To Be Or Not: Dunbar and Juster On Suicide

Topics discussed in this episode include:

-That famous soliliquy

-"The Myth of Sisyphus" by Albert Camus

-Inferno Canto XIII

-"Orthodoxy" by G.K. Chesterton

-The Catechism of the Catholic Church

-Prayopavesa

-Martyrs, Berserkers, Stoics and Samurai

-"The Right To Die" by Paul Laurence Dunbar

-"No" by A.M. Juster

-"Resume" by Dorothy Parker

Transcript

Versecraft 6-6: To Be Or Not: Dunbar and Juster On Suicide

“To be, or not to be, that is the question.” What does it say about our species that the most famous and celebrated utterance by the most famous and celebrated writer in world history is a soliloquy debating the merits of suicide? The Algerian absurdist Albert Camus went even further than Hamlet, claiming that the question of suicide was the only important philosophical question. The force of this claim lies not in some radical assumption that suicide ideation is a constant and overriding feature of human mental life—for most of us, it is not. Rather, it is in the insight that living is a choice, and to choose to live implies a belief in the meaningfulness of life. To discover and realize what this meaning consists of then becomes the ultimate quest of both every individual and of civilization generally. We cannot even begin to embark on this quest however without a basic belief in the goodness, the worthwhileness, of our lives. It is where we start. To question this goodness is to question every effort and edifice of human activity, and this threat to the very substrate of our existence is, unsurprisingly, an object of fascination to the inquiring intellect. 

The prospect of suicide is fascinating for other reasons, too. It presents us with a vicious tangle of moral quandaries which often verge on the tantalizingly paradoxical: is the murder of the self truly murder? Is it even technically an act of violence? Is suicide always fundamentally selfish? Is it the most cowardly thing one can do, or the most courageous? Is it rational or irrational? Is it necessarily evil, or might it, in some circumstances, be the most righteous course of action? Thousands of years of thinking by billions of minds, and the jury is still out. 

If there is one thing that many people agree on, spanning across the philosophical and religious spectrum, it is that the acceptability and moral status of suicide is context dependent. In Abrahamic religions, the commandment “thou shalt not kill” is interpreted to forbid suicide, and the act is universally condemned as a rejection of God’s creation. However, while Catholic thinkers like Dante and Chesterton railed against suicide as one of the gravest and most grotesque sins, at the same time, they venerated martyrs whose very holiness consisted in choosing death over life, a quality which to a certain extent was exhibited by Jesus himself. The modern Catechism of the Catholic Church is far more tolerant than either Dante or Chesterton. In paragraphs 2282 and 2283 it states:

"Grave psychological disturbances, anguish, or grave fear of hardship, suffering, or torture can diminish the responsibility of the one committing suicide. We should not despair of the eternal salvation of persons who have taken their own lives. By ways known to him alone, God can provide the opportunity for salutary repentance. The Church prays for persons who have taken their own lives.” 

In Judaism and Eastern Orthodoxy, similar mercy is granted to those who commit suicide under severe mental or emotional duress. In Buddhism, suicide is usually forbidden due to its violent nature and karmic consequences, but may be acceptable for those who have truly detached themselves from earthly passions. In Hinduism, suicide is frowned upon as an act of violence and impiety, but may be permissible to the elderly and disabled who, no longer able to fulfill their civic and familial duties, wish to undergo Prayopavesa, ritual starvation. 

Besides the case of martyrdom, wherein an individual willingly goes to their death as an act of faith, there are several other kinds of situations where suicide has been viewed not only as acceptable, but praiseworthy. To pursue battle against impossible odds, for instance, has often been seen as an act of commendable valor. Indeed, in Norse theology, one could not reach the highest realms of the afterlife without dying in battle, which encouraged many to pursue a martial death with reckless abandon. Suicide has also been lauded as an act of dedicated civil obedience, as in the cases of Seneca and Socrates. For the Stoics, suicide was preferable to living in a situation where one could not live up to one’s standard of virtue. It was for this reason that Cato, seeing a Caesarian dictatorship imminent, took his own life at Utica, an act for which he has been celebrated ever since, even by the Christian West. According to Bushido, the code of the samurai, a warrior who had been disgraced or who would otherwise be forced to betray his master was obligated to commit seppuku, ritual suicide, in order to maintain his honor and the honor of his family. Some of these practices may seem foreign to a contemporary Western audience, but even we tend to lionize those who, whether in books, movies, or real life, willingly sacrifice themselves either for a noble cause or for the sake of others. “Save yourself, go on without me!” is a cliché of our narratives. 

All of this ought to demonstrate, even without getting into the question of personal suffering, that suicide is not an issue upon which one can in good faith pronounce a single, universal moral judgement. There are simply too many variations and too many variables. For those of us who believe in the goodness of life (which in a broad sense is all of us, otherwise we wouldn’t be here) suicide will always strike us as unfortunate, and our biological and moral biases lead us to take actions to prevent it in ourselves and others. The fact that suicide is generally undesirable however does not mean that those who commit suicide are necessarily doing something morally wrong, and this is a crucial distinction: causing displeasure and being immoral are not the same thing. If we are wise, we will give up on the attempt to treat suicide as a monolithic issue of which we may approve or disapprove, and rather try to focus on particular situations and instances as more suitable for the exercise of moral investigation. 

For the remainder of this episode, I would like to examine two poems which take opposite views on the legitimacy of suicide. Neither poem discusses a specific situation in detail, but both, by revealing their assumptions, may help us to refine our own views, and by contrasting these poems, we may acquire a greater grasp of the complexity of the question. 

The first is an intriguing piece of blank verse rhetoric entitled “The Right To Die,” written by Paul Laurence Dunbar. Dunbar, who lived from 1872 to 1906, was born in Dayton, Ohio, the son of former slaves, and was later a classmate of the Wright brothers. After his early poetry was discovered and promoted by literary notables like James Whitcomb Riley and William Dean Howells, Dunbar became the first nationally famous African-American poet, acclaimed for the charm and craftsmanship of his verse, as well as his ability to speak powerfully on the African American condition and bring Black dialects into American poetry. As with Keats, Dunbar’s precocious career was cut short by tuberculosis, of which he died at the age of 33. Despite the brevity of his life, Dunbar has come to be considered the founding father of modern African American poetry, and an acknowledged inspiration by figures as varied as Frederick Douglass, Robert Hayden, and Maya Angelou. 

Written when Dunbar was in his mid-twenties, “The Right To Die” is an impassioned rejection of the superstition and moral taboo surrounding suicide. The poem goes like this: 

The Right To Die

I have no fancy for that ancient cant
 That makes us masters of our destinies,
 And not our lives, to hold or give them up
 As will directs; I cannot, will not think
 That men, the subtle worms, who plot and plan
 And scheme and calculate with such shrewd wit,
 Are such great blund'ring fools as not to know
 When they have lived enough.

Men court not death
 When there are sweets still left in life to taste.
 Nor will a brave man choose to live when he,
 Full deeply drunk of life, has reached the dregs,
 And knows that now but bitterness remains.
 He is the coward who, outfaced in this,
 Fears the false goblins of another life.
 I honor him who being much harassed
 Drinks of sweet courage until drunk of it,--
 Then seizing Death, reluctant, by the hand,
 Leaps with him, fearless, to eternal peace!

            There is something of a young man’s bravado in this poem, and the description of humans as “subtle worms” and Christian doctrine as “false goblins” was no doubt designed to shock. Yet the argument is deployed in an admirably pure and frank style and the poem succeeds not only in convincing us of the nobility he preaches, but in demonstrating it. Despite the lack of rhyme, the music is masterful: the meter is perfectly orthodox, but never boring, and the frequent alliteration—as in the line, “full deeply drunk of life, has reached the dregs,” adds a sparkling energy. 

            The argument runs as follows: It is an absurd or hypocritical doctrine which says that man was gifted free will yet is forbidden to do with his life what he likes, which may include the disposing of it. It is moreover condescending to believe that humans, who are so calculating in other matters, are incapable of properly assessing when their own lives should end. No one seeks death who still has pleasures ahead of them, and no brave man holds on to life when he knows he only has bitterness ahead of him. Only cowards fear the false threat of a punishment in the afterlife. I honor the man who lives a courageous life, then enthusiastically kills himself when he feels life has nothing left to offer. 

            Dunbar asserts that, contrary to the opinion of his day, suicide may be an act of courage rather than cowardice, a rational embrace of death rather than an irrational fleeing from life. That this is sometimes the case is undeniable, as in the case of the terminal cancer patient or dementia sufferer who elects to be euthanized. To Hamlet, who lamented that people choose to endure miserable lives because they are afraid of the “undiscovered country” beyond, Dunbar scoffs scornfully, judging such superstitious fears mere excuses for cowardice. 

            As much as we might sympathize with Dunbar’s view, and as much as we might hope to have the courage to embrace our own deaths when the time is right, there are problems with his argument. To begin with, just because you think a doctrine is ridiculous and fodder for cowards is no proof that it is not true. A person who genuinely believes that God condemns suicide and that hell awaits them after death is not going to be convinced otherwise by Dunbar’s dismissive handwaving. 

Even if we do accept Dunbar’s Epicurean hypothesis, which is just as unprovable as any other, that death is mere nothingness, there is a larger problem—namely, we may not share Dunbar’s confidence that a human being is or can be a perfect judge of when their life ought to end. As we know from the testimony of countless survivors of suicide attempts, many who plunge from a bridge or swallow fistfuls of sleeping pills immediately regret doing so, and realize with tragic clarity at the instant of no return that their insurmountable difficulties were not as insurmountable as they thought. In light of such terrible mistakes, to be as cavalier as Dunbar about letting people go their own way seems utterly irresponsible. 

This fact however does not justify us in generally pronouncing, as some do, that “suicide is a permanent solution to a temporary problem.” This may sometimes be the case, and in such cases we are obligated to do all we can to help such circumstantially overwhelmed people see reason, but it is also true that people who elect to end themselves are often dealing with problems that they know will haunt them their whole lives, like severe depression or other debilitating mental illness. Such people may be, despite all efforts, marked for lifelong misery. In all cases, we ought to provide suicidal individuals with the counsel and support they need to choose life, but in some truly persistent cases, we may perceive that it is most merciful to let these people cast themselves away. To force someone to endure daily torture in order to make ourselves feel better is very far from humane. 

Before moving on, let us hear Dunbar’s poem one more:

The Right To Die

I have no fancy for that ancient cant
 That makes us masters of our destinies,
 And not our lives, to hold or give them up
 As will directs; I cannot, will not think
 That men, the subtle worms, who plot and plan
 And scheme and calculate with such shrewd wit,
 Are such great blund'ring fools as not to know
 When they have lived enough.

Men court not death
 When there are sweets still left in life to taste.
 Nor will a brave man choose to live when he,
 Full deeply drunk of life, has reached the dregs,
 And knows that now but bitterness remains.
 He is the coward who, outfaced in this,
 Fears the false goblins of another life.
 I honor him who being much harassed
 Drinks of sweet courage until drunk of it,--
 Then seizing Death, reluctant, by the hand,
 Leaps with him, fearless, to eternal peace!

            I think we are now ready to hear the other side, in the form of a bracing sonnet by the poet A.M. Juster, simply and forbiddingly entitled, “No.” A.M. Juster is the nom de plume of Michael J. Astrue, an American attorney and a former Social Security Commissioner of the United States, associate counsel to the president, and general counsel for the U.S. Department of Health. Apart from his considerable career in politics, law, and business, Astrue is also an accomplished poet and classicist. Under the “Juster” moniker, he has won the Howard Nemerov Sonnet Award a record three times, the Richard Wilbur Award, and the Willis Barnstone translation prize, published numerous books of original poetry, translations of Petrarch, Tibullus, and Horace, among others, and served as the poetry editor of First Things and Plough Quarterly. He is, I think, the closest thing the modern world has to a Renaissance man, a poet-statesman-scholar along the lines of Sir Philip Sidney, Walter Raleigh, or Andrew Marvell. 

            His award-winning sonnet, “No,” is a cold rebuke to the hot swagger of Dunbar. It goes like this: 

No

No, not this time.  I cannot celebrate
 a man’s discarded life, and will not try;
 these knee-jerk elegies perpetuate
 the nightshade lies of Plath.  Why glorify
 descent into a solipsistic hell?
 Stop.  Softly curse the waste.  Don’t elevate
 his suffering to genius.  Never tell
 me he will live on.  Never call it fate.

Attend the service.  Mourn.  Pray.  Comfort those
 he lacerated.  Keep him in your heart,
 but use that grief to teach.  When you compose
 a line, it is a message, not just art.
 Be furious with me, but I refuse
 to praise him.  No, we have too much to lose.

            Similar to Dunbar, Juster uses punctuation and brilliant rhythmic modulation, as well as, in his case, frequent enjambment, to give his perfectly metrical, perfectly rhymed English sonnet a sense of speech-like immediacy. Unlike in the Dunbar, we seem here to be dealing with a specific instance of suicide, a “this time,” yet, as with many of the heresies of late antiquity, all we know of the circumstance is the extant writer’s condemnation of it. Juster rebukes those who would elegize or eulogize a man’s descent into a “solipsistic hell,” and thereby perpetuate, or perpetrate, as a later version has it, the “nightshade lies of Plath,” a reference to the confessional writer Sylvia Plath, who romanticized her own suicide attempts in her writing before eventually succeeding in destroying herself. 

            In such a polemical poem as this, it is important to take stock of what exactly the poet is criticizing. It is unclear whether Juster believes that all suicide involves “descent into a solipsistic hell,” but he clearly believes that this particular instance did. Whether his judgement is correct we are at a loss to say, we simply do not have enough information. Accusations of solipsism are never positive, but it is nevertheless also unclear that Juster holds the suicidal man to blame for his fatal act. Given the vitriol of Juster’s language, his claim that the suicide “lacerated” his loved ones, and his insistence that the man not be praised may lead us to assume that he does indeed hold the man morally responsible for his self-slaughter, but this would actually be a leap, even if it is a leap in the right direction. In reality, the only subjects whom Juster actively castigates are the elegizing mourners, and this is an important point. The thrust of Juster’s specific argument is not that suicide is sinful, but that suicide is a horror that must not be glamorized under any circumstances. Whether he takes this reasonable point too far we will examine in a moment. 

            What exactly does Juster refuse to do? He will not celebrate a discarded life; he will not glorify severe depression; he will not elevate suffering to genius; he will not praise the man. Notice however that these actions are not mutually inclusive— one negation does not necessitate or imply the others. To two of these negations we can immediately assent: it is obviously wrong to glorify depression, and obviously wrong to elevate suffering to genius. To do so is not only unjustified, but can only have negative effects on our society. While it is doubtful that a typical person, even a typical depressed person, will rush to leap off a bridge because his favorite poet did so, people who are particularly vulnerable, impressionable, and unstable may be pushed over the edge, figuratively and literally, if they are encouraged to see suicide as a guaranteed way of gaining prestige, sympathy, redemption, or attention. For more on this phenomenon, see my episode on Confessionalism. Furthermore, it is only logical to presume that the more that suicide becomes normalized and accepted in a society, the more it will occur in that society. Historical Japan is a significant example. 

            However, one may condemn suicide as tragic, or even, in certain cases, as selfish and irresponsible, without refusing to praise or celebrate the life of someone who commits it. Obviously, no one should be praised or celebrated because they committed suicide, and here we may say that Juster is entirely in the right. However, Juster puzzlingly refuses to make this distinction, and seems to say that, in order to discourage suicide in others, we must refuse to celebrate or praise someone who commits it in general. This strikes me, as I know it strikes some others, as deeply unfair. Juster seems aware that he will be perceived as harsh, saying that others may “be furious” with him, but that he must insist upon his position because “we have too much to lose.” He does not however give any argument for why refusing to praise a person generally would be a more effective tactic of dissuasion than the specific condemnation of suicide. If a good friend of mine were to commit suicide, I would lament the fact that they did so, and I would refuse to glorify or praise that horrible act, but it would not blind me to the many virtues which they possessed in their life, virtues which it is the duty of loved ones to share and remember. Were I to give a eulogy, it would be an insult not only to the memory of my friend but an insult to the intelligence of my audience to act as if the goodness of the person and the badness of their end could not be distinguished. 

I think that Juster’s poem is an important one, as I too passionately believe that poetry is “a message, not just art,” and that Juster’s attitude is, to a point, a needed corrective to the hyper-romantic neo-confessionalism of modern poetic culture. I cannot follow his argument all the way, however. Even if we assume that suicide is a sin, to condemn the memory of the sinner along with the sin strikes me as more vindictive than morally effective. We may “use our grief to teach” as Juster suggests, but this teaching may actually be all the more impactful if we also recognize the goodness we have lost. 

Attuned to the rage and sadness beneath the blistering admonishment, let’s now hear this poem one last time:

No

No, not this time.  I cannot celebrate
 a man’s discarded life, and will not try;
 these knee-jerk elegies perpetuate
 the nightshade lies of Plath.  Why glorify
 descent into a solipsistic hell?
 Stop.  Softly curse the waste.  Don’t elevate
 his suffering to genius.  Never tell
 me he will live on.  Never call it fate.

Attend the service.  Mourn.  Pray.  Comfort those
 he lacerated.  Keep him in your heart,
 but use that grief to teach.  When you compose
 a line, it is a message, not just art.
 Be furious with me, but I refuse
 to praise him.  No, we have too much to lose.

Ultimately, the proper view toward any given suicide must take into consideration the highly specific factors and reasons which went into it, and, while never ceasing to forget larger social ramifications, be guided by a basic sense of empathy. No one commits suicide who is neither A. In a state of irrational desperation, or B. in a state of principled resolve. The former are to be pitied more than judged, and the latter, even if we fiercely disagree with their conclusions, must at least be taken seriously as the primary authorities on the tenability of their own lives. As believers and upholders of the sanctity of life, it is our duty to attempt to give comfort to the desperate, and offer a firm, guiding hand to those who need our help to survive their own temporary crises. To those who are beyond our help, yet who are duty-bound to live through consideration of their dependents, we must give constant strength and encouragement. And to those beyond our help who have settled their affairs and responsibilities, we must steel ourselves and wish them peace in whatever they decide to do. 

I’d like to conclude on a little bit a of a lighter note, courtesy of Dorothy Parker. In her famous epigram “Resume,” she writes:

Razors pain you;

Rivers are damp;

Acids stain you;

And drugs cause cramp.

Guns aren’t lawful;

Nooses give;

Gas smells awful;

You might as well live.