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6. Death, Desire, and the Homosocial
- University of Iowa Press
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6 Death Burning the Days (1997) is for some readers Salter’s best work, and it is the only entirely original book-length work he has published since 1979. Hemingway once wrote in a letter that he “by jeesus will write my own memoirs sometime when I can’t write anything else” (Selected 388). There is a whiff of death in the line, even in its casual invocation of Jesus. When I can’t write anything else, he says — when as an author, as a real writer, he is finished. Done for. To write an autobiography, one strain of autobiography theory argues, is to be the author of one’s own death. “Implicit in the search for totality in more traditional autobiographical criticism,” writes Laura Marcus in Auto/Biographical Discourses (1994), “is the paradox that autobiography ex hypothesi cannot be written from the standpointbeyondthegravewhichwouldsecurethistotalising [sic]vision of the life. By extension, for the autobiographer to aim at this totalizing vision would itself be to aim for death” (208). In other words, to write a complete vision of one’s life is in effect to end one’s life on the last page, is to participate in the memorializing process, to pre- figure one’s death and essentially to author it. It is also a way of beating death, of ensuring the self’s textual immortality. As Bond observed, pilots “often seem to treat death itself as a living rival” (29) so that a pilot’s career — like a writer’s career — can be likened to a drawn-out dogfight with death. To write one’s own death through autobiography is a way of beating death by outmaneuvering it; Salter further outmaneuvers death in his refusal to include essentially onehalf of his life in his “recollections.” By not writing the totality of his life, he has not implied its completion. His life hasn’t been entirely Death, Desire, and the Homosocial cast on the page; it goes on, it grows, it develops, it has its secrets still. Again, by writing the autobiography, Salter authors his death, and refuses to do both; his flirtation with the autobiography form can be read as a flirtation with death. By refusing to include much of his life, Salter further asserts control over his life by denying others access. The act of exclusion is on the one hand an acknowledgment of the life no one can know and on the other a way of tightly controlling what others know, say, and write. In 1885 Sigmund Freud destroyed fourteen years’ worth of his notes and correspondence to thwart his biographers. To thwart one’s biographers is one way of defying death as represented by the biographical act. But also, as psychoanalyst Adam Phillips notes, “It is part of our own life story to try and keep control of the stories people tell about us. . . . Freud was to suggest that the ways in which we tried to destroy our lives (and our life stories) were integral to our life stories. That we were always, as it were, tampering with the evidence of ourselves” (77). Phillips’s essay “The Death of Freud” and the introduction to the book in which the essay appears, Darwin’s Worms: On Life Stories and Death Stories (2000), provide a manageable perspective on Freud’s hypothesis of the death instinct (or “drive”) by explaining it as “an organizing principle.” According to Freud, ever since the earth’s firstorganismbecameanimateandfoughttoreturntoitsstablecondition of the inanimate, “external influences altered in such a way as to oblige the still surviving substance to diverge ever more widely from its original course of life and to make ever more complicated detours before reaching its aim of death.” Thus “we have no longer to reckon with the organism’s puzzling determination (so hard to fit into any context) to maintain its own existence in the face of every obstacle. What we are left with is the fact that the organism wishes to die only in its own fashion” (Freud in Phillips 76–77). The italics belong to Phillips, who then recasts the passage: “There is a death, as it were, that is integral to, of a piece with, one’s life: a self-fashioned, selfcreated death. . . . We are, in other words, perfectionists to the end, the artists of our own deaths” (77). Phillips’s language of control, and desire, and self-determination , and artistry, positively reverberates with Salter’s concerns. 154 • reading james salter Recalling himself as a cadet reflecting...