The death by suicide of Gary J Shipley's close friend, Conrad Unger
(writer, theorist and amateur entomologist), has prompted him to
confront not only the cold machinery of self-erasure, but also its
connections to the literary life and notions surrounding
psychological bewitchment, to revaluate in both fictional and
entomological terms just what it is that drives writers like Unger
to take their own lives as a matter of course, as if that end had
been there all along, knowing, waiting. Like Gerard de Nerval,
David Foster Wallace, Ann Quin and Virginia Woolf before him, Unger
was not merely a writer who chose to end his life, but a writer
whose work appeared forged from the knowledge of that event's
temporary postponement. And while to the uninitiated these literary
suicides would most likely appear completely unrelated to the
suicide behaviors of insects parasitized by entomopathogenic fungi
or nematomorpha, within the pages of this short study we are
frequently presented with details that allow us to see the
parallels between their terminal choreographies. He investigates
what he believes are the essentially binary and contradictory
motivations of his suicide case studies: where their self-dispatch
becomes an instance of necro-autonomy (death as solution to an
external thraldom, or the zombification of everyday life as
something requiring the most extreme form of emancipation), while
in addition being an instance of necro-equipoise (death as solution
to an internal thraldom, or the anguish of no longer being able to
slip back comfortably inside that very everydayness). The deadening
claustrophobia of human life and achieving a stance outside of it:
both barbs on the lines that can only ever detail the sickness,
never cure it. Through extracts and synopses of Unger's books,
marginalia and underscorings selected from his extensive library,
and a brief itinerary of his movements in that last month of exile,
a picture of the writer's suicidal obsession begins to form, and it
forms at the expense of the man, the idea eating through his brain
like a fungal parasite, disinterring the waking corpse to flesh its
words.
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