In Our Time - Death

Episode Date: May 4, 2000

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Death, what the 16th century philosopher Frances Bacon called, ‘the least of all evils’. A subject which has provoked thousands of reflections which live on: How has the perception, dread or even desire for our own endings shaped the development of the culture of Europe and the West, from funeral rituals to Gothic novels, to the Aids fiction and fact of today. From the celebration of the passage of a soul to the grief of the loss of a body. And how have different eras addressed the essential existential problems that death presents us with?With Jonathan Dollimore, Professor of English, York University; Thomas Lynch, poet, essayist, funeral director and author of The Undertaking - Life Studies from the Dismal Trade; Marilyn Butler, Professor of English Literature and Rector of Exeter College, Oxford.

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash radio 4. I hope you enjoy the program. Hello, our subject today is what the 16th century philosopher Francis Bacon called the least of all evils. Death, a subject which has provoked thousands of reflections which live on.

How has the perception, dread, or even desire for our own ending shaped the development of the culture of Europe and the West and how have different eras addressed the essential existential problems that death presents us with. With me is the poet essayist and undertaker, Thomas Lynch. He made an international impact with his first book of essays The Undertaking two years ago

and is just publishing his new collection, Bodies in Motion and at Rest. I'm also joined by the Professor of English Literature and Rector of Exeter College Oxford, Marilyn Butler, and by Jonathan Dollimore, Professor of English Literature at York University, an author of death, desire and loss in Western culture. Jonathan Dolomore, in your book you claim that death is central to the development of Western culture,

just to get some kind of shape and definition to it. Is it peculiarly significant in Western culture, or do you see it in other cultures? It certainly is in other cultures, but perhaps we should stick with Western culture. And I think we also need to say what we mean by death. There is obviously the question of my death or the existential question of, how one lives in the face of the universal fact of death. But for artists and philosophers, it's a deeper question. It's to do not just with mortality in that sense,

but the fact that we live in a world which is governed by change, by time, a world which is subjected to the tyranny of time, a world in which we experience constantly the trauma of loss. And I would argue that actually major strands of art, philosophy, and certainly theology, rooted in this profound sense of dissatisfaction with the world in which we live. So death has to be understood in terms of these larger concepts like mutability, change, and the destructive effects of time.

Inside the Western tradition that you're talking about, would you put the Christian idea of original sin at the centre of that? I would, I would, and I think that even people who congratulate themselves on being perfectly atheistical, are still profoundly indebted to the, the idea of original sin, the idea of the full, the narrative of the full. It's an immensely profound myth, and I say that as someone who is not a Christian, particularly the idea that in the fall, sexuality and death come into the world together. Before the fall, there was no death, there was no sexuality, certainly not as we know it.

And I think the truly remarkable thing about Christianity, but there are two things. One, I suppose, that it invented heaven, as a compensation for death and the destructive effects of time, but perhaps more importantly that it made man responsible for death. Thomas Lynch, do you agree with Jonathan Dollymore that original sin is central to the idea of death which then permeated Western culture? I do.

I think the whole narrative of the fall, which arguably is a fall upwards into life, is central to the way... the way we think of things. Any 18-year-old who's just fallen in love knows that it was better to have fallen than to have remained in this idyllic situation where everybody was naked

and there were no private parts and there was no desire and there was no death. And in a sense, well, Jonathan's work points itself out very well, but the connection between desire and mortality is central to that story. there would not be any interest in no-load mutual funds if it had not been,

if enough were always enough as it was before the fall. But as soon as Eve bit that apple for truth, for knowledge, the knowledge she got was that enough is not enough. She knew, I think, as any sensible woman does, that no one pays for cows where milk is free. and because of that she had to have that knowledge and I do think of her as the mother of invention and the mother of the marketplace

and if along with it came mortality well it has shaped everything we've done since well let's just talk about mortality a bit more specifically from your point of view how would you link the Adam and Eve myth the story the fall which you consider might be a leap upwards with death specifically in the way that Western culture has rolled through?

Well, to the extent that Western culture has used it as the punctuation for life, whether we end with exclamation points or full stops or question marks, as most of us do, death is the punctuation for the life we lead. No one takes a breath without knowing that there is a finite number, of breaths. So to the extent that we believe that death entered the world through this fall of man, that narrative is particularly important to us. Marlene Butterer, what's your reflection on that? Well, I mean, I react slightly against it because, after all, the time before the fall is pretty

short. And, I mean, events in it are pretty scanty and not very well documented. So in a sense, when it comes to looking at death in literature, I think that the extraordinary thing about death in literature is how fecund and various the ways of approaching it are. And though the fall is certainly an extremely important one, it is the original myth, but there must be at least as much literature about death that has written against the idea of the fall

or the idea of the fall even being the significant idea. And the great moments in time, I think, when there have been resuscitations of the idea of death and that they become great vokes, you know, there are sort of noticeable times in English literature, for instance, when that's happened, and maybe the present is one of them, I think that there's often been a stronger reaction against the idea,

you know, the sort of centre of gravity is really against the idea rather than with it. Are we putting too much emphasis, before we move on, to talk about how it affected literature, on original sin as almost a starting point, because we look on Greek tragedy is full of deaths. How would you say that we're starting too late in the game in that sense, Marilyn Butler? Yes, I would, you know, because it seems to me that obviously Greek tragedy is different in that respect.

And the idea of fate and an external force is very, very strong in Greek tragedy. And so that doesn't put the onus on the individual person. But interestingly, that doesn't stop the interest being. on the individual person. And that's why I am a little skeptical about whether original sin is in fact the key to... Jonathan Dolemore? The point is when we say original sin,

we're not trying to promote a theology. For me, it would be a myth and a profoundly resonant myth. And I think that when Tom says that what we inherit from that myth is the idea that enough is never enough, that sense that desire is always driven by this deep,

inner dissatisfaction, that in a sense, fulfillment is illusory. Now, that is a very dominant narrative. Do you think the fact that Christianity brought in, didn't bring in, it had been there before, but put much greater emphasis, as I understand it, correct me if I'm wrong, and much greater focus on the idea of the soul and the possibility of another, different, better, further life? Do you think that changed the way, radically changed the way thereafter writers and artists has dealt with this, Marlene Butler.

I think that in many poetic treatments of death, such as elegies, there isn't a conviction of an afterlife. I mean, I think that a doubt about whether there is an afterlife either for oneself or for the person that you're mourning is stronger, again, than faith. But there's great poignancy and edge given to death

sometimes by the notion that you will be reunited with the dead one. Certainly. And in idea of the soul, obviously, on future life figures, I mean, in Bishop Henry King's the exequate, for instance, he will be reunited with this young wife

who has pre-deceased him, and that is the whole dynamism of that wonderful poem. Yes, and it's the plot of the rest of his life, and she was much younger than him to go, and he tells her, but hark my pulse like a soft drum beats my approach. which tells the I come.

And the fact that he is, that the end of his life is going to be to lie down with her, that certainly is a case where he's expecting that to happen. But it is that he's going to lie in the grave with her. I just think it's so brilliant about that, those lines you quote,

is that, of course, the pulse, I mean, the register of life is what is measuring his approach to death. So he feels death on the pulses, as it were. Yes, he does. That is so characteristic of that. Yes, while she's lying quiet in the tomb now. So the difference between them is established by that.

Thomas Lynch, what do you see the place of the Christian idea of the soul plays in the notions of views of death in writers? Well, I'm glad to bring up the bishop's poem because it goes into full metaphor mode to discuss this sort of dual, this dual nature. We are given this wild card of a soul, whether by mythology or, or by faith or by ancient narrative. And the idea that the soul, this incorruptible thing, will outlive

what is so manifestly corruptible. What I admire about the exiqui is how bodily this death is. And it's something that we've gotten away from, I think, in modern times, the notion that a, body rots and the soul doesn't. So the notion of a soul as metaphor for permanence

that we want and crave as human, some measure of immortality, this is one of the reasons why people write so that one sentence might survive them, their body will rot, but a word might hold forth 50 or 100 years later. So the idea that we get this free pass, if we just behave ourselves,

is one that's appealed to cultures, I think cross-culturally. It's not just a Christian myth. I think that's a very different idea, though, from eternity, isn't it? The idea that your lines may survive you. Of course, that's important. But I think I would want to say,

going back to the King poem, that I would want to say that this conception of heaven to be reunited with the lost one, I think is also, perhaps more disturbingly for us, a wish to be released from the pain of this life. I think that very often the representation of heaven

is a very thinly disguised expression of the death wish, by which I mean the wish to be free of this yearning, this trauma of loss, this deep sense of the inadequacy of this life. So I think that we sometimes console ourselves with the idea that they did believe in the soul in eternal life, but actually I'm not sure that is true. I think it was much more

sometimes heaven was conceived as a release from pain. It was conceived negatively, if you were. And certainly as a way of making sense of pain that was going to be there regardless. We are in pain because that is our condition. And heaven makes somehow that pain redemptive. The idea, you know, central to the Christian theology, is redemptive suffering,

the notion that you can suffer your way. Before we move on from this, do you want to give us one or two more, lines from this poem of 1624, Marilynne Butler, so that listeners can attach themselves rather more to what you've been talking about from the execue? Yes, it's quite a long poem.

It's about a hundred and ten lines, so it's much too long to give the whole story. But he expresses his extraordinary shock and anger in the first half of the poem that she died before him when she was a much younger woman in her 20s. And he's a middle-aged man. But then he turns to addressing her directly,

Sleep on my love in thy cold bed, never to be disquieted. Stay for me there. I will not fail to meet thee in that hollow veil. And think not much of my delay. I am already on the way. And follow thee with all the speed, desire can make, or sorrows breed. Each minute is a short degree, and every hour a step towards thee. But hark my pulse like a soft drum, beats my approach, tells thee I come,

and slow howe'er my marches be, I shall at last sit down by thee. Is that some, not necessarily, not a turning point, Jonathan Dolomar, but is that something that keys in a view of death in our culture that is important for you? I think it's crucially important to that period, if we can call it loosely the Renaissance. in that idea, the feeling of death on the pulse is this almost scandalous or provocative idea that somehow death is felt where life should be. That is so characteristic of the literature of this period. And perhaps most notably in the tragedy,

that is say Renaissance tragedy, including the writing of Shakespeare. And yes, in fact, Shakespeare has one of his sonnets, I think it's 147, And the poet cries out at the crux of the poem, desire is death. And it seems to me that could be almost a kind of epigraph to the tragedy of this period, where obviously there is a lot of death on stage. It's often thought to be extremely bloodthirsty, but that really isn't the point. It's much more that this tragedy explores the idea of desire as a kind of death.

And we have figures, the malcontent figures, for example, who are socially politically alienated and stand. decide, often they administer death, but they also comment upon death. They are, as it were, the critics, the commentators on the culture. And it isn't just an individual question of the individual facing the problem of death. It's a social and political question. It's about a whole world destroying itself. Thomas Strench, what does this body count, body pile up in Jacobyan drama tell you as an observer,

a very close observer in your day job as what was in your writing of death? What sort of society was that that was producing that literature? Well, I think it was a society that remarked the big changes. The births, the deaths, and the marriages were, in a sense, more remarkable, more tied into the culture, more tied into the society than perhaps there. Now, you know, the deaths of those times were sociable deaths in a way. They were one-to-one murders or plague-induced things. People knew what was going on.

like the more narcissistic deaths that we have nowadays or the global deaths that are just outside of our range. We can't imagine the atomic deaths. We think of death somehow today as somehow the fault of the person that died if they'd just eaten fewer cheeseburgers. This wouldn't have happened as if somehow there were a cure for it. But I think in Shakespeare's time, the notion that death went through the culture and had to be watched, had to be kept track of as important. And I think that's why it infects the poetry. Marilyn Butler. Well, we haven't come to the subject of mourning for another person. We've been so far discussing

the subjective take on death and what the reader or the audience thinks of their own death when they're viewing or reading. But the question of the deaths of others does involve thinking about whether there's an ongoing life in dead people, whether you remain in contact with them, whether they're friends or enemies, frightful figures, you know, sort of terroristic, where they have an ongoing influence. I mean, all of those issues start to come back into the literature of death

in a period of relative skepticism in the later 18th century and treated as subjects of horror and terror. Would you like to take that on, Tom Lynch, in terms of the morning? Yeah, I think sometimes of the first Neanderthal widow waking next to a lump of dead protein next to her and thinking she would sense eventually, she would sense through her nose that something had to be done. And whether she left the cave to him or dug a ditch to push him into or built a fire to burn his body in, she knew that something had to be done. and it was when she was looking into that fire

or into that hole in the ground or over that ledge she pushed him over. I think that's when she began to wonder what comes next. Looking into that void, she asked what comes next. And I think that's what put us all in business. Now, this was before we had an alphabet, before we farmed. Do you know, I think that was one of the first questions

out of which comes all these myths and traditions and literatures that we've been speaking. of that first question, what's next? Put the shamans and soothsayers and priests and pooh-baz and the poets and the writers and the dramatists into business. It's become a cliche now to talk about the analogy between sex and death. But that doesn't mean, of course, there isn't a massive amount of truth in it as there is a... Can we maybe start with your line from Shakespeare or start with Freud? and talk about this idea of the sex drive

and the drive for death being interrelated and what you find in that connection, which is important for your thesis about Western culture. Let me put it like this. I'll come to your question. A child dies. Now, of course we never forget, and if we love the child, if we bore the child,

we perhaps never recover. Now, for the human being, there is something, the human being is permanently at odds with the reality in which they live. What I mean to say is that for an organism to die in infancy is the norm of nature, not the exception. And yet for the human being, there's something profoundly alienating about that fact. And I think what we have to hang on to, and I don't know how far back it goes, but at some level to be human is to be alienated in the world in which we live, and death is both the reality and the metaphor for that alienation.

Now, I think it's partly because of that, that we have this, paradoxal and often quite scandalous idea that sexuality, which should be on the side of life, in an obvious sense, somehow gets fused with death. Let's think about the myths we have in modern culture. Those who are most hungry for life often die young. There is a sense in which the passion for life has a strangely destructive, even self-destructive component in it. Now, that is very different. That's a romantic idea. If we go back to the Renaissance again, often the attraction of death was to be released from desire.

Because desire itself was inherently driven by death, or at least this profound sense of dissatisfaction, the sense that we are governed by the world of time. I mean, Sydney, one of his remarkable line, says, Leave me, O love, which reaches butt to dust. There's a sense that even the activity of reaching to embrace the act of love itself is somehow producing the dust, which is. our eventual destiny, therefore we have to reject it. Why is this because desire is so powerful it's burning you up,

or because it's just reminding you of the shortness of your life? It's both of those things, but it's also the sense that desire is a profoundly negative thing, which is just driving you to your own destruction, which promises a fulfillment which can never come. I mean, Sydney has another line, which I remember all the time, where he said, I desire nothing but the death of desire.

And again, it's put the other way around, that if we could only be free of desire, we would have the chance to live, which is a perverse paradox indeed. But it's almost as if, with the romantics, that the escape from this pain is through death itself. It's almost if death is the only thing that can offer the consummation, which we desire.

And, of course, Hamlet's great line, death is a consummation devoutly to be wished. And Keats line, I'm half in love with easeful death, which takes us to the romantic view, pushing on from that which John Litton. was alluding to. What's your comment on that line, Marlon? I know he's only half in love.

But even so, he is half in love. But the best thing in the line is that he says half in love because it's a wonderful sort of self-observation that there is something excessive about this, which he's, you know, there's another side of Keats all the time. You know, there's the side of him that is very physical and that's a doctor and, in fact, is in many ways skeptical. So the Ode the Nightingale is the poem of his that most magnificently does express this powerful sense,

which I think is always there in intensely subjective treatments of death, the notion of the connection between love and death as a very physical thing and reality for the person is there. But it does also relate to a negative religiously. feeling, which is that the church in the past has excessively associated sexuality with sin. Can I just bring Tom Lynch in here, this idea, would you find, a relationship between sex and death? In all, Marilynne Butler mentioned that Keats is to rather trivialise this as his day job as a doctor. Your day job is an undertaker and so on. But still, I mean, do you find any, do you find that this is, this speaks a sort of,

of truth from the reality of the experience you have? Well, they are the horizontal mysteries. They are the things that will put us on our back, make us breathless. Cigarettes are often implicated, you know. But I like your idea, Marilyn, how the church has turned this notion of sexuality and mortality, these opposing gravities they've turned on us in a way.

The idea that the cross, that suffering and death, is the passion strikes me as an odd. transformation of words. Yates wrote to Pound that the only thing that writers should ever bother with is sex and death. And the idea that these represent sort of the bookend between which

we live out our life, the things that make us and regenerate us and enthuse us and give us pleasure, this desire side, is connected very much to the things that dissipate us and undo us eventually. But there's lines of Yates that you like to quote

man is in love and loves what vanishes. That is all there is to say. That is all there is to say. He adds to what more is there to say. Of course, the answer is endlessly more to say. That is literature. That is philosophy. It is a response to that trauma.

Can I just come back to the Keats? I mean, you stress the half as if that's, I mean, he isn't going too far. I would want to stress in that line, I think, from memory, many a time have I been half in love with Eastville death. It's been almost an obsession. And I think that in that poem, you have. this sense of the actually the ecstasy of death

to be free from, again from memory, the weariness, the fever and the fret. That is mortality. That is to be under the sway of time. And there is a sense that oblivion would be, well, the peace that passeth all understanding. And I think that even a poet like Shelley when he's writing his elegy

on the death of Keats, I mean, an extraordinary celebration via a kind of aesthetic platonism of the desire to be released from pain in death. I mean, I think the death wish is there and I think that as literary critics

we have often wanted to tidy this back onto the side of life and I don't think it necessarily is. Do you think that we marginalised death compared with previous, rather recently previous cultures just a few hundred years ago, Tom Lynch,

that we deny it much more than we used to? Well, 100 years ago, of course, we had great public funerals and private sex and today we have public sex and private funerals. So that is a change in 100 years.

So I would say as a culture, yes, we tend to have it farmed out a little bit more. The wonderful thing about Keats' poetry is that he was a position, and he did know the body parts and spoke of them. And when your man holds up the skull in the graveyard, how many of us will hold that skull? We'll call someone on our cell phones and have that skull taken care of with our gold card. So, yes, I don't know if we've so much denial, but we have marginalized it.

We're into convenience more than custom, I'm afraid. And ritual is fine until it really presses our noses up against corruptible flesh. We will not smell our dead. Nor will we bury them, nor will we light the fire that burns them. The more is the pity. Because I think that witness is an important one. We got the sex down well, but when it comes to writing effectively about death and dying and bereavement,

We have to nature fake it because... What do you mean by nature fake? Well, we don't do it. We do the surrogate deaths, you know. We do the surrogate funerals. I mean, what was, you know, Diana's funeral, but sex and death writ large, you know, and, you know, made a media event,

a bereavement opportunity for people who would not oftentimes send flowers to their dead uncles and aunts and fathers and mothers and sisters and brothers. And we do the same thing in America, you know, when John Kennedy falls from the sky. We all are, we enter a period of what is declared national mourning. For someone we only met in the tabloid press. We don't know that person. We're not attached to him.

We don't relate to him. And yet we readily say we're mourning that. But when, if you open the papers today in London, you'll see every effort made in the obituaries to say anything but we're having a funeral. you can have a service of Thanksgiving, but you can't shake a fist in God's face and say, what did you have in mind here when that child died? Well, thank you very much. Thank you very much, Sir Jonathan Donny Moore,

whose book Death, Desire and Loss in Western Culture we'll be talking about, to Thomas Lynch, his new book, his body's immersion in rest, and to Marilyn Butler. And thank you very much for listening. We hope you've enjoyed this Radio 4 podcast. You can find hundreds of other programs

about history, science and philosophy at BBC.com.com.uk forward slash radio four.