Apparent
Death
Defining Death
The concept of the
“apparent death” reaches into every crack and cranny of the romantic ideal.
Whether we look at the quick, and some would proffer shallow, tales of the
first Greek novels or at the stories of the King
and the Corpse and its cohorts from the tales of Hindu myth, apparent death
finds its way into each of them, rearing its ugly head like some vast
cosmological Titan bent on the destruction of the heroic ideal. At least, Death
appears to take this form. The audience, after all, growing up in a world of
brevity and eventual demise, would at first see the Death as the same dastardly
figure that haunted their own lives, the same hooded, or more precisely,
invisible personage that came for their parents, or worse their children,
before finally coming for them. For most of us, as for those audiences, the
specter of Death remains a frightening and mysterious concept that we can
little understand. Death is the mystery that neither science nor mathematics
has yet to understand, in spite of the fact that each has helped to define much
of the known universe to this point. Science explains everything from gravity
and the vast workings of the sun to the minutia of the atom and how the tiniest
molecules of our beings work. Through mathematics, we can calculate gravity,
the speed of an object, or how far away from our own Earth the nearest star
might be. Yet, neither of these amazing constructs of man can penetrate beyond
the veil of mortality. Neither can give us an answer of what happens when we
die.
The question remains
however, a tantalizing morsel just out of our grasp, a dangling fruit that we
long to take and eat. We have become, then, much like Adam and Eve, in search
of a knowledge that it would appear is forbidden to us. We are Tantilus, doomed
to reach for food that we can never have and drink that will never touch our
lips, no matter how close either gets to our mouths. We long to taste, if only
for a moment, the sweet nectar of understanding that would give us so much to
work with, a lasting peace that we could at least embrace with finality even if
it were not the answer we were looking for.
Yet, perhaps we are
looking in the wrong place. Perhaps science and math, in their infinite
understanding of what they perceive to be the natural order of things have
missed the most crucial of ingredients in the understanding of finality, of
Death itself. It should be understood that Death is no more a vast cosmic
working than we ourselves are gods on Olympus. Death weaves its fateful web
about everything in its turn, yes, but it is in many respects a condition of
what Paul Weiss calls the self[1].
The self, he argues, is beyond the physical. It comprises the innermost
workings of the individual, built of no less than the most basic and
fundamental components of the individual. The self cannot be measured. It
cannot be seen, and yet it is there, as real and substantial, Weiss argues, as
the physical body. The self is not limited to the workings of the body,
however, and when the body dies, the self does not. It simply moves from that
confining shell into a greater existence within the world.
Weiss’s arguments are,
though, while enlightening, not purely what we need to understand the
complexities of the apparent death within Romance. As its name would imply, the
apparent Death does not fall into any sort of physical demise as we so often
see in the real world. Rather, it implies a sense of illusion, a sense that
what we have seen is not the truth of the matter and that we must open our eyes
in order to see what is truly happening. We must gaze upon the death and see it
for what it really is if we are to understand its basic necessity within the
arch of the story.
Death, then, takes
many forms in the myths, legends, and stories that our culture knows and
thrives on. It can take the form of a disappearance, such as that of Haroun’s
mother in Haroun and the Sea of Stories,
where the person believed to be dead has quite literally left the family
structure or group. As with Haroun’s mother, those who abandon the main
characters are, for all intents and purposes, dead. They cannot be seen or
communicated with, and so they have passed out of the realm of possibility into
an unknown world, a world much like death, where the main character cannot
follow lest he too become lost in the labyrinth of the underworld, or so he
thinks. Thus our first understanding of the apparent Death comes simply as the
belief that the loved one we cannot see is no longer with us, that they have
somehow or other met with a terrible misfortune and are now not only physically
beyond our reach but emotionally as well. Such fears pervade our every thought,
invading our dreams and waking us in the middle of the night to call loved ones
and make sure that our nightmares have not followed us into the waking world.
This concept of dreams
hits on a second understanding of death: simply put, the sleep. “We are such stuff as dreams are made on”
Prospero tells his audience in The
Tempest, “And our little life is rounded with a sleep”. Thus
Shakespeare gives us one of the truest understandings of death in this
Christianized world that of the impermanent sleep. In Romeo and Juliet as well, he gives us a glimpse of this feigned
death with a poison that allows the drinker to pass into such a deep sleep that
he or she will appear to be dead. This play, however, does not end so happily,
as Romeo, truly believing his Juliet dead due to some very unfortunate
circumstances, kills himself, and she, in her own turn, commits suicide as
well, this time no longer feigned. The motif remains, however, and the
audience, or reader, can see other examples in texts from Callirhoe to Sinbad where
characters are said to feint as if dead, falling into a stupor that the other
characters see as a brush with death. Callirhoe
contains a very violent understanding of this form of perceived death. When Chaereas believes
that Callirhoe is unfaithful to him, the young man kicks his bride so hard that
she passes into a state of near death. The family and the lover are
appropriately aggrieved by the actions, and eventually the woman is laid in a
tomb where her lover plans to join her.
In both of these
manifestations of death, we see a connection between what is perceived to be
real and what the reality is. The stories leave us with an understanding that
death is in the eye of the beholder. For Haroun, as long as his mother was
gone, she was dead. When he slept later and flew to Earth’s second moon, he was
also dead, but only in a sense that the outside world no longer existed to him.
Thus perspective is very important to the concept of the apparent death, but
still it feels as if we are only grasping at the surface of the lake, letting
the waters pour through our fingers as we try to grasp concepts above and beyond
our understanding.
Perhaps the most
subtle forms of apparent death, however, come as simply that: forms. That is to
say that the apparent death, if we see it as a skewed perception of the actual
reality, can also be personified, or rather interpreted, through the lens of
the metamorphosis, or changes of the body into something that it is not. The
reader may see the change as something as grand as the transformation of people
into birds and trees, as in Ovid’s Metamorphoses,
or they may see the same concept in the simple disguises that men and women
characters wear in plays in order to deceive those around them into believing
that they are of the opposite sex. The comic scene between Qamar al-Zaman and his wife Princess Budur certainly comes to
mind as a wonderful example of this same idea. The point remains that, within
this last concept of death, the characters within the novel or story still
consider their significant other to be quite dead.
So far, we have seen a
physical representation of the apparent death, and for all intents and
purposes, this death is indeed physical. Yet, there remains within it an aspect
of the spiritual, a connection to the self, as Weiss would say. While most of
the stories and romances conceive of the apparent death as a physical thing, or
sometimes a lack of the presence of the physical, what we are most interested
in is not the physical but the spiritual. As Northrop Frye notes… “From the beginning the poetic
imagination has inhabited a middle earth. Above it is the sky with whatever it
reveals or conceals… There are four primary narrative movements in literature…
descent from a higher world… descent to a lower world… ascent from a lower
world… the ascent to a higher world” (97).
In other words, the major themes of romance deal in at least some
particular way with either the ascent or the descent. This paper is more
concerned with the latter.
Thus, the motif itself deals with an aspect of the
descent, of the body or spirit, moving from this world, or even a higher realm
of existence, into a lower one. The apparent death drops us from our prescribed
place in the world into an alternate reality, one where we are not meant to be
but where we must reside until we can find our way back to the place from which
we came. Thus, though the apparent death can be seen as a simple image within
the larger scope of the narrative, it is in fact much more profound than such a
simple understanding of the motif would imply. That is, we must dig deeper if
we are to understand the true meaning of Death within romance.
Death, then, is no
longer a physical manifestation but a spiritual struggle between us and the
demons, or more eloquently desires, of a lower world. Death abandons us on the
plains of Tartarus with only our harp as a weapon and demands that we make our
way through the very gates of hell before we may climb back to the peaks of
Mount Olympus. When we finally begin to comprehend the death, not as a physical
manifestation of the events within the story but as a journey that the
characters must undertake in order to reach the ultimate goal of understanding
and enlightenment, we can begin to move from the first level of the knowledge
of death into its murkier and more dangerous depths. Thus Orpheus’s journey to
face the mighty Hades, Persephone’s own abduction by the same Hades, in fact,
more stories than can really be listed in such a short paper, each harnesses
the understanding of that same journey into the underworld as a loss of
identity and a subsequent necessity to understand one’s identity more fully
before the return.
The apparent death we
shall define, then, as a process by which the characters of the story are
metamorphosed, not only physically but internally. Through their many journeys
and close escapes, the characters that we first become transformed into newer
and better representations of their former selves. Yet, the understanding of
the apparent death cannot be defined so easily. Rather, we must take our own
journey from the very beginnings of the heroes and heroines into their own
understanding of a need for change and on to the paths of the dead before we
can finally return to the concepts of death, change, and, perhaps the grandest
and hardest of all to understand, immortality. It is my hope in this paper to
start any readers that may read, on the road to understanding apparent death
and its necessity within the larger scope of the romance, not simply as another
contrivance necessary for the author to push the action along in order to give
his characters something to do, but rather as the main catalyst that spurs the
action on willingly, drawing the reader into a world from which they themselves
cannot return unchanged.
The important concept
to understand, however, is that the reader, himself goes through a sort of
death as he or she reads. The outside world slips away, and the person who
picked up the novel or story no longer maintains a connection with the outside
world if, like Haroun’s father, the story teller has the power to weave the
magic tales that we so desperately desire. The death that we may be looking to
comprehend, is none other than our own, the death we each face every time that
we pick up a book and loose ourselves in the adventures of Haroun or Daphnis
and Chloe or even Sinbad.
Meager Beginnings
Whether we wish to
believe it or not, the heroes that we meet in each of these stories are
imperfect. While their outward appearances may reflect a perfection unequaled
in this world, their internal structure leaves much to be desired. The King in
the quite aptly titled King and the
Corpse, is a man that believes his rule to be perfect. He imagines that he
has nothing more to learn and that he is a benevolent enough king, deigning to
listen to the pleas of the common folk each and every day, and therefore has no
need for spiritual growth. Yet, soon he learns that all his perceptions were
mistaken. First, he discovers that the fruit he has been discarding each day
for the past several years is filled with diamonds. Later, when he has followed
the apparent ascetic priest’s orders to come to a graveyard at night, he does so
to find in short order that he is being deceived, and that the priest is really
a necromancer bent on killing him and taking power from the underworld in order
to rule the world of men. Only with the help of a possessed corpse is the king
able to overcome these obstacles and truly become the king that he is meant to
be.
Zimmer in his book
that bears the name of the tale I have just related, argues that “We are not we
are not wholly or perpetually the kingly personage whom we present to the gaze
of official circles” (219). Rather, our outward appearance is only a partial manifestation
of our inward appearance. In another Hindu myth that I am truly sorry I could
not find and quote for this paper, the god Krishna, disguised as a chariot
driver for the mighty warrior Arjuna, tells the latter to fight his foes. Yet
Arjuna has his doubts. He begins to question the need for such violence and
bloodshed. In many ways, he is a respectable even admirable figure, questioning
the edicts of his god. Any man can be certain of death for challenging their
deities; yet Arjuna stands firm in his beliefs. It is only when the god reveals
his true form, his ultimate inner being
that the mortal Arjuna can begin to comprehend the vast complexities of a world
that not only contains aspects of death but also requires it in much the same
way that, as we will later see, death and life are intertwined.
In a very similar way,
the mortal King of The King and the
Corpse must come to understand both the mortal and the divine within
himself. It is to this end that the specter within the corpse challenges him to
answer the riddles set forth one after the other as the two trek across the
graveyard. It is no coincidence that such a place would resemble the paths of
the dead because, in a way, that is precisely where the king has found himself,
trudging back and forth along the lonely road of mortality, his earthly burden
cast over his shoulder, trying to understand both himself and the purpose for
which he is there.
The corpse, despite
its no doubt haggard and sinister appearance, remains a guide figure, much like
the ghost of Virgil in Dante’s Inferno
and Pergatorio. It brings to him,
with no better way to say this, life puzzles that the man must either solve or
remain silent. However, the threat of death remains because if he knows the
answer but does not proclaim it, then his head will explode. This leaves the
King in quite a precarious position, and, time after time, he answers the
question that the corpse brings before him at the end of each story only to
have the burden leave his shoulder and fly back into the tree. It is only once
the corpse has completely befuddled him that the man is allowed to continue
with his burden. Yet, this “lack” of understanding, hides within its core a
fundamental truth that we can only begin to understand in the echoing vaults of
silence. Zimmer puts it quite more eloquently saying that “[guilt] and
innocence are rarely obvious. They are unapparent, interwoven intimately with
each other in a marvelously convoluted design” (224). Only when he understood
that the deepest and most profound concepts of human identity were beyond
classification, beyond the simple strictures and designs that men could create,
could he truly begin to understand himself and subsequently make the
metamorphosis into something greater than he already was.
The King is lucky,
though. He did not at first recognize that he needed to change. Rather, that
necessity was shown to him on his walk down the paths of the dead. He does not
at first recognize his own lack, his own incompleteness; yet, the story moves
him along anyways granting him that knowledge as he walks the lonely paths of
the dead. For other characters in myth and story, the knowledge of their
division comes far earlier. I concur
with what Northrop Frye labels this concept as, using the term “identity” (Structure of Romance). Much of what Frye
says enlightens any half clever reader that can take only a fraction of what
the man is saying to heart. Frye notes that “divine creation and human self
creation are one” (157). I will be brave enough in postulating that, in this
same sense, the hero and the heroine are one. Perhaps the artists and
dramatists of earlier cultures did not know how to express such an enigmatic
concept, and who could really blame them. Regardless, the fact remains that the
male and female counterparts of the romance can, and should, be seen as two
sides of the same coin. It is why they desire so desperately to be married, to
be joined in one flesh, as the Bible
and other religions profess that marriage accomplishes.
Of course, such a
realization of the happiness of unity cannot possibly come for the characters
so early in a tale. After all, where would the story be without the tensions of
a lost love? Love in this manner takes on the conception of a unifying force of
the masculine and the feminine, or, in other stories, the secular and the
divine. Once the characters understand that they are incomplete, once they
finally see the wholes within themselves, they can begin to make amends, to move
from the worldly, down through hell and on into a greater understanding.
In much the same way
that the characters are meant to understand their incompleteness, so too are
the readers and audience members. Zimmer notes that we, all of us, are kings in
our own right, confused, perhaps more accurately deceived, by the belief that
we are other than our inner selves. The story, the novel, can be seen as the
guide on our shoulder, the specter enchanted corpse probing us with story after
story to try and make us understand that we are more than this shell, and we
must find that part of us which is incomplete if we are to ever take the paths
of the dead and return truly whole.
The Paths of the Dead
Now, perhaps we begin
to get to the meat, the crux, of the situation. In every ancient culture, in
many modern cultures to be more accurate, the deaths are lead along their path
to the underworld by a guide. We have seen corpses and books guide us into
understanding that we must take this path, but we have not yet looked at the
actual process of following the paths themselves. In Greek culture, Hermes
guided dead souls to the cave down which they would descend. At the bottom of
the chasm a ferry waited that, if you could pay the fee, would carry you over
the river Styx and into the land of the dead. This is all rudimentary myth,
yet, it brings us back to an important point. Why must we travel the paths of
the dead in search of knowledge? Only three figures that I have read personally
before this class have literally passed into Hades and returned. The first is
Orpheus whom I mentioned a few pages earlier. The second is Heracles who was
charged to tame and return with the three headed dog Cerberus to the world of
men as one of his twelve labors. The third was Dante himself in the Inferno. Each of these men had either
incredible skill or divine will guiding and protecting him along his way. That
being said then, why would we be charged with traveling the paths of the dead,
if it is impossible?
The simple answer to
this rather troubling question, and one that I am sure will anger no less than
several of my readers, is that the paths of the dead are only a simple
metaphor. Many of you now cringe, perhaps dreading the simple, logical answer;
yet, it stares you in the face. I can only beg that each of you continue
reading. We have already mentioned the descent as described by Northrop Frye.
He does a fantastic job of painting a picture for each reader of a being either
fallen from a heavenly realm down to this one, or a being from this realm who
has fallen to a lower realm. For the purposes of this article, the first
description seems to work best. That is, we will not look at a fall from our
world into some nether realm but, rather, a fall from some higher state of existence
into our own.
Once again Zimmer
seems helpful to our current objectives noting that “the human king is an
avatar, an incarnation… of…god” (234). In other words, the king that we see in
the story is little more than a piece of the greater manifestation of the
divine. It is only because the divine cannot exist in its purist form in this
lesser realm that the king is at all made flesh. Yet, this same concept does
not really do justice to what is going on in the tale. The king, if we will
remember, had forgotten who he really was. Only when the corpse had pealed back
the layers of illusion hiding the inner from the external self, could the king
recognize that he was more than he had at first appeared to be.
In much the same way,
though perhaps on a less profound note, Daphnis
and Chloe deals with a very similar concept in that the two main
characters, aptly named Daphnis and Chloe, find out at the end of the novel
that they are, in fact, born of wealth and prestige. They had lived their
entire lives believing themselves to be sheep and cattle herders when actually
they were the son and daughter of rich merchants and local lords. Once again,
though, it is the necessity of the revelation, the pulling away of the veil of
mystery that allows the male and female to become who they were born to be.
Interestingly enough
we seem to have hit upon a pattern here. Both in the story of Daphnis and Chloe
and in The King and the Corpse, we
see a necessity for the revelation. In Daphnis
and Chloe this newfound knowledge comes rather quickly, almost like the
ripping off of a bandage. However, in the other example, we see a slow
revealing as the corpse tells the man twenty-four stories until finally the
truth is revealed. It is no coincidence, as has been noted before, that the man
continually walked through a graveyard. He might as well have been sauntering
along the same path that Dante took with Virgil. While on the path, the cobwebs
and dust of confusion and secular normalcy are burned away leaving behind only
the truth. The purpose of the walk down such a dreary road pertains, then, to
the necessity for the destruction of all that holds us to this world, all that
binds us, ironically Marley’s own chains bound him in Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol. We walk down the road
to Hades, not because we wish to return with something of this world or that
but because we want something grander and greater than we already know. We
must, in Plato’s understanding, remember what we had forgotten.
In much the same way
that the hero and heroine must come to understand themselves better if they are
to live, we readers must also achieve that goal. Our path lies not on a journey
through a graveyard, hopefully, though we may perhaps be so lucky as to find a
wealthy parent waiting in the wings to welcome us with open arms. Rather, we
must move along the path down which the story takes us, guiding us, through the
experience of the characters into a new understanding of ourselves. That we are
the heroes and heroines of our own romances and that there is within each of us
a spark of the divine that must be uncovered if we are to truly achieve the
greatness that we so desperately desire.
Death and Metamorphosis and Immortality
Once the paths of the
dead have been crossed, once we have been stripped of all our preconceived
notions and shadowy understandings we can begin the process of the
transformation. While the previous section held the keys to our understanding
how to get to such an apotheosis, this one, I hope will allow each reader to
see that the ultimate goal of that long trek down the dark and cavernous paths
of death was necessary only because it allows us to, much like the caterpillar.
I know that those few people who have read my blog before will recognize the
metaphor. Yet, I think it a good one. After all the caterpillar eats and lives
based on its instinct for a particular amount of time before one day weaving a
cocoon around itself. For all intents and purposes, that caterpillar is dead.
Yet within just a few short days, the caterpillar emerges, no longer its
earthbound grub eating former self. It now flies through the air and eats the
nectar of flowers. Interestingly enough the concept of wings is, I believe,
another concept of Plato who perceived that man had once had wings and, through
knowledge and understanding, could grow those appendages anew. The other, and
perhaps more convenient link for this study, is that both butterflies and the
gods of ancient Greece consumed nectar. Thus we have almost a perfect
representation of the apotheosis of the human, that is the reconstruction of
the mortal into the divine.
In The King and the Corpse the king, upon
understanding his divinity sees the descent of Shiva and the other gods to the
place where he stands. There they reveal to him the fact that at the end of his
earthly life he will return to the heavens and rule the domain of the dead for
many years afterward. It is this divinity that the man has, perhaps without
knowing it, been searching for his entire life.
In much the same way,
we, as the readers, find ourselves woven into a story that we did not even know
existed. Immersed in the story, we, if we are careful, can finally become aware
that our wholeness, the unity of ourselves is not simply measured in the number
of atoms that make up our physical being. Most of what we are comes from
within. It is only when we open up the story that we can begin to see this
reality, that we can finally understand that the ultimate road to immorality
lies not in the cures of science nor the numbers of mathematics but in the ebbs
and flows of the Ocean of Streams of Stories. Once we dive into its depths and
begin to understand the vast panorama that surrounds us, for we can only truly begin to comprehend it, do we truly
begin to understand the immense, immeasurable, immortal complexities of our own
being. The story is a mirror of our internal selves, the glass that we hold up,
the all seeing third eye of Shiva that burns away any identity we may have
assumed for ourselves and leaves us with only the basic, true, and what can
only be called divine aspect of our essential being. We die, as those in the
stories die, “apparently” so that we may truly learn to live.
[1]
See Weiss’s discussion entitled Immortality
to which much of the next part of my discussion is indebted.
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