DE MORTUIS

I do not know what goes on at the Institute of Applied Research for Tropical and Subtropical Fruits, outside Paris. I prefer to imagine. There must be white-robed mandarins equipped with the panoply of competitive qualifications that in France are indispensable to every professional caste, from literati to chiropodists. Shadowy emissaries from Papua, Cipango, and the rain forests of Amazonia circulate among them offering for inspection succulent hybrids of passion fruit and guava, of cherimoya and loquats, of scented Dipteryx odorata and Litchi chinensis. Samples are skeptically nibbled, sniffed, and caressed. The seeds of a rare fly-eating apricot plant, smuggled out of the New Guinea uplands, sprout in the window box. As the Institute is housed at Maisons-Laffitte, discreet libations are, from time to time, poured from the noble vintage of a kindred name.

Like all self-respecting institutes, that of Applied Research for Tropical and Subtropical Fruits boasts an information section, a catalogue, a desk from which to send lofty but illuminating answers to the questions that pour in from the Keeper of Parrots at the Jardin Zoologique, from those, always fairly numerous in France, seeking novel, fastidious toxins whereby to poison their wives, from crossword-puzzle setters and solvers. The director of information is one M. Philippe Ariès. He is an industrious man. Between answering queries on the nine thousand six hundred and seventy-one varieties of inedible berries in the Ceylonese undergrowth, M. Ariès writes massive tomes on life and on death, on private man and on public history. His “Centuries of Childhood,” which appeared in English in 1962, his preliminary study of “Western Attitudes Toward Death,” translated in 1974, his “The Hour of Our Death,” which has just been published in a lively translation, by Helen Weaver (Knopf; $20), have made of Ariès one of the “herald figures” (figures de proue) in the immensely influential current school of French history and historiography.

Traditional history is, as English schoolboys put it, “about maps and chaps.” This somewhat literalist perspective has long been challenged by such special branches as economic history, the history of ideas, the theory and analysis of international relations, and the attempt, brilliantly represented in this country by Daniel Boorstin, to make an organic whole of the records of technology, of scientific invention, of daily life in the city and on the farm, and of the archives of social institutions and family life. The French school has striven to cut radically inward. It has sought to bring into the light of methodical narrative—and, indeed, of quantifiability—the sources and flux of human consciousness, the changes of feeling, of the habits of sentiment in a given society, milieu, or epoch. No translation is entirely adequate to the native tag “histoire des mentalités” with its simultaneous pointers to historicity in the old sense and to the primacy of inwardness in the new. The growth of this French school is, of itself, a fascinating piece of “internal history.” Positivism, in the nineteenth-century version of Auguste Comte, had taught that history was the all-embracing analytical instrument through which a society arrives at a meaningful image of its own genesis and specific character. Comte, Hippolyte Taine, Marx had forcefully urged that sociology, the statistical investigation of social mores and demographic trends, be made an integral part of the historian’s methods. Parallel to this current was that of the great tradition of French social-realistic fiction, from Balzac and Flaubert to Zola and Proust, the vividly documentary, investigative focus of literary narrative on the attitudes, institutions, psychological trends of French society both rural and urban, both aristocratic and mercantile-bourgeois. These two parallel traditions seem to conjoin in the pioneering work of historians of genius such as Marc Bloch, Fernand Braudel, and Lucien Febvre. Febvre, especially, asked the key questions. He wanted to know how men and women in the sixteenth century thought and felt about love, how they experienced and coped with the emotional stress of religious conflicts, what attitudes they had toward sickness and death. He called for full-scale “histories of joy, of compassion, of private anguish.” He wondered whether the new availability of eyeglasses and improvements in artificial lighting had eroded the great civilization of smells, the busy expertness of the nose, as it had prevailed in the reeking cities of the Middle Ages and the fifteenth century. Long before McLuhan, Febvre wondered about the sensory and ideological implications of the gradual shift from manuscript to print.

A galaxy of French—and, of late, English and American—historians have followed Febvre’s lead. Not only do they inquire into the structure and development of, say, marital relations in town and country in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; they seek to determine—and this is the point—the ways in which men and women at the time understood, symbolized, and acquiesced in or sought to rebel against what they took to be (itself a problematical issue) the “realities” of marriage of sex, of childbearing and child rearing, of the inheritance and transmission of property rights. For example, such historians as Georges Duby try to bring back to life what must have been the profound modifications in the human consciousness of distance, of community, of personal reach, as the great forests of early-medieval Europe thinned, as roads became practicable once more after the decay of the Roman mandate. Other historians want to know in what precise regards, to what extent, the expectations of Hell as preached and pictured in ecclesiastical doctrine and the very gradual but steady erosion of these expectations did or did not affect the modes of warfare and the bias toward “incestuous” intermarriage of the chivalric order on the one hand and the nascent “worldliness” of the mercantile classes on the other.

Literature and the arts, the transformative history of words and of grammar, the evidence of public and domestic architecture, the evolution of cookbooks and school primers, the files of the tax collector and the phrase book of the public scrivener (with its odd survival in the Western Union selection of ready-made messages of felicitation or lament), the sermons of the parish priest and the case notes of the physician describing to himself and his community the nature of a given illness—all these are grist to the mill of the historian of “mentality.” Very nearly by definition, nothing thought, felt, recorded, but also nothing overlooked by a society is irrelevant. For if perception is a historical condition, so is oversight. Did men and women before Freud not see certain salient features of sexual life in children, in themselves, in their dreams? Did they not choose to see them? Or was there as yet no accepted vocabulary for the definition and articulation of such features? We lack histories of dreams. It had long been observed that young children in medieval and Renaissance art were diminutive adults, that the artist’s realization did not extend to the native qualities of childhood in a child’s mien and motion. Convincing children are all but absent from Shakespeare’s “universality.” The child is a discovery of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, he is “invented” by libertarian and romantic sensibility and Rousseauist theories of education. In his “Centuries of Childhood,” Ariès sought to trace and to document the history of this gradual, surprisingly late addendum to the range of essential personal and public recognitions. He then turned to death, to the altering modes of emotional and intellectual awareness and interpretation which Western man has brought to bear on mortality as an individual experience and a collective institution.

The raw material is immense and diverse: factual and literary accounts of fatal ailment and decease; the contracts with death recorded in last wills; the chronicles of burial practices and sites; the numerous, often dramatic changes in the idiom of epitaphs and the style of commemorative monuments; philosophical, liturgical meditations on the meaning of death; fictive explorations such as Tolstoy’s “The Death of Ivan Ilyich;” medical diagnoses of the causes of death; changing representations of “afterlife;” the investigations of the economics and psychology of terminal states and demise as conducted by modern sociologists and social psychologists (since the pioneering work of Geoffrey Gorer in England). There is, in fact, a substantial sense in which the history of a society’s attitudes and gestures in the face of death is a central account of that society itself.

Philippe Ariès’s main argument in the present tome is difficult to summarize. This is not only because, unlike many of his peers in the Gallican stable, Ariès takes a vast topic and a vast time scale (a millennium) for his canvas. It is because the main threads of his thesis are obscured by a plethora of entrancing details, and because, in a manner at once reassuringly candid and mildly exasperating, Ariès persistently qualifies, even contradicts, the general postulates he has just advanced. In a recent set of autobiographical interviews, Ariès recalls his early years among the golden youths of the extreme right-wing Action Française. The sense of impish adventure is there still. But now Ariès combines the theoretical, rigorist determinism of much of modern French anthropology and historiography with the messy, wide-awake empiricism and flexibility of the Anglo-American persuasion.

At some point in the twelfth century, Ariès contends, an archaic, essentially collective experiencing of death yielded, certainly as far as the elite went, to a personalized sense of extinction, to the concept that a specific, “biographical” individual was passing away. Throughout the medieval and early modern periods, both social and personalized agencies of mourning, of burial, of the depiction and commemoration of the dead were at work in a complex variety of models and institutionalized practices. These, in turn, depended on social class, on locale, on the prevailing confessional framework (Catholic or Protestant). They depended also on changing types of property relations. According to Ariès, romanticism brought with it an immense transformation. The social role of mourning did not cease altogether, but it was little by little overtaken by the licit expression of emphatic—even histrionic—pain. The unique, numinous identity of the dear departed was now exalted. In its ritualized negation of death (“Thou art with us now, thou shall be with us always”), in its lyric assurance of undying remembrance and evocation, romantic pathos was intended to assist the bereaved, to buttress the solitude of widow and orphan with a shared convention of transcendence. The life of the lost one continued in memoriam. (Witness the triumph of this theme in Shelley, in Tennyson.) Ariès argues that this romantic transformation was so pervasive as to seem to us, who come after, to represent some natural constant in human nature. But we, too, are experiencing deep alterations in the status of death. If the romantic investment in the enduring presence of the dearly beloved is operative, there is at the same time a contrary current of discretion. The dying are removed from sight. In 1967, in New York, seventy-five per cent of all deaths occurred behind the veil of the hospital room. Ostentatious grief is no longer acceptable in a society of agnostic hygiene, or, rather, it is regarded as a relic of former ways characteristic of immigrant or “Mediterranean” mores, it is Mafia burials that preserve the flamboyant desolation of the romantics. Or so it was, notably in the United States, until very lately. Drawing on a number of recent studies—in particular on Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s “On Death and Dying” (1969)—Ariès concludes his monumental survey by backtracking disarmingly. He finds more “visible,” more psychologically dramatized styles and ceremonies of death coming back. These would counter the tidal drag toward clinical anonymity, toward emotional blandness in late-twentieth-century urban existence. “Timor mortis conturbat me” proclaimed the Psalmist and the medieval poet: “Fear of death wrings my guts.” This alone has not altered.

Such an outline gives little idea of the particular densities and forces of suggestion in this book. Numerous sections—on medieval graveyards and charnel houses, on the testaments of the seventeenth-century propertied households, on baroque funerary chapels and lapidary inscriptions, on the poetry of death in the Brontës, on the clashes between traditional morticians’ techniques and the rise of modern sanitation, on the millennial history of one single French rural cemetery, on the growing popularity, if this term be allowed, of cremation and the spiritual-social significance of this option—could form arresting, monographs on their own. Philippe Ariès is alert to the oddities, the atavisms, the play of fantasy and of terror in human behavior. He interweaves poetry and statistics, legal briefs and folktales, metaphysics and the advertisements of funeral parlors. Where else would we find Gothic horror stories of live burial linked with contemporary debates on neurophysiology and with public unease about the amount of valuable terrain being swallowed up by the necropolis? “The Hour of Our Death” is a feast for the imagination.

In the charm and fascination of so panoptic an approach lie its obvious vulnerabilities. It is one thing to cite a poignant passage from a medieval epic or to invoke the inspired anatomy of death in a Tolstoy novella, and quite another to demonstrate that such texts are representative—that we can legitimately infer from them the attitudes of an entire society and era. It is one thing to instance the changes in the phrasing of wills and epitaphs, and quite another to arrive at a confident reading of the mental attitudes that underwrite such “encodings” or to deduce from them chronological transformations in Western sensibility. In all historical writing, the historian’s own frame of perceptions plays an inevitably selective and ordering part. In “histories of consciousness,” the process of refraction is a twofold one, and the light of distant evidence passes twice at least through the prism of interpretation. Certain magnitudes, moreover, seem to defy the often “literary,” almost “aesthetic” reconstitutive tact and intuitions of the historien des mentalités. In what ways and measure have the facts of mass annihilation in global warfare and in totalitarian mass murder and the possibility of nuclear destruction as we now face it affected the Western apprehension of personal death? Ariès all but leaves this topic to one side. It may well be that he will return to it.

To “think death,” the famous, challenging phrase of the philosopher Heidegger, is at once a fearfully private and a fully communal act. To marshal evidence as to the long history and current conditions of this act is to come very near the bone of our being. This book is a moment of passionate awareness and, therefore, strangely bracing.