What Would Lynne Tillman Do? (20 page)
Read What Would Lynne Tillman Do? Online
Authors: Lynne Tillman
What happened in 2012?
Body Parts for Sale
One night Patrick McGrath regaled a group of us with a strange but, he said, true tale: A man went into a bar in lower Manhattan for few drinks, was seen talking to a woman and didn’t return home. The man’s wife was frantic—he’d never done this before, not come home. A few days passed and there was still no word from him. Then, on the fourth day of his absence, a man awoke in Central Park, dazed; he didn’t remember what had happened to him. He was taken by the police or passersby to a hospital. The doctors found, on his lower back, a fresh and healing scar, evidence of an incision. It turned out that the man had been robbed—of his kidney. The hospital was not surprised. This was not the first time they’d encountered it. Body parts are for sale these days, what with organ transplants being a hot new technique and organs very much in demand.
We all thought it was a perfect story for Patrick to tell me— a modern day horror story. We all thought it was really ghoulish business, business for our times.
The tale took on added credibility when on September 23, 1991, I read an account in the
New York Times
of an Egyptian laborer who was selling one of his kidneys in Cairo to the highest bidder, so as to give his children an education. In the Third World, organ selling is a growing market that “relies on live donors and
draws donors from throughout the Middle East.” The news story was titled “Egypt’s Desperate Trade: Body Parts for Sale.”
The body as a commodity wouldn’t have surprised Karl Marx. But what surprised me, in looking back at the Fetishism of the Commodities chapter of
Capital
, was to see that Marx himself had been influenced by the Gothic—and/or, that the Gothic had been for him a viable way to analyze the commodity form.
Here Marx writes of the mysterious quality of the commodity form. He says: “The table continues to be wood, an ordinary sensuous thing. But as soon as it emerges as a commodity, it changes into a thing that transcends sensuousness . . . it evolves out of its wooden brain grotesque ideas, far more wonderful than if it were to begin dancing of its own free will. The mystical character of the commodity does not therefore arise from its use-value . . . it is nothing but the definite social relation between men which assumes here, for them, the fantastic form of a relation between things. In order therefore to find an analogy we must take flight into the misty realm of religion. There the products of the human brain appear as autonomous figures endowed with a life of their own . . . I call this the fetishism which attaches itself to the products of labor as soon as they are commodities . . .”
A little later in his narrative Marx refers to a hidden secret. He imagines how commodities might speak. In these passages Marx, a Gothicist, refers to the “grotesque,” and spices his discourse with “transcends,” “mystical,” “wonderful,” “misty,” and “fantastic.” He animates the commodity form—anthropomorphizes it, as when he wonders how it would speak and then he goes so far as give it voice or dialogue. The things he imagines so vividly represent the
hidden labor and relations of people and in the way he conjures them brings to my mind Mary Shelley’s
Frankenstein
, and further the Golem story that Frankenstein was based on.
In that story, the Jews create a man of clay to protect them, to represent them, the most famous Golem that of Rabbi Low’s creation in the 16th century. Rabbi Low has to destroy the Golem when he runs amuck and cannot be controlled by his human creator. In Marx’s version of capitalism, the commodity form seems to be its uncontrollable Golem. I like looking at what Marx wrote in this section as allegorical, as a kind of narrative fiction that uses as its antihero protagonist the Golem named commodity form.
It’s interesting to reflect on why Marx would use the Gothic to talk about and render the effects of capitalism. And, to bring the question up to date: What I am doing in an anthology titled
The New Gothic
. And why does it exist? Perhaps the current enthusiasm for the Gothic, for horror as a genre in the U.S. and England, is in part a reflection of contemporary life, specifically life under postindustrial multinational capitalism, a capitalism under, in and through which we writers labor and produce, and a powerful way of articulating and representing that condition. Inescapably, the new Gothic will also be a handle, a fad, a marketing tool, but this does not alter its value, to me.
These days the west gloats over the demise of communism, the premise being that democracy and capitalism are synonymous. The demise of totalitarianism from the left or right is something to be happy about, but I’m left wondering what capitalism offers, apart from a certain economic system, to the spirit that haunts our Gothic stories, and to a sense of how society should be run, to
a sense of what common goals can be. Dog-eat-dog and survival of the fittest are appropriate metaphors for not just the capitalist ethic but also for the production of gothic perambulations. In our country without adequate health care and housing, a country first decimated by Reagan’s criminal grotesqueries and Bush’s new world order, what more credible form is there?
The Final Plot
Some writers believe they control their fictional worlds, and nothing else; others that they are conduits for a story—words arrive, characters write themselves. (Few believe they have no control at all over what or how they write.) But even if one can imagine dying or being dead, one can’t represent it autobiographically. The impressions and scenes that can be imagined will have been nourished by others’ deaths—those witnessed, heard or read about. (Duchamp’s tombstone epitaph, “After all, it’s always the other one who dies,” means it’s always the other’s story, too.) The way being dead actually feels, a lack of all sensation, supposedly, can’t be described, depriving human beings of certainty about life’s afterlife; but, conversely, fomenting, with death’s partner sexual curiosity, a drive for knowledge.
Ones who know they are dying, those physiologically at death’s door, and also those who pathologically fear death, might want to rush life’s conclusion and kill themselves. Suicides, or self-murderers, as the Dutch put it, can select the method, day and hour, and direct the last narrative, up to a point. Despair, significantly and regularly, overrides choice and strips it of volition. And, how being dead feels will also elude a suicide’s capacity to know. (Virginia Woolf wrote in her diary that it was “the one experience I shall not describe.”)
When death progresses naturally, which can be slow-going, over days or months, unless from a high-impact, head-on car crash, when organs fail fast, depleted of blood and oxygen, there
comes a stunning withdrawal: people, like other animals, remove themselves psychically and physically from the known world. A person goes elsewhere, while the body works hard to shut itself down. One is “actively dying,” hospice workers say. Death is oxymoronic until it finishes its work.
On ordinary days, a depressive has her funeral to fantasize, an activity that reassures with sad, cozy comfort. When required in actuality, planning it will probably be discomforting. A dying person may type, scrawl or dictate a list of demands or wishes for a service or memorial, exerting a sort of posthumous control. (The list can also be a preemptive strike against the omissions or excesses of fond others). A funeral might be plain as a pine coffin or theatrical. One who is dying might have specified songs, musicians, speakers and kinds and colors of flowers, or, if possessed of minimalist inclinations, wanted no displays or eulogies, just a plaintively beautiful song. (Both may have designated worthy charities.)
For a writer’s funeral, words could seem superfluous, though there can never be enough, also. Selecting speakers raises unique problems. Most particularly, eulogizers script themselves. Some will mumble, overcome or shy, while others will improvise on humiliating episodes in the dead person’s life. All jokes will be on the dead. (Most people will speak primarily about themselves.) In fantasy, a depressive mourns herself and watches the abstract procession, loving the inconsolation of others; but soon her morbid pleasures are jolted by the awkwardness of social situations, pre-and post-death. Inclusions, exclusions, who speaks first, last? (Funeral rites survive, and have changed historically, for the living.) Planning an actual funeral might allay worry or generate more.
For writers and nonwriters, other kinds of writing than suicide notes can be left behind. A letter might confess secret loves and hates, with recuperative gestures of remorse and forgiveness. Or, it could be a screed against the living. A death essay could be an “avant-fin” manifesto, raving mad, or setting out rational principles for existence. (A treatise on melancholy risks mawkishness and unoriginality.) The essay could haltingly document one’s protracted departure (exquisitely incomplete).
Any of these compositions might supply a reason to live fully while dying, but inciting, for writers, a specific anxiety. The final text could cause a cascade of revisionist views of the individual and body of work, staining both, and lasting until everyone who knew the writer had died (considered in Buddhism an individual’s “second death”).
Most likely, one will have scant energy for planning and writing in the final stages of life. (There are exceptions, who prove the rule.) Meeting death, sometimes called “the maker,” though really the unmaker, is essentially debilitating, so its specific conditions dominate and alter the living. A dying person may have no ambition or desire to control anything during the process (in itself unburdening). One’s death, though, will likely be written about by someone else or, even more likely, no one. Most deaths go unremarked. So-called “ordinary people” get thousands of hits on YouTube, when killed by a usually docile lion on an ecological safari or pushed in front of a train. (The living identify with the pathos and meaninglessness of random, final endings like these.)
An ignominious death recasts an entire life as unintelligent and witless. A relatively healthy person moves an old, huge TV
set or a five-drawer steel file cabinet, which, unbalanced, leans, starts falling, its weight unbelievable, gains velocity, collapses, and crushes one beneath it. (Domestic deaths invariably make foolish last impressions.) An ignominious end is beyond prediction. But the great majority of deaths will be common, following a predictable course indicated by one of several illnesses, resulting in complete organ failure. Sherwin Nuland, in his book,
How We Die
, refutes the contemporary delusion of living forever by defeating the ageing process. He insists, almost too vociferously, that human beings will die sooner or later, because of the wear and tear on the body, also known as old age, which is not a disease. But if one believes people are dying as soon as they are born, then living itself is an illness overcome only by dying.
Near to death, people usually don’t speak or have last words, hospice workers say, especially not those profound or pithy final utterances compiled in books.
Thomas Carlyle: “So this is Death—Well!”
Aleiester Crowley: “I’m perplexed.”
Ulysses S. Grant: “Water
!”
Emily Dickinson: “Let us go in. The fog is rising.”
Goethe: “More light!”
Edgar Allan Poe: “Lord help my poor soul . . .”
Washington Irving: “Well, I must arrange my pillows for another weary night!
When will this end?”
Gertrude Stein: “What is the question?”
Ludwig Wittgenstein: “Tell them I had a wonderful life.”
If a dying person had her wits about her and enough bodily function—swallowing becomes impossible—she might be able to come up with a line or two. But this also can’t be plotted. (Spoken and written communications not close to death are technically not deathbed statements.) Withdrawing from life for days or weeks, one is expected to be silent and uncommunicative, or will communicate but be misunderstood. (The writing of Ivan Ilych’s death, hospice workers say, is eerily close to how dying people feel; they wonder at Tolstoy’s prescience.)
Since what death feels like is unknowable, most people fear it, and dying, particularly in great pain. In this time, as no other before, unless wishing to suffer mentally and physically, a patient can receive palliative care and medicines that make the “transition,” a hospice term, from life to death painless or nearly painless. (Many believe hospice speeds death along, but often it prolongs what life is left.) Against all reason, which death conquers easily, a few want to feel pain, not to remain as lucid as possible and say their good-byes, but as self-punishment for past bad acts and guilty consciences.
Hardly anyone wishes “to die badly.” In the late Middle Ages, when the concept of “artes moriendi” was formulated, the ideal of “a beautiful death” emerged, and it thrived through the 19th century. “Dying well” has replaced “dying beautifully” and is rigorously enforced by post-mortem judgments. People aren’t supposed to struggle at the end, people should be “ready to go” and “accepting,” and opprobrium is cast on those who aren’t ready and willing, on those who “died badly.”
This ultimate indictment glosses and assesses a human being’s last trial. (To die smiling makes it easier for the living.) But in the matter of dying and death, mortal judgments, like most received wisdoms concocted of exasperating pieties and galling stupidity, should be eliminated. Only death’s uninitiated would espouse these moralisms.