Arts of Dying: Literature and Finitude in Medieval England by D. Vance Smith (review)

D. Vance Smith states succinctly the central thesis of his new book Arts of Dying: Literature and Finitude in Medieval England: “literature and dying are inextricably linked” (4). Summarizing it effectively is more challenging. Let me begin by describing Smith’s definitions of “literature” and “dying.” Smith views literature through a formalist lens as a self-contained mode of language, though like a deconstructionist, he asserts that meaning is indeterminate and unity deferred (5). He differentiates “literature” from theology and philosophy, noting it is “neither a prayer nor a proposition” (1). However, Smith approaches the second term “dying” with a philosopher’s subtlety. He incorporates ideas from Aristotle to Derrida, but Maurice Blanchot and Gillian Rose on the language of dying and Theodor Adorno and Edward Said on late style are especially influential. Dying, as Smith conceives of it, is not death; rather, it “lies between life and death” and is “a movement toward something, an aspect of the unfolding of time” (5, 22). What literature and dying share, then, is uncertainty and engagement with the illogical and transsensory amid external constraints. Covering English literature from the tenth through the fifteenth centuries, Arts of Dying demonstrates that literature, like dying, is never complete, always open for interpretation, and that medieval thinking about finitude is more complex than the endless mourning characteristic of postmodern philosophy. “No medieval subject” could have embraced boundless despair, Smith insists, because teaching about transcendence endowed dying with “deep responsibility” (4). Incisive close readings of primary sources make each chapter compelling on its own, but as a whole, Arts of Dying beautifully and profoundly meditates on that responsibility.

The book’s twelve chapters are divided into three chronological sections that Smith describes as cultural moments oriented toward different metaphors: the emerging soul in Old English; entering a crypt in the fourteenth century; and being dispersed into an archive in the fifteenth (2–3, 6). The three chapters in part one consider the speaking soul and are the most diffuse. The first chapter after the introduction begins with Hamlet, Caesar, Clark Kent, and Roger Bacon but contends writers like Augustine and Boethius recognized the impossibility of speaking about the dead, and late medieval philosophers, including Abelard and the Oxford Calculators, were preoccupied with the problem in their theories of language and reference (20). Chapters 2 and 3 focus on Old English texts that, Smith says, construct the body as “the corpse of language” and ask what happens when “there is speech without a body” (32).

The second section contains the book’s most important insights. The six chapters offer astute readings of Middle English poems where the corpse in a crypt parallels enigmatic literature. Chapter 4’s dazzling study of the four-line lyric “Erþe toc of erþe erþe wyþ woh” [Earth took of earth earth with woe] unpacks the poem’s suspension “between the semantic permissiveness of logic and the strict and literal jealousy of grammar” (76). The next two chapters discuss Chaucer. Chapter 5 unexpectedly and productively pairs The Book of the Duchess and the Pardoner’s Tale to argue that death makes poetry possible through its deferral, but efforts to represent death fail spiritually and literally. Chapter 6 locates irony in the Knight’s inability to provide an alternative to the Monk’s string of tragedies, a failure that Smith maintains stems from his misreading of The Consolation of Philosophy. The seventh chapter traces the word “pestilence” through Piers Plowman and details Langland’s revisions to the figure of Trajan in the B and C texts to show how “the search for terms, for the precise and permanent naming of things” is “an unending and infinite enterprise” (151). The virtuoso analysis of Pearl in chapter 8 suggests that “the awful finitude of the grave” shadows the poem’s “compulsive aestheticizing of experience” (153). In chapter 9, the second section’s central metaphor...