The Designated Mourner

Photo: Brigitte Lacombe

In Wally Shawn’s The Designated Mourner currently revived at the Public Theater, under the direction of Andre Gregory, neither Jack (Wally Shawn), self-described as “a former student of English literature who went downhill from there,” nor Judy (Deborah Eisenberg) his wife, nor Howard, Judy’s father (Larry Pine), who has written a book called The Enemy and who flies “each day on wings of scorn” talk to each other. They speak all their monologues as if the others weren’t there and what interactions that do occur are replays of scenes from the past. In one sense the very form of the play which might be subtitled Strange Interlude For Smarties tells the whole story. The Designated Mourner conforms to the Aristotelian unities to the extent that there is unity of time, place and action (the central action being the downfall of Western civilization), but the comparison to Aristotle, perhaps the greatest and most powerful symbol of the western esthetic, ends there—since in the most profound sense The Designated Mourner has no beginning, middle and end. That’s the genius of the play and its problem as it takes the form of a Socratic dialogue/monologue that could go on forever. What are the subjects? Them and us (“the disemboweling of the overboweled”), hi and lo brow, and most particularly the nature of the self. At one point Jack has an affair with Peg, a girl who operates a lemonade stand. “Jack I love you,” she says. “Is she talking about me,” Jack remarks. “My name rang oddly in my ears.” Of course the disembodied self is a theme that might have appeared in Beckett, albeit with different syntax. If The Designated Mourner were a horror film, then Oedipus would have been the creature that Dr. Frankenstein created. The first half of the play is all about triangulation in both its sexual and historical forms with the second “act,” which suffers from its share of redundancy, having to do with the downfall of the Holy Trinity of Howard, Jack and Judy,  as Western Civilization meets it’s maker. The father dies just in time for the son to lose his hard-on. “My dick lay limply in my trousers like a lunch packed by mother,” Jack comments, as he relieves himself of Judy and relieves himself (and defecates) on a volume of John Donne’s poetry. 

Endgame

James Atlas begins a recent Times Op-Ed piece by quoting Ray Kurzweil’s The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology saying, “ ‘software-based humans’ will be able to survive indefinitely on the Web, ‘projecting bodies whenever they need or want them, including virtual bodies in diverse realms of virtual reality’” (“Life Goes On, and On…,” NYT 12/17/11). There are three circumstances which mitigate against the benefits of life extension and possible immortality according to Atlas:  economics (social security and Medicare are imperiled), quality of life (what good is it to live with consciousness and the senses increasingly limited), the horror of outliving children (Atlas provides the anecdotal case of a recently deceased Washington Post executive, a college classmate of his, whose mother outlived him). And then Atlas brings up the question of the children, the aging baby boomers who have to support parents whose savings have run out and whose medical care is becoming increasingly prohibitive. This is an interesting point that deserves amplification. The “make love not war” generation believed in the sanctity of all life. Their mantra might have been John Donne’s famous line “any man's death diminishes me.” Yet now managing chronically ill parents kept alive by the wonders of modern medicine, many alumni love children may experience untoward emotions. Every one admires older people with spirit, but sometimes the desire to live can be so voracious as to feel like greed. The aging parent who refuses to die seems to be sucking the life out of his own child. Much is made of the oedipal feelings of children, but there's the less talked about Medea Complex which though usually limited to describing the hatred of mothers could also be employed to describe the homicidal and competitive feelings of parents in general towards the children who will outlive them, outdo them and freely partake of all the pleasures which they (the parents) are no longer able to perform or enjoy. No one wants to die. That’s what keeps gun toting criminals in business. Yet will the current generation, perhaps the first to experience the negative effects of longevity, be willing to pull the plug on themselves? No one wants to look up from the hospital bed at the exasperated face of a grown child, who feels the best years of his or her life are being stolen by an ailing parent. No one wants to find themselves like a drunken hanger-on at a party for whom the host is on the verge of asking,  “haven’t you overstayed your welcome?”

Death Be Not Proud

Many people who are beginning to realize that life is not what it’s cracked up to be are no longer willing to pay big bucks for graduation ceremonies. The Times recently ran a story on the “boom” in the cremation business, “In Tough Times, a Boom in Cremations as a Way to Save Money,” NYT, 12/8/11). And there are probably people who would just as soon toss their loved ones down the incinerator as pay for even a cremation. The only problem is that the average person who is finicky about the sight of blood is unlikely to feel comfortable acquiring saws, mallets and other tools which could aid in chopping a corpse into the kind of easily disposable pieces which would fit down the hallway hatch of a highrise. For some reason we are not OK with human abattoirs, unless we are trying to exterminate another race. If we only treated our loved ones the way we do those we hate and despise and have no feelings sending to the auto-da-fe then maybe we could save a buck it these perilous times. But back to the subject of plain old cremation. The Times reported that while cremation was “All but taboo in the United States 50 years ago, cremation is now chosen over burial in 41 per cent of American deaths, up from 15 percent in l985, according to the Cremation Association of North America.” Does the Cremation Association offer health and even life insurance policies to its members and is the plan open to crematees as well as cremators? If one reads the fine print of the Times piece one thing is certain: cremation is a good deal. In an anecdotal example one deceased person’s remains were cremated for $1600. The front page Times story went on to say that the price included "a death notice, a death certificate and an urn bought on line. It was a fraction of the $10,000 to $16,000 that is typically spent on a traditional funeral.” However caveat emptor, at current rates, the death notice is unlikely to appear on the obituary page of the Times.

The Kingdom of God

“No man is an island” is a line written by the famous metaphysical poet John Donne, but it is a disputable premise. In effect, every man is an island whose existence is very much like that of England, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand and Japan, all countries created on large islands bounded by one or another body of salty water. After the euphoria of gestation in the amniotic sac, we are all born into a state of isolation, which is the condition in which we die. We may be grieved and missed, but no one can die with us. If someone is upset enough about our deaths, they might die (you’ve heard the stories about couples who die within hours of each other). They might even commit suicide, but there is no known method by which one human being can inhabit or occupy the insides of another. Technology faces no such limitations. Hard drives are replaced and technicians routinely enter the intelligences of computers to perform even the most mundane tasks. But despite the advent of fMRIs, which measure brain function, no one is able to enter another consciousness, the filter through which each of us perceives the world. If you think about this condition, it’s rather disconcerting. For all our vain attempts to form vehicles of congregation that offer the reassuring prospect of something greater than the individual (to which we all can ostensibly belong), there is nothing that can truly fulfill our desire for ultimate union unless you believe in the unverifiable yet tantalizing prospect of a Kingdom of God in the here or hereafter.