Narrative and the Afterlife in Modern Fiction The Meanings of Life After Death Alice Bennett

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Bennett, Alice
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Narrative and the Afterlife in Modern Fiction
The Meanings of Life After Death
Alice Bennett
The copyright of this thesis rests with the
author or the university to which it was
submitted. No quotation from it, or
information derived from it may be
published without the prior written
consent of the author or university, and
any information derived from it should be
acknowledged.
PhD Thesis
Department of English Studies
Durham University
2008
2 3 APR 2009
The copyright of this thesis rests with the author. No quotation from it should be
published in any form, including electronically or on the internet, without the
author's prior written consent. All information derived from this thesis must be
acknowledged appropriately.
Contents
Acknowledgements v
Chapter 1
Introduction: Afterlife Now 1
The Stories of Life after Death 3
Narrative. Afterlife. Modern. Fiction. 22
Chapter 2
Dead Endings: Making Meaning from the Afterlife 35
Distinguishing Afterlife and Apocalypse 37
Sense After the End 46
Living with a Memory of Death 58
Reading with a Memory of Death 61
Chapter 3
After Effects: Retrospection and Causality 66
The Effects of Tense 72
The Effects of Preterition 85
The Effects of Prolepsis 95
The Cause and Effect of the After Effect 104
Chapter4
Plotting Death: The Dead Narrator and Plot 106
The Descent Narrative Possibility 111
Detecting Death: the Murder Mystery Possibility 120
Crude spectres: the Ghost Story Possibility 127
A Voice-from-Beyond-the-Grave: the Life-Writing Possibility 134
The Most Acceptable of all the Possibilities 140
ll1
Chapter 5
Ghostwords: The Dead Narrator and Mind-Reading 144
Omniscience and Divinity 145
Omniscience and Humanity 157
Omniscience and Transparency 163
Omniscience and Telepathy 173
Chapter 6
Here and Hereafter: Space and the Afterlife 188
Perspective and Pictorial Space 190
On the Outside 199
On the Other Side and in the Other World 204
Triangulation and Topography 209
On the Goddamn Map 218
Chapter 7
Killing Time: Narrating Eternity 223
Pincher Martin and Subjective Time 229
The Human Age and Bureaucratic Time 236
The Third Policeman and Iterative Time 240
Time's Arrow and Oscillationist Time 249
ChapterB
After Life Writing 256
After: Post 257
After: Meta- 263
Appendices
Appendix 1: Chronology of Afterlife Fictions 270
Appendix II: Leviathan and Lanark Frontispieces 272
Appendix III: Maps from How the Dead Live and The 274
Chronicles ofNarnia
Works Cited 277
lV
Acknowledgements
At some moments in the last three years I have regretted, like Beckett's Malone,
"launching forth on all this ballsaching poppycock about life and death."
However, the care and support of a number of people has seen this thesis to
completion, and I am keen to offer them all thanks and acknowledgement.
Firstly, I have an enormous debt of gratitude to Prof. Pat Waugh for her wisdom,
patience, good judgment, and constant kindness and fun. I have been so
fortunate to have benefited from her guidance over the last three years, and I
feel privileged to have experienced her unfailing enthusiasm for my work and
for learning.
I Would also like to express my appreciation to Prof. Tim Clark for his
encouraging comments on early chapters of this thesis, which gave me
confidence when I was feeling least sure of myself: thank you.
Thank you to Matt for endless encouragement, love, and cheering from the
sidelines and, often, the other end of a phoneline. Also, for explaining what a
Poisson distribution was. No more excuses!
And, lastly, more thanks than I can express to my mum and dad for their
unbounded love and support, in the last three years and always: everything
good in this is from you.
v
Chapter 1
Introduction: 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)
As an object for speculation, the mystery of what happens after death is a fertile
topic with a lengthy history. In secular Western cultures today, with belief in some
form of an afterlife by no means standard,1literary engagement with life after
death has entered a new and abundant phase. Simultaneously, a movement
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 investigating the benefits of
thinking abstract concepts in the human terms of narrative fiction. Fictional
1 Asked whether they believe in life after death, around 50% of people in the UK answer yes: in an
Ipsos MORI poll in October 2007, the figure was 47%; in a Populus poll in April2005 it was 53%.
Internationally, the 48% of people who believe in heaven in the UK compares with 58% in Canada,
and 81% in the USA, according to Gallup polls from 2004. The Gallup polling also consistently
showed reported belief in heaven to be more frequent than reported belief in hell.
2 The Catholic Church, for instance, seems to be in the process of dismantling the architecture of the
afterlife: Pope John Paul II gave audiences in the summer of 1999 ('General Audience: Wednesday
28 July 1999' and 'General Audience: Wednesday 4 August 1999') that suggested neither purgatory
nor hell were "places" but conditions inflicted on the soul through separation from God and the
necessity of purification. Heaven, on the other hand "is neither an abstraction nor a physical place
in the clouds, but a living, personal relationship with the Holy Trinity. It is our meeting with the
Father which takes place in the risen Christ through the communion of the Holy Spirit" Similarly,
Pope Benedict XVI approved publication of a report by the International Theological Commission in
2007, which can be read as evidence that the doctrine of limbo for unbaptised infants has been
abandoned ('The Hope of Salvation for Infants Who Die without Being Baptised}
1
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·""·-
engagement with the afterlife has, historically, combined elements from different
religious and folk traditions, as well as addressing the immediate cultural and
social concerns of the living in different periods in history. This suggests that, if
narratives about the afterlife were not simply serving religious purposes then, even
without faith in an afterlife as the default for many people, the literature of the
afterlife still has a function. It offers a model for another world, in an alternative
kind of time and space, against which this world has been conceptualised. It is
peopled by characters whose status is somewhere between persons and non
persons, and who are notoriously interested in telling their own life stories.
Framed in these terms, the afterlife becomes an irresistible topic for narratives that
are concerned with their own fictional processes and formal conventions. After the
· afterlife has stopped being an item of faith for 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.
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 has both uncannily and
comfortingly familiar elements. 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 situating 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 capabilities and conventions of narrative fiction that
make an investigation of the afterlife so readily an investigation of these features as
well? This thesis will argue that narrative fiction has found itself with a strange
and unexpected affinity for these issues. In some ways, thinking about the afterlife
has always had a narrative strand that attempts to convert something unthinkable
2
into terms that can be conceptualised. However, there are also strands of narrative
- and the conventions of the novel most particularly- that resonate with the
unnatural and un-lifelike aspects of the afterlife, and it is these which are also
exposed in modern fictions of the afterlife.
This thesis aims to perform three interdependent functions: firstly, to identify
and describe common features in the increasingly frequent occurrences of
afterlives in modern fiction; secondly, to argue for the place of writing about life
after death as a way of engaging with narrative techniques and conventions;
thirdly, to suggest a context for this work in a more pervasive cultural sense of
endings, which are best represented by the idea of personal death and 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 contextual framework for some of the theological issues that bear on
the subject matter, and, secondly, to give a sense of some literary texts on which
contemporary fictional afterlives are drawing.
The Stories of Life after Death
Introducing and summarising scholarship on the subject of medieval eschatology in
their collection Last Things: Death and Apocalypse in the Middle Ages (2000),
Caroline Walker Bynum and Paul Freedman have three comments to make on the
state of research in the field. Among their first observations is the idea that study
of the period has imposed a modern sense of fragmented eschatology on concerns
that, for people in the Middle Ages, would have been more connected. "Recent
scholarship," Bynum and Freedman note, "has tended to treat separately concerns
that both medieval intellectuals and ordinary people would have seen as closely
linked: death, the afterlife, the end of time (whether terrestrial or beyond earth),
and theological anthropology or the theory of the person" (1 ). The implication here
is that, for moderns, these issues are always separated. Chapter 2 of this thesis
3
surveys the current state of the most prominent aspect of contemporary
eschatology- apocalypse -but it is an important detail to note at this point that
this division among last things has not always been the case.
One reason for the separation of eschatological elements could be the loss of
a sense of imminent apocalypse, meaning that the time period between an
individual's demise and the imagined end of the world was understood as being so
close as to be virtually one and the same. This is touched upon in Bynum and
Freedman's more detailed summary of the prevailing historical perspectives on the
Middle Ages:
Study of medieval attitudes toward death and death rituals has
tended to agree in essence if not always in detail with Philippe
Aries's sense of a shift in the central Middle Ages from "tamed
death"- a death expected and prepared for, experienced in
community- to a "personal death," an understanding of the moment
of death as a decisive accounting for an individual self. Study of the
afterlife has seen a parallel shift, in the twelfth century, from a
twofold eschatological landscape of heaven and hell to an at least
partially three-tiered afterlife, including the in-between space and
time of purgatory, to which most Christian souls go after "personal
death" for a propitiating and cleansing that may (or may not,
depending on the prayer-work of those on earth) continue until a
far distant Last Judgement. Work on concepts of the human person
has detected in the thirteenth century a shift from emphasis on
resurrection of the literal, material body at the end of time to stress
on the experience of the separated soul after death, although this
scholarship has pointed out that the separated soul was at the same
time increasingly imaged as bodily (somatomorphic), and that
ordinary piety came to be characterized by both a sense of the
4