The point of death

Abstract

David Pocock’s previously unpublished Inaugural Lecture on ‘The point of death’ marked his promotion to a Personal Chair at the University of Sussex and was delivered on 3rd May 1977. Pocock generously gave Parry a copy of his text while the latter was writing up material on death in Banares, and as far as we know, this is the only hard copy that has survived (though an audio recording of the lecture itself is listed in the Sussex University Library catalogue). It was written for verbal presentation and, at points, has a somewhat elliptical quality (though that is also true of much that Pocock published). The main text has been edited as lightly as possible and only with a view to occasionally clarifying its meaning. The comments and references in the footnotes have all been added by us. We are grateful to David Pocock’s executors, Paul and Susan Yates, for permission to include his lecture alongside our own appreciation of him. The justification for doing so is its enduring interest—both as a still highly suggestive contribution to the comparative study of mortuary practices and of ideas about death, and as an historical document that evokes a number of Pocock’s intellectual preoccupations and something of his intellectual style. As our own contribution to this issue of the journal has suggested, death was a topic on which he had long reflected; and here, he addresses it with characteristic erudition and an impressively catholic range of reference to literary and historical sources. But the resonances with his other writings go much further than that. These include: his continuing concern with the way in which uncontrollable biological occurrences and the effects of duration are subordinated to society (showing here that ‘the point of death is not the point of death’); and his related concern with the way in which unrepeatable historical events that unfold in linear time are accommodated to a theory of endlessly repeated cyclical time. Thus, the classical Hindu theory of the kaliyug is invoked to argue that the ‘good death’ of the householder is not really so ‘good’ after all. It is merely a kind of ersatz kaliyug version of the ideal, which supposes that by the time of his death, the householder will have taken sanyas. This fudge, Pocock intriguingly suggests, is associated with the fuzziness and contradictoriness of the eschatology. And that’s another of his recurring themes—the vague and tentative nature of religious belief. But perhaps, the most important message of his lecture has to do with the contrast it sets up between the ‘traditional complex’, with which the first part of the article is concerned and for which Hindu India stands, and the ‘modern complex’ exemplified by the contemporary and significantly secularised West, where the values of individualism are associated with ‘a maximal denial of death’—and indeed, of society itself. The contrast looks, on the face of it, highly Dumontian; but on closer reading, it is distinctly ambiguous. Though the ‘imperative insistence’ of Christian doctrine on the survival of the individual soul precludes the assimilation of the individual personality into a general category in a way that no other culture has done, and though the individual’s death is represented as being as unique as his birth and subsequent life, elements of the ‘traditional complex’ nevertheless persist. Rumours about mixing up bones and ashes in the crematorium recur, the standardised depersonalised coffin comes to stand for the deceased and Lily Pincus’s advocacy of a renewed intimacy with death and the dying is welcomed as a modern transformation of the older complex. It is the open-endedness and his sense of the complex ambiguity of social and intellectual life that makes Pocock both so frustratingly elusive and so attractive as a thinker. Editorial note by Jonathan Parry and Edward Simpson