On Monday, October 12, Professor Edith Hall will join us on Zoom at 11:30 am Eastern Time for a Casual Conversation about suicide. She is the author of “Facing Down the Furies: Suicide, the Ancient Greeks, and Me” (Yale University Press 2024). Ms. Hall is a Professor in the Department of Classics and Ancient History at Durham University in the UK. Her university website may be found here: https://www.durham.ac.uk/staff/edith-hall/ . Her short biography states:
“I was born in Birmingham, went to school in Nottingham, university (BA/MA and DPhil) in Oxford, and taught at London, Reading, Oxford, Cambridge, Leiden and Northwestern Universities, before rejoining the department at Durham on New Year’s Day 2022. Besides academic research, I advise theatre companies, contribute to radio and television programmes, and campaign to improve access to classical subjects in state schools across the UK.”
Her website links to a number of related sites, including her amazingly impressive full cv. She is the author of more than thirty books and is an expert on Greek drama and ancient Greek and Roman philosophy, which are central to her thinking about suicide, but her sources reach far beyond antiquity to describe the defenses of suicide (and counterarguments) that have been posited since the Enlightenment.
This is a bracingly challenging investigation into suicide, and the author’s passionate belief that it is the harm that suicide causes others that renders it unacceptable (except perhaps in extreme cases, but ennui, for example, is not one of them). [T]he purely secular moral case against suicide, although still underdeveloped today, was in fact initiated by Aristotle: suicide wrongs other people.’ (At 3.)
Professor Hall describes her “motives” in writing this book as follows: First, “to track down one source of my own problems—the history of suicide in my maternal family tree [in which there were two lineal antecedents who died by suicide]. A second motive was to contribute to the secular philosophical case against suicide,” articulated in Jennifer Michael Hecht’s book. Hecht’s “emphasis was on our broader obligation to stay alive.”
In reading this book, I saw Socrates in a different, and manifestly unfavorable light, and not as a hero for choosing to take his own life and rejecting at death the company of his wife and children. Aristotle, to the contrary , shines forth as someone who understands the offense that someone who chooses to end his or her own life commits on family, friends, and society. I thought as I read this about the distant, but still real, impact on me of the loss of the artistry of Carole Landis who took an overdose of Seconal after being told by Rex Harrison that he would stay with his wife Lili Palmer. And Inger Stevens, a wonderful actress, and all the joy we were denied when she took her own life. And Pier Angeli. At a far remove, certainly, but it is a loss nonetheless that I feel. And to the Greek drama that I have watched live: the “Oresteia” (directed by Ariane Mnouchkine in Montreal, rendered in a language I do not understand), “The Trojan Women,” in Stratford Ontario, and “Oedipus and The Critic” also in Stratford, replicating the 1945 Old Vic double bill headed by Laurence Olivier.
Professor Hall turns to what she knows best, the 30 odd plays surviving from Greek antiquity. And she brings a new understanding to the Greek notion of a curse, as in the House of Atreus as set forth in the Aeschylus trilogy, the “Oresteia.” The curse is what she understands to be the heritage of tragedy, especially suicide, that brings sorrow, anger, and despair, to both those alive then and later born and harmed by the passing of the consequences by and to each successive generation.
From the review in “Times Literary Supplement” by Barabara Graziosi, Professor of Classics at Princeton University (May 17, 2024):
“This book made me think of my own repeatedly suicidal mother, and my desolation when she finally died, of natural causes, in 2020 – there was no talking her out of that. It also made me think of my children and how I may best balance silence with song.”
Summarizing Professor Hall’s thesis, Professor Graziosi writes:
“We are not autonomous agents, freely deciding whether to live or die: that very notion, [Professor Hall] argues, is a “narcissistic vacuity”, a fabrication of self-centred men. Just as we are not born of our own volition, so too we need to take seriously our investment in the lives of others. Mothers matter. Daughters too. We are connected. The Furies haunt us, silent and unseen, one generation after the next, but we can face up to them.”
At the end of her book, Professor Hall manages to finds a good measure of peace and a deeper appreciation of her own mother who “stared the Furies unleashed by family bloodshed full in the face and did not give in to them. . . . I had discovered a new and profound admiration for her moral courage. And I did not kill myself when I might have done.”
Please join Professor Hall and your classmates on this Monday at 11:30 am on Zoom. RSVP by emailing me at arthur.fergenson@ansalaw.com.
“He who destroys himself destroys the world.” Moses Maimonides.
Let me know.
Arthur Fergenson