Mocked with Death: Tragic Overliving from Sophocles to Milton (review)

In the acknowledgements section of her recently published book, Emily R. Wilson thanks her supervisors for teaching her to be sexy and clear. Mocked with Death: Tragic Overliving from Sophocles to Milton indeed appears to retain both earmarks. The subject matter of the book – tragic overliving—undoubtedly possesses alluring power, while clarity and precision dominate the pages. Given that the term "overliving" does not widely circulate in academic circles, it needs certain explanations. Wilson borrows the word, as well as the title for her book, from Milton's Paradise Lost, where Adam exclaims: "Why do I overlive, / Why am I mocked with death, and lengthened out / To deathless pain?"

According to Wilson, "the prefix 'over' suggests excess and, therefore, implies a normative notion of how long one ought to live. In the context of Adam's speech as a whole, it is clear that he feels he has lived too long because he has lost what made his life worth living" (2). Having further elaborated this idea, the author brings forth the term "overliving" to define situations when "people go on living even after the moment when they or others feel they should have died" (1). Heretofore, literary scholars addressed such situations primarily in the context of discussions on senescence and physical frailty, i.e., topics that "may be used as metonymy for tragic overliving" (3). The difference between overliving and its metonymies seems to lie in emphasis rather than in substance—while senescence and physical frailty highlight sadness associated with a troubled present condition, overliving stresses sadness associated with a missed opportunity in the past. Apart from the metonymies, overliving might be represented by a set of specific images and tropes, namely:

Repetition and reduplication, both of individual words, of scenes and of arguments; the sense of unending shame, guilt, and pollution; the desire to be invisible and unseen; images of torture, heaviness, and the body as a burden; the loss of selfhood, order, meaning, and understanding; the presence of multiple, competing ways to understand time; the conflict between human emotions and impersonal, historical responses to them; revenge as a possible solution to overliving; regret at birth and desire for death; depictions of life as living death.

(164)

By resorting to the new term, Wilson simultaneously challenges and expands the Aristotelian notion of tragedy. Indeed, since ancient times, tragedy has been commonly viewed as a genre that depicts central characters' deaths. Many scholars have argued that even when exitus letalis does not take place on stage, its occurrence is nonetheless metaphorically implied. Wilson confronts such a standpoint by arguing that death is not a necessary attribute of tragic structure. According to her, "there is a central thread in tragic tradition that is concerned not with dying too early but with living too long or 'overliving'" (1). Surprisingly enough, despite its prima facie obviousness, generations of philosophers and literary scholars have overlooked the phenomenon of overliving.

Compositionally, the book consists of an introduction, eight chapters, extensive endnotes, author and subject indexes, and a lengthy bibliography. Each chapter analyzes a certain representation of overliving in the works of classical Greco-Roman and early modern English authors. Thus, the first chapter examines Sophocles' Oedipus Tyrannus, the play that Wilson regards as "a paradigmatic example of tragic overliving" (16). Having discovered the truth about his birth, Oedipus does not die but continues to live and pass his terrible sin to future generations. Because a definite ending is not provided, this overliving creates a sense of frustration for the audience.

While the Oedipus Tyrannus offers virtually no solution to the problem of tragic overliving, Sophocles' Oedipus Coloneus, discussed in the second chapter, tries to find an answer by expanding Oedipus's experience for the whole human race. Consequently, all human life is seen as too long and overliving becomes a depressing destiny: "All of us overlive . . . . We live too long from the moment of birth, even if...