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Aries has contributed a bold, ambitious, and flawed book to the current
surfeit of literature on death. Because of the book's scope and the intelligence
of its author it demands a reading, and deserves to be studied for its weak-
nesses no less than for its strengths.
Writing about death is like writing about life. The target is both too small
and too large. One can focus either on the very moment death occurs,
observing precisely what happens when life vacates an organism, or on the
broad range of personal and societal patterns of response to death. In the
one case the matter at issue might be so slight as to elude us altogether. It
has largely fallen to physicians and physiologists to study the organic processes
on either side of the moment of death. Their interest, however, is not in
determining what in fact death is, but in determining when precisely it can
be said to have occurred. The reason for their interest is primarily legal, for
the technological capacities of modern medicine often force the question as
to whether support systems may be turned off or organs transplanted to other
bodies. The definition of death that emerges from the medical deliberation
of these issues is therefore concerned with determining when a medical
procedure becomes homicide.
If our focus shifts from the moment of death itself to the responses to
death, large conceptual difficulties quickly overtake us. How do we know
what is a response to death and what is not? There is no shortage of thinkers
who argue, in a variety of ways, that all human actions are properly to be
understood as responses to death. If the problem of looking precisely at the
moment of death is that we cannot ascertain what death is but only when it
occurs, the problem of looking at human responses to death is that nearly
every statement will do - which, of course, is equivalent to saying that no
statement will do. It seems then that in both cases it is impossible to talk
about death itself.
Before we can make any judgment of the book's success, we must briefly
summarize the major discoveries of his journey through this historical period.
He begins by quickly painting in the classical background that preceded
the thousand years under study. We find there an attitude toward death that
originates in ancient history, perhaps prehistory, and persists in one form or
another into the present age. He seems to find it now only in the death of
simple people like the peasants whose indifference to dying is described most
memorably by Tolstoy and Solzhenitsyn. Aries characterizes this enduring
image as that of "the tame death" (la mort apprivoisee). Although his account
here is spare of detail, and gives an implausibly uniform picture of this sweep
of history, we are certainly acquainted with the common scene of antiquity
in which the wounded hero, the martyred saint, the poisoned philosopher,
or the aged king, plainly aware that death is upon him, bids his grieving
companions farewell with measured and sagacious words. The intuitive notion
here is that while a person's death constitutes a painful loss to others, it is
not in itself a source of dread for the dying. This kind of death occurs in
public. Both the living and the dying approach death as something with
which they are familiar.
The era of the tame death extends well into the Christian centuries, al-
though not without striking changes in funerary custom. The Roman practice
of burying their dead outside the cities, often alongside major roads, reflects
the fact that the corpse was considered repugnant in antiquity. Because of
the Christians' belief in the resurrection of the body, "this aversion to the
proximity of the death soon gave way among the early Christians, first in
Africa and later in Rome" (30). This resulted in the location of cemeteries
in the macabre. In the familiar scene of the danse macabre we note that the
semi-skeletal figure of death engages the living in its obscene gambols. The
dead not only initiate this activity, Aries points out, "they lead the dance;
indeed, they are the only ones dancing" (116). Aries is at pains to indicate
here that the prominence of the macabre does not mean that life has itself
become frozen in the fear of death and therefore deathlike. He insists, rather
shrewdly, that the macabre exposes a "passionate love for this world and
a painful awareness of the failure to which each human life is con-
demned" (130). What we find in the funerary customs of the Middle Ages
is an urgent love of life, even an ill-concealed avaritia for one's own material
possessions.
As the Middle Ages gives way to the Renaissance there is a "turning of
the tide" in the collective attitude toward death. The shadow of death
lengthens and falls across the entire course of life. The importance of the
final deathbed drama vanishes. Death cannot be prepared for in the final
hours of life. The new attitude of the Renaissance is most aptly characterized
by the fact that "clergymen stopped urging deathbed conversion and started
insisting that the consideration of death be part of one's daily practice" (314).
The lusty avaritia of the Middle Ages yields to a measured sobriety and a
nourished unconcern with the things of this world. What is evolving here
"is a model of the good death, the beautiful and edifying death, which re-
places the death of the medieval artes in the bedroom invaded by the power
of heaven and hell, the memories of life, and the feverish fantasies of the
devil" (310). Life is now considered utterly vain, and is to be treated as a
possession one should lightly release. Later in the Renaissance death comes
to be regarded even as a "blessed haven, safe from the troubled seas and
the quaking earth. Life and the world have taken the place of the negative
pole that the people of the late Middle Ages and the early Renaissance had
identified with death. Death and life have switched roles" (332).
Aries places the Renaissance attitude toward death in a category described
as "remote and imminent death." Death is now no longer familiar, and no
longer sharply different from life.
Near the end of the eighteenth century a fourth attitude takes shape, a
"romantic" disposition that is focused primarily on the "death of the other."
This coincides with what Aries calls "that great modern phenomenon, the
revolution in feeling" (472). He does not mean by this that emotion is unique
to the Romantics, but that in earlier ages affectivity was widely distributed
and not restricted to the members of the conjugal family. "Beginning in the
eighteenth century, however, affectivity was, from childhood, entirely con-
centrated on a few individuals, who became exceptional, irreplaceable, and
inseparable" (472). Aries denies that romanticism in this form is a super-
ficial gloss on society as it is often said to be. "We now know that it is a
in the vanity of life, for example, he stresses its profound influence on the
culture by speculating that "Capitalism would not have prevailed if the
pursuit of pleasure and the immediate enjoyment of things had continued to
be as powerful as they were in the Middle Ages. The capitalist entrepreneur
had to agree to postpone his enjoyment in order to accumulate his profits.
The acquired wealth immediately became the source of other investments,
which in turn created further wealth" (333). Here is a possibility of making
the connection between funerary customs and culture that could anchor the
work to larger issues. But oddly the entire discussion of this connection is
contained in these three sentences. Neither this theory nor anything quite like
it is discussed anywhere else in the book. It is a potentially powerful salvo
that never goes off, and therefore has no effect on the shape of the study as
a whole.
A more ambitious venture into theory occurs still later in the text in a
discussion of the union of love and death in the imagery of the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries. Society has been able to exist from its earliest days
to the present, Aries declares, only by sustaining a defense system against
the unpredictabilities of nature. "This bulwark erected against nature had two
weak spots, love and death, through which a little of the savage violence
always leaked" (393). But by means of sexual taboos and the taming of
death nature's violence was kept at a distance. It was in the nineteenth
century that the "two gates" of love and death finally gave way. As a result,
the savageryof nature invaded the city of man just as the latter was preparingto
colonize nature by expanding the frontiers of technological advancementand ra-
tional organization.It is almost as if society, in its effort to conquer nature and
the environment,abandonedthe old defense system that had surroundedsex and
death, and nature,which had apparentlybeen conquered,surged back inside man,
crept in through the abandonedfortificationsand made him savage again. (395)
Although this theory is nodded at again in the conclusion it has no real
purchase on the work as a whole. Its rich interpretative possibilities are never
exploited. The reason for this may be that technology and bureaucracy do
not show up in a decisive way in those activities concerned with the "hour of
our death."
True, Aries makes much of the recent tendency to isolate the dying in
institutions, and certainly this tendency is encouraged by technology, but the
role he gives technology is quite benign. It is simply that the machines
required for adequate care are too costly and inconvenient for persons to
make use of anywhere but in hospitals. Since the machines are there the
people must be there. He ignores the more exciting possibility, suggested
in the long quotation above, that the rise of technology is itself a manifesta-
tion of something darkly menacing in the "city of man." When Aries wants a
description of the way modern persons die, ignored by those with whom they
have had the most intimate ties, he turns to Tolstoy's memorable short story,
Now this is an attitude toward death that cannot be found on anyone's tomb-
stone, or in the practice of visiting cemeteries, but it is an attitude toward
death that has altered the lives of all of us.
In the era of the tame death Socrates said thinkers should spend their
lives learning how to die. Why, in the era of untame death, should so many
thinkers spend their lives learning how to kill? The question is so important
we can only regret that Aries is not an historian of death.
JAMES P. CARSE
New York University
This is the season of applied history. We have seen nothing quite like it
before. Classic claims for the utility and applicability of historical knowledge
always rested on broad assumptions of history's capacity to offer perspective,
causal explanation, and liberation from the thralldom of the past. Yet these
claims have always defied specificity and have often been meant as much to
convey an impression of the superior learning and wisdom of those who
utter them as to convince those to whom they are addressed.
Recently, these arguments have gone into eclipse, being challenged, though
not supplanted, by claims about utility of a different order. The reasons are
more cultural and professional than intellectual, more external than related
internally to the direction of historical research. Since the Second World War,
many historians, believing themselves ineffectual in comparison with econ-
omists, sociologists, psychologists, and other scientists in providing useful
knowledge, have purposefully sought ways -through new methods and re-
search interests - to contribute to the understanding of contemporary public
issues and to the development of public policies. More recently, the career
difficulties of younger historians, their sights originally set on academic
berths, have led many - seasoned and fledgling historians alike - to seek
new uses for venerable analytical skills in the field of what is now called
"public," or "applied," history.
Forces external to formal historical study have been even more influential.
Policies pursued on grounds devoid of historical understanding and often
barren of substantiating evidence - especially in connection with the war in
'Vietnam - roused many historians to try to get the past record straight for
policy application. Direct changes in the administration of laws, such as
required archaeological and environmental impact statements, encouraged
trained historians to involve themselves in the implementation of policies
lest the inexpert do so. Above all, the implacable demands of broad social