AFTERTHOUGHT
JOHN WELLS
It has always seemed to me rather curious that the idea of dying should generally be regarded as so intrinsically comic. Sudden and violent death is probably the most successful stock punch-line in all traditional English folk humour, and there is a great deal of material based on the enfeebled condition of the mori- bund, the dying man's last words, the incon- gruous appearance of the corpse, and its subsequent involuntary or even miraculous activities. In addition to this there are a host of jokes about embalmers, funerals and coffins, as well as constant impromptu excursions into the dismal field by original wits, like that made by the humorist Milligan recently on emerging from Bertorelli's in Shepherd's Bush, when he lay down on the pavement outside the under- takers' next door, assumed a rigid position with his chin sharply raised, and shouted 'Shop!'
Like humour at the expense of God, though, black jokes of this kind made in the face of extinction still seemed until recently to elicit a slightly hysterical laugh from the listener, as if he were in the grip of some secret fear, or nervous lest a mysterious power were at that moment poised above him with a divine sledge- hammer raised, waiting until his disrespectful cackle reached its highest note to fell him with a single blow. But now death appears to be enjoying something of a comeback among the fashionable. It is considered a suitable subject for semi-serious conversation, and even for hurried essays at the end of intellectual week- lies. Audiences confronted with a coffined corpse on the stage of the theatre, or with a 'camp' funeral on the cinema screen, seem to react in a more relaxed way. It is possible, I suppose, that the fear of death, the origin of all these liberating jokes, may be receding, if only temporarily.
Not that the black jokes themselves can ever have offered anything more than a tem- porary consolation: whole audiences of men may find release from their secret fears of im- potence by bellowing with laughter at the plight of some temporarily unmanned hero in a Feydeau farce, but they can never wholly escape their fear of death by seeing it ridiculed on the stage. Indeed it might be possible to construct a feeble anti-religious argument on the idea that this basic fear of death can only be eased by the spectacle of its being acted out on the tragic stage of religious belief, and then only completely by the irrationally trium- phant last act of the Resurrection, just as the ultimate comfort of those seeking consolation in Feydeau might be found face to face with the enormous and delicately painted erections in Japanese fertility shrines.
But turning from the traditional comforts, the situation of the good 20th century atheist should in many ways be enviable. Freed from the terrors of a disembodied soul wandering for ever in a deserted universe of punishment and rejection, he has only to face the gentle dissolution of the individual consciousness and its ultimate painless extinction. Hence perhaps the glib mockery of corpses and the increasing frivolity at funerals. But it is not so easy.
However much comfort he may find in the gentle dissolution of the individual conscious- ness, he must inevitably remember that the flesh is not so immediately dissoluble: that one day or one night the machine is going to break, and that something will have to be done with the wreckage.
Some of us, it now seems almost certain, will be fortunate enough to be burned instantly in a nuclear accident, and leave no trace behind us but our shadow on the pavement: for the rest the prospect remains grim. Whether we are destroyed by slow disease, so that we withdraw gradually into a shrunken centre of consciousness in a derelict body, or have to face the impact of a bone-twisting, skull- smashing accident, whether we collapse sud- denly in Piccadilly Circus with heart failure or give a last pathetic groan in the damp sheets of a white-painted hospital bed all hung with rubber tubes and antiseptic apparatus, looked down on by a weeping relative or a face we never saw in our lives, we nevertheless have to meet this personal deadline. And afterwards the undignified dummy we inhabited will have to be picked up, undressed, buried or burnt.
What makes this difficult to accept, even for the good atheist, is that the individual consciousness, or the soul in the case of the religious, seems so intimately connected with the physical apparatus. Being for the most part disinclined to consider the details of death when we are in good health, and usually dis- inclined to think lucidly about anything when we are ill, we are left on the one hand with the, instinctive feeling of immortal well-being and on the other with the dark and formless fear of extinction. Sitting with friends at dinner, enjoying food and conversation and wine and colours and scents, perceiving innumerable pleasurable details simultaneously, it seems furthermore that this centre of communica- tions can never be extinguished, and that having known nothing else there must either be an endless continuation of the present state of affairs or some dramatic alternative. Extinction seems inconceivable, perhaps not least because we shall have nothing with which to conceive it.
Perhaps the most satisfactory spiritual exer- cise in self-preparation for the event was
developed by a German writer whose name as usual I am unable to remember but whose work has appeared since the war. The short story in question is called Spiegelgeschichte. or Story in Reverse, and concerns the life of a woman
from the moment her coffin is lowered into the grave, through her last illness, the loneliness
of her middle years, her youthful unhappy love and childhood, and ends suitably enough with her birth and conception. At the end of the story no trace of her remains: she has grown out of corruption into an old woman, shrunk into a child and has vanished into the loins of her parents leaving no soul or spirit behind her. It all seems very logical and simple. And now I rise from the typewriter and creep anxiously about, waiting for the bony finger to tap me on' the shoulder or the mysterious mallet to be brought down suddenly on my head. Read next week's column for further news.
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