Reflecting on Dominique Venner’s recent suicide has caused me to consider the entire subject of self-slaughter anew. There are many different angles from which one might analyze and comment upon the matter of dying by one’s own hand—and I have weighed many of them before—but one which has gone largely unremarked is the concept of suicide as a pop-cultural phenomenon. At the risk of sounding insufferably po-mo, what is needed is a “meta”-analysis of the practice of quietus-making and bodkin-baring.
To begin a discussion of the macro, one starts with the micro, working one’s way outward, from the mysterious fibers of one’s own soul into the complex interweavings of the collective soul of the culture at large. As a nihilistic, agnostic, chronically morose Gen-X teenager marooned in the mid-80s, consumed with all-too-typical alienation and tiresomely frequent spasms of unsightly anomie from the onset of puberty’s bitter bloom and forever afterward, I can vividly recall the suicide hysteria that broke out in America just as I found myself stumbling, mumbling, and lumbering through adolescence.
To begin a discussion of the macro, one starts with the micro, working one’s way outward, from the mysterious fibers of one’s own soul into the complex interweavings of the collective soul of the culture at large. As a nihilistic, agnostic, chronically morose Gen-X teenager marooned in the mid-80s, consumed with all-too-typical alienation and tiresomely frequent spasms of unsightly anomie from the onset of puberty’s bitter bloom and forever afterward, I can vividly recall the suicide hysteria that broke out in America just as I found myself stumbling, mumbling, and lumbering through adolescence.
