GNED 1201: Death in Literature - Aging and Controlling Death

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Literature and Aging: Theoretical Frameworks

  • Defining Aging: R0udiger Kunow suggests thinking of aging not as a biological or chronological metric, but as "difference itself": "the difference that time makes on a person’s sense of identity" (Kunow 295).

  • Cultural Perspectives:

    • Current cultural expectations regarding aging are increasingly negative.

    • Aging is frequently presented as a "litany of losses and exclusions."

    • Literature serves to counter these stereotypes and provide a platform for dialogue.

  • Dystopian Representations: In dystopian literature, the elderly are often either absent or positioned to reflect critically on what has vanished from the social order (e.g., The Giver).

  • Gerontology Disciplines:

    • Narrative Gerontology: Focuses on personal narratives and subjective experiences rather than purely biological aspects.

    • Medicalization: Aging is often defined as a medical risk, with "frailty" viewed as a vulnerable and unpredictable state.

    • Historical Shift: The 20th20^{th} century began to see later life as a possible period for freedom, leisure, and self-realization.

  • The Role of Literary Studies: Literature does not exist to illustrate gerontological concepts. Instead, it maintains the "crucial complexity" of growing old and uses the contradictions of aging to gain aesthetic strength.

  • Dementia in Age Studies:

    • Dementia presents a challenge to literary representation because it depletes memory and language.

    • Writers often attempt to destigmatize the disease.

    • Contemporary literature focuses on identity, framing life as a "quest of finding one’s self," which dementia threatens by removing the ability to maintain a coherent self-account.

    • Literature explores "social death" vs. physical death and the ethics of decision-making for those who have lost rationality.

Human Desire to Control Death

  • Anti-Aging Measures: Literature and real life show a consistent human effort to control or delay death.

  • The Bhagavad Gita and Krishna:

    • Krishna grants Arjuna divine vision to see Krishna's true form.

    • Quotes: "I am Time, the destroyer of all; I have come to consume the world.", "Death am I, and my present task Destruction.", "Now I am become Death, destroyer of worlds."

  • Robert Oppenheimer:

    • Known as the "father of the atomic bomb."

    • As an undergraduate at Harvard, he studied Hindu texts in translation.

    • He famously recited the Bhagavad Gita quote when watching the first atomic bomb explosion in Los Alamos, New Mexico, on July16,1945July 16, 1945.

    • The use of this quote symbolizes:

      • The ethics of people in power.

      • The human relationship to weapons of mass destruction.

      • The human desire to control death through destructive capacity.

Analysis of "The Bear Came Over the Mountain" by Alice Munro

  • Author Profile: Alice Munro is a Canadian short story writer and Nobel Prize winner for Literature, described as the "master of the contemporary short story." Her writing is known for lyrical, economical, and intense narrative style.

  • Film Adaptation: The story was adapted into the 2006 film Away From Her.

  • Characterization and Agency:

    • "Fiona" is the first word of the story, establishing her importance.

    • Fiona is described as having the "spark of life" and appearing as a woman of will and agency from the start.

  • Symbolism and Imagery:

    • Memory Signs: The text focuses on the "memory of signs" and the subsequent erasing of those signs.

    • Flowers: Grant brings flowers (Narcissus) to Fiona, which symbolizes irony. The cost is negligible compared to the clinic fees, and his gesture may be "too late."

    • The Verb "Quit": Used regarding marks on the floor ("I thought they'd quit doing that") and smoking. It alludes to Grant mentally quitting Fiona in the past.

    • The Invertebrate Comparison: The nurse describes patients as "happy as clams," implying a lack of humanity and mobility. Fiona is later described as "coming out of her shell."

    • The Skull: Alludes to death within the narrative symbols.

  • Setting and Institution:

    • The story compares a Gothic-like 1950s institution (pre-anti-asylum movement) where people were "dumped" to a modern one that is essentially just a copy of the old standards.

  • Social and Economic Themes:

    • The nuclear family of Fiona and Grant (upper-middle class) contrasts with Marian, who stays with her husband because she cannot afford the clinic without selling her house.

    • Aubrey provides Fiona with a new sense of purpose; she acts as a nurse to him, suggesting elderly individuals can still have social roles.

Analysis of "A Lonely Death" by Norimitsu Onishi

  • Context: Written by Canadian journalist Norimitsu Onishi for The New York Times. Onishi won a Pulitzer Prize in 20152015 for coverage of the Ebola epidemic.

  • The Setting (Tokiwadaira, Japan):

    • A large apartment complex (danchi) built for postwar baby boomers aspiring to an American lifestyle.

    • Now characterized by economic stagnation, aging populations, and declining birth rates.

    • An industry has emerged specifically to clean apartments where "decomposing elderly people" are found.

  • Key Imagery and Symbols:

    • Cicadas: They lie underground for years, cast off shells for a short second life, mate, cry, and die with "legs pointing upward."

    • The Paper Screen: Mrs. Ito's screen is the crux of the story. She tells her neighbor, "If it’s closed, it means I’ve died."

    • Smell: A neighbor mistook a decaying body's smell for kusaya (dried fish). The text differentiates between the smell of death and the smell of someone "clinging to life."

  • Themes of Loss:

    • "The way we die is a mirror of the way we live."

    • Physical vs. Psychological loss: Mrs. Ito speaks of her dead daughter in the present tense, feeling her "true life" ended with her family.

    • Declining Body: Mr. Kinoshita, once strong enough to support bags of rice, eventually collapses in a Jacuzzi and refuses the ambulance, representing a shrinking world.

  • Grief as Detachment: Grief is defined as a process of making the loss "real" and reducing emotional connections to an "illusory past" to develop new attachments.

Choosing Death: "Passage" and MAiD

  • Bill C-14 | Medical Assistance in Dying Act (MAiD):

    • Passed in 20162016.

    • Requires an incurable illness and an advanced state of irreversible decline.

    • Respects autonomy while affirming the equal value of every person's life.

    • Includes a 1010-day waiting period and a written request that can be withdrawn at any time.

  • "Passage" by Jennifer Bowering Delisle:

    • A collection of lyrical non-fiction essays titled Micrographia.

    • The term "Passage" has multiple meanings:

      1. 13th13^{th}-century definition: The action of crossing from one place to another.

      2. Bill C-14: The legal passage to death.

      3. Narrator's negative association: Steerage, dark, rat-infested holds.

  • Agency and Symbolism:

    • Choosing the time and place of death is the only agency the mother has left in her illness.

    • Intertextuality with Thanatos: Viewed as "scooping up" the mother to carry her on the passage she chose.

    • The mother views death as a chore or a planned activity; the narrator struggles to explain "dead" to a child when the body cannot be seen or touched.

    • The narrator's view shifts from fear to a recognition of the mother's choice.