Narrative, desire and the death-instinct

                               ‘Desire is death’ – William Shakespeare

When we read narrative fiction do we, as readers, want the knowledge of our own death? We do according to Walter Benjamin. His argument is that because we are denied that in our real lives we seek it from narrative. We are searching for the total comprehension of what went before. What drives us through the desire to read on is the anticipation of that act of retrospection. As we read on we read meanings that only become final at the very end. When we look at it like that we can understand the subconscious things we do as readers of narrative fiction. The act of flipping back through the book to re-read parts that suddenly take on a new meaning or level of significance. The way we can read a book several times and actually come away with something new each time that maybe we missed in previous readings. As Peter Brooks discusses in Reading for the Plot ‘Anticipation of restrospection is our chief tool in  making sense of narrative: we read on in confident dependence on the idea that what remains to be read will end in restructuring the provisional meanings of what we’ve already read’.

Brooks also believes that the reading of the plot is a form of desire. The reader has a duplication of the desire of the protagonist of the story. This links back to Freud’s work Beyond the Pleasure Principle. His theory was that there is always a psychic battle going on within each of us between the pleasure principle – eros – and the death instinct – thanatos. His argument is that yes, we all wish to gather separate beings in one totality but we also all want to return to a state of peace. Brooks believes that this battle is played out again in the act of reading. The last page of a book is both a moment of fulfillment and a moment of death. Both the pleasure principle and the death instinct together. The French saying for orgasm is ‘la petite mort’ which translated means ‘the little death’. Roland Barthes, theorist and literary critic once used this concept to describe the feeling you should get when reading great literature.

How death and desire exist together in a narrative was looked at by Dennis De Rougemont in his book Love in the Western World. He looks at love stories like Romeo and Juliet and traces them back to what he calls the origins of this kind of story,‘Tristan and Isolde’ an ancient Celtic story (on a side note the 2006 film version of Tristan and Isolde is well worth a look). Their love can never be satisfied and can only end with their death. He explores the founding myth of love – does love actually want the obstacles that are thrown in its way because what love actually wants is death? Is this where the idea in Western culture comes from that the truest love ends in death? The ultimate sacrifice and the noblest end. Jonathan Dollimore explores De Rougemont’s work in his book Death, Desire and Loss in Western Culture when talking about Tristan and Isolde ‘Parting is an obstruction, and the passion of the two lovers creates such obstructions because these are what it really wants. And behind the desire for obstruction is the desire for death, which passion ultimately serves’. He also looks at Romeo and Juliet in depth and he views this as a good example of death and desire bound together ‘That this is a play about the paradoxical binding together of desire and death is clear enough: in the Prologue the passion of the young lovers is described as a “death-marked love”’. It is clear when reading this play that desire and death are threaded together throughout the narrative side by side before reaching the climactic end. Dollimore’s take on the ending is also very interesting ‘It has been said that Romeo, when he incites ‘love-devouring death’ (II.v.7), is desiring and not defying death, and that his belief that Juliet is dead in the tomb is less the cause of his own suicide than the excuse for it’. Death and desire become as one and it is hard to find where one exists without the other or where one starts and the other begins.