5th Global Conference

Conference Programme, Abstracts and Papers

Session 8: Literature and Stories of Dying and Death
Chair: Helen Ennis

Death and Repetition: A Literary Approach
Francisc Szekely
English Department of the University of Auckland, New Zealand

There is a very important problem mourning shares with all other forms of communication: it longs for generality, for the unity of perception, for the representation on the largest scale possible. This is because, apart from being an individual expression of a feeling, the text of mourning is a genre, a literary species, a text to be read, interpreted, commented, politically inscribed, given meaning by the rebel reader and carried on by the enthusiastic crowd. In order to survive as a genre, mourning must become what it is not in the beginning: extra-personal experience, publicity. All this is made possible through repetition.
The English word ‘repetition’ is borrowed from the French repeter, which entered the neighboring language around mid-13th century. The French word itself is a composition, from the Latin words re (meaning “again”) and petere (“go toward, demand, attack”). In other words, repetition is not a passive form of recapitulation. It is not a copy or imitation, but an active act of tackling with the never-changing issue of death.

Violet Flowers with Shades of Gold
Abir Hamdar
Languages and Cultures of the Near and Middle East, University of London – SOAS, London, United Kingdom

This is a short story about a Lebanese mother who has ‘that disease’ and is admitted to the hospital only to have her lower colon, rectum and bladder taken out, her cervix and uterus removed and her vagina discarded. As she lies on a hospital bed and tries to live up to the false compliments of visitors, her son pretends she has a severe case of gases while her daughter can only find satisfaction in the thought of strangling her to death. Violet Flowers with Shades of Gold depicts the bitterness that cannot be healed when a mother’s dream goes amiss, a daughter thought she was part of that dream and a son who chooses not to remember anything of it. Through it all, only the reality of chronic illness and impending death remain acute.

“Half in Love with Easeful Death”: Death in The Loved One and Love Among the Ruins
E. Morera de la Vall
Australian Studies Centre, University of Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain

The thought of death has inspired rites, myths, cultures, from the beginning of time. With Christianity, death acquired a transcendental meaning. It was the door to either eternal punishment or eternal joy. This was the view held by Evelyn Waugh who, as a convert to Catholicism, was concerned by the new paganism that was displacing traditional beliefs in the western world. It informed his novel The Loved One and his novelette Love Among the Ruins.
A visit to a grandiose cemetery, “Forest Lawn”, which fascinated Waugh, as well as the funeral customs of Southern California, were the inspiration for The Loved One, a satire about a decadent society that has to find euphemistic words and concepts to veil the crude aspects of death that it cannot face. In the novel, “Forest Lawn” becomes “Whispering Glades”, an amazing necropolis where a dead person is referred to as “the loved one”. ‘Art’ and eternal happiness are offered to its denizens as part of the undertaking service. Both claims come under the novelist’s attack.
When Waugh wrote Love Among the Ruins a few years later, his mood had become much grimmer and theamused glance that had permeated The Loved One had turned sour. His novelette is one more dystopia in a disillusioned age that produced a good number of them. The society depicted here is bleak, the atmosphere dismal and devoid of hope, as if ‘Man’ had become prefabricated and soulless. In Satellite City the only Department that is expanding is the Department of Euthanasia, for death has been devaluated and is gladly welcome to end the unbearable burden of life.

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