CROSSROADS IN CULTURAL STUDIES
Fourth International Conference
June 29 - July 2, 2002, Tampere, Finland
Planned Exits. Suicide Concepts in Contemporary Fiction
Organisers: Ursula Ganz-Blaettler and Donna Reiner
Kehoe, Jennifer Spungin (St. John Fisher College, USA) POSTMODERN CHAOTIC
FICTION: THE IMMORALITY CRITIQUE IN DON DELILLO AND DONALD BARTHELME
Postmodern
fiction resists the conventional border between the textual worlds of the reader
and writer. Both diverse and experimental, postmodern fiction comments on the
social immorality of the postmodern age. Critiquing the loss of humanity in a
technically expanding world, postmodern fiction disrupts textual space. This
collapse occurs on several different levels. The postmodern novel breaks textual
borders by requiring that the reader play an active role from within the text.
Secondly, the postmodern novel seeks to reveal the social reworkings and moral
recodings of the literal world. As technical industry and computer literacy
advance, the importance of language and knowledge is negated and mistrusted.
Lastly, the postmodern novel unveils language and social order as both
untrustworthy and unreadable. Both Donald Barthelme and Don DeLillo challenge
contemporary notions of morality and disembody traditional properties of
textuality. By resisting traditional textual properties, Postmodern fiction
reveals the shifting borders of language and literariness in the face of a
capitalist society obsessed with commercialization and commodification.
Boccardi, Mariadele (University of Cambridge, United Kingdom) WRITING AGAINST
DEATH. NARRATIVE AND SUICIDE IN GRAHAM SWIFT'S EVER AFTER AND JULIAN BARNES'
FLAUBERT'S PARROT
Two suicide attempts, one successful and one failed, dominate
Graham Swift's novel Ever After (1992). The motivations for the attempts, their
modalities and outcomes are the subject of the novel, whose narrator is the
author of the failed attempt. And yet, even as the analysis of suicide reaches
new depth, the possibility of it recedes and the very act of writing - even
writing suicide - becomes an antidote to carrying out what is so meticulously,
and lovingly, described. A similar situation occurs in Flaubert's Parrot (1984):
suicide is, again, at the centre of the narrative, and the incessant narrative
flow in the novel is pitched against the unchangeable fact of that death. My
proposed paper discusses the process by which writing defers, delays, and
ultimately erases suicide and compares Swift's dissecting tendencies with
Barnes' evasive ones, both aimed at one goal: writing death while still alive.
Reiner, Donna (Independent Scholar, Phoenix, USA) PLANNED EXIT: THE BEST WAY
OUT?
Emile Durkheim's 1897, Suicide: A Study in Sociology, suggests that a
person who commits suicide is suffering from some mental instability. While
suicide is a reality of our existence and has become a more common topic in
literature and other media narratives, studies demonstrate that the motivation
for one's planned exit from everyday existence varies. For centuries, numerous
writers have addressed these motivations and the act itself despite negative
religious and/or societal views on the subject. A common motivation for many
suicides may be the inability to deal with pain or hardship, yet the altruistic
motivation is a conundrum. Can a single planned exit truly benefit others? Does
the motivation for the prospective suicide pose a moral dilemma for members of
society? Science fiction indirectly addresses this conundrum with stories
revolving around the alteration of history. On the other hand, Daniel Stern's
work, Suicide Academy, proposes that we'll "learn to live or die--and
more--" that we'll "learn the truth: that one of them is best."
Ganz-Blaettler, Ursula (University of Geneva, Switzerland) CAUGHT IN THE ACT.
THE VISIBILITY OF SELF-INFLICTED DEATH
Suicides in popular fiction are not
always to be identified with careful planning. It is the old question of
suspense and surprise: What do (which) characters know at which state, and what
do we, the audience know or guess? An announced death is always
"visible" to a certain point, whereas accidental or improvised demises
do leave a need for reconstruction. For the sake of jurisdiction maybe. Or in
order to assure some assurance company about what it needs to be sure about. Or
for the desperate need of survivors to "make sense" in hindsight. A
protagonists' suicide goes seldom unannounced. That may be the main reason why
we, as witnesses, get to be spared the gruesome details. When they go, they
usually go gently by vanishing into thin air ("Sweet November") or by
leaving us in merciful suspense ("Thelma and Louise"). Should we
"need to know", for dramaturgical purposes, there are either less
disfiguring exit modes to ponder (the Snow White effect, highly gendered with
regards to narrative conventions) - or modes so utterly convincing there won't
be traces left. In my presentation I question suicide's visibility in film and
television with regards to character status and gender, to narrative logic and
necessity of "proof".
Wagner, Tamara (University of Cambridge, United Kingdom) THE SUBVERSIVE
NOSTALGIA OF THE PLANNED EXIT. SUICIDE AND HAPPY ENDS IN CONTEMPORARY NARRATIVES
Terry Gilliam's parodic Dystopia Brazil ends with Lowry's exit into his
dream-spaces, defeating his torturers: "He has escaped us now!" The
planned exit as a form of resistance has had a comeback in contemporary
literature. Informed by Romantic cults of world-weariness as well as by the
classical topos of political resistance, Socrates' death, fiction engages anew
and often self-ironically with the triumph of ostensible defeat with the
outward surrender that constitutes passive resistance. The representations of
planned exits as an expression of a subversive nostalgia demands the return of
r/Romantic endings. Looking closely at works that negotiate the problematics of
rewriting the happy end within the contexts of postmodernism, this paper focuses
on the fiction of Amy Tan and Catherine Lim. Suicide is a central topic in Tan's
most recent novel, The Bonesetter's Daughter, but it is in The Hundred Secret
Senses that a planned exit figures as sacrificial and supernatural, paving the
way for a happy end. Lim's Following the Wrong God Home, a historical novel
about the Singapore of the 1980s, on the other hand, briefly evokes the suicide
of a peripheral character, who acts out the frustrations of the main
protagonist, who exits in an off-stage plane-crash. In both novels, the search
for happy endings is conducted through planned exits as the narratives at once
eschew and nostalgically endorse fairy-tale happy ends.
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