Narrating Death: The Limit of Literature 9781138360365, 9780429424663

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Narrating Death

The editors offer a valuable, singular study probing strategies for negotiating the unknowable passage from life to death as depicted in a diverse range of international literary classics. Emphasizing aesthetic devices and philosophical underpinings used by authors of each literary classic chosen, the conception of death as a passage exposes the limits and transformative qualities of death, that ‘uncrossable border.’ This is a major study certain to inspire scholars to pursue further examinations of this most universal of journeys. —James Fisher, The University of North Carolina at Greensboro

Drawing on literary and visual texts spanning from the twelfth century to the present, this volume of essays explores what happens when narratives try to push the boundaries of what can be said about death. Daniel K. Jernigan is Associate Professor of English Literature at Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Singapore. He has written extensively on Tom Stoppard, including his monograph, Tom Stoppard: Bucking the Postmodern (2013). He also edited Flann O’Brien: Plays and Teleplays (2013) and Aidan Higgins’s collection of radio plays, Darkling Plain: Texts for the Air (2010). Walter Wadiak is Assistant Professor of English at Lafayette College. He specializes in Middle English literature and has written for Exemplaria, Philological Quarterly, and Glossator. His book, Savage Economy: The Returns of Middle English Romance (Notre Dame, 2016), examines the afterlives of chivalric culture in late-medieval English romances. W. Michelle Wang is Assistant Professor at Nanyang Technological University’s School of Humanities, English. She received her PhD from The Ohio State University and was postdoctoral fellow at Queen Mary University of London, specializing in postmodern and contemporary fiction. She has published articles in the journals Narrative, Review of Contemporary Fiction, and Journal of Narrative Theory.

Routledge Studies in Comparative Literature

1  Bicultural Literature and Film in French and English Edited by Peter I. Barta and Phil Powrie 2  Modernism and the Avant-garde Body in Spain and Italy Edited by Nicolás Fernández-Medina and Maria Truglio 3  The Historical Novel, Transnationalism, and the Postmodern Era Susan Brantly 4  Literature and Ethics in Contemporary Brazil Edited by Vinicius de Carvalho and Nicola Gavioli 5  Cryptic Subtexts in Literature and Film Secret Messages and Buried Treasure Steven F. Walker 6  Narrating Death The Limit of Literature Edited by Daniel K. Jernigan, Walter Wadiak, and W. Michelle Wang

Narrating Death The Limit of Literature

Edited by Daniel K. Jernigan, Walter Wadiak, and W. Michelle Wang

First published 2019 by Routledge 711 Third 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 © 2019 Taylor & Francis The right of the editors 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 CIP data has been applied for. ISBN: 978-1-138-36036-5 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-429-42466-3 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by codeMantra

So many crucial events take place behind people’s backs, when they aren’t in a position to watch: birth and death, for instance. —Oryx and Crake, Margaret Atwood

Contents

List of Contributors Introduction

ix 1

Da n i e l K . J e r n i g a n , Wa lt e r Wa d i a k , a n d W. M i c h e l l e Wa n g

Part I

The Uncrossable Border 1 Photography and First-Person Death: Derrida, Barthes, Poe

9 11

K e v i n R i o r da n

2 “This memory all men may have in mynd”: Everyman and the Work of Mourning

27

Wa lt e r Wa d i a k

3 From Nothing to Never: Facing Death in King Lear

43

M ich a el N eill

4 “Is there no danger in counterfeiting death?”: Molière’s The Imaginary Invalid

62

Da n i e l K . J e r n i g a n

Part II

Trajectories

75

5 “She is the God of Calvin, she sees the beginning and the end”: Narrating Life and Death in the Fiction of Muriel Spark 77 J o s e p h H . O ’ M e a ly

viii Contents 6 Talking to the Dead: Narrative Closure and the Political Unconscious in Neil Jordan’s Fiction

91

K eith H opper

7 Samuel Johnson and the Grammar of Death

107

L aura Dav ies

8 Death and Romance in Sir Orfeo

126

E li z abeth A llen

Part III

Aesthetic Crossings

147

9 Death and the Maidens: John Banville’s Ekphrastic Storyworlds

149

N eil M urphy

10 Blood Meridian, the Sublime, and Aesthetic Narrativizations of Death

161

W. M ichelle Wang

11 Murder Amidst the Chocolates: Martin McDonagh’s Multifaceted Uses of Death in In Bruges

176

W illiam C . B oles

12 The Ruined Voice in Tom Murphy’s Bailegangaire

189

C heryl J ulia L ee

Index

207

List of Contributors

Elizabeth Allen is Associate Professor of English at University of California, Irvine. Her first book, False Fables and Exemplary Truth in Later Middle English Literature, came out from Palgrave in 2005. Her current project, Uncertain Refuge: Ideas of Sanctuary in Medieval English Literature, explores the symbolic ramifications of seeking sanctuary in holy places. William C. Boles,  Professor of English at Rollins College, authored Understanding David Henry Hwang (University of South Carolina, 2013) and The Argumentative Theatre of Joe Penhall ­(McFarland, 2011). He is a board member of the Comparative Drama Conference. Laura Davies is Director of Studies at King’s College, Cambridge. Her research focuses primarily on non-fiction prose and is concerned with the relationship between lived experience and textual representation in the long eighteenth century and, particularly, with the kinds of experience that elude or resist language and narrative. She has published articles and book chapters on attitudes towards orality, Samuel Johnson and speech disorders, James Boswell and soundscapes, and representations of time in spiritual autobiography. She is currently at work on a book about dreams. Keith Hopper teaches Literature and Film Studies at Oxford U ­ niversity’s Department for Continuing Education. He is the author of Flann O’Brien: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Post-modernist (revised edition, 2009); general editor of the twelve-volume Ireland into Film series (2001–2007); and co-editor of Flann O’Brien: Centenary Essays (2011) and The Short Fiction of Flann O’Brien (2013). Recent work includes co-editing (with Neil Murphy) a series of four books relating to the late Dermot Healy: The Collected Short Stories and an edited reprint of Healy’s debut novel Fighting with Shadows appeared in 2015; The Collected Plays and a volume of critical essays entitled Writing the Sky: Observations and Essays on Dermot Healy were published in 2016.

x  List of Contributors Daniel K. Jernigan  is Associate Professor of English Literature at Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Singapore. He has written extensively on Tom Stoppard, including his recent monograph, Tom Stoppard: Bucking the Postmodern (2013). He also edited Flann O’Brien: Plays and Teleplays (2013) and Aidan Higgins’s collection of radio plays, Darkling Plain: Texts for the Air (2010). Cheryl Julia Lee is a PhD candidate at Durham University. Her interests lie in contemporary fiction, aesthetic theory, and philosophy. Neil Murphy is Professor of contemporary literature at NTU, Singapore. He is the author of Irish Fiction and Postmodern Doubt (2004) and editor of Aidan Higgins: The Fragility of Form (2010) and of the revised edition of Higgins’ Balcony of Europe (2010). He 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 (2013). He has published numerous articles and book chapters on contemporary fiction, Irish writing, and theories of reading. His most recent book monograph, John Banville, was published by Bucknell University Press in May 2018. Michael Neill  is “Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Auckland. He is the author of Issues of Death (Oxford, 1997) and Putting History to the Question (Columbia, 2000). His editions of early modern plays include Anthony and Cleopatra (Oxford, 1994), Othello (Oxford, 2006), and The Duchess of Malfi (Norton, 2015).” Joseph H. O’Mealy is Emeritus Professor of English and former Dean of the College of Languages, Linguistics, and Literature at the University of Hawaii, Manoa. He is the author of Alan Bennett: A Critical Introduction (Routledge, 2001), several essays on Bennett – most recently in Modern British Drama on Screen (Cambridge, 2013) – as well as essays on Dickens, Conrad, and Margaret Oliphant. Kevin Riordan is a 2018 Writing Fellow at the Johannesburg Institute for Advanced Studies, and an Assistant Professor in the School of Humanities at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. ­R iordan’s research interests include modernism, theater and performance studies, and world literature. His writing has appeared in journals such as Modern Drama, Performance Research, and Intertexts, and he is currently at work on a performance history of the around-the-world tour. Walter Wadiak  is Assistant Professor of English at Lafayette College. He specializes in Middle English literature and has written for Exemplaria, Philological Quarterly, and Glossator. His book, Savage Economy: The Returns of Middle English Romance (Notre Dame,

List of Contributors  xi 2016), examines the afterlives of chivalric culture in late-medieval English romances. W. Michelle Wang is Assistant Professor at Nanyang Technological University’s School of Humanities, English. She received her PhD from The Ohio State University and was postdoctoral fellow at Queen Mary University of London, specializing in postmodern and contemporary fiction. She has published articles in the journals Narrative, Review of Contemporary Fiction, and Journal of Narrative Theory.

Introduction Daniel K. Jernigan, Walter Wadiak, and W. Michelle Wang

Death is an enigma. No less so in literature—where, most famously, it is Hamlet’s “undiscovered country.” Indeed, the very boundary between life and death is itself reminiscent of the boundary between the fictional and the real. Consider, for example, death in the theatre, where dying on stage has so much potential for drawing attention to the illusory nature of theatre. Indeed, what does it mean that a “death” on stage can draw attention to the very artificiality of the stage, except that one death inevitably entails another? The death of illusion. The loss of innocence. Or consider Macbeth, speaking of his queen’s death and imagining his own imminent demise: “Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more” (5.5.17–24). The play only manages to outlive its namesake by forty-seven lines before it, too, is “heard no more.” Perhaps the “always-­ already” inevitability of death in tragedy is why it remains such a compelling theatrical mode. In the diverse range of artistic genres explored in this volume, death in fiction, theatre, drama, and film proves similarly disruptive to comfortable and straightforward narrative expectations. Even as the narrator of Dylan Thomas’s famous poem urges his father to “rage against the dying of the light” (239), the poem rages against its own imminent ending— an ending made all the more inevitable by the fact that the poem, as a villanelle, has a predetermined point of conclusion (a predestined death, one might say). And even as the nature of tragedy practically pre-ordains Macbeth’s death, films such as Dead Man exploit the narrative logic of the Western such that Johnny Depp’s William Blake faces his own inevitable death—an end made all the more certain by the fact that for most of the movie he has a bullet lodged precariously close to his heart. In Jacques Derrida’s Aporias—drawn from a lecture he gave at a conference in his name, “Le Passage des frontières (autour de Jacques Derrida)”—Derrida uses the conference theme to reflect on the border between life and death. While this collection is in no way intended as a meticulous theoretical extension of those ideas, the three types of border Derrida describes in his treatise correspond in compelling ways with three types of narrative limits discussed by our contributors. Indeed, the

2  Daniel K. Jernigan et al. three borders Derrida describes are clearly identified as limits: “three forms of limits, to which I have given the somewhat arbitrary names of problematic closure, anthropological border, and conceptual demarcation” (41). Derrida describes these limits as follows: In one case, the nonpassage resembles an impermeability; it would stem from the opaque existence of an uncrossable border: a door that does not open or that only opens according to an unlocatable condition, according to the inaccessible secret of some shibboleth. Such is the case for all closed borders (exemplarily during war). In another case, the nonpassage, the impasse or aporia, stems from the fact that there is no limit. There is not yet or there is no longer a border to cross, no opposition between two sides: the limit is too porous, permeable, and indeterminate. There is no longer a home [chez-soi] and a not-home [chez-l’autre], whether in peacetime (exemplarily according to the rule of universal peace, even beyond the Kantian sense that presupposes a public, interstate system of rights) or in wartime—war and peace both appreciate, but appreciate very little, the borders. By definition, one always makes very little [peu de cas] of a border. And this “very little” would have to be formalized. Finally, the third type of aporia, the impossible, the antinomy, or the contradiction, is a nonpassage because 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) Derrida’s first kind of limit—the “uncrossable border” that divides life from death—manifests itself in diverse ways in the essays by Kevin Riordan, Walter Wadiak, Michael Neill, and Daniel Jernigan. Ranging from the medieval to the contemporary, these essays each speak to problematic closures of one sort or another as well as to the unique ability or inevitable failure of narrative to transcend these limits. The essays share a sense that there is a problem endemic to the very project of narrating death—with the attempt, invoked in any and all attempts to write about death, to see past what Derrida calls the “opaque” divide that separates life from its opposite. Riordan takes on Derrida’s thinking about this sort of limit explicitly and directly—setting the stage for the other essays in this section by focusing on Derrida’s attempts to understand the many deaths that feature in all of our lives. Roland Barthes was apparently consumed by the idea that any photograph captures something akin to death, where the click of the camera is identified as representative of the “transition” between these two modes of existence. As Riordan explains it, Edgar Allan Poe provided Barthes (and Derrida, in turn) something akin to the narrative

Introduction  3 equivalent of the photograph in his story of a man professing his death from the far side of that uncrossable border: “In committed rereading and through what Derrida calls the ‘violence’ of quotation these authors continue to speak as and for the living, just as we speak for them.” That the limits which define death are ultimately subject to the same penetratingly intertextual gestures as other literary modes speaks well of the professed goals of the project in its entirety, which remains committed to the idea, to quote Riordan, that “interpretative communities can continue to form, change, and disband across life / death.” Wadiak considers the late-medieval play that is virtually synonymous with death, the English Everyman, in relation to its Dutch source, arguing for the English play’s greater emphasis on death as an intimate and emotionally fraught event. Where the Dutch play advertises itself in its title as an exemplary “mirror” of Everyman’s salvation, the English play registers a more complex “memorializing” function in its emphasis on the suffering and isolation of the dying person. Drawing on Philippe Ariès’ account of a late-medieval transition in understandings of death, Wadiak argues that Everyman expresses a tension between Ariès’ “tame death” and the later “death of self” characteristic of modernity. Despite the gestures of theological reassurance preserved in the English play, Everyman exhibits (in Derrida’s terms) a greater sense of the potentially “uncrossable” nature of the border between life and death. In the final analysis, Wadiak argues, the play is “if not exactly ‘modern’ in its understanding of death … then certainly a precocious expression of our own anxieties.” Recognizing that King Lear is perhaps underrepresented in the literature on death in Renaissance drama (including in his own Issues of Death), Neill’s essay elucidates how this modern conception of death—a death “triangulated around three great negatives: ‘nothing,’ ‘no cause,’ and ‘never’”—is designed to force the audience to “confront death as mere blankness.” Ultimately tending towards nihilism, in Neill’s interpretation the play emphasizes the difficulties inherent in narrating an experience of total vacuity. The intrigue of the work lies in the fact that purported restorations—such as Lear’s being outfitted in “fresh clothes” to indicate a potential reprieve from his madness—ultimately prove “to be nothing more than a deceitful prelude to the events of the last act,” whose conclusion Neill suggests leaves “nothing to be seen, when there is no-one there, there is nowhere to go; and, soon enough, no us to go to it.” In his essay on Molière’s final play, The Imaginary Invalid, Jernigan extends these meditations on death in the theatre by considering how counterfeiting illness and death onstage necessarily foregrounds boundaries between the artificial and the real—between playing and being dead. Jernigan recognizes the stage “as a most fitting place for examining these increasingly amorphous boundaries” and finds compelling

4  Daniel K. Jernigan et al. resonance between that boundary which separates stage and audience (the fourth wall) and that boundary which separates the living from the dead. As Jernigan explains it, the fact that Molière’s ironic and enthusiastic embodiment of a chronic hypochondriac did little good in helping him survive the exertions of his fourth performance (which would send him to his deathbed just hours later) is reason enough to believe that this wall is as impenetrable as it has always been. The essays by Joseph O’Mealy, Keith Hopper, Laura Davies, and ­Elizabeth Allen offer a counterpoint or re-reading of the first set of essays by insisting conversely on Derrida’s second kind of limit—the “anthropological limit” as what reveals the porousness of the border separating life and death. In this model, the border exists, but only as a way of marking death as potentially just one stage within the context of life. Death defines and/or is defined by the trajectory of human existence, and the process of narration confounds and is confounded by this same trajectory. In this way of thinking about the boundary, Derrida suggests, “there is not yet or there is no longer a border to cross, no opposition between two sides: the limit is too porous, permeable, and indeterminate” (20). There is no passage because there is no separate stage to be passed. O’Mealy begins with Frank Kermode’s claim—cited by Derrida—that death is a stage that shapes and endows our preceding existence with meaning, and finds this same trajectory at play in Muriel Spark’s novels. Noting Spark’s ambivalent fascination with the Calvinist theology that informed her Scottish Presbyterian upbringing, O’Mealy shows how prolepsis functions throughout Spark’s novels as an analogy for the remorseless certainty of divine foreknowledge—a foreknowledge that the characters in several of the novels attempt to claim for themselves, for which rashness they are invariably punished. Thus, for instance, the heroine of In the Driver’s Seat tries and fails to dictate in advance the circumstances of her death, and Miss Jean Brodie, in the eponymous novel, makes the mistake of supposing herself to be “the God of ­Calvin”; hubristically intent on determining the futures of the girls in her charge, she is unable to foresee her own unceremonious dismissal from her teaching post and subsequent death. For O’Mealy, such ironies serve to remind Spark’s readers that “there is an end beyond the end that we can see.” Yet while the characters’ vision may be limited, this allows us to perceive all the more clearly how—in O’Mealy’s words—“present life and future death walk together” in these novels “as if there were no boundaries between them.” Hopper locates a similar porousness of the boundaries between life and death in the work of the Irish writer and filmmaker Neil Jordan, whose narratives resist closure in ways that should be understood, ­Hopper suggests, as being “rooted in a long-standing tradition of narrating death” that is particular to the Irish cultural imaginary. Beginning with the recognition that Jordan’s work is marked by “an abiding and self-conscious

Introduction  5 fascination with death,” Hopper argues that there is, in the ambivalent endings of almost all of Jordan’s stories, a “macabre dance between Eros (the life instinct) and Thanatos (the death instinct)” that problematizes those endings, as death, marriage, and Oedipal drama intermingle in ways that preclude definitive resolution. While Jordan’s vampire films offer the most direct instance of this refusal to clearly separate death from life, Hopper reads three “exemplary texts”—the opening and closing stories from Night in Tunisia (1976), and the 1994 novel Sunrise with Sea Monster—as also profoundly invested in this refusal. In Sunrise, for instance, “an invisible line” reconnects a son with his dead father, in “a place where both worlds meet,” and their reconciliation in this “liminal in-between space” emphasizes that the work of coming to terms with the past, whether personal or political, necessarily puts the living into communion with the dead. Such crossings suggest for Hopper “the impossibility of narrative closure in the real world, where the ghosts of history and memory invariably come back to haunt.” For Davies, it is the thought of death’s closeness that haunts the living in Samuel Johnson’s tortured and ambivalent meditations on what Derrida calls “the permanent imminence of death.” Davies focuses on the grammar of Johnson’s writing about death in a number of essays in both The Rambler and The Idler, in particular his fraught use of the progressive tense, which attests to the “depth, complexity and irresolution of Johnson’s meditations on indeterminacy.” While cautioning that of course Derrida’s is “not a theoretical vocabulary that Johnson would recognize,” Davies remarks that “the insistent presence of the ‘secret’” in Johnson’s writing about death contains echoes of Derrida’s musings on “the privileged dimension of this experience of the secret” that is death. Just as, for Derrida, “language about death” operates “on the border” between “public” and “private,” so too, for Johnson, the “secret horror” of death is, ironically, what the latter “could not persuade himself to suppress” in his own writing about death, despite its being “an affliction perhaps not necessary to be imparted to the Public.” As Davies argues here, the profound ambivalence characteristic of Johnson’s writing about death “enact his endeavors to reconcile an intense fear of death with an equally strong commitment as a Christian moralist author to ‘virtue and to truth.’” In the last essay in this section, Allen, like Hopper, explores the ways in which narratives of death can reach across the border that separates death from life. Her focus is romance, a genre that “sutures” life to death. For Allen, “the beauty of romance’s happy endings, the symmetry of its resolutions, are part and parcel of its genealogical extensions, its capacity to thwart death even as it admits death into its system of representation.” Allen reads the Middle English Sir Orfeo as one such effort at “suturing” life and death together. The central image of the “grafted” tree in Orfeo—like the “invisible line” of Jordan’s Sunrise with Sea

6  Daniel K. Jernigan et al. Monster as read earlier in this section by Hopper—figures the possibility of a connection between life and death. Precisely because romance as a genre contains a “tragic core,” Allen provocatively suggests, it allows us to imagine a crossing between worlds that uncannily resemble each other: in the case of Orfeo, the ideal but static world of Orfeo’s kingdom and a Fairyland peopled with living dead whose mute stillness mirrors that of Orfeo’s queen, a figure who by the romance’s end has been ostensibly but, on Allen’s reading, only provisionally restored to the world of the living. Like Orfeo’s “impossible narration of his own death” in the poem’s concluding scene, the silence of his rescued queen hints that this romance’s fantasy of “dynastic continuity” depends upon a confrontation with death that cannot be fully erased by the romance’s end. Rather, Orfeo shows how romance inhabits “the impossible threshold between life and death, a territory characterized by internal contradiction.” As each of these readings suggest in their different ways, the border between life and death can be envisioned as a porous and unstable one. But what if, as Derrida goes on to suggest in the passage quoted near the beginning of this introduction, the very distinction between life and death is an “antinomy” or “contradiction,” such that the “passage” from life to death cannot even be conceived as movement? The third and final set of essays deals with Derrida’s paradox of death as “both an impossible and a necessary passage” (Aporias 17): thinking through this impossibility is the challenge taken up by the texts analyzed in essays by Neil Murphy, Michelle Wang, William Boles, and Cheryl Julia Lee. Like other essays in this collection that tackle problems with narrating or staging death, essays in the final section focus on contemporary works and their interrelations with art forms such as painting and music, exploring various artistic strategies which might allow the texts (or characters) to transcend narrative limits inherent in the subject of death. Whether or not these strategies can be deemed successful in specific works of art—and the contributors come to differing conclusions on this score—each essay addresses issues which include: what the border we call death concretely implies; what “affects the very experience of the threshold” we call death (33); and, in relation to the issue of narration, from what vantage point this border is being examined. Murphy’s choice of epigraph from John Banville’s The Sea problematizes the very notion of death as passage, as the drowned twins Chloe and Myles remain “suspended in a vast bright space” of the narrator’s mind. Abounding in such “deathly in-between ontological states,” ­Murphy calls The Sea “Banville’s book of the dead” and explores the role of ekphrasis in the novelist’s work, where “paintings are offered as a means of combating death.” In The Book of Evidence, Murphy explores death’s paradox in the figure of its murderer-protagonist Freddie Montgomery, whose “true failing” is his inability to imagine his victim “vividly at any point before he killed her”: Freddie admits, “I could kill her

Introduction  7 because for me she was not alive.” Murphy notes that “[t]he resulting death speaks primarily of an aesthetic failing of a very particular kind.” By focusing on the “philosophical question of ontological vanishing” in both novels, Murphy argues that Banville uses art as a strategy of defiance, a means of recovering the other from “deathly oblivion.” Wang detects a similar spirit of defiance in Cormac McCarthy’s elaborate aestheticizations of death, which she contends serve as a means of foregrounding ethical concerns in Blood Meridian. Focusing on “the sublime as an aesthetic mode of narrating death,” Wang observes that McCarthy’s theatrical “images of death function like stylized, visual choreography,” facilitating “a corresponding unease many critics and readers experience in the gratuitous spectatorship of violent deaths in which we are thus implicated when reading the novel.” Such disquietude is magnified by the text’s “conspicuous absence of ethical comment or judgment”; that Blood Meridian is “driven by historically based sources only serves to make such refusal to engage in moral conversations even more disturbing.” Wang ultimately argues that “working our way out of Derrida’s paralyzing aporia or nonpassage”—in the confrontations staged “between violent death and poetic beauty,” between “historical representation and artful knowledge”—is the ethical move that Blood Meridian invites readers to undertake. Boles’s essay begins by addressing the challenges of staging death in theatre, explaining how Martin McDonagh’s turn from stage to film provided “a much richer and multifaceted canvas on which to explore the power and narrative possibilities” of character deaths. Focusing on McDonagh’s theme of “hitman purgatory” in the film In Bruges, the characters Ray and Ken’s state of “limbo” as they await their next assignment vividly invokes Derrida’s theme of nonpassage. Though dispensing death should come as second nature to the hitmen, Ray and Ken are forced to confront the enormity of the question of what death means when the conceptual line between those considered acceptable versus non-acceptable targets (in this case, children and friends) is violated—what Boles terms the film’s “principle of honor among thieves.” Attending closely to the film’s use of paintings, “locations, editing, and cinematography,” Boles explains that McDonagh “doubles down on the stray bullet motif” to fashion a complex interlacing of how intentionality, innocence, guilt, penance, and redemption affect the experience of the threshold we call death. In the collection’s final essay, Lee explores how playwright Tom ­Murphy’s Bailegangaire stages an “encounter with silence (and along with it, death, absence, and loss)” in the figure of Mommo—an elderly seanchaí who “represents a dying oral tradition.” Displaced “along with the general decline of Gaelic culture” in the 1800s, Lee notes that the “seanchaí’s voice was always already a voice reaching from the past, a voice of memory, which stands in the breach of life and death.” Pointing to “Mommo’s speech-as-glossolalia” as an extreme manifestation

8  Daniel K. Jernigan et al. of “voice-as-sound,” Lee explains how “[g]lossolalia speaks both to the physical and figurative limits of reality,” gesturing “to the existence of a God and an afterlife, and more broadly, of mysteries that cannot be explained.” Signaling our limited ability to know and represent experience, glossolalia functions as an artistic strategy for mediating Derrida’s nonpassage between life and death—an attempt to transcend narrative limits by giving “form to an intention or feeling that cannot be otherwise communicated.” Lee argues that in aspiring to music or song, Mommo’s faltering narration ultimately reveals the playwright’s “faith in the potential of human utterance,” whereby “the encounter with death staged in the ruined voice” is subverted by the art forms that “live in spite of death.” The essays in this volume, then, approach the question of Derrida’s “limit” in diverse ways. And mindful of this diversity, we do not mean, in speaking of a figurative “limit” of literature, to be limiting in our sense of what might be said (or narrated) about death. We do mean to raise death as a problem—perhaps even the central problem—of literature as it attempts to make sense of life retrospectively. On the one hand, death is what confers meaning on life. “What draws the reader,” Walter ­Benjamin avers, “is the hope of warming his shivering life with a death he reads about” (100–101). But can we ever enter that flame? Or must we—like the speaker in Wordsworth’s “There Was a Boy”—stand “mute” before the spectacle of death, our inability to narrate death written into our very attempts to do so? Drawing on literary texts spanning from the fourteenth century to the present, this volume of essays explores, confronts, and challenges the limits of narrating death, reimagining the transformative possibilities of literature that dares to approach or even cross the border that separates us from the unknowable.

Note We are most grateful to Dr. Tissina George for her invaluable assistance in the preparation of this document and to Nanyang Technological University for their financial and logistic support.

Works Cited Benjamin, Walter. “The Storyteller: Reflections on the Works of Nikolai Leskov.” 1936. Illuminations. Translated by Harry Zohn, edited and introduced by Hannah Arendt. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1968, pp. 83–109. Derrida, Jacques. Aporias. Translated by Thomas Dutoit. Stanford UP, 1993. Shakespeare, William. Macbeth. The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, revised edition. Wordsworth Editions Ltd, 1997, pp. 858–884. Thomas, Dylan. “Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night.” The Poems of Dylan Thomas. New Directions, 1952. Wordsworth, William. “There Was a Boy.” The Poems of William Wordsworth. Edward Moxon, 1865, p. 141.

Part I

The Uncrossable Border

1 Photography and First-Person Death Derrida, Barthes, Poe1 Kevin Riordan

(Photo: powerless to say what is obvious. The birth of literature.) Roland Barthes, Mourning Diary

In response to his friend’s death in 1980, Jacques Derrida wrote an essay for Poétique called “The Deaths of Roland Barthes.” Derrida opens by addressing the plural in his title. He defers to Barthes’s own characterization of his deaths-to-come in the latter’s last published work, Camera Lucida. There, Barthes writes about photography’s many deathly qualities in relation to his mother’s recent passing, and from these reflections he anticipates his own death: “From now on I could do no more than await my total, undialectical death” (Camera Lucida 72). In naming this one—the total, undialectical death—Barthes implies that there were, and are, other deaths. Negotiating this plural, Derrida reads the late Barthes, and reads with the late Barthes, to mourn, celebrate, and remember his friend. Camera Lucida, as Derrida sees it, has “kept watch over its author,” and for Barthes and Derrida, this work becomes a shared meditation on closure (Derrida, “Deaths” 36). While Barthes had addressed death before—most famously that of the author in 1968—Camera Lucida is unprecedentedly personal. Subtitled Reflections on Photography, the book discusses the practice, history, and “wound” of photography, but it is also framed as a work of mourning for his mother. Haunted by her absence, Barthes finds in the eclectic photographs before him—nuns and soldiers in Nicaragua, “Idiot Children in an Institution,” Nicéphore Niépce’s 1823 “The Dinner Table”—a single common element: “that rather terrible thing which is there in every photograph: the return of the dead” (Camera Lucida 9). For Derrida, writing after Barthes’s own untimely death, Camera Lucida becomes its own kind of wound, an occasion for rereading and for mourning. Derrida considers Barthes’s many deaths, “his deaths, these and those of his relatives, those deaths which must have inhabited him,” to trace the more general relations between death, language, and thought (“Deaths” 52). Throughout the “Deaths” essay,

12  Kevin Riordan he reminds himself of this purpose: “I must concern myself with this thought of a death that begins, like thought and like death, in the memory of language… a certain thought of death set everything in motion” (52). Late in the piece, however, Derrida interrupts himself, realizing that there is something amiss in his process. He describes his scene of writing, and he sets Camera Lucida aside to peruse photographs of Barthes in other books and newspapers. He writes: “I can no longer tear myself away from the photographs and the handwriting. I don’t know what I’m still looking for, but I’m looking for it in the direction of his body” (63). In this self-conscious interruption, in this dramatized moment of not knowing what to do, Derrida fortuitously receives a copy of an old Barthes essay in the mail. In the simulated presence of his own reader (herself reading Derrida after his death), Derrida unexpectedly reads the words of the recently deceased. Barthes’s “Textual Analysis of Poe’s ‘Valdemar’” had been published eight years earlier, but this was the first time Derrida had seen it. In receiving this deferred package—deferrals and letters are, of course, touchstones for deconstruction—Derrida feels again the loss of his friend. He decides to look here—to this document, to its unexpected arrival—to reckon with the deaths of Roland Barthes. The 1973 “Valdemar” essay is a compact recapitulation of the kind of reading Barthes pioneered in the much longer S/Z, his book-length study of signifiance in Balzac’s “Sarassine.” Derrida finds in this seemingly minor work Barthes’s deliberate reading of the Poe story. Skimming through the analysis, Derrida is startled when he finds in Poe what Barthes himself had been startled to find, a statement that “says nothing but itself,” an utterance that is “radically impossible” (Barthes, “Textual Analysis” 153). Derrida encounters a chain of retellings and rereadings in which he himself is implicated. He reads Barthes reading—now beyond the grave—a character saying the impossible: “I am dead.” Through their readerly and writerly engagements with Camera ­Lucida, Barthes and Derrida join many other thinkers in pursuing questions of life and death in relation to photography. Walter Benjamin famously wrote that the camera gives “the moment a posthumous shock, as it were” (“On Some Motifs” 175), and Susan Sontag claimed that every photograph is a “memento mori” (15). If, as André Bazin puts it, “death is the unique moment par excellence… the frontier between the duration of consciousness and the objective time of things” (30), then photography provides the mechanical means to transgress that frontier, to indexically transform the living or the conscious into things. In their works of mourning, Barthes and Derrida enter this broader conversation to theorize how one can think, see, and feel in relation to the photograph from a number of different positions (as its object, its producer, or its viewer). To locate a fundamental unit of analysis, they both zoom in on the “camera’s click” as a simulation of the instant of death. But this

Photography and First-Person Death  13 punctuating, puncturing click only disperses their ideas once again like so many waves and particles of light; the camera’s click propels both thinkers elsewhere, towards ambitious discussions of the subject, of language, and of the living’s relationship with the dead. While photography is productive for understanding the timing and spacing of death, literature lends Barthes and Derrida a set of more flexible tactics with which to narrate, describe, and pluralize that understanding. Poe’s uniquely first-person “death sentence” in particular poses, for both thinkers, a provocative challenge to their photographically inflected vocabularies as well as to the broader conventions of linguistics and philosophy; “I am dead” seems to be neither descriptive, constative, nor performative. And yet its enunciation is perfectly plausible—though no less provocative—within literary fiction’s horizons of expectation. Literature, as Poe’s “Valdemar” is especially apt in revealing, is expansive and fundamentally transgressive to the language in which it participates; it is that discourse which can, according to Derrida, “say anything, accept anything, receive anything, suffer anything, and simulate everything” (“Demeure” 28).2 “Barthes’s” and Derrida’s syncopated readings of “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar” show how literature can indeed say anything and how, in doing so, it continues to surprise and to read us. The exceptional case of M. Valdemar—his continuing to speak, hypnotized after death—calls attention not just to what literature is but also to what it does and to what it asks of the reader. In this case, as a witness to the dying scene, the reader is herself called into the dynamic negotiation between the living and the dead. Literature in general and this Poe story in particular allow and even insist that the reader assume shifting discursive positions beyond herself, to be variably the “I,” the “you,” and the other. Poe’s story powerfully demonstrates the kind of “complex personhood” on which committed reading relies, while it also positions the reader as at once here-and-there, now-and-then, even living-anddead. With the flexible temporalities that both narrative and reading produce, literature not only implies, simulates, and illuminates the instant of death—as photography does—it also can reinhabit and recross that pivotal moment, traveling in either direction, again and again. With these conventional means to move us and to mediate between the living and the dead, literature is uniquely positioned to make us read, think, and even speak the impossible.

Mourning Barthes: Two Sides of a Camera’s Click In Camera Lucida, Barthes assesses the typical critical positions for reckoning with the photograph. Studies of photography, he observes, tend to be either semiological or sociological; one kind regards photographs at “a very close range,” the other “from a great distance” (6–8).

14  Kevin Riordan Barthes prefers to move between, and ultimately to eschew, these positions. In an early declaration of purpose, he sets out to consider photography “not as a question (a theme) but as a wound: I see, I feel, hence I notice, I observe, and I think” (Camera Lucida 21). While his method in the book sometimes reads as personal to the point of idiosyncrasy, in this sentence, Barthes establishes the high conceptual stakes for his study, namely the development of a kind of photographic cogito. In listing the various actions of the “I” hinged across the “hence,” Barthes proposes a revision to, or more precisely a precondition for, Descartes’s. In the French, the phrase’s similarity to je pense donc je suis becomes the more pronounced, “je vois, je sense, donc je remarque, je regarde et je pense” (La chambre claire 42). Seeing and feeling, for Barthes, are the preconditions for thinking and being. If being is contingent on seeing, then by corollary photography offers lessons on nonbeing and on death. From this premise, Barthes reads death—his mother’s, his own, others—photographically. In a rhetorical flash, in a caption, he most succinctly captures the unsettling relations he finds among life and death, the photographic image, and the language we use to make sense of them. Under a portrait of a handcuffed Lewis Payne (later executed for attempting to assassinate William H. Seward), Barthes writes: “He is dead and he is going to die…” (Camera Lucida 95). Barthes’s words are striking for their implication as well as for their form. First, the italics propose an emphasis that their consistency across all the book’s captions belies. According to other conventions, italics mark words as foreign, to the surrounding language, to the image, or to themselves. Or perhaps they signal a set of stage directions, a kind of death sentence. The caption’s concluding ellipsis (or “suspension points” in British usage), like Barthes’s death itself, is a strange plural singularity; it is at once several things and one thing. According to Jennifer DeVere Brody, this punctuation mark comes to “stand for what need not be said, for what may be redundant to say as well as for what cannot be said, for that which exceeds locution and is therefore impossible” (76–77). Arriving at the sentence’s end, the ellipsis is an uncertain prolonging, a deferral near death, a typographical symptom for impossible speech. He is dead and he is going to die… In this reflection on an old photograph, Barthes rehearses, in the third person, something like Monsieur Valdemar’s first-person speech. In both cases, the author writes on both sides of death, the syntax stretching across an untraversable chasm. If literary conventions offer the reader identification and transference among narrators and characters—relations usually scored by the pronouns— photography provides a material means of negotiating similar (dis)associations in time and space. One sees oneself from an outside perspective, and one sees the bodies of the living and the dead joined in the same indexical form. Photography has long invited abstract associations with death and dying, but it also offers this more quotidian, mechanical means

Photography and First-Person Death  15 of self-estrangement, of seeing and thinking of oneself differently, of effectively shifting between the first, second, and third persons. In “The Deaths of Roland Barthes,” Derrida initially rereads the bookends of Barthes’s broad oeuvre—Writing Degree Zero (1953) and Camera Lucida (1980)—to frame the deceased’s wide-ranging ideas. But he zeroes in on Camera Lucida for some combination of its personal quality, its discussion of photography, and its more sustained meditations on death. Camera Lucida’s 1980 publication confers upon it the status of Barthes’s writerly last words, and it shares many qualities with his other, concurrently composed but posthumously published works. Prominent among these works, the Mourning Diary is composed of the short fragments Barthes wrote on pieces of “quartered typing paper” beginning the day after his mother’s death in 1977 (Howard 261). This personal (and now public) diary helps to clarify some of Barthes’s late sensibilities. Richard Howard, Barthes’s primary English translator, describes Mourning Diary as a set of “crucial and painful notations” that can be read as “the companion to the ultimate writings of Roland Barthes” (261). Across these last works, Barthes seems to write to the scale of the quarter-page. In this Diary and in the book project he calls “Photo-Maman,” Barthes composes in short flashes, captions, and aphorisms (Mourning Diary 136). Barthes, among theorists, is characteristically attuned to the material and the sensual—perhaps most notably in The Pleasure of the Text— and in Camera Lucida, he details the many material touches upon which photography relies, the shutter clicks and the chemicals, the feel of the paper’s edges. Among photographs and his own notes—he is at once author, producer, collector—Barthes discovers a late, flexible grammar for material association, a montage of attractions. He experiments with different ways of arranging and ordering notes and old photographs: in stacks and albums, strips and folders, frames and page proofs. It is amidst this passing, material traffic—and in the corresponding gaps—that the late Roland Barthes comes to synthesize his suspicions about photography and death into what he calls the “paradigm” of “Life/Death.” To mark the boundary between life and death, Barthes relies on a photographic figure, the camera’s click; to set that click in print he uses a slash. He explicates the paradigm in terms of photography’s physical materials: “Life/Death: the paradigm is reduced to a simple click [déclic], the one separating the initial pose from the final print [papier]” (Camera Lucida 92). In this articulation, the click seems swift in separating life from its opposite, or from its representation. Time here is both compressed and elided. The slash stands for a seemingly impossible instant while the subsequent explanation draws out a longer process: the developing/drying/enlarging/printing/developing/fixing/drying of a photograph’s final print. So the slash is sudden, and less so; death is not one with itself. In Mourning Diary, Barthes works through a comparable double-timing for how he experiences his mother’s death: “There

16  Kevin Riordan is a time when death is an event… and then it is no longer an event, it is another duration” (50). The line between life and death, for Barthes, appears to be an event of the first order, but in both anticipation and retrospect, it is prolonged into an indistinct duration. Sigmund Freud, in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, explains the death drive through a child’s game of making a spool disappear and appear again, fort/da. If photography provides a figurative means of witnessing the transition between life/death, then some of its pleasure derives, as in Freud’s game, from preemptively rehearsing that eventual trauma. Barthes admits to finding pleasure in the ‘mortifying’ practice of photography and especially in the audible click itself. Barthes indulges in the details: “the trigger of the lens… the metallic shifting of the plates… I love these mechanical sounds in an almost voluptuous way… their abrupt click breaking through the mortiferous [mortifère] layer of the Pose” (Camera Lucida 15). The camera’s click breaks through the lived continuum, seeming to reanimate the stillness of a pose; and here lies the strange pleasure of mechanical execution. In reflecting on Barthes’s own photographic reflections, Derrida comes to adopt his late friend’s terms as well as his characteristic late style. Derrida had also addressed life and death elsewhere—notably in “Demeure,” his accompaniment to Maurice Blanchot’s “The Instant of My Death”—but here he commits to a different, borrowed method, that is, to reading and writing with Barthes in “approval, solidarity, and gratitude” (“Deaths” 56). He even feels that “a certain mimetism is… a duty (to take into oneself, to identify oneself with him in order to let him speak, to make him present and faithfully represent him)” (38). The form of his essay itself, with its short sections and open questions, pays homage to Barthes: “I must leave these thoughts for Roland Barthes fragmentary… I value them for their incompleteness” (34–35). Derrida even pauses to comment on the kinds of material qualities he rarely mentions in his own work, the folds in an old piece of paper, for example, or the color of a letter’s ink (64). Derrida cites and repeats Barthes’s “Life/Death” and joins him in sounding that photographic click. If the divisive slash, as Barthes had written earlier, can misread, slice, and castrate, it is also “the slash of censure, the surface of the mirror, the wall of hallucination, the verge of antithesis, the abstracting of limit, the obliquity of the signifier, hence of meaning” (Barthes, S/Z 107). Derrida follows Barthes’s productive and volatile slash, that voluptuously mechanical click, into “the verge of antithesis.” He proceeds to read this figure as mediating not only the relationship between life and death but between all seeming oppositions. Working through the photographic configuration of “Life/Death,” Derrida outlines a broader theory for what he calls haunting: Ghosts: the concept of the other in the same, the punctum in the studium, the dead other alive in me. This concept of the photograph

Photography and First-Person Death  17 photographs all conceptual oppositions, it traces a relationship of haunting which perhaps is constitutive of all logics. (“Deaths” 41–2) It is not only in the photograph that the dead return but also through it; the noun is activated into its verb form. Derrida expands from the singular ghost sensed in a photograph—the dead other in me—to a broader and more profound logic. Ten years later, in Specters of Marx, Derrida would expand and define “hauntology” as the logic that underlies and unites ontology, eschatology, and teleology. For Derrida, “everything begins with the apparition of a specter” (Specters of Marx 2); and in this early draft of the idea, the photograph conveniently bears the apparition. Barthes’s paradigm is where “everything begins” for Derrida. Derrida works with the same “almost no time” of a camera’s click but blurs the central distinction: “Neither life nor death, it is the haunting of the one by the other. The versus of the conceptual opposition is as unsubstantial as a camera’s click” (“Deaths” 41). In the work of mourning life and death become peculiarly (in)separable for Derrida. To express the unsubstantial, Derrida deploys a decidedly substantial figure, namely the camera’s click. The division and opposition of life and death are a substantial insubstantiality, ghosted by the lens’s trigger and the shift of metallic plates. Derrida’s click, seemingly deployed to clarify a blurred opposition, introduces life/death as a state of mutual transgression or haunting. The click is another event-and-duration, a substantial division that will not divide. The proper instant—which has no observable duration—purports to be the most fundamental unit of time, but it remains something of a fiction. Empirical science cannot locate it and mathematics can only approximate it. As Giorgio Agamben writes, the instant is “always elusive”; it is “nothing more than the continuity of time… a pure limit which both joins and divides past and future” (101). The instant is an idea without a worldly referent, and in its spacelessness and timelessness, it invites metaphysical and ideological meddling. It resists experience, mechanical capture, and direct representation; it only begins to assume a character through contiguity, that is, through what surrounds it. The instant of death, like the ellipsis or the photograph, functionally becomes a singularity expressed through plural components. The instant—and particularly the instant of death—is in psychoanalytic terms a missed encounter, according to Alice Rayner, a “leave-taking that has no absolute point in time, only a before and an after, which are representations of the moments surrounding death” (10). The instant of death borrows its shape from the moments “surrounding” it, through the joining together of a before and after. In becoming perceptible, the “instant” becomes something other than itself; the singular becomes a plural re-posing as the singular. Derrida stitches together

18  Kevin Riordan these haunting, temporal relations revealed near death, imagining time from the instant outwards: “Time: the metonymy of the instantaneous, the possibility of narrative magnetized by its own limit” (“Deaths” 61). Given linguistic form, the sententious instant of death is always-already narrative. From the reverse perspective narrative is always authored and authorized by death. Faced with death, magnetized by the limits of language and time, stories begin and they proliferate. If the instant of death is the end of a life, it is also, according to many theorists, the beginning of language and of stories. In “The Storyteller,” Walter Benjamin argues that the relationship of stories to death far predates print: “Death is the sanction of everything that the storyteller can tell. He has borrowed his authority from death” (94). In his seminal essay “What Is an Author?” (often paired with Barthes’s “The Death of the Author”), Michel Foucault notices the persistent “kinship between writing and death” (116–17). His examples range from Scheherazade’s “strategy for defeating death” to how writing can “become the murderer of its author” in the cases of Flaubert, Proust, and Kafka. In “Language to Infinity” from 1963, Foucault even more directly situates language’s origins near the point of death. There, language begins and repeats itself: “Before the imminence of death, language rushes forth, but it also starts again, tells of itself, discovers the story of the story and the possibility that this interpenetration might never end” (54). To capture this rushing forth, Foucault turns to another optical object, the mirror, to account for this process without end. He proceeds: death is undoubtedly the most essential of the accidents of language (its limit and its center): from the day that men began to speak toward death and against it, in order to grasp and imprison it, something was born, a murmuring which repeats, recounts, and redoubles itself endlessly. (“Language to Infinity” 55) Foucault’s characterization of this endless repetition widens and continues through his essay (and beyond), and his effusive form comes to model and mirror his object—ostensibly to infinity. For Foucault and others, language’s profusion begins with the prospect, and with the tacit acknowledgment, of our common mortality. Barthes, in “The Rustle of Language” (1975), usefully names this kind of relentlessness of language “stammering”: Speech is irreversible; that is its fatality. What has been said cannot be unsaid, except by adding to it: to correct, here, is oddly enough, to continue. In speaking, I can never erase, annul; all I can do is

Photography and First-Person Death  19 say ‘I am erasing, annulling, correcting,’ in short, speak some more. This very singular annulation-by-addition I shall call stammering. (76) To speak is to misstep, and yet one must continue. The implication here is that one’s first words are a kind of linguistic original sin. One speaks, and her characterization of the world is inevitably incomplete or unsatisfying. And one—in a Beckettian sense—must go on, must correct-by-continuing. A child says “mother,” and then, from this incomplete and unsatisfying account of the world, speaks of another, perhaps a “father,” and so on. She stammers to better represent and to speak of and to the world around her, without end. For any individual speaker, Foucault’s language-without-end and ­Barthes’s stammering have an endpoint, namely in death. Dying words, the speech directly preceding the instant of death, are the anomaly to these systems, at least on the level of the individual speaker; this anomalousness is in part responsible for the prominence of dying words for history and literature alike. Famous last words remain uniquely unmodified by their speakers, the only instances of language exempt from stammering. 3 That is, unless one continues to speak after death. It is this moment of beginning/ending that Edgar Allan Poe’s story so unusually dramatizes. Two years before writing “The Rustle of Language,” Barthes had confronted the speech of the dead in “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar.” Through this story, Barthes isolates literature’s unique conditions vis-à-vis death, how it allows one to speak across mortal limits and to say the impossible.

The Contents of a Letter; or, Other Interpretations Are Possible Near the end of “The Deaths of Roland Barthes,” after working through and across photography’s (in)substantial click, Derrida senses that his work of mourning remains somehow incomplete. He stammers, before fortuitously receiving two things unexpectedly: a note from an unnamed, long-deceased friend and an essay of Barthes’s which he previously had not seen. Despite leaving the personal letter in plain sight, Derrida withholds all other details about it.4 In the other envelope, postmarked from the United States, is Barthes’s 1973 reading of the Poe story in which a dead man says of himself: “I am dead.” Poe’s mesmerist-narrator italicizes these words to emphasize their strangeness, though in both “Barthes’s” and Derrida’s retellings the quotation loses its italics. 5 In reading and writing the language, in making it their own, they shift its typography, quietly scoring its difference. Derrida reads Barthes reading Poe and repeats these words, finding in the dead speech that same “scandal of language… the impossible

20  Kevin Riordan utterance.” In Mourning Diary, Barthes had written by hand that near death writing became impossible, “The high seas of suffering… Writing no longer possible” (213). And in his reading of Poe he finds a phrase that is impossible to speak.” In Poe’s 1845 “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar,” Valdemar’s corpse remains hypnotized after death. After several doctors, nurses, and a medical student confirm that the body has lost all vital signs, the corpse nevertheless says, “I am dead”; these, as Poe’s title indicates, are the “facts.”6 The body continues to speak not just for an extended moment but for seven months. In his “Textual Analysis,” Barthes postpones attending to the story’s late scandal, insisting that he will work methodically through its 150 lexias without imposing an overarching argument, “Our analysis will be progressive: we shall cover the length of the text step by step, at least in theory” (137). Barthes’s intended, step-by-step treatment proves to be only theoretical. Despite selecting the piece for its manageable length, even Poe’s story proves too long to cover in detail. Barthes divides “Valdemar” into some 150 units and, after discussing the eighteenth (which is still on the first page of Poe), he skips ahead to the most notable instance of “how the text explodes and disperses” (“Textual Analysis” 135). While setting out to demonstrate a methodical analysis, Barthes leaps ahead to consider the peculiar speech of the dead. This impetuous move models in miniature other leaps in Barthes’s career, from his early formalism to something like post-structuralism. Faced with Valdemar’s speech, Barthes shifts his attention from the story’s intricate workings to address the very limits of language itself. Barthes argues that Valdemar’s “I am dead” “says nothing but itself,” that it is “radically impossible” (153). Valdemar’s sentence somehow speaks life and death in the same impossible breath. It transgresses that fundamental separation and so exposes a mutual haunting, an opposition as (in)substantial as a camera’s click. Barthes supplements and paraphrases the line; he stammers to explain that, given its context, it seems to mean, “I am dead and not dead.” Here he drafts his own caption for the Payne photograph but in the more startling first person. But this explication, this putting Poe’s words in other words, is unsatisfying and only extends the “paroxysm of transgression, the invention of an unheard-of category: the ‘true-false’, the ‘yes-no’, the ‘death-life.’” Barthes’s essay, modestly introduced as an illustrative analysis, suddenly opens to much larger questions that reverberate beyond Poe, and perhaps even beyond life/death. Barthes locates in Poe the invention of “an unheard-of category,” a literary means to embrace multiplicity and contradiction beyond our linguistic and mortal limitations. After that paroxysm, Barthes’s essay ends quietly, but in its final moments he defers to another text: “Other commentaries are possible, notably that of Jacques Derrida.” Uncannily, Barthes seems to defer—beyond

Photography and First-Person Death  21 his own death—to Derrida’s forthcoming response. However, a footnote directs the reader to Derrida’s 1967 commentary on Edmund Husserl in Speech and Phenomena. There, Derrida already had considered impossible syntax and had speculated on the mortal limitations of speech. He isolates the subject speaking (of) itself in another self-definitional phrase not unlike the cogito. Derrida, on Husserl, goes after not what it means to think and to be but what it means to be alive and to be speaking (which may be much the same): “I am originally means I am mortal. I am immortal is an impossible proposition” (Speech and Phenomena 54). For Derrida, the unmodified I am already presumes the distinction between life and death; Poe’s third word is redundant. To speak locates one on the side of life. However, at the time of writing “The Deaths of Roland Barthes,” Derrida does not seem to have seen his own name or to have read that reference. He “leafs” through the photocopy of the “Textual Analysis” and pledges that he “will read it later” (“Deaths” 64). Earlier in the “Deaths” essay, he wrote that “the proper name… alone and by itself says death, all deaths in one… even while the bearer of it is still living” (34). With his presumably incomplete reading, Derrida has missed his proper name and its associated deaths. Setting aside the Barthes essay, he revisits the Poe story itself; he joins his friend in rereading. Following Barthes’s paraphrase of “I am dead,” Derrida stammers when reading the story too, but now there is an intimacy, a solidarity, in their reading the same object across the divide of life/death. They repeat the Poe citation though they frame its duration differently—“I am” and “I am dead”—as if negotiating a camera’s shutter speed. In his reading of the Poe, Derrida finally comes to locate the impossibility of the utterance in an even quicker exposure, a more isolated citation, that is, in the voicing of a single syllable, a single letter. Barthes’s paroxysm had been in the sentence’s conclusion, in the subject’s arrival at its predicate, in a complete self-declaration of death. In Speech and Phenomena, Derrida had located a similar idea in just the subject and verb, “I am.” And in “The Deaths of Roland Barthes,” Derrida locates the relation between speech and death in the “I” itself. In “I am dead,” the pronoun refers to the one “to whom the utterance ‘I am dead’ can never happen” (“Deaths” 65). In his rereading, Derrida reverses the direction of the sentence’s logic; what is impossible is that the predicate should reach the same subject that could speak it. Put another way, faced with this aporia, the syntax is irrelevant: in “I am dead,” the terms haunt one another, their separations as insubstantial as a camera’s click. The spoken “I” is always bound for the death it cannot reach; it is suspended, like a dead letter. In this final reduction, it is not language’s syntax which is the problem but the subject’s relation to speech itself. The single syllable is both an event and a duration. To say “I” is a verbal misstep, which we can only supplement by stammering, can only modify

22  Kevin Riordan with other, incomplete mortal emendations. To speak the “I” exposes the cogito itself as vanitas. Death is an impossible or at least continually deferred destination, and Poe’s “Valdemar” remarkably acts out this prolonged click of language’s (in)difference.

Poe’s Paroxysm: Reframing Life/Death In The Voice in Cinema, Michel Chion discusses how the dead speak in and through the moving image. Perhaps even more prominently than photography or literature, cinema from its beginnings has been recognized as transgressing life/death. In the reviews of the very first Lumière screening, the papers proclaimed that cinema would bring dead loved ones back to life and that “death would cease to be absolute” (qtd. in Doane 62). Indeed, all voices in cinema will one day be the voices of the dead brought back to life. Filmmakers often have integrated this morbid fact into cinema’s narrative work: in the opening of Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard, for example, the voice-over narrator introduces the viewer to his dead body floating in a Los Angeles pool; or, in the recent Twin Peaks: The Return, Laura Palmer says, “I am dead… and yet I live.” Chion reads many instances of dead cinematic speech before rhetorically concluding: “What could be more natural in a film than a dead person continuing to speak as a bodiless voice, wandering about the surface of the screen?” (47). Yet the examples that begin and end his section “The Dead Speak” are both from literature, from fiction. Chion opens with Marcel Proust and closes, naturally, with this: “The famous line from Poe’s novella The Strange Case of Mr. Valdemar is apt: ‘I tell you that I am dead’” (46). Chion turns to literature for this apt conclusion, for this instance of dead speech par excellence. And yet the quotation is different than it had been for Derrida or for Barthes. The discrepancy is not just a matter of translation (nor is the issue Chion’s alternate title or his characterization of the story as a novella). Chion relies on a different frame of reference and so, effectively, reanimates a different Poe. He selects a quotation from later in the story, when the novelty of dead speech has diminished, and yet the dead Valdemar continues. Monsieur Valdemar had more to say after death and even after announcing “I am dead.” In literature, the dead stammer along with the living. In Poe’s story, he dramatizes these peculiar features of language that resist characterization in anything other than literary discourse. Ernest Valdemar “who has resided principally at Harlem, N.Y., since the year of 1839 is (or was) particularly noticeable… for the whiteness of his whiskers, in violent contrast to the blackness of his hair” (Poe 96). He had become terminally ill and, sympathetic to the narrator’s interest in mesmerism, agreed to be hypnotized on his deathbed. He sends the narrator a note indicating that “now” is the time; Poe italicizes this time

Photography and First-Person Death  23 signature, a reminder of the peculiar insistence of the always-now of reading. The narrator presides over the convalescent Valdemar, along with a doctor, a nurse, and a medical student. This student, a Mr. L—l, takes notes of everything that occurs and—despite his fainting for much of the crucial period—these notes, the reader learns, become the largely verbatim basis for the narrator’s supposedly first-person telling (Poe 98). With internal documents and ventriloquized accounts, Poe’s story, like his “Purloined Letter,” sets in motion a set of ambivalent, contested meanings, that is, the very signature of the literary. Valdemar undergoes hypnosis. He provides intermittent updates to his deathbed audience: “Yes; still asleep—dying” (Poe 100). Nearing the moment of death, the assembled witness some familiar but unusually grisly “death-bed horrors,” an “audible jerk” and “in full view the swollen and blackened tongue.” Here the narrator interrupts himself: “I now feel that I have reached a point of this narrative at which every reader will be startled into positive disbelief. It is my business, however, simply to proceed” (Poe 101). With this “now,” the narrator of this retrospective account pulls the reader into the intimate present of the telling, not unlike that scene of writing in which Derrida receives an essay in the mail. Without yet relaying anything particularly out of the ordinary, the narrator’s preemption of disbelief becomes the promise of it, priming the reader to anticipate the startling or the unexpected. Now, the narrator attends to the sound of Valdemar’s voice, which for the moment remains unformed in words. The voice takes on an extraordinary quality, seeming to “reach our ears—at least mine—from a vast distance, or from some deep cavern [and] it impressed me… as gelatinous or glutinous matters impress the sense of touch” (Poe 101). Valdemar finally speaks again: “Yes; — no; — I have been sleeping— and now—now—I am dead” (Poe 101). In the more extended quotation, with a wider frame of reference, Valdemar himself appears to draft ­Barthes’s “unheard-of category” and Derrida’s ghostly oppositions by conceptually linking yes/no to life/death. These contradictions—or rather the terms’ mutual haunting—here are choreographed more deliberately, painstakingly, with the stop-starts of semi-colons and dashes. Poe again returns the reader to the perpetual present with the repeated “now.” Through the speaker’s first-person present, the narrator and the reader both seem hailed into the scene, to the sensation of being there now, and yet the moment of death remains indistinct, unobservable, even on a rereading. Valdemar stammers through his own death, speaking on both sides of it. With each “now,” he invites and shares his audience’s desires to know exactly when he dies, but even the hypnotized Valdemar himself cannot name the “instant.” This passage of narrative induces the reader to join the characters in the unfolding of the dying scene, across the provisional division of life/ death. The conventions of literature allow for the participants to inhabit

24  Kevin Riordan this very moment and to move through it. This literary now is the site in which statements such as “He is dead and he is going to die…” and “I am dead” make readerly, if not empirical, sense. And, if the shifter “now” places us there and then, the shifting “I”—alternately the narrator, Valdemar himself, me, you—compels us to move among bodies, experiences, and memories, even across life/death. Valdemar not only continued to speak after death; according to literary conventions he continues to speak after death. He continues to speak through others, both ahead of and along with anyone who reads these words, who ventures to speak the “I.” Literary discourse allows for one to move freely in time and space while, even more strangely, spurring one to be other than oneself. To read the “I” is both intimately personal and flexibly impersonal; one reads, speaks, and writes the “I” as oneself and as another. In Derrida’s Husserl reading, “I” meant “I am mortal,” but the pronoun also means “I am another.” Under literary conditions—like those of prosopopoeia or those Poe produces—speaking the “I” becomes a way for the living to even speak for and as the dead—and vice versa. In committed rereading and through what Derrida calls the “violence” of quotation, these authors continue to speak as and for the living, just as we speak for them (Derrida, “Deaths” 59). Through this recursive process, and as Derrida and Barthes’s mutual citations after death affirm, interpretative communities can continue to form, change, and disband across life/death. If photography provided Barthes and Derrida the vocabulary to simulate life/death and to witness that chasm’s power, Poe’s literary discourse offers a privileged articulation of how literature can transgress those provisional mortal limits. Poe showcases one of the distinctions of literary reading, the practice that compels us to be other than we are. These special conditions do not reside strictly in literature as it is written but in the forms of reading that that writing provokes, sustains, and requires. This reading in the fuller senses is what Barthes and Derrida modeled throughout their expansive careers and—abiding by this literary logic— even after their deaths. Their approaches to reading near the occasion of death serve as an untimely reminder of the virtues and the vulnerabilities of imagining reading as nearly indistinguishable from writing, as non-consumption, as play and pleasure, as a wound, and as difference in and of itself.

Notes 1 The title of this essay is a nod to Barbara Johnson’s “The Frame of Reference: Poe, Lacan, Derrida,” which lends implicit methodological inspiration. I also would like to acknowledge the helpful suggestions of the editors and of John Mowitt, Nick Hengen Fox, and Josh Lam.

Photography and First-Person Death  25 2 Ivan Callus points to this articulation of literature in his closely related article, “(Auto) Thanatography or (Auto) Thanatology?: Mark C. Taylor, Simon Crichtley and the Writing of the Dead.” Forum of Modern Language Studies, vol. 41, no. 4, 2005. 3 They are, of course, repeated, modified, and interpreted by others. The moment of death, in this sense, is when language becomes decidedly apersonal, untethered to the corporeal. 4 With this letter, Derrida alludes to his essay on Poe’s “Purloined Letter,” “La Facteur de la Verité,” and in this context it also becomes a nod to ­Barthes’s famous withholding of the Winter Garden photograph in Camera Lucida, what Derrida calls the punctum of the whole. 5 Charles Baudelaire had maintained the italics in the French translation from which Barthes and Derrida both worked. 6 While Baudelaire translates faits as “facts” elsewhere in the story, he changes the title of the story to “La verité sur le cas de M. Valdemar,” shifting the status of the story from a plural set of facts to a singular truth; this is the first lexia to which Barthes attends in his essay.

Works Cited Agamben, Giorgio. “Time and History: The Critique of the Continuum and the Instant.” Infancy and History: The Destruction of Experience. Translated by Liz Heron. Verso, 2007, pp. 96–116. Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. Translated by Richard Howard. Hill and Wang, 1981. ———. La chambre claire: Note sur la photographie. Éditions de l’Étoile, Gallimard, Le Seuil, 1980. ———. Mourning Diary. Translated by Richard Howard. Hill and Wang, 2010. ———. “The Rustle of Language.” The Rustle of Language. Translated by Richard Howard. University of California Press, 1989. ———. S/Z: An Essay. Translated by Richard Miller. Hill and Wang, 1975. ———. “Textual Analysis of Poe’s ‘Valdemar.’” Translated by Claude Chabrol. Untying the Text: A Post-Structuralist Reader. Edited by Robert Young. Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1989, pp. 133–161. Bazin, André. “Death Every Afternoon.” Translated by Mark A. Cohen. Rites of Realism: Essays on Corporeal Cinema. Edited by Ivone Margulies. Duke UP, 2003, pp. 27–31. Benjamin, Walter. “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire.” Illuminations. Translated by Harry Zohn. Schocken, 1968, pp. 155–200. ———. “The Storyteller.” Illuminations. Translated by Harry Zohn. Schocken. 1968, pp. 83–110. Brody, Jennifer DeVere. Punctuation: Art, Politics, and Play. Duke UP, 2008. Chion, Michel. The Voice in Cinema. Translated by Claudia Gorbman. Columbia UP, 1999. Derrida, Jacques. “The Deaths of Roland Barthes.” The Work of Mourning. Edited by Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas. University of Chicago Press, 2003, pp. 31–68. ———. “Demeure.” The Instant of My Death and Demeure: Fiction and Testimony. Translated by Elizabeth Rottenberg. Stanford UP, 2000, pp. 13–103.

26  Kevin Riordan ———. Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International. Translated by Peggy Kamuf. Routledge, 1994. ———. Speech and Phenomena: And Other Essays on Husserl’s Theory of Signs. Translated by David B. Allison. Northwestern UP, 1973. Doane, Mary Ann. The Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency, and the Archive. Harvard UP, 2002. Foucault, Michel. “Language to Infinity.” Language, Counter-Memory, Practice. Translated by Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon. Cornell UP, 1977, pp. 53–67. ———. “What Is an Author?” Language, Counter-Memory, Practice. Translated by Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon. Cornell UP, 1977, pp. 113–138. Howard, Richard. “Afterword.” Mourning Diary. By Roland Barthes. Translated by Richard Howard. Hill and Wang, 2010, pp. 257–261. Poe, Edgar Allan. The Complete Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe. Vintage, 1987. Rayner, Alice. Ghosts: Death’s Double and the Phenomena of Theatre. University of Minnesota Press, 2006. Sontag, Susan. “In Plato’s Cave.” On Photography. Picador, 1973, pp. 3–26.

2 “This memory all men may have in mynd” Everyman and the Work of Mourning Walter Wadiak The medieval play of Everyman (c. 1500) is synonymous with death— so much so that the American novelist Philip Roth, when he wrote his late-in-life meditation on death, named it for the fifteenth-century play. As Roth pointed out in an interview, death is not just the theme of Everyman but may just conceivably have been its original setting, as many medieval plays were in fact performed in cemeteries.1 Whether or not there is any historical truth in the picture of a play about death that was literally staged in a graveyard, Everyman remains for many the prototype of a literary representation of death. The plot 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. Yet for a play that famously urges its audience to think always on the end, Everyman proves remarkably cagey on the question of what death is. Is death a sudden extinction of the self—as Everyman’s startled anxiety at Death’s approach seems to indicate—or is it rather the “tame death” imagined by Philippe Ariès as the province of the medieval, a time when self and community were most robustly integrated precisely at the moment of death, an event reassuringly explicated by Christian doctrine and circumscribed by ritual? Should we conclude, as one reader does, that “in Everyman we witness the late medieval taming of death” (Duclow 108)—a drama in which death is ultimately shown to be nothing to fear? Or are we confronted instead with the possibility that death is untamable—a figure of dread who cruelly searches out prey with his fatal dart, in the play’s arresting image? Is the play ultimately comforting and even conventional in its representation of death, or is it a specimen of the late-medieval macabre that realizes the full horror of

28  Walter Wadiak death as the snuffing out of an individual life? These questions are of interest both for what they can tell us about Everyman’s place in what one might call a “history of death” and as a way of understanding the play’s difference from its presumed source, the Dutch Elckerlijc. More than its source, I will argue, Everyman makes the dying self the central focus of its drama, highlighting death as a personal and intimate crisis of the individual soul. The notion that the self is emphasized in Everyman might at first seem almost perverse. Even if in some obvious sense, Everyman is (nearly) alone by the end of his journey, he can hardly be said to be an individual in the modern meaning of that term. The play’s very title seems to deny this possibility since, of course, the character can only be Everyman insofar as he is no one in particular. No less an authority than God Himself—who appears in the play’s opening scene—deliberately plays on the double meaning to suggest that Everyman (or “every man”) is little more than an abstraction. In this, Everyman mirrors the characters he meets—personages with names like “Fellowship” and “Beauty”—all of whom are evidently abstractions, even if they are occasionally made to sound like real people for comic effect. The play begins and ends with moralizing sermons that announce the point of the play as one that applies to the entire human race and thus seems to minimize the impact of Everyman’s travails as having any individual significance. Moreover, the play seems thoroughly invested in the institutions and authorizing discourses of its day. Where other late-medieval religious works often seem to question theological conventions and even authority figures— one thinks of the comically inept and self-satisfied figure of “Lady Holy Church” in Piers Plowman—Everyman seems at first glance to be firmly orthodox in its opinions. For instance, Five Wits might be speaking for Archbishop Laud himself when he tells Everyman that there is nothing like a priest for ensuring salvation: Theyr is no emperour, kynge, duke, ne baron That of God hath commyssyon As hath the leest pryest in the worlde beynge, For of the blessyd Sacramentes pure and benygne He bereth the keyes and therof hathe he cure. (713–17) In all these ways, Everyman seems to conform to the rule that fifteenth-century morality plays represent the self only as a type—what one scholar calls a “type-figure”—rarely if ever as an individual. 2 Like Mankind, the eponymous protagonist of a roughly contemporaneous play, Everyman seems to evade particularity, becoming, in essence, a cipher who points outward toward the social and institutional life of late-medieval Christendom, perhaps nowhere more so than in the

This memory all men may have in mynd  29 remarkable scene at the end of the play—to be discussed below—during which he appears literally to become Christ at the moment of his death. Such an understanding accords well with the consensus among its scholarly readers that Everyman constitutes an ars moriendi—­essentially, a how-to guide on dying—of the sort then popular throughout Europe, and with which the play’s author was undoubtedly familiar. 3 One can indeed see in such treatises a precise mapping out of the stages of Everyman’s journey toward the grave—an event in which, as in the treatises, the entire community participates (represented in the play by the figures of Fellowship, Kindred, and Cousin) along with the full institutional sanction of the medieval Church (to whose ranks belong the plot-­ explicating Doctor and the priestly figure of Confession, and arguably even some of the more “internalized” figures such as Knowledge, not to speak of the panoply of heavenly figures depicted in the play from God Himself down to the humble Messenger who summons Death). The plot of Everyman can be roughly summed up as a procession to the grave under the auspices of such figures, followed by confession and the application of extreme unction, and finally a laying-to-rest in the grave itself. In the play’s closing image, Everyman is summoned to heaven by an ­angel, who leaves us with a reminder that we will follow the same path if we live virtuously: “Now shalt thou into the hevenly spere Unto the whiche all ye shall cume That lyveth well before the Day of Dome.” (899–901) In its focus on communality and the reassuring predictability of familiar rituals, Everyman’s journey exemplifies in many ways a medieval understanding of death that Philippe Ariès referred to as “tame death.” On this view, death was merely a transition to eternal life under the auspices of the Christian church. In an age that tended to stress the communal over the individual—or rather, to see the individual as meaningful only in relation to the larger community of the faithful— death was a social event, mapped out in detail beforehand and with a predetermined end. In a sense, death lost its power to horrify precisely by being the same for everyone. As Donald F. Duclow puts it, ­Everyman assimilates “dying to the public world of Christian myth and ritual” (108). Perhaps the ultimate example of this “taming” of death in Everyman is the remarkable moment in which Everyman seems literally to become Christ at the moment of his descent into the grave: “Into thy handes, Lord, my soule I commende, Receyve it, Lorde, that it be nat lost.

30  Walter Wadiak As thou me boughtest so me defende, And save me from the fendes boost That I may appere with that blessed hoost That shall be saved at the Dome. In manus tuas, of myghtes moost Forever, commendo spiritum meum.” (860–67) Everyman’s prayer that he be received into the “blessed hoost” at the end of the world is typical of the emphasis on the communal aspects of death and dying that pervades medieval writing in the ars moriendi tradition. Such prayers were central to the “art” of the good death. Not content with this conventional prayer, Everyman also repeats the words of Christ on the cross, not once but twice, the second time (as if for good measure) in the Latin words of the Vulgate (“into thy hands, Lord … in manus tuas”). The notion that every death was in some sense a reenactment of the death that “paid for all” was common in medieval writing. Indeed, that one ought to die with Christ’s words on one’s lips was not an unusual sentiment in the Middle Ages, and we have records of medieval people who make their last words an echo of their savior’s.4 Yet in Everyman the parallel is unusually explicit, remarkably so given the sinfulness of Everyman’s life up to the moment of his death, when an abrupt transition from sinner to Christ-figure seems to occur. Seen one way, it would be hard to find a more striking example of the way in which death was “tamed” in the ars moriendi tradition by being robbed of all particularity, so that there is—from a perspective in which all deaths echo the only one that really matters—no absurdity in the spectacle of a deathbed repentant claiming the words of Christ as his own. On this view, it would be pointless to ask why Everyman goes direct to “the hevenly spere” (899)—as though he were a saint—rather than to Purgatory, where one might reasonably expect him to be settling in for a long stay, given the sinfulness of his life and last-minute timing of his repentance. Nor, on such a view, is there anything over the top about the florid praise with which the play’s Angel ushers him up to heaven’s VIP section: Cume, excellent electe spouse to Jesu. Here above thou shall go Bycause of thy synguler vertue. (894–96) The “synguler” virtue of Everyman, on such a reading, is to be precisely as much like Christ as anyone else, insofar as he, too, must “suffer” death (to use the word that the play applies indiscriminately both to

This memory all men may have in mynd  31 Everyman’s death and to Christ’s).5 Such language was perfectly conventional, with roots in the Bible, even if its expression here feels somewhat jarring against a background in which Everyman’s fate is uncertain up to the last possible moment. The force of the Christological analogy is that it levels out all such distinctions, so that—as a natural conclusion of this theology—to die is to become Christ. Yet I want to linger on this scene to suggest that it exemplifies one of the paradoxes of late-medieval theology: the way in which a focus on the individual’s relationship with Christ could actually emphasize the particularity of individual lives, even though this relationship was ostensibly predicated on a model of history as repetition, in which individual lives only had significance as part of a larger pattern. The imitation of Christ was central to the devotio moderna, a religious movement that took root in the Low Countries during the late fourteenth century and that has been shown to have influenced the author of the Dutch play, Elckerlijc, upon which Everyman is based.6 Broadly a lay movement that stressed a personal relationship with Christ, the devotio moderna encouraged its followers to develop the sorts of inner practices—for instance, various forms of meditation—that have been associated by historians with the cultivation of an individual subjectivity. One popular form of this meditation involved projecting oneself into a Biblical scene in order to feel and experience it for oneself. The paradox of such practices is that they called for an erasure of self—a melding of self with Biblical character— that was at the same time a form of self-expression, one that sometimes attracted the condemnation of Church authorities. In this, as in much else, the devotio moderna was a movement forged out of the tensions between the increasingly individualistic practices of late-medieval piety and the claims of Church authority.7 The tension between these impulses is especially acute in Everyman, which rewrites its Dutch source in a way that emphasizes the paradox of an Everyman who is, at the same time, somebody special. Thus, for instance, where the Angel tells Everyman that he is being spirited to heaven “bycause of thy synguler virtue” (896), the author of ­Elckerlijc refers more modestly to its protagonist’s “goede Virtuyt” (849). In the scene to which I refer above—in which Everyman repeats the words of Christ in both English and Latin—Elckerlijc alludes more obscurely, and never in Latin, to the same words. The Christological parallel is further obscured in the Dutch source by Elckerlijc’s final plea to the figure of Virtue (“Duecht”) whom he hopes will guide him to heaven, where Everyman’s direct appeal to God the Father suggests a Christ-like status at the crucial moment of death, as though Everyman is now suddenly not sinner but savior. The stronger identification of Everyman with Christ in the English play is part of a pattern established before this closing scene, as when Everyman, abandoned by his former friends, seems to recall

32  Walter Wadiak the words of Christ on the cross—“O Jesu, helpe, all hath forsaken me” (851)—where the Dutch original lacks both the mention of Christ as well as the Biblical echo contained in “forsake,” a word that is subsequently repeated a number of times in the English text.8 Everyman’s death is thus arguably problematized by the English play in a more intense way than is the case in Elckerlijc, so that the former— while obviously not a novel production—offers a distinct and markedly more vivid picture of the contradictions inherent in the late-medieval view of death. On the one hand, as I have suggested, Everyman is much the bolder play in its equation of Everyman’s death with the crucifixion of Christ, even pointedly using the word “suffering” to describe what Everyman undergoes. At the same time, I want to argue that the particularity of Everyman’s death—its status as a “singular” event (to use the play’s language)—is realized more sharply by the English play. The result is an English rewriting of Elckerlijc that more urgently dramatizes death as something potentially “untamable”—a reality that stubbornly resists the various efforts to domesticate death that were supplied by late-medieval theology and cultural practice. Suffering, in other words, becomes something that is felt by the real individual in the process of dying.9 Another way of putting this would be to say that Everyman, even as it represents the practices that sustained late-medieval people in their efforts to “tame” death—elaborate burial rituals, sacramental practices, and imaginative understandings of any and every death as containing echoes of Christ’s willing sacrifice—at the same time dramatizes what Ariès calls variously “the death of self” or “one’s own death.” According to him, a change in Western attitudes towards death divides the early Middle Ages—in which death was ritually “tamed” by the kinds of practices I have referred to—from later periods in which death came increasingly to be understood as the extinction of an individual life. In making this case, Ariès appeals to physical evidence, such as the appearance during the thirteenth century of individual inscriptions on tombs, as well as to a discernible shift in cultural representations of death, including the increasingly macabre and often terrifying depictions of skeletons, corpses, and the like familiar from late-medieval art, notably in depictions of the Dance of Death. The macabre character of such representations testifies to a new fear, according to Ariès, that arises partly from this shift in understanding in which death becomes an intensely personal experience—in the face of which the older, communal practices could provide only scant comfort. While he suggests that the reasons for this change are complex, Ariès cites the Black Death and the newly individualistic ethos of the late Middle Ages as driving forces. The plague made death unpredictable and omnipresent while the new focus on the individual made it terrifying and lonely. In considering how Everyman departs from its source, it seems to me that the English play offers a

This memory all men may have in mynd  33 more vivid realization of the “death of self” that Ariès associates with late-medieval culture. I will further argue that we can read the play’s relatively more explicit moralization of its theme as an attempt to contain the horror engendered by this more vivid and intimate portrait of death. The more urgent atmosphere of the English play is already suggested by the inclusion of a prologue—absent in Elckerlijc—that stresses life’s brevity (“how transytory we be all daye” [6]) alongside the physical decay of the dead body and the consequences of sin for the damned soul. As the Messenger warns the audience in a direct address, sins that seem sweet in the beginning “causeth thy soule to wepe / Whan the body lyeth in claye” (14–15). That urgency is further reflected in the blunt title of the English play as The Somonyng of Everyman, where the title given in the Elckerlijc manuscript—translatable as The Mirror of Everyman’s Salvation—emphasizes the protagonist’s ultimately happy fate.10 Another part of that urgency, as at least one scholar has noted, is the English play’s more threatening portrayal of Death as an adversary of humankind, one who vows to “cruelly out serche bothe great and small” (73) and to strike those who are avaricious with his “darte” (76) in order to blind them and lead them into perdition (in an echo of the “sharpe rod” [28] with which the God of Everyman threatens to scourge sinners).11 A relatively neutral figure in Elckerlijc—whom the protagonist of the Dutch play even, at one point, addresses familiarly as “Dear” or “Lieve Doot” —Death in Everyman is by contrast terrifying and almost Godlike in his power, a “mighty messengere” (63) whose fatal “darte” recalls God’s own rod of justice.12 The increased poignancy and terror of the English play’s representation of Death is arguably behind one of the English translator’s rare bursts of poetic inspiration, in which he wrote the play’s most famous line: “O, Deth, thou cummest whan I had thee leest in mynde” (119).13 In this and other ways, the English play gives voice to the anxiety engendered in the late Middle Ages by the dreadful prospect of the mors improvisa, the death that comes without warning and before the possibility of confession and forgiveness. The notion that the timing of one’s death mattered to the fate of one’s soul was persistent enough, as late as the time of Shakespeare, to be a credible reason for Hamlet’s delaying his killing of Claudius until such time as the latter’s soul could be sent off unprepared for its passage into the afterlife. In Ariès’ account, the early medieval view of death as almost a stage of life, to be awaited serenely with arms crossed, facing upward, gave way by the fourteenth century to the increasingly urgent possibility of a sudden and unadvised death, especially after the first outbreak of the plague in Europe between 1347 and 1351. Although Ariès does not focus on literature, his theory of an earlier view of death as predictable, almost a voluntary decision, finds echoes in literature from the early Middle Ages onward. In Beowulf, a character is described as retreating into the privacy of his chambers,

34  Walter Wadiak putting his affairs in order, and “choosing God’s light” upon his death. Much later, in the Morte Darthur, Gawain ends a last letter to Lancelot with the almost businesslike information that “this letter was written, but two hours and a half afore my death”—a statement that can only make sense in a culture for which death was a predictable and in some sense almost an ordinary event.14 Set against the background of this earlier understanding, the sudden death represented in Everyman would have seemed particularly striking to the play’s original audience. That audience would have been aware of the earlier model even as it must have feared the prospect of death as something that could never be adequately foreseen. This fear is at the root of the injunction, expressed in so much medieval homiletic writing, to be thinking always on the end. Everyman makes the moral explicit, reminding the audience that the “tyde” (143) or time of death cannot be predicted. Where Elckerlijc has Death admonish his prey that the latter’s moaning will do him no good, Everyman both increases the urgency of the situation and generalizes the point by appending a reminder that death comes to everyone as punishment for Original Sin: “And in the worlde eche lyvynge creature / For Adams synne must dye” (143–45). The notion of death as a payment for sin raises the stakes of the play’s central metaphor of judgment as a reckoning up of sins and merits. One way of managing such fears—central to Everyman—was to imagine the life of the individual as an account-book, in which profits and losses (good works and sins) might be toted up. If one were sufficiently prepared, the thinking went, then even a sudden death would present no danger. At the same time, Ariès suggested, the notion of an account-book marked a shift in the understanding of death toward something more personal, as the divine scales of justice were rewritten as the text of an individual life. So pervasive is this image of the account-book in the late-medieval literature that Ariès referred to his own study of the literature as his own “personal account-book.” Another scholar whose work Ariès draws upon, Alberto Tenenti, suggests the stakes attached to the use of the bookkeeping metaphor, and others like it, seeing in them “a sign of the passionate love for this world.” What such metaphors express, Tenenti concludes, was fundamentally a new sense of time, of the value of the body as a living organism. It was based on an ideal of active life that no longer had its center of gravity outside earthly life. It no longer expressed, as it once had, the impulse toward an otherworldly existence, but an attachment increasingly limited to a life that was merely human (qtd. in Ariès 128–29).15 Though neither of these scholars mention Everyman, the play takes its cue from the ars moriendi literature in its persistent focus on what

This memory all men may have in mynd  35 it variously refers to as Everyman’s “boke of counte” (104), “boke of rekenynge” (134), “countynge boke” (137), “boke of accounte” (502), and so on throughout the play.16 As in the examples cited by Ariès and ­Tenenti, bookkeeping in Everyman is imagined as a way to keep the horror of the unpredictable at bay—wiping away the blot that makes the text of a life unreadable, so that it will once again stand “clere” (136).17 Yet Everyman is an uneasy play. It registers the possibility that death is ultimately untamable, as I have already started to argue. This may be why the play works so furiously, in its closing scenes, to “tame” death. The play’s many parallels with the ars moriendi tradition—of which the bookkeeping metaphor is the most prominent—find dramatic expression in a trajectory that rises from despair to salvation. At his lowest point, abandoned by friends and family, and finding no solace in his possessions, Everyman acts the part of a tragic hero facing his solitary fate: “O, to whome shall I make my mone?” (463). The sense of desolation is if anything more pronounced in the English play, as Everyman laments a series of abandonments that has “lefte me alone” (467) rather than simply decrying the treachery of his fair-weather friends, as in the original.18 Correspondingly, there is a tendency in the English play to stress the emotional solace provided by the “helper” figures whom Everyman subsequently encounters. In famous lines, Knowledge vows: “Everyman, I wyll go with thee and be thy guyde / In thy moste nede to go by thy syde” (522–23), where the Dutch play merely has Kennisse promise in a terse line to protect the hero (ick sal u bewaren at 475). Similarly, where Biechte promises to help Elckerlijc “to your advantage” (vromen at line 509), the analogous figure of Confession in the English play offers a more emotionalized response: “I wyll you comforte as well as I can” (556).19 Or again, the translator revises the salutation with which Duecht greets Elckerlijc—pelgrijm uutvercoren (“elect pilgrim” 590)—to suggest a more personal relationship between Everyman and Good Deeds: “pylgrym,” as in the Dutch play, but also “my specyall frende” (229). These alterations, though slight, suggest how the English translator emphasizes the emotional stakes of the drama wherever possible, stressing in particular the threat of death as a solitary experience: a painful sundering of community that the “helper” figures promise to assuage as best they can. A yearning for community also finds expression in Everyman’s final words upon entering the grave. Having been helped into the grave by his remaining companion, Good Deeds, Everyman now prays that he will join the blessed in due course: “that I may appere with that blessed hoost / That shall be saved at the Dome” (884–85). The editors of the most recent scholarly edition of the play gloss these lines by distinguishing between “the particular Judgment,” which Everyman now faces at the hour of his death, and “the general Judgment when all must appear before God to be dispersed to Heaven or Hell.”20 The distinction is

36  Walter Wadiak described by Ariès, who remarks that, in contemporary treatises on dying, “the resurrection of the flesh was … detached from the great cosmic drama and shifted to the personal destiny of the individual” (106). That the prospect of a more personal death could be frightening has been established. Much of the play’s atmosphere of urgency derives from this narrowing of the scene of the drama, from the cosmic stage of the Day of Judgment to the claustrophobic space of the grave or bedroom, where the soul’s destiny depends upon “the outcome of the final ordeal” that the dying person must undergo “in hora mortis, in the room in which he will give up the ghost” (Ariès 109). 21 So part of the “taming” of death that arguably seems to occur in the play’s final moments has to do with a widening of perspective, when Everyman turns again toward the universal and general fate of humankind as capable of salvation from sin. Yet Everyman is perhaps less sanguine about this happy prospect than its source, as I want to suggest by considering a final series of changes made by the English translator. These are contained in the last lines of the prayer offered by the Doctor who comes onstage at the play’s conclusion. After warning us (in a detail absent from the Dutch play) that God will condemn to everlasting fire those who fail in their good deeds— “God wyll saye, ‘Ite maledicti in ignem eternum’” (915)—Everyman ends with the following lines: 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. Therto helpe, the Trynytye, Say ye for saynte charytye, Amen. 

(915–22)

We have already seen that the image of the account-book is central to the late-medieval discourse of dying, but here the more striking image is that of the body, which—like the account-book—is imagined to be “hole and sounde” in heaven, when body and soul will again be “togyther.” The idea of togetherness may have been suggested to the English translator by the Dutch phrase— “alle gader” (678)—with which Elckerlijc ends: Now let us pray at once that this may be imprinted into everyone’s heart in order that we come pure before God in the end. May the heavenly Father grant us this. Say “Amen” all together (alle gader). (874–79)

This memory all men may have in mynd  37 Though the parallels to the closing passage of Everyman are obvious, the meaning of “together” has been shifted from a communal context—the collective “Amen” of the Dutch play—to an image of personal, bodily integrity in Everyman: “That we may live, body and soule togyther” (emphasis mine). The change is minor but telling, registering a reluctance to surrender life and its pleasures. Though the sentiment is conventional enough—contained in the Nicene Creed— the play’s insistence that the physical body will be resurrected along with the soul sets it apart from its source. Once again, and for the last time, the English play casts a backward glance at the very things it had earlier condemned—here, the decomposing “body [that] lyeth in claye” (15) at the poem’s beginning (a detail that was itself added by the translator). 22 Even in its closing lines, Everyman can’t quite let go of the world. It’s thus intriguing that “saynt charytye” (921)—rather than the “heavenly Father,” as in the Dutch play—is the object of the final prayer in Everyman. 23 Though recognized as a saint in the Middle Ages, “saynt charytye” appears also to be the play’s catchphrase for the so-called Corporal Acts of Mercy: “feeding the hungry, giving drink to the thirsty, providing shelter for the homeless and the stranger, clothing the naked, caring for the sick, and visiting ­prisoners — to which was added the burial of the dead.”24 As the editors of the TEAMS Everyman note, “in Everyman we are reminded of these acts whenever ‘saint charyté’ — that is, ‘holy charity’ — is invoked” (Davidson et  al.  9). The reference in the play’s penultimate line arguably activates all of these meanings. It recalls the Good Deeds that constitute Everyman’s means of salvation, driving home once more the lesson that faith without works is dead. But it also calls for a sympathetic response to Everyman himself, locating charity in the ceremonies of burial and the compassionate treatment of the dead. By recommending charity as a response to Everyman’s end, the English play—as it has done all along—foregrounds the fact of death itself, here in order to stress the need for a humane response to the vulnerability of the dying person. As has been the case throughout the play, the English translator’s change is subtle, but it again shifts the frame, implicitly calling for a response from its audience—an emotional investment— where the Dutch play simply offers a prayer. If we read the final “Amen” in Everyman as a cue to the audience to join in the closing prayer—as at least one scholar has suggested we should—it seems like a hard-won gesture toward community at the moment of our greatest potential isolation from one another, as every member of the audience is called upon to reflect upon the particular death that will be his or hers (Rastall 311). So to what extent, finally, does Everyman enact a “late medieval taming of death,” as Duclow has suggested (108)? I think the answer

38  Walter Wadiak is complex. 25 It’s true that the play mobilizes a wide range of late-­ medieval beliefs and institutions for dealing with the fact of death, and the parallels to the ars moriendi tradition are unmistakable. But looking at the English play’s relation to its source in ­E lckerlijc makes it clear that the poet-translator of Everyman heightens the emotional drama of death as a painful sundering of self from community, making explicit tensions in the late-medieval understanding of death that Elckerlijc more often elides. In this, the English play looks forward to an understanding of death much like our own, in which death is both highly personal and, for that reason, potentially terrifying. Everyman manages, but does not fully contain, the fear of death as an extinction of the self, and even its closing images—most strikingly of the soul reunited with the physical body, and of a personal account-book that is “hole and sound”—offer a promise of the continued integrity of the self after death, in which the text of one’s life, like one’s restored body, will be readable as a locus of meaning and personal identity: a whole. The other side of that promise, as I have tried to show, is the threatening power of death understood, not as a stage of life or part of a divine plan, but as the ultimate form of isolation. Much of the play’s power to haunt us still, centuries later, seems to me to derive from its exploration of these tensions. It may not be mere happenstance, then—or lazy translation—that where Elckerlijc commends itself to its audience as a “mirror” for our edification (spieghel at line 872), the translator of Everyman uses the word “memoryall”: “This memoryall men may have in mynde” (902). A memorial is an aid to memory—a mnemonic that can be used to drive home a lesson—but also, as in modern usage, a literal monument to a particular death. 26 When the plot-explicating Doctor of Everyman sums up the action by enjoining us to consider the forgoing play as a memorial, we can almost see him pointing to the tomb, reminding us of the particular death that awaits us, too. 27 Such memorials were characteristic of the fifteenth century, appearing most spectacularly (and shockingly) in the effigies of the dead that helped make the material culture of this century synonymous with the macabre. The English translator’s subtle shifting of the interpretive frame—from “mirror” to “memoryall”—draws attention to the play as potentially itself a ritual of mourning, in which the individual audience member might see him or herself, proleptically, being lowered into the grave. Rather than mere reflection or exemplification, the English play activates memory as the privileged site (for medieval people) of the deepest kind of learning. 28 Everyman, to a greater degree and more self-consciously than its source, thus figures itself as a memento mori of the kind that would become increasingly familiar in the succeeding centuries. But as an emotionally fraught portrayal of the dying process, its meaning is not reducible to a lesson in theology. A text that fully registers the horror of death as an

This memory all men may have in mynd  39 uncertain event, Everyman is, if not exactly “modern” in its understanding of death—whatever that would mean—then certainly a precocious expression of our own anxieties.

Notes 1 Records suggest that at least some medieval drama was performed in graveyards, though it is impossible to know whether Everyman might have been among them. See Muir 45. Woodcuts of two early editions of the play depict Everyman being confronted by Death in a graveyard, and at least one modern performance of the play does terminate in a cemetery (Davidson et al. 13). 2 For one such argument, see Wertz. Schmitt suggests the limits of this traditional and rather stereotyped view. 3 See Duclow, as well as Bruster and Rasmussen, who follow Duclow in regarding the play as “something like a dramatic ars moriendi” (45). See also Goldhamer, who emphasizes the psychological drama of the play in relation to the ars moriendi tradition on which it draws. 4 One contemporary manual urges the dying man to “put all thy trust in His [i.e., Christ’s] passion and in His death only, having trust in none other thing. To this death commit thee fully. In his death wrap all thyself fully” (qtd. in Duclow 101). The manual in question is transcribed in Comper, Craft of Dying. 5 See lines 32, 564, 616, 888. 6 The consensus view is that Everyman is a translation of the Dutch play rather than the other way around. See Tigg and Manly for two early and influential arguments. 7 For a discussion of the play’s relationship to the ideas of the devotio moderna, see McRae. 8 See lines 35, 214, 233, 255, 274, 297, 305, 350, 371, 471, 808, 829, 846, 851, 853, 856, 858, 868, 904, and 906. By contrast, the equivalent Dutch word appears only twice in Elckerlijc (at lines 264 and 465). Elsewhere the Dutch play uses more general terminology (cf. vliet or “flee” at line 822, where Everyman has “forsake” in the corresponding place at line 868). The English translator’s use of a term with Biblical resonance arguably raises the emotional stakes and heightens the drama of Everyman’s separation from his community, as discussed below. 9 See Ariès: “The sick man is about to die. At least this is what we learn from the texts, which say that he is crucified by suffering” (108). 10 The Dutch play is more formally known as Den Spyeghel der Salicheyt van Elckerlijc, the title given in manuscript. 11 Elckerlijc by contrast has “It shall be accomplished, Almighty God. / I shall go forth to reign in the world” (56–57). Death in Everyman is armed like a scorpion, whereas in Elckerlijc the protagonist is told only that “you will stand with a heavy burden and in misery before God.” Cf. Thiel 30, who argues that Death in the Dutch play takes a comparatively mild attitude toward Elckerlijc. 12 “Lieve” at line 28. In other medieval versions he is actually the Devil, a role that seems to be played in Everyman by Goods, who is arguably the closest thing to a conventional Vice figure in either play. 13 Cf. Elckerlijc: “Oh, Death, you are come so near to me / when I least expected it” (100–101).

40  Walter Wadiak 14 See Malory 682. 15 While Ariès takes issue with some aspects of Tenenti’s view, this seems mostly to concern the placing of the historical boundary separating earlier from later models of death and dying, which Ariès would locate at the junction between the early and late Middle Ages rather than, as Tenenti, between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. The work of both scholars may be seen broadly as advancing a version of the “secularization thesis”— in which a medieval culture of religious devotion is replaced by a modern culture of disenchanted secularism. Though this view has since been recognized by most scholars working in the Middle Ages as an oversimplification, the notion that something is different about the religious culture of the late Middle Ages—characterized by a movement outward from the Church to the world at large—has persisted. The secularization thesis can be traced back to the work of Max Weber. For a recent and influential formulation, see Taylor. 16 The word most often used, however, is “rekenynge,” which occurs dozens of times throughout the play, first at line 20. 17 By contrast, Good Deeds later boasts that he has rendered Everyman’s account-book “blotted and blynde” (419). 18 Cf. Elckerlijc 416–31. 19 One meaning of the Dutch troesten is something like “to help,” but nevertheless vromen suggests the real meaning is as translated above. 20 See Everyman, note to line 885. 21 According to Ariès, this is part of a process that made death “more personal and individual” (31). 22 The earlier passage, too, was added by the English translator, as was the entire speech of which it is a part (lines 1–21). 23 Elckerlijc uses the equivalent German word only once—caritaten (line 653)—and does not personify the virtue as a saint. 24 Like Everyman himself, “saynt charytye” raises the question of the extent to which a personification can be identified as a real person. Although “Saint Charity” does have a feast day (August 1) in the calendar of the medieval Church, Chapman considers the identification of “Saint Charity” with a historical Roman woman to be the product of an “allegorical impulse” (120), given the paucity of evidence for such a person’s having existed. 25 To his credit, Duclow himself gestures toward the complexity I argue for here when he remarks, at the conclusion of his study, that “death in this epoch may have been neither wholly macabre nor wholly tame” (109). Yet his argument differs from mine in its emphasis on looking for parallels to the ars moriendi, whereas my reading has tried to stress the ways in which Everyman—especially in relation to its source-text—departs from the tradition embodied in the manuals. 26 See Middle English Dictionary, “memorial” (n.), sense 2(a). 27 As the editors of the TEAMS edition of the play remark, the word “memoryall” (in the copy of the text most often used as the basis for modern editions) is replaced in another, closely contemporary manuscript of the English play with “moral,” and the substitution is perhaps telling (Everyman, note to line 902). In Everyman, death itself is the moral. 28 The TEAMS editors highlight the role of memory in understanding the play’s impact: “The intended visual effect, whether on stage or in the imaginations of readers, was to create a kind of memory theater to which the mind would return again and again as a way of being reminded in symbolic terms of human mortality and the consequences of one’s actions in this life” (Davidson et al. 5). For an influential discussion of how medieval people thought of

This memory all men may have in mynd  41 memory, see Carruthers. Interestingly, “memorial” can, in Middle English, mean the faculty of memory itself. See Middle English Dictionary, “memorial” (n.), sense 1(a).

Works Cited Ariès, Philippe. The Hour of Our Death. Oxford UP, 1991. Beowulf: A New Verse Translation. Translated by Seamus Heaney. Norton, 2000. Bruster, Douglas, and Eric Rasmussen, editors. Everyman and Mankind. Methuen, 2009. Carruthers, Mary. The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture. Cambridge UP, 1990. Chapman, Alison A. “Ophelia’s ‘Old Lauds’: Madness and Hagiography in Hamlet.” Medieval & Renaissance Drama in England, vol. 20, 2007, pp. 111–135. Comper, Frances M., editor. The Book of the Craft of Dying. Longmans, 1917. Davidson, Clifford, Martin W. Walsh, and Ton J. Broos, editors. “Introduction.” Everyman and Its Dutch Original, Elckerlijc. Medieval Institute Publications, 2007, pp. 1–14. Duclow, Donald F. “Everyman and the Ars Moriendi: Fifteenth-Century Ceremonies of Dying.” Fifteenth Century Studies, vol. 6, 1983, pp. 93–113. Everyman and Its Dutch Original, Elckerlijc. Edited by Davidson, Clifford, Martin W. Walsh, and Ton J. Broos. Medieval Institute Publications, 2007. Goldhamer, Allen D. “Everyman: A Dramatization of Death.” Quarterly Journal of Speech, vol. 59, 1973, pp. 87–98. Kempis, Thomas À. The Imitation of Christ. Translated by Leo Shirley-Price. Penguin Books, 1952. Manly, John Matthews. “Elckerlijc-Everyman: The Question of Priority.” Modern Philology, vol. 8, 1910, pp. 279–302. 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. Le Morte Darthur, or the Hoole Book of Kyng Arthur and of His Noble Knyghtes of the Rounde Table. Edited by Stephen H. A. Shepherd. W. W. Norton, 2004. Muir, Lynette R. The Biblical Drama of Medieval Europe. Cambridge UP, 1995. Rastall, Richard. “Music and Liturgy in Everyman: Some Aspects of Production.” Leeds Studies in English, vol. 29, 1998, pp. 305–314. Roth, Philip. “It No Longer Feels a Great Injustice That I Have to Die.” Interview by Martin Krasnik, Guardian, 14 December 2005, section G2, pp. 14–27. Schmitt, Natalie Crohn. “The Idea of a Person in Medieval Morality Plays.” Comparative Drama, vol. 12, 1978, pp. 23–34. Taylor, Charles. A Secular Age. Harvard UP, 2007. Tenenti, Alberto. Humana Fragilitas: The Themes of Death in Europe from the 13th Century to the 18th Century. Edited by Pierroberto Scaramella and Alberto Tenenti. Ferrari editrice, 2002.

42  Walter Wadiak ———. La vie et la mort à travers l’art du Xve siècle. A. Colin, 1952, 1977. Thiel, Gudrun. “The Changing Significance of the Figure of Death in Various Everyman Plays.” Literator, vol. 7, 1986, pp. 21–47. Tigg, E.R. “Is Elckerlijc Prior to Everyman?” Journal of English and Germanic Philology, vol. 38, 1939, pp. 568–596. Weber, Max. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Scribner, 1930. Wertz, Dorothy. “Mankind as a Type-Figure on the Popular Religious Stage: An Analysis of the Fifteenth-Century English Morality Plays.” Comparative Studies in Society and History, vol. 12, 1970, pp. 83–91.

3 From Nothing to Never Facing Death in King Lear Michael Neill

Undoing the Dead The maske must as well be taken from things, as from men, which being removed, we shall find nothing hid under it, but…death. Montaigne, “That to philosophie, is to learne how to die,” Essays I, xix Es ist nichts. Archduke Franz-Ferdinand, Sarajevo, 1914 In early modern England, as Protestant doctrine transformed the relationship between the living and the dead, representations of death in both literature and the visual arts developed an increasingly secular cast; and the burgeoning of tragic drama in late Elizabethan and ­Jacobean England played a crucial part in this history. That at least was the argument of my book Issues of Death (Neill 9). King Lear, with its evacuation of the heavens, its desolate travesty of apocalypse, and its emphasis upon the inconsolable finality of death, might very well seem to represent the ne plus ultra of the secularizing process I described, yet it receives less attention in the book than any of Shakespeare’s major tragedies. Hamlet alone is the subject of two full chapters, while Othello and Anthony and Cleopatra get one each, but Lear earns a bare four mentions. Looking back, this seems an almost inexplicable mistake; yet the play is similarly disregarded in Michael Andrews’ This Action of Our Death: The Performance of Death in Elizabethan Drama (1989), and entirely ignored in William E. Engel’s Death and Drama in ­Renaissance England (2002). Even in ­Robert N. Watson’s The Rest is Silence: Death as Annihilation in the English Renaissance (1994) it is only, as he says, “the brooding absent presence of [his] argument” (45). This general neglect seems especially strange given the way in which ­William Elton, half a century ago, had addressed what he saw as the play’s nihilism in King Lear and the Gods (1966). Exploring the theological implications of the protagonist’s “Nothing will come of nothing”

44  Michael Neill (Lear 1.1.90), Elton sought to show how “the devastating fifth act shatters…the foundations of faith itself” (Elton 337). With the foundations of faith, we might add, the tragedy also undermines the groundwork of political belief; for it shows a king reduced to his own “shadow,” an anointed monarch degraded to a mere “ruined piece of nature” and forced to recognize the “smell of mortality” upon his own sanctified hand; and it shows a man who, by the play’s end, becomes part of a tableau which, to its appalled spectators, resembles an “image” of that “promised end” when, in an act of final annihilation, “this great world / Shall…wear out to nought” (1.4.222; 4.6.129– 31; 5.3.261). This is a play whose entire action, indeed, is triangulated around three great negatives: “nothing,” “no cause,” and “never.” At its end, turning its back on traditional moralizations, Christian and pagan, and the consolations of memorial artifice, it confronts death as mere blankness, a “nothing” whose utter abjection is realized in the temporal desolation of “never.”1 There is a context for such nullification—one that is eloquently described in Steven Mullaney’s recent study The Reformation of Emotions in Shakespeare’s England. Mullaney begins his book by recalling a grim event in 1549 when, under the orders of Lord Protector Somerset, the great charnel house of St Paul’s was emptied of its dead—a thousand cartloads of bones carried away by night to be dumped in a marsh by Finsbury Fields (Mullaney 1–6). For Mullaney, the episode epitomizes what that chronicler of funeral monuments, John Weever, would later decry as a “rage against the dead” (qtd. in Mullaney 11): the protestant determination—consequent upon the abolition of purgatory and the whole associated industry of intercession—to undo the familiar sense of the dead as a continuing presence, a crucial “age group” in pre-reformation society (Mullaney 3).2 Conspicuous manifestations of this purge included the widespread vandalization of tombs and gravestones through which (in Mullaney’s words) “entire cemeteries were rendered mute, indecipherable” (11). Paradoxical as it may seem, the counterpart of this iconoclastic rampage was the extraordinary efflorescence of funeral arts that began in the late sixteenth century, as English churches and cathedrals became crammed with the increasingly lavish tombs of the rich and powerful. 3 In contrast to the old chantry chapels, where perpetual masses intervened for the souls of the departed, these were monuments (as Bosola, the pretended tomb-maker of The Duchess of Malfi, sardonically observes) “wholly bent upon the world” (4.2.149), designed to secure a kind of immortality that would be enshrined only in the memory of the living. The other face of Mullaney’s secretive nocturnal procession with its heaps of anonymous bones is to be found in the triumphal pageantry of the heraldic funeral whose overwhelmingly secular ostentation was at once a proclamation of individual transcendence and a defiant celebration of the ongoing social order.

From Nothing to Never  45 The preoccupation with worldly fame and remembrance evident in such shows, and more permanently embodied in the extravagant inscriptions and iconographic display of “monumental alabaster,” is colored with a special poignancy by what it reveals about the anxieties attendant on ­ ullification what John Donne called “the most deadly and peremptory n of man that we can consider” (D3v)—something figured forth, amid the pomp of heraldic obsequies, in the leveling anonymity of funeral blacks. No doubt the fear of death as “peremptory nullification” has always haunted the human imagination—however, much Christian doctrine may have struggled to push it to the margins of consciousness—but it seems to have gained increasing traction once the idea of the dead as a continuing presence could no longer be sustained. It is the idea of death’s shockingly abrupt cancellation of identity that so terrifies Claudio in Measure for Measure, when he contemplates his own imminent execution: “Ay, but to die, and go we know not where / To lie in cold obstruction, and to rot” (3.1.118–19); and it is these fears that are rendered shockingly visible in the graveyard scenes of plays like Hamlet and Cyril Tourneur’s Atheist’s Tragedy. Nowhere, indeed, is the trauma of nullification that results from losing touch with the dead more eloquently registered than in Hamlet, which sets the uncertain status of old Hamlet’s ghost, with its desperate imprecations for remembrance, against the brutal materialism of the cemetery, with its mockingly silent skulls. The succession of characters in which Hamlet dresses these remains (“This might be the pate of a politician… Or of a courtier… This might be my lord such a one… Why might not that be the skull of a lawyer… This fellow might be in’s time a great buyer of land,” 5.1.72–95) serves only to draw attention to their dreadful anonymity. The Ghost whose appearance opens the play conspicuously belongs to the pre-reformation dead: it claims to be on night-release from the purgatory in whose reality Protestant playgoers were expected not to believe, and whose nonexistence must have been instilled in Hamlet at his famously Lutheran University of Wittenberg—hence his fear that “The spirit that I have seen / May be the devil,” an emissary of hell, seeking only to encompass his damnation (2.2.575–80). Confusingly for a seventeenth-century audience, however, the subsequent action appears to warrant the truth of the Ghost’s claims, even allowing it a second appearance where any lingering fears about its demonic nature seem banished by its sudden tenderness for Gertrude’s feelings (“O, step between her and her fighting soul” [3.4.103]). Yet in the last act the Ghost’s insistent presence is effectively displaced and silenced by the rotting bones that give a shockingly concrete reality to Hamlet’s earlier jests about how “a king may go a progress through the guts of a beggar” (4.3.30–31). The skull, which the Gravedigger invests with the identity of Yorick, is crucial here: as Hamlet recalls how in his childhood the old king’s jester bore him on his back “a thousand times” and kissed his lips

46  Michael Neill “I know not how oft” (5.1.172–75), Yorick is momentarily imagined as a surrogate father, displacing the Ghost—only for the skull’s materiality to proclaim the brutal nullification of death in its reduction to a mere memento mori: “Now get you to my lady’s chamber and tell her, let her paint an inch thick, to this favor she must come” (5.1.178–79).4 In the play most obviously influenced by Hamlet, Thomas Middleton’s The Revenger’s Tragedy, the protagonist’s mistress has already come to such a favor. The play begins not with the ghost of a murdered king, but with the skull of a murdered woman—one whose name recalls the most famous sobriquet of a dead Queen. Gloriana’s skull serves, like Yorick’s, as an minatory emblem of mortality, a “terror to fat folks / To have their costly three-piled flesh worn off / As bare as this” (1.1.45–47); but at the same time, this “shell of Death” is also the focus of a more personal kind of remembrance, as Vindice recalls how “life and beauty naturally filled out / These ragged imperfections” until the bare bone becomes imaginatively “appareled” in the lust-provoking flesh of Gloriana (1.1.15–18, 31). That metaphor will be brought to grotesque life in Act Three, when the skull reappears “dressed up in tires,” punningly disguised as “a country lady…with a grave look” (3.5.42 sd, 132–35). The corrosive on her lips turning her, in a double sense, into the very face of death, Gloriana returns to perform a revenge upon the Duke that is also a proof of remembrance—one more brutally effectual, perhaps, than the “tomb of pearl” promised to the “fair…monument” who was once Antonio’s wife (1.4.68–71), because it is accomplished through a reenactment of her original murderous violation. Here, it is as if memory takes material form, grotesquely condensing the chain of poisonings in Hamlet, where—as a final consequence of the venomous history poured into Hamlet’s ear by the Ghost—­Claudius is killed with a “poison tempered by himself” (5.2.270): a mock-­communion (“drink it, in remembrance of me” [1 Corinthians 11:25]) that ironically recalls the toxin he himself once poured into the ear of his sleeping brother. But if memory can destroy, it can also be imagined as a kind of balm for the dead, a remedy for nullification. When Hamlet, in one of his characteristically double-edged jibes, tells Rosencrantz and Guildenstern that “The King is a thing…. Of nothing” (4.2.26–28), he is recalling a wellknown passage from Psalms, “Man is like a thing of nought” (144.4); however, the context gives the proverb a more local meaning: for Hamlet has in mind not merely the empty show of Claudius’s usurped authority, but the erasure of memory that once rendered his own father, the true king, a thing of nothing. It is striking that where the Ghost of the source play had been notorious for his shrieks of “Hamlet, revenge!”, ­Shakespeare’s tormented spirit appears to long not so much for retribution as for remembrance, haunting his son with the pathetic plea “Remember me” (1.5.91); and though Hamlet may speak to Horatio of “a

From Nothing to Never  47 divinity that shapes our ends” (5.2.10), at his own end, faced by Death’s arrest, he is concerned only to ensure that he too will be remembered, rescued by the proper telling of his story from the oblivion of “things standing thus unknown” (5.2.278–91). 5 The fear of peremptory nullification is never expressly articulated in Hamlet—though it is fleetingly glimpsed in the “not to be” and “no more” of his most famous soliloquy (3.1.58, 63); instead we see it embodied in the graveyard’s quintessence of dust; in Macbeth, however, it is more directly imagined in the protagonist’s response to the death of Lady Macbeth, where the memorial promise of “recorded time” is reduced to the empty posturing of a player who “struts and frets his hour upon the stage, / And then is heard no more,” and where life issues only in the narrative erasure of “a tale / Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, / Signifying nothing”(5.5.20–27; emphasis added). A similar evacuation of meaning is registered in John Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi, a tragedy whose ending, like Hamlet’s, is ushered in by a graveyard scene: in the final moments of the play Bosola, echoing his earlier satire of memorial ostentation, mocks the dying Cardinal with a familiar archetype of mortal vanity: I do glory That thou, which stood’st like a huge pyramid Begun upon a large and ample base, Shalt end in a little point, a kind of nothing. (5.5.74–77, qtd. in Webster) For Webster and many of his contemporaries, the vandalized tombs of earlier generations stood as reminders of the folly of such bids for everlasting glory. So it is that in Malfi’s graveyard, Antonio is made to moralize on the spectacle of monastic ruin that, unbeknown to him, contains the resting place of his murdered wife: here in this open court, Which now lies naked to the injuries Of stormy weather, some men lie interred Loved the church so well, and gave so largely to’t, They thought it should have canopied their bones Till doomsday; but all things have their end: Churches and cities, which have diseases like to men, Must have like death that we have. (5.3.12–19) In this scene, it is the sound of the Duchess’s voice, issuing like an echo from her unmarked tomb, that is made to stand for the only certain

48  Michael Neill counter to the “peremptory nullification” of death—the persistence of memory that will be celebrated in the play’s concluding couplet: “Integrity of life is fame’s best friend, / Which nobly, beyond death, shall crown the end” (5.5.118–19). In his encomiastic verses on Webster’s tragedy, Thomas Middleton, responding to what he clearly recognized as the play’s dominant motif, proclaimed that “Every worthy man / Is his own marble, and his merit can / Cut him to any figure and express more art / Than Death’s cathedral palaces” (Webster 6, lines 7–10). The “art” he had in mind was that of the play itself, “this work of fame” (line 3), the “masterpiece” which, according to John Ford, “to memory hath lent / A lasting fame to raise [the author’s] monument” (Webster 7, lines 2–6), and which Webster’s own dedicatory epistle offers to extend to his intended patron, so that he may “live in [his] grave and laurel spring out of it” (Webster 5, lines 19–20). This, of course, is the same Horatian trope (exegi monumentum aere perennius) that is famously elaborated in Shakespeare’s time sonnets: Not marble, nor the gilded monuments Of princes, shall outlive this powerful rhyme, But you shall shine more bright in these contents Than unswept stone, besmeared with sluttish time. When wasteful war shall statues overturn, And broils root out the work of masonry, Nor Mars his sword nor war’s quick fire shall burn The living record of your memory. ‘Gainst death and all-oblivious enmity Shall you pace forth; your praise shall still find room Even in the eyes of all posterity That wear this world out to the ending doom. (Sonnet 55, lines 1–12) The pathos of this sonnet, however, depends on the finely balanced irony by which it is precisely “this powerful rhyme” that makes us feel the destructive force of “sluttish time”—the very nullification of “death and all-oblivious enmity” that its own memorial artifice seeks to defy.

Coming to Nothing [E]very part of the Universe, is Body; and that which is not Body, is no part of the Universe: And because the Universe is All, that which is no part of it is Nothing; and consequently no where. Hobbes, Leviathan 4.46

From Nothing to Never  49 Nothing is more substitutable and yet nothing is less so than the syntagma “my death.” Jacques Derrida, Aporias 22 ­ amlet, King Lear has no equivalent for the bone-yard moralizing of H The Revenger’s Tragedy, and The Atheist’s Tragedy, or for the ­charnel-house horrors of Romeo and Juliet and The Second Maiden’s Tragedy—let alone for the deathly grand guignol of The Duchess of Malfi, with its waxwork corpses and dead man’s hand; and it is equally bereft of the funeral monuments that play so important a part not just in Malfi but also in works as various as Titus Andronicus, The Winter’s Tale, and Ford’s Love’s Sacrifice. But of all the plays of the period, it is arguably the one most conspicuously preoccupied with the terror of mortal nullification. In James Calderwood’s words, Shakespeare makes of “‘nothing’… a kind of verbal vortex that draws the ordered world of King Lear downward, reducing Lear to nakedness and madness” and diminishing language itself “to the point where words are shorn of meaning and become again mere savage cries….[an] extreme of verbal nothingness” (7). It is true that, in the Folio text at least, King Lear ends with “a dead march,” signaling the funeral procession in which tragedies of the period conventionally conclude—a ritual that proclaims human defiance of the very ending it enacts; but where in Hamlet, for example, the march is ceremoniously orchestrated by Fortinbras as a rite of remembrance that will “speak for” the dead prince, in Lear it is announced only by ­A lbany’s curt “Bear them from hence”; no memorial tribute distinguishes the bodies of Lear and Cordelia from those of Goneril, Regan and Edmund; instead the procession is merely prefaced by the painfully inadequate injunction to “Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say,” in lines whose reduplicated negatives echo the terrible “nevers” of Lear’s last speech: The oldest hath born most, we that are young Shall never live so long, nor see so much. (5.3.324–25) If, as I previously argued, early modern tragedy is about “the discovery of death and the mapping of its meanings” (Neill 1), then Lear is perhaps the single most striking contribution to that atlas of mortality; its opening scene is built around a piece of emblematic action which gestures at this grim cartography. The oration that announces Lear’s “darker purpose” is ostensibly about practical matters—dowry and the politics of inheritance—but the ironic self-deprecation with which the king attempts to pre-empt the issue of his own transience (“while we /

50  Michael Neill Unburdened crawl toward death” [1.1.39–40]), marks out the play’s fatal direction by drawing attention to the implicit significance of the map on which this monarch is about to chart his own undoing: the stage picture mirrors such images as Elizabeth’s Ditchley Portrait, in which the queen’s body is set against a map that represents her body politic, or the very similar image of James and his heir, superimposed upon a map of Britain, that appears on the title-page of Purchas his Pilgrimes (1625). In the light of such graphic devices, literalizing the idea of the kingdom as royal body politic,6 Lear’s theatrical division of his land begins to resemble an act of cartographic self-dissection, morbidly anticipating his own fantasy of anatomizing Regan (3.6.73–75). What results is a vividly pictorial version of the deposition scene in Richard II, where another monarch undertakes to “undo [him] self” (4.1.193) in a formal surrender of authority. Richard’s “woeful pageant” (4.1.311) strips him not just of “title” but of the very “name was given me at the font,” reducing him to a mere “nothing,” a histrionic “shadow” divorced from his own “substance” (4.1.245–46, 191, 282–89); and in his prison cell, this king will imagine himself as an empty role-player, one who may be “king’d again” only to be “unking’d” once more, becoming in the process so much a “nothing” (5.5.31–38) that only the final annihilation of death can soothe his distress:7 But whate’er I be, Nor I, nor any man that but man is, With nothing shall be pleas’d, till he be eas’d With being nothing. (5.5.38–41) The incantatory “nothings” of Richard II can help to explain the extraordinary violence of Lear’s reaction to Cordelia’s “nothing” in the love test (1.1.87–89). It is not simply that her stubborn refusal to play her assigned part reduces her father’s theatre of royal bounty to humiliating anti-climax: LEAR:  What

can you say to draw A third more opulent than your sisters? Speak. CORDELIA:  Nothing, my lord. LEAR:  Nothing? CORDELIA:  Nothing. The pausing enforced by the stark rhetorical and metrical isolation of those repeated “nothings” makes them hang in the air like portents of the very end which the mock-abnegation of her father’s “crawl[ing] towards death” had sought to buy off; and Lear can resist it only by a

From Nothing to Never  51 gesture of counter-annihilation. “Nothing will come of nothing. Speak again.” On the face of things, this seems like a simple admonitory version of the old proverb nihil ex nihilo fit, warning his daughter that all she can expect to receive from him is the contemptuous “Nothing” of his subsequent offer to Burgundy (l. 247). But to a contemporary audience, as Elton pointed out (179–88), the meaning of Lear’s proverb will have been complicated, not just by its ironic echo of the Christian orthodoxy which insisted that God had indeed fashioned his entire creation out of nothing, but by the grim corollary of which Thomas Nashe reminded his audience: “This world is transitory; it was made of nothing, and it must to nothing” (Summers Last Will and Testament, in Works, III, p. 241). At the same time, Lear is anticipating the formal annihilation of Cordelia’s royal identity that will render her dead to him, reducing her, as it were, from a “little seeming substance” to the obstinately reiterated “Nothing” of his offer to Burgundy, insisting that “we / Have no such daughter” (1.1.199–201, 247, 265). Edgar will experience a similar self-cancellation in the wake of repudiation by his own father: “Edgar I nothing am” (2.3.192). Gloucester himself has spoken of “the quality of nothing” in his first exchange with Edmund, deploying a paradox whose sarcastic wit depends on the obvious fact that, since “nothing” is by definition without properties, it can hardly be invoked as a quality: as mere absence it has “[no] need to hide itself” (1.2.34–35). Stripped of the “propinquity and property of blood” that should define their being (1.1.116), Cordelia and Edgar are both “unqualitied”—in the word with which Iras will describe the dissolution of Antony’s selfhood, in Antony and Cleopatra (3.11.43). “We / Have no such daughter,” Lear announces, “nor shall ever see / That face of hers again” (1.1.264–66): in what will prove to be a fearful anticipation of his own last moments, Lear de-faces his daughter, exposing her to a nullification that, in his mind, is no different from death. But it is the king himself who—as the Fool points out in a cruel reprise of Lear’s own proverb—proves subject to a more absolute nullification: in the repeated negatives of an exchange that becomes an extended riff on Hamlet’s “The King is a thing…Of nothing” (Ham., 4.2.27–29), even the Fool’s affectionate “nuncle” can seem charged with its own punning negativity: KENT:  This is nothing, fool. FOOL:  …you gave me nothing

for it. [to Lear] Can you make no use of nothing, nuncle. LEAR:  Why no, boy; nothing can be made out of nothing. FOOL:  …I would not be thee nuncle. Thou hast pared thy wits on both sides and left nothing in the middle….Now art thou an O without a figure; I am better than thou art now. I am a fool, thou art nothing.8

52  Michael Neill LEAR:  Does

any here know me. This is not Lear….. Who is it that can tell me who I am? FOOL:  Lear’s shadow. (1.4.126–30,177–85, 216–22 (emphasis added)) A “shadow” is “a type of what is fleeting or ephemeral” (OED n. 4c), “an unreal appearance; a delusive semblance or image; a vain and unsubstantial object of pursuit” (OED n. 6a) and hence—in one of the word’s contemporary meanings—a mere “actor” (OED n. 6b). Beyond that, of course, it can also mean “an attenuated remnant, a form from which the substance has departed” (OED n. 6g) and thus a “spectral form, phantom” (OED n. 7), a bodiless nothing like the dead king in Hamlet: HAMLET:  Do you see nothing there? QUEEN GERTRUDE:  Nothing at all. Yet all that is HAMLET:  Nor did you nothing hear? QUEEN GERTRUDE:  No, nothing but ourselves.

I see. (3.4.122–24)

In King Lear, the word “nothing” tolls repeatedly from one scene to another, so that even when it is most casually spoken it can sound as if freighted with significance beyond its immediate context: GLOUCESTER:  …it shall lose thee nothing. (1.2.115) FOOL:  …so your face bids me, though you say nothing. (1.4.286) EDMUND:  Have you nothing said… (2.1.26) KENT:  …[thou] art nothing but the composition of a knave… (2.2.19–20) OSWALD:  I have nothing to do with thee. (2.2.33) KENT:  Nothing almost sees miracles

But misery. (2.2.163–64) which the impetuous winds… Catch in their fury and make nothing of… (3.1.8–9) LEAR:  No, I will be the pattern of all patience I will say nothing. (3.2.380) GLOUCESTER:  Go to, say you nothing. (3.4.8) EDGAR:  The wretch that thou has blown unto the worst Owes nothing to thy blasts (4.1.7–8) EDGAR:  There is nothing done, if he return the conqueror. (4.6.260–61) ALBANY:  thou art in nothing less Than I have here proclaim’d thee. (5.3.95–96) GENTLEMAN:  [That]

“In nothing am I changed / But in my garments,” insists the disguised Edgar to his blind father, as if clothing were itself nothing, presenting a

From Nothing to Never  53 mere semblance of identity (4.5.9–10). Garments, however, can mean everything: just as Richard II performs his self-annihilation by renouncing the symbolic accoutrements of royalty—crown, scepter, and the sacramental balm of coronation—so Lear’s is acted out in successive literalizations of the metaphor in which he first imagined the surrender of kingly authority: “Since now we will divest us both of rule / Interest of territory, cares of state” (1.1.49–50; emphasis added). The idea of royal identity as a kind of dress, though admitted here in an almost offhand parenthesis, is one to which the play repeatedly returns. Coronation, of which we are reminded by Lear’s offer of “this coronet” to his sonsin-law (l.140), was an act of formal investiture, a sacramental act that transformed the nature of its recipient: so that to “undeck the pompous body of a king” (RII, 4.1.250) was in some profound way to annihilate his identity—rather as Cordelia’s public self is meant to be undone by the “dismantl[ing]” of her father’s favor (1.1.228). The paradox of Richard’s gesture is that for his ceremony to have meaning, credence must still be given to the king’s quasi-sacerdotal powers. Something even more radical is involved in Lear, however; and the clue to its vision of undone selfhood is to be found in the “presented nakedness” that expresses Edgar’s sense of having been rendered “nothing” (2.2.182, 192). Turning himself into Poor Tom, identified by his own father simply as the “naked fellow” (4.1.42, 46, 54), he appears to Lear as a mirror for his own sense of nullification: “Couldst thou save nothing…Nothing could have subdued nature / To such a lowness but his unkind daughters” (3.4.63, 69–70). Out in the storm, even before Lear calls down annihilation upon the world, the Knight witnesses the king pitching his own “little world of man” against a tempest that threatens to “make nothing” of him (3.1.9– 100). Confronted by the nullity of Edgar’s “unaccommodated man”—a bare “thing” who is in the Fool’s terms no-thing—Lear is driven, like Richard, to act out his own undoing, repudiating what he will come to see as the vacant guise of “robes and furred gowns” (4.6.160): “Off, off you lendings” (3.4.106). Passing through the judgmental mock-purgatory of 3.6, he reappears as the “ruined piece of nature” whose condition reminds Gloucester of the universal end when “this great world / Shall so wear out to nought”—to nothing (4.6.130–31).

Going Nowhere; Seeing Nothing HIRST:  I

am mistaken. There is nothing there. Silence SPOONER:  No. You are in no man’s land. Which never moves, which never changes, which never grows older, but which remains forever, icy and silent. Harold Pinter, No Man’s Land

54  Michael Neill What succeeds the king’s symbolic annihilation is a resurrection— one strangely foreshadowed by the mock “miracle” of Gloucester’s own revival, following his apparent suicide in 4.6. In a play, whose topography (despite the conspicuous cartographic display of its opening scene) is more than usually vague, the placing of this episode is made to appear of some importance: productions and editions from the eighteenth to the twentieth century were careful to locate it in “The Country, near Dover”; 9 and even in Deborah Warner’s recent revival at the old Vic, the set for the play’s final movement features “a perspective of distant blue sea [that] tells us we are in Dover” (­B illington): whether as the center of resistance to the usurping sisters or as the location of the vertiginous brink to which Poor Tom leads the blind Gloucester, Dover is mentioned eleven times in the space of little more than a single act—most insistently in the blinding scene with its three times repeated “Wherefore to Dover?”10 The rhetorical prominence of the name is even more striking in light of the fact that it is among Shakespeare’s more conspicuous additions to the story. There is no Dover in Geoffrey of Monmouth, or in any of the versions that Shakespeare is likely to have read: in The Mirror for ­M agistrates (1574), in Holinshed’s Historie of England (1587), in William ­Warner’s Albion’s England (1589), in Spenser’s Faerie Queen (1596), or in Camden’s Remaines Concerning Britaine (1606). It is not mentioned even in the anonymous True Chronicle Historie of King Leir, from which Shakespeare borrowed so much incidental detail, and which is often quite specific in its use of place-names. There is something very deliberate about this, but the reason for it is by no means entirely obvious; indeed it seems to have been obscure even to Nahum Tate, who cut most references to Dover from his revision of the play. Act 4 opens with a scene in which Gloucester is being led “I’the way toward Dover” (l. 45) by a faithful old retainer, before twice seeking directions from Poor Tom: “Dost thou know the way to Dover?”; “Dost thou know Dover?” (4.1.58, 74). By now the audience will think that they too “know Dover”—that Gloucester is simply following his own advice to Kent in seeking the “welcome and protection” of Cordelia and her supporters at the seaport; but then we are suddenly made aware that his is a different destination: There is a cliff whose high and bending head Looks fearfully in the confined deep: Bring me but to the very brim of it, And I’ll repair the misery thou dost bear With something rich about me. (4.1.77–80)

From Nothing to Never  55 The Dover he imagines is no longer a place of refuge and safety: no longer the town itself, but the site of that “extreme verge” to which the disguised Edgar will pretend to lead his father in 4.6: “From that place,” the old man insists, “I shall no leading need.” It is as if in Gloucester’s mind Dover has simply become another name for death, the location of his “promised end.” So perhaps the play’s rhetorical emphasis on Dover was meant, because of its famous cliffs,11 as a simple prompt to the audience’s imagination? It is that, but a notably misleading one, for, though Edgar tells us “here’s the place” (4.6.11) and conjures up its “fearful and dizzy” precipice in vivid detail, there is no suggestion that the action ever brings us anywhere near Dover’s famous edge: working on the audience’s “imaginary forces” Edgar’s speech was the sort of rhetorical conjuring trick in which the early modern theatre could take self-conscious pleasure: “Think, when we talk of horses, that you see them, / Printing their proud hooves in the receiving earth” (Henry V, Prologue, 25–26). In King Lear, we are asked to see Gloucester and Edgar toiling up the hill to the clifftop, to envisage their rough climb, to hear the sea below, and then to experience, through Edgar’s intensely visual anticipation, a kind of slow-motion fall past the samphire-gatherer as he “hangs” against the cliff, to the roaring sea below. Such is the vertigo his vision produces, it is as if sight itself and even hearing begin to fail, like Gloucester’s own “imperfect senses”: how fearful And dizzy ‘tis to cast one’s eyes so low…. The fishermen that walk upon the beach Appear like mice, and yon tall anchoring barque Diminished to her cock, her cock a buoy. Almost too small for sight. The murmuring surge That on th’unnumbered pebble chafes Cannot be heard so high. I’ll look no more, Lest my brain turn and the deficient sight Topple down headlong. (4.6.11–24; emphasis added) But of course this is all a cheat: indeed even before Gloucester makes his leap from “the very brim,” Edgar offers the audience a hint that perhaps not everything is quite as they have been made to visualize it: “Why I do trifle thus with his despair, / Is done to cure it”; but the charade nevertheless continues as the blind old man resolves to end his suffering by plunging into the abyss: This world I do renounce and in your sights Shake patiently my great affliction off. (4.6.35–36; emphasis added)

56  Michael Neill It is not in the sight of the gods, however, that his suicide occurs, but only in that of the audience, who have been gulled into sharing the vision of a blind man. Their misprision is quickly corrected by Edgar: “Had he been where he thought, / By this had thought been dead” (4.6.44–45); and at this point, playgoers are forced to recognize that all which their “imaginary forces” have made them see amounts to a mere nothing, a phantasm of the mind. Edgar, admittedly, would have us think that this is a nothing which amounts to something, involving the miraculous operation of divine grace (“think that the clearest gods, who make them honours / Of men’s impossibilities, have preserved thee”); and it is true that Gloucester’s theatre of resurrection anticipates the carefully orchestrated revival of the unconscious Lear in 4.7, where the king appears in the “fresh garments” that—even if he himself cannot recognize them—are meant to reinvest him with his royal identity (4.7.22, 66–67). But the fact that Dover, as the place we are repeatedly promised but never really see, turns out to be a kind of nowhere—a fictive scene of empty histrionics—prepares us for an even more cruel nullification: for Lear’s restoration, like Gloucester’s, proves to be nothing more than a deceitful prelude to the events of the last act. Transformatory and redemptive as the episode may appear, it proves to be only the most persuasive of a pitiless sequence of false endings that includes Edgar’s victorious trial by combat, Edmund’s last minute repentance, and the hanged Cordelia’s seeming revival (“This feather stirs: she lives”). Each of these moments in turn promises to repeat the happy resolution that crowned the old play of King Leir; but each, of course, leads only to further suffering and death.

The Face of Death The dead love no-one, nothing. Ian McEwan, Nutshell 98 She’s gone to dust and rubble. Gone nowhere. No where to go. No she to go to it. Jenny Diski, “Who’ll be last?” LRB, 19 Nov. 2015, 13 The reconciliation between father and daughter, by virtue of its simplicity and emotional constraint, is possibly perhaps the most moving scene anywhere in Shakespeare: when Lear makes his abject confession to Cordelia, she responds with a sublime paraphrase of the repeated “Nothings” that precipitated his rage against her: “No cause, no cause” (l. 75). But the cruelty of the play’s design is that, in theatrical terms, even this transcendent annihilation of past wrong turns out to involve

From Nothing to Never  57 another deceit; for the play is progressing towards a very different kind of negation—one that begins to remind Kent of the horrors of biblical apocalypse (“Is this the promised end?” (5.3.261)), but which is actually headed in an even darker direction. In the incantatory negatives with which the old man responds to the inert corpse of his daughter, the play’s primal “nothing” is again paraphrased, but this time with a finality that exposes its earlier translation as empty wish-fulfilment: “No, no, no life…thou’lt come no more, / Never, never, never, never, never” (5.3.304–307). The five times repeated “never” belongs, of course, to the Folio text in which—as if Lear’s hammering spondees were not enough—the line is followed by a piece of stage business that faces the audience with nullification of the most peremptory kind: “Look on her, look, her lips, / Look there, look there!” (5.3.309–10). It is sometimes imagined that Lear dies here in joyous delusion, supposing that Cordelia’s lips move—that she is, after all, alive; but if that were the case, Shakespeare would tell us so, as he did earlier in the scene (“This feather stirs, she lives,” l. 263); instead, this is, I think, the only moment in the canon where the audience’s gaze is directed onto a face without their being told what they are to see there; and that is because on those cold, unmoving lips there is, in the absolute sense, nothing.12 Lear’s vow at the end of the opening scene never to “see / that face of hers again” has achieved its terrible fulfilment. Somewhere in the back of Shakespeare’s mind, as he constructed this scene, must surely have been the lines from the second act Chorus of Seneca’s Troades (post mortem nihil est ­ipsaque mors nihil… [5.2.388–89])—which he had recently remembered in Measure for Measure (3.1.318 ff.). I quote the Chorus here in the magnificent version by the Earl of Rochester, which moves towards its own equally conclusive gesture of silent nullification (one that, whether consciously or not, echoes the “no mores” of Hamlet, Lear, and Macbeth): After Death, nothing is, and nothing Death, The utmost Limit of a Gaspe of Breath…. Dead, wee become the Lumber of the World, And to that Masse of matter shall be swept, Where things destroy’d with things unborne are kept. Devouring tyme swallows us whole, Impartial Death confounds Body and Soule. For Hell, and the foul Fiend that Rules God’s everlasting fiery Jayles, (Devis’d by Rogues, dreaded by Fooles) With his grim griezly Dogg, that keepes the Doore, Are senseless Storyes, idle Tales, Dreames, Whimseys, and noe more.

(Walker13)

58  Michael Neill Rochester’s lines, however, for all their superb control, are marked by a kind of aristocratic swagger—superbia, we might call it—of which there is no trace in Lear’s ending: that indeed is the point of their control—to remind readers of the way in which nothingness, because of the opportunity it offers for the defiant extreme of self-display, can even be a focus of perverse desire. The longing for annihilation into which despair plunges Malfi’s Cardinal, (“let me / Be laid by and never thought of” [5.5.87–88]), or Marlowe’s Dr Faustus (“O soul, be chang’d into little water-drops, / And fall into the ocean, ne’er be found!” [xix.185–86]) is of different kind, but driven by egotism nevertheless, as is the end of Shakespeare’s disillusioned Timon. When Timon consigns himself to the “everlasting mansion” of a tomb that will be progressively eroded by “the salt flood” (5.2.100–104), his gesture answers to the same preoccupation with self that has consumed him from the beginning. His monument is to be inscribed with an epitaph whose plea for oblivion merely restates Hamlet’s craving for remembrance as bitter negation: Here lies a wretched corpse Of wretched soul bereft. Seek not my name…. Pass by and curse thy fill, but pass And stay not here thy gait. (5.5.71–78) It must have been Timon that the playwright John Marston had in mind when he devised the sardonic epitaph which, according to Anthony à Wood, was to be inscribed on his own tombstone: oblivioni sacrum.14 It is true that the tantalizing force of such gestures derives partly from their ability to arouse the same horror vacuui which they merely pretend to erase; but it depends also upon the way in which their sour bravado constitutes an appeal for deathless admiration. This, surely, is why W.B. Yeats, like Marston, chose to echo Timon in the epitaph that has helped to turn his self-consciously humble grave at Drumcliff into a place of sentimental pilgrimage: Cast a cold eye On life, on death. Horseman, pass by. (Yeats 401) The much colder eye of King Lear allows for no such barren comfort: and that is because Lear’s gaze is focused not upon himself but upon Cordelia, upon a recognition of death not now as nullification of the self, but as the absolute and desolating absence of another; that is where the agonizing journey from “nothing” to “never” has taken the king—and

From Nothing to Never  59 us with him: “O see, see! …Look there, look there!” the play urges its audience, but simply to teach us that, if only it were possible, we had much better look away. This, finally, is what it means to face death. When there is nothing to be seen, when there is no one there, there is nowhere to go; and, soon enough, no us to go to it. Note: A portion of this chapter, in an abbreviated form, appeared in Suzanne Gossett and Dympna Callaghan (editors), Shakespeare in Our Time: A Shakespeare Association of America Collection (Arden Shakespeare, 2016). I am grateful to the editors and to Margaret Bartley of the Arden Shakespeare for permission to reuse it here.

Notes 1 For useful surveys of the variety of approaches to the idea of “nothing” in Shakespeare, see Brian Sheerin, “Making use of Nothing: The Sovereignties of King Lear,” Studies in Philology, vol. 110, 2013, pp. 789–811 (esp. pp. 791, n. 5), and Jessica Chiba, “‘And nothing brings me all things’: ­Shakespeare’s Philosophy of Nothing,” forthcoming in The Routledge Guide to Shakespeare and Philosophy. As her title suggests, Chiba’s thoughtful account of Shakespearean nothingness is more optimistic than my own, concluding with the claim that “through ‘nothing’ Shakespeare shows that existence is filled with meaning and presence.” 2 The phrase is from Natalie Zemon Davis’s important essay, “Ghosts, Kin, and Progeny: Some Features or Early Modern Family Life,” Daedalus, vol. 106, no. 2, 1977, pp. 87–114 (p. 102). 3 See Neill 39–48. 4 On Hamlet as an expression of Protestant anxieties about the dead, see ­Stephen Greenblatt, Hamlet in Purgatory (Princeton UP, 2001); Neill, Issues of Death, pp. 38–39, 244–46; and Mullaney 18. 5 See Michael Neill, “Remembrance and Revenge: Hamlet, Macbeth, and The Tempest,” Jonson and Shakespeare, Edited by Ian Donaldson (Macmillan/ HRC, 1983), pp. 33–66. 6 See Richard Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood: the Elizabethan Writing of England (University of Chicago Press, 1992), pp. 112–15. The classic account of the doctrine on which these images are based is Ernst Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theory (Princeton UP, 1957). 7 For an analysis of the political significance of “nothing” in Richard II and King Lear, see Sheerin, “Making Use of Nothing” (cited in n.3 above). 8 On the mathematical significance of the Fool’s “O”/“nothing” see R. S. White, “Making Something out of ‘Nothing’ in Shakespeare,” Shakespeare Survey, vol. 66, 2013, pp. 232–45 (esp. pp. 242–44). 9 The editorial tradition of identifying the scene in this way, deriving from the representative conventions of the post-Restoration scenic stage, can be traced back ultimately to Nahum Tate’s 1681 revision (where the equivalent episode is located in “The Country Scene”), but it derives more immediately from Lewis Theobald’s 1733 edition where the scene is placed in “The Country, near Dover.” Fidelity to Jacobean staging conditions has meant that editions from the 1960s ceased to identify locations in sdd. at the beginning of scenes; but a lingering nostalgia for such directions is evident as recently as the Norton Shakespeare (1997), where suggestions for placing the action are

60  Michael Neill

10 11

12

13 14

routinely footnoted: so in all three of Norton’s Lear texts we are invited to think of Gloucester’s attempted suicide as happening “Near Dover.” So in Q. In the F text Kent’s initial reference to it in 3.1 as the place where Lear’s supporters are gathering is, somewhat confusingly cut. The cliffs of Dover were as well known in Shakespeare’s day as they are now; and in the last book of Michael Drayton’s chorographic epic, Polyolbion (1622), the “Sampyre” that grows on “Dovers neighbouring Cleeves” is even recommended as a “simple” to “excite / [The] dull and sickly taste, and stirre up appetite” (p. 300). For a reading of this moment which insists that Lear dies in “joyous” delusion, supposing that Cordelia is, after all, alive, see Leah Marcus, “King Lear and the Death of the World,” in Michael Neill and David Schalkwyk (editors), The Oxford Handbook of Shakespearean Tragedy (Oxford UP, 2016), pp.  421–36 (p. 434). Marcus argues that the Q version of Lear’s death, which is without any “Look there…” produces a darker ending in which “Lear dies not ‘redeemed’ but broken hearted.” Cited with slight alteration to punctuation. The words also paraphrase the title of the final poem in Marston’s collection of satires, The Scourge of Villainy (1598), “To Everlasting Oblivion.”

Works Cited Billington, Michael. Review of King Lear, directed by Deborah Warner. The Guardian, 5th Nov 2016. Calderwood, James L. “Creative Uncreation in King Lear.” Shakespeare Quarterly, vol. 37, 1986, pp. 5–19. Donne, John. Deaths Duell. 1632. Elton, William. King Lear and the Gods. Huntington Library, 1966. Middleton, Thomas. The Revenger’s Tragedy. New Mermaids. Edited by Brian Gibbons. A&C Black, 2008. Mullaney, Steven. The Reformation of Emotions in the Age of Shakespeare. Chicago UP, 2015. Nashe, Thomas. The Works of Thomas Nashe. 5 vols. Edited by R.B. ­McKerrow. Vol. III. Basil Blackwell, 1958. Neill, Michael. Issues of Death: Mortality and Identity in English Renaissance Drama. Clarendon P, 1997. Shakespeare, William. Antony and Cleopatra. The Norton Shakespeare, 1st edition. Edited by Stephen Greenblatt. W.W. Norton, 1997. ———. Hamlet. The Norton Shakespeare, 1st edition. Edited by Stephen Greenblatt. W.W. Norton, 1997. ———. King Lear: The Arden Shakespeare Third Series. Edited by R.A. Foakes. Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1997. ———. Macbeth. The Norton Shakespeare, 1st edition. Edited by Stephen Greenblatt. W.W. Norton, 1997. ———. Measure for Measure. The Norton Shakespeare, 1st edition. Edited by Stephen Greenblatt. W.W. Norton, 1997. ———. Richard II. The Norton Shakespeare, 1st edition. Edited by Stephen Greenblatt. W.W. Norton, 1997. ———. “Sonnet 55.” The Norton Shakespeare, 1st edition. Edited by Stephen Greenblatt. W.W. Norton, 1997.

From Nothing to Never  61 ———. Timon of Athens. The Norton Shakespeare, 1st edition. Edited by ­Stephen Greenblatt. W.W. Norton, 1997. Walker, Keith, editor. The Poems of John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester. Blackwell, 1984. Watson, Robert N. The Rest is Silence: Death as Annihilation in the English Renaissance. California UP, 1994. Webster, John. The Duchess of Malfi. Edited by Michael Neill. W.W. Norton, 2015. Yeats, W.B. “Under Ben Bulben.” Collected Poems. Macmillan, 1956, pp. 341–343.

4 “Is there no danger in counterfeiting death?” Molière’s The Imaginary Invalid Daniel K. Jernigan Molière was extremely ill during the writing and staging of his final play, The Imaginary Invalid, dying a few hours after the play’s fourth performance. As such, the episode provides compelling insight into the relationship between the illusion of theatre and the reality of death—especially so in that in the leading role of Argan, Molière was, in essence, “pretending” to be a hypochondriac who “suffers” from numerous imagined maladies, even while he himself was so sick during the final performance that at one point he was “seized by a convulsion” which he attempted to mask with a laugh (apparently, the audience wasn’t fooled). It was, of course, cold comfort to Molière that even while the end of the play would ultimately provide the playwright himself with final relief from his chronic suffering, his erstwhile alter ego would ultimately face no consequences for “counterfeiting death” (Molière, The Imaginary Invalid 3.17) and so live on to tempt death in future performances of the play. That the episode draws our attention to the division between the artificial and the real is compelling in itself given Molière’s French Neoclassical commitments, which, in order to maintain the suspension of disbelief, dictated not only that a play must abide by the unities of time and space while also providing a coherent and logical narrative progression, but that it must also conform to the Aristotelian ideal that tragedies should end unhappily (perhaps, even, with the death of the protagonist) and comedies happily (most commonly, in marriage). ­M ichael Neill explains how prescriptive the Greek attitude towards death was, such that even when Death seemingly manifests itself in a single persona, it remained offstage: Euripides, it is true, casts Death as Hercules’ mightiest opponent in Alcestis, where the hero goes off to wrestle with the chthonic lord for the life of the stolen queen. But even this contest is an off-stage one; for the actual appearance of Death in his theatre would be (in every sense) unimaginable. (Neill 4)

Is there no danger in counterfeiting death?  63 In his own era, Molière was so devoted to French Neoclassical expectations that of the thirty-six major plays that he wrote and produced in his lifetime, only his Don Juan dared to break with one of the unities, and even in this case, its break with the unity of space is relatively inconsequential.1 Coincidentally, Don Juan is also the only Molière play in which the central protagonist dies, although Don Juan’s death is not explicitly staged. 2 Instead of dying onstage, Don Juan is, rather, drawn into a hellmouth, where “the earth opens / and swallows him up; and great flames issue from / the abyss into which he fell” (Don Juan 5.4). That La Grange, the actor in the title role, would have been transported backstage even as Don Juan was transported to the afterlife is indication enough that the hellmouth serves as a poignant reference to both the fine line between the theatrical and the real and the equally fine line between this world and the next. As a neoclassical writer of comedies, it should hardly come as a surprise that death would make itself so scarce in Molière’s plays. According to Henry Phillips, the very fact that Molière had given up tragedy quite early in his career (which he had no talent for as an actor) is at least part of what continues to attract critics to the incidents surrounding the final performance of The Imaginary Invalid: “Most commentators fail to resist recreating the moment at which Argan feigns death, which for Molière becomes a sort of stage death where the failed tragic actor finds this time unwelcome success” (Phillips 27). Among the various ironies vis-à-vis the final performance of The Imaginary Invalid, this observation concerning Molière’s commitment to French ­Neoclassical conventions (which strictly defined how comedies—and tragedies—should end) is suggestive in its own right, pointing as it does to the simple fact of Molière’s seeming stubbornness in actually surviving (at least for a few hours) the final performance of The ­Imaginary Invalid—as in doing so, like a true Greek tragic character, he did manage to die offstage, behind the scenes. 3 And yet one inescapable impression of all the socio-critical attention to his death is that perhaps he need not have worked so hard at surviving his final performance, for this act of defiance against his own mortality ultimately did very little to sustain the various illusions he attempted to keep up not only as author, actor, and director, but also as an upstanding citizen of the decidedly Catholic world in which he lived. That “counterfeiting death” (or, rather, that pretending to counterfeit death) would simultaneously provide his audience with both a peek beneath the illusion of theatre (a door that was not meant to open)—even as he himself inadvertently caught a glimpse beyond what Jacques Derrida might call “an uncrossable border: a door that does not open” (20)—provides a parallel worth unpacking, especially in light of various recent theoretical perspectives which

64  Daniel K. Jernigan suggest that our sociocultural experience of death itself is a largely illusory phenomenon (I am thinking here of Philippe Ariès’ treatment of death in The Hour of Our Death).4 To be sure, peeking beyond the illusion of the stage requires as profound a shift in the way we bear witness to the illusion of theatre as peeking beyond the illusion of death would require—and, to my way of thinking, this very resonance between the illusion of death and the illusion of the stage at least partly explains why Molière’s final exit continues to attract scholarly attention. During much of The Imaginary Invalid, we find Argan fretting over his own imminent death, even as he is treated by doctors, receives and takes prescriptions, pays his numerous medical bills, and argues with his brother, Béralde, about the value of the medical profession. In addition to chastising Argan’s indulgence with quack doctors, Béralde is also suspicious of Argan’s young and beautiful wife, Béline, and unhappy with the fiancé Argan has chosen for Angélique. For true to his self-centered nature, Argan intends to have his daughter marry the dim-witted young doctor, Thomas ­D iaforius, whom Argan has chosen merely out of concern for his own seemingly chronic illnesses. However, in a series of scenes which raises the specter of Molière’s own looming death, Argan is eventually convinced by his ever-faithful (if strong-willed) servant Toinette to test his wife’s commitment to him by going beyond feigning illness to actually feigning death, twice— which is a compelling scene in itself given the argument of this chapter. For even while these episodes fall short of the sort of staged death that is forbidden on the neoclassical stage, they are, perhaps, all the more illusion-disrupting for suggesting how a death might be staged should the occasion call for it—and, in turn, for how performative our day-today existence is. If there is one character who outperforms even Argan within the various metaperformative intrigues of the play it is Toinette, who always has Argan’s best interests at heart, whether he recognizes it or not. In the first instance, where Argan acts his own death, Toinette suggests this bit of intrigue on the pretext of convincing Argan’s brother, Béralde, that Béline’s love for Argan is sincere: TOI:  (To

BÉRALDE) Will you let me convince you; and to show you at once how my mistress loves my master. (To ARGAN) Sir, allow me to undeceive him, and to show him his mistake. ARG:  How? TOI:  My mistress will soon come back. Stretch yourself full-length in this arm-chair, and pretend to be dead. You will see what grief she will be in when I tell her the news. ARG:  Very well, I consent.

Is there no danger in counterfeiting death?  65 […] TOI:  (to BÉRALDE). Hide yourself in that corner. ARG:  Is there no danger in counterfeiting death? TOI:  No, no. What danger can there be? Only stretch

yourself there. It will be so pleasant to put your brother to confusion. Here is my mistress. Mind you keep still. (3.16–17)

This is, of course, an act of subterfuge on Toinette’s part; for she knows full well how Béline will respond. In the end, it seems the only danger in counterfeiting death is that Argan will find out the truth about what his wife thinks of him: BEL:  My husband is dead? TOI:  Alas! yes; the poor soul is gone. BEL:  Are you quite certain? TOI:  Quite certain. Nobody knows of

it yet. I was all alone here when it happened. He has just breathed his last in my arms. Here, just look at him, full-length in his chair. BEL:  Heaven be praised. I am delivered from a most grievous burden. How silly of you, Toinette, to be so afflicted at his death. TOI:  Ah! Ma’am, I thought I ought to cry. BEL:  Pooh! it is not worth the trouble. What loss is it to anybody, and what good did he do in this world? A wretch, unpleasant to everybody; of nauseous, dirty habits; always a clyster or a dose of physic in his body. Always snivelling, coughing, spitting; a stupid, tedious, ill-natured fellow. (3.18) In essence, Argan plays up a falsehood to learn a truth—that his wife is only interested in his money. But the anxiety Argan feels at counterfeiting death is interesting in its own right, especially coming from the mouth of a hypochondriac who is always on the lookout for some new ailment to make his own. Might playing at death be dangerous? If so, then what about the “playing at dying” that is part and parcel of ­A rgan’s hypochondria? And not just Argan’s—what of Molière’s playing at death within the context of writing and starring in and producing this play? Indeed, one question so easily begets the next that it is hard to ignore the possibility that Argan’s anxieties may very well have been Molière’s as well, albeit an anxiety that Molière seemingly went out of his way to confront with all of the gusto of his theatrical oeuvre. An anxiety, no less, that speaks intriguingly to the question of what metaperformative rituals might serve to open the door of a seemingly “uncrossable border.” Before the play can come to an end, however, there is still the issue of Angélique’s marriage, which is yet to be arranged to everyone’s satisfaction so that the play can fulfill itself as comedy. Toinette again proves up

66  Daniel K. Jernigan to the task, as she once again asks Argan to repeat his performance, this time to test Angélique’s love for Argan: TOI:  I

hear your daughter coming, place yourself as you were just now, and let us see how she will receive the news. It is not a bad thing to try; and since you have begun, you will be able by this means to know the sentiments of your family towards you. TOI:  (pretending not to see ANGÉLIQUE). O heavens! what a sad accident! What an unhappy day! ANG:  What ails you, Toinette, and why do you cry? TOI:  Alas! I have such sad news for you. ANG:  What is it? TOI:  Your father is dead. ANG:  My father is dead, Toinette? TOI:  Yes, just look at him there; he died only a moment ago of a fainting fit that came over him. ANG:  O heavens! what a misfortune! What a cruel grief! Alas Why must I lose my father, the only being left me in the world? and why should I lose him, too, at a time when he was angry with me? What will become of me, unhappy girl that I am? What consolation can I find after so great a loss? (3.20) Touched by his daughter’s genuine outpouring of emotion, Argan is fully prepared to change his mind about her wedding: “Well, let him become a doctor, and I will consent to the marriage. (To Cléante) Yes, turn doctor, Sir, and I will give you my daughter” (3.22). And so there remains this one final difficulty to be overcome before Angélique’s engagement to Cléante can be finalized. Desperate to have a doctor in the family to treat his ailments and to write prescriptions for him on demand, the conundrum is solved when Argan is finally convinced by his brother to become a doctor himself. BER:  But,

brother, it just strikes me; why don’t you turn doctor yourself? It would be much more convenient to have all you want within yourself…. You are clever enough for that; there are a great many who are not a bit more clever than you are. ARG:  But one must be able to speak Latin well, and know the different diseases and the remedies they require. BER:  When you put on the cap and gown of a doctor, all that will come of itself, and you will afterwards be much more clever than you care to be. … ARG:  But what can I say, what can I answer? BER:  You will be instructed in a few words,

and they will give you in writing all you have to say. Go and dress yourself directly, and I will send for them. ARG:  Very well; let it be done. (3.21)

Is there no danger in counterfeiting death?  67 Apparently, all Argan has to do is to take on the role and habit of a doctor, and he will become one. Molière, it seems, was wise to every sort of performance, both on- and offstage. Notably, it was just at the end of this initiation ceremony—after having become, in essence, the very quack his brother had warned him against 5 —that Molière suffered the final fit of coughing which would follow him backstage and to his eventual deathbed. And so even while the fit may very well have fallen on him unawares, the fact that counterfeiting medicine rather than death would ultimately prove Molière’s undoing deserves attention as well—especially so in that (unlike his alter ego) Molière seemed to be well aware of what today has become common knowledge about the doctors of his era (that such doctors were as likely to kill their patients as to cure them). Béralde expresses this very sentiment earlier in the play as he talks up Argan’s health: BER:  I

mean, brother, that I know of no man less sick than you, and that I should be quite satisfied with a constitution no worse than yours. One great proof that you are well, and that you have a body perfectly well made, is that with all the pains you have taken, you have failed as yet in injuring the soundness of your constitution, and that you have not died of all the medicine they have made you swallow.

The episode would seem to suggest that Molière is tempting fate not only in playing at fabricating illness and death but in fabricating medical curatives as well. Death truly is a door which might just be nudged open under any number of mysterious circumstances. That Molière himself was deeply invested in the question of what precisely stood between himself and death comes into clearer focus by considering a quote Michel Baron (Molière’s understudy) attributes to Molière in the hours before the final performance: “I can no longer stand these pains and griefs, that give me not a moment’s relief. A man must suffer before he dies. However. I feel that I am done for” (Scott 257). Numerous critics have found this anecdote hard to ignore, especially given the fact that during the course of the play Molière (as Argan) continually referenced Molière’s tortured relationship with physicians: “Your Molière is a fine impertinent fellow with his comedies! I think it mightily pleasant of him to go and take off honest people like the doctors” (3.3). To be sure, such self-conscious intrusions of the author into the script would generally have been frowned upon for their potential to disrupt the suspension of disbelief.6 Moreover, to quote H. C. ­Chatfield-Taylor, this constitutes quite the “eerie prophecy, since scarcely were those words uttered upon the stage than the doctors were avenged” (370–71). And so while it may well be difficult to believe that Molière was prescient enough (or radical enough) to write his death into his final play,

68  Daniel K. Jernigan numerous critics over the years have proven that it is equally hard to ignore the various resonances written therein. I would argue that the various ironies surrounding Molière’s death are no less intriguing for Molière having survived long enough to die in his own bed. For such is the fascination with this close call that many records of the event actually go out of their way to obscure Molière’s final hours, often implying that he had indeed died on the stage.7 What are we to make of the fact that there is a tradition that goes out of its way to embellish the conceit that he had died on stage? Perhaps that even while Molière himself remained more or less devoted to the conventions of his era, the theatre community more generally was ready to move on: to have the illusions of neoclassical verisimilitude shattered, its conventions overturned. And while there have been calls from some critics to be cautious about reading too much into the coincidence of Molière’s death, the trend continues even today. Stephen Fleck, for instance, casts considerable doubt on the legitimacy of the above quote—attributed to Michel Baron and first appearing in Jean-Léonor Le Gallois de Grimarest’s La Vie de M. de Molière (1705)—which he calls an “unreliable source at best, having been published thirty years after Molière’s death” (134). However, after refusing to read the play according to the backdrop of Molière’s own death, Fleck ultimately provides what amounts to one of the more thorough indexes of all the various ways in which death comes up as a topic in the play. This is because Fleck’s argument is ultimately more concerned with an ongoing scholarly debate about whether the play is best understood as devoted to exploring the gloominess of the author’s own psychological ailments or, rather, should instead be seen as “one of Molière’s most delightful and joyous” (Fleck 135) plays. As Fleck sees it, “Argan’s superstitious fear of death is deeply comic, an aspect of his gullibility, rather than material for a character study of obsession” (135). Fleck’s description of these various comic effects continues apace: Far from being even a stage-reality—no one dies in the Malade—the notion of death is rather the occasion for play. Louison, for instance, humbles her fantastically gullible father by playing dead […]; Argan then foils Béline’s plot by acting out the same child’s trick that he has just learned […]; Argan believes Purgon’s verbal death-sentence […]; this playfulness courses through Malade, gathering momentum until it finally bursts into the festively laughing chorus in the medical ceremony; “… et tuat!” (135) However, while agreeing that the evidence that Molière was intent on speaking to his own imminent death is rather circumstantial, I would argue that the playful spirit of the play that Fleck defends is made all

Is there no danger in counterfeiting death?  69 the more intriguing in light of the larger context of Molière’s death. For there can be little doubt that even while the Argan that Fleck describes would have presented quite the challenge to a sick and dying actor, there are compelling reasons to believe that it was a challenge Molière had decided to embrace. Consider, for instance, this description from Chatfield-Taylor about how Molière navigated the final performance: Molière performed with great difficulty, and half the spectators noticed that in pronouncing ‘Juro’ in the ceremony he was seized by a convulsion. Realizing that the audience had noticed it, he made an effort and hid what happened with a forced laugh. (257) The “forced laugh” is telling. For why not a groan? Indeed, rather than dissuading an ironic reading of a dying man playing at being a hypochondriac, I would argue that this makes such a reading all the more compelling given the very depth of the mask Molière had to sustain. For at the very least, Molière was a very sick man who had to pretend to be well enough to continue playing a character who himself was continually pretending to be sick—and, to hear Fleck describe it, he had to do so with great gusto and verve. There is little doubt that this would have been exhausting, making it all the more likely that Molière would have been increasingly aware of these same ironies, and, perhaps, to have gone so far as to write them into both text and performance in various unobtrusive ways. In any case, Fleck’s reading does little to dissuade the idea that Molière was trafficking in the reality of his own imminent demise, only that he must have done so with irony and good humor even as his own illness intruded upon the neo-classical stage. In his “phenomenological” investigation of the various ways that the real can intrude upon the artificiality of the stage, Bert States makes a number of observations about “the activity of theater making itself out of its essential material: speech, sound, movement, scenery, text, etc.” (1) which are relevant to understanding our fascination with the events leading up to Molière’s death. According to States, some of the things which “theatre makes itself out of” have a fundamental impact on the illusion of theatre. States’ point is best made in his discussion of the dog on stage in Shakespeare’s Two Gentleman of Verona: “Crab usually steals the show by simply being itself. Anything the dog does—ignoring Launce, yawning, wagging its talk, forgetting its ‘lines’—becomes hilarious or cute because it is doglike” (33). According to States, this does much to disrupt the more familiar associations and environment of theater: What surprises us, of course, is that the dog can be used in the play, that it unknowingly cooperates in creating the illusion. And  this

70  Daniel K. Jernigan surprise arises from our observation of the dog as dog-in-itself. Questions like this might occur: Isn’t it interesting that the dog will submit to being on stage? Then, of course, the answer: It isn’t submitting, it is simply being itself. What if it barks? Urinates? Obviously, even these natural acts… would contribute to further comedy. So the illusion has suddenly become a field of play, of “what if?” The illusion has introduced something into itself to demonstrate its tolerance of things. It is not the world that has invaded the illusion; the illusion has stolen something from the world in order to display its own power. (34; italics in original). States concludes that “my thesis here is that the dog on the stage is a nearly perfect symptom of the cutting edge of theatre” (36)—by which he means that it provides the perfect intrusion of the real into the performed, a turn of events intensified by the fact that at any moment the dog might start acting like a “real” dog. For States, “the dog is simply at the lowest echelon of living things that come on stage tethered to the real world” (37). In turn, isn’t it also worth asking what it would look like for an actor to start acting like a “real person” on stage? Is there anything an actor might do which is similarly “tethered to the real world” in theatrically significant ways? What of kissing? Smoking? Drinking several shots of tequila? Sexual intercourse? And then, of course, there is the item which drives the current investigation—Molière’s illness and imminent death. A quick and dirty gloss of the situation would seem to suggest that the possibility of “real” pain and suffering coincides with every theatre performance— and that, as a consequence, the possibility that an actor may inadvertently start acting like a “real human” is ever-present. Certainly Molière was acting like a “real human” during the coughing fit that interrupted his final performance of An Imaginary Invalid. But what of covering up and carrying on? Is this any less what a “real human” would do just because it is also what is expected of Molière as an actor? Certainly not. There is something all too human about following up a coughing fit with an expression meant to indicate we are alright. We have all jumped to our feet immediately after an accidental fall. Wanting to “appear okay” to our peers is surprisingly normal, no matter the circumstances. And aren’t all of us actors on such occasion? From this perspective, one of the most suspicious things about Argan’s behavior is his very refusal to do the same during the rest of the play (i.e., his constant overtures about how ill he is). The division between the artificial and the real is very thin indeed—as thin, perhaps, as the heart skipping a beat even as one protests against one’s own death. Perhaps taking the prize for gumption in the face of death, Gaius Caligula reportedly informed his assassins “I am alive,” even as he drew his last breath.

Is there no danger in counterfeiting death?  71 But is this all that we are to take away from the various ironies of Molière’s final hours? From the most prominent figure of the French Neoclassical tradition, whose own theatrical innovations, while occasionally self-referential, never disrupted unities of time, space, and action, and whose comedies always ended happily (if often just short of a wedding)? In this instance, it is almost as if death itself was held at bay by the will of a man pretending to be well enough to finish his final performance, even as the character he was playing embraced each and every conceivable illness as if he did not even want to survive. What are we to conclude except, perhaps, that while illness—and the performances attached to dying—might very well be of the stage, death is something else entirely? Something fundamentally different from every human gesture—either onstage or off—that in any way seeks out death’s company. Perhaps it is worth looking at this issue the other way around. That, rather, this final episode in Molière’s theatrical career should serve as a stark reminder that death, as we experience it, is nothing more than a socially constructed phenomenon; that death, in essence, is never anything more than its own public performance. Citing Phillip Ariès, Michael Neill defends such a perspective in his investigation of death in Renaissance theatre: The idea that death might be invented in this way will seem paradoxical only if it is thought of as a natural given, rather than as the human fiction that thanatologists like Philippe Ariès have shown it to be—a fiction, moreover, of a particularly fluid kind. For ‘death’ is not something that can be imagined once and for all, but an idea that has to be constantly reimagined across cultures and through time; which is to say that, like most human experiences that we think of as ‘natural’. It is to be culturally defined. (2) And to be sure, the death of such a well-known and public figure as Molière would require some sort of public acknowledgment, even if, as in Molière’s case, it involved no small amount of political maneuvering between his wife, his king (and long-time benefactor, Louis XV) and the Catholic church, before the Church would finally agree to terms which would allow him to be buried on consecrated ground. For actors in Molière’s era “could not receive the sacraments without prior renunciation of their sinful profession,” a fact which only further complicates who might have said what about when and where Molière died. And as it turns out, the performance which did accompany his body to its final resting place was hardly something that “might have been imagined once and for all” but something very specific to Catholic

72  Daniel K. Jernigan neoclassical France, as against the Catholic Church’s better instincts, the following compromise was finally agreed to: We have allowed the parish priest of Saint-Eustache to give the body of the deceased Molière a Christian burial, on condition none the less that it takes place without pomp and beyond the hours of daylight with only two priests in attendance. (Neill 2) The truth concerning Molière’s funeral procession is difficult to pin down, with the total number in attendance varying according to the source from “200 to 7–8,000, plus as many poor” (Neill 28). In any case, it is worth noting that whatever the outcome, the initial decree that “it take [] place without pomp and beyond the hours of daylight with only two priests in attendance” is fraught with its own performative symbolism. For the church, winning the public relations battle surrounding Molière’s death clearly meant that the performance was to be minimalist, rather than extravagant—but to be sure, it was to be a performance all the same. And yet for all its effort at finally corralling Molière’s public image to its own ends, the very discrepancy over the numbers in attendance speaks tellingly of an era where the performativity of the stage was in the ascendency even as Catholic performativity was in decline. It is also telling that Molière was denied the opportunity to renounce his sins as actor, when two different priests refused to attend to him. And while it is hard to separate out fact from legend, that there was no priest in attendance at his death essentially means that Molière was also denied the opportunity to speak his own final lines in the culturally defined final performance known as “the last rites.” Molière had, in essence, survived one performance only to die before the completion of what should have been his final scene. Brian McHale explains the resonance of ontological boundaries (between the real and the artificial) in literature by suggesting that “[i]n a sense, every ontological boundary is an analogue or metaphor of death” (231). While McHale goes on to argue that such boundary breaking identifies a work as postmodern, the various self-conscious elements both within An Imaginary Invalid—and which make up what we know of Molière’s final performance—are certainly suggestive of a work that managed to defy the conventions of the era in profound ways. McHale’s argument that the way in which the overt self-consciousness of postmodernist fiction marks it as particularly apt at “foregrounding themes” and suggesting “ontological structures” in such a way that “it is always about death” (231), would seem to imply that drama’s all too easy ability to do the same despite the playwright’s best efforts to maintain the illusion of theatre marks even traditional theatrical modes as akin to postmodernist writing in this respect. McHale’s follow-up suggestion is

Is there no danger in counterfeiting death?  73 perhaps even more telling given the concerns of this chapter: “Postmodernist writing enables us to experiment with imagining our own death, to rehearse our own deaths” (232). As we have seen, this proved all too true of the author, director, and actor Molière. And so it bears repeating, that while dying and performing death may just as well make use of the deathbed, the funeral procession and the cemetery even as it does the stage, death itself is something else entirely—an ontological shift devoid of reference, despite our best authors’ best efforts to comprehend such uncrossable barriers.

Notes 1 While all the scenes take place in Sicily, the characters are transported from a garden to the seashore to a forest to a mausoleum to Don Juan’s living room before concluding in the countryside. Albert Bermel is less generous to Molière, pointing out that “Don Juan is an anomaly among Molière’s works,” which offered no less than seven “spiky provocations” to his Neoclassical audience (Bermel 220–221). 2 Despite Don Juan’s death, Molière maintained that the play was a comedy. 3 One wouldn’t want to make too much of Molière’s neoclassically aesthetic conservatism. For in his own way, Molière did much to advance the French theatre of his age, even if, as Thomas Crane explains it, Molière was in many ways liberated from some of the more onerous dictums of French Neoclassicism simply as a result of working in comedy rather than in tragedy: The limitations of French classical tragedy apply equally to the comedy of the seventeenth century, but not with the same injurious effects. The author is not confined to historical or quasi-historical, plots, but may invent or borrow plots to suit his purpose. He may also abandon the form of verse and employ prose, but he will run the risk of offending the taste of his audience if he uses prose for anything but farce. Comedy, then, is a freer form, and, as it deals with ordinary mortals and not with kings or heroes, is of more universal interest than tragedy. (xix) To be sure, one of Molière’s most celebrated works, The Misanthrope, ends both happily and unhappily; for even as the central protagonist Alceste looks forward to self-exile, his close companions, Philinte and Éliante, plan to wed. 4 As Ariès explains it, the sociocultural performativity of death supersedes the “natural extravagance” of death: “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.” As Ariès goes on to explain it, “The fact that life has an end is not overlooked, but this end never coincides with physical death.” Death, as Ariès explains it, is subsumed by the sociocultural performativity of the living (604). 5 “Béralde: All the excellency of their art consists in pompous gibberish, in a specious babbling, which gives you words instead of reasons, and promises instead of results” (Molière, The Imaginary Invalid, 3.3). 6 And yet this was not the first play in which Molière had characterized the entire medical community as corrupted by quacks and charlatans.

74  Daniel K. Jernigan 7 Misinformation about Molière’s demise is ubiquitous. Before telling the complete story of Molière’s death, Henry Phillips obscures the reality in the opening paragraph: “The exact moment is recorded as being the point where he pronounced the word ‘Juro’ in the mock ceremony of doctors which concludes the comedie-ballet, when Molière seemed to have suffered a seizure evident to audience and actors alike” (Phillips 23). And while the Wikipedia page on Molière correctly explains that he “died a few hours” after his final performance (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moli%C3%A8re#Death) another Wikipedia page containing a “list of entertainers who died during a performance” says only that “Molière, the French actor and playwright, died after being seized by a violent coughing fit while playing the title role in his play Le Malade imaginaire (The Hypochondriac)” (en.wikipedia.org/ wiki/List_of_entertainers_who_died_during_a_performance). This second Wikipedia page cites the NYU Literature, Arts, and Medicine Database, which says “On 17 February 1673, Molière played the role of Argan, but he fell into a fit of coughing during the final scene and died” (medhum.med. nyu.edu/view/1420).

Works Cited Ariès, Philippe. The Hour of Our Death. Vintage Book, 1982. Bermel, Albert. Molière’s Theatrical Bounty: A New View of the Plays. Southern Illinois UP, 1990. Chatfield-Taylor, H. C. Molière: A Biography. Forgotten Books, 2013. Crane, Thomas. “Introduction.” Molière: A Biography. By C. H. Chatfield-Taylor. Duffield & Company, 1906, xvii--xxv. Derrida, Jacques. Aporias: Dying—Awaiting (One Another At) the “Limits of Truth.” Translated by Thomas Dutoit. Stanford UP, 1993. Fleck, Stephen H. Music, Dance, and Laughter: Comic Creation in Molière’s Comedy Ballets. PFSCL, 1995. McHale, Brian. Postmodernist fiction. Routledge, 1987. Molière. Don Juan. Translated by Charles Heron Wall. G. Bell and Sons, 1876–77. ———. The Imaginary Invalid. Translated by Charles Heron Wall. G. Bell and Sons, 1876–77. Project Gutenberg, www.gutenberg.org/files/9070/9070h/9070-h.htm. Neill, Michael. Issues of Death: Mortality and Identity in English Renaissance Tragedy. Oxford UP, 1997. Phillips, Henry. “Molière: The Empty Chair.” Dying Words: The Last Moments of Writers and Philosophers. Edited by Martin Crowley. Rodopi, 2000, 23–38. Scott, Virginia. Molière: A Theatrical Life. Cambridge UP, 2000. States, Bert. Great Reckonings in Little Rooms: On the Phenomenology of Theatre. U of California P, 1985.

Part II

Trajectories

5 “She is the God of Calvin, she sees the beginning and the end” Narrating Life and Death in the Fiction of Muriel Spark Joseph H. O’Mealy When Frank Kermode, in his classic study The Sense of an Ending (1966), speaks of the early work of Muriel Spark, he notes the singular manner in which Spark’s fiction differs from that of other writers influenced by the French nouveau roman: But having stressed what Mrs. Spark has in common with other researchers into novelistic form, one needs also to point out a deep difference of mood. Those deep and delightful concordances assume or assert that the world itself is a land of fiction, a divine fiction which is the supreme fiction because absolutely if strangely true; and that contingencies, under the pressure of imagination, resolve themselves into beautiful, arbitrary, and totally satisfying images of this benign arrangement. (132) Nearly forty years later, in his “Introduction” to the Everyman’s Library edition of four of Spark’s novels (2004), Kermode shifts his attention to her ability to “offer an image of life in the world that is virtually unique though perfectly reasonable” (xx). Perhaps to quiet any misgiving that Spark is a theological apologist in the mold of, say, C.S. Lewis, Kermode also quotes her demurral about her ambitions, “I don’t claim that my novels are truth. I claim that they are fiction, out of which a kind of truth emerges.” He then adds his own assessment: “It is of course important that the truth is that of the Roman Catholic religion, an absolute truth, but treated quite unsentimentally in these books” (xi). Kermode is not alone in identifying Muriel Spark as a writer with a “religious sense” (Massie 94), though his emphasis on the influence of Roman Catholicism, which she embraced in 1954 when she was thirty-six years old, downplays the importance of her earlier exposure to other religious traditions, in particular Scottish Presbyterianism and its Calvinist roots. Born in Edinburgh of a Jewish Scottish father and an English Anglican mother, Muriel Camberg received a consistent and prolonged religious

78  Joseph H. O’Mealy grounding in all twelve years of her education at the James Gillespie School for Girls, which was affiliated with the Church of Scotland. In her autobiography, Curriculum Vitae, she describes “my religious education at school” as naturally being “Presbyterian, for which, with its predominant accent on the lovely Bible, I have always been grateful. Some Jewish observances on my father’s side of the family came my way, rather less so than in my brother’s education” (115). Muriel Spark the novelist might have been thinking of the influences on Muriel Camberg the student when she gave to Miss Jean Brodie a confident and memorable boast about the pedagogical power of early exposure to dogmatic views: “Give me a girl at an impressionable age and she is mine for life” (Jean Brodie 110). In addition to her gratitude for the “lovely” emphasis on Bible reading she received at school in the Scottish Presbyterian tradition, Spark also remembers the more threatening and dour teachings of Calvinism she inevitably ingested as part of her ecumenical religious diet. One Christmas, while still young enough to believe in the Scottish version of Santa Claus (“Santie”), she reached into Santie’s sack for a present and pulled out “a religious, positively Calvinistic, picture book about Baby Jesus and the dire consequences to children who didn’t fit the required standards. My mother, at home, pronounced my hostess a damn fool for giving such books to children” (CV 36). Her mother’s anger apparently impressed on young Muriel the power and danger of the darker, puritanical side of the Scottish religious tradition, which the James Gillespie School for Girls, with its official insistence on “tolerance” at all costs (CV 53), could not completely paper over. As Allan Massie has pointed out, “Never herself a Calvinist, she was not immune to Calvin’s influence…. The Old Testament God, the God of Israel and of Scotch Presbyterianism, is never far absent from Mrs. Spark’s work” (96–97). As a contemporary theologian has pointed out, although the doctrine of predestination “was not central to the thought of Calvin himself, it became the central nucleus of later Reformed theology” (McGrath 137), and thus became the popular, if not strictly accurate, face of Calvinism and a dominant doctrinal strain in the Scottish Presbyterian Church. The “dire consequences” that Spark remembered for “children who didn’t fit the required standards” undoubtedly consisted of the threat of consignment to the fiery pits of hell accompanied by a vivid description of the torments and sufferings of those so damned. Compounding that nightmarish fear would be the Calvinist doctrines of justification by faith and predestination, which teach Scottish Presbyterians that they cannot earn their way to salvation through prayer and good works—only God’s grace freely and unpredictably bestowed can save them. Because God is omniscient he also knows from all eternity whom he will save and whom he will damn, so humans cannot know or control their own fates. They are already determined. The students at the James Gillespie School for Girls would certainly be aware that these ideas lurked at the foundations

She is the God of Calvin  79 of their religious traditions, even if they were soft-pedaled at that time. Sandy Stranger in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie knows that Calvinism “pervaded the place [Edinburgh] in proportion as it was unacknowledged” (106). One can see this lingering influence of Calvinism both in the narrative voices Spark uses in many of her early novels, and in what Malcolm Bradbury calls Spark’s “growingly high-handed manner both with her readers and her characters” (187). Her narrators often resemble a literary version of Calvin’s unsentimental God, even to the extent of being as arbitrary and capricious as their divine model. Spark rarely slips into the romantic pose that her characters have lives of their own and that they dictate the direction of the narrative. From the beginning, the narrators of these novels demonstrate their complete control over the lives and deaths of the characters and, by suspending our expectations of the usual sequence of beginning, middle, and end, flaunt that power to the reader. Five early novels—Memento Mori (1959), The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961), The Driver’s Seat (1970), Not to Disturb (1971), and The Hothouse by the East River (1973)—illustrate this Calvinist omniscience well, especially in the way Spark views and handles the deaths reserved for the central characters. The death of the individual character, which, as Kermode has pointed out, has replaced the general Apocalypse as the terminus of most fictions since the early modern period (Ending 67), sits at the center of these five novels. How Muriel Spark conceives of and presents her characters’ individual and personal ends illustrates most clearly her idiosyncratic sense of an ending, her believer’s counterpoint to contemporary literature’s mostly agnostic depictions of death. Death’s inevitability dominates Spark’s 1959 novel Memento Mori. This familiar Latin tag is usually translated as “Remember you must die,” and that is the simple message that a dozen or more of the characters in the novel hear when they answer their telephones. All are fairly elderly, seventy years old or more, and they live on into their old age preoccupied with the settling of scores arising from petty rivalries begun half a century before, or with the smug anticipation of outliving their partners and companions and inheriting their money, or with other old sins of lust, vanity, and greed that they cannot seem to get past. The voice each hears on the phone seems to take on a personal tone designed specifically for each auditor, so that no one person can agree with another whether it belongs to an old or young, a civil or rude man (though one character hears a voice distinctly female). What begins as a nuisance grows into a general panic of paranoia and fear as each in turn picks up the phone to hear the same four words: “Remember you must die.” Is this a prank, they ask? Or a warning of impending criminal victimization? Two of the more astute characters recognize that neither a prankster nor a potential murderer is calling. It’s Death itself. Spark does not rework the cliché that a brush with death will make you appreciate being alive all the more. She aims deeper than that: “to

80  Joseph H. O’Mealy remember one’s death is, in short, a way of life” (167). Death is the first of the Four Last Things that all must face: Death, Judgment, Hell, and Heaven. As a meditative practice and warning, The Four Last Things owe much to traditional Catholic teaching about achieving a “good” death, but beneath this can be found traces of an earlier theological influence on Spark. We are not dealing here with a Catholic view of a God who weighs one’s sins and virtues at the particular Judgment after death, but the God of Scottish Calvinism who has seen from all eternity who will be rewarded with salvation and who will be damned. Her narrator displays a certain mordant sense of humor as if enjoying the spectacle of these foolish people from a distance. She doesn’t try to win over the reader to sympathy for them, even with the least objectionable personalities. When she does occasionally step closer to the characters it is usually with the necessary correction of a stupid remark or perception. For example, when a character says to herself that she “knew instinctively” that Mrs. Pettigrew, a particularly bad egg, “was a kindly woman,” the narrator in the very next sentence interrupts to say, “Her instinct was wrong” (53). She teases even the reader near the end of the novel with a possible naturalistic explanation for the phone calls. But the old man in the mental hospital, who thinks he is God (and says at the news of his ex-wife’s death: “Have I taken her to Myself?” [237]), is only a red herring. The only prankster in the novel is the narrator. In imitation of a dispassionate Calvinistic God, Spark kills off nearly everyone by the end, a slaughter that makes the corpse-strewn stage at the end of Hamlet seem under-populated. Early critics of the novel, like V.S. Pritchett, seem to feel unsettled by the “cold-blooded” qualities of Memento Mori and feel it necessary to caution readers that Spark might not appeal to all tastes. Pritchett also points out her “severity” and characterizes her comic sense as “witty and gruesome” (xvii) without much “charity” shown for the characters, although there might be “a sort of compassion which a God—or a Church—might feel” for these characters’ feeble, fallen natures (xvii). While correct in his assessment of the unsentimental nature of Spark’s narration and her all-seeing basilisk eye, Pritchett’s grasping at the straw of a compassionate God hidden somewhere in the narrative is wide of the mark. He also could have spared himself worrying about her alienating her readership. These supposedly equivocal qualities would be precisely the ones in her later works that would propel Spark to an even wider readership and come to characterize her singular appeal. In The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961), Spark softens her narrative voice somewhat and broadens her canvas to look back at Edinburgh in the 1930s when she was a young girl. Calvin’s doctrines of election and predestination, though applied more socially than theologically, pervade the novel. She paints Edinburgh, a city closely identified with John Knox, a disciple of Calvin’s and the founder of Scottish Presbyterianism,

She is the God of Calvin  81 as a place still under the Calvinist spell. Miss Brodie’s characterization of her hand-chosen “set” of six girls as the “crème de la crème” and her prediction that each one of them will be “famous” for something, whether for mathematics or sex or beauty, functions as a secular parody of Calvin’s predestined elect. Similarly, even in the worst of the Depression years, the privileged students of the Marcia Blaine School for Girls come from backgrounds of relative comfort, at least compared with the “Unemployed” or “Idle” inhabiting the Old Town, whom the girls catch only a fearful glimpse of on organized school outings. When, on one of these outings, Sandy stands in front of St. Giles Cathedral, emblem “of a dark and terrible salvation,” she realizes that “it was the religion of Calvin of which [she] felt deprived…. She desired this birthright; something definite to reject. It pervaded the place in proportion as it was unacknowledged” (106). Sandy’s family “had never spoken of Calvinism except as a joke” (106). But there are others, like Miss Gaunt and the Kerr sisters, who adhere to the rigor of the Scottish Presbyterian doctrines derived from Reformed Calvinism in the seventeenth century. Their disapproval of Miss Brodie is no joke and eventually contributes to her downfall. Sandy, who will become famous as a psychologist nun, says of Miss Brodie: “She thinks she is Providence… she thinks she is the God of Calvin, she sees the beginning and the end” (118). In a story replete with ironies, one of the better ones is this ascription of a traditional Calvinistic worldview to the unconventional Miss Brodie because, to an even greater extent, the omniscient narrator of Jean Brodie displays, even flaunts, these same qualities. She has dispensed with the Aristotelian progress through beginning, middle, and end in Jean Brodie, replacing them with a narrative arc that sees almost all the actions in a kind of eternal present, as Calvin’s God might see them. As David Lodge has pointed out, Spark “shows her hand as author in extraordinarily daring time-shifts backwards and forwards across the chronological span of the action, and it is perhaps in this respect that authorial omniscience most closely mimics the omniscience of God” (153). For example, revelations of secrets are not held in abeyance until the end. Just as there is no past or present or future in the mind of Calvin’s God, neither is there in the narrator’s. In the second chapter, we learn that nearly a decade later Miss Brodie will be dismissed from her post by her archenemy, Miss Mackay. But who has betrayed Miss Brodie to Miss Mackay and caused her forced retirement? Not even halfway through the story, the narrator casually reveals to readers that it was Sandy: “The whine in her voice—‘betrayed me, betrayed me’—bored and afflicted Sandy. It is seven years, thought Sandy, since I betrayed this tiresome woman. What does she mean by ‘betray’?” (58). In the mind of God there can be no surprises or suspense. But for his creatures (and the reader), it’s a different story.

82  Joseph H. O’Mealy Spark herself has commented on her use of the “early give away” or the rhetorical device of prolepsis. I think it does two things: that device is quite deliberate. To give the show away in a strange way, strange manner, creates suspense more than the withholding of information does. Secondly, I think that it has an eschatological function. (Hosmer 246) Gabriel Josipovici has noted that prolepsis—the narrator moving forward beyond the immediate moment to the eventual outcome—is a notable feature of the [Scottish] border ballads and a powerful contributor to the sense of doom and inevitability they convey… prolepsis is a sign of a vision that extends beyond the perspective of individual, mortal men, which has tended to be the vision of the novel. (33–34) Neither are revelations of death reserved for the conclusion of the story. In keeping with the narrator’s “eschatological” perspective, we are made aware of death’s impending arrival early in the stories of two central characters. First, there is poor Mary Macgregor who is invariably described as “stupid” by the narrator and other members of the Brodie set. Her death is treated in an almost dismissive way, introduced in the first chapter as a dependent clause in a sentence that insults her. In answer to a question put to her by Miss Brodie, “Mary Macgregor, lumpy, with merely two eyes, a nose and a mouth like a snowman, who was later famous for being stupid, and always to blame and who, at the age of twenty-three, lost her life in a hotel fire, ventured ‘Golden.’” (12) It is of course the wrong answer, but Mary is only ten years old at this point, and the tone has the harshness of impatience lasting longer than ten years. Mary’s death in the fire is described at the start of the next chapter, of how she ran back and forth in a panic along the corridors through the smoke. “She ran one way; then, turning the other way; and at either end the blast furnace of the fire met her” (13). This pitiless description inevitably reminds us of the fires of hell that Calvin, “varying for artistic effect from his habitual estimate of one in a hundred to one in twenty or even one in five in more generous moods,” though only a small number of us would escape (­MacCulloch 237). Mary’s accidental death as an adult in the hotel fire takes on the weight of an inescapable destiny when Spark prefigures her end by describing her panic in a science class at the flames shooting out of test tubes:

She is the God of Calvin  83 Mary Macgregor took fright and ran along a single lane between two benches, met with a white flame, and ran back to meet another brilliant tongue of fire. Hither and thither she ran in panic between the benches until she was caught and induced to calm down, and she was told not to be so stupid by Miss Lockhart. (74–75) Miss Brodie’s death is revealed early on in the story too, when “twenty-­ eight years after Eunice did the splits in Miss Brodie’s flat” (24) she mentions to her husband that on their next trip to Edinburgh she’d like to find Miss Brodie’s grave and place flowers on it. The death of a favorite teacher of one’s youth, especially one liberal enough to allow you to do gymnastics in her kitchen three decades ago, would seem to be a not unexpected event nor would the desire to remember her with a visitation to her grave. But Eunice neglects to tell her husband little more than “Oh, it’s a long story. She was just a spinster…. Her retirement was rather a tragedy” (25). In the next paragraph, the narrator moves back those twenty-eight years to describe the long walk Miss Brodie took her class on through the old parts of Edinburgh, and she reminds us of what she had already said on the previous page: Behind Miss Brodie, last in the group, little Eunice Gardiner, who twenty-eight years later said of Miss Brodie, ‘I must visit her grave,’ gave a skip between each of her walking steps as if she might even break into pirouettes on the pavement. (26) In the narrator’s scheme of things, present life and future death walk together as if there were no boundaries between them. Miss Brodie as a character evokes contradictory emotions. Like the God of Calvin, in Sandy’s formulation, she can inspire great loyalty and gratitude in those who have been elected as her chosen ones and at the same time create the desire to transgress against that election and perhaps even betray her. One of Miss Brodie’s favorites ultimately “shook off Miss Brodie’s influence as a dog shakes pond-water from its coat,” although “Miss Brodie was not to know that this would be” (117). Sandy, who would never shake off Miss Brodie, saw this tendency to transgress as a component of the uncertainty that Calvinism planted in the minds of those who could never be entirely confident of their election: “she sensed [it] in the curiously defiant way in which the people she knew broke the Sabbath, and she smelt them in the excesses of Miss Brodie in her prime” (107). Miss Brodie had “elected herself to grace in so particular a way and with more suicidal enchantment than if she had simply taken to drink like other spinsters who couldn’t stand it any more” (107).

84  Joseph H. O’Mealy In Sandy’s understanding of Calvin, “God had planned for practically everyone before they were born a nasty surprise when they died” (106). Calvin must have had Miss Brodie in mind when he conjured up a God whose pleasure [it was] “to implant in certain people an erroneous sense of joy and salvation, so that their surprise at the end might be the nastier” (107). Miss Brodie’s surprise at her downfall is great. She gloried in what she called her “prime,” and “reckoned on her prime lasting till she was sixty. But this, the year after the war, was in fact Miss Brodie’s last and fifty-sixth year” (54). Embittered and still incredulous about her betrayal, ailing with what seems to be cancer, Miss Brodie never becomes an object of pity to Spark. Sandy’s charge that Miss Brodie is a “born Fascist” carries conviction with the reader, not just because of her admiration for the so-called reliability of Mussolini and Hitler, but in her almost unconscious and unexamined belief that the elect, the “crème de la crème,” are above the common moral and ethical laws that bind the rest of us. Even after having lived through the horrors of the Second World War, the most Miss Brodie can concede about Hitler is that he “was rather naughty” (120). Reading that, the reader is surprised at the inadequacy of her contrition and, as a result, her romantic rebellions are seen in a less naïve light. If we remember that Sandy gives the same answer twice, once at the beginning of the novella and once at the end, to the question of who the major influence in her school days was: “There was Miss Jean Brodie in her prime” (33; 125); we realize that it is not Sandy who sees it whole, as she clutches the bars of her self-chosen cloister in quiet desperation, nor is it the seductive and destructive Miss Brodie, but it is the narrator who truly sees the beginning in the end and the end in the beginning. Spark foregrounds death in The Driver’s Seat (1970), as she did in Memento Mori, but this time her focus is on a character who is seeking death rather than on a collective of characters avoiding it. Frank Kermode has called The Driver’s Seat the “most chilling and desperate of all the novels” in Spark’s canon (“Introduction” xvi). Part of its horror undoubtedly comes from Spark’s pessimistic examination of questions of free will and determinism in the story of a young woman, Lise, who travels from her home in northern Europe to Rome, in search of a man who will kill her in the precise way she has prescribed. It demonstrates almost clinically that death “haunts so many of her characters, haunts them because death is clearly not going to be the end” (Weatherby 24). The narrator teaches Lise that lesson in the last few seconds of her life: she is not really in the “driver’s seat,” as she had assumed. Lise seems, on introduction, to be an exceptionally strong-willed character who demands complete control over her actions and decisions. In essence, she behaves like the narrator of a story, which in this case, she apparently hopes, is a murder mystery. In the first chapter “she lays the

She is the God of Calvin  85 trail” (274) by trying on a garishly colored outfit, “patterned with green and purple squares on a white background, with blue spots within the green squares, cyclamen spots within the purple” (241). When the shop girl helpfully adds that the fabric “doesn’t stain,” Lise rips off the dress and storms out of the shop. She buys an even more lurid combination of dress and coat patterned in clashing colors in the Resort section of a department store, assured that this fabric is not stain-proof. In addition to the outlandish clothes, which invite insults (“Are you going to join a circus?” [248]), she speaks more loudly in public than strictly necessary, such as in the airport queue, and purchases a paperback book, also in garish colors, that she carries face out so all can see and remember not just the book but its owner as well. Despite Lise’s elaborate attempts to create a scenario that will raise interest and speculation about her journey to Rome, when the omniscient narrator steps in to say: “Who knows her thoughts? Who can tell?” (273), the reader realizes that Lise’s psychological motivation is not Spark’s central concern. Instead, Spark seems determined to expose Lise’s hubris in imagining that she could play the role of the narrator-God of her own life. Chapter 3 begins, She will be found tomorrow morning dead from multiple stab-wounds, her wrists bound with a silk scarf and her ankles bound with a man’s necktie, in the grounds of an empty villa, in a park of the foreign city to which she is travelling on the flight now boarding at Gate 14. (255) This is not Spark’s first use of prolepsis in the story and, in fact, Spark uses prolepsis to a greater extent here than in any previous fiction. There are at least a dozen instances when the present tense action halts for a glimpse into a future time when the discovery of Lise’s body will lead to interviews with all the people who encountered her on her journey to death, as the authorities search for her identity or inquire into the circumstances of her final day. Lise’s rejection of stain-proof clothing suggests either her arrogance or her ignorance of one of the foundational points of Calvin’s theology: the metaphoric stain that original sin, Adam and Eve’s disobedience, has placed for all eternity on the human race. Calvin followed Luther’s insights on this point: the notion of free will as held by the pagan philosophers and by the moralists of [Luther’s] time did not take into account the enormous power of sin. Sin is such that we are powerless to be rid of it. Only by divine intervention can we be justified and freed from the power of evil. And even then we continue to be sinners. (Gonzalez 42–43)

86  Joseph H. O’Mealy The belief that humans, through their own free will, can choose to expunge their sinful natures through contrition, good deeds, and prayers had been (and still is) central to Roman Catholic teaching. Reformation theologians, on the other hand, downplayed the efficacy of free will and, in some instances, denied its existence. For them, God’s immense power easily outweighed man’s puny pretensions to control his destiny. In choosing Rome as Lise’s terminus, Spark is perhaps deliberately enjoying that disruptive irony. Lise’s death wish is not surprisingly infused, and perhaps confused, with the sexual drive, which to the strict Calvinist constitutes the original “stain” she has mistakenly decided is irrelevant. When she is asked the purpose of her trip, she says, “I’m going to find [my boyfriend]. He’s waiting for me” (253). On the flight to Rome, she sits between two men, one a respectably dressed businessman and the other a “hungrier-looking man,” whose interest in her is clearly sexual (255). The businessman changes seats as the plane taxis, “and heaves a deep breath as if he had escaped from death by a small margin” (258). In one of Spark’s more pointed ironies, the “hungrier” passenger will turn out to be only a nuisance, a macrobiotic guru who insists he needs one orgasm a day, which she should supply, while the man who flees her will turn out to be her killer, recently released from a clinic for sex offenders, and frightened by the Eve-like temptation she represents. Lise’s various futile attempts to find her “boyfriend” in Rome postpones their fatal encounter, but it cannot be indefinitely avoided. When Lise befriends an elderly Jehovah’s Witness, Mrs. Fiedke, who is waiting for her nephew to arrive in Rome, she tells Lise, “You and my nephew are meant for each other. As sure as anything, my dear, you are the person for my nephew” (289). At the climax of the story, we discover that this nephew is the businessman who fled Lise on the plane. He tries to resist her again when she insists that he get into her car: “No, I don’t want to come. I want to stay. I came here this morning, and when I saw you here I got away. I want to get away” (314). Almost abducting him, she tells him “I knew you were the one” (314), and she drives him to the Borghese Gardens, where she lies down on the ground, makes him tie her hands with a scarf she purchased that day, then tells him to tie together her legs with his necktie so he will not rape her, and finally orders him to stab her to death with the knife she also purchased that day. All carefully planned, all well prepared for, but Lise’s ability to control her death scene vanishes once she has chosen a “sex-maniac” just released from six years in a clinic, as her executioner. She tells him “I don’t want any sex. You can have it afterwards. Tie my feet and kill, that’s all.” He has other ideas, however, as Spark writes with minimal delicacy: “All the same, he plunges into her, with the knife poised high…. As the knife descends to her throat she screams, evidently perceiving how final is finality” (318). Lise recognizes too late that “she cannot impose the

She is the God of Calvin  87 terms of her own death” (Kermode, “Introduction” xvii). Spark denies Lise and her murderer the capacity for unfettered free will, undercutting their attempts to design and carry out the plots of their own lives and, especially, of Lise’s death wish. Spark has instead given her narrator the last move in a maneuver similar to one favored by Sandy Stranger’s ­Calvinist God, who postpones until the last minute his “nasty surprise.” Malcolm Bradbury has characterized both The Driver’s Seat and Spark’s next novel, Not to Disturb (1971), as “novels of ending” (189). True enough, in that “the future is as certain here [Not to Disturb] as in The Driver’s Seat” (Hynes 243), but Spark has characteristically upped the ante in this later novel. As strange as the story of Lise’s pursuit of her own death may be—Kermode notes that Spark based the story on a newspaper item that caught her attention (“Introduction” xvii)—the murder-suicide deaths of Baron Klopstock, the Baroness, and their ­secretary Victor Passerat, in the library of the Klopstock mansion in ­Geneva, surpasses it in complication and mystery. Because the reader never sees inside the locked library to learn why and how these deaths occur, s/he must rely on the servants in the house for any information as to motive and action. These servants, who possess historically but enigmatically significant names like Lister, Heloise, Eleanor, Clovis, and Hadrian, are all in some way invested in the deaths of the trio. Scheming servants who know more than their masters are the mainstay of many comedies, and while some absurd and macabre incidents do occur, this is not a comedy. What these servants know that their masters do not is that once the three have been locked together in the library, not one of them will emerge alive the next morning. On one level, the novel resembles a perverse parlor game wrapped in a detective story. The key to understanding the mystery seems to be that Spark is here demonstrating how, without an omniscient narrator who can see “the beginning and the end,” we are left without a master narrative, just a jumble of unreliable, self-interested, and competing narratives. The narrative has been ceded to the characters and, as a result, the indeterminable reigns. Each character is a storyteller of sorts, one writing a screenplay and selling it to Hollywood before the fact, another pre-selling the scandalous elements of this ménage to the tabloid journalists, while the rest create and rehearse personas of grief and shock that amount to auditions for parts in the film version. Lister, as butler, plays the major role in the creation of their scenarios: “It’s Lister who decides,” says Eleanor (29). When Prince Eugene, a friend of the Baron’s, stops in to see him and learns that the Baron and Baroness are locked in the library, not to be disturbed, with their shared male secretary, his first response is “Almighty God, I’d better get out of here!” Before he flees the scene, ordering Lister to forget he had stopped by, he asks, “Lister, do you expect something to happen?” Lister answers, “We do, sir. The domestic staff is prepared” (45–46). Even before the Klopstocks and their secretary have taken their

88  Joseph H. O’Mealy places in the library, Lister has prepared not only his staff but also the reader for a story of inevitable and untidy death. The story begins with Lister entering the house, as if onto a stage, and speaking to his fellow servants lines from Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi: “Their life a general mist of error. Their death, a hideous storm of terror” (3). The authoritative tone and morally damning nature of the judgment place Lister in the company of many a Calvinist preacher setting the text for the day’s lesson. Yet Lister’s pastoral leadership can hardly be called unimpeachably moral, nor does he seek justification by any authority other than narrative fiat. Lister’s power to know all that will occur is limited because there are aspects of the deaths that he and his staff cannot anticipate with any accuracy, such as the actual time of the deaths. Lister suggests three a.m., but Heloise counters with “I would say six o’clock tomorrow morning. Right on the squeak of dawn” (8), and he concedes she may be right. They are good at improvising when new information becomes available, however, and marry off Heloise to “him in the attic” when he turns out to be the Baron’s younger brother and heir, and not the Baroness’s relative, as their script had first assumed. Nonetheless, only the general shape of their narrative holds true: in the course of a storm-filled night, the Baron, his wife, and their secretary will die in the locked library while the household staff in the morning will act shocked and disapproving of the scandalous implications of their deaths—from which they will profit enormously. There is no way they can agree on why or how or what it means. Joseph Hynes, who has analyzed Not to Disturb at great and complex length, warns, “we must always expect the unexpected if we would empathize with Spark” (247). As we have seen in earlier novels, prolepsis is one of Spark’s favorite tools for demonstrating the contiguity of beginning and end in human lives. Her manipulation of tense and time in Not to Disturb, however, goes well beyond her previous uses of prolepsis. As Eleanor and Lister await the Baron’s return to the house, for example, she asks, “Suppose the Baron wants his dinner?” To which Lister replies, “Of course he expected his dinner… But as things turned out he didn’t live to eat it. He’ll be arriving soon” (8). Present, past, and future tenses mingle in these sentences, but we have already heard Lister warn Eleanor, “Let us not split hairs between the past, present and future tenses” (4). We later hear Lister correct McGuire the sound engineer, “Let us not strain after vulgar chronology,” when he tries to challenge Lister’s statement that “the Baron is no more” with his own assertion “I can hear his voice. What d’you mean?” (49). Hynes sees in the novella Spark’s return to the “familiar conflict between God’s foreknowledge and God’s predestining. That is, the book poses the question of human choice, of free will. And in this matter, too, ambivalence prevails. Thus, Lister can state both that the trio was unprepared for their trouble and that “they have placed themselves, unfortunately, within the realm of predestination” (243–44).

She is the God of Calvin  89 The mention of predestination reminds us that Spark has placed Not to Disturb in Geneva, the birthplace of Calvinism. This latter-day ­G eneva is, however, a debased version of Calvin’s. Prince Eugene’s surmise about the sordid aspects of the Baron-Baroness-Secretary relationship, with a hint of many-sided blackmail, is compounded by the ­ cGuire, servants’ fond reminiscence of films they have acted in for Mr. M the sound engineer, and Mr. Samuel, the cameraman. Heloise seems particularly proud that it was her idea to base these films, which are surely pornographic, on versions of fairy tales like Little Red Riding Hood, the Princess and the Pea, and Goldilocks and the Three Bears. It should also not be forgotten that the servants’ interests in this story are almost exclusively economic, not moral. They will make buckets of money from selling the story to the media, and of course they stand to share in the riches of the Klopstock estate once the current holders are dead. The moral clarity of Memento Mori, Jean Brodie, and even The Driver’s Seat has been lost. The master narrative has become fragmented and the narrators mere improvisers. The Hothouse by the East River (1973) marks both a return to a more controlled point of view and a radical change in Spark’s presentation of death—a change which foregrounds the porous border separating life and death. Up to this point in her career, Spark has created narratives in which her characters face death with varying degrees of unawareness about the implications of their predestined fates. In Hothouse, she goes one large step beyond: the characters are already dead and live on in some kind of purgatorial version of New York. The reader first suspects something uncanny when the narrator continually points out that Elsa’s shadow falls on the wrong side of her body and that the apartment Paul and Elsa occupy is always oppressively hot, regardless of the season. Paul also occasionally falls into an intense moment of panic: “His heart thumps for help. ‘Help me! Help me!’ Cries his heart, battering the sides of the coffin” (14). Most of the action of the story is seen through Paul’s eyes, and readers eventually become aware that the details of a life of upper-class boredom in 1970s New York (psychiatrists, nightclubs, avant-garde theatre, and even two aimless adult children) are the imaginative afterlife of Paul’s refusal to accept the fact that he, Elsa, and several other colleagues who worked for the British government were all killed in a V-2 bomb attack in 1944. Elsa and the others seem to know this, but they are waiting for Paul to accept it: “‘You died, too,’ says Elsa. ‘That’s one of the things you don’t realize, Paul’” (131). His ultimate acceptance that the life he has seemed to lead has been little more than a dream apparently allows them all to move on. Their time in purgatory has been concluded and the hothouse prison they have inhabited begins to crumble: “They stand outside their apartment block, looking at the scaffolding. The upper stories are already gone and the lower part is a shell…. ‘Now we can have some peace,’ says Elsa” (145–46).

90  Joseph H. O’Mealy There is, of course, no place in Calvin’s theology for the notion of purgatory. So perhaps we see in Hothouse Spark’s pivot away from the Calvinist God and toward the Roman Catholic view of a potentially more merciful final disposition. Among the many enigmatic elements in Hothouse are the opening lines: “If it were only true that all’s well that ends well, if only it were true” (3). It is possible to detect in that disappointment Spark’s idiosyncratic reminder that no matter how confidently we may judge the success of an outcome, such as a “good life,” we are forgetting another realm of judgment. There is an “end” beyond the end that we can see.

Works Cited Bradbury, Malcolm. “Muriel Spark’s Fingernails.” Critical Essays on Muriel Spark. Edited by Joseph Hynes. G. K. Hall & Co., 1992, pp. 187–193. Gonzalez, Justo L. The Story of Christianity. Vol. 2. Harper & Row, 1984. Hosmer, Robert E. Jr., editor. “Fascinated by Suspense: An Interview with Dame Muriel Spark.” Hidden Possibilities: Essays in Honor of Muriel Spark. University of Notre Dame Press, 2014, pp. 227–255. Hynes, Joseph, editor. “Taking and Making: The Page as Looking-Glass.” Critical Essays on Muriel Spark. G. K. Hall & Co., 1992, pp. 221–263. Josipovici, Gabriel. “The Large Testimony of Muriel Spark.” Hidden Possibilities: Essays in Honor of Muriel Spark. Edited by Robert E. Hosmer Jr. University of Notre Dame Press, 2014, pp. 17–35. Kermode, Frank. “Introduction.” Four Novels. Everyman’s Library, 2004, pp. ix–xx. ———. The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction with a New Epilogue. Oxford UP, 2000. Lodge, David. “The Uses and Abuses of Omniscience: Method and Meaning in Muriel Spark’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie.” Critical Essays on Muriel Spark. Edited by Joseph Hynes. G. K. Hall & Co., 1992, pp. 151–173. MacCulloch, Diarmaid. The Reformation. Viking, 2003. Massie, Allan. “Calvinism and Catholicism in Muriel Spark.” Muriel Spark: An Odd Capacity for Vision. Edited by Alan Bold. Vision and Barnes & Noble, 1984, pp. 94–107. McGrath, Alister E. Reformation Thought: An Introduction. Blackwell, 1999. Pritchett, V.S. “Introduction.” Memento Mori. Time-Life Books, 1964, pp. xiii–xvii. Spark, Muriel. Curriculum Vitae. Constable, 1992. ———. The Driver’s Seat. 1970. Four Novels. Everyman’s Library, 2004. ———. The Hothouse by the East River. 1973. Viking Press, 1973. ———. Memento Mori. 1959. New Directions, 2014. ———. Not to Disturb. 1971. Viking Press, 1972. ———. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. 1961. Four Novels. Everyman’s Library, 2004. Weatherby, W. J. “Introduction to Muriel Spark’s “My Conversion.”” Critical Essays on Muriel Spark. Edited by Joseph Hynes. G. K. Hall & Co., 1992, p. 24.

6 Talking to the Dead Narrative Closure and the Political Unconscious in Neil Jordan’s Fiction Keith Hopper Death in Irish literature is an obsessive reprise, dressed up in different genres and encrypted in various kinds of discourse. Its persistence is neither a matter of literary or philosophical vogue, nor an aesthetic decorum, nor a symptom of modern existential crisis. Rather it is an ancestral, cultural characteristic, a powerful locus communis […], where the graveyard functions as the mediating link between different Irish worlds and generations. Witoszek and Sheeran 21

Introduction To date, Neil Jordan (b.1950) has directed seventeen feature films, and is the author of seven novels and a seminal collection of short stories. His films, in particular, exhibit a remarkable diversity: from intimate Oedipal dramas (The Miracle) to epic Hollywood blockbusters (Interview with the Vampire); from religious melodramas (The End of the Affair) to romantic comedies (High Spirits). Despite the fact that Jordan draws on a wide range of genres and cinematic styles, his work displays a thematic and formal consistency, even in his most commercial and ostensibly “impersonal” films (The Brave One; We’re No Angels). Moreover, these auteurial themes and tropes reappear in his stories and novels in increasingly subtle and imaginative ways, and are incorporated within a variety of genres and modes of discourse: coming-of-age tales (Night in Tunisia), surrealist fable (The Dream of a Beast), historiographic metafiction (The Past), magic realism (Sunrise with Sea Monster), the Jamesian ghost story (Shade), postmodern thrillers (Mistaken and The Drowned Detective), and contemporary adult fairytale (Carnivalesque). Throughout Jordan’s eclectic and expansive oeuvre, there is an abiding and self-conscious fascination with death, both as an existential fact and as a narratological conundrum. In particular, Jordan is interested in how death is conventionally used as a convenient but ultimately limiting means of narrative closure. Of course, such concerns are hardly unique to Jordan, although, as I will argue, Jordan operates within a particular

92  Keith Hopper Irish literary tradition where, as Witoszek and Sheeran suggest, “mourning is still an unfinished process, lacking in the kind of closure that is usually brought about by detaching memories and hopes from the dead” (8). As J. Hillis Miller has noted, most narratives end in marriage or death, but this metaphorical tying or untying of knots remains deeply paradoxical: “If marriage, the tying of the marriage bond, is a cessation of the story, it is also the beginning of another cycle in the endless sequence of generations” (260–61). On the other hand, “Death is the most enigmatic, the most open-ended ending of all. It is the best dramatization of the way an ending […] always recedes, escapes, vanishes. The best one can have, writer or reader, is what Frank Kermode, in his admirable phrase, calls ‘the sense of an ending’” (Miller 261). One of the most interesting aspects of Neil Jordan’s skeptical, counterrealist aesthetic is the way in which these paradoxes of closure are confronted in a self-conscious and often playful manner.1 All of his films find resolution in death but usually with some variation on the theme of marriage and family. Indeed, in Jordan’s “Irish” films (i.e. films made in or about Ireland), death, marriage, and Oedipal conflict are deeply intertwined: his early screenplay for Traveller (1981), for example, ends with the murder of the heroine’s sexually abusive father and the break-up of her arranged marriage; his directorial debut Angel (1982) ends with multiple murders and charts the breakdown of several marriages as a consequence of violence; The Miracle (1990) ends with a symbolic marriage (the teenage protagonists are reunited, but only after the hero has overcome his Oedipal desire for his estranged mother); and The Crying Game (1992) ends with death and a prison “marriage” between the hero and his transvestite lover. Similarly, the historical epic Michael Collins (1996) ends with the hero’s assassination as his fiancée makes preparations for their wedding; The Butcher Boy (1997) ends with the murder of a mother-figure, spurred on by the protagonist’s epiphany that his own parents’ failed marriage was doomed from the outset; and Breakfast on Pluto (2005) ends with the transvestite hero finding his birth mother and deciding to help raise his best friend’s baby. In Jordan’s most recent Irish film, Ondine (2009), the interplay between death and marriage as expedient acts of closure is foregrounded yet again: in this contemporary fairytale, a divorced fisherman catches an exotic woman in his net and brings her back to life. His daughter imagines that the stranger is a selkie (a seal woman) but she turns out to be a drug mule on the run from a gangster. At the end, in a reversal of the opening, the gangster gets caught up in a net and drowns, and the protagonists marry (the final shot, echoing Jean Vigo’s L’Atalante (1934), shows her in her wedding veil on the prow of the boat, flanked by her new family). The endings of Jordan’s transnational films prove equally complicated: The Company of Wolves (1984) ends with the young heroine’s symbolic marriage to a werewolf and her rebirth as a woman/wolf; Mona Lisa

Talking to the Dead  93 (1986) ends with murder and betrayal, but in a comforting coda the hero is reunited with his estranged daughter; In Dreams (1999) seemingly ends with the death of the heroine and her estranged husband, although in a dramatic coda she returns from the dead to haunt the killer of their daughter. Similarly, The End of the Affair (1999) closes with the death of the woman at the center of a love triangle, while her lover and husband end up sharing a home together; The Good Thief (2002) concludes with the thief and his prostitute lover walking off into the sunset, trading tall tales about their families of origin; and The Brave One (2007)—ostensibly the least personal of Jordan’s films—ends with the vigilante heroine returning to the scene of the original crime to commune with her dead lover. Even Jordan’s comedies participate in this macabre dance between Eros (the life instinct) and Thanatos (the death instinct): We’re No Angels (1989) ends with a death, a symbolic resurrection, and two marriages (one conventionally heterosexual; one coyly homosexual), while High Spirits (1988), conversely, ends with two marriages through death and resurrection (a woman dies and is united with her ghostly lover, while a female ghost comes back to life to be with her human lover). Considered in their totality, Jordan’s counter-narratives typically involve a wounded hero who betrays the bonds of belonging through their defiance of a stern father figure. The hero crosses into a world of unfettered desire, personified by a mysterious Other who ultimately remains out of reach. Order is provisionally restored through a process of psychic healing, and an actualization—often parodic—of the Freudian “family romance”. 2 This archetypal sequence of transgression, transfiguration, and reconciliation underpins all of Jordan’s feature films, and is central to the development of his fiction over the past forty years. However, true resolution and narrative closure is perpetually deferred in all of these stories, mediated as they are by anxious and unhappy protagonists who exist in some kind of endlessly looped, in-between state. In this respect, the emblematic figure in Jordan’s work is the modern day vampire, that unholy revenant who remains eternally trapped between the world of the living and the world of the dead. Thus, at the end of Jordan’s most recent film, Byzantium (2013), the young female vampire transforms her human lover into her own kind, thereby combining death and marriage in a single bite. However, in so doing, she perpetuates the endless cycle of life-in-death and death-in-life. Similarly, in Jordan’s most commercially successful film, Interview with the Vampire (1994), the initial resolution—the protagonist’s telling of his cautionary tale, which concludes with the destruction of his vampire family—is disrupted by an ironic coda, where the vampire antagonist, Lestat, literally rises from the ashes. This reprise can be read in a number of ways: glibly, perhaps, as the return of the repressed; narratively, as catharsis and a repetition of the theme of resurrection; even commercially, as it allows for the

94  Keith Hopper possibility of that most undead of genres, the Hollywood sequel. In all cases, though, Jordan’s endings are deliberately artificial, metafictionally self-reflexive, and narratively and ontologically unstable. Or as Lord Byron (himself the inspiration for John Polidori’s 1819 generic urtext, The Vampyre) describes it in Don Juan, “All tragedies are finish’d by a death, / All comedies are ended by a marriage; / The future states of both are left to faith”. For the purposes of this essay, I wish to focus on the endlessly complex endings in Jordan’s literary fiction, while exploring the various ways in which death remains a central concern, both formally and thematically. Jordan’s Theatrum Mortis will be considered in terms of what Witoszek and Sheeran have called the “Irish funerary tradition”—“an unbroken transmission of rhetorical modes, values and ritual actions which are centred on death” (11). Given the limitations of space, I will restrict my analysis to three exemplary texts: the opening and closing stories from Night in Tunisia (1976), and the 1994 novel Sunrise with Sea Monster. Throughout the essay, I will draw on some key psychoanalytic concepts as a means of exploring Jordan’s most fundamental theme: the relationship—usually unconscious—between longing (personal desire) and belonging (collective attachment). As Jordan noted in a radio interview for Desert Island Discs (2000), “People often don’t know what they desire. The whole mechanism of need and longing has always fascinated me”. Furthermore, as a means of linking the fictional with the historical, I also wish to invoke Fredric Jameson’s suggestive concept of the political unconscious: the idea that, in Colin MacCabe’s words, “every text is at its most fundamental level a political fantasy which in contradictory fashion articulates both the actual and potential social relations which constitute individuals within a specific political economy” (MacCabe, ix). While Neil Jordan’s stories can be (and have been) read allegorically, these open-ended allegories of longing and belonging are never settled or straightforward. In this regard, his mysterious and elusive endings are an index of the impossibility of narrative closure in the real world, where the ghosts of history and memory invariably come back to haunt.

“The Return of the Repressed”: Night in Tunisia (1976) Jordan’s debut collection, Night in Tunisia, is book-ended by two stories of exile, loss, and death, which operate in direct counterpoint to each other. In the opening story, “Last Rites,” a young Irish laborer commits suicide in a London bathhouse. The narrative flickers between vague memories of an adolescence spent in the seaside resorts of Dublin and more vivid images of the unnamed protagonist’s immediate, alien environment. Before slitting his wrists, the young man masturbates, feeling all “the expense of passion and shame” leak out of him (19). As his blood and semen intermingle with the water, transforming it “into the

Talking to the Dead  95 colour of weak wine” (8), his haunted memories of Ireland begin to fade and fragmented images from his final hour—a green bridge, a black man’s face, the white shower tiles—come sharply into focus: “And dying he thought of nothing more significant than the way he had come here, […] thinking: there is nothing more significant” (19). In several respects, the concluding story in the collection, “A Love,” is a reversal of the first: a young emigrant working in London, “Neil,” returns to Dublin for a final encounter with his former lover, a middle-aged woman now dying of cancer. Again, the narrative is structured as a series of short, imagistic vignettes, fluidly cross-cutting between a traumatic past and an uncertain present. Importantly, the first part of the story takes place against the backdrop of the state funeral for Éamon de Valera, interspersed with Neil’s memories of the Oedipal struggle with his widower father for the love of this unnamed woman. Unlike “Last Rites,” however, the protagonist’s memories seem more vivid than his perceptions of the real world, a feeling echoed by the population at large in the wake of de Valera’s passing. The archetypal figure of de Valera—the “Father of the Nation”—is resurrected in other Jordan texts, including The Past, Sunrise with Sea Monster and Michael Collins. In an interview with Colm Tóibín in 1982, Jordan recalled the original inspiration for this conceit. On the day of de Valera’s state funeral in Dublin (2 September 1975), Jordan had just returned home from working in England, and as the cortège passed down O’Connell Street he noticed a crowd of people gathered around a television shop, watching images of the funeral taking place behind them: It seemed to symbolise to me the fact that Irish identity and the Irish consciousness was one of questions and problems, not one of a firm knowledge of who or what we are. […] They could have just peeped their heads over and looked at the real thing, but they preferred just to gaze at the television and it seemed to me to show that Irish people now did not know how to respond to such an event, given that the [Northern Irish Troubles] has happened, given that the simplicity or the naivety of Irish life in the forties and fifties has been destroyed by the sixties, and it also struck me that the nature of our inheritance is one of huge question marks all the time. […]. I was just wondering [that] if human beings lose their memory of the past, whatever the significance it has for them, [then] they’ve lost their ability to criticise and to understand themselves. And it was questions like those that I wanted to write about. (16) In the second part of “A Love,” the couple drive to the west of Ireland, where they make love for the last time. At the moment of sexual and

96  Keith Hopper narrative climax, Neil recalls the traumatic source of his exile and angst: how in a fit of jealous, adolescent rage he had tried to kill his father with a pistol (significantly, a relic left over from the Irish Civil War). The story ends in the village of Lisdoonvarna in County Clare—famous for its annual matchmaking festival—where the dying woman takes the healing waters of the sulfur spa (a key motif throughout Jordan’s stories and novels). Neil remains ignorant of the protocols of this ritual, unsure “whether you drank the waters or bathed in them” (123); for him, the sacrament of sex and the act of narration have been healing enough: “I knew it was definitely ending […]. You called it love, I remember. And it must have been” (closing lines, 124). Structurally and thematically, Night in Tunisia bears close comparison with James Joyce’s Dubliners (1914): both collections open with a death shrouded in ritual and mystery (“Last Rites” / “The Sisters”); both end with a spiritual journey from Dublin to the west of Ireland (“A Love” / “The Dead”). However, in the sixty years that separate these two collections, Irish society had changed beyond recognition, and Jordan is keen to register those changes on a number of levels. Taken as a whole, one of the most interesting aspects of Jordan’s oeuvre is the dialectical tension between his filmmaking and his writing: Jordan’s films are frequently literary in their concerns—indeed, many of them are adapted from literary texts—while his stories and novels are often quite cinematic in their structure, style, imagery, and allusions. Of course, an interest in cinema is hardly exclusive to Jordan: Joyce famously opened the first dedicated cinema in Dublin in 1910 (Ellmann 300–304), while Beckett wrote a letter to Eisenstein in 1936 about the possibility of studying film in Moscow (Bair 204). However, whereas the modernist fascination with the literary possibilities of film is largely epistemological (a means of exploring the nature and limits of knowledge), in Jordan’s fiction—and certainly in Night in Tunisia—it also manifests itself on an ontological level (a means of exploring the nature and limits of being). Throughout Night in Tunisia, Jordan explores the ways in which a traditionally verbal culture (one which venerates the word) has become an increasingly visual one (which fetishizes the image), and this psychosocial dynamic is reproduced on a formal level. Thus, in “Last Rites,” the narrative of the suicide unfolds in a series of cinematic cross-cuts, flickering between the past and the present (and ending, appropriately, with a slow fade-to-black). Significantly, the young man’s memories are presented in italics, as if directions in a screenplay, while his sense impressions of the real world “came to him with an unusual clarity; as if he had seen them in a film or in a dream and not in real, waking life” (7). The sacramental and solipsist nature of the young laborer’s suicide is also reflected in the liturgical rhythms of the self-reflexive prose: “each action was performed with the solemnity of an elaborate ritual, each action was a ring in the circular maze that led to the hidden purpose—the

Talking to the Dead  97 purpose he never elaborated, only felt” (8–9). In much the same way, the motivation of the suicidal protagonist is never fully elaborated, merely suggested. Instead of psychological portraiture Jordan sets up a “montage of attractions,” which allows the reader to draw their own conclusions.3 As Maurice Harmon observes, “Jordan concentrates on the reality outside of and around his characters […], as though his imagination conceived them in cinematic terms, figures within settings, against changing shapes, within different perspectives” (74). In the case of “A Love,” Jordan’s cinematic style is more allegorically ambitious. Throughout the story, characters conceive of the world almost entirely in visual terms: Neil’s only memories of his dead mother, and of the dead president, come from photographs, while the mourners on the street prefer to watch de Valera’s funeral procession through the window of a television shop, “staring at the death being celebrated behind them” (111). Enshrined in these vignettes is a subtle but crucial psychological difference: photographs seem to embalm the past and freeze it in time, whereas moving images give an illusion of progress, of history moving forward. If, as Roland Barthes claimed in Camera Lucida, photography is inherently tied into death, then cinema, as Christian Metz has argued, is its metaphorical opposite: “Film gives back to the dead a semblance of life, a fragile semblance, but one immediately strengthened by the wishful thinking of the viewer. Photography, on the contrary, by virtue of the objective suggestions of its signifier […] maintains the memory of the dead as being dead.”4 Significantly, in “A Love,” Neil’s memories of his lover (and, implicitly, of his estranged father) lie somewhere in between a photograph and a film, trapped in a twilight world of dead or fading Hollywood idols: “Once it was desire I filled you out with, not memory. You were a blown-up photograph to me, a still from a film. […] And you played with me, you let me fill you out, you played Ava Gardner to my James Dean” (112). At his lover’s prompting, they drive to the west of Ireland, where Neil has never been: “You’ll never understand this country till you have,” she tells him (115). This picaresque journey westwards—consciously echoing the final epiphany in Joyce’s “The Dead”—becomes a kind of literary road movie, an attempt to exorcise the personal and collective ghosts of the past. At the end of Jordan’s story, this imaginative quest concludes with the mysterious coda, where the dying woman takes the healing waters of the sulfur spa. Although Neil remains uncertain about the significance of this ritual, its meaning may well lie in the particular nature of his lover’s illness. As Susan Sontag argued in Illness as Metaphor (1978), cancer is a common trope in twentieth-century literature, “a disease to which the psychically defeated, the inexpressive, the repressed—especially those who have repressed anger or sexual feelings—are particularly prone” (98). More specifically, though, cancer is an important motif in the work of John McGahern, one of Jordan’s acknowledged influences (see Rogers).

98  Keith Hopper Throughout McGahern’s fiction—e.g. The Barracks (1963) and The Pornographer (1975)—a recurring disillusionment with sex is often counterpointed against the epiphanic nature of cancer. As Seamus Deane observed of this morbid dynamic, “Sexual experience, which involves another, leads to self-enclosure; illness, which is private and involves one’s own body exclusively, leads to an opening out towards others” (222). At the end of “A Love,” there is some catharsis in the sexual act, at least for the young male protagonist. For the dying woman, though, in a world where the traditional certainties of Catholicism and Irish nationalism have begun to collapse, meaning is ultimately found through the sober contemplation of death and in the nurturing of others. As ­ Christina Hunt Mahoney perceptively notes, the phrase “we’ve changed” is repeated several times throughout the story, but its “meaning extends beyond the recognition articulated by the lovers, to the transitional state of Ireland, as it begins a new chapter after the death of the founding father. As with all parental deaths, real or metaphorical, there is sorrow but also release” (242).

“Sorrow but also release”: Sunrise with Sea Monster (1994) Jordan’s third novel, Sunrise with Sea Monster (hereafter Sunrise), first published in December 1994, revisits this theme of familial and national reconciliation. The book is structured in four parts. In Part I, the first-person narrator, Donal Gore, a volunteer with the Irish Socialist contingent of the International Brigades during the Spanish Civil War, awaits execution in a Falangist jail. Against the backdrop of a Latin mass, Donal recalls the events that led him to this point, in particular the conflict with his father, Sam, a former Irish Republican Army man: “His memory of his War of Independence was like the inviolate rose, ravished by the Civil War […]. And fifteen years later, I joined a remnant of the splinters of that conflict, a wayward bunch of Republicans who, having exhausted the litany of betrayal at home, sought new possibilities abroad” (14). In a series of flashbacks, Donal outlines his family’s litany of personal and political betrayals, beginning with his father’s drift from Sinn Féin’s radical nationalism to right-wing conservatism: He had been born a Protestant but converted to Catholicism at the time of his marriage. Betrayal, then, began with him. He had betrayed the interests of his Ascendancy class by joining the Republican movement. When the War of Independence gave way to the Civil War, he felt betrayed by that Republican movement in turn. He joined the Treaty side, was given a post in the first Cosgrave administration and there his slow drift back to the politics of his class began. (35)

Talking to the Dead  99 Later, Donal recalls, his father ran for election for Fine Gael in 1932, “his military past and his Ascendancy present presumably a bulwark against the rising tide of Republicanism” (36). But Sam’s perceived betrayal goes further: despite his contempt for his former “Chief,” Éamon de ­Valera—“I had heard him mutter darkly about de Valera as the embodiment of satanic guile, as the murderer of one Michael Collins” (35)—Sam accepts a post in de Valera’s new Fianna Fáil government. However, the real betrayal in the narrative lies closer to home. When Donal is about six years old—the exact timeline remains opaque—his mother dies of tuberculosis. Several years later, Sam hires a young ­piano teacher, Rose de Vrai (literally, “The Rose of Truth”), to encourage Donal’s musical talents. Both father and son fall in love with her, but it is with Donal that Rose begins a sexual relationship: “We came to relish our status as sinners, the melancholy of the truly damned” (47). As in “A Love” (and also in The Past), Sam later proposes to Rose, and she accepts; Donal, distraught, goes off to fight in Spain. At the end of Part I, and while Donal’s family try to negotiate his release through diplomatic channels, Donal is visited by Hans, an intelligence officer with the German Abwehr. Hans is a former theoretical physicist who had worked under Werner Heisenberg: “He relates to me the bones of quantum physics, says how Einstein claimed God does not play dice with the universe then tells me how he discovered God does nothing else” (67), and this evocation of the “uncertainty principle” remains an important metaphor throughout.5 Hans arranges for Donal’s safe passage home, on condition that he act as go-between for Hans and the pro-German rump of the IRA in the neutral Irish Free State.6 Donal reluctantly agrees, and returns to Ireland on the eve of World War II. In Part II, Donal’s father is now paralyzed from a stroke and exists in a vegetative state. Donal begins fishing with Sam, remembering, as he did in prison, how in his childhood, “We would lay nightlines, in our rare moments of tranquillity, on the beach below the terrace […]. We would turn without a word after watching for a while as if words would have fractured the moment’s peace” (2–3). Donal also resumes his affair with Rose: “[I] could see Rose, myself and father as a triangular cocoon, an equation known only to ourselves that related to no known numerical system” (116). In a further round of betrayals, Donal makes contact with the IRA through his childhood friend Mouse (before Rose’s arrival, Mouse and Donal were teenage lovers); however, Donal also colludes with de Valera’s security forces at Dublin Castle to help thwart the German-IRA plot: “Deceit, I realised, had become my element. Betrayal, a kind of destiny” (142–43). In Part III, the double-dealing reaches its climax: on a beach at ­Spanish Point in Co. Clare, near the healing spa of Lisdoonvarna, Hans and the IRA men are captured. At the same time, Donal’s father, whom he had left sitting in his wheelchair on the beach, goes missing and is

100  Keith Hopper presumed drowned. Grief-stricken and guilt-ridden, Rose and Donal separate for good, and he spends the rest of the “The Emergency” (as WWII was officially known in neutral Ireland) fishing: “The news from Europe passed us by, seemed monstrous, but somehow less intimate than the monstrosities we had accomplished” (165). Part IV opens at the end of the war: “Then, on the day after de Valera presented his condolences to the German embassy on the death of Hitler, I resurrected my father” (166). In a surprising—though graceful—shift into magic realism, Donal, who has been drinking heavily since his father’s death, sets his nightlines in a “place where both worlds meet” and catches a strange “elemental” fish (172–73). The ghost of Donal’s father also appears: “I’d fished him from the sea somehow, dragged him from one element to the other with an invisible line” (174). They cook and eat the fish together; his father “spoke then, as if the taste had released something. His voice was quiet, with none of the fury it had held in life” (176). In an epic and healing conversation, father and son finally resolve their differences. At twilight, the ghost of Donal’s mother silently appears. Reunited with his first wife, Sam returns to the Otherworld, and the novel comes to a tender close: I knew that she, of all things, was what he most wanted. I saw them walk then, in the thin evening light across planes of sand, sea and air, mauve, purple and silver, till the light became so thin they could be seen no longer. I looked down at my bare feet and saw he had taken his shoes. (183) In a detailed Lacanian reading, Hedwig Schwall argues that Sunrise is “about sexual as well as textual politics, whereby politics are presented as merely a matter of (derailing) word play, thus making language the hinging factor in all problems” (32). More specifically, “In Jordan’s story, what is the matter is the mater, the mother. Not only is she ambiguous in her behavior, she will even be doubled in the figure of Donal’s stepmother, Rose, who will turn out to be a Dark Rosaleen” (34). As in “Night in Tunisia” (and also The Miracle), the aching absence of the mother is displaced, at least for a time, by the healing language of music; as Schwall observes, Donal loves playing Satie for his “arbitrary melodies” and “discords” (Sunrise 43), and later progresses to Debussy, whose “fractured harmonies reinforced my sense of exile” (Sunrise 47). However, unlike Jordan’s earlier fictions (especially his short story “Night in Tunisia”), music eventually creates discord between father and son, and so they need another language to communicate in. In the absence of the Lacanian Real—God remains “a great mass of quiet, a silence that was happy with itself, a closed mouth” (Sunrise 17)—Donal creates a new Symbolic Order through the magic of personal ritual. As Schwall notes: Two rituals recur

Talking to the Dead  101 throughout the book, that of the “nightlines” and that of the eucharist. Both will converge in the final laying of a nightline and the ensuing “eucharistic meal” of a “sea monster”. […] In this eucharist, the bread is replaced by two alternative symbols of Christ, the fish and the unicorn, which are both linked to the language question (43–45). The Christian significance of these symbols, as Schwall suggests, is two-fold: “In the catacombs, Christ was pictured as a fish; in medieval Bestiaries, he is often represented as a unicorn, sign of purity and friendly intercourse” (Schwall 49). However, Donal’s quest for a transcendental language is predicated on a more inclusive synthesis of Catholic and Celtic symbolism, one which combines Catholic faith healing—the laying on of hands—with what Roy Foster has called “Protestant Magic” (220), the latter mediated through W.B. Yeats’s Celtic Twilight poetry, and most especially his 1897 poem, “The Song of Wandering Aengus,” where a fish magically transforms into “a glimmering girl” (Yeats 66). This mythopoeic synthesis is symbolically (and politically) important for the resolution of conflict; only by resurrecting the ghost of the absent mother/motherland, can Donal and Sam find true peace and reconciliation: “The accident of her absence [had] led to a silence that was hard to break” (177). This process of psychic reconciliation can also be read in terms of the political unconscious: a way of exploring “the multiple paths that lead to the unmasking of cultural artefacts as socially symbolic acts” (Jameson 5). As Karin Möller acknowledges in her postcolonial critique of Sunrise, “one of the most baffling aspects of the novel” is the manner in which its themes and symbols “are presented in such a way that it is possible to find traces of both allegorical fixity and transformable myth” (3). However, throughout the novel, the one fixed pattern is the lack of dialogue between father and son, which the resurrected Sam is finally able to articulate to Donal: “If he were to die, he told me, he would rather die in that element which had given voice to all we never said […], and the accidents that had muddied our efforts to be in that language were just that: accidents” (Sunrise 177). In the context of Anglo-Irish relations in the early 1990s, this actually has a quite concrete analog. From the beginning of the Northern Irish Troubles, successive Irish and British governments had imposed strict censorship bans on Sinn Féin and the IRA, which by the 1990s had led to a strange and dangerous impasse. As Richard Barbrook describes it: Under section 31 (1) of the 1960 Broadcasting Authority Act, […] the law gave unlimited censorship powers to the Irish government over radio and television broadcasting. But, in practice, section 31 remained dormant until the outbreak of political unrest in Northern Ireland. […] In the early 1970s, the Fianna Fáil government introduced a series of repressive measures against the supporters of the

102  Keith Hopper Provisional IRA […]. As part of this clamp-down, the Minister of Posts and Telegraphs used section 31 to forbid the appearance of anyone advocating political violence on RTÉ’s programmes. (Barbrook) Between 1988 and 1994, a similar censorship rule operated in the UK, although British broadcasters subverted this restriction by dubbing Sinn Féin speeches and interviews, with, absurdly, an actor’s voice ventriloquizing the words verbatim. However, in 1993—the year before Sunrise was published—the section 31 ban was controversially repealed by the newly appointed Labor Minister for Arts, Culture & the Gaeltacht, ­Michael D. Higgins, as one of the first choreographed steps in the emergent Northern Irish Peace Process (see Horgan 149–56). Thus, from this materialist perspective, Sunrise quietly gestures towards a more openminded and optimistic future, one where twenty years of stony silence might yet be replaced by speech, and where submerged lines of communication can finally be re-opened: And coming to the surface, he had seen me there, playing with the lines as if I had never stopped in two decades. And he realised those lost possibilities were not losses, they were always there, intimated by the fabric of what had come to happen: unravel one of them and the infinity of others present themselves. And that was the sum of what was. And he nodded at the pan and said we had come to the end of that fish. (181) In an appreciative review of Sunrise, Rüdiger Imhof suggested that “Hitherto, there was often something pretentious about [Jordan’s] output, a teasing inconclusiveness coupled with too much sleight-of-hand” (25). But this inconclusiveness is a crucial part of Jordan’s counterrealist aesthetic. Like many of Jordan’s counter-narratives, Sunrise with Sea Monster does not provide any answers, although it does attempt to reframe some of the questions. In this novel, Jordan re-imagines the borders of personal and political desire, and invites his readers to do the same. Or as Donal tells the more skeptical Hans: “I am Irish, I say. I live in realms of pure possibility” (Sunrise 63). Within that realm of possibilities—a fictional multiverse of alternative endings—the father tells the son that he “would rather die in that element which had given voice to all we never said” (Sunrise 177). Here, death is figured as a liminal in-between space, where the unsaid in life—be it political or personal (or both)—is what finally comes back to haunt. Jordan once joked that he considered himself to be “a bad Catholic and a bad ­Marxist” (­Finney 5); however, as Freud reminds us, a joke is never really a joke. Both theologies—Catholicism and Marxism—ultimately turn on the question of good and bad faith. Within Jordan’s syncretic theology,

Talking to the Dead  103 things that are said in life—however harsh or unpalatable—can always be forgiven. The only real sin is leaving things unsaid, especially those things which appear to be unsayable.

“Realms of pure possibility”: Conclusion In 2014, an early Samuel Beckett story, “Echo’s Bones”—composed in 1933—was published for the first time. In this “recessional story” (Beckett, ix), the deceased protagonist of More Pricks than Kicks (1934), Belacqua Shuah, is resurrected and given a ghastly afterlife in a surreal underworld. As one reviewer remarked: [The dead] may die hard but they do not rest easy: in modernist Irish writing no sooner are the dead inhumed than they are put to work, as a backdrop for Gabriel Conroy’s wintry meditations in “The Dead,” acting out the ancestral curses of Yeats’s Purgatory, following the hellish, bicycle-infested rounds of [Flann O’Brien’s] The Third Policeman, or in Máirtín Ó Cadhain’s Cré na Cille. (Wheatley 11) Why is this the case? Is this obsession with the undead and the impossibility of closure simply a historical aberration, an attempt by Irish modernists to deal with the dead weight of history and its morbid consecration by nationalist and Catholic ideologies? Or is there something more profound going on here, something more intrinsic and central to the Irish cultural imaginary? In their book-length study of the Irish “funerary unconscious” (22), Nina Witoszek and Pat Sheeran explore a wide range of texts—from the medieval period to the present day—and note how “early modernist fascinations meshed at so many points with vernacular, death-centred traditions” (7). Building on the work of the French ethnographer and folklorist Arnold Van Gennep, Witoszek and Sheeran argue that what these historically diverse texts have in common is that they all seem to “hint at the existence of a powerful realm bordering on the living” (21–22)—a psychic borderland which is conjured up through prolonged acts of mourning: [The] mourning process involves an identification between the bereft and the deceased in that both are situated “between the world of the living and the world of the dead” [Van Gennep 142]. Given this unresolved state, there are two choices. The mourners can either kill the dead a second time, so as to remove themselves from the realm of liminality, or preserve the dead and prolong their stay in the intermediate world. [These Irish texts] indicate a cultural reluctance to “kill the dead a second time.” (8–9)

104  Keith Hopper Considered in this context, Neil Jordan’s fascination with death and the impossibility of closure seems less peculiar and idiosyncratic; on the contrary, his work is rooted in a long-standing tradition of narrating death that remains remarkably vital and alive.

Notes 1 The concept of counterrealism was first mooted by Richard Kearney in Transitions: Narratives in Modern Irish Culture (1988), where he uses it to describe an anti-realist mode of writing which explores the “fundamental tensions between imagination and memory, narration and history, self and language.” For Kearney, the Irish authors within this recent counterrealist tradition—epitomized for him by Flann O’Brien, Aidan Higgins, the later Francis Stuart, John Banville and Neil Jordan— “share with Joyce and Beckett the basic modernist project of transforming the traditional narrative of quest into a critical narrative of self-questioning” (183). 2 According to Freud, the child’s “estrangement from his parents” often results in a fantasy about replacing them with “grander people.” However, “these new and aristocratic parents are equipped with attributes that are derived entirely from real recollections of the actual and humble ones; so that in fact the child is not getting rid of his father but exalting him” (235–42). 3 As Sergei Eisenstein wrote: “Instead of a static ‘reflection’ of an event with all possibilities for activity within the limits of the event’s logical action, we advance to a new plane—free montage of arbitrarily selected, independent […] attractions.” See Eisenstein, 232. 4 For a good discussion of this contrast between photography and film, see Barry, 28–30. 5 According to Heisenberg’s “Uncertainty Principle” (1927), “there seems to be a reciprocal relationship between the imprecisions, or uncertainties, with which one can simultaneously measure the velocity and the position of an electron at any given instant: ‘The more precisely we determine the position, the more imprecise is the determination of velocity in this instant, and vice versa.’ And this reciprocal relationship between uncertainties in measurement also holds for other conjugate pairs of variables, such as energy and time.” See Cassidy, 228. 6 Historically, Hans is most likely a conflation of two real-life German spies, Ernst Weber-Drohl and Hermann Görtz. See Wills, 147–79.

Works Cited Bair, Deirdre. Samuel Beckett: A Biography. Jonathan Cape, 1978. Barbrook, Richard. “Broadcasting and National Identity in Ireland.” HRC Archive, 2007. www.imaginaryfutures.net/2007/01/20/broadcasting-and-national-­ identity-in-ireland-by-richard-barbrook. Accessed 31 Oct. 2017. Barry, Kevin. The Dead. Ireland into Film Series. Edited by Keith Hopper and Gráinne Humphreys. Cork UP/Film Institute of Ireland, 2001. Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. Translated by Richard Howard. Jonathan Cape, 1982. Beckett, Samuel. Echo’s Bones. Edited by Mark Nixon. Faber & Faber, 2014. Byron, Don Juan (1819–24). Project Gutenberg, www.gutenberg.org/ files/21700/21700-h/21700-h.htm. Accessed 31 Oct. 2017.

Talking to the Dead  105 Cassidy, David C. Uncertainty: The Life and Science of Werner Heisenberg. Freeman, 1991. Deane, Seamus. A Short History of Anglo-Irish Literature. Hutchinson, 1986. Eisenstein, Sergei M. The Film Sense. Edited and translated by Jay Leyda. Faber & Faber, 1943. Ellmann, Richard. James Joyce. New and revised edition. Oxford UP, 1982. Foster, R.F. “Protestant Magic: W.B. Yeats and the Spell of Irish History.” Paddy and Mr Punch: Connections in Irish and English History. Allen Lane and Penguin P, 1993, pp. 212–232. Freud, Sigmund. “Family Romances” (1909). The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. 9. Translated and edited by James Strachey, with Anna Freud, Alix Strachey and Alan Tyson. Hogarth P and the Institute of Psycho-analysis, 1960, pp. 235–242. Harmon, Maurice. “First Impressions: 1968–78.” The Irish Short Story. Edited by Patrick Rafroidi and Maurice Harmon. Universite de Lille III, 1979, pp. 63–77. Horgan, John. Irish Media: A Critical History since 1922. Routledge, 2001. Imhof, Rüdiger. “Fiction” [Review of Sunrise with Sea Monsters [sic]]. Linen Hall Review, vol. 12, no. 1, Spring 1995, pp. 23–26. Jameson, Fredric. The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. Routledge, 1983. Jordan, Neil. Desert Island Discs. Interview with Sue Lawley, BBC Radio 4, 23 January 2000. ———. “The In Dublin Interview.” Interview with Colm Tóibín. In Dublin, vol. 152, 29 April 1982, pp. 14–19. ———. Night in Tunisia. 1976. Brandon P, 1982. ———. Sunrise with Sea Monster. Chatto & Windus, 1994. Kearney, Richard. Transitions: Narratives in Modern Irish Culture. Manchester UP, 1988. Kermode, Frank. The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction. 1966. Oxford UP, 1979. MacCabe, Colin. “Preface.” The Geopolitical Aesthetic: Cinema and Space in the World System. By Fredric Jameson. Indiana UP/British Film Institute, 1992, pp. i-xvi. Mahoney, Christina Hunt. “Neil Jordan.” “Modern Irish Fiction – Art and Re­ artin’s, ality.” Contemporary Irish Literature: Transforming Tradition. St M 1998, pp. 239–242. Metz, Christian. “Photography and Fetish.” October, vol. 34, Autumn 1985, pp. 81–90. Miller, J. Hillis. “The Problematic of Ending in Narrative” (1978). Reprinted in The J. Hillis Miller Reader. Edited by Julian Wolfreys. Stanford UP, 2005, pp. 259–261. Möller, Karin. “Beast in the Barrier Zone: Transformations of Irish Politics, History and Myth in Neil Jordan’s Sunrise With Sea Monster.” Humanetten, vol. 6, 2000, DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.15626/hn.20000601. Accessed 31 Oct. 2017. Rogers, Lori. Feminine Nation: Performance, Gender and Resistance in the Works of John McGahern and Neil Jordan. UP of America, 1998. Schwall, Hedwig. “Fictions about Factions: An Analysis of Neil Jordan’s Sunrise with Sea Monster.” Nordic Irish Journal, vol. 1, 2002, pp. 32–34.

106  Keith Hopper Sontag, Susan. Illness as Metaphor. 1978. Penguin, 1991. Van Gennep, Arnold. The Rites of Passage. Translated by M.B. Vizedom and G.L. Coffee. Chicago UP, 1960. Wheatley, David. “Makee Me.” Review of Echo’s Bones. By Samuel Beckett. Times Literary Supplement, 6 June 2014, p. 11. Wills, Clair. That Neutral Island: A History of Ireland during the Second World War. Faber & Faber, 2007. Witoszek, Nina and Pat Sheeran. Talking to the Dead: A Study of Irish Funerary Traditions. Rodopi, 1998. Yeats, W.B. “The Song of Wandering Aengus” (1897). The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats. Gill & Macmillan, 1982, p. 66.

7 Samuel Johnson and the Grammar of Death Laura Davies

It has long been acknowledged that although Johnson possessed an “inordinate sensitivity to the inevitability of death” (Vance 177), he also had “more than one attitude” towards it.1 The aim here is not to challenge this consensus, but rather to examine how it informs the texture of his prose. The chapter will take as its focus the periodical essays written for The Rambler (1750–52) and The Idler (1758–60), which demonstrate what have been termed the “peculiarities” that “distinguish the prose of Johnson’s maturity” (Wimsatt 54). Reading these essays in light of Derrida’s analysis of the “rhetoric of borders” (Aporias 3), the argument will be made that Johnson’s prose is marked by a collocation of grammatical features that reveal his complex reflections on the relationship between life and death and enact his endeavors to reconcile an intense fear of death with an equally strong commitment as a Christian moralist author to “virtue and to truth” (Rambler IV.136.359).

To Life Must Come Its Last Hour James Boswell reports of Johnson that “he never had a moment in which death was not terrible to him” (Boswell 839) and Arthur ­Murphy, writing his own biography a year later, agrees: “the contemplation of his own approaching end was constantly before his eyes; and the prospect of death, he declared, was terrible” (Johnson, Miscellanies I.439). These observations are echoed by Johnson himself. In one strand of his complex thinking on the subject, he does indeed conceive of death as always looming on the horizon of life, an unavoidable future event, which he dreads. The state of being “mortal” according to his Dictionary is to be “Subject to death; doomed sometime to die” and death is thus “imminent”: “impending, at hand, threatening. Always in an ill sense.” In a number of his sermons, he asserts that just as death itself cannot be avoided, so no “shelter or refuge” (154) can be found from the torment of fearful expectation because there is no cessation of the “horrors which the approach of death perpetually excites” (263). The Rambler articulates the same feeling: death “seldom fails to terrify when it approaches the bed of sickness, in its natural horror” (V.202.291).

108  Laura Davies Thus, he suggests, we may understand death to “approach” us, or we it. The latter is the case in the final Idler, which is prefaced by a quotation from Juvenal’s tenth satire where, in the figure of the chariot race, Solon tells Croesus to look to the last lap of life—“Respicere ad longae jussit spatia ultima vitae”—and thereby invokes the idea of a finish line to be crossed at the end of life (103.314). In the body of the essay, however, there is little sense of victory associated with this “end.” The “termination of any period of life,” we are told, is a reminder that “life itself has likewise its termination” (315). Preceding examples of this idea appear in The Rambler. No. 178, for example, defines life as “terminated by the grave” (V.178.174) and the same construction is repeated in No. 203. Here death is similarly described as the “termination of our material existence” and the trope of the imminent ending is also present. Yet the future likewise has its limits, which the imagination dreads to approach, but which we see to be not far distant […] We know that the schemes of man are quickly at an end, that we must soon lie down in the grave. (V.203.294) Combined across these examples are spatial and temporal figures—of laps, graves, prospects, and distance, and of aging, hours, and speed— but, in keeping with his definition of “terminate” in the Dictionary as “to bound,” “to limit,” and “to put an end to,” these essays insist that death both comes at the end (is “last”) and is an ending (a “termination”). Thus, like Derrida in his discussion of the Senecan notion of “the farthest limit of human life,” we find ourselves “convoked” through Johnson’s language “to the crossing of borders by the end, that is, by the ends or confines (finis is therefore the term, the edge, the limit, the border)” (Aporias 4–5). Rambler 78 is a case in point, where in relation to the vision of death shown to Adam in Paradise Lost, Johnson writes: For surely, nothing can so much disturb the passions, or perplex the intellects of man, as the disruption of his union with visible nature; a separation from all that has hitherto delighted or engaged him; a change not only of the place, but the manner of his being; an entrance into a state not simply which he knows not, but which perhaps he has not faculties to know; an immediate and perceptible communication with the supreme Being, and, what is above all distressing and alarming, the final sentence, and unalterable allotment. (IV.78.47) There are multiple interwoven strands here: death is understood as a “disruption,” “a separation,” “a change not only of the place but the manner of his being” and of his relationship to the “supreme Being”; it

Samuel Johnson and the Grammar of Death  109 is characterized as “an entrance,” which as Derrida suggests indicates the crossing of a “threshold” (Aporias 8), or a passing from outside to inside; and it is bound up with the judgment of “the final sentence” and its consequence, the “unalterable allotment.” The evidence suggests that Johnson understood this notion of judgment and “allotment” literally. As Hester Thrale recounts, he lived in “daily terror lest he had not done enough to justify his salvation” (Johnson, Miscellanies 1.223) and that at his “last hour” he would be “Sent to Hell” and “punished everlastingly” (Boswell 1296). The same is true of the last Idler essay where he writes of the “day in which 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” (103.316). Here, as in Rambler 78, Johnson conceives of life as a period of probare, of trying or examination. In the Rambler, Johnson insists that we should each reflect upon “how soon we may be added to the number of those whose probation is past, and whose happiness or misery shall endure for ever” (IV.78.50). Meanwhile, in the Idler, he pronounces: “to life must come its last hour, and to this system of being its last day, the hour at which probation ceases, and repentance will be in vain […]” (103.316). In so doing he draws together legal and theological notions of “sentencing,” suggesting that life is a period of “trial and examination” and also that, at its end, this life as a whole will stand as “proof, evidence, testimony” on which the final judgment will be made. 2 Unsurprisingly, therefore, Johnson asserts that the contemplation of death is necessary for a virtuous life. This is most famously articulated in Rambler 17, which recounts a tale of an “eastern monarch” who employed an officer “to remind him of his mortality, by calling out every morning, at a stated hour: ‘Remember, prince, that thou shalt die.’” Confirming the usefulness of the precept—“Keep thine eye fixed upon the end of life”—Johnson remarks: “A frequent and attentive prospect of the moment, which must put a period to all our schemes, and deprive us of all our acquisitions, is, indeed, of the utmost efficacy to the just and rational regulation of our lives” (III.17.92). In this belief Johnson obviously falls into a long Christian tradition and we know that he read contemporary texts that advocated such a practice, including Jeremy Taylor’s The Rule and Exercises of Holy Dying (1651) and William Law’s Practical Treatise Upon Christian Perfection (1726) and A Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life (1728). 3 However, a return to his Dictionary at this point reveals an additional dimension of his thinking. Whilst “Death” (n.) is understood to be both an ending and a change of state—“The extinction of life; the departure of the soul from the body” and “Life” is defined in relation to death as “Enjoyment or possession of existence, as opposed to death,” the second definition of death does not follow the same pattern. Here we find an intimation of a different

110  Laura Davies kind of interrelation, one less sure of death as an event, and registered in the form of an equivocal semi-colon: “Mortality; destruction.” This is a possibility to which Johnson returns repeatedly, and consistently his diction signals the influence of Locke.4 In particular, he demonstrates a commitment to an understanding of time where the self is constituted by an awareness of duration that is itself dependent on a perception of succession. As Locke writes in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690): For whilst we are thinking, or whilst we receive successively several ideas in our minds, we know that we do exist; and so we call the existence, or the continuation of the existence of ourselves, or anything else, commensurate to the successions of any ideas in our mind, the duration of ourselves. (II.xiv.3) This succession comprises a series of individual beginnings and endings and in this, Locke, following Augustine, aligns the experience of self, through an awareness of the succession of ideas (which occurs in time), with an understanding of time as composed of fleeting moments with the immediate supplanting of each moment by the next: “we shall find our ideas always, while we awake or have any thought, passing in time, one going and another coming without intermission” (II.xiv.3). Rambler 41 illustrates Johnson’s replication of these ideas very clearly. Indeed, almost all that we can be said to enjoy is past or future; the present is in perpetual motion, leaves us as soon as it arrives, ceases to be present before its presence is well-perceived, and is only known to have existed by the effects which it leaves behind. (III.41.223–24) Similarly, Rambler 203 insists that this unavoidable and constant series of cessations and losses is a necessary feature of our understanding: “The eye of the mind, like that of the body, can only extend its view to new objects, by losing sight of those which are now before it” (V.203.295). 5 As Adam Potkay has observed Johnson’s sensitivity to this “perpetual motion” is compounded by a preoccupation with the approach of the final end (505). His understanding of succession thus combines a sense of one termination after another, the impression of ongoingness, and a reminder of life’s ultimate limitation. “Succession is not perceived but by variation” claims the final Idler, and the “uncertainty of our duration is impressed commonly by dissimilitude of condition; it is only by finding life changeable that we are reminded of its shortness” (103.315). A number of Rambler essays reveal

Samuel Johnson and the Grammar of Death  111 Johnson’s awareness of both the necessity of attending to the passing of time and his horror at the thought of its destructive action. 6 Each of these essays recalls the central conceit of his verse imitation of Juvenal’s tenth satire “The Vanity of Human Wishes”—“Year chases year, decay pursues decay / Still drops some joy from with’ring life away” (Poems 129)—in which life is characterized as a state of degeneration in the present as well as a period that will ultimately be terminated by death. For example, Rambler 203 is prefaced by a quotation from Ovid’s Metamorphoses: “Come, soon or late, death’s undetermined day, / This mortal being only can decay” (V.203.291). Idler 41 observes that “Nothing is more evident than that the decays of age must terminate in death” (41.129). And, when in Rambler 69 Johnson writes of the necessity of faith to mitigate the “horror” of old age—citing Ovid’s depiction of time as devourer in the epigraph (“Tempus edax rerum”)—we see that he is in fact describing the fundamental state of all humankind in terms of “mortality; destruction” when he pronounces that “Piety is the only proper and adequate relief of decaying man” (III.69.367). Such a combination of ideas produces complex effects. On the one hand, it is on the grounds of transience grounded in successiveness that Johnson constructs a distinction between life and death. For example, in Rambler 151: “the predominance of successive passions […] is the condition upon which we are to pass our time, the time of preparation for that state which shall put an end to experiment, to disappointment, and to change” (V.151.42). And in Sermon 15: “this changeable and uncertain life is only the passage to an immutable state, and endless duration of happiness or misery” (151). This distinction is grounded on the opposition Augustine articulates in the Confessions between human temporality and divine eternity: “Your years do not come and go. Ours do come and go, so that all of them come in succession” (II.13). In this opposition (as also in the notion of “preparation for that state”), death is defined in terms of absolute difference from life. And yet at the same time, Johnson’s understanding of time as a series of successive moments, the ending of each registering in miniature the larger discontinuities that we perceive as variation, builds termination into the structure of consciousness and of human understanding. Thus, although he does not directly pose the question explored in Aporias—“Can death be reduced to some line crossing, to a departure, to a separation, to a step” (6)—Johnson’s attention to “the present moment as part of the mapping onto each other of the three temporal discourses of the past, the future, and the present” (Clingham 32) and his insistence that the “unalterable allotment” will be determined by the conduct of the probationary period, which is itself defined as a “passage,” along with the simultaneous characterization of death as both a terminating limit and an “entrance,” nonetheless open up the space for such an inquiry.

112  Laura Davies

The Permanent Imminence of Death It is in this space that we can observe an additional feature of Johnson’s prose style operating: a recurrent and pervasive use of the progressive (be + ing) to represent the nature of the human experience and the relationship between life and death. It is apparent that there is a connection in Johnson’s mind between these matters and this grammatical construction when in the “Grammar of the English Tongue” (Dictionary) he illustrates the progressive with the examples of “I am going,” “I am grieving,” “She is dying,” “the tempest is raging,” and “I am pursuing an enemy.” But the connection extends much further than this. It is, for instance, central to such eschatological framings as “The world passes away, and we are passing with it” (Boswell 1244) and to his representation of the human experience of succession: “The state of the world is continually changing” (Rambler 3.29.161), Johnson observes, and men of active minds especially “are continually ranging over all the scenes of human existence […] busied with a perpetual succession of schemes” (Rambler 3.63.337). It is present too in his descriptions of time and the workings of the mind, where perpetual change is perceived as degeneration: “Ideas are retained by renovation of that impression which time is always wearing away, and which new images are striving to obliterate” (Idler 72.225). Even the representation of hope is construed in terms of separation and loss: “That the mind of man is never satisfied with the objects immediately before it, but is always breaking away from the present moment, and losing itself in schemes of future felicity” (­R ambler II.2.9). The recurrence of “always,” “continually,” “perpetually” in these examples is typical, as is the association of the progressive with adjectival verbs that recall the notions of “with’ring life” and “decaying man.” This decay is as much moral as it is physical or mental. It is bound up with the need for alertness to the weaknesses of the human condition upon which Johnson’s moral instruction rests: As we lose part of our time because it steals away silent and invisible, and many an hour is passed before we recollect that it is passing; so unnatural desires insinuate themselves unobserved into the mind, and we do not perceive that they are gaining upon us. (Idler 119.462) “Weariness and negligence are perpetually prevailing by silent encroachments” (Rambler IV.127.312) and All assemblies of jollity, all places of publick entertainment exhibit examples of strength wasting in riot, and beauty withering in irregularity; nor is it easy to enter a house in which part of the family is not

Samuel Johnson and the Grammar of Death  113 groaning in repentance of past intemperance, and part admitting disease by negligence, or soliciting it by luxury. (V.178.175) We need to keep an “eye” to the “last hour,” moreover, lest we succumb to the the absurdity of stretching out our arms incessantly to grasp that which we cannot keep, and wearing out our lives in endeavours to add new turrets to the fabric of ambition, when the foundation itself is shaking, and the ground on which it stands is mouldering away. (III.17.93)7 Although in Old English the progressive had a stative function, and this was retained into Middle English, from the end of this latter period up until the nineteenth century an increase in the present tense main clause form (rather than past tense adverbial clauses) is apparent, as is its transitive use (Petré, 231–32). This development has shaped how the construction is now most commonly understood to function, i.e. aspectually, to indicate that an action was, is, or will be happening, and as such is in progress, incomplete or has a limited duration: in the relevant middle phase of the sequential intervals of time usually described as aspectual, the progressive can be seen as an existential, or contingent, assertion. The auxiliary be functions at the same time as a copula, with the –ing participle in predicative position, and as the verb of existence (cf. da sein in German, estar in Spanish, tá in Irish). What it refers to is valid (i.e subject to empirical verification, as opposed to the truth value of formal logic) for the timespan considered and open to eventual, though not necessary, change in the next phase. (Arnaud 126) It is not difficult to see why this construction should be pertinent to Johnson’s preoccupation with the ideas of succession and degeneration, both of which are organized around a particular attention to the relationship between the present and the future, and to the notion of change. It also accords with his understanding of life as a probationary period. When employed by Johnson in the specific context of death, however, it accretes ambiguity. In the ordinary experience of daily life, change is indeed perceived by him as “eventual, though not necessary,” since even though the “coming and going” of each moment means that change cannot be avoided, it is possible for a subject to experience ongoing duration. And yet, as we have seen, Johnson also wants to insist that it is precisely through our attention to all such temporal succession that we

114  Laura Davies are reminded of the absolutely inevitable, eventual and necessary, coming of a final change of state. With respect to this relationship of living in relation to the end, it is significant that the progressive construction is also crucial in Derrida’s analysis of Heidegger’s idea of “being toward death.” The full title of Aporias “dying - awaiting (one another at) ‘the limits of truth’” registers one aspect of the indeterminacy he identifies in this formulation of “being” in terms of the conceptualization of death as a border. In addition to his dismantling of the idea of death as limit (15), he explores a “problem” with the notion of death in terms of an “edge-line,” which is that such a “tracing can only institute the line by dividing it intrinsically into two sides” and hence this “intrinsic division divides the relation to itself of the border and therefore divides the being-one-self of anything” (11). This in itself takes us into aporetic territory but the uncertainty of the distinction between the two sides of this division is further compounded by the logic of the wider structure of what he terms the “phantasmic relation to the other,” which is predicated on the structure of the “‘coming before’ of the other in the I” (Derrida and Ferraris 89). Within Derrida’s analysis of the state of expectation generated by death’s distinctive imminence, the same structure is articulated: the waiting for something that will happen as the completely other than oneself, but of waiting (for each other) by awaiting oneself also […] by preceding oneself as if one had a meeting with a oneself that one is but does not know. (Aporias 66) Derrida’s rhetorical interjections in Aporias (originally a conference paper) enact such an impossible possibility grammatically: “I am, here, now, reaching the end. If possible” (62). As we shall see, it is illuminating to consider Johnson’s representation of death in relation to these reflections on the “edge-line” and the quality of this state of “waiting.” However, it is apparent that the progressive construction also serves a more pragmatic end in these essays, offering a means to meet the challenge of Johnson’s competing impulses with regard to death. It enables him to invoke the idea of succession and change, and through this to be reminded of the final terminating change of state, but at the same time to gain some relief from the pressure of a “confrontation” with his “own finitude” (Kleinberg 47) by a foregrounding of the ongoing “middle” of the “timespan.” Through it, what has been described as Johnson’s deep “horror at finality” (Parker 240) is ameliorated to a degree, via a nuanced version of what the Rambler describes as the “general remedy, in all ages” for the fear of death, which is “to chase it away from the present moment, and to gain a suspence of the pain that could not be cured” (Sermons 263). Of course, Johnson is aware that there is a danger of succumbing to the “foolish

Samuel Johnson and the Grammar of Death  115 forgetfulness of mortality” against which Seneca warns (­Aporias 5). This he makes clear in the final Idler: “partly by the inevitable incursion of new images, and partly by voluntary exclusion of unwelcome thoughts, we are again exposed to the universal fallacy” (103.315). But through the progressive he does not seek forgetfulness. Rather it enables him to attend to this human frailty—the consequences of which are always playing out in the present—and at the same time embed the idea of a necessary end within the structure of his writing as a counterbalance, such that it is present but not overwhelming: “surely the remembrance of death ought to predominate in our minds, as an habitual and settled principle, always operating, though not always perceived” (Rambler IV.78.47). Understandably, in his last days Johnson perceives his own death to be imminent as an event that will come in the forthcoming days or weeks. He writes of this quite literally in his last letter to Boswell in November 1784 as his dropsy worsens: “The water is now encreasing upon me” (Boswell 1362). But as we have seen, the prospect of death looming on the horizon appears consistently in his prose long before this and his understanding of the nature of the human experience of time runs deeper than a concern with his own individual death to an apprehension of the structure and meaning of temporal existence as a limited period. Even before his illness, what Johnson understands as the “end” is always imminent. Thus, when he writes of death’s “undetermin’d day” and of it as “an event, which must soon, we know not how soon, happen,” the time of which “we cannot appoint” (Rambler IV.78.47–48) he acknowledges both what Heidegger terms the “‘everyday being toward the end’ and the full existential concept” (Farell Krell 162). In the latter, indetermination is a defining trait, rather than simply a “matter of events that have not yet occurred” (White et al. 119). It is to this understanding—“that the imminence of death, which as existential possibility is always still outstanding” (Farell Krell 162)—that Johnson’s use of the progressive attends. It enables him to register in the grammatical texture of his prose the state of mortality as a succession of individual moments “passing” and, at the same time, a state that is “open to eventual […] change” in the final phase, the arrival of which is always imminent. Thus, while insisting on the end, it can also enact the indeterminacy of the “not yet” that in Heidegger’s conception of Dasein “bends us toward death,” and which, as Derrida explores it, is a special state of “waiting” (Aporias 69): “one must expect it, I am expecting it, we are expecting it” (62).

The Secret Horrour of the Last There are clearly grounds on which to align this mode of representation with what has been identified as Johnson’s “emphasis on the common and the general” (Parker 235) and to a universalizing tendency in his work.8 He certainly does identify a significant degree of “Uniformity

116  Laura Davies in the state of Man” and argues that “We are all prompted by the same motives, all deceived by the same fallacies” (Rambler III.60.320). Seen from this perspective, Johnson’s frequent repetition of “always,” “every moment,” “continually,” “perpetually,” in combination with the progressive, seems to insist on the unavoidability of this condition of “permanent imminence” by reinforcing what is most commonly a transitive construction with an additional echo of its earlier stative form. But although there are strong grounds to interpret the patterning of Johnson’s representation of death in this way, an additional possibility presents itself if we attend to a further feature of the historical development of the progressive: what has been termed its “subjectification,” in which the construction is understood to have developed a modal, as well as an aspectual function. Adverbs of the “always” kind in this context have been identified as a good “indicator” of such “subjectivity,” in part because “they lend themselves easily to hyperbole” (Killie 28). In this usage “the choice of the progressive draws attention to the stance or positioning of the emotional experience of the speaker with respect to what is being talked about” and “focuses on the (speaking) subject’s consciousness of being inside an event, state, activity, looking out” (Wright 156). The frequency of Johnson’s repetition of these adverbs in conjunction with the progressive construction, therefore, can also be construed as a representation of his personal experience of this state of “permanent imminence” as well as his insistent determination to attend to what horrifies him. This struggle is clearly apparent in the fact that Johnson’s horror of death quite frequently led him to resist his own precepts. He recognized that fear is a reasonable consequence of his faith: “the most rational in my opinion, look upon salvation as conditional; and as they can never be sure that they have complied with its conditions, they are afraid” (Boswell 1280). But he was not able to make it a “prominent feature of private religious exercise and of public exhortation to morality” (­Hagstrum 309) without considerable personal struggle.9 In fact, as ­Boswell records more than once, he could not bear for anyone to “bring before his view what he ever looked on with horror” (Boswell 427).10 One exchange between the two men in particular illustrates this conflict. Here, in response to Boswell’s comment that he has seen “several convicts” executed at Tyburn who did not seem “under any concern” at their imminent demise, Johnson both admonishes the average man’s failure to regulate his life by reflections on death and attests to the strength of the impulse to resist such thoughts: JOHNSON: Most of them, Sir, have never thought at all. BOSWELL: But is not the fear of death natural to man? JOHNSON: So much so, Sir, that the whole of life is but keeping

away the

thoughts of it. (Boswell 416)

Samuel Johnson and the Grammar of Death  117 The strain is registered in the Johnson’s simultaneous agreement that the “fear of death” is “natural to man” (“So much so”) and his characterization of “the whole of life” in terms of “keeping away the thoughts of it,” where “it” refers both to the thought of death itself and to the fear that is concomitant with such thought. Moreover, the conjunction “but” introduces an equivocation, and as such an acknowledgment of the battle that Johnson both faces and must write in the face of. In its most straightforward sense, the sentence might be glossed as “life is nothing but the keeping away the thoughts of it”; yet at the same time the inverse possibility lurks too: “life is everything but the keeping away the thoughts of it.” Such a subjective interpretation of the progressive need not replace the preceding aspectual analysis. Distinguishing between the two forms in any given example is not always straightforward and it is also possible that the two may operate simultaneously (Killie 43). As Davis has observed, “the first duty of Johnsonian syntax is to locate, and adapt itself to, the structure of existence” (57). What the evidence suggests in this case is that Johnson deploys the progressive both aspectually and modally to identify a fundamental facet of the human experience in time and with respect to the end, as well as the intensity of his subjective emotional experience of this condition. Such an interpretation accords with the fact that although he is writing in a period where there is an observable rise in the use of the progressive and this increase has been shown to be concomitant with the emergence of the modal form, his prose style at this point does not display the colloquial quality that is commonly identified in these proliferations, which suggests that elements of the aspectual form are retained and work to generate the sense of generalization that critics have observed (Arnaud 128). The final Idler essay, with which this chapter began, demonstrates that such a pattern of grammatical construction correlates with a wider recognition in these essays of the ways in which death disrupts definitive distinctions between other apparently opposing relations, including what is a universal state (mortality) and what is particular to an individual subjective experience of that state. The following remarks are in this respect central to the work of the essay: The secret horrour of the last is inseparable from a thinking being, whose life is limited, and to whom death is dreadful. We always make a secret comparison between a part and the whole; the termination of any period of life reminds us that life itself has likewise its termination. (103.315) In part Johnson reiterates here what has by now become familiar: the language of “horrour” and of “limit” and “termination,” the comparison

118  Laura Davies of “part” and “whole,” and the adverb “always.” But these sentences emphasize more directly the inextricable binding together of the fact of life’s limitation not only with the condition of fear but with the very possibility of being, which itself cannot be detached from thinking. The repetition of “secret” is, moreover, striking given that elsewhere Johnson characterizes the fear of death as ubiquitous and “natural,” and is rendered more so by its positioning alongside the pronouns “we” and “us.” A number of essays in both the Rambler and the Idler explore the telling and keeping of secrets, often reflecting on the tendency to conceal what embarrasses or shames us. Rambler 155, for instance, observes that “We are secretly conscious of defects and vices which we hope to conceal from the publick eye” (V.155.60), whilst Idler 51 discusses “hidden vices” and “practices indulged in secret, but carefully covered from the publick eye” (51.158).11 From this standpoint, we may observe a gesture towards the idea of “hiding” in the action of making “a secret comparison,” which in turn might be seen as registering the discomfort arising from an uncertainty about the extent to which death should be acknowledged as part of the business of life. This adjectival use also reflects the fact that such a comparison must necessarily take place privately within the mind of each individual, even if, as the “we” suggests, the action is universal. But the same cannot be said of the first sentence; here “secret horror” attests not to an action but to an aspect or a quality of secrecy within the horror which is “inseparable from a thinking being.” It was suggested earlier that this “horror of the last” can be understood as a “horror of finality,” the preeminent manifestation of which is the “final sentence” and “unalterable allotment,” and at first glance, this final Idler essay does not appear to contradict such a conclusion. In fact, it draws attention to the date of its publication just before Easter as “that solemn week which the Christian world has always set apart for the examination of the conscience, the review of life, the extinction of earthly desires and the renovation of holy purposes” (316). But this positioning of the essay within the communal and public context of the liturgical calendar, the necessarily private aspects of self-scrutiny notwithstanding, pulls against the notion of secrecy. The manner in which the Dictionary defines “secret” as “kept hidden, not revealed, concealed, private” suggests an explanation for this disjunction and indicates that there is more to consider with regard to Johnson’s horror than “finality.” Most notably, the first illustrative quotation is drawn from Deuteronomy 29.29 and states: “The secret things belong unto the Lord our God; but those things which are revealed belong unto us.” This acknowledgment of the distinction between divine and human knowledge insists on a realm that is absolutely unknowable and enacts the etymological ground of the “secret” from the Latin secernere—to separate. These “things” are secret because we are aware of the impossibility of

Samuel Johnson and the Grammar of Death  119 their unfolding and because they do not “belong” to us. In his prayers, Johnson recognizes this, as he struggles to rein in his mind from futile speculation: “teach me, by thy Holy Spirit, to withdraw my Mind from unprofitable and dangerous inquiries, from difficulties vainly curious, and doubts impossible to be solved. Let me rejoice in the light which Thou hast imparted” (Byrd 383–84). However, although “the secret horror of the last” appears to extend this structure of secrecy to death, we have also seen that in these essays death complicates and undermines ideas of limitation, termination and of a border that might be said to hold one side apart, or separate, from the other. When Johnson writes directly of the realm beyond death—which as Jacob Sider Jost has observed he does relatively rarely—this destabilizing effect is apparent (135). For example, when Idler 41 invokes the distinction between what is knowable because it has been revealed and what is secret, he simultaneously articulates two opposing ideas: We know little of the state of departed souls, because such knowledge is not necessary to a good life. Reason deserts us at the brink of the grave, and can give no further intelligence. Revelation is not wholly silent. “There is joy in the Angels of Heaven over one Sinner that repenteth” [Luke 15.10] and surely this joy is not incommunicable to souls disentangled from the body, and made like Angels. (41.130) On the one hand, the “brink of the grave”12 suggests that beyond this terminating line is a realm unknowable to mankind, because our defining human faculty of “reason” cannot extend across it, and in this sense “such knowledge” is “not necessary to a good life” but also does not properly “belong” to the state of mortality and is thus “secret.” But equally, it is asserted that it is precisely of this state beyond the “brink” that “Revelation” gives us knowledge and possession. The difficulty of reconciling these positions is additionally registered in the differing force of the actions of departing and of crossing the brink, both of which sit uncomfortably with the disentangling of the soul from the body. It is also signaled in the qualifier “is not wholly silent.” Once alert to this equivocation over the matter of secrecy, we hear it too in the characterization of death that Johnson presents in Rambler 78 through reference to Paradise Lost. Here, although we understand that Adam’s vision was exceptional, the legacy of which is a revelation we can access through scripture, the additional mediating presence of Milton’s poetic representation of the vision insists on the indirect nature of this “knowledge.”13 Another qualifier, this time “perhaps” (death is “an entrance into a state not simply which he knows not, but which perhaps he has not faculties to know”) further compounds the uncertainty over the extent to which death is a secret or can be “known.”

120  Laura Davies As a consequence, it becomes apparent that the essay is uncertain of the adequacy and coherence of the figurations of death as a “disruption,” a “separation,” an “entrance,” and a change of state upon which it relies. It is precisely on account of such challenges to the “rhetoric of borders” that Derrida also articulates the relationship between death and secrecy; a secret is “something non-thematizable, non-objectifiable, non-sharable,” and death is a “privileged dimension of this experience of the secret” (Derrida and Ferraris 57). Both, in his analysis, contain an aporia regarding self-partition (“How to Avoid Speaking” 25) and the relation of the other with the self and are concerned with what “belongs to us” (Aporias 3). The “language about death,” furthermore, operates “on the border” between “public” and “private.” It is “always a shibboleth” since it “puts forth the public name, the common name of a secret” (Aporias 74), and because the “syntagm ‘my death’” is both absolutely singular and entirely substitutable (Aporias 22). This is not a theoretical vocabulary that Johnson would recognize, but nonetheless his writing about death also operates in such territory. In addition to his aspectual and modal use of the progressive, the insistent presence of the “secret” in Idler 103 attests to this. Later, in the Life of Milton, Johnson reflects further on the confluence of the public and the private. Noting that Paradise Lost has been termed “without an indecent hyperbole” a “book of universal knowledge,” he identifies the extent to which theological understanding held in common with other Christians in the Anglican tradition not only pervades the experience of all believers, but is absorbed into their thoughts, language, and even selves. Describing the “last things,” i.e. “the redemption of man, the need of repentance, and future judgment” as “truths” that “have been taught to our infancy,” he observes that “they have mingled with our solitary thoughts and familiar conversation, and are habitually interwoven with the whole texture of life” (Lives 194). Thus he recognizes that even before he may attempt to write of them, as tenets of his faith his conceptions of death exist at the border of the cultural and the subjectively experiential (Aporias 24), exemplifying the complex interpenetration of learned knowledge and personal understanding, of scriptural revelation and individual apprehension. In itself, this acknowledgment does not suggest why Johnson should stress not merely secrecy but “secret horrour.” A second reading of Idler 41 does, however, shed light on the matter. This essay takes the form of a letter ostensibly from a correspondent whose intention appears to be the recommendation of faith as the source of consolation to which we can turn when faced with the deaths of loved ones. And yet, although it calls for “hope” and asserts that the “mind” can “take refuge in religion” (41.130) it does not quite convince and we think again of Johnson’s fervent prayer that he may resist “doubts impossible to be solved.” In the mention of “refuge,” we are reminded of Johnson’s despairing lament that “no shelter or refuge” (Sermons 154) can be found from the fear of

Samuel Johnson and the Grammar of Death  121 death, whilst in the description of the correspondent’s suffering we hear the familiar language of horror combined with a sense of absence, of a void, as he describes his “state of dreary desolation, in which the mind looks abroad impatient of itself, and finds nothing but emptiness and horrour” (41.130). At the same time, the prefatory comments Johnson inserts before the start of the letter construct an equivocal relationship of identification with and yet distance from this subject matter, beyond that already attained by “The Idler” eidolon: “The following letter relates to an affliction perhaps not necessary to be imparted to the Public, but I could not persuade myself to suppress it, because I think I know the sentiments to be sincere” (128). Given that this essay was written in the same week that Johnson’s mother died, editors have tended to identify the letter as a means of transposing Johnson’s own intense “affliction” of grief onto a fictional correspondent who has lost a friend “upon whom the heart was fixed, to whom every wish and endeavour tended.”14 From this perspective, the reference to his inability to “suppress” the letter seems also to stand in substitution for a grief that could not be held in. However, the ideas of “suppression” and of the mind looking “abroad impatient of itself,” combined with the reflection on what is or is not “necessary to be imparted to the Public,” also return us to the secret. And here, in the context of a vision of “desolation,” and of “nothing but emptiness and horror,” what also leaks out is the possibility of a different “horrour,” of a higher order than the “utmost privation” (103.130) caused by the loss of a “friend,” or even a mother. In a movement of looking that gestures towards what may lie beyond the limitations of the mind, and recorded in an essay that will render what may have been a temporary torment of grief into a form “permanent and unalterable” once “in the hands of the public” (Rambler III.23.127), there is an intimation of a vision that the state to come may be an annihilation, “nothing but emptiness and horror.” The horror of this is not of what has been revealed—the inevitable final judgment—but of what might be obscured by faith in divine “assurance” (131). Again, the possibility of this is registered in small details of expression. The loss of a bereavement is aligned with “the prospect of our own dissolution” (131), and “hope” can only speak to what has not yet been proved wrong but which is therefore still unknown: “Let hope therefore dictate what revelation does not confute, that the union of souls may still remain” (41.130). Boswell records Johnson as saying of annihilation that it is “neither pleasing, nor sleep; it is nothing,” and that therefore it is in “the apprehension of it that the horror of annihilation consists” (950–51).15 But here the phrase “nothing but emptiness and horror” yokes the two together, combining them in mutual constitution, and so we are led to acknowledge that, for Johnson, just as there is horror in the idea of emptiness, the void, so there is an absence at the heart of the idea of horror. The same entwining occurs within the Idler’s formulation of “the secret horrour of the last,” where

122  Laura Davies the experience of horror is imbued with secrecy, but equally, the idea of the secret has horror as an attribute. Given Johnson’s avowed commitment as an author to “teach what is not known, or to recommend known truths, by his manner of adorning them” (Rambler III.III.14), what is knowable and what is unknown, and, relatedly, what should be written of and what should remain secret, are matters of the utmost significance. With particular regard to the representation of death, we can observe in him a strong connection between what he recommends as “a constant state of vigilance and caution” on account of a “‘holy fear’ of what is to come at the last hour” (Sermons 30) and his belief that Of the caution necessary in adjusting narratives there is no end […] All truth is not, indeed, of equal importance; but, if little violations are allowed, every violation will in time be thought little; and a writer should keep himself vigilantly on his guard against the first temptations to negligence or supineness. (Boswell 1345) But it is also evident that there are moments in these essays where his prose reveals aspects of Johnson’s thinking that he can neither fully prevent nor acknowledge. The progressive construction is capacious enough to accommodate but not resolve these multivalences. It attends to the quality of anticipation that Johnson understands as characterizing life in relation to death, acknowledges the inevitable next phase, but does not attempt to represent it. In so doing, it enacts the fact that death is structurally as well as experientially constitutive of mortality, and it enables Johnson to write of both. In this respect it functions as a grammatical form of the strategy Garrett Stewart identifies as particular to the writing of death: “death as narrative moment must be approximated by a verbal style charged with elusive evocation in lieu of evidence, not just in the lack of such testimony but in the very space of absence” (4). Such efficacy notwithstanding, its emotional charge and pervasive presence in his prose also attest, however, to the depth, complexity and irresolution of Johnson’s meditations on indeterminacy, not just of the radical uncertainty of salvation, or the condition of “permanent imminence,” but of the resistance of death to stable figuration in language.

Notes 1 The key early essay on this theme is J. H. Hagstrum. See also Patrick ­O’Flaherty and Max Byrd. 2 Dictionary “probation.” On Johnson’s extensive legal knowledge, see Forbes. 3 A summary of the religious texts in Johnson’s possession at the time of his death can be found in Quinlan. See also De Maria 134.

Samuel Johnson and the Grammar of Death  123 4 This association with Locke is most fully discussed in Gaba. 5 Johnson’s familiarity with Augustine is observed in Quinlan 4, 12. 6 This is also noted by Sherman 190. 7 Particularly apparent here is Johnson’s adaptation of Locke’s language of the “constant decay” of ideas and “those tombs to which we are approaching” in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, II.X.V. 8 This is discussed by Smallwood and Joeckel. See also Wechselblatt 61. 9 See further Suarez 201 and Damrosch 72. 10 Also at Life, 579, 839, 95. 11 Secrets are additionally discussed in Ramblers 13 and 144, and Idler 23. 12 The idea of the “brink of the grave” also appears in Sermons 161. 13 Johnson observes this directly later in “The Life of Milton.” See Lives of the English Poets 194–95. 14 Johnson’s wife was seriously ill during the period of The Rambler’s publication and died three days after the last essay was published. Wechselblatt 121 discusses this and argues that in Rambler 54 we see another “potential surrogate” for Johnson in the letter from Athanatus. 15 There is a debate amongst Johnson scholars as to whether his fear is one of judgment or annihilation. Although I would resist such an opposition, Deutsch usefully reviews this scholarship at 278, fn 48.

Works Cited Arnaud, René. “The Development of the Progressive in Nineteenth-Century English: A Quantitative Survey.” Language Variation and Change, vol. 10, 1998, pp. 123–152. Augustine. Confessions. Translated by Henry Chadwick. Oxford UP, 1991. Boswell, James. The Life of Samuel Johnson. Oxford UP, 1970. Byrd, Max. “Johnson’s Spiritual Anxiety.” Modern Philology, vol. 78, no. 4, 1981, pp. 368–378. Clingham, Greg. Johnson, Writing and Memory. Cambridge UP, 2002. Damrosch, Leopold, Jr. Samuel Johnson and the Tragic Sense. Princeton UP, 1972. Davis, Philip. “Johnson: Sanity and Syntax.” Samuel Johnson: The Arc of the Pendulum. Edited by Freya Johnston and Lynda Mugglestone. Oxford UP, 2012, pp.49–60. De Maria, Robert. Samuel Johnson and the Life of Reading. Johns Hopkins UP, 1997. Derrida, Jacques. Aporias: Dying - Awaiting (One Another at) the “Limits of Truth.” Translated by Thomas Dutoit. Stanford UP, 1993. ———. “How to Avoid Speaking: Denials.” Translated by Ken Frieden. Languages of the Unsayable. Edited by Sanford Budick and Wolfgang Iser. Columbia UP, 1989, pp.3–70. Derrida, Jacques and Maurizio Ferraris. I Have a Taste for the Secret. Translated by Giacomo Donis. Edited by Giacomo Donis and David Webb. Polity P, 2001. Deutsch, Helen. Loving Dr. Johnson. U of Chicago P, 2005. Farrell Krell, David. “Immanent Death, Imminent Death.” Speculations after Freud: Psychoanalysis, Philosophy and Culture. Edited by Shonu Shamdasani and Michael Münchow. Routledge, 1994, pp.151–166. Forbes, Alexander M. “Johnson, Blackstone, and the Tradition of Natural Law.” Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature, vol. 27, no. 4, 1994, pp. 81–98.

124  Laura Davies Gaba, Phyllis. “‘A Succession of Amusements’: The Moralization in Rasselas of Locke’s Account of Time.” Eighteenth-Century Studies, vol. 10, no. 4, 1977, pp. 451–463. Hagstrum, Jean H. “On Doctor Johnson’s Fear of Death.” English Literary History, vol. 14, no. 4, 1947, pp. 308–319. Joeckel, Samuel T. “Narratives of Hope, Fictions of Happiness: Samuel Johnson and Enlightenment Experience.” Christianity and Literature, vol. 53, no. 1, 2003, pp. 19–38. Johnson, Samuel. A Dictionary of the English Language. To Which Are Prefixed, a History of the Language, and an English Grammar. 2 vols. London, 1755. ———. Johnsonian Miscellanies. Edited by G. Birkbeck Hill. 2 vols. Constable and Company, 1966. ———. The Poems of Samuel Johnson. Edited by David Nichol Smith and ­E dward L. McAdam. Clarendon P, 1974. ———. Sermons. Edited by Jean Hagstrum and James Gray. Yale UP, 1978. ———. 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. ———. 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. ———. The Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson. Vol. XXI. The Lives of the Poets. Edited by J.H. Middendorf. Yale UP, 2010. Killie, Kristin. “Subjectivity and the English Progressive.” English Language and Linguistics, vol. 8, no. 1, 2004, pp. 25–46. Kleinberg, Ethan. “Not Yet Marrano: Levinas, Derrida, and the Ontology of Being Jewish.” The Trace of God: Derrida and Religion. Edited by Edward Baring. Fordham UP, 2014, pp.39–58. Locke, John. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Penguin, 2004. O’Flaherty, Patrick. “Towards an Understanding of Johnson’s Rambler.” Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900, vol. 18, no. 3, 1978, pp. 523–536. Parker, Fred. Scepticism and Literature: An Essay on Pope, Hume, Sterne, and Johnson. Oxford UP, 2003. Petré, Peter. “The Extravagant Progressive: An Experimental Corpus Study on the History of Emphatic [BE Ving].” English Language and Linguistics, vol. 21, no. 2, 2017, pp. 227–250. Potkay, Adam. “Johnson and the Terms of Succession.” Studies in English Literature, 1500 –1900, vol. 26, no. 3, 1986, pp. 497–509. Quinlan, Maurice J. Samuel Johnson: A Layman’s Religion. The U of Wisconsin P, 1964. Sherman, Stuart. Telling Time: Clocks, Diaries, and English Diurnal Form, 1660–1785. U of Chicago P, 1996. Sider Jost, Jacob. Prose Immortality, 1711–1819. U of Virginia P, 2015. Smallwood, Philip. “Annotated Immortality: Lonsdale’s Johnson.” EighteenthCentury Life, vol. 31, no. 3, 2007, pp. 76–84. Stewart, Garrett. Death Sentences: Styles of Dying in British Fiction. Harvard UP, 1984. Suarez, Michael. “Johnson’s Christian Thought.” The Cambridge Companion to Samuel Johnson. Edited by Greg Clingham. Cambridge UP, 1997, pp. 192–208. Vance, John A. Samuel Johnson and the Sense of History. U of Georgia P, 1984.

Samuel Johnson and the Grammar of Death  125 Wechselblatt, Martin. Bad Behavior: Samuel Johnson and Modern Cultural Authority. Bucknell UP, 1998. White, Carol, Mark Ralkowski, and Hubert L. Dreyfus. Time and Death: Heidegger’s Analysis of Finitude. Routledge, 2016. Wimsatt, William Kurtz. Philosophic Words: A Study of Style and Meaning in the Rambler and Dictionary of Samuel Johnson. Yale UP, 1948. Wright, Susan. “Subjectivity and Experiential Syntax.” Subjectivity and Subjectivisation: Linguistic Perspectives. Edited by D. Stein and S. Wright. Cambridge UP, 1995, pp. 151–172.

8 Death and Romance in Sir Orfeo Elizabeth Allen

The Middle English lay Sir Orfeo rewrites the classical Orpheus myth. The medieval Orfeo, unlike his classical counterpart, is a king. Instead of the classical Eurydice’s death by snakebite, the medieval Heurodis sojourns for a decade in the land of the Fairy King who, unlike his ancestor Hades, eventually allows Orfeo to “Take hir bi the hond and go” (470).1 The poem omits the condition of her release, the taboo against Orfeo’s backward glance along the path out of the Underworld, so that the medieval Orfeo brings Heurodis safely back to human life and resumes his throne. 2 The harp—which identifies the classical Orpheus as son of Apollo, and which allows him to enter the Underworld and calm its denizens ­—­becomes in the medieval tale the instrument of both erotic and political unity: through the harp Orfeo makes his way to the fairy kingdom and back and reveals his lost identity. After his return, he names his loyal steward the kingdom’s heir, providing political stability. This fairy romance, then, replaces the classical tragedy with a happy ending. To be sure, the classical versions of the myth always hover between tragedy and its aversion. Ovid’s Orpheus tries to endure his loss (“I won’t deny that I wished to—and tried to—endure it,” “posse pati volui nec me temptasse negabo,” 25) but Love overcomes him and leads him to try to redeem his wife from death. 3 The core hope of the story is that, in fact, Eurydice can come back—and Orpheus, by way of the harp’s gorgeous artifice, manages to come as close as possible to that happy ending, which would provide the generically appropriate ending of romance. In Ovid, the romance is not completed. Orpheus’s backward glance—to see that his redeemed wife is present and safe—is the story’s central device, at once evincing his love and separating him from his beloved: Orpheus, afraid That she would fail him, and desiring A glimpse of his beloved, turned to look: At once she slipped back to the underworld. (Martin 75–78)

Death and Romance in Sir Orfeo  127 hic, ne deficeret metuens avidusque videndi, flexit amans oculos. Et protinus illa relapsa est. (Ovid 56–57) Precisely the gesture that expresses his love also ends it. “Orpheus’s” tragedy is that his suffering cannot be remedied by his own art, which in turn reveals the limits of human desire and capacity to transcend death. In both Ovid and Virgil, the moment of reconciliation between the lovers passes in a flash, and the narrative reverts to loss. The root causes of that loss—the snakebite and the taboo against turning back—are arbitrary, one a chance event and the other a condition imposed without clear cause.” In the Boethian retelling, the story’s comedy lies beyond the narrative capsule, in the salvation offered to those who, allegorically, do not turn back, those who do not submit themselves to the arbitrary turns of Fortune’s wheel. The forward movement leads to salvation, but the backward glance is cast as human excess, human error. For resonant human response to the arbitrary—that is, for depictions of death—we might be more inclined to turn to tragedy, a genre of suffering and loss, than to romance, a genre of fantasized happy endings.4 Yet like many romances, the medieval Sir Orfeo has a tragic core.5 Indeed, I shall suggest that, even as the medieval fairy narrative “romances” the classical myth, Sir Orfeo also depicts, in symbolically laden terms, the queen’s tragic and irremediable death. After the Fairy King appears to Heurodis to announce he will abduct her, she cries out horribly and mutilates her body in a scene that breaks both marital unity and courtly peace. This rupture is figured, moreover, in the image of the ympe-tre or grafted tree under which she sleeps at noon in the orchard, when the Fairy King appears. Her abduction produces political disorder, as Orfeo in his grief leaves the kingdom in the care of his steward. Yet Orfeo himself remains in limbo: his wife’s abduction produces a boundary between worlds—“real” and fairy—that he cannot cross until, after a decade as a wild man in the woods, he sees his wife in a fairy hunting party and can suddenly “cross over,” following her into the fairy world. There, in a gallery of frozen and dismembered bodies, he sees her frozen too, asleep beneath the grafted tree. Orfeo forces the Fairy King to let him take Heurodis back. And yet, returning to their city, Winchester, Heurodis remains silent and unseen in a beggar’s house while Orfeo returns to greet the steward who has ruled since his departure. Proven loyal by his grief at Orfeo’s false tale of his own death and then by his joy at the king’s survival, the steward is named the king’s heir. Inasmuch as the poem’s “happy ending” provides a resolution to a political problem—naming the steward as heir—it simultaneously exposes that political problem—the inaccessibility of Heurodis and the consequent

128  Elizabeth Allen lack of an heir. In the very process of playing out its existential fantasy of “crossing over,” the poem depicts the mortal limits it seeks to transcend. Many previous readers of the lay have observed these dark threads. Tara Williams notes Heurodis’s silence at the end, her reduction to spectacle, and the way in which this compromises the joyousness of the ending. Though Williams does not go so far as to doubt Heurodis’s resurrection, she does write that an irremediable division “has arisen between the spouses as a result of Heurodis’s time in the fairy kingdom…. She has been fundamentally altered and cannot return completely to her previous self” (558). Others have connected Heurodis’s injury to the problem of succession. Oren Falk links the poem to the reign of Edward II and sees the steward’s succession as part of a “dynastic tragedy” in which Heurodis, “maimed and mute,” is “unfit to bear the son of Orfeo.” For him, the ending of the poem is “euphemistic” about the queen’s barrenness inasmuch as it resolves the failure of inheritance by “grafting” the steward onto the royal line (248; 260).6 Elliott Kendall, connecting the story rather to the rule of Richard II, argues that the installation of the steward deliberately calls inheritance itself into question: it is “anti-patrimonial: it de-centers the family and then excludes lineage from the royal succession” (289). If Kendall finds the poem less “euphemistic” than Falk, both suggest that the historical instability of dynastic continuity creates what Falk calls the “dark subconscious” of the poem (249). For other writers, the “dark subconscious” is something more existential. Alan Fletcher focuses on the poem’s most striking image, those men and women frozen in the moment of their abduction and arranged in the Fairy King’s gallery. For Fletcher, this gallery and its Otherworld setting evoke competing discourses, all of which seek supernatural explanations for death: Christian salvation, astrology, and fairy magic. Yet each discourse offers only a partial or, finally, distorted explanation of the scene’s symbolic import, producing an interpretive impasse. Fletcher argues that this impasse sends readers fleeing for “refuge” in the form of the poem’s unifying image, the harp, “stability’s champion” (167), which through ceremonial performance can produce coherent artistic order and meaning both within the poem’s courtly world and outside it, in the musical performance of the poem. Neil Cartlidge similarly finds the events of the poem—especially the sojourn in Fairyland, to which he compares a range of medieval textual Otherworlds—produce a sense of entropy or chaos. This chaos is only barely contained in the image of Heurodis’s return, “a wholly artificial convenience” (226) that nonetheless returns her to life. Cartlidge astutely insists upon the poem’s refusal to close off the chaos of Fairyland and the competing ideas of what Heurodis’s abduction might mean—death, sexual violence, madness. The consequences of this undecidability produce, for the reader of the poem, not only hermeneutic and moral instability but also a profound “existential confusion.”

Death and Romance in Sir Orfeo  129 What is the point of such confusion, such radical indeterminacy? In effect, we have here a version of the aporia—the impasse or unresolvable contradiction—that attends an effort to conceptualize death by representing its aftermath in human action in two enfolded worlds. For Derrida, death’s border is aporetic: to cross that border may not clearly define so much as blur the line between life and death.7 I shall argue here that, in Sir Orfeo, that line is blurred from the beginning in the description of the iconic court, an image of stasis that provides the foil for H ­ eurodis’s agitated suffering. Without denying that the poem depicts the “resurrection” of Heurodis, I will argue that Sir Orfeo simultaneously represents the queen’s death; that Orfeo’s journey to the Underworld entails a reconciliation that bespeaks loss; that the steward’s inheritance both reveals and recuperates the queen’s death; and that, by interweaving death and resuscitation, rupture and repair, the poem meditates on the way in which romance averts tragedy. Sir Orfeo refuses to decide whether Heurodis is alive or dead because it wants to show the degree to which tragedy constitutes romance.

Childbirth and Genealogy Heurodis falls asleep at noon under a grafted tree and awakens in a vivid frenzy of self-mutilation: Sche crid, and lothli bere gan make; Sche froted hir honden and hir fete, And crached hir visage—it bled wete— Hir riche robe hye al to-rett And was reveyed out of hir wit.

loathsome outcry made rubbed; hands scratched her face; profusely she tore all to pieces driven (78–82)

Heurodis’s terror or madness is a shock to the senses: her outcry is an ugly thing, an assault on the ears, a matter of raucous and even aggressive conduct.8 This is a far cry from the snakebite that kills Ovid’s ­Eurydice quickly, quietly, and without dialogue: “as the bride was strolling through the grass, / attended by the naiads, she dropped dead, / ­bitten on her ankle by a snake.”9 If Ovid’s Eurydice slips into death without a sound, the Heurodis of Sir Orfeo lingers noisily. Her self-abuse is also tactile, as she rubs her hands and feet, scratches her face bloody, and rends her garments. Yet the reason for her distress is ambiguous: crying out suggests fear; scratching her face and rending her garments looks like mourning; rubbing her limbs seems like madness, perhaps transposed from Ovid’s Maenads or raided from Virgil’s depiction of the ­panicked flight of Eurydice.10 Heurodis’s ladies call the whole household

130  Elizabeth Allen to come and carry her back to her chamber and hold her fast.11 The court’s massive effort to contain the outrages of the queen’s body points to the bodily origins of her struggle; in the retrospective fashion of romance, the form of her disruption suggests that the lay’s basic problem might lie precisely with the workings of her body, understood initially as an integrated whole but here, after the fairy king’s dream, as fragmented by impulse and motion. The queen assaults herself in the midst of an emphatically peaceful court bound by Orfeo’s paradisal harping; her horrid cry breaks his harmony both aurally and politically, rupturing not just her marital communion but also the king’s political peace. For, in the poem’s opening, his harp is an instrument of unity. Orfeo welcomes harpers to his court with great honor, and indeed, he loves harping so much that he learns to do it himself: Himself he lerned forto harp, And leyd theron his wittes scharp; He lerned so ther nothing was A better harpour in no plas. In al the warld was no man bore That ones Orfeo sat before— And he might of his harping here— Bot he schuld thenche that he were In on of the joies of Paradis, Swiche melody in his harping is.

He taught himself to applied in no way any place born once hear think one (29–38)

The harp mediates between king and people: the king honors those who play it, and once he has learned to play himself, the sound binds his subjects in a court so joyful and beautiful that it seems like Paradise. Playing the harp is imagined as a socially binding act, one that creates loyal (“trewe”) subjects and even, as Seth Lerer writes, “has the power to bring out the order inherent in Creation” (93). At the same time, there is a peculiar stasis to this opening scene, as though all movement initially belongs only to the harp. Heurodis is full of love for Orfeo, full of goodness as well as beauty; he loves best his harp. As is conventional in such initial romance portraits, their respective loves appear as unchanging identities, not shifting emotional reactions: she is defined by her fullness of love and he by his love of melody.12 Yet the lack of change here defends against human interaction, and thus even against the process of plot itself. Heurodis later says, “Allas, mi lord, Sir Orfeo! / Sethen we first togider were / Ones wroth never we nere” (120–22). Indeed, perhaps what Orfeo loves is precisely this absence of wrath, tied to the appearance of social harmony that the harp’s melody can produce: people hearing it “schuld thenche” they might be

Death and Romance in Sir Orfeo  131 in paradise (36).13 This communal perception of paradise is an artifice produced by the king’s music; the correspondence between kingship and harmony admits no conflict. Nor does it map temporal change: it anticipates no futurity. Indeed, when the poem narrates Orfeo’s appropriation of music from others—he loves the harp, learns it, and plays better than ­anyone—the suggestion is that he fills in any gap between himself and the conventional figure of the court minstrel who might tell a story—even a story that might call into question rather than confirm the king’s peace.14 The harping king invokes a combination of political and aesthetic order, as well as the harmony of the spheres, an idealized pattern of movement in a court otherwise defined by its pictorial stillness. Even at the poem’s start, the ideality of Orfeo’s court appears willed, perhaps enforced, and artificial. As is conventional for a romance’s initial court scene, the terms by which social cohesion is achieved are carefully controlled. In this case, however, the courtly paradise suggests, uncannily, that this is not a living court. Indeed, as we shall see, the stasis of this court is negatively reflected in the spookily static bodies in the courtyard of the Fairy King. The harp’s peace hints of death within the monarch’s life. Heurodis and her maidens sit under the ympe-tre, she has her noontime sleep, and they do not dare disturb her: her “stillness” is at a premium to everyone around her, a condition of this static court. But the ympe-tre also indicates a rupture, since the graft is an artificial break designed to produce fruit or flower on a strong stock.15 The horticultural rupture is simultaneously the place of repair, binding the disjoined rootstock and scion, parent and heir. Falk rightly associates the graft with the “grafted” genealogy of the steward, Orfeo’s “surrogate son” (248). Yet surely the graft must first and foremost “belong” to the body of the queen sleeping so close beside it: the image suggests her internal bodily rupture. Kendall finds that the garden shows the costs of “female political exclusion,” and further suggests a link between Heurodis’s sojourn in Fairyland and infertility, or “willed avoidance of pregnancy and its perils” (313–14); in his account, queenship’s basic frustration lies in the instrumental genealogical function of women, which restricts their political agency. But far from simply reflecting Heurodis’s reluctance or barrenness, the ympe-tre is an image of fertility, a manifestation of both the queen’s desire and the needs of the kingdom. Grafting increases a tree’s fertility, suggesting the physical breaches attendant upon human procreation: sex and childbearing. The poem is more conscious of the queen’s body as locus of rule than readers of her political role would have it. Heurodis’s body, according to the patrimonial logic of romance, ought to produce an heir to Orfeo’s throne and is crucial, central, to the court’s success. In her initial portrait, the poem describes her as “the fairest levedi, for the nones, / That might gon on bodi and bones”—her body anatomized already hints at the fragmentation we see later, but her fairness creates

132  Elizabeth Allen a picture of coherence. More important, genealogy is not a disinterested “natural” development but an ideological formation: it is a way of mapping social needs onto the animal function of having babies.16 In this sense, any genealogical continuation, including untroubled biological procreation, could be considered a “graft,” even if Orfeo’s desire for paradisal harmony does not initially admit such ruptures. To associate the ympe-tre with fertility, not barrenness, calls attention to the way in which perpetuating the court through genealogical heirs requires rupturing the very body whose static beauty stands for courtly ideality. Breaking the courtly stasis—the ideal itself—could become the necessary, and happy, condition of dynastic continuity. Nonetheless, when Heurodis wakes up screaming, her mysterious terror evokes not only madness and grief but also the pain and fear of miscarriage or complications of labor and childbirth, a suggestion of desire revealed and wrecked.17 Heurodis’s outcry ruptures the court’s stability; it disrupts both the queen’s body and the fantasy of dynastic continuity. After her terrible sleep, the ympe-tre also figures the separation of the lovers, the breach of dynastic continuity, and the crossing of boundaries between Orfeo’s court and the world of the Fairy King. In relating her dream of the Fairy King, Heurodis emphasizes the necessity of separation, while Orfeo objects that he himself will be lost without her: “Ac now we mot delen ato; Do thi best, for y mot go.” “Allas!” quath he, “forlorn icham! Whider wiltow go, and to wham? Whider thou gost, ichil with the, And whider y go, thou schalt with me.” “Nay, nay! Sir, that nought nis! Ichil the telle al hou it is.”

must divide apart I must Utterly lost I am Where will you; whom I will [go] Cannot be I will; all how (125–32)

Orfeo’s echo of the marriage vow marks an attempt to enclose the lovers linguistically within something approaching a chiastic ­structure— or perhaps more precisely, to enclose Heurodis: I go with thee, thou goest with me, he insists—but the refrain actually alternates pronouns in a way that escapes chiasmus (thou, I, thee; I, thou, me). Although he alternates the pronouns to suggest the inextricability of “thou” from “I,” actually in order to speak the phrase he has to make an inevitable distinction between himself and his queen, marked by different pronouns. In the separation scene, even marriage itself contains sameness and difference, ideality and rupture: their love is now represented not by the unifying sign of the harp, but by the more equivocal sign of the graft.

Death and Romance in Sir Orfeo  133 This “grafting” also takes place at the level of geography. Heurodis goes on to explain that the Fairy King has shown her his kingdom and announced that she must “live with ous evermo” (168). Her insistence that she and Orfeo must “delen ato” points to the irrevocable loss of death—that ultimate separation against which Orfeo’s echo of the marriage vow is no match. Yet the strange delay she is granted, during which she can demonstrate her grief and pain, explain her departure, and bid him goodbye, suggests something less certainly defined. While she speaks, the limit or border between the two worlds seems for the moment permeable or indistinct, held in suspension: not only is she in the process of crossing the threshold, but the two sides mirror one another; she conveys the splendor of the fairy court and the royalty of its leader in terms that chime with the description of Orfeo’s own paradisal court. Her temporary rescue—and the process by which she is lost—“grafts” one world onto another in a way that suggests their proximity. This proximity is in one sense symbolic: as we shall see, the Fairy King’s court echoes in a darker key both Orfeo’s court’s initial stasis and its responsiveness to music. But the door between the worlds also does not shut permanently behind her, and this capacity for fairy and “real” worlds to interact suggests in turn that the poem is working against a basic conceptual problem or aporia. Crossing is not usual: the loss of Heurodis creates an impasse, an arbitrary and complete separation of a living person, which is death. But the poem’s imaginative work consists in imagining this problem, symbolically finding a way around, or across—or paradoxically into—the aporia of death.

Crossing: To Death and Back The firm boundary between “real” and fairy worlds is established when Heurodis is abducted, only to be softened and crossed when, after ten years in the forest, Orfeo glimpses his wife, follows her into the fairy kingdom, and brings her back to Winchester. This fairy kingdom is a problem, a kind of symbolic work-around.18 It replaces the classical Underworld, allowing Orfeo to walk “in at a roche” (347) instead of arduously climbing down into Hell. Fairyland is a brilliant territory, not shaded in fog and darkness; and it is flat, not steep: it is geographically contiguous with Orfeo’s living human realm.19 Indeed, there is a castle there, with a hundred towers, made of precious stones that make it shine as bright as the noonday sun; so rich is the place that “Bi al thing him think that it is / The proude court of Paradis” (375–76). Fairyland’s echoes of the living courtly world suggest that the boundary between worlds is neither absolute nor violently maintained. Nonetheless, if the echo of Orfeo’s own paradisal aspirations makes the place look as if it might embrace courtly ideals, the noonday sun recalls the violence of the Fairy King’s noon abduction. Moreover, the very brilliance of the place

134  Elizabeth Allen makes it alien, a foreign court that Orfeo enters into in disguise, as an uninvited—and hostile—guest. There are other differences from the myth. Orfeo crosses secretly, by his own will rather than the consent of the Fairy King. Indeed, even during his ten years as a wild man in the forest, he has occasionally glimpsed the fairies—the two worlds seem divided at times by only a thin membrane, as if they are not so much separate territories as coextensive fields that remain mostly inaccessible to one another. The Fairy King hunts in Orfeo’s very forest, never catching any beasts, coming and going mysteriously. Orfeo sometimes perceives the fairies but does not know their causes or purposes: “No never he nist whider they ­bicome / … Ac never he nist whider thai wold” (288–96). This lack of knowledge implies a lack of will or care, a failure of curiosity, associated with melancholy (Freud 243–58). But when one day he sees his wife among the fairies, something changes, the membrane separating the two worlds thins, and the lovers recognize one another. In fact, the change seems to be brought about by another problematic depiction of death. One day, though he has never seen the fairies catch their quarry, Orfeo now watches as fairy falcons kill their prey: Ich faucoun his pray slough— That seigh Orfeo, and lough: “Parfay!” quath he, “ther is fair game; Thider ichil, bi Godes name; Ich was y-won swiche werk to se!”

Each; prey killed saw; laughed by my faith I’ll [go] I was wont such sport (313–17)

The act of slaying rhymes, here, with laughter (slough/lough): falconry signifies the pleasure of the chase. Until now, Orfeo’s sojourn in the forest has been wordless, marked only by the cyclical and non-teleological sound of the harp that can gather animals but just as easily let them dematerialize again when Orfeo stops playing (279–80). Now, when he watches a fairy hunt progress to the point of death, it is as though a stopped clock restarts: Orfeo recalls his own history, implicitly including the social status and ties that attended his former royal role. The scene evinces a change in his perspective, though the reason he can change only now, and not sooner, is left indeterminate. Nonetheless, his response to the falcons’ predatory success reframes his time in the forest as a mental and emotional passage from past to present, that is, as a labor of memory in time, and it implies a possible ­ rfeo’s ­memory—­hawking—­transmutes futurity as well. The content of O ­ eurodis. Hawking suggests a manageable image of the the death of H ­ redictable, arbitrary, a ritualized courtly order within which death is p ­tolerable, even benign. Yet still, what the fairies’ appearance here brings to the surface is the fact of Heurodis’ death.20

Death and Romance in Sir Orfeo  135 At the same time, the idea that death might be no more than courtly game amounts to an externalization of Orfeo’s devoutest wish: that he can change the outcome of this game. The topos of the boundary, formerly impassable but suddenly dissolved, marks the poem as romance, or in particular, as a lay, that subgenre of romance whose operations can meditate on the workings of the larger genre. To be sure, the poem’s thematic engagement with love and magic, the stuff of fairy, and its structural framing as a story beginning in the court and continuing in the world of adventure have already established its genre. But the boundary topos recalls the mal-mariées of Marie de France’s “Guigemar” and “Yonec,” escaping from their hitherto locked towers, and anticipates the misery of Dorigen in Chaucer’s Franklin’s Tale, confronted with the absence of her husband and wishing the rocks along the shoreline to melt away. When the boundary between worlds dissolves in Sir Orfeo, the wandering king experiences a new freedom, and a new possibility emerges. As suddenly and causelessly as Heurodis was abducted, equally suddenly, and likewise without overt motivation, Orfeo regains a sense of his own place in the world and his capacity for action. 21 Moreover, what has happened here is a genre-specific evasion. The dominance of the Underworld in the Orpheus myth—in Ovid, the filmy dissolution of Eurydice’s touch; in Virgil, the commanding grotesque darkness of the place; in Boethius, the harsh spiritual lesson—these impulses are covered over by a dramatic, glittering paradise, the gleaming material beauty of the fairy kingdom. The materiality and vastness and level ground of Fairyland promise to avert the traditional dark tragedy. Instead, then, what Orfeo seeks is not only his wife but a generic metamorphosis, a romance happy ending, which is more than a motif or a plot element and which therefore requires a thoroughgoing pattern of generic shifts. 22 The events that follow suggest that, like his classical counterpart, Orfeo can, in fact, act upon the fairy Otherworld and bend it to his desires. He knocks at the gate, announces himself as a minstrel, and enters the castle yard. His minstrelsy recalls the disguises of Tristan or King Horn, who enter enemy courts with their harps at the ready. Yet the promise of passage is immediately stopped short: here Orfeo beholds the strange vision of the “folk that were thider y-brought / And thought ded, and nare nought” (389–90)—each of the “taken,” unliving and undead, captured at the moment of dismemberment or disaster. The gallery of bodies resides at the border between what is outside the court and what is within, but more important, between what is alive and what is dead: the gallery represents the aporia, the impasse that is death’s passage. The statue bodies paradoxically can no longer “be.” Their existence is stuck or blocked, for as Cartlidge shows so well, they lack potential afterlives—salvation, magical recovery, stellification— that would remove them from their twisted and impersonal stasis. 23 The gallery, in fact, imagines stasis as peculiarly horrifying, neither socially

136  Elizabeth Allen ideal as in Orfeo’s happy court nor resolved and done as in the eternal realms of heaven. At the end of the list of torn bodies, Orfeo sees “Wives ther lay on childe bedde, / Sum ded and sum awedde” (“some dead and some mad,” 399–400) and finally “Dame Heurodis, his lef liif,” sleeping still under the ympe-tre (406–7). As we have seen, the poem associates both childbirth and madness with Heurodis’s death, and here it is as though, as he scans the multiple frozen bodies, he perceives an ekphrasis of her death: a childbirth ending in madness, a disordered birth, a kind of de-creation inside which she remains still. The gallery announces that, though Fairyland may seem to be passable and porous, like a romance Otherworld, its shining surfaces and frozen bodies bespeak an unyielding and impenetrable loss, forcing upon Orfeo and the reader a perspective from which death has already, irremediably, occurred. Nonetheless, Orfeo moves through the courtyard and indeed, for the rest of the lay, he is full of movement and futurity. His entry into the court is a trick; it is a romance topos; it is also marked as exceptional, for the Fairy King says that since he began to reign, no one has ever been foolhardy enough to come to his kingdom (425–28). 24 After this innovative arrival, Orfeo proceeds to exert mastery over stasis. At first, his harp does for the Fairy King’s realm what it used to do for his own, as everyone in the palace lies down at the harpist’s feet, and even the king comes into a state of rest: “The king herkneth and sitt ful stille; / To here his gle he hath gode wille” (443–44). If the Orpheus of the myth moves Persephone to pity, the Orfeo of the romance stills the Fairy King, an aural and somatic echo of both Orfeo’s ideal but childless court and the frozen statues in the King’s own castle yard. 25 Yet Orfeo activates a past that implies temporal innovation and futurity—or spatially, movement within the Otherworld and out again—and elicits from the Fairy King a rash promise. Orfeo’s productive movement here suggests not simply the permeable boundary between the worlds of Fairy and “real” but Orfeo’s particular mastery of the crossing, his capacity to overcome—or at least, to mystify—the aporia between the living and the dead. The Fairy King is ravished into promising the minstrel anything he wants. The rash boon, like the unmotivated crossing and the minstrel disguise, is a romance topos that calls attention to a generic deviation from the classical narrative. Comparing again to classical versions of the myth, the topos entirely changes the nature of the contract between this realm and the Otherworld, or the living and the dead. Whereas Hades sets the condition for Eurydice’s release—Orpheus must not turn around until they cross the boundary into life—the rash boon instead subjects the underworld king to a condition, while explicitly and absolutely releasing his guest from any condition whatsoever: Menstrel, me liketh wel thi gle. Now aske of me what it be,

what(ever) you wish

Death and Romance in Sir Orfeo  137 Largelich ichil the pay; Now speke, and tow might assay.

Generously if you wish to find out (449–52)

In making a rash promise, the speaker cedes control of the contract precisely to demonstrate the extent of his largesse: he says, in effect, that he has the capacity to grant the minstrel any payment he might wish. Embedded in the magnificence of the rash boon, of course, is always the threat that what is asked will turn out to be too much: in fact, the topos consists precisely in an embrace of excess and of risk. Its ironic function is often to expose monarchical (or lordly) limits and to empower the vulnerable supplicant. 26 The poem uses this rash boon to place a limit upon the Fairy King’s power, and hence to undo his realm’s complete hold upon death: the land of the dead becomes, here, permeable to the demands of the living. Indeed, if at first the promise shows the king’s assurance of his own mastery, its consequences play out so as to show the sheer extravagance of Orfeo’s request to undo Heurodis’s death. The Fairy King’s response, predictably, is to refuse Orfeo’s request— but somewhat surprisingly, on the basis of Orfeo’s unsuitedness to Heurodis: For thou art lene, rowe, and blac, And sche is lovesum, withouten lac; A lothlich thing it were, forthi, To sen hir in thi compayni. (459–62)

lean, rough beautiful, blemish loathly; therefore see

This masquerades as an objection that arises from courtly idealism: beauty doesn’t go with ugliness. But it has existential implications. O ­ rfeo is thin and rough and blackened from his decade in the forest so that his identity as king and husband is obscured. This “lothlich” pairing echoes the “lothly bere” of Heurodis’s earlier madness and grief: their reconciliation would at once disrupt and mirror the queen’s outcry. To take her back is to object, to cry out against her death, and to undo it. As well as an aesthetic judgment, the Fairy King’s remark is a jurisdictional boast: the lovesome Heurodis belongs in glittering ­Fairyland, not somewhere else. The objection also reveals the Fairy King as a creature of courtly propriety, a mirror of Orfeo in his paradisal home court, where king and queen were never once angry at each other (122). Heurodis, in the Fairy Kingdom, has the perfection of stasis; her body is preserved unchanged, presumably unaging, because she is frozen in the land of the unliving. Most important, the King’s objection points out the transgressiveness of Orfeo’s very presence in his court: Orfeo is alive and in progress, tanned and aging but not yet dead; indeed, he is asserting a new mastery, whereas Heurodis is under the static sign of death, beyond mutability. What the Fairy King means to say is, “Death and life don’t mix.”

138  Elizabeth Allen He means to re-affirm the impassability of the membrane between the two worlds. Yet in this text, death and life do mix, not only in the image of the “undead” in the Fairy King’s yard but in his own promise and in the dynamic rescue of Heurodis. To be sure, it would seem that Sir Orfeo refuses to depict death at all. The rash boon offered by the Fairy King—and the demonstration of the truth to his word that the promise entails—shows the extent to which he is a figure from romance, and not from ancient tragedy. As a result, the poem resists equating Fairyland with a land of death. The Fairy King is not Hades but a medieval king; his court is not the Underworld but a level otherworld; the statues in the courtyard are not the bodies of the damned but “thought ded, and nare nought.” The Fairy King issues no condition of escape, and Orfeo does not look back. He takes Heurodis by the hand and hightails it out of the country: almost without a pause, “Right as he come, the way he yede” (476). He crosses with her into Winchester, his royal seat. Orfeo seems to bring Heurodis back from a world of the living, an Otherworld, not from Hades. At the same time, the sheer pace of their return suggests its status as a fantasy. It is as though he has rescued his wife from a military enemy—an impossible revision of what he could not do when she was taken, under the ympetre, despite the ten hundred knights he had arrayed to defend her. In his return to Winchester, like Odysseus coming back to Ithaca, Orfeo stays with a beggar at the edge of town. Unlike Odysseus, though, he leaves his wife, at noon, in order to go reclaim the throne. Heurodis lingers at the border, temporally as well as spatially, while the king returns alone.

Mystifying Death Back at court, Orfeo pours his effort into mystification: he masters the fact of Heurodis’s death by telling stories of his own. To mystify the loss of his queen in this way is at once to cover it up and to mark it, to incorporate or “graft” her death onto a story of dynastic continuation whose joint remains visible, if sutured with care. Thus the final hundred lines of the poem seem to give us a happy ending, but make us aware of Heurodis’s grief and her fragile, even fictive status. The poem knits the existential to the ideological by way of the harp, a figure that combines harmony with a specifically linguistic art, the art of song. Yet as Williams and others have pointed out, Heurodis is silent and passive throughout the concluding action. Her silence is all the more notable given the poem’s thematics of sound, its emphasis not only on harmony, but also on noise and stillness. Orfeo, on the other hand, speaks at length about his own death and his royal return, albeit his speech is marked as contraryto-fact. Nonetheless, Heurodis is confirmed as queen and the steward is confirmed as heir. Through these delicate displacements and substitutions, death is smoothed over and political stability achieved. Having

Death and Romance in Sir Orfeo  139 made Orfeo a king, the poem makes his story a romance in order to mystify the tragedy that would destabilize the very ground of kingship. We have seen from the beginning that the harp’s harmony creates the king’s peace, that Heurodis is associated with that peace, and that such peace verges on immobility. It is because of the particularly aural register of peace that Heurodis’s screams in the garden and her “lothli bere” cause such disruption. Orfeo shows his distress for her in aural terms: “O lef liif, what is te, / That ever yete hast ben so stille / And now gredest wonder schille?” (“O dear life, what is it with you, / Who ever yet has been so calm, / And now cries strangely shrilly?” 102–4). Though stillness does not necessarily denote total stasis, here it does indicate quiet and stability. Sound, by contrast, has a deep association with movement, as Chaucer’s characterization of sound as “air y-broken” (766) shows. Heurodis’s outcry comes with rubbing and scratching and rending; in rhyming with “schille,” her former stillness is set against resounding and disordered noise. Coaxed by Orfeo, she lies “stille” (117) only long enough to report the even more radical motion of the Fairy King’s ­abduction: “he me nam” (154). If music arranges sound into meaningful pattern, noise and silence represent closely related aural disorders. Throughout the poem, much of Orfeo’s energy is spent on stilling others through the harp. When he is in the forest, his harp resounds in language that recalls, through rhyme, the “stillness” of his original court and queen: “[He] harped at his owhen will. / Into alle the wode the soun gan schille” (“He played at his own desire. / Into the whole forest the sound did resound,” 271–72). This sound gathers beasts and birds who sit about him (273–76), quieting the beasts’ animal motions until the song is done. In Fairyland, Orfeo’s harp likewise makes the Fairy King himself sit still, as we have seen, in an echo of the static beauty of Orfeo’s own initial court (443). To the extent that Orfeo seeks to still the savage beast, his music paradoxically reproduces the fantasy of silence. We have seen that silence and stasis are associated, in this poem, with both peace and death, in the figures of Orfeo’s childless court and the frozen bodies in the courtyard of the Fairy King. When Heurodis and Orfeo recognize one another in the forest, they do not speak, a silence that seems to indicate her death and entail his own: “Allas! to long last mi liif, too long lasts When y no dar nought with mi wiif, No hye to me, o word speke. nor she / one will not Allas! Whi nil min hert breke! come what may Parfay!” quath he, “tide wat betide, Wherever these Whiderso this levedis ride, The selve way ichil streche— same / hasten Of liif no deth me no reche.” nor / I do not care

140  Elizabeth Allen This is not the peaceful silence of the entranced court, but the silence of loss, as Heurodis weeps at her husband’s changed state. Orfeo seems to grieve that they do not dare to speak, a fear perhaps of his own death he resolves afterward to follow the ladies even if it means he will die. Indeed, the wordless encounter signals a kind of over-living, a death in life; to acknowledge the horror of silence is to render the line between living and death so thin that he can simply cross it, following the ladies whatever may happen. In this context, Heurodis’s total silence after he brings her home suggests less that he has successfully retrieved her than that she remains enclosed in the same unformed silence. Her lack of voice—whether musical or shrill—indicates her tragic absence. Heurodis’s silence is all the more notable in the context of the musical and narrative forms of sound that define Orfeo’s return to the throne. Carrying his harp through the streets of Winchester, where everyone remarks his gnarled appearance without knowing he is their king, he cries out “loude,” announcing himself as a pagan harpist to the steward, who invites him home because every harpist is welcome “For mi lordes love, Sir Orfeo” (518). Orfeo waits to play in a court that has already fallen “stille,” rather than silencing it with his music (529–31); indeed, the music instead inspires the speech of the steward, who has recognized his harp and wants to know where he got it. The scene’s rapid shifts are a far cry from the peace and beauty of his paradisal opening court. Moreover, Orfeo’s answer is a lie: he says that he found the body of a man torn apart by lions and wolves, and “Bi him y fond this ich harp; / Wele ten yere it is y-go” (540–41). The lie imagines his own death in a scene of dismemberment that resembles Heurodis’s self-mutilation, the Fairy King’s threat that she will be “totorn” if she refuses to come with him, and the torn bodies in the courtyard of the Fairy King itself; it also recalls the dismemberment of Orpheus by the Maenads. This concern with the fragmented body, as we have seen, figures the failure of dynastic continuity—here, by the simple death of the king. Pragmatically, the deceit is a test of the steward’s loyalty, which he passes, falling into a swoon in his grief. Symbolically, though, the lie refers to death: Orfeo accomplishes the impossible narration of his own death, which he depicts as a result of his self-exile in the dangerous forest. Derrida writes, “Is my death possible?” and answers that it creates an impasse, both in the impossibility of owning death as part of one’s life story and in the indeterminacy of death itself; it is impossible to master death (to say it is mine; Derrida 21–22). In telling the story of forest misadventure, ­Orfeo tells in the third person of his own “crossing” into Fairyland; he is inhabiting the impossible threshold between life and death, a territory characterized by internal contradiction. In a sense, he does so in order to appropriate to himself the death of his wife, as though he could, through such displacement, replay her demise in a different key: his own death along with hers, a lie that tells truth, a real death rendered fantasy. 27

Death and Romance in Sir Orfeo  141 It is within this framework of hypothetical truth that Orfeo reveals himself. Seeing the steward’s loyalty, he now tells his story in the subjunctive (Caldwell 303): Yif ich were Orfeo the king, very long ago And hadde y-suffred ful yore In wildernisse miche sore, sorrow won / away Amd hadde ywon my quen o-wy Out of the lond of fairy, And hadde y-brought the levedi hende gracious lady Right here to the tounes ende, And with a begger her in y-nome, had placed her And were mi-self hider y-come Poverlich to the, thus stille, In poverty For to assay thi gode wille, test And ich founde the thus trewe, should never regret it Thou no shust it never rewe. Surely / fear Sikerlich, for love or ay, should Thou shust be king after mi day. (558–72) There is no death here; ten years of suffering is dispelled in two lines, and the queen’s retrieval is a victory held off only for the sake of testing the loyalty of the steward, as much to display the king’s power as to affirm the peace of the realm. That peace, encapsulated in the frank loyalty of the steward, rhymes with the secrecy of Orfeo’s disguise in a new variant of the “still” / “schill” / “will” rhyme: Orfeo’s trick, his “stillness,” is legitimized because it furthers the peace or “stillness” of the realm. Orfeo’s ipseity, his living mastery, is expressed in the “Ich” that is the subject of the 11-line clause. Nonetheless, the clause is hedged by subordination: if he were king, if he had brought back his wife, if he had found the steward true. On the one hand, Orfeo dramatizes his return all the more by understating it. On the other hand, though, to reveal his identity in the subjunctive is to call it into question, or at least to call attention to the way in which his return fulfills a political fantasy and an existential wish: that the king might never die. An alternate genealogy is not a new or even unusual thing for romance: Athelstan’s heir is his nephew; Emaré abandons both her home and her husband’s home to install her son in Rome; Arthurian romance is founded in adultery. Sir Orfeo’s symbolic cultivation of the steward as heir “grafted” onto Orfeo’s rootstock encourages a meditation on the political ideology of inheritance so fundamental to romance, especially English romance. Indeed, it is Orfeo’s kingship that constitutes the medieval poem’s most salient addition to the classical legend. To make Ovid’s god-descended youth into a king is to “graft” political power onto the erotics of human loss.

142  Elizabeth Allen This addition entails the mystification of Heurodis’s demise and the substitution of the steward as heir. Once the hero becomes a king, the poem’s task becomes that of romancing tragedy, mystifying the tragic kernel of loss, Heurodis’s death, in order to uphold the role of monarchy as continual, stable, and “stille.” To call Orfeo a king, then, is no mere surface anachronism. The poem’s “sutured” politics has an existential corollary: the suturing of life to death. As we saw in Orfeo’s sojourn in the Fairy Kingdom, this poem does not treat death as indescribable in its difference from life but rather startlingly juxtaposed with it; and this juxtaposition enacts a “social magic,” a political assertion that—in this case—a king’s power lies in his capacity to overcome the ordinary mortal subjection to time and change. 28 Such juxtaposition is essential not only to this lay but also to romance as a genre. The beauty of romance’s happy endings and the symmetry of its resolutions are part and parcel of the genre’s capacity to thwart death even as it admits death into its system of representation. Sir Orfeo, that is, points out the way in which romance addresses itself to the materials of tragedy. J.R.R. Tolkien writes that the romance happy ending evinces a sudden and miraculous grace: never to be counted on to recur. It does not deny the existence of dyscatastrophe, of sorrow and failure: the possibility of these is necessary to the joy of deliverance; it denies (in the face of much evidence, if you will) universal and final defeat, and in so far is evangelium, giving a fleeting glimpse of Joy, Joy beyond the walls of the world, poignant as grief. (68–69) The steward’s reaction to Orfeo’s self-revelation demonstrates his loyalty in a manner that also suggests rupture: he overturns the table in the hall and falls at Orfeo’s feet. The overturned table suggests that the steward sweeps aside his own lordship and turns over the role of host to the rightful king. It also figures this transition as violent, vaguely akin to the overturning of tables that comes with an internecine battle in the rebel romance Gamelyn. Although the poem’s structure ensures the peaceful transition from Orfeo to his “grafted” heir, the potential for rupture is marked here in the form of a gratuitous dramatic gesture. It is a rupture that the poem insistently mystifies, but the crashing furniture reminds us of the more thoroughgoing destruction of Heurodis’s body and of her life itself. Following this final recognition scene, Orfeo’s body is bathed and shaven and clothed as befits a king: no longer “totorn” by beasts or hedged about by ‘“ifs,” he is newly crowned. In a great procession, “Thai brought the quen into the toun / With al maner menstraci” (588– 89). The Queen lives long afterward, but it is almost as if she exists only through the force of song.

Death and Romance in Sir Orfeo  143

Notes 1 All quotations from the poem are from the edition of Laskaya and Salisbury. 2 Sources for the myth for the medieval writer would have included Ovid’s Metamorphoses X and Virgil’s Georgics IV along with their commentaries. In commentary, Orpheus becomes a Christ figure and the tale foretells redemption; see Laskaya and Salisbury 16–17. 3 For Ovid’s Latin, see Ovid X.1–85 and XI.1–66. For the English, see ­Martin X.1–122 and XI.1–94. For Virgil, see Virgil Book IV, 453–527. For ­Boethius, see Boethius III m. 12. 4 The story of Orpheus is not a tragedy in the Aristotelian sense, lacking as it does the fatal flaw and cathartic recognition of the hero. Yet it remains a story about the confrontation of loss, with its attendant self-alienation, and in this sense conforms to medieval ideas about tragedy, which traditionally combine human experience of the depredations of Fortune with the affect associated with loss and grief. On tragedy defined as the falls of great men, see Kelly. For a more expansive recent examination of medieval tragedy based on Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Heroides, see Pearcy; for an account of tragedy’s relation to epic and history, see Lee Patterson 244–62; for a meditation on genre itself, see Orlemanski 207–21. 5 Others have occasionally, but not habitually, noted links between romance and tragedy. For example, Eric Jaeger writes of the romances of Chrétien de Troyes that “They knit together tragic failure and epic optimism” (168). Sarah Beckwith finds the tragedy of Lear, with its misrecognition and failed ritual, in the background of Pericles’s romance recognition scenes (85–103). 6 For a reading that associates the poem with Edward II, see also Caldwell 293. 7 For Derrida, the border between life and death creates an impasse in knowledge, space, and logic: an impossible epistemological definition, an impassable territorial border, and an irrational logical demarcation that “make one single braid” (41). 8 “Bere” is from the OE noun gebaeru or geberu, bearing or comportment; for the verb “beren,” MED suggests “behave oneself in combat” and “rush, charge”. 9 Nam nupta per herbas dum nova, Naiadum turba comitata, vagatur, occidit in talum serpentis dente recepto.

(Met. X, 8–10)

10 In Ovid’s version of the story, Orpheus rejects women after the death of his wife and is eventually torn apart by vengeful Maenads. In Virgil’s Georgics IV, Eurydice dies from a snake bite as she flees headlong (dum fugeret praeceps, 457) the advances of Aristaeus. This quasi-rape narrative seems to find an echo in the Fairy King’s abduction. 11 On the court’s desire to restrain the queen’s crisis in the interest of courtly stability, see Kendall 313. 12 On the notion that harmony is implied by the word “melody,” see Lerer 102–105. 13 “Shulde” conveys a range of senses from rightful or prudent conduct to conditional feeling (“might think”) to obligatory, even enforced conduct (MED, s.v. “shulen,” esp. 3a and 3b). 14 See, for instance, Sir Isumbras, who is initially described as a grand lord who likes to hear minstrels singing in his hall; for the minstrel who calls into question the king’s power, see both the Tristan tradition and King Horn.

144  Elizabeth Allen 15 See also Lerer 95–96. 16 For an account of genealogy as a formation of language, see Bloch. On alternative genealogies, see Stahuljak. 17 Pain, danger, miscarriage, and death in childbirth are well known in medieval accounts of childbirth and of medicines, herbs, charms, and pregnancy girdles; for a useful account, see Gibson. Madness can be associated with complications, though not typically: “When the time for delivery came, she could not give birth … for fifteen days the feotus did not move. The living one thought she was being made rotten by the dead one. She began to lose her senses, becoming desperate. ‘What are we to do? We are sitting here in despair.’” The couple makes a vow to St. Thomas and she gives birth (qtd. in Biller 49). Caldwell compares Heurodis here to a virgin mutilating herself to avoid rape (295–96). See also Spearing 258–72. 18 A problem in Derrida’s sense is what is not possible when confronting an aporia or impasse. The problem is a projection or barrier, “a prosthesis that we put forth in order to represent, replace, shelter, or dissimulate ourselves” (11). The aporia is what one faces when “it would no longer be possible to constitute a problem…. the problematic task becomes impossible” (12). 19 In Ovid, the Underworld is “inamoena … regna … / umbrarum” (15–16) and, on the way upwards, “He started out upon the soundless path / that rises steeply through dense fog and darkness,” “Carpitur acclivis per muta silentia trames, / arduus, obscurus, caligine densus opaca” (53–54). Virgil’s Georgics IV contains an extended description of Underworld as dim and insubstantial. 20 This reading of Orfeo’s re-engagement with his memory differs importantly from Simpson, who identifies the recognition scene as the first in the series of recognitions that “reconfirms the traditional order” with little question (27). It also differs from Freudian readings of mourning and melancholia as an approach to the repetitions of romance. For Freud, the unproductive grief of melancholia is marked by identification with the lost object and a consequent aggression against the self (245–49). Elliott Kendall reads Orfeo as becoming a kind of corpse-like figure in the wilderness, whereas once he seeks and finds Heurodis “fairyland becomes more knowable” and enables Orfeo’s “refusal to accept that untimely deaths or madness can dismantle his meaning-full [sic] household world” (323). As compelling as this reading is, I am arguing that a Freudian narrative of progress out of melancholia misconstrues what remains a far more deadly Fairyland and a process of mystification that does not, in fact, end simply by bringing the lost object back to light. 21 On causation in romance, see Bloomfield 97–128. 22 James Simpson’s account of romance is more optimistic than my argument here, but he does remark that the “shameful secrets” of the genre are “presented in displaced and disguised form,” but they are “never simply discarded, since they provide the energies by which the narrative achieves circularity” or resolution (274). Helen Cooper similarly asserts that the sovereign’s return from apparent death is “the model close to the generic heart of romance” (344). 23 The “taken” or abducted reside in variously hellish, shameful, or in-between states in the fairy stories to which Cartlidge compares Orfeo. 24 On minstrelsy in romance, see Zaerr, esp. 26–43; and Liuzza. 25 In Ovid and Virgil, Persephone responds to his prayer, but the souls in torment are momentarily stilled. 26 For example, compare Arthur’s rash promise to Kay in Chrétien de Troyes’s Lancelot; or Dorigen’s rash promise to Aurelius in Chaucer’s Franklin’s Tale.

Death and Romance in Sir Orfeo  145 27 Derrida writes, further, that “my death” implies the impossibility of one death substituting for another: “Everyone’s death, the death of all those who can say ‘my death,’ is irreplaceable” (22). 28 On “social magic,” see Bourdieu 125.

Works Cited Beckwith, Sarah. Shakespeare and the Grammar of Forgiveness. Cornell UP, 2011. Biller, Peter. “Childbirth in the Middle Ages.” History Today, Aug. 1986, pp. 42–49. Bloch, R. Howard. Etymologies and Genealogies: A Literary Anthropology of the French Middle Ages. University of Chicago Press, 1983. Bloomfield, Morton W. “Episodic Motivation and Marvels in Epic and Romance.” Essays and Explorations. Harvard UP, 1970, pp. 96–128. Boethius. Consolation of Philosophy. Translated by Richard Green. Bobbs-Merrill, 1962. Bourdieu, Pierre. “Rites of Institution.” Language and Symbolic Power. Edited by John B. Thompson. Translated by Gino Raymond. Harvard UP, 1999, pp. 117–126. Caldwell, Ellen M. “The Heroism of Heurodis: Self-Mutilation and Restoration in Sir Orfeo.” Papers on Language and Literature: A Journal for Scholars and Critics of Language and Literature, vol. 43, no. 3, 2007, pp. 291–310. Cartlidge, Neil. “Sir Orfeo in the Otherworld: Courting Chaos?” Studies in the Age of Chaucer, vol. 26, 2004, pp. 195–226. Chaucer, Geoffrey. House of Fame. The Riverside Chaucer, 1st edition. Edited by Larry D. Benson. Houghton Mifflin, 1987, pp. 347–74. Cooper, Helen. The English Romance in Time. Oxford UP, 2004. Derrida, Jacques. Aporias. Translated by Thomas Dutoit. Stanford UP, 1993. Falk, Oren. “The Son of Orfeo: Kingship and Compromise in a Middle English Romance.” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, vol. 30, no. 2, 2000, pp. 247–274. Fletcher, Alan J. “Sir Orfeo and the Flight from the Enchanters.” Studies in the Age of Chaucer, vol. 22, 2000, pp. 141–177. Freud, Sigmund. “Mourning and Melancholia.” Complete Psychological Works. Edited and translated by James Strachey. Vol. XIV. Hogarth Press, 1914–16, pp. 243–58. Gibson, Gail. “Scene and Obscene: Seeing and Performing Late Medieval Childbirth.” JMEMS, vol. 29, no. 1, 1999, pp. 7–24. Jaeger, C. Stephen. Enchantment: On Charisma and the Sublime in the Arts of the West. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012. Kelly, H.A. Chaucerian Tragedy. Brewer, 1997. Kendall, Elliott. “Family, Familia, and the Uncanny in Sir Orfeo.” Studies in the Age of Chaucer, vol. 35, 2013, pp. 289–327. Laskaya, Anne and Eve Salisbury, editors. “Sir Orfeo: Introduction.” The Middle English Breton Lays. Medieval Institute Publications, 1995, pp. 15–25. Lerer, Seth. “Artifice and Artistry in Sir Orfeo.” Speculum, vol. 60, no. 1, 1985, pp. 92–109.

146  Elizabeth Allen Liuzza, Ray. “Sir Orfeo: Sources, Traditions, and the Poetics of Performance.” JMRS, vol. 21, no. 2, 1991, pp. 269–284. Martin, Charles, translator. Metamorphoses. By Ovid. W. W. Norton & Co., 2004. The Middle English Dictionary. Edited by Hans Kurath, Sherman M. Kuhn, and Robert E. Lewis. The University of Michigan Press, 1952–2001. MED, quod.lib.umich.edu/m/med. Orlemanski, Julie. “Genre.” A Handbook of Middle English Studies. Edited by Marion Turner. John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., 2013. pp. 208–221. Ovid. Metamorphoses. Edited and translated by Frank Justus Miller, revised by G. P. Goold. 2nd edition. Vol. 4. Harvard UP, 1984. Patterson, Lee. “Troilus and Criseyde: Genre and Source.” Answerable Style. Edited by Frank Grady and Andrew Galloway. Ohio State UP, 2013, pp. 244–62. Pearcy, Roy J. “‘And Nysus doughter song with fressh entente’: Tragedy and Romance in Troilus and Criseyde.” Studies in the Age of Chaucer, vol. 24, 2002, pp. 269–297. Simpson, James. Reform and Cultural Revolution. Oxford UP, 2002. Sir Orfeo. 2nd edition. Edited by A. J. Bliss. Clarendon Press, 1966. Spearing, A.C. “Sir Orfeo: Madness and Gender.” The Spirit of Medieval English Popular Romance. Edited by Ad Putter and Jane Gilbert. Longman, 2000, pp. 258–72. Stahuljak, Zrinka. Bloodless Genealogies of the French Middle Ages: Translatio, Kinship, and Metaphor. UP of Florida, 2005. Tolkien, J.R.R. “On Faerie-Stories.” Tree and Leaf. HarperCollins, 1988, pp. 1–82. Virgil. Georgics. Works. Translated by H. Rushton Fairclough, revised by J. P. Goold. Vol 1. Harvard UP, 1999. Williams, Tara. “Fairy Magic, Wonder, and Morality in Sir Orfeo.” Philological Quarterly, vol. 91, no. 4, 2012, pp. 537–568. Zaerr, Linda Marie. Performance and the Middle English Romance. D.S. Brewer, 2012.

Part III

Aesthetic Crossings

9 Death and the Maidens John Banville’s Ekphrastic Storyworlds Neil Murphy

But did I believe they were dead? In my mind they were held suspended in a vast bright space, upright, their arms linked and their eyes wide open, gazing gravely before them into illimitable depths of light. John Banville, The Sea

Death haunts John Banville’s work; from the casual murder of Josie Bell in The Book of Evidence (1989), to the allegorical attempts at her resuscitation in Ghosts (1993) and Athena (1995), and the multiple deaths in The Sea (2005), the presence of murder, suicide, death by illness, and the accompanying philosophical question of ontological vanishing—or the expiry of the other—spread like an illuminating stain in his work. But death is also intimately connected with the compelling sequence of visual narrative devices that Banville places at the heart of much of his mature work. The parallel positioning of paintings embedded within the linguistic narratives generates an immediacy of presence via the stilllife effect while simultaneously blending the spatial fixity of the visual images with the sequential temporality of the novels. In some cases, the images in the paintings are offered up as notional alternatives to dead characters (The Book of Evidence) while in others they are offered as a means of combating death, as in The Sea, in which Max is fascinated by Pierre Bonnard’s habit of painting his wife for years after her death, rescuing her, in a sense, from deathly oblivion. In this narrative reworking of Orpheus, Banville self-reflexively positions Max at the center of a multifaceted artistic attempt to mitigate death by recovering the other in artistic form. In fact, the use of ekphrastic language, in Susanne Peters’ view, “reaches its apotheosis in The Sea” where the “classical concept of the role of Ekphrasis in combating, even reversing, death continues to figure” (50). This chapter will demonstrate that death and art are explicitly and implicitly connected in John Banville’s The Book of Evidence and The Sea, two seminal novels that act as major defining moments in Banville’s development. Banville’s deployment of the ekphrastic mode in several key novels is one of the ways in which his narrative structures extend beyond the sequential form of prose fiction. By interrupting the temporal sequence

150  Neil Murphy of narrative discourse, the ekphrastic moments both pause the narrative momentum of the fictions and simultaneously establish additional ontological levels that resonate with the primary plot lines. In this way, the temporally static and the sequential merge to create a dynamic sense of structural coherence. In the context of Banville’s late-modernist or postmodernist inspired fictions, the integration of additional ontological levels into the aesthetic whole also reminds one of Brian McHale’s assertion that “every ontological boundary is an analogue or metaphor of death” (231). For McHale, with respect to postmodern fiction, the foregrounding of ontological boundaries is also “a means of foregrounding death, the unthinkable, available to the imagination, if only in a displaced way” (231). In addition, he observes that “texts about themselves, self-reflective, self-conscious texts, are also, as if inevitably, about death, precisely because they are about ontological differences and the transgression of ontological boundaries” (231). McHale’s ontological boundaries thus act as shadow-puppet shows of death itself while the self-conscious voices that proliferate postmodernist fictions are the narrative harbingers of imaginatively displaced death. Banville’s work typically features multiple ontological frames that are linked by the presence of complex intertextual patterning, ekphrastic interludes, imagined scenarios (within the primary fictional ontologies), overlapping real and imagined memory-sequences, and multiple localized mirror-images that hint at alternative narrative planes or parallel ontologies. In McHale’s sense, the foregrounding of such ontological boundaries effectively simulates, and permits us to imaginatively experience, death in advance (232). Banville’s use of ekphrasis has such an effect; it registers a discontinuation of temporal sequence while simultaneously establishing a concurrent, but related, ontologically separate world. Extending McHale’s logic to ekphrasis has particular significance given its traditional association with death, as earlier alluded to by Peters. In fact, Elizabeth Bergmann Loizeaux argues that “[a]ll ekphrasis could be said to begin necessarily in elegy” because of “the fact of difference between the living poet and the fixed image, always already a corpse” (63). Similarly, the embedding of ekphrastic moments in literary fictions inevitably includes elements of both representation, in verbal form, and critical commentary on the representation itself. So, in Murray Krieger’s terms, ekphrasis is both an example of “the creative act itself—through the Greek mimesis, imitating, copying—and of the secondary critical act of commentary, description, revelation” (185). This partly corresponds with McHale’s observation that self-reflexive moments announce the ontological boundary between fictional planes; by definition, this too occurs in ekphrasis, which is always both a creative and a critical gesture. Thus in certain kinds of prose fiction—Banville’s included—ekphrasis, death, the elegiac, and the ontologically transgressive, fuse to create multi-textured storyworlds in which a multiplicity of fictional levels intersect and inform each other. Furthermore, in Banville’s fiction, ekphrasis never simply offers submissive plot

Death and the Maidens  151 diversion or mere adornment. Rather, as James Heffernan argues, ekphrasis “is the unruly antagonist of narrative, the ornamental digression that refuses to be ornamental” (5). As we shall see, Banville’s work is intimately connected to the primary aesthetic rationale, while it also saturates and disturbs the primary narrated level to such a degree that it may even be seen as a replacement narrative. In a series of interconnected narrative innovations, death, paintings, and ekphrasis are inextricably linked in The Book of Evidence and The Sea. In The Book of Evidence, Freddie Montgomery’s obsession with a painting, Portrait of a Woman with Gloves,1 leads directly to his murder of Josie Bell, a maid in the country house where the painting is displayed; the painting is also the source-material for Freddie’s ekphrasis, as well as his invention of a scenario that details the actual painting of the image—a kind of pre-ekphrasis. The Sea, alternatively, might reasonably be described as Banville’s book of the dead, littered as it is, ultimately, with Max’s procession of corpses: the drowned twins, his cancer-stricken wife, Anna, his own early self (he has effectively ‘killed’ his former self with a change of name); we even have a doctor death, Mr. Todd (Tod being German for death), who conveys Anna’s fatal diagnosis. The ghost of Pierre Bonnard’s wife, Marthe, also haunts the novel via Max’s ekphrasis of the painting Nude in the Bath, and Small Dog (1941–46), and as a spectral mirror image of Max’s own wife Anna. In both novels, the constant shifts through ontological boundaries, across multiple diegetic levels, deepen Banville’s engagement with a narrative poetics of the dead, in which the primary level’s engagement with death finds close resonant correspondences as one shifts across storyworlds and states of being. In The Book of Evidence, the figuration of the two female figures (Josie Bell and the woman in the painting), both of whom are dead in different senses, is critical to how Banville’s self-conscious aesthetic context is developed. Similarly, a consideration of how the painting is integrated with several other narrative elements in the novel alerts one to the limits of a plot-centric reading. The resonant relationship between the woman in the painting (including the ‘invented’ scenario of her being painted) and Josie Bell is of primary significance. From the first, the two women are narratively conflated 2: It was not just the woman’s painted stare that watched me. Everything in the picture, that brooch, those gloves, the flocculent darkness at her back, every spot on the canvas was an eye fixed on me unblinkingly. I retreated a pace, faintly aghast. The silence was fraying at the edges. I heard cows lowing, a car starting up. I remembered the taxi, and turned to go. A maid was standing in the open French window. She must have come in just then and seen me there and started back in alarm. (BoE 79)

152  Neil Murphy This initiates a pattern of narrative interconnections between the two figures. In fact, the next time that Freddie views the painting, on the day of the theft and murder, this overt conflation is repeated, when Josie enters the room precisely at the moment that he is stealing the painting: So I struggled up, moaning and sniveling, and grasped the picture in my arms and staggered with it blindly, nose to nose, in the direction of the French window. Those eyes were staring into mine, I almost blushed. And then—how shall I express it—then somehow I sensed, behind that stare, another presence, watching me. I stopped, and lowered the picture, and there she was, standing in the open window, just as she had stood the day before, wide-eyed, with one hand raised. (BoE 110) The two figures again merge; their distinct ontological zones are momentarily transcended and both effectively become figures in paintings. Josie holds precisely the same pose as she did the previous day, literally framed within the French windows, herself a figure in a painting. The narrative superimposition invites one to compare Freddie’s descriptions of the women in two consecutively placed additional scenes—the invented scenario that Freddie conjures, derived from the woman in the painting, and the scene in which he murders Josie. In Freddie’s invented scenario, considerable focus on the artist’s “impersonal intensity” (107) is offered, echoing the mesmerizing cold detachment in the painting that Freddie had earlier acknowledged. In turn, the painter’s sense of detachment is mirrored in the woman’s reaction to seeing her painting: She had expected it would be like looking in a mirror, but this is someone she does not recognize, and yet knows. The words come unbidden into her head: Now I know how to die. She puts on her glove, and signals to her maid. (108) Several narrative traces combine in this imagined event: the linkage of death, self-consciousness, and imaginative apprehension, as well as the presence of the maid and the artist’s detachment, all conspire to create a distorted, or inverted, mise-en-abyme within the novel, and simultaneously foreshadows the murder of the maid Josie that occurs in the immediately preceding pages. The significance of the inverted mirror lies in Freddie’s own inability to achieve the detachment of his imagined artist-figure, an inability that lies at the heart of his failure of imagination.

Death and the Maidens  153 Freddie immediately thereafter kills the maid Josie, claiming that he did so because “I never imagined her vividly enough, that I never made her be there sufficiently” (215). Several critics argue that Freddie does, in fact, genuinely see the girl but not until just before he kills her. Elke D’Hoker claims that he “clearly sees the maid in the moment before he kills her” (27), while Patricia Coughlan refers to “Freddie’s terrible failure to apprehend the ‘radiance’ of Josie Bell until the very last seconds when he is already embarked upon murdering her” (90). However, if one reads the event of the murder in terms of the aesthetic context in which it is embedded, a fundamentally different reading may be possible; it is possible to view the imagined scenario as the articulation of an artistic credo that registers a case for impersonality as a genuine artistic aim, itself a familiar modernist position. 3 Freddie’s encounter with Josie is crucially marked by subjectivity, by over-personalization. Roger Scruton points to a fundamental difference between personal interest and “disinterested interest.” Disinterested interest, or engagement, for Scruton, permits one to “set all interests aside, so as to attend to the thing itself,” and to thus erase all traces of self-interest (22–23). In The Book of Evidence, Freddie self-pityingly feels that everything is unfair (113), he is embarrassed and rages at his situation, and feels more “exposed” than ever before (112). He maintains that he can see “clean through her head”—hardly lending credence to his claim of being able to see Josie “as she truly is.” Similarly, almost at the moment of her death, Freddie insists that he feels her presence but nonetheless fails to set all interests aside in order to actually describe Josie in any meaningful detail; all that is offered is one line that speaks of her “mousy hair and bad skin, that bruised look around her eyes” (113). She is instead, as with so much else in the first half of the novel, smothered with clichés; they are like “a married couple having a fight” (113), she is “wide-eyed, like a rebuked child” (112), while he himself is “an old lion roaring at the whip and chair” (111). Freddie later admits his true failing to be his inability to imagine her vividly at any point before he killed her: [T]hat I never imagined her vividly enough, that I never made her be there sufficiently, that I did not make her live. Yes, that failure of imagination is my real crime, the one that made the others possible. What I told that policeman is true—I killed her because I could kill her, and I could kill her because for me she was not alive. (215) Freddie’s imaginative failure is an aesthetic failure, and his acknowledgment of this does not support the notion that he truly saw Josie just before the murder. Furthermore, he later admits that the first time he saw her “in the open French window with the blue and gold of summer

154  Neil Murphy at her back,” was no different to the moment when he “hit her again and again,” in the sense that on both occasions there had “been no more of her there, for me, than there was in the newspaper stories” (215). The resulting death speaks primarily of aesthetic failing of a very particular kind. Freddie did not manage to achieve the same quality of artistic detachment as the imagined painter of the Portrait of a Woman with Gloves, and thus fails to see Josie. In effect, this amounts to an overt discursive rejection of over-personalized forms of artistic engagement on Banville’s part. The ekphrasis of the painting, the general commentary surrounding the painting, and the imaginative account of the artist and his subject all self-consciously mirror the work-in-process that is the novel itself. Françoise Canon-Roger argues that in The Book of Evidence, Banville “both shows a verbal picture in the making and provides the means of a satiric interpretation for it,” through the device of the painting (25). While this is certainly accurate, the relationship between the painting and the novel is perhaps more complex than the rhetorical purpose of straight satire. The painting has several functions in the novel; firstly, on its most obvious level the plot is framed around the material object of the painting. Secondly, within the novel’s figurative system, Freddie’s ekphrasis and fictional account of the painting of the girl both effect a metaphorical hall-of-mirrors in which a nuanced self-reflexive commentary on the limits and possibilities of art are played out, including a narrative transference of significance from the visual to the verbal form. The importance of the painting is not merely a parallel locus of implication but an attempt to extend beyond the aesthetics of movement that one associates with linguistic narratives, towards the quality of stillness that is frequently associated with the visual arts—what Stephen Cheeke terms the “for ever now” quality of visual images (5). Cheeke explains how the “timeless and the temporal” might feature in the ontological frame that is “art’s eternity”: Aesthetic patterning and form, not merely in the sense of high technical competence, but also in the sense (and the two are indivisible) of complex intelligibility, promise a marvelous and perhaps mystical intersection of the timeless and the temporal or chronologically linear. (5) In The Book of Evidence, the narrative account seeks to interweave both the visual and the verbal, and the stillness of (visual) art with the inherent movement of verbal narrative. It is particularly striking that the precise point of intersection of these different ontological levels is closely aligned to Josie’s death, the act of painting the girl, and the still elegiac world of the painting itself. Anja Müller, who explores ekphrastic

Death and the Maidens  155 functions in the Frames trilogy (The Book of Evidence, Ghosts, and Athena) in terms of the representation of women, sees the relationship between the different ontological levels in more literal terms: “In The Book of Evidence, the narrator tries to materialize a woman (i.e., to render her most vividly) through ekphrasis, while objectifying her as if she were a picture” (199). It is perhaps more fruitful to consider that the precise reasons for Freddie’s failure to ‘render’ Josie Bell—to aestheticize her, and thus truly ‘see her’—lie primarily in the inverted example of the painter who managed to make his woman live, in the forms of art, precisely because he did not seek to over-personalize his subject, and eyes her instead with “a kind of impersonal intensity” (106). The novel’s reflective, embedded self-referential discourse suggests the connection between impersonal engagement and the life-giving process of meaningful aesthetic renditions. This discourse, represented by the inverted painterly scenario, is akin to the self-referential signals that McHale sees in texts that foreground ontological boundaries, and which are “inevitably, about death” because they represent “the transgression of ontological boundaries” (231). Banville’s dead and dying characters in The Sea are also repeatedly represented in the context of varying visual images. In addition to the pervasive presence of Pierre Bonnard’s work and that of other painters like Van Gogh and Vermeer, mirror images, windows, photographs, and reflections of various kinds, are extensively deployed throughout the novel, particularly with reference to the figuration of Max’s dying wife, Anna. For example, when Max and Anna receive her cancer diagnosis from Mr. Todd in his office, a subtle inversion of the surface reality is integrated into the primary diegetic level as a narratorial gateway to another imagined level. While awaiting the doctor, Max averts his eyes from the scene at hand and gazes out the window, “the glass wall,” as he calls it, with his back to his wife. Through a trick of the light, he observes Anna, “palely reflected in the glass,” like one of the vague, barely discernible figures that almost materialize in several of Bonnard’s paintings.4 Anna sits “very straight on the metal chair in three-­quarters profile” with “one knee crossed on the other and her joined hands resting on her thigh” (15). Framed as she is by the window, Anna simultaneously occupies two ontological layers, being both herself and her ghostly other. Similarly, in their kitchen, a framing window at one point generates a sense of visual doubling in Max’s perspective: Light from the window behind me shone on the lenses of her spectacles where they hung at her collar bone, giving the eerie effect of another, miniature she standing close in front of her under her chin with eyes cast down. (21)

156  Neil Murphy The distorted sense of proportion and the pictorial illusion—via the double-mirrored image—emphasize the ontological instability of the subject, Anna, while the grim presence of her impending death lingers forcefully in the already splintered levels of being that she occupies. In fact, at times in the novel she becomes the literal site of ontological transgression, such as when Max forces himself to think of her, post-death: I make myself think of her, I do it as an exercise. She is lodged in me like a knife and yet I am beginning to forget her. Already the image of her that I hold in my head is fraying, bits of pigment, flakes of gold leaf, are chipping off. Will the entire canvas be empty one day? (215) The remembered image of the dead woman, the figures in art, and Max’s aestheticizing consciousness, conjoin to conceive of a kind of art-life in death, akin to Bonnard’s late interiors, which are illuminated by images of his dead wife, and multiple other figures who whisper just out of focus. The presence of Bonnard in The Sea is even more profoundly significant to both the creation of ontological shifts and to the presence of death. Max is working on a biography of Bonnard, which accounts for the frequent allusions to the painter’s work and life. The novel frequently alludes to familiar items in Bonnard’s paintings, to biographical details of his life, and to the integration of his aesthetic principles into the self-­ conscious Banvillean fiction. Furthermore, both of Max’s dead females— his wife, Anna, and his childhood love, Chloe—are continually linked to Bonnard’s paintings in the novel. In fact, some of Bonnard’s work is so central to the narrative framing of The Sea that Rüdiger Imhof argues that the painter’s late work, in particular, “provides an exact correlative to the narrative” (176). Banville’s and Bonnard’s work are conjoined in several ways, but perhaps most profoundly in terms of how each artist seeks to respond to death via his art. The connections between Bonnard’s painting, Nude in the Bath, and Small Dog, and Max’s figuration of Anna are overtly registered throughout the novel. Max is explicitly reminded of Anna when he looks at the painting: “Her right hand rests on her thigh, stilled in the act of supination, and I think of Anna’s hands on the table that first day when we came back from Mr Todd, her helpless hands with palms upturned…” (153). Anna’s hands were also earlier mentioned in the reflected image that Max witnesses in the framed window of Mr. Todd’s office, like Marthe’s, “resting on her thigh” (15). This effects a sequence of intertwined visual images that blur the ontological lines between the two aestheticized women. Bonnard painted Marthe in the bath repeatedly in her later years and Banville also depicts Anna taking long baths during her illness. Like Marthe and Bonnard, who shut themselves away in isolation in Le

Death and the Maidens  157 Cannet (Cogeval and Cahn 170), Max and Anna also closed themselves away from the world after her diagnosis in “a deep dreamy silence” (154), effectively in a disconnected, silence-filled ontological otherness that mirrors the impression generated by Bonnard’s domestic interiors. In Bonnard’s painting, Nude in the Bath, and Small Dog, 5 the sense of intense silence and stillness is, in Max’s ekphrastic reading, observed in a fusion with fluid spatiality: “All moves here,” Max claims, “moves in stillness, in aqueous silence” (152). Movement, stillness, and silence come together in a manner that reflects Banville’s novel throughout. For example, Max had earlier indicated that, for him, [A]ll had begun to run together, past and possible future and impossible present. In the ashen weeks of daytime dread and nightly terror before Anna was forced at last to acknowledge the inevitability of Mr Todd and his prods and potions, I seemed to inhabit a twilit netherworld in which it was scarcely possible to distinguish dream from waking, since both waking and dreaming had the same penetrable, darkly velutinous texture, and in which I was wafted this way and that in a state of feverish lethargy, as if it were I and not Anna who was destined soon to be another one among the already so numerous shades. (97) The manner in which the boundaries between Bonnard’s and Max’s ontologies mirror or echo each other in an elaborate transgression of fictive zones reminds one again of McHale’s sense of how postmodern writing “models or simulates death” via a “vacillation between different kinds and degrees of reality” (232). In the observations above, Max renders this sense even more explicit when he offers testament to an imagined world beyond worlds, “a twilit netherworld,” in which he too begins the process of modeling his own death. A similar sense of deathly in-between ontological states is encapsulated in Max’s ekphrasis of Nude in the Bath, with Dog, in which Marthe is already an aestheticized revenant: In the Nude in the Bath, with Dog, begun in 1941, a year before Marthe’s death and not completed until 1946, she lies there, pink and mauve and gold, a goddess of the floating world, attenuated, ageless, as much dead as alive, beside her on the tiles her little brown dog, her familiar, a dachshund, I think, curled, watchful on its mat or what may be a square of flaking sunlight falling from an unseen window. The narrow room that is her refuge vibrates around her, throbbing in its colors. Her feet, the left one tensed at the end of its impossibly long leg, seem to have pushed the bath out of shape and made it bulge at the left end, and beneath the bath on that side, in

158  Neil Murphy the same force-field, the floor is pulled out of alignment too, and seems on the point of pouring away into the corner, not like a floor at all but a moving pool of dappled water. All moves here, moves in stillness, in aqueous silence. (152) Nude in the Bath, with Dog was painted both before and after Marthe’s death and exerts such a force on the subject that the bath itself bulges while the floor is “pulled out of alignment.” Bonnard and Banville both seek to bear artistic testament to death, or to the subject rescued from death. In Max’s ekphrasis, time is effectively transcended and acts as a narrated variation of the visual form from which it is derived. Müller has made a similar observation in her analysis of the “extensive ekphrastic passages” in Banville’s art trilogy, suggesting that the effect is to “incorporate a notion of space into the temporal verbal medium, creating moments in which the flux of time seems to be momentarily suspended to experience an immediacy of presence” (187). The immediacy of presence, in all its stillness, is directly linked to the death-subjects in The Sea, just as it is in The Book of Evidence. In The Sea, both Anna and Marthe are enshrined in the respective portraits of their creators. While the representation of Anna does not, strictly speaking, amount to ekphrasis, but rather what Heffernan terms pictorialism (which “generates in language effects similar to those created by pictures”), certain depictions, as we have seen, seek to mimic ekphrastic effect (3). Both female figures’ existences are predicated on the conditions of paintings and are transformed into the still ontological otherness of art. In death they are further transfigured; while Marthe was seventy-three when she died, Bonnard continued to paint her as a young woman, an image that is extracted from material reality. Bonnard painted Marthe as an impression of shimmering color in the late interiors, more a fluid presence than material flesh. Similarly, Anna evolves into a grim death-image, a face that speaks of death and otherness: “She said so many strange things nowadays, as if she were already somewhere else, beyond me, where even words had a different meaning. [….] Her face, worn almost to the bone, had taken on a frightful beauty” (155). Gaston Bachelard suggests that imagination is not “the faculty for forming images of reality; it is the faculty for forming images which go beyond reality, which sing reality” (16). In death, in the stillness of paintings, in the very fact of their being centered at the intersection between the mortality of the flesh and the immortality of art, the dead women in Banville’s fiction, irrespective of their significance for gendered readings of his work, 6 are not images of material women, they are instead images which sing beyond reality.

Death and the Maidens  159

Notes 1 The painting to which Freddie refers is Willem Drost’s Portrait of a Woman (1653–55). Oil on canvas. 50.8 × 76.4 in. (129 × 195 cm). Szépművészeti Múzeum / Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest. 2 I consider the relationship between, and representation of, these two female figurations more comprehensively in my book, John Banville (Bucknell UP, 2018). 3 T. S. Eliot, for example, suggests that the “progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality” (2173). Similarly, in James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Stephen contends that the “personality of the artist, at first a cry or a cadence or a mood and then a fluid and lambent narrative, finally refines itself out of existence, impersonalizes itself, so to speak” (233). 4 Such ghostly figures proliferate in Bonnard’s late interiors, in paintings like White Interior (1932) in which a vague figure can be seen bending beside the table, while in Corner of the Dining Room at Le Cannet (1932), a female presence can be discerned, turned away from the viewer with some of the head cropped. Similarly, in The Sea, Max directly connects the figure of Chloe with a presence from another of Bonnard’s paintings: “her handsome, high-domed, oddly convex forehead—like, it suddenly strikes me, remarkably like the forehead of that ghostly figure seen in profile hovering at the edge of Bonnard’s Table in Front of the Window” (137). 5 In fact, the title that Max uses is a minor variation on the correct title, Nude in the Bath with Small Dog (or Nu dans le Bain au petit Chien). Max instead uses Nude in the Bath with Dog in the novel. This most likely represents an attempt to generalize beyond a single painting, while retaining much of its detail in the ekphrasis. Several Bonnard paintings feature a dachshund (Woman with Dog, Dressing Table and Mirror, and The Bathroom) and Banville may be simply alluding to them. 6 Joseph McMinn and Derek Hand were the first to offer critiques of B ­ anville’s depiction of women, with the former considering it largely a matter of representation and the latter considering it an extension of ­Banville’s heroes’ general engagement with an “unknowable” world (McMinn 2; Hand 113). Alternatively, with respect to The Book of Evidence, Elke D’Hoker argues that the world of art is more responsive to Freddie’s subjective “imaginative interpretations” than is the less malleable figure of the ‘real’ woman, Josie Bell. I discuss Banville’s gender representation at greater length in my book, John Banville (Bucknell UP, 2018).

Works Cited Bachelard, Gaston. Water and Dreams: An Essay on the Imagination of Matter. Pegasus Foundation, 1983. Banville, John. The Book of Evidence. Secker & Warburg, 1989. ———. The Sea. Alfred A. Knopf, 2005. Bergmann Loizeaux, Elizabeth. Twentieth-Century Poetry and the Visual Arts. Cambridge UP, 2008. Canon-Roger, Françoise. “John Banville’s Imagines in ‘The Book of Evidence.’” European Journal of English Studies, vol. 4, no. 1, 2000, pp. 25–38. Cheeke, Stephen. Writing for Art: The Aesthetics of Ekphrasis. Manchester UP, 2008.

160  Neil Murphy Cogeval, Guy, and Isabelle Cahn, editors. Pierre Bonnard: Painting Arcadia. DelMonico Books, 2016. Coughlan, Patricia. “Banville, the Feminine, and the Scenes of Eros.” Irish University Review, vol. 36, no. 1, Spring-Summer 2006, pp. 81–101. D’Hoker, Elke. “Portrait of the Other as a Woman with Gloves: Ethical Perspectives in John Banville’s The Book of Evidence.” Critique, vol. 44, no. 1, Fall 2002, pp. 23–37. Eliot, Thomas Stearns. “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” Vol. 2 of The Norton Anthology of English Literature, 6th edition. Edited by M.H. Abrams. W. W. Norton & Co., 1993, pp. 2170–2175. Hand, Derek. John Banville: Exploring Fictions. The Liffey Press, 2002. Heffernan, James A.W. Museum of Words: The Poetics of Ekphrasis from Homer to Ashbery. The University of Chicago Press, 2004. Imhof, Rüdiger. “The Sea: ‘Was’t well done?’” Irish University Review, vol. 36, no. 1, 2006, pp. 165–181. Joyce, James. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Penguin, 1992. Krieger, Murray. Ekphrasis: The Illusion of the Natural Sign. Johns Hopkins UP, 1992. McHale, Brian. Postmodernist Fiction. Routledge, 1987. McMinn, Joseph. The Supreme Fictions of John Banville. Manchester UP, 1999. Müller, Anja. “‘You Have Been Framed’: The Function of Ekphrasis for the Representation of Women in John Banville’s Trilogy (The Book of Evidence, Ghosts, Athena).” Studies in the Novel, vol. 36, no. 2, Summer 2004, pp. 185–205. Peters, Susanne, Klaus Stierstorfer, and Laurenz Volkmann, editors. Teaching Contemporary Literature and Culture, 6 vols. Wissenschaftlicher, 2006–2008. Scruton, Roger. Beauty: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford UP, 2011.

10 Blood Meridian, the Sublime, and Aesthetic Narrativizations of Death W. Michelle Wang

Death is an “occasion of the sublime,” writes Jahan Ramazani (174). In a variety of guises and names, “death precipitates the emotional turning called the sublime” and is the “recurrent obsession” for theorists “from Longinus to Heidegger and Bloom” (164). Since the sublime predominantly concerns the unpresentable (including that which ultimately remains unknowable), it seems inextricably linked to death. Drawing on the works of Neil Hertz, Thomas Weiskel, and Martin Heidegger, amongst others, Ramazani interprets the sublime as “a staged confrontation”: an “ecstatic encounter with death” (164). I explore this staged confrontation in the present chapter by explicating the relationship between narrating death and the sublime in postmodern and contemporary fiction, using Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian (1985) as a case study. Extensive engagements with the posthumous in postmodern and contemporary fiction—such as Flann O’Brien’s The Third Policeman (1939–40/1967) and Alasdair Gray’s Lanark (1981), amongst innumerable others—make the relationship between death and the sublime a rich avenue of study, particularly in light of Brian McHale’s remark that “postmodernist fiction is about death in a way that other writing, of other periods, is not. Indeed, insofar as postmodernist fiction foregrounds ontological themes and ontological structure, we might say that it is always about death” (231). Marie-Luise Kohlke, for instance, uses Michael Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost (2000) and Pat Barker’s The Ghost Road (1995) to highlight “the violated body” as a problematic site of “unexpected transcendence” (139). In this chapter, I focus on the sublime as an aesthetic mode of narrating death. I begin with a brief, condensed history of the sublime, including its key characteristics and the associated affect (and effects) that philosophers, artists, and writers typically associate with this aesthetic mode. My analysis suggests that the novel’s elaborate, aesthetic narrativizations of death stylistically distance the narration from a stance of historical objectivity—despite McCarthy going “out of his way to lock a great deal of Blood Meridian” to the historical sources that belie its creation (Sepich, “What” 137). That is, his writing celebrates language

162  W. Michelle Wang as contrived artifice rather than transparent medium, notwithstanding its historical subject-matter. In doing so, Blood Meridian implicitly stages conflicts between artful language and historical representation, between aesthetic appreciation and ethical dissent, and between beauty and violence. This chapter explores the implications of such conflicts as I consider the sublime’s relationship to aesthetic narrativizations of death in Blood Meridian. One of the earliest accounts of the sublime, dated sometime between the first and third centuries, can be traced to Longinus, who emphasized a speaker’s moral character (one “whose spirit is generous and aspiring” and capable of “grandeur of thought”) and “a certain disorder of language, imitating the agitation and commotion of the soul” (Lang, “Introduction”; Longinus, Sublime §8). Interest in the sublime became particularly pervasive between the mid-eighteenth- and early ­nineteenth-century, spanning a vast array of cultural movements and national traditions. These encompassed the British Romantic and Gothic traditions, which included figures such as Irish philosopher Edmund Burke and English poets William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge; the German Romantic tradition, best exemplified by Caspar David Friedrich’s landscape paintings; the American tradition of landscape painting, as represented by the work of Thomas Cole, ­Fredric Edwin Church, Fitz Hugh Lane, and others; as well as ­K antian and Nietzschean philosophical traditions. The sublime’s emerging importance “reflected a new cultural awareness of the profoundly limited nature of the self,” which led artists, writers, and philosophers “to draw attention to intense experiences which lay beyond conscious control” (Morley 14–15). The aesthetic mode of the sublime thus “provided a flexible semantic container for the murky new Romantic experiences of awe, terror, [and] boundlessness,” by paralyzing “the spectator’s traditional habits of seeing and thinking” (Rosenblum 109; Adorno, “Aesthetic” 362). Critical theorizations of the sublime regained momentum in the early twentieth century, inspired by the work of poets such as W. B. Yeats,1 Surrealist writing and iconography, and artists such as Kasimir ­M alevich, Wassily Kandinsky, Piet Mondrian, Barnett N ­ ewman, and Mark Rothko (Dickson and Romanets 22; Harten 73; Johnson 122). Sometimes termed artists of the “abstract sublime,” their works are often discussed by art theorists through terms such as “the infinite,” indeterminacy, and ambiguity, in their challenges to “the continuity and wholeness of spatial experience” (Harten 73; Johnson 122; van de Vall 72–73). 2 The renewed importance of the sublime as an aesthetic mode is in part conditioned by traumas of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Simon Morley, for instance, points to the works of artists such as Joseph Beuys, Anselm Kiefer, Doris Salcedo, and others, which address “the

Blood Meridian  163 sublime’s connection to traumatic historical events” (13)—a connection which I suggest is inextricably tied to narrativizations of death in ­ ndrew postmodern and contemporary art, literature, and philosophy. A Slade proposes that interest in the sublime is “grounded in violent historical experience” (“Antigone” 87). “How, for example, should we speak ­ ambodia, of the terrors of recent history, of Auschwitz, Hiroshima, C Rwanda, and 9/11? How could these events be described […] as objects of sublime delight?” (P. Shaw 127). Philip Shaw suggests that these events can only be “‘known’ by refusing to phrase [them] in terms of a judgment of understanding; for what the Holocaust [and other horrors of the contemporary age] signifies is nothing less than the impossibility of such knowledge” (128). This paradox or aporia likewise underpins Jacques Derrida’s conception of the “nonpassage” (Aporias 12)—a point to which I shall return. Three aspects of the sublime most relevant to narrating death in postmodern and contemporary fiction pertain to limitlessness, conflicting affective states, and the interrelationship between ethics and aesthetics. Theorists of the sublime return repeatedly to notions of the “limitless,” “limitlessness,” and “unboundedness” (Rosenblum 112; Crowther 7; Johnson 122; Gilbert-Rolfe 51). Jean-François Lyotard argues that literary art in particular has a greater potential for generating a sense of the sublime: “words themselves have, over other aesthetic materials, the privilege of engendering a limitlessness” (66–67; 55). Limitlessness also closely relates to the notion of infinitude, most prominently in Immanuel Kant’s “mathematical sublime” (Kant 394; see also Burke 118; van de Vall 72; Merritt 39; Etlin 233; 230). Though Kant was primarily concerned with natural phenomena, postmodern and contemporary literature rigorously play with the idea of the infinite: prominent instances include Jorge Luis Borges’s The Garden of Forking Paths (1941) and ­Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967/1970). “[A]ffective states (such as transcendence, awe, fear, and terror)” also signal the presence of the sublime, characterized by “an overabundance of stimulation” or the sense of “exceed[ing] what imaginative thought can grasp at once in a form” (Costelloe 7; 2; Potkay 204–207; P. Shaw 7; Weiskel 105; Lyotard 53–54). The sublime’s effect of transfixed terror, in particular, represents what Derrida terms “the experience of the nonpassage,” “paralyzing us in this separation” (Aporias 12) between the agonizing threshold of knowing and unknowing, as the unnamed protagonist meets his end in one of Blood Meridian’s most petrifying passages. He stood outside listening to the voices fading away and he looked again at the silent tracks of the stars where they died over the darkened hills. Then he opened the rough board door of the jakes and stepped in.

164  W. Michelle Wang The judge was seated upon the closet. He was naked and rose up smiling and gathered him in his arms against his immense and terrible flesh and shot the wooden barlatch home behind him. (347) Readers never learn of the protagonist’s eventual fate (most speculate he is raped and/or killed) as we are forever frozen in his moment of paralysis— our last glimpse of the world through his eyes—as the narrative shifts in focalization from the jakes back to the saloon. Lyotard suggests that “there are no sublime objects but only sublime feelings” (182). Though philosophers vary rather widely on what these “sublime feelings” might entail,3 most broadly agree that the aesthetic mode of the sublime is characterized by resistance or conflicting affective states. Kant, Schiller, Lyotard, and Derrida all point in various ways to the affective experience of the sublime as a contradictory, indirect, and/or “negative pleasure” that alternates between attraction and repulsion, knowing and unknowing (Kant 391; Lyotard 67; 109; Derrida, “Parergon” 42; Merritt 40; P. Shaw 7; Slade, Lyotard 85; Schiller 182– 83; Ramazani 164). “The ascendancy of the sublime” in the twentieth century, Adorno notes, “is one with art’s compulsion that fundamental contradictions not be covered up but fought through in themselves” (Aesthetic Theory 197). Such conflicting affective states almost invariably relate to the larger interrelationship between ethics and aesthetics in postmodern and contemporary fiction.4 In a recent book celebrating literary greatness and the American sublime, Harold Bloom emphasizes the centrality of writers who represent the “incessant effort to transcend the human without forsaking humanism” (Daemon 3).5 Ethical considerations are thus inextricably implicated in the aesthetic mode of the sublime. Drawing on the work of Martha Nussbaum, Berys Gaut notes that “‘texts which display to us the complexity, the indeterminacy, the sheer difficulty of moral choice’” warrant considerations of “aesthetic merit” because “literature can yield insights into moral reality of a depth and precision that no other cultural form is well placed to match” (594). Ethical judgments of texts consider questions such as: “what are we asked to value in these stories, how do these judgments come about, and how do we respond to being invited to take on these values and make these judgments?” (Phelan ix). The highly stylized and aestheticized narrations of death in Blood ­Meridian stage some of the most conflicting and challenging ethical judgments readers have to make, given McCarthy’s confluence of beauty and a violence that is almost always fatal, blurring the lines between artful language and historical representation, and between aesthetic appreciation and ethical dissent. Richly fashioned from a wealth of historical and geographical sources, including Samuel Chamberlain’s memoir My Confession, Blood

Blood Meridian  165 Meridian is a rewriting and partial fictionalization of events involving a gang of scalphunters along the Texas-Mexico border around the mid-nineteenth century, populated by “historically verifiable characters, places, and events” (Sepich, Notes 1). In tandem with Derrida’s aporias, which draw on a “rhetoric of borders” (Aporias 3), Blood ­Meridian is likewise concerned with borders in literal and figurative ways: the scalphunters’ trail of violence across the region between El Paso and ­Chihuahua city literally trace territory in a border of blood, yet their bloody passage is simultaneously a nonpassage for readers in the destabilization of conceptual demarcations between violent death and poetic beauty, historical representation and artful language, ethical dissent and aesthetic appreciation. Scholars dominantly discuss McCarthy’s novel in relation to ­American exceptionalism, the American dream and manifest destiny, colonial/­ imperial expansion, and racial domination (Jarrett 74–75; Vieth 47; ­Masters 25; Owens 7; M. Evans 81; Cant 5; 157; Shaviro 146; Bowers 8–9; 46; Campbell 221; Parrish, Civil 93; J. I. Shaw 209). Critics like Barcley Owens, Steven Shaviro, Rick Wallach, and Ronja Vieth have variously attended to the novel’s “sublime realism,” “sublime prose style,” or “sublime effects,” in relation to the American Gothic (Owens 54; 7; Shaviro 153; Josyph 109; Vieth 47; 51–53). The novel’s “ubiquitous violence” is most often understood “as a demythologizing of the American West”: a “revisionist western” or “postmodern form of the historical romance,” which “challenges and critiques the once-popular view of the West as a place of romance and honor” (Peebles 231; Jarrett 69; Frye 109; Snyder 127; Snyder and Snyder 31; 34). Even this “revisionist reading,” however, is beset with difficulty, in that “savagery is independent of race” in Blood Meridian and massacres are committed by Anglo Americans, African Americans, Native Americans, and Mexicans alike (Cant 159; Owens 38–39; D. H. Evans 419). Some critics suggest that the novel is both a narrative about a distinctly “American violence” and a universal narrative about humankind’s enduring propensity for violence (Jarrett 88; Bowers 26; M. Evans 81–82; Bloom, How 255; Parrish, “History” 68)— an assessment borne out by the novel’s invocation of limitlessness. Blood Meridian engenders a sense of limitlessness particularly in ­McCarthy’s treatment of time and space. Events in the novel are set against “celestial motions and divine plottings”—a gesture that invokes the cosmic in ways that resonate with the sublime’s etymological root “from the Latin sublimis” (meaning elevated or lofty) (Masters 34; ­Morley 14). Vividly calling the novel’s subtitle The Evening Redness in the West to mind, the scalphunters’ bloody deeds are implied in the very landscape, as the earth is “drained up into the sky at the edge of creation” to run like blood across the firmament (Blood Meridian 47). The world “is a great stained altarstone,” with a thirst that cannot be slaked even by the “blood of a thousand Christs” (108)—the single man whom in

166  W. Michelle Wang Christian understanding was sent for the redemption of all humankind. The chilling proportions of a bloodthirsty world—one in which readers are inescapably implicated, given the text’s historical ­underpinnings— are vividly invoked as the entire world is channeled into the single image of an altarstone, a grotesque inversion of celebratory sacrifice with no possible hope of redemption. The ubiquitous recurrence of violent deaths gives the novel epic proportions that fail to be contained either by geographic space or by the passage of time, as implied by McCarthy’s epigraph from The Yuma Daily Sun, emphasizing a history of cruelty across continents and the span of 300,000 years.6 Extradiegetic prolepses scattered throughout the novel—typically insinuations or bald-faced statements about how gang members will meet their end—such as the fatal conflict between the “black and white ­Jacksons” (85; 96–97; 111–13) or the Vandiemenlander’s death (92; 237),7 alongside the chapter summaries or blurbs at the beginning of each chapter, give Blood Meridian a sense of prophetic doom that implies or is underpinned by a cosmic consciousness. Most of the novel is narrated in past tense, but towards the end, the ominous, chillingly celebratory refrain that the judge “never sleeps” and that he will “never die” switches to the present tense (348–49), keeping this violent chapter of U.S.-Mexican history alive and in the present, as something that readers need to continue to grapple with, rather than that which is known, dead, and buried in the past. From an aesthetic point of view, Robert Jarrett points out that several of Blood Meridian’s most violent scenes of death and carnage “probably comprise the best writing in the novel” (75; 88). The sublime beauty of McCarthy’s prose emerges from highly stylized and heterogeneous configurations of violence, at times characterized by visual chaos and sensory overload—with “bits of broken mirrorglass that cast a thousand unpieced suns against the eyes” in the “fevered dream” of the Comanche attack (Blood Meridian 54–55)—or is ephemeral and surrealistic at other points in the narrative. The dream-like confrontation with the Apaches in Chapter 9, for instance, blends man and landscape, as the “thin frieze of mounted archers,” “immense and chimeric,” “trembled and veered in the rising heat,” “like burnt phantoms” out of a “vanished sea,” kicking up “spume that was not real,” “shimmer[ing] and slurr[ing] together” as they were “lost in the sun” and the lake (115). As the kid fires at them, the narration of their deaths takes on an eerie and ephemeral quality as they begin to “crumble in the serried planes of heat and to break up silently,” vanishing and “dissolving in the […] hallucinatory void” (115; 119). At other times still, the highly contrived, almost theatrical, images of death function like stylized, visual choreography. When the Glanton gang arbitrarily decides to run a group of mercury-bearing muleteers off into an abyss, the animals drop “silently as martyrs, turning sedately

Blood Meridian  167 in the empty air and explod[e] on the rocks below in startling bursts of blood and silver as the flasks broke open,” and “small trembling satellites” of mercury race “in the stone arroyos,” as though “some ultimate alchemic work” was being decocted in “the secret dark of the earth’s heart” (203). The multifarious configurations of such remorseless, savage fireworks and choreographed friezes that pervade Blood Meridian attest to McCarthy’s mastery of aesthetic technique—and facilitate a corresponding unease that many critics and readers experience in the gratuitous spectatorship of violent deaths in which we are thus implicated when reading the novel. Most readers likely experience a sensory overdrive after 350 pages of unrelenting violence, as we are continually confronted by partially eaten human bodies (63; 189) and other corporeal desecrations that are wrenching in their intimacy. Following the confrontation with the Comanches, Sproule and the kid come to a bush hanging with dead babies. [….] These small victims, seven, eight of them, had holes punched in their underjaws and were hung so by their throats from the broken stobs of a mesquite to stare eyeless at the naked sky. Bald and pale and bloated, larval to some unreckonable being. (60) Writing about the slaughter of children and innocents in Blood Meridian, George Guillemin notes that this terrible vignette of the bush hung with dead infants, then, translates into a pure memento mori motif […], reminding us not only that even infants may be subject to murder, let alone death, but also that the world is essentially indifferent to this fact and to such incidents. (243–44; 258) Such highly stylized narrations of death likely cause readers to reel with sickening disgust: the recount and specialized diction8 stumbles us momentarily, as we are forced to dwell with the number of dead babies and the precision with which they are calculatedly hung from the tree. Scrupulous in its description of not only the cruel method—where each hole and string goes—the narration takes the reader’s mind’s eye over the infants’ bodies, moving our gaze from throat to eye socket to scalp, forcing us to confront the very corporeality of these babies in an excruciating fashion. Nor are such descriptions sporadic or infrequent. In one of the ­Glanton gang’s subsequent massacres, one of the Delawares emerged from the smoke with a naked infant dangling in each hand and squatted at a ring of midden stones and

168  W. Michelle Wang swung them by the heels each in turn and bashed their heads against the stones so that the brains burst forth through the fontanel in a bloody spew and humans on fire came shrieking forth like berserkers and the riders hacked them down with their enormous knives and a young woman ran up and embraced the bloodied forefeet of Glanton’s warhorse. (Blood Meridian 162) The methodical, procedural deliberateness of the description—squatting, swinging, bashing, bursting forth, hacking, and the unexpectedly, almost tender gesture of embracing at the end (which emerges from what Derek Attridge has elsewhere called the use of a completely “different aesthetic register” [336])—becomes so overwhelming that one is frequently torn between staying with the scene/text and feeling compelled to avert our vision from the mental carnage, paralyzed in the aporia of “not knowing where to go” (Derrida, Aporias 12). Alternating “between awe at the sumptuous prose and the haunting vignettes and visceral revulsion at the heinous atrocities unremittingly depicted in them,” critics’ analyses of Blood Meridian point overwhelmingly to the novel’s capacity for vividly engendering conflicting affective states, as evident in references to its “blood music” or the “difficult beauty” of McCarthy’s prose (Eddins 32; Josyph 51; Donoghue 277). Furthermore, Blood Meridian is a troubling book because it has the appearance of being “ethically bereft,” in the conspicuous absence of ethical comment or judgment that pervades the text (Josyph 70; Frye 7; Donoghue 264). The sublime emerges (in part) from aestheticized narrations of death that some readers believe should be left unpresented. In perhaps one of the most damning judgments of the novel, Richard Selzer argues that there is only the mindless mercenary impulse toward slaughter. Blood Meridian fairly reeks with the accumulation of gore. Massacre after massacre is described with lipsmacking relish. [….] I continue to be nonplussed by his [McCarthy’s] egregious love of depravity and violence for its own sake. What a waste! All that great gift laid at the feet of cruelty. (qtd. in Josyph 59–60) Moral issues are inevitably foregrounded and exacerbated by the text’s own strange dearth of ethical comment—compelling us to question the degree to which our acts of spectatorship in the reading process become complicit with the monstrous deeds enacted. The novel’s lack of ethical commentary is stylistically reinforced by the distance at which the narration holds us: readers are given very limited access to character minds or inner lives, and all is treated with the

Blood Meridian  169 same “thoroughly dispassionate” equanimity (Phillips 35–37). This narratorial distance is fortified by McCarthy’s use of the cosmic to foster readers’ sense of infinitude. That the novel is driven by historically based sources only serves to make such refusal to engage in moral conversations even more disturbing; critics like Shaviro and David Holmberg thus note that “Blood Meridian seems to have nothing to do with actively righting the wrongs of history,” since readers “are called to no responsibility” (Holmberg 141; Shaviro 148). However, when we consider the novel through the aesthetic mode of the sublime in the dissonant affective states engendered, I suggest that it is precisely the narration’s apparent ethical paucity that underscores the readerly responsibilities that the text demands of us—in readers’ sense of the aporias or conflicts between beauty and violence, between artful language and historical representation, and between aesthetic appreciation and ethical dissent. I argue that Blood Meridian itself is an act of fictionalized historical testimony in which readers are called to the responsibility of exercising our moral freedom, in both senses of the word: first, in the active application of our ethical judgments of the text, as we grapple with the atrocities represented; second, the fictional text as a means of training and stretching such capacities for ethical response. In this case, exercising readerly ethical judgment invites readers to consider, for instance, what we are being asked to value in the apparent “mindless mercenary impulse toward slaughter” in the novel’s narrations of death, the strength of such assessments or interpretations of the text, and our response to the invitation of making these difficult ethical judgments (Josyph 59–60; Phelan ix). Like Steven Frye and Denis Donoghue, I consider McCarthy’s refusal to pass ethical comment to be a moral stance in and of itself—and one that requires no mean aesthetic feat. The usual catharsis associated with poetic justice, for instance, fails to resonate here. One of the Delawares, earlier shown to be responsible for the brutal mutilation of an infant in each hand, meets his own grisly end along with numerous other scalphunters: They were skewered through the cords of their heels with sharpened shuttles of green wood and they hung gray and naked above the dead ashes of the coals where they’d been roasted until their heads had charred and the brains bubbled in the skulls and steam sang from their noseholes. (Blood Meridian 162; 237) The bubbling brains and singing steam are clearly meant to resonate with his own earlier act of bashing the infants’ “heads against the stones so that the brains burst forth through the fontanel in a bloody spew” (162), yet readers likely find it nauseatingly difficult to rejoice in the

170  W. Michelle Wang implicit act of poetic justice. Only a further sickening sensation registers in the face of such unrelenting exactitude in the narrations of death, as we struggle with the excessive violence that marks the potential act of terrible poetic justice, unsettled by the sense that there is something terribly wrong with it all. The deliberate orchestration of such gut-wrenching scenes of apparent poetic justice—combined with the narration’s withholding of explicit ethical judgment in its refusal to attribute causality—forces the reader to confront the meaning (or lack thereof) of these violent deaths over and over again, both of aggressors and innocents alike. The moral implications of Blood Meridian’s aestheticized narrations of death are thus foregrounded by the absence of ethical commentary, implicitly staging the conflict between ethics and aesthetics, and between historical representation and artful language. These conflicts are staged in two distinct ways: first, in the refusal to allow the value and meaning of violence to be assimilated, which some historians and critics rightly identify as a type of violence in and of itself;9 second, in confronting the possibility of the fundamental nonrationality of the world, especially in an age of increasing secularity and agnosticism in certain cultures and regions. Slade notes that historians and critical theorists have “sought to guard critical thought against transforming painful and traumatic histories into a field of enjoyment” (“Antigone” 90). Dominick LaCapra, for instance, “sees the aesthetic of the sublime […] as an effort to transform the violent and traumatic histories of the twentieth century into sacred objects that can comfort us through their aesthetic value” (qtd. in Slade, “Antigone” 90). However, notwithstanding its aesthetic merits, Blood Meridian seems to work against such a model; here, the aestheticization of violence serves to disconcert rather than comfort us. McCarthy’s act of withholding ostensible ethical judgment in Blood Meridian “short-circuit[s] easy assimilation” (Hooker 51) and works against readers’ consumption of the novel’s terrible violence as a tidy object of historical knowledge. On the one hand, readers appreciate the novel’s landscapes of sublime beauty and eloquent orchestration of assorted aesthetic registers; on the other, we are likely to be ethically conflicted at the highly stylized deaths that thus emerge from such orchestrations. By sustaining these dynamic oscillations between aesthetic appreciation and ethical conflict, Blood Meridian’s narrations of death remain ultimately troubling and unresolved. As Guillemin remarks, “McCarthy’s fiction belongs to what Roland Barthes designated ‘writerly’ (as opposed to ‘readerly’) literature, the meaning of his writings being dependent on what we make of them and their epidemic destructiveness” (262). Negotiating such conflicting affective responses becomes the central readerly task McCarthy ultimately invites his readers to undertake. A second function of the sublime in Blood Meridian is its implication of the world’s nonrationality. Paul Guyer notes that “if we take

Blood Meridian  171 the Dionysian as Nietzsche’s version of the sublime, then Nietzsche has radically reconceived the experience of the sublime as an intimation of the fundamental nonrationality of existence, rather than its rationality” (115). Such nonrationality has enormous implications for our understanding of what human life and death might mean, particularly in light of the senseless massacres strewn across Blood Meridian and, more generally, throughout human history. Anthropologist Nancy Scheper-­ Hughes observes that “the one thing humans seem unable to accept is the idea that the world may be deficient in meaning” (qtd. in Dickson and Romanets 19). This nonrationality certainly seems to be the position implied both by the novel and by McCarthy’s remarks in an interview that there is “no such thing as life without bloodshed” and “the notion that the species can be improved in some way, that everyone could live in harmony, is a really dangerous idea” (Woodward). Many readers struggle with Blood Meridian partly because we want the terrible violence to mean something at the end—such as condemnation of racism, for instance—but McCarthy offers the chilling alternative that there may be no such compensatory significance, or at least that vindication or meaning is not his to offer. The novel’s dispassionate narrations of death imply that the only available ethical move—of working our way out of Derrida’s paralyzing aporia or nonpassage—is one that is up to the reader to make, not McCarthy. In so doing, McCarthy ensures that the literary art object itself does not pass from feeling into knowledge. The move from feeling to knowledge, from nihilism to meaning-making, is ours to make—and the corresponding responsibility that comes with this knowledge, the responsibility for co-building a better world, the reader’s as well.

Notes 1 See Ramazani’s analysis of the sublime in poems such as “The Magi,” “Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen,” and “The Second Coming,” amongst others. 2 Barnett Newman, in particular, has invited special attention from critics, given that his magnum opus, Vir Heroicus Sublimis, explicitly invites viewers to associate his work with the aesthetic tradition of the sublime. Philip Shaw suggests that in Newman’s paintings, “a yearning for transcendence is pitted against an open acknowledgement of the impossibility of this desire” (7). 3 Longinus, for instance, proposes that the sublime’s effect is “transport” (Critical Theory 77) while Scottish philosophers Alexander Gerard, Henry Home, Archibald Alison, and Dugald Stewart suggest that “terror is not the definitive moment of the sublime,” as Burke proposes; instead, as indicated by its etymology, “elevation” is the “central, defining characteristic” (­Zuckert 66). 4 Moral or ethical judgments are historically related to the sublime: Longinus, for instance, considers the orator’s moral character to be relevant in his judgment of the sublime (Lang, “Introduction”; Longinus, Sublime §8).

172  W. Michelle Wang 5 One of the ways in which “Humanism” is defined in The Oxford English Dictionary is as “[a] variety of ethical theory and practice characterized by a stress on human rationality and capacity for free thought and moral action, and a rejection of theistic religion and the supernatural in favour of secular and naturalistic views of humanity and the universe.” 6 The epigraph reads: “Clark, who led last year’s expedition to the Afar region of northern Ethiopia, and UC Berkeley colleague Tim D. White, also said that a re-examination of a 300,000-year-old fossil skull found in the same region earlier showed evidence of having been scalped.” 7 “[O]n the inside of his [the Vandiemenlander’s] lower arm was there tattooed a number which Toadvine would see […] when he would cut down the man’s torso where it hung skewered by its heels from a treelimb in the wastes of Pimeria Alta in the fall of that year” (Blood Meridian 92; 237). 8 Stob is dialect for a broken branch while a mesquite is a shrub or tree native to southwest US and Mexico. 9 “[T]he application of ‘meaning’ to violence allows observers to ‘extinguish rage and grief for those whose lives are taken’ [….]: ‘Whenever we allow ourselves to attribute meaning, whether political or spiritual, to the useless suffering of others we behave a bit like public executioners’” (Dickson and Romanets 19).

Works Cited Adorno, Theodor. Aesthetic Theory. 1970. Translated by Robert Hullot-Kentor. Edited by Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann. U of Minnesota P, 1997. ———. “Aesthetic Theory.” 1961–1970. Aesthetics: A Comprehensive Anthology. Edited by Steven M. Cahn and Aaron Meskin. Blackwell Publishing, 2008, pp. 358–369. Attridge, Derek. “Once More with Feeling: Art, Affect and Performance.” Textual Practice, vol. 25, no. 2, 2011, pp. 329–343. Bloom, Harold. The Daemon Knows: Literary Greatness and the American Sublime. Spiegel and Grau, 2016. ———. How to Read and Why. Touchstone, 2000. Bowers, James. “Reading Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian.” Boise State University Western Writers Series. Vol. 139, 1999. Burke, Edmund. “A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful.” Aesthetics: A Comprehensive Anthology. Edited by Steven Cahn and Aaron Meskin. Blackwell Publishing, 2008, pp. 113–122. Campbell, Neil. “Liberty beyond Its Proper Bounds: Cormac McCarthy’s History of the West in Blood Meridian.” Myth, Legend, Dust: Critical Responses to Cormac McCarthy. Edited by Rick Wallach. Manchester UP, 2000, pp. 217–226. Cant, John. Cormac McCarthy and the Myth of American Exceptionalism. Routledge, 2008. Costelloe, Timothy M., editor. The Sublime: From Antiquity to the Present. Cambridge UP, 2012. Crowther, Paul, editor. The Contemporary Sublime: Sensibilities of Transcendence and Shock. Academy Editions, 1995. Derrida, Jacques. Aporias. Translated by Thomas Dutoit. Stanford UP, 1993.

Blood Meridian  173 ———. “Parergon.” 1978. Translated by Geoffrey Bennington and Ian McLeod. The Sublime. Edited by Simon Morley. Whitechapel Gallery and MIT Press, 2010, pp. 41–46. Dickson, Lisa and Maryna Romanets, editors. Beauty, Violence, Representation. Routledge, 2014. Donoghue, Denis. The Practice of Reading. Yale UP, 1998. Eddins, Dwight. “‘Everything a Hunter and Everything Hunted’: Schopenhauer and Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian.” Critique Studies in Contemporary Fiction, vol. 45, no. 1, 2003, pp. 25–33. Etlin, Richard A. “Architecture and the Sublime.” The Sublime: From Antiquity to the Present. Edited by Timothy Costelloe. Cambridge UP, 2012, pp. 230–274. Evans, David H. “True West and Lying Marks: The Englishman’s Boy, Blood Meridian, and the Paradox of the Revisionist Western.” Texas Studies in Literature and Language, vol. 55, no. 4, Winter 2013, pp. 406–433. Evans, Michael. “The Second Horseman: The Philosophy of War in Blood Meridian.” Quadrant, vol. 55, no. 4, April 2011, pp. 80–88. Frye, Steven, editor. The Cambridge Companion to Cormac McCarthy. Cambridge UP, 2013. Gaut, Berys. “The Ethical Criticism of Art.” 1998. Aesthetics: A Comprehensive Anthology. Edited by Steven M. Cahn and Aaron Meskin. Blackwell Publishing, 2008, pp. 589–601. Gilbert-Rolfe, Jeremy. Beauty and the Contemporary Sublime. Allworth Press, 1999. Guillemin, George. “‘See the Child’: The Melancholy Subtext of Blood Meridian.” Cormac McCarthy: New Directions. Edited by James D. Lilley. U of New Mexico P, 2014, pp. 239–265. Guyer, Paul. “The German Sublime after Kant.” The Sublime: From Antiquity to the Present. Edited by Timothy Costelloe. Cambridge UP, 2012, pp. 102–117. Harten, Doreet. “Creating Heaven.” 1999. The Sublime. Edited by Simon ­Morley. Whitechapel Gallery and MIT Press, 2010, pp. 73–76. Holmberg, David. “‘In a Time before Nomenclature Was and Each Was All’: Blood Meridian’s Neomythic West and the Heterotopian Zone.” Western American Literature, vol. 44, no. 2, Summer 2009, pp. 140–156. Hooker, Richard. “Sublimity as Process: Hegel, Newman and Shave.” The Contemporary Sublime: Sensibilities of Transcendence and Shock. Edited by Paul Crowther. Academy Editions, 1995, pp. 42–53. “Humanism.” The Oxford English Dictionary. 3rd edition. Oxford UP, 2009. Jarrett, Robert L. Cormac McCarthy. Twayne Publishers, 1997. Johnson, David B. “The Postmodern Sublime: Presentation and Its Limits.” The Sublime: From Antiquity to the Present. Edited by Timothy Costelloe. ­Cambridge UP, 2012, pp. 118–134. Josyph, Peter. Adventures in Reading Cormac McCarthy. Scarecrow Press, 2010. Kant, Immanuel. “From Critique of Judgment.” Critical Theory since Plato. Translated by J.H. Bernard. Edited by Hazard Adams. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1971, pp. 377–399.

174  W. Michelle Wang Kohlke, Marie-Luise. “Sublime Violations: Trauma Literature and the Search for Transcendence through Violence.” Creating Destruction: Constructing Images of Violence and Genocide. Edited by Nancy Billias and Leonhard Praeg. Rodopi, 2011, pp. 139–158. Lang, Andrew. “Introduction.” On the Sublime. By Longinus. Project Gutenberg, www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/17957. 2006. Longinus. On the Sublime. Translated by H.L. Havell. Project Gutenberg, www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/17957. 2006. ———. “On the Sublime.” Critical Theory since Plato. Translated by W.R. Roberts. Edited by Hazard Adams. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1971, pp. 76–102. Lyotard, Jean-François. Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime. 1991. Translated by Elizabeth Rottenberg. Stanford UP, 1994. Masters, Joshua J. “‘Witness to the Uttermost Edge of the World’: Judge Holden’s Textual Enterprise in Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian.” Critique, vol. 40, no. 1, Fall 1998, pp. 25–37. McCarthy, Cormac. Blood Meridian; Or, the Evening Redness in the West. Vintage International, 1985. McHale, Brian. Postmodernist Fiction. Methuen & Co., 1987. Merritt, Melissa McBay. “The Moral Source of the Kantian Sublime.” The Sublime: From Antiquity to the Present. Edited by Timothy Costelloe. Cambridge UP, 2012, pp. 37–49. Morley, Simon, editor. The Sublime. Whitechapel Gallery and MIT Press, 2010. Owens, Barcley. Cormac McCarthy’s Western Novels. U of Arizona P, 2000. Parrish, Timothy. From Civil War to the Apocalypse: Postmodern History and American Fiction. U of Massachusetts P, 2008. ———. “History and the Problem of Evil in McCarthy’s Western Novels.” The Cambridge Companion to Cormac McCarthy. Edited by Steven Frye. Cambridge UP, 2013, pp. 67–78. Peebles, Stacey. “Yuman Belief Systems and Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian.” Texas Studies in Literature and Language, vol. 45, no. 2, Summer 2003, pp. 231–244. Phelan, James. Living to Tell about It: A Rhetoric and Ethics of Character Narration. Cornell UP, 2005. Phillips, Dana. “History and the Ugly Facts of Blood Meridian.” Cormac ­McCarthy: New Directions. Edited by James D. Lilley. U of New Mexico P, 2014, pp. 17–46. Potkay, Adam. “The British Romantic Sublime.” The Sublime: From Antiquity to the Present. Edited by Timothy Costelloe. Cambridge UP, 2012, pp. 203–216. Ramazani, Jahan. “Yeats: Tragic Joy and the Sublime.” PMLA, vol. 104, no. 2, March 1989, pp. 163–177. Rosenblum, Robert. “The Abstract Sublime.” 1961. The Sublime. Edited by Simon Morley. Whitechapel Gallery and MIT Press, 2010, pp. 108–112. Schiller, Friedrich. Aesthetical and Philosophical Essays. Vol. 7. Edited by Nathan Haskell Dole. F. A. Niccolls & Co., 1902. Sepich, John. Notes on Blood Meridian. 1993. U of Texas P, 2008. ———. “‘What Kind of Indians Was Them?’ Some Historical Sources in Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian.” Perspectives on Cormac McCarthy. Edited by Edwin T. Arnold and Dianne C. Luce. U of Mississippi P, 1991, pp. 123–143.

Blood Meridian  175 Shaviro, Steven. “‘The Very Life of Darkness’: A Reading of Blood Meridian.” Perspectives on Cormac McCarthy, revised edition. Edited by Edwin T. Arnold and Dianne C. Luce. U of Mississippi P, 1999, pp. 145–158. Shaw, Jonathan Imber. “Evil Empires: Blood Meridian, War in El Salvador, and the Burdens of Omniscience.” Southern Literary Journal, vol. 40, no. 2, Spring 2008, pp. 207–231. Shaw, Philip. The Sublime. Routledge, 2006. Slade, Andrew. Lyotard, Beckett, Duras, and the Postmodern Sublime. Peter Lang, 2007. ———. “Violence and Beauty: Jacques Lacan’s Antigone.” Beauty, Violence, Representation. Edited by Lisa Dickson and Maryna Romanets. Routledge, 2014, pp. 87–99. Snyder, Phillip. “Disappearance in Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian.” Western American Literature, vol. 44, no. 2, Summer 2009, pp. 127–139. Snyder, Phillip A. and Delys W. Snyder. “Modernism, Postmodernism, and Language: McCarthy’s Style.” The Cambridge Companion to Cormac McCarthy. Edited by Steven Frye. Cambridge UP, 2013, pp. 27–40. Van de Vall, Renée. “Silent Visions: Lyotard on the Sublime.” The Contemporary Sublime: Sensibilities of Transcendence and Shock. Edited by Paul Crowther. Academy Editions, 1995, pp. 68–75. Vieth, Ronja. “A Frontier Myth Turns Gothic: Blood Meridian: Or, the Evening Redness in the West.” Cormac McCarthy Journal, vol. 8, no. 1, 2010, pp. 47–62. Weiskel, Thomas. The Romantic Sublime. 1976. Foreword by Harold Bloom. Johns Hopkins UP, 1986. Woodward, Richard B. “Cormac McCarthy’s Venomous Fiction.” New York Times, 19 Apr. 1992. www.nytimes.com/1992/04/19/magazine/­cormacmccarthy-s-venomous-fiction.html. Accessed 11 Aug. 2014. Zuckert, Rachel. “The Associative Sublime: Gerard, Kames, Alison, and ­Stewart.” The Sublime: From Antiquity to the Present. Edited by Timothy Costelloe. Cambridge UP, 2012, pp. 64–76.

11 Murder Amidst the Chocolates Martin McDonagh’s Multifaceted Uses of Death in In Bruges1 William C. Boles Martin McDonagh’s playwriting aesthetic is to disrupt the dramatic status quo, usually relying on violence and shocking deaths as a gateway into challenging the state of the theatre and its audience. In an infamous interview with the United Kingdom’s Elle, which had to be cut short because of McDonagh’s inebriated state, he announced that his concept of theatre “is some kind of punk destruction of what’s gone before” (qtd. in Wolf 48). McDonagh relishes his antagonistic streak, especially when it comes to using violence to startle the audience. He explained: I am interested in the whole kind of danger aspect to it. There are times when people in the audiences are hit with bits of stuff flying off the stage, mostly skulls. There’s one point where a stove suddenly explodes. I love to be in the theater and watch that. The people in the audience jump out of their skins. (Lyman 19) His fascination with blowing things up has also made the producing of his plays problematic. Probably the most noted issue occurred with The Lieutenant of Inishmore, which went unproduced for several years. McDonagh has chalked up the delay to the play’s politics involving the Irish Republican Army and a fear that the play’s production might have caused difficulty for the peace negotiations that were taking place. However, he also noted that a particular scene in the play was proving to be problematic to stage. He remarked, “a cat is being blown up…. It isn’t, really, but the audience will believe that it is. I think it makes some people uncomfortable” (Lyman 19). And it is precisely that uncomfortableness of McDonagh’s plays that is provoked by his theatrical use of death. In the National Theatre’s production of The Pillowman, Tupolski’s premature execution of Katurian visibly startled Lyttelton Theatre audiences. At the conclusion of the penultimate scene of the Royal Court Theatre’s production of The Beauty Queen of Leenane, the audience gasped at Mag slowly sliding out of her rocking chair as part of her skull

Murder Amidst the Chocolates  177 fell away due to Maureen’s savage beating of her with a fireplace poker. In the first few minutes of the Royal Court’s production of Hangmen, a prisoner is executed by hanging in a realistically convincing bit of stage business and later another character meets a similar fate, this time slowly choked to death, feet flailing, while hidden behind a curtain. While Sean O’Hagan described these two violent deaths in Hangmen as “elaborate” and “spectacularly staged acts of violence” (O’Hagan, “Theatre is never going to be edgy”), his observation extends to all of McDonagh’s plays and his use of fatal violence. And yet, no matter how dramatically effective the violence is and how realistic it appears, there is still the nagging problem of getting the “dead body” of a live actor off-stage, while still maintaining the theatrical realism of the scene and visceral engagement of the audience. After all, nothing ruins a dramatically powerful and gasp-inducing scene more than to have the dead body suddenly rise up in view of the audience (even in shadows of a blackout) and walk off stage completely under full power. McDonagh’s theatrical writing has become much more aware of how to deal with the dead body dilemma since The Beauty Queen of Leenane where the dead body of Mag needed to stand up and exit the stage before the play’s final scene commenced. After Katurian’s execution by Tupolski, there comes the problem of how to get his body off-stage for the curtain call. McDonagh solves it via Katurian’s returning to life and then relaying the story of what went on in the author’s mind the last few seconds before he died. This device works because throughout the play Katurian, the storyteller, exists in a different narrative space than Katurian, the prisoner. In a nod to Sunset Boulevard, McDonagh uses the technique of the dead character telling his own story. In Hangmen, the executed prisoner drops below the stage and out of view of the audience, while the second hanging victim dies behind a curtain and then the body is wrapped up in a carpet and left on the stage until the play’s end. Film, though, solves the problem that theatre faces with death. ­Camera angles. Squibs. Makeup. Post-production touch up. Editing. Special effects. All make for a far more realistic (and no doubt grislier) depiction of death. By working through the medium of film, McDonagh does not need to worry about the execution of the violence being correct night after night. It only needs to be right once and from there on it will be perfect. Equally, on film, there is no problem with what to do with a dead body. A quick edit to a new scene removes the issue of a body coming back to life. The view of the audience is controlled by the camera, director, and editor, unlike the theatre where the audience member controls her own view of the stage. And McDonagh has made it clear that he prefers the medium of film to theatre, telling Fintan O’Toole, early in his career, that plays are “mostly frequented by older, duller, less rock ‘n’ roll-y kinds of people.” Almost twenty years later, he still held the same opinion, telling The Observer:

178  William C. Boles I guess I’ve accepted that theatre is never going to be edgy in the way I want it to be…. It’s like going to a fancy meal in a fancy restaurant with the attitude that, I’m here and I’ve paid the money so I’m going to enjoy it even though it tastes like shite. (O’Hagan, “Theatre is never going to be edgy”) His dismissal of theatre and fascination with film becomes clearer when he discusses the influences on his plays. Playwrights rarely are cited (although he has acknowledged J. M. Synge and Harold Pinter). 2 Instead, filmmakers and films are always lauded. Over the years, recurring film influences have appeared in interviews, including Martin Scorsese and Taxi Driver, Quentin Tarantino and Reservoir Dogs, 3 Sam Peckinpah and The Wild Bunch, Terrrence Malick and Badlands, as well as S­ ergio Leone and John Woo. And this fascination with film has played its part in his theatrical endeavors, as he aims “to bring as many cinematic elements into theater as possible” (Lyman 17). As The Lieutenant of Inishmore approached its premiere, he gleefully talked up the cinematic nature of the play, bragging that the play “will have more gunshots and squibs going off on stage than any play you’ve ever seen” (O’Hagan, “The Wild West”) and comparing it to something you might see in a Woo or Tarantino film. And yet, a tension exists between the two art forms for McDonagh, who remarked I would be unhappy if I wrote 90 good plays and didn’t make a good film. But if I made one good film. If I made one brilliant film, one really, really good film, I’d be happy. One would be enough. (O’Toole) The reason for his enthrallment with film resides in its permanence. The theatre is too ephemeral, too shifting, too changing, and too impermanent. He remarked: “There could be a hundred interpretations of a play and some will be good, some will be great, and some of them won’t be so good, but with a film, if they get it right, it’s there forever” (O’Toole). So far, McDonagh has written and directed four films: one short film Six Shooter, which won him an Academy Award for Best Short; In Bruges, which was nominated for a Best Screenplay Oscar; Seven Psychopaths and Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri.4 Through his entry into the world of film, McDonagh now has a medium which is much more suited to his desire to depict violence in a realistic and shocking way, but, in addition, and I would argue even more importantly, film provides him a much richer and multifaceted canvas on which to explore the power and narrative possibilities of the death of his characters through the use of locations, editing, and cinematography. This richness can be revealed in looking at three consecutive

Murder Amidst the Chocolates  179 scenes from In Bruges, namely Ray’s intentional killing of Father McHenry and accidental slaying of a little boy, and the two scenes that bookend this crucial flashback, in order to highlight the fertile canvas present in film when it comes to the visual and narrative power of death. Film, unlike the shock tactics of his theatre, allows McDonagh to use death with far more reaching correlations to character arc and narrative cohesiveness.

Scene 1: The Basilica of the Holy Blood One of the most effective uses by McDonagh of the visual and narrative elements of death in In Bruges occurs during a ten-minute, three-scene sequence in the film’s first act, where on location filming and the use of close-up and point-of-view shots reinforce and dramatize the preeminence of death as a major motif. Prior to the start of these three scenes, hitmen Ray and Ken have been sent to Bruges by their gangster boss Harry and instructed to await his phone call as to their next assignment. Bored in the hotel room, Ray convinces Ken to go out and see the town at night, leading them to miss Harry’s call. In a message, taken down by the hotel’s co-owner Marie, Harry demands that they stay in the next night to receive his phone call. However, while sightseeing, Ray scores a date with Chloe, a Belgian woman who works on a film set, and he convinces Ken to stay in the hotel to take Harry’s call while he goes out with her for dinner. In return, Ken demands that Ray sightsees with him in Bruges. The first of the three scenes involves their visit to the Basilica of the Holy Blood, one of the most popular as well as holiest sites in Bruges. The church houses a sacred relic, the blood of Jesus, which was, according to lore, brought to Bruges on April 7, 1150 by Derrick of Alsace, who acquired it during the second crusades (“Tradition”). As Ken informs Ray from his always present guidebook, the blood on the cloth will turn to liquid in times of great strife. While McDonagh shot on location for much of the film, this particular scene was not filmed in the ornate basilica. Instead, the more sedate, brick-walled Jerusalem Chapel served as a substitute, and serendipitously it offered a powerful visual link to the film’s motif of death because of its famous sculptured altar, which contains three skulls. While the three skulls represent the three deaths on the crosses, they also foreshadow the three confirmed deaths to come of Ken, Harry, and Jimmy, a dwarf actor working on a film inspired by Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now, 5 as well as the three deaths in the flashback church sequence of the priest, the little boy, and the ever-present reminder of the death of Christ. In addition, the selection of the Basilica of the Holy Blood allows for a powerful connection of religion and death, as represented by the Holy Relic.

180  William C. Boles In an interview with The New York Times, McDonagh revealed that during his own visit to Bruges he found himself of two minds about the town. Sylvanie Gold explains: He was first struck by ‘how beautiful the place was.’ And he wondered why no one had ever used its picture-postcard streets and canals in a movie. By his second day, however, ‘having gone around to every single place twice, because it’s so small,’ he couldn’t shake his sense of boredom. This juxtaposition becomes embodied through the characterizations of Ken and Ray. Ken relishes his time in Bruges, religiously carrying around a guidebook, and at one point, when he is alone, up in the Bruges bell tower, taking in the cityscape and looking down at the square at an uninterested Ray, admits to himself “I like it here” (McDonagh 8). He marvels at the history and of it being the best-preserved medieval town in Europe. Meanwhile, Ray has a far more deflating perspective, expressing at numerous times that Bruges is a “shithole.” KEN:  Ray, you’re RAY:  Ken, I grew

about the worst tourist in the whole world. up in Dublin. I love Dublin. If I’d grown up on a farm, and was retarded, Bruges might impress me, but I didn’t, so it doesn’t. (McDonagh 7)

This scene in the basilica, in particular, provides a prime example of the juxtaposition between the two hitmen, whose differences are manifested in numerous ways throughout the film: young versus old; novice versus professional; impulsiveness versus thoughtfulness; small versus big; and normal Irish beer drinker versus Belgian “gay beer” drinker. Their reaction to the Holy Relic of Jesus’s blood reinforces these differences. When the scene in the Basilica opens, McDonagh gives us a shot of Ken, holding his guidebook, impressed, respectful, and excited to be in the presence of the relic. In the background, alone and slightly out of focus sits Ray. McDonagh then cuts to Ray, who acts like a bored child, playing with the chair in front of him, the sound of which echoes throughout the small space of the chapel. Ken, annoyed, calls him over and Ray, continuing his childlike behavior, mopes over by sliding his feet on the floor and his arms crossed like he is being reprimanded. Ken notices Ray’s physical protest at their time in the basilica, commenting, Ray, did we or did we not agree that if I let you go on your date tonight, you’d do the things I wanted to do today?… And that we’d do them without you throwing a fucking moody like some five-year-old who’s dropped all his sweets? (McDonagh 20)

Murder Amidst the Chocolates  181 The space holds no sense of wonder or marvel for Ray. After Ken explains the history behind the vial, he says he is going to go up and touch it and invites Ray to join him. Ray rejects Ken’s invitation, asking “Do I have to?” provoking Ken to emit a profane outburst of “Of course you don’t have to! It’s Jesus’s fucking blood, isn’t it?! Of course you don’t fucking have to! Of course you don’t fucking have to!” (McDonagh 21). While a funny sequence, and keeping in line with what has preceded in terms of juxtaposing the two men’s perspectives and personalities, it also allows McDonagh to introduce Ken’s conversion to behaving Christ-like. Throughout the film, Ken is Ray’s helper, his tour guide, his father figure, his facilitator, and ultimately his forgiver, who constantly looks for opportunities to engage his younger partner and find positive perspectives to offer against Ray’s pessimism. Despite his profane outburst about Jesus’s blood, Ken dons Christ-like characteristics after touching the relic. Later that day, he receives a phone call from Harry, who orders him to kill Ray. Ken, stunned by Harry’s decision, is incredibly reluctant to do so, even though Harry threatens Ken’s life if the execution does not take place. Even Yuri, the alcove-obsessed gun runner from whom Ken acquires his weapon, remarks later to Harry that he could see in Ken’s eyes that he was not up to the task. After acquiring a gun, Ken tracks Ray to a children’s playground. As he approaches Ray from behind, gun in hand, he spies that Ray is about to kill himself. Instead of allowing Ray to commit suicide, Ken stops him, even though it would have solved his own dilemma of having to kill his young partner. He then counsels Ray, almost priest-like, in the good he has left to do in the world. RAY:  Ken!

I killed a little boy…! Ray breaks down in tears that won’t stop. Ken holds him, and Ray allows himself to be held. KEN:  Then save the next little boy. Just go away somewhere, get out of this business, and try to do something good. (McDonagh 57–58) Ken puts Ray on a train, encouraging him to restart his life. In place of Ray, he offers himself up as a sacrifice to Harry, who has angrily traveled to Bruges after Ken notified him of Ray’s escape. Having moved to the bell tower to avoid the crowds of the square, the two men face off, but Ken refuses to engage in a gun battle with his boss. Instead, Ken tells Harry: “I am totally in your debt. The things that have gone between us in the past, I love you unreservedly for all that. For your integrity, for your honour. I love you” (McDonagh 73). His Christ-like statements to the man who wants to kill him initially save his life, but Harry still needs to make an example out of Ken’s refusal to follow orders and shoots him in the leg, rebuking him for acting precisely like “Robert fucking Powell

182  William C. Boles out of Jesus of fucking Nazareth” (McDonagh 74). As Harry helps Ken down the narrow, winding stairs of the tower, he learns that Ray has returned to Bruges, and after a brief tussle over a gun, Ken is shot in the neck. While Harry rushes down the stairs to find Ray, Ken drags himself to the observation platform of the tower. Once there, he pulls out a handful of coins and drops them out of the tower to clear the space below of pedestrians. Ken, in a Christ-like act, falls out of the tower to warn Ray about Harry and pass him his gun for protection. (The gun, as one might suspect, does not remain intact on impact.) While the Holy Relic of Christ’s blood is an iconic representation of Bruges’s religious past, McDonagh strategically uses it as a signifier of Ken’s transformation and ensuing actions. The holy blood that was spilled on the cloth in the vial is eventually echoed by Ken’s own blood being shed in the Bruges bell tower and on the cobblestones of the square below, all in his attempts to be Ray’s savior.

Scene 2: Market Square/Catholic Church (Ray’s Flashback) While Ken stands in line to touch the vial, a pouting Ray exits to the square to wait for Ken, and it is in this sequence that McDonagh reveals why Harry has sent Ken and Ray to Bruges and the reason behind Ray’s emotional and, at times, teary outbursts. While the scene in the basilica and Ken’s interaction with Christ’s blood foreshadow his later behaviors, the scene that immediately follows provokes Ray to have a flashback, the only one in the film. As he sits on a bench, he eyes a family (mother, father, and the requisite two children) across the square, laughing and enjoying their day out in Bruges. McDonagh depicts the family in slow motion, framing the two young children at the shot’s center. Over this image a sound bridge occurs, letting us hear Ray say “Murder, Father” (McDonagh 22), providing his psychological association between the family image before him and his past action. The flashback is of Ray’s first assignment for Harry, the killing of Father McHenry.6 In the confession booth, Ray admits his sin of the soonto-be-murder of the priest is motivated by money, similar to Judas’s act of betrayal against Christ, and after telling the priest that Harry ordered the hit, he shoots McHenry in the stomach. Not having applied a kill shot through the confession booth wall, Ray watches McHenry stumble out of the booth and through a doorway. Ray, looking to finish the job, shoots McHenry numerous times in the back. McDonagh changes the camera angle to a frontal view of the priest in the doorway just as the bullets rip through his chest. Before collapsing, McHenry croaks out, “The little boy” (McDonagh 23). As the body falls out of the shot, a shocked Ray stands behind the priest, realizing that his gunshots have had an unintended victim. McDonagh cuts to a bloodstained piece of

Murder Amidst the Chocolates  183 paper held in a little hand and then shows us a young boy with a gunshot wound to his forehead. On the piece of paper were three sins to confess: being sad, bad at math, and being moody. One of McDonagh’s starting points in writing the film was to answer the question of “What happens when….?” In this case, “I’d always been irritated by macho films with guns and bullets flying everywhere…. I’d wondered where the stray bullets go. What happens when a bullet hits the wrong target?” (Gold). McDonagh actually doubles down on the stray bullet motif, as not only does the little boy awaiting confession get killed by a stray bullet, but later Jimmy, the film actor, who was befriended by Ray and Ken, is killed inadvertently by Harry, whose gunshots also pass through Ray’s body, hitting an innocent victim. From this flashback sequence in the church, we now understand the reasons for Ray’s outbreaks of sadness and guilt. Being in the “shithole” of Bruges, doing nothing, only exacerbates his wallowing over the death of the child. It is only when he manages to acquire a gun and some bullets (through a robbery of him that went wrong) that he decides to kill himself. And yet it is this decision on Ray’s part that prompts the most significant difference between the two hitmen: Ken’s vision of a way forward for Ray from the death of the little boy versus Ray’s inability to move beyond his killing of the child. He is in limbo, mired in this one moment, stuck to replay this sequence of events, and it is the ending of the flashback that visually dictates this crucial difference between the two men. Ray stands crestfallen over the dead bodies, holding the boy’s confession note, rooted to the spot. Ken rushes in and drags him out of the church, propelling him forward and away from the two bloody bodies. Ken’s advice to Ray is to “Just keep on moving. Keep on moving” (McDonagh 59). And Ken puts his advice into practice numerous times in Bruges, when he forces Ray to go out into the town to sightsee and embrace the world around him in an effort to expunge his guilty thoughts and then later puts him on a train to escape Harry’s decree of death. In Ken’s mind, the further Ray moves away from his actions in the church, the better chance he has to do something good and redeem his murder of the little boy.

Scene 3: The Groeninge Museum The third scene features Ken and Ray visiting the Groeninge Museum and viewing three different paintings, all of which feature death as their main subject. The first painting is introduced as Ray’s flashback ends with an overhead shot of the scene just described of Ken pulling Ray out of the church. There is then a slow dissolve of the two bloody bodies overlapping with a two-paneled painting called Death and the Miser by Jan Provost. The left panel contains a well-dressed man, sitting at a desk and filling out paperwork, while the right panel features Death, who has come to take the miser. Connecting the two panels is the miser’s left

184  William C. Boles arm crossing from the right panel into the left one, as he hands Death a note. McDonagh scholars have argued that the painting is intended to comment on the previous scene. Irina Melnikova states that Provost’s work “reminds the spectator of the previous episode in the film when a piece of paper (a confession note) was transferred from the boy who was accidentally killed to Ray” (Melnikova 50). Margitta Rouse expands upon this idea by stating that the murder scene and painting are iconographically connected: Provost’s painting is divided into two halves, the left showing the Miser, and the right showing the skeleton. This composition resembles the take in which Ray, occupying the left half of a confessional, confesses to a murder he has not committed yet and then shoots the priest sitting on the other side of the grille. (Rouse 176) As persuasive as their arguments are, they do fail to answer the following question: if the painting is supposed to be a comment on Ray’s narrative, why does McDonagh position Ken as the sole viewer of the painting? After the dissolve finishes, a full shot of the painting fills the screen. Ken walks in front of the painting from the right-hand side of the screen and stops in front of the left-hand side of the painting, the miser’s side, almost directly in front of the miser’s position in the painting, drawing an immediate visual correlation between the miser’s oncoming fate with Ken’s later in the film. While Melnikova and Rouse make a compelling case about Ray picking up the little boy’s confession list and the paper in the painting, they fail to acknowledge that Ken is also connected to death via a piece of paper. When he returns, sans Ray, to the hotel from their first night sightseeing (Ray meets Chloe and then goes out drinking on his own), Ken receives a typed phone message from Harry, who is vituperatively profane about their absence from the hotel when he called. The note demands that they stay in the next night for his call, which will pronounce not only Harry’s death sentence for Ray but will also begin the process leading to Ken’s death. In addition, Ken’s death is connected with another piece of paper: his last will and testament, which he leaves in the hotel room on the mantle before heading out to meet the recently arrived Harry. The screen image cuts from Ken’s observation of Provost’s painting to Ray standing in front of the second panel of a Gerard David diptych The Judgement of Cambyses, which was specially commissioned by the city of Bruges as a warning to city leaders to stay true to the oath of their positions. The first panel, not seen in the movie, depicts the arrest of the bribe-taking judge Sisamnes in one corner of the painting and then, as the main visual narrative element, Cambyses pronouncing judgment on him. The second part of the diptych, and the one that Ray

Murder Amidst the Chocolates  185 studies, depicts the flaying of Sisamnes, which was one of the punishments handed down by Cambyses for Sisamnes’s betrayal of his eminent position as judge. The film alternates between graphic details of the painting, the flaying of an arm, a foot, and chest, and close-ups of Ray’s various countenances of trepidation, discomfort, and perplexity about the grisly scene before him and his own questioning of what passes for art. (He later tells Ken that the paintings “were rubbish by spastics” [McDonagh 24].) Despite Ray’s uncertainty about the painting, its subject matter perfectly parallels his own inner turmoil. The physical evisceration of Sisamnes’s body parallels Ray’s psychological tumult and guilt that strip away at his tough guy, public façade in dealing with the severity of his accidental killing of the little boy. Through his flashback and the viewing of this painting, he begins to peel away his own reactions to what transpired and is finally able to vocalize to Ken in the next scene that “I killed a little boy…. I know I didn’t mean to. But because of the choices I made, and the course that I put into action, a little boy isn’t here anymore. And he’ll never be here again” (­McDonagh 27). Because of Ray’s view of the painting of Sisamnes and his self-recognition of his error through the flashback, Ray finally begins to confront and articulate his culpability in the boy’s death. Not only does the painting provide Ray the impetus to articulate his guilt, but it also, through ­Sisamnes’s physical condition, mirrors his own state of limbo in Bruges. As the punishment is imposed on the corrupt official, he enters a state of liminality between life and death. Still alive, Sisamnes experiences the torturous pain of having his skin stripped away from his body. He does not have long to live and will not survive such an act, but in the moment depicted in the painting, he exists in a state where he cannot go back to the normal, pain-free life he once experienced and he has not yet passed on to the state of death. It is a point of limbo for the judge, who can only hope that his death comes sooner rather than later. While not as violently dramatic, Ray exists in a similar situation of liminality. Through the murder of the little boy, Ray waits for the judgment of Harry on his action. He is no longer a hitman in Harry’s gang and because of his action of murdering the priest and the little boy he cannot return to being a normal citizen of the world, like everyone else with whom he interacts in Bruges. Because of his actions, he exists in a place of uncertainty. Unlike Sisamnes though, who knows his final fate, Ray meanders through Bruges contemplating suicide as an escape from his liminal state. In addition, according to Patrick Lonergan, the painting’s story is about the failure to follow a moral code, which parallels the film’s moral positioning. The most important code that hangs over the film’s action, and is the reason Ken and Ray are in Bruges, is the principle of honor among thieves.7 Harry expects proper behavior of his hitmen, and one of the most important precepts involves the death of children. He says:

186  William C. Boles “Ken, if I’d killed a little kid, accidentally or otherwise, I wouldn’t have thought twice, I’d’ve killed myself on the fucking spot! On the fucking spot! I’d’ve stuck the gun in my mouth on the fucking spot!” (McDonagh 67). Part of Ray’s struggle with the death of the child is that he has yet to create a personal moral philosophy upon which to act. Instead, he responds in the moment, spontaneously reacting without forethought to the results, as seen by his beating up of the smoke averse Canadian couple at the restaurant, which ultimately leads to his arrest while trying to escape Bruges. Ray, being new to Harry’s organization and the position of hitman, has yet to absorb all of Harry’s codes. In his liminal state, he struggles with defining what is right and wrong in this violent criminal world, and in discussions with Ken he ponders the moral permutations of various violent scenarios; Harry’s hit on the priest; Ken’s allegiance to Harry because he avenged Ken’s wife’s death; and the proper response to someone coming at you with a bottle. As part of the mob, Ray is expected to follow the expected rules, and when he does not, Harry, like Cambyses, makes the judgment that death is his punishment. The final painting depicted is The Last Judgment by Hieronymous Bosch, which Ken and Ray look at together (and Ray finds that he quite likes this one, unlike the rubbish before). The camera moves over various distinctive and iconic Bosch creations who suffer a torturous existence as they wait in purgatory. McDonagh cuts between the painting and the two men, as they discuss what the painting means. Bosch’s work completes the set of paintings that McDonagh uses to reflect on Ray’s character—the first one connected to his past, as argued by Melnikova and Rouse; the second to his current psychological state; and Bosch’s to Ray’s future. Rouse argues: “While viewing the Bosch painting, Ray is, for the first time, able to communicate his questions of guilt and judgement” to Ken (Rouse 177). Rouse suggests that the paintings set in motion his [Ray’s] spiritual quest. The artworks’ power culminates as the painted scenes are reenacted for the screen at the close of the film. During this scene, Harry finds his ironic death, and we cannot be sure whether Ray is alive or has moved on to Purgatory. (Rouse 179) The painting also represents where both Ray and Ken are now, stuck in limbo, in hitman purgatory in Bruges, waiting for what is to come and at the same wondering what will be, as they travel amidst the chocolates, the lace, the tourists, waiting for Harry’s call to see what the next step will be, much like the two hitmen stuck in Harold Pinter’s The Dumb Waiter.8 The painting also provokes both men to debate what will be their position after they die: heaven, hell, or purgatory. In Ken’s mind, while there is no chance of salvation for him, there is still room for Ray to redeem himself because of his youth. He later tells Harry that one of the reasons he

Murder Amidst the Chocolates  187 allowed Ray to escape is that he “has the capacity to change. The boy has the capacity to do something decent with his life” (McDonagh 67). Briefly, there is a suggestion that Ken may be right about Ray. Before he leaves to kill himself, he gives all his money to Marie, the pregnant hotel owner, and tells her that it is for her unborn child. Later, when he and Harry return to the hotel to continue their shootout, he makes Harry promise “not to start shooting until [Marie]’s left the hotel” (McDonagh 81), so that she and her baby are not injured. And yet, by the movie’s final moments, his actions lead to the death of yet another “little boy,” the dwarf actor Jimmy, who is dressed in a school uniform for the film shoot. In Bruges, though, ends ambiguously about the fate of Ray. Does he die from Harry’s gunshots, or does he survive? However, either fate resolves his time in Bruges and allows him to escape from his state of limbo. As he acknowledges, no matter what happens he either is going to end up in prison or dead, both states with more certainty and defined boundaries than what he has experienced since he accidentally killed the little boy in church. While In Bruges features the gunplay and violence that McDonagh so loves in his plays, these three short scenes show the transition of M ­ cDonagh from a playwright with a fascination for shocking the audience via death and violence, to a director and a screenwriter who uses the camera, location filming, and the controlling visual nature of film to deepen the narrative’s depiction of death. In these three scenes, two violent deaths are bookended by scenes that explore ethical conundrums, personal suffering, and religious uncertainty, showing that while McDonagh’s use of death on stage is spectacular and shocking, as he proudly sprays audience members with bits of flying stuff, film allows for more narrative and character introspection when it comes to death and violence. True, the splattering still exists, but it is juxtaposed with thoughtful, carefully considered visuals and narrative decisions that place death in a much more intellectual and philosophical framework. In Bruges, beyond the three scenes discussed here, offers a wide tapestry of death imagery, narrative and representative, which powerfully deepens the audience’s understanding of the characters and the entire film, showing that when it comes to death, McDonagh is not only a showman of violence on the stage, but also a contemplative explorer of death on the screen.

Notes 1 An earlier version of this chapter was presented at the 40th Comparative Drama Conference in Baltimore, Maryland in March of 2016. Comments from fellow presenters and audience members helped to refine the piece’s direction, and I am indebted to them for their assistance. 2 His latest piece Hangmen is undeniably inspired by Harold Pinter of the early 1950s and 1960s, when Pinter was in his heyday as a “comedy of menace” playwright. Some examples of McDonagh’s intertextual nod to Pinter include the strategic uses of silences, men in a pub taking the piss out of one

188  William C. Boles another, and one character who obsessively checks on whether he has been called “menacing.” 3 Posters from Taxi Driver and Reservoir Dogs were prominent on the wall of McDonagh’s bedroom in the 1990s, according to Lyman’s profile. 4 Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri received seven Oscar nominations, including Best Original Screenplay and Best Director for McDonagh. Frances McDormand won a Best Actress Oscar, while Sam Rockwell won a Best Supporting Actor Oscar. 5 The film ends with Ray being shot multiple times, but there is uncertainty whether the wounds are fatal or not. 6 The motives for Harry’s targeting of a Catholic priest, which are never explained in the film, can be found in the online shooting script: (1) McHenry held up a real estate deal that Harry was pursuing; and (2) McHenry sexually abused Harry when they took a trip to Bruges when the gangster was a child. See Martin McDonagh, In Bruges: The Shooting Script. www.scribd.com/ doc/133625227/IN-BRUGES. Accessed 28 January 2016. 7 Lonergan argues that there are two other ethical positions posited by the film: the morality of religion, specifically an eye for an eye, as evinced by Harry’s philosophy to kill himself immediately if he ever killed a kid; and political correctness, which is challenged at almost every turn by Ray’s inappropriate comments. See Patrick Lonergan, The Theatre and Films of Martin McDonagh (Bloomsbury, 2012), pp. 147–52. 8 For an in-depth examination of the connections between Pinter’s The Dumb Waiter and McDonagh’s In Bruges, see Lance Norman, “‘It is a bit over-elaborate’ or Dumb Waiters, Dead Children and Martinizing the Pinteresque.” Pinter Et Cetera, Ed. Craig N. Owens (Cambridge Scholars, 2009), pp. 139–58.

Works Cited Gold, Sylvanie. “A Dark-Humor Master Gets a Camera.” The New York Times, 13 Jan. 2008. LexisNexis. Accessed 25 Jan. 2016. Lyman, Rick. “Most Promising (And Grating) Playwright.” New York Times Magazine, 25 Jan. 1998. McDonagh, Martin. In Bruges. Faber & Faber, 2008. Melnikova, Irina. “In(visible) Bruges by Martin McDonagh.” Journal of European Studies, vol. 43, no. 1, 2013, pp. 44–59. O’Hagan, Sean. “Theatre is Never Going to Be Edgy in the Way I Want It to Be.” The Observer, 13 Sep. 2015. www.theguardian.com/culture/2015/sep/11/ martin-mcdonagh-theatre-never-going-to-be-edgy-hangmen-interview. Accessed 3 Mar. 2016. ———. “The Wild West.” The Guardian, 25 Mar. 2001. LexisNexis. Accessed 28 Jan. 2016. O’Toole, Fintan. “Martin McDonagh.” BOMB, no. 63, Spring 1998. bomb magazine.org/article/2146/martin-mcdonagh. Accessed 20 Apr. 2016. Rouse, Margitta. “‘Hitmen on Holiday Get all Medieval’: Media Theory and Multiple Temporalities in Martin McDonagh’s In Bruges.” European Journal of English Studies, vol. 15, no. 2, 2011, pp. 171–182. “Tradition.” The Basilica of the Holy Blood. www.holyblood.com/?page_ id=98&lang=en. Accessed 2 Feb. 2016. Wolf, Matt. “Martin McDonagh on a Tear.” American Theatre, vol. 15, no. 1, January 1998, pp. 48–50.

12 The Ruined Voice in Tom Murphy’s Bailegangaire Cheryl Julia Lee

The dead have a hold on Ireland. Her houses and her pubs, her pages and her stages are full of revenants. These “ghosts in [the] sunlight”1 are specters conjured by a national imagination, the bronze and marble statues along the street come to life; they are also fathers and mothers, brothers and sisters, the ones with whom we share names and seats at the table, whose eyes tell us how we will grow old, or not. They are reminders of time and time passing, love and the inevitability of love lost. Mostly, they are kept at a distance for fear of the hurting. In Bailegangaire (1985), however, Irish playwright Tom Murphy orchestrates an encounter with the dead, for he suggests that it is in the hurting that a space for meaning to come into being can be located. Murphy is widely considered one of Ireland’s greatest living writers, his oeuvre as being of “great significance for the development of Irish theatre” (Etherton 107), and Bailegangaire one of his masterpieces. Taking place on a single night in the year 1984, the play stages a drama of three women struggling to overcome their tragic past. In Bailegangaire, Mommo tries to tell the story of how the town Bochtán came to be known as Bailegangaire, or “the town without laughter,” which she has hitherto never finished telling. Once a seanchaí (or a traditional storyteller) but now senile, Mommo struggles with the act of narration, and her telling is confused and barely coherent. Her granddaughters are her unwilling audience, forced to listen to her circumlocutory tale while dealing with their individual traumas: Mary has returned home from London after a period of absence in the hope of “put[ting] everything right” (Bailegangaire 153) while Dolly, trapped in a loveless marriage, is pregnant with a stranger’s child. As Mommo persists in telling her story despite the sisters’ pleas, quarrels, and confessions, it is in her ruined dying voice that the sisters find hope for “some future” (160).

Mommo’s Ruined Voice The lights go down. The curtain rises. On stage is a double bed in the middle of a kitchen and in it sits an old woman. “Scoth caoc! Shkoth!” she yells; she is “driving imagined hens from the house” (93). With this,

190  Cheryl Julia Lee the tone is set for Bailegangaire. Mommo’s voice—the rambling and incoherent voice of “a half-senile crone sitting up in bed, spitting bits of food onto the floor, swinging from rambling incoherence to epic fluency” (FitzGibbon 42)—inducts the audience into the play. Bailegangaire belongs to Mommo. Her voice determines the atmosphere of the stage, structures the narrative action, and constitutes the meaning of the play. Yet, it is a ruined voice: it comes from a place of decline, speaks without communicating, and what it speaks is loss. As a seanchaí, the elderly Mommo represents a dying oral tradition. Both a means of entertainment and a keeper of folklore, the seanchaí held an esteemed position in Irish society until she was displaced in the 1800s along with the general decline of Gaelic culture. 2 Mommo tells her stories to “imagined children” (91)—her granddaughters forming her incidental and frustrated audience—while all around her are signs of time having passed: photographs (which Roland Barthes has irrevocably associated with death in Camera Lucida) as well as “modern conveniences” like the light bulb, which Mary keeps switched off for Mommo’s sake, and the radio that Mary switches on for respite from Mommo’s voice (91; 100). Moreover, because of her dementia, Mommo is not simply a seanchaí but a caricature of one: she speaks to an imaginary audience, her telling is fragmentary and tortured, and she is endowed with an exaggerated and almost grotesque physicality, spitting and snapping her way through the play. The audience of a seanchaí might have “loved to hear a familiar story again, and again, having a deep admiration for the skill with which it was told” (Kiberd 44–45), but Mommo’s telling of the “same old story” night after night while withholding “the last piece that you never tell” alternately bores and frustrates her granddaughters (Bailegangaire 101; 157). In addition, the tragic tale of Bailegangaire that Mommo is compelled to recite is a lore less like the “fairytales of the Celtic Twilight” than “the original folktales which are guides to survival in the hostile and harsh world of the peasant” (O’Toole, “Introduction” xiii). While the former tended to explain things away by way of supernatural entities, the latter was gritty realism, “full of widows and orphans, sudden deaths, cruel diseases that cannot be withstood, and predatory economic forces in which dispossession and starvation are constant possibilities” (xiii). What Mommo communicates is not simply the idea of passing time but rather that of devouring time, of still devouring time that has yet to complete its task, and the bitterness and grief that lie in its wake. The senile Mommo is trapped in the midst of this time, between the onward drive of the act of narration and the backward-looking origin story of Bailegangaire that is her narrative content—which also turns out to be part of her origin story. She is disoriented and disordered in time, by time, caught in the push and pull of its tides. Falling out of narrative time, Mommo also falls out of narrative space. Bailegangaire takes place

The Ruined Voice  191 on the familiar stage of the “single-set Irish country kitchen” (Morash and Richards 113). A commonplace in Irish theatre, it is a space that is “bounded, and … readable at a glance,” the manifestation of what Tom Garvin refers to as “the notion of a static and unchanging order that was to be regarded as ideal” (qtd. in Morash and Richards 23). The senile Mommo represents a rupture within this readily known space. Whereas the figure of the seanchaí and his or her stories are distinctly placed— “[their] time and place are the winter fireside, or the spring sowing time, or the country road at any season” (Pearse; qtd. in Kiberd 46)—Mommo takes center stage in a double bed (dis)placed in a kitchen. Mommo’s bed carves out the boundaries of her particular ontology within the communal space of the kitchen, a stage within the stage as it were, signaling “a dehiscence” (Kilroy 5). Peter Crawley describes the image of Mommo in her bed as “utterly shocking” and “a daring manoeuvre…, which gives the play an almost otherworldly focus” (Irish Times). “Otherworldly” is precisely the patina that the play seeks to establish: for most of the play, Mommo inhabits a different reality from her grandchildren, speaking to her memory of their young selves rather than to their present grown-up selves. Meanwhile, Mary and Dolly, painfully present as they are, “don’t understand a word she’s sayin’”; to Dolly, Mommo’s rambling is “[s]eafóid, nonsense talk about forty years ago” (Bailegangaire 106). In Dramatic Theories of Voice in the Twentieth Century, Andrew Kimbrough defines language as a “verbal system of communication … held in common by a community” (5), which is to say the words used must be anchored in the same reality. Because Mommo inhabits a different reality from her granddaughters, there is little basis for a common language among the women, and without language to fashion the voice’s sounds into sense (6), there is little opportunity for productive, meaningful dialogue. Instead, the women talk to themselves, creating an echo chamber in which their hurt and longing are constantly reflected back at them. Otherwise, they engage in acts of mimicry that emphasize their separateness. Mommo mimics various kinds of laughter in her telling, the “nonsensical” sounds of which reinforce the wall of non-meaning around her that is founded on her dementia—a wall impenetrable to Mary and Dolly, as well as the audience. Similarly, each time Mary and Dolly mimic Mommo or each other, a difference between the mimic and the mimicked emerges. For instance, when Mommo falls asleep, Mary takes over the telling of the story with “[a] touch of mimicry of Mommo” (Bailegangaire 121). This moment tends towards empathy as Mary recognizes in Mommo the desire to “go home,” only to end in frustration as Mary questions where home is (121). That the question is motivated by feelings of rejection on Mary’s part, and that it goes unanswered, signals an impasse between the two women.

192  Cheryl Julia Lee Mimicry is never harmless in Bailegangaire. Even when it stems from petty derision, such as when Dolly mocks Mary’s comment that “[t]his is our home” (151), mimicry always carries with it an assertion—even an accusation—of difference. William N. West explains that “[t]he experience of the mimetic object is in fact the experience of the cleft within it between itself and the other thing [it mimics]” (144). In this case, Dolly is charging Mary with abandonment, of leaving Dolly with Mommo for ten years, of not knowing terror, hatred, and desperation like she does. There is no “our home,” as Mary claims (Bailegangaire 130). It is for this reason that Mary is desperate to finish the story with Mommo: finishing it together would overcome the great gulf between them and establish some sort of common ground, which in turn would bring with it the possibility of “mov[ing] on to a place where, perhaps, we could make some kind of new start” (125). Divested of language and its purpose of communication, Mommo’s speech—a hybrid of Gaelic, English, and nonsensical utterances— approximates to sound. Mladen Dolar argues that the voice is “elusive, always changing, becoming, elapsing, with unclear contours, as opposed to the relative permanence, solidity, durability of the seen” (A Voice and Nothing More 79). At its heart, language is “just vibrations of the air, which are gone as soon as they are produced, a pure passing, not something that could be fixed or that one could hold on to” (Dolar, “The Object Voice” 11). The voice-as-sound emphasizes these non-physical conditions of enunciation and, in its extreme, manifests as “glossolalia”: the manifestation of language at the level of its pure materiality, the realm of pure sound, where one obtains a total disjunction of signifier and signified. As such, the relation between sound and meaning breaks down through the glossolalic utterance; it is the image of language inscribed in its excess, at the threshold of nonsense. (Weiss 19–20) Glossolalia speaks both to the physical and figurative limits of reality. Usually situated in a religious context and interpreted as “possession by a supernatural entity, conversation with divine beings, or the channeling of a divine proclamation” (“Glossolalia”), glossolalia gestures to the existence of a God and an afterlife, and more broadly, of mysteries that cannot be explained. In striving to give form to an intention or feeling that cannot be otherwise communicated, that is, to be a “pure manifestation of expression” (Weiss 20), it speaks of our limited ability to know and represent our experience. The meaning of glossolalia or voice-assound lies outside of itself. It reaches for something deeper, something other, something beyond visible and recognizable reality. Pointing to the “tortured vacillation between poetry and pure sound,” Chris Morash notes that where “language collapses into pure sound” in

The Ruined Voice  193 Murphy’s plays, “these are not points at which language breaks down, or at least not in any sense in which such a breakdown constitutes failure” (25–26; emphases added). Rather, these transitions signal an approach towards the profundity of our existence, a movement towards some kind of truth (26): a truth within the individual, for no one can mistake the ruined voice as coming from somewhere other than Mommo. Mommo’s speech-as-glossolalia is the precise articulation of the depths of her individual experience. In this aspect, Mommo’s speech shares some affinity with scat singing, another form of non-mimetic discourse. Unlike the controlled chaos of Mommo’s speech—wherein every syllable, each ho and hih and ha, is not left to chance or improvisation but detailed in Murphy’s script—scat singing is improvised in the moment. There is, however, a similar precision to the sounds vocalized by each singer that we recognize as their “signature traits” (Berliner 126).3 More than just superficial markers of personality, these subtleties in each singer’s idiosyncratic scat singing are charged with feeling and meaning. Nathaniel Mackey argues that scat’s “apparent mangling of articulate speech testifies to [the unspeakable]”—specifically, the unspeakable history of racial violence in this case—and that it is a “telling ‘inarticulacy’” (qtd. in Edwards 624), which expresses “the edges of the voice: the moan, the falsetto, the shout” (Edwards 625). It, hence, signals a kind of truth-telling, the sincere expression of an individual’s emotional timbre. Nicholas Grene writes that in Bailegangaire, Murphy “deliberately risks unintelligibility to gain its effect” (Politics 222); this chapter argues instead that its unintelligibility is a crucial part of its effect. Like scat, the “faults” in Mommo’s broken utterance (for broken it is, in all senses of the word) allow for an unadulterated expression of who she is and of the sum of her lived emotional experience. Dolly is not wrong when she refers to Mommo’s ramblings as a confession, but Mary is closer to the mark when she suggests that “[m]aybe she’s crying now” (Bailegangaire 141; 143).

A Laughter in the Dark Mommo’s “nonsense talk” is positioned as the denouement of a process in which we as human beings learn to speak, forget to speak, and finally lapse into silence. “It is characteristic of the voice to die,” writes Barthes. “What constitutes the voice is what, within it, lacerates me by dint of having to die, as if it were at once and never could be anything but a memory” (A Lover’s Discourse 114). The voice works its way in time towards ruin and loss is inscribed in the voice. Mommo’s voice is an aged voice that is deeply ingrained with the welts of existence. In what it speaks, how it sounds, and the way it tends towards silence, it documents loss as a condition of experience. The “defiance” and “hatred” (Bailegangaire 93) in Mommo’s voice is a reaction to a history of pain,

194  Cheryl Julia Lee deprivation, and desolation. It looks forward to the end of her narrative, where she makes her contribution to the laughing competition—a litany of the dead, a living record of loss: Her Pat was her eldest, died of consumption… An’ for the sake of an auld ewe was stuck in the flood was how she lost two of the others, Jimmy and Michael. … An’ the nice wife was near her time…Died tryin’ to give birth to the fourth… [Then] soft Willie, aged thirty-four, in Louisaville Kentucky, died, peritonitis. (163–64) And after all her children have passed before her, Mommo loses Tom and Séamus in quick succession. The inheritance of the “poor banished children of Eve” (169) is loss; their legacy in turn is bitterness. The received wisdom the seanchaí’s tale imparts in this case, as the sisters put it, is that “the saga will go on” (147). There is a perverse vitality to the heartbreaking continuities in the women’s lives that is embodied in the ruined voice, which rings out in a space haunted by the “[a]ul’ brown ghosts” of the dead, their faces staring out from “[f]ramed photographs on the walls” in contrasting silence (104; 91). Their silence echoes throughout the play, announcing the smaller death of indifference: it is iterated in Séamus’s withholding of Mommo’s first name, which leads her to think he hates her; it is in the wires Dolly’s husband, Stephen, sends that is their primary means of communication; it is in Mommo’s refusal to engage with Mary. The silence always comes again, as Murphy’s stage direction goes. For the family “acquainted with grief” (127), it is a known silence, a deeply felt and familiar silence that encroaches on the women. Thomas Hardy’s “Silences,” which Mary misquotes, engages with this paradox of the voice. Silence and sound are inseparable pairs as each enables the other: the silence of copse or croft is achieved “[w]hen the wind sinks dumb,” the silence of the belfry loft “[w]hen the tenor after tolling stops its hum,” the silence of a lonely pond after a man and his brother have drowned (865). Of all the silences Hardy names, the “most forlorn” is “the rapt silence of an empty house/where oneself was born,/dwelt, held carouse/with friends” (865), for the memories one has of the place is both the reason for and the only response to the silence. But where “remembered songs and music-strains” fail, Hardy’s poetic voice succeeds: there is, after all, a way of “stir[ring] a torpor like a tomb’s” (865) even if only for the duration of the poem, for Hardy too must eventually fall silent. In the same way, Mommo’s ruined voice stays the silence momentarily: Mary quotes the poem when Mommo falls asleep and the house is quiet, and the sound of a car passing by outside “punctuate[s]” (Bailegangaire 121) the silence, both interrupting and emphasizing the “torpor” in the house.

The Ruined Voice  195 The ruined voice emerges despite itself. It is the prerogative of the living, a reflection of an obligation to speak, to try and communicate consciousness. Yet, it is always haunted by the impending silence. In the laughing competition, Mommo and Séamus, along with the townsfolk, attempt to overcome this silence, to defy their fates by laughing at their miseries, and therefore to assert their presence in the world. The competition begins as a confrontation between two parties who are each eager to safeguard their pride: Mommo identifies Séamus and herself against the Bochtáns—people set apart by their proclivity for misfortune, whose land was “so poor… when ‘twasn’t bog ‘twas stone,” with weather “seven times worse than elsewhere in the kingdom” (92). As strangers, Mommo and Séamus’s intrusion into the community creates a territorial protectiveness that is intensified by Séamus’s claim that he is “a better laugher than [their] Costello” (127), who “was the one an’ only boast they ever had in that cursèd place” (102). The insult to their pride is doubled by Séamus being a small man while Costello is so physically dominating that “you’d near have to step into the verge to give him sufficient right-of-way” (101). Mommo’s goading of Costello and Séamus into competition comes similarly from a place of anger and hurt pride, the result of years of emotional detachment from her husband: The forty years an’ more in the one bed together an’ he to rise in the mornin’ (and) not to give her a glance. An’ so long it had been he had called her by first name, she’d near forgot it herself. (140) The collective laughter that ensues in the competition broadens the parameters of the confrontation: the conflict is now set between man and God. Counterposed to the sigh of submission that Séamus O’Toole denies himself (100), laughter—“great rumbles” rising from their chests, the “rich rolls of round sounds” out of their mouths “to explode in the air an’ echo back rev-berations” (156)—is embodied presence,4 emerging as evidence of strength, a way of overcoming misfortune by acknowledging it and defying its dominion over one’s emotional life. Drawing from Marcel Pagnol’s Notes sur le rire, Susanne Langer locates the source of laughter in “the subject who laughs,” as opposed to funny things or situations, marking laughter as “‘a song of triumph’” which “‘expresses the laugher’s sudden discovery of his own momentary superiority over the person he laughs at’” (Feeling and Form 339). In gallows humor, in particular, Langer suggests that “the harsh laugh in distress” is “a flash of self-assertion” (340); Sigmund Freud similarly argues that in such instances, “[t]he ego refuses to be distressed by the provocations of reality, to let itself be compelled to suffer. It insists that it cannot be affected by the traumas of the external world” (162). Vivian Mercier describes such laughter rather more emphatically as “purgation” and

196  Cheryl Julia Lee “comic catharsis”: the “howl of protest uttered sooner or later by every one of the tormented leading characters in Murphy’s [plays]” brings forth life and goodness (“Noisy Desperation” 18). 5 Commiserating over their fates, the Bochtáns and the strangers form a bond: by the end of the first round, the former “couldn’t do enough for that decent man an’ woman, all vying with each other… to buy treats for the strangers, tumblers of whiskey an’ bumpers of port wine” (Bailegangaire 155). The laughing competition also reignites the emotional spark between Mommo and her husband: like a girl, [Mommo] smiled at her husband, an’ his smile back so shy, like the boy he was in youth. An’ the moment was for them alone. Unaware of all cares, unaware of all the others. An’ how long before since their eyes had met, mar gheal dhá gréine, glowing love for each other. Not since long and long ago. (162) It seems then as if collectively, the strangers and the Bochtáns have reclaimed agency and successfully asserted their presence in a world that has hitherto only frustrated their best efforts. But if their laughter was an attempt at purgation or comic catharsis, it could only ever be a failed attempt: laughing in the face of distress, the individual is “repudiating reality and serving an illusion” (Freud 166). Accordingly, laughter occurs in bursts—Langer’s laugh of self-assertion is a flash—and comes to a stop eventually. Laughing the longest, Costello eventually laughs himself to death. To laugh is finally not to overcome but to cede to that which exceeds our reach. Georges Bataille declares that that which incites laughter may simply be the unknowable: We laugh, in short, in passing very abruptly, all of a sudden, from a world in which everything is firmly qualified, in which everything is given as stable within a generally stable order, into a world in which our assurance is overwhelmed, in which we perceive that this assurance was deceptive. Where everything had seemed totally provided for, suddenly the unexpected arises, something unforeseeable and overwhelming, revelatory of an ultimate truth: the surface of appearances conceals a perfect absence of response to our expectation. (90) This is especially so in the case of gallows humor, which Mercier argues, is always “concerned with forces which in the long run are uncontrollable,” such as death (The Irish Comic Tradition 4). In Bailegangaire, it is death’s minion, unreasonable and unfair misfortune—the “damnedable” potato crop for that year, the cow “that just died,” the man who

The Ruined Voice  197 “lost both arms to the thresher,” as much as the deaths in Mommo’s family (163)—that literally invites laughter, and that is incomprehensible and unknowable. Laughter occurs at “[a] point of slippage” (Bataille 97) and brings us into a confrontation with nothing. For Bataille, this confrontation enables one to “find an experience not only as rich, but, to me, richer still, deeper if possible, because in this experience I further part with common experience” (95). But in the poverty-ridden landscape of Bailegangaire where “the church is slow to pay out” (126) in more ways than one, transcendent experience escapes the characters and the only “nothing” that they can phantom is that of the “profane,” wherein “actions are often commanded by fear” and loneliness (Bataille 95). In sympathy with Bailegangaire’s emotional logic, Joachim Ritter is less optimistic in his articulation of the double bind of laughter: What is grasped and played out in the case of laughter is the fact that nullity secretly belongs to existence… in such a way that it becomes visible and audible within the exclusionary order itself, as it were a part of the order. (qtd. in Glasgow 188) Mercier hypothesizes that laughter is a “defence mechanism against the fear of death,” which finds its end in “help[ing] us to accept death” (The Irish Comic Tradition 49). And so Mommo laughs in her telling of the story of Bailegangaire, and in laughing, she returns laughter to the town without laughter. But it is a knowing and grieving laughter that acknowledges the inescapable fact of nullity, the impossible task of reconciling loss as a condition of experience, of making meaning in a world that seems intent on taking it away: “The ‘hih-hih-hih’ that punctuates her story sounds more like tears— ingrown sobs—rather than laughter” (Bailegangaire 164). In Mommo’s desperate and lonely laughter echoes Costello’s dying laughter, as he tells of throwing the rabbits he could not sell at the market against Patch Curran’s door. The image Costello conjures—the truth he tells with his last words—is one of ruined innocence, pointless misfortune, and the bitterness and potential for cruelty that follows as a result. To laugh in the face of this is finally irrational, to rebel ineffectual and punishable as a sin; and so, “they don’t laugh there [in Bochtán] anymore. … Save the childre, until they arrive at the age of reason” (167). The perversity of laughter is the perversity of the ruined voice that persists. Laughter always comes from a place of vitality: it is “a culmination of feeling— the crest of a wave of felt vitality” (Langer, Feeling and Form 340). ­Mommo’s “Och hona ho gus hah-haa” as she laughs it now is no longer the “derisory shout [she makes] on the night” (Bailegangaire 162), nor does it come across straightforwardly as “a cry of triumph,” which is

198  Cheryl Julia Lee how Murphy himself describes it (Grene, “Talking it through” 78). Instead, it is a laughter embedded with the stones of guilt and pain and sorrow, that gives form and meaning to the grief that stems from loss, and that approaches the rhythm of life. The seanchaí’s voice was always already a voice reaching from the past, a voice of memory, which stands in the breach of life and death. In the past, the seanchaí was celebrated as a guardian of time, his voice “the channel through which the past flows to inform the future” (de Blacam 349), creating the illusion that the seanchaí could somehow preserve us from devouring time or at least allow us to save something from it. In the dying light of dusk that governs Murphy’s play, the tensions inherent in such a voice and the corresponding impossibility of resolution and redemption culminate in Mommo’s ruined voice, which is at once both laughter and tears, life and death. Mommo’s father’s warning to “never step on a snail” is a warning about the painful and at times unreasonable continuities that govern existence (Bailegangaire 123). To know one’s place like the snail “knows his place… and understands the constant parameters—and the need for parameters—in the case under consideration, God’s prize piece, the earth” (123), and to know that our place is at once on both sides of those parameters—this is the “moral” of Mommo’s telling (and of Murphy’s along with it), for only then are we “free” and everything we do “in innocence” (123). Just as Mary declares, “No freedom without structure” (120), there is no innocence6 without the knowledge of evil. Is it fair that evil is the price we pay for the possibility of goodness? Mercier argues that Murphy would answer that it is not (23), and yet, to borrow Antonin Artaud’s words, Murphy is aware that “life cannot help exercising some blind rigour that carries with it all its conditions, otherwise it would not be life” (113–14). To recall O’Toole’s comment, Murphy’s tale as much as Mommo’s is a folktale, a guide to survival and not an escapist fantasy.

The Condition of Music Leslie Kane argues that twentieth-century literature is “distinguished by [a] shocking retreat from the word” and “yield[s] to the temptation and authority of silence to express the unspoken and the unspeakable” (14). Bailegangaire is a play that strives and rallies against silence. An encounter with silence (and along with it, death, absence, and loss) is staged in the ruined voice, conferring the urgency to create meaning in our ephemeral lives by forging forms for our experience. Through ­Mommo’s ruined voice, Murphy reveals a faith in the potential of human utterance—in the form of art—to perform this task. Mommo knows only to tell one story and it is a story of loss, but she persists in her telling and her telling is lively: she laughs and she cries in her laughter, her accent varies in tone, and she employs rhetorical

The Ruined Voice  199 devices such as anaphora and alliteration. Denis Donoghue posits that such “dancing of speech” is eloquence: “the aim of a dance is not to get from one part of the village green or the stage to another, it is to create and embody yet another form of life beyond the already known forms of it” (2). To employ Grene’s distinction, Mommo’s ruined voice finds its end in expression rather than communication (“Talking it through” 67). Hence, while Mary and Dolly cannot understand her, they are able to participate in her narrative and eventually achieve reconciliation. Like Mommo, Mary and Dolly are unable to “talk straight” (Bailegangaire 142) and communicate their emotions. All three women dance around in their words, skirting the edges of the complex of emotional states that they all share. Lacking a common vocabulary, the women understand words like “home” and “family” differently, but in all their variations, the words feel the same: they feel like anger and guilt and grief. As Mary declares, “[n]o one who came out of this—house—had it easy” (148), and nowhere is this more evident than in Mommo’s voice. Mommo’s ruined voice speaks on; it even aspires to song. In its varying rhythms, Mommo’s seafóid establishes itself as a rich interplay of sounds that captures an emotional reality that, as suggested by the earlier association with scat singing, makes of it something akin to music. Her narrative moves between emotional states rather than ideas: guilt and remorse prompt a switch to a “child-like” tone (97) while pauses are motivated by moments of deep love, such as when she remembers Séamus’s “grey eyes [which] were growing in handsomeness as the years went by” (99). In this aspect, it resonates with Langer’s suggestion of music as “a tonal analogue of emotive life”: The tonal structures we call ‘music’ bear a close logical similarity to the forms of human feeling—forms of growth and of attenuation, flowing and stowing, conflict and resolution, speed, arrest, terrific excitement, calm or subtle activation and dreamy lapses … the greatness and brevity and eternal passing of everything vitally felt. Such is the pattern, or logical form, of sentience; and the pattern of music is that same form worked out in pure, measured sound and silence. (Feeling and Form 27) Music is the ideal that Mommo’s ruined voice strives towards: it is able to maintain the tensions between sound and silence, presence and absence, between the varied emotions that each character struggles to express. These are the same tensions that everywhere threaten to tear Mommo’s voice asunder. Langer argues, “Because the forms of human feeling are much more congruent with musical forms than with the forms of language, music can reveal the nature of feelings with a detail and truth that language

200  Cheryl Julia Lee cannot approach” (Philosophy 235). Murphy appears to share a similar belief: he tends to turn to music in his desire to “write about the feeling of life. Not life as an intellectual process, or a concept, but as a feeling” (“Home to Darkness”). Echoing Walter Pater’s argument that “[a]ll art aspires to the condition of music,” Murphy suggests that the aspiration is “to get a simultaneity of things happening” without “confus[ing] the situation or mak[ing] it over complex”: the richness of music is that “[i]n music you can be elated, deflated, happy, sad in a phrase of music” (“In Conversation with Michael Billington” 108). Music abounds in Murphy’s play, the most important of which is Schubert’s Notturno in E Flat, which introduces the play and closes both acts. Schubert’s nocturne is neither a counterpoint to Mommo’s ruined voice (White 149) nor mere accompaniment. The nocturne swells and sinks, charting the range of passions in Mommo’s ruined voice and bringing it to the depths that it cannot reach — “music articulates forms which language cannot set forth,” writes Langer (Philosophy 233)—and above all, it ties them all in harmony. The nocturne accomplishes a similar effect with the three women’s voices. Mercier suggests, “One might describe the entire play as a long solo [Mommo’s], with interruptions” (“Noisy Desperation” 19) but surely, Mary and Dolly’s parts are more than just inconvenient “interruptions.” Mary and Dolly are Mommo’s companions in more ways than one: their “individual sounds” and “individual sound patterns,” which Patrick Mason suggests Murphy endows all his characters with (105), give context to Mommo’s voice and show what there is still left to be lost in life, thereby intensifying the pain cutting through it. In this way, they resemble musical phrases, which are both individual expressions with their own self-contained meaning and parts of a larger conversation in which they modify and are modified by other musical phrases. In the following exchange, for instance, although Mommo is ostensibly ignoring and speaking over Mary, they are not “performing solos,” so to speak: MARY:  Mommo? … I’m very happy here. MOMMO:  Hmmph! MARY:  I’m Mary. MOMMO:  Oh but she looked after her grandchildren. MARY:  Mommo? MOMMO:  And Tom is in Galway. He’s afeared of the gander. MARY:  But I’m so… (She leaves it unfinished, she can’t find the word.) MOMMO:  To continue. MARY:  Please stop. (She rises slowly.) MOMMO:  Now man and horse, though God knows they tried, could see

the icy hill was not for yielding. I’m so lonely. (Bailegangaire 98)

MARY:  Because

The Ruined Voice  201 Mommo’s “responses” to Mary contradict the latter’s words in tone and meaning but are not entirely disconnected from them, in much the same way that Mommo is both here in the kitchen in 1984 and not here. When Mommo insists on telling her story despite Mary’s protestations, the former is in fact engaging with her granddaughter in the conversation she wants to have (i.e., the one about her loneliness), albeit in a circulatory way because the way things are right now are a consequence of the way things happened then. Through this strategy of “echo” and “counterpoint” (Grene, “Talking it through” 79), Murphy allows motifs such as “the cursèd paraffin,” “misfortunes,” and the idea of “homecoming” to repeat across each of the women’s speeches and to build up to startling revelations. It is hence that Grene can speak of a “musical relationship” being established among the women (78–79). Bailegangaire was never meant to be a solo; for if the play is a musical composition, it is in the key of loneliness. Although it is only Mary who confesses to it, all three women are struggling with feelings of abandonment and isolation—and loneliness is another name for the inability to articulate and communicate our emotions to another. “I need to talk to—someone!” insists Mary; “I need to talk to someone too,” replies Dolly quietly (112). In keeping with the musical terms at play, loneliness then needs must be at the very least a duet. At the end of Bailegangaire, as the three women lie in the bed together, the climax of their “symphony” (122) is reached in the moment when Mommo calls Mary by name. Murphy’s subtlety here belies the fact that surely this is the most deeply felt and anticipated moment in the play. Names signal recognition and presence; they are a stay against loss. It is what Mommo herself feels deprived of by her husband. In her litany of the dead, Mommo lays out the names of her loved ones who are dead as if the effect was cumulative, and the greatest one—the loss of Mary— still to come, the greatest for it being the most probable and the most imminent. Dolly’s own tragedy is that if and when it comes down to it, she will always be the one “left holdin’ the can” (103), who will see to it that their saga goes on “one way or the other” (147). Throughout the play, she makes to leave this house she hates (112) but always returns eventually, as if she is compelled to stay. This is not to say that Dolly is excluded from this climax, as Mommo’s recognition of Mary harkens back to the sisters’ conversation earlier in the play when Dolly suggests that Mommo’s inability to remember Mary is the result of the latter’s departure, or her abandonment of the family as Dolly sees it. Mommo’s naming of Mary at this juncture also suggests a literal stay against loss where Dolly is concerned. This tremendous note of perfect harmony (in which one woman’s utterance brings all three together) is aptly met with Schubert’s nocturne, the strains of which come to us notably after Mary switches the radio off, as if from somewhere beyond. It is not a resolution that Murphy is trying to achieve at the end of the

202  Cheryl Julia Lee play. As Grene justly argues, the negative energies that dominate the play “cannot be simply exorcised by [Dolly] falling drunkenly asleep in the family bed with her sister and her grandmother” (“Talking it through” 78), or by the sisters’ brief commiseration with one another through laughter (which recalls the laughing competition). Instead what Murphy offers us in the closing scene is a truth that the audience is compelled to attend to, a recognized form of the women’s experience. And also of our experience, for Notturno in E Flat simultaneously allows Bailegangaire to expand beyond both the confines of the women’s world and of the stage. Grene suggests, “the expressiveness of [music] does not have to be located as the expression of any one identity or meaning. It can be appropriated to the mood and feeling of the listener” (“Talking it through” 73). Which is to say that music leaves the door open for any one of us to follow after. It is an invitation, and specifically, an invitation for empathy—Notturno in E Flat literally welcomes the audience into the world of Bailegangaire—and empathy is our means of access to Murphy’s play. Not able to overcome the silence of death, the playwright might at least quell the silence of indifference. Schubert’s Notturno in E Flat is Murphy extending a hand out to the characters and the audience in compassion.

Last Notes In “The State of the Art,” Fintan O’Toole calls for a “theatre of evocation” to replace a “theatre of recognition.” He argues that because a sense of shared place is no longer available to us, the vocabulary of a theatre of recognition “in which a world is signalled to us through objects and we tacitly agree to recognise it as our own” has been rendered irrelevant (57). A theatre of evocation is concerned with calling something up “to the eye of the mind” (57) rather than recreating what is before the physical eye. The “single” world that a theatre of evocation stages for the physical eye splits into many worlds—as many worlds as there are audience members before the stage, each one of them subjective, private, and elusive. A theatre of recognition seeks to determine while a theatre of evocation intimates and is completed only beyond the confines of the stage. In calling for a theatre of evocation, O’Toole goes back to definitions of theatre in which the relationship between the characters onstage and the audience is first principle: I can take any empty space and call it a bare stage. A man walks across this empty space while someone else is watching him, and this is all that is needed for an act of theatre to be engaged. (Brook 9; emphasis added)

The Ruined Voice  203 Michael Etherton points out that Murphy’s plays—along with those of Kilroy, Arden, and D’Arcy—are exemplary of the idea that “[a] written play text has no meaning until it is made in the imaginations of the audience” (4). These plays are “not ‘about Ireland’” or “‘an Irish view’” per se, but are “about other things: an opening-up of ideas about which they and their Irish audiences need to reach a greater understanding, a deeper truth” (4). Bailegangaire is as much a play about love and loss as it is an answer to the need for a new vocabulary in an Irish theatre fixated on the material past. Mommo’s ruined voice enacts a blink in space and time in order that we might reach this truth by seeing with other than the physical eye. Its substance is what Langer refers to as “semblance.” The importance of semblance lies in the way it “liberates perception—and with it, the power of conception—from all practical purposes” (Feeling and Form 49), which is to say that “they exist only for the sense or the imagination that perceives them” (50). Peter Brook would speak of the voice-as-sound as a “true symbol”—specific, “hard and clear” but indefinable (58). “We get nowhere if we expect to be told what they mean, yet each one has a relation with us we can’t deny,” argues Brook. “If we accept this, the symbol opens in us a great and wondering O” (58). This “great and wondering O” is the meaning of the ruined voice, of the voice-as-sound. It is also the aim of a theatre of evocation, of imaginative response, of empathy and compassion. As each night brings in a new audience, the great and wondering ‘O’ takes on new shapes and develops new relations. Meaning-making is brought into the present where it belongs, life and death commingle on stage in innocence, and theatre fulfills its role as “the living form” (Murphy, “Home to Darkness”). Bailegangaire becomes immortal, and these forms of experience that live in spite of death, we call art.

Notes 1 In “Ghosts in Sunlight,” Truman Capote describes the experience of seeing the past and the present converging in a moment as akin to seeing “a ghost … sauntered in out of the sunlight” (269). 2 This was partly the result of technological developments and the mass emigration that took place in the wake of the Famine. See J. H. Delargy’s “The Gaelic Story-Teller.” 3 “Some people sing love so differently—luuv or lahv. There are different ways of saying words like cry. You can say cryie or crahy. Also, singers may place their emphasis on different words in the same song” (Lundy; qtd. in Berliner 125–26). 4 The Irish word for laughter is gáire, which comes from the combination of the words for “noise” and “violent bodily movement” (Janus 160). 5 Mercier’s engagement with Bailegangaire is limited and contentious. For instance, he describes Mommo as “a female Job who longs to unburden herself of all her grievances before she dies” (19); this chapter argues that Mommo’s task is more sophisticated. The play’s mechanics of laughter are

204  Cheryl Julia Lee more complicated than Mercier makes them out to be, since the story does not end with Séamus having “attain[ed] comic catharsis and prolong[ing] his laughter sufficiently to defeat his jovial opponent” (20). Mercier’s diminishing of Mary and Dolly’s roles in the play is addressed later in this chapter. 6 Murphy’s use of “innocence” here is intriguing. He certainly does not mean it in the usual sense of “being untouched by evil”; as his plays tend to demonstrate, there is no one of us that escapes being touched by evil in one way or another. Alongside this constant presence of evil is a prevailing sense of a pursuit for innocence, an innocence that does not transcend a world governed by unreasonable misfortunes and the inevitability of death but is firmly located in it. Within the context of Bailegangaire, such innocence seems to constitute an acceptance of, and a rugged determination to live within, the parameters of our existence. Dolly’s unborn child is the embodiment of this bittersweet, tragicomic innocence. The child, ostensibly to be named after their dead brother, is the result of unhappy and cruel circumstances, and possibly a harbinger of more of the like, but he simultaneously represents “another chance” for the family, “[sent] to gladden their home” (170). It is in association with this complex sense of “innocence” that I refer to “goodness” in the next line, a word that is itself not free of complications in Murphy’s world.

Works Cited Artaud, Antonin. Theatre and Its Double. Grove, 1958. Barthes, Roland. A Lover’s Discourse. Translated by Richard Howard. Penguin Books, 1990. Bataille, Georges. “Un-Knowing: Laughter and Tears.” Georges Bataille: Writings on Laughter, Sacrifice, Nietzsche, Un-Knowing, vol. 36, Spring 1986, pp. 89–102. Berliner, Paul F. Thinking in Jazz: The Infinite Art of Improvisation. The University of Chicago Press, 1994. Brook, Peter. The Empty Space. Simon & Schuster Inc., 1996. Capote, Truman. “Ghosts in Sunlight.” Portraits and Observations: The Essays of Truman Capote. Modern Library, 2008, pp. 267–274. Crawley, Peter. Review of Bailegangaire, Irish Times, 15 Sep. 2014. De Blacam, Aodh. Gaelic Literature Surveyed. Talbot Press, 1973. Delargy, J.H. “The Gaelic Story-Teller, with Some Notes on Gaelic Folk-Tales.” The Sir John Rhŷs Lecture. 28 Nov. 1945. Proceedings of the British Academy (1945), vol. 31. Oxford UP, 1946. Dolar, Mladen. “The Object Voice.” Gaze and Voice as Love Objects. Edited by Renata Salecl and Slavoj Žižek. Duke UP, 1996, pp. 7–31. ———. A Voice and Nothing More. Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 2006. Donoghue, Denis. On Eloquence. Yale UP, 2008. Edwards, Brent Hayes. “Louis Armstrong and the Syntax of Scat.” Critical Inquiry, vol. 28, no. 3, 2002, pp. 618–649. Etherton, Michael. Contemporary Irish Dramatists. St. Martin’s Press, 1989. FitzGibbon, T. Gerald. “Thomas Murphy’s Dramatic Vocabulary.” Thomas Murphy Issue. Special issue of Irish University Review, vol. 17, no. 1, 1987, pp. 41–50. Freud, Sigmund. “Humor.” Collected Works Vol. 21. Edited by James Strachey. Hogarth Press, 1961, pp. 159–166.

The Ruined Voice  205 Glasgow, Rupert. D.V. Madness, Masks, and Laughter: An Essay on Comedy. Associated University Presses, 1995. “Glossolalia.” Encyclopædia Britannica (2014): Research Starters. Web. 29 Jan. 2016. Grene, Nicholas. The Politics of Irish Drama. Cambridge UP, 1999. ———. “Talking it through: The Gigli Concert, Bailegangaire.” Talking About Tom Murphy. Edited by Nicholas Grene. Carysfort P, 2002, pp. 67–81. Hardy, Thomas. “Silences.” The Complete Poems. Edited by James Gibson. Macmillan, 1976, p. 865. Janus, Adrienne. “From ‘Ha he hi ho hu. Mummum’ to ‘Haw! Hell! Haw!’: Listening to Laughter in Joyce and Beckett.” Journal of Modern Literature, vol. 32, no. 3, 2009, pp. 144–166. Kane, Leslie. The Language of Silence: On the Unspoken and the Unspeakable in Modern Drama. Associated University Presses, Inc., 1984. Kiberd, Declan. “Storytelling: The Gaelic Tradition.” The Irish Writer and the World. Cambridge UP, 2005, pp. 42–51. Kilroy, Thomas. “A Generation of Playwrights.” Theatre Stuff: Critical Essays on Contemporary Irish Theatre. Edited by Eamonn Jordan. Carysfort Press, 2000, pp. 1–7. Kimbrough, Andrew M. Dramatic Theories of Voice in the Twentieth Century. Cambria Press, 2011. Langer, Susanne. Feeling and Form. Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1953. ———. Philosophy in a New Key. 1942. Harvard, 1976. Mason, Patrick. “Interview with Christopher Murray.” Thomas Murphy Issue. Special Issue of Irish University Review, vol. 17, no. 1, 1987, pp. 100–113. Mercier, Vivian. The Irish Comic Tradition. Oxford UP, 1962. ———. “Noisy Desperation: Tom Murphy and the Book of Job.” Thomas Murphy Issue. Special Issue of Irish University Review, vol. 17, no. 1, 1987, pp. 18–23. Morash, Chris. “Murphy, History and Society.” Talking About Tom Murphy. Edited by Nicholas Grene. Carysfort Press, 2002, pp. 17–30. Morash, Chris and Shaun Richards. Mapping Irish Theatre: Theories of Space and Place. Cambridge UP, 2013. Murphy, Tom. Bailegangaire. Tom Murphy Plays: Two. Methuen Drama, 1993, pp. 89–170. ———. “Home to Darkness: An Interview with Playwright Tom Murphy.” Interview with Belinda McKeon. The Paris Review (July 2012). ———. “In Conversation with Michael Billington.” Talking About Tom Murphy. Edited by Nicholas Grene. Carysfort Press, 2002, pp. 91–112. O’Toole, Fintan. “Introduction.” Tom Murphy Plays: Two. Methuen Drama, 1993, pp. ix–xiv. ———. “Irish Theatre: The State of the Art.” Theatre Stuff: Critical Essays on Contemporary Irish Theatre. Edited by Eamonn Jordan. Carysfort Press, 2000. pp. 47–58. Weiss, Allen S. Phantasmic Radio. Duke UP, 1995. West, William N. “Repeating Staging Meaning between Aristotle and Freud.” SubStance, vol. 28, no. 2, issue 89: Special Section: Marcel Bénabou, 1999, pp. 138–158. White, Harry. “Tom Murphy and the Claims of Music.” Alive in Time: The Enduring Drama of Tom Murphy. Carysfort Press, 2010. pp. 139–53.

Index

account-book 34, 36, 38, 40n17 aesthetics 92, 102, 131, 137, 151, 153–55, 156, 157, 161, 162–64, 166–67, 169, 170, 176 Allen, Elizabeth 5–6, 126–46 Aporias (Jacques Derrida) 1–2, 6, 21, 108–09, 114, 120, 129, 133, 135–36, 144n18, 163, 165, 168–69, 171 Ariès, Philippe 27, 29, 32–36, 40n15, 64, 71, 73n4 Bachelard, Gaston 158 Bailegangaire (Tom Murphy) 7–8, 189–204 Barbrook, Richard 101–02 Baron, Michel 67–68 Barthes, Roland 2, 11–16, 18, 19, 20, 23, 97, 170, 190, 193 Bataille, Georges 196–97 Beckett, Samuel 19, 96, 103, 104n1 Benjamin, Walter 8, 12, 18 Blood Meridian (Cormac McCarthy) 7, 161–62, 164–71 Bloom, Harold 161, 164, 165 Boles, William C. 7, 176–88 The Book of Evidence (John Banville) 6–7, 149, 151–55, 158 Boswell, James 107, 109, 112, 115, 116, 121, 122 boundaries 1, 3–4, 15, 40n15, 72, 83, 127, 132–33, 135–36, 150–51, 155, 157, 187, 191; see also ontological boundaries; Sir Orfeo: boundaries and their significance in Bradbury, Malcolm 79, 87 Brody, Jennifer DeVere 14 Brook, Peter 202, 203 Byron 94

Camera Lucida (Roland Barthes) 11–16, 25n4, 97; see also Barthes, Roland Calderwood, James 49 Caldwell, Ellen M. 141, 143n6, 144n17 Calvinism see Spark, Muriel: Calvinist ideas in work by Canon-Roger, Françoise 154 Cartlidge, Neil 128, 135, 144n23 catharsis 93, 98, 143n4, 169–71, 195–96 Catholic 63, 71–72, 77, 80, 86, 90, 98, 101, 102, 103, 182, 188n6; see also funeral Chamberlain, Samuel 164–65 Chatfield-Taylor, H. C. 67, 69 Chaucer, Geoffrey 135, 139, 133n26 Cheeke, Stephen 154 Chion, Michel 22 click see photography and the camera’s click Clingham, Greg 111 comedy 62–63, 65–66, 73n3, 187n2 confession 27, 29, 35, 181–83, 193 Coughlan, Patricia 153 Davidson, Clifford, et. al 37, 39n1, 40n28 Davies, Laura 5, 107–25 dead speech 22 Deane, Seamus 98 death: aestheticization of 162, 166–68, 170; and art 48, 149, 183–86, 203; and language 11, 13, 18–19, 120, 122; and the failure of imagination 152–54; and the sublime 161, 163, 166, 169, 170–71; as an illusion 1, 64, 71; as nullification 45–47, 51, 57, 58–59; as performance 65,

208 Index 71–73, 73n4; counterfeiting 63, 65, 67; difficulty staging 176–77; drive 16; in film 177–79, 187; in French NeoClassical writing 62, 68; instant of 17–18, 23, 25n3; laughter and 196–97 Death and the Miser (Jan Provost) 183–84 “The Deaths of Roland Barthes” (Jacques Derrida) 11–12, 15, 16, 19, 24 deceit 3, 55–56, 57, 64–66, 99, 140 Derrida, Jacques 1–3, 11, 15, 16–17, 19, 21, 24, 63, 108–09, 114, 120, 140, 143n7, 145n27, 164; see also Aporias (Jacques Derrida); “The Deaths of Roland Barthes” (Jacques Derrida); haunting; nonpassage D’Hoker, Elke 153, 159n6 A Dictionary of the English Language (Samuel Johnson) 107, 108, 109, 112, 118 Dolar, Mladen 192 Donne, John 45 Donoghue, Denis 168, 169, 199 The Driver’s Seat (Muriel Spark) 79, 84–87 The Duchess of Malfi (John Webster) 44, 47, 49, 58, 88 Duclow, Donald F. 27, 29, 37, 39n3, 40n25 Edwards, Brent Hayes 193 ekphrasis 149–50, 157–58 elegy 150, 154 Elton, William 43–44, 51 Etherton, Michael 189, 203 ethics 168–71, 185–86, 188n7; and aesthetics 164; see also death, aestheticization of Everyman (medieval play) 3, 27–39; as ars moriendi 29, 30, 34, 3538, 39n3, 40n25; devotio moderna as context for 31–32; relationship to Eleckerlijc 28, 31–38 “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar” (Edgar Allan Poe) 13, 14, 20–24, 25n6; see also “Textual Analysis of Poe’s ‘Valdemar’” (Roland Barthes) Falk, Oren 128, 131 Farell Krell, David 115

film 1, 4–5, 7, 22, 89, 91–93, 96–97, 104n4, 177–79, 183, 187 FitzGibbon, T. Gerald 190 Fleck, Stephen H. 68–69 Fletcher, Alan J. 128 Foucault, Michel 18–19 Freud, Sigmund 16, 93, 102, 104n2, 134, 144n20, 195, 196 funeral 44–45, 49, 71–72, 94–95, 103; see also Neil Jordan: Irish funerary tradition as context for work Gaut, Berys 164 ghosts 16–17, 23, 45–46, 100–01, 151, 155, 159n4, 194, 203n1 glossolalia see voice as sound Gonzalez, Justo L. 85 Gold, Sylvanie 180, 183 grammar 5, 15, 107, 112–14, 115–17, 122; see also Samuel Johnson: progressive tense as key stylistic device Grene, Nicholas 193, 198, 199, 201, 202 grief 64–66, 87, 121, 127, 138, 140, 144n20, 190, 194, 197–98 Guillemin, George 167, 170 guilt 7, 183, 185–86, 199 Guyer, Paul 170–71 Hamlet (William Shakespeare) 1, 33, 43, 45–47, 49, 51–52, 58, 59n4 Hardy, Thomas 194 Harmon, Maurice 97 haunting 5, 11, 16–17, 20, 23, 46, 84, 94, 102, 149, 151, 194, 195 hauntology 17; see also haunting Heffernan, James A. W. 151, 158 Heidegger, Martin 114, 115, 161 history 5, 7, 11, 19, 27, 28, 31, 40n15, 43, 87, 91, 92, 94, 97, 103, 104n1, 104n6, 116, 128, 143n4, 161–62, 163, 164–66, 169–71, 180, 181, 193 Hopper, Keith 4–5, 91–106 The Hothouse by the East River (Muriel Spark) 79, 89–90 Howard, Richard 15 Hynes, Joseph 87, 88 The Idler (Samuel Johnson) 107–12, 115, 117–22 illusion of theatre 63, 67; breaking the 68–69; see also death as an illusion

Index  209 The Imaginary Invalid (Molière) 3–4, 62–68, 72 imagination 1, 4, 6, 8, 32, 55, 71, 73, 97, 102, 103, 104n1, 133, 150, 152, 155, 158, 189, 203; see also death and the failure of imagination Imhof, Rüdiger 102, 156 In Bruges (Martin McDonagh) 7, 178–87 Jameson, Fredric 94, 101 Jarrett, Robert L. 165, 166 Jernigan, Daniel K. 1–8, 62–74 Johnson, Samuel 107–22; progressive tense as key stylistic device 112–17, 120, 122; secrecy as theme in writing of 117–22, 123n11; see also A Dictionary of the English Language (Samuel Johnson); The Idler (Samuel Johnson); The Rambler (Samuel Johnson) Jordan, Neil 91–104; films of 91–94; Irish funerary tradition as context for work 94–95, 103; Oedipal archetypes as theme 91–92, 95, 100–01; political unconscious in writings by 94, 101; see also Night in Tunisia (Neil Jordan); Sunrise with Sea Monster (Neil Jordan) Josipovici, Gabriel 82 Jost, Jacob Sider 119 The Judgement of Cambyses (Gerard David) 184–85 Kane, Leslie 198 Kant, Immanuel 2, 162–64 Kearney, Richard 104n1 Kendall, Elliott 128, 131, 143n11, 144n20 Kermode, Frank 4, 77, 79, 84, 87, 92 Kiberd, Declan 190, 191 Killie, Kristin 116, 117 Kimbrough, Andrew 191 King Lear (William Shakespeare) 3, 43, 49–59, 143n5 Krieger, Murray 150 LaCapra, Dominick 170 La chambre claire see Camera Lucida (Roland Barthes) Langer, Susanne 195, 196, 197, 199, 200, 203

The Last Judgment (Hieronymous Bosch) 186 Lee, Cheryl Julia 7–8, 189–205 Lerer, Seth 130, 143n12, 144n15 limbo 183, 185–86 liminal 5, 102, 103, 185; see also limbo limitlessness 163, 165 Locke, John 110, 123n4, 123n7 Lodge, David 81 loneliness 32, 197, 201 Lonergan, Patrick 185, 188n7 Longinus 161, 162, 171n3, 171n3 Lyman, Rick 176, 178, 188n3 Lyotard, Jean-François 163, 164 Macbeth (Shakespeare) 1, 47 MacCabe, Colin 94 MacCulloch, Diarmaid 82 McCarthy, Cormac see Blood Meridian (Cormac McCarthy) McDonagh, Martin 7, 176–79, 180, 183, 187n2, 188n3, 188n4; see also In Bruges (Martin McDonagh) McGahern, John 97–98 McGrath, Alister E. 78 McHale, Brian 72, 150, 155, 157, 161; see also ontological boundaries Mahoney, Christina Hunt 98 Measure for Measure (William Shakespeare) 45, 57 Melnikova, Irina 184, 186 memento mori 12, 38, 46, 167; see also Memento Mori (Muriel Spark) Memento Mori (Muriel Spark) 79–80, 84, 89 memory 5, 7, 12, 38, 40n28, 44, 46, 94, 97, 104n1, 134, 144n20, 150, 198; as counter to nullification 46, 47–48 Mercier, Vivian 195, 196, 197, 198, 200, 203n5 metanarrative 64, 65, 94 Metz, Christian 97 Middleton, Thomas 46, 48 Miller, J. Hillis 92 Milton, John 119–20, 123n13 mimesis 16, 150, 192–93 mimicry 191–92 mirroring 152, 155–56 Molière 62–64, 65, 67–69, 71–72, 73n3, 74n7; see also The Imaginary Invalid (Molière)

210 Index monument 38, 44–45, 48–49, 58 morals see ethics Morash, Chris 191, 192 Morley, Simon 162, 165 mourning 11, 13–17, 19, 38, 92, 103, 129, 144n20 Mullaney, Steven 44, 59n4 Müller, Anya 154–55, 158 murder 18, 46, 84, 86–87, 92, 149, 151–53, 167, 182, 184, Murphy, Arthur 107 Murphy, Neil 6–7, 149–60 Murphy, Tom see Bailegangaire (Tom Murphy) music 193, 199–202 narrative 1–8, 13, 18, 22, 79, 87, 91, 93–94, 104, 104n1, 136, 140, 149–52, 154, 156, 161, 163, 167, 170, 177, 178–79, 187, 190, 199 Neill, Michael 3, 43–61, 62, 71–72 NeoClassical 62–63, 68, 73n3; see also death in French NeoClassical writing Night in Tunisia (Neil Jordan) 5, 91, 94–98 nonpassage 2, 4, 7, 163, 165, 171; see also Aporias (Jacques Derrida) nothingness 49, 50–51, 59n1, 59n7, 59n8; desire for 58; see also death as nullification Not to Disturb (Muriel Spark) 87–89 O’Hagan, Sean 177, 178 O’Mealy, Joseph H. 4, 77–90 ontological boundaries 6–7, 72–73, 96, 150–52, 154–57, 161, 191 O’Toole, Fintan 177, 178, 190, 198, 202 painting 151–52, 156, 183–86 Pater, Walter 200 Peters, Susanne 149, 150 Phillips, Henry 63, 74n7 photography: and self–estrangement 14–15; and the camera’s click 2, 15, 16, 20, 22; as a wound 14; in relation to death 11–12, 14 postmodernism 72–73, 150, 157, 161, 163, 164 Potkay, Adam 110, 163 The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (Muriel Spark) 78–84, 89

Pritchett, V. S. 80 Protestant 43, 44, 45, 59n4, 98, 101 psychological 182–83, 185 Ramazani, Jahan 161, 164, 171n1 The Rambler (Samuel Johnson) 107–22 Rastall, Richard 37 redemption 7, 56, 60n12, 120, 143n2, 166, 186–87, 198 representation 15, 19, 27, 32, 43, 112, 114, 115–16, 119, 122, 142, 150, 155, 159n2, 159n6, 162, 164–65, 169, 182, 186, 187, 190, 192 revenant 93, 157, 189; see also ghosts Riordan, Kevin 2–3, 11–26 Ritter, Joachim 197 Rosenblum, Robert 162, 163 Rouse, Margitta 184, 186 ruin 190, 193 salvation 3, 28, 35, 37, 78, 80, 109, 116, 122, 127, 186–87 Schiller, Friedrich 164 Schwall, Hedwig 100–01 Scruton, Roger 153 The Sea (John Banville) 149, 151, 155–58 seanchaí 7, 189–91, 194, 198 Selzer, Richard 168 Shaw, Philip 163, 164, 171n2 silence 6, 7, 45, 102, 127–28, 138–40, 157, 193–95, 198, 99, 202 Sir Orfeo: boundaries and their significance in 133–38; centrality of harp to 126, 128, 130–31, 132; dynastic continuity as fantasy 128, 132, 138, 140; image of grafting in 131–33, 142; relationship to Ovid 126, 129, 135, 136, 140, 141, 143n2, 143n4, 143n10 Slade, Andrew 163, 164, 170 Sontag, Susan 12, 97 sound see voice as sound Spark, Muriel 4, 77–90; Calvinist ideas in work by 4, 77–79, 79–90; prolepsis as device in the novels of 82, 85, 88; see also The Driver’s Seat (Muriel Spark); The Hothouse by the East River (Muriel Spark); Memento Mori (Muriel Spark); Not to Disturb (Muriel Spark); The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (Muriel Spark)

Index  211 stammering 18–19, 21 States, Bert 69–70 Stewart, Garrett 122 subjectivity 31, 116–117, 120, 153, 159n6, 202 sublime 161–164, 165, 168, 170–171, 171n4 suicide 54–56, 94, 96–97, 149, 181, 185 Sunrise with Sea Monster (Neil Jordan) 5, 91, 98–103 temporalities 13, 18, 154 Tenenti, Alberto 34–35, 40n15 “Textual Analysis of Poe’s ‘Valdemar’” (Roland Barthes) 12, 20–21; see also Barthes, Roland theatre 1, 2–3, 7, 56, 62–64, 69–70, 176–78, 191, 202–03 Thrale, Hester 109 Timon of Athens (William Shakespeare) 58 Tolkien, J. R. R. 142

tragedy 1, 6, 35, 43, 47, 49, 62–63, 126–27, 129, 135, 139, 142, 143n4, 143n5 transgression 12, 17, 20, 22, 24, 83, 93, 137, 150, 155–57 trauma 16, 45, 95–96, 162–63, 170, 189, 195 typography 14, 19–20 Vance, John A. 107 voice 190, 193, 198, 200; as sound 7–8, 192–93, 195, 203 Wadiak, Walter 1–8, 27–42 Wang, W. Michelle 1–8, 161–75 Watson, Robert N. 43 Weever, John 44 Weiss, Allen S. 192 Williams, Tara 128, 138 Wimsatt, William Kurtz 107 Witoszek, Nina and Pat Sheeren 91, 92, 94, 103