt, trunt” is just nonsense: “it means rubbish and junk and aha and hubble bubble, that sort of thing” (180). Consequently, Ines’s enunciation of this meaningless phrase signals her distance from human norms and her embrace of a new and distinct way of living that is resistant to conventional attempts at interpretation and understanding. In this respect, Ines’s experience mirrors Arthur Kleinman’s description of grief felt in the wake of his wife’s passing and the ways in which it influenced his worldview: “My grief, like that of millions of others, signalled the loss of something truly vital in my life. This pain was part of the remembering and maybe also the remaking. It punctuated the end of a time and a form of living, and marked the transition to a new time and a different way of living” (608). Like Ines, Kleinman finds that the experience of grief is not simply of loss but a period of remembering and remaking; grief marks a moment of transition and transformation into a new and potentially richer form of selfhood. 388

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“A Stone Woman” enriches debates about grief, aging, and death by foregrounding individual experience over biomedical conceptualizations of the body.

Dementia Narratives and Grief before Death The onset of dementia is a devastating experience for both those with the disease and their caregivers that results in lives turned upside-down and the dissolution of future plans. As Steven Sabat notes, the “long-anticipated ‘golden years’ become tarnished with pain, sadness, and irreversible, inexorable loss” (vii). Symptoms of dementia include memory erosion, behavioral difficulties, impaired ability to understand or produce speech, inability to recognize people or things, and a survival rate of only five to ten years after diagnosis. Profound cognitive decline limits intellectual performance and renders the person dependent on caregiving. Consequently, the disease carries with it significant identity-threatening consequences that exceed the limits of biomedical knowledge. Dementia affects the brain, often considered to be the site of an individual’s identity, which leads Howard Brody to question at what stage “the individual no longer exists as a person” (69). This question is made more complex when we consider that most dementia narratives are authored by caregivers; we rarely hear the patient’s voice. Martina Zimmerman questions “whether they can reliably picture the patient’s situation and world of experience, not least since the caregiver’s agenda, inevitably, differs from the patient’s outlook” (31). Byatt captures the tension between the caregiver’s and the patient’s narratives in the final short story in the collection, entitled “The Pink Ribbon.” In this story, James Ennis cares for his wife, Madeleine, who suffers from early-onset dementia and appears to be a completely different person from her past life as a shrewd military intelligence officer. An apparition visits James at night and although the ending is ambiguous, it is heavily implied that he decides to end Madeleine’s life. “The Pink Ribbon” demonstrates the ways in which the daily lives of caregivers challenge their ideals, stretch emotional limits, and heighten interdependency. The text problematizes the perception of the patient with dementia as a passive and empty receptacle for their former vital self and questions infantilizing metaphors and comparisons to the undead.1 Accordingly, the ambiguous ending challenges readers to decide whether the body occupied by a person with dementia is a different person from the previous occupant of that body and, by extension, whether caregivers should work in the interests of the earlier person or the current person. Should death be understood as the biological end of the individual, or should those with dementia be considered to be deceased at the onset of a disease that ravages memory and identity? There is an enormous psychological and emotional cost involved in spousal caregiving, as memories of a lifelong relationship color the caregiver’s perception of the patient who may appear, outwardly at least, to be physically well. As John Wiltshire notes, the dementia patient “incarnates the disruption or bafflement of normal meaning-making activity, and seems in fact to be a different ‘self’ or to have lost the self that they were” (413). In “The Pink Ribbon,” James is the primary caregiver for Madeleine – who refers to herself as “Maddy Mad Mado” (233) – with support from the Jamaican helper, Deanna Bright. The titular pink ribbon signals the indeterminacy of Madeleine’s selfhood. Although James receives approval from Deanna for brushing his wife’s hair and attaching a pink ribbon – “A really pretty pink ribbon. A sweet colour, fresh. A lovely colour” (235) – we learn from James’s interactions with the apparition that Madeleine hated the color pink. Subsequent re-readings suggest that the ribbon is a symbol of James’s repressed hostility and rage against fate, age, and Madeleine herself. Nevertheless, Madeleine’s own frenzied attempts to remove the ribbon serve as a reminder that some aspect of his wife remains. Despite Mrs. Bright’s skepticism, James is able to connect with his wife via his interpretation of Madeleine’s speech when she talks about lamb cutlets: “Cold cutlets. Very 389

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cold, with sauce” (244). James recognizes that she is referring to revenge, a dish best served cold. Similarly, James realizes that Madeleine’s references to spies should be taken literally because she worked as a spymaster during World War II. These brief moments of connection and understanding suggest that despite the devastating effects of dementia, the split between Madeleine and Mado is not absolute; through the memories of the family and community around her, aspects of Madeleine continue to live on.2 The caregiver lives and acts while being constantly reminded of the patient’s radical loss of self, and the story highlights the ways in which continuity between Madeleine’s current status and her former life has been disrupted. At the start of the narrative James equates his wife’s personhood with her brain and emphasizes that although her body is present, her mind is dead: “Her poor brain is a mass of thick plaques and tangles of meaningless stuff. Like moth-eaten knitting. There’s no one there […] Or not much of anyone” (236). The local shopkeepers remember Madeleine as kind and vivacious but for James his wife is someone he “barely remembered and could not mourn” (237). Rather than establishing continuity between Madeleine and Mado, the community reinforce the notion that Madeleine has become a person who is not his wife. Zimmerman notes that spousal tales suggest that “where caregivers manage to perceive continuity, the patient’s identity is preserved and the carer’s burden appears less pronounced” (27). But in ‘The Pink Ribbon’ the patient’s identity is continuously contested and it is never clear whether readers should perceive Madeleine and Mado as two different people or insist on continuity. In order to provide care for his wife, James decides on discontinuity: “it was in both their interests that he should never think of Madeleine, for his duty was here, now, to Mado, whose need was extreme” (263). The ambiguous separation of biological death from social death interferes with the grieving process, since it is unclear whether James should withdraw emotional attachment from his wife in her past or present state. It is only with the appearance of the apparition that James begins to reestablish continuity between Madeleine and Mado, which in turn initiates the process of realization. The question concerning whether James should endorse or reject the division between Madeleine and Mado is brought to a head by the apparition, which is later revealed to be a fetch: a spiritual manifestation of a living person that is usually understood to be an omen of impending death. The fetch has multiple roots in Irish and Norse mythology and, as William Sayers notes, is eventually synthesized as the Hiberno-English fetch: “The Norse concepts of the spirit emanation of an individual and the personal or family female guardian spirit merged in Ireland and in the Western Isles, and they were conjoined with the native Irish narrative tradition of prophetic women appearing at the onset of a change in the fortunes of an individual, family, or tribe” (207). Furthermore, the term “fetch-life” is an obsolete term from the sixteenth century that refers to a psychopomp sent to “fetch” the soul of a dying person; the word is used in Richard Stanyhurst’s 1583 translation of the Aenied. Unusually, the fetch in “The Pink Ribbon” does communicate and informs James of aspects of his wife of which he was previously unaware: stories that complicate the apparent discontinuity between Madeleine and Mado. Firstly, that during the war, James had packed a crate with oranges and lemons in Algiers and sent them home to Madeleine. However, the fetch reports that by the time she received them, they had gone moldy and dissolved into a “beautiful pale-green powder, like a puffball” (267); James had never known the truth about his gift. Secondly, when James was called for military service, Madeleine had demurely acquiesced, “acting the little English wife” (270) but as soon as he left, she “lay on the floor and howled like an animal, rolled up and down as though she was in extreme agony” before taking a bath, applying makeup, and listening to music in order to transform herself into “someone else.” The fetch’s stories articulate Madeleine’s past experiences, thereby allowing her to resume her status as the author of her life story in contrast 390

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to Mado, who may be the subject of her life story but cannot act as the author in any meaningful way. In the wake of these revelations, Mado’s present bodily state is reconnected to Madeleine by a narrative account of an entire life, leaving James to honor the wishes of Madeleine’s earlier self rather than the interests of Mado. It is the fetch that finally urges James to commit euthanasia: “You don’t do it, because you would be set free yourself, and you think that would be wrong. But you don’t think of her, or you would know what she wants. What I want” (274). By reconnecting Madeleine’s memories with her present bodily state, the fetch reaffirms the continuity between Madeleine and Mado; despite the ravages of dementia, this is the same person. Consequently, it is heavily implied that James decides to honor Madeleine’s wishes – her chief concern – rather than those of Mado, whose demands are incoherent and limited to immediate experiential concerns. “The Pink Ribbon” offers fresh insight into the complexities of Alzheimer’s patient narratives that demand that the caregiver decide between continuity and discontinuity rooted in the distinction between social death and biological death.

Conclusion A. S. Byatt’s Little Black Book of Stories explores grief and death using a distinctive hybrid of realism and metafiction that problematizes clear distinctions between illusion and reality. Byatt’s self-conscious realism depicts the ways in which humans approach death both cognitively and emotionally. Grief is a process of detachment that reflects both the desire to hold onto the lost person and the recognition that he or she is no longer present. It reduces emotional connection to an illusory past and helps individuals to develop new attachments grounded in reality; physical death and social death do not occur simultaneously and grief is a process of realization or “making real” the loss. Little Black Book of Stories offers an ontology of uncertainty that acknowledges and responds to the fragility of life and the contingency of death in highly varied ways. These themes are similarly dramatized in the other stories in the collection. “Raw Material” suggests that the act of writing can function as therapy, but also questions whether it is ethical to reframe another’s death as art. “Body Art” depicts a physician’s halting attempts to empathize with a patient who is experiencing grief after an abortion. These stories dramatically evoke the contingency and suddenness of death as well as the ways in which grief shapes individual lives in unexpected ways. “The Thing in the Forest” highlights the ways in which later generations “remember” the personal, collective, and cultural trauma of those who came before by means of the stories, images and behaviors among which they grew up. Whereas the grief process is concerned with the gradual withdrawal of comforting illusions in the face of the inexorable demands of reality, the encounter with the thing in the forest is a traumatic irruption into the girls’ lives that leads to pathological grief states. Although they lack first-hand experience of the war, the specter of death and destruction manifests itself via their imaginative capacity in the form of the thing. Meanwhile, “A Stone Woman” condenses the sensations of aging, illness, and grief into the image of turning to stone and problematizes biomedical approaches to these conditions. In this story, decay and dissolution are portrayed as aesthetic rather than grotesque, which poses questions concerning the ways in which language frames and constructs the aging body. Grief is shown to mark the transition from death to a new way of living. Finally, “The Pink Ribbon” problematizes the perception of the patient with Alzheimer’s disease as a passive and empty receptacle for their former vital self. The story challenges readers to decide whether the body occupied by a person with dementia is a different person from the previous occupant of that body. The ambiguous separation of biological death from social death interferes with the grieving process because it is unclear whether James should withdraw emotional attachment from his wife in her past or 391

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present state. The fetch reaffirms narrative continuity between Madeleine and Mado in a way seemingly that allows James to value Madeleine’s wishes over Mado’s more immediate needs. Overall, Byatt’s short stories offer fresh insight into the human dimension of illness, aging, and death. They demonstrate the ways in which grief can be passed on through the generations, how it can act as a passage to a new form of living, and how it can complicate the life narrative of individuals suffering identity-threatening illnesses. The ways in which individuals encounter, interpret, and respond to grief suggest that – to paraphrase Norman Cousins – death is not the greatest loss in life; the greatest loss is what dies inside us while we live.

Notes 1

2

The biology of dementia co-exists with cultural representations and stereotypes that shape how we view the elderly, and Byatt’s story troubles two problematic cultural stereotypes about patients with dementia: (i) that senile dementia is akin to entering a second childhood; (ii) comparison to the undead, and zombies in particular. David Morris offers a detailed and compassionate analysis of Alzheimer’s disease as “an illness more frightening than death: it is the death of the self while the body lives on” (234), but nevertheless refers to dementia patients in dehumanizing terms as “blank infantile humanoids” (235) and “as close as we are likely to see to a literal embodiment of the undead” (234). Deanna refutes the idea that dementia patients are going through a second childhood and is quick to challenge James’s notion that Madeleine is a zombie. The term zombie has strong racial connotations, and Roger Luckhurst points out that the creature represents “the logical outcome of being a slave: without will, without name, and trapped in a living death of unending labour.” Similarly, infantilizing conceptualizations of dementia patients devalue their life narrative, truncate their agency, and compound their loss of awareness. Consequently, James and Deanna refrain from calling Mado “naughty,” as that implies that she is undertaking a second childhood and instead use terms such as “wild” and “restless.”

Works Cited Alfer, Alexa, and Amy J. Edwards de Campos. A. S. Byatt: Critical Storytelling. Manchester UP, 2012. Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations. Translated by Harry Zorn. Pimlico, 1999. Brody, Howard. Stories of Sickness. 2nd ed. Oxford UP, 2003. Byatt, A. S. The Biographer’s Tale. Chatto & Windus, 2001. Byatt, A. S. “Fairy Stories: The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye.” Written for Insel Verlag, 1995. asbyatt. com/onherself.aspx. Byatt, A. S. Little Black Book of Stories. Chatto & Windus, 2003. Campbell, Jane. A. S. Byatt and the Heliotropic Imagination. Wilfred Laurier UP, 2004. Hirsch, Marianne. The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture After the Holocaust. Columbia UP, 2012. Kleinman, Arthur. “Culture, Bereavement, and Psychiatry.” The Lancet, vol. 379, no. 9816, 2012, pp. 608–609. Luckhurst, Roger. Where Do Zombies Come From? 31 Aug. 2015. www.bbc.com/culture/story/ 20150828-where-do-zombies-come-from. Morris, David B. Illness and Culture in the Postmodern Age. U of California P, 1998. Sabat, Steven R. The Experience of Alzheimer’s Disease: Life Through a Tangled Veil. Blackwell, 2001. Sayers, William. “A Hiberno-Norse Etymology for English Fetch: ‘Apparition of a Living Person.’” ANQ: A Quarterly Journal of Short Articles, Notes and Reviews, vol. 30, no. 4, pp. 205–209. Wiltshire, John. “Biography, Pathography, and the Recovery of Meaning.” The Cambridge Quarterly, vol. 29, 2000, pp. 409–422. Zimmerman, Martina. The Poetics and Politics of Alzheimer’s Disease Life-Writing. Palgrave Macmillan, 2017.

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PART VI HISTORICAL ENGAGEMENTS

In this final section, our six contributors examine their chosen texts in light of specific historical events, from the Black Death in fourteenth-century Europe to the 2013 biomedical controversy of Winkfield v. Children’s Hospital Oakland. These essays approach the intersections between death and history in two distinct ways: first, by examining the topic of death in relation to the text’s moment of composition and the broader sociocultural contexts within which it is embedded; second, by addressing historical contexts invoked by or within the literary artifact’s story or plot, which may or may not be aligned with its moment of production. Christina Staudt points out that although we cannot (and should not) “categorically connect all artistic and literary work of a period with the prevailing historic mentality of death,” it is possible to “discern affinities” (564) within such representations – and it is the implications of these affinities that our contributors attend to in this section. Indeed, given that the writers under consideration in this section were responding to specific events ranging from the personal (e.g., Mary Shelley’s loss of her twelve-day-old daughter) to the collective (e.g., World War II), their works constitute a distinct form of historical engagement that is explicitly mediated by the passage of time – one that evinces the possibilities, struggles, and (narrative) limits of representing and making sense of the historical past. In the section’s opening essay, “On the Corpse of a Loved One in the Era of Brain Death: Bioethics and Fictions,” Catherine Belling challenges dominant biomedical conceptions of the body with reference to the 2013 legal controversy sparked by Winkfield v. Children’s Hospital Oakland. She argues that “the contestable determination of brain death” reveals a fundamental tension “between scientific and narrative epistemologies.” Belling explains how the body becomes a site of struggle “between medical expertise and common knowledge,” “between scientifically accessible biological fact and the cultural constructs […] that determine so much human – and even clinical – decision-making.” Her insightful essay eloquently interweaves the medical controversy surrounding Jahi McMath’s death with a range of literary works – including Evelyn Waugh’s The Loved One, Maylis de Kerangal’s The Heart, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, and William Shakespeare’s King Lear and Romeo and Juliet – in order to explore the complexities and attendant ethical implications of pronouncing death. The next two essays address serial narrations of the Second World War in two distinct ways. Catherine Hoffmann’s “Death to the Music of Time: Reticence in Anthony Powell’s Mediated Narratives of Death” focuses on Powell’s 12-volume A Dance to the 393

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Music of Time (1951–75). Hoffmann argues that characters like Max Pilgrim, Eleanor WalpoleWilson, and an anonymous air-raid warden from The Soldier’s Art (Volume 8), pay “tribute to the unostentatious heroism of civilian Londoners during World War Two.” Hoffmann examines how Powell’s narrative and rhetorical strategies of dramatization, delayed disclosure, reticence, and understatement shape reader reception, as characters struggle with both the acts of conveying and receiving news of death – “a signifier with an incessantly receding, ungraspable signified” (Goodwin and Bronfen 4). In “Death and Chinese War Television Dramas: (Re)configuring Ethical Judgments in The Disguiser,” W. Michelle Wang focuses on narrative ethics in the 41-episode Chinese spy war drama The Disguiser (2015). By attending to what James Phelan terms conversational and authorial disclosures, visual structure, gender dynamics of on-screen character deaths, degrees of overkill, and other aspects of the narrative, Wang articulates the implicit ethical hierarchies that emerge in this contemporary television serial set during the Second Sino-Japanese War and the Second World War. Wang contends that fictional representations of war are ultimately driven by humankind’s problematic impetus for meaningmaking, in our attempts “to wrest meaning from or thrust significance upon the extensive death and suffering encountered in historical wars.” Kit Ying Lye’s “Where Do the Disappeared Go? Writing the Genocide in East Timor” examines Indonesian writer Seno Gumira Ajidarma’s short stories, which take the form of Sastra Koran (newspaper literature), a narrative mode that straddles the porous borders between fiction and new journalism. This literary form serves as a means of resisting the (self-) censorship and culture of silence that surrounds the largely neglected genocide in East Timor. Given the writer’s inclusion of “actual testimonies from witnesses and survivors” in stories such as “The Incident,” Lye observes that Seno’s Sastra Koran functions as a form of testimonial literature in response to the 1991 Dili massacre in East Timor, where literature becomes the dominant mode through which Indonesian writers “confront silencing” and “call for accountability,” “recovering that which has been left unsaid and buried” within the regime’s official, totalizing master narratives. The final two essays in this section and the subsequent coda examine how epidemics profoundly shape and shift our atttitudes toward death. In his essay “‘Doubtfull Drede’: Dying at the End of the Middle Ages,” Walter Wadiak explains how “late-medieval literature of the macabre” was broadly shaped by its cultural moment and especially by “the impact of the Black Death,” which historians estimate claimed the lives of perhaps 60 percent of Europe’s overall population in the mid-fourteenth century. Wadiak observes that imaginative literature of this period is “deeply rooted in the experience of fear,” driven by the dual aims of both horror and consolation, as the Black Death fueled fears of “mors improvisa, the death that comes without warning and before the possibility of confession and forgiveness.” As death came to mean “a terrifying extinction of a unique subjectivity,” Wadiak contends that late-medieval literature was further marked by an “interest in the body as a site for both belief (for instance, in the fetishizing of relics) and vulnerability.” Beyond the loss of individual subjectivity, the concept of death further functions as a metaphor for social issues (Hakola and Kivistö viii) in Wanlin Li’s “Urbanization, Ambiguity, and Social Death in Charles Brockden Brown’s Arthur Mervyn.” Li examines the cultural consequences of urbanization in Philadelphia at the turn of the nineteenth century, where Charles Brockden Brown’s vivid representations of the 1793 yellow fever epidemic in Arthur Mervyn (1799) transfigure the plagued city into “a Gothic scene of horror,” wherein premature burials of the ill (and their subsequent “resurrections”) demonstrate the epidemic’s power to blur the seemingly uncrossable line between life and death. By attending to such forms 394

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of “living death” (including premature burial and social death), Li argues that the novel generates powerful ambiguities that insightfully reveal “the physical and moral, as well as cultural, consequences of urbanization.”

Works Cited Goodwin, Sarah Webster, and Elisabeth Bronfen, editors. Death and Representation. Johns Hopkins UP, 1993. Hakola, Outi, and Sari Kivistö, editors. Death in Literature. Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2014. Staudt, Christina. “Death in Western art and literature.” The Routledge Companion to Death and Dying, edited by Christopher M. Moreman. Routledge, 2018, pp. 558–570.

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36 ON THE CORPSE OF A LOVED ONE IN THE ERA OF BRAIN DEATH Bioethics and Fictions Catherine Belling

In Maylis de Kerangal’s 2014 novel The Heart, twenty-one-year-old Simon is declared brain dead – in the original French, en mort cérébrale – after a car accident. He is sustained on life support while his distraught parents decide about organ donation. The critical care doctor worries that the parents cannot tell that their son is in “reality” dead. “What could they have gleaned with their ignorant eyes,” he asks himself, “incapable of understanding the relationship between Simon’s destroyed insides and his peaceful exterior, between reality and appearance?” (81). He fears that because they cannot see beneath the surface to what medicine knows, they will hesitate and agonize rather than accept and decide. Simon’s body is the site for an epistemological struggle between medical expertise and common knowledge, and also, within medicine, between scientifically accessible biological fact and the cultural constructs, the shared fictions, that determine so much human – and even clinical – decision-making. The corpse of a loved one is a cognitive challenge, a trauma that reality inflicts upon reason. In his satirical novel The Loved One, Evelyn Waugh observes the way American funerary practices struggle to demarcate the deadness of each “Loved One” as simultaneously tolerable and definitive. “The spectacle” of death, thinks one character, had been “rude and momentarily unnerving,” but cultural rituals enable him to adjust: “his reason accepted the event as part of the established order” (33). Embalming and cosmetics are meant to diminish horror at the spectacle of the dead and also ritualize this appearance as an unrepeatable fiction; the event of death has occurred, the body will be disposed of, “the established order” is inescapable (33). To reach this point of acceptance, however, the loved one must first be known to be dead. This is more complicated than it used to be. Biomedical technology has, as a byproduct of lengthening many lives, made us increasingly dependent on medicine to tell us when death has happened, sometimes in the face of seemingly contradictory evidence. Tensions arise between medical expertise, with its attendant reliance on positivist language, and experience of a family member who might see, with a terrible mix of hope and fear, what clinical language tries to erase: ambiguity. These days, our final medical procedure is often carried out not with needles or scalpels but with words: a medical professional pronounces the patient dead. This linguistic act both identifies the quality of deadness and performatively claims a moment in time as specifying a 397

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life’s absolute endpoint. But because becoming dead is a process, this specificity is not biological fact; it is a useful social (and legal) fiction. This does not mean it is false, only that a precise moment of death is effectively unfalsifiable. The contestable determination of brain death, then, usefully reveals a tension in contemporary Western medical and popular discourses between scientific and narrative epistemologies, and the clinical challenges posed (to healthcare professionals and patients/families alike) by insufficient attention to the power of verbal connotation and the danger of imposing specialized “scientific” denotations on a vernacular word as significant as death. Not long ago, I returned home from work just as an ambulance pulled away from our apartment building. In minutes, the police in the lobby had me in their car, escorting me to the hospital. All they’d say was that my husband had collapsed. I ran into the emergency room and gave his name to the triage nurse. She couldn’t find him. As she rechecked her computer, a man behind me said, helpfully: “Ambulance brought a body in right now. It’s not in the system yet.” He gestured, I followed, and there was the fact of it. The event had already happened; that body was the appalling confirmatory spectacle. This seems ironic. My work concerns uncertainty and anxiety in medicine, inconsistent clinical findings, and the negotiations of hypochondria, the places where a truthful medicine admits, ambivalently, to not knowing. But here, instead, was complete certainty. There’d been no time for hope or fear. He was peaceful, familiar, yet incontrovertibly pale, cold, and still. There was no doubt. Yet my reason rebelled anyway. When a tactful nurse came to disconnect the flatlined heart monitor, I turned to her quickly, filled with sudden hope: What? Did you see something? But no. Of course not. That first cognitive shock was followed by a long struggle to reconcile my mind’s irrational yet persuasive efforts to find things otherwise, and I wonder how much more difficult that would have been had he still seemed alive even while doctors assured me he was dead. When life-sustaining intensive care became much more effective with developments in mechanical ventilation in the 1960s, a new imperative emerged to challenge the mourner’s rational capacities: you must accept that a loved one’s apparently still-living body is effectively already a corpse. In what follows, I consider the uneasy biologism of the “brain death” determination and suggest how recognizing its status as a – legal, medical, social – fiction might paradoxically make it a more acceptable way of becoming dead. A real-life medical-ethical case illustrates this tension. In 2013, a woman in California named Latasha Winkfield flatly rejected medicine’s determination that her daughter, Jahi McMath, was dead. I first encountered the case through the lens of bioethics and I accepted that brain death was real death, masked by the illusory effects of so-called life support. I believed Jahi’s mother was being (perhaps understandably) irrational. But in the context of my own recent experience, and my turn to reading literature about the challenges of apprehending a loved one’s corpse, my usual interest in uncertainty reasserted itself. In this essay, I focus on an odd group of literary parents: King Lear; Mary Shelley; Juliet’s parents, the Capulets; and the donor’s mother in De Kerangal’s story of a transplanted heart. All suffer the agony of accommodating their children’s deaths. From their perspectives, I suddenly found the medical language of brain death to be tyrannical and absurd, a cognitive burden on those who use it or are urged to abide by it, clinicians and loved ones alike.

Two Kinds of Dead I know when one is dead, and when one lives; She’s dead as earth. ( Shakespeare, King Lear [5.3.312–313]) 398

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After surgery to treat sleep apnea, thirteen-year-old Jahi McMath began to bleed. By the time doctors realized that a wayward artery had been breached, her heart had stopped. In an earlier time, that would have been the end. No heartbeat, no oxygen circulating where it was needed, the hypoxic brain’s function failing and then its structure beginning to disintegrate. But CPR and life support have separated the two essential parts of dying: the extinction of what we might think of as maintenance of life (intake and distribution of oxygen: breath and pulse) and its governance (the brain’s control over life processes from breathing to consciousness). In 1968 in the US, “brain death” was defined as a way to be dead when governance failed despite artificial maintenance of breath and pulse. The initial term, “irreversible coma,” was adjusted to include “death” partly to facilitate organ removal for transplantation: the “dead donor rule” requires that such a patient be clinically defined as already dead, even though the relevant organs must still be alive. In 1981, the Uniform Definition of Death Act (UDDA) was passed in an effort to create legal consensus about the two sets of criteria for telling whether or not a person is dead: “An individual who has sustained either (1) irreversible cessation of circulatory and respiratory functions, or (2) irreversible cessation of all functions of the entire brain, including the brain stem, is dead” (Uniform Determination of Death Act [UDDA, 1981]). In practice, this terminological sleight of hand has proven hard to sustain. Jahi’s heart was restarted and a ventilator took over control of her breathing from her brain stem. She seemed to be sleeping peacefully at last, but the doctors’ scrupulous tests told them that her entire brain had irreversibly stopped functioning: she would never wake up. They told Latasha Winkfield that her daughter’s brain was dead – and that this meant Jahi was dead, so they should turn off the breathing machine, and allow her heart to stop permanently. A social worker would have approached Winkfield about donating her daughter’s still-living organs. After the terror (and hope) of hours of bleeding (and false reassurance), followed by panicky resuscitation efforts, Jahi was stable, and surely not her mother’s idea of a corpse. So Winkfield rejected medicine’s pronouncement, later capturing her sense of the medical paradox in a quote to CBS News, “Jahi wasn’t brain dead or any kind of dead” (“Jahi McMath”). What followed was a public challenge to the security of “brain dead” as a biomedical diagnosis. What interests me most here is the role of language in what happened. Might things have gone differently had Jahi’s doctors not felt it necessary to insist that she was already dead, if they had realized the problem was with a deliberately limited clinical vocabulary and not with Winkfield’s “ignorant eyes”? Near the end of Shakespeare’s King Lear, Lear enters carrying the body of his daughter Cordelia, recently hanged. We imagine her body is still warm; perhaps we imagine how, today, we could start CPR and it might not be too late. But Lear claims confidence in his ability to “know when one is dead, and when one lives,” and that his daughter is “dead as earth” (5.3.313). Or so he says. Then he turns to technology for confirmatory evidence, just in case. No EEG yet, but another external measure of internal activity: “Lend me a looking-glass; /If that her breath will mist or stain the stone, /Why, then she lives” (5.3.313–315), and then, “This feather stirs,” he cries, “she lives!” (5.3.319). He begs the others to recognize what he so desires to see: “Look on her, look, her lips, /Look there, look there!” (5.3.372–375). This conflict between certainty and denial, as we shall see, proves fatal to Lear. In The Heart, Simon’s mother assesses his condition just as Lear does Cordelia’s: she “leans over her child’s mouth to feel his breath, places her face sideways on his chest to hear his heart.” Because he is still receiving life-sustaining treatment, she encounters the evidence Lear sought: “He is breathing, she can feel it; his heart is beating, she can hear it” (75–76). She is expected nonetheless to regard her son as dead. The transplant coordinator knowingly uses “brutal 399

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phrases” to tell Simon’s parents the news; he “knows all too well how much suffering can be caused by ambiguity, misplaced subtlety, in these kinds of interviews” (101). His view is that uncertainty just prolongs the agony of parents who believe that until their child stops breathing there is a possibility of recovery, and who then also feel it is their responsibility to decide when to give up hope. (This uncertainty can, of course, also sabotage organ procurement.) It would be easier if the loved one could be defined as already a corpse. But a breathing cadaver is an inescapably ambiguous entity. This cannot be changed by repeated assertions to the contrary. I have come to believe that pressure to assert and accept as medical fact what is finally unknowable – not that such patients are incurably damaged, which is clear, but that they are already dead – may itself cause harm. An ICU nurse taking care of Simon treats him as she would any other patient, speaking directly to him, telling him what she is doing as she checks his vitals; “she is so gentle, it is almost unbearable” (78). A doctor later chastises her: “his parents were in the room, and for them it was a contradictory signal in an extreme situation; such words, spoken in the context of treatment, blur the message we are trying to communicate to them, when the situation is already upsetting enough, okay?” (90). The doctor’s warning indicates the effort required to counteract the strong perception that Simon is not a corpse. Both he and the transplant coordinator see false hope as a source of confusion and suffering, but equate such hope with a far less false recognition that a patient in a state beyond coma – the French coma dépassé – is not (yet) a dead body. The doctor struggles to eliminate ambiguity and shores up his position by appealing to his professional access to the body’s inner truths, allowing him to “know when one is dead, and when one lives” – despite the commonsense outward signs that for so long were our communal measure of death, and on which the “ignorant eyes” of Simon’s parents still depend. Similar reasoning seems to have informed the position taken by clinicians treating Jahi. An ABC News report exemplifies the hospital’s efforts – and the media’s inability – to sustain medical certainty. Under the headline “Brain Dead Girl’s Mom Says Hospital’s Not Feeding Her,” the article gets tangled in its own assumptions, undermining the headline’s implication that Winkfield is irrational: “[T]he hospital where the 13-year-old girl is being kept on life support is not feeding her and has been insensitive in referring to the brain-dead teen as ‘the body,’” they report, before quoting Winkfield herself: “I hate it that they refer to her as just the body or the deceased; that is my child that they’re talking about…. They don’t even use her name” (Newcomb and Schabner, 2013). A fundamental cognitive dissonance is clear: for Winkfield, they are mistreating her child; for the hospital, repeated authoritative assertions that Jahi is no longer a person but “the body” are meant to persuade her otherwise. The dissonance is exacerbated by difference – in race, class, culture – and Winkfield’s resistance to the pronouncement of death was seen by some as evidence of stubborn denial or of an inability to understand the hospital’s counterintuitive definition of death, that she lacked “health literacy” and needed to be “educated” by her doctors. But Winkfield was not unusual in rejecting this definition of death. “Brain death” is a term that even experienced clinicians struggle with. In a 2001 New Yorker article, Gary Greenberg notes how almost “every expert I spoke with about brain death was tripped up by its semantic trickiness. ‘Even I get this wrong,’ said one physician and bioethicist who has written extensively on the subject, after making a similar slip.” Another physician notes “with some dismay that even highly trained professionals who fully accept the concept sometimes talk to brain-dead patients.” This compassionate behavior (encouraged in every other clinical scenario) suggests less a “failure to accept the truth,” I would argue, than the deep-seated rejection of an unacceptable, even untruthful, framing of what counts as the truth. If we have to work so hard to persuade ourselves that someone is dead, the word dead may 400

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simply not, despite efforts to reconstitute its meaning within medical terminology, be applicable. Bioethicist Stuart Youngner tells Greenberg that this “need for linguistic vigilance indicates a problem with the concept itself.” What does it mean when word, concept, and claim – or signifier, signified, and referent – form so unstable a sign? In Jahi’s case, the patient, after being declared dead, took another five years dying. If she had stayed in California, where “brain dead” and “dead” are legally synonymous, the ventilator would have been removed and the dying process would have continued quickly and ineluctably from brain to heart and then to all of her (except, given consent, organs removed for transplantation). Instead, Winkfield moved her daughter to New Jersey, one of two US states whose law allows long-term accommodations for those who do not accept brain death. Here, “brain dead” and “dead” are not legally synonymous, which meant that artificial respiration, hydration, nutrition, and so on could be continued. As a result, most of Jahi’s body continued to be alive, despite efforts in the bioethics media discourse to argue otherwise. Rachel Aviv, in her compelling account of Jahi’s story, gathers some of bioethicist Arthur Caplan’s public warnings: in a Newsday op-ed, Caplan “wrote, ‘Keeping her on a ventilator amounts to desecration of a body.’ He told CNN, ‘There isn’t any likelihood that she’s gonna survive very long.’ In an interview with USA Today, he said, ‘You can’t really feed a corpse’ and ‘She is going to start to decompose.’” But Jahi’s body did not behave like a corpse. For five years she remained more or less stable, except that she underwent puberty, beginning to menstruate. Puberty is governed by the brain: hers was thus, at least to this extent, still alive. Even more significantly, there was evidence – controversial, to be sure – that Jahi was at times aware enough to respond with particular hand and foot movements to specific commands given by her mother. The neurologist Alan Shewmon concluded: “Based on the compelling video evidence and the gross structural preservation of her brain in the 2014 MRI scan, I am convinced that, from early 2014, Jahi McMath was in a ‘minimally conscious state’” (“The Case of” S76). In 2018, after Jahi’s liver failed, the ventilator was withdrawn and her mother took her home to California for her funeral.

Irreversibility Thou’lt come no more, Never, never, never, never, never! ( Shakespeare, King Lear [5.3.371]) By perseverating on the assertion that Cordelia will never waken, Lear seems to be trying to convince himself to accept what he knows: that her condition is irreversible. Forms of this struggle have been recorded by many bereft parents: in early 1815, Mary Shelley gave birth prematurely to a daughter who died twelve days later. Not long after, she wrote in her journal: “Dreamt that my little baby came to life again; that it had only been cold, and that we rubbed it before the fire, and it lived. Awake and find no baby” (71). This has been read as foreshadowing her novel Frankenstein, begun a year later, in which Victor’s effort to defeat death begins in the loss of his mother: “It is so long before the mind can persuade itself that she … can have departed forever” (45). Shelley’s dream and her novel both express the mind’s effort to be wrong that the loved one is dead, an effort that can lead to madness and, in some cases, death. In medicine, to declare someone dead is not only to announce their present condition but also to predict with certainty that they will never return to the state – alive – they were in before. To identify a permanent state at a single point in time requires confident prognostication. In most cases, these predictions are never tested: once breathing support is withdrawn, death is inevitable and will be permanent, even when it is not instantaneous. Were it not 401

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for the requirement of the dead donor rule, this permanence would be sufficient. A person declared to be brain dead is permanently dead if the breathing machine is turned off, or if her organs are removed for transplantation. In hindsight, we can then judge this now-permanent state as having been irreversible at the time of the declaration. The truth of this is seldom tested, but keeping Jahi on “life support” did exactly that, finding that either “brain death” is (very partially) reversible, or the diagnosis was wrong: she had not been clinically or legally dead after all. But how do we know for certain that something is irreversible? A contradiction in Mary Shelley’s description of her dream anticipates our struggles with the concept of brain death. Shelley writes that in the dream her baby “came to life again.” By implication, the baby had definitely been dead, and then restored, as if miraculously, to life. Death had been reversed. But in the next sentence, she undercuts this: “it had only been cold” and never dead at all. Rubbing it by the fire, then, had been resuscitation, not resurrection. Yet Shelley, in her account of the dream, leaves it unclear: despite her unconscious efforts, her child is still dead when she wakes. Like Lear, what she knows and what she wants are profoundly, and threateningly, dissonant. I wonder what dreams Latasha Winkfield might have had, if she slept at all, in the hospital room beside her breathing undead daughter. When Jahi’s body did not decompose as the clinicians and ethicists had predicted, media reports began questioning that key component of brain death: its irreversibility. Confusion followed: “Doctors are saying Jahi McMath’s brain showed signs of improvement after being declared brain dead. [… They] say there were clinical signs she incrementally improved over the five-year span, crossing the line between brain dead and a ‘minimally conscious state’” (CBS News, “Report”). By the clinical and legal definition of brain death, this line cannot be crossed. One bioethicist saw Jahi’s case as a medical breakthrough: “this case has always been fascinating […] because it’s the first case ever where someone correctly declared dead, arguably is no longer dead […]. That’s never happened before […] once you’re declared dead, you’re supposed to stay dead” (Gafni). This claim trusts that a declaration of death is based on biomedical access to an absolute truth inside the body. This is false: it relies on a set of legally agreed-upon criteria (some measurable, like an EEG; some not yet, like future events) for defining dead and then for applying the adjective to a particular person. Neurologist Alan Shewmon has been emphatic in correcting this view of Jahi’s “improvement,” warning against confusing the diagnosis of brain death, even when based on brain imaging and clinical testing, with a biological fact. He writes, “Since, by definition there is no recovery from BD or death, it makes no sense to ask, even rhetorically, whether Jahi ‘could be the first person to recover from brain death’ or whether ‘there is something unique about her brain that would allow it to become the only brain that could recover from death’” (“Truly Reconciling” 165). What’s unusual is not that a brain came back to life, but that a brain determined to be dead was, rather than being allowed to continue the dying process (through withdrawal of artificial respiration), kept in a mostly living body long enough for the initial diagnosis of death to turn out to have been wrong. What happened was not, then, a reversal or a miracle but the exposure of an error, as if Shelley’s baby had been, as in her dream, just cold, never dead. Or as if Frankenstein’s monster were a person accidentally buried alive while in a coma, rescued and resuscitated, and then found to be damaged, disabled, and traumatized. Perhaps this is why Mary Shelley had to raise the stakes in her novel, erasing the ambiguity expressed in her dream by having Victor animate a composite body that had by definition never died because it had never before been alive. I must be clear: I am not arguing that people who seem to be in irreversible comas should be kept on life support longer just in case the diagnosis, and all-important prognosis, were wrong. 402

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I believe it would have been better for Jahi, and all involved in her care, if she had been taken from the ventilator and allowed to complete the dying process that had already begun. It seems horrifying to imagine she was still conscious, even just a little, now and then, for those five long years. We cannot know, but surely this is a good reason to intervene less rather than more. And this is why it seems that the diagnosis of death – already dead – fails patients and families, even in the context of organ donation. “Brain death,” rather than reflecting a biological reality or offering a social and legal palliative, is a construct that generates precisely the loss of trust and the reasonable resistance with which Winkfield responded: a distrust exacerbated and made reasonable by the context of racial, historical, and socioeconomic disparities in health care, as well as possible negligence in the surgery and in Jahi’s postoperative care. A legal fiction is intended to generate agreement to accept as fact something that cannot be known for certain. What if Jahi’s doctors had been given the latitude to acknowledge that “brain dead” is a term of art (a way to say “we know she is not going to wake up”), rather than a term of science (“we have special insight into the truth of her state that you don’t, and we say she’s dead and our work is to persuade you that this is a fact despite the evidence of your own senses”)? This agonizing effort seems to arise out of medicine’s anxiety about its own knowledge, a need to insist upon certainty in the face of ambiguity, and its belief that what the doctor in The Heart calls “misplaced subtlety” (101) is more harmful than candid acknowledgment of the liminal and the indefinite.

Fictions Alack the day, she’s dead, she’s dead, she’s dead. ( Lady Capulet [Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, 4.5.29]) In Shakespeare’s tragedy Romeo and Juliet, Juliet’s parents find her unconscious and both quickly conclude that she is dead. Her father articulates and applies physical criteria: “Ha, let me see her! Out, alas, she’s cold. /Her blood is settled, and her joints are stiff. /Life and these lips have long been separated” (4.5.30–32). The audience knows that Juliet has taken a drug in order to feign death. Friar Lawrence, the play’s medical expert, describes its effect: “No warmth, no breath shall testify thou livest” (4.1.99). Forty-two hours later she will wake “as from a pleasant sleep” (4.1.108). But her parents agree that she is dead, and she is placed in the family crypt and mourned. When Romeo finds her, his observation seems different from what Juliet’s parents saw. She is less visibly cadaverous: “Death, that hath sucked the honey of thy breath,/Hath had no power yet upon thy beauty. /Thou art not conquered. Beauty’s ensign yet/Is crimson in thy lips and in thy cheeks, /And death’s pale flag is not advancèd there” (5.3.92–96). Horribly, we may deduce that the death Romeo thinks is slow to advance is in fact retreating, that the color is returning to her cheeks because the drug is wearing off. We watch in awful suspense, hoping that maybe this time Romeo will wait long enough for her to wake up. But he too does not doubt that she is dead; he poisons himself, and then she wakes and finds his corpse, and kills herself, incontrovertibly, with his dagger. The stage direction tells us she is dead, for real this time. Even more than in King Lear, Shakespeare reminds us of our fallibility in the precise determination of death. The fictionality of the plays adds an extra epistemological complexity – that of dramatic irony. We know, of course, that the person on the stage before us is not dead. As long as we understand and accept the conventions of the play – our eyes are not “ignorant” – we know that the actors under the visible surfaces of Cordelia and Juliet are alive. But we also accept that, after she has revived and then performed her suicide, Juliet really is dead. We abide by the conventions because they allow us to agree on the story, the fiction, even while we accept that it is a fiction 403

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that depends for its communicative success on our suspension of commonsense observation (Juliet, after stabbing herself, is dead, even if we can see the actress breathe or blink). Lear, in the midst of struggling to establish whether he can see Cordelia as dead, is interrupted by a brusque stage direction: “He dies” (SD 5.3.375). In both plays, there is a significant contrast: there are characters agonizing over the state of a loved one’s body and there is the uncontestable death dictated by the playwright. This authority is absolute, within its unfalsifiable fictional context. Stage directions are rare in Shakespeare’s folios, yet this one tells us definitively that, despite his determination that Cordelia’s state leaves room for doubt, the actor must convey, and the audience must accept, that Lear’s death is evident and absolute. The pronouncement determines the performance; the spectacle inescapably signifies the event. In the world of the play, dying is easy because it is an entirely outward event, named as such and accepted unquestioningly as such, without recourse to what Hamlet called “that within which passes show” (1.2.88): the inward mental or physical truths that can be hidden from observers, and must be actively, often violently – and sometimes medically – extracted. Lear is dead when the play ends because his inward state is irrelevant. What if we think about the diagnosis of brain death as a similar kind of stage direction? An expert – the author, the doctor – tells the audience that a character, or our loved one, is dead. “He dies.” Despite what you see (even if the actor before you is breathing), if you understand the conventions of this situation, you should accept the tacit agreement required by the rules of the genre: your role is to behave as if your loved one is already and undeniably a corpse. Much effort has been expended on teaching this new rule. Greenberg quotes Howard M. Nathan describing the campaign (in the clinic and in public health discourse) to encourage people to reject a longaccepted concept: “It took us years to get the public to understand what brain death was […]. We had to train people in how to talk about it.” “People” includes health care professionals themselves. But you object: This is not a play! We are talking about real bodies, real death. The stakes are completely different and how can you treat serious medical decision-making as if it were fiction and make-believe? I would reply that “brain death” is already a fiction, and that the only way for the bewildered next of kin to make decisions within the decorum of the clinical genre is to play along. And yes, this is indeed a lot to ask. The term “brain death” seems intended to manufacture certainty where it is not possible and hence to demand a shared illusion in a context that claims to value objectively proven scientific truths above all. The language developed by bioethicists, neurologists, legal scholars, and theologians in their effort to reach a public agreement on how to treat people who are irretrievably brain-damaged sadly turned to the word “dead” to describe people who are undergoing what the same lexicon calls life-sustaining treatment. It need not have been so. In an article entitled “A Definition of Irreversible Coma” published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, even the responsible committee seemed to hesitate: “Our primary purpose is to define irreversible coma as a new criterion for death” (“Ad Hoc” 337). Yet they were called (or called themselves) the “Ad Hoc Committee of the Harvard Medical School to Examine the Definition of Brain Death.” Problems remained; hence the 1981 Uniform Definition of Death Act was formalized, intended “to convince the public that brain death was not just a legal fiction but the description of a biological truth” (Shewmon, “Truly Reconciling”). I would guess that if nobody told Winkfield to accept that her breathing daughter was already dead, she may have been more willing to look clearly at the complexity of Jahi’s condition, integrating her own perceptions, fears, and beliefs with the doctor’s evaluation and prognosis, rather than trying to protect her daughter from a system she no longer trusted. Her story reveals a failure in the ethics of naming: the need for a stable biological fact deafens medicine to the power of words – alive with history – to disturb clinical, legal, and ethical policy decisions. 404

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I am not arguing that it was right for Latasha Winkfield to have her daughter kept on life support for all those years. In fact, I believe it was not right. I hope Jahi was not more aware than medical technology could tell. Because finally medicine can not tell, not certainly enough, not always. This need not mean indecisive paralysis. It means acknowledging uncertainty, and allowing families to consent to treatment withdrawal and organ donation on the basis of an honest and trusting account of the patient’s condition, rather than confronting the grieving and terrified with rationalizations that are at odds with all they see and feel and know, at a time when reality has itself become, temporarily, inconceivable. If there was ever a time for words to be used more carefully, this is that time.

Works Cited Ad Hoc Committee of the Harvard Medical School to Examine the Definition of Brain Death. “A Definition of Irreversible Coma.” Journal of the American Medical Association, vol. 205, no. 6, 1968, pp. 337–340. doi:10.1001/jama.1968.03140320031009. Aviv, Rachel. “What Does It Mean to Die?” New Yorker, 5 Feb. 2018. www.newyorker.com/magazine/ 2018/02/05/what-does-it-mean-to-die. CBS News. “Jahi McMath, Girl at Center of Debate over Brain Death, Dies, Mother Says.” 29 June 2018. www.cbsnews.com/news/jahi-mcmath-girl-at-center-of-debate-over-brain-death-dies-mother-says. CBS News. “Report: Jahi McMath’s Brain Showed Some Signs of Improvement After Brain Death, Doctors Say.” 3 July 2018. sacramento.cbslocal.com/2018/07/03/jahi-mcmath-brain-death-report. De Kerangal, Maylis. The Heart, translated by S. Taylor. Picador, 2014. Gafni, Matthias. “Jahi McMath Death Could Have Costly Implications in Civil Case Against Hospital, Doctors.” Mercury News, 30 June 2018. www.mercurynews.com/2018/06/30/jahi-mcmath-deathcould-have-costly-implications-in-civil-case-against-hospital-doctors. Greenberg, Gary. “As Good as Dead.” New Yorker, 13 Aug. 2001. www.newyorker.com/magazine/2001/ 08/13/as-good-as-dead. Newcomb, Alyssa, and Dean Schabner. “Jahi McMath: Brain Dead Girl’s Mom Says Hospital’s Not Feeding Her.” ABC News, 31 Dec. 2013. abcnews.go.com/Health/jahi-mcmath-brain-dead-girlsmom-hospitals-feeding/story?id=21381684. Shakespeare, William. Hamlet. 1599–1602. Folger Digital Texts, edited by Barbara Mowat, Paul Werstine, Michael Poston, and Rebecca Niles. Folger Shakespeare Library, 30 Aug. 2019. www.folgerdigitaltexts.org. Shakespeare, William. King Lear. 1604–1605. Folger Digital Texts, edited by Barbara Mowat, Paul Werstine, Michael Poston, and Rebecca Niles. Folger Shakespeare Library, 28 July 2019. www. folgerdigitaltexts.org. Shakespeare, William. Romeo and Juliet. 1597. Folger Digital Texts, edited by Barbara Mowat, Paul Werstine, Michael Poston, and Rebecca Niles. Folger Shakespeare Library, 30 Aug. 2019. www. folgerdigitaltexts.org. Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein. 1818, edited by M. Hindle. Rev. ed. Penguin, 2003. Shelley, Mary. The Journals of Mary Shelley. 1815. Edited by P. R. Feldman. Johns Hopkins U-P, 1995: pp. 71, entry for Mar. 19, 1815. Shewmon, Alan. “The Case of Jahi McMath: A Neurologist’s View.” Hastings Center Report, vol. 48, no. S4, 2018, pp. S74–S76. Shewmon, Alan. “Truly Reconciling the Case of Jahi McMath.” Neurocritical Care, vol. 29, no. 2, 2018, pp. 165–170. Uniform Definition of Death Act (UDDA). National Conference of Commissioners on Uniform State Laws (NCCUSL). 1981. Adopted by all 50 US states. Waugh, Evelyn. The Loved One. Little, Brown, and Company, 1948.

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37 DEATH TO THE MUSIC OF TIME Reticence in Anthony Powell’s Mediated Narratives of Death Catherine Hoffmann

Introduction: Narration by Proxy – Anthony Powell’s Corpseless Danse Macabre Anthony Powell’s 12-volume roman-fleuve, published over the period 1951–75, bears the title of an allegorical painting by Poussin, A Dance to the Music of Time,1 referred to in the sequence’s incipit and intended as a visual metaphor for the appearance and disappearance of fictional characters in time. Although the painting suggests cyclical time rather than the irreversibility of human life and its journey toward death, the homodiegetic narrator, Nicholas (Nick) Jenkins, immediately connects “the image of time” with “thoughts of mortality” (Question of Upbringing 2). It is inevitable that in the course of his retrospective narrative, covering the period from 1914 to the early 1970s, and adhering to the conventions of realist fiction, a number of characters should die, whether of natural or accidental causes, or as a result of the two World Wars. Though the early volumes of the sequence are almost death-free, the toll accelerates from volume 5 onward (Casanova’s). This leads Isabelle Joyau, when examining the motif of the dance in her work on Anthony Powell’s novel, to observe that “the dance can turn into a macabre dance, a dance of death as the roll-call of demises increases in the later volumes” (96). In the last volume, Nick evokes, in a theatrical metaphor, reminding us of the fictional nature of the work, “the dismantling process steadily curtail[ing] members of the cast, items of the scenery, airs played by the orchestra, in the performance that has included one’s own walk-on part for more than a few decades” (Hearing 566). Anthony Powell himself, in his memoirs, resorts to a graphic metaphor to introduce his narrative of the immediate post-war period: “The second war (as the first had done at an earlier age) drew a hard line across the story of one’s day […]. […] an untidy scrawl of death and disjunction had been traced by Time across the pages of our address-book […]. Such wastage among friends and acquaintances is one of the liabilities of middle-age” (To Keep 325). Paradoxically, however, this dance of death is a corpseless one because, as in a classical tragedy and partly for similar reasons of bienséance, all deaths take place offstage, at one or more removes from Nick, who does not witness any of them but instead hears about them through different channels: some deaths are reported in press obituaries, some in letters, some by other characters. The reports also vary hugely in length, ranging from mere passing mention to fully developed scenes in which a character narrates to an audience, generally including Nick, the death of another inhabitant of the storyworld. 406

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Ontologically, fictional deaths are no different from other events in the storyworld and, as Michel Picard observes, their place and inclusion in the diegetic sequence, independent of extra-fictional reality, are the products of authorial choices made for reasons of genre, ethical considerations, plot progression, or disposal of characters no longer needed (15–16). In A Dance to the Music of Time, the functions of fictional deaths range from the merely convenient one of character removal to providing occasions for scenes of funerals or for moments of emotional intensity. This essay concentrates on an instance of the latter: the end of Chapter 2 of The Soldier’s Art, the eighth volume of the sequence, in which the cast of characters is suddenly depleted by air-raids on London. At the heart of the study lies the question of reception. Specifically, what will be the effects on the audience of the combination of narrative and rhetorical strategies deployed here: dramatization, delaying tactics, understatement, and general reticence to even name death? More generally, this raises the question of why, in the individual experience of reading, literary deaths sometimes affect the audience in a different way from other story events.

Dramatization, Suspense, and Tragic Irony In the passage under consideration, Nick Jenkins, in London on a short leave from the Army, hears on the same evening about the deaths in two air-raids of characters known or related to him: the first bombing, of the fictional Café de Madrid, killed (among many others) Bijou Ardglass, a fashionable beauty celebrating her birthday there, and Chips Lovell, a friend of Nick’s and husband of his sister-in-law Priscilla; the second air-raid, on a private house, killed Priscilla Lovell and her aunt Molly Jeavons. The messenger of death in the first case is an aging cabaret singer, Max Pilgrim, who was performing at the Madrid, whereas in the second case, the macabre role falls to an anonymous air-raid warden. In both instances, the disclosure of the two series of deaths is dramatized (that is, presented in the form of scenes, including dialogue and stage directions) from the restricted perspective of Nick-the-character as opposed to the retrospective all-embracing vantage point of the narrator. Thus, information known to the narrating-I is only gradually disclosed to the reader at the same time as it is communicated to the narrated-I by Max Pilgrim and by the warden, the more intense moments of the scenes even leading to momentary discursive self-effacement of the narrator. One of the effects of this narrative choice is to establish a parallel (or more accurately, the illusion of a parallel) between characters and readers,2 with the concomitant of a double foregrounding at the diegetic level: of verbal reticence attending narratives of death and of audience response to the gradual disclosure of fatalities. As a result of dramatization, the systematic retardation of this disclosure occurs both at story level and at the level of the narrative. From the start, an array of tactics is deployed, the initial effect of which is to delay the appearance of Pilgrim, the first bearer of tragic news. The setting is the flat that Moreland, an old friend of Nick’s, now shares with Mrs. Maclintick and Pilgrim. Having dined in a restaurant where Pilgrim was supposed to join them after his act at the Madrid, Nick, Moreland, and Mrs. Maclintick return to the flat for a last drink just as the airraid warning begins to sound (400). The dialogue, concentrating initially on the practical details of the blackout, is interspersed with minute description of the three friends’ progress into the flat and the report of Nick’s thoughts. The passage preceding Pilgrim’s appearance – “a tall willowy figure in horn-rimmed spectacles and a green brocade dressing gown” (401) – is punctuated by Mrs. Maclintick’s repeated use of his name, either to express concern – “I hope Max is all right” (400) – or to call him, as if to conjure up his materialization in the flesh – “‘Max…’ shouted Mrs Maclintick […] ‘We’ve got a visitor, Max,’ shouted Mrs Maclintick 407

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again” (401). Thus, even before he emerges from the depths of the flat, Pilgrim becomes the focus of attention not only for the participants in the scene but also for the reader, held in expectation of why the status of this minor character should suddenly be enhanced by the building up of narrative tension and suspense3 around him. Further delaying and diversionary tactics defer the moment of disclosure: a passage devoted to Nick’s reminiscences of Pilgrim, which also serves the practical purpose of refreshing readers’ memories of this character, and Pilgrim’s own reluctance to break the news without the protection of all-purpose clichés: “You don’t know how glad I am to see you,” “I’ve been having a most unenjoyable evening” (402). Both diegetic and extradiegetic audiences then have to wait until the next page for Pilgrim to release the news of the air-raid on the Madrid and another two pages to hear about the deaths of Bijou and Chips Lovell. By this time, however, hints have accumulated registering the characters’ growing apprehension and increasing the reader’s sense of impending news of disaster: “For some reason I felt a sudden lack of ease, an odd embarrassment, even apprehension” (402), “I continued to feel indefinably uncomfortable” (403). Yet, the parallel between the reactions of characters and readers requires some qualification, for any reader alert to the suspenseful atmosphere created by the carefully paced intensification of narrative tension will guess more than the characters. Thus, while Nick, having observed that Pilgrim “certainly appeared pale as death” (402), attributes the singer’s complexion to lack of make-up, the reader is likely to interpret this as a hint suggesting Pilgrim’s literal encounter with death. Readerly anticipation of the news of the bombing is also encouraged by the insistence earlier in the chapter on the noise heard during dinner at the restaurant being too faint for an airraid, a belief reiterated by Moreland upon arriving home to the sound of the air-raid warning: “That’s the genuine article, not like the faint row when we were at dinner” (400). The disclosure of the second series of deaths in the raid on the Jeavonses’ house is, like the first, painstakingly deferred in ways that also include hints pointing toward another tragedy. Nick Jenkins, having been told of Chips Lovell’s death, realizes that he has a moral duty to bring the news to Priscilla and Molly so that he too will be a messenger of death, albeit death unwitnessed by him: “It became clear that an unpleasant duty must be performed. There was no avoiding it. Priscilla would have to be told about the Madrid as soon as possible. If I called up the Jeavonses’ house right away, the telephone, with any luck, would be answered by Molly Jeavons herself” (406). Jenkins’s delaying tactics at the diegetic level to retard communication of the news are translated stylistically into free indirect thought in a paragraph that runs for about two-thirds of a page and slows down the narrative speed. The passage is remarkable for including repetitions of the names “Priscilla” (three times) and “Molly” (four times) in a foregrounding and maximizing of their textual presence which, in retrospect, read as tragically ironic, while, even upon a first reading, the insistent repetitions sound strange enough to arouse apprehension of these characters’ fate. A few lines later, the paragraph narrating in detail Nick’s failed attempts to phone the Jeavonses’ house is characterized by a concentration of negative expressions acting as ominous signs: “There was no buzz. I tried again. After several unsuccessful attempts, none of which even achieved the ‘number unobtainable’ sound, I rang the Exchange. There were further delays. Then the operator tried the Jeavons number. That, too, was unproductive. No sound of ringing came. The line was out of order” (407). Further deferral of the news of Molly’s and Priscilla’s deaths is achieved by the slow-motion description of Nick’s unreal journey to and arrival at the Jeavonses’ house, with the addition of elegiac memories of Chips Lovell: The pavements were endless, threading a way down them like those interminable rovings pursued in dreams. Cutting through several side turnings, I at last found myself 408

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among a conjunction of dark red brick Renaissance-type houses. In one of these the Jeavonses had lived for twenty years or more, an odd centre of miscellaneous hospitality to which Chips Lovell himself had first taken me. (408) Once Nick learns from the anonymous warden that Molly and Priscilla were killed by the last tip-and-run raider heard earlier on from Moreland’s flat, the full extent of the situational irony is revealed: Jenkins turns out to bring news of death to people who are themselves dead, which makes his apprehension and delaying tactics pointless. His situation is briefly mirrored when Eleanor, an old acquaintance of Nick’s who is helping clear up at the Jeavonses’, planning the list of people to tell about Molly’s and Priscilla’s deaths asks: “Are you in touch with Chips?” to which Nick answers, with exceptional directness: “Eleanor – Chips has been killed too” (411). The two series of deaths by bombing appear to vindicate Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s conception of war as the supreme site of irony, where unlikely associations and connections are established.4 Individual fate and war are here indissociably linked in the plot’s tragic irony and fully perceived only in retrospect: Chips deciding earlier in the chapter to go to the Madrid in the hope of meeting Priscilla there, while she, dining in the same restaurant as Nick and his friends, leaves suddenly to go back to the Jeavonses’ in order to get away from talk about air-raids and the war. The chapter ends with an analepsis and Nick’s quoting Chips on the occasion of a first visit to the Jeavonses’ in the 1930s: “the chief reason I want to visit Aunt Molly is to take another look at Priscilla Tolland, who is quite often there” (414). The effect of war has thus been to turn Priscilla’s harmless habit of visiting her aunt into tragic fate and a friendly house into her grave.

The Unnamable For a sequence often regarded as social comedy, the death toll in these few pages is strikingly high: it includes not only four characters of the novel, but also a host of anonymous people spending a merry evening at the Madrid and one of the Polish officers housed at the Jeavonses’. Yet, the narrative avoids direct representation of death on the part of its witnesses and messengers. The fundamental aporia characterizing the concept of death, and the noun itself have often been underlined: Michel Picard, for instance, defines it as “un signifiant sans référent” (27), while Elisabeth Bronfen and Sarah Webster Goodwin regard it “as a signifier with an incessantly receding, ungraspable signified, always pointing to other signifiers, other means of representing what finally is just absent” (4). It could be argued that Michel Picard’s definition applies best to one’s own death and that the death of others can be witnessed either as a process from one state (that of being still alive) to another (that of being dead), or as an irreversible fact. In these senses, the death of others can be – indeed has often been – narrated and there is no shortage in literature of corpses or scenes of dying, the former being sometimes generic prerequisites.5 In the extract from A Dance to the Music of Time discussed here, the death of others is as unnarratable and unspeakable as one’s own death would be according to the conventions of realist literature, and it can only be reported obliquely. In addition to the delaying tactics previously studied, a whole array of strategies of avoidance and reticence informs the passage, beginning with the eschewing of the word “death” itself, used only once in the clichéd simile “pale as death” (402) already mentioned, while “killed” fares hardly better with two occurrences (404, 411). Considering such linguistic and rhetorical strategies from a philosophical perspective, Vladimir Jankélévitch observes that understatement and obliquity spare us the use of the “mot néfaste” (61) – the fatal word – the obscene monosyllable of the taboo-word (221). This circumnavigation around the word “death,” he argues, softens the blow of its lethal 409

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meaning (61). As if in vindication of Jankélévitch’s remarks, both the narrator and the characters obey a linguistic and narrative etiquette prohibiting crude, direct mention or depiction of death. A passage earlier in the chapter, where Moreland expresses his “acute embarrassment when bombed” would apply just as well to being confronted with death: “It’s like an appalling display of bad manners one has been forced to witness. The utter failure of a party you are giving – a friend’s total insensitiveness about some delicate matter – suddenly realising you’ve lost your notecase, your passport, your job, your girl. All those things combined and greatly multiplied” (386). In view of what happened to Bijou’s party at the Madrid and given the euphemistic meaning of the verb “lose,” some of Moreland’s analogies retrospectively assume a predictive quality. The verbal etiquette adhered to by the characters in relation to death is in keeping with the narrator’s and the author’s own standards and, more generally, with the ethos of English society at the time. In the third volume of the series, Nick, “brooding about the complexity of writing a novel about English life,” thus reflects that “understatement and irony – in which all classes of this island converse – upset the normal emphasis of reported speech […] Understatement […] had its own banality; for, skirting cheap romanticism, it could also encourage evasion of unpalatable facts” (Acceptance 544, 546). Apart from its interest as a reflexive inset showing Powell’s awareness of the connection between expression and ethics, the quotation is also remarkable for stressing the classless nature of this rhetoric of obliquity and attenuation. In the extract from The Soldier’s Art, this is demonstrated by the fact that the cabaret singer, the working-class warden, the intellectuals Moreland and Jenkins, and the upper-class Eleanor Walpole-Wilson all share the same reticence about mentioning death and about giving free rein to expression of sadness, distress, or horror, as in the following examples, the first relating to the bombing of the Madrid, the second to the raid on the Jeavonses’ house: ‘Bijou Ardglass was there with a party.’ Pilgrim looked at me with surprise. ‘You knew that?’ he said. ‘Yes.’ ‘Were you asked? If so, you were lucky to have another engagement.’ ‘They were –’ ‘Bijou’s table was just where it came through the ceiling.’ ‘So –’ ‘I’m afraid it was Bijou’s last party.’ […] ‘But the rest of them?’ ‘No one survived from that corner. That was where the worst of the damage was done.’ (404–5) ‘Anybody hurt?’ He took the cigarette from his mouth and nodded. ‘I know the people – are they about?’ ‘You know Mr Jeavons and Lady Molly?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘You’ve only just arrived here?’ ‘That’s it.’ ‘Mr Jeavons and me are on the same warden-post,’ he said. ‘They’ve taken him down there. Giving him a cup of tea.’ ‘Was he injured?’ ‘It was her.’ 410

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‘Badly?’ The warden looked at me as if I should not have asked the question. ‘You hadn’t heard?’ he said. ‘No.’ ‘Didn’t survive.’ He went on speaking at once, as if from a kind of embarrassment at having to announce such a thing. (408–9) Understatement is not the only form taken by the “evasion of unpalatable facts,” or, in the present case, of the deeply distressing fact of death. In particular, the passage offers striking examples of a displacement of focus onto places, objects, and material details that stand in a metonymic relation either to the dead or to someone like Pilgrim who has been in direct contact with them, narrowly escaping death himself. Mention of his bandaged hand, for instance, recurs like a refrain: “I noticed […] that his right hand was bandaged” (402), “[h]e nursed his bound hand” (403), “holding his wounded hand with the other” (404), “passing the bandaged hand across his eyes” (405). Pilgrim’s wounded hand is, in the absence of any corpse, the only physical trace of the bombing visible to his audience, a sign of his close encounter with death inscribed on his body. Metonymic strategies shifting the discourse from the destruction of human lives to the destruction of place and objects characterize both the narrative passages and the dialogue. Inside the Jeavonses’ house, Nick thus notes that “[t]he pastels, by some unknown hand, of Moroccan types […] were hanging at all angles, the glass splintered of one bearing the caption Rainy Day at Marrakesh” (412), while Pilgrim delays the announcement of the deaths by concentrating on the fate of the Madrid, the complete destruction of the place also marking the end of an era and of people, like Bijou Ardglass, so closely associated with the social life of the pre-war period: ‘The Madrid is no more,’ he said. ‘Finished?’ ‘Finished.’ ‘The season or just your act?’ ‘The place – the building – the tables and chairs – the dance-floor – the walls – the ceiling – all those gold pillars. (403) In the case of death, the verbal strategies of avoidance do not simply reflect conformity to socially acceptable forms of expression. More profoundly, they have to do with the unspeakable nature of death and with the feelings aroused by the annihilation of life. As previous quotations make clear, even the protection of understatement and metonymic displacement collapses under the weight of emotional undercurrents. In the most intense moments, dialogue, often untagged, consists of increasingly elliptical sentences, sometimes a single word, even a mere monosyllable. In some cases, speech is suspended into the silence of a dash, as if by physical inhibition. The dialogue becomes punctured by what Garrett Stewart aptly calls “gaps of designation” and “ruptures of utterance” (13) which, to paraphrase him, reify absence as textual gap (60). Besides thus figuring absence, those ruptures of utterance manifest the impossibility of expressing emotion in words, so that, at certain points in the text, gestures act as substitutes for speech: “Pilgrim nodded,” “Pilgrim nodded again” (404), “Pilgrim glanced away, quickly passing the bandaged hand across his eyes” (405). Death, the unnamable, the unnarratable, can only be experienced and defined as loss by the living.6 Of the dead themselves, nothing can be known and therefore narrated except their lives, so 411

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that death, from a narrative perspective, leads backward to reminiscences of life and to biography. This is precisely what happens when Pilgrim shifts, as soon as he can, from Bijou’s death to her life story: I’d known Bijou for years […]. Known her when she was a little girl with a plait trying to get a job in the chorus. Wasn’t any good for some reason. Can’t think why, because she had the Theatre in her blood both sides. Do you know, Bijou’s father played Abanazar in Aladdin when my mother was Principal Boy in the same show? Anyway, it all turned out best for Bijou in the end. Did much better as a mannequin than she’d ever have done on the boards. Met richer men, for one thing. (405) Similarly relieved after imparting the fatal news, the air-raid warden turns to reminiscences of the Jeavonses: “Used to see a lot of them. Always very friendly people. Got their newspapers from me, matter of fact” (409). In both cases, the biographical vignettes link the survivors to the victims of the bombings through the sharing of ordinary life experience, while, at the same time, the use of the pluperfect by Pilgrim – “I’d known Bijou” – and of “used to” by the airraid warden signals grammatically the finality of death and the rupture it produces in the flow of time, the unbridgeable rift between past and present.

Pilgrim’s Progress Of the two messengers of death, Pilgrim is clearly given more narrative prominence, although his function is similar to the warden’s and both, as we have seen, approach it with the same verbal reticence. Contrary to the warden, however, who makes only this one, anonymous, appearance “on stage,” Pilgrim belongs to the main cast of characters in Dance to the Music of Time, although he has so far been only a minor participant, the stereotype of a histrionic cabaret singer labelled in a previous volume by the piano player Heather Hopkins “that old queen, Max” (At Lady 95). At first sight, this would hardly qualify him for the serious task of relating the deaths of others. Yet, for readers familiar with Powell’s sequence, this is an especially striking instance of the technique of delegating the disclosure function to secondary characters. This authorial choice introduces a form of narrative dialogism interweaving with the narrator’s discourse a variety of diegetic voices for, as Nick Jenkins observes, “[o]ne hears about life, all the time, from different people with very different narrative gifts” (Temporary 498). In the present case, one hears mostly about death, a variation on the general principle which affects Pilgrim’s status in ways that exceed the question of his narrative gifts. What the passage performs is Pilgrim’s gradual elevation from histrionic stereotype to humble civilian hero. Initially, the aging entertainer, true to form, seems to play his usual part: “‘Here you are at last, my dears,’ he said. ‘You don’t know how glad I am to see you. You must forgive what I’m looking like, which must be a perfect sight. I took off my slap before going to bed and am presenting you with a countenance natural and unadorned, something I’m always most unwilling to do’” (402). In retrospect, however, his opening words acquire new significance. The hyperbolic expression of joy at seeing the others, for instance, should be taken literally, while the reference to having removed his make-up prefigures analogically the unadorned character of his language when he relates the bombing and its fatal consequences to his audience. The mannerisms of Pilgrim’s first verbal intervention do more than just link his present appearance to the persona already known to the reader from previous volumes: they also set off, by contrast, the clipped, breathless quality of his report of events from the next page onward. The change in his speech, once stripped of its stereotypical embellishments, contributes to the heightening of tension and the intensification of the feelings experienced by his 412

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audience, where the verbal minimalism becomes a manifestation of his own genuine emotion. His gestures substitute for words when utterance, even of the barest kind, becomes impossible; gestures that are divested from their habitual theatricality and “unduly fervent social manner” (402). Nick thus comments, when Pilgrim passes his wounded hand across his eyes: “It was an instinctive, not in the least dramatized, gesture” (405). Towards the end of the scene, Pilgrim returns to his usual self-centeredness in an anticlimactic remark which provides a fleeting moment of humorous relief, not necessarily intended as such by the speaker: “‘Strange those young Germans up there trying to kill me,’ he murmured to himself. ‘Ungrateful too. I’ve always had such good times in Berlin’” (407). Despite their levity, Pilgrim’s words carry a number of serious implications about the effect of war on individuals: the brutal clash it causes between enjoyable past personal experience and the present situation which has transformed the young Germans loved by Pilgrim into anonymous killers, participants in an operation of blind destruction of life. In his own flippant manner, the cabaret singer here may well echo Hofmannstahl’s conception of the fundamental irony of war. This return to type on Pilgrim’s part does not, however, affect his rise in the aesthetic and ethical axiologies of the novel. Not only is he promoted to the role of messenger of tragic news directly affecting Nick Jenkins when he had until then been a mere caricatural figure hovering in the background, but, as observed previously, he performs his task according to an ethos and rhetoric of reticence which he shares with Nick and with the air-raid warden. In this, he stands in sharp contrast to another reporter of death, Alfred, formerly cook to Nick’s parents, in whose hotel Nick’s Uncle Giles dies: He launched at once into an elaborate account of Uncle Giles’s last hours, making no attempt to miminise the fearful lineaments of death. In the end, with a view to terminating this catalogue of macabre detail, which I did not at all enjoy and seemed to have continued long enough, however much pleasure the narrative might afford Albert himself in the telling, I found myself invoking the past. (Kindly 624) Disapproval of Albert’s colorful narrative of death, besides being stated explicitly by Jenkins, also entails suppressing his voice and words, his speech being reported neither directly nor indirectly, whereas Pilgrim’s utterances are essential to the dramatization of the disclosure of the fatal news. The singer’s ethical status is further enhanced by his minimizing of his wound – “It’s only a scratch” (404) – and of his role on the scene of the bombing where he helped carrying the bodies: ‘The wardens and I carried out six or seven at least. Must have. They’d all had it.’ […] ‘You’re sure all the Ardglass party –’ ‘They were the ones I helped carry out,’ said Pilgrim. He spoke quite simply. (404–5) The scene is paradigmatic of the ethical implications of narrative and rhetorical choices that contribute to what Philippe Hamon has termed the “ideology-effect,” by analogy with the “character-effect” and “reality-effect,” by which he means the verbal construction of axiologies, or hierarchies of values, internal to the text (20). In the passage from The Soldier’s Art, the effect reaches beyond the storyworld to the external realities of war and the behavior of ordinary human beings in wartime, since Pilgrim, the air-raid warden, and Eleanor WalpoleWilson provide the indirect means of paying tribute to the unostentatious heroism of civilian 413

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Londoners during World War II. Whether at the diegetic or extradiegetic level, our attention is thus directed away from death back to the living.

Conclusion: “Lack of Outward Display” or the Affecting Power of Narrative under Control At the end of the chapter, upon leaving the Jeavonses’ house, Nick is struck by the fact that, apart from a notice about bomb damage, “there was nothing to indicate the place had been subjected to an attack from the air, which had killed several persons. This lack of outward display was comparable with the Madrid’s fate earlier that evening, when a lot of talking in a restaurant had been sufficient to drown the sound of warning, the noise of the guns” (413). Lack of outward display also applies to the narrative and to the characters’ speech and emotions, so that, in the brief moments when this decorum is breached – when Pilgrim passes his hand across his eyes, when Eleanor begins to cry (412), or when Nick kisses her, “which [he] had never done before” (413) – the effect on the audience is likely to be heightened by this exceptional departure from the prevailing reticence. There is, of course, no way of legislating for the impact of narrative and rhetorical control on the reader’s reactions, especially given the plasticity of such devices as understatement and irony which, used in different contexts, produce very different effects. This reader’s experience, however, corroborated by the reactions of friends, suggests that, in the present case, reticence and understatement intensify the emotive power of the scenes, which lose none of their poignancy upon re-reading. This would imply that what affects readers is not the death of fictional characters, textual creatures who may be resurrected at will upon returning to previous volumes or chapters. With the possible exception of Molly Jeavons, none of the characters killed in the air-raids are constructed by the narrative to elicit sympathy when alive and sadness when dead. Of death in literature, Michel Picard observes that readers identify with situations rather than characters (163). What we identify with in this passage is the survivors’ difficulty in imparting the news and their audience’s difficulty in receiving it, both experiencing the shock of a brutal termination of life among people known to them. The last sentence of the chapter, already mentioned as an instance of retrospective tragic irony, expresses Nick’s elegiac mood: “it did not seem all that long time ago that Lovell […] had suggested we should look in on the Jeavonses,” because “the chief reason I want to visit Aunt Molly is to take another look at Priscilla Tolland, who is quite often there” (414). By bringing together the names of Chips Lovell, Molly, and Priscilla, the closing sentence provides a textual cenotaph to those corpseless dead, “a memorial to the very idea of independent fictional existences constructed in the absence of any remains thereof at the site of writing” (Stewart 49–50).

Notes 1 2 3

The edition of A Dance to the Music of Time used for this study is the four-volume edition published by Arrow, each volume containing three of the sequence’s novels. The parallel also includes the narratee, but because this study is concerned with the reception of the scenes by flesh-and-blood readers, this narratological category is not relevant here. On narrative tension and suspense, see Baroni, in particular his analysis of narrative tension as the result of a textual reticence that arouses the interpreter’s eager expectation and anticipation (99). See also his observations about the emotional dimension of suspense and its resistance to reiterated readings (271, 284–88).

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See Schoentjes’s quotations from and discussion of Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s Die Ironie der Dinge (1921) in Poétique de l’ironie, 67–69. In detective novels or in romans noirs, for instance. See Picard 142.

Works Cited Baroni, Raphaël. La tension narrative: Suspense, curiosité et surprise. Seuil, 2007. Goodwin, Sarah Webster, and Elisabeth Bronfen, editors. Death and Representation. Johns Hopkins UP, 1993. Hamon, Philippe. Texte et idéologie. 1984. Presses Universitaires de France, 1997. Jankélévitch, Vladimir. La mort. Flammarion, 1977. Joyau, Isabelle. Investigating Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time. St. Martin’s Press, 1994. Picard, Michel. La littérature et la mort. Presses Universitaires de France, 1995. Powell, Anthony. The Acceptance World. 1955. A Dance to the Music of Time, vol. 1: Spring, Arrow, 2000. Powell, Anthony. At Lady Molly’s. 1957. A Dance to the Music of Time, vol. 2: Summer, Arrow, 2000. Powell, Anthony. Casanova’s Chinese Restaurant. 1960. A Dance to the Music of Time, vol. 2: Summer, Arrow, 2000. Powell, Anthony. Hearing Secret Harmonies. 1975. A Dance to the Music of Time, vol. 4: Winter, Arrow, 1999. Powell, Anthony. The Kindly Ones. 1962. A Dance to the Music of Time, vol. 2: Summer, Arrow, 2000. Powell, Anthony. A Question of Upbringing. 1951. A Dance to the Music of Time, vol. 1: Spring, Arrow, 2000. Powell, Anthony. The Soldier’s Art. 1966. A Dance to the Music of Time, vol. 3: Autumn, Arrow, 1998. Powell, Anthony. Temporary Kings. 1973. A Dance to the Music of Time, vol. 4: Winter, Arrow, 1999. Powell, Anthony. To Keep the Ball Rolling: The Memoirs of Anthony Powell. Penguin, 1983. Schoentjes, Pierre. Poétique de l’ironie. Seuil, 2001. Stewart, Garrett. Death Sentences: Styles of Dying in British Fiction. Harvard UP, 1984.

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38 DEATH AND CHINESE WAR TELEVISION DRAMAS (Re)configuring Ethical Judgments in The Disguiser W. Michelle Wang

Perhaps more extensively than many of its global counterparts, death haunts the Chinese television screen, particularly in its multitude of representations addressing the formation of modern China. The period following the end of the Qing dynasty monarchy in 1912 to the establishment of the People’s Republic of China in 1949 was marked not only by internal revolutions and political upheavals from within, but also by the threat of colonizing forces from without: from Japan’s invasion of northeast China/Manchuria in 1931 to the 7 July Marco Polo bridge incident in 1937, the subject matter of the Second Sino-Japanese War leading into World War II and finally ending with the Chinese Civil War has long been a mainstay of Chinese film and television productions.1 While onscreen depictions of death in contemporary Western cultures have been and continue to be examined at length (including essays in this Routledge collection by Stacy Thompson and Benjamin Bennett-Carpenter), I extend such lines of inquiry to Chinese television dramas – particularly because of their substantial viewership of more than a billion Chinese citizens who frequently access such programming,2 but also in light of China’s growing influence in global television markets and its significance as a medium for diasporic engagements.3 Taking The Disguiser 《 ( 伪装者》, 2015) as my case study, I draw on rhetorical narrative theory to partly take up Michele Aaron’s line of questioning in Death and the Moving Image (2014) about “mortal economies.” This term refers to the work’s “structuring logic or systems of exchange or encounter” that are underwritten by who lives and who dies, “which lives are sovereign,” and what beliefs are “held sacred” (5). By attending to what James Phelan terms “conversational disclosure (what characters communicate to each other in a scene of dialogue) and authorial disclosure (what authors communicate to their audiences through the conversational disclosures)” (168), I explicate the ethical hierarchies that emerge in The Disguiser’s representations of death and war, explaining how the series shapes ethical norms by guiding viewerly judgments, even as gaps between the two kinds of disclosures foreground self-reflexive considerations of genre.

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Contextual Frames Shortly after the First World War began, Sigmund Freud noted that the “accumulation of deaths put an end to the impression of chance,” such that wartime death was no longer treated as an event of contingency, but one of necessity; as a character in The Disguiser evenly remarks, “death becomes routine” rather than the exception (Bronfen 413; Disguiser, ep. 8). Such representations of death in Chinese television serials typically foreground two polarizing responses. On the one hand, viewers vividly experience death’s arbitrariness in the loss of control that characterizes wartime encounters,4 affectively rendered in the loss of beloved onscreen characters whom we come to care for over the course of the series; on the other hand, this very sense of gratuitousness often impels viewers to make moral meaning out of such uncertainty. That is, given that the context of war tends to foreground characters’ powerlessness or limited options when faced with impending threats of death, what they do with the choices they possess – particularly those with in/direct consequences on the (potential) deaths of others – becomes especially crucial in viewers’ ethical judgments of the narrative and its characters. Guy Westwell observes, “Perhaps the most significant component of the contemporary cultural imagination of war is its avowedly moral viewpoint” (113). Death, or threat of death, thus functions as a mode for exposing or reordering human priorities, where the war’s context of continual impending death becomes a default mode against which the narrative’s ethical progression is charted. Though many Chinese television serials that engage with the theme of war focus on the aforementioned period between 1931 and 1949, Chinese war dramas also favor distinct pretwentieth-century periods in China’s history. Frequent choices are the Warring States period leading up to the Qin dynasty’s formation from the fifth to the third century BCE (e.g., Sun Tzu’s The Art of War and the 36 Stratagems [2000]; The Qin Empire [2009]; The Legend of Mi Yue [2015]); the Chu-Han contention circa 206 to 202 BCE (e.g., The Battlefield [1985]; Han Liu Bang [1998]; The Story of Han Dynasty [2003]; The Conqueror’s Story [2004]; King’s Legend [2012]; Chu Han Zheng Xiong [2012]); and the era of the Three Kingdoms from the second to the third century CE (e.g., Three Kingdoms [1976]; Zhuge Liang [1985]; Romance of the Three Kingdoms [1994]; Three Kingdoms [2010]; Cao Cao [2014]; God of War, Zhao Yun [2016]; The Advisors Alliance [2017]; Secret of the Three Kingdoms [2018]), among others. War dramas alternately center on Chinese legendary and/or historical folk heroes like Hua Mulan (circa fourth to sixth century CE),5 the Yang family generals (circa 10th–13th century CE),6 and Yue Fei (12th century CE).7 Given that “war is exceptional in human experience for sanctioning the act of killing, the act that all nations regard in peacetime as ‘criminal’” (Scarry 121), these serials typically address war’s “moral ambiguity” (139) at the local level of protagonists’ struggles with the deaths, suffering, and cruelty encountered in combat: for example, in Mulan’s attempts to console a traumatized Jili in Hua Mu Lan (1999), or contextualizing Yang Ye’s military career in terms of protecting unarmed civilians – that they may live to see days of peace, even as the general himself remains haunted by his bloodstained hands – in The Young Warriors (2006). Crucially, such conversational disclosures do not work to destabilize justifications for engaging in mortal combat; rather, they solicit viewers’ positive judgments of these characters as ethical beings, where revelations of their inner moral struggles reinforce or articulate the defensible nature and/or worthy purposes of their acts. The purpose for engaging in military combat takes on even less ambiguity in war dramas addressing the twentieth-century Second Sino-Japanese War leading into World War II. Tellingly termed kang ri ju (抗日剧), which translates to Japanese resistance serials, these Chinese 417

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war dramas are largely divested of the need to qualify the basis for engaging in combat, and universally invoke the right of self-defense against Japanese invasion, which finds legitimacy in the “long philosophic tradition” of “self-help, the ability to defend oneself” (Scarry 139). The other dominant strand of Chinese war dramas tends to be temporally situated after the end of World War II, primarily addressing the Chinese Civil War between the Nationalists and the Communists, such as All Quiet in Peking (2014), in which a significant number of characters do agonize over the war’s significance. Television serials like Drawing Sword (2005), situated from the 1930s to the 1950s, also address all three wars given their historical overlap. The spy television genre within which my case study The Disguiser falls forms a key subset of Chinese war dramas situated in the twentieth century. Shuyu Kong points out that “the first TV series in post-socialist China,” Eighteen Years in the Enemy Camp (1981), was a spy drama about “an undercover Communist who infiltrates the Nationalist government from 1931 to 1949” (105). Importing genre conventions from “Soviet Union spy movies and spy fiction,” which “served as a major ideological source and narrative model,” Kong notes that the Chinese spy genre originated in the late 1940s during the Chinese Civil War and flourished across print, film, and television mediums between the late 1970s and early 1980s, before fading in the 1990s with the end of the Cold War (105). Ang Lee’s adaptation of Eileen Chang’s 1979 novella Lust, Caution (2007) is perhaps one of the best-known examples of the Chinese spy war genre. To borrow from Elaine Scarry, in these narratives, war makes visible “the extreme literalness with which the nation inscribes itself in the body,” demanding that individuals radically empty the self in service of country (113, 122). Kong observes a “revival of interest” in the genre during the twenty-first century, where spy war television dramas like Undercover (a.k.a. Lurk, 2008) are distinctive in their portrayals of a previously absent character ambivalence (105–6). She contends that the “moral ambiguities and existential dilemmas depicted” relate to contemporary “uncertainty of identity and moral anxiety in today’s increasingly confusing world of new technology, ideological conflicts, and transnational flows” (119, 106). Like Kong, I shift away from the current emphasis in existing scholarship about Chinese popular culture – which remains “overwhelmingly focused” on “political discourse and ideological messages” (11–12) – to attend instead to audience agency.8 To elucidate how death functions in the Chinese spy war drama, I adopt what Phelan terms an “inside out” approach to The Disguiser’s narrative ethics: “[t]hat is, rather than using a particular theory of ethics to interpret and evaluate” the narrative’s ethical dimensions, Phelan’s rhetorical model seeks to identify and infer the narrative’s ethical frames and positions through the communicative situation (9). Produced in 2015, on the 70th anniversary marking the end of the Second World War/ Sino-Japanese War, The Disguiser is a televisual adaptation of novelist and screenwriter Yong Zhang’s 2012 novel. Set in 1939, the series centers on the fictional Ming family’s resistance efforts in China, right on the cusp of World War II and two years after China’s crucial loss of the city during the 1937 Battle of Shanghai – historical contexts that are explicitly invoked in The Disguiser’s opening scenes. Death pervades the series; during most (if not all) of its 41 episodes, characters are killed and/or engage with the subject of dying in their conversational exchanges. By attending to its visual structure, conversational disclosures, and authorial disclosures across conversations, I examine the varied ways in which character deaths are presented (i.e., comparing onscreen with offscreen deaths, degrees of overkill, narrative consequences of character deaths, etc.) in order to explicate the significance of the implicit ethical hierarchies that emerge.

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Of Mortal Economies and Ethical Hierarchies Ralph Donald and Karen MacDonald observe, in Women in War Films: From Helpless Heroine to G.I. Jane, that Hollywood often portrays women on the battlefield “as an aberration” or “as afterthoughts to the combat scenes,” serving as “a ‘love interest,’” an object for men’s gratification, or, “in Homer’s case, to explain one of the chief reasons that men fight each other” (2). However, when we examine the roles that women assume in war films more closely, their depictions “are often more complex and certainly more varied” (3). The Disguiser, for instance, features a significant number of well-rounded female characters in a diverse range of roles: intelligence operatives, businesswomen, civil servants, military personnel, and medical staff, among others. But if we consider the gender dynamics of what Aaron terms “mortal economies” (5) through a close examination of women who die onscreen in The Disguiser, a more complex picture emerges. Take, for instance, the visual structure viewers are presented with when the character Wang Manchun brutally slits the throat of a woman we are initially led to believe is the Ming family’s eldest sister, protagonist Ming Jing (Disguiser, ep. 37).9 The misdirection and narrative suspense are facilitated by abrupt cuts between scenes, where the middle brother Ming Cheng dashes home in a panicked frenzy with a team of armed operatives as the razor is plunged into the sleeping woman’s neck, such that the audience experiences a palpable sense of relief to see Ming Jing alive in the scene that follows. We eventually learn that the murdered woman is Liang Zhongchun’s mistress, whose name we never learn (only that her last name is Tong), and the partial shot of her face when her throat is slit is the only time she appears onscreen in The Disguiser. Not only does this filmic sleight of hand allow the production team to create the red herring and unexpected narrative turn, it is also an implicit indictment of Liang and Tong’s adultery, a relationship that isn’t allowed to see the light of day and is literally killed in their bed during the dead of night. When Liang’s affair is exposed earlier in the series, he sends his wife and son away from Shanghai – partly to keep his mistress by his side, but also to keep his family out of harm’s way, as revealed in previous conversational disclosures with Ming Cheng (ep. 16; ep. 20). In other words, not only Ming Jing but inadvertently Mrs. Liang also narrowly escapes death. Though the audience is not led to celebrate Tong’s death – the harrowing intimacy of the extreme close-up shot of the razor pressed into her neck likely caused some viewers to flinch – we do experience a certain sense of double relief, in that if it was inevitable that someone had to die, the interpretive reconfiguration viewers are led to is that it is better for Tong to be killed than Ming Jing or Mrs. Liang, characters whose fates we have become more emotionally invested in over the course of the series. Ming Cheng’s discovery of the crime scene is further tinged with comic elements, as he cautiously approaches an inert Liang slumped over a chair, uncertain if he is dead or alive, and nearly jumping out of his skin when the latter suddenly begins to speak. The audience is not led to linger on Tong’s body, but instead follows Ming Cheng’s gaze as the camera pans from the bloodied sheets to the ransacked closets, shifting our attention to what has been taken from the house following the murder (which is crucial to the next step in the narrative progression) in the conversational disclosures between Ming and Liang that follow. The Disguiser was a particularly compelling series due in part to its nuanced portrayal of many strong female characters who are written into crucial roles. However, this turns into somewhat of an Achilles heel when so many of these women in nontraditional roles are killed by the end of the series:

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•

•

• •

•

Ming Jing – the unmarried Ming family matriarch who has run the extensive family business independently since she was seventeen is killed when she intercepts a bullet intended for her brother (ep. 41); Yu Manli – sold into prostitution at the age of fourteen, the tragic femme fatale and murderer escaped death row when the war erupted and she was recruited as a Chinese Nationalist intelligence operative; her death occurs in an extended three-minute scene of overkill during Operation Death Knell, where her body is riddled with bullets (ep. 31); Nantian Yangzi – an ambitious and prideful Japanese officer who heads the brutal special higher police,10 she is literally shot at for two-and-a-half-minutes onscreen (ep. 23); Wang Manchun – who heads an intelligence unit reporting to her teacher Nantian and takes sadistic delight in acts of torture and killing; her death is likewise characterized by overkill as Ming Lou and Ming Tai empty their pistols into her body before she collapses out of a second-floor window (ep. 38); and Aunt Gui – Ming Cheng’s foster mother who initially mistakes him for the child she bore out of wedlock and whose care turns to cruel abuse when she realizes her misrecognition; she spends years in Manchuria using her identity as a Chinese woman to infiltrate and destroy Chinese resistance forces, and is eventually killed by Ming Cheng to protect his younger brother (ep. 40).

Given its genre of war drama, it is unsurprising that only half of 12 billed performers in the opening credits play characters who survive to the very end of the 41-episode series. However, only two of these surviving characters are women, both of whom are undercover Communist intelligence operatives: Cheng Jingyun, a nurse and Ming Tai’s fiancée; and Cheng’s aunt Mrs. Su, who assists with her husband’s medical practice. Although characters like Nantian, Wang, and Gui are vicious antagonists whose deaths are justifiably considered due punishment for their misdeeds (including innumerable acts of murder), a more holistic consideration of their backgrounds reveals a disturbingly problematic erasure of women who refuse to conform to traditional gender roles. When we compare the female characters who eventually survive to those who are killed, a significant textual pattern emerges: the adulteress (Tong), the prostitute (Yu), and the “spinster”11 (Ming; Wang; Gui) are erased in death. The destabilization of maternal figures that propels the initial formation of the Ming family – the two elder biological Ming siblings adopted Ming Cheng (rescued from his foster mother Aunt Gui’s abuse) and Ming Tai (whose mother was killed in a hit-and-run) as their younger brothers – is problematically redressed, as women are once again relegated to positions of wife, mother, and caregiver by the end of the series. Those who survive – including Jingyun and her aunt, who wield multiple identities as undercover agents – literally perform roles that ostensibly conform to such traditional gender expectations. Though Japan’s wartime aggression remains central to the narrative, The Disguiser’s compelling ethical complexities arise in part from the series’ shift in focus to the culpable roles that Chinese nationals played in abetting Japanese colonization. Compare antagonists Liang Zhongchun, Aunt Gui, and Wang Manchun, for instance. All three characters are Chinese nationals working in varying capacities for the Japanese to weed out Chinese resistance forces. The characters’ conversational disclosures reveal Liang’s fickle allegiances (which aid in resistance work) to be preferable to Gui’s and Wang’s unyielding loyalty to the Japanese. Late in the narrative progression, after Liang reluctantly aids the Ming brothers (partly through coercion and partly through bribery), he laments that it is “now too late to turn back,” but Ming Cheng corrects him, calling Liang “the prodigal son” (ep. 35). The moral imperative becomes even clearer when we contrast the deaths of all three antagonists: Liang dies offscreen at the 420

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hands of the Japanese special higher police, but Gui and Wang, who persist in their loyalty to the Japanese government (and thus treason to the Chinese people), die onscreen at the hands of all three Ming brothers. Loyalty thus takes a backseat to patriotism, which is in turn subordinate to righteousness, specifically defined in The Disguiser as the defense or survival of an ethnic group against invasion. This is framed by conversational disclosures about the books that the youngest Ming brother reads: the Spanish writer Bartolomé de las Casas’s A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies and the Polish Nobel Prize laureate Henryk Sienkiewicz’s The Knights of the Cross, which Ming Tai explains is about “the tyranny of colonialism” and a necessary read for “resisting colonial powers” respectively (ep. 1; ep. 13). In response to Ming Tai’s glib remark that “Communists don’t fear death,” his fiancée Jingyun observes: “There is no one who does not fear death; this is our struggle for survival – the survival of the entire ethnic group” (ep. 28). The authorial disclosure thus conveyed is that what’s at stake is not merely limited to Chinese versus Japanese interests; instead, the ethnic group’s survival becomes the implicit standard/ norm against which other ethical values are measured in The Disguiser. Take, for instance, the death of an undercover Japanese communist agent, who (in order to protect Chinese resistance efforts) attempts but fails to kill a Chinese agent preparing to defect. In his conversations with the special higher police, Ming Cheng – a covert member of the Chinese Communist resistance, disguised as an employee of the Japanese-supported puppet government during the Wang Jingwei regime – takes his cue from the Japanese to describe the Chinese defector as “zhuan bian zhe” (“转变者”), literally meaning “one who switches sides,” a term thereby stripped of pejorative connotations (ep. 16). However, in Ming Cheng’s private conversations with his elder brother, the Chinese agent is termed a “traitor” who must be “execute[d]” – not killed, attacked, or assassinated, which are the Japanese police’s preferred terms (eps. 16–17). To prevent the defector from disclosing the identities of other resistance members, which will likely get them killed, Ming Cheng’s choice of the word “execute” connotes the act of dispensing justice or due punishment for one who is condemned. The use of the term “traitor” is particularly suggestive here because the undercover Japanese agent who tries to take out the Chinese defector is never thus labeled, even though his act would have been considered as such by his compatriots. Instead, Ming Cheng describes the Japanese agent’s offscreen death as an act of “self-sacrifice” (ep. 17), affirming the ethical hierarchy established in The Disguiser as one that judges individuals by act rather than nationality, valuing the moral consequences of their choices over patriotism. Such attention to word choice, particularly in disclosures relating to character deaths, is observed throughout the series. For example, Ming Cheng and Mrs. Su both describe Li Cheng’s death as an act of “sacrifice” (ep. 3), while a stunned Ming Cheng reports that “Guo Qiyun and Yu Manli have been martyred for their country” (ep. 32). Notions of sacrifice and martyrdom remain problematic, even as the deaths of Guo, Yu, and their teacher Wang Tianfeng during Operation Death Knell are shown to have successfully “delayed the onward advance of the Japanese army” in Jiangsu, southern Anhui, Zhejiang, and Fujian (ep. 39). Wang Tianfeng, in particular, is one of The Disguiser’s most ethically complex characters, whose unorthodox (and often unethical) methods nonetheless yield indisputable results. Not only does the intelligence trainer strong-arm and manipulate others in the service of war and country – even as he remains aware that they are simultaneously being used by the Chinese Nationalist government for war profiteering – he is also the mastermind behind Operation Death Knell, wherein he knowingly leads his unsuspecting students/subordinates to violent deaths (including his own) for a strategic outcome that “preserved the lives of countless civilians” (ep. 39).

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After Wang Tianfeng expels the free-spirited Ming Tai from military school for disobedience, the latter returns to beg for his partner Yu Manli’s life when he learns that her original death sentence has been upheld following his departure – all of which has been calculatedly orchestrated by Wang to discipline Ming into following military orders. Seizing his chance, Wang lashes out vehemently: “The country is in tatters, almost a country no longer, yet here you are ranting about freedom! […] Young Master Ming, if you have returned today for the sake of moral righteousness, you can leave now. When the Japanese troops bombed Chongqing, the entire street of your bloodied countrymen failed to rouse your will to fight. Yet a prostitute’s life or death has sparked your compassion? Disgraceful!” (ep. 5) Even as audiences judge Wang to be ethically problematic – both in his manipulative acts and in the conversational disclosure implying that a prostitute’s life is of lesser value – we recognize the validity of Wang’s ethical evaluation of Ming Tai, whose romantic inclinations have dominated the storytelling thus far. As with Wang Tianfeng’s rebuke of Ming Tai, the authorial disclosure that belies this conversational disclosure is its implicit reproach of the genre’s treatment of war as a backdrop against which themes such as romance are played out – a charge that The Disguiser itself is not exempt from. The bombing that Wang mentions is a likely reference to the historical 4 May 1939 bombing of Chongqing, in which more than 4,000 people were killed and 3,000 others injured (Lary 87). Diana Lary notes that the provisional capital of China was the target of more than 200 air-raids between 1938 and 1943, as Chinese civilians were relentlessly bombed by the Imperial Japanese Army for six years, as part of Japan’s campaign to “spread terror amongst the civilian population” (87–89). However, the narrative was at a critical juncture in Ming’s and Yu’s evolving relationship as they were fleeing the air-raids in Chongqing (Disguiser, ep. 4), so most members of the audience were likely to be more invested in those dynamics – and are thus implicated in Wang’s indictment. Just as Ming’s preoccupation with Yu’s survival outweighs his sense of responsibility to the war effort, audiences are likewise implicated in Wang’s censure of Ming’s behavior, in that the entire street of bloodied civilians (based on a historical bombing) likely meant less to us or struck us less profoundly than the developing romantic tension. As viewers, we are similarly guilty in our complicit spectatorship of allowing war and its casualties to become a backdrop to romance. The authorial disclosure becomes a double-gestured move that, on the one hand, allows the series to remain invested in romance as a storytelling staple and, on the other, functions as a form of self-reflexive indictment that recognizes the shortcomings of war television drama’s treatment of its own subject matter (a critique similarly applicable to genres such as war films).

Final Remarks Fictional representations of war have almost always been an exercise in meaning-making regarding death, with most attempting to wrest meaning from or thrust significance upon the extensive death and suffering encountered in historical wars. Yet, our penchant for meaning (whether as television viewers, literary theorists, or cultural anthropologists) may be part of the very problem. Even as we recognize the consolatory value of such meaning-making processes, anthropologist Nancy Scheper-Hughes contends that “the arbitrary character of suffering and death [remains] hidden” as a result of human attempts to rationalize “the useless suffering and 422

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death of the Other” (26–27), be it in war or other contexts. While “[o]ne may attribute meaning to one’s own suffering,” Scheper-Hughes argues that “the only ethical way to think about the suffering of the Other is to see it as irremediably tragic and senseless, without meaning,” since “ideas of ‘acceptable death’ and of ‘meaningful,’ rather than useless, suffering extinguish rage and grief for those whose lives are taken and allow for the recruitment of new lives and new bodies into the struggle” (26–27, 19). In a similar vein, war veteran Philip Caputo observes in his memoir A Rumor of War that there are “no good deaths in the war” (260–61). Nevertheless, literary and cultural representations of wartime death are often driven by this very impetus: to discover what a fitting, worthy, or purposeful death might encompass, as the context of war extends the usual adage of living life to the fullest to making my death count. For better or worse, human beings work hard to make ethical meaning of death, even as engaging in such processes complicates a text’s ethical horizons. In the Chinese war drama, notions of a good death take on distinctly utilitarian values with pragmatic, communal consequences. These include considerations that extend to the protection of significant others (cf. Ming Cheng; Ming Jing; Yu Manli), prioritizing the lives of innumerable civilians over select intimate others (cf. Wang Tianfeng; Ming Lou), minimizing suffering (cf. Cheng Jingyun), and so on. By interrogating death’s significance through the problematization of concepts such as loyalty and sacrifice, television serials like The Disguiser invite the audience to complete our own ethical judgments in the deliberate gaps left between ethically complex characters and the consequences of the difficult choices they make, challenging us to engage fully in the complex negotiations of death’s meaning-making that ensue.

Notes

1 2 3 4

5 6

7 8

9

I gratefully acknowledge the support of Nanyang Technological University for making the research and writing of this paper possible (NTU Start-Up Grant No. M4082338). A shorter version of this paper was presented at the annual conference of the International Society for the Study of Narrative (2018). Shuyu Kong further notes that China’s “inordinate regulation focused on contemporary dramas has had the effect of pushing production toward endless reversions and recreations of history” (5). See Latham 43. See my chapter in Media Culture in Transnational Asia: Convergences and Divergences (edited by Hyesu Park, forthcoming from Rutgers University Press). Though death is arguably always linked to this sense of losing control, Pamela L. Kroll observes that a dominant theme that emerges in the work of many artists and writers who struggle “with the subject of war” (including Gertrude Stein) is that its “primary impact […] on the civilian is loss of control: the loss of one’s sense of mastery over oneself, one’s home, and one’s world that defines the ‘time’ of war” (31). See, for instance, A Tough Side of a Lady (1998), Hua Mu Lan (1999), Mu Lan (2012), and The Legend of Hua Mulan (2013), among others. See, for instance, Yang Men Nu Jiang (1981), The Generals of the Yang Family (1983), Tie Xue Yang Jia Jiang (1984), The Yang’s Saga (1985), A Courageous Clan: Mu Kuei-ying (1989), The Generals of the Yang Family (1991), Bi Xue Qing Tian Yang Jia Jiang (1994), The Great General (1994), The Heroine of the Yangs (1998), Legendary Fighter: Yang’s Heroine (2001), The Young Warriors (2006), among others. See, for instance, Eight Thousand Li of Cloud and Moon (1988), The Legend of Yue Fei (1994), and The Patriot Yue Fei (2013), among others. Kong rightly notes that “much of the work produced on Chinese popular culture and mass media” neglects “the agency of audiences” who consume these media artifacts, which “results in a tendency to inadvertently view audiences as cultural dopes, and popular culture exclusively as a site for ideological domination” (11–12). All references to character names follow the Chinese convention of surnames/last names followed by first names to minimize confusion. Translations from The Disguiser are mine, unless otherwise stated.

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W. Michelle Wang 10 Also known as te gao (特高) in Chinese or tokubetsu kōtō keisatsu (tokkōtai) in Japanese, the special higher police was a Japanese surveillance arm that employed brutal measures in its task of state repression (Kushner, Thought War 51; “Japan’s” 256). 11 Ming Jing’s status as an unmarried woman is repeatedly remarked upon, with Wang Manchun derisively labeling her “a bitter old spinster” for opposing the latter’s union with Ming Lou (Disguiser, ep. 11; ep. 23). Wang’s own single status as a result of this lingering affection in turn becomes a subject of her colleague Liang Zhongchun’s sardonic mockery (ep. 2; ep. 34).

Works Cited Aaron, Michele. Death and the Moving Image: Ideology, Iconography and I. Edinburgh UP, 2014. Bronfen, Elisabeth. “War and Its Fictional Recovery On-Screen: Narrative Management of Death in The Big Red One and The Thin Red Line.” The Philosophy of War Films, edited by David LaRocca. UP of Kentucky, 2014, pp. 413–436. Caputo, Philip. A Rumor of War. 1977. Henry Holt, 2014. The Disguiser 《 ( 伪装者》). 41 episodes. Directed by Xue Li, written by Yong Zhang, performances by Ge Hu, Dong Jin, Mintao Liu, and Kai Wang, Shandong Film & TV Media Group and Daylight Entertainment, 2015. Donald, Ralph, and Karen MacDonald. Women in War Films: From Helpless Heroine to G. I. Jane. Rowman & Littlefield, 2014. Kong, Shuyu. Popular Media, Social Emotion and Public Discourse in Contemporary China. Routledge, 2014. Kroll, Pamela L. “Games of Disappearance and Return: War and the Child in Roberto Benigni’s Life Is Beautiful.” Literature/Film Quarterly, vol. 30, no. 1, 2002, pp. 29–45. Kushner, Barak. “Japan’s War of Words: World War II Propaganda.” Routledge Handbook of Modern Japanese History, edited by Sven Saaler and Christopher W. A. Szpilman. Routledge, 2018, pp. 251–264. Kushner, Barak. The Thought War: Japanese Imperial Propaganda. U of Hawai’i P, 2007. Lary, Diana. The Chinese People at War: Human Suffering and Social Transformation, 1937–1945. Cambridge UP, 2010. Latham, Kevin. Pop Culture China!: Media, Arts, and Lifestyle. ABC-CLIO, 2007. Phelan, James. Somebody Telling Somebody Else: A Rhetorical Poetics of Narrative. Ohio State UP, 2017. Scarry, Elaine. The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World. Oxford UP, 1985. Scheper-Hughes, Nancy. “Sacred Wounds: Making Sense of Violence.” Theatre Symposium, vol. 7, 1999, pp. 7–30. Westwell, Guy. War Cinema: Hollywood on the Front Line. Wallflower, 2006.

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39 WHERE DO THE DISAPPEARED GO? WRITING THE GENOCIDE IN EAST TIMOR Kit Ying Lye

On December 7, 1975, Indonesian forces invaded East Timor on the pretext of curbing the communist-leaning Revolutionary Front for an Independent East Timor (FRETILIN), and so began their twenty-four-year occupation of the former Portuguese colony.1 Under Suharto’s authoritative regime, Timorese were denied political freedom and basic human rights.2 Indonesia’s occupation of East Timor only came under international scrutiny after the 1991 massacre in Dili, during which more than 250 people were killed and many more disappeared entirely. By the time East Timor was declared an independent state on May 20, 2002, an estimated 100,000 to 250,000 Timorese lives had been lost in what has come to be one of the largest cases of genocide in modern-day Southeast Asia.3 Despite harsh oppression by the Indonesian government, Timorese writers such as Borja da Costa and Xanana Gusmao, and a few Indonesian writers such as Y. B. Mangunwijaya and Seno Gumira Ajidarma persist in writing about the situation in East Timor. While it would be useful to examine a wider assortment of the Timorese literature that discusses the genocide, the lack of translated texts hinders such scholarship.4 Hence, this chapter focuses on the translated short stories of Seno Gumira Ajidarma as a way to examine the difficulties of writing about the East Timor genocide that remains relatively obscured even today. A particularly notable feature of Seno’s short stories in this regard is that they bear striking similarities to New Journalism, and, as such, the Sastra Koran [newspaper literature] is best understood as a form of resistance and call for accountability. The regular publication of poetry, short stories, and literary commentaries in magazines and newspapers led to the creation of Sastra Koran, a genre that marries the features of journalism with literary techniques and concerns. Of its many variations, Cerpen Koran, or the newspaper short story, became even more popular in the 1970s with the increase in the number of newspapers that were started and published at that time.5 Sastra Koran is especially popular because many established writers also take on editorial work in these magazines and news offices, and its medium is mostly affordable. More importantly, it remains relevant because it embodies a contemporary Indonesian literature that assumes not only the form but also the social realistic content typical of news articles. Seno Gumira Ajidarma is one of the leading authors of Sastra Koran. Seno’s attempts at reconciling history and literature through Sastra Koran bring to the foreground issues of representation, truth, and accountability when one is writing under an authoritarian regime. In 425

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fact, Seno has called for writers to take responsibility and carry out their duties by evading censorship through literature, and to reinstate the importance of truth-telling. He attempts to circumvent harsh press censorship of his short stories, such as “Eyewitness,” “The Mystery of the Town of Ningi,” and “The Incident,” by simultaneously employing journalistic and literary techniques in his reworking of what is real, fictional, and historical. For Seno, the emphasis is on the truth, not what is “real”; he insists that “[w]hen journalism is gagged, literature must speak. Because if journalism speaks with facts, literature speaks with truth” (“Fiction” 164). This application of Sastra Koran closely resembles that of New Journalism, which according to James Murphy is an “artistic, creative, literary reporting form” with “dramatic literary techniques; intensive reporting; and reporting of generally acknowledged subjectivity” (16). Like other New Journalism writers, Seno is very much aware of the historiographical form of his short stories when he employs reporting techniques and self-reflexive yet ambivalent characters to debate the demands of truth-telling. This ambivalence in bearing witness is evident in “Eyewitness” (1995). The story begins with a man whose eyes had been gouged out by soldiers, who then appears in court as an eyewitness to the mass killings. The blind eyewitness’s persistence in testifying “for the sake of justice and truth” affects the judge, who begins to wonder if it is up to him to “make an even greater sacrifice” (than losing one’s eyes) to validate the eyewitness’s testimony (Seno, “Eyewitness” 47). However, we do not see the judge fulfilling his duty; in fact, he dozes off after asking the question. As the story ends, we learn that the soldiers return that very night to pull out the witness’s tongue so that he can no longer speak of the violence he has witnessed and experienced. In “The Mystery of the Town of Ningi” (1993), Seno’s self-reflexive narrator is slightly more proactive. The narrator, who is a census collector, recounts his tenure in a town with a rapidly dwindling population where, oddly enough, everyone is accounted for. In his fifteen years in Ningi, the narrator witnesses the disappearance of those who “didn’t die from natural causes” until “the population of Ningi has disappeared completely” (177, 178). According to the narrator, There was no epidemic, no war, no large-scale exodus, but where had those 111,750 human being[s] disappeared to? In one village at the edge of the town, which had once had a population of 9,607, 5,021 of the population had gone missing – was it they who’d become the invisible beings, the wandering spirits? (177) He continues to explain that according to the locals, those who were murdered or made to “disappear” are known as the “invisible people” (177). Because they did not die naturally or have their disappearances acknowledged by the security forces, they must be alive and living with family members. Therefore, there is no cause to remove them from the national censuses. Even though the collector tries to explain the disappearances, he realizes that he will never know what happened because even though “[h]istory doesn’t get wiped out... historical records can be destroyed,” leaving him to wonder if the country’s history could ever be fully known (177). The collector’s figures, though not entirely factual, do not contradict the actual official numbers.6 Even if Ningi is a fictional town in a fictional country, it still offers a picture of what East Timor might have been during Indonesia’s occupation. The extreme violence and undocumented deaths in “Eyewitness” and “The Mystery of the Town of Ningi” are faithful representations of the mass murders committed despite their characters’ inability to accurately account for the disappeared and the dead. Thus, through the use of fictional settings and the omission of figures and historical records, Seno not only avoids censorship and prosecution, but 426

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also draws attention to effects of self-censorship during the writing process, a feature which becomes even more explicit in “The Incident.” Before discussing “The Incident” (1996), it is important to understand the culture of selfcensorship in which Seno was writing. Seno was reportedly punished for publishing uncensored accounts of the Dili massacre when he served as editor of Jakarta-Jakarta, a local magazine. That it was later revealed that Seno was disciplined by the publisher rather than by the Indonesian government is strongly indicative of a self-imposed censorship, and to a larger extent, a culture of maintaining silence regarding political violence and oppression.7 “The Incident,” therefore, explores what happens when people value a culture of silence, and when dominant regimes appropriate this culture to cover up a genocide. According to Seno, the accounts included in “The Incident” are actual testimonies that were discredited by Suharto’s government.8 The harsh censorship, along with a highly valued culture of silence, continues to prevent the political violence in East Timor from being fully comprehended even though more than a decade has passed since the Indonesian occupation came to an end.

Understanding the Santa Cruz Massacre in Dili On November 12, 1991, hundreds of people gathered at the Motael church to attend the memorial service of pro-independence activist Sebastiâo Gomes. Gomes was killed at a protest reacting to the barring of an Australian journalist from joining a since-cancelled Portuguese delegation’s visit to East Timor. The Timorese had seen the visit as an opportunity for them to gain international attention and support in their fight for freedom. The cancellation of the trip and the subsequent death of Gomes culminated in massive attendance at his memorial service, as thousands of demonstrators joined the congregation during the funeral procession, many of whom were observed to be holding banners and shouting pro-independence slogans. As the congregation approached the Santa Cruz cemetery, they were surrounded by soldiers from Indonesian security forces. As later investigations reveal, an alleged provocation (the stabbing of a general) led to shots being fired. According to Soren Blau and Luis Fondebrider, “[t]he procession/demonstration has been described as largely peaceful and controlled until, without warning or provocation, Indonesian security forces fired on the crowd” and survivors were assaulted and arrested by the soldiers (1251). What happened after the shooting remains a mystery, as the event continues to be obscured from public knowledge despite foreign media coverage and international criminal investigations.9 Unlike Seno’s other short stories, “The Incident” is more journalistic than literary, as Seno opts for facts instead of exaggerated representations. As the final installment in his three-part novel, Jazz, Parfum, dan Insiden, “The Incident” reveals previously silenced accounts of the Dili massacre through the style of a metafictional Sastra Koran. Seno’s representation of the Dili massacre marries the need for factual reporting with the need to present the massacre in a coherent narrative so that the magnitude of the violence can be fully understood.10 Following the government’s ban on detailed reporting, the narrator, who is an editor, attempts to make sense of the numerous testimonies submitted to his office as he gathers information pertinent to the “incident.” Witnesses recount scenes of people “being gunned down, collapsing just like in a movie” while “[s]hots were coming from every direction” (Seno, “Incident” 204), with one witness claiming that “[t]here didn’t seem to be any civilians alive – at least no one able to walk,” and that all he could see were “soldiers and corpses” (206). The various testimonies provided corroborate actual reports from official United Nations (UN) investigations conducted in 1991. Yet, even as investigations and eyewitness accounts reveal the magnitude of the Dili massacre, much about the events that followed the incident is left buried in history. According to the Indonesian Government’s report, there were only 19 dead and no 427

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disappearances in the days following the massacre. However, investigations conducted by the UN Committee reveal that approximately 271 people were killed, with at least 270 reported to be missing.11 A forensic investigation conducted in 2008 recovered only 16 bodies that showed evidence of peri-mortem trauma, gunshot wounds, and fractures consistent with the assaults recorded during the massacre.12 If only 16 bodies were recovered, where are the rest of the bodies? Where did the disappeared go? Uncertainty permeates the story as the narrator attempts to piece the events together, and it is these “fictional” accounts that enable Seno to reveal the truth that has been kept hidden from the public: the fate of the dead and those who disappeared after the massacre. Just as one witness claims, “[t]he government later said nineteen people had been killed, but with that many soldiers shooting rapid-fire into such a large crowd, there’s no way only nineteen people died” (Seno, “Incident” 203). While these accounts and investigations confirm that the actual death and casualty toll is higher than that conceded by the Indonesian government, they also suggest that much has been left out of the historical records, including the culture of fear and silencing which followed,13 as exemplified in a witness’s explanation that he had “gotten threats from the army, telling [him] not to talk about it [the incident] and not to expect to recover [his] brother’s body” (Seno, “Incident” 208). From this, we can see that under a persistent fear of being made to disappear, the act of articulating what happened is hindered, thus further obscuring the massacre from Indonesia’s version of Timorese history.

The Silence Surrounding the Event As mentioned earlier, Seno asserts that the accounts he included in “The Incident” are actual testimonies from witnesses and survivors. For Seno, to insist on retelling these stories is to “confront silencing,” and to do so he must ensure that “the forbidden text which has been banned can be disseminated – in a way that is safe and according to the rules” (“Fiction” 167). However, even when these previously censored accounts are finally revealed to the readers, they continue to be kept outside of the larger official narrative. The violence related by survivors is too raw and “un-beautified,” and their testimonies threaten to undermine Indonesia’s account of the occupation in East Timor. The narrator realizes this and this is why these testimonies will remain unpublished, because news of the war in the papers and on TV have “all been filtered and cleaned up” by the ruling regime (“Incident” 205). Charles Maier argues that the Holocaust witness must not only tell “what he has seen, but that he has seen and experienced” (102), such that the witness testifies against perpetrators of violence while bearing witness to his own presence in history. Seno’s narrator may not have witnessed the killings at Dili, but he is presented with a choice and opportunity to validate these testimonies and define his role in the remembrance of this genocide. The dead and the disappeared need survivors and those with power to reveal the truth and acknowledge their sufferings. The collector in “The Mystery of the Town of Ningi” starts by investigating discrepancies in a national census, while the blind witness in “Eyewitness” testifies in whatever ways he can in order to hold those responsible for the violence to task. The narrator in “The Incident” thus has to decide if he will do more or remain complicit in the violence inflicted upon the Timorese. To be clear, the narrator is not writing about mass murders and violence many years after the event has occurred so that his readers will never forget this moment in Timorese history. What the narrator is tasked to do is to arrange and publish these testimonies to counter the effect of a government-ordered media blackout on East Timor and resist any attempt at downplaying accusations of violence committed by Indonesian security forces. By publishing the truth, the narrator may be able to

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prevent any party from denying that the massacre at Dili ever happened, and do his part to help the dead and the disappeared find redress. The narrator experiences a dilemma as his desire for truth and accountability is outweighed by his desire to survive when he wonders, “[c]ould I ever air my views so freely? I’d like to, but can we just do as we please, disregarding how our actions might affect other people?” (“Incident” 211–12), even as he is aware that “[e]ach of the people whose words are represented here gave the utmost for these few written lines” (212). The choice to speak the truth or agree with sanitized official accounts determines if one is allowed to remain a part of the community; this is reminiscent of the case of José Arcadio Segundo in Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude. After the government denies the violent end to the union strike at the train station, José Arcadio Segundo insists on the veracity of his account of the massacre even as Macondo comes under the influence of the government’s propaganda and “forgets” that the strike even occurred. It is because of his dedication to the truth that José Arcadio Segundo ceases to exist to those who believe the stories broadcasted to the town and remains invisible to the soldiers sent to the Buendía house to silence him. Like García Márquez’s character, Seno’s editor now faces the possibility of being “erased” through censorship and censure should he insist on publishing these testimonies. However, if he buries these eyewitness accounts, he breaks his oath as a journalist who is obligated to tell the truth and to give the people (especially the dead and the disappeared) their voice. This brings us back to the dilemma in “Eyewitness”: Should the editor be inspired by the conviction of the blind eyewitness despite the danger he would face, or should he merely question his purpose and go to sleep like the judge did? The responsibility of reading, understanding, and withholding this information proves to be increasingly demanding as the narrator goes on to reveal, “I am so very tired, physically and spiritually. Must I keep reading? It’s my job, I know, but how many more reports must I read? I feel exhausted just thinking about it” (“Incident” 213). As the story ends, we see that the narrator does not “do” anything with the reports, nor does he reveal his intentions for these testimonies, because of his trepidation. If he does remain ambivalent and therefore complicit, he undermines the purpose of writing Sastra Koran. Furthermore, the ambiguous ending draws attention to the passivity of readers of such Sastra Koran, as they too, like Seno’s narrator, are invited to contemplate their roles in perpetuating the continual silencing of the surviving Timorese. Linda Hutcheon proposes that New Journalism places “stress on subjectivity (or psychological realism)” and that “it is specifically the author whose historical presence as participant authorizes subjective response” (117). In “The Incident,” we see the narrator (as a participant) caught in a dilemma between bearing witness and saving himself. Moreover, even as Seno does more to draw attention to this than his narrator does, he too is forced to adhere to the demands of the government in his storytelling. According to Seno, “The Incident” is placed in the three-part novel Jazz, Parfum dans Insiden for a purpose – to “publish all the reports of the incident in their entirety” – and that the stories in “Jazz” and “Parfum” are there “to throw the eye of the censor off” his intention to tell the truth (Seno, “Fiction” 167–68).14 Fittingly, the final account in “The Incident” takes the form of an official document titled “Disappearances and Extra-Judicial Executions” (213). The report is redacted, and part of it reads The ■ military has also failed to resolve the fate of the more than two hundred people who reportedly “disappeared” after the massacre. The official ■ government figure of sixty-six disappearances falls far short of the more than two hundred people who remain unaccounted for […] ■ has received reports of dozens of new disappearances in ■ since the massacre… (213)15

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Seno reveals that he deliberately censored the account, so that it “throws into sharp relief the bitter irony of the way a writer has to censor his/her writings … just so that the novel [ Jazz, Parfum, dan Insiden] appears to have an air of the literary about it” (“Fiction” 168). The redaction not only represents the silencing of voices, but also serves as a visual reminder of what has been omitted from the nation’s grand narrative – and in this case, what has similarly been omitted from public consciousness. The implications of this silencing in the narrative gesture to larger issues concerning the representation of genocide in East Timor. By revealing the monstrosity of the crimes committed by the Indonesian security forces, but not allowing the narrator to actively empower his witnesses with the means to publish their testimonies, Seno not only explores the problems of silencing that arise from oppression by the ruling regime, but also draws attention to the complications that occur when the act of silencing is reinforced by the community that survived the violence. According to Seno, [w]ith every passing day it becomes more apparent that violence doesn’t only exist as criminality, but as our culture. Perhaps it makes no sense to think that violence can become a culture. However, in the flare of that violence any voice that rejects violence is almost gagged by voices that not only endorse it, but also are directly involved in it. It’s as though violence can only be overcome by violence. (“Fiction” 170) This normalization of violence, as Giti Chandra argues, feeds on itself, with “a boundless source of energy in the silence that surrounds it” (36). Both Seno and Chandra’s observations are similar to what Ronnie Janoff-Bulman identifies as a “conspiracy of silence” (159). Janoff-Bulman’s concept of silence and trauma is best explained as a process in which survivors “feel a need to testify to their experiences, to make them real and to make themselves whole again, but society will not let them speak, leading to a fragmented or shattered sense of self” (Fivush 91). This raises the possibility of victims and survivors maintaining the silence regarding their experiences in order to continue to remain a part of the larger community, as “[t]he act of forgetting violent events as a form of self-preservation can be attributed to a national consciousness as well as to individuals” (Everly 31). In the case of this obscured violent history, violence no longer becomes the dominant subject of discussion; rather, it is the silence surrounding it that motivates and generates cultural narratives. Silence thus becomes a phenomenon which binds a nation of survivors together.

Implications of Silence However, the issue of silence being indicative of a collective consciousness is complicated by the Timorese desire for justice. By submitting their accounts to news editors (and the fictional narrator), these survivors and eyewitnesses contest the official account of the Dili massacre and actively resist the silence imposed by the Indonesian government. The fact that these victims are aware that their accounts are being discredited by the Indonesian authorities, alongside the possibility that the narrator will not publish these accounts, means that these memories and experiences will continue to be marginalized despite Seno’s efforts to publish the truth in the form of a metafictional Sastra Koran. Ironically, the official explanation for the silence surrounding the event reveals an attempt (be it truthful or not) to contain the massacre’s aftermath. According to the general’s testimony, officials did not actively seek to return the dead or provide information about the “disappeared” due to security concerns:

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[y]ou want to know why the bodies of the victims haven’t been returned to their families? Just look at what happened because of one body being buried: nineteen people died! So, if the bodies of the nineteen were returned to their families, how many hundreds more might die? So forget it. With nineteen bodies, there would be all these funerals and special masses. Just imagine if there were several hundred masses. How many more people would die? The most important thing is public safety. (Seno, “Incident” 213) This apparent concern for public security on the part of the Suharto regime attempts to justify the deliberate censorship of reports pertaining to the massacre.16 The general’s arguments mirrors Judith Herman’s description of the perpetrator who “marshals an impressive array of arguments, from the most blatant denial to the most sophisticated and elegant rationalization” in order to redefine reality (8). According to Herman, “the perpetrator does everything in his power to promote forgetting” and “[i]f secrecy fails, the perpetrator attacks the credibility of his victim. If he cannot silence her absolutely, he tries to make sure that no one listens” (8). Herman may be referring to the domestic abuser but her observations certainly explain how the regime made use of silence to obfuscate the genocide in East Timor, as evidenced in the lack of admonition from other countries, and the continual inaction in the redressing of victims’ grievances during the Cold War period.17 “The Incident” thus captures the absurdity of this lack of accountability, as Seno’s narrator neither accepts nor rejects the explanations given by the government official. The narrator’s ambivalence and inaction once again place him in the position of a bystander who remains complicit in the forgetting or suppressing of the horror that had occurred.

Conclusion The Indonesian government’s insistence that only 19 died in the Dili massacre and the denial of genocide in East Timor clearly reflect a manipulation of facts into acceptable “truths” that will only further Suharto’s cause. The lack of a proper revelation of what went on in East Timor is reflected in the very form of “The Incident” as Seno places fragments of testimony together without ever completing the puzzle. This means that readers of the story, along with the narrator, are made to discern what is true, what is unsaid, and what is being manipulated in order to understand what happened in Dili on their own. This process of piecing information together is very similar to how the massacre and other violence committed by the Indonesian security forces is understood by international media and scholars as Indonesia continues to place an embargo on East Timor, even after UN interventions. What we knew and will know about East Timor continue to be scraps of information from survivors and eyewitnesses whose desire to speak the truth is greater than their fear of being incarcerated. Even then, the testimonies and casualty count are, at best, estimates by survivors and eyewitnesses whose credibility has been undermined by the government. The Indonesian government’s control on media coverage of East Timor, along with the victims’ inability to articulate their experiences only mean that the twenty-four-year Indonesian occupation of East Timor can never be fully understood. Thus, the purpose of Seno’s “The Incident” is not simply a matter of providing an alternative history, but also to mitigate the effects of obscuring and forgetting the Timorese genocide. The implications of the continued silence that surrounds these traumatic events in Timorese history are reflected in what has been explicitly buried and omitted from the short stories studied in this chapter. As Tim Harper has aptly pointed out, “[t]o rediscover the past is to recover an entire language of politics which had been buried for thirty years by the Suharto regime” (516); Seno’s Sastra Koran thus becomes an attempt at recovering that which has been left unsaid and buried in Suharto’s master narrative. This urgent need to counter Suharto’s 431

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totalizing narrative explains why the people’s accounts are kept “raw” and never fully incorporated into the narrative. Furthermore, the divide between what is allowed to be said and what the characters desperately want to say clearly demonstrates a criticism of the master narrative which prevents a reassessment of the past. The short stories offered by Seno thus aim to subvert the official stories offered by Suharto through their form and content, even as his characters are aware that the relevant violent events have already been so thoroughly erased from historical records by both the perpetrators and by the victims themselves that their complicity and moral dilemmas can no longer be neatly resolved.

Notes 1 Timor was divided into two, with West Timor being colonized by the Dutch and East Timor by the Portuguese. With the withdrawal of the Portuguese in 1974, nationalist leaders of East Timor began to work toward gaining independence. Fearing that an independent East Timor would fuel further secession initiatives in areas such as Aceh and West Papua/West Irian, Suharto labeled the leaders of Timor’s pro-independence group FRETILIN as being communists and staged a military invasion of East Timor. 2 According to John Taylor, “Indonesian troops had been given orders to crush all opposition ruthlessly, and were told that they were fighting communists in the cause of Jihad (Holy War), just as they had done in Indonesia in 1965” (70). 3 See Kiernan, Genocide and Resistance, 118–20, for his analysis of the estimated casualty counts. 4 See Lipscomb. 5 See Danerek 419–20. 6 See Kiernan, “Demography” 590. The census conducted by the Portuguese in 1970 estimated a population of 609,477. However, the census conducted in 1974 reported a population of only 635,000, which by 1978 had further decreased to an alarming count of around 498,000. 7 See Chudori. Chudori, an Indonesian writer and journalist, also recalls the self-imposed censorship: “We were trained to become reporters with integrity, but at the same time we knew – back then – that we could not write freely and extensively.” 8 See “Anatomy of Press Censorship,” Asia Watch’s 1992 report on press censorship in Indonesia. 9 A group of Australian and British journalists managed to smuggle video clips and several testimonies out of East Timor. 10 Robyn Fivush explains, “[p]eople may agree on the facts of what happened (i.e., accuracy) but if they disagree about what those facts mean, the memory is not perceived to be truthful in that the narrative does not make sense.” Narratives thus serve to present facts, and attempt meaning-making as reconciliation for victims and witnesses of violent events (95). 11 See Table 1 in Blau and Fondebrider 1252. 12 See Blau and Fondebrider 1264. 13 See Inbaraj 99. A report submitted to the Human Rights Commission by UN Special Rapporteur, Bacre Waly Ndiaye, reveals the victims’ continual fear of being further incarcerated. In his report, Ndiaye writes that “a number of prospective witnesses had not been willing to give their account of the event because of doubt and concern that they would be directly incriminated in the November 12 incident in Dili, or out of fear they would be regarded as belonging to the anti-integration group.” 14 In his introduction to Eyewitness: Protest Stories from Indonesia, Seno explains, “What was important about these stories, especially when compared with reports of the other media? For me what was important was the finding of some testimonies which indicated that the shooting of a number of demonstrators was not just an ‘incident,’ that is, an unintentional accident. Of course, neither do I want to say that the shooting was planned.” 15 The report is based on actual formal investigations conducted by members of Amnesty International. 16 The general’s explanation is very similar to an account provided by Major General Sintong Panjaitan, the commander who was put in charge of East Timor. General Sintong Panjaitan admitted to reporters on November 14, 1991 that 19 were killed and 91 wounded on November 12. 17 Inbaraj points out that “many Western powers could not bring themselves to vote against Jakarta [at the United Nations General Assembly] and abstained. What concerned them was not whether the UN charter had been violated – as it clearly had – but how to avoid offending Indonesia” (49).

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Works Cited “Anatomy of Press Censorship in Indonesia: The Case of Jakarta, Jarkata and the Dili Massacre.” Asia Watch, vol. 4, no. 12, 27 Apr. 1992. Blau, Soren, and Luis Fondebrider. “Dying for Independence: Proactive Investigations into the 12 November 1991 Santa Cruz Massacre, Timor Leste.” The International Journal of Human Rights, vol. 15, no. 8, 2011, pp. 1249–1274. doi:10.1080/13642987.2010.511999. Chandra, Giti. Narrating Violence, Constructing Collective Identities: “To Witness These Wrongs Unspeakable.” Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Chudori, Leila S. “Seeking Identity, Seeking Indonesia.” Inside Indonesia, vol. 114, Oct.–Dec. 2013. www. insideindonesia.org/seeking-identity-seeking-indonesia. Danerek, Stefan. “Cerpen Koran: Its Canon and Counter-world.” Indonesia and Malay World, vol. 41, no. 121, 2013, pp. 418–438. doi: 10.1080/13639811.2013.826425. “East Timor: Truth, Justice and Redress.” Amnesty International. November 1997. www.amnesty.org/en/ documents/ASA21/081/1997/en. Everly, Kathryn. History, Violence, and the Hyperreal: Representing Culture in the Contemporary Spanish Novel. Purdue UP, 2010. Fivush, Robyn. “Speaking Silence: The Social Construction of Silence in Autobiographical and Cultural Narratives.” Memory, vol. 18, no. 2, 2010, pp. 88–98. doi:10.1080/09658210903029404. Harper, Tim N. “‘Asian Values’ and Southeast Asian Histories.” The Historical Journal, vol. 40, no. 2, 1997, pp. 507–517. www.jstor.org/stable/2640078. Herman, Judith. Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence from Domestic Abuse to Political Terror. Basic Books, 1997. Hutcheon, Linda. A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction. Routledge, 1988. Inbaraj, Sonny. East Timor: Blood and Tears in Asean. Silkworm Books, 1997. Janoff-Bulman, Ronnie. Shattered Assumptions: Towards a New Psychology of Trauma. Free Press, 1992. Kiernan, Ben. “The Demography of Genocide in Southeast Asia: The Death Tolls in Cambodia, 1975–79, and East Timor, 1975–80.” Critical Asian Studies, vol. 35, no. 4, 2003, pp. 585–597. doi:10.1080/ 1467271032000147041. Kiernan, Ben. Genocide and Resistance in Southeast Asia: Documentation, Denial & Justice in Cambodia & East Timor. Transaction, 2008. Lipscomb, Leigh-Ashley. “Post-independence Timorese Literature and the Aesthetics of Accountability.” Hatene Kona Ba Timor Leste Compreender Timor Leste Understanding Timor Leste Mengerti Timor Leste, edited by Michael Leach. Timor-Leste Studies Association, 2010, pp. 168–173. Maier, Charles S. “Recounting, Retrieving, Rereading: Approaches to the History of Genocide.” Journal of Genocide Research, vol. 16, no. 1, 2014, pp. 101–111. doi:10.1080/14623528.2014.878116. Murphy, James E. “The New Journalism: A Critical Perspective.” Journalism Monographs, vol. 34, 1974. Seno Gumira Ajidarma. Eyewitness: Protest Stories from Indonesia. Translated by Jan Lingard and Bibi Langker. Imprint, 1995. Seno Gumira Ajidarma. “Fiction, Journalism, History: A Process of Self-Correction.” Translated by Michael Bodden. Indonesia, vol. 68, Oct. 1999, pp. 164–171. www.jstor.org/stable/3351300. Seno Gumira Ajidarma. “The Incident.” Translated by Greg Harris. Manoa, vol. 12, no. 1, 2000, pp. 203–213. www.jstor.org/stable/4229840. Seno Gumira Ajidarma. “The Mystery of the Town of Ningi.” Indonesia: Pramoedya Ananta Toer and His Work, vol. 61, Apr. 1996, pp. 175–178. www.jstor.org/stable/3351369 Taylor, John G. East Timor: The Price of Freedom. Zed Books, 1999. “Timor-Leste: All Parties Must Act to Ensure Justice for Human Rights Violations.” Amnesty Australia. Amnesty International, 2006.

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40 “DOUBTFULL DREDE” Dying at the End of the Middle Ages Walter Wadiak

No other epoch has laid so much stress as the expiring Middle Ages on the thought of death. ( Johan Huizinga 138) Were medieval people obsessed with death, as Huizinga (a great medievalist of the last century) suggests? We have a word – “macabre” – to describe precisely this supposed fixation. And it is true that much of the literature of the period, especially near its end, is concerned with death and the terror that it engenders. This chapter offers a survey of some of that literature, in English, near the close of the Middle Ages (from about the thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries). I conclude that this is indeed an age of the macabre in literature, but perhaps not in the sense we usually mean. For rather than merely encouraging fear, the literature of the macabre offered its contemporary readers a way of dealing with it. If death in this period is becoming “wild” (as another well-known historian of the Middle Ages has argued), then the literature I will survey can be regarded as in some sense an effort to “re-tame” it.1 It is the tension between these two visions of death – “tame” and “wild” – that supplies much of this literature with its emotional and spiritual drama. This chapter explores a range of literary texts that dramatize the dying process, from the well-known (such as Everyman) to the much less so (the brief and utterly weird poem called “A Disputation Betwyx þe Body and Wormes”). Despite their differences, all of these works strive to render death meaningful and manageable for their late-medieval audiences, even as they also (sometimes) suggest the limits of any imaginative attempt to come to terms with the stark prospect of life’s final extinction. It is useful to understand the broad outlines of the cultural moment in which this literature arose, especially the impact of the Black Death, which raged through Europe first in 1347–51, claiming the lives of perhaps 60 percent of the overall population of Europe.2 This gave rise to the dreadful prospect of the mors improvisa, the death that comes without warning and before the possibility of confession and forgiveness.3 If this is the primary “exogenous” cause of the latemedieval fascination with death, there were also forces working from within the culture of this period that can help explain the rise of a macabre aesthetics.4 For some scholars, the culture of the macabre is a natural outgrowth of the medieval Christian focus on guilt and penance, the most famous example of which is to be found in the late-medieval order of flagellants who processed through the streets of stricken towns and villages. Certainly late-medieval English 434

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writers do raise the possibility that the plague was the direct result of human malfeasance. The Middle English poet William Langland, for one, averred that “these pestilences were for pure sin” (qtd. in Binski 127). Yet another view has been proposed by Paul Binski, who argued that the macabre “can only be understood by seeing it as an internal development of medieval visual culture itself,” and was correspondingly wary of literary evidence, which he (as an art historian) saw as fundamentally unreliable.5 This last view is obviously of limited use to my own project here, though I share with Binski a sense that the macabre is informed by an interest in the body as a site for both belief (for instance, in the fetishizing of relics) and vulnerability. A final explanation, important to my own thinking, ties the rise of the macabre to broader cultural changes happening at the close of the Middle Ages. This view can be attributed in large part to the work of Philippe Ariès, who argued that the late Middle Ages marked the emergence of a new emphasis on selfhood and the idea of the individual, such that death became not just an abstract process but a terrifying extinction of a unique subjectivity.6 In earlier medieval culture, death had been “tame”: not devoid of all fear, perhaps, but a process that was legible in terms of a set of beliefs and practices, less an end than a passage, ideally awaited serenely with hands folded, as recommended in the ars moriendi or treatises on dying. By the late Middle Ages, however, death increasingly becomes or appears “wild” (to use Ariès’s term) because it threatens, not merely a collective identity that can sustain itself beyond death, but rather the very self of the dying person. I contend in what follows that one function of imaginative literature in this period is indeed to “tame” death – to render it manageable for late-medieval audiences in light of the threat it represents to emerging ideas about the value of individual life. As a result, this literature is deeply rooted in the experience of fear. Indeed, the late Middle Ages saw a flourishing of interest in what we might call the psychology of fear. In perhaps the most famous medieval English romance, the hero, Sir Gawain, lies awake in the hours before dawn, tossing and turning as he contemplates what he thinks will be his end.7 Geoffrey Chaucer, when he wants us to imagine the fear felt by his heroine, asks us to picture the terror on the face of a man who is about to be hanged. We instantly pick out that face in a crowd, he says; it is the one marked out for death by its pallor.8 One of the most interesting accounts of the fear inspired by death in this period is by Julian of Norwich, an English mystic who in 1372, at the age of 30, had a near-death experience that led to a series of spiritual visions. Julian has a lot to say about what it feels like to be afraid. One kind of fear, which she calls “drede of affray,” comes suddenly and is a testament to the frailty of the human body (“cummith to a man sodenly be frelte” – here it is hard not to think of Julian’s sudden and nearly fatal illness). Another kind of fear, which Julian calls “drede of peyne,” is even more obviously tied to what she frankly calls “bodily deth” – a prospect that this pain serves to remind us of – whereas the two other kinds, “doubtfull” and “reverent” fear, concern the fate of the soul after death. Only “reverent” fear, says Julian, will bring us closer to God. But even this devotionally appropriate fear figures as a problem in what we would now call psychological terms: it is terrifying to experience. The best she can say of the discomfort it causes is that this will be transmuted into pleasure after death, becoming “delectabil” to virtuous souls in heaven. For all of these writers, it is not just the fact of death that is the problem, but the experience of living in the shadow of our own mortality. Though these writers are not “macabre” in the sense that they are writing about skeletons and graves, they show how general was the interest, by the fourteenth century, in the question of how to encounter death. This interest was also evident, of course, in texts that we more readily associate with the macabre, to which I now turn. Like the more familiar and canonical texts of the period that I have mentioned, the late-medieval literature of the macabre takes a deep interest in the individual experience of fear and the ways in which it is embodied. In a fourteenth-century “debate poem” between the body and the soul of a 435

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deceased man, an onlooker watches with horrified fascination as the soul of the man is dragged to hell while the man’s body (with which it has been disputing the question of relative blame) rots in its tomb. Waking from his vision – it has been a dream – the onlooker reports that every hair on his body was wet with fear: “On uche an her a drope stod, /For fyn fere ther I lay” (Wright 349). A Middle English lyric of the same period imagines how it will feel when the speaker, his lips black, hair falling out, and feet growing stiff, finally dies. In a poem rife with images of physical decay, there is also an emotional component: my heart will be frightened, and my hands will tremble (“Min herte griseth, /And mine honden bivien.”) (Luria and Hoffman 224). Such poems are of course meant to encourage repentance. As the narrator of the debate poem puts it: It was too late for the man being dragged to hell, but you still have time to save yourself. Beyond this obvious purpose, however, there lies an uneasiness with the death of the self that is arguably new to the late Middle Ages and not so easily explained – indeed, a fascination with fear itself. As Ariès remarks, the memento mori theme is not itself novel, going back in Western culture to antiquity, which is replete with reminders that death is our common end and that one ought therefore to have contempt for the world and its pleasures. Contemptus mundi poems in this tradition are common in Middle English, such as the short lyric known as “When the turuf is thy tour”: When the turuf is thy tour, And thy put is thy bour, Thy wel and thy white throte Shulen wormes to note. What helpet thee thenne All the worilde wenne? (Luria and Hoffman 223) [When the earth is your tower, And the pit is your bower, Your skin and your white throat Worms will have to eat. What will avail you then All the world’s bliss?]9 Although there is a touch of the macabre here in the picture of worms eating away at the “white throte,” the emphasis of the poem is on the appropriate attitude to be taken toward the prospect of one’s death: a turning-away from the world and toward God. Other poems of the late Middle Ages offer a similar lesson but with more emphasis on the macabre aspect. In the fifteenth-century Middle English poem known as The Three Dead Kings, three young rulers encounter three dead men who are revealed to be their own deceased forebears, and the message is clear: As we are, so shall you be. The message is again a conventional one of the memento mori type, and the three rulers learn the lesson well, resolving to live virtuously and submit their will to “God the King of Pity” (line 120). Yet though its moralizing tone is conventional, the poem lingers chillingly on the fear that these corpses, in their various states of decomposition, evoke in their beholders. As the young rulers each in turn recognize the three approaching figures as dead men, the atmosphere of fear builds until the last of the living men speaks: Þen speke þe henmest kyng, in þe hillis he beholdis, He lokis vnder his hondis and his hed heldis; Bot soche a carful k[ny]l to his hert coldis, So doþ þe knyf ore þe kye, þat þe knoc kelddus. (Turville-Petre 149) 436

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[Then the last king speaks, he looks toward the hills, He looks out from under his hands and holds his head; But a terrible blow chills his heart, Like the knife or the key, that chills the knuckle.] The theme of “The Three Living and the Three Dead” is a common one in late-medieval culture by the thirteenth century and finds its way often into art, where it takes on aspects of the danse macabre. Caught in postures of disgust or shock, the figures in these illustrations are decorated with “speaking scrolls” that testify to the beholders’ terror. “I am afraid” (Ich am afert), says one such figure, another, “I am aghast” (Ich am agast).10 Fear, then, is crucial to much of this literature, and becomes a subject unto itself. Yet terror is not the only effect being aimed at. I have already mentioned one so-called “debate poem” that clearly testifies to (and is meant to evoke) fear – the one in which a man awakes from a harrowing vision of mortality in a cold sweat. A more subtle poem in the same vein, and also a stranger one, is the short debate piece called “A Disputation Betwyx þe Body and Wormes” (ca. 1460). Like its literary cousins, “A Disputation” is an exercise in a well-established medieval tradition of memento mori poetry. The poem recounts a vision by a male narrator fleeing the Black Death “in þe ceson [during the season] of huge mortalite” (1).11 Pausing at a church along the way, he stops to pray before noticing a tomb surmounted with the image of a “fresche fygure fine” (21) of a beautiful lady. Falling into a slumber, he dreams of the argument – “in maner of a dyaloge” (14) – between the deceased lady thus memorialized and the worms that gnaw her bones (in this way replacing the “Soul” figure of more conventional debate-poems with the worms who are this body’s real antagonist). When the lady protests that she should be spared because of her nobility and great beauty in life, the worms reply with gleeful malice that they will not cease to devour her so long as one of her bones is attached to another (“while þat one of þi bones with oþer wil hange” [58–59]). On its surface, this poem exuberantly testifies to the late-medieval taste for the macabre. With its picture of “orrybyll flesche rotyng and stynkynge” (66), “A Disputation” enacts the logic of the “cadaver tomb” or transi – a term first proposed by Ariès himself (113–16). Here, the usual depiction of the rotting corpse that complements the upper, “fair” representation of the deceased in the full flourishing of life is replaced with an actual encounter, in visionary form, with the lady’s rotting corpse as it laments its fate. To read this in the terms that Ariès suggests for the transi, we might say that poems like “A Disputation” mark a transition in late-medieval attitudes toward death: “the new image of the pathetic and personal death” has its counterpart “in a new image of destruction” (Ariès 112). Instead of dust returning unto dust, we get stinking corpses. In the fifteenthcentury romance Sir Amadace – to take one example – the stench of a dead man is so overpowering that the protagonist can barely enter the house in which he lies (lines 61–84).12 By the end of the Middle Ages, even a romance can afford a whiff of the macabre. However, to say that this is a literature to provoke terror does not always do justice to its subtlety of effect. If the literature of the macabre paints death as “wild” – in Ariès’s terms – it is driven also by an effort to tame and contain the force of its own representations, turning them into a source of comfort (to varying degrees of success, it must be admitted). In Amadace, the stinking corpse is replaced by others that do not smell, and may (in an odd twist) not even be real (lines 517–40).13 Ultimately, it is a story about the community between the living and the dead – tame stuff indeed. In “A Disputation,” the “taming” of death is even more explicit, if no less weird. After being told off by the worms, the unfortunate lady and her tormentors engage in an almost friendly debate. The worms point out reasonably that all sorts of crawly things live on people even while they are alive, so she can hardly object to something of which 437

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she already has so much experience. The lady, trying a new line of attack, boasts that God, in the Book of Genesis, gave humanity dominion over all other life on Earth, but the worms retort that this doesn’t apply to dead people. After some further back and forth, the lady concedes defeat and literally offers to kiss and make up: “Let vs kys and dwell to gedyr euermore” (195). As one reader has noted, the “euermore” of the lady’s invitation seems like an odd choice of words, given the hope the poem holds out for the lady’s resurrection, at the Day of Doom, as part of the “body glorified” (198) of Christ.14 The ambiguity is symptomatic of a deeper tension within the poem between the solace of doctrine and the terror of death conceived as a final end – one in which all of us end up as wormfood. So it is remarkable that the poem ends by recommending its story as not just instructive but “vn to þe reders þinge delectabyll” (212): a “thing delectable” for us, the poem’s readers. The gustatory metaphor for taking in wisdom by reading – so common to the Middle Ages – perhaps nowhere else has such a ghoulish cast. But the word “delectable” just possibly points upward too, recalling, in Julian’s account, the pleasures of paradise: what is uncomfortable to us now will then be “delectabil.” The echo, though distant, hints, I think, at the logic of the macabre as an aesthetic that mingles horror and reassurance in equal measure. Something of this complexity informs the text that is most readily identified with death in the corpus of medieval English literature: the play called Everyman. Partly because this play is so central to our idea of a specific period and aesthetic, Everyman has often been taken as a crude exercise in memento mori literature. It is understandable why; the play explicitly recommends itself to its audience as a “reminder” (memoryall 902) of our mortality.15 The play’s first image is pointedly that of a decomposing “body [that] lyeth in claye” (15). When the American novelist Philip Roth wanted to write a late-in-life meditation on death, he thought he could do no better than to title it Everyman.16 And indeed the plot of the medieval play is devastating in its simplicity. Everyman, surprised by Death and admonished to give an account of his life without delay, searches with increasing desperation for volunteers to accompany him on his journey to the grave, yet all but Good Deeds desert him along the way. Abandoned by his former friends, Everyman receives religious instruction, hastily giving away his belongings before undergoing confession and receiving extreme unction, and dies with a prayer for mercy on his lips. He is saved but is held up as a warning to the audience about the suddenness with which judgment may strike – an apt lesson in the age of the terrible plague. Like some of the other texts we have considered, Everyman seems driven in part by a new emphasis on death’s unpredictability. The “tyde” (143) or time of death cannot be predicted, a warning that sounds eerily in the play’s best-known line: “O, Deth, thou cummest whan I had thee leest in mynde” (119). Yet for all its apparent (and brutal) directness, Everyman is a remarkably ambivalent play. Is Everyman himself a type or an individual? Is his death representative of the fate of all humankind – on the model of Ariès’s “tame death” – or is it a dramatic enactment of the death of a fully individuated self ? And is the play’s message ultimately comforting or terrifying? It turns out to be hard to say. Like the other examples of the macabre cited earlier, the play seems to aim at both horror and consolation at once. Drawing on its origins in a relatively bland Dutch morality play called Elckerlyc, the better-known English version we know as Everyman begins on an especially harrowing note, as death roams through a late-medieval English town, armed with a fatal dart (the Black Death was often pictured in medieval art as a skeleton carrying a sharp arrow).17 As Death searches out his victim Everyman, the grim hunter’s glee verges on the diabolical. Everyman, taken by surprise, pleads desperately for more time, and finding no reprieve, sees his friends and companions (first), and then his family, and finally his bodily strength and mental faculties leave him one by one, in a terrifying enactment of the logic of dying – a sort of perverse mirror-image of the late-medieval ars moriendi, “how-to-die” texts 438

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that describe the dying process in stages (sometimes with almost comical exactitude) but which the play invests with real psychological fear. Because Everyman is unprepared, he risks damnation, as the personification of his earthly possessions (a character named Goods) reminds him, cruelly making sport of his fear: “I must nedes laugh. I cannot be sad” (456). By the play’s end, Everyman seems to be an isolated figure. About to be lowered into the grave, he laments that “all hath forsaken me” (851) – words that echo those of Christ on the cross, as does his slightly later commendation of his spirit into the hands of God (at lines 880–87). Of course, there is a paradox here: Everyman is alone, having been forsaken by all, but his very aloneness makes him a type of Christ (oddly enough, given his apparently sinful life). Indeed, he is ushered straight to heaven’s VIP section, among the saints, for what the receiving angel calls his “synguler virtue” (896) – of which, it might be argued, Everyman has shown scant evidence. This is the conventional logic of the macabre turned on its head: at the very moment in which he is lowered into the grave, Everyman enacts the Resurrection, cheating death at the last instant.18 The play’s closing prayer offers an image of wholeness and bodily integrity that is, strikingly, the exact opposite of the images of disintegration and decay with which the macabre is typically associated: And he that hath his accounte hole and sounde Hye in Heven he shall be crounde, Unto the whiche place God brynge us all thether That we may lyve, body and soule togyther. (915–18) The notion that the physical body will survive death is conventional enough – contained in the Nicene Creed – though the play’s insistence that the physical body will be resurrected along with the soul sets it apart from its source.19 This closing fantasy of bodily integrity offers a comforting answer to the less appealing image with which the play begins, the decomposing “body [that] lyeth in claye” (15) mentioned earlier (a detail also tellingly absent from the play’s source).20 If the macabre is focused on the body – as the period’s many debate poems between “body” and “soul” also attest – it is in part because it is the body that is also the site of a possible redemption. So it is apt that the English play – more macabre than its Dutch exemplar – also contains an odd kind of reassurance, like many of the texts considered here. Thus, though the play opens by reminding us, in true memento mori style, that life is short – “how transytory we be all daye” (7) – it immediately backtracks: But the intente of it [i.e., the play] is more gracyous And swete to bere awaye (9–10) The message may seem bitter, but is actually sweet, if not exactly delectable (as in the cases of Julian of Norwich and the “Disputation”). This might seem like an amusing claim given the play’s dark theme, but it suggests that the function of the macabre goes beyond mere horror and should be viewed in its context, as a kind of mirror-image of the resolutely carnal, embodied nature of medieval Christian belief itself.21 In that sense, the play’s term for itself – memoryall – is telling. A memorial is a mnemonic, a means of remembering a lesson. But it can also, in Middle English, denote a particular monument, a grave, like those “double-decker” transi tombs that show both “fair” and decaying “copies” of the deceased.22 The macabre here, too, works on both levels, much like the transi, to activate fear and offer comfort in the same gesture.

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If this is so, it suggests a complication to understandings of what the macabre does in latemedieval culture, and why it is a dominant aesthetic mode of the period. Death in this period is neither “tame” nor “wild” (in Ariès’s terms) but both at once: a thing newly terrifying, but which medieval Christian belief nevertheless struggled to contain and render less fearful.23 The struggle between these two impulses – fear and comfort – is not unique to the medieval period in terms of cultural responses to death. We have our own ways of aiming at comfort, and our own fears, even if the distance between them is greater, such that the macabre seems to “erupt” from time to time out of a culture that largely prefers not to think about death at all – for instance, in gruesome portrayals of death on screen or in news and eyewitness footage, or in the haunting memento mori creations of an artist like Damien Hirst. Still, it can be argued that the macabre was imbued with a heightened sense of drama in the late Middle Ages, so much so that this period seems to us in retrospect to have been a defining moment in the history of death.

Notes 1 The medievalist is Philippe Ariès, as discussed in greater detail later. 2 Recent estimates tend to be considerably higher than the 20 percent to 30 percent suggested by scholars up to about 1960, in part because more recently discovered data for poorer segments of the population suggest a higher mortality rate among those segments than was previously assumed. Moreover, tax records and manorial registries that historians have long used to make estimates typically only record heads of households, when actual mortality certainly must have extended as well to (unrecorded) women and children. For an analysis of the methodological problems involved, see Benedictow 257–72. 3 For a brief discussion of this point as it pertains to literary representations of death, see Wadiak 33–34. 4 A thoughtful analysis is given by Binski 126–34. I am indebted to his thinking in my condensed account here, as to his useful distinction between “endogenous” and “exogenous” causes. 5 Binski 133. For his wariness of “the literary component,” specifically with respect to interpreting the physical architecture of transi tombs, see 147. 6 For a brief exposition, see Ariès 103–7. 7 See Winny, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, lines 1748–54. 8 See Chaucer, “The Man of Law’s Tale,” lines 645–50. 9 Translations are mine unless otherwise indicated. 10 The scrolls appear in an illustration in the de Lisle Psalter (Arundel MS 83). See Fein 84–91, for an analysis of the significance of these English vernacular intrusions into a predominantly French manuscript (in language and style), as well as connections to surviving English lyrics. 11 Conlee 50. Subsequent line references are to this edition. 12 Line references are from the TEAMS edition. 13 According to the editor of the TEAMS edition of the poem, the wreck is “apparently magically provided” (113). 14 The observation is Steel’s: “Yet [the poem’s] reassertion of humanism works only if we ignore the ‘euermore,’ or twist it into meaning ‘until things improve’” (para. 73). 15 Line references for Everyman are from the TEAMS edition. 16 See Roth’s Guardian interview for the novelist’s sense of his connection to the medieval play. 17 Binski describes the conventional imagery as “a shower of malevolent, retributive darts from heaven” (127). For a visual example, see the penultimate color-plate between pages 128 and 129, which depicts a quite alarming skeleton holding a dart and grinning maliciously. 18 This moment may show the influence of ideas that sprang from a late-medieval reform movement known as the Devotio Moderna. See McRae. 19 The corresponding passage in the Dutch play does not mention the body and soul being together, instead exhorting the audience to praise God: “‘Amen’ segghet alle gader” (878). The idea of togetherness may have been suggested to the English translator by the collective nature of the proposed prayer (alle gader), for which he substitutes an insistence on the body’s survival after death, together with the soul.

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Works Cited Ariès, Philippe. The Hour of Our Death. Oxford UP, 1991. Benedictow, Ole J. The Black Death, 1346–1353: The Complete History. Boydell Press, 2004. Binski, Paul. Medieval Death: Ritual and Representation. Cornell UP, 1996. Chaucer, Geoffrey. The Man of Law’s Tale. The Riverside Chaucer: Reissued with a New Foreword by Christopher Cannon, 3rd ed., edited by Larry Benson. Oxford UP, 2008, pp. 87–104. Conlee, John W. Middle English Debate Poetry: A Critical Anthology. Colleagues Press, 1991, pp. 50–62. Davidson, Clifford, Martin W. Walsh, and Ton J. Broos, editors. Everyman and Its Dutch Original, Elckerlijc. Medieval Institute Publications, 2007. TEAMS online edition. https://d.lib.rochester.edu/ teams/text/davidson-everyman. Duclow, D. F. “Everyman and the Ars Moriendi: Fifteenth-Century Ceremonies of Dying.” Fifteenth Century Studies, vol. 6, 1983, pp. 93–113. Fein, Susanna Greer. “Life and Death, Reader and Page: Mirrors of Mortality in English Manuscripts.” Mosaic, vol. 35, 2002, pp. 69–94. Huizinga, Johan. The Waning of the Middle Ages: A Study of Forms of Life, Thought, and Art in France and the Netherlands in the Dawn of the Renaissance. Edward Arnold, 1924. Luria, Maxwell S., and Richard Hoffman, editors. Middle English Lyrics. Norton, 1974. McRae, Murdo William. “Everyman’s Last Rites and the Digression on Priesthood.” College Literature, vol. 13, 1986, pp. 305–309. The Middle English Dictionary, edited by Hans Kurath, Sherman M. Kuhn, John Reidy, and Robert E. Lewis. U of Michigan P, 1952–1999. Roth, Philip. “It No Longer Feels a Great Injustice that I Have to Die.” Interview by Martin Krasnik, Guardian, 14 Dec. 2005, section G2, 14. 27. The Shewings of Julian of Norwich. TEAMS Middle English Text Series. Medieval Institute Publications, 1993. www.lib.rochester.edu/camelot/teams/julianfr.htm. Sir Amadace. Amis and Amiloun, Robert of Cisyle, and Sir Amadace. TEAMS Middle English Text Series. Medieval Institute Publications, 1993. https://d.lib.rochester.edu/teams/text/foster-sir-amadace. Steel, Karl. “Chapter 3: Food for Worms.” How Not to Make a Human: Pets, Feral Children, Worms, Sky Burial, Oysters. Forthcoming with U of Minnesota P, 2019. Available at https://commons.gc.cuny. edu/papers/chapter-3-food-for-worms. Turville-Petre, Thorlac, editor. Alliterative Poetry of the Later Middle Ages: An Anthology. Routledge, 1989. Wadiak, Walter. “This memory all men may have in mynd.” Narrating Death: The Limit of Literature, edited by Daniel K. Jernigan, Walter Wadiak, and W. Michelle Wang. Routledge, 2019, pp. 27–42. Winny, James, editor and translator. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Broadview Press, 1992. Wright, Thomas. The Latin Poems Commonly Attributed to Walter Mapes. Camden Society, 1841.

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41 URBANIZATION, AMBIGUITY, AND SOCIAL DEATH IN CHARLES BROCKDEN BROWN’S ARTHUR MERVYN Wanlin Li

For centuries, death has been a perpetual motif in the gothic, not only because of its apparent connection with horror, but also because its various mock forms, such as premature burial and resurrection, are powerful ways to generate ambiguities closely linked with the experience of terror.1 Among death’s various transmogrifications in the Gothic, social death has rarely been explored for its potential to generate ambiguities and produce terrible experiences. In this chapter, I study the connection between social extinction in Charles Brockden Brown’s urban Gothic Arthur Mervyn and its famous ambiguities, especially the moral ambiguity surrounding its central character Arthur Mervyn. Instead of focusing on resolving the ambiguity by determining Mervyn’s moral nature, as previous critics did,2 I find it more productive to investigate the uses or purposes of the ambiguity. I read the ambiguity against the background of an increasingly urbanizing American society and as an inevitable consequence of the threat of social annihilation arising in the process. Combined with other ambiguities in the novel, the moral ambiguity reveals Brown’s insightful understandings of the physical and moral, as well as cultural, consequences of urbanization. Specifically, I argue that Brown views urbanization as a process that threatens migrants with a debilitating loss of identity leading to social extinction or “social death.” Individuals such as Mervyn try to reestablish their social legitimacy and relevance in a new urban environment by taking advantage of the opportunities presented by an unprecedented epidemic, which serves as a powerful demonstration of the destructive physical consequences of urbanization. In the process of striving against social extinction and regaining recognition, Mervyn inevitably performs services for victims of the epidemic, and cultivates meaningful connections that were previously nonexistent. The combination of selfish and altruistic motives necessarily blurs Mervyn’s moral character, and in doing so, reveals the ethical paradoxes involved in urban citizenship. Moreover, the moral ambiguity revolving around Mervyn also reinforces Brown’s general concern with the ambiguity of appearances, which results at least partly from the alterations in social structure and human relations in the wake of urbanization. Considering the ambiguities as indicative of Brown’s view on an increasingly urbanizing American society helps us perceive the underlying connections between the Gothic ambiguities of the story, which transcend various natural and unnatural boundaries, and its much-celebrated social realism. It also revises popular understanding 442

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of Brown as primarily a Gothic writer, even as it reveals a politically conscious Brown deeply concerned with the changing realities of his native society. As mentioned earlier, although critics disagree considerably on Mervyn’s moral nature, they almost unanimously praise the realism of the novel.3 However, though most critics focus primarily on Brown’s vivid representation of the yellow fever epidemic, Brown’s shrewd observation of the physical as well as social consequences of the expansion of American cities (Philadelphia in particular) also deserves attention. In the decades leading up to the yellow fever epidemic in 1793, Philadelphia was experiencing rapid growth, its population rising from 23,700 in 1775 to 42,520 in 1790 (Weinstock 64). Many of the newly arrived were immigrants from European countries, and the city also provided shelter for refugees from various countries and regions. The refugees from Saint Domingue were particularly known to have infected the city with the yellow fever disease, which later claimed the lives of 5,000 in a population of around 50,000. The poor sanitary conditions of the city as a result of overcrowding also contributed in no small way to the rapid spread of the epidemic and its final death toll (Warner 16). Therefore, in a sense, the deadly fever and its mass casualties were products of Philadelphia’s particular mode of expansion. Brown represents the plagued city as a Gothic scene of horror: countless people flee the city in fear; the ones forced to stay cover themselves with vinegar and shun all possible contacts with others. The ill are neglected, mistreated, and sometimes even buried prematurely to save the undertakers trouble. Mervyn himself is nearly buried alive once when stricken unconscious by a ruffian, whom he takes to be a specter at first. The live burials and subsequent “resurrections,” as more or less accurate reflections of historical realities,4 add considerably to the Gothic horror of the story. As a narrative device explored by many Gothicists before and after Brown, including Ann Radcliffe, Edgar Allan Poe, and Wilkie Collins, live burial holds special appeal for Gothic writers because of its unusual effectiveness in generating fearful emotions, which in turn derives from its disturbing transgression of the seemingly insuperable boundaries between life and death. Poe once commented, in the voice of his fictional narrator, on the supreme horrors of premature interment in his short story “The Premature Burial”: “To be buried while alive is, beyond question, the most terrific of these extremes which has ever fallen to the lot of mere mortality” (955). He further attributes the horrors to the ability of the device to blur the lines between the world of the living and that of the dead: “The boundaries which divide Life from Death, are at best shadowy and vague. Who shall say where the one ends, and where the other begins?” (955). The terrible quality of hasty burial therefore arises from a dreaded engagement or communication between the present world and the afterworld, from a maddening ambiguity that positions individuals on the borderline of the said worlds. Sigmund Freud calls live burial “the most uncanny thing of all” (241), exactly because it effaces the distinction between imagination and reality, creating a cognitive confusion inducive of anxiety. The same confusion and ambiguity are also invoked by the idea of social death in Arthur Mervyn, which is another form of living death, usually resulting from individuals’ loss of a recognizable social identity in cases of degenerative illnesses, institutionalized oppression, or legal punishment. As a relatively new critical concept, social death initially gained currency through Orlando Patterson’s 1982 monograph Slavery and Social Death, where Patterson uses the term in relation to the socially alienated and marginalized slave, “who ceased to belong and had been expelled from normal participation in the community” (41).5 In the subsequent decades, connotations of the term gradually broadened to include a variety of situations involving a loss of social identity or social connectedness. Following the steps of earlier medical sociologists, such as David Sudnow, Helen Sweeting and Mary Gilhooly, for instance, discuss the occurrence of social death in elderly patients with dementia, who are treated as if they were dead. Claudia Card, pioneering the study of social 443

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death in genocide, and inspiring later researchers such as Damien Short, revises earlier understanding of genocide by placing social death, defined as the destruction of social relations on which a group’s identity depends, at the center of its evil. Joshua Price investigates the connections between social death and incarceration, where individuals are subject to “generalized humiliation, institutional violence and natal alienation” (6). Despite the various scholarly definitions and uses, critics generally agree that social death marks the end of one’s ability to function as an accepted social being, and that it represents a state where individuals experience a missing sense of belonging, and a disruption of social roles connected with employment, family, or community. As Jana Králová observes, “the general trend among scholars using the social death concept is to use it when a person/group has experienced extreme and profound loss,” including the loss of social identity, of social capital, and of social networks (236). Although social death has been amply discussed in sociological terms, it has rarely been studied as a Gothic device that generates disturbing ambiguities. Brown explores the Gothic potential of social death by examining its connection with a common phenomenon in the urbanization process – forced migration – and by studying its effects on Mervyn as a representative of involuntary migrants. Forced migration has been a notable cause of social death, as it removes individuals from their habitual environment, and disconnects them from their families and communities. In Arthur Mervyn, Brown offers us a unique perspective on the sociopsychological consequences of forced migration through his focus on Mervyn’s experience. The son of a Philadelphian farmer, Mervyn is forced to leave his native place after his indulging mother dies and his father remarries a “rude, ignorant, and licentious” farm maid Betty, whom Mervyn finds intolerable (20). For lack of social experience, Mervyn is tricked into a dangerous situation (from which he narrowly escapes) on his way to Philadelphia, and is left penniless even before he reaches his destination. Having renounced his family and community ties, the moneyless and friendless Mervyn officially finds himself in an existential crisis, and faces the dire need of reestablishing himself in an alien city. Mervyn does so by forging connections with the socially powerful, even if it means overstepping moral lines sometimes. To extract himself from his desperate situation, Mervyn enters into Welbeck’s service, and in his capacity as the latter’s personal clerk, he assists his employer in disposing of his enemy’s body, even when he has full knowledge of Welbeck’s criminal history, including fraud, seduction, and murder. When his employment with Welbeck terminates after the latter absconds, he takes up new residence with the Hadwins at a nearby farm. However, the outbreak of the epidemic opens up opportunities for him to return to the city and cultivate new connections. On his return trip, Mervyn makes the acquaintance of Dr. Stevens when he tries to send the fatally infected Wallace back into the arms of his anxiously waiting lover Susan, Hadwin’s elder daughter, and of Mrs. Fielding when he rescues Clemenza, a woman seduced by Welbeck, from the corrupted household of Mrs. Villars. That Mervyn’s efforts to relieve others from suffering also bring him into contact with figures indispensable to his own social rise seems to make his story one of rewarded virtues. Critics, however, question the purity of Mervyn’s motives, as he often sacrifices moral principles for material gains. Indeed, apart from the aforementioned incident with Welbeck, Mervyn also seems to have a tendency to fall in love with heiresses or wealthy widows. He falls for Clemenza when he mistakes her for his wealthy employer’s daughter, and for Eliza, Hadwin’s younger daughter, when he imagines her inheritance to be much greater than he later realizes. He finally marries the rich widow Mrs. Fielding, and gives up Eliza, who loses her inheritance to her greedy uncle upon her father’s untimely death. Scholars call Mervyn calculative (and perhaps rightly so), but few have considered his circumstances and the sociopsychological motives of his choices: namely, his need to remake himself by building or maintaining professional or marital connections with the socially established. 444

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The truth is, migrants such as Mervyn were not only under terrible pressure to rebuild socially sanctioned relations, so as to avoid the unfortunate destiny of social death, but also often had only themselves to rely upon when seeking recognition in their new urban surroundings. Although American society in the 1790s was largely agricultural, cities on the Atlantic coast were rapidly growing, as commercial exchanges with Britain, the British colonies, and various European countries continued to flourish (Roth 388–89). The largest city in the country and an important seaport in the 1790s, Philadelphia continued to draw large crowds of immigrants from Germany, Ireland, and France. The influx of foreign and rural migrants, which started as early as the colonial days, placed a heavy burden on the city’s finances and overstrained its social care system. In addition, the rise of unemployed (and sometimes unemployable) population in the city also caused a surge in crime rates and became an important source of social unrest (Bridenbaugh 407). As a result, Philadelphia, among other cities that suffered from the same problem, imposed various restrictions on immigration, which further marginalized the migrants. It is therefore small wonder that migrants such as Mervyn would resort to every conceivable means to free themselves from the situation. To complicate matters, the large scale of migration also restructured social relations significantly, changing the demography to such an extent that Philadelphia became a city of strangers (Grabo 105). A social network based on strangeness threw the task of developing a recognizable identity in a new environment upon the migrants themselves. Mervyn responds to the challenge by performing services for others, and in the process cultivates connections with powerful individuals through employment or marriage. If his choices are not entirely motivated by altruism, his willingness to care for others at his own cost, especially at times of chaos and confusion, still deserves to be recognized. For instance, in order to soothe Susan’s anxiety, Mervyn returns to the infected city in search of her fiancé Wallace, disregarding his own health and safety. He also spares no effort to retrieve Clemenza from the house of the prostitutes, and puts her under the guardianship of a compassionate Mrs. Wentworth. Moreover, Mervyn takes trouble to return a large sum of money to the Maurices, as soon as he learns of their status as the lawful owners. Even though not all of Mervyn’s actions lead to the intended results, his interventions do help to restore order, if only on a limited scale, to a society thrown into disarray by the epidemic. In trying to pull his community together in a way that benefits its individual members, Mervyn serves as a model of responsible citizenship at times of crisis, when government authority fails to fulfill its leadership role. Capable of both selfish calculations and altruistic behaviors, individuals in the context of urbanization are therefore necessarily complex moral creatures. Brown turns the very ambiguity of Mervyn’s moral character into his own commentary on the ethical complexities involved in the urbanization process. Mervyn’s strenuous efforts to fight against social extinction eventually meet with success. The conclusion of the novel witnesses Mervyn’s entry into a formal apprenticeship with Dr. Stevens, which marks the beginning of a promising career, and into a blessed marriage with Mrs. Fielding. In an essentially bildungsroman story with strong social consciousness, Mervyn appears at the beginning as a marginalized individual threatened with social death, and emerges in the end as a fully integrated citizen embarking on an exciting new journey in life. He achieves the miraculous transformation by seizing the precious opportunities provided by the epidemic to anchor himself firmly in a new environment. The urbanization process, in Brown’s depiction, both poses severe (and sometimes even fatal) challenges for individuals and affords unique opportunities for them to make themselves anew. Survivors such as Mervyn can rise above the challenges and seize the opportunities so as to promote their own integration. The process, however, almost necessarily produces ethical paradoxes, as individuals instinctively combine selfish and altruistic motives in their social performances. 445

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Apart from inspiring morally ambiguous considerations and actions, urbanization also restructures social relations in such a way that highlights the unreliability of appearances and further reinforces the ambiguity of urban existence. In a society that constantly receives large numbers of newcomers, the lack of natural familiarity among social members compels them to rely frequently on stories and appearances as the bases of judgments. However, stories and appearances can easily prove to be more deceptive than trustworthy. Much of the ambiguity in Arthur Mervyn actually derives from their dubious reliability. For instance, in Wortley’s story, Mervyn appears to be a villain who conspires with Welbeck in a fraud against an honest man. Later, in his own version (narrated in an attempt to clear his name in the eyes of the Stevenses), Mervyn portrays himself as an innocent country youth forced by unfortunate circumstances to escape into the city to make a living. This account, however, is soon contradicted by his former neighbor Mrs. Althorpe, whose report reveals Mervyn to be an idle and ignorant youth who detests physical labor and intellectual pursuit of all kinds. According to Mrs. Althorpe, Mervyn is also romantically involved with his stepmother Betty. He even steals his father’s horse and money to run away when the scandal comes to light. Curiously, Brown himself does not furnish much evidence to substantiate any one of their accounts so that the others may be excluded from consideration. The unresolved discrepancies between the conflicting accounts inevitably throw long shadows on Mervyn’s character. This questionable reliability of stories reinforces the ambiguity of appearances. Even Dr. Stevens, who once calls Mervyn’s physiognomy “the index of an honest mind” (230), has to acknowledge the potential deceptiveness of appearances and stories because of the inherent complexity of human motives: “A smooth exterior, a show of virtue, and a specious tale, are, a thousand times, exhibited in human intercourse by craft and subtlety. Motives are endlessly varied, while actions continue the same” (229). As Stevens observes, unarticulated motives often trouble the surface of truth by imperceptibly shaping stories or appearances, and secretly manipulating listeners to the advantage of storytellers. Thetford, for example, manages to persuade Wallace to stay in his service despite the impending danger of infection; Welbeck convinces Mervyn of the fakeness of the banknotes and gets very close to cheating him out of them. Notably, villains are not the only ones guilty of exploiting stories and appearances for their own benefits. The same tendency seems to be present in everyone. Mervyn, for example, resorts to the same hyperbolic and pathetic storytelling that he always uses when soliciting favors from others, as he tries to persuade Mrs. Wentworth into making Clemenza her protégé: “Will you take to your protecting arms, to your hospitable roof, an unhappy girl whom the arts of Welbeck have robbed of fortune, reputation and honor, who is now languishing in poverty, weeping over the lifeless remains of her babe, surrounded by the agents of vice, and trembling on the verge of infamy?” (358). All narratives are therefore necessarily warped by the agendas, concerns, or motives of their tellers, whether noble or selfish. The resultant inscrutability of appearances in an impersonalized society makes character judgments, and all other activities depending on them, a precarious enterprise. As this analysis shows, Brown’s novelistic ambiguities are deeply social in nature. His narrative devices generating the ambiguities are not employed simply to create Gothic effects such as confusion or suspense, but to embody Brown’s concerns with the problems of an urbanizing American society. In Brown’s vision, the drastic shifts of living spaces in migration threaten individuals with the loss of a recognizable social identity by uprooting them from their native cultures, and severing their connections with the social relations through which they identify and orient themselves in the world. The process in which individuals strive against social extinction by establishing new connections often involves moral compromises, even as it encourages heroic actions. In addition, urbanization also produces a new form of social interaction, which at once 446

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relies on appearance as a valued basis of judgments, and repeatedly proves its misleading nature. With penetrating insights, Brown identifies the yellow fever, social death, and moral ambiguity as interlocking problems of an urbanizing American society at its nascent stage. This image of Brown as a socially conscious writer seems to be at variance with his modern reputation as a pioneer in Gothic literature, a genre conventionally criticized for its entertaining nature and lack of social benefits. However, as Joseph Ellis reminds us, early republican writers “retained the traditional assumption that social and aesthetic life was indivisible and interconnected” (25), which means Brown’s contemporaries often created literary works with sociocultural purposes in mind, even works in genres seemingly far removed from reality such as the Gothic. In Brown’s fictionalized essay “Walstein’s School of History,” published in the same year as Arthur Mervyn, he articulates his literary vision, laying particular emphasis on the social uses of fictional writing. Brown sees literary creation as a main way in which “genius and virtue may labour for the public good” by “assailing popular errors and vices” (338). He also believes that fictional works should provide inspirations for readers who find themselves in similar situations as fictional characters: “The usefulness [of fictional works], undoubtedly, consists in suggesting a mode of reasoning and acting somewhat similar to that which is ascribed to a feigned person” (410). Based on the assumption of interconnectedness, Brown even suggests that writers choose fictional incidents “most analogous to facts” so as to produce similitude and facilitate readerly uses of fictional knowledge (410). It may be this same literary vision that prompted Brown to adopt a fictional setting for Arthur Mervyn which bears strong resemblance to the historical Philadelphia during the yellow fever epidemic, so that his readers can draw valuable inspirations from the experience of the characters. Apart from stressing the social utility of fictional writing, Brown also shows in the same essay a sharp awareness of the interaction between individuals and their social environment: Every man occupies a station in society in which he is necessarily active to evil or to good. There is a sphere of some dimensions, in which the influence of his actions and opinions is felt. The causes that fashion men into instruments of happiness or misery, are numerous, complex, and operate upon a wide surface. Virtuous activity may, in a thousand ways, be thwarted and diverted by foreign and superior influence. (408) In Brown’s understanding, individuals are both easily influenced by the powerful (and often invisible) forces in society, and can actively shape their surroundings through their own actions and opinions. He therefore designs his Gothic devices to foreground the choices of characters in particular circumstances, in an effort to underscore their faults and merits, and more importantly, to draw attention to the social circumstances producing such behaviors and character traits. In addition, by creating a strong parallelism between his fictional world and the real world of his contemporary readers, Brown also hopes that his literary portrayal may improve his readers’ understanding of their own reality in a rapidly changing American society, and enhance their ability to deal with the problems and challenges arising in the process.

Notes 1

I follow Ann Radcliffe’s distinction between horror and terror here, using horror to refer to the momentary feeling of revulsion and fear when something appalling happens, and terror to describe the dreadful anticipation of terrible events in a period of uncertainty. Radcliffe famously distinguishes horror and terror in the following terms in “On the Supernatural in Poetry”: “Terror and horror are so far opposite, that the first expands the soul, and awakens the faculties to a high degree of life; the other contracts, freezes, and nearly annihilates them … where lies the great difference between horror and

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terror, but in the uncertainty and obscurity, that accompany the first, respecting the dreaded evil?” (149–50). Ever since the novel’s publication in 1799, critics have debated continuously on Mervyn’s moral character. They either believe Mervyn to be a moral exemplar who has only the interests of others in his heart, or regard him as a selfish hypocrite who secretly manipulates others for his own gain and yet poses as an altruist. Many earlier critics, including Henri Petter, Harry Warfel, Norman Grabo, James Justus, and Kenneth Bernard, belong to the first camp. Grabo praises Mervyn’s “basic honesty, a sense of justice, [and] persistence in rectifying others’ wrongs” (126). Justus calls Mervyn “one of ‘nature’s noblemen’” (308). Bernard believes that Mervyn’s “gradual acceptance of the complexity of the world, his adjustment to its many planes of reality, is an act of growing, his fixed ideals a reflection of character” (445). Later critics such as Warner Berthoff, Michael Davitt Bell, Patrick Brancaccio, James Russo, Donald Ringe, and Emory Elliot, are more skeptical. Berthoff calls Mervyn a “chameleon of convenient virtue” (xvii). Brancaccio believes Mervyn is a “meddlesome, self-righteous bungler who comes close to destroying himself and everyone in his path” (22). Russo argues that Mervyn’s “piety is feigned, his virtue convenient, and his self-deprecation a species of calculated, phony modesty” (381). Ringe is more mildly critical, suggesting that there is “a kind of self-deception on Mervyn’s part that enables him to get what he wants materially out of life without cost either physically or emotionally to himself and allows him at the same time to preen himself on his own benevolence” (64). Bernard, for example, considers Arthur Mervyn “Brown’s most complete portrait of the world around him” (441). Gregory Eiselein praises the novel’s “‘realistic’ account of Philadelphia devastated by an epidemic” (218). Marc Amfreville observes that the novel’s critics “seem chiefly to have been attracted by the realism of the book.” He calls Arthur Mervyn “the most realistic of Brown’s novels,” because of its vivid portrayal of “the almost tangible presence of a deadly epidemic,” and suggests “reading the entire novel as a pretext for social painting or historical testimony” (40). Many historical records show that premature burial was a commonplace occurrence during the yellow fever epidemic in Philadelphia. For instance, an anonymous author in Graham’s Magazine commented on the horrors of hasty burials in the following terms: “During the prevalence of the yellow fever in this city, in the year 1793, we have every reason to believe, that many persons, suffering with disease, were removed from their houses and interred before the vital spark had fled. So general was this desolating scourge, that those who officiated as undertakers, acted without any check or responsibility, and if in entering a house, the door of which was marked with the fatal characters of the disease, the dying were taken with the dead, to avoid the trouble of a second visit; there was none to call them to account” (“Burying Alive” 379). For a more detailed account of the history of the term, see Jana Králová.

Works Cited Amfreville, Marc. “The Theatre of Death in Charles Brockden Brown’s Arthur Mervyn.” Litteraria Pragensia, vol. 14, no. 28, 2004, pp. 40–49. Bell, Michael Davitt. The Development of American Romance: The Sacrifice of Relation. U of Chicago P, 1980. Bernard, Kenneth. “Arthur Mervyn: The Ordeal of Innocence.” Texas Studies in Literature and Language, vol. 6, no. 4, Winter 1965, pp. 441–459. Berthoff, Warner. “Adventures of the Young Man: An Approach to Charles Brockden Brown.” American Quarterly, vol. 9, 1957, pp. 421–434. Brancaccio, Patrick. “Studied Ambiguities: Arthur Mervyn and the Problem of the Unreliable Narrator.” American Literature, vol. 42, 1970, pp. 18–27. Bridenbaugh, Carl. Cities in the Wilderness: The First Century of Urban Life in America, 1625–1742. Oxford UP, 1971. Brown, Charles Brockden. Arthur Mervyn: or, Memoirs of the Year 1793. Kent State UP, 1980. Brown, Charles Brockden. “Walstein’s School of History.” The Monthly Magazine and American Review, vol. 1, 1799, pp. 335–338, 407–411. “Burying Alive.” Graham’s Illustrated Magazine of Literature, Romance, Art and Fashion, vol. 9, 1834, p. 379. Card, Claudia. “Genocide and Social Death.” Hypatia, vol. 18, no. 1, 2003, pp. 63–79. Eiselein, Gregory. “Humanitarianism and Uncertainty in Arthur Mervyn.” Essays in Literature, vol. 22, no. 2, 1995, pp. 215–226. Elliot, Emory. Revolutionary Writers: Literature and Authority in the New Republic 1725–1810. Oxford UP, 1982.

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Urbanization, Ambiguity, and Social Death Ellis, Joseph. After the Revolution: Profiles of Early American Culture. W. W. Norton & Company, 1979. Freud, Sigmund. “The Uncanny.” The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, edited by James Strachey, et al., vol. 17. Hogarth Press, 1955, pp. 219–252. Grabo, Norman S. The Coincidental Art of Charles Brockden Brown. U of North Carolina P, 1981. Justus, James H. “Arthur Mervyn: American.” American Literature, vol. 42, 1970, pp. 304–324. Králová, Jana. “What Is Social Death?” Contemporary Social Science, vol. 10, no. 3, 2015, pp. 235–248. Patterson, Orlando. Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study. Harvard UP, 1982. Petter, Henri. The Early American Novel. Ohio State UP, 1971. Poe, Edgar Allan. “The Premature Burial.” The Collected Works of Edgar Allan Poe, edited by Thomas O. Mabbott, vol. 3. Belknap, 1978, pp. 935–972. Price, Joshua. Prison and Social Death. Rutgers UP, 2015. Radcliffe, Ann. “On the Supernatural in Poetry.” New Monthly Magazine, vol. 16, no. 1, 1826, pp. 145–152. Ringe, Donald. Charles Brockden Brown. Twayne Publishers, 1991. Roth, Lawrence. “The Growth of American Cities.” Geographical Review, vol. 5, no. 5, 1918, pp. 384–398. Russo, James R. “The Chameleon of Convenient Vice: A Study of the Narrative of Arthur Mervyn.” Studies in the Novel, vol. 11, 1979, pp. 381–405. Short, Damien. Redefining Genocide: Settler Colonialism, Social Death and Ecocide. Zed Books, 2016. Sudnow, David. Passing on: The Social Organization of Dying. Prentice-Hall, 1967. Sweeting, Helen, and Mary Gilhooly. “Dementia and the Phenomenon of Social Death.” Sociology of Health & Illness, vol. 19, 1997, pp. 93–117. Warfel, Harry. Charles Brockden Brown, American Gothic Novelist. U of Florida P, 1949. Warner, Sam Bass. The Private City: Philadelphia in Three Periods of Its Growth. U of Pennsylvania P, 1968. Weinstock, Jeffery Andrew. Charles Brockden Brown. U of Wales P, 2011.

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42 CODA Julian Gough

As I write this, in April 2020, we are all death. It is an unusual and somewhat awkward situation, for death has no friends. If I were to meet you, today, we would not hug. We would not kiss each other’s cheeks. We would not shake hands. That old gesture, to show you do not hold a weapon in your right hand, can now, ironically, kill. But, of course, we are unlikely to meet, today. Here in Berlin, the streets are silent. I live with my wife, Solana, and our new son, Arlo, near Tegel airport; I look up from my balcony, at the bright blue spring sky: not a single jet trail. Airports are empty. Borders are closed. A third of the world’s population is sheltering in place. Global trauma has seldom been so quiet. Literature does many things: one of them – an important one – is process trauma. But it is hard to make sense of traumatic experiences while living through them. There’s so much we don’t know yet. The data hasn’t been gathered; isn’t clear. We’re looking at the world through a straw, or a keyhole. Perhaps a quarter of all cases are asymptomatic, they think. No, wait: now they think perhaps half. (Or was that yesterday’s theory?) … The world has become the cover of the Pink Floyd album, Wish You Were Here. Two men stand face to face, shaking hands; but one of them is on fire. The trouble is, right now, as I approach you and you approach me, we don’t even know which one of us is on fire. You can’t make universal statements on so little data. So this brief essay, this coda, will not process the COVID-19 pandemic; a disease with a name so new that “covid” still autocorrects to “cover” when I type it in. Even our computers aren’t sure how to react to this threat. When I say “fuck covid 19” in an email, my iPhone ducks and covers. Instead, I will write something personal. Perhaps, if we’re lucky, the accidental alchemy of art will occur, and through this tight, personal keyhole, a few of you will somehow glimpse something broader, universal. Think Alice in Wonderland … As I am writing this, longhand, I can hear a man shouting in Turkish. He has been confined to his home for a couple of weeks now, and it is not going well for him. It is going even worse for his family. Their dog? Don’t even ask. I am writing this in my flat, in a one-meter by two-meter closet, which I have converted into a tiny office-slash-recording studio by attaching rippling sheets of soundproof foam to the walls and ceiling. But the soundproofing doesn’t keep the noise out when the man shouts. What other noises would I like to keep out, as I write? 450

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I have seen ambulances on my street over the past couple of weeks, but I have not heard them: they drift silently to a halt, and go about their business, and move off again. There is no need for sirens, because there are hardly any cars on the streets. No one needs to get out of the way, because everybody has already got out of the way. Meanwhile, indoors, life is often curiously, pleasantly, simple. Yesterday morning I got up with Arlo (so Solana could sleep – it’s the end of the world; we can’t go anywhere, we can’t do anything; and yet somehow we still don’t get enough sleep), and we sat on the floor in the kitchen, and took the lid off an empty jar of applesauce and put it back on again, over and over. It was great. We are all death, and no literature has yet processed this specific moment. But it will. There is no hurry. The raw material of art needs time to compost: it usually takes at least ten years to become rich enough soil in which to grow something good. The general rule is lots of bad art immediately; and then some good stuff, with depth and perspective, starting a decade or so on. Meanwhile – if you need to read, you weirdo, instead of compulsively refreshing your social media app of choice – literature has already dealt with COVID-19; not specifically, of course, but through metaphor, vision, premonition. I spent my childhood reading many such books. In the warm, cozy catastrophes of John Wyndham, COVID-19 ravaged the villages of Middle England, disguised as triffids, krakens, Midwich cuckoos. In the colder, harsher catastrophes of J. G. Ballard it ravaged the soft, sinister suburbs of our modern metropoli, disguised as a flood, a drought, a mysterious contagion turning everything to crystal. Indeed, if I am unusually calm in the middle of this pandemic, it is probably because I read a lot of J. G. Ballard as a child. In a way, I have been waiting for something like this ever since. Ballard destroyed the world in his first book, The Wind from Nowhere. He destroyed it again in his second, The Drowned World, and in his third, The Burning World, and in his fourth, The Crystal World … To be fair, sometimes he just destroyed the people. Or society. Or the sense that there is a normal world. To read, as I did in 1989, the opening sentence of High Rise, written in 1975 (“Later, as he sat on his balcony eating the dog, Dr Robert Laing reflected on the unusual events that had taken place within this huge apartment building during the previous three months”), is to be perfectly psychologically prepared for a global pandemic in 2020. Literature is a vaccine; it injects an exquisitely tiny, artificial version of the terrible truth of life into your system. Your body and mind react as though to the real thing; so that when the real thing finally happens, it is familiar; your system is prepared. You are not taken by surprise, overwhelmed. If, in a few weeks, I find myself eating my neighbor’s dog on my balcony, therefore, it will feel familiar. Almost cozy. Of course, Ballard didn’t know he was processing COVID-19. Preparing a vaccine for me and a million others. Like so many writers, he peered into the vast room of the universal through the keyhole of the personal – into our future through his past. He was cauterizing the wound of his childhood, two years of which were spent in an internment camp, after the Japanese occupied the International Settlement in Shanghai in 1943, during the Second SinoJapanese War, and destroyed his old world, his parents’ world; thereby giving him the gift of a new world. In his private wound grew a vaccine for the world. If J. G. Ballard helped me come to terms with the death of societies, cultures, normality – worlds – then Norman Mailer (that least fashionable of writers, in this modern moment), helped me come to terms with my own personal death. Of course, I already knew that death existed – what death was and how it acts – and I knew that, theoretically, in some abstract way, it waited for me; but I didn’t truly understand death, my death – hadn’t internalized it – until as a teenager I read Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead. A specific page, a specific scene: a young American infantryman, on patrol on a recently 451

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captured Pacific island during World War II, stumbles on the body of a Japanese soldier. He studies the body: as the reality, the finality, the awesome truth of death sinks in for him, it sank in for me, too. I walked around for a couple of weeks afterwards dazed by death: it was as though a great wind blew perpetually through me. I have my doubts about Norman Mailer now: I have reread him, and been stunned by the size of the flaws that I couldn’t see when I was a teenager. An alarming percentage of his work reads like he typed it with his dick, while high. But in his first novel, he processed death for me, which was a hell of a gift. It came in useful later in my teenage years, when my best friend’s father shot himself with a .22 rifle. Or when I was looking down on my friend Tom Ryan, in the open coffin, dead of meningitis, his face black and purple from septicemia, wearing his favorite denim jacket with its Iron Maiden patches. Or when Johnny Goggin, the lead guitarist in my first band, swerved his motorbike one night to avoid a dark horse on the black road, and went under a truck coming in the opposite direction … Literature had given me a map of these territories. Without a map, you get lost … I am writing this section fast, while my son is asleep, and I am thinking that it is important not to get lost. If you get lost, those who follow you will get lost too. An aside, to illustrate the point: I grew up in rural Tipperary, in Ireland. There is a farmhouse just visible from our kitchen window. Hard to see in the daytime, many fields away, grey against green, its lights are visible at night. One night, a few years ago, the farmer hung himself in the brightly lit machinery shed. A couple of years later, on the anniversary, his son hung himself in the same shed. I glance out at that light sometimes when I’m home on a visit. Would literature have helped? Provided them with a map? A vaccine against their own feelings, thoughts, lives; deaths? Maybe, maybe not. But it’s hard to see how it could have made things worse. The writer’s curse (one of the writer’s curses – there are many) is that everything is material. It can be hard not to disengage from the moment, step outside your mind and your feelings, and float above it all, taking notes. So this is what it feels like, to climb a ladder and paint over the blood on the ceiling in the room where your best friend’s father shot himself. The Boomtown Rats “I Don’t Like Mondays” is playing from the paint-spattered Phillips radio-cassette player hanging by its black leather strap from the ladder. (“And he can see no reasons/’Cause there are no reasons/What reason do you need to die?”) Remember that. We are laughing, my friend and I, remember that. I didn’t expect so much laughter. Neither did the huge Alsatian, who loved the dead father; she is angry and confused; she jumps, high, and snaps her wet jaws right beside your ear. Remember that. The man speaking Turkish is very angry now. He is getting louder and louder. I have ordered more soundproofing – four sheets of foam, and 16 smaller acoustic foam tiles – from Thomann, the music specialists; but deliveries are delayed due to so many people, in lockdown, ordering what they need to survive, for delivery by nervous young men who no longer ask you to sign their touchscreen with your finger, because your finger has become death, as in some forgotten fragment of Greek myth, processing some lost wave of annihilation, some ancient plague. Two and a half thousand years ago, of course, a plague swept through Athens – that brilliant, dysfunctional democracy – and ended the Athenian age. Pretty soon collectivist Sparta was running Greece … Why am I reminded of this? Oh, yes. Yesterday, deaths set a new record in New York, and the President of the United States of America held a press briefing to boast about the ratings for his press briefings. Well, everything is material; I lean forward into my laptop screen. Here, I think, is a man trying to make literature out of the pandemic: trying to write a story in which he is the hero. The audience cranes to look behind the president, and watch the experts’ faces, like seismometers, to try and tell what’s really going on. (An expert carefully places his face in the palm of his hand, and the audience groans.) 452

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This happens every night now. The man who holds the job once informally known as leader of the free world stands in front of the experts, who know things, and he repeats, again and again, for an hour or two every night, look at me look at me look at me. An hour, two hours, of talk every night, for weeks; and the only line that has escaped, survived, replicated, that is still quoted regularly, transmitted from human to human, is “I take no responsibility for anything.” Writing a story in which you are the hero is harder than you’d think. My son, Arlo, is one today. He has begun writing the story in which he is the hero. There are no other children in that story. The kindergartens are all closed. Play dates have been outlawed by the government. Sometimes, when we take him outside for some fresh air, he crawls up to the gates of the playground beside our building and, puzzled, rattles the padlock and chain. We ordered his presents online last week, but they will arrive late. Amazon is prioritizing necessary items, and Amazon’s algorithms think a Tiamo Little Dutch Children’s Wooden Toolbox 20 Pieces Mint Blue is not a priority item. It is possible they are correct. This afternoon, we gave Arlo an empty one-liter Tetrapak (formerly containing oat milk) for his birthday. We sat on the floor of the living room and screwed the cap on and took it off again, over and over. It was great … We are all death, and it’s not nearly as dramatic as you’d think. We have returned to the past – before secular modernity, before materialist reductionism, before vaccines – where everything is alive, and everything is trying to kill us: unwashed fruit, door handles, the breeze. The virus, like an angry god, is everywhere and nowhere. Invisible and omnipresent. It demands we carry out rituals to appease it, or it will strike us down. And so, on crossing thresholds, we wash our hands, again and again, till they dry and crack. In just a few weeks, we burn, in a great orgy of sacrifice, a third of the economy on its altar, in a triple-tithe. In earlier plagues, the people had a Bible, a Koran, a holy book. It would comfort them, admonish them, tell them the rituals of sacrifice and cleansing that might save them. Now we reach compulsively, dopamine-addicted, for our filthy phones. We look at our phones and our phones look at us. Comfort us. Admonish us … Apps tell us that we are standing too near people. Cellphone statistics are aggregated, and used to tell the government how closely we are adhering to the stay-in-place orders. Google works with governments to perfect the technologies. The state is watching over us for our own good. In a couple of quick months, the secular age, the individual age, the age of vaccines and privacy, has ended. Two gods now watch over us: the angry, ancient god of nature, in the shape of the virus, and the god of technology in the shape of our phone. But if those are the gods, where is the hero? Because the main problem for literature, here, is that the hero’s journey has been temporarily cancelled. Everything is upside down: Be a hero by doing nothing. You can only be a villain by heading out into the world and confronting the evil. You cannot return home with a boon; only a curse. And so weak men stand bewildered in the space where the hero should be. By the time you read these words, this fragile, uncertain time will probably be over: you will know how many died, how the economy turned out, how lethal the virus was, how easily transmitted. Who handled it well, who handled it badly. Whether we were foolish or wise, standing two meters apart, one of us on fire. Wearing masks, or not wearing masks. The probability wave will have collapsed to a single value. But we don’t know any of those things yet, for sure: The error bars are so wide, they contain everything, and thus nothing. The death toll in the US will be between 20 thousand and 2.2 million, said a recent influential model. But that’s not a prediction at all. The thing you will all miss, when you look back, with your perfect 2020 hindsight, is the confusion. 453

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Not just the confusion of the people: the confusion of governments, the medical authorities, the virus itself, for the virus mutates. But above all the confusion inside individuals, from day to identical yet exponentially different day, as the previously unimaginable becomes the irritatingly normal. We have become death; and it is of course banal. At last the world has been brought together, has been spiritually synchronized. The utopian future John Lennon imagined is finally here: “and the world will live as one….” We are all seeing the same headlines, reading the same conspiracy theories, receiving the same scam WhatsApp alerts. A slow wave of prison riots circles the world. There will be a million journals of this plague year, and they will all be identical. Already some of us are going stir-crazy, under lockdown. Already; and so far less than onetwentieth of one percent of the world’s population have officially tested positive. Many aren’t convinced this god is as powerful as we were first told. They don’t want to believe it. They want to risk its wrath. Kiss, hug, shake hands. Barbecue. Get their hair cut. Defy death. Be heroes. In Colorado, a nurse in a mask, on foot, confronts an anti-lockdown protester in an SUV, in an eerie, tragi-comic parody of Tank Man in Tiananmen Square. A commotion in the hall outside. Someone, stir-crazy, escaping. From the closet in which I write – my tiny padded cell – I hear the neighbor’s dog leap, high, and snap his wet jaws right beside my neighbor’s head. Who will eat whom, on which balcony, is still up for grabs. No, this virus will not end the world, but neither will it vanish one day soon “like a miracle.” In the coming days, weeks, months, it will roam the aching space between the error bars, as these bars close like jaws, to eventually crush it to a single point, a single set of figures: this is what happened. And then we will argue over what the figures mean; then, what they really mean; then, with less anger as time passes, what all that meant. And literature will process that trauma into drama. And the god of surveillance will retreat, or will not. And the other, angry God, who watches us now, who demands our sacrifices and our rituals, will diminish to a point, to something too small to see, a mere virus. A speck of RNA. A statement, repeating itself, forcing us to repeat it, again and again, and all it says is look at me look at me look at me. I take no responsibility for anything.

454

INDEX

Aaron, Michele 123, 416, 419 Abate, Michelle Ann 101–02n3 Abel, Lionel 30, 33, 36, 37–38, 40n2 abjection 111, 112, 113, 180, 186, 188n7, 206, 209, 237, 239 Adair, Gilbert: The Death of the Author 59, 72–73, 79 Adorno, Theodor 193, 305 Aers, David 267, 274n4 Aeschylus 269 aesthetic 21, 36, 55, 140, 141, 145, 146, 147, 162, 190, 192, 193, 194, 195, 196, 197, 199, 207, 216, 217, 221, 223, 224, 226n1, 280, 286, 323, 352, 355, 356, 357, 365, 386, 387, 391, 413, 438, 440, 447 affective 65, 109, 143, 144, 147, 148, 150, 151, 180, 191, 195, 196, 209, 213, 226, 228, 233, 343, 366, 417 affective comprehension 141, 144–47, 148–49, 151; see also comprehension afterlife 10, 11, 12–13, 18, 51n11, 53–57, 59, 60, 61n4, 68, 72, 74, 75, 77, 78, 79, 80, 83, 84, 89, 97, 101, 117, 135, 171, 173, 174, 177, 178, 179, 187, 219, 249, 277, 281, 284, 285, 290, 291, 302, 303, 304, 321, 322, 323, 375 Agamben, Giorgio 79, 206–08, 215 agency 30, 113, 135, 137, 261, 271, 326, 343–45, 347, 348, 355, 375, 392n2, 418, 423n8; female 113, 137 aging 96, 117, 120, 181, 230, 366, 372, 381, 383, 386, 388, 389, 391–92, 407, 412 Agosta, Lucien L. 94 AIDS 112, 118, 121, 203n3 Alaniz, José 117–22 Alber, Jan 42–52, 64, 72, 77 Alexievich, Svetlana 167: Voices from Chernobyl 167–68

ambiguity 75, 210, 215, 234, 312, 373, 397, 400, 402, 403, 417, 418, 438, 442–47 ambiguous 32, 74, 148, 159, 161, 214, 215, 221, 234, 252, 267, 270, 271, 273, 290, 291, 308, 311, 313, 315, 347, 373, 389, 390, 391, 400, 429, 446 Amfreville, Marc 448n3 Amis, Martin: Time’s Arrow 13, 57 anecdote 80, 98, 102n13, 310–16, 316n8–11, 317n17, 319, 326, 350, 354, 356 Anthologia Graeca [Greek Anthology] 249, 250–52, 254n23 anthropocene 121, 160, 169 anthropomorphizing 99, 193 anxiety 16, 46, 67, 96, 106, 107, 111, 118, 176, 220, 223, 247, 273, 277–82, 285, 288, 292, 295, 296n4, 351, 352, 355, 358, 398, 403, 418, 443, 445 anxious 281, 357, 384, 444 apocalypse 10–11, 16–17, 53, 165, 167, 168, 169, 183, 370 appearance 23, 31, 119, 178, 192, 203n2, 216, 217, 223, 225, 264, 271, 272, 320, 352, 390, 397, 406, 407, 412, 442, 446–47 Arendt, Hannah 326 Ariès, Philippe 30, 257–58, 264, 267, 277, 278, 279, 281, 308, 435–37, 440n1, 440n6 Aristotle 48, 85, 86, 125, 132–33, 134, 135, 136, 137–38n1, 266, 270, 274, 327n2 ars moriendi 258, 277, 281, 282, 375, 435, 438 art galleries 190, 193, 194, 200 Artaud, Antonin 21–22, 25 artificial 20, 21, 25, 29, 31, 33, 34, 36, 38, 39, 40, 55, 184, 185, 347, 399, 401, 402, 451 artificial intelligence 9, 10, 13, 16 Attridge, Derek 65, 68, 69n2, 70n6

455

Index Atwood, Margaret 365; MaddAddam 17; The Penelopiad 59, 78 audience 20, 21, 26, 27n5, 30–31, 33–39, 65, 75, 86, 87, 107, 108, 123, 132, 135–37, 138n5–6, 252, 260, 263, 264, 272, 273, 299, 302, 305, 403, 404, 406, 407, 408, 411, 412–13, 414, 416, 418, 419, 422, 423, 423n8, 434, 435, 438, 440n19, 452 Augustine 241, 267, 269, 272 authorial disclosure 416, 418, 421, 422 authority 84–87, 89, 106, 107, 109, 141, 142, 143, 150, 226n2, 236, 292, 386, 404, 445 autobiography 59, 71, 73, 78, 119, 129n3, 181, 186, 216, 228, 257, 304, 324, 333, 350, 351, 359, 362, 372–73, 375, 378, 381n1; see also biography autography 119 auto-reflexive 351 autothanatography 59, 362–70, 372–75, 377, 378, 379, 381, 381n1; autobiothanatoheterography 361–62, 363, 365, 366, 369, 370; see also thanatography; thanatology Aviv, Rachel 401 axiologies 413 Bachelard, Gaston 222 Bacon, Francis 308 Badiou, Alain 172 Baena, Rosalía 372–82 Bahti, Timothy 368 Bakhtin, Mikhail 50, 141, 147 Ballard, J. G. 451 Banfield, Ann 167 Banville, John 63, 69n2, 350–51 Barbour, Reid 23 bardo 56–57 Barish, Evelyn 322–23 Barks, Cathy W. 324 Baroni, Raphaël 414n3 Barreca, Regina 140, 141, 288, 292 Barthes, Roland 123, 128, 306, 364 battle 23, 120, 161, 198, 246, 250, 251, 261, 282, 305, 347, 374, 375, 378, 418, 419; see also combat; wartime death Bauman, Zygmunt 278 Beck, Margaret Milne 267 Beckett, Samuel 17, 20–21, 22, 40n4, 43, 44, 48, 50n3, 62, 63, 64, 67, 69n2, 69n4, 223, 316, 355, 363, 367, 378; “The Calmative” 48; The Lost Ones 17 Beckett, Sandra L. 94, 101–02n3 Beer, Gillian 216, 217, 222 belief system 72, 77, 276, 285 Bell, Michael Davitt 448n2 Belling, Catherine 373, 397–405 Benjamin, Walter 226n2, 301, 321–22, 327,

327n3–4, 385; Berliner Kindheit um 1900 335–36, 385 Bennett, Alice 53–61, 71, 72, 73, 77 Bennett-Carpenter, Benjamin 123–31, 416 bequest 105, 258, 261, 263 Berger, John 193, 194, 211 Berman, Jeffrey 373, 375, 381 Bernard, Kenneth 448n2–3 Bersani, Leo 198–200, 201, 203n3 Berthoff, Warner 448n2 Bible 26, 345, 346, 377, 453 bienséance 406 Bigelow, Kathryn: Strange Days 9, 17 Binski, Paul 435, 440n4–5, 440n17, 441n21 bioethics 398, 400–01, 402, 404 biography 129n3, 182, 198, 246, 250, 267, 274n7, 307–08, 310, 313–15, 316n1–2, 316n7, 316n11, 319–28, 383, 412; see also autobiography birth 21, 38, 180, 237, 246, 249, 250, 251, 254n49, 283, 285, 294, 341, 345, 348n3, 384, 401 Black Panther 171, 173–76, 177, 178, 179 Blair, Robert 278–79, 280 Blake, Quentin 99 Blake, William 54, 145, 278 Blanchot, Maurice 217–18, 225, 226n1, 362, 364, 369 Blau, Herbert 20–21, 22, 24, 26, 27n5 Blau, Soren 427, 432n11–12 blending 42, 43, 48, 66, 235, 319, 353 blindness 24, 160, 167, 310, 350–53, 355, 356, 358, 359, 376, 426, 428, 429 Bloom, Harold 186 body 11, 12, 20, 21, 22, 24, 25, 26, 42, 55, 56, 59, 64, 66, 68, 72, 80n3, 111, 113, 114, 117, 120, 148, 161, 167, 168, 178, 186, 191, 192, 196, 198, 201, 203, 211, 220, 230, 237, 250, 252, 257, 259, 261, 262, 268, 270, 277, 278, 279–80, 282, 284, 285, 289–90, 292, 293, 295, 296n2, 298, 300, 302, 303, 306, 310, 327, 337, 343, 344, 363, 366, 374, 379, 383, 386–89, 391, 392n1, 397–99, 400–02, 404, 411, 419–20, 435–36, 437–39, 440n19, 444, 451, 452 Boey, Kim Cheng 228–29, 230, 231, 233–34, 238 bog 160, 162–64, 166 Bohlmann, Markus P. J. 99 Boland, Stephanie 62, 66, 69n1 Borg, Ruben 368 Boswell, James 308, 313, 314, 316n3, 316n11, 319 both/and 342 Bouchard, Hervé: Harvey: Comment je suis devenu invisible [Harvey: How I Became Invisible] 99 Boxall, Peter 356 Boyd, Brian 146 brain death 397–403, 404 Brancaccio, Patrick 448n2 Breverton, Terry 342 Bridenbaugh, Carl 445

456

Index Briggs, Julia 220 Brin, David: Kiln People 48 Brody, Howard 389 Brody, Paul 324 Brombert, Victor 364 Bronfen, Elisabeth 120, 277, 278, 286, 293, 409, 417 Brontë, Emily: Wuthering Heights: 293–95, 296n8 Brown, Charles Brockden 442, 446–47; Arthur Mervyn 442–47, 448n3 Brown, David S. 324, 325–26 Brown, Margaret Wise: The Dead Bird 95, 102n8 Broyard, Anatole 374, 375 Bruccoli, Matthew 325 Buckland, Michael 123 Buell, Lawrence 165 Bunyan, John 346, 377 Burbridge, Roger 23, 27n1 burial 49, 83, 173, 183, 184, 245, 247, 250, 253n5, 261, 262, 283, 290, 292, 294, 295, 296n1–2, 311, 443 burial ground 164, 166 Burke, Edmund 280 Burke, Michael 109 Burroughs, Edgar Rice 10 Burt, E. S. 364, 368, 381n1 Burt, Stephen 9, 11, 12, 13, 18 Butler, Judith 191, 262, 361 Butler, Marilyn 276 Butler, Octavia: Dawn 15; Kindred 13; Lilith’s Brood 17; Patternmaster series 11; Wild Seed 11 Byatt, A. S. 383–92 Callaghan, Dympna 26 Callus, Ivan 361–70 Calvino, Italo 11 Cameron, Alan 253, 254n23 Cameron, James 9–10 Campbell, Jane 383 cancer 109, 112, 114, 118, 119, 150, 167, 197, 345, 347, 357, 362, 366, 367, 374–81 Cannadine, David 289, 296n4 Capaldi, Peter 9–10 capitalism 16, 171, 172–73, 174–75, 178–79, 269 Card, Claudia 443 Cardoso, André Cabral de Almeida 118 Carrard, Philippe 71–82 Castle, Terry 281, 282 Catholic 45, 46, 47, 51, 80, 164, 166, 177, 269, 270, 276, 281–84, 320 Cavarero, Adriana 298, 299 Cave, Terence 84, 89 Cerpen Koran 425 Chandra, Giti 430 character-narrator 42, 43, 44, 45, 50n3, 62 Chast, Roz: Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant? 119–20

Chateaubriand, François-René, Vicomte de 71, 363 Chaucer, Geoffrey 267, 435, 440n8 Chekhov, Anton 27, 31 Chew, Shirley 233, 234 Chiang, Ted: “Story of Your Life” 14 childbirth see birth childhood 13, 57, 93, 101n1, 107, 108–09, 112, 113, 128, 169, 216, 233, 283, 334, 336, 355, 357, 358, 377, 392n1–2, 451 children’s literature 93–102 China 76, 416–24 Chinese Civil War 416, 418 Christianity 51n13, 54, 68, 133, 134, 137, 138n3, 182, 184, 246, 254n37, 260, 273, 277, 279, 282, 285, 290, 292, 296, 302–03, 308, 342–43, 346, 348, 348n1, 434, 439, 440 church 51n10, 67, 80, 164, 187, 262, 266, 267, 269, 272, 282, 283, 285, 286, 427, 437; see also Christianity; Roman Catholic cinema of attractions 124 city 17, 22, 76, 134, 161, 228, 229, 232, 233, 235, 236, 238–39, 269, 384, 418, 443, 444, 445, 446, 448n4 civilian 412, 413, 417, 421, 422, 423, 423n4, 427 Clark, Stephen R. L. 11, 12, 13 Clément, Catharine 138 Clement, Lesley D. 93–104 climate change 112–13, 159, 169 Cline, Sally 324–25 Clingham, Greg 308 clinical 147, 181, 397, 398–400, 402, 404 clinic 191, 404 Coats, Karen 105–16 Coco 171, 175–79 Coetzee, J. M.: Elizabeth Costello 53 Cold War 16, 418, 431 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 271, 381 Collins, Suzanne: The Hunger Games 106, 108, 110, 113 combat 417, 418, 419 comedy 132, 133, 141, 143, 145, 148–49, 260, 269, 273, 359, 409 comic 35–38, 53, 85, 133, 143, 145, 148, 250, 257, 267, 269, 311, 419, 454 comics 117–21 commodification 16, 184, 235, 285, 288–89, 301, 305 community 55, 77, 94, 98, 105, 107, 110, 111, 112, 143, 146, 151, 152n2, 163, 165, 176, 228, 229, 250, 264, 284, 291, 357, 358, 377, 390, 429, 430, 437, 443, 444, 445 comprehension 68, 98, 186, 313, 384; see also affective comprehension confession 257, 260, 261, 263–64, 343–44, 345, 356, 362, 381, 434, 438 connectedness 94, 101, 161, 443, 447

457

Index Conrad, Joseph: Heart of Darkness 337–38, 339 consciousness 9, 12, 20–21, 27, 43, 66, 68, 74, 88, 114, 123, 125, 129, 172, 186, 190, 219, 220, 223, 236, 269, 272, 281, 310, 338, 344, 353, 356, 361, 372, 376, 384, 399, 430, 445 consolation 183, 184, 185–86, 187, 191, 219, 221, 246, 247, 250, 277, 278, 279, 282, 288, 289, 290, 304, 335, 372, 438 conversational disclosure 416, 417, 418, 419, 420, 421, 422 Cormier, Robert: The Chocolate War 110–11 corporeality 20, 24, 35, 38, 144, 194, 236, 262, 263, 285, 286, 298–99, 301, 305, 321, 335, 365, 383, 385 corpse 14, 15, 23, 25, 43, 47, 48, 49, 51n13, 76, 126–28, 191, 206, 249, 252, 261, 262, 277–80, 282, 285, 288–90, 293, 294, 295, 296, 312, 397–401, 403, 404, 406, 409, 411, 414, 427, 436, 437 Corr, Charles A. 96, 102n9 Corréard, Nicolas 83, 84 Cosentini, John W. 83, 84, 87 Costello, Peter 94 Cotton, Penni 102n10 Coulouma, Flore 159–70 Couser, G. Thomas 120, 373 Cousin de Grainville, Jean-Baptise Francois Xavier 369 Coutts, Marion 363 COVID-19 129n1, 450, 451 Crawford, Jen 228–40 Crisp, Thomas 94 Critchley, Simon 307, 312, 363 Crowther, Kitty 98; Moi et rien [Me and Nothing] 98; La visite de petite mort [The Visit of Little Death] 100, 102n14 cruising 198, 199–201 Crutzen, Paul J. 160 Culler, Jonathan 76, 230, 231, 368 cultural 26, 50, 53, 54, 7, 96, 98, 101n3, 106, 107, 112, 126, 128, 129n6, 134, 135, 136, 137, 141, 172–78, 180, 191, 195, 201, 219, 223, 226, 228–30, 233, 237, 239, 252, 258, 267, 276–78, 280, 281, 286, 288, 289, 301, 302, 308, 319, 320, 321, 322, 372, 373, 374, 375, 377, 381, 383, 384, 386, 387, 391, 392n1, 397, 417, 422, 423, 423n8, 430, 434, 435, 440, 442, 447 Curl, James Stevens 296, 302 Cust, Richard 266 cyberpunk 12 cyborg 9, 12, 15, 114 d’Orléans, Charles 258 Daniel, Carolyn 94 danse macabre [dance of death] 226, 406, 437 Dante 42, 54, 55, 59, 60n2, 63, 217 Dasenbrock, Reed Way 132–39

Daugherty, Tracy 327 Davies, Laura 307–18 Davison, Carol Margaret 276–87 Day, Ronald E. 124 Dayananda, Y. J. 344 de Assis, Machado 59, 64, 363 de Hauteville, Pierre 257–64 De Kerangal, Maylis: The Heart 393, 397, 398–400 De Loughry, Treasa 62, 64, 65, 67, 69n1, 70n7–8 de Man, Paul 72–73, 322–23, 327–28n6, 328n7, 368, 372 dead narrator 42, 44, 59, 60, 63, 64, 66, 68, 71, 74, 75, 78, 80n5, 363; see also posthumous narrative death row 420 death sentence 422 Deckard, Sharae 65 decorum 404, 414 deforestation 165, 166 deity 161, 342, 343 Dekker, Thomas 268, 270 Delany, Samuel R. 12; Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand 16–17 delaying tactics 407–09 dementia 77, 384, 389–90, 391, 392n1–2 demourance 363 denial 16, 22, 26, 65, 80, 86, 95, 101, 105, 106, 115, 119, 120, 129, 138n3, 163, 167, 168, 199, 278, 323, 344, 372, 399, 400, 431 Derrida, Jacques 40, 59, 144, 264, 315, 361–62, 363, 364, 369 descent narrative 53–54, 60n2 DeShazer, Mary K. 373, 374 dialogue 23, 54, 83–88, 89, 97, 100, 208, 210, 247, 249, 272, 373, 407, 411, 416 Diamond, Jared 160, 164 dichotomy 296n2, 347 Dick, Philip K. 48; Counter-clock World 13; “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep” 10, 48; Dr. Bloodmoney 16; Ubik 15 Dickens, Charles 295: The Old Curiosity Shop 293 Didion, Joan 327 diegetic 32, 223, 261, 263, 407–12, 414; extradiegetic 32, 42, 59, 408, 414; heterodiegetic 74, 80n2; homodiegetic 74, 76, 406; intradiegetic 42, 87; metadiegetic 32 Dili massacre 427, 428, 430, 431 Dillard, Annie 237 Diski, Jenny: In Gratitude 372, 377–78, 379 Disney 171, 173–79 displacement 33, 40, 195, 233, 288, 411 divine providence 51n17, 283, 344, 348n3 documentary 123–29, 129n2–6, 167, 169, 231, 249, 253; experience of 123, 124, 125, 126–27, 128; consciousness 125, 129n6; conventions 124, 129n6 Dolar, Mladen 298 Donne, John 141, 147, 149–51, 210–11, 212

458

Index Donoghue, Denis 213 downstream 84, 86, 87, 88, 89, 90 Doyle, Arthur Conan 295; “The Story of the Japanned Box” 299–300, 301, 303 Doyle, Rob 62, 69n2 Dr. Who 9–10, 17 drama 22, 29, 30, 40n4, 64, 89, 132, 133, 135, 136, 137–38n1, 141, 147, 150–51, 272, 418, 434, 440, 454; see also theater; war drama dramatization 27n1, 324, 407, 413 Dunant, Sarah 257, 261, 263 Dunbar, Robin 146 DuPlessis, Rachel Blau 206, 207 dying 17, 20–21, 26, 31, 33, 36, 39, 43, 63, 67, 73, 80, 83, 88, 93, 95–96, 98, 101n3, 102n12, 105, 107, 111, 112, 117, 120, 121, 128, 132, 134, 141, 147, 149, 166, 168, 190, 192–93, 199, 200, 203, 203n4, 257, 258, 259, 260, 263, 264, 268, 277, 284, 289, 292–93, 294, 296, 299, 300, 308, 338, 342–44, 347–48, 348n1, 357–58, 361, 362, 363, 365, 366, 372–77, 379–81, 383, 388, 390, 399, 401, 402–04, 409, 418, 434–35, 438–39, 448n4 dystopia 9, 10, 12, 15, 108 Eagleman, David 60n1, 74, 75, 79, 80 East Timor 425–32 ecocide 160, 164 ecocriticism 159 Edison, Thomas 127, 298–99, 304, 305 Edson, Margaret: Wit 141, 147, 150–51 Egan, Susanna 372–75, 381 Ehrenreich, Barbara 374, 380 eighteenth century 49, 69n5, 83, 87, 89, 162, 180, 184, 185, 186, 272, 276, 278, 292, 308, 310, 313 Eiland, Howard 321, 322, 327, 327n3, 327n5 Eiselein, Gregory 448n3 Eisenberg, Evan 301, 303 ekphrasis 203, 249, 252, 359 elderly 79, 95, 96, 98, 259, 351, 392n1, 443 elegy 53, 121, 160, 161, 166, 180–87, 190, 191–92, 194, 195, 196, 198, 199, 214, 221, 228, 230, 231, 233–34, 238, 246, 276–80, 289, 368, 408, 414 Eliot, George 65, 295 Eliot, T. S. 23, 203n1, 216–17, 226n3, 377 Elliot, Emory 448n2 Ellis, Joseph 447 Ellmann, Richard 327n1 emotion 97, 108, 109, 118, 141, 144–45, 150, 162, 195, 201, 271, 281, 300, 411, 413, 414 emotional: attachment 390–91; distress 386–87; intensity 407; investment 111, 193, 238; response 105, 107, 109, 127, 145, 384, 386; undercurrents 411 emotive power 188n5, 414

empirical 124, 125–26, 127, 272, 280, 285, 308, 319 end-of-life 304, 354, 372–74, 377, 378, 381 enjambment 195, 207, 209, 214 Enlightenment 272, 276–82, 285, 286 environmental 95, 112, 128, 159, 160, 164–65, 166, 169, 386 ephemeral 20, 88, 220, 223, 225, 236, 237, 302 epidemic 121, 166, 294, 316n9, 426, 442–43, 444, 445, 447, 448n3–4; see also pandemic epigram 136, 245–53, 254n22, 254n25, 254n32, 254n35 epiphany 165, 166, 167, 216, 218, 219, 220, 222, 223 epitaph 53, 85, 245–53, 253n12, 253n14, 253n17, 254n25, 254n46, 257, 261–62, 264n4 Erdrich, Louise 165–66 Erlbruch, Wolf: The Big Question 93, 101; Duck, Death and the Tulip 100–01 ethical 23, 106, 112, 146, 280, 323, 338, 374, 381, 391, 398, 404, 407, 413, 416–18, 419, 420–22, 423, 442, 445; hierarchies 416, 418, 419, 421; judgments 417, 423; norms 416 ethics 197, 213, 398, 401, 404, 407, 410, 413, 418; see also ethical etiquette 141, 142, 152n2, 410 eulogy 246, 319, 326 Euripides 249, 251 Everly, Kathryn 430 Everyman 267, 274n2, 434, 438–39, 440n15, 441n21, 441n23 execute 124, 136, 281, 362, 421, 429 exile 14, 231, 238, 269, 273, 321 experimental 15, 20, 50, 62–63, 64, 65, 69n2–3, 121, 128, 217 Fabricant, Carole 186 facticity of death 140, 141, 149, 192 faith 24, 148, 271–72, 288, 290, 303, 308, 310, 342, 343, 345–47, 348n3 Falconer, Rachel 53, 54, 73–74 Farmer, Philip José 11 fathers 20, 22, 37, 39, 44, 46–47, 50n3, 51n12, 56, 97, 98–99, 109–11, 168, 171, 173, 174, 175, 179, 222, 230, 233, 268, 269, 273, 281, 282, 305, 321, 322, 334, 336–37, 340, 353–54, 376, 385, 403, 444, 452 Faulkner, William: As I Lay Dying 74, 78, 79, 80n3, 363 fear 10, 49, 93, 96–98, 101, 105–08, 132–35, 141, 144, 145, 147–49, 150, 161, 162, 193, 218, 220, 251, 270, 271, 272, 274, 277, 282, 285, 286, 295–96, 307, 309, 323, 324, 326, 339–40, 347, 348, 357–58, 380, 384, 397, 398, 404, 421, 428, 431, 432n1, 432n13, 434–40, 443, 447n1 fiction 12, 17, 18, 30, 32, 40n2, 44, 50, 53, 57, 58, 62–65, 68, 69n3–5, 74, 78, 79, 80, 87, 88,

459

Index 89–90, 126, 128, 160, 169, 220, 225, 257–61, 283, 284, 292, 295, 304, 320, 324, 328n7, 343, 344, 345, 350–51, 358, 359, 364, 381–82n1, 397, 398, 403, 404, 406, 418; see also metafiction; science fiction; Young Adult fiction Field, Louise Maunsell 326 film 9, 10, 13–15, 17, 53, 55, 71, 94, 123–28, 129n3, 160–62, 171–79, 194, 231, 235, 236, 312, 343, 368, 416, 418, 419, 422 Filmer-Davies, Cath 343 Fineman, Joel 314–15, 316n16 fire 67, 111, 145, 159, 169, 233–34, 310–11, 367, 386, 401, 402, 450, 453 Firth, Steward 167 Fitzgerald, F. Scott 324–26 Fivush, Robin 430, 432n10 Fletcher, Alan J. 45 Flynn, Deirdre 67 focalization 76, 211, 219, 223 Folkenflik, Robert 314, 316n13 Fondebrider, Luis 427, 432n11–12 Fontenelle, Bernard le Bovier de: Nouveaux dialogues des morts 83–90 Ford, John: The Broken Heart 22–27, 27n2 forest 44, 160–62, 166, 168, 384, 391 Foucault, Michel 27n4, 191, 314, 315, 316n14, 325 Frattarola, Angela 298–306 Freud, Sigmund 53, 172, 185–86, 191, 198, 199, 269, 278, 326, 327, 362, 417, 443 Friedman, Alan 71, 79, 292 Friel, Brian 163 Frow, John 50n2, 140–41, 142, 143–144, 145, 146, 147, 152, 152n1 Frye, Joanne S. 218 Frye, Northrop 49, 50 Fukuyama, Francis 266, 273, 274 Gaiman, Neil 93, 101, 101n1 Galkin, A. 344 Gappah, Petina 257, 260, 262 Gardner, Alexander 123, 128 Gardner, Jared 117, 118, 119 Gaskell, Elizabeth: Ruth 293, 294–95 Gawande, Atul 368, 381 Gee, Maggie 17 gender 22, 26, 27n2, 27n4, 79, 107, 110, 111, 135, 136, 138n4, 182, 183, 186, 199, 203n2, 212, 224, 291, 295, 300, 384, 419, 420 Gendreau, Vickie 257, 258, 259, 260, 261, 262, 263, 264, 264n5 generic conventions 43, 49 Genette, Gérard 32, 42, 76 genre 9–12, 16–18, 23, 45, 48, 50n2, 51n5, 53–55, 69n3, 71, 72, 75, 77, 78, 80n3, 83, 84, 86, 88, 99, 107, 108, 112, 118–19, 123–25, 133–36,

138n4, 140–52, 160, 182, 186, 188n6, 190, 194, 214, 233, 234, 245–46, 248, 257, 258, 266, 280, 284, 304, 307, 313, 316n5, 320, 327, 358, 365, 372–73, 374–75, 404, 407, 416, 418, 420, 422, 425, 447; as afterlife 60; as etiquette 141–42, 152n2; as a fact of language 142–43; as natural organism 142, 143–44 ghost 12–13, 43, 45–48, 49, 50n3, 51n12, 51n15, 56, 59–60, 73, 76, 80n1, 98, 113, 182, 184, 192, 214, 230, 245, 269, 284, 294, 295, 303, 358, 363 ghost story 53, 55, 72, 73, 75, 76, 269, 281, 285 Gibboury, Achsah 211 Gibson, William 12–13, 237 Gilhooly, Mary 443 Gleick, James 13 good death 94, 101, 137, 278, 291, 292, 293, 303, 368, 423 Goodman, Jessica 83–90 Goodwin, Sarah Webster 277, 409 Gossman, Lionel 314, 316n10 Gothic 45, 47, 48, 49, 182, 238, 239, 276–83, 285–86, 295–96, 299, 442–43, 444, 446–47 Gough, Julian 450–54 Grabo, Norman S. 445, 448n2 Graham, Jorie 370 grandparents 95–97, 102n9 Graphic Medicine 120–21 graphic novel 94, 99, 113, 118, 121, 160, 161, 162, 324; see also comic graveyard poetry 186, 276–80, 282 Gray, Alasdair 54, 64 Gray, Thomas 184, 187 Gray, William 346 Greek 29, 73, 86, 87, 138, 213, 245, 249, 251, 252, 253n1, 253n12, 253n20, 254n50, 452 Greenfield, Thelma 25 grief 21, 23, 26, 42, 94–96, 98–101, 105, 107, 108, 110, 111, 118, 120, 142, 181, 184, 186, 190, 191, 192, 194, 197, 200, 219, 229, 230, 231, 233, 234, 238, 247, 252, 267, 272, 277, 282, 285, 290, 291, 292, 296, 327, 336, 346, 353, 373, 377, 383–92, 423 “grief-porn” 111 Grierson, John 123, 124 Groom, Amelia 353, 354 Grundy, Isobel 308, 309 Gubar, Marah 93 Gullo, Arianna 245–56 Gustafson, Richard F. 344 Gygax, Franziska 374, 375 Hainge, Greg 300 Haldeman, Joe 14 Hamilton, Andy 146 Hamilton, Christopher 333–41

460

Index Hamon, Philippe 413 Hansen, Richard P. 342 Harper, Tim N. 431 Haverty, Anne 352 heartbeat 66, 67, 399 heaven 12, 43–44, 47, 48, 51n16, 54, 56, 68, 75–76, 83, 97, 101, 102n12, 178, 273, 278, 279, 291, 294, 435, 439, 440n17; see also hell Heidegger, Martin 107, 192, 206, 337–38 Heinlein, Robert A.: Methuselah’s Children 11; The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress 13; Time Enough for Love 13 Heinze, Ruediger 74, 76 Heise, Ursula K. 159 hell 47, 51n16, 54, 56, 61n5, 68, 73, 75–76, 77, 80, 101, 217, 283, 308, 316, 436, 452; see also heaven Herman, David 50n1, 77 Herman, Judith 431 hero 10, 13, 49, 78, 111, 118–19, 134–37, 143, 165, 173, 245, 250, 267, 270, 283, 292, 412, 417, 435, 452–54 heroic 10, 13, 56, 88, 112, 118, 135, 138n4, 141, 143, 151–52, 186, 236, 250, 251, 254n49, 270, 294, 309, 316, 325, 446; see also self-sacrifice heuristic 123 Higgins, Aidan 62, 69n2, 350–59 Hill, Eugene D. 46, 49, 51n9 Hirsch, Marianne 384 history 11, 29, 42, 48, 53, 54, 60, 69n2–3, 80n4, 84, 86, 87, 93, 118, 119, 125, 129n3, 142, 159, 160, 163, 165, 167, 183, 191, 193, 203n3, 216, 217, 224, 229, 230, 231, 233, 236, 239, 257–58, 266–67, 268, 273, 274, 283, 302, 304, 312, 314–15, 316n10, 319, 320, 321, 324, 326, 327, 355, 404, 417, 423n1, 425, 426, 427, 428, 430, 431, 440, 444, 448n5 Hoban, Russell: Riddley Walker 17 Hoffman, Michael 167 Hoffman, Richard 436 Hoffmann, Catherine 406–15 Hofstadter, Douglas 33 Hole, Stian 97, 98; Annas Himmel [Anna’s Heaven] 97; Garmanns sommer [Garmann’s Summer] 96–97 Homer 48, 78, 86, 87, 245, 249, 250, 253n1, 253n5, 254n37, 269, 355, 363, 368, 419 Hood, Thomas 290 Hopkins, Lisa 23 horror 15, 45, 54, 67, 73, 108, 110, 177, 283, 324, 344, 367, 374, 378, 383, 384, 385, 388, 397, 410, 431, 438, 439, 442, 443, 447n1, 448n4 hospital 79, 147, 190, 191, 192, 194, 200, 203n2, 294, 324, 348n3, 368, 386, 387, 398, 400, 402 Howell, W. S. 308 Howells, Christina 364 Howells, Coral Ann 277, 281, 283, 284, 286

Huizinga, Johan 434 Huron, David 141, 145, 147, 148–50 Hutcheon, Linda 78, 137, 138n4, 429 Hutcheon, Michael 137, 138n4 identity 23, 75, 80n1, 87, 100, 106, 109, 112, 126, 182, 191, 198, 207, 218, 236, 249, 257, 258, 260, 261–63, 264, 285, 289, 300, 302, 364, 386, 389, 390, 392, 418, 420, 435, 442, 443–444, 445, 446 ideology 107–08, 110–14, 144, 171, 174, 178, 179, 186, 193, 225, 226, 253n1, 266, 270, 271, 281, 327n6, 413, 418, 423n8 illness 36, 67, 101, 117, 119, 120, 162, 165, 167, 186, 220, 260, 261, 281, 282, 292, 293–95, 324, 334, 350, 358, 363, 365, 366, 372–75, 377, 380, 381, 383, 386, 391, 392, 392n1, 435, 443 imaginary 57, 76, 88, 98, 118, 125–26, 178, 179, 225, 234, 235, 281, 323, 352, 368 imagination 9, 15, 22, 24, 29, 30, 38, 54, 60, 69n2, 88, 89, 117, 124, 125, 141, 145–46, 159, 162, 186, 216, 245, 271, 308, 326, 353, 358, 363, 417, 443; cultural 174, 417 Imhof, Rüdiger 62 immigrants 16, 79, 176, 443, 445; see also migrants immortal 10, 11–12, 13, 85, 89, 145, 172, 238, 245, 278, 295, 366 immortalize 85, 279, 290, 375 “impersonal emotions” 143, 144, 145, 152n2 Inbaraj, Sonny 432n13, 432n17 inheritance 63, 65, 95, 190, 233, 261, 277, 280, 2822, 294, 444 inscription 194, 245–46, 247, 248–49, 252–53, 253n6, 253n20, 254n22, 254n25, 254n28, 254n50, 362, 367 invisibility 99, 101, 212 invisible 21, 99, 161, 164, 169, 183, 323, 356, 387, 426, 429, 447, 453 inwardness 15, 25, 26, 182, 201, 267, 355, 404 Irish 62, 63, 64, 65, 68, 69n1, 69n2, 69n3, 98, 163, 194, 195, 203n2, 384, 358, 390 ironic 88, 100, 113, 119, 120, 148, 149, 184, 188n8, 216, 219, 220, 221, 223, 225, 226, 248, 258–63, 266, 273, 283, 285, 319, 320, 322, 347, 365, 377, 378, 398, 408, 430, 450 irony 141, 143, 145, 147–49, 150, 258, 259, 260, 261, 262, 263, 364, 365, 366, 407, 409, 410, 413 irreversible coma 399, 400, 402, 404 Ishiguro, Kazuo 9 isolation 110, 115, 117, 173, 224, 342, 344, 351, 357, 358, 373 Jack the Ripper 295 Jackson, Jeanne-Marie 66, 68 Jacobs, Courtney 143

461

Index Jalland, Pat 278, 289, 296n1, 296n5 James, Clive 365, 366, 368 Jameson, Anna 193 Jameson, Fredric 10, 11–12, 171, 235 Jankélévitch, Vladimir 409–10 Janoff-Bulman, Ronnie 430 Japanese 94, 119, 160–62, 163, 168, 416, 417, 418, 420, 421, 422, 424n10, 451–52 Jeffers, Oliver: The Heart and the Bottle 98 Jennings, Michael W. 321, 322, 327, 327n3, 327n5 Jernigan, Daniel K. 29–41 Johnson, Loretta 159 Johnson, Samuel 182, 184, 307–17, 319 Johnston, Freya 309 Johnston, Lynn 118 Jones, Emrys 308 Joseph, Miriam 46 Joyau, Isabelle 406 Joyce, James 62, 65, 69n2, 78, 137–38n1, 140, 142, 148, 226n1, 267, 268, 274n7, 354, 358 Justus, James H. 448n2 Kachtick, Keith 74, 75, 77 Kalanithi, Paul: When Breath Becomes Air 372, 376–77, 379 Kantorowicz, Ernst 268 katabasis 53, 54, 73 Kaufmann, R. J. 24, 25 Kearney, Richard 69n2 Keats, John 183, 210, 222, 234, 278, 348 Kellehear, Allan 94–95, 303 Kelley, Robert E. 313, 316n1 Kermode, Frank 208, 214 Kierkegaard, Søren 339 Kiernan, Ben 432n3, 432n6 killing 15, 31, 36, 49, 79, 105, 112, 118, 129n1, 161, 177, 276, 348n4, 417, 418, 419, 420, 421, 422, 426, 428 Kilpatrick, Ross S. 359 King, John S. 303 Klause, Annette Curtis: The Silver Kiss 109–10, 114; Blood and Chocolate 110 Klein, Herbert 68 Kleinman, Arthur 375, 388 “knowingness” 93, 101 Knox-Shaw 221 Kong, Belinda 79 Kong, Lily 228, 229 Kong, Shuyu 418, 423n1, 423n8 Králová, Jana 444, 448n5 Kubiak, Anthony 21 Kübler-Ross, Elisabeth 95, 98, 102n13, 105, 115, 344, 374 Kubrick, Stanley: 2001: A Space Odyssey 9 Kucich, John 289 Kurosawa, Akira: Dersu Uzala 160–61 Kyd, Thomas 46; The Spanish Tragedy 46, 47

Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe 364 Lamont, Claire 316n6 Lamont, Peter 303 language 14, 23–24, 27n2, 29, 65, 69n2, 69n4, 79, 109, 112, 140, 141–43, 146, 151, 163, 168, 172, 182, 184, 191–92, 194, 198, 206–07, 208, 213, 215, 216–26, 235, 253, 257, 270, 273, 312, 314, 323, 325, 337, 352, 363–64, 366, 367, 376, 378, 384, 385, 387–88, 391, 397, 398, 399, 404, 412, 431, 440n10 Larkin, Philip 339 le Goff, Jacques: The Birth of Purgatory 45, 46, 47, 53 Le Guin, Ursula K.: “Semley’s Necklace” 14; “Winter’s King” 14 Lee, Hermione 320 Lee, Vernon 193 legacy 85, 86, 89, 94, 96, 101, 134, 137–38n1, 257, 258, 261, 263, 277, 353, 375 legend 225, 320, 324, 325, 383, 384, 417 Lejeune, Philippe 364 Lewis, C. S. 54, 61n4, 342–43; A Grief Observed 343, 345–47, 348, 348n4 Lewis, David 102n5, 173 Lewis, Matthew 47, 281, 283, 284 Lewis, Wyndham 54, 59 Leys, Ruth 141, 144 Li, Wanlin 442–49 life support 80, 397, 398, 399, 400, 402, 405 life writing 78, 316n5, 350, 356, 372, 373, 375 Lin, Jamie 342–49 Lispector, Clarice 320 live burial see premature burial Loades, Ann 346, 347 longevity 10, 11–12, 13; see also immortal Loseff, Lev 320–21 Low, Anthony 46, 47, 51n10 Lubbock, Tom 363, 368 Lunde, Stein Erik 97–98: Eg kan ikkje sove no [My Father’s Arms Are a Boat] 97 Luria, Maxwell 436 Lutz, Deborah 289–90, 296n8, 298–99, 300, 301, 305 Luxmoore, Nick 106, 109, 111, 114 Lye, Kit Ying 425–33 lyric 58, 134–35, 146, 201, 204n6, 208–09, 211–13, 217, 219, 229, 230–31, 232, 237, 249, 258, 259, 335, 365, 366, 367, 368, 436, 440n10 lyric mode 229, 230 macabre 25, 83, 93, 97, 259, 271, 285, 286, 351, 358, 406, 407, 413, 434–40, 441n23 Macfarlane, Robert 164 Machiavelli, Niccolo 271, 273 Maier, Charles S. 428 Mailer, Norman 451–52 Malm, Andreas 160

462

Index Maner, Martin 308 Mann, Thomas 303, 364 Marchal, Roger 83, 84 Mariani, Umberto 29–31, 34, 39, 40n3 Marker, Chris: La jetée 13 Marmon Silko, Leslie 165, 166 martyr 260, 421 Massumi, Brian 144 material 12, 21, 24, 26, 27n4, 58, 68, 109, 112, 113, 124, 125, 128, 175, 184, 211, 226, 231, 245, 248, 252, 267, 268, 270, 271, 272, 281, 282, 289, 290, 300, 301, 305, 313–15, 326, 335, 347, 348, 353, 372, 385, 411, 444, 448n2, 451, 452, 453 materiality 68, 223, 226, 289 Matheson, Richard 16, 53 Matthews, Gareth B. 94 Matthews, Graham 383–92 Maturin, Charles Robert 281, 283, 284, 285 McCaffrey, Anne: The Ship Who Sang 12 McCarthy, Cormac: The Road 17 McCormack, Mike 62–70 McDonald, Michael 180, 184 McGuire, Kelly 180–89 McHale, Brian 9–19, 32, 33, 40n2, 40n4, 50n4, 206–07 McKeon, Darragh 168, 169 McMath, Jahi 398–99, 400–03, 404–05 meaning 43, 49, 55–58, 96, 106, 107, 121, 141, 144, 172, 193, 196, 201, 207, 208, 210, 218, 221–24, 226, 246, 248, 252, 272, 273, 290, 309, 311, 312, 315, 316, 326, 327, 328n7, 340, 345–48, 352, 353, 369, 373–78, 381, 388, 389, 391, 401, 410, 417, 422–23, 432n10, 434, 442 meaningless 171, 183, 220, 340, 388, 390, 137 meaninglessness 340, 345–47, 348 medicine 27n4, 123, 124, 147–49, 278, 365, 368, 376, 377, 381, 383, 387, 388, 397–99, 401, 403, 404–05 melancholia 180, 185–86, 187, 188n7, 191, 196, 197, 198, 202, 220, 269, 281, 296, 353, 354 Mellow, James 324 melodrama 20, 26, 111, 141, 143, 145, 148, 149–50, 269, 280, 294 memento mori 123, 126–27, 228, 250, 277, 280, 282, 285, 298, 301, 302, 436–40 memento vivere 126–27 memoir 53, 71, 78, 80n4, 119–20, 121, 160, 234, 284, 327, 333, 334, 336, 350, 351, 355, 359, 361, 363, 364, 372–81, 406, 423; see also biography memory 36, 69n2, 85, 89, 93, 96, 101, 128, 163, 164, 166, 168, 185, 188n8, 190, 196, 228, 229–34, 238–39, 246, 247, 250, 253n6, 257, 262, 266, 307, 312, 313, 319, 326, 352, 356, 359, 362, 369, 389, 432n10 Menand, Louis 322, 323

Menippean satire 48, 50 metafiction 17, 18, 62, 64, 378, 383, 384, 391, 427, 430 metatheater 30–34, 36–37, 39 metaphor 18, 22, 24, 33, 44, 49, 54, 55, 59, 95, 98–99, 107, 108, 111, 128, 140, 143, 164, 169, 188n3, 203n1, 207, 208, 211, 220, 230–31, 249, 263, 272, 273, 289, 303, 309, 316, 342, 346, 356, 358, 378, 379–80, 387, 389, 406, 438, 451 metonymic 198, 219, 411 Meyers, Jeffrey 324 Mézières, Philippe de 257–60, 262, 263–64 Mianowski, Marie 68 Middle Ages 42, 44, 50, 210, 257, 267, 269, 282, 434, 435–40 migrants 234, 442, 443, 444, 445; see also immigrants migration 128, 444, 445, 446 Mikics, David 49 Miller, Andrew H. 280 Miller, Carolyn 146 Miller, Nancy K. 372, 373 Milton, John 54, 181, 280, 355; “Lycidas” 180–87, 368 miscarriage 166 Miyazaki, Hayao 160–61; Mononoke-Hime [Princess Mononoke] 161, 168 Mizener, Arthur 325 mock heroic 309, 316 modernism 22, 62, 65, 69n2, 194, 198, 216–17, 223, 226n1, 368 modernization 228–29, 230, 232, 233, 234, 238–39 Mokoena, Dikeledi 174 Molière 29, 88; The Imaginary Invalid 29, 36, 40n1 Molinet, Jean 258 Montaigne, Michel de 308, 375, 377, 379, 380 Montgomery, L. M.: Anne of Green Gables 93; Rilla of Ingleside 94 Montrose, Louis 268 monument 184, 246–50, 252, 253n1, 253n5–6, 254n37, 266, 268, 272, 288, 312, 362, 439 Moore, Madeline 225 Moore, Susanna: In the Cut 59, 64, 72 moral 417, 418, 420, 421, 422 mors improvisa 434 mortal economies 416, 419 mortality 9, 11, 12, 13–14, 15, 20–22, 57, 16, 93, 94, 96, 98, 99, 101, 123, 124, 126–29, 276–77, 282, 285, 289, 293, 353–54, 372, 374, 376–77, 406, 435, 437, 438, 440n2, 443; see also immortal Moser, Benjamin 320 mothers 14, 37, 74, 76, 78, 80n3, 97, 98, 109–11, 112, 113, 120–21, 135, 162, 168, 217, 219, 246, 251, 268–69, 274n6, 281, 283, 285, 327, 333–38, 340, 351, 355, 361, 368, 378–79, 384, 385, 386–87, 398, 399, 401, 420, 444, 446

463

Index mountain 120, 160, 162, 163 mourning 180–88, 191, 192, 195, 247, 250, 252, 288–90, 292, 294, 296, 296n1, 296n2, 296n8 Mulvey, Laura 123, 124, 138n2 murder 13, 64, 72, 73, 75, 101n3, 133, 174, 191, 260, 262, 283, 419–20, 444 murder mystery 72, 73, 75, 76, 78, 108 Murphy, Alexander 180, 184 Murphy, James E. 426 Murphy, Neil 62–70, 350–51 museums 124, 146, 190, 193, 194, 200–03 music 23, 45, 126–27, 136, 141, 145–46, 148, 150, 152, 207, 210, 212–13, 252, 301, 303, 304, 305, 339, 365, 366, 390, 452 myth see legend Nadeau, Janice: Harvey: Comment je suis devenu invisible [Harvey: How I Became Invisible] 99 Nadel, Ira 319–29 Nancy, Jean-Luc 212–13, 215 narcissism 193, 196, 199, 200, 201, 204n7, 272, 362, 378 narrative account 13, 313, 391 narrative device 63, 94, 443, 446 narrative form 53, 216 narrative genre 141, 142–43, 144, 145, 147, 150, 152 narrative level 32, 37, 165 narrative, natural 72, 77 narrative theory 32, 75, 416 narrative voice 54, 58, 63, 222, 264, 279, 388 narrative, unnatural 72, 74, 75, 77–78 narrative tension 408, 414n3; see also suspense nationalism 163, 171, 195, 232–33, 276, 418, 420, 421, 432n1 naturalization 77, 177, 278 nature 30, 49, 84, 102n12, 124, 125, 145, 159–69, 183, 220, 221, 222, 224, 225, 237, 321, 343, 379, 448n2, 453 Naylor, Gloria: Mama Day 77, 78 nekuia 53 neurology 109, 141, 145–46, 148, 152n1, 401, 402, 404 neurophysiological 145–46 New Journalism 425, 426, 429 Newman, Karen 27n1 Nicholls, Peter 217 Nichols, Bill 124, 125, 129n3–4 Nichols, Nina da Vinci 39 Nieuwland, Mante S. 43 nineteenth century 9, 29, 53, 59, 114, 117, 132, 135, 136, 137–38n1, 162, 163, 183, 270, 276, 289, 292–93, 295, 296n2, 301–02, 304, 327, 343 Nixon, Rob 159, 167 noise 337, 408, 414, 450 Nolan, Christopher: Interstellar 14

Nolan, Val 64, 65, 69n1 nothingness 101, 206, 220, 271–72, 278 novum 10–11, 12, 17–18 nuclear disaster 160, 167–69 nuclear war 10, 17 Ó Cadhain, Máirtín: Cré na Cille 54, 64 O’Brien, Flann 62, 63, 69n1–2; The Third Policeman 50n3, 53, 63–64, 67, 77 O’Mahony, Seamus 368 O’Muirithe, Lara 350–60 O’Neill, Michael 365–67, 368, 369 offscreen death 418, 420, 421 Olberding, Amy 142, 152n2 Olson, Greta 44, 75 omniscience 59, 76, 77, 192, 223, 237, 290 onscreen death 126, 128, 416, 417, 418, 419, 420, 421 ontology 17–18, 21, 22, 30–35, 38, 39, 43, 46, 47, 49, 63, 64, 192–93, 222, 264, 266, 270, 271, 272, 274, 285, 384, 391, 407 opera 35, 37, 132, 135–38, 299, 303 organ donation/transplant 79, 121, 397, 399, 400, 401, 402, 403, 405 Orwell, George 333, 337 Oswald, Alice 366, 368 overkill 418, 420 Owen, Wilfred 190, 217 Palahniuk, Chuck: Damned 54, 73, 75–76 Pamuk, Orhan: My Name Is Red 50n3, 54, 76 pandemic 450–52; see also epidemic paradox 13–14, 39, 44, 83, 89, 98, 101, 112, 113, 132, 135, 172, 175, 181, 191, 196, 197, 199, 201, 207, 213, 217, 218, 223, 225, 250, 252, 259, 263, 272, 315, 342–48, 348n1–2, 350, 353, 361, 375, 381, 386, 398, 399, 406, 439, 442, 445 para-human 15 paralepsis 74, 77, 78 parataxis 234–35, 239 Pardi, Charlotte: Græd blot hjerte [Cry, Heart, But Never Break] 100 parents 59, 73, 76, 93, 95, 97, 102n4, 106, 107, 109, 118, 120, 164, 175, 246, 247, 250–51, 269, 305, 325, 334, 336–37, 340, 397, 398, 400, 401, 403, 413, 451; parental death 97–98; see also fathers; mothers Parisot, Eric 276, 279 Parker, Fred 314 Parker, Robert 253n1 Parks, Suzan-Lori: Getting Mother’s Body 74, 76, 77, 78, 79, 80n3 Parnell, Thomas 278–79 particularity 310, 312, 315, 368 passer-by 247, 248, 250, 252, 253n17, 254n34 Paster, Gail Kern 27n4

464

Index Pasternak, Boris 190 Paterson, Mark 352, 355 Patterson, Orlando 443 Pausch, Randy 363, 375 penitence 260, 261, 272 performance 20, 21, 22, 24, 29, 33, 34, 35, 36–37, 39, 40n1, 109, 146, 184, 215, 236, 238, 288, 299–302, 389, 404, 406, 445 Perloff, Marjorie 208–09, 210, 211, 213 Perrow, Eber Carle 257, 258 persona 181, 184, 185, 257–64, 412 Petrarch 134, 211 pets 95–96, 118, 172 Petter, Henri 448n2 Phelan, James 42, 78, 146, 416, 418 Phelan, Peggy 26 phenomenology 119, 172, 193, 210, 212, 213, 217, 271, 327, 351, 355, 361, 362, 364 philosophy 337–41 phonograph 298–306 photograph 123–24, 128, 162, 194, 289, 295, 298–99, 300, 301, 304, 327, 350, 353–55, 356–57, 359 Picard, Michel 407, 409, 414, 415n6 Picker, John M. 302, 303 Pinter, Harold 223; Family Voices 48, 50n3 Pirandello, Luigi 29–30, 32, 34, 35, 37–40, 40n2; Six Characters in Search of an Author 29–32, 33, 34, 36, 37, 39, 40n4; Each in his Own Way 29, 32, 34; Tonight We Improvise 29, 30, 34–37; The Mountain Giants 29, 38–39 plague 16, 17, 21, 25, 165, 270, 435, 438, 452, 453, 454; see also epidemic; pandemic Plutarch 133 Poe, Edgar Allan 284, 363, 443; “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar” 9, 363; “The Fall of the House of Usher” 15 poetic justice 44, 55 poetics 71, 125, 152n1, 165, 199, 225, 228, 231, 234, 239, 277, 280, 362, 363, 364 polarities 311, 348, 357 Pope, Alexander 309–11, 313; “Elegy to the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady” 180, 182–87 posterity 84–90, 231–32, 234, 236, 238, 239, 245, 257, 266 posthumanism 113–14, 115, 169, 364, 370; see also cyborg; immortal; para-human; undead posthumous 12, 15, 54, 56, 57, 59, 63–64, 66, 67–68, 72, 79, 84, 88, 89, 178, 179, 257, 259, 261, 264, 313, 369; see also posthumous narrative posthumous narrative 54, 59, 64, 66, 71–79, 80n1 postmemory 384 postmodernism 17, 40n2, 42, 43, 44, 48, 49, 50, 50n3–4, 55, 62, 64, 74, 78, 79, 194, 234, 235, 267, 383 Powell, Anthony 406–15; Books Do Furnish a Room

320; A Dance to the Music of Time 406–14; The Acceptance World 410; At Lady Molly’s 412; Casanova’s Chinese Restaurant 406; Hearing Secret Harmonies 406; The Kindly Ones 413; A Question of Upbringing 406; The Soldier’s Art 407, 410, 413; Temporary Kings 412; To Keep the Ball Rolling: The Memoirs of Anthony Powell 406 premature burial 15, 442, 443, 448n4; see also burial Price, Joshua 444 prolepsis 73, 187, 267 proprioceptive 193, 363, 368 Protestant 134, 270, 271, 276, 279, 281, 282, 283, 284 Pujol, Stéphane 83, 87 Quintero, Ruben 182, 187n1 Rachman, Tom 372, 374 Radcliffe, Ann 281–83, 443, 447n1 radioactivity see nuclear disaster Raschka, Chris: The Purple Balloon 98 real world 17, 32, 33, 34, 35, 42, 43, 46, 63, 72, 123, 125, 126, 163, 447 reality 124, 125–126, 128, 129n5, 129n6; creative treatment of 124; vs irreality 125–26, 140–41, 142 rebellion 22, 96, 109, 110, 166, 326, 336 rebirth 95, 101, 137–38n1, 221, 290; see also birth reception 39, 72, 78, 125, 129n6, 180, 192, 193, 195, 200, 204n6, 264n6, 350, 383, 407, 414n2 refugee 164, 168, 327n5, 443 relic 289, 298–300, 301–03, 304, 305, 435 religion 53, 54, 177, 266, 277, 270, 281, 385 religious 53, 54, 97, 102n12, 109, 114, 146, 191, 224, 245, 257, 266, 270, 276, 277, 279, 281, 283, 284, 286, 289, 291, 293, 301, 303, 338, 344, 345, 438 Renaissance 22, 45, 49, 133, 134–35, 136, 203n5, 211, 267, 270, 273, 319, 409 representation 27, 49, 53, 60, 63, 64, 65, 67, 73, 77, 83, 97, 99, 100, 101n3, 106–07, 117, 126, 129n1, 132, 140, 146, 159, 160, 164, 165, 169, 173, 175, 194, 195, 212, 216, 217, 218, 220, 222, 228, 229, 233, 237, 252, 253n7, 254n46, 293, 295, 299, 301, 307, 308, 314, 352, 365, 368, 372, 385, 392n1, 409, 416, 417, 422, 423, 425, 426, 427, 430, 437, 440n3, 443 reservation 160, 164–66 reticence 407, 409, 410, 412, 413, 414, 414n3 revenge tragedy 22, 45, 46, 48, 49, 51n9 Reynolds, Jason: The Boy in the Black Suit 110–11; Long Way Down 111 rhetoric 23, 24, 27, 123, 124–25, 176, 308, 324, 368, 410, 413 rhetorical 124, 146, 180, 182, 184, 210, 225, 258, 264, 359, 372, 402, 407, 409, 413, 414, 416, 418

465

Index rhythm 26, 63, 65–68, 100, 146, 193, 196, 198–200, 201, 203n5, 208, 209, 211, 212, 214, 230, 336, 361, 373 Richardson, Brian 59, 69n5, 72, 78 Richardson, Ruth 280, 289, 296n1–2 Richardson, Samuel: Clarissa 292–93 Ricks, Christopher 363, 367 Riggs, Nina: The Bright Hour 372, 378–81; “When a Couch Is More than a Couch” 379 Riley, Mary 368 Ringe, Donald 448n2 Ringtved, Glenn: Græd blot hjerte [Cry, Heart, But Never Break] 100 Rist, Thomas 46, 49 Robinson, Edward G. 9 Robinson, Kim Stanley: Aurora 13; Mars trilogy 11; The Years of Rice and Salt 61n5 Robinson, Tim: Connemara: Listening to the Wind 163–64 Roman Catholic 80, 276, 282, 283; see also Catholic Romantic 138n4, 144, 162, 214, 271, 276, 278, 280, 286, 325 Romero, George A.: Dawn of the Dead 16; Night of the Living Dead 15 Rosen, Michael 99; Michael Rosen’s Sad Book 99, 101–02n3 Rossetti, Christina 290, 291 Rossetti, Dante Gabriel 290–91 Roth, Lawrence 445 Roth, Philip 323–24, 438, 440n16 Roth, Veronica 108, 113 Rowling, J. K.: Harry Potter 93, 105, 106 Rubenstein, Roberta 221, 222 Rugg, Julie 276, 278 Russian Formalists 10, 167 Russo, James R. 448n2 Rutherford, Jennifer 16 Ryan, Marie-Laure 13, 77 Sabat, Steven R. 389 sacrifice 10, 22, 27, 56, 105, 111, 161, 175, 199, 239, 293, 294, 295, 300, 342, 421, 423, 426, 444, 453, 454; see also self-sacrifice Sadler, David 96, 102n9 Said, Edward W. 365 Sastra Koran 425, 426, 427, 429, 430, 431 Saunders, Corinne 45 Saunders, George: “The Brain-Dead Megaphone” 59; Lincoln in the Bardo 55–60; “The New Mecca” 55; “The Perfect Gerbil” 57; see also bardo Sayers, William 390 Scarry, Elaine 417, 418 Schenck, Celeste M. 182, 186 Scheper-Hughes, Nancy 422–23 Schleifer, Ronald 140–53 Schoentjes, Pierre 415n4

Schor, Esther 280, 296n1 Schweitzer, Darrell 45 science fiction 9–18, 44, 48, 49, 50, 114, 169 Scott, Ridley: Blade Runner 9, 13 séance 295, 302–03 Sebold, Alice: The Lovely Bones 43, 44, 45, 48, 50n4, 54, 64, 72, 75, 78, 79, 80n1 Second Sino-Japanese War 416, 417, 418, 451 seeing 62, 68, 125, 128, 191, 192, 195, 213, 215, 225, 252, 291, 303, 335, 350, 351, 352, 355, 377, 435, 454 self 16, 21, 60, 87, 111, 112, 180, 186, 187, 191, 194, 196, 198, 199, 201, 225, 258, 267, 272, 278, 284, 298, 336, 364, 368, 373, 375, 389, 392n1, 418, 436 selfhood 73, 350, 389, 435 self-reflexive 69n2, 85, 87, 179, 416, 422, 426 self-sacrifice 10, 56, 295, 300, 421 semantic 148, 207, 208, 209, 210, 236, 268, 272, 308, 363, 400 semiotic 128, 142, 144, 148, 207, 208, 209, 210, 272, 277, 281 Seno Gumira Ajidarma 426, 428, 429–30; “Eyewitness” 426, 428, 429, 432n14; “The Incident” 427–29, 431; “The Mystery of the Town of Ningi” 426, 428 serial 118, 119, 199, 201, 321, 417, 418, 423 sex 93, 96, 134, 194, 197–200, 291–95, 324, 338, 341 Shakespeare, William 32, 38, 78, 132–35, 266–74, 277, 280, 319, 338, 339; Hamlet 20, 46, 47, 51n12, 51n14, 78, 99, 267, 268–72, 361, 363, 367, 404; Julius Caesar 133; King Lear 267, 398, 399, 401, 402, 403–04; Romeo and Juliet 78, 132, 133–36, 403–04; The Tempest 78, 135, 273 Sheils, Barry 190–205 Shelley, Mary 369, 398, 401–02; Frankenstein 9, 10, 16, 281, 283, 285, 401, 402; The Last Man 16, 369 Shelley, Percy Bysshe 183, 185, 188n5, 210, 278–79, 368 Shem, Samuel: The House of God 141, 147–49 Shepard, Lucius: Green Eyes 15 Sherman, Donovan 20–28 Shewmon, Alan 401, 402, 404 Short, Damien 444 Shoten, Tokuma 161 Shouse, Eric 144 silence 97, 99, 101, 162, 168, 192, 206, 208–10, 212–15, 218, 224, 225, 252, 310, 351, 367, 373, 386, 387, 411, 427, 428–31, 450, 451 Simpson, David 311, 313, 316n16 simulation 123, 125 Singapore Memory Project 228–31 Singapore poetry 228–39 Sir Amadace 437 Sir Orfeo 44–45, 49

466

Index skull 127, 272, 376 Smith, Adam 185 Smith, Ali 50n3, 59, 61n3, 64, 74 Smith, Andrew: A Grasshopper Jungle 108; The Alex Crow 114 Smith, Charlotte: Elegiac Sonnets 186–87 Smith, Hallett 269 Smith, Sidney: The Gumps 117–18 Sobchack, Vivian 125, 126, 129n6 social death 390, 391, 442–44, 445, 447 Sontag, Susan 16, 363 Sophocles 26, 249, 355 soul 23, 51n13, 51n17, 56, 80, 83, 87, 96, 100, 171, 173, 183, 220, 252, 259, 267–68, 269, 270, 272, 273, 274, 277, 279–80, 282, 283, 288–89, 296, 296n2, 300–01, 303, 390, 435–36, 437, 439, 440n19, 447n1 spatial 10, 55, 75, 77, 190, 201, 226n1, 229, 234, 236, 238, 260, 353, 358 spatialization 62, 216–26 speaking object 245–46, 247 Spinks, Lee 144 Spinoza, Benedict 270, 327, 358 spirit 45, 56, 59, 160–62, 171, 179, 183, 272, 273, 286, 290, 295, 303, 348, 390, 439 spiritual 24, 97, 126, 148, 161, 162, 165, 166, 175, 176, 216, 219, 277, 279–80, 282, 288, 290, 291, 294, 295, 298, 299, 303, 305, 344, 375, 383, 390, 434–35, 454 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty 361 spy war drama 418; see also war drama Stableford, Brian M. 50 Stanzel, Franz Karl 42, 43 Star Wars 10 Steele, Joseph 308 Stendhal 152 Stephenson, Jen 381n1 Stephenson, Neal: Seveneves 17 stereotype 96, 120, 392n1, 412 Sterling, Bruce: Holy Fire 11, 12; Schismatrix 11, 12, 15 Sterne, Jonathan 302 Sterne, Lawrence 79n2–3, 69n5 Stevens, Wallace 151, 152, 268, 273, 368 Stewart, Garrett 288, 411, 414 Stoermer, Eugene F. 160 Stoicism 22, 24, 25, 26 Strayed, Cheryl 327 Styan, J. L. 33 subject 16, 53, 68, 85, 88, 94, 96, 106, 113, 118, 119, 120, 132, 163, 181–82, 183, 184, 185–87, 187n1, 191, 195, 201, 206, 209, 210, 211–13, 223, 225, 231, 239, 258, 262–63, 264, 284, 286, 290, 307, 309, 313, 314, 315, 319–27, 353, 355, 359, 391, 416, 418, 422, 423n4, 430, 437 subjectivity 29, 30, 69n5, 111, 113, 193, 196, 199, 200, 201, 206, 212–13, 217–18, 223, 225, 226,

236, 237, 238, 277, 278, 281, 290, 298, 364, 368, 369, 426, 429, 435 Sudnow, David 443 suffering 21, 100, 110, 140, 142, 147, 150, 163–65, 166, 167, 173, 198, 282, 284, 292, 300, 310, 334, 336, 344, 345, 357, 358, 374, 392, 400, 417, 422–23, 428, 444, 448n4 suicide 29, 34, 38, 39, 56, 73, 85, 101–2n3, 112, 119, 127, 133, 134, 136, 162, 166, 180–87, 180n1, 224, 261, 294, 321, 322, 327n5, 327–8n6, 356, 357, 403 superhero 118–19, 173 supernatural 15, 45, 46, 47, 49–50, 53, 55, 59, 126, 141, 267, 282, 283, 284, 285, 302, 303, 343, 348n3, 358, 376 survival 17, 85, 94, 133, 160, 162, 166, 245, 247, 253n6, 257, 269, 270, 271, 288, 289, 362, 369, 374, 389, 421, 422, 440n19 suspense 111, 207, 209–10, 379, 403, 407–08, 414n3, 419, 446; see also narrative tension Suvin, Darko 10 Sweeting, Helen 443 Swift, Helen 86, 257–65 Swift, Jonathan 69, 310–11; Gulliver’s Travels 48, 49, 50, 51n18, 63; “Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift” 184, 188n4 syntax 65, 207, 209, 213–14, 217, 236 “tame death” 277, 435, 438, 440 Tan, Amy: Saving Fish from Drowning 54, 76 Tan, Ian 216–27 Tan, Kenneth Paul 231 Tangney, John 266–75 Taniguchi, Jirô 160–62 Tarlow, Sarah 276, 285 Tay, Eddie 230 Tay, Kheng Soon 231–32 Taylor, Charles 327n1 Taylor, Jane H. M. 261 Taylor, Jeremy 316 Taylor, John 432n2 teenager 76, 106–15, 451–52 television 9, 13, 15, 16, 71, 79, 123, 126, 144, 236, 416–18, 422–23 temporal 10, 11, 13, 14, 24, 56–57, 66, 67, 70n7, 75, 144, 217, 225, 226n1, 229, 230, 236, 238, 260, 264, 315, 326, 352, 353, 354, 356, 418; see also time Tennyson, Alfred T.: In Memoriam 191, 288, 289–90, 366, 368 tension 69n2, 119, 125, 145, 146, 160, 182, 207, 209, 213, 218, 230, 264, 298, 342–45, 346–48, 368, 389, 397–98, 408, 412, 414n3, 422, 434, 438, 441n23 testament 162, 257–64, 264n2–3, 311, 314, 435 thanatography 117, 119, 362, 365; see also autothanatography

467

Index thanatology 276, 277, 281, 283, 285, 368 The Disguiser 416–24 The Shewings of Julian of Norwich 435, 438, 439 theater 20–24, 26–27, 27n5, 29–39, 40n3, 40n5, 87, 124, 137, 138n6, 223, 233, 301; see also metatheater Thomas, D. M.: The White Hotel 53, 71, 78 Thomas, Derek 346 Thomas, Dylan 141, 147, 149, 150, 191 Thompson, Stacy 171–79, 416 Thumboo, Edwin 228–29, 231–33, 236, 238 time 17, 20–22, 26, 53, 54, 55, 56–57, 60, 66, 67, 68, 83–86, 88, 107, 112, 117, 127, 128, 132, 167, 172, 193, 195, 215, 216, 217, 221–22, 224, 225–26, 226n1, 231, 232, 233, 260, 266, 267, 270, 289, 311, 325, 353–56, 358, 362, 370, 373, 378–79, 380–81, 388, 397, 401, 406, 412, 438, 445, 451, 453; see also temporal; time-travel time-travel 10–15, 17 Tolstoy, Leo 342, 364; The Death of Ivan Ilych 343–45, 346–47, 375 tragedy 22–23, 26–27, 132–38, 141, 143, 145, 150–51, 198, 249, 251, 267, 269, 270, 403, 406, 408; see also revenge tragedy transcendence 14, 186, 210, 232, 277, 280, 282, 285, 343, 376, 379 transcendental 44, 142, 217, 361 trauma 63, 109, 117, 121, 165, 181, 217, 221, 223, 268, 269, 273, 281, 285, 380, 384, 385, 391, 397, 402, 417, 428, 430, 431, 184, 188n4, 450, 454 Trites, Roberta Seelinger 107, 111 Turner, Mark 42, 43 Turville-Petre, Thorlac 436–37 Tutuola, Amos: The Palm-Wine Drinkard 54 Twain, Mark: Huckleberry Finn 93 twentieth century 10, 13, 40n4, 54, 59, 62, 68, 73, 117, 118, 120, 135, 141, 164, 166, 182, 193, 194, 270, 273, 323, 324, 355, 364, 372, 417, 418 Ulrich, Plenzdorf 78 Ulrich, Roberta 164 undead 15–16, 45, 119, 285, 389, 392n1, 402 understatement 407, 409, 410, 411, 414 undiscovered country 269, 361 Uniform Determination of Death Act (1981) 399 Updike, John 365 upstream 84, 86, 90 urban 117, 228, 229, 234–35, 295, 325, 442, 445, 446 urbanization 288, 303, 442, 444, 445, 446 Ussher, Arland 354 utopia 10, 15, 165, 178, 454 van Berkum, Jos J. A. 43 Verhoeven, Paul: Robocop 9, 12

Verne, Jules 305; The Castle in Transylvania 299–301 verse form 185, 186, 190, 191, 199, 204n6, 207, 209, 212, 214, 245–52, 258, 368 Villeneuve, Denis: Arrival 14 Villon, François 62, 257–63 Violi, Jen: Putting Makeup on Dead People 110 virtual reality 9, 17–18 Visible Evidence 125 vision 68, 77, 93, 138n3, 140, 162, 164, 168, 179, 183, 185, 200, 219–20, 221–23, 224, 226n1, 228, 229, 270, 272, 347, 352, 355–59, 385, 436–37, 446–47, 451 voice 23, 55, 57–60, 66, 74, 77, 79, 89, 98, 100, 138n5, 165, 167, 176, 180, 183, 186, 187, 217, 222, 223, 225, 231, 232, 238, 245–46, 259, 260, 261, 262, 263, 264, 283, 291, 298–306, 338, 365, 367, 368, 373, 377, 379, 380, 381, 388, 389, 412, 413, 429–30, 443 Von Hofmannsthal, Hugo 409, 415n4 Vonnegut, Kurt: Slaughterhouse-Five 14 Wadiak, Walter 434–41 Wall, Aimee 257, 259, 260, 261, 264, 264n5–6 Wallace, David Foster 73 Walmsley, Peter 276 Walpole, Horace 47, 49, 280; The Castle of Otranto 47, 49 Walsh, Julie 190–205 Walsh, Kelly S. 217 Wang, Michelle 416–24 war 10, 14, 16, 17, 22, 46, 59, 87, 118, 119, 126, 165, 167, 181, 195, 197, 203n2, 250, 303, 319, 323, 337, 384–85, 390, 391, 406, 409, 411, 413, 416, 417–23, 423n4, 428, 432n2; see also Cold War; nuclear war; Second Sino-Japanese War; World War I; World War II war drama 417–18, 420, 423 Ward, Jesmyn: Sing, Unburied, Sing 74, 76 Warfel, Harry 448n2 Warner, Sam Bass 443 wartime 322, 413, 417, 420, 423; death in 417, 423; see also battle; combat Watt, Mélanie: Bug in a Vacuum 95 Waugh, Evelyn: The Loved One 397 Wee, C. J. W.-L 228, 229 Wee, Samuel Caleb 206–15 Weinbrot, Howard D. 182, 185 Weinmann, Frédéric 364, 368 Weinstock, Jeffery Andrew 443 Weiss, Peter: Abschied von den Eltern 333–41 well-managed death 303, 304 Wheeler, Michael 289, 290, 296n1 White, E. B.: Charlotte’s Web 94 Whitehead, Colson: Zone One 15–16, 17 Wieners, John 190, 194, 196, 197–203, 204n6; The Hotel Wentley Poems 197–98, 200–03

468

Index Wilde, Oscar 319, 323; The Picture of Dorian Gray 296 will see testament Williams, C. K. 365, 368 Williams, Margery: The Velveteen Rabbit 94–95, 102n7 Williams, William Carlos 190 Wilson, Carl 161 Wilson, Edmund 325 Wilson, Emma 123 Wilson, Garragh 161 Wiltshire, John 389 Wiman, Christian 347 Winkfield, Latasha 398–99, 400–01, 402, 403, 404–05 Wiseman, Angela M. 96, 102n9 Witek, Joseph 117, 119 witness 11, 13, 31–32, 34, 35, 37, 56–57, 62, 68, 113, 126, 162, 164, 167, 194, 217, 234, 258, 263–64, 282, 284, 290, 303, 363, 374, 376, 377, 406, 408–10, 426–31, 432n10, 432n13, 440, 445 Wittenberg, David 10, 13 women 22, 24–27, 27n1, 27n4, 79, 80n3, 85, 87, 110, 119, 132, 134, 135, 137, 138n4, 165, 182–83, 186, 196, 246, 250, 251, 254n46, 254n50, 268, 272, 282, 299, 300–02, 348n3, 374, 379, 385, 390, 419–20, 440n2; death of 118–19, 132, 136, 137, 138n4 Wondrich, Roberta Gefter 358

Wood, Claire 289, 296n6 Woolf, Virginia 216–26, 319–20, 364; Mrs. Dalloway 140 World War I/First World War 181, 217, 326, 417 World War II/Second World War 72, 73, 165, 167, 383, 384, 390, 414, 416, 417–18, 452 Wright, Thomas 436 Yakushima 161 Yalom, Irvin D. 358 Yeats, W. B. 145, 181, 182, 208–10, 211, 212, 214, 190–96, 198, 199, 200; “The Municipal Gallery Revisited” 194–96, 198 yellow fever 443, 447, 448n4 Yeow, Kai Chai 228–29, 234–39 Young Adult fiction 10, 94, 101n3, 105–15 Young, Edward 278, 279; Night Thoughts 278, 279 Yu, Charles: How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe 13 Zelazny, Roger: This Immortal 11 Zigarovich, Jolene 288–97 Zimmerman, Martina 389, 390 Zimmerman, Virginia 106 Žižek, Slavoj 172 zombie see undead Zunshine, Lisa 43

469