Death, Distress, and Solidarity

Special Issue "OMEGA Journal of Death and Dying"

Robert Kastenbaum

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781351844802
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Cultural Policy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

In preparing this special issue of "Omega: The Journal of Death and Dying" - we choose to consider solidarity in a somewhat larger perspective than the other one usually adopted by a clear majority of social support studies. This perspective gives priority to microscopic, immediate, direct transactions between a focal individual - the one affected by the prospect of soon to come death and two classes of people: those included in the core of that person's personal network and the health care personnel treating and accompanying soon to die people, many of them already advanced into agony.

DEATH AND ITS RITUALS IN
NOVELS ON AIDS

JOSEPH J. LÉVY

Université du Québec a Montréal

ALEXIS NOUSS

Université de Montréal

ABSTRACT

Several novels have been published recently, both in English and French, dealing with the AIDS epidemic. Their perspectives on death can be extracted through content analysis. Overall, these novels present a weak symbolization about death with rituals that are not highly elaborated. Complex images of the afterlife are not offered. By contrast, there is a strong theme expressing the impact of this epidemic on personal networks as well as the effect of repeated losses on the survivors. The desperate feeling that the entire homosexual community is on the verge of extinction is among the specific themes that are expressed.

Throughout history, literature has incessantly collected the cries and sighs of humanity faced with the ultimate unknown: death. From biblical scriptures to contemporary narrative prose; from Antigone to Ivan lllitch; from Hamlet to Joseph K., literary works question the meaning of death. Novels dealing with the AIDS epidemic have surfaced as the latest metamorphosis of this literary expression and they are numerous enough to be used as a source of data for an anthropological analysis [1]. A study of such a corpus has not yet been attempted, although elements of reflection have been suggested by authors like Sontag, Gilman, and Crimp [2-4]. From a socio-cultural point of view though, these studies choose to deal with the journalistic and mediatic aspects of the disease, emphasizing its spectacular aspects at the expense of its profound sociocultural meaning.

Methodology

Between 1987 and 1990, at least sixteen novels and three collections of short stories have been written by French authors (five novels), American authors (twelve novels and two collections of short stories), and British authors (one short story), among them two women, one American and one French. Novels and short stories can be classified into two groups: those presenting an intimist perspective and those concerned with a sociopolitical one. The homosexual universe is dominant and the reason is essentially sociological. Autobiographies and personal accounts have been disregarded to preserve the uniformity of the literary genre which offers the narrative objectivity necessary for an accurate perception of the representations and phantasms surrounding both the disease and death from AIDS. The methodological approach is inspired by that of Glaser and Strauss, and is used in the qualitative analysis of novels [5, 6]. An in-depth reading of the corpus singled out the main themes, particularly those concerning death. We will discuss here the representations of death, the reactions to it, the rituals surrounding it, and the impact it has on social networks.

Representations Of Death

[...] dying perhaps, but not death [7, p. 131].

I’ll never die because I’m already dead [8, p. 260].

These two quotes undoubtedly illustrate the dominant perspective surrounding death within the literary corpus. The data collected, as a whole, stress not the end it represents, but the process leading to it—dying:

“I’m sick.”

“It doesn’t matter. What’s written is not your death, it’s the closeness of your death; its weight on you multiplying each day” [9, p. 60].

Unlike the representations inspired by the plagues of the Middle Ages (pest, cholera) or by syphilis, where allegorical representations are numerous (for example: the Apocalypse riders, the skeleton, the angel), novels on AIDS present but a poor symbolic elaboration of death’s figurations. Even if death accompanies the disease from the very start as an inevitable dimension, its figurative strength is poor. This weakness in the personification process seems to reflect the reduction of the expression of death in the occidental civilization. It could also be attributed to the novelty of the phenomenon, which did not allow enough time for a deeper sociosymbolic elaboration. Lastly, the idea that the disease only affects certain specific populations might have encouraged society’s resistance to integrate the phenomenon in its collective imagination.

In the literary corpus examined, death’s personification presents several degrees of symbolic elaboration. On the more abstract level where death is not even named, we find a self-explanatory image which reminds us of the self-referential symbolic of the expressionist writings:

A tiled corridor filled with doctors and nurses opened off every room he would ever share with Neil. He had always known it was there, but today the door to it had briefly been opened. [10, pp. 118-119].

On a second level, death is treated iconographically, illustrated here through the use of a pictoral image with various mortuary references; a Nineteenth century Italian painting, where grief is blended with suffering and love, signaling death from AIDS:

The painting was called After the Duel, and in the lower right-hand corner, appeared a man’s bloody shirt, bearing the mark of the hand that had torn it from the body; hanging out to dry like a shroud, like a flayed human skin, from the tip of a sword that could barely be seen. The painting didn’t reveal the story behind its subject and so remained an enigma, which I always like. Was the young model the assassin of the victim whose body has already been carried away? Or his second in the duel? Was he his brother? Lover? Son? [11, p. 64].

Its representation can be mediatized through the death of a movie star, for example Rock Hudson, who, because of his spectacular and public dimension, offers the image of a modern tragedy. On another level of analysis, symbolization tends towards allegorization. In Les Nuits Fauves, for example, depiction of death seems hybrid, insofar as its abstract dimension is mingled with the presence of physical elements:

I woke up suddenly. Death was there, in the horrifying shape of a pile of clothes left on a chair at the foot of the bed, standing out of the darkness in the moonlight. It had been there for two years, day after day, minute after minute; it was isolating me from the rest of the world. Watery, darkened brain compressed by a shapeless form, by lungs stuffed under my skull; bloody ox lung hanging in my nape [9, p. 15].

Death can also be rid of any depiction to become a proper noun—a frequent stylistic process in modern literature, which uses mythological elements, bypassing their representation—or even simply an initial:

After all, when he came unhinged in the awful final vigil at Cedars-Sinai, staring Death in the face, it was Dell and Steven who kept him from going out the window [12, p. 6].

Yeah, the big D. See how fucked it is? Who wants to even get started if everyone’s just gonna die? [12, p. 222].

Finally, the symbolical representation of death can be reduced to a corporeal reference or to a value judgment which defines its aesthetic horror:

Death. In the shape of a soft little ball, like the one women find one night, one morning, or in their bath, while feeling their breasts [13, p. 157].

Reactions To Death

Any symbolic process is one of distanciation, by which the individual locates his personal experience in the collective dimension. Two contradictory functions are thus assured by literature through its treatment of death. As a human expression, on the one hand, it naturally tends to deny the reality of death. But on the other hand, as a reflection of the human condition, it can only proclaim its inescapability:

Death was the inevitable, unmitigatible purpose of life. Most people’s dreams skirted it [14, p. 3].

Since AIDS is incurable, the inescapability of death is intrinsically entwined to the diagnosis of the disease:

[...] this phone call; above all, this phone call that decides life and death; that heralds the disease’s ravages, the spread of the virus [9, p. 147].

The inevitability of death raises two philosophical responses: first, it can be negatively invested, passively endured, with a meaning that fails to be deciphered (fate); or positively invested, endowed with a meaning (destiny). It seems that the first model is more prevalent in the novels. Death is defined more often in a naturalistic perspective, i.e. as a natural, normal phenomenon; AIDS, encompassing death, only hastens an inherent end to the human condition:

“With the passage of time, scientists are beginning to believe that all those infected will develop symptoms and die,” the article said. It really doesn’t sit well to read about one’s mortality in such general terms [15, p. 100].

With AIDS, death is inescapable. If your characters don’t have AIDS, you’ll have cheated your public. If they do have it, it’s not worth it to write a play. AIDS equals death. In three months or in two years, by rotting, by suffocating, by asphyxia, by liquefaction; any which way, but always without appeal nor reprieve [16, p. 99].

“Listen, Andy,” Marina hissed at him, “my Jim had great attitude, and he died like a vegetable anyway. So don’t tell me to look on the bright side. We’re all going to die here” [12, p. 72].

The naturalist view goes so far as to blend itself with a fatalistic attitude, which eliminates all hope. It can also fade away in the face of a iatrogenic conception where hyper-medicalization becomes the source of death, instead of preventing it:

“It’s dangerous in the hospitals, so far. Everyone dies.”

“Yes, that’s the nature of the disease.”

“It’s the nature of hospitals,” he insisted. “The drugs are all too strong. Too gross. It’s been like that from the beginning. People all die” [7, p. 151].

This inevitability introduces a paradigmatic change in the individual awareness of death. AIDS, by its two-sided nature, fatal and epidemic, reduces the “otherness” dimension and reminds the individual of the certainty of one’s own end, since the death of a person is the death of oneself. The micro-social dimension of the m...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Contributors
• Introduction: Death, Distress, and Solidarity
• Distress, Stress, and Solidarity in Palliative Care
• Death of the Nursed: Burnout of the Provider
• The Organization of Life Before Death in Two Quebec Cultural Configurations
• Death and Its Rituals in the Novels on AIDS
• Death, Grief, and Solidarity: The Polytechnique Case
• Reconstructing Death in Postmodern Society
• Thanatology Research from Québec: A Different Emphasis