Arts of Dying: Literature and Finitude in Medieval England by D. Vance Smith

Abstract

Reviewed by: Arts of Dying: Literature and Finitude in Medieval England by D. Vance Smith Julie Orlemanski D. Vance Smith. Arts of Dying: Literature and Finitude in Medieval England. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020. Pp. x, 299. $30.00 paper. Dying is bound up with the nature of literary art. This is the guiding insight of D. Vance Smith’s luminous new study Arts of Dying: Literature and Finitude in Medieval England. As Smith explores, the representation of death is consistently unsettled, circular, interminable—because “when it seems to appear, its absence of being calls into question the means by which it is supposedly represented” (14). Interminability is at the heart of how Arts of Dying defines literature as well, as a discourse that “is never definitive, never arrives at a unified meaning that can be transposed to some other, more useful, register” (5). Both the language of dying and the language of literature, then, “point toward a messianic moment at which they do not arrive” (5). Incapable of reaching the terminus that lies beyond language’s aesthetic and referential resources, they are nonetheless directed toward the limit—and so help us “discover something about our experience of finitude” (4). The reciprocity between interminability and finitude emerges across twelve chapters’ worth of finely wrought readings, of texts that span the late tenth to the fifteenth century. The readings gain depth [End Page 346] from Smith’s marshaling of medieval philosophy and theology, as well as the work of modern thinkers such as Martin Heidegger and Maurice Blanchot. By means of “imagination, style, and form,” Smith argues, “this literature justifies itself as a language that can say the unsayable” (14). Arts of Dying is a beautiful book, almost vibrating with the intensity of its thinking. The introduction and first chapter together orient readers within the project as a whole. There, Smith distinguishes what his topic is not: it is not the afterlife nor theological accounts of death, “which provide answers for a finitude we have not yet fully experienced” (4). Instead, the book pursues “accounts of dying, not death, because strictly speaking what we talk about when we talk about death is really dying,” or the suspended state of mortal life approaching death (4–5). Certainties about the terminus of this suspended state are hard to come by. To explain why, Smith recapitulates two long-standing problems in medieval logic. One is how properly to name someone who has died and thus, strictly speaking, ceased to exist: “The question of how to refer to someone who was dead became, in the later Middle Ages, one of the central problems in theories of reference” (21). The other problem is how to describe the duration of dying, or “what, or when, dying is” (23). Both of these problems extend far back into the history of philosophy but reemerged in early fourteenth-century Oxford, where terminist logic and quantitative kinematics provided new ways of thinking about change, limit, and language. The “slippage between termination and term,” or “the trace of death in language,” turns out to be a concern that philosophy shares with medieval vernacular texts (24, 26). At a couple of points in Arts of Dying, Smith argues for the direct influence of academic logic on Middle English poetry (as in the reading of Pearl in Chapter 8). For the most part, though, the representational aporias of dying index the common existential and discursive situation that philosophy and poetry share, one likewise addressed, as Smith shows, by Heidegger, Blanchot, G. W. F. Hegel, Edward Said, and Gillian Rose, among others. The driving claims of Arts of Dying are more theoretical and literary-critical than historical. This helps explain why Smith has relatively little to say in his introduction about how Arts of Dying fits alongside previous monographs in Middle English studies. For instance, readers may be surprised not to see more engagement with Amy Appleford’s important Learning to Die in London, 1380–1540 (2015), which tracks how the genre [End Page 347] of ars moriendi played a crucial role in the civic culture of late medieval London. But Arts of Dying is a work of criticism more than it...