{∅, {∅}, {∅, {∅}}} : Rage Against the Meat Grinder

Farewell to the World begins by breaking down what Barbagli considers to be the flaws in Durkheim’s original theory of suicide. In brief, Durkheim held that all suicides fall into one of four categories: egoistic, altruistic, anomic, and fatalistic. All four types of suicide, according to Durkheim, were ultimately caused by a lack of social regulation and integration. In other words, suicide came about as a result of pathology, a fatal mismatch between an individual and environment. When Durkheim conducted his study of suicide toward the end of the 19th century, he was responding to a very particular set of cultural concerns. Europe had recently seen a sharp rise in voluntary deaths, leading many observers to fear for the welfare of society as a whole. Durkheim had personal motives as well: he wanted to legitimize sociology as an academic discipline. “The first led him to view suicide as a symptom of the ills of society,” Barbagli writes, “the second to explain it using only (some) sociological categories and to ignore the contribution of other human sciences.”

Unsatisfied with Durkheim’s pathology-based theory, Barbagli argues that the broader culture that surrounds an individual has more of an effect on their decision to commit suicide than any other factor. It’s not those who are mismatched to their cultures who commit suicide; it’s those who fit right in. In particular, Barbagli argues, Durkheim’s theory does not explain why, “over the past forty years, thousands of people … have sacrificed themselves for a collective cause, to help their own people and to fight their enemies.” To prove this point, he takes on the enormous task of sifting through the entire recorded history of humanity in order to examine changing cultural attitudes to suicide. Claiming that “social integration and regulation are … neither the only nor the most important causes of changing suicide rates over time and space,” he all but eliminates anomic suicide and fatalistic suicide from Durkheim’s original schema and adds two new categories: aggressive suicide and suicide as a weapon.

As might be expected from the addition of these categories, Barbagli focuses heavily on the rise of the suicide bomber. He began his research on Farewell to the World in 2001, shortly after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center, and the ensuing media attention to the culture of Islamic jihad has clearly influenced his research. It is in discussing suicide bombers that Barbagli is at his most thorough.

MacGreevy therefore wisely suggested that Beckett could read The Imitation of Christ in a secular manner, perhaps by substituting the objectionable word ‘God’ with terms such as ‘goodness’ or ‘disinterestedness’.

Beckett wrote back to say that he was grateful for MacGreevy’s concern, but pointing out that he had actually read the book some years ago, and didn’t find it especially helpful:

    All I ever got from the Imitation went to confirm & reinforce my own way of living, a way of living that tried to be a solution & failed. I found quantities of phrases like qui melius scit pati, majorem tenebit pacem [he who knows how to suffer well shall find the most peace], or Nolle consolari ab aliqua creatura magnae puritatis signum est [to refuse comfort from any creature is a sign of great faith], or the lovely per viam pacis, ad patriam perpetuae claritatis [by the way of peace to the country of everlasting clearness] that seemed to be made for me and which I have never forgotten. Am[on]g many others. But they all conduced to the isolationism that was not to prove very splendid. What is one to make of ‘seldom we come home without hurting of conscience’ and ‘the glad going out & sorrowful coming home’ and ‘be ye sorry in your chambers’ but a quietism of the sparrow alone upon the housetop & the solitary bird under the eaves? An abject self-referring quietism indeed.

This letter shows that Beckett was drawn to the promise of spiritual release: the Latin phrases he cites all describe a kind of transcendent peace, a peace that is found by going into suffering rather than resisting or shying away from it. But Beckett also acknowledges the dangers of such unearthly priorities. The Imitation of Christ, he says, promotes ‘isolationism’. Don’t go out, it says. Remain in your cell. Shun the company of others. Beckett then proceeds to explain to MacGreevy it was precisely this aloofness and distance from other people that caused his panic attacks to worsen in the first place.

Beckett’s word for the attitude that he finds in The Imitation is ‘quietism’, a term that crops up in several of his letters and notebooks from the 1930s. And it seems from this letter that he saw quietism as both the cause of his affliction and its unforthcoming solution. It is, as one of his later novels says about religion, both ‘poison and antidote’.

While he was no closer to a cure for his anxiety attacks, Beckett had begun to see that his personal problems might nevertheless be useful for his growth as a writer. In a diary entry from 1937, he confessed his hope that he might be able to put his suffering to artistic ends and ‘turn this dereliction, profoundly felt, into literature’. Quietism, it turned out, provided a means to do so.