Through the Past, Darkly
Leaving You should have included on its cover a disclaimer, one that
states emphatically that the book does not endorse suicide, but neither does
it reject it. What the book does instead is draw upon various cultural cues
in which suicide is historically defined, regardless of whether the act
served as a means of escape or one of rebellion. The work is also a reminder
of how the taking of one's own life can be representative of more than just
depression, that rather, it can become, for better or worse, a deliberate
act of independence.
When Kay Redfield Jamison published her memoir An Unquiet Mind, the
division between mainstream non-fiction and psychology was bridged. Then
after Jamison published her book about suicide, Night Falls Fast, a
more specific, but no less taboo, subject was broached. The author, a
professor of psychiatry at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, narrowed
her approach to encompass human emotions and art rather than traditional
psychology. While these books were mainstream in approach, they were
successful in illustrating important, well-researched issues, such as
manic-depression and suicide, and they were written by someone who spent her
life treating them in her patients and, as it turned out, in herself.
The books also mirror modern civilization's own move toward introspection,
or as modern poets called it, "self-consciousness." As more people wrote
books like Elizabeth Wurtzel's Prozac Nation -- bestsellers that
emerged between therapy sessions -- the stigma of abnormal psychiatry became
much less, well, abnormal. The result is an enlightened interest in the
field that's much less preoccupied with taboo.
Lisa Lieberman, however, is not anything like Jamison.
Lieberman isn't interested in medicine; she's a scholar whose focus, modern
European and cultural history, establishes the foundation for her book. The
distinction is important to keep in mind when reading Leaving You. As
opposed to a collection of clinical observations, the book is, instead, an
analysis of the cultural issues surrounding suicide throughout various
societies, both ancient and modern. Because the book is more academic in its
mission, the author neither endorses nor demonizes the act of suicide. She
does not provide answers or self-help. In fact, to Lieberman, morality is
irrelevant. She reports the facts with a journalist's integrity, touching
upon historical research, religious dictates, and democratic freedoms. She
does not base her research on medical science, but on social science.
The author also draws on a wide array of sources to determine the meaning of
suicide, attempting to determine whether the act is one of self-destruction
or one of subversion against society. She travels from the state-sanctioned
death of Socrates forward to modern narcotic therapy, seeking to cast light
on the act and its vehicles, whether they be burning monks or depressed
teenagers. She explains it as such:
Efforts to read meaning out of suicide are not hard to find
today. Therapeutic strategies that treat suicide as an illness, medicating
the depression while ignoring the underlying motivations that drive people
to end their lives, effectively diminish individual responsibility for the
decision to die. In a similar way, sociological explanations that emphasize
social causes over personal intentions serve to make suicides passive:
victims of forces beyond their control--forces that can, reassuringly, be
isolated and manipulated by the sociologist. But an appreciation of the
disruptive potential of self-destruction, the power of individuals to use
death as a weapon in order to undermine the authority of states or to bring
into question the cherished values of societies and institutions, pervades
the Western tradition.
Lieberman categorizes these deaths along several categories: defiant deaths,
democratic deaths, sex-related deaths, and explores the notion of loss and
tragedy in general. Each of the categories reflects a larger goal, to give a
face to the multifaceted nature of suicide. According to Lieberman's thesis,
the act of killing one self is not limited to sickness. Instead, it becomes
much more symbolic of rebellion and, in some cases, "self-destruction purely
in existentialist terms," -- as in the case of Jean Amery, an Austrian
writer who chronicled his own suicide attempt.
The author also references Balzac, who once wrote, "Every suicide is a poem
sublime in its melancholy," as well as Seneca, Antony and Cleopatra, and
Augustine. She turns to John Donne, who wrote Biathanatos, a 1602
treatise about the moral implications of suicide.("Whensoever any
afflication assails me, methinks I have the keys of my prison in my own hand
and no remedy presents itself so soon to my heart as mine own sword.")
Literary references to suicide are especially critical to Leiberman's
analysis. She uses them to establish how societies expressed suicide in
literature, poetry and drama. In addition, historical accounts are used to
support her conclusions that suicide often represented a slight of life,
rather than always an instinct toward death. Socrates becomes a pivotal
example of someone who would rather choose death over hypocrisy, avoiding
acting against the civilization that he helped to shape.
Probably the most important presence in the book is that of organized
religion, which changed and sublimated its own stance on suicide as it
gained and lost power throughout the centuries. For instance, Lieberman
writes:
The Ordinance of 1670 codified the religious prohibitions
against suicide into French law. By its terms, criminal proceedings were
instituted against the cadaver or against the memory of individuals who
killed themselves. The state's penalty was confiscation of the suicide's
property. Additionally, the body was to be dragged, face down, through the
streets on a hurdle and hanged by the feet as a public example.
In contrast, she notes that the legends of Lucretia, Cato, Brutus and Portia
were inspirational as far as art and politics were concerned. "Their deaths
became the models for a distinctive subgenre within the annals of
self-destruction: the suicide of honor," she writes. "To die for some higher
ideal, for the sake of virtue, patriotism, or faith was to turn death into
an occasion for homage."
Lieberman nevertheless acknowledges, "This is not art." These deaths,
whether punishable or venerated, were real deaths, and in some cases, both
personal and famous examples of loss in society. "Dying on your own terms is
still dying," she writes, citing Amery's own words: "Often I have asked
myself whether one can live humanly in the tension between fear and anger."
Her point? Every shred of evidence condemning and validating suicide is,
without a doubt, relevant to today's world. Prozac or not.
— 16 October 2003
