At the Deathbed: Edward Albee's All Over

At the Deathbed: Edward Albee's All Over HENRY I. SCHVEY However men die, the experience is not only the physical dissolution and ending; it is also a change in the lives of others. for we know death as much in the experience of others as in OUf own expectations and endings. Raymond Williams, Modern Tragedy. The deathbed scene, where the dying person says his parting words to a group of assembled loved ones and friends, has a long and distinguished history in Western literature and the visual arts. Treatments of the theme naturally vary greatly through the ages and are determined by the attitude of a particular historical period toward the subject ofdeath itself. Thus, medieval paintings on the death of Lazarus emphasize what Johan Huizinga calls the "great primitive horror of death" according to which "Lazarus, after his resurrection, lived in a continual misery and horror at the thought that he should have again to pass through the gate of death."\ In Renaissance canvases, such as Poussin's Testament of Eudamidas, the deathbed scene, in which the dying man is surrounded by his family and friends, suggests triumph over death by means of the loved ones who will survive him. Neo-Classical deathbed scenes such as David's painting Socrates Drinking the Hemlock (1785) stress the idea of death as an art of heroic self-sacrifice to a higher cause, while Delacroix's Death of Sardanapalus (1827), based on Byron's play, emphasizes a brand of romantic Molochism in which the dying Assyrian king, having lost his power, casually looks on as his favorite horses and concubines are all put to death in a lustful orgy of satanic destruction, which reveals the romantic interweaving of death and sexuality. As Baudelaire wrote in "Les deux bonnes soeurs": La Debauche et la Mort sont deux aimables filles, Et la biere et l'alc6ve en blasphemes fecondes At the Deathbed: All Over Nous offrent tour atour, comme deux boones soeurs, De terribles pJaisirs et d'affreuses douceurs.2 353 By the middle of the nineteenth century, interest had shifted from the romanticization of death as either beautiful or erotic to a concern with "the mundane truth ofdying - the bare truth, stripped of all transcendental meanings and metaphysical implications.'" In works like Leon Cogniet's Tintorello Painting his Dead Daughter (1846), the mid-nineteenth-century painter suggests the clinical detachment with which death might be perceived. As Proudhon wrote, defending Gustav Courbet's controversial A Burial a/Omans (1849), "The death of man today, in universal thought, is like that of an animal.,,4 It is in a similar sense that Monet, in his Camille on herDeathBed (1879), is concerned with recording surface impressions rather than exploring the dead person's psyche. As Linda Nochlin has observed, "the pathos of the painting arises from precisely the contrast between the objective notation of sense perceptions which create the image and the understood context of emotional stress.,,5 In his account of the genesis of the picture, Monet records (with apparent horror) the process of recording the interplay of color and light at the expense of any more profound human feelings: "One day, when I was at the death-bed of a woman who had been and still was very dear to me, I caught myself, my eyes fixed on her tragic forehead, in the act of mechanically analysing the succession of appropriate colour gradations which death was imposing on her immobile face. Tones of blue, of yellow, of grey, what have you? This is the point I had reached.''' But irrespective of the great differences between these examinations of the act of dying, the works I mention have acommon element: the central position of the dying or dead person with respect to the figures surrounding him. As we enter the twentieth century, however, this perspective towards death and the dying changes radically. Indeed, it may be argued that the deathbed itself has become largely outmoded today as the place of death has shifted from the home to the hospital, the place to which contemporary society sends those who are about to die. It is therefore no surprise to learn that in 1965 seventy...