Dying Modern: A Meditation on Elegy by Diana Fuss (review)

Death, we know, makes history. The deaths of kings and monarchies, the passing of empires, the slaughter of millions in genocides everywhere, the decimation of peoples—all these transform the culture we inherit. But history makes death too. The gradual or abrupt alterations of our belief systems, the revisions of our elegiac modes, the dissipation of what, in Yeats’s words, has been “accustomed, ceremonious”¹—these changes transform our visions of dying, along with our ways of literally or figuratively coming to terms with death and the dead.

Focusing on these points, Diana Fuss’s Dying Modern is an exceptionally lively, often glitteringly witty essay on the vagaries, contents, and discontents of nineteenth- and twentieth-century elegy, a genre whose fate, in England and America, has been radically disrupted and even, sometimes, deformed by the cultural fate of modern death itself. Learned though she is, Fuss resists the temptation to produce yet another wide-ranging genre-study or historical analysis of elegy and its attendant ars moriendi. Instead, in three wise but terse chapters she singles out three specific modes of literary mourning that she considers representative for (roughly speaking) our era: the poem of “last words”; the “corpse poem”; and, somewhat obliquely, the aubade. In the first of these, poets record and/or reimagine those final utterances to which, over the centuries, we’ve given so much weight, an obsession with linguistic “lastness” that has its origins in, for instance, Goethe’s famous “Mehr Licht” (“More light”) or (an example Fuss doesn’t discuss) Socrates’s renowned “Sacrifice a cock to Asclepius.” In the second, perhaps her most striking contribution, she reviews the impulse toward what rhetoricians call “prosopopoeia”—the supposed transcription of speech by an imagined or absent person—that animates (if I may risk a pun) the soliloquy or monologue hypothetically spoken by a dead person, a corpse, or ghost. And in the third, she meditates on the poem of daybreak parting known as the aubade, the dawn poem in which, as lovers take leave of each other, they model larger forms of farewell.

Fuss’s overview of those poems of last words spoken by, in her phrase, “the dying voice,” harks back to the nineteenth-century evangelicism or sentimentalism of writers whose reverent farewells aim to be consolatory for both mourner and mourned. “Weep not for me! soon, soon the weary one / Will be at rest, / his throbbing pulses stilled, / His spirit free,” admonishes one Thomas Westwood, a British contemporary of Tennyson, while the American Helen Hunt Jackson, in “a gracious final farewell,” assures her loved ones that “I am looking backward as I go, / Am lingering while I haste, and in this rain / Of tears of joy am mingling tears of pain” (14–15). Such final utterances seek to soothe all sufferers. The bereaved are to be reminded that they were central in hearts that have now been stilled, while the dying may, with luck, reiterate traditional hopes of heaven, “that bright world, / Beyond the grave” (14).

Yet not even nineteenth-century religious conventions barred outbursts of anger or anxiety from those who were “crossing the bar”—or indeed from those witnesses who participated in the rituals of what was known as the “deathwatch.” Fuss examines the furious commands recorded by Lydia Sigourney (in “Last Words of an Indian Chief”) and Frances Ellen Watkins Harper (in “Bury Me in a Free Land”). “Lay not my bones / Near any white man’s bones,” insists Sigourney’s speaker, while Harper’s refuses to be buried “in a land where men are slaves” (17). In other works, Fuss studies the vengeful instructions often included in murder ballads that constitute “lethal last testament[s]” (21). The American verse “Johnny Randall,” for instance—a poem that (although Fuss fails to note this) has its origins in the classic Child ballad “Lord Randal”—incorporates last words demanding “a twisted hemp rope” to hang the victim’s killer, while another poem similarly calls for “a...