The Role of the Dead

Though it seems to be a more minimal aspect of Foucault's essay, as I believe it only prevails on page 905, I was most enthralled with his discussion of the nexus between writing and death. Foucault commences that “this link subverts an old tradition exemplified by the Greek epic,” noting that this relationship, as I understand it, undermines the Greek epic's disposition to “perpetuate the immortality of the hero,” which involved a youth's willingness of his own death “so that his life, consecrated and magnified by death, might pass into immortality.” Foucault asserts that “this accepted death” is thus absolved, for it offers, in exchange, the potential for permanence.

Elsewhere, “the pretext of Arabian narratives [...] was also the eluding of death.” Indeed, Foucault suggests that even the tradition of storytelling itself is inherently performed “in order to forestall death” of the speaker in efforts to “[renew] each night, to keep death outside the circle of life.” The habitual ritual of these storytellers orating “into the early morning [...] to postpone the day of reckoning that would silence the narrator” works in a way that Greek epics do, but extends further beyond the story itself—and here also establishes a prolonging of life, or, perhaps more suitably, a denial of the inescapability of death, for the person sharing these stories.

Foucault proposes that our culture has transformed this self-prolonging concept of narrative or writing into a nexus for “sacrifice, even to the sacrifice of life,” which, he notes, is a voluntary act of emaciating the writer's own existence. The conservation of life the Greek epics and Arabian narratives provided before “now possess the right to kill, to be its author's murderer.” This is, in part, accomplished through the “effacement of the writing subject's individual characteristics,” but, as we discussed in class, is also reliant on the audience: Foucault asks, “when Sade was not considered an author, what was the status of his papers? Were they simply rolls of paper onto which he ceaselessly uncoiled his fantasies during his imprisonment?” Was it not until an audience could recognize the validity of a novel like 120 Days of Sodom that Sade really would come to face death of his individuality? Must writers “assume the role of the dead man” when they write? Does our culture, as Foucault suggests, demand writers to martyr themselves—and become something other than themselves?