MAPACA

Mid-Atlantic Popular &
American Culture Association

There is no daily force that has evoked more scrutiny and contemplation than Death. While the exceptional moments of death’s hush stand out most vividly, what drives this study is not these exceptions but the more mundane moments. For each day, we imagine, fear, and anticipate death in a myriad of minute motions and emotions, most of which remain completely unuttered. It is precisely this unnamable quality of death that encourages this Grail-like theorization of Death throughout all forms and genres of literature and life, or as Michel De Certeau puts it, “texts proliferate around this wound on reason. Once again, it [death] supports itself on what cannot be mentioned. Death is the problem of the subject” (The Practice of Everyday Life 192). This syntactical problem is only furthered twisted by Jacques Derrida in The Gift of Death, when he writes, “Death is very much that which nobody else can undergo or confront in my place. My irreplaceability is therefore conferred, delivered, “given,” one can say, by death” (42). Our subjective position in life is thus anteceded in this unnamable subject of death, for life is given meaning only in relation to this concept, death, which we cannot linguistically subjugate. This linguistic void is inescapable and disquieting, and in many ways reverberates through and colors our understanding of all forms of endings, especially our discomfort with the determined closure of literature. This paper will seek to trace the connection between De Cereau’s subject problem and Derrida’s “object” problem through the exemplum of the close of a novel. The work of literary endings then is to culminate in the pensive stillness, and thus in endings, while determined and fixed, prose remains reflective, and in its reflection we can give ourselves a momentary reprieve through which death may reach a liminal subjugation.