On October 1, I gave a presentation about Bye Bye I Love You to friends and colleagues, hosted by the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at Maastricht. I was in conversation with Leonie Cornips, professor at FASoS and linguist, but before we began talking, I read this for some context. It begins with the start of an essay that I wrote two years ago, then continues:
Several weeks ago a question popped into my head. I was in a meeting at the law school where I work as an administrator, sitting across the table from the vice-dean as she spoke, a room full of other law school muckety-mucks, most of them Dutch, me the only American and the only non-lawyer, an ornately appointed room that used to be part of the Dutch queen’s quarters for her visits to the remote province of Limburg. It suddenly seemed profoundly stupid in its improbability. All of it. A law school, in a remote province of the Netherlands, in the queen’s room. We don’t have queens, have never had queens, where I’m from. I’m not Dutch, nor am I a lawyer, nor would anyone say that by nature I am fit to be an administrator—I’m a writer with a day job. And so the question that popped into my head was, What the fuck am I doing here?
The answer to that question for the previous five years had been easy: I came here to write a book, this book, but once it was done, well, I had some things to figure out. This is the book I am happy to present to you today.
Why did I write it? There are many reasons, one of which was to address and correct several asymmetries.
The one that looms is the disparate levels of visibility and status given to early language and language at the end of life in science, culture, religion, and personal lives. In popular culture, last words are far more prominent than first words, while in linguistics, a concern for first words, early language, and language origins predominate, while language and communication function at the very end of life has not been explored in any way whatsoever.
Meanwhile, first words don’t play the same cultural role that last ones do, at least not in public life. What is going on here? What explains this asymmetry, in terms of the role of cultural models of linguistic agency, the role of the state, the limits of scientific curiosity, the boundary between the private and the public, modes of parenting and death care and more generally just care? So I wondered: what happens if you put first words and last words on the same level? How do you locate the rhythms of linguistic finitude, where those rhythms are historical, cultural, and personal?
There is another asymmetry in what linguistic phenomena are attributed to nature and which to culture in regards to early language and language at the end. On one hand, language is understood to be intrinsically bound up in culture, shaping and shaped by cultural systems. Yet when it comes to first and last words, these are seen as naturally occurring, as natural content, as inherent to a developmental moment. People would ask me, so you’re writing about last words, what do people say, as if there is something that it’s natural to say, when in fact we come to our deaths as socialized users of our language, which includes our cultural models of being a dying person. We die as embodied selves and enculturated bodies in a way that the study of language is at the very beginning of attempting to understand, and we raise our children through processes of enculturating their bodies that leave marks on their first words as much as they re-inscribe our own enculturated bodies. Even linguistics itself, it turns out, operates out of cultural groundings that, for instance, assume that this attention to first words is universal and not historically determined. And so I attempted a sort of “follow the thing” methodology to inspect the things called “first words” and “last words” and how they are constructed. What are the underlying cultural decisions that lead to certain constructions and what implications do those decisions have?
This pairing uncovers numerous other asymmetries, inconsistencies, and blindspots about our cultural and personal investments. To paraphrase William James, it’s asymmetries all the way down. To take one example, people are willing to accept that babies' first words are both biologically constrained and relationally meaningful, but nonsensical talking on the deathbed is either an organic brain dysfunction or contact with a spiritual realm--no synthesis is possible, and the ontological politics here can be vicious.
I also uncovered instances in which contemporary language scientists attempt to rebalance an asymmetry, for instance when they realize in the 1980s that identifying a precise first word is less of an empirical matter and more the result of cultural decisions. And I believe we will start the conversation with Leonie with a key quote that anchors the book on this point.
The agents and editors I first approached with this book idea thought I was cramming two books into one, but pairing first and last words turned out to be enormously productive for generating insights and hypotheses. The book couldn’t have been written any other way. I also discovered a conceptual vocabulary for assessing encounters with these linguistic limits. This vocabulary helps to sort expectations about first words, uncovers vastly underappreciated ritual last words and their histories, and places first and last words and the cultural decisions that make them in historical time. An additional strength of this vocabulary is that allows the project and the tensions within it to be situated and illuminated; if you read it right, the book eats itself.
At the same time, it is what it is. It describes the full range of linguistic and communicative phenomena that characterize the end of life, which is not done in linguistics, nor in the death care literature. This book is the first word of a new subfield of linguistics. Moving forward I am less interested in what dying people talk about than the forms of their productions: as names, curses, pre-determined chunks of lexical meaning, nonverbal communicative behaviours, or even silence, and I’m interested in the direction of change as death approaches. I am interested in the cultural matrix into which these productions are thrown and which are transformed into personal meanings. And I am interested in how people navigate the closing of the ‘interaction window,’ which refers to the abstract social space through which people interact with each other, and what people aim to achieve in their use of this window as it closes. This encompasses a range of cultural models for what should happen, whether dying people are to say ritual last words prescribed by their religious tradition, some individual spontaneous utterance, some relational content, all of these things, or nothing at all. And so I am also interested in what happens when people don’t experience what they expect.
So that’s why I wrote this book, but why did I write this book? I am too much of a historian to be a good linguist and too much of a poet to be a good academic and too much of a nomad to work the same territory season after season. The book was partly inspired by my time as writer in residence at the Max Planck Institute in Nijmegen in 2017, where the linguistics of interaction and of multimodality opened a path, which I could not ignore, for understanding language at the end of life in new ways. I wanted to write it in the Netherlands because I wanted to be close to the MPI, and also because this is where I found a job that would allow me to write the book in my own way, on my own schedule, without an agent, small amount of funding from the US National Endowment for the Humanities and the Sloan Foundation. This freedom made it a better book. I bring my outsider status to the fore for a couple of reasons. One, I’m proud of the niche I have constructed; in a way the niche construction is the true art. Two, many people’s creative and research production is done on the side and not truly valued by the institutions that employ them, so in the long run what matters are the relationships and community and the mutal visibility that we give each other. So I want to thank all of you for coming, and FASoS for hosting me, to Elsje Fourie and Joe Litobarski for the invitation to do this and the support, and to Leonie Cornips, who will be my interlocutor.
