Sites of death in some recent British fiction

Abstract

In The Birth of the Clinic, an extended engagement with medical science and its institutions in eighteenth-century France, Michel Foucault argued that an epistemic shift took place at the end of the eighteenth century, a major component of which was the rediscovery of the idea that death provided 'the absolute point of view over life and opening ... on its truth'.1 For Foucault, the development of pathological anatomy in this period was the most vital expression of the new medicine. Through the dissection of the dead body came the discovery that 'it is at death that disease and life speak their truth' (B°C, p145). From this perspective, disease breaks away from the metaphysic of evil and becomes, instead, 'life undergoing modification in an inflected functioning' (p153). More importantly, the anatomical gaze revealed 'the forbidden imminent secret: the knowledge of the individual' (p170). Accordingly, Foucault concluded that 'the experience of individuality in modern culture is bound up with that of death' (p197).Elisabeth Bronfen made productive use of this re-emergence of the idea that death is 'that moment in a person's life where individuality ... could finally be attained' and 'an otherwise incommunicable secret could be made visible' in her reading of nineteenth-century literature and art.2 She cites, as one example, Nell's death in The Old Curiosity Shop, where death 'recreates the body into a perfect version of its former self' (Over her dead body, p89). She notes also the nineteenth-century literary convention in which the deathbed scene involves not only the farewell greetings from friends and kin but also the dying person's last minute vision of the after-life (p77). While death remains an untransmissable experience, the deathbed spectators watch the dying person hovering on the threshold and through them hope to gain a glimpse into 'the Beyond'.This new conception of 'death's presence in life' which Foucault delineates, Bronfen suggests, gave a new power to the dying person and led to 'elaborate stagings' of death (p77). Death certainly seems to have been a regular part of everyday Victorian life, from high infant mortality rates to the death of women in childbirth, from public executions to familial death-beds, from elaborate rituals of mourning to commemorative photographs of the dead.3 Victorian fiction bears eloquent testimony to 'death's presence in life' in a rich variety of forms. If we confine ourselves to the works of Dickens, in addition to Nell's long journey to death in The Old Curiosity Shop, there is Oliver Twist's morally-improving final meeting with Fagin in the death-cell; the 'Resurrection Men' in The Tale of Two Cities; the unhealthy graveyards of Bleak House; the death-house of Our Mutual Friend; and Pip's meditations over the tombstones of his parents and five little brothers at the start of Great Expectations.By contrast, we generally think that dying and death have retreated from contemporary everyday life, withdrawn to the non-places of nursing homes, hospitals, hospices, funeral parlours, crematoria. Thus Ruth Richardson, in her pioneering work on the history of attitudes towards death in the early Victorian period, observes that nowadays 'preparation of the dead for disposal is regarded as a sanitary problem, dealt with professionally by hospitals and undertakers'.4 Roger Luckhurst makes a wider claim: 'In advanced capitalist societies, encounters with extremity are suppressed: birth, death, insanity are all removed from the everyday and placed under technical and institutional command'.5 In Marc Auge's words, this is 'a world where people are born in the clinic and die in hospital'.6In this essay, I will argue that while the process of dying has been removed to these non-places, death itself (in mediated and unmediated forms) has become ubiquitous in contemporary life. I will approach this through the engagement with death in a range of recent novels arguing that, if 'death's presence in life' was linked with the attainment of individuality for the Victorians, death in recent fiction is rather associated with an alienation and a randomness that de-emphasise individual identity. …