Death in Life

# 26

Death in Life

The crucial theme of modern times, as reflected in modernist writers such as Joyce, Eliot, Gide, and Kafka is death in life. The vision of The Waste Land is truly a vision: “I had not thought death had undone so many.” What haunts such works as “The Dead” or The Counterfeiters or The Trial is the sense of human beings as automatons, as creatures baffled by rote and routine, and, feeling, accordingly, a desperation that, on one hand, echoes distantly within them and that, on the other, may drive them to seemingly pointless actions. Many things make for this feeling—the sheer accretion of meaningless habit, alienation from the sources of life, the mechanical squalor of vast cities, the so-called Great War that reduced lives to mere numbers, the denigration of wisdom traditions, and a nervousness about what one should do with one’s life. Artists, however, are never about explanations and causes. They are about the lived life, even a reduced life such as Josef K’s.

Though countless people have taken such writers to heart, their visions are not easy ones to live with. There has always been a resistance to the modernist vision as being too dark, too difficult, too complicated. What don’t they just come out and say it rather than relying on allusions and metaphors and epiphanies and allegories and parables to say nothing of those damned footnotes? Why don’t they just get it over with?

If it were easy to convey the sense of life that they sought to convey, they would have done it. Part of facing up to modern times lies in the recognition of complexity. Given the inevitable cross-purposes of human beings, life always is complex, but modernity, as it exaggerated the random stimulations assaulting human beings and opened up seemingly endless vistas about other people’s lives, introduced a newly wearying note into human affairs. Eliot’s fascination with death by water seems no accident. Modern people drowned each day in the babble of headlines and news, of political slander and the incredible spectacle of the cinema with its new array of personalities, stories, and larger-than-life aura of celebrity. The consequential and the inconsequential went hand in maddening hand.

Again, there always has been plenty of confusion on earth. Frost’s definition of a poem as “a momentary stay against confusion” seems a prescient one. What characterized modernity, however, were forms of dread and anxiety that seemed heretofore unthinkable. One feels in Eliot and the others an incredible, shattering weight bearing down on human beings. One feels a plethora of insights, feelings, presences, gossip, notions, vagaries, hard facts, memories that make the very notion of a coherent human presence tenuous. In a word, one feels fragments.

“These fragments I have shored against my ruins,” wrote Eliot at the end of The Waste Land. There is a good deal of pathos in that line but there is honesty, too. The shoring matters as does the possessing of the ruins. They aren’t “the ruins;” they are “my ruins.” That leap into “my” seems quintessentially modern. We must take life personally in ways that doom and taunt us. (The ruins may be mine but The Waste Land is just that—an impersonal the.) We have no comforting larger perspective to make sense of something like World War I, something that seems unbearably senseless. We are small and getting smaller, yet we seem to have more imaginative avenues open to us than ever before. Hence we are large and getting larger. Hence the fragments may not appall so much as they may inveigle. There are worse fates and to be sure there have been.

What haunts the modernists is the sense that human beings are dispensable. At the center of life stands nothing, neither God nor humanity nor nature. This is literally death in life, a grotesque void that nothing can fill no matter how many febrile amusements or ideologies we toss into it. Think of Stalin watching movies in the Kremlin and you are close to the heart of this dark matter.

An enormous struggle characterizes modern times, one that pits the attempt to somehow shore up human stature against the forces of machines and the blandishments, theories, and rigors that have buttressed those machines. If one wrung faith inside out, one would wind up with The Waste Land and with much modern writing (including American writers as diverse as John Dos Passos, William Faulkner, and Joseph Heller) that enacts that wringing, that terrible sense of people striving to make sense of a world that will not allow them to do that. Yet the people persevere and the writers honor that, however grim and degraded the outcomes may be.

People adapt to pretty much anything and as the twentieth century went along various styles arose that showed how to live with death in life. In their various ways, camp, punk, post-modernism, steadfast irony, and the endless versions of anti-art have all celebrated the joys of meaninglessness. However mendacious they may appear, joys are not to be dismissed out of hand. It isn’t hard to feel, though, that such energies are working on a very exiguous margin. At some point, mockery loses interest in what it is mocking and turns on itself. When that happens there aren’t even any fragments or, for that matter, ruins left. There is nothing to shore against and nothing to be shored. There is nothing to oppose. In that sense, modernism has aspired to a perfect emptiness that is the shadow of the harrowing achievements of the modern world. When the jet planes hit the frighteningly tall buildings, one of the last acts of the modern world was being played out. Such a meeting seemed, in a sense that a work like The Waste Land defined, inevitable. One fragmentary vision is bound to assault another.

“I had not thought death had undone so many.” We can hear that line forever but we tend not to believe it. We who are alive are alive. That is our pleasure and right. The testament of modernism, however, says otherwise.