Towards a Literary Critical Suicidology

Taking James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) as its exemplar, this essay considers some of the ways in which literature can inform our understanding of suicide. The essay addresses the emerging field of ‘critical suicide studies’, an area of scholarly endeavour developed over the last decade that sees the ‘scientific framework of research’ as ‘too narrow’ and that resists what it sees as ‘Western’ and ‘universalizing assumptions’ about suicide, advocating instead an approach that encompasses ‘contextualist, historical, subjective, ecological, political, cultural, and social justice perspectives’. The paper asks how critical suicidology or critical suicide studies might help us to reframe our understanding of and approach to the representation of, and engagement with, suicide in literature. But it also asks whether, in its turn, literature might help us to think about and even to reframe suicidology itself. The essay presents seven key ways in which literature engages or critically intersects with the question of suicide: inadmissibility and the inadmissible; disciplinarity and literary indiscipline; invention and ideation; a shared exemplarity in the discourses of literature and of suicide; representations of the ‘experience’ of suicide; empathy and its resistance; and meaning in and the meanings of suicide.