Emotion, Identity and Death

Mortality Across Disciplines

Chang-Won Park, Douglas J. Davies

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781409424147
• eBook ISBN: 9781317144663
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Religion
• Index: Social Sciences

Death affects all aspects of life, it touches our emotions and influences our identity. Presenting a kaleidoscope of informative views of death, dying and human response, this book reveals how different disciplines contribute to understanding the theme of death. Drawing together new and established scholars, this is the first book among the studies of emotion that focuses on issues surrounding death, and the first among death studies which focuses on the issue of emotion. Themes explored include: themes of grief in the ties that bind the living and the dead, funerals, public memorials and the art of consolation, obituaries and issues of war and death-row, use of the internet in dying and grieving, what people do with cremated remains, new rituals of spiritual care in medical contexts, themes bounded and expressed through music, and more.

Chapter 1
The Postmodern Obituary: Why Honesty Matters

Tim Bullamore

The lessons of history play an important role in helping to construct both our collective memory and our identity as individuals, with obituaries providing one way in which we learn who we are and where we are from. While, for many years, the principle of de mortuis nil nisi bonum (of the dead speak only good) was widely held to apply to obituaries, since the mid-1980s the British press has changed this approach by introducing some wit, humour and accounts of misdemeanours to obituaries to produce what I have termed the ‘postmodern obituary’. Nevertheless, this chapter argues that the transformation is incomplete for, to an unfortunate degree, newspapers continue to omit, make light of, or play down, the darker side of these life studies. In so doing, newspaper obituaries continue to portray an unrealistic ideal of how a life has been lived, thus potentially causing a confusion in identity among readers who cannot hope to live up to the virtues of those of whom they read. The chapter suggests that it is possible for the obituary pages to dispatch the deceased with what Nigel Starck (2006: 89) calls a ‘tincture of charity’ while still giving an honest account of the downsides of life that beset us all.

The study of the obituary as a ‘distinctive genre in literary journalism’ (Bytheway and Johnson, 1996) is a relatively recent phenomenon. Some have argued that it is the obituary pages ‘that save British journalism from the banalisation of mediocrity’ (Kirkup, 2002) and that they are ‘an essential contribution to history’ (Hattersley, in Howard and Heaton, 1993). Others claim that obituaries combine ‘the reporter’s craft with the scholar’s judicious sense of perspective’ (Stewart, 2005) and that ‘their formal characteristics and place in newspapers have led them to be included in the genre taxonomies of journalistic practice’ (Corona, 2006). Some have gone farther and eulogised that ‘(y)ou could look elsewhere in newspapers for many weeks and fail to find anything so close to poetry’ (Ferguson, 2002), while others suggest that ‘on the British obituary page harsh value judgment gives the sense of listening to one family member talk about another, with the reader presumed to be part of the family’ (Ledbetter, 2002). According to one of the art’s practitioners, ‘(t)he best reaction an obituary can create … is for the reader – having perhaps embarked on a piece about someone unknown to him, and from a field in which he has no real interest – to conclude that he wished he had heard of this fascinating figure before’ (McKie, 2003). However, too many newspaper obituaries paint an unrealistic portrait of a life, suggesting that the life in question has followed a perfect – even predestined – course or trajectory. Take for example:

Everyone knew that Muriel [Bradbrook] was destined for great things … (Guardian, 19 June 1993)

[Juliette Huxley] found herself engaged to Julian Huxley, an untested biologist ten years her senior at the time, but obviously destined for great things. (Times, 3 October 1994)

Given such a home environment [Raphael Pati] was predestined for academic achievement. (Independent, 7 August 1996)

[Sir Guy] Fison was given a traditional education at Eton [sic], where he excelled at sports. (Times, 30 October 2008)

This had, in fact, been the way of obituaries since newspapers first appeared in Britain. The death of an Establishment figure was reported as news, with a narrative that reinforced his position – and it usually was ‘his’ – as a faultless individual. If a newspaper felt obliged to record the death of someone outside the Establishment, it would generally do so in a mean-spirited manner, such as the Times’ account of the death of Oscar Wilde:

The verdict that a jury passed upon his conduct at the Old Bailey in May 1895 destroyed for ever his reputation, and condemned him to ignoble obscurity for the remainder of his days … Death has soon ended what must have been a life of wretchedness and unavailing regret. (Times, 1 December 1900)

The Daily Telegraph was even less forthcoming. When it did record a death, it treated the obituary art with disdain. Starck notes that from the 1950s, for some 30 years or so, the paper published ‘a daily main obituary of seven or eight short paragraphs (about 10-12 column centimetres) followed by a collection of one-paragraph death reports. It was colourless stuff’ (2004: 99). By 1979, particularly on Mondays, there was in The Daily Telegraph just one ‘obituary’ – if it could be called that – of half a dozen lines or so (2004: 104). What little did appear – even in the Times, which at least ran lengthy pieces – was dry, dull and almost exclusively about a member of the Establishment, i.e. those whom Pierre Bourdieu has described as ‘dominants’.

Today, fortunately, these are not the only types of obituary that appear in the British newspapers. In recent years some obituaries have contained greater candour, humour and honesty, while others poke fun gently at the eccentricities of otherwise blameless individuals, recalling anecdotes or sexual proclivities that, while not necessarily pertinent to their public career or persona, nevertheless give a more rounded appreciation and understanding of the character in question. Take for example:

The 3rd Lord Moynihan, who has died in Manila, aged 55, provided, through his character and career, ample ammunition for critics of the hereditary principle. His chief occupations were bongo-drummer, confidence trickster, brothel-keeper, drug-smuggler and police informer … (Telegraph, 26 November 1991)

Despite his outrageous antics and boorish behaviour, many of [Gerald] Kingsland’s former companions, wives and mistresses retained a soft spot for him. (Times, 16 May 2000)

Knighted in 1953 (the same year in which he was fined £10 for importuning in Chelsea), [Sir John Gielgud] was appointed Companion of Honour in 1977. The Order of Merit followed in 1996. (Times, 23 May 2000)

[David Tomlinson] steered well clear of anything devoid of laughter – ‘Personally I wouldn’t go near Hamlet. Far too serious’ – and spurned all but occasional small-screen roles. ‘Television is all so rushed,’ he explained. ‘It’s run by civil servants, you see – and all they know about the business is one line that goes “It’ll be all right on the night”. They’ve no idea how to deal with nervous actors like me.’ (Times, 26 June 2000)

[Fritz Spiegl] had several fallings out with successive editors of the Liverpool Daily Post over the content of his column, but such was his following among the paper’s readership that he was invariably brought back into the fold. (Telegraph, 25 March 2003)

In the early 1970s [Noel] Mander [an organ builder] took to using lineage advertisements in The Times to alert potential purchasers to instruments he had acquired … [One] claimed, rather startlingly, ‘Progressive synagogues need organs’; it was sandwiched between notices for ‘Unisex Massage’ and ‘Chelsea Girl Escorts for all occasions’. (Telegraph, 27 September 2005)

Academics, such as Nigel Starck at the University of South Australia, and enlightened practitioners, such as James Fergusson, obituaries editor of the Independent from its founding in 1986 until 2007, suggest that this change in the obituary, to include greater honesty and – at times – more humour, can be traced to changes in the structure of the newspaper industry around 1986, including deunionisation, computerisation, the exodus from Fleet Street and a collapse in the price of newsprint. Starck (2006: 67) records that Hugh Massingberd, obituaries editor of The Daily Telegraph, Fergusson (Independent) and John Grigg (Times), working independently of each other, brought about these changes.

Grigg, although not the author of the Times piece in question, was obituaries editor and allowed to be published an extraordinarily direct account of the choreographer Robert Helpmann: ‘His appearance was strange, haunting and rather frightening. There were, moreover, streaks in his character that made his impact upon a company dangerous as well as stimulating. A homosexual of the proselytising kind, he could turn young men on the borderline his way’ (Times, 20 September 1986). At The Daily Telegraph, the newly-appointed Massingberd – whether aware of Grigg’s indiscretion or not – had been inspired by Brief Lives, Roy Dotrice’s one-man show about the seventeenth-century antiquarian John Aubrey: ‘Picking up a work of reference, he read out an ineffably dull biographical entry about a barrister: Recorder of this, Bencher of that, and so on. He then snapped shut the volume with a “Tchah”, or it may have been a “Pshaw”, and pronounced: “He got more by his prick than his practice.”’ This, wrote Massingberd, was his ‘blinding light’; he would dedicate himself to ‘the chronicling of what people were really like through informal anecdote, description and character sketch rather than merely trot out the bald curriculum vitae’. Massingberd was always quick to point out that his new-look obituaries began to appear in September 1986 – the same month as the Times’ infamous Helpmann obituary. From then on, according to Starck (2004: 136) ‘the Telegraph’s subject selection was to be driven by the quality of the life story, rather than by the rank of the individual’. The Independent’s first edition appeared on 7 October 1986, with an obituary page edited by Fergusson. According to Starck (ibid.), it was the pictorial treatment – in a manner that, until then, had been reserved for magazine features – that set the Independent’s obituaries apart, as well as the inclusion of an author’s by-line (which is still omitted from obituaries in the Times and Telegraph).

Representatives of all three papers have claimed to be first with transforming the obituary, although many commentators concede that Massingberd was the driving force. In his introduction to The Guardian Book of Obituaries, the editor Phil Osborne directly acknowledges Massingberd’s work at The Daily Telegraph: ‘All obituaries editors, in one way or another, are indebted to Massingberd for paving the way for much more rounded insights into people’s achievements – and their failures’ (2003: 1). Anthony Howard, obituaries editor of the Times from 1993 to 1999, has declared Massingberd to be ‘the founding father of the modern craft’ (Howard, 1999). Fergusson (1999: 154) states that, when planning the obituary page for his new paper in the spring of 1986, he decided that the Independent should ‘do something different: it should seek a new audience, write a new agenda. There should be transparency’. He adds: ‘Where the Independent sought to open up and demystify the obituary … the Telegraph, under Massingberd, set out to subvert the traditional obituary from within’ (1999: 155).

Clearly we can demonstrate with some degree of accuracy that, from the autumn of 1986, the more humorous, more direct and more indiscreet obituaries – as well as more personal recollections of a life that has ended – began to appear in the British broadsheet newspapers. Thus, with the collapse of traditional boundaries within the art of obituary writing, the postmodern obituary was born.

However, to understand obituaries through the prism of postmodernism one first needs to appreciate ‘modern’ obituary writing with its dry, factual account of lives, that listed individuals’ achievements without providing much colour or assessment of their character. This was the case with the Times, as published throughout the twentieth century, and regarded as leading the way in its obituary coverage. Few commentators are comfortable defining postmodernism; but, inasmuch as it represents a change from the order that dominated culture and writing in the bulk of the twentieth century, the examples given above of humorous, irreverent or directly honest obituaries can be said to be postmodern. Indeed, Frederic Jameson stresses that postmodernism is ‘not just another word for the description of a particular style’, but is a ‘periodising concept’ (Roberts, 2000: 122). The ‘depthlessness’ (2000: 126) that is defined by postmodernism is represented in contemporary obituaries with the inclusion in newspapers of obituaries for non-Establishment figures, celebrities, bit players and even criminals. Similarly, the ‘warts and all’ approach to obituary writing exemplified by Massingberd and his successors – even of traditional or Establishment figures, or dominants – is a further example of how the art of obituary writing has evolved into its postmodern state.

Key to the success of many postmodern obituaries is ‘the code’, a mechanism developed to its full potential by Massingberd and which, argues Starck, allows the dead to be dispatched with a ‘tincture of charity’ (2006: 89). ‘Tireless raconteur’ therefore meant that the subject was a crashing bore; ‘gave colourful accounts of his exploits’ translated as ‘liar’; ‘an uncompromisingly direct ladies’ man’ had in life been a flasher (ibid.). Discussing the code, Marilyn Johnson explains how ‘the Telegraph never uses the words “pederast” or “disastrous failure” or “raving mad exhibitionist”. It doesn’t have to. The newspaper employs understatement and mock-delicacy, not to avoid saying something baldly, but to set up the joke’ (2006: 163). However it does have its limitations. As Massingberd conceded: ‘“He was unmarried” could mean anything from, well, he was unmarried to a lifetime spent cruising the public lavatories of the free world’ (ibid.).

The life course includes education and the passage of adult years, often through employment; unsurprisingly the dominants will often have been educated at elite universities. However, the absence of negative actions (failed exams, dismissal from jobs, driving offences, reasons behind a collapsed marriage) from the narrative of the dominants’ lives – with occasional exceptions such as Lord Moynihan, above, where the obituary writer made a virtue of his subject’s misdemeanours – creates an unrealistic impression of life’s trajectory. A similar problem arises with military subjects who, according to Howard, ‘still receive kid-glove treatment, if only because the pieces about them are nearly all written by products of their own loyalty culture’ (Howard, 1999). This, it can be argued, has the potential to cause a confusion in identity among readers, many of whom experience some form of difficulty in their lives but do not read of similar upheavals in the lives that we choose to remember.

Bridget Fowler (2004), who discusses at great length the social value that we place on some lives as opposed to others and the role of the dominants, divides the obituary genre into four categories: traditional-positive, negative, ironic and tragic. While traits of one of these categories dominate in many obituaries, I find this to be an unsatisfactory classification not least because the boundaries – particularly between negative, ironic and tragic – are blurred. Instead, I would argue that most lives contain an element of all these and therefore that an honest obituary – a truly postmodern obituary – should reference good and bad, as well as irony and tragedy, in the life it is recalling. Yet, despite the rise of the postmodern obituary, the traditional obituary – which often reads more like a hagiography – continues to dominate the pages of the British broadsheet newspapers, creating this confusion in identity. Furthermore two papers, the Independent and Guardian, now encourage family-written ‘mini’ obituaries, which appear on the obituary pages and, unsurprisingly, lack any semblance of objectivity, let alone any postmodern trait.

Even for the professional practitioner there are pressures – of space, of economy, of sparing the feelings of the bereaved, of perpetuating an image of a type of person or member of a social class – that can leave him or her writing an account that fails to meet the (admittedly ill-defined) criteria of a postmodern obituary. Indeed, in an industry that is experiencing the credit crunch to a greater degree than many others, anecdotal evidence suggests that, at the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century, the postmodern obituary is in retreat, with newspapers increasingly accepting obituaries – often without the need to pay – supplied by friends, colleagues and even family members of the deceased, who will have every interest in painting a eulogised picture of their l...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• List of Contributors
• Introduction: Emotion, Identity and Death
• 1 The Postmodern Obituary: Why Honesty Matters
• 2 Chronic Illness, Awareness of Death, and the Ambiguity of Peer Identification
• 3 Nationalization and Mediatized Ritualization: The Broadcast Farewell of Fadime Sahindal
• 4 Wiring Death: Dying, Grieving and Remembering on the Internet
• 5 Individuals and Relationships: On the Possibilities and Impossibilities of Presence
• 6 Crafting Selves on Death Row
• 7 Sojourn, Transformative: Emotion and Identity in the Dying, Death, and Disposal of an Ex-Spouse
• 8 Seeing Differently: Place, Art, and Consolation
• 9 ‘Sacramentality’ and Identity Transformation: Deathbed Rituals in Dutch Spiritual Care
• 10 Every Funeral Unique in (Y)our Way! Professionals Propagating Cremation Rituals
• 11 Designing a Place for Goodbye: The Architecture of Crematoria in the Netherlands
• 12 New Identity of All Souls’ Day Celebrations in the Netherlands: Extra-Ecclesiastic Commemoration of the Dead, Art, and Religiosity
• 13 A Dream of Immortality: Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde (The Song of the Earth)
• 14 De morte transire ad vitam? Emotion and Identity in Nineteenth-Century Requiem Compositions
• 15 War without Death: America’s Ingenious Plan to Defeat Enemies without Bloodshed
• Index