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.