Eyes Speak Lies ...

I thought it was written on bricks
And had crumbled to saffron dust
It was, but, etched on rock, grey
And simply smeared with mud

posted by Swetank Gupta @ 9:59 pm 11 Comments

Memento Mori : Death - A Literary Theme

Through valleys dark and deep, over mountains proud and rigid, beside meadows lush and green, past time gone and towards ensuing moments, beneath the azure firmament and the eternal Sun, flows life. Life that courses its way around the anomalies that it encounters, ever moving, ever fighting, tirelessly, discounting all obstacles barring one. Death. Death the inevitable. Death the adorable. Death the abominable. When life runs into death, occurs a transfusion like none other, a surrender so complete, so dignified that silence alone dares speak. The journey beyond is a hazy picture of ambivalence, invisible to our restricted vision.

“Give me a prejudice and I will move the world”, writes Gabriel Garcia Marquez in his novel, Chronicle Of A Death Foretold.

Never did a statement hold more truth than this does for the ingrained prejudice against death that we nurture. Across cultures and languages, over different periods of time and in every era, authors have dealt with the sensitive issue of death, its consequences and the inferences they derive from this side of the brook. Thematically speaking, death or one of its manifestations becomes the fulcrum of every text from the neo classic to the romantic to the modern and post modern era. Even when the author intends to portray a different theme, death, or a desire to attain victory over this untamed adversary forms the underlying basis of almost all the works. Most authors, both poets and prose writers, treat death as something despicable, to be averted with one’s utmost efforts. Death, to its credit, finds solace in the works of certain authors like ‘Emily Dickinson’ who treat it with reverence, not conforming to popular social and religious beliefs.

Giving in to the will of death means permanent loss of the self as we see it. The soul and life beyond death form good bedtime stories but are yet to be substantiated with indubitable proof. From this feeling of helplessness against death, emanates a desire to subdue it, to bend its will according to one’s own, to thwart its efforts of sending one rolling down the abyss of obscurity. The eminent Elizabethan age poet and playwright, William Shakespeare, in his Sonnet 18, describes the beauty and tenderness of the person he is dedicating the poem to. Yet he speaks of fading glory with the passage of time and the undeniable end of everything. He seeks to immortalize the beauty of his subject by capturing it in his lines so that it remains unfazed by death. He tries to render eternal glory to something as transient and superficial as physical beauty. The following lines from the same sonnet are extremely revealing of the prevalent prejudices against death at that time.


The obsession with death has its roots in the invincibility that death possesses. No one has ever been able to exert his or her authority over the shackles of death.

“Death, my lord, are your realms pristine”, pleaded the mortal. “All that’s left is the unseen, the sky's bloody blue, my blood's sky-serene”, replied death.

Death as a symbol of redemption is portrayed in the poems of Emily Dickinson. The mystifying appeal of death is not something unique. Thinkers have dwelled over the question of what lies on the other side since times immemorial. Dickinson feels that once one touches the shores of death, one is liberated from the bounds of this irrational world. Death to her is eternity. Her imagination stretches far and on the other side of the sealed door of death, she perceives majestic secrets never seen or heard by the people of this world.


In her poems, she uses the standard imagery of life and death being separated by a brook or river, with all mortals stranded on one side of the river. She, unlike myriads of humans around her, craves to embrace death as it is the ultimate form of deliverance from worldly and material ties. Her arcane language is indicative of her attraction to mysticism, the life after death and the lands beyond borders of mortal life. Death is the transcendence of the self, a confluence with the higher being. The following lines would probably describe best, her fascination with death.


The most popular of romantic poets, John Keats in his beautifully crafted poem Ode To Autumn, is in a melancholic mood. In his dying days, he identifies with Autumn as the season of death when all that bloomed during Spring is in the final stages of its life. Life before its end, is at its peak, overflowing, excessive, misleading. He is trying to come to terms with the knowledge of his own death at the time he conceived this poem and sees it as a form of deliverance. This is when he tells Autumn that it need not worry, since it had it’s own music, albeit gloomy in nature. Without being didactic, the poems borders on the issues of pantheism and the misery associated with the last stages of life.

“O! Death, the invincible, sympathy I plead. Heal not my scars”, bellowed the mortal, braving death. “You see horizons and beyond, of the lack of walls, you grow fond. Alas! you can't see the bars, unless you try to reach the stars”, offered death.

The highly controversial author of popular books like ‘Midnight’s Children’ and ‘The Satanic Verses’, Salman Rushdie, in his story The Prophet’s Hair from the collection ‘East, West’ mocks at the fallacy of religion, ridiculous beliefs associated with it, and absurd practices that go with fanaticism. The story meanders through these issues and culminates with the death of all of Hashim’s family and the thief, who meet their unfortunate end as a result of their association with the relic that was the prophet’s hair. Though Rushdie is predominantly concerned with the matter of hollow rituals of religiosity, and the misfortune it brings about to unsuspecting individuals, the misfortune manifests itself in the form of the death of innocent people. It is portrayed as a misfortune of the highest order and Rushdie, very evidently considers death as an unpleasant experience.

The issue of death as a misfortunate occurrence arises again in The Story Of An Hour by Kate Chopin. The death of her husband in an accident was supposed to evoke feelings of despair and agony in Mrs. Mallard but Louise takes over, who rather relishes her new found freedom than grieve her loss. The resurgence of life in the spirit of Louise, that was her self, at the death of her spouse, is antithetical. Even the thought that a death could give one happiness is repulsive, to say the least. The death of Louise on the return of her husband is comical, unfortunate and revealing. This strand of thought of death being an unpleasant, unfortunate incident that runs across all texts shows the fear of the unknown and jibes at the fickle nature of human mind and life.


One of the best Spanish poets, Chile born Pablo Neruda, through his poems which bespoke of his communist sympathies, has become a symbol of resistance to tyranny. In the above lines from his poem Explico Algunas Cosas (I’m Explaining A Few Things), which translate to devouring of human beings by bonfires leaping out of the earth, he condemns Franco and his allies for the massacre that is a consequence of their greed for power. Innocent individuals, children and women, are killed in the quest of certain people with convoluted mindset for exerting their supremacy over the others. He describes a heart-rending scene of blood flowing in the streets, a very powerful image of death that seeps into your very existence and shakes you out of your complacency. Neruda too, describes death as unfortunate for those who were needless victims and as a grotesque act of unabated hunger for its perpetrators. It is the destruction, the death of humans, of children, of morals and values, of humanity, of sanity, that coaxes him to give up his love poetry and write for a cause, the cause of mankind. Again, death it is that triggers him.


In The Dead, James Joyce, the Irish author reiterates the death of feelings and inspiration in the middle class of Ireland in particular and throughout the world in general. The two lines above succinctly express the state of people who go about their daily chores oblivious to their immediate surroundings and the happenings that mark them. The story is woven around the issues of inanity in the life of people, of the relinquishing of one’s roots while adopting foreign culture, of the farce that is marriage, where two apparently wedded individuals are appendages in each others lives, unaware of the needs and desires of their partner. He talks of the death of the relationship that goes by the name of marriage, of the death of the vapid in an individual when it is that today defines lives of all. Again, in this story as well, the death of Michael Furey, antithetically, enlivened something in Gretta, albeit in an entirely different manner as compared to Mrs. Mallard of Chopin’s story. If we were to consider that Furey, in truth, laid down his life for Gretta, this becomes the highest form of sacrifice that one could make for one’s love. Here, too, death assumes gigantic proportions. Whether we see death as redemption, misfortune, or punishment, we observe it is always the extreme, the biggest form of expression, of sacrifice, of freedom, of reprieve.

“O! cruel master of fate, O! death, shall thee not forgive my mistake”, cried the mortal. “In my arms, refuge you must take. Justice is at stake”, observed death.

Death at the zenith of the punishment tree is another image that can be evidently witnessed in a whole lot of works by various authors. In The Second Coming, William Butler Yeats writes about the second coming of Christ, an event that will mark the end of mankind since it must pay for its sinful deeds. Ethics lying askew, morals gone astray, the spirit of humanism in search of an abode, this age of the beast or Satan must end. The second coming marks the reining of the beast, which would also imply the death of mankind as we all have sinned during the course of our lives. The punishment that we must face for our sins is death, nothing less.

John Steinbeck, the Nobel prize winning American author of books like ‘Grapes Of Wrath’, in his novella Of Mice And Men, narrates the story of two friends whose circumstances take them to a ranch where one of them, Lennie, must meet his end. The story pauses at each character, to ensconce the essence of the plight of the working class in the U.S. of A. during 1930s. One such character is Candy who is a misfit in the capitalist society due to his handicap and was soon to be thrown off when he could reap for his employers no further benefits. Even his dog was not borne with and shot dead for it did not fulfill any purpose whatsoever. George kills his closest friend, Lennie, in the moment of Lennie's ecstasy because he too, was not supposed to be a part of them. His naivete posed problems for him at every step and the only way to release him from the clutches of this unrelenting world. George knew that this was Lennie’s moment of salvation while the others were content at him being aptly punished for killing Curley’s wife. Steinbeck, as well, does not see death in a positive light in his work but it is a sure way to escape from the profanities of this world, as death, very definitely demarcates the boundaries that one can cross and hope to come back from those that shut their doors on you forever.

The Tell-tale Heart by Edgar Allen Poe is another example where the story revolves around the frayed edges of death. I say frayed since the old man who was murdered in cold blood must have been nearing his death anyway, and also since death has ever since the inception of mankind, embraced so many of our kind, that its boundaries must be painstakingly old and worn out. Poe takes us on a journey through the mind of a character which appears to be insane at the very least and wants to kill a person just because he wants to get rid of the eye of that person. The only way he could think of to relieve himself of this predicament was to send the old man into a deep slumber for eternity.

Marquez accuses a whole town for being responsible for the death of Santiago Nasar in his Chronicle Of A Death Foretold. The Vicario brothers, according to the customs that prevailed, were supposed to avenge the loss of virginity of their sister by robbing Santiago of his life. His punishment was to be of such a magnitude. Every soul in town affirmed that the nature and measure of punishment was appropriate, given that he was responsible for the crime. Death, which the bravest resist, has to be dished out to satisfy hollow morals and double standards.

The shores of death beckon some but more are pushed over to the other side by mere chance or indiscretion. Life hands over the baton of fate of an individual to death when they chance to meet and from then on, obscurity or serenity, whichever way one looks at it, is the destiny of the subject. This innate knowledge and even fear of death is brought out in every work of authors despite their differences in cultures, age and languages. Life finds beauty inherently in the fact that it has to end some day. The profligacy of life is enhanced when one encounters death.

One very famous literary meditation on death would be Hamlet's classic "To be or not to be..."

posted by Swetank Gupta @ 6:55 am 5 Comments