Suicide presents ethical and moral challenges; these challenges persist in its representation in the narrative form. When a work of fiction trivializes or relies on a trope or a cliché of suicide, the work thus risks diminishing a complete understanding of suicide, or at worst, can perpetuate stigmas of suicide, namely, in silencing further discussion. However, some works challenge such views. Consider, for instance, the contemporary novel, Freshwater by Akwaeke Emezi. Emezi’s work explores suicidality, or the tendency of a person to commit suicide, and the act of suicide itself. However, her novel refuses the cliché of suicide. Instead, Emezi uses suicidality as a site to examine the question of how to live, rather than how to die, through the experience of self as fractured. Similarly, this panel strives to present an alternative view of suicide as represented in fiction.
I have selected three panelists strictly limited to 15-minute papers to promote discussion. The first two papers challenge traditional views of suicide that have contributed to the trivializing of suicide and the perpetuation of the stigmas surrounding suicide.
For instance, in “The Dead Cannot Reply: Émile Durkheim, the British Detective Novel, and the Sociology of Suicide,” Aaron Botwick studies the influences of Durkheim’s sociology and its emphasis on social forces on the suicides of British detective novels. Botwick’s research identifies a transformation in suicide discourse between the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and his work is mainly concerned with the multidirectional relationship between fictional suicide and early experiments in sociology and psychoanalysis. Botwick argues that Durkheim’s totalizing rhetoric insists on exclusively empirical explanations of the act. As such, the representations of suicides in the British detective novel offer an incomplete view of suicide, precisely one that denies the voice to the suicide.
Similarly, Mary Gryctko’s insights offer a perspective on suicide and systems of power, particularly concerning children. Gryctko’s research in the shifting figure of the child in the nineteenth century and background in childhood studies and gender and sexuality studies extends the topic of suicide to the child. Gryctko’s paper, “‘It was in his nature to do it:’ Jude the Obscure and Fictions of Child Suicide in fin de siècle Great Britain,” refutes Foucault’s notion that death itself is “the term, the limit, or the end of power, too. Death is beyond the reach of power” (Society Must be Defended248). Instead, Gryctko claims that systems of power continue to shape the meaning of individual lives and deaths — even long after death has occurred. Gyryctko further argues that the notion that some agency can be gained through suicide — already problematic in fiction — becomes horrific when we apply this idea to the lives and deaths of children.
Finally, in “Anticipating and Addressing Melancholy: The Fictional Text as Suicide Letter,” Patrick Duane contribution to this discussion is one that explores suicide and suicidality as a site of narrative making and meaning making. Duane’s background in media, art and textual studies and creative writing, adds a dimension of creative writing practices to this study of suicide. Duane considers Édouard Levé (Suicide) and Hermann Burger (Tractatus Logico-Suicidalis: On Killing Oneself), authors who write about the unknowability of suicide. Duane argues that suicide creates a space of unintelligibility for survivors (the loved ones and acquaintances of the suicide), who seek to fill meaning through narrative. Duane’s research offers a study of narrative strategies that authors like Levé and Burger apply to capture the paradoxical, incomprehensible nature of suicide, and additionally, when writing about suicide.
These papers jointly challenge representations of suicidality in fiction to propose an alternative view of how we represent and discuss suicidality in fiction. Considering the current mental health crisis, which the Covid-19 pandemic has exacerbated, this panel intends to create a space to discuss and consider the ethical and moral dilemmas of the representation of suicide in fiction seriously and thoughtfully to provide new insights on this topic. These three papers will develop and add nuance to a significant but often silenced aspect of life. Following these presentations, as the presider, I will encourage an open conversation between panelists and the audience to ask questions and to test their ideas to engage in a larger conversation of trauma and literature.