So why, I wonder, aren't more writers compelled to tell us what it's like when the inevitable arrives?Well, there's John Osborne. The last words that he wrote, found by his wife scrawled on a cigarette pack beside his deathbed in the hospital, were "I have sinned. "
Sunday, April 05, 2009
Endgame ...
... The literature of death. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
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Then there is Flannery O'Connor. She knew for a long time that she was fated to die at a relatively young age of lupus, the same disease that had killed her father. By close-reading of her work, particularly works following WISE BLOOD and the first collection of short stories A GOOD MAN IS HARD TO FIND (i.e., the second novel, THE VIOLENT BEAR IT AWAY, and the second collection of stories, EVERYTHING THAT RISES MUST CONVERGE), attentive readers can discern a brilliant writer's and a fierce Catholic's "negotiation" with death. It is not explicitly there, but its subtle pervasiveness is part of O'Connor's exquisite craftsmanship
ReplyDeleteMarin Sorescu's The Bridge (translation by Adam J Sorkin & Lidia Vianu, published by Bloodaxe Books, Ltd., 2004) consists of poems that he wrote (largely by dictating them to his wife) between November 1 and December 7, 1996, while he was hospitalized with terminal liver cancer. He died on December 8. The book is a remarkable record of his experience of dying.
ReplyDeleteThere's a whole tradition of death poems in Zen Buddhism, wherein the last words from the dying master are often a poem, whether it's a haiku or tanka or one of the classic Chinese four-line syllabic forms.
ReplyDeleteThere's a whole anthology of this literature available in translation.
I also think of the literature of surviving: of having observed a loved one die, and writing about it. Maybe that's a separate genre from what you're talking about, I don't know.