by Rameen Saad (’23)
Abstract:
The absurdity of death underlies its grotesqueness – without one, we cannot have the other. It is a challenge to existence and yet a re-affirmation of it, a sway over humankind and a balm to those who are fortunate enough to live on. Through this paper, we will unpack the immensity of the spirituality behind death, focusing first on Bakhtin’s notions of the pregnant death and the cosmic universality of the human body that does not allow for finality. Then, we will explore cultural differences in death perceptions, analyzing Helena Maria Viramontes’ The Moths and Githa Hariharan’s The Remains of the Feast in comparison to the poems of Phillip Hodgins in Blood and Bone to draw a juxtaposition between the presentations of death in these cultures. Lastly, with these examples in tow, we will draw from a gendered analysis of the portrayal of death as an entity, and as it defines the dying female body, proving its construction is re-envisioned generationally. The purpose, thus, is to touch upon the immense spirituality of death, and the universality it holds, signifying there is no end and humanity is as endless as the cosmos.
Keywords: death, the grotesque, Mikhail Bakhtin, comparative literature
To the naked eye, life presents itself as a series of destinations we must reach before we enter the final stage, death, where we ultimately come to an end. We see an almost universal fear of death, dedicating our lives to avoid its fatality, the pain that is associated with it. The unanimous question this arouses is of meaning – what do we bring to the world? What does it mean to be gone? Such questions permeate the consciousness and spring denial, conflict and revulsion. There is such an intrinsic complexity to these fears, it is a necessity to engross ourselves in the construction of this feeling. In an exploration of cultural and philosophical dilemmas of death, we must realize that these concepts are birthed from the Western consciousness, and that the perception of death is different culture to culture, philosophy to philosophy. In the eyes of Bakhtin and his breakdown of the grotesque, we view death through the body of the dying and its following generations. Through the grotesque, death is seen as cyclical, and does not fall linearly; in Hindu and Chicana cultures, death is regenerative, and holds a life of its own; even on the gendered spectrum, death holds different qualities, entailing completely new ways of living that were not possible while the body was alive.
The universe in its immensity tests what we mean by calling it endless – as Caitlin Moran discusses, “the level of matter in the universe has been constant since the Big Bang.” (Moran) She goes further on to explain that the universe then becomes a “sealed, twisting kaleidoscope that has reordered itself a trillion trillion trillion times over,” (Moran) an ode to the trajectory of this paper whose very premise is on the cyclical nature of the life around us. Before delving into the world of the grotesque, we must discuss how these fears of death are not an internal phenomenon, but a conditioned response due to the “the rise of individuality with the illusion of self-sufficiency” (Moore and Williamson). Our industrial lives are over-wrought by the need to exist as our own people, and as our body is so tied to the concept of death, thus we begin seeing it as a monolith. The body becomes corruptible – “the recipient of disease and subject to decay” (Moore and Williamson). Misery becomes bodily, pain derived straight from the flesh, while reason emanates from the soul. By dividing the two, it is perhaps unsurprising that the knee-jerk reaction to death becomes of fear.
Bakhtin confronts this construction, and breaks it down with the multidimensional approach of the grotesque. In this realm, “the limits between objects and phenomena are drawn quite differently than in the static world of art and literature.” (Bakhtin) The grotesque refuses completion, and is “always in the act of becoming…it is never finished, never completed.” (Bakhtin) It is in a process of creation, creating other bodies and ‘swallowing’ the world itself and is swallowed as well. Linearity is problematic here, as the body outgrows and transgresses itself, constructing a “double body” (Bakhtin) that links one body to another, retaining that death and life remain interconnected – thus bringing us to the notion of the pregnant death. Simply, the tradition stems from Rabelais, where a mother dies during birth. The act of birth itself intermingling and breaking the boundaries drawn between life and death, allowing the act to exist in a middle-space, breaks down the hierarchy of the body – “the lower stratum replaces the upper stratum” (Bakhtin). The ideas of the head as the embodiment of high-class is broken down, and with it, notions tied to the head of rationalism and individualism go too. Thus, the grotesque body is “open, protruding, irregular, secreting, multiple and changing” (Cuesta). By degrading a highly spiritual act, the material body is uncrowned and undergoes a lesson in realism and anatomy. Death and birth become dynamically connected, employing other forms of existing that evade categorization. The logic of the grotesque ignores that which is closed and impenetrable, allowing only for that which opens and protrudes. It exists in its entirety, and encompasses the world, and so holds cosmic qualities. There is a stress on the elements, directly relating it to a greater cosmic hierarchy. The body, thus, “can fill the entire universe” (Bakhtin).
To build on this, we explore the new bodily canon that varies from that of the grotesque, insisting on “an entirely finished, completed, strictly limited body, which is shown from the outside as something individual” (Bakhtin). This closed, impenetrable mass thus constructs a border, closing the individual off from higher meaning as well as their connection to other bodies and the world. Inner life is not touched upon, and there is a formality to its treatment. It is a self-sufficient body, as informed previously, prohibiting all links with what is construed as passionate, and evoking only reason. It is one body – “no signs of duality have been left” (Bakhtin). As everything that happens to the body occurs in an individual sphere, events acquire only one meaning – death becomes only death, tearing it from the cycle of birth, tearing old age from youth. They are enclosed within one single body, limits pronouncing an “absolute beginning and [an] end [that can] never meet” (Bakhtin). This ultimately becomes the root of the fear of death, so intrinsic it produces text that associates corruption with orifices, a foundation set by the myth of Adam and Eve. As narrated,
“In the Old Testament creation myth, Adam and Eve sin by eating of the fruit of the tree of life. Their eyes are opened and they subsequently have sex. They also learn that they must die. Their sins thus involved the two bodily orifices that can be most subject to conscious control, the mouth and the genital organs. Their once-perfect bodies were corrupted by these acts, and Adam and Eve were required to leave the Garden of Eden and live by the sweat of their brows” (Moore and Williamson).
The laws are thus set forth religiously to in turn shy from the notion of the open body towards the concept of purity and abstinence. Bodily desires become seen as depraved, and barriers are built. These religious approaches were thus then countered by the age of reason that flourished during the Renaissance period – there, the conception was that “life is a gift made all the more real by death” (Moore and Williamson). Through philosophical dilemmas, thinkers such as Descartes discusses the mind/body dualism, evoking that death must not be feared – “[the] mind/soul is eternal; the decay of the body need not imply the destruction of the mind” (Moore and Williamson). What we achieve from this is the understanding that there is a limitation to the human mind that only insist that: A. death is a release of an immortal spirit, or B. that it is a complete annihilation and can offer no more punishment to the earthly being (Moore and Williamson). Though this is offered, still a fear of one’s own individual annihilation cannot be filtered and exists as an existential crisis within the western consciousness.
This fear can be witnessed firsthand in the examples of Philip Hodgins, who evades the connection of death and old age by being confronted with a ticking time bomb in the form of cancer. He writes his poetry as a reaction to the fears and mystification of death as a foreign object, personifying his cancer to create a tangible, corporeal enemy that can be blamed for his condition. In his poem, Death Who, Hodgins treats cancer as an opponent, a force that must be battled. It is a new entity, a new emotion:
“You get each other’s measure
And the conversation settles,
subjects divide and increase like cells.
Gradually you realize
that like the background Mozart
all the emotions are involved,
and that you’re no longer saying as much.
Put it down to strength of intent.
He’s getting aggressive.
And you’re getting tired. Someone
Says he’s a conversational bully
But you’re fascinated.” (Hodgins)
As he grows and begins to weaken, death begins poking and prodding, “blow[ing] cigar smoke into [his] face…And mak[ing] a little joke,” (Hodgins) it takes up a dominating, oppressive quality that is “pushing [him] to death” (Hodgins). While death is a ‘conversational bully’ in this instance, in his poem Prognosis we see the impact of disease on the body, and the notion of the dying body that is wracked with pain. He thinks of this state with the attitude of one that is already dead, so overcome he is with this disease that it has now become who he is. There now exists one way of being: that of the diseased body. He ends the poem with defining lines,
“There are too many words for my disease.
I know death is nothing after this.” (Hodgins)
Signifying the existential dilemma evoked by the philosophers discussed before, where death becomes the final resting place, one free from pain and an escape. Death is absolute. Finally, we look at his poem, Spleen, where he makes the body the structure of his poem, the spleen acting as a placeholder and personified as the dying body. There is a very internal disassociation present here, where the body is usually not seen as the many organs but as a whole. Now, Hodgins is forced to confront himself outside of hid body as it is working against him. The theme of blame carries forward in the lines,
“From here the paradigm
is mystery.
You weren’t the cause –
though you knew all along.” (Hodgins)
There is so much hopelessness, so much despair, that the spleen becomes an entity of spite, conspiring against the individual. These examples portray the intrinsic western themes of thought as related to death and its finality.
We cannot make the mistake of subjecting death to being encased in one culture’s perception. In societies where the cultural response is not to be scared of death, individuals themselves do not respond to it with fear. Every culture implements a “system of thought that incorporates the reality and inevitability of death in a manner that preserves the social cohesion of that culture in the face of the potentially socially disintegrating aspects of death” (Moore and Williamson). The use of religion bolsters this conception, evolving “ideas of continual rebirth and the attainment of freedom from the cycle of rebirth,” (Moore and Williamson) according death a place in society reminiscent of that of the grotesque. Meanings are offered and society is prevented from collapse in the face of total nihilism. Through confronting death, some cultures found ways to integrate it into their “understanding of the natural scheme of existence” (Moore and Williamson). The notion of fleeing from death was obstructed, and new ways of feeling were introduced as practices were developed to allow ritualistic ways of the disposing of corpses. It allowed “what was once an incomprehensible horror within the realm of an ordered understanding of the role of death in the human experience” (Moore and Williamson). The ability of humans to imagine and dream aided in this, allowing for the processing of mental images of those who have died to reflect on them, allowing the dead to exert an effect on those living. Ancestors became objects of appeasement and control that allowed the creation of meaning for those living. This naturally branched into spirituality, forming its basis and allowing the regulation of human behavior, becoming an institution of social order.
To understand the various depictions of death, we cast our gaze towards our pre-constructed notions of the cyclical nature of death, drawing from selected texts. In The Moths by Helena Maria Viramontes we witness Chicana culture, one where death is an inevitability but not a leave-taking. The relationship between a young girl and her Abuelita is explored, where the caretaker becomes the ward due to her aging body. Descriptions intensify the decay we witness, explaining her being: “looking into her gray eye, then into her brown one, the doctor said it was just a matter of days,” (Viramontes) evoking the notions of death already existing within your body in different forms. As she deteriorates, she evokes emotions among the living, reducing the narrator’s mother to tears, different forms of feeling arousing in the young girl who is so new to the concept of death. Upon coming into the room, our narrator is met with the sight of her deceased Abuelita, who had “defecated the remains of her cancerous stomach” (Viramontes). Such grotesque imagery evokes a very different reaction than of disgust – instead, there is sorrow and relief for the body who has passed and illness has finally departed from. The realism erodes our thought process, heightening the ritual the narrator now begins to release her Abuelita of the earthly plane. She washes her and her sheets, changing the water in the tub, noting the aging of the body in front of her. In the bath, she sits with her, cradling her, inversing the binary of the older taking care of the younger. Following this is beautiful imagery of release, where the soul leaves in a final act of love.
“Then the moths came…small, gray ones that came from her soul and out through her mouth fluttering to light…dying is lonely and I wanted to go to where the moths were, stay with her and…I wanted to rest my head on her chest with her stroking my hair, telling me about the moths that lay within the soul and slowly eat the spirit up; I wanted to return to the waters of the womb with her so that we would never be alone again.” (Viramontes)
The remarkableness of the words depict the intrinsic beliefs of the grotesque: that of the earthly nature of the womb, of the womb being the place between life and death, where the boundary is blurred and a double body is created. Through the death of her Abuelita, the narrator is reborn, inducing the symbolical pregnant death through generational experiences. Through this cathartic experience, we witness the cyclical nature of life, where death is not an end as the soul lives on through one’s descendants.
Similarly, we witness this cyclicality in The Remains of the Feast by Githa Hariharan. Ratna, our narrator, and her relationship with her great-grandmother, Rukmini, is depicted by accentuating the lack of access available to Rukmini. We begin with the knowledge of her death, a situation due to the mistrust towards modern medicine her family would hold that allowed the tumor on her neck to grow without checking. The biggest fear was to die an ‘unnatural death’, one that was associated with the hospital. Their relationship was demarcated by the breaks from tradition her great-granddaughter allowed her, bringing her street food to eat, a delicacy not allowed to a widow who was to eat humbly her entire life. This understanding shows how, through her death and its knowledge, she was allowed to live for once, having the ability to succumb to her cravings. While she died, her body exhibited intense expression through the acts of vomiting, the last bursts of strength that allowed her to pull her IV and request a red sari for her burial. This request was not carried forward, her family burning her in her brown widow’s weeds. Notably, this resonated with Ratna, who is very affected by her death – she eats in her memory, evoking a sense of regeneration in the lines “I plot her revenge for her, I give myself diarrhoea for a week” (Hariharan). Carrying forward her legacy, Ratna allows her great-grandmother to live through the freedoms she has been granted, relishing the memory of her cravings and desires and enacting them. A new sense of purpose is ignited, hardening her resolve to study harder. Such is cyclicality, where meaning is given to the life of the living through death. There are no ends, only new beginnings.
The woman-centric nature of these works brings us to the question of the gendered conception of death. Through the inversion of the classical body done by the grotesque, where the ‘open, protruding, changing’ lower stratum becomes the object of focus, we “find a correlation between the female body and the grotesque since both embody the otherness and the alien side of what is socially accepted and politically encouraged” (Cuesta). Our cultural imagination roots this relation, connotations evoked involving that of the ‘womb’ being likened to caves, earthly matter, and traditional images that evoke ‘primal’ elements. The earth is the womb, and through this symbolism, we locate feminine bodies, in their fertility, to be carriers of “a grotesque exaltation of pain and sacrifice in order to embody fertility and death” (Cuesta). The construction of the feminine body is shaped by the male gaze, and with this shaping, power dynamics take over meaning. Through the grotesque, there is a collapse of these pre-conceived notions, entering a conscious allowance for bodies to be “open, boundless, and dynamic” (Journey). It challenges these masculine visions, “provok[ing] an anxiety that arises out of the gap between the expected and the actual, opening up the possibility for social transformation” (Journey). With this notion, we begin to see the complexity of death. We cannot encase it in the western construction: as explained, it is a masculine, dominating, and overcoming presence, a ‘conversational bully’ and a marker of finality. Such is our societal construction of the feminine body that we do not allow it to live while alive, and such as in these stories, find new ways of living: through their deaths, as in The Remains of the Feast, or generationally through their descendants. The ability to mourn is widened, rituals a facet of living through the dead, affirming the passing of one by still carrying their soul with you. By resisting tools of modern normalcy, we enter new dimensions of being, where the body decays and with its decay, inspires life within another body.
The absurdity of death underlies its grotesqueness – without one, we cannot have the other. It is a challenge to existence and yet a re-affirmation of it, a sway over humankind and a balm to those who are fortunate enough to live on. Its universality echoes in the continuation of humanity, where connections are birthed and love is shared between families, where granddaughters become torchbearers of legacies, invoking a new kind of spirit that evades finality. Rituals and traditions, the most human acts of all, contain the basis of hopes, of immortality and of new kinds of truths, allowing the prospect of an existence that goes from body to body, carried forward by those who imagine the dead through dreams and memories. Through this cosmic universality, we order what is seemingly random and meaningless into events that brim with significance, denying death its centrality.
Works Cited
Bakhtin, Mikhail. “The Grotesque Image of the Body and Its Sources.” The Body, 2020, pp. 92-95.
Cuesta, Vanesa M. “‘THE MOUTHS OF CORPSES’: DEATH, FEMININITY AND THE GROTESQUE IN SYLVIA PLATH’S POETRY.” ODISEA. Revista de estudios ingleses, no. 16, 2017.
Hariharan, Githa. The Art of Dying and Other Stories. Penguin Books India, 1993.
Hodgins, Philip. Blood and Bone. Angus & Robertson, 1986.
Journey, Anna. “Earn the Vomit: Employing the Grotesque in Contemporary Poetry.” The American Poetry Review, vol. 43, no. 5, 2014, pp. 15–19., www.jstor.org/stable/24593727. Accessed 21 Dec. 2020.
MOORE, CALVIN C., and JOHN B. WILLIAMSON. “The Universal Fear of Death and the Cultural Response.” Handbook of Death & Dying, pp. 3-13.
Moran, Caitlin. “Caitlin Moran’s Theory of the Afterlife.” The Times & The Sunday Times, 22 Feb. 2014, www.thetimes.co.uk/article/caitlin-morans-theory-of-the-afterlife-3kzbvchckng.
Viramontes, Helena M. The Moths and Other Stories. Arte Publico P, 2014.