Arts of Dying: Literature and Finitude in Medieval England

Abstract

D. Vance Smith states succinctly the central thesis of his new book Arts of Dying: Literature and Finitude in Medieval England: “literature and dying are inextricably linked” (4). Summarizing it effectively is more challenging. Let me begin by describing Smith's definitions of “literature” and “dying.” Smith views literature through a formalist lens as a self-contained mode of language, though like a deconstructionist, he asserts that meaning is indeterminate and unity deferred (5). He differentiates “literature” from theology and philosophy, noting it is “neither a prayer nor a proposition” (1). However, Smith approaches the second term “dying” with a philosopher's subtlety. He incorporates ideas from Aristotle to Derrida, but Maurice Blanchot and Gillian Rose on the language of dying and Theodor Adorno and Edward Said on late style are especially influential. Dying, as Smith conceives of it, is not death; rather, it “lies between life and death” and is “a movement toward something, an aspect of the unfolding of time” (5, 22). What literature and dying share, then, is uncertainty and engagement with the illogical and transsensory amid external constraints. Covering English literature from the tenth through the fifteenth centuries, Arts of Dying demonstrates that literature, like dying, is never complete, always open for interpretation, and that medieval thinking about finitude is more complex than the endless mourning characteristic of postmodern philosophy. “No medieval subject” could have embraced boundless despair, Smith insists, because teaching about transcendence endowed dying with “deep responsibility” (4). Incisive close readings of primary sources make each chapter compelling on its own, but as a whole, Arts of Dying beautifully and profoundly meditates on that responsibility.The book's twelve chapters are divided into three chronological sections that Smith describes as cultural moments oriented toward different metaphors: the emerging soul in Old English; entering a crypt in the fourteenth century; and being dispersed into an archive in the fifteenth (2–3, 6). The three chapters in part one consider the speaking soul and are the most diffuse. The first chapter after the introduction begins with Hamlet, Caesar, Clark Kent, and Roger Bacon but contends writers like Augustine and Boethius recognized the impossibility of speaking about the dead, and late medieval philosophers, including Abelard and the Oxford Calculators, were preoccupied with the problem in their theories of language and reference (20). Chapters 2 and 3 focus on Old English texts that, Smith says, construct the body as “the corpse of language” and ask what happens when “there is speech without a body” (32).The second section contains the book's most important insights. The six chapters offer astute readings of Middle English poems where the corpse in a crypt parallels enigmatic literature. Chapter 4's dazzling study of the four-line lyric “Erþe toc of erþe erþe wyþ woh” [Earth took of earth earth with woe] unpacks the poem's suspension “between the semantic permissiveness of logic and the strict and literal jealousy of grammar” (76). The next two chapters discuss Chaucer. Chapter 5 unexpectedly and productively pairs The Book of the Duchess and the Pardoner's Tale to argue that death makes poetry possible through its deferral, but efforts to represent death fail spiritually and literally. Chapter 6 locates irony in the Knight's inability to provide an alternative to the Monk's string of tragedies, a failure that Smith maintains stems from his misreading of The Consolation of Philosophy. The seventh chapter traces the word “pestilence” through Piers Plowman and details Langland's revisions to the figure of Trajan in the B and C texts to show how “the search for terms, for the precise and permanent naming of things” is “an unending and infinite enterprise” (151). The virtuoso analysis of Pearl in chapter 8 suggests that “the awful finitude of the grave” shadows the poem's “compulsive aestheticizing of experience” (153). In chapter 9, the second section's central metaphor of the crypt is most developed as Smith uses the obscurity of the mysterious tomb whose discovery animates St. Erkenwald to explore the alterity of death in the face of ongoing dying.Part Three focuses on usable archives and appropriately studies three named poets: John Lydgate, Thomas Hoccleve, and John Audelay. Chapter 10 demonstrates that Lydgate's Fall of Princes and Troy Book turn Chaucer's concept of tragedy into an archive by prioritizing communal memory. In chapter 11, Smith argues that Hoccleve's Series epitomizes how the second postpandemic generation sought to make public the moment of dying. The final chapter (there is no conclusion) reads John Audelay's The Three Living and the Three Dead in light of Audelay's work as a chantry priest, demonstrating that the poem unites close reading and prayers for the dead. As a whole, this final section persuasively counters the common stereotype of a fifteenth century obsessed with representing catastrophic death, since as Smith shows, “death was already catastrophic, difficult to comprehend, before the Black Death” (215).The book does exhibit some editorial weaknesses. Its organization highlights an underdeveloped historicist argument. Even after rereading the book, I find Smith's three moments difficult to nail down. More connections between the chapters in each part would help to differentiate the three metaphors, and more attention to their cultural moments would clarify the history. Other concerns include a structural inconsistency—the table of contents lists three chapters in the first section devoted to “Soul,” but the introduction says it covers two, and the subtitle appears before chapter 1 (VII, 2, 11)—and erratic translation practices. The default seems to be to provide Modern English translations for all foreign language quotations, but occasionally the original is presented alone. Despite these quibbles, Arts of Dying amply rewards careful reading.Ultimately, the book attests to how medieval literature merits study for what it can tell us about the human experience. Arts of Dying demonstrates the importance of history “not just as the object of undirected nostalgia, but precisely because the past is something that becomes difficult for us to understand, even to endure” (46). Equally important is the timeliness of this volume. The preface, written during national mental health month in 2019, acknowledges Smith's mental illness, encouraging career-minded academics to prioritize their own health and asking administrators to help erase the stigma of therapy. The April 2020 publication date corresponds to early months of the COVID-19 pandemic, and, read alongside works like David Coley's Death and the Pearl Maiden and Elizabeth Outka's The Influenza Pandemic and Interwar Literature (both 2019), it seems almost prescient. Certainly, Arts of Dying deserves to be read in that context, but also to be revisited when our experiences of catastrophic death tolls are less immediate.