Death is rarely a happy affair, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be funny. For every Antigone, there is a Weekend at Bernie’s; for every Lear, a Taylor Mac. None of this is news. Tragedy plus time equals comedy; it’s a cliché for a reason. But there are certain deaths at which laughter hesitates, namely those of children, addiction, and suicide. It is this final category that interests Drew Daniel in his new book Joy of the Worm: Suicide and Pleasure in Early Modern English Literature (University of Chicago Press, 2022). That taboo, he argues, has not always been in place. Rather, in early modern literature, suicide could offer “an occasion for humor, mirth, laughter, ecstatic pleasure, even joy and celebration” (13). Together, those responses comprise the “joy of the worm,” a phrase Daniel borrows from the Clown in Antony and Cleopatra to describe an archive of surprisingly cheerful emotional registers in “scenes of self-killing” (13). Note the terminology here: Daniel makes a compelling case for using “self-killing” rather than “suicide” to describe death by one’s own hand in the early modern period. There’s a straightforward historical reason—the term “suicide” did not exist until Thomas Browne’s coinage of it in 1643, as Daniel discusses in an excellent chapter on the neologism (4). But more importantly, preferring the former term allows Daniel to shake off the stifling murk of pathology and psychopharmacology latent in contemporary discourses of suicide.
That affective shift—from a stodgy self-conscious criticism to one more attuned to the often surprising glee in these scenes of self-killing—marks the great strength of Daniel’s project. Early on he writes that topics like self-killing can prompt an immediate defensive stance in the critic, who feels compelled to prove his or her bona fides as an “ethical agent” capable of empathy (25). Who does that moral posturing ultimately serve, Daniel asks, the suicidal subject or their critic? The question is a provoking one that gives a much-needed jolt to the dreary pile of intellectual histories of suicide. But Joy of the Worm does not only concern the critic writing about suicide. In its method and subject, the book probes the limits of hypervigilance for literary criticism broadly construed. Infatuated with its own sensitivity, hypervigilant criticism can become mired in an overblown sense of itself as ethical arbiter. As such, the book intervenes not only in the historical and aesthetic conversations about its literary objects but in the epistemological, tonal, and methodological assumptions that organize those conversations.
Daniel’s first chapter covers Sir Philip Sidney’s play Old Arcadia (1580), in which a prince called Pyrocles fails to kill himself after raping a woman named Philoclea, as well as Hebe’s rejected self-sacrifice in John Lyly’s comedy Gallathea (1588). Reading both works with an eye toward the comic potential in killing oneself for others allows Daniel to question the critical tendency to sentimentalize scenes of self-killing, and furthermore to rewrite historical receptions of Sidney and Lyly. Exempla neither of courtly politeness nor excessive literary refinement, as they are traditionally read, Sidney and Lyly instead typify a certain early modern campy sensibility. The book’s second chapter analyzes scenes of synapothanumenon (the Greek term for what one might now call a suicide pact) and slapstick in Antony and Cleopatra. If Antony cannot win against his Roman adversaries in the play, he can’t quite seem to lose either. Twice he fails at killing himself, and Daniel brilliantly teases out the slapstick potential beneath his awkward, protracted death scene. Shakespeare doubles down on the slapstick a few scenes later, as a Clown enters to bring Cleopatra and her ladies, Iras and Charmian, the venomous asps that will be their means of self-killing. The Clown’s entrance is a notoriously bizarre tonal shift that disrupts the play’s grand denouement. Once he sets down the basket of asps, he lingers onstage, punning and playing, despite Cleopatra’s four separate attempts to bid him farewell. His farcical inability to read the room creates what Daniel calls, wonderfully, a “dramaturgical tourniquet as Shakespeare ties off tragic momentum via comedic detour” (79).
Once the Clown finally exits, though, and we are left with Cleopatra and her ladies, the comic register of Daniel’s reading starts to flicker. After she has taken the “aspic” poison on her lips, Cleopatra kisses her attendants and Iras promptly falls and dies. The queen laments:
This proves me base:
If she first meet the curled Antony,
He’ll make demand of her, and spend that kiss
Which is my heaven to have. Come, thou
mortal wretch,
[To an asp, which she applies to her breast]
With thy sharp teeth this knot intrinsicate
Of life at once untie.[1]
For Daniel, Iras’s premature death before her lady “prompts the decisive intrusion of comedy into the scene” because she steals Cleopatra’s thunder and causes her queen to “rever[t] to a performative display of her competition with other women” (85). The comedy here, especially given the passage’s incredible lyric power, is tricky to grasp. Daniel acknowledges as much, granting that the language’s tragic force runs counter to his identification of humor in the action on stage. Earlier, he writes beautifully about the affective pleasure surrounding Cleopatra’s figuration of her death as an elemental return to the “continuous plenum of bodies and flows” that makes up the universe (84), but here the reading, overly reliant on tropes of feminine jealousy, lacks his characteristic nuance. Elsewhere, a more sustained consideration of the gender dynamics in scenes of women’s self-killing also feels needed. In the Lyly section, Daniel is so quick to declare Hebe a “potential object of camp pleasure” for the audience that he skates over her exempla from Greek tragedy, Iphigenia and Polyxena, and how they may inflect the audience’s susceptibility to humor (48). Gender likewise appears as unfinished business with Pyrocles of the Old Arcadia, who intends to kill himself because he raped Philoclea. Daniel only briefly touches on the gender switch latent in Sidney’s treatment of rape-prompted suicide: for in attempting to kill himself, Pyrocles “aspires to occupy both the position of Sextus Tarquinius and that of Lucretia” (43). He is, in other words, both the rapist and the raped woman in one of Western literature’s oldest rape stories. When Pyrocles fails to stab himself because his weapon is too blunt, we laugh. But is it comedic that men can’t seem to punish themselves for raping women, even when they try to? Why?
E. B. and Katharine White once wrote that explaining a joke is like dissecting a frog. Once you see its innards, you understand how the thing works, but you’ve killed it along the way.[2] In the examples of Pyrocles, Hebe, and Iras and Cleopatra, Daniel’s frogs needed to die. There are other places where the joke—or even the pleasurable affective response Daniel sees—begs explanation. In his fourth chapter, for instance, Daniel charts an age-old question via John Donne’s Biathanatos: can we call the Crucifixion an act of self-killing? Or even “suicide by cop,” as he proposes via a provocative comparison with Huey P. Newton’s concept of revolutionary suicide (138)? I found myself wondering where the “joy of the worm” was in either. Political martyrdom can accrue positive affects in both martyr and follower, but there is always danger in devotion. Explaining a joke ruins the fun, but sometimes, to accept Daniel’s playful rereadings of scenes commonly read as tragic, we need a cue card that tells us when to laugh.
This is not to say that Joy of the Worm is not funny. It is undeniably so, especially because of Daniel’s own style. Mixed metaphors pile up like a tasty hoard of precious jewels. To borrow Daniel’s phrase for Dorothy Parker’s poem “Resumé,” this is a “morbid bonbon” of a monograph (1). From the quirky-yet-perfect diction to the bubbling syntax and adverbial flair, I could pick his prose out of a lineup. In the introduction, Daniel nods to early modern examples of self-killing that his reader might expect but will not encounter in the book. “Some examples (Spenser’s Cave of Despair in The Faerie Queene, Shakespeare’s The Rape of Lucrece, Milton’s Samson)…are undeniably cases of self-killing in early modern English literature,” Daniel explains, “but they do not meet an additional but perhaps unexpected requirement: they do not spark joy” (13). To compare Marie Kondo’s criteria for throwing out an old jacket to Samson’s tragic seriousness? I cackled, which is not something one can often say about reading academic monographs. Daniel’s comic chops are formidable, and the book reads easily because of them.
At times that irreverence can drift into gimmickry. I use “gimmick” here not as a pejorative but instead to point out in Daniel’s critical stance what Sianne Ngai has identified as the gimmick’s “invitation to playful sociality around an object of suspicion.”[3] Suicide is an object of suspicion par excellence; Daniel’s objective is, among other things, to give the green light to “playful sociality” in our discussions of it. Ngai writes that the gimmick, beyond just being an object of analysis, can comprise the analysis itself as a “contrivance” used to work through critical and aesthetic problems.[4] The book’s fifth chapter, on Paradise Lost, opens with one such critical gimmick. Daniel recounts the story of an undergraduate student of his who had been struggling. She was missing class and “when she did show up,” she was prone to “crying jags” in Daniel’s office (160). Eventually she slipped a hand-drawn cartoon under Daniel’s office door, in which she plausibly suggested that she had an urge to die. To use light colloquialisms like “jags” and “show up” with regard to Shakespeare is one thing. To use them to describe the actions of a student in crisis, who may well read this book or be identifiable in it to those who knew her, is quite another. (Nowhere does Daniel say if the story was shared with the student’s permission.) Daniel then lists various actions he took to ensure the student’s relative safety, both out of empathy and an admitted fear of institutional liability. He concludes the anecdote by using the student’s cartoon to launch a reading of Paradise Lost, which employs a mnemonic called “IS PATH WARM?” from clinical suicide-prevention protocols to think through suicidality in Milton’s epic (161). Each letter in the mnemonic stands for a warning sign in a potentially suicidal patient (e.g., I for ideation, S for substance abuse, P for purposelessness, etc.). The letters structure his chapter: Daniel looks first at the “ambient” ideation in Adam’s desire for rest (165), then at the Edenic apple as a controlled substance, then at Eve’s “proactive momentum” in contrast to P-as-purposelessness (169), and so on.
As critical gimmick the mnemonic speaks for itself, but I am more interested in Daniel’s use of the student’s story as framing tool.[5] He relays the story as a “particular example of a general capacity that artworks have: to render affective experiences, even and especially suicidal ideation and fantasies of self-harm and self-killing, portable” (161). Her visual representation of distress is, in other words, transferable insofar as it prompts a sympathetic response from Daniel, but it also curtails true aesthetic engagement because in viewing it, he—and we—are inevitably interpellated into a cascade of social responsibility, concern, and even institutional liability. That cascade isn’t shared by the other artworks in Joy of the Worm: we may care for fictional characters, but we don’t feel that we owe them our action or that we are liable for their actions. The student’s story, drawn from lived experience and all too familiar to many who work in university settings, reinvigorates some of the hypervigilance that Daniel has thus far modulated. For the incident to read solely as an exploration of suicidal art’s ability to both induce and suppress aesthetic and affective engagement, the reader needs to ascertain a certain critical remove between herself and the student. Otherwise, the anecdote risks appearing simply like an exciting way to jazz up the roadmap of a chapter’s argument. I couldn’t quite summon enough of a remove to comfortably incorporate the student into a critical framework of affective pleasure; maybe others can. Either way, critics shouldn’t be expected to do the work of the crisis center. That’s not our job, nor should it be. But because most critics these days are also teachers and mentors, aesthetic removes are undeniably fragile; the student knocks on the door and real life walks in.
To be clear, I don’t think that scholars can never bring student suicide into their criticism. In fact, queer theory has made something of a practice of doing so ever since Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s proclamation in her essay “Queer and Now” that “everyone who does gay and lesbian studies is haunted by the suicides of adolescents.”[6] Gayle Salamon has charted the entanglement of queer theory and suicide from Sedgwick to her own classroom, recalling that in a recent class, she and her students “sat with Sedgwick’s haunted contemplation of the suicides of queer adolescents. We were a small seminar that year, just a handful of students. Most of them queer. Half students of color. One of them did not survive to the end of the term. Suicide.”[7] The mental struggles of students can perhaps prompt a critical argument, but prompting an argument is different than becoming prop for that argument. Props, after all, have an “uncanny isomorphism with the gimmick,” and both have the power to objectify.[8]
In the introduction, Daniel offers a “tone warning” for the pages to come, informing his reader that he will “adopt tones toward violent death and suffering that are ludicrous, flippant, and occasionally cruel” (24). By questioning Daniel’s choice of his student as critical object, maybe I failed to heed the tone warning. Maybe I killed the frog. But because I believe in the overall project of Daniel’s work—that attending to the “joy of the worm” is not only ethically sound but is in fact imperative for a reader who aspires to engage honestly with a text—it was frustrating to see the book perform the limits of its own premise. Joy of the Worm operates on the belief that critical hypervigilance serves the critic more than it does the object of critique. I’m inclined to agree. But at times Daniel’s professed anti-vigilance, the position at the heart of his tone warning, recreates the very dynamic against which he labors. The book’s flippancy and irreverence—even though, per Daniel, flippancy and irreverence are not inherently bad qualities in a critic!—sometimes draw attention away from its subject and to itself, while at the same time telling us that its objective is to do the opposite. That’s the thing about a gimmick: it can claim and aim to do many different things—to sell, to convince, to achieve, to convey—but in the end it always points back to its own gimmickry.
Late in Joy of the Worm Daniel sums up his argument with the following sentences: “at a crucially liberatory remove from the pressure of lived consequence, a death from suicide can also be rendered in language as a heroic gift, sexual release, elemental return, amorous fusion, or political self-rescue. These are genre’s gifts to those who choose to take them up. They are costly and fraught and subject to revaluation…. Gifts can also be poison” (223). For Daniel, literature is what affords that “crucially liberatory remove.” If we have the distance created by representation, we can laugh; if we remain caught up in the proximity of reality, suicide’s demands for tragedy and solemnity become harder to overcome. The great gift Daniel gives us in this book is to see joy in the darkest of places: his honest and sharp readings will reshape our understanding of the role of self-killing and its affects in early modern literature and beyond. Daniel’s other great gift is the humor of his own pen. More academic monographs could do with the lively wit of this one. But pens, like gifts, can be poison.
Notes:
[1] William Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra, ed. John Wilders (London: Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare, 2015), 296.
[2] E.B. White and Katharine White, “The Preaching Humorist,” The Saturday Review, October 18, 1941, 16.
[3] Sianne Ngai, Theory of the Gimmick: Aesthetic Judgment and Capitalist Form (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2020), 51.
[4] Ngai, Theory of the Gimmick, 51.
[5] Daniel’s first book, The Melancholy Assemblage: Affect and Epistemology in the English Renaissance (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013), begins with a not dissimilar use of lived experience. On the second page of the introduction he recounts witnessing a woman having a panic attack in a Philadelphia hotel where the Modern Language Association was convening for its annual meeting. He quotes the words she shouts into a cellphone and then recalls his own affective response to her distress vis-à-vis their shared existence in a “competitive profession that cultivates and mobilizes the productive affect of constant low-level anxiety” (2). Through their “affective bond-which-is-also-a-gap” Daniel kicks off the book’s reading of melancholy and its accompanying affects (3).
[6] Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “Queer and Now,” in Tendencies (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993), 1.
[7] Gayle Salamon, The Life and Death of Latisha King (New York: New York University Press, 2018), 102.
[8] Ngai, Theory of the Gimmick, 16.