Battle in Print: Morbid Fascinations - our obsession with death

Tony Walter, 27 September 2006

Fifteen or 20 years ago, the jury was out – does our society deny death, or are we morbidly fascinated by it? For some it was the great taboo of our age. And yet in 1979, M Simpson’s bibliography, Dying, Death and Grief, began wryly: ‘Death is a very badly kept secret; such an unmentionable topic that there are over 650 books now in print asserting that we are ignoring the subject’. The 1987 update added another 1,700 books. In a three-month period in the mid-1990s with no major wars or disasters, my colleagues and I found over half the stories and pictures of Britain’s daily newspapers concerned death.

It is safe to say that, as far as the mass media are concerned, the secret is now well and truly out: we humans die. More broadly too, practices are changing – British and American doctors generally tell patients if they have cancer, hospices fit snugly into suburban side streets, millions visit exhibitions of plastinated cadavers. Of course, in everyday conversation and behaviour taboos remain. Whilst we are generally pretty up-front about sex in our society, there is still a time and a place, and most of us prefer it this way. The same is true of death. Social taboos and rules need not equate with psychological denial.

I do not want to exaggerate the extent to which death has become uncensored. Though the boundaries as to what the press can show of dead bodies have been fast expanding, for every hundred press photographs taken at the scene of a gory accident, disaster or war scene, only a tiny handful remain publishable. Despite training, some doctors, nurses and clergy remain terrified of death. Middle aged people who can talk about cancer may not be able to discuss impending dementia with their elderly parent. Unlike the Irish ‘I’m sorry for your troubles’, the English insist on their stiff upper lip and have no ritual form of words with which to address the grieving.

Nor is either the ‘old’ denial of death or the ‘new’ morbid fascination the same throughout the modern world. In less individualistic countries like Italy or Japan, many patients are content to let the family or doctor take decisions and may remain ignorant of their illness. English people – and I say ‘English’ advisedly as Britons of Northern Irish, Hindu or Muslim origin are likely to be ritually familiar with corpses – encounter dead bodies far less often than do Irish, Japanese, Americans or Greeks where a ritual public viewing of the corpse is a central part of the funeral process. In Ireland or Japan one attends because of one’s relation to the chief mourner as much as to the deceased. The only inkling many English had of this kind of thing was on the TV news when the Pope died. With few if any rituals for viewing the corpse, the English end up as voyeurs of the dead displayed in exhibitions and TV shows, rather than as ritual participants. But then the Japanese, who do have such rituals, are as voyeuristic at such shows as the English. Ritual is not necessarily the cure for either denial or morbid fascination.

And remember: morbid fascination with the corpse is not necessarily the same as fascination with mourners’ emotions, nor with one’s own mortality. But given such caveats, how to explain our current morbid fascinations?

Back in 1955, Geoffrey Gorer wrote a short but influential article in Encounters, ‘The Pornography of Death’. He argued that if sex was the taboo of the nineteenth century, death has become that of the twentieth. And when something as fundamental and ultimately inescapable becomes socially taboo, it does not disappear – it re-surfaces in pornography. Gorer was thinking of publications such as Second World War comics in which the Hun shot dead by the brave Tommy is no more human than today’s Page Three girl. We might consider today’s death-oriented exhibitions and websites in this light, except that, given their visibility and popularity, it is hard to claim them as the underbelly of a taboo.

Some of the new openness about dying and grieving may be part of a new emotional expressiveness in a number of western cultures, particularly Britain – hierarchy has declined, people are expected to express their feelings, affluence and peace offer time to explore doubts and traumas. A Britain that is increasingly informal and distrustful of ritual is seeing more people visit relationship counsellors and fewer get married, while funerals become almost peremptory. Of course, not everyone approves. Martin Bashir’s famous Panorama interview with a frank and emotional Princess Diana split the nation. Half celebrated: ‘someone in the establishment is showing their vulnerability at last’; the other half said ‘We never got through two world wars by blubbing about our troubles.’ So, should we pack our troubles in our old kit bags and smile, smile, smile? Or unpack them on the therapist’s couch or TV reality shows? We are in the midst of a massive cultural shift, stoicism versus expression - and it’s affecting how we deal with death as much as any of life’s other stressors.

A key shift concerns the extended time people now face, still with the knowledge of their own mortality. Medical advances mean life-threatening disease (heart disease, cancer, HIV+) may be diagnosed decades before death, and even the terminal phase can continue for up to a year or two. The old hiding of the dying in hospital side wards is no longer possible – sufferers of terminal diseases are walking around, working in the office next to you. Many of us would like to die in our sleep fifteen or twenty years after retirement at the end of a good day on the golf course, but we know it’s more likely to be an extended cancer or dementia, with our autonomy and dignity threatened. No wonder so many of us consume the autobiographical or biographical ‘pathographies’ of the dying, whether by John Diamond or Dennis Potter or John Bayley’s portrait of his wife, Iris Murdoch. The old medieval ars moriendi assumed a few days to put yourself right with maker and family after contracting cholera or some other infectious disease that killed in days; pathography writers and the hospice movement inaugurate a new ars moriendi, how to live with death for months or years.

Add to this the internet, patients’ charters, informed choice, and challenges to medical paternalism, and it is clear that conversations between the dying and medical practitioners have irrevocably changed.

Whatever the explanation for the new openness, the question remains: is it a good thing? Where is the dividing line between morbid fascination and a healthy interest in our own anatomy? Between voyeurism, and a memento mori that spurs us to live more positively in light of our mortality, recent research lays doubt over the real benefits of expressing your feelings against the supposedly repressive stoicism. Though health workers need to know what does and does not work in terms of mental health, cultural critics may prefer other criteria. Explaining morbid fascination must come down to the historical moment we inhabit. We are social beings and emotional expressiveness reigns not because it is necessarily healthy, but because we inhabit a culture shaped by sixty years of peace and affluence. Should we experience again several years of world war or killer pandemic, we may well witness a general return to stoicism. Many elderly people are stoics by necessity, having to deal with several friends and family dying each year. Morbid fascination, and expressiveness, are found more among younger and middle aged people for whom the Grim Reaper is a distant figure.

Tony Walter, Centre for Death and Society, University of Bath

 References

Gorer, G. (1965). Death, Grief and Mourning in Contemporary Britain. London, Cresset Press.

Simpson, M. (1987). Dying, Death and Grief: a Critical Bibliography. Philadelphia, University of Philadelphia Press.

Walter, T., M. Pickering and J. Littlewood (1995). ‘Death in the news: the public invigilation of private emotion’. Sociology 29: 579-96.

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