Suicide is the resurrection and reading of the author.

In After Words: Suicide and Authorship in Twentieth Century Italy, Elizabeth Leake examines Guido Morselli, Amelia Rosselli, Cesare Pavese, and Primo Levi, who share a distinction along with differences.

Leake writes: “This study begins with a gunshot wound, an overdose of sleeping pills, and two falls from great heights …” She continues:

This study investigates the interrelations between suicide and reading: both how the suicide of an author informs critical and popular interpretations of his or her writings, and how, after suicide, an author’s life becomes a text to be read. I will argue that suicide functions as a hermeneutical tool with which readers, critics, publicists, and the author him- or herself construct the author’s life.

The death of the author merely precedes his resurrection because the reader is too weak and too strong: too demanding and insatiable for the author of the text, the author as the text. The moral failing also seems to lie with the author. The mortal sin of J.D. Salinger, for instance, was not his hermetic life and shuttered work after the Catcher in the Rye. They were merely his turns in a perverse game of cat and mouse. His mortal sin was The Catcher in the Rye, by J.D. Salinger. The author is dead, long live the very same.

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Elizabeth Leake, After Words : Suicide and Authorship in Twentieth-Century Italy, Toronto Italian Studies Series (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011).

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But is the wince not also indicative in the opposite, which simply is to wince with your whole being at being? Being that winces at itself. Being that is winced at. As its being. By its very being. Being wincing at. Wincing being. Being winced at. And so on.

Wincing is merely shorthand, of course, for Wincing which by other names goes by angst or estrangement or alienation or an abyss or the absurd or nausea or dread or vertigo or literal screaming. Each of course entails its own finer points of wincing. Unheimlich, for instance, is good shorthand for aporia as wincing as being shocked and unsettled by not even being at home in your very self. A turtle that carries its shell around except this shelter is one of unheimlich. Which way I go I wince, says the turtle, within this my very house and home. And then the turtle fizzes, meaning coalescing into a quickening, a concentration, a concerto of figuring whether to be or not to be, meaning to exit the home you are not, where figuring out is to know to do so it is done. Get busy living, says the turtle, or get busy dying. Damn straight, reply all the turtles in the house.