Afterlife and Narrative in Contemporary Fiction

235 Pages·2012·1.813 MB·English

by  Alice Bennett (auth.)

Afterlife and Narrative in Contemporary Fiction
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Afterlife and Narrative in
Contemporary Fiction
Alice Bennett
© Alice Bennett 2012
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The author has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this work
in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published 2012 by
PALGRAVE MACMILLAN
Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited,
registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke,
Hampshire RG21 6XS.
Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC,
175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.
Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies
and has companies and representatives throughout the world.
Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States,
the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries.
ISBN 978-1-349-34935-7 ISBN 978-1-137-02269-1 (eBook)
DOI 10.1057/9781137022691
This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully
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10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12
Contents
Acknowledgements vi
1 Afterlife Now 1
2 Dead Endings: Making Meaning from the Afterlife 22
3 Killing Time: Narrating Eternity 47
4 After Effects: Purgatory, Prolepsis and the Past Tense 72
5 Plotting Murder: Genre, Plot and the Dead Narrator 98
6 Ghostwords: Mind-Reading and the Dead Narrator 117
7 Death Writing: Person and the Dead Narrator 148
8 Here, There and Hereafter: Fictional Afterlife Worlds 167
9 After Life Writing 192
Appendix: Chronology of Primary Texts 199
Notes 204
Bibliographyy 214
Index 223
v
Acknowledgements
Quotations from Alice Notley’s ‘Close to Me and Closer . . . (the Language
of Heaven)’ from Close to Me and Closer . . . (The Language of Heaven) and
Desameree (1995) are reprinted with permission of the author, and of Litmus
Press.
A shorter version of Chapter 4 appeared as ‘Anticipated Returns:
Purgatory, Exchange and Narrative After Life’ in the Oxford Literary
Revieww 31.1 (July 2009). Chapter 5 appeared in a different version
as ‘Unquiet Spirits: Death Writing in Contemporary Fiction’ Textual
Practice 23.3 (June 2009).
vi
1
Afterlife Now
Only poetry can hold the . . . depths . . . of heaven . . .
in one still place. The only way on earth . . . we might
say what we know . . . in the all- at-once way . . . that
we know it.
‘Close to me and Closer . . . (The Language of Heaven)’
Life after death is a fiction. It imagines a world other than our own:
a dream or a nightmare, taking place in unmappable landscapes
peopled by unfamiliar beings. It is an object of speculation and imagi-
nation, but also a product of h alf-recollected experience, unreliable
testimony and retold stories. Fiction is also a kind of life after death
and, in contemporary culture, the afterlife finds its most pervasive and
diverse manifestations in the forms of narrative fiction.
In secular, western cultures today, with belief in some form of an
afterlife by no means standard,1 literary engagement with life after
death has entered a new and abundant phase. Simultaneously, a move-
ment towards less prescriptive theological positions on certain aspects
of the afterlife has relegated some of the more specific architecture of
heaven and hell to the level of human fictions,2 thereby opening up a
field for thinking abstract concepts in the human terms of narrative fic-
tion. Fictional engagement with the afterlife has, historically, combined
elements from different religious and folk traditions, as well as address-
ing the immediate cultural and social concerns of the living. Afterlives
accumulate new details depending on present concerns, and their
form and function changes with the times. The things that the times
currently demand from our afterlives are things that narrative fiction
best s upplies. After the afterlife has stopped being an item of faith for
1
2 Afterlife and Narrative in Contemporary Fiction
many, the logic, architecture, and, most of all, the narrative strategies
associated with various aspects of life after death have been retained and
repurposed by narrative fictions. Life after death has become an arena
for exploration of fictional processes and formal conventions.
The retention of some of the conceptual and structural parts of
the afterlife in the context of consciously fictive narratives suggests a
convergence of concerns about telling stories and imagining life after
death. Writing about the afterlife invokes debates about the processes
of writing about life and shifts their grounds to a new location that is
never of this world, but is both uncannily and comfortingly f amiliar.
However, the inheritance that contemporary fictional afterlives are
interrogating is as much a part of a literary tradition of writing about
this world as of a religious and philosophical tradition of writing
about the other world. In an important sense, modern narratives are
writing afterlife by s ituating themselves after writing about life.
Why should narrative fiction, then, and particularly the novel and its
realist and post-realist legacy, be so well suited to talking about these
profoundly un-lifelike ideas? What are the capacities and conventions
of narrative fiction that make an investigation of the afterlife so r eadily
an investigation of these features as well? This book’s central claim
is that contemporary narrative fiction has found itself with a strange
and unexpected affinity for the afterlife. In some ways, thinking
about the afterlife has always had a narrative strand that attempts to
convert something unthinkable into terms that can be conceptualised.
Storytelling is one way in which these unthinkable concepts can be
explored. However, there are also strands of narrative – and the conven-
tions of the novel most particularly – that resonate with the unnatural
and u n-lifelike aspects of the afterlife, and it is these which are also
exposed in modern fictions of life after death.
After the Death of Alice Bennett
Fiction’s and the afterlife’s uncanny qualities came together for me in
a children’s book which was published while I was researching this
project. Entitled After the Death of Alice Bennettt (2007), the novel’s
coincidences were hyperbolically stranger than fiction. The book, by
Rowland Molony, is about a boy who believes he is receiving text mes-
sages from beyond the grave, after the death of his mother. So, what did
I discover while reading ‘after’ my own death? Firstly, that the afterlife
continues to have an emotional urgency and cultural resonance, which
is shaped by tradition, but has been transformed by the qualities of
Afterlife Now 3
modern experience. This leads into the first activity performed in this
book – and mainly in this chapter, and in the chronology of primary
texts in the appendix – of identifying and describing common features
of afterlives in modern fiction, and suggesting a genealogy for them
in the history of afterlife thought. My experience of reading my own
death is, apparently, not all that uncommon, as contemporary existence
can be characterised by its post-consciousness – its consciousness of its
status as after. Every reminder of post-modernity, of the p ost- historical,
the post-human (and so on, eternally) is a reminder of the presence,
already, now, of our own afterlives. This is more than a memento mori:
many of the established conceptual frameworks we use rely on us think-
ing of ourselves as already dead, yet still living.
The bulk of this book is devoted to exploring these conceptual
frameworks in the forms of experimental narrative fiction, looking at
the way narrative techniques and conventions are shown to embed
ideas about the afterlife in fiction. The chapters proceed according to
narrative techniques, but these are also explorations of particular issues
in the traditions of life after death, and of contemporary interests in
the afterlife. The first of these functions begins in this introduction,
and requires an explanation of how contemporary representations of
the afterlife should be situated in the context of current thought about
life after death, as well as how they emerge out of a tradition of writing
about the afterlife. The field here is huge, so my intention is to trace a
small number of significant and representative features to, firstly, offer
a necessarily brief contextual framework for some of the theological
issues that bear on the subject matter, and, secondly, to give a sense of
some of the literary context for the texts considered.
Last things
Life and death are an oppositional binary that begins to multiply to
form a set of complex systems with the addition of the afterlife. In
the same way, within traditional Catholic eschatology, the four last
things of death, judgement, heaven and hell form an apparently solid
foundational matrix for thinking about life and afterlife. However, this
four- square explanatory structure has been disturbed from its origins, as
the addition of heaven, hell and judgement to death ought to under-
mine the finality and significance of death. How can it be a last thing
if there is so much after it? Similarly, the fraught temporal gap between
death and judgement – the judgement that occurs immediately post-
mortem and at the end of all time – marks off different theological