Between the (Disciplinary) Acts: Modernist Suicidology

[S]he applied for his reasons. Now, though he had none, as we have seen, that he could offer, yet he had armed himself so well at this point, forewarned by the study he had made of his catspaw’s mind, that he was able to pelt her there and then with the best that diligent enquiry could provide: Greek and Roman reasons, Sturm und Drang reasons, reasons metaphysical, aesthetic, erotic, anterotic and chemical, Empedocles of Agrigentum and John of the Cross reasons, in short all but the true reasons, which did not exist, at least not for the purposes of conversation.

—Samuel Beckett, More Pricks than Kicks, 1934

In Samuel Beckett’s early story “Love and Lethe,” from More Pricks than Kicks, Ruby Tough asks Belacqua his reasons for proposing that she aid him in committing suicide—though the word “suicide” is never uttered and the proposal is therefore obscure. Parsing the reasons he gives would require extensive reading, as Belacqua’s list goes well beyond the standard “Greek and Roman reasons” that remain relatively well known today, most commonly, those known as death before dishonor and agent’s choice before patient’s suffering. For the purposes of this essay, one thing that stands out in Beckett’s list is an absence: its lack of reference to any of the reasons usually advanced for suicidal ideation in the lives or works of modernist writers. That is, Belacqua does not mention existential despair, crisis in norms or values, or wasteland senselessness and alienation. Aside from the final comment, that “true reasons” do not “exist, at least not for the purposes of conversation,” which hints at suicide’s lasting mark of taboo, Beckett’s list is both scholarly and neutral in affect.

How did Belacqua arrive at his particular set of reasons for suicide? Tracing the etiology of his list involves a thick historicization of the rise of suicidology in the first modern suicidological texts. Suicidology, so-called since the 1960s but nameless before then, emerged, as I will argue, from among more prominent emergent social sciences, particularly psychology, sociology, anthropology, and the new methodology of statistics. Suicide also remained in the territory of philosophy, history, the law, and literature. Physiology, though increasingly subordinated or simply side-stepped by pre–World War II proto-suicidologists, also played a role. In addition to the intellectual definition and social formation of discrete modern academic disciplines, interdisciplinary collaboration and competition combined to create modernist suicidological discourses. Non-academic commentators played major roles in these discourses as well, and a number of the most influential texts were aimed equally at the lay reader and the scholarly audience; they sought to persuade and guide ordinary readers as well as to shape and change the disciplines.

In the modernist period, suicidology emerged sufficiently to become what one might call an “inter-discipline.” Modernist discourses about suicide often emphasized a need to traverse different disciplines to deal with the vexing phenomenon and thus formed the basis for contemporary suicidology. While overlooked by most contemporary modernist critics, these deliberately self-modernizing proto-suicidological discourses formed the ideational background for representations of suicide in modernist literature, from that literature’s beginnings in the last decades of the nineteenth century through high modernism in the 1920s and ’30s. Literature itself played a varied role in those discourses, even as—together with literary criticism—it gradually became a disciplinary player in its own right.

Contextualizing suicide among the academic disciplines, however, entails reconsideration, first, of suicide’s status both as taboo and as symptom of an alleged modernist crisis.

“The Repressive Hypothesis,” Redux

When cultural and literary critics write of suicide in the modernist era, they usually contextualize it as A. Alvarez does in his classic study The Savage God. Alvarez aligns suicide with Eliot’s “waste land” of chaos, alienation, numbness, and despair and with Conrad’s “horror.” Even when qualifying these admittedly sensationalizing terms (as Alvarez also does), suicide is offered as a symptom of the “crisis” of “modernism.”¹ So, indeed, is death. Inspired by Philippe Ariès’s discussion of all death having become gradually...