THE WAYS WE GRIEVE

Sandra M. Gilbert, a professor of English at UC Davis and the author, most recently,of Death's Door: Modern Dying and the Ways We Grieve, is the subject of this extremely interesting Q&A with Scott McLemee over at Inside Higher Education.

Q:The deep, dark core of the book is the contrast you make between “expiration” and “termination.” It seems like that distinction is where the elements of memoir, cultural history, and literary analysis all link up.

A: “The deep dark core of the book.” Thank you. That’s a really incisive and insightful point because the basic argument of the book — certainly the argument about the “fate of the elegy” — began with my own experience of that distinction.

In chapter six, I tell the story of two episodes that powerfully moved me. In the first, the surgeon who was in charge of my husband’s case testified that he had arrived at the hospital when his patient (my husband) was “terminating” — i.e., dying. In the second, a nurse, more than three decades earlier, told me that my first child (a very premature baby who survived a few days) had “expired” — i.e., died. After the doctor talked about “termination,” the two words became so resonant for me that I brooded on them for quite some time.

To “terminate” is to come to a flat end. To “expire” is to breathe out something — a breath that represents, perhaps, a soul. So each word seemed to me to have key metaphysical implications. “Termination,” I decided, is modernity’s definition of death; “expiration” the more traditional western (Christian) notion. For “termination” leads to Beckett, to what in Waiting for Godot Lucky calls “the earth abode of stones” while “expiration” empowers Milton, whose “Lycidas” has breathed out a soul that ultimately lands in heaven, where “entertain him all the saints above.” So “termination” is terrifying, makes death almost unspeakably scary, and leads toward horror, repression, and denial, while “expiration” leaves us with some hope — or anyway it used to.

Comments

[Jim H]

Mark,
I'm a regular reader of TEV; love the site, even tho' I'm an East coaster. Also, am and have been a serious reader of John Banville. I share your awe. Please, please print the rest of your interview with him; as far as I can tell there are only 3 of a possible 5 sections.
Best,
JH