The Twice‐Killed: Imagining Protest Suicide
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KARIN ANDRIOLO The Twice-Killed: Imagining Protest Suicide ABSTRACT The inspiration I take from J. M. Coetzee’s book Elizabeth Costello (2003) is his advocacy of imagining as an alternative to rational thought. Imagining, as I understand him, is mindwork that engages the body as an experiential and metaphorical site. I apply this notion of imagining to suicides conducted in the service of political protest: The fatal hunger strike of ten prisoners in Northern Ireland in 1981 and Jan Palach’s self-immolation in Prague in 1969. Three questions direct the exploration of their trajectories: What feeds the hope for the effectiveness of protest suicides? How do they use the body as a performance site? Do such suicides call for an ethics of attentiveness? [Keywords: protest suicide, ethics, performativity, northern Ireland] ELIZABETH COSTELLO AND ELIZABETH CHANDOS to see. My article takes its inspiration from Coetzee’s no- We are reading the final chapter of J. M. Coetzee’s Elizabeth tion of “imagining,” which I will delineate from Elizabeth Costello (2003) and accompany the book’s eponymous hero- Costello’s lectures and broodings. Then I will return to ine to “The Gate,” where she anxiously negotiates what Elizabeth Chandos’s letter: the keystone, I take it, to the seems to be her afterlife; the book is finished, we assume. arc of the book. We turn the last page and realize that it is not the last one The act of imagining figures prominently in the three- after all. A postscript presents us with a letter from a woman way task of the writer. Her mind relates to the world and who enters the book at this late point, swept in from a its creatures, intent on understanding their being, while different literary universe. She calls herself Elizabeth, Lady her words relate to the reader the understanding she has Chandos, and she and her text are fictional spin-offs from gained. Both kinds of relating are strewn with hurdles, per- another author’s epistolary character. The Austrian writer haps insurmountable ones. The writer releases her text from Hugo von Hofmannsthal composed a letter in which a cer- the coop with a hesitant flutter of her ceding fingertips and tain Lord Chandos explained to his friend, the philosopher with the anxious question: Will it be read with the meaning and statesman Francis Bacon, why he was relinquishing I desire to express? This transmission from writer to reader, writing.1 Lord Chandos’s correspondence is dated 1603, and however daunting, is Coetzee’s lesser concern, and he treats it was published by Hofmannsthal in 1902. A century later, it throughout with sober irony. Elizabeth Costello lectures it was amended by Coetzee; again, Bacon is the recipient of assuredly, often passionately. But in the discussion that fol- a letter, this time one in which Lord Chandos’s wife diag- lows she is easily tripped, blunders off target, and proves noses the cause of her husband’s retreat from language. an awkward mediator between her text and the listeners’ Why do I suggest that we enter Elizabeth Costello via understanding. Elizabeth Chandos, in turn, writes with a its postscript of four pages, through a narrow passage that nervously word-pinching insistence on being understood requires the unspooling of tangential threads? The periph- and propels her letter forward on the crutches of italics eral, disjointed manner of the postscript is only surface play. and brackets: “It is as if (as if, I say), it is as if” (Coetzee Written by another woman whose initials are E. C.,2 the 2003:229). More portentous than the communication of letter confirms and completes the dominant theme of the meaning is its procurement, the entry of the world into book—the promises and perils of imagining. That it arrives the writer’s mind, and, for that matter, the representation suddenly on the already empty stage ensures its clear and of the world in everyone’s mind. To which carrier should distinct visibility. Our unpreparedness for the mysterious one entrust this crucial transfer: to thought—as in rational intruder lets us read her message straight, unfiltered, like thought, ideas, academic discourse—or to imagining—as in when we catch our reflection in the mirror from an un- literary imagination, empathy, or putting oneself into the expected angle, now unprimed to see only what we wish place of another? AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST, Vol. 108, Issue 1, pp. 100–113, ISSN 0002-7294, electronic ISSN 1548-1433. C 2006 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press’s Rights and Permissions website, at http://www.ucpress.edu/journals/rights.htm. Andriolo • The Twice-Killed 101 The interplay of these two alternatives constitutes the visions Crusoe and Friday through the eyes of their third, structure of the book, which consists of a series of academic female companion, whom Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe lectures that dispense earnest thought but are delivered and jealously has left out from his account.3) responded to by imagined characters in imagined settings. Other chapters stroke the gains of embodied mind- To many readers and reviewers, this proved, depending on ing less confidently. An African writer pronounces that the their brand of humor, an irritating or amusing stumbling African novel and his own poetry are oral, that their au- block. What is this, many asked, a novel or a book of ideas? thenticity is bound to their being spoken amidst people, as Well, it is not either–or; it is quite insistently both. It offers different from the solitary and silent reading of the West- rational discourse, assertively presented yet continuously ern disembodied novel. Consequently, the African novel destabilized by its literary frame. This destabilization of ra- is twice bereft. Once written, it is lost to its homeland tional thought is the book’s prominent agenda. Destabiliza- where it cannot be heard, and when read by its former tion is a word I choose carefully; it does not imply denun- colonizers, its true voice remains silent. Elizabeth’s sister, a ciation, denial, subversion, or whatever drastic attack on medical missionary in South Africa, denies that rational hu- rationality radical postmodernists conduct. Destabilization manism has ever reached into the core of our being. Only cautions: Do not put your whole trust in rationality; it is suffering touches this core and, therefore, we must em- not going to hold, it is not going to last, because it carries brace it as our only form of self-validation. On the lighter the seed of its own contestation. Stability and sameness are side, Elizabeth wonders what sex with a god must have felt faulty assumptions. Everything shaped by humans dwells, like for mortals, an interspecies encounter that evades bio- like human existence itself, in the shadow of death, and we logical cogitation, yet hilariously deflates the airs of the sub- must factor that in; yet, the tug of destabilization notwith- lime when one envisions bedding a swan or a pigeon. standing, we must hold our balance. The shadow cast by imagining grows longer. Through- What is the definition of imagining that approximates out Elizabeth’s cerebrations, her aged, tired, lumpy body is Coetzee’s use of the word? Whereas rational thought stays pressed on us. Her son watches her seated next to him on a within the mind, imagining does not; it tentacles into the plane, asleep and with her mouth agape, and prefers at that body. When we imagine an object or a scene, our senses get moment to think of himself as having descended from her involved: We see a house, a face, autumn leaves; we hear mind rather than from “the pear-shaped belly-sac” at the sounds; we smell the madeleines of childhood. Edgar Alan end of her gullet (Coetzee 2003:34). Embodied minding, Poe’s words, indeed, can spin a sensation of dread; and a we had been told elsewhere so optimistically, is connec- friend describing how she broke her arm, if we allow our- tive and even can prevent the commission of cruelty. Here selves to imagine it, can give us a feeling of nausea. Imagin- we are made to realize that it can also be distancing and ing grabs mind and body. What is felt in one’s body speaks cruel. Even though, as long as silence keeps it locked away a mightier authenticity than an abstract idea in one’s brain. within the minder, it will not hurt Elizabeth, mothers, or the Imagining is embodied minding. elderly. What is the appraisal of imagining vis-a-vis` rational One stride further into pursuing the potential effects thought, and what is to be gained from its destabilizing en- of embodied minding, and we have reached the limit, the terprise? Several chapters of the book rate imagining above antipode to its humanizing mission. What if the precise rationality. If we would truly imagine the pain of animals and unflinching envisioning of evil indeed conjures up evil, and the suffering of humans, if we were to put ourselves embodies it in the writer and reader, in whose minds those into the place of our victims, victimization would end, or, who were once tortured relive their torture? Are there places at least be reduced. Imagining can penetrate into territories one must not enter? Is there evil one must not imagine that are impassable for abstract thought. To those creatures but lock up in silence? In a much-commented-on chapter, who do not have the capacity to think, we can only relate Elizabeth has prepared a speech on evil, in which she will by way of imagining their lives in their bodies, by feeling raise these questions and advocate the writer’s self-censure.