In “Public Suicides and Victorian Fiction: Novelists and Newspapers, 1844-1899,” Aaron Botwick argues, after a review of five hundred Victorian suicide reports, that the legal and journalistic discourses that emerge combine a genuine desire to excuse and understand voluntary death with still-rudimentary Enlightenment tools that obscure the humanity of the victim. Ostensibly documenting coroner and jury reports, these articles frequently engage in implicit explanations of the acts—professional or family problems, cross-dressing, hereditary madness. Apparent causes become unchallenged truth, and the reader is provided with a closed narrative unfettered by epistemological doubt. Though this fosters a culture of communal participation in the creation of suicide narratives, not one reckons with the necessary gap between the witness and the victim, between what can only be inferred and what cannot be known, what Jean Améry calls “the anti-logical logic of death” (19). He then argues that novelists like Charlotte Brontë and George Eliot understood suicide in parallel terms, as communal property, as a means of fulfilling a narrative purpose rather than the substance of the narrative itself, before Thomas Hardy shattered such complacency with Jude the Obscure (1895).
Next, in “Narrative Suicidology: Humanist Approaches to Suicide Notes,” Kristen Cardon argues that, though the field of suicidology has long been interdisciplinary, its account of narrative has yet to fully emerge. Because the field retains a strong interest in scientific methodology, incorporating humanist methods may seem like a move in the wrong direction. Nevertheless, innovative interdisciplinary theorizing such as Bradley Lewis’s work on narrative psychiatry demonstrates the relevance—and even the centrality—of humanist practice to mental health. Cardon builds from Lewis’s work toward suicidology, using humanist methods of paranoid and reparative reading to revise our understanding of narratives fundamental to suicidology: suicide notes. Her archive is the collection of suicide notes housed in suicidology founder Edwin Shneidman’s papers at UCLA Special Collections. By bringing narrative theory into conversation with the emerging field of critical suicidology, Cardon demonstrates the importance of each to the other. Without critical suicidology, narrative studies miss the opportunity to explicate the hugely consequential narratives of suicide notes, narratives long believed to have some explanation for—and thereby remedy to—the tragic self-killings that affect so many of us. And without narrative studies, critical suicidology misses a robust tradition of textual explication that can help, for example, to account for toxic masculinity and colonial histories that exist in and between the lines of suicide narratives. As U.S. suicide rates increase despite ever-rising use of psychotropic medication, Cardon argues that new methods for reading suicide notes invite the kind of cultural and social specificity necessary to understand and prevent suicides.
Finally, in “‘Why, is it such a bad thing to die?’: Silence, Subalternity and Suicide in Han Kang’s The Vegetarian,” Dipsikha Thakur reads Yeong-hye, the protagonist of Han Kang’s 2008 novel The Vegetarian, as a subaltern figure whose decision to die by starvation marks a discursive rupture in her interpellation. Her initial refusal to consume meat is read here as resistance to the intersection of patriarchy and conventions of consumption that seeks to objectify her body into a binary of flesh/meat. While her silence is read as insanity, perversity and disobedience by other characters throughout the novel, Thakur argues that Yeong-hye’s refusal to speak (and eventually to live) performs an ambivalent subversion of power in the novel. Seen through the lens of subalternity, Yeong-hye’s action also interrogates Gayatri Chakravarty Spivak’s project for a “radical practice that should attend to [the] double session of representations,” since like Spivak’s heroine Bhubaneshwari Bhaduri, Yeong-hye too responds to oppression by taking away the capacity for others to articulate (/for) her (74). Yeong-hye’s silence throughout the narrative resists the verbalized, cried-out, masturbated and dreamt-of image of her that her brother-in-law desires. While “the terrifyingly unknowable compulsions” that drive this novel manifest in him as an excess of expression and desire, in Yeong-hye, they manifest as abstinence, silence and finally suicide (93). This structures Yeong-hye’s compulsion to give up meat-eating, and eventually her own life, into a form of protest that troubles the notion of volition and its relationship to both meaningful resistance and suicide.
The historian Kenneth M. Pinnow writes, “To commit suicide is to hand over one’s self and story to others” (205). In examining how that story is told, or in attempting to return it to the suicide, each panelist hopes to offer a critical experiment in humanistic literary suicidology.
Améry, Jean. On Suicide: A Discourse on Voluntary Death. Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1999.
Bennett, Andrew. Suicide Century: Literature and Suicide from James Joyce to David Foster Wallace. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2017.
Kang, Han. The Vegetarian. London, Hogarth, 2016.
Pinnow, Kenneth M. “Violence against the Collective Self: Suicide and the Problem of Social Integration in Early Bolshevik Russia.” Histories of Suicide: International Perspectives on Self-Destruction in the Modern World, edited by John Weaver and David Wright. University of Toronto Press, 2009, 201-230.
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravarty. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory: A Reader, edited by Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman. Columbia University Press, 1994, 66-111.