Grave concern
Ian McEwan
Deaths of Man Edwin S. Scheidman (Millington £3.50)
It is often said that death is the taboo of our death-laden age, just as sex was once for the Victorians. For that reason alone Edwin Scheidrnan might find himself without readers, and that would be a pity for his book is intriguingly and morbidly wide-ranging in its concerns, as well as being a precise statement of a behavioural scientist's atheism.
A lovely and brilliant young woman who was dying of scieroderma once said to Dr Scheidman, "I badly don't want to die, but most of all, I don't want to die badly." One of the author's major concerns in the first part of the book is to show how those who are professionally involved with the dying — Scheidman calls them thanatologists — can help victim § achieve a good death, an "appropriate" death, and help the survivors deal better with their loss. As a therapeutic exchange, this might strike the reader as a hopeless, if not sentimental, intention. But the moving transcripts of videotaped sessions Scheidman himself conducted with a forty-eight-year-old woman dying of lymphosarcoma show this not to be the case. To help the dying person acknowledge his coming death and deal with it realistically is practical simply because it is humane. Such efforts, insists Scheidman, "ennobles both the dying person and the one who attempts to sustain him."
The nearest Scheidman comes to any kind of belief in life after death is in what he calls the "postself" (like many behavioural scientists he likes to coin words). The postself is what we may imagine to be our influence and reputation after we have died; how we will live on in the minds of others. "The spirit that survives," writes Kaplan whom Scheidman quotes, "is a pattern or meaning which can be embodied or expressed in one material as well as in another. The self ends as a wave dies down or as an inscription is eroded. Whether there is a continuance of the sense of identity is another question; who remains to say I? But it is still far from clear who it is that says I now." It is one of the shortcomings of the book that in the chapter on the postself, Scheidman does little more than string together a number of tantalising quotations such as this one. A measured stateme.nt of his own pointof view, or at least a greater synthesis of his sources, is frequently omitted in favour of an approach which unambitiously catalogues rather than analyses.
Scheidman touches (again tantalising and brief) on the phenomenological paradox of death. One can experience, empathetically, the death of another. But one cannot experience one's own death — if it could be experienced it would, by definition, not be death. In another chapter the author makes a rationalist's plea for the deromanticisation of death. Death, he says, must be viewed as the enemy — "the threat of being erased, of being reduced to nothingness, can be viewed reasonably only as the most perfidious of forced punishments." The romanticisation of death, he argues persuasively, is an anachronistic and fundamentally destructive notion for it includes the romanticisation of homicide and suicide; it encourages unreal attitudes of war and lies behind America's recent inability to amend its own gun laws.
Why is death a taboo? Again, it is a pity that Scheidman expends only two paragraphs on• the question. It is taboo, he says, because it is incapable of being adequately expressed. This begs the question why the Victorians were so unembarrassedly good at death. A possibly approach might have been found in the Freudian polarities of Eros and Thanatos which Scheidman admits as useful metaphors. Could it be that a society liberates one at the expense of the other?
Scheidman draws heavily on Melville's novels. This works best when Melville is used to illuminate Scheidman; it is not particularly successful the other way round. Charts and graphs are employed to illustrate the rather bleary point that Melville, with 1,800 "death thoughts" distributed through 4,500 printed pages, was obsessed by death at a too early age.'
For me the high point of the book was the brilliantly placed short story by the Japanese writer, Naoya Shiga, to illustrate an `equivocal' death — one that fall ambiguously betwen an accident and a murder. The story carries home Scheidman's point that an individual's death is as complex a matter as ti. a individual himself.
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