Arnold Weinstein - A Scream Goes Through The House (48 page)

Could you make death speak? Poe, in his "The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar," offers a grisly scientific version of this imperative: to make the dying body tell its story. But this promised narrative collapses in on itself, as Valdemar's words "dead!" "dead!" are described as "absolutely
bursting
from the tongue and not from the lips of the sufferer, his whole frame at once—within the space of a single minute, or even less, shrunk—crumbled—absolutely
rotted
away beneath my hands. Upon the bed, before that whole company, there lay a nearly liquid mass of loathsome—of detestable putridity" (842). Poe, explorer of the macabre that he is, tries to capture the moment of exit itself and force it into speech, but the decaying body cashiers the tongue, and whatever secret death possesses is one that cannot be transmitted.

Since death itself cancels language, cancels out the speaking or writing subject, what can art possibly know? Where does it find its data? There is, first of all, the immediate issue of
access:
how do you say death if death isn't talking? Is death to be grasped as elemental silence? as riddle? Writers and artists have wondered about these matters, and have often been willing to step into the breach and ventriloquize on their own. I will also investigate what we can and do know: the testimony of witnesses, survivors, and mourners. After all, we do in fact encounter death throughout our lives in a distinctly survivable fashion: the death of others. Here is a lifelong form of exposure to finality, and although I do not want to regard mourning as a kind of trial run, I do want to attend to the complex scenarios—emotional, moral, temporal—that the death of others, especially the death of loved ones, triggers in our own lives.

Memory is especially critical here, in its role in tallying losses, reverencing and referencing the dead, and overseeing the survival of the self. It will be seen that literature sheds a special light on these matters. (How often that metaphor—"sheds light"—appears in this book! My meaning is elemental: literature "discovers," "uncovers" [takes the cover off] the complex reach of issues that are hidden underneath our conceptual tags.) And finally, I will consider the sheer richness and shocking power of artistic renditions of the experience of death and dying, proving just how pulsating and vital this somber topic can be. From personal undoing to national wound, from choreographic endgame to report beyond the grave, writers present their odd findings. Sometimes the angle of vision is private and cryptic; at other times, it is wide-angled and urgently social in its claims. In all instances, these images and visions, far from being snapshots that confirm what we know, jolt and shock us in their strangeness, overturn our received views, disclose a sweep and scale that make us larger than we were.

SURVIVABLE DEATH: MOURNING

We start, then, with the unspeakable nature of death. What can be spoken is the pathos and meaning we ascribe to death. Since one is always outside the experience, what does it mean to be the outsider witnessing a death one can neither stop nor speak? These matters engage us most, take on urgency and pathos when the dead person is a loved one. Already here we can measure the gap between art and science: medically speaking, all deaths are (more or less) alike, but art records "data" about the deaths that matter, the ones we feel. How the bereaved living survive the death of others can be said, and is said, differently in different discourses. The discipline of psychology has theorized these matters, and there is a considerable body of how-to literature that instructs us on the mechanics of mourning and severance. I say "mechanics," because one of the most classic formulations about mourning is very much an affair of determinist laws and rules that govern our experience of the death of

loved ones; I am thinking of Freud's "Mourning and Melancholia," and it is worth citing the key passage that spells out how the human subject lets go, how we accept the finality of death:

The testing of reality, having shown that the loved object no longer exists, requires forthwith that all the libido shall be withdrawn from its attachments to this object. Against this demand a struggle of course arises—it may be universally observed that man never willingly abandons a libido-position, not even when a substitute is already beckoning to him. This struggle can be so intense that a turning away from reality ensues, the object being clung to through the medium of a hallucinatory wish-psychosis. The normal outcome is that deference for reality gains the day. Nevertheless its behest cannot be at once obeyed. The task is now carried through bit by bit, under great expense of time and cathectic energy, while all the time the existence of the lost object is continued in the mind. Each single one of the memories and hopes which bound the libido to the object is brought up and hyper-cathected, and the detachment of the libido from it accomplished. Why this process of carrying out the behest of reality bit by bit, which is in the nature of a compromise, should be extraordinarily painful is not at all easy to explain in terms of mental economics. It is worth noting that this pain seems natural to us. The fact is, however, that when the work of mourning is completed the ego becomes free and uninhibited again.
(126-127)

Freud is very much the biologist here, in his conviction that the organism must choose life and that the "ego's attachments" will in due course be redistributed so that the dead can effectively be "cut loose" from the mourning subject. What I have called "mechanical" is the tentacular, string-tying nature of human connection that is imagined here. Each of our memories, our libidinal "linkages" with the dead one, are brought up for review and exposed as futile, as pointless, so that the umbilical

cord can be cut; moreover, we understand this process to be slow and incremental, since our linkages are multiple, and it would seem that they cannot be called up at once, but rather require dismantling one by one. It is not unlike jettisoning a huge cargo to which we are bound by countless ropes and ties, and the work of mourning would be the systematic undoing of each knot, so that finally the dead cargo could sink to the bottom of the sea, sink into oblivion. At this point, the "ego becomes free and uninhibited again."

MOURNING: THE DEATH OF A WE-WORLD

There is something at once brilliant, heartless, and tonic in Freud's theory. With the unflinching lucidity of a surgeon, he analyzes the most painful transactions of human life, and seeks to show us how the very muscle and tissue, the tendons of love, must atrophy and die when the loved one is dead. His view is bathed in a higher pragmatism, a shrewd, even profound sense that the "reality principle" must ultimately prevail. We are not constituted in such a way as to deny life or serve death, and even though other Freudian notions about melancholia or the death instinct complicate this thesis, it seems nonetheless to hold true for "healthy" mourning. One recovers. The will puts up a fight, but gradually the
automatic
severing of ties carries the day, educates the will as to its errors. Freud admits to puzzlement as to why this should be so painful, since our "mental economics" governing this redirecting of libido is so clear and unarguable; yet, Freud admits that we take this pain to be "natural."

What does it mean to "naturalize" this pain? Clearly, our moral, emotional, and religious beliefs enter the picture here, since they have their own rival view of mourning, notably that death is unallowable, that our ties to our loved ones are imperishable, that they should be revered. Of course Freud knows this, but he is confident that the ego's imperious need for
living
attachments must win out in the end. We cannot be

nourished by dead tissue, he seems to be saying, and sooner or later our system gets the message.

It seems fair to say that prevalent modern theories of mourning essentially toe the Freudian line. The utilitarian flavor of Freud's argument will be put aside, but the basic principles remain valid, as we theorize our encounter with the impossible. The response to death is strangely the same, whether one is the dier or the survivor. Hence, someone like Elisabeth Kiibler-Ross, whose work focuses on the stages of resistance and acceptance that mark patients' responses to their own imminent deaths, provides a map that governs grief too. In some sense, Kiibler-Ross, who has done extensive fieldwork with the dying and their families, resembles Freud in that she articulates the specific nodal points and passages at work as the ego goes through its
Trauerarbeit
(the work of mourning), a narrative process in itself not unlike a "station drama." This holds for letting go of oneself, or of others.

Kubler-Ross's well-known model—denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance—lays out a kind of trajectory that can now function as "advance knowledge" for those who confront death (their own or others'), as a kind of compass that alerts them to the phase of the journey they are currently in. This is profoundly educative, and insofar as it draws on Freud's model, it would seem to sketch out a set of laws that apply to all of us, regardless of individual circumstances. Such would be the constitution of the human animal. For the dying, the hoped-for result is a final readiness. For the mourning, it is not farfetched to view this trajectory as a kind of univeral "pilgrim's progress," but with the guaranteed result that the quest will be successful, that eventually, after each of the hurdles has been passed and the stages gone through, our ego will again be "free and uninhibited."

Literature complicates these matters. We might assume that literature would seek merely to extend the illumination mission common to both Freud and Kiibler-Ross, in putting a name and a face on the phases of mourning, in helping us to a more vivid and particularized sense of

the journey we are making. Here is, of course, one of the oldest rationales for art: to give us images and stories where we only have laws and principles. But things are not this simple. Let us consider Linda Pas-tan's poem "The Five Stages of Grief," which quite explicitly picks up the famous psychological principles of Kubler-Ross:

The night I lost you

someone pointed me towards

the Five Stages of Grief.

Go that way, they said,

it's easy, like learning to climb

stairs after the amputation.

And so I climbed.

Denial
was first.

I sat down at breakfast

carefully setting the table

for two. I passed you the toast
—

you sat there. I passed

you the paper—you hid

behind it.

Anger
seemed more familiar.

I burned the toast, snatched

the paper and read the headlines myself.

But they mentioned your departure,

and so I moved on to

Bargaining.
What can I exchange

for you? The silence

after storms ? My typing fingers ?

Before I could decide,
Depression

came puffing up, a poor relation,

its suitcase tied together

with string. In the suitcase

were bandages for the eyes and bottles of sleep. I slid all the way down the stairs feeling nothing. And all the time Hope flashed on and off in defective neon. Hope was a signpost pointing straight in the air. Hope was my uncle's middle name, he died of it.

After a year I am still climbing, though my feet slip on your stone face. The treeline

has long since disappeared; green is a color I have forgotten.

But now I see what I am climbing towards:
Acceptance
written in capital letters, a special headline:
Acceptance,
its name is in lights. I struggle on, waving and shouting. Below, my whole life spreads its surf, all the landscapes I've ever known or dreamed of. Below a fish jumps: the pulse in your neck.
Acceptance.
I finally

reach it.

But something is wrong. Grief is a circular staircase. I have lost you.

Pastan's poem is more than "illustrated" Kubler-Ross. We recall Freud's notion that mourning consists of a laborious but urgent series of severances, of calling up all the memories of the dead one so that the news of death can do its job of cutting the cord. Pastan shows us what this calling up might look like: you are still at the breakfast table when I sit down; the headlines speak of you. Routines die hard, but that is the least of it: we
disseminate
our loved ones into the world, so they crop up in headlines, show up even in the jumping of a fish. This is more than cutting a few cords of memory; it attests to the endlessly creative work of love, namely that it fashions a "we-world," in which objects and places turn out to be saturated with spilled-over feelings, "leavings" that broadcast a life together. Pastan shrewdly enlists a medicalized idiom to convey the damaged life of the mourner: "like learning to climb / stairs after the amputation";
Depression
is figured both familially and medically as relation whose suitcase contains "bottles of sleep," causing the mourner to lose all sentience. What I have labeled a "pilgrim's progress" is imaged as a mountain climb, an arduous journey (amputees do not climb easily) up the stairs toward recovery and "Acceptance."

Pastan insistently underscores the road markers and labels that guide us in this trek toward healing. These markers are utterly true to the spirit of Freudian inquiry, insofar as private anguish might now be understood generically, so that a map could be drawn, yielding something of great value to those who hurt in the dark. A large Enlightenment project is being played out here, reflecting the elemental hopes we pin on science itself. To "know" that this pain has a form and an end stage is our best weapon for dealing with it. Pastan knows all of this, but her brilliantly imaged account of the trip is hard going for the reader. Each of the five stages is metaphorized into living drama, at first intimate and do-