‘Manfred’ Follow-up: Richard Lansdown

This week Richard Lansdown, whose paper for the Manfred Symposium dealt with suicide in Manfred, speaks about this topic before reflecting upon pedagogical approaches to discussing such an emotive subject.  Lansdown encourages teachers not to shy away from such conversations and, as he indicates at the end of his response, suggests that writers such as Byron and Sylvia Plath offer the unique opportunity to study the difficult experiences and suffering involved with such contemplation. 

What does Manfred teach us about attitudes regarding suicide throughout history and in contemporary society?

It teaches us nothing, least of all about attitudes ‘throughout history’; and how could it teach us anything about contemporary society—whatever that might be? (‘Contemporary society’ hosts a fair number of suicidal terrorists, after all.) If Byron’s poem has a lesson to offer on suicide it is a simple one: that the discussions of the issue offered by David Hume in his essay on suicide or by Freud in ‘Mourning and Melancholia’ are rationalist treatments of something that is not explicable in such terms. (Suicidal terrorism above all.) Manfred is the most anguished poem in the language: theorizing of the kinds Hume and Freud have to offer just drop off it. If we admire Romantic literature and feel that it has something special to offer, that is probably the reason why: its psychological understanding is something way beyond Hume and Freud. Manfred and Werther mark that understanding, for sure. 

Suicide is a very emotive and sensitive topic to discuss, both inside and outside of academia. What are the pedagogical challenges of teaching and encouraging students to engage with such a contentious and controversial issue? 

There can’t be any such challenges, or you’d quit being a teacher. Suicidal feelings are part of life; as such there is nothing contentious or controversial about them, and there can’t be any ‘encouraging’ students to engage with them, either. If modern students and educators want to avoid discussion of such feelings so much the worse for them and everyone else besides. It is not my job to ‘encourage’ such contact, only to enable it. I teach Sylvia Plath’s Ariel to first-year literature students every year, and I am well aware that suicide is a scourge in regional Australia, where I work. It is my job to get well out of the way and let students encounter her work, which will always record suicidal ideation much more vividly and more profoundly than I can. So far as I can see, students understand her work with the respect it deserves. Hers is the record of real psychological experience; if we need ‘encouraging’ to come to terms with that, we shall certainly never understand it. People like Plath and Byron are those from whom we can really learn when it comes to the tragedy of people taking their own lives: I wouldn’t worry too much about contention and controversy. Worrying about such things is often enough a form of egotism. The world is contention and controversy, after all, and the humanities are designed to engage with such things—only we don’t ‘engage’ with them, thank Heaven, we read about them.