Making Light of Plight
Literature’s pleasurable death throes
katie kadue
A man walks into a bar. Well, he tries. Having removed a bar from the window of his prison cell and intoned an impassioned final speech, he thrusts the bar into his chest—but it’s not sharp enough to pierce through. He tries again and again but succeeds only with nicking his skin and bruising his ribs, and only when his girlfriend physically intervenes does he finally give up on giving up the ghost for good.
Is this funny? Maybe not; the bar for a successful suicide joke is high. The scene comes from Philip Sidney’s prose romance The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia (c. 1580), where the beleaguered prince Pyrocles is trying and failing to kill himself with an instrument that proves too blunt. This, according to some persuasive analysis in Drew Daniel’s Joy of the Worm: Suicide and Pleasure in Early Modern English Literature, is camp. Daniel argues that in literary examples like this, camp—notwithstanding its exhaustively diagnosed critical exhaustion—can prove to be an unlikely means of survival, a refusal to take suicide seriously that can provide the necessary comic distance to give those at risk of self-harm second thoughts. An animating attention to the cold dead past of literary history might help us find reason to live today.
Suicide, which we may think of as almost tautologically tragic, in fact often deflates, mocks, or chafes against the genre of tragedy
Joy of the Worm is a scholarly study of the unexpected humor—“slapstick” and “trolling” as well as camp—and other “positive affects” generated in and by portrayals of self-killing in sixteenth- to eighteenth-century tragedy, poetry, and prose. The title refers to a line in the final act of Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra, when the Clown, who has delivered the fatal asp to the Egyptian queen, awkwardly delays his exit with small talk. When he wishes her “joy o’ the worm,” he’s saying he hopes she has fun killing herself, and also perhaps hinting at a sexual dalliance with the suggestively shaped snake. It might sound perverse to take pleasure in one’s own suicide—a morbid onanism invoked also in the clever title of Daniel’s introduction, “Renaissance Self-Finishing”—or to make lewd puns about the suicides of others, but such perverse pleasure is precisely Daniel’s purview. This spirited book’s refreshing claim is that suicide, which we may think of as almost tautologically tragic, in fact often deflates, mocks, or chafes against the genre of tragedy. What Camus called the “one truly serious philosophical problem” can be taken unseriously, and can prove surprisingly lively. The silliness, sexiness, and sociality that sometimes arise from suicidal scenes show that, as Daniel puts it in a witty inversion of the dour Christian formula, “in the midst of death we are in life.”
In psychoanalytic thought, the intertwining of life with death is perhaps nowhere more present than in the theorization of the pleasure principle and the death drive, elaborated most famously by Freud but also by Sabina Spielrein before him and by Lacan, Laplanche, and others after him. The psychic drama, as well as the comedy, of prolonged death and near-death scenes like Pyrocles’s and Cleopatra’s would seem to put the war between these drives at center stage: everything seeks to die in its own fashion, but the frustration of that desire can bring pleasure. “The aim of all life is death,” Freud announces in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, and yet the organism, as it has evolved, has been forced “to make ever more complicated détours before reaching its aim of death.” These characters want to die, but they also want to live it up. “One group of instincts rushes forward so as to reach the final aim of life as swiftly as possible,” but then “the other group jerks back to a certain point to make a fresh start and so prolong the journey.” In the terms used by Peter Brooks in his translation of Freud’s psychic model into narratology, campy and slapstick suicides might be said to constitute “a dilatory space in which pleasure can come from postponement,” where narrative plot itself is nothing but “an ever more complicated postponement or détour leading back to the goal of quiescence.”
But Daniel’s “joy of the worm” does not simply denote satisfaction in life’s purposeful fulfillment in death, in its accomplishment of its own destruction in its own way. Nor is it quite, even in erotically tinged death scenes like Cleopatra’s, what Leo Bersani—drawing on Laplanche, for whom the death drive is just another name for sexuality—called the “suicidal ecstasy” and “self-shattering” of sexual penetration. Daniel finds most theorizations of the death drive inadequate, and other expected psychoanalytic frameworks are de-emphasized as well. “Mourning and Melancholia” and Beyond the Pleasure Principle are duly cited but quickly lost in the book’s densely constellated, relentlessly additive bibliography, which draws on sources ranging from premodern critical race studies to pop music to personal anecdotes to affect theory to traditional literary criticism to suicidology to self-help.
Yet despite the explicit marginality of psychoanalysis, Daniel’s energetic prose itself invites psychoanalytic reading. This is life-force-fed writing, crammed with a hodgepodge of references, kinetic verbs, far-reaching analogies, and general linguistic jouissance. The book runs like a psychic economy, regulated by a high-octane pleasure principle that enthusiastically exchanges negative affects into positive ones. When Daniel asserts that literary genre is “a technology that converts risk and harm into pleasure,” the same might apply to criticism: the literary critical study of suicide is a pain-processing machine, geared toward the production of joy. This machine works imperfectly, producing substantial byproducts—lees, slag, smoke, sparks coming off the cogwheels when things get a little too hot—and those raw dark materials are never entirely purified. But that’s life. Building on Adrian Johnston, the one psychoanalytic thinker who passes his death-driving test, Daniel finds literary instances of “joy of the worm” to be—as, I think, he invites us to find Joy of the Worm to be—“alloys of libido and death drive,” two sides of a coin that even the most advanced metallurgical technique couldn’t separate.
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Joy of the Worm’s first three chapters—on Sidney’s Old Arcadia, John Lyly’s Gallathea, and Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Timon of Athens, and Antony and Cleopatra—are the most joyful: in failed or exaggeratedly extended suicides like Pyrocles’s and Cleopatra’s, comedy is allowed to ventilate tragedy and last words are recast as last laughs. These literary provocations to take ourselves and our pain less seriously have an antidepressant benefit similar to that which Joan Didion attributed to putting a paper bag on her head while crying: “It is difficult in the extreme to continue fancying oneself Cathy in Wuthering Heights with one’s head in a Food Fair bag,” she counsels in her essay “On Self-Respect.” There is, throughout, a certain reality principle at work as well: that other side of the coin. Lest we find the Clown’s “joy o’ the worm” sex joke to Cleopatra too funny, Daniel solemnly warns us that the suggestion that an African woman is so hypersexual as to orgasm at even the most inappropriate times plays on the racist tropes of misogynoir. Some suicide humor, like Hamlet taunting Ophelia’s brother as he mourns her death, is simply sadistic.
In Joy of the Worm’s second half, in chapters on John Donne’s Biathanatos, Thomas Browne’s Religio Medici, Milton’s Paradise Lost, and Joseph Addison’s Cato: A Tragedy, lightheartedness increasingly dies off. Humor gives way to the “positive affects” we might more readily expect to arise in Christian and Stoic reflections on self-killing: the more philosophical pleasure of self-sacrifice, the ecstatic thrill of self-loss. Even as he hopes to prevent suicide, Daniel wants us not to pathologize those who attempt or succeed at self-killing. The upshot is disconcertingly neutral: sometimes suicide is funny and sometimes it’s not. Sometimes self-killing is no tragedy and shouldn’t be condemned—euthanasia for terminal illness and acts of political martyrdom are his main contemporary examples—and sometimes we should do all we can to avoid it.
Will this book’s pleasure generator ever shut off?
Meanwhile, the pleasure principle of the prose grinds on. One text “cruises suicide”; another “cruises flippancy.” Daniel is gleefully, though often apologetically, addicted to puns, gimmicks, allusions, and alliteration, to the point where even fellow sufferers of such afflictions might start to feel phonetic fatigue. It’s as if he’s trying to stuff as much life—but also as much linguistic deadweight—as possible into a book about those who refuse life, but who do so with such vivacity and joy, who seek pleasure at all costs, including the cost of life itself. One of the book’s main mechanisms of pleasure is “risk.” Suicide risk—the actual risk of self-harm that must be assessed by care providers and mandatory reporters—becomes sublimated into a series of rhetorical “risks” staged with melodramatic magnitude. At various points, Daniel’s analysis risks, among many other things, “bad taste,” “the ludicrous,” “overbroad assertions,” “lowering the tone,” “constructing a Miltonic Hallmark card,” “pomposity and arrogance,” “a facile knowingness,” “flippancy,” and “fatal submersion” in the prose of Thomas Browne. The stakes of these risks are often comically—campily?—low. We are unlikely to actually drown in the Religio Medici, no matter how “circuitous” the “roundelay of self-doubts, objections, digressions, and counterpoints”; no one’s life is on the line when Daniel runs the “calculated risk” of “offering a tendentious claim” about how a phrase of John Donne’s calls to mind the work of the contemporary theorist Roberto Esposito. But the overriding, and most serious, risk of the book—that of “trivializing a serious subject” by laughing off the reality of people offing themselves—seems to be of a different order than that of boring the reader with an overlong block quote.
The restlessness of Daniel’s prose means we are never given much time to let the uneven implications of these risks sink in. The generally startlingly active verbs kick into an especially high gear in descriptions of the rhetorical roller coasters found within the texts he analyzes. Language is said to churn, snag, twitch, and writhe; it is short circuited, hotwired, and telescoped through; it performs pirouettes (at one point, a “triple pirouette”) and backflips; “switchbacks of dependent clauses” climb up ramps and go off cliffs. Concepts take off from launchpads; pumps are primed. We are propelled along by an undaunted unifying drive, motored by a hyperactively associative imagination that lets no synaptic fire go unrecorded. Disparate examples fuse together through the sheer combinatory force of Eros, or by the logic of a joke, what Freud calls “a method of linking things up which is rejected and studiously avoided by serious thought.” The decision not to include some apparently obvious contenders for early modern literature’s top suicide scenes is explained with an endnoted quotation from Marie Kondo’s best-selling guide to decluttering, The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: those suicides did not “spark joy.” This reference may feel like citational clutter, but the connection across genres and historical periods is what sparks joy for Daniel. Still, some of these allusive tics can border on the offensive, and it isn’t always clear if the reward of edginess is worth the risk. “Will the subaltern ever shut up?” is Daniel’s glib gloss on Cleopatra’s chatty Clown, a riff on Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s “Can the Subaltern Speak?” Will this book’s pleasure generator ever shut off?
If Daniel’s style seems spammy, he may be taking inspiration from a scholar he quotes in his Donne chapter who compares the Renaissance humanist rhetorical practice of copia to internet spam: an “indiscriminate pile-on of textual ‘primitive accumulation’ for its own sake,” in Daniel’s paraphrase. Erasmus, the sixteenth-century authority most frequently associated with copia, might take issue with this. He defines copia as the careful distribution of a variety of diction and rhetorical devices and precisely not a free-for-all: to “pile up a meaningless heap of words and expressions without any discrimination,” Erasmus cautions, would be “silly and offensive.” But the fact that Daniel’s libidinal citationality, like that of many great Renaissance authors who also ignored Erasmus, diverges from an orthodox humanist approach doesn’t necessarily make it unproductive. At its best, Joy of the Worm teems with all the life of a party, with various voices excitedly contributing to a multilayered conversation. Dump a bunch of citations into a “chaotic compost heap” (as Daniel describes Donne’s citation-riddled Biathanatos) and add worms, and you might very well end up with potent fertilizer. Or you might reach a dead end.
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It’s become a convention in academic humanities discourse to complain about the conventions of academic humanities discourse. The turn to criticism-memoir hybrids, “critical fabulation,” and experimental chapter formats has been touted as an antidote for the soul-killing drudgery of scholarly writing, and perhaps even a prevention strategy for the mass murder via slashed budgets of humanities departments across the country, an extinction event some critics have cast as self-induced, the result of a lamentable failure to deploy the old-fashioned willpower and innovative prose styles that could save us from ourselves. Understanding the crisis of the humanities in this way is to cast it as a certain kind of what Freud calls “bungled action,” whereby a suicidal person ends up dying by an apparent accident that has in fact been unconsciously wished for and arranged: suicide by budget cut. Are literature departments unwittingly putting themselves out of existence? And is the death of a discipline always tragic?
Taking a cue from Daniel’s self-consciously melodramatic stagings, I more than once imagined that this book was trying to talk early modern literary studies, or academic literary criticism in general, off the ledge it had wandered onto. This is by no means to say that Daniel, like the critics alluded to above, victim-blames his discipline for its precarious position, but simply that the urgent exuberance of his prose stakes a claim for academic writing as a matter of life or death; its breathlessness, with some chapters accruing example after example as if to indefinitely stave off their conclusion, is, after all, textbook pleasure principle. Like Cleopatra’s Clown, who just needs to get a few last words in before making his exit and letting Cleopatra make hers, Daniel is reluctant to stop wishing us joy, and indeed would have liked to keep going: while promoting the book on Twitter, he lightly lamented the editorially imposed necessity of cutting down his manuscript by over 30,000 words. He calls this process “painful,” but concedes that the paragraphs lost led to a better book: a felix culpa.
I was left wondering what exactly literature had afforded.
Daniel describes his book as “unabashedly” literary criticism, focused on the unique “affordances” of literature. In his many analogies to contemporary phenomena, some sustained and some slapdash—in a mode, “with apologies to Winnicott,” that he calls “good enough presentism”—Daniel seeks to bridge the divide between past and present while breaching scholarly decorum. Hamlet is a “hot mess”; Antony “is a military commander who ‘can’t get no respect.’” On multiple occasions, we are asked to reflect on our experience browsing Netflix. This, like the Freudian joke’s “method of linking things up which is rejected and studiously avoided by serious thought,” can be fun. It can also both domesticate and exoticize the remote, dusty literature of the past to powerful effect: Shakespeare’s famous, daunting lines can become both less drearily familiar and less monumentally intimidating when translated into the idiom of the internet.
But after reading, for example, that “Hamlet is not an RIP troll”—an anonymous internet user who mocks the survivors of suicides, like Hamlet mocks Laertes at Ophelia’s funeral—“but he is not not an RIP troll either,” I was left wondering what exactly literature had afforded. When in this mode of motiveless magnanimity, Joy of the Worm seems to be doing it for the “lulz.” As Daniel explains in the chapter that compares the Shakespearean misanthropes Hamlet and Timon to internet trolls, affect is what passes among trolls for ideology, and everything they do is for an undefined pleasure. “Freud’s metapsychology of libidinal energy,” Daniel comments, “would more or less agree.” No thoughts, just “lulz,” just vibes, just the erotic satisfaction of binding one experience to another through recognition, or of mixing negative and positive affects, high and low registers, into the “alloy” called “joy of the worm.” Hamlet is not an internet troll, but he’s not not an internet troll, and like in a meme where a famous actor or sleepy kitty is captioned “me,” the play between identity and nonidentity makes for a diverting semiotic game. But how does this help us understand Hamlet differently? The critical apparatus that churns pain into the complicated pleasure of making superficial connections here stops short of generating meaning—or, perhaps, it postpones the generation of meaning by inviting the reader to add their own worms to the compost and see what comes of them.
As Freud remarks in Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, “recognition is pleasurable in itself,” because it provides psychic relief: what felt like unbridgeable chasms now feel like manageable distances; the life force can and will bring what is now “alien”—people, texts, historical periods, feelings, ideas—back together, as if to an originary whole. But the connective Eros of “good enough presentism” is fused with the book’s own death drive. Daniel deliberately chooses readily at-hand, up-to-the-minute presentist analogies with the understanding that they will in time need to be replaced by better, more topical ones: this is what makes them “good enough” for now. Actively courting its own irrelevance, Joy of the Worm cheerfully suggests that an academic book’s obsolescence is no tragedy—provided that other readers and writers will survive it.