A Novel Explores the Spectrum of Euthanasia
Naked Singularity
Victoria Alexander
The Permanent Press. 2002.
189 pp. US $24.00
ISBN 1-57962-078-7
“Death’s inevitability is the Great Teacher” tradition quotes the Buddha as saying. This novel confronts death with a similar passion. In Naked Singularity (“Your last metaphor for God was the Singularity” [p. 22]) Victoria Alexander examines and grapples with the conundrum of euthanasia.
The book’s subject is no surprise to those who know Ms. Alexander’s biography. A relatively recent PhD graduate, she has published scholarly work in literary criticism, science, and teleological philosophy (of teleology Webster says “the character…attributed to nature or natural processes of being directed toward an end or shaped by a purpose”).
The heroine of Naked Singularity is also a teleologist, as well as a woman with a tortured relationship with her father. Now dying, he has been source of her life’s greatest angst and inspiration. Fitting the teleological theme, this chimeric paternal relationship has predicated her other bonds with men, including both husband and lovers. She is both deeply intellectual and an extremely sexual being.
Into this fertile ground for story-telling-- confronting questions of love, impermanence, betrayal, inevitable death, assisted death, the hopeful and the jaded-- Dr. Alexander introduces the inward-most existential thoughts of her heroine (often fond or discordant remembrances of her father) italicized, and used to set-off, or break, portions of the storyline:
“I have often heard you say that a fatal action began when your father had yelled at your mother, Get in the car, and she had obeyed. …Easier to attribute death to the mysterious purpose of some greater power than think it might have been avoided”. (p. 44)
This device allows the author to introduce multiple-angled views on the question of euthanasia through the thought-struggles of her characters. In life, Dr. Alexander specializes in “mechanistic teleology” (wherein direction emerges from within--“in the rearview mirror all is determined, if not inevitable.” [p. 64]). Where has musing ended and the story line begun again? What is really real here? What has really happened? If I felt this way, how would I act?
In the story, of course, it is this dying father who expects this “courageous” “renegade” among his daughters to be the one to mercifully “snuff him out” when he has finally had enough. Can she? Will she? And, if so, who can she trust to help?-- all questions by book’s-end rendered into a maze of philosophical alternatives left by Alexander, apparently on purpose, for the reader to sort out. Publishers Weekly found the book’s ending “barely believable” but perhaps that reviewer missed what may be Dr. Alexander’s precise point-- that none of us can be exactly sure about what is true in our lives and none of can be exactly sure of what we might do if faced with such a request by one of our most loved ones.
Other reviewers have called this book “painful”, “raw”, “gut-wrenching”, “lurid” and “macabre”-- yet also “profound”. Metaphorically, perhaps the best way to read this book is to simply bring your own baggage, get on the train, and see where it takes you. There is very little in the spectral question of assisted death that is not explored in this relatively short novel, which can be read in one sitting. One may feel quite blank by the time one has gotten to the end, but perhaps this is the point. As Dr. Alexander’s heroine muses to herself, hearkening back to the Big Bang:
“Old light, tired starlight, climbing out of the last planetary abyss, tell us what you know. What agency broke the primordial symmetry? Who gave us these frozen accidents, our laws? But there was no answer to the question because of the way it was posed. They failed to understand that a Naked Singularity would not be like a god at all, except in his absence. He would have no throne to squat upon, no object in view. He would be but a symbol, bubbling up in the rolling void. Nothing so grand as anti-entropic entities like you and I, builders, painters and celestial mapmakers”. (p. 92).
The reader is left to ponder whether the daughter’s acceptance of her father’s ultimate request would be entropic or anti-entropic after all, and, lastly, what could be measured of its grandeur.
Kurt Johnson is a member of the Board of Trustees of the Brooklyn Society for Ethical Culture and the National Service Conference of the AEU. With a doctorate in evolutionary biology, he has published widely concerning conservation and ecological issues and is also active in inter-cultural and inter-religious dialogue. Originally in the Christian religious life, Dr. Johnson spent a year during that period working with dying children.
Naked Singularity
Victoria Alexander
The Permanent Press. 2002.
189 pp. US $24.00
ISBN 1-57962-078-7
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