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The Savage God: A Study of Suicide
"Suicide," writes the notes English poet and critic A. Alvarez, "has permeated Western culture like a dye that cannot be washed out." Although the aims of this compelling, compassionate work are broadly cultural and literary, the narrative is rooted in personal experience: it begins with a long memoir of Sylvia Plath, and ends with an account of the author's own suicide attempt. Within this dramatic framework, Alvarez launches his enquiry into the final taboo of human behavior, and traces changing attitudes towards suicide from the perspective of literature. He follows the black thread leading from Dante through Donne and the romantic agony, to the Savage God at the heart of modern literature.
322 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1971
About the author
Al Álvarez
40 books61 followersAlfred Alvarez was an English poet, novelist, essayist and critic who published under the name A. Alvarez and Al Alvarez.
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February 17, 2011
It must strike us that after all the melancholic does not behave in quite the same way as a person who is crushed by remorse and self-reproach in a normal fashion. Feelings of shame in front of other people, which would more than anything characterize this latter condition are lacking in the melancholic, or at least they are not prominent in him. One might emphasize the presence in him of an almost opposite trait of insistent communicativeness which finds satisfaction in self-exposure -- quoted from Freud.
I'm not sure how to go about writing this review. The above quote and all of the quotes below are taken from this book but are from other writers.
This book is about suicide. It opens with the author's personal reminiscence of Sylvia Plath who he was somewhat of a friend of, and ends with the story of his own failed suicide attempt (which chronologically came before Plath's successful attempt).
In between these two personal essays the book is split into two sections. The first, and shorter section looks at some misconceptions about suicide and a general way that society views the topic. The second section is a survey of sorts of the way that suicide has been seen in literature from the time of Dante through the 1960's.
At the heart of this survey though is the question of what is it about roughly the start of Modernism that made suicide something of a plague among writers. Surprisingly before the 20th century not that many writers ended up killing themselves. There was the Romantics worship of death and the the Werther craze of of the early 19th century but as the century went on different forms of suicide started occurring in greater frequency among writers, Alvarez counts soft-suicide in with the real thing, the people who destroy their lives with deliberate choices and substances, who attempt to kill of part of themselves and keep on biologically living: people like Rimbaud and Baudelaire and Poe. But what was in a way sensational in the 19th century became something of a norm among writers in the 20th century (something meaning that it was more common than it had been in the past, many many writers navigate life to it's natural end, more than end up sadly ending it early).
Kafka wrote to a friend:
The books we need are the kind that act upon us like a misfortune, that make us suffer like the death of someone we love more than ourselves, that make us feel as through we were on the verge of suicide, or lost in a forest remote from all human habitation - a book should serve as the axe for the frozen sea within us.
(Kafka is viewed by Alvarez as a failed suicide, he attempted to kill himself postmortem through the destruction of all his writing. Max Brod of course foiled the attempt.)
Why do I want to read the books that Kafka describes? Why does he eloquently describe what I am looking for in literature most of the time? And who out there can write these books that Kafka says we need without putting themselves in danger?
Of the world as it is one cannot be enough afraid.
--Adorno
Tadeusz Borowski wrote possibly the bleakest first person account of being in Auschwitz. If you haven't read it and you want to have all hope in humanity sucked from you than should go pick up a copy of This way to the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen. The book is a beautiful testament to the depravity of what humanity is capable of. After he finished the novel, he killed the writer in himself and devoted himself wholeheartedly in Stalinist politics until he gassed himself in his house when he was twenty seven. He held a mirror up for us to look at ourselves in and see that it wasn't just the Nazi's to blame, but all of us were capable of being complicit. That he himself could be engaged in a game of soccer while a prisoner and give no thought, like everyone else around him engaged in the game, to the thousands being exterminated in a building just behind them. If I had to imagine every death that every bomb and missile launched at every civilian in a war to protect my 'freedom' where would my head be at now. Can the human condition as it became in the 20th century be honestly faced without having that old Nietzschean problem with staring into the abyss for too long? And this doesn't even need to be political. Add to the list included in this book Deleuze and Debord. Look at the depraved amorality of Focault in his last years.
I'm feeling bleaker writing about the book then when I was reading (secretively, I wouldn't tell anyone I was reading it, it never was on my currently reading list, it never got read outside of my apartment...) it. It's actually a fairly uplifting book to me, there is something affirming about it. You might find it depressing though.
I'm not sure how to go about writing this review. The above quote and all of the quotes below are taken from this book but are from other writers.
This book is about suicide. It opens with the author's personal reminiscence of Sylvia Plath who he was somewhat of a friend of, and ends with the story of his own failed suicide attempt (which chronologically came before Plath's successful attempt).
In between these two personal essays the book is split into two sections. The first, and shorter section looks at some misconceptions about suicide and a general way that society views the topic. The second section is a survey of sorts of the way that suicide has been seen in literature from the time of Dante through the 1960's.
At the heart of this survey though is the question of what is it about roughly the start of Modernism that made suicide something of a plague among writers. Surprisingly before the 20th century not that many writers ended up killing themselves. There was the Romantics worship of death and the the Werther craze of of the early 19th century but as the century went on different forms of suicide started occurring in greater frequency among writers, Alvarez counts soft-suicide in with the real thing, the people who destroy their lives with deliberate choices and substances, who attempt to kill of part of themselves and keep on biologically living: people like Rimbaud and Baudelaire and Poe. But what was in a way sensational in the 19th century became something of a norm among writers in the 20th century (something meaning that it was more common than it had been in the past, many many writers navigate life to it's natural end, more than end up sadly ending it early).
Kafka wrote to a friend:
The books we need are the kind that act upon us like a misfortune, that make us suffer like the death of someone we love more than ourselves, that make us feel as through we were on the verge of suicide, or lost in a forest remote from all human habitation - a book should serve as the axe for the frozen sea within us.
(Kafka is viewed by Alvarez as a failed suicide, he attempted to kill himself postmortem through the destruction of all his writing. Max Brod of course foiled the attempt.)
Why do I want to read the books that Kafka describes? Why does he eloquently describe what I am looking for in literature most of the time? And who out there can write these books that Kafka says we need without putting themselves in danger?
Of the world as it is one cannot be enough afraid.
--Adorno
Tadeusz Borowski wrote possibly the bleakest first person account of being in Auschwitz. If you haven't read it and you want to have all hope in humanity sucked from you than should go pick up a copy of This way to the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen. The book is a beautiful testament to the depravity of what humanity is capable of. After he finished the novel, he killed the writer in himself and devoted himself wholeheartedly in Stalinist politics until he gassed himself in his house when he was twenty seven. He held a mirror up for us to look at ourselves in and see that it wasn't just the Nazi's to blame, but all of us were capable of being complicit. That he himself could be engaged in a game of soccer while a prisoner and give no thought, like everyone else around him engaged in the game, to the thousands being exterminated in a building just behind them. If I had to imagine every death that every bomb and missile launched at every civilian in a war to protect my 'freedom' where would my head be at now. Can the human condition as it became in the 20th century be honestly faced without having that old Nietzschean problem with staring into the abyss for too long? And this doesn't even need to be political. Add to the list included in this book Deleuze and Debord. Look at the depraved amorality of Focault in his last years.
I'm feeling bleaker writing about the book then when I was reading (secretively, I wouldn't tell anyone I was reading it, it never was on my currently reading list, it never got read outside of my apartment...) it. It's actually a fairly uplifting book to me, there is something affirming about it. You might find it depressing though.
May 23, 2019
Naleteh na ovu knjigu svojevremeno na nekom uličnom štandu – čovek tražio 150rsd, ja drage volje dao, tutnuo je na policu i bar dve godine je ponovo nisam ugledao. I onda, kako to već biva, dok sam birao izmedju sedam različitih knjiga koja da bude sledeća, uzeh baš ovu, osmu.
Alvarez, lični prijatelj Silvije Plat, pesnik i romanopisac, književni kritičar i esejista, napisao je nešto za šta komotno mogu da kažem da je jedan od najbolje istraženih, najrečitije napisanih i najempatičnijih nefikcijskih tekstova koje sam imao priliku da pročitam. Centralna tema je, kao što štrči na naslovnoj, samoubistvo, a pristupi istom su raznovrsni – kroz mitologiju, religiju, psihonalizu i, ono u čemu je Alvarez daleko najvičniji, književnost. Ne sećam se iz koje knjige sam toliko izvukao kao iz ove. Otvorila mi je prozore, vrata, podsetila me je da je svet toliko bogat i krcat da i jedan tako svima poznat, varljivo jednostavan fenomen kao što je suicid, krije mnoštva i da bežati od pokušaja razumevanja ne čini sam termin opskurnim, već opasnim. Ide na policu nacionalne kuhinje “Za sva vremena”.
5
September 7, 2017
Me encanta que no mencionen números o cifras sobre el suicidio. No reduce el suicidio a algo que se puede medir matemáticamente o explicar científicamente. Este libro habla desde lo más profundo del ser humano, menciona distintas situaciones que llevan al suicidio y logra generar un grado de entendimiento respecto a las personas que deciden actuar de esa forma. Ojalá este libro fuese más conocido y más hablado, especialmente en la sociedad del día de hoy.
August 22, 2017
"'An act like this,' said Camus, 'is prepared within the silence of the heart, as is a great work of art.'"
In The Savage God, Al Álvarez examines suicide through a variety of lenses: personal, historical, psychiatric, philosophical, cultural, and literary. The book contains a great deal of thought-provoking material on a notoriously difficult subject. It is well worth reading.
Álvarez begins by discussing Sylvia Plath’s life, work, and eventual suicide. He then proceeds to look at suicide from a historical perspective. The resulting overview of humanity’s complicated relationship with suicide is absolutely fascinating. Of the various customs and attitudes he mentions in this section, the following is particularly telling:
"Even in the civilized Athens of Plato, the suicide was buried outside the city and away from other graves; his self-murdering hand was cut off and buried apart."
He goes on to investigate psychoanalytic theory’s treatment of suicide. He also analyzes some of the reasons why suicide can be appealing on a purely emotional level.
Then Álvarez delves into suicide in literature. Dante’s portrayal of the ghastly punishment reserved for suicides in The Inferno is briefly discussed; I’ve always found this imagery haunting:
"…when the soul violently tears itself from its own body, it is thrown by Minos haphazardly into the terrible wood, where it springs up like a grain of wheat and eventually grows into a thorn tree. Then the harpies make their nests in its branches and tear at the leaves, endlessly repeating the violence the soul had inflicted on itself. At the Day of Judgment, when bodies and souls are reunited, the bodies of suicides will hang from the branches of these trees, since divine justice will not bestow again on their owners the bodies they have wilfully thrown away."
Other authors he examines in this section include John Donne, Robert Burton, William Cowper, Thomas Chatterton, Goethe (he focuses on The Sorrows of Young Werther’s impact in particular), Coleridge, Camus, and Dostoevsky. After discussing literature, he concludes the book by sharing the story of his own suicide attempt.
There are two areas in which I believe Álvarez’s analysis is especially incisive. The first is his examination of the emotions, mood, and general mental state experienced by many suicidal individuals. The book features numerous harrowing descriptions of this state of mind; notable among them are those of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Emily Dickinson. These depictions powerfully convey the profound sense of apathy, detachment, and debilitating hopelessness which tends to lead to suicide. Boris Pasternak describes this here quite well:
“But a man who decides to commit suicide puts a full stop to his being, he turns his back on his past, he declares himself a bankrupt and his memories to be unreal. They can no longer help or save him, he has put himself beyond their reach. The continuity of his inner life is broken, his personality is at an end. And perhaps what finally makes him kill himself is not the firmness of his resolve but the unbearable quality of this anguish which belongs to no one, of this suffering in the absence of the sufferer, of this waiting which is empty because life has stopped and can no longer fill it.”
The second is Álvarez's insight into the relative futility of asking why an individual decides to kill him/herself. He explains how “no single theory will untangle an act as ambiguous and with such complex motives as suicide.” Even an integrated approach, one which incorporates several different theories, will still fall short. Suicide is, by and large, an intrinsically enigmatic act. We can comprehend bits and pieces of the truth. We can form a more or less vague idea of the typical mindset involved. But often, even the suicidal individual is incapable of truly explaining it. For:
“…a suicide’s excuses are mostly by the way. At best they assuage the guilt of the survivors, soothe the tidy-minded and encourage the sociologists in their endless search for convincing categories and theories. They are like a trivial border incident which triggers off a major war. The real motives which impel a man to take his own life are elsewhere; they belong to the internal world, devious, contradictory, labyrinthine, and mostly out of sight.”
Overall, The Savage God illuminates many of the distinctive shades and hues that color “all that anguish, the slow tensing of the self to that final, irreversible act.” I believe these fragmentary, momentary glimpses are the best we can hope for in our struggle to fathom this ever-elusive beast. It is simply not possible to fully grasp the beast’s nature, and perhaps that’s okay. Is it not absurd to demand of the silence what, by its very nature, it is incapable of ever articulating?
–Édouard Manet’s Le Suicide
September 29, 2019
TL;DR: Knjiga o samoubistvu koja vam je oduvek bila potrebna
Kontekst: Nasumično je odabrala sa 'to-read' liste dok sam čekala da konačno skinem petu sezonu BoJack Horsemana sa torrenta, a internet mi je stabilan kao nezavisnost Katalonije, naravno nije moja fora jer je odlična ali je trpam gde stignem. Okej, verovatno i to što je užasno dosadna nedelja a ja kontempliram svrhu sopstvenog života prljave kose u pidžami u dva popodne isto igra neku ulogu
Knjiga: Al Alvarez je bio prijatelj Silvije Plat, i sa njom (i njenim večnim "...dying is an art" i naravno rernom) počinje ova knjiga. Prva polovina knjige je posvećena filozofiji i teorijama o samoubistvu, a druga književnim osvrtima na isto, od Dantea do dadaizma. Sve teme su obrađene sa toliko empatije i nežnosti, da se čovek oseti toliko ušuškano i shvaćeno u svojim ruminacijama, možda po prvi put u životu. Poslednji deo je o Alvarezom pokušaju samoubistva na Božić:
The truth is, in some way I had died. The over-intensity, the tiresome excess of sensitivity and self-consciousness, of arrogance and idealism, which came in adolescence and stayed on and on beyond their due time, like some visiting bore, had not survived the coma. It was as though I had finally, and sadly late in the day, lost my innocence.
Koji u poptunosti validiram iz ličnog iskustva, i mogu samo da dodam najbolji internet strip ikada: http://hyperboleandahalf.blogspot.com...
Zaključak: Kad sam krenula da koketiram sa suicidalnim idejama i akcijama u ranoj adolescenciji, pedijatrica iz novobeogradskog Instituta za majku i dete mi je rekla "moraš to da kriješ od svih, inače će roditelji zabranjivati svojoj deci da se druže sa tobom". Well guess what, dobronamerna pedijatrice, deset godina kasnije se deca i dalje ne druže sa mnom (šalim se, imam prijatelje, i to stvarno prave prijatelje). Valjda mi se u nekom trenutku smučilo to skrivanje, majku mu, čega imam da se sramotim, nemoguće da sam jedina u tom stanju. Za neke sam bila i ostala lujka (verovatno im mame i dalje ne daju da se druže sa mnom), ali začuđujuće velik broj večito nasmejanih kolega sa prethodnih poslova ili ljudi sa studija je počeo da mi prilazi, da se polako otvara "znaš, i ja sam imao periode kada sam želeo da okončam sve". Samoubistvo za mene ostaje značajni deo kompleksnosti ljudskog postojanja i zato mislim da je bitno da se deli sa drugima, i da je ova knjiga Ala Alvareza nezaobilazno štivo.
Kontekst: Nasumično je odabrala sa 'to-read' liste dok sam čekala da konačno skinem petu sezonu BoJack Horsemana sa torrenta, a internet mi je stabilan kao nezavisnost Katalonije, naravno nije moja fora jer je odlična ali je trpam gde stignem. Okej, verovatno i to što je užasno dosadna nedelja a ja kontempliram svrhu sopstvenog života prljave kose u pidžami u dva popodne isto igra neku ulogu
Knjiga: Al Alvarez je bio prijatelj Silvije Plat, i sa njom (i njenim večnim "...dying is an art" i naravno rernom) počinje ova knjiga. Prva polovina knjige je posvećena filozofiji i teorijama o samoubistvu, a druga književnim osvrtima na isto, od Dantea do dadaizma. Sve teme su obrađene sa toliko empatije i nežnosti, da se čovek oseti toliko ušuškano i shvaćeno u svojim ruminacijama, možda po prvi put u životu. Poslednji deo je o Alvarezom pokušaju samoubistva na Božić:
The truth is, in some way I had died. The over-intensity, the tiresome excess of sensitivity and self-consciousness, of arrogance and idealism, which came in adolescence and stayed on and on beyond their due time, like some visiting bore, had not survived the coma. It was as though I had finally, and sadly late in the day, lost my innocence.
Koji u poptunosti validiram iz ličnog iskustva, i mogu samo da dodam najbolji internet strip ikada: http://hyperboleandahalf.blogspot.com...
Zaključak: Kad sam krenula da koketiram sa suicidalnim idejama i akcijama u ranoj adolescenciji, pedijatrica iz novobeogradskog Instituta za majku i dete mi je rekla "moraš to da kriješ od svih, inače će roditelji zabranjivati svojoj deci da se druže sa tobom". Well guess what, dobronamerna pedijatrice, deset godina kasnije se deca i dalje ne druže sa mnom (šalim se, imam prijatelje, i to stvarno prave prijatelje). Valjda mi se u nekom trenutku smučilo to skrivanje, majku mu, čega imam da se sramotim, nemoguće da sam jedina u tom stanju. Za neke sam bila i ostala lujka (verovatno im mame i dalje ne daju da se druže sa mnom), ali začuđujuće velik broj večito nasmejanih kolega sa prethodnih poslova ili ljudi sa studija je počeo da mi prilazi, da se polako otvara "znaš, i ja sam imao periode kada sam želeo da okončam sve". Samoubistvo za mene ostaje značajni deo kompleksnosti ljudskog postojanja i zato mislim da je bitno da se deli sa drugima, i da je ova knjiga Ala Alvareza nezaobilazno štivo.
Read
July 10, 2011Sleep
Unknown
I
Can
In
Death
Escape
Unknown
I
Can
In
Death
Escape
February 27, 2021
Cuando lees un ensayo, debes ser capaz de tener una mente abierta a toda la información que recibirás, aunque puede ser abrumadora te llevará a consultar datos que no conocías y que al profundizar puede ser un camino con muchas paradas obligatorias, como leer poemas tan contundentes como papi de Silvia Plath, entender por fin al dadaísmo y su influencia en el arte, descubrir los tortuosos caminos que siguieron algunos poetas a través de los siglos, y si también leer sobre el suicidio.
La muerte no es un tema fácil, y el suicido lo es menos aún, pero en este libro se habla mucho y bien de las distintas circunstancias y condiciones que llevan a ser un suicida, así como las maneras en que la sociedad enfrenta o asume las consecuencias.
El escritor acierta con un inicio íntimo, hablando de su amiga, la poeta Silvia Plath, de una manera que nos permite conocerla mejor, no como esa mujer desesperada y desequilibrada que presentan la mayoría de las notas sobre ella, sino como un ser humano complejo, un ser y su circunstancia.
En los capítulos de en medio existe un recorrido histórico mezclado con filosofía, poesía, religión y en carril lateral, latente el suicidio como un animal agazapado luchando por prevalecer.
Al final cierra de manera muy inteligente con la experiencia personal del propio autor, lo cual redondea el tema.
Uno sale con muchas preguntas, muchos pensamientos y sobre todo con una conclusión, que el suicidio es parte de la vida, que no existen causas o razones únicas, que duele, que asombra, que sobrecoge.
La muerte no es un tema fácil, y el suicido lo es menos aún, pero en este libro se habla mucho y bien de las distintas circunstancias y condiciones que llevan a ser un suicida, así como las maneras en que la sociedad enfrenta o asume las consecuencias.
El escritor acierta con un inicio íntimo, hablando de su amiga, la poeta Silvia Plath, de una manera que nos permite conocerla mejor, no como esa mujer desesperada y desequilibrada que presentan la mayoría de las notas sobre ella, sino como un ser humano complejo, un ser y su circunstancia.
En los capítulos de en medio existe un recorrido histórico mezclado con filosofía, poesía, religión y en carril lateral, latente el suicidio como un animal agazapado luchando por prevalecer.
Al final cierra de manera muy inteligente con la experiencia personal del propio autor, lo cual redondea el tema.
Uno sale con muchas preguntas, muchos pensamientos y sobre todo con una conclusión, que el suicidio es parte de la vida, que no existen causas o razones únicas, que duele, que asombra, que sobrecoge.
March 24, 2014
And I see myself, flat, ridiculous, a cut-paper shadow
Between the eye of the sun and the eyes of the tulips,
And I have no face, I have wanted to efface myself.
The vivid tulips eat my oxygen.
-Sylvia Plath, Tulips
While filled with interesting tidbits to support his theories on suicide in the arts (the most worthwhile on the romantics) the keystone of this book is A.'s belief that Plath did not intend her death and was forced into a corner by the conventions of her work.
This is faced by overwhelming evidence to the contrary. One would be better off reading Plath's diaries (which came out after the publication of TSG) or her collected works than A.'s second-hand account of a mind's inner workings he was not actually privy to.
April 22, 2022
Uno de los mejores ensayos que he leído, lejos.
July 6, 2022
Sadly, some poets are more famous for the fact that they committed suicide than for their work. If for no other reason than this, The Savage God was a book that had to be written. It could be argued that in some ways, Alvarez wrote this book in part to work out his own personal experiences: not only was he a friend of Sylvia Plath, but he also attempted suicide himself.
Acquired Aug 15, 1983
Classics Book Shop, Montreal, Quebec
Acquired Aug 15, 1983
Classics Book Shop, Montreal, Quebec
July 7, 2023
Watch my discussion and review of the book here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lwz6_...
A fascinating investigation into the facets of suicide through a study of history, literature, art, psychology, philosophy, and the author's own failed attempt prior to the book's publication. Also, the introduction on Sylvia Plath was excellent.
Highly recommend if you can stomach a critical analysis of this topic. Also, familiarise yourself with Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar and her poetry for better context on the introduction.
My favourite passages are as follows:
“A suicide’s excuses are mostly by the way. At best they assuage the guilt of the survivors, soothe the tidy-minded and encourage the sociologists in their endless search for convincing categories and theories. They are like a trivial border incident which triggers off a major war. The real motives which impel a man to take his own life are elsewhere; they belong to the internal world, devious, contradictory, labyrinthine, and mostly out of sight.” // Pg.123
“People try to die in such operatic ways only when they are obsessed more by the means than by the end, just as a sexual fetishist gets more satisfaction from his rituals than from the orgasm to which they lead. The old man driving nails into his skull, the company director with his power drill and the lovelorn girl swallowing all that hardware seem to be acting wildly out of despair. Yet in order to behave in precisely that way they must have brooded endlessly over the details, select-ing, modifying, perfecting them like artists, until they pro duced that one, unrepeatable happening which expressed their madness in all its uniqueness. In the circumstances, death may come but it is superfluous.” // Pg.145
“The psychoanalysis have suggested that a man may destroy himself not because he wants to die but because there is a single aspect of himself which he cannot tolerate. A suicide of this order is a perfectionist. The flaws in his nature exacerbate him like some secret itch he cannot get at. So he acts suddenly, rashly, out of exasperation. Thus Kirilov, in The Possessed, kills himself, he says, to show that he is God. But secretly he kills himself because he knows he is not God. Had his ambitions been less, perhaps he would have only attempted the deed or mutilated himself. He conceived of his mor tality as a kind of lapse, an error which offended him beyond bearing. So in the end he pulled the trigger in order to shed this mortality like a tatty suit of clothes, but without taking into account that the clothes were, in fact, his own warm body.” // Pg.146
“The life of the suicide is, to an extraordinary degree, unforgiving. Nothing he achieves by his own efforts, or luck bestows, reconciles him to his injurious past.” // Pg.149
“Without the buttress of Christianity, without the cold dignity of a Stoicism which had evolved in response to a world in which human life was a trivial commodity, cheap enough to be expended at every circus to amuse the crowd, the rational obstacles begin to seem strangely flimsy. When neither high purpose nor the categorical imperatives of religion will do, the only arguments left are circular. In other words, the final argument against suicide is life itself. You pause and attend: the heart beats in your chest, outside the trees are thick with new leaves, a swallow dips over them, the light moves, people are going about their business. Perhaps this is what Freud meant by ‘the narcissistic satisfactions [the ego] derives from being alive’. Most of the time, they seem enough. They are, anyway, all we ever have or can ever expect.” // Pg.152
“These are the people who will do everything to destroy themselves, except admit that that is what they are after; they will, that is, do everything except take the final responsibility for their actions. Hence all those cases of what Karl Menninger calls 'chronic suicide’, the alcoholics and drug addicts who kill themselves slowly and piecemeal, all the while protesting that they are merely taking the necessary steps to make an intolerable life tolerable. Hence, too, those thousands of inexplicable fatal accidents - the good drivers who die in car crashes, the careful pedestrians who get themselves run over - which never make the suicide statistics. The image recurs of the same climber in the same unforgiving situation. In the grip of some depress-sion he may not even recognize, he could die almost without knowing it. Impatiently, he fails to take the necessary safety measures, he climbs a little too fast and without working out his moves far enough in advance. And suddenly, the risks have become disproportionate. For a fatal accident, there is no longer the need of any conscious thought or impulse of despair, still less a deliberate action. He has only to surrender for a moment to the darkness beneath the threshold. The smallest mistake - an impetuous move not quite in balance, an error of judgement which leaves him extended beyond his strength with no way back and no prospect of relief - and the man will be dead without realizing that he wanted to die.” // Pg.155
“Along with the increase in suicide by drugs has gone a proportionate decrease in the older, more violent more violent methods: hanging, drowning, shooting, cutting, jumping. What is invved, I think, is a massive and, in effect, a qualitative change in suicide. Ever since hemlock, for whatever of obscure reason, went out of general use, the act has always entailed great physical violence. The Romans fell on their swords or, at best, cut their wrists in hot baths; even the fastidious Cleopatra allowed herself to be bitten by a snake. In the eighteenth century the kind of violence you used depended on the class you came from: gentlemen usually took their lives with pistols, the lower classes hanged them-selves. Later it became fashionable to drown yourself or endure the convulsions and agonies of cheap poisons like arsenic and strychnine. Perhaps the ancient, superstitious horror of suicide persisted so long because the violence made it impossible to disguise the nature of the act. Peace and oblivion were not in question; suicide was as unequivocally a violation of life as murder.
Modern drugs and domestic gas have changed all that. They have not only made suicide more or less painless, they have also made it seem magical. A man who takes a knile and slices deliberately across his throat is murdering himself. But when someone lies down in front of an unlit gas-fire or swallows sleeping pils, he seems not so much to be dying as merely seeking oblivion for a while. Dostoevsky’s Kirilov said that there are only two reasons why we do not all kill ourselves: pain and the fear of the next world. We seem, more or less, to have got rid of both. In suicide, as in most other areas of activity, there has been a technological breakthrough which has made a cheap and relatively pain. less death democratically available to everyone. Perhaps this is why the subject now seems so central and so demanding, why even governments spend a little money on finding its causes and possible means of prevention. We already have a suicidology; all we mercifully lack, for the moment, is a thorough-going philosophical rationale of the act itself. No doubt it will come. But perhaps that is only as it should be in a period in which global suicide by nuclear warfare is a permanent possibility.” // Pg.159-60
“To express an inward tragedy in an art form, and so purge himself of it, is something that can only be achieved by an artist who, even while living through his tragedy, was already putting forth sensitive feelers and weaving his delicate threads of construction; who, in short, was already incubating his creative ideas. There can be no such thing as living through the storm in a state of frenzy and then liberating pent-up emotions in a work of art as an alternative to suicide. How true that is can be seen from the fact that artists who really have killed themselves because of some tragedy that happened to them are usually trivial songsters, lovers of sensation, who never, in their lyrical effusions, even hint at the deep cancer that is gnawing them. From which one learns that the only way to escape from the abyss is to look at it, measure it, sound its depths and go down into it.” (Cesare Pavese)
“The thing most feared in secret always happens...
All it needs is a little courage. The more the pain grows clear and definite, the more the instinct for life asserts itself and the thought of suicide recedes. It seemed easy when I thought of it. Weak women have done it. It needs humility not pride. I am sickened by all this. Not words. Action. I shall write no more.” (Cesare Pavese’s last diary entry)
“Every battle with death is lost before it begins. The splendour of the battle cannot lie in its outcome, but only in the dignity of the act.” // Paul-Louis Landsberg
“In this life it is not difficult to die
It is more difficult to live.” (Mayakovsky)
A fascinating investigation into the facets of suicide through a study of history, literature, art, psychology, philosophy, and the author's own failed attempt prior to the book's publication. Also, the introduction on Sylvia Plath was excellent.
Highly recommend if you can stomach a critical analysis of this topic. Also, familiarise yourself with Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar and her poetry for better context on the introduction.
My favourite passages are as follows:
“A suicide’s excuses are mostly by the way. At best they assuage the guilt of the survivors, soothe the tidy-minded and encourage the sociologists in their endless search for convincing categories and theories. They are like a trivial border incident which triggers off a major war. The real motives which impel a man to take his own life are elsewhere; they belong to the internal world, devious, contradictory, labyrinthine, and mostly out of sight.” // Pg.123
“People try to die in such operatic ways only when they are obsessed more by the means than by the end, just as a sexual fetishist gets more satisfaction from his rituals than from the orgasm to which they lead. The old man driving nails into his skull, the company director with his power drill and the lovelorn girl swallowing all that hardware seem to be acting wildly out of despair. Yet in order to behave in precisely that way they must have brooded endlessly over the details, select-ing, modifying, perfecting them like artists, until they pro duced that one, unrepeatable happening which expressed their madness in all its uniqueness. In the circumstances, death may come but it is superfluous.” // Pg.145
“The psychoanalysis have suggested that a man may destroy himself not because he wants to die but because there is a single aspect of himself which he cannot tolerate. A suicide of this order is a perfectionist. The flaws in his nature exacerbate him like some secret itch he cannot get at. So he acts suddenly, rashly, out of exasperation. Thus Kirilov, in The Possessed, kills himself, he says, to show that he is God. But secretly he kills himself because he knows he is not God. Had his ambitions been less, perhaps he would have only attempted the deed or mutilated himself. He conceived of his mor tality as a kind of lapse, an error which offended him beyond bearing. So in the end he pulled the trigger in order to shed this mortality like a tatty suit of clothes, but without taking into account that the clothes were, in fact, his own warm body.” // Pg.146
“The life of the suicide is, to an extraordinary degree, unforgiving. Nothing he achieves by his own efforts, or luck bestows, reconciles him to his injurious past.” // Pg.149
“Without the buttress of Christianity, without the cold dignity of a Stoicism which had evolved in response to a world in which human life was a trivial commodity, cheap enough to be expended at every circus to amuse the crowd, the rational obstacles begin to seem strangely flimsy. When neither high purpose nor the categorical imperatives of religion will do, the only arguments left are circular. In other words, the final argument against suicide is life itself. You pause and attend: the heart beats in your chest, outside the trees are thick with new leaves, a swallow dips over them, the light moves, people are going about their business. Perhaps this is what Freud meant by ‘the narcissistic satisfactions [the ego] derives from being alive’. Most of the time, they seem enough. They are, anyway, all we ever have or can ever expect.” // Pg.152
“These are the people who will do everything to destroy themselves, except admit that that is what they are after; they will, that is, do everything except take the final responsibility for their actions. Hence all those cases of what Karl Menninger calls 'chronic suicide’, the alcoholics and drug addicts who kill themselves slowly and piecemeal, all the while protesting that they are merely taking the necessary steps to make an intolerable life tolerable. Hence, too, those thousands of inexplicable fatal accidents - the good drivers who die in car crashes, the careful pedestrians who get themselves run over - which never make the suicide statistics. The image recurs of the same climber in the same unforgiving situation. In the grip of some depress-sion he may not even recognize, he could die almost without knowing it. Impatiently, he fails to take the necessary safety measures, he climbs a little too fast and without working out his moves far enough in advance. And suddenly, the risks have become disproportionate. For a fatal accident, there is no longer the need of any conscious thought or impulse of despair, still less a deliberate action. He has only to surrender for a moment to the darkness beneath the threshold. The smallest mistake - an impetuous move not quite in balance, an error of judgement which leaves him extended beyond his strength with no way back and no prospect of relief - and the man will be dead without realizing that he wanted to die.” // Pg.155
“Along with the increase in suicide by drugs has gone a proportionate decrease in the older, more violent more violent methods: hanging, drowning, shooting, cutting, jumping. What is invved, I think, is a massive and, in effect, a qualitative change in suicide. Ever since hemlock, for whatever of obscure reason, went out of general use, the act has always entailed great physical violence. The Romans fell on their swords or, at best, cut their wrists in hot baths; even the fastidious Cleopatra allowed herself to be bitten by a snake. In the eighteenth century the kind of violence you used depended on the class you came from: gentlemen usually took their lives with pistols, the lower classes hanged them-selves. Later it became fashionable to drown yourself or endure the convulsions and agonies of cheap poisons like arsenic and strychnine. Perhaps the ancient, superstitious horror of suicide persisted so long because the violence made it impossible to disguise the nature of the act. Peace and oblivion were not in question; suicide was as unequivocally a violation of life as murder.
Modern drugs and domestic gas have changed all that. They have not only made suicide more or less painless, they have also made it seem magical. A man who takes a knile and slices deliberately across his throat is murdering himself. But when someone lies down in front of an unlit gas-fire or swallows sleeping pils, he seems not so much to be dying as merely seeking oblivion for a while. Dostoevsky’s Kirilov said that there are only two reasons why we do not all kill ourselves: pain and the fear of the next world. We seem, more or less, to have got rid of both. In suicide, as in most other areas of activity, there has been a technological breakthrough which has made a cheap and relatively pain. less death democratically available to everyone. Perhaps this is why the subject now seems so central and so demanding, why even governments spend a little money on finding its causes and possible means of prevention. We already have a suicidology; all we mercifully lack, for the moment, is a thorough-going philosophical rationale of the act itself. No doubt it will come. But perhaps that is only as it should be in a period in which global suicide by nuclear warfare is a permanent possibility.” // Pg.159-60
“To express an inward tragedy in an art form, and so purge himself of it, is something that can only be achieved by an artist who, even while living through his tragedy, was already putting forth sensitive feelers and weaving his delicate threads of construction; who, in short, was already incubating his creative ideas. There can be no such thing as living through the storm in a state of frenzy and then liberating pent-up emotions in a work of art as an alternative to suicide. How true that is can be seen from the fact that artists who really have killed themselves because of some tragedy that happened to them are usually trivial songsters, lovers of sensation, who never, in their lyrical effusions, even hint at the deep cancer that is gnawing them. From which one learns that the only way to escape from the abyss is to look at it, measure it, sound its depths and go down into it.” (Cesare Pavese)
“The thing most feared in secret always happens...
All it needs is a little courage. The more the pain grows clear and definite, the more the instinct for life asserts itself and the thought of suicide recedes. It seemed easy when I thought of it. Weak women have done it. It needs humility not pride. I am sickened by all this. Not words. Action. I shall write no more.” (Cesare Pavese’s last diary entry)
“Every battle with death is lost before it begins. The splendour of the battle cannot lie in its outcome, but only in the dignity of the act.” // Paul-Louis Landsberg
“In this life it is not difficult to die
It is more difficult to live.” (Mayakovsky)
December 20, 2024
Seguramente es uno de los libros que más me han impactado.
Es un lúcido ensayo sobre el suicidio, sin dramatismos baratos, que se inicia con un breve relato de la muerte de Sylvia Plath y sigue con un tratado sobre la historia del suicidio en occidente para acabar con el propio intento de Al Álvarez. Imprescindible.
Es un lúcido ensayo sobre el suicidio, sin dramatismos baratos, que se inicia con un breve relato de la muerte de Sylvia Plath y sigue con un tratado sobre la historia del suicidio en occidente para acabar con el propio intento de Al Álvarez. Imprescindible.
October 12, 2022
"Una vez el suicidio fue aceptado como hecho socialmente común -no noble alternativa romana, pecado mortal del Medioevo ni causa a ser defendida o execrada sino, simplemente, algo que la gente hacía sin grandes titubeos, como cometer adulterio- Y porque echaba sobre los momentos críticos de la vida una luz aguda, estrecha, intensamente dramática, pasó a preocupar a cierto tipo de escritores posrománticos, como Dostoievski, pioneros de la literatura del siglo xx.
En el centro de la revolución romántica estaba la aceptación de una nueva responsabilidad. Cuando, por ejemplo, los augustianos hablaban del <>, se referían a su público, la sociedad educada; el <> florecía en ciertos salones de Londres y París, de Bath y Versalles. Para los románticos, de otra parte, <> solía significar una Naturaleza -probablemente montañas, sin duda indomadas- por la cual el poeta se movía solitario, justificado por la intensidad de sus impremeditadas respuestas al ruiseñor y la alondra, al pimpollo y al arco iris. Al principio, bastaba con que las respuestas fuesen puras, frescas y personales, que el artista se liberase de la férreas convenciones clasicistas que lo habían aherrojado durante más de un siglo. Pero a medida que se apagaba el entusiasmo inicial se hizo claro que la revolución era más profunda de lo que había parecido. Tuvo lugar una reorientación radical: el artista ya no era responsable de la sociedad educada; al contrario, a menudo le hacía la guerra. Antes que nada debía responsabilidad a su propia conciencia.
Las artes del siglo xx heredaron esa responsabilidad y la han mantenido, tal como todos heredamos las responsabilidades políticas -el principio de democracia, el de autogobierno- propugnadas por las revoluciones francesa y estadounidense. Pero dado que el descubrimiento (o redescubrimiento) del self como campo de las artes coincidió con el derrumbe del sistema de valores por el cual se juzgaba y ordenaba tradicionalmente la experiencia: la religión, la política, las culturas nacionales y finalmente la razón misma, el estado nuevo, permanente del artista pasó a ser la depresión. Kierkegaard fue el primero en describir el proceso con claridad. En su diario leemos:
La época toda puede dividirse entre los que escriben y los que no escriben. Los que escriben representan la desesperación, y los que leen la desaprueban y se creen poseedores de una sabiduría superior; sin embargo, si fueran capaces de escribir, escribirían lo mismo. En el fondo, los dos de que sus grupos están igualmente desesperados; pero cuando uno no tiene la oportunidad de que su desesperación lo vuelva importante, apenas vale la pena desesperarse y mostrarlo. ¿Esto significa entonces haber dominado la desesperación? "
En el centro de la revolución romántica estaba la aceptación de una nueva responsabilidad. Cuando, por ejemplo, los augustianos hablaban del <>, se referían a su público, la sociedad educada; el <> florecía en ciertos salones de Londres y París, de Bath y Versalles. Para los románticos, de otra parte, <> solía significar una Naturaleza -probablemente montañas, sin duda indomadas- por la cual el poeta se movía solitario, justificado por la intensidad de sus impremeditadas respuestas al ruiseñor y la alondra, al pimpollo y al arco iris. Al principio, bastaba con que las respuestas fuesen puras, frescas y personales, que el artista se liberase de la férreas convenciones clasicistas que lo habían aherrojado durante más de un siglo. Pero a medida que se apagaba el entusiasmo inicial se hizo claro que la revolución era más profunda de lo que había parecido. Tuvo lugar una reorientación radical: el artista ya no era responsable de la sociedad educada; al contrario, a menudo le hacía la guerra. Antes que nada debía responsabilidad a su propia conciencia.
Las artes del siglo xx heredaron esa responsabilidad y la han mantenido, tal como todos heredamos las responsabilidades políticas -el principio de democracia, el de autogobierno- propugnadas por las revoluciones francesa y estadounidense. Pero dado que el descubrimiento (o redescubrimiento) del self como campo de las artes coincidió con el derrumbe del sistema de valores por el cual se juzgaba y ordenaba tradicionalmente la experiencia: la religión, la política, las culturas nacionales y finalmente la razón misma, el estado nuevo, permanente del artista pasó a ser la depresión. Kierkegaard fue el primero en describir el proceso con claridad. En su diario leemos:
La época toda puede dividirse entre los que escriben y los que no escriben. Los que escriben representan la desesperación, y los que leen la desaprueban y se creen poseedores de una sabiduría superior; sin embargo, si fueran capaces de escribir, escribirían lo mismo. En el fondo, los dos de que sus grupos están igualmente desesperados; pero cuando uno no tiene la oportunidad de que su desesperación lo vuelva importante, apenas vale la pena desesperarse y mostrarlo. ¿Esto significa entonces haber dominado la desesperación? "
October 12, 2021
I discovered this fascinating book while looking for biographies of Sylvia Plath. The author was a friend of the ill-fated poet’s; her untimely demise inspired him to write this book. Despite media blowhards’ constant assertion that suicide is at an all-time high, nothing could be further from the truth. Self-destruction, indeed, has a long and storied history—from the Vikings who believed eternal paradise would be denied those who didn’t die violently, whether in battle or by their own hand, to the Christians who willingly offered themselves to the lions in the Roman arenas…as long as their families were compensated.
Suicide wasn’t always the social and moral taboo it is in modern times. I was astonished to learn that early Christians offed themselves in such numbers (in order to reach heaven and avoid sin) that suicide was itself made a sin. The ancient Greeks even pragmatically established legal guidelines for the act:
Excellently written, The Savage God is filled with memorable, disquieting, and thought-provoking quotes from throughout history. Here are a few of my favorites:
Suicide wasn’t always the social and moral taboo it is in modern times. I was astonished to learn that early Christians offed themselves in such numbers (in order to reach heaven and avoid sin) that suicide was itself made a sin. The ancient Greeks even pragmatically established legal guidelines for the act:
Whoever no longer wishes to live shall state his reasons to the Senate, and after having received permission shall abandon life. If your existence is hateful to you, die; if you are overwhelmed by fate, drink the hemlock. If you are bowed with grief, abandon life. Let the unhappy man recount his misfortune, let the magistrate supply him with the remedy, and his wretchedness will come to an end. –Athens, Greece statute
Excellently written, The Savage God is filled with memorable, disquieting, and thought-provoking quotes from throughout history. Here are a few of my favorites:
From each branch liberty hangs. Your neck, your throat, your heart are all so many ways of escape from slavery…Do you enquire the road to freedom? You shall find it in every vein of your body. – Seneca
Listen to the newborn infant’s cry in the hour of birth—see the death struggles in the final hour—and then declare whether what begins and ends in this way can be intended to be enjoyment. – Soren Kierkegaard
Enter without knocking but you are requested to commit suicide before leaving. – from a magazine published in Romantic-era Paris
December 6, 2008
C'mon, all you morbid types, you know you want to read a well-researched yet compulsively readable study of suicide. & all of us morbid girls who still want to know a bit too much about S. Plath--well, the intro's all about her. And his description of his own attempt is refreshingly unsentimental yet eminently fascinating.
June 2, 2008
What shelf do you put a literary approach to suicide on? Any way, have put it in 'spirit'. Good overview of historical attitides to suicide, psych etc. and very personal on the death of his friend Sylvia Plath, and his own attempted suicide. Have read it a few times, and if I had a suicide shelf would have this as a key text. Suicide, as in, to do with existentialism rather than depression, by the way, the sort of 'can't take any more'/ 'I will punish you' acts of suicide important of course, but part only of a much bigger and fascinating set of questions. As the Hamlet boy said.
August 8, 2007
I read this for the chapters about Sylvia Plath. Always a fascinating subject to me.
March 18, 2012
i liked this book, and it was well worth the read, but what was not clear at all to me about it before starting it was that this is, largely, a study of suicide as reflected in (mostly historical) literature. the author was/is a literary critic and this can often become very clear, and very tiresome to someone who, picking up a book on suicide, is not too inclined to revisit, repeatedly, things like arguing with sylvia plath about whether the phrase "the nude/verdigris of the condor" is too "exaggerated, morbid" and if it should be left in the piece she is writing or not. if the book got rid of the nobody-gives-a-shit literary review aspects in it, it would probably be a much more concise and moving book. clearly i am not the target audience for such things, but i think most people reading this book are not looking for a literary review, but, well.. "a study of suicide." in that specific plath instance, he does admit to the criticism being a way to distance himself emotionally from the situation and emotions of it at the time, but i'm not sure that he realizes that he returns to this very same crutch throughout the book for what i can only assume is for the same personal effect. unfortunately this naturally has the same effect on the audience (or at least, me), and so it makes it very difficult to become in any way immersed in the book or the subject as you are reading, because once you begin to get wrapped up into it, here comes another literary critique that no one is interested in.
though he has taken on the no doubt terrible task of writing about suicide in seriousness, he clearly finds it difficult to write about and uses his literary critique skills to distance himself from the subject quite often, to the disappointment of myself at least, if not most of the people i imagine would read this. his emotional distancing carries through into the epilogue, where he flatly says of *his own suicide attempt* "not that it matters, since none of it now means much to me personally." a literally unbelievable statement if there ever was one. denial is a hell of a drug, i suppose.
speaking of denial, in his prologue about his personal relationship with and the inevitable suicide of sylvia plath, he absurdly rationalizes his belief that sylvia plath *did not really intend to kill herself*. i sympathize with the pain that writing about such a terrifying subject can induce, and even more about accepting that a close friend has committed suicide *and meant it*, but it is particularly grating to me that while he writes a book that seems to ostensibly be about un-tabooing suicide/understanding it better/understanding the people who commit suicide as not terrible, selfish monsters but people who are stuck in the "closed world of suicide", it is denials like this about sylvia plath and the rest of his manifestations of his emotional distance that reenforce the bullshit in the subtext: people who commit suicide are selfish. sylvia plath was a loving mother, so she could not have committed suicide, because she loved her children too much. (she even brought them food for when they woke up, see!) it is amazing to see a man write an entire book, researched very thoroughly and written with no doubt immense thought, energy, skill and time, still fall back into the basic premise which he is otherwise fundamentally rejecting, arguably when it matters most.
though i am disappointed with this book because of the above, i do think if you are interested in the subject, it is worth reading. it is difficult to get through at times, but the overview of suicide it provides throughout history through the arts/literature shows many interesting viewpoints to consider. it helped me to trace back more authoritatively the "suicide is selfish/evil" concept that seems to be rife within our society, right back to where most horrible concepts originate, which is in, of course, "our" judeo-christian beliefs.
though he has taken on the no doubt terrible task of writing about suicide in seriousness, he clearly finds it difficult to write about and uses his literary critique skills to distance himself from the subject quite often, to the disappointment of myself at least, if not most of the people i imagine would read this. his emotional distancing carries through into the epilogue, where he flatly says of *his own suicide attempt* "not that it matters, since none of it now means much to me personally." a literally unbelievable statement if there ever was one. denial is a hell of a drug, i suppose.
speaking of denial, in his prologue about his personal relationship with and the inevitable suicide of sylvia plath, he absurdly rationalizes his belief that sylvia plath *did not really intend to kill herself*. i sympathize with the pain that writing about such a terrifying subject can induce, and even more about accepting that a close friend has committed suicide *and meant it*, but it is particularly grating to me that while he writes a book that seems to ostensibly be about un-tabooing suicide/understanding it better/understanding the people who commit suicide as not terrible, selfish monsters but people who are stuck in the "closed world of suicide", it is denials like this about sylvia plath and the rest of his manifestations of his emotional distance that reenforce the bullshit in the subtext: people who commit suicide are selfish. sylvia plath was a loving mother, so she could not have committed suicide, because she loved her children too much. (she even brought them food for when they woke up, see!) it is amazing to see a man write an entire book, researched very thoroughly and written with no doubt immense thought, energy, skill and time, still fall back into the basic premise which he is otherwise fundamentally rejecting, arguably when it matters most.
though i am disappointed with this book because of the above, i do think if you are interested in the subject, it is worth reading. it is difficult to get through at times, but the overview of suicide it provides throughout history through the arts/literature shows many interesting viewpoints to consider. it helped me to trace back more authoritatively the "suicide is selfish/evil" concept that seems to be rife within our society, right back to where most horrible concepts originate, which is in, of course, "our" judeo-christian beliefs.
August 23, 2023
Aunque el título le dé escozor a lxs amigxs y el psiquiatra te mire raro cuando le digas que estás leyendo un ensayo sobre el suicidio, si estás pasando por una situación jodida que lo contempla este es un buen libro para desistir (o retrasarlo todo el tiempo que dure la lectura).
Álvarez repasa el papel del suicidio en la literatura y en la historia y cómo pasó de ser un acto horroroso y condenable a ser estimulado y enaltecido por el primer cristianismo,
y otra vez condenado,
luego estetizado,
moralmente reprobado,
y en el medio está el dolor incomprensible y permanente de todas las personas que sufren y no ven más salida que liquidarse (incluyendo al autor).
Al Álvarez me hace sentir que es un amigo cálido y comprensivo que te entenderá aunque quiera zamarrearte.
Álvarez repasa el papel del suicidio en la literatura y en la historia y cómo pasó de ser un acto horroroso y condenable a ser estimulado y enaltecido por el primer cristianismo,
y otra vez condenado,
luego estetizado,
moralmente reprobado,
y en el medio está el dolor incomprensible y permanente de todas las personas que sufren y no ven más salida que liquidarse (incluyendo al autor).
Al Álvarez me hace sentir que es un amigo cálido y comprensivo que te entenderá aunque quiera zamarrearte.
August 7, 2020
El ensayo parte de la evidencia de que el suicidio sigue siendo un misterio y un tabú. Álvarez, amigo u vecino de Sylvia Plath inicia su indignación a partir de este caso para seguir componiendo una historia del suicidio literario (el de los personajes y el de algunos autores) y concluir con un estremecedor capítulo final sobre su propia experiencia. Sus análisis del Romanticismo o el dadaísmo son muy notables y demuestran su profundidad como crítico.
October 6, 2021
Es muy lindo leer a Al Alvarez. Es raro, porque habla del suicidio, pero en algún sentido me hace sentir como que estoy en una cama muy cómoda. Leer este ensayo te cambia un poco la forma de ver el suicidio.
May 15, 2020
This is a once-in-a-lifetime read. A strikingly well-researched and empathetic view of suicide and its history without modern dispositions on the fatal choice. You will find no empty platitudes on the importance of thinking positive, no gibberish on how the universe reacts to your positive energy, no illusions on how God above abhors the act. In fact, Al Álvarez does not condemn suicide at all. Likely because he, too, has felt that final urge pulling him to the void. That inexorable urge for the bitter end won him over. As it did with me. But in the case of both of us, the gloom of death stayed its hand.
The Savage God goes through the history of the many ways suicide has been viewed, from the Stoics and Augustine to Dadaists and Romanticists. The book does not shy away from condemning nonsense when it comes across it. It is not wholly objective—that is not a fault. It is very much necessary. That is not to say that The Savage God is pro-suicide; it is not. But it is "anti-anti-suicide", in a way. The Savage God is beautifully written, staunchly personal, and it embraces the meaninglessness of life; consequently, it embraces the dead-end of death. Suicide exists between.
The book is mostly progressive for its brutal and honest view of suicide at the time, but it does falter in that regard. As it was written nearly 50 years ago, it is dated. It idolizes Freud, whose theories are mostly disproven (but not unimportant, of course) and spends a great deal of time doing so. Of course, Álvarez could not have known, and it doesn't take much away from his analysis of self-destruction on a more personal scale. In other words, the study of suicide in psychiatry and cognition is, to the modern reader, not entirely accurate. In addition, it contains periodic casual sexism and outdated racist terminology at times. These two things can mar the experience here and there and it's important to criticize work with those qualities. Yet, with these points and The Savage God's age in mind, it is still a thorough, heartfelt, and raw study of an act that many have taken—Álvarez and I included—and many will take.
At points, The Savage God becomes crushingly bleak. This is necessary, as the act is bleak. It is a rejection of all that would make you suffer as well as a rejection of all that would make you happy. It is choosing to end existence; how terrifying a thing, to shed the one thing you have always known, to betray one's own body and join the dead in their thoughtlessness. Álvarez addresses suicide for what it is: rejection.
To paraphrase a quote contained in the book; we have no conception of the acute anguish and dolor that leads one to take their life. Well, through his sharp analysis of suicide's history, gripping and poignant prose, intricate weaving of philosophy and art, and personal experience with the deed, I can attest from experience that Al Álvarez comes close.
9.4/10.
The Savage God goes through the history of the many ways suicide has been viewed, from the Stoics and Augustine to Dadaists and Romanticists. The book does not shy away from condemning nonsense when it comes across it. It is not wholly objective—that is not a fault. It is very much necessary. That is not to say that The Savage God is pro-suicide; it is not. But it is "anti-anti-suicide", in a way. The Savage God is beautifully written, staunchly personal, and it embraces the meaninglessness of life; consequently, it embraces the dead-end of death. Suicide exists between.
The book is mostly progressive for its brutal and honest view of suicide at the time, but it does falter in that regard. As it was written nearly 50 years ago, it is dated. It idolizes Freud, whose theories are mostly disproven (but not unimportant, of course) and spends a great deal of time doing so. Of course, Álvarez could not have known, and it doesn't take much away from his analysis of self-destruction on a more personal scale. In other words, the study of suicide in psychiatry and cognition is, to the modern reader, not entirely accurate. In addition, it contains periodic casual sexism and outdated racist terminology at times. These two things can mar the experience here and there and it's important to criticize work with those qualities. Yet, with these points and The Savage God's age in mind, it is still a thorough, heartfelt, and raw study of an act that many have taken—Álvarez and I included—and many will take.
At points, The Savage God becomes crushingly bleak. This is necessary, as the act is bleak. It is a rejection of all that would make you suffer as well as a rejection of all that would make you happy. It is choosing to end existence; how terrifying a thing, to shed the one thing you have always known, to betray one's own body and join the dead in their thoughtlessness. Álvarez addresses suicide for what it is: rejection.
To paraphrase a quote contained in the book; we have no conception of the acute anguish and dolor that leads one to take their life. Well, through his sharp analysis of suicide's history, gripping and poignant prose, intricate weaving of philosophy and art, and personal experience with the deed, I can attest from experience that Al Álvarez comes close.
9.4/10.
November 5, 2011
Read as research for a play about suicide.
As with two other books I read on the subject (History of Suicide: Voluntary Death in Western Culture and Leaving You: The Cultural Meaning of Suicide), this one contains much to open the eyes and provoke thought. The overall lesson here is simple (and applies as well to the other two), though it does a disservice to these engaging books to reduce it to such: the human being does have and has always had many possible reasons for committing suicide. Those reasons, in any particular case, are often kept private, may not be speakable by the suicide, and may go beyond the individual (as with the Jews of Masada or the aborigines of Tasmania). Those who remain behind, and those who see and wonder, are left, as Alvarez says in his preface, to "attempt to find out why these things happen." Thus, along with the many possible reasons for one person's self-destruction, many theories have arisen to explain the phenomenon. Alvarez surveys the reasons as well as the theories, often paying close attention to writers and other artists.
There's not only much to learn and much to think about here; there's also much to please anyone who loves "quotable quotes." (Again, that's also true of the other books I named.) I'll give only one, which Alvarez borrows from Erwin Stengel: "At some stage of evolution man must have discovered that he can kill not only animals and fellow-men but also himself. It can be assumed that life has never since been the same to him."
Alvarez considers at some length the case of Sylvia Plath, whom he knew (and who has become such a fetish that her daughter complained of her mother having been made into a "Sylvia Suicide Doll"). Discussing that or giving any further account of the book itself is beyond me without a careful survey of the text, as I read it some years ago.
As with two other books I read on the subject (History of Suicide: Voluntary Death in Western Culture and Leaving You: The Cultural Meaning of Suicide), this one contains much to open the eyes and provoke thought. The overall lesson here is simple (and applies as well to the other two), though it does a disservice to these engaging books to reduce it to such: the human being does have and has always had many possible reasons for committing suicide. Those reasons, in any particular case, are often kept private, may not be speakable by the suicide, and may go beyond the individual (as with the Jews of Masada or the aborigines of Tasmania). Those who remain behind, and those who see and wonder, are left, as Alvarez says in his preface, to "attempt to find out why these things happen." Thus, along with the many possible reasons for one person's self-destruction, many theories have arisen to explain the phenomenon. Alvarez surveys the reasons as well as the theories, often paying close attention to writers and other artists.
There's not only much to learn and much to think about here; there's also much to please anyone who loves "quotable quotes." (Again, that's also true of the other books I named.) I'll give only one, which Alvarez borrows from Erwin Stengel: "At some stage of evolution man must have discovered that he can kill not only animals and fellow-men but also himself. It can be assumed that life has never since been the same to him."
Alvarez considers at some length the case of Sylvia Plath, whom he knew (and who has become such a fetish that her daughter complained of her mother having been made into a "Sylvia Suicide Doll"). Discussing that or giving any further account of the book itself is beyond me without a careful survey of the text, as I read it some years ago.
October 7, 2021
"Sterven is een kunst, als al het andere."
- Sylvia Plath
- Sylvia Plath
January 8, 2012
If was being truly honest, I would rate this book closer to three and a half stars, but I'll round up and give Alvarez the benefit of the doubt. The best parts of this book were the first and last chapters. In the first, Alvarez discusses the suicide of Sylvia Plath. Alvarez talked with Sylvia only days before she took her life. He was also one of the first critics to champion her poetry. In the last chapter, Alvarez talks in painful detail about his own failed suicide attempt. In the middle sections of the book, Alvarez explores the idea of suicide throughout history, clumsily quoting literary figures along the way. Oftentimes, a quote will go on for a good three or four pages. Afterward, Alvarez may or may not offer a paragraph or two of anaylsis. Certainly an interesting topic and one of morbid curiosity for many, suicide has somehow become linked with artistic creativity. In one of the more enlightening sections of the book, Alvarez brilliantly links the turmoil, uncertainty, and chaos of the modern world, as well as the new conception of the 'artist', as the main reason for this tragic correlation. Like I said, the best parts of this book are when Alvarez stops relying on outside sources and writes about his own experiences. As a man who has fully felt the seductive temptation of suicide, his final conclusion, that suicide is a useless and futile attempt to escape suffering, is especially powerful. A very interesting read - I only wish Alvarez would have had a little more faith in his own insights and not relied so much on other sources.
January 28, 2016
This book is (understandably) limited in its Eurocentricism and its reliance on speculation about its subjects' thought processes. I'd also argue that Alvarez assigns too much importance to Freudian theory, but as long as one isn't expecting a totally scientific/empirically researched volume, this is a fascinating read that inspires reflection, not just about suicide and its motivators, but about the nature of good, enduring art and the creative process.
October 19, 2024
I had a meaningful conversation about suicide during an Anna Keranina book club, to which my lovely, intelligent friend expressed that many of those that commit suicide do not actually want to die, but are attempting to feel in control of one aspect of an arguably “out-of-control” situation or life. Even the consideration of suicide is a choice, and a choice can feel powerful to an individual who has felt robbed of their autonomy. They are attempting (and sadly succeeding) in grasping the wheel of that car spinning out chaotically through the streets of their mortality.
Alvarez puts it plainly: “For suicide is, after all, the result of a choice. However impulsive the action and confused the motives, the moment when a man finally decides to take his own life he achieves a certain temporary clarity. Suicide may be a declaration of bankruptcy which passes judgement on a life as a long history of failures. But it is a history which amounts at least to this one decision which, by its very finality, is not wholly a failure. Some kind of minimal freedom — the freedom to die in one’s own way and in one’s own time — has been salvaged from the wreck of all those unwanted necessities.”
The Savage God is a pertinent discussion of the suicide as a truth of life and art, withstanding the decades since its publication to sing an electric chord on our narrow preconceptions which still exist today. Pulsing with an undogmatic view, both compassionate and objective in its understanding of the subject, this book entwines history, literary criticism, and memoir in such a way that ensnared me, making it near impossible to put down. Alvarez has solidified this work as one of the most important reflections on this mortal coil that I’ve encountered, and I imagine I will be reading and rereading again for many years to come.
Alvarez puts it plainly: “For suicide is, after all, the result of a choice. However impulsive the action and confused the motives, the moment when a man finally decides to take his own life he achieves a certain temporary clarity. Suicide may be a declaration of bankruptcy which passes judgement on a life as a long history of failures. But it is a history which amounts at least to this one decision which, by its very finality, is not wholly a failure. Some kind of minimal freedom — the freedom to die in one’s own way and in one’s own time — has been salvaged from the wreck of all those unwanted necessities.”
The Savage God is a pertinent discussion of the suicide as a truth of life and art, withstanding the decades since its publication to sing an electric chord on our narrow preconceptions which still exist today. Pulsing with an undogmatic view, both compassionate and objective in its understanding of the subject, this book entwines history, literary criticism, and memoir in such a way that ensnared me, making it near impossible to put down. Alvarez has solidified this work as one of the most important reflections on this mortal coil that I’ve encountered, and I imagine I will be reading and rereading again for many years to come.
October 16, 2024
He disfrutado bastante leyéndolo, pese a no estar de acuerdo con algunas cosas, creo que hace críticas certeras a la sociología, medicina y psicología en sus diversas formas de abordar el suicidio -pero creo que el autor se decanta, o por lo menos se nota más el apego, por el psicoanálisis.
Me ha gustado que se haya estructurado de forma histórica, y que reine la total honestidad al presentar el tema: su propia experiencia y la de Plath como amiga suya, la dificultad de separarse analíticamente del hecho y los riesgos de hacerlo -frente a toda una maquinaria histórica, médica y cultural que condena, mitifica y vacía de significado las vidas que se repasan en el libro.
Creo que no logra dar con la fórmula, creo que tampoco lo pretendía.
Me ha gustado que se haya estructurado de forma histórica, y que reine la total honestidad al presentar el tema: su propia experiencia y la de Plath como amiga suya, la dificultad de separarse analíticamente del hecho y los riesgos de hacerlo -frente a toda una maquinaria histórica, médica y cultural que condena, mitifica y vacía de significado las vidas que se repasan en el libro.
Creo que no logra dar con la fórmula, creo que tampoco lo pretendía.
September 8, 2021
Objetivamente es un libro imperfecto, lo suficientemente riguroso para ser un ensayo al que darle pelota y tener pretensiones de seriedad. Subjetivamente me encantó, me hizo recordar sueños recurrentes y me dejó lleno del tipo de preguntas que solo se contestan cuando alguna experiencia te tira la respuesta a la cara.
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