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

In its sheer variety, the modern elegy traverses mourning and boastfulness, remembrance and prediction, identification and separation, critique and praise, as well as introspection and poetic theorization. Diana Fuss’s Dying Modern maps such traversal in American and British poetry from the past two hundred years, claiming that the post-Enlightenment rise of secularism and waning of religious influence made death “so terrifying that it could no longer be articulated,” but also that, at the same time, poets’ fascination with death persists, and even “the dead commence chattering away in poetry, as if to give the lie to modernity’s premature proclamation of death’s demise” (1). Fascinated with this thwarting of death’s demise, Fuss seeks to “probe the literary desire to make death speak in the face of its cultural silencing” (1–2). She identifies as the main problem and questions for her book the following: “[T]he literary desire to make death speak in the face of its cultural silencing. What does poetry have to gain by resisting death’s decline? Why are words an appropriate vehicle for reviving death? And how do we survive death’s reawakening?” (2). Dying Modern addresses these questions by investigating three different voices in the poetry of modern death: the dying voice, the reviving voice, and the surviving voice, which, taken together, Fuss sees as constituting a modern ars moriendi (3).

Fuss’s stated aim is no less than “inventing more than recovering a modern ars moriendi that comes fully to life through a labor of rhetorical and critical animation” that studies what she identifies as three “categories of elegy”: “last words, live corpses, [and] lost loves” (3, 4). Correspondingly, her book has three parts, respectively titled “Dying … Words,” which examines last-word poems; “Reviving … Corpses,” a discussion of the corpse-poem; and “Surviving … Lovers,” a bold commentary on the modern aubade (italics Fuss’s). The first and the third parts are generous, engaging discussions that Fuss constructs with an eye that is trenchant and even playful (as in her remarks on the unrepentant folk-ballads of thieves, highwaymen, drunkards, and others in the book’s first part, as well as in the third part’s delightful, apparently delighted gloss on the erotic wordplay in Yeats’s aubade, “Parting”). However, it is the second part of the three that is most provocative and most problematic.

A twinning of ethics and elegy gives Dying Modern sparkling insights, as well as parts that dim its sparkle. For Fuss, “ethics is elegy: speaking, acting, and surviving in the face of loss” (7; italics Fuss’s). She adds that ethics “begins in the ability to imagine another’s suffering, making elegy one of the most necessary, if perilous, of aesthetic forms” (5). This gives her book one of its niggling problems as Fuss reads a dazzling range of modern elegies, but, more often than not, with the restrictive view that the elegy has a desire to “revive” for its ignition. Expanding the ambit of her reading, Fuss contends, “In no small degree, the ethical task of the modern elegy is to determine what indeed ethics might mean in a world that appears to have lost its ethos, its ‘principle of human duty’” (6). This brings with it the caution that “we have been perhaps too ready to proclaim language ethically compromised, too quick to dismiss the considerable reparative powers of elegy” (6).

A tendency to see intention and closure in Dying Modern (especially in its examination of corpse poems) collaborates with a compulsion to make visible a fluctuating, spectral, or absent voice. The role of evidence is prominent, if fugitive, in elegies and last-word poems. Fuss writes, “Seeking to bridge the seen and the unseen, the poetic rehearsal of last words is conscious from the beginning of its dual audience and purpose: the human audience that must be consoled and the divine audience that must be convinced” (15). Visibility and persuasion play crucial, interlinked roles in the modern elegy. Material evidence...