The Art of Dying

Abstract

This paper will discuss three gardens and garden metaphors which represent such abstract ideas as temporality, transience, sickness or death. Even though these gardens do exist in reality, more of us are familiar with them from literature. The gardens of Sylvia Plath in Devonshire, Derek Jarman in Dungeness and Péter Nádas at Gombosszeg have acquired a metaphoric existence due to literary texts, they have been filled with meaning in the imagination of the readers, and they point to something beyond themselves. While constant change is part of the natural existence of gardens, these metaphoric gardens or garden metaphors are transferred to a certain timelessness, an everlasting present by the literary texts. This aesthetic existence or metaphoric overdetermination also affects the actual gardens themselves: if we are familiar with the poems or narratives written about them, we are no longer able to regard them as neutral spaces devoid of meaning.