Death In Literature

Having had a week of frivolity I’m going to suddenly get more serious. I want to talk about Siri Hustvedt’s wonderful novel, What I Loved, but to do so I’m going to need to give away a little of the plot, an event that happens about 100 pages into a 370 page novel, to give the spoiler some context. I leave it up to you as to whether or not you feel the need to skip the next paragraph.

I have to begin this by saying that I was loving What I Loved, but I find myself uncertain now as to whether or not I can keep reading it. It is a gorgeously written novel, intelligent, moving, and wise about art. It’s initially about two couples, Bill the artist and Lucille, the unstable poet, who have a son named Mark, and Leo, the book’s narrator and an art critic, and his wife, the literary academic, Erica. They have a son named Matt. The friendship between Bill and Leo bonds them all together and their lives start to intertwine. Lucille and Bill separate, and Bill’s model, the vibrant Violet, becomes the love of his life. At first the book is a leisurely exploration of their relationships to each other and to the work they do, and I much admired Hustvedt’s sensitivity in her approaches to both the creation of art and the compulsion to talk about it. And then, in an abrupt, wholly unexpected and fairly devastating plot development, Leo and Erica’s son, Matt, dies aged eleven, in a freak accident at his summer camp. The grief of his parents is powerfully described. Hustvedt had no idea she had an unspoken contract with me, and indeed no author should write for the unknown sensibilities of his or her readers, but in that narrative act, she crossed a line; I don’t like reading about the deaths of children. I’m not attempting to justify this in any kind of critical way – I can’t. My response here comes out of an irrational place in my maternal heart (that never knew reason). I skipped the death of the child in Camus’s novel The Plague, and I do tend to avoid buying novels that feature children bravely struggling through terminal illness, and disabling conditions like cystic fibrosis. With that kind of subject matter, I can’t actually read the book; I can only suffer through it, no matter how courageous, redemptive and ultimately uplifting the book is meant to be. In fact that might only make it worse.

And so, having laid the novel down, uncertain now whether I wanted to continue with it, I began to think about death in literature. I have the feeling, you see, that stories are one of the ways in which we can prepare our unwilling and unaccepting minds for death. Often books do this thematically, not least by showing us how to give life meaning as we live it so that whatever happens, we know we have not lived in vain. But often, too, stories present death in such a way that it becomes a culmination or a necessity. Detective fiction is very interesting about death, I think, in that it puts all the power of narrative in motion in order to show us that a death that seemed random and inexplicable was actually motivated and sometimes – though not always – justified. Death in narrative can be about many things, a heroic self-sacrifice, a sense of completion and closure, an event against which another protagonist must define themselves and grow, but it is rarely permitted to be arbitrary. If it is meaningless, like the death of the Arab in Camus’s The Outsider, or inexplicable like the death of Miles in The Turn of the Screw, then critics will produce thousands of pages of analysis that seek to return order to the scene of outrage. These two narratives have had more critical ink spilled over them than the vast majority of modern literature and the confusing centrality of death in each one is not coincidental to that fact.

More tenuously, I feel that the structure of a novel has just as much to tell us about practicing loss. When we read a novel we live its life for a brief interval; its joys and sorrows are ours, we are engaged in a profound way. Turning over the last page of a book we’ve really loved brings a mixture of emotions with it: relief and the sense of mastery, but also loss and sadness. Sometimes we have to mourn a book in a gentle and mild way, leaving a space after it until a passage has been crossed and the next one can come along. I think a relationship to death is what makes prose so very different from poetry. A poem (unless it’s of the epic variety) often ends in such a way that we need to return to the beginning or even the middle again, in a continuous loop. Because a novel takes time, and accompanies us on a journey, its ending is momentous, significant despite itself, affecting. We cannot but sigh and pause. Books are other lives, virtual, imaginary worlds we might have inhabited, had circumstances been different. I can never understand the belief that reading is a way of avoiding experience, because I always think readers are voracious livers; so hungry are they for life that they have to drink it down in concentrated portions. But that very openness to the fictional world and the acts of identification it encourages us to make, mean that fiction makes unspoken promises. Killing off sympathetic characters is still an ambivalent trick to pull off; sometimes, like Susan Hill’s detective stories, it becomes an audacious move that intrigues most of her readers, sometimes, Sherlock Holmes just has to reappear back on the right side of the Reichenbach Falls.