story

“To Die One’s Own Death,” by Jacqueline Rose

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lrb

London Review of Books Vol. 42 No. 22 · 19 November 2020

Written during the first wave of the pandemic with its soaring death rates made worse by the fumbling response of corrupt governments, and amid accelerating climate catastrophes, Rose’s essay, subtitled “Jacqueline Rose on Freud and his daughter”, looks at how we cope with these repeated blows. If we shut down emotionally and intellectually, “does that leave room to grieve, not just for those who have been lost, but for the broken pieces and muddled fragments that make us who we are?”

Rose takes us back to a similar moment in time: 25 January 1920 when Freud’s favourite daughter, Sophie Halberstadt-Freud, died in the last wave of the Spanish flu. A devastated Austria had lost the war; Freud himself had lost his earlier enthusiasm for his homeland’s role in the war and now supported the breakup of the Austrian Empire. With his family starving, and himself unable even to get to his dying daughter because there were no trains, Freud’s situation was eerily similar to what many experienced during our own pandemic: “the lack of state provision, the missing medical supplies, the dearth of equipment and isolation from human touch have made it feel to many for the first time that death is something of which a person – the one dying, and those closest to her or him – can be robbed.”

He turned to writing, adding the lengthy Chapter Six to Beyond the Pleasure Principle which was published later in 1920. In this chapter, he first presents the idea of a death drive in conflict with our drive for self-preservation, the life drive, deriving it from what “he had first identified in soldiers returning from battle who found themselves reliving their worst experiences in night-time and waking dreams.” He compares this repetition compulsion to his other patients and their resistance to therapy, concluding that “The urge of all organic life is to restore an earlier state of things.”

He carries this idea further to postulate an internal human need to craft our own track to the end of life, regardless of any limit for self-preservation, saying “The organism wishes to die only in its own fashion.” Thus, for victims of wars and pandemics and natural catastrophes, the randomness of their deaths robs them “of the essence of life.”

Rose’s essay continues, supplementing Freud’s ideas from another paper written during WWI, “The Phylogenetic Fantasy,” with current research on inherited trauma to look at how anxiety travels through generations, an anxiety that is a “response to an imperilled world, but also . . . a reaction to the tyranny of the powers that come to meet it.”

There is much more to this essay, and I recommend it to anyone who is looking for new insight into our current state of being. However, I was struck by the idea of an urge to restore an earlier state of things and its relevance to the stories we tell.

Books such as Robert McKee’s Story, Christopher Vogler’s The Writer’s Journey, Lisa Cron’s Wired for Story, and Larry Brooks’s Story Engineering describe a basic structure dating back to the Western world’s earliest stories. This ur-story begins with a normal world—troubled but getting by—that is disrupted in some way. Hence novelist John Gardner’s famous saying about all stories being either about going on a journey or a stranger coming to town: the two ways a world is disrupted.

The story then is about the attempts, usually by the main character, to restore their original normal world. But there is no going back, any more than there is for the soldiers reliving their nightmares. Instead, the main character must address not only the events around them but also their internal troubles, now no longer balanced but demanding change. By the end of the story, they are indeed changed, as Gawain returns to Arthur’s Court humbled and contrite after his encounter with the Green Knight, as Elizabeth Bennet enters her marriage realising that she must look beyond her first hasty judgments in order to discover real goodness.

The urge to restore an earlier state of things also makes me think of the nostalgia for a previous age that so many today have succumbed to. Not only do our stories tell us that such a return is impossible, but the image of that previous age is false, usually edited to be more attractive than it actually was. While often that false image has been deliberately created for political purposes, it is also true that our own minds chip away at our memories, according to recent research, subtly changing them each time we recall an incident.

We cannot go back to the time before the pandemic, and how we remember it may not even be reliable. We have been changed by this experience, in ways we may not yet recognise, and we are not yet at the end of it. Eventually, I believe, we will turn to stories to understand, help us grieve, and put the broken pieces back together.

What are you reading or listening to that is helping you better understand this extraordinary time?

The Overstory, by Richard Powers

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overstory

I read this popular, Pulitzer Prize-winning novel a few months ago but wanted to let it sit for a while before blogging about it. I needed to sort out the emotions it left me with: a combination of enchantment and disappointment.

It’s an ambitious work, one that is out to change the world, at least our human part of it. Powers conjures our life as a whole, the one that we share with the rest of nature, through nine characters, whose individual tales bounce off each other and sometimes intersect. While their goals may be art or love or survival, each character’s journey is also one of developing a relationship with nature, specifically trees.

Writers are told to avoid polemics, to get down off our soapboxes, or we risk annoying or alienating readers. I don’t think anyone could question the wondrous greatness of trees or their life going on independently of us, yet Powers avoids the trap of dogma by giving us their side of the story through those of his characters, their resistance, their devotion, their sacrifice.

I didn’t need convincing. I’ve had a deep emotional attachment to trees since earliest childhood, counting some among my best friends. Nor did the rest of my book club, all of us already in love with trees, living as we do in the Green Mountains. Yet we all struggled with the beginning of the book, unable to remember the characters after each was introduced in the first section, having to flip back to remind ourselves.

We were also disappointed—while profoundly moved—by the ending. I try not to give away endings, so I’ll just echo the assertion of writing master Donald Maass that we want stories that reflect reality; he says, “the truth is that while we may live in a bleak world we are not empty inside.” Here, the enigmatic ending left us debating this idea.

The baffling prologue was enough to make me put the book down several times before reluctantly reading on for the sake of my book club. As it turns out, it doesn’t reflect the book as a whole. You can safely skip it.

Otherwise, the writing is often enchanting. Eventually the characters became distinct and memorable but always the events and descriptions kept me reading.

Now the linden, it turns out, is a radical tree, as different from an oak as a woman is from a man. It’s the bee tree, the tree of peace, whose tonics and teas can cure every kind of tension and anxiety.

Powers also brings devastating psychological insight to his characters. One, a man who has lived a life considered normal for a middle-class American man, says: “I’ve been a man who happily confuses the agreed-upon for the actual.” A brilliant description that could fit quite a few people I know.

But what I find most stunning is the brave attempt to write a larger story, surely another meaning of the title, which the author uses as a synonym for trees’ canopy. By telling the world’s story through those of nine characters, Powers has chosen the most effective way to accomplish this seemingly impossible task. As writing master Lisa Cron has memorably described, stories have been our means of survival since the earliest days. Stories are how we learn and the best way for us to remember.

My book club discussed the concept of forest bathing, the idea of de-stressing and even healing by walking through the woods, agreeing that we all had been doing this long before the term was coined. We hoped that this novel would increase awareness of and activism to protect the natural world, especially our beloved trees.

Have you read this book? What did you think of it?