A Death of One's Own: Literature, Law, and the Right to Die by Jared Stark

Procrastinating before sitting down to write this review, I picked up the New York Times to catch up on the day's news. Instead of distracting me from my task, however, the newspaper only reiterated for me the intelligence, sensitivity, and timeliness of Jared Stark's book A Death of One's Own: Literature, Law, and the Right to Die. For opening the paper, I found myself facing not one but two articles that engage the very questions with which A Death of One's Own is concerned. In "A Debate Over 'Rational Suicide'" (New York Times, 31 August 2018), Paula Span observes that Americans, particularly older Americans, are increasingly determined to exercise control over their deaths. In the same issue, Sarah Lyall, as her mother slowly and painfully dies of lung cancer, recounts the difficulty a daughter has in finding a way to honor her mother's request that she help her die ("The Last Thing Mom Asked," New York Times, 31 August 2018). A Death of One's Own focuses on the two questions these articles raise: "What does it mean to respond to the appeal, 'Let me die'? What does it mean to have one's relationship to another defined by the moment, present or eventual, when they may call upon you, or you upon them, for assistance in dying" (3)? As Jared Stark argues (and as my failed effort to avoid confronting the blank page shows), in contemporary life, these questions are difficult to escape.

That said, Stark observes that literary studies have not often given much explicit thought to the meaning of the right to die. As so many famous instances of "literary encounters with modern death" exist (4), this lack of thought is curious, but Stark does not reflect on it. Instead, he takes the opportunity to be one of the first to draw from literature and literary studies to consider what the right to die means for the ways in which life and death are imagined, what it means for ethics and relations to others, and what it means for the idea of what it means to be human. Organized around the presentation and discussion of three arguments that, according to Stark, serve as the basis for claims to the right to die—the argument that the right to die is an exercise of personal autonomy, the argument that death is a moment of self-authorship, and the argument that the right to die enacts "a death with dignity" (5)—Stark shows how death increasingly entails forms of decision and participation. In Stark's study, the tension between "modern death" and the grounds on which it is justified reveals not only something about death as it is met today, however. It also reveals something about the strangeness of modernity—specifically, that death may no longer to be taken for granted. Confronting this "crisis" (18) in the image of death means having to consider how we, human or otherwise, are alone and with others, now.

Beginning with a delicate reading of Franz Kafka's "A Country Doctor," the introduction to A Death of One's Own poses the questions with which the book is concerned and contextualizes the study it undertakes. Emphasizing how difficult it is to speak about the end of life at law, in the clinic, or among family and friends, Stark suggests that literature may offer resources for naming and relating to that which can never be properly represented. Literature may have these resources to offer because it grapples self-consciously not only with the figurative nature of language, but also with the limits of knowledge and the uncertainty of communication. A brief glance at the cultural history of death reminds us that death has not always been so difficult to discuss, but it also alerts us to the way in which death has become invisible as death is medicalized and eventually denied...