It was a catharsis that failed. Whole classes and
provinces turned out to say a tearful farewell to their "Rose without Thorns",
splashing out on carnations, inscribing their names in black-edged tomes, and filling Hyde
Park beyond its capacity, yet it was clear that this was a wound that only time could deal
with. Spectacularly displayed as they were, the nation's rituals of bereavement, some
official, others hesitant and impromptu, seemed obscurely unsatisfying.
The funeral itself was thankfully restrained. The dreadful "celebration of the life
of" type of exhibitionism was ruled out, no doubt to the sorrow of many members of
Di's partytime generation. Some of the old must have winced as the Abbey echoed to the
mawkish croonings of Reg from Pinner, the homosexual divorcee. But a genuine reminiscence
of what was once the sober and dignified Anglican rite for the dead was preserved. A few
prayers were said, not enough of course; but the Church knows that the new Britain is ill
at ease when the Almighty is mentioned. Still, the prayers were there, sounding above the
din.
And yet the diffuse anthology of performances: Verdi's histrionics, Pachelbel's splendid
Canon, and the réchauffé medievalism of Taverner, hinted at a profound disjuncture
between rite and audience. Embedded in these cameos attentive listeners could detect
muffled residues of outlandish beliefs that had echoed down the centuries from Chalcedon
through Cranmer, only to fade away before reaching the ears of the tragic queen who never
was. Archbishop Carey stood as a lonely, defiant figure, speaking of his triune God, and
assuring the deceased that God Himself had been crucified for her sins. Few of the
assembled young can have registered his beliefs with anything but discomfort and a sense
of strangeness.
The archbishop knows well enough that the Sloane species, and indeed the rest of the
restless Princess Feelgood generation, is not in tune with Trinities, Vicarious
Atonements, or Dual Natures. The Britain which displayed its mourning so conspicuously was
declaring its preference for the very different worldview which Diana, and in his
alternate, more introverted fashion, her ex-husband, were palpably and sometimes
controversially seeking. The rituals at the Abbey were a posthumous bid to claim the
Dionysiac, indulgent, tarot-card Princess for an older and more Christian generation; yet
the presence of the crowds outside mutely affirmed her modernity. Simple beliefs, simple
goodness, and simple spirituality were the values she was believed to have upheld, in
opposition to the now largely uncomprehended complexities of Trinitarian ritual and
belief.
Rooted in Roman mortuary custom, the Christian obsequies which enshrine these notions are
protracted and often agonising. Grieving relatives must display themselves, and be
scrutinised by the prurient public eye during a lengthy and deliberately tear-jerking
ceremony. Other religions, almost without exception, regard this dirgelike and spun-out
style of valediction as disturbingly lacking in compassion, and also as morbidly insistent
on the physical presence of the deceased. In Muslim communities, things are done fast: the
body is washed by relations, as a moving physical sign of farewell; and is then prayed
over in the mosque in a ceremony which requires no more than two minutes. The deceased,
carried in turn by members of the family and by friends and wellwishers, is then walked to
the cemetery. The voyage from death to dust takes less than a day, after which the family
can retreat into private grief and prayers, unburdened by plans for the coming week. The
healing is supplied by the confidence that "nothing will befall us save what God has
inscribed", and by the balm of the Revelation, with its soaring, dignified cadences
which remind all humans that their mortality in this world is as sure as their immortality
in the next.
The princess's companion, the Fayed heir, thus endured less, and his family could begin to
reconstruct their lives quickly, privately, and with less distraction. Yet although
tradition parted them in death, the affianced pair perished together, blood conmingled, in
a poignant union of love and death which Orientals are already prizing as a latter-day
romance of Layla and Majnun, or Ferhad and Shirin. The British public will not accept this
motif, of course, since the blonde princess's lover was an Arab, and the gossip-columnists
who had shaken their heads over Dodi's "unsuitability" were transparently and by
public consent alluding to his race and religion. The disclosure that her suitor had given
her a ring hours before their death, and reports of her own joyous proclamations of having
been happier in his company than ever before in her life, must needs be passed over in
puzzled silence by White England. The idea of the nation's Rose surrendering to the
embraces of a brown, Arab, non-Christian Egyptian, of contemplating a future as Mrs Diana
Al-Fayed, will forever be too much for our country to contemplate. There can be no doubt
that had Dodi been of approved genetic and spiritual inheritance, Di's funeral would have
been as romantic as her wedding.
But our England will have none of this, and they lie apart in the very different worlds of
Woking and the island in the Spencer estate near Northampton. Dodi, the public has
concluded, was simply a confusing annoyance, a walk-on part. He is written out of this
Shakespearian tragedy whose audience will tolerate no subplots, and only one moral to the
story, now that the grand denouement has been written.
But the morals of this story are legion, and they cut to the core of our modern anxieties.
The millions who followed her funeral were not just mourning a posh odalisque, they were
propelled onto the streets by a mute desire for answers to deep and frightening questions.
Confronted by the sudden, irrevocable extinction of the world's best-known woman, who had
revelled in her role as an incarnation of the zeitgeist, the masses were unpleasantly
faced with their own mortality. If Diana is not divine, then, perhaps, neither are we. We
are all tagging along after her cortege, and all our ambitions, disappointments and
pleasures will end up in a muddy hole. "Wherever you may be, death with catch you up,
even if you be in lofty citadels," insists the Book; for "every soul will taste
of death." The Grand Leveller who is insistently and so successfully veiled by a
modern generation which has no time to reflect, still awaits us all, not, as we vaguely
assume, as a distant liberator from senescence, but as an ever-threatening extinguisher of
all our pleasures.
The crowds sensed something else. Just as Diana was mortal, so too are the institutions
she did so much both to represent and to injure. The Union Flag flapping uncomfortably at
half-mast over the Palace seemed like the augury of a dynasty's future. The tabloids,
obsequiously voicing the inchoate passions of the masses, demanded that the thunderstruck
Royals perform in public, and in the same clipped, hectoring sentences promised to respect
their privacy more fully. Even reigning monarchs cannot now transcend the empire of the
media: their worth for the ephemeral politicians who can decide their fate is measured not
by the tables in Debretts but by the opinion polls; and now that their lives are not
clearly distinguished in the popular consciousness from the melodramas of Brookside, the
House of Windsor may be abolished altogether with a simple collective click on the TV
switch. Thus the Prince's remarriage prospects, already complicated by religious
strictures, now seem hopeless, his dignified or floundering responses to a soundbite age
send his popularity plummeting ever further; and England may well surrender to the
mediocrity of republicanism before it has another queen, or even a princess
consort.
Diana incarnated for the masses their confusion about the Royal Family, but also held up a
mirror to their nervousness about modern family life in a more general way. She had
inflicted much damage on her own marriage through her erratic craving for self-esteem
which, as the Morton revelations documented, made her manipulative enough to set her own
happiness firmly before that of her family and the constitutional security of the nation.
Part of the blame for this must be carried by feminism, which has diminished the
self-esteem available to wives seeking fulfilment in traditional roles. But there is
another culprit to be fingered. Traumatised at six by a mother who ran off with another
man, Diana revealed to the public a fact it suppresses and yearns to deny: the depth and
permanence of the wound that divorce inflicts. "Divorce shakes the throne of
God", a hadith affirms, and Diana showed how it could shake temporal thrones just as
thoroughly. Her own divorce, adding to the tide of misery now flooding through the courts
each year, seemed to personify the public fear that the most basic of all our institutions
is under threat.
The princess also captured the public's imagination in her pursuit of the traditional
noblesse oblige charity work expected of women in her position. She was not exceptional in
this, despite the media hype: Princess Alexandra and Queen Mary had been no less
indefatigable in their support for good causes. But Diana's chosen charities showed how
intimately she shared the nervousness of the world beyond the palace gates: homelessness,
AIDS, toddlers maimed by British landmines, modern casualties of every sort were embraced
by Diana, and the public embraced them through her arms, as though to dissipate some
fraction of its guilt.
Diana hence becomes a true icon of modernity. The cultish reactions to her death well
define the quality of our contemporary mood, which cannot imagine a saint who negates
self, and can only venerate those who fall prey to vice, and who then publicly, for our
entertainment and vicarious delectation, wrestle with the consequences. Yet she knew, as
do we all, that the new sanctity does not liberate. Every time she hurled herself down an
Adams staircase, or starved herself almost to death, she discovered the child's bitter
lesson that the relief and attention brought by crying never lasts. But her world failed
to teach her the alternative, which is to be noticed not by mortals but by God, and to
draw strength and consolation from private prayer. Her mother-in-law no doubt tried to
explain this to her, but the babble of the age drowned out all such counsels. The
tristesse which follows each brief bout of enjoyment demands either penitence, or further
indulgence. In the end, her commitment to the latter, Dionysiac choice of her world made
her a martyr to the modern jet-set trinity of cognac, cars and recurrent priapic
consolations. King Priapus, tirelessly working to unseat the House of Windsor, and busy
too in Washington, usually wins in the end. The only enemy that has ever chained him is
religion, and religion is old here, and has grown feeble.
Diana was her own victim, certainly. More self-restraint and wifely acquiescence in her
husband would have ensured that she would now be at Balmoral with her children. But hers
was not an independent mind, she merely followed the instincts of her class, and those
instincts are ultimately self-destructive. Ill-prepared for life amid the staid but
genuinely self-abnegating Windsors, she threw herself downstairs. She was not
pushed.
As for the nation's mourning, this can only be interpreted as guilt. We are responsible
for the ethos that killed the Princess. We did not shout with disgust at her adulteries;
we sniggered, and asked for more pictures. We did not express our misgivings at her
involvement with the airheaded and abjectly materialistic international set. She heard our
lack of protests, and pressed on to destruction. We are all instrumental in her demise;
hence the raw sharpness of the nation's grief, and the disturbing failure of its rituals.
The orgiastic and shallow world that we have shaped in defiance of God has claimed another
soul - and each one of us will be judged.
-----------------------------
[Currently, he is a Research Fellow at the University of Oxford. He studied at the
universities of Cambridge and al-Azhar, Egypt, and has also translated a number of Islamic
works including Imam al-Bayhaqi's The Seventy Seven Branches of Faith (Quilliam
Press, 1992).]
