The Act of Dying in Literature and Film as an Imaginative Challenge

“Where do bad folks go when they die?

They don't go to heaven where the angels fly

They go to the lake of fire and fry

Won't see them again 'till the fourth of July”

 – Curtis Matthew Kirkwood, Meat Puppets (1983)

DEATH IN LITERATURE: PERSPECTIVES

Death is more than an anatomical and physiological matter. Accordingly, the study of death in literature is a broad topic; myriad analyses consider philosophical, psychological, and spiritual perspectives on dying. Concepts such as good death (also called successful dying), death positivity, and death denial all show up in literature. This essay employs literary analysis––textual and reader-response––as the primary methodology. As well, the rationale is informed by a geographically diverse cross-section of interdisciplinary sources from literature, film, music, health humanities, and various science disciplines. A range of theoretical viewpoints, such as death-positive, right-to-life, and transhumanist, are considered.

In early twentieth-century literary circles, Virginia Woolf suggested a more literal recognition of the body as a central figure in circumstances of poor health. In her essay, On Being Ill, she lamented how the body is marginalized, “the body is a sheet of plain glass through which the soul looks straight and clear, and, save for one or two passions such as desire and greed, is null, negligible and non-existent.” Woolf acknowledged our avoidance of illness and its associated morbidity and questioned the mind-body hierarchy, “People write always about the doings of the mind; the thoughts that come to it; its noble plans; how it has civilised the universe.” Similarly, in elaborating on Woolf, the way we talk about death with recurring tropes and ritualized responses reflects much of humanity’s eternal dread of death.  In the field of narrative medicine, John Skelton, Professor of Clinical Communication at University of Birmingham (UK) has studied how writers have approached the concept of death. He explains the epistemology of science is to find single facts by eliminating uncertainty, whereas the epistemology of the humanities is to represent knowledge as complex and ambivalent. Skelton argues that one of the primary reasons healthcare professionals should read literature is to become familiar with this different epistemology.  In contemporary culture, the tension between a general denial of death as existentially inevitable and a neo-gothic, macabre fascination with death as a multifaceted object of entertainment upholds this complicated ambivalence. 

DEATH IN LITERATURE: AN IMAGINATIVE CHALLENGE

Death is a shared experience, which compels the use of narratives, across literary cultures, to sooth anxieties and confront hesitations and fascinations around dying. In all languages, the scientific brevity of depicting a death in meager, factual words may coexist with spaces for imaginative liberties. Such openings may allow humans to better undertake the sometimes hideous effort of dying and the uncertainty about what happens after death. 

Tropes can be a vital part of the creative and narrative process. The overuse of certain tropes and the reliance on prevalent tropes, which clog the prevailing norms within Western societies, is a hindrance to a more imaginative depiction of death and dying. For example, the use of war and military metaphors is pervasive. Additional common tropes include, comedic metaphors, visual metaphors, and figurative language. Other uses of death in literature––such as death imagery, death itself as a character, horror fiction, and dark fantasy––are relevant for overall meaning making, but not addressed in this essay. This is a call to create a more expansive repertoire of the death experience and realize the visions of past artistic torchbearers, such as Virginia Woolf. This essay acknowledges present-day scholars and creatives, unafraid of the horrors and hopes around dying, yet not besotted by either the commoditization of death or the cult of death phenomena––both fetishized, misanthropic approaches.  

What follows is an evidenced-based exploration of two late twentieth century novels, The Hours by Michael Cunningham and Big Fish by Daniel Wallace, and analysis of how these authors represent death. An important distinction is the difference between the meanings attributed to the death of specific characters within the context of a story as opposed to the act of dying itself. Although the scope of this essay is limited, the same literary criticism may be applied to other works in literature and film. 

Visions and Versions of Death in Literature and Film. The late nineties novels, Big Fish and The Hours, both included subsequent film adaptations in the early aughts. Death is a primary theme and supports character arcs, yet the visions and versions of death represented in these works differ. 

In The Hours, the suicides of Virginia Woolf and Richard Brown bookend the story; throughout the stream-of-consciousness narrative the main characters grapple with mortality in compelling ways. Death is a plot device designed to support the parallel story structure and eventually connect the characters, Clarissa Vaughn, Virginia Woolf, and Laura Brown. The two suicides are both voiced through omniscient narration, yet shift in narrative point of view. 

Richard Brown’s death is inevitable because he is dying of AIDS. Clarissa goes to Richard’s apartment to help him get ready for the party she’s been planning to fete him. She finds him perched on a windowsill, unbathed, in his robe. After brief dialogue, he jumps and falls to his death. Through Clarissa’s lens, the scene ends with her weeping and ruminating over his body, “She would like to speak to him, but can’t. She simply rests her head lightly, against his back” (203). 

Virginia’s suicide is only witnessed by the narrator, yet Cunningham gets closer to her body and spirit. Following her death by drowning in a river, Virginia’s body floats downriver and nears a bridge, with a boy and his mother standing and observing a WWII military truck filled with soldiers:

He waves back. He demands that his mother pick him up so he can see the soldiers better; so he will be more visible to them. All this enters the bridge, resounds through its wood and stone, and enters Virginia’s body. Her face, pressed sideways to the piling, absorbs it all; the truck and the soldiers, the mother and the child (8). 

Cunningham’s imaginative description of the absorption of life by a fresh corpse creates a more intimate proximity to death. Whereas Richard’s death is a plot point, which serves to culminate Clarissa’s persisting grief and advance the story arc to the novel’s denouement. 

The Preface of Big Fish suggests the author may possess a spiritual view of death, “On one of our last car trips, near the end of my father’s life as a man…”(1). The sentence is also an example of artfully spare foreshadowing. Wallace’s magic realism tale of a dying father, Edward Bloom, is told from the perspective of the adult son, William. In this personal narrative point of view, the final scene between Edward and William takes place four times––in four different ways––in chapters titled, “My Father’s Death: Take 1, 2, 3, and 4” respectively. These accounts may be alternate or intertwined; offering versions, which may or may not be entirely accurate. 

In Take 1, Wallace validates the role of the body, as William describes his father’s physical decline, “He used to be hard to look at…but I’ve gotten used to it now. Even though he doesn’t have any hair and his skin is mottled and scabbed, I’m used to it” (17). In Take 2, Wallace addresses the afterlife. William asks his father if he believes in Heaven. Edward dodges the question, offering jokes and eventually landing on a poignant sentiment:

 “I was a good dad,” he says. A statement of not unassailable fact he leaves hanging there, as if for my appraisal. I look at him, at it. “You are a good dad,” I say. “Thanks,” he says, and his eyelids flutter a bit, as if he’s heard what he’s come to hear. This is what is meant by last words: they are keys to unlock the afterlife. They’re not last words but passwords, and as soon as they’re spoken you can go (74).

In Take 3, Wallace tackles death denial. The story is filled with Edward navigating his pain and impending death with a joke-filled prattle, first to the doctor, then to William. Despite Edward’s comedic litany, William notices a shift, “He’s not a man in the same way now. He’s something else altogether” (109). In Take 4, after losing consciousness in the family pool Edward lies in a coma in the hospital. Wallace portrays medical death, as William observes his father’s intubated form and considers, “I sat there and waited—for what I don’t know—and stared at those marvelous machines. This wasn’t life, of course. This was life support. This was what the medical world had fashioned to take the place of Purgatory”(171). William attempts to retell a favorite joke to his comatose father, who awakens. In the throes of dying, Edward asks, “Tell me everything it is I’ve taught you about life so I can go ahead and die and so I won’t have to worry so much. Just . . . just go ahead and say it” (174). 

In the subsequent and final chapter, entitled Big Fish, William answers his father with his own tall tale. It’s the ultimate palliative care for Edward, the fantastical storyteller. He imagines carrying his father out of the hospital and driving to a riverbank:

I just stood there, holding his body shrouded in a blanket on the banks of this river, until he told me, You might want to look away now and then Please, and all of a sudden my arms were full of the most fantastic life, frenetic, impossible to hold on to even if I’d wanted to, and I wanted to. But then all I was holding was the blanket, because my father had jumped into the river. And that’s when I discovered that my father hadn’t been dying after all. He was just changing, transforming himself into something new and different to carry his life forward in (179-180).

The story and Edward––the man––come to an end. He turns into a fish and swims away. William declares, “I saw him dart this way and that, a silvery, brilliant, shining life, and disappear into the darkness of the deep water where the big fish go...” (180).

Edward’s death takes place outside the hospital bed, a sanguine commingling of father-son imaginings. The four chapters on dying are less about the truth of what happened than how each of us understands what is true––if anything––and what is important for us to believe. There is a coda in the film adaptation, which is not in the book. At the riverbank, the characters from Edward’s mythical stories appear at his funeral, and the viewer realizes that his astonishing tales are based on real people; in the book there is no funeral and no explanation. The film provides an additional interlude before his transformation into a big fish. 

The depiction of Edward’s death in Big Fish is an imaginative triumph and an antidote to the common tropes. Wallace succeeds in demonstrating how the body is both connected and separated from the spirit. In The Hours, death and the potentiality of death are a plot mechanism, moving the characters to action. Richard’s suicide is primarily an intellectual endeavor, rather than an imaginative experience. Whereas Virginia’s death scene offers a more imaginative ending as she drifts down the river absorbing the reverberations of life surrounding her lifeless body. 

CONCLUSION

The late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century examples cited in this essay are a sample of a larger argument surrounding death and dying in literature and film. For example, Allegheny College English professor John MacNeill Miller considers why there are so few literary works that consider what happens to humans after we die. He suggests death should not be treated as a final stop, citing the death-positive movement and non-fiction portrayals as advances, while calling for more creative imaginings of the afterlife. Miller suggests:

If we want to reclaim the good death as part of the good life, we need to consider how we incorporate death in the stories we tell about ourselves. When we tacitly treat death as The End of every individual’s story, we only increase a collective sense of death’s unspeakability. What lies beyond the grave seems unthinkable in part because it remains unimaginable.

The literary challenge to stretch narrative conventions and reimagine the act of dying is not purely an artistic aspiration relegated to fictional settings. Creative narrative expression contributes subjectivity to the experience of death in real, clinical situations and underpins larger sociocultural trends, such as the death-positive movement and its supporting modalities. However, moving forward, it will be important to bring conversations about death and dying to marginalized communities as certain practices favor affluent whites, 3 such as narrative medicine, the use of end-of-life doulas, and natural death. The potential sociocultural impact on public health, the environment, and the economy is enormous.

Notes

1. According to Van Brussel and Carpentier, we cannot reduce death to the way it is socially and culturally interpreted, but at the same time death remains loaded with meaning and we cannot detach it from the processes of social construction.

2. Dina Khapaeva, Professor of Russian at Georgia Tech University, explores the focus in electronic media and popular fiction on non-human figures and the devaluation of humans in today’s Western culture. She identifies a linked fascination with death, which she associates with ‘a gothic aesthetics,’ a literary tradition over the past two centuries. In her view of these developments, she argues the origins are in a critique of European humanism and the rejection of human exceptionalism. Khapaeva points to the role of French theory and extends her argument to include proponents of animal rights, who put animals on par with humans. She notes the appeal of recently fashionable ideas of posthumanism and transhumanism. 

3. Sociologist Ara Francis indicates self-reflection and self-expression, choice and personal customization, and the desire for what is ostensibly “natural” are culturally and historically specific values that resonate especially strongly with affluent whites. 

Works Cited

 Cunningham, Michael. The Hours. Picador, 1998. Print.

Francis, Ara A. “An App to Remind You You’re Going to Die? On Death Positivity.” Literary Hub,  24 Apr. 2019, https://lithub.com/an-app-to-remind-you-youre-going-to-die-on-death-positivity/. Accessed 3 May 2020.

 Khapeva, Dina. The Celebration of Death in Contemporary Culture. The University of Michigan Press, 2017. Print.

 Miller, MacNeill, John. “Can Novels Change Our Attitudes About Death.” Electric Lit. 27 February 2018, https://electricliterature.com/can-novels-change-our-attitudes-about-death/. Accessed 5 April 2020.

 Skelton, John. “Death in Literature.” Métode Science Studies Journal, Vol 8, 2018: 247-253. 

Sontag, Susan. Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors. Picador, 2001. Print.

Van Brussel, L. , & Carpentier, N., editors. The Social Construction of Death: Interdisciplinary Perspectives. London, England: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014.

 Wallace, Daniel. Big Fish: A Novel of Mythic Proportions. Chapel Hill, N.C: Algonquin Books, 1998. Kindle Edition. 

Woolf, Virginia. On Being Ill. 1930. Print.

Works Consulted

 Campo, Rafael. “What I Would Give.”Poetry Foundation, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/54467/what-i-would-give. Accessed 5 April 2020.

 Koloze, Jeff. “Death Scenes in Literature from the Nineteenth Century to Current Fiction.” Semantic Scholar, 2008. Web. Accessed 5 April 2020.

 Lofland, Lyn H. The Craft of Dying: The Modern Face of Death 40th Anniversary Edition. The MIT Press, 2019.

 Nirvana. Nirvana–MTV Unplugged in New York (Live). Geffen Records, 1994. Apple Music.

 Šubrtová, Milena. “When Children Die In War: Death in War Literature for Children and Youth.” Bookbird: A Journal of International Children's Literature, VOL 47, NO. 4, 2009, 1 - 8.

 Teodorescu, Adriana. Death Representations in Literature: Forms and Theories. Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2015.