Transacting death: José Saramago’s Death at Intervals and the politics of the death industry

Authors

• Devaleena Kundu Christ (Deemed to be University)

Keywords:

death industry, good death, gerontopolis

Abstract

With discourses of urbanization revolving around socio-economic factors of production, exchange, and consumption even an intricately personal-cum-social event such as death is now subjected to the economic gaze. The advent of industrialization, urbanization, commercialization, and specifically medicalization, has brought about a radical attitudinal change towards death and dying, in the process modifying and magnifying them into complex structures of exchange. According to Allan Kellehear urban social complexity necessitates that “dying becomes a full economic but privatized transaction.” It is in this light that I propose to analyze José Saramago’s novel Death at Intervals (2008). Saramago explores the conjugation of the social and the biological within the thanatological schema and diversifies it into a newer domain – the “death industry.” The literary narrativization of thanatocentric infrastructure in Death at Intervals adumbrates urban confrontations with death, dying and disposal. Is the “death industry” a requirement, or is it merely an emancipatory utilitarian perspective? Is it a safeguard mechanism adopted by the urban space to prevent being metamorphosed into a ‘gerontopolis’? Is the proto-industrialization of death a logical advancement required to sustain the urban socioeconomic order? By historicizing the novel from these perspectives, this paper will elucidate the configuration of death within the liberalist, welfarist dispensations of urban society. The diachrony of thanatology, as seen through the novel, will divulge the blurring of the hazy delimitations between death, a personal face-off, and death, a social occurrence, thereby, responding to the call for a more outlined and examined resolution of the dying process in the garb of a good death.