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4.0 out of 5 stars
Suicide and Its Effect on Readers, May 4, 2000
Berman's latest inquiry examines the underbelly ofcollege-taught literature, the creative-writing efforts of people inthe throes of acute depression. The book returns to the topic that has occupied him for a third of a century: the devastation visited on survivors in the wake of a loved one's suicide. This time, Berman approaches his subject through the work of certain authors who killed themselves and the stories that evolved from their suicides, sometimes as criticism, sometimes as newspaper accounts, sometimes as tales offered by distraught survivors, sometimes as copycat suicides. To a discussion of Woolf, Hemingway, Sexton, and Plath--the four writers who took their own lives--are added reflections on the writings of William Styron, an author still living whose fictional characters are often suicidal or actually kill themselves. Kate Chopin's _The Awakening_ is included as the example of an author who created a suicidal protagonist but did not herself commit suicide. The works of these writers form the content of a course he has taught and Berman bases the rationale for the course on the prevalence of suicidal ideation among adolescents. He cites a national, school-based "Youth Risk Behavior Survey," sponsored by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, which shows that the suicide rates for adolescents fifteen to nineteen years of age have quadrupled in the last forty years and that the suicide rate for fifteen- to nineteen-year-olds is now at the highest level ever.
The contagion effect, "suicide's ability to `infect' other people," causes Berman to pose questions like, "Should literature teachers take special precautions when discussing self-destructive authors?" and "Can a suicidal poem or story literally endanger a reader's health?" In light of the growing number of students who have seriously contemplated suicide and who may be at risk when reading a writer whose stories abound in fantasies of heroic death, it is essential to avoid celebrating suicide, he points out. He says that Durkheim's 1897 contention that the suicide rate remains unaffected by imitation or suggestibility was proven erroneous only in 1974: "The longer a story remains on the front pages of a newspaper, the larger the rise in the suicide rate" (26).
The book is dedicated "To the memory of Leonard Port, 1936-1968," and Berman reiterates that "Words like 'devastated' or 'traumatized' do not begin to describe how I felt when my best friend committed suicide thirty years ago," and that "The driving force behind my teaching and writing has been the need to work through the paralyzing guilt, anguish, and confusion that are the legacy--or illegacy--of suicide" (19). He elaborates that "Thirty years after his death, I still mourn his loss and have difficulty forgiving him" (20). Berman's revelation that the "best friend" was his former college instructor is significant.
The book is a must-read for learners and teachers concerned with the social effects of the literature taught at high school and college campuses across the nation; however, individuals in the throes of depression may want to defer a reading until the crisis has subsided. Possibilities of imitating the thinking and behavior of suicidal subjects may well extend to readers of this book.
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