Here’s the first in my new blog series I’m calling Visitations, in which I blog about an extended stay with a book that I really should have read by now. I’d also like to offer the caveat that this review/critical analysis is spoiler heavy.
George Pollucci’s appearance within The Bell Jar is a flicker within the pyre of Sylvia Plath’s only novel: he’s the would-be suicide who appears prior to the series of suicide attempts perpetrated by Plath’s narrator and alter ego Esther Greenwood. Pollucci is talked down from the ledge of a seven-story building, and after reading the documentation of the event in the local newspaper, Esther remarks
I brought the newspaper close up to my eyes to get a better view of George Pollucci’s face, spotlighted like a three-quarter moon against a vague background of brick and black sky. I felt he had something important to tell me, and whatever it was just might be written on his face.[1]
The inscrutable message writ on his face is similar to (but ought not to be confused with) that otherworldly wisdom present in an image of someone’s final moments of existence, just before life and perhaps the soul are about to peel away from the body and leave it in perpetual stillness. Still more confounding are the faces of suicides, where a storm of nerve is gathering, and it is inevitably one that, they hope, will soon yield to the eternal peace that they seek.
In The Art of Suicide, author Ron M. Brown asserts that most of the mythical suicides of the ancient Greco-Roman world, such as Ajax, Phaedra and Dido, are depicted with “the body portrayed intact, and what is chiefly shown is intent, rather than the deed itself.”[2] Intent, if taken to its more motivational connotations, is what is paramount when it comes to suicides. They who succeed cannot report to us those final thoughts, and those of us who confront the great why that suicides leave behind are left to foggy, unsolvable labyrinths of intent, searching for meaning among what they conceivably believed was meaningless in the end.
What tends to affect us most about suicides is that their deaths arrive with the essence of the preventable. The ancient Greeks perceived hanging as a distasteful form of suicide – which acquired further infamy in Western culture through Judas’ suicide after the dawn of Christianity[3] – because the act itself placed an irrevocable space between the earth and the suicide, leaving her dangling in the heavens and unable to return to the earth from which she had come.[4] This otherworldly space acquires a different symbolic meaning when taken with its effect upon suicide’s survivors, for they often feel the need to become a retroactively applying and life-sustaining bridge between heaven and the earth and reconnect her to the world. This essence of the preventable confronts us and makes us realize that our futility rests not in what we could’ve done or said to stay her hand, but in how we might have made ourselves available to listen to and alleviate the perhaps imperceptible pain that pushed her over the edge.
There is a cultural etiquette for suicides, primarily in that they are expected to leave a note and supply a quiet echo of their intent, even though many suicides do not.[5] Those who do leave notes often explain their pain, apologize or, such as in the case of Mitchell Heisman, who left a 1,904-page suicide note,[6] protest society and the very nature of life itself. Many have argued that The Bell Jar is a suicide note and assign it the distinction of a slow farewell. It was written during the last year of Plath’s life and released the month before she gassed herself in her kitchen, and it recounts her own numerous suicide attempts through the translucency of fiction. However, the novel’s intentional nakedness echoes in the decades after her death as a quest for even the tiniest morsel of meaning among the meaningless.
Esther begins her journey through madness with the execution of the Rosenbergs, with all its gruesome imagery, and lays down a steady beat of images and observations that fuse with the counterpoint of mortality and its perpetual decay. Her story is a Bildungsroman penned by a young author at heart – full of naïveté and premature, unearned knowledge that lacks experience – albeit a nastier brand of it, for it is less the becoming of self as it is unbecoming on account of the self, the act of shattering oneself into a thousand, mirrored pieces and trying to survive the process of becoming whole again without bleeding to death. The world itself is too much for her: smells and sounds are too human and fetid and alive, and films in Technicolor are too bright. She is surrounded by those who are in a perpetual state of reduction: from the young women also in the employ of Ladies’ Day magazine who are trying to lose a few pounds, to her Chemistry professor Mr. Manzi, who abbreviates the beauty of the natural world and its elements into equations and the shorthand of the Periodic Table. After she is rejected from the summer writing course on which she had set her heart, her future dissolves, and her entire world becomes inverted and distorted as if viewed from within a bell jar. In recounting one of her sickest, most defeated moments, Esther relates an episode from her time in the hospital after one of her many suicide attempts:
“I can’t sleep.”
They interrupted me. “But the nurse says you slept last night.” I looked around the crescent of fresh, strange faces.
“I can’t read.” I raised my voice. “I can’t eat.” It occurred to me I’d been eating ravenously ever since I came to.[7]
This manner of inversion continues within the novel: whereas Esther began with a brutal description of the electrocution of Rosenbergs, the path away from and back to her sanity and salvation lies in electroconvulsive therapy, as it was first misapplied by the poor Dr. Gordon and then properly administered by the good Dr. Nolan. Plath is, above all else, a poet, and this symbolic inversion is demonstrative her poet’s exploration of the oppression of the self and the self’s unstable, mad perceptions on the path to putting herself back together again.
Plath’s fellow poet and suicide Anne Sexton wrote, “Suicide is, after all, the opposite of the poem.”[8] Poetry is, on many levels, beauty and sensuality rising through the structure of language. The Bell Jar is nothing if not intrinsically poetic, and to fill a narrative with such poetry demonstrates the author’s battle against succumbing to the chaos, the void, the numbness and the silence of death. Plath’s novel is a testament to hope, that there is a remedy available to right the cosmic misunderstanding that drove her to want to end her life in the first place.
Within the first few pages of The Bell Jar, Esther writes
I got such a kick out of all those free gifts showering on to us. For a long time afterward I hid them away, but later, when I was all right again, I brought them out, and I still have them around the house. I use the lipsticks now and then, and last week, I cut the plastic starfish off the sunglasses case for the baby to play with.[9]
The key to understanding The Bell Jar is that Esther has survived and even gone on to become a mother to a child. The novel is hardly a suicide note but a record of surviving the flames of one’s own personal hell in order to be reborn, for in the beginning, Esther establishes a clear intent to relocate joy among seemingly small, insignificant things and live despite a seeming prevalence of meaninglessness. Taken superficially, the look on Pollucci’s face that captures Esther’s attention might be interpreted as the look of someone about to confront mortality and embrace the meaninglessness of life, but the message she receives from him is quite different. The Bell Jar is a protraction of Pollucci’s look: the curiosity that urges one to continue on the quest for meaning rather than slip away.
The tragedy of her triumph is that it wasn’t enough. Plath continued writing until the days before her death, and if one is searching for that final look before she stepped into the void beyond us, one only needs to read the poems in Ariel to glimpse the literary fatigue and unwavering intent in the eyes. None of us will ever know how The Bell Jar would have been received had Plath rediscovered her own curiosity, as it is impossible to separate it from her sad end. Even though the novel suggests otherwise, its darker moments ring as a recurring moment of futility for the observer who follows the desperate, determined intentions of Esther Greenwood through to the final action of Sylvia Plath, where we wonder if anyone could have been a bridge that united heaven and earth and saved her.
References
1 Plath, Sylvia (1971). The Bell Jar. New York: Harper & Row. p. 152. ISBN 0-06-017490-0.
2 Brown, Ron (2001). The Art of Suicide. London: Reaktion Books Ltd. p. 33. ISBN 1-86189-105-9.
3 Zweig, Ben (February 29, 2012). “The Despair and Suicide of Judas in Medieval Art.” Retrieved September 15, 2012.
4 Brown, p. 45.
5 Shioiri, T., Nishimura, A., Akazawa, K., Abe, R., Nushida, H., Ueno, Y., Kojika-Maruyama, M. and Someya, T. (2005). “Incidence of note-leaving remains constant despite increasing suicide rates.” Psychiatry and Clinical Neurosciences, 59: 226–228. doi: 10.1111/j.1440-1819.2005.01364.x. Retrieved September 15, 2012.
6 The Huffington Post (September 24, 2010). “Man Who Killed Himself On Harvard’s Campus Left 1,904-Page Note.” The Huffington Post. Retrieved September 15, 2012.
7 Plath, p. 198.
8 Simon, John (December 1991). “Connoisseur of madness, addict of suicide: On Anne Sexton.” The New Criterion. Retrieved September 15, 2012.
9 Plath, p. 4.
