The Obituary as Collective Memory

Bridget Fowler

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9781134218011
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Customs & Traditions
• Index: Social Sciences

The first serious academic study of obituaries, this book focuses on how societies remember. Bridget Fowler makes great use of the theories of Pierre Bordieu, arguing that obituaries are one important component in society's collective memory. This book, the first of its kind, will find a place on every serious sociology scholar's bookshelves.

PART I
Theoretical, historical and quantitative studies of the obituary

Introduction

Lives are supported and maintained differently […] Certain lives will be highly protected […] Other lives […] will not even qualify as “grievable”.

A hierarchy of grief could no doubt be enumerated. We have seen it already in the genre of the obituary, where lives are quickly tidied up, and summarised, humanised, usually married or on the way to be, heterosexual, happy, monogamous. […].

[…] we have to ask, again and again, how the obituary functions as the instrument by which grievability is publicly distributed. It is the means by which a life becomes, or fails to become a publicly-grievable life, an icon for national self-recognition, the means by which a life becomes noteworthy. As a result we have to consider the obituary as an act of nation-building. (Butler 2003:32; 34)

This book concerns the selection and depiction of the lives chosen for enduring memory. Butler, despite the power of her writing, is somewhat dated in her view of contemporary obituaries: not all of them have subjects who are heterosexual and ‘married or on the way to be’. Although the focus of the obituary is on the public sphere, the distinguished are often now acknowledged to be in private, somewhat transgressive figures. Even those who have committed suicide are no longer excluded automatically as they once were.¹ Further, it has to be conceded that certain figures appear now who would never have been given obituaries one hundred years ago, such as the Nigerian-born hot-water fitter and anti-colonial activist Michael Akintaro (The Guardian, 7 October 2000), Irene Thomas, the daughter of a meter-reader, who won Brain of Britain (4 July 2001) and the working-class Cumbrian climber, Alice Cross, whose partner made her boots (The Times, 13 March 2004). Even leaders of Hamas have had favourable obituaries, such as Abdel Aziz Rantisi (The Independent, 19 April 2004).

Due to these changes, obituary editors often discuss ‘the revolution in the obituaries’ since the 1970s. According to them, anyone memorable can now be given an obituary. Indeed, the figure of Akintaro seems to bear this out. This small African arrived in London as an immigrant seafarerturned-caretaker, in the 1930s, and started a club where black GIs could dance with white women, leafletted for George Padmore (the champion of colonial freedom), and, later, acted as the repository of migrant collective memory in Camden. Paradoxically, he ended his anti-colonial career with an Imperial Services Medal for his duties as a hot-water fitter in Whitehall and even Buckingham Palace.

Yet, despite such vivid evidence of occasional democratisation, there is an underlying validity in Butler’s view that some lives are more to be mourned than others. In this book I shall seek to explore the principles and taken-for-granted practices through which Western obituaries continue to be oriented particularly to the dominant discourses—and thus to elites, a Eurocentric location and to masculine achievement. This will be undertaken by obituary studies adopting both quantitative and qualitative analyses, alongside interviews with the obituary editors. Further, I will explore the wider theoretical significance of the obituary not just in relation to issues of national memory, but also for the light it continues to shed on the social relations of class, gender and ethnicity.

THE SOCIOGENESIS OF THE OBITUARY

The first modern obituaries in newspapers or periodicals or death announcements accompanied by brief biographies, appeared in 1731,² in the London-based The Gentleman’s Magazine. Under the editorship of John Nichols in 1778, this magazine: ‘established a standard of necrology for modern times’ (Fergusson 1999:149). Interestingly, the eighteenth century net of ‘eminent persons’ was cast unusually widely, including in one issue—as Fergusson shows—an astronomer, a well-known widow, a man with thousands of descendents, a ‘wild man’ who lived by poaching and John Wesley (an obituary of eight pages) (1999:149–50).

The precursors for these magazine obits were earlier books of short biographies. Particularly influential were John Aubrey’s Brief Lives, written from 1669–96 (Clark, 1898). In uncanny resemblance to today’s obituaries, Aubrey focuses especially on philosophy, the arts, the sciences and the political field—mainly delineating men, but with a minority of scholarly woman.³ However, Aubrey’s seventeenth century actors existed within a wider cosmos that is radically different from our post-Enlightenment universe. It is not just that he views his subjects’ lives as profoundly affected by the astrological conjuncture at the precise minute of their birth, and by their predominant humour (phlegm, choler, melancholia, sanguinity) (1898:48). A more profound contrast is that most of his subjects pursued their work in highly unstable political structures, in which they were imminently in danger of being exposed and forced into ideological conformity or exile. In the Civil War, especially, these actors experienced a ‘world turned upside down’, a social reality more changeable than was the Second World War for today’s obituary subjects. The 2000–2001 subjects had fewer temptations to be ‘turncoats and opportunists’.⁴

There is also a striking historical difference in the portrayal of the arts. From the 1850s’ emergence of modernism, these have been constructed as a refuge or ‘pure world’, based on the practice of art for its own sake. Aubrey, in sharp contrast writes vividly of contemporary artists’ interests—their need for money and their deep fear of material insecurity—adopting a practical tone quite remote from the later ethos of idealised cultural production. Moreover, Aubrey’s subjects inhabit a noticeably less specialised world, where thinkers can be at once mathematicians and philosophers (Descartes), or Lord Chancellors and epistemologists (Bacon). In our sample, lannis Xenakis, both an experimental composer and architect, was alone in having two concurrent specialisations.

Aubrey’s biographies were sparked off through his personal acquaintances, centring especially on Oxford and Cambridge. The eighteenth century journal, such as The Gentleman’s Magazine, provided a broader framework for its obits. It is no coincidence that the secular obituary, this ‘first stab at biography’ (Fergusson 1999:150), emerged at the same time as the coffee-houses and the new reading public within Habermas’s democratic eighteenth century public sphere (Habermas 1989; Houlbrooke 1998:329–30⁵; Sennett 1984; Lara 1998):

However much the […] salons and coffee-houses may have differed in the size and composition of their publics […] they all organised discussion among private people that tended to be ongoing […] First, they preserved a kind of social intercourse that […] disregarded status altogether… Laws of the market were suspended as were laws of the state […] Secondly, discussion within such a public presupposed the problematisation of areas that until then had not been questioned […] Thirdly, the same process that converted culture into a commodity […] established the public as in principle inclusive. (Habermas 1989:36–37)

Here the male members (p. 33) of the bourgeoisie and artisans jostled next to the aristocracy, whilst new forms of evaluation, notably literary criticism, emerged out of the expanded cultural maelstrom (Eagleton 1984:12–13). As Habermas points out, this was a public space in which the press was freely available, cheap and radically anti-hierarchical.⁶

The Gentleman’s Magazine was to pass the obit baton in1785 to The Daily Universal Register—better-known later as The Times—which was another staple of the coffee-houses. This paper was to revolutionise production by its early use of the steam press and by a network of foreign correspondents. It early acquired a reputation for impartial, independent journalism⁷ (Anon.1935, 18).

When The Daily Universal Register first appeared in 1785, it carried only death notices. By 1835, retitled, it had begun to feature obituaries: unpaid commemorations which focussed on the individual significance of its subjects’ public lives (see the obituary for the Headmaster of Harrow, 7 November 1835). But for a considerable period The Times obituaries took a highly conventional and formulaic form. ‘The Obituary’ listed deaths in order of precedence, as part of an annual record of ‘Death’s Doings’. Thus the list for 1869 started with the names of those in the House of Lords, followed with those of baronets, then those in the worlds of art, literature and science, the legal world, the professional army and the House of Commons and ended with the medical world, with a coda containing ‘foreign royalty and dignitaries’. Concurrently, detailed obituaries of an individual, modern type appeared as occasional separate entries (see Prof. Jukes, %& Au gust 1869). Their appearance did not become a regular feature until 1879, when 515 individual deaths were noted in this form throughout the year, sometimes taking the shape of a specialised obit column. Today’s obituary was in fact inaugurated under the editorship of Delane (1841–1877) who expanded the form, making obituaries ‘the first drafts of history’ that they are now (Brunskill 2005:xiii).

The obituary thus became linked to class. Indeed, as Fergusson nicely comments: ‘for many years [The Times] was the only place to be seen dead in’ (1999:152). Aristocrats would make sure their servants informed The Times of their impending demise. Despite its middle-class founder, who had made his money as a coal merchant (Anon., 1935: xii–6), The Times, by the twentieth century, had become staffed by the haute bourgeoisie or minor aristocracy. Possessing, themselves, an ‘effortless authority’ (Fergusson, 1999:152), this assurance became transferred to the impersonal judgements and dignity of its post-mortem judgements. In fact, as will be shown in chapter 4, this Establishment character had produced in its entries for the year 1900 an apparent return to the traditional order. For obituaries appearing in The Times, the dissenting and pacifist tradition of the progressive bourgeoisie were entirely absent from the agenda of power.⁸ What was at stake instead, then, was not just the invention of the nation, but of new ‘feudal’ traditions, of which the obituary, ordered by hierarchical precedence and genealogical pedigree, was one.⁹ Its tacit rules of operation now turned on these regular circuits of elite information and canons of eligibility,¹⁰ far from the expansive curiosity of The Gentleman’s Magazine. In the late nineteenth century and through much of the twentieth, no paper seriously competed with it: ‘the paper’s obituaries were matchless’ (Fergusson 1999:153).

It has become conventional to see the command The Times had over obituaries as shattered by two changes. Firstly, the birth of The Independent in 1985 went hand-in-hand with author-attributed contrbutions, as opposed to the anonymous form that had prevailed in The Times. Secondly, at The Daily Telegraph, Hugh Montgomery-Massingberd took office as obituaries’ editor, inaugurating a new informality and directness of style, even a ‘sepulchral hilarity’ (Fergusson 1999:155). In brief, by the 1980s, the form is claimed by contemporary newspaper editors to have entered a ‘brave new world’. In this symbolic revolution, the obituary had made the transition from the closed universe of The Times Establishment to the open cosmos ushered in by The Independent and Massingberd. A new set of evaluative criteria and a plurality of voices had replaced the old, ‘subverting the traditional obit from within’. The Massingberd revolution engineered a reactive shift even in The Times. If Rupert Hart-Davis had complained (in 1956) of the space for the ‘Sewage Disposal Officer for Uppingham’—read, t he routinised appearance of The Establishment—by the 1990s the Sewage Officer had been whisked away (Brunskill 2005:xii—xiii). Similarly The Guardian Obituaries editor, when interviewed, refers to the stringent reappraisal of who should get such a notice. Challenges began to appear to the traditional procedures, such as the rule that every diplomat who had completed two tours was entitled, after death, to such dignified inclusion in the obituary columns (on obituaries editors, see ch. 5).¹¹

In America, other innovations appeared—Alden Whitman (the New York Times) interviewed subjects for their entry before they died, thus giving an entirely new meaning to the obituary writer as ‘the recording angel’. This gave an extra gravitas to an interview with an actress or artist, as Bette Davis was quick to appreciate (BBC, Radio 4, 3 February 2006).¹² In France, Le Monde broke new ground by extending highly critical obituaries even to former Prime Ministers—such as Chaban-Delmas—whilst at the same time, their language changed, even sometimes permitting those disruptions of grammatical rules that are typical of avant-garde styles.

The consensus...

Table of contents

• Routledge Advances in Sociology
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• PART I Theoretical, historical and quantitative studies of the obituary
• PART II Memories burnished at the shock of death
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index