v

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
Bibliography 214
Index 223
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1
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 half- 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 supplies. After the afterlife has stopped being an item of faith for
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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 familiar.
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 capacities and conventions
of narrative fiction that make an investigation of the afterlife so readily
an investigation of these features as well? This books 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 un- 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
Fictions and the afterlifes uncanny qualities came together for me in
a childrens book which was published while I was researching this
project. Entitled After the Death of Alice Bennett (2007), the novels
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
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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 post- 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
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4 Afterlife and Narrative in Contemporary Fiction
positions and, again, adds more time after these last things. Beliefs
that explicitly continue life and time after the death of the individual
include both purgatory and reincarnation. Both of these present their
own particular attractions to modern fictional afterlives.
There are three areas that represent the major threads I want to trace
through the history of the afterlife in this introductory tour through
heavens and hells: the distinction between communal and individual
experiences; the place of embodiment and physical experience of the
afterlife (as opposed to the psychological, subjective or soul-experiences);
and, finally, the relationship between people in this world and the other
world, which, in the case of medieval Christianity, was so complicated
by the addition of purgatory.
The place of the individual in these creation- scale systems is reflected
in microcosms of small groups and forced communities, often involving
some shared institution with rules and an ordering logic. The story
of different models for communities in the afterlife begins as early as
Zoroastrian ideas of life after death, in an underworld in which people
were enclosed within single cells or boxes. Alice K. Turner describes, in
The History of Hell (1993), how this was recorded in a descent narrative
of the ninth century (18). She connects these boxes to the tradition in
Byzantine art for depicting people in isolation in hell, with barriers sepa-
rating them. In contrast, she argues, chaotic and crowded piles of naked
bodies consistently characterise western depictions of the damned. Turner
describes hell as oddly fleshy, with tortures that hurt and an atmosphere
that is, particularly during some of Hells history, excessively gross (3).
Her story of the evolution of hell tends to make heavens sound rather
dull by comparison, with the riotous depictions of hell offering titillating
pleasure in graphic renderings of sin and punishment but, at the same
time, casting their audience in the role of the saved in heaven, enjoying
the pleasure the saved were said to derive from watching the torments
of the damned.
3
This has some very serious consequences for any mod-
ern representation of afterlives, when our best ambitions for ourselves
as human beings are codified as universal human rights. When there
are hells in contemporary literature, the reader is cast into a position of
disapproval, outside both heaven and hell, rather than taking pleasure
in suffering from the satisfied position of one of the saved. The conflict
between human rights and the afterlife (even heaven, which denies us
our human right to marriage and family life, not to mention the right to
freedom of conscience and religious practice) summarises the essential
conflict that runs through the hope for the afterlife and our hopes for
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Afterlife Now 5
ourselves as human beings: is heaven defined by being something alien
to human values, or the sum of the best of human values?
Hells can be imagined in these two conflicting ways too, with
supernatural horrors or a revelation of the worst of humanity left to our
own devices. In the second category, the two aspects of hell mentioned
above the fleshy hells that developed into the seventeenth centurys
Baroque Jesuit overcrowding (Turner, 1993: 173) and the Dantesque
meticulous ordering and accounting for souls, with each sinner filed
tidily within their appropriate circle represent the poles of the worst
possible outcomes for living in the world, and within a human social
order. There are few hells that see the damned neither crowded out by
the presence of other peoples bodies nor oppressed by the equivalent of
state powers, either as in a horrifically overpopulated earthly city (hell
always lacks a proper sewage system) or catalogued and controlled by
an oppressive power with the intention of causing maximum suffering
to each individual. Both poles are ultimately united in contemporary
fiction in images of the city, the school, the hospital, the (refugee or
displaced persons) camp, and, most overwhelmingly in the twentieth
century, the concentration camp and the hotel.
Increasing urbanisation added a new layer to depictions of overcrowded
hells, but some of the benefits of urbanisation and urban institutions
were also translated into ideas about heaven. The imagery of feudal rela-
tionships and jewelled castles in the Middle- English Pearl poem were,
by the nineteenth century, transformed into urban streetscapes. For
instance, the New York City preacher Thomas DeWitt Talmage described
heaven in 1892 as a great metropolis with boulevards of gold and
amber and sapphire (qtd. in McDannell and Lang, 1988: 279). In a time
of urban expansion and, more importantly, town planning and brand
new cityscapes, is it any wonder that hopes for the afterlife were tied up
with the hopes invested and embodied in modern cities? The bestseller
in mid- century America was Elizabeth Stuart Phelpss The Gates Ajar
(1868)
4
which appealed to the nineteenth centurys interests in death,
spiritualism, and family life, as well as to a specifically post- Civil War
concern for the fate of dead loved ones. The heaven described in The
Gates Ajar and actually visited in Phelpss sequel, Beyond the Gates (1883),
was largely pastoral, with the dead living in woodland cottages housing
family groups and complete with pets, pianos, and audi ences with
famous figures from history. Coleen McDannell and Bernard Lang, in
Heaven: A History (1988), conclude their analysis of this moment of
Victorian religious feeling with the observation that, It was the home,
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6 Afterlife and Narrative in Contemporary Fiction
and not the church, which writers described as the antitype of heaven
(272). Even the Victorian home is a house of many mansions, built for
an extended family even more extended by resurrection.
McDannell and Lang also offer some analysis of the systems in place
in these heavens for souls whose needs were not met within the home,
and had to be institutionalised. They give multiple examples of both
preaching and religious novels that posit the idea of children being edu-
cated in heaven, and suggest that the efforts in favour of free schooling
for all children were responsible for similar concerns in heaven (268).
Phelps, for instance, describes how many of the souls in heaven
seemed to be students, thronging what we should call below colleges,
seminaries or schools of art, or music or sciences (195). McDannell and
Lang also cite descriptions from preaching that included prisons, sani-
taria and hospitals, presumably reflecting similar nineteenth- century
interests in public health, healthcare institutions, and the model of
sin as disease. We can draw a direct line (in this example and many
others) from Phelps to todays bestseller of the afterlife, Alice Sebolds
The Lovely Bones (2002), whose dead narrator is spending eternity in the
playground of a perfect high school, and who recovers from the trauma
of her murder through talking therapy and something approaching a
support group.
Of all the possible institutions of the afterlife, the concentration
camp has been most often approached as an avatar of the inferno,
5
but
the hotel is an equally common contemporary trope that has received
far less critical attention. The hotel has been a particularly potent and
multivalent symbol because of its potential to represent any aspect of
the afterlife: its temporary nature becomes a symbol of purgatory, or
the bardo between reincarnations; its (literally) unheimlich qualities are
exploited to full effect in the original hotel hell, Sartres No Exit (1946),
while, in Wyndham Lewiss Monstre Gai (1955) the fulfilment of all
desires in the form of a perfect hotel the angelically named Phanuel
Hotel becomes a model for one kind of heaven. The hotel continues
to be a common image in more recent afterlives like Ali Smiths Hotel
World (2001), D.M. Thomass The White Hotel (1981) or Julian Barness
A History of the World in 10 Chapters (1989).
In an essay on Lewiss The Human Age (an uncompleted tetralogy, of
which Monstre Gai is the second book) entitled Visions of Hell (1966),
J.G. Ballard describes how these institutional hells were completely
altered by the events of the Second World War. Ballards mid- century per-
ception of the hotel and the death camp both of which appear in the
post- war books of Lewiss work, Monstre Gai and Malign Fiesta favours
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Afterlife Now 7
a change in this sense of the institutional afterlife, once post- war
consciousness had adapted to fully comprehend the implications of
recent history:
A valid hell is one from which there is a possibility of redemption,
even if this is never reached, the dungeons of an architecture of grace
whose spires point to some kind of heaven. The institutional hells
of the present century are reached with one- way tickets, marked
Nagasaki and Buchenwald, worlds of terminal horror even more final
than the grave. (140)
In Ballards reading, a hell in which the inferno rages for all without
judgement is the end of the line for hell: the concept becomes invalid
when there is nothing to imagine beyond indiscriminate torture. There
is no ticket out of these hells, not because of eternity, but because there is
no equivalent heaven. These horrifically real hells involve organisation
and efficiency without the logic which was always coupled to these
measures in the hells that follow Dante. George Steiner, in In Bluebeards
Castle (1971), actually suggests that hells dematerialisation into meta-
phor was responsible for the death camps, that the ambiguous afterlife
of religious feeling in Western culture was to blame: To have neither
Heaven nor Hell is to be intolerably deprived and alone in a world
gone flat. Of the two, Hell proved the easier to recreate (48). Fictional
afterlives then appear as a kind of inoculation against this possibility. In
order to live, daily, imagining theres no heaven, it may be that we need
to imagine and recreate other possibilities for the afterlife in fiction to
prevent them materialising on earth.
In Visions of Hell, Ballard assesses the particular architecture of Lewiss
work in terms of the organisational structures of consumer culture and
totalitarian violence: the spaces are layered like a department store, the
presiding bureaucracy of demons and supernal gauleiters would satisfy
the most narrow- minded fundamentalist (140). Modernitys golden
boulevards have their equivalent in the layers of an infernal department
store, which skilfully combines imagery of the perambulatory tour of
hell and the layered complex of organised and categorised spaces that
makes up the afterlife.
This inescapably bleak view of a world in which human beings have
surpassed our own previously imagined depictions of the utmost evil
is worth reading in the context of Gnostic theology, which ultimately
conflates earth with hell. The concept of an impersonal God, and one
who has no involvement in or responsibility for the evils of the world,
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8 Afterlife and Narrative in Contemporary Fiction
is obviously an attractive one for moderns trying to reconcile the
existence of a loving deity with the historical reality of genocide or the
atomic bomb. Turner describes the Gnostic view of hell as curiously
modern in its lack of egregious violence and lurid imaginings (48),
and the theological basis seems to me just as modern as this failure of
imagination after the terminal horror of Hiroshima or the Holocaust.
For similar reasons, a painting like Hieronymus Boschs The Garden of
Earthly Delights also has this same curiously modern edge. One way of
coping with the contemporary prospect of a hell, post- terminal horror,
is combining the senseless suffering of mass death and the accretion
of an almost unbearable level of meaning. In the example of Bosch,
the minute semiotics of hells conventions are grossly inflated to the
point of complete meaninglessness: there is every possibility that a
bird- headed depiction of Satan with a cauldron for a hat and pots for
shoes would have a very specific significance in afterlife- logic, but the
combination of this potential meaning (just out of reach of decoding)
and the surface arbitrariness forms a very modern sensibility about the
afterlife, despite the paintings origins in the sixteenth century.
6
Ballards argument is, essentially, for a move from the details, mecha-
nics and maps of the afterlife to a model for heaven or hell which as
with Ballards championing of science fictions inner-space comes from
inside the individual. There has been a change from the institutionalised
hell to the hell imagined as internal: Hell is out of fashion institutional
hells at any rate. The populated infernos of the twentieth century are
private affairs, the gaps between the bars are the sutures of ones own
skull (140). We probably only need to go back to Marlowes Dr Faustus or
the experiences of Miltons Satan to suggest that this is not a revolution
unique to twentieth- century thought, and this is a thread that surfaces
from out of institutionally organised afterlives over and over again. After
hell, for instance, became filled with the torments of simply being human
in the presence of other human beings (overcrow ding, waste, decay: all
the messy business of embodiment), rather than supernatural monsters
or devils actively torturing the damned, then the next step in an afterlife
characterised by the possibilities for mans inhuma nity to man in the
absence of God would be a turn to the possibilities for self- torture. This is
matched by the neat possibility of virtue being its own reward in heaven.
Ballard goes on to advance the position that the hells that face us now
(the piece was originally published in 1966) do not take on the mecha-
nics of the bureaucracy of punishment through an institution, but deal
with the very dimensions of time and space, the phenomenology of the
universe, the fact of our own consciousness (144). These are always the
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Afterlife Now 9
issues at stake in narrating the other world as it is manifested in other
places and other laws of time and space.
Both the internal, subjective sense of an afterlife that is determined
only by the state of the individual, and the idea of the Gnostic hell on
earth conform to another strand in the history of the afterlife, which
can be described as an oscillation between the most explicit and the
most cryptic or abstract senses of life after death. McDannell and Lang
call these poles the anthropocentric and the theocentric forms of the
afterlife, making use of convenient theological jargon on the subject
(353). Since the belief in an anthropocentric afterlife does not neces-
sarily denote an absence of God (although there are some influences
from Buddhism and other non- theist beliefs) it is important to define
McDannell and Langs terms further: they suggest that anthropocentric
heavens stem from ancient ancestor worship and the natural desire to
undo the personal losses of death, while theocentric heavens emphasise
the supernatural status of heaven by removing the emotional aware-
ness of loss, thereby directing every sense towards the presence of God.
Heaven: A History describes itself as a work on the social and cultural
history of heaven (xii), which leads its authors to a natural emphasis
on the interpersonal relations in the afterlife: the community of saints;
the models of medieval courtly love, which imagined a heavenly
court based on values of romantic love; the Renaissance rediscovery
of the Ciceronian reunion motif and the classical descent narrative,
prompting meetings with dead friends and famous people in literary
imaginings of the afterlife; and the Victorians heaven of home and
the family group (3556). Conversely, the history of the theocentric
heaven is traced from the teachings of early Christians, as McDannell
and Lang argue that Jesus, St Paul and St John of Patmos remodelled
the heaven taught by the Pharisees according to two basic ideas: the
priority of orientation toward God with direct experience of the divine,
and the rejection of ordinary society structured by kinship, marriage
and concomitant family concerns (44). For me, the story of the after-
life told here is one of its contested ownership between, loosely, mass
culture and the theologians. There is compelling drama in this conflict
between the investment of the best hopes of human beings in the sum
total of human and divine love, and the concept of perfection in an
order that is other than everything human. There has been an ever-
present problem with identifying the contents of the afterlife: too little
information and the afterlife becomes abstract and irrelevant to the
lives of ordinary people; too much, and heaven becomes mawkish and
ridiculous, while hell becomes pantomime or pornography.
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10 Afterlife and Narrative in Contemporary Fiction
The final dynamic I want to offer for the history of the afterlife is
related to this oscillation between human values and divine (implicitly
non-human) values, and involves processes by which the concepts of
the afterlife have the potential to leach into the world of the living. The
border here is particularly thin between the world and purgatory which,
like reincarnation, can be most easily associated with relationships of
intercession or merit- making between the dead and the living. In the
same way, heaven and hell are better fitted to concerns about the points
at which individuals meet social institutions. Where hell and heaven
are largely spatial ideas, purgatorys conceptual framework is a temporal
one, and it occupies a position most genuinely after life: time goes on
there after a fashion which is the supplement to and copy of life
time; the dead go there immediately after death rather than having to
wait for judgement and the end of time entirely; its logic is the human
logic of debt and repayment, and so on.
The first aspect of purgatory to note is that it is has long been
recognised as the best fit for the properties of narrative. Even if hell
might be the most lurid and compelling, purgatory is easier to narrate.
In Gnie du christianisme (1826), written after his reconversion back
to Catholicism, Chateaubriand commented on the affinities between
purgatory and certain aspects of its representation in art:
It must be confessed that the doctrine of purgatory offers Christian
poets a type of the marvellous unknown to antiquity. There is
nothing more favourable to the muses than this place of purifica-
tion, situated between sorrow and joy, which implies the union
of confused feelings of happiness and misfortune. The gradation
of these souls in their sufferings more or less happy, more or less
brilliant according to past sins and according to their proximity to
the double eternities of pleasure or pain, could supply topics for art.
Purgatory surpasses heaven and hell in poetry because it presents a
future missing from the primary locations of the afterlife. (II: IV: xv,
my translation)
7
Some of the features of purgatory that Chateaubriand identifies here are
not unique to this aspect of the afterlife. For instance, the satisfaction
that comes from allotting punishments that uniquely fit the crime is
equally possible through hell or reincarnation (as in the karmic return
of Will Selfs How the Dead Live, when the narrator is reincarnated as her
own granddaughter, and forced to live with the next- generation conse-
quences of her failed parenting). However, the other element expressed
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Afterlife Now 11
here is purgatorys unique placement in the light of the possibility of
both development and endings. Those features vital for narrative the
passage of time and the occurrence of changes within that time cannot
be found in heaven or hell.
This is in contrast with another prevailing narrative trope in modern
fiction, the descent narrative, which Rachel Falconer has identified in
Hell in Literature (2005) as a story for the living; a metaphor for self-
renewal and reversal for leaving hell behind. The texts considered in
this book will often see travel through afterlives, but this is travel expe-
rienced by the dead. The appropriate punishments of hell, exemplified
by the Dantean contrapasso, are static images arrayed in a fixed system
through which the living traveller journeys. More interesting (from the
perspective of a plot following the dead in the afterlife) are the processes
of reincarnation or purgatorial experiences. Karma is a punishment with
a plot; a story about how people deal with the cosmic consequences of
their actions and continue living in different, transformed ways. The
focus of this book, and its overarching interest in narrative processes,
is shored up by modern fictions recurrent interest in purgatorial or
reincarnatory afterlives.
In The Persistence of Purgatory (1995), Richard K. Fenn makes an argu-
ment for the importance of the temporality of purgatory to our lives,
right up to the present day, and suggests that the relationship between
purgatory and life is one of the most complex of all the relations
between life and afterlife. It is also the most preoccupied with narrative
properties. Fenn argues that purgatory changed our notions of time,
and that the modern sense of urgency and responsibility about time
manifested in worries about lateness, making time and killing time and,
of course, deadlines comes directly from our continued investment in
purgatorial thinking.
In The Birth of Purgatory (1981), Jacques Le Goff teases out many of the
conceptual reconfigurations that had to occur in order for the doctrine
of purgatory to truly take hold, including advances in cartography,
theories of justice, and new techniques in finance and accounting.
These came together in a new understanding of space, and particularly
of time, that made purgatorys relations with the world into something
revolutionary. According to Le Goff, not only did purgatory destabilise
the idea of a boundary between life and death, it also became an annex
of the earth and extended the time of life and of memory (233). The
relations between the dead and the living became more complicated,
with suffrages offered by the living and visitations coming from the
dead to walk the earth. With this complexity, argues Le Goff, came
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12 Afterlife and Narrative in Contemporary Fiction
narratives that linked the two worlds, from ghost stories to death- bed
accounts of lives that attempted to total the time that would be spent
in purgatory, and therefore the requests for prayers that should be asked
from survivors in a last will and testament. The culmination of this
relationship is identified in The Birth of Purgatory as the simultaneous
developments in a certain kind of heavily emplotted, individualist
narrative and purgatory:
The success of Purgatory was contemporary with the rise of narrative.
More than that, the two phenomena are related. Purgatory intro-
duced a plot into the story of individual salvation. Most important
of all, the plot continued after death. (291)
Plot is analogous with Chateaubriands identification of purgatorys
future as a necessity for narrative thinking. In this way, the afterlife is
shown to be a cause of, or a model for narrative fiction.
Returning to the place of purgatorial thinking today, in Fenns
analysis of the subject, we can see that these narrative and temporal
configurations still retain a powerful hold. Fenns argument is informed
by Charles Taylors view, in Sources of the Self (1989), that modernity saw
the emergence of a radically reflexive self. In Fenns reading of Taylor,
the impulse to self- reformation [. . .] appears in the widespread belief
in purgatory (qtd. in Fenn, 1995: 84):
8
self- creation is constantly in
progress in operations rooted in purgatory; through narrative, through
taking responsibility for the self, through making the most of time.
Moreover, in Fenns work, the reflexivity of the self is also linked to the
special time of purgatory, which involves a casting forward to the self in
the future, and an envisioning of the present self as past. He finds that,
To remember the future was not only the quintessential act of Christian
piety; it defined modernity (12). This is modern thinking, on which
consequentialist ethics, insurance, loans and investments, and the plot-
ting of the novel all rely. The other side of thinking about the afterlife
as a continuation of the present means thinking about the present as
already a kind of afterlife, and feeling ourselves to be already among the
dead. Moreover, the reflexivity of the self is also reflected in narrative
fiction, in interests in autodiegetic narration and its possibilities, and
in narratorial omniscience, which allows us to read the thoughts we
normally infer from peoples actions.
The other significant change in thinking about the afterlife, which
occurred from the mid- nineteenth century onwards, was the introduc-
tion of Buddhist and Hindu thought about life after death into western
9780230364240_02_cha01.indd 12 4/12/2012 2:31:25 PM
PROOF
Afterlife Now 13
cultures. This involved a separation of the theory and practice of these
religions, with Buddhism in particular being considered as an ideally
textual construct, with its practice a degraded and secondary concern.
9
The Persistence of Purgatory refers to the ideas of the twentieth- century
Catholic theologian Karl Rahner, who suggested that, in Fenns words,
purgatory concerns a place or a time- interval in the full development of
an individual with regard to the core of the person, to the body, and in
relation to the world as a whole [and] should be understood in relation
to such Eastern notions as reincarnation (3). There are certainly valid
comparisons between these two mechanisms for the improvement of the
human soul. However, one of the attractions of purgatory for the novel,
over reincarnation, is the very specific boundaries which the doctrine
of purgatory maintains for our concept of the individual. Reincarnation
lends itself less easily to linear, finite narrative, not only because succes-
sive lives can follow potentially infinitely, but because the incarnations
of a single soul imply a constantly changing and develo ping notion of
character which is difficult to contain within narrative conventions.
This is not to say it is impossible to narrate a chain of reincarnations:
Kim Stanley Robinsons epic alternative history, The Years of Rice and
Salt (2002), ranges across centuries of reincarnations for its characters,
including their time in the bardo between lives. However, the focus here
is on the epic span of historical time that overwhelms the individual
life, and which necessitates multiple incarnations for its telling. A more
common strategy in these texts is a movement from life to a purgatorial
or bardo- state afterlife, and then on into a heaven or nirvana of non-
existence. Only two of the contemporary texts considered in this book
have a wholly Buddhist perspective (just as only two involve a Muslim
afterlife) but the idea of reincarnation and karmic justice is an influen-
tial and powerful one. The stories of the afterlife considered above have
established a movement from explicit, external punishment and reward
to a concept of being punished or rewarded by sinfulness or virtue in
themselves: a distinction between being punished for sin and being
punished by sin.
Reincarnation and purgatory do involve some comparable ideas
about the self: within Buddhist thought, the most damaging spiritual
error is attavada, the belief that the self is distinct from others and from
the world, yet karma also has to be worked through without the possi-
bility of atonement by a third party. Similarly, purgatory can be seen as
both a force for encouraging collective responsibility for the fate of the
dead, but also a new form of individualism that was deeply concerned
with self- responsibility and self- creation.
9780230364240_02_cha01.indd 13 4/12/2012 2:31:25 PM
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14 Afterlife and Narrative in Contemporary Fiction
One of the explanations offered for the interest in reincarnation in
Philip C. Almonds The British Discovery of Buddhism (1988) is the rise of
religious pluralism in the increasingly secular society of the nineteenth
century (34). Conversely, Alasdair Gray, in his novel Lanark: A Life
in Four Books (1981), also attributes the imbalance that favours the
infernal imagination to increasing secularisation: modern afterlives
are always infernos, never paradisos, presumably because the modern
secular imagination is more capable of debasement than exaltation
(489). We have seen above that other analysts of modern afterlives
have found that hell has attracted more attention than heaven, but we
have also seen an increasing interest in purgatory and reincarnation
as concepts which have a more attractive potential for change and
development. Both of these have been attributed to increasing secu-
larisation, and the dominance of secularism in the present is the point
from which I started this discussion. According to Charles Taylors
analysis in A Secular Age (2007), the major features of secularisation do
not just include the option of choosing between many possibilities for
the expression of faith or, more often today, spirituality, but a move
from transcendence to immanence or, in the terminology I have taken
from McDannell and Lang, theocentrism to anthropocentrism as the
primary value system. In Taylors words: we have moved from a world
in which the place of fullness was understood as unproblematically
outside of or beyond human life, to a conflicted age in which this
construal is challenged by others which place it (in a wide range of dif-
ferent ways) within human life (15). If, like Alasdair Gray and many
other writers, we are going to rank aspects of the afterlife in terms
of their rate of occurrence in contemporary fiction, purgatory, rather
than hell, would probably come out on top. In a secular age, however,
the significance of the afterlives in this book is their status as fictions
rather than beliefs, and self- conscious attention to the techniques of
narrative fictions becomes one way of foregrounding their status as
fictions.
The only way on Earth?
In her poem Close to me and Closer . . . (The Language of Heaven), Alice
Notley wrote the lines that head this chapter:
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 . . . (1995: 54)
10
9780230364240_02_cha01.indd 14 4/12/2012 2:31:25 PM
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Afterlife Now 15
This is a challenge to narrative, but one which many writers have been
ready to face, precisely in order to explore the outer limits of what
narrative is capable of conveying of the all- at-once knowledge of the
afterlife. There is an important network of interactions here which
leads me to investigate the conflict about the nature of the afterlife as a
conflict of ideas about time and its expression in words, manifested here
as an association which pairs poetry and eternity, narrative and time.
In other work by Notley, historical and fictional narratives are con-
flated, with both being equally culpable in the manufacture of distance
between lived time and its representations. In The Descent of Alette
(1992), all books that record or represent life are responsible for dividing
up the wholeness of time and creating death:
Books books ruined us Scrolls & tablets created time, created
keeping track Distanced us from the perpetuation of our beautiful
beginning moment . . . only moment Created death (1992: 132)
11
Texts engaging with the afterlife are always aware of the objection that
writing about life after death colours living existence, but Notleys
characters suggest here that all books create a sense of time which is
inflected by our mortality. In the introduction to the volume in which
The Descent of Alette is published, The Scarlet Cabinet, Notley suggests
that poetry (including prose that is poetry, novels, stories that are
poems [v]) is important in a society filled with extraneous, waste-
ful material because it can convey truths less wastefully, and less
humanely:
Poetry has had many uses in the past which are denied it now. It told
stories, for example, often more quickly & more essentially than prose
does & taking up less bulk of pages, less of the physical & psychic
space of the outer world. Movies, & most novels, are simply more
dominating than poems are. They impose their stories, they impose
minds upon us. Poetrys involvement with music formalizes it, beau-
tifies it, its aesthetics are more like natures, less like a humans. (vi)
Poetry could therefore be categorised with the not- human aspects of
heaven, the theocentric, while narrative, and especially the novel,
would fall on the anthropocentric side of this division.
The mythic sense of a poem like The Descent of Alette is an attempt to
make the physical existence of the poem superfluous, to create a holy
story, that is told again & again, that is known in the air, that satisfies
9780230364240_02_cha01.indd 15 4/12/2012 2:31:26 PM
PROOF
16 Afterlife and Narrative in Contemporary Fiction
without the temporality of successive pages, the terrible linearity of all
these successive books (vi): the ideal poetry, then, is outside time when
it is re- experienced and recalled in the mind, rather than when it is read.
In an email dialogue with the poet Claudia Keelan published in The
American Poetry Review (2004) Notley mischievously indicates exactly
the type of novel which has proved her point in its dominating bulk
of pages when she mentions Don DeLillos Underworld, calling him one
of the big- fattome male novelists (16). Perhaps the project of writing
a novel, which inevitably takes up a lot of physical room in the world,
is somewhat abated by choosing to set it in the other world, where its
conceptual space, at least, will not overlap?
The non- narrative and unnarratable aspects of life after death always
weigh heavily on narratives of the afterlife, and quotations from Notleys
poetry counterpoint my arguments at the beginning of every chapter of
this book: the areas where narrative and the afterlife are a good fit for
each other become even more significant after consideration of the many
areas where they are impossible to unite. In opening a study of narra-
tive, novels and the afterlife by referring to poetry that doubts narratives
capacity to write about the most important features of the afterlife, by
a poet who has remarked on the novels hegemony of minds and shelf-
space, I want to venture that this is a continuation of the debate which
has been conducted among theologians for centuries about the correct
way of representing the afterlife to ordinary people. Today, the popular
forms that the afterlife comes in are narrative cinema and the novel.
The specifics of narrative in the form of the novel are under investi-
gation here, but it is important to note that the most powerful models
for twentieth- century writing about the afterlife mainly have their
origins in drama. I have already mentioned Wyndham Lewiss The
Human Age, which was initially created as a drama for broadcast on
BBC radio. Alasdair Grays Lanark: A Life in Four Books and J.M. Coetzees
Elizabeth Costello, for instance, both make more or less explicit refe rence
to Lewiss work in the afterlives they imagine. The other two major
influences from the earlier part of the twentieth century are Jean- Paul
Sartres No Exit (1946) and the plays of Samuel Beckett, whose tramps
and moribunds can be seen in characters as diverse as Ali Smiths home-
less and disabled women, and Will Selfs dark play with bodily ruin.
No Exit famously identified hell as other people, and the torture of
that particular afterlife relies upon the preservation of identity, which
the history of the afterlife has shown to be a central concern. Alongside
Sartres hell, which takes institutions and relationships of ordinary life
and turns them hellish in infinite time, I want to place Samuel Becketts
9780230364240_02_cha01.indd 16 4/12/2012 2:31:26 PM
PROOF
Afterlife Now 17
characters, who are less the living dead and more the dead living.
Becketts settings, particularly in his dramatic work, occupy curious
places, halfway between life and death, yet the overall effect is of the
deathliness of life, rather than the liveliness of death.
12
Steven Connor discusses the differences that are generally identified
between dramatic and novelistic processes, noting: It is conventional,
for instance, to oppose the living art of the theatre to the dead or
abstract experience of private reading (1988: 116). Dead men walking
in the theatre are perhaps even more unexpected than dead men speak-
ing in the novel. However, the influence of Beckett on more recent
fictions has been from both the living art of his plays and the dead
words read from his novels. Connor analyses Waiting for Godot in terms
which will resonate in every chapter of this book:
To reappear, to be on stage again, is in itself to allow the shadow
of absence or non- being to fall across the fullness and simplicity of
Dasein. It opens up the dual anxiety of living in time, an anxiety
expressing itself in the two questions: am I the same as I was
yesterday, and will I be the same as I am today? (1988: 119)
These are the problems at the heart of a fictional afterlife, a second life
that ghosts the first one, casting both in the role of the inauthentic or
repetitious. In the form of a novel, it demands to be read always with
an eye to its own end, which replaces the present with an anticipated
retrospect. In terms of presence, not only are both being displaced by
the pre- eminence of the other but, when they are represented in narra-
tive, the complexities of tense and temporality complicate the prospect
in very different ways from a dramatic presentation. This is also the
complaint that Alice Notley makes about books: when they Distanced
us from the perpetuation of our beautiful beginning moment . . .
only moment Created death (1992: 132), they were also forcing us to
view directly the divisions that were opened up in time by the repeti-
tion of the world in its representation and in the recounting of events.
The only one of Becketts novels which seems to come down on the
side of the living dead than the dead living is How It Is (published in
French as Comment cest in 1961 and in English in 1964). In Becketts
Dying Words (1993), Christopher Ricks describes it as the strangest of
Becketts novels, the one which makes as if feints as if to convert
his trilogy [. . .] into a tetralogy (3). However, the intervening period
in Becketts work was filled with the dramatic works, Endgame and
Waiting for Godot, that most interrogated the dramatic consequences
9780230364240_02_cha01.indd 17 4/12/2012 2:31:26 PM
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18 Afterlife and Narrative in Contemporary Fiction
and possibilities of having figures from the afterlife present on the stage.
How It Is is a very different text from the earlier trilogy of novels, with
its present- tense narrative and division into stanza- like sections reminis-
cent of Dantes terza rima. The change seems to be from an investigation
of the possibilities of dead or almost- dead voices in the novels, to the
implications of presence and the present among the dead in Becketts
dramatic works. How It Is reads like one of the first attempts to put these
performed discoveries onto the page.
Fictional afterlives should be placed alongside popular novels like
A.M. Holmess The End of Alice (1996) or Lionel Shrivers We Need to
Talk about Kevin (2003) which employ the plot twist that major charac-
ters are revealed to be dead at the end of the novel also the premise of
films like The Sixth Sense (1999) and The Others (2001). Film has some a
history of making use of narration from the afterlife in the context of
murder mystery and haunting, as in Sunset Boulevard (1950), American
Beauty (1999) and Sin City (2005).
There are some important formal distinctions to be made here, which
can help to think about why the novel is a form with such an affinity
for afterlife fictionalising. Firstly, there is the feature of the novel which
means it is not intended to be consumed in one sitting. Poe, the mas-
ter of the short storys shocking conclusion, believed that short works
had the advantage of totality, or unity of effect (The Philosophy of
Composition, 196). If we compare the revelation at the end of con-
temporary films with similar techniques in short stories, we can see the
same effect at work. The visual pull- back- and- reveal is the structuring
principle for the and- they- were- dead-all-along plot twist. This seems to
work better in short stories than in novels. For instance, two of Muriel
Sparks short stories feature dead narrators who reveal their posthu-
mousness in the course of the story, half as a shocking revelation, and
half as a casual joke about popular turns of phrase. The narrator of The
Portobello Road cheerfully recalls, He looked like he would murder
me and he did, as our first indication that she is dead (412). Spark also
goes for a similar one- liner in another story, The Girl I Left behind Me:
With a great joy I recognized what it was I had left behind me, my body
lying strangled on the floor (222). These two stories were published in
1958 and 1957, respectively, at the same time Spark published her first
novel, The Comforters (1957), which posits a typing ghost as one of
the possibilities for its narrator. Sparks novel explores the idea far more
fully, and with more of an eye to the problems of plots and their weight-
ing towards the end than her short stories. In the short stories, the dead
narrator is essentially a punchline, and it almost seems as though, for
9780230364240_02_cha01.indd 18 4/12/2012 2:31:26 PM
PROOF
Afterlife Now 19
Spark, it is something that shuts down possibilities rather than opening
them up. The stories therefore set up a kind of limit case for investi-
gations into narrative and death; or establishing the boundaries of the
territory before exploring the interior in her novels.
The formal divisions that demarcate a study of narrative fiction, and
mostly of novels, are matched by the need to give some justification
for the chronological barrier I have placed at the beginning of my
study. This is a book about narrative experimentation, and all of the
examples are taken from modern and contemporary fiction. When
I use it here, the term modern (like the term life) is always subject to a
prefix that will consign our present to an imagined past. Like life, too,
modernity is supplemented with extensions and additions. This makes
every use of concepts of modernity, the contemporary or the present
tricky to negotiate in this book. In terms of the primary texts and their
chronology, I have worked with a casual distinction between texts as
they have influenced and texts as they have been influenced, which is
most clearly expressed by a conversation between the protagonist and
the author at the end of Grays Lanark:
The index proves that Lanark is erected upon the infantile foun-
dation of Victorian nursery tales, though the final shape derives
from English language fiction printed between the 40s and 60s
of the present century. The heros biography after death occurs in
Wyndham-Lewiss trilogy The Human Age, Flann OBriens The Third
Policeman and Goldings Pincher Martin. (493)
13
The influencing segment of the texts considered in this book can be
mostly defined as English language fiction printed between the 40s and
60s of the present century (and the printed is an important point of note
for two of the texts listed in this quotation). Adding Beckett and Faulkner
(with a certain amount of elasticity in these dates) and the earlier works
of Muriel Spark offers a loose division between the more recent novels of
the afterlife and these earlier works. However, like all the categories of life
and afterlife discussed here, there is a characteristic permeability between
what comes before and what comes after, what is early and what is late.
It is the combination of narrative experimentation and a rich tradition
of artistic representations of the afterlife that gives modern novels about
life after death such an important place at the intersection of convention
and novelty. Artistic predecessors, the earlier dead, are revisited in com-
plicated temporal and referential relationships between texts and ideas,
which ultimately reveal new liveliness in familiar techniques.
9780230364240_02_cha01.indd 19 4/12/2012 2:31:26 PM
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20 Afterlife and Narrative in Contemporary Fiction
The idea that there is a link between narrative experimentation and
life after death is at the heart of every chapter of this book, and the nar-
ratological topics covered are guided by the wide- ranging experimental
activities of texts which use the afterlife (see the Appendix for a
chronological list of the texts discussed in the book). Chapter 2 puts
forward the afterlife as an alternative model for fictional endings,
in place of apocalyptic structure and style. This chapter begins to
advance some ideas about how the temporality of reading is affected
by thinking of texts as life and reading as afterlife. These ideas, related
to the anticipation of retrospection and the memento mori, inform the
following chapters. Chapter 3 offers analysis of some different ways of
dealing with eternity in narrative fiction, and considers some of the
uses of narrative as part of an investigation of eternity, and therefore of
time. Chapter 4 continues the theme of experiments with temporality,
and looks at examples of paradoxical causality and disturbances in
cause and effect. The aim of this chapter is to situate fictional afterlives
in a context of more recent narrative experimentation with tempo-
rality, and to begin to show how some conventional aspects of the
narrative fictions special time structures (like prolepsis or grammatical
tense) already contain within them paradoxes and inconsistencies that
are uncovered by a story told from the afterlife. Chapter 5 begins
the discussion of the technique of the dead narrator and looks at
how the plots associated with two popular genres the murder mystery
and the ghost story are transformed by the addition of the voice of a
dead narrator. This chapter begins an investigation of the attributes
and implications of dead narrators, which is advanced in Chapters 6
and 7. Chapter 6 reconsiders models for narratorial knowledge and
omniscience in the light of narrators who speak from beyond the
grave. This chapter aims to offer new options for narratorial categories
that are drawn from experimental fiction. Chapter 7 compares dead
narrators impossible first- and second- person narration, as they enact
communication across deictic boundaries and the boundaries between
the fictional and the real world, and between this life and the afterlife.
In this chapter and the next, issues related to belief and faith come
to the fore, and these chapters pose the question of how the formal
aspects of narrative experimentation might form a wider interrogation
not just of narrative conventions, but of the whole category and pur-
pose of the fictive. The investigation of the boundaries between fiction
and fact continues in Chapter 8, which looks at fictional worlds, and
lays out some of the ways in which fictional worlds that include after-
lives as part of a whole imaginary universe assert their status as fiction
9780230364240_02_cha01.indd 20 4/12/2012 2:31:26 PM
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Afterlife Now 21
rather than objects of belief. Chapter 9 offers a cultural context for a
discussion which has been, for the most part, focused on the formal
and narratological aspects of these texts. This chapter aims to join up
post- realist narrative experimentation with postmodern anxiety about
a single truth, post- religious choice- inflected secularism and a general
sense of cultural posthumousness. Every section of this book asks the
question of why both the form and content which comes along with
writing about the afterlife should be so resonant and attractive in
contemporary fiction.
9780230364240_02_cha01.indd 21 4/12/2012 2:31:26 PM
PROOF
223
Index
Note: n. after a page reference denotes a note number on that page.
abominable fancy, 98, 204 n. 3
Adair, Gilbert, 99, 1534, 1568, 201
The Death of the Author, 1534,
1568, 201
Aeneas, 151, 178
Aichinger, Ilse, 15960, 165
Life Story in Retrospect, 159, 165
Alber, Jan, 171, 183
Albom, Mitch, 161, 166
The Five People you Meet in
Heaven, 161
American Beauty, 18, 99,
Amis, Martin, 669, 196, 201, 212
n. 5
Einsteins Monsters, 67
Other People, 67
Times Arrow: Or the Nature of the
Offence, 51, 6670, 201, 212 n. 5
analepsis, 69, 91, 195
angels, 32, 58, 82, 127, 133, 143, 146,
156, 165, 169, 182
anthropocentrism 9, 1415, 99
compare theocentrism
anticipation of retrospection, 20,
3641, 157
apocalypse, 20, 2231, 34, 423, 50,
67, 188, 1945, 200, 206 n. 2, 206
n. 4, 206 n. 7
atheism, 11819, 1656, 191, 196,
211 n. 1
Atwood, Margaret, 74, 915, 202, 206
n. 11, 211 n. 3
The Penelopiad, 74, 915, 202, 206
n. 11, 211 n. 3
Augustine, 30, 4950, 62, 140, 186,
204 n. 3
author, death of, 40, 158
autobiography, 69, 125, 1489, 1512,
154, 15663, 195, 207 n. 9
fictional autobiography see
first- person narration
autodiegesis see first- person narration
avant- garde 99, 125, 182
Bailiff, 578, 208 n. 5
Bakhtin, Mikhail, 336, 207 n. 9
Ballard, J.G., 68
Bangs, John Kendrick, 187, 199,
213 n. 6
Banks, Iain, 158
bardo, 6, 13, 51, 151, 188
Barnes, Julian, 6, 187, 200
A History of the World in 10
Chapters, 6, 187, 200
Barthes, Roland, 40, 72, 76, 956,
207 n. 11
Writing Degree Zero, 96
The Death of the Author, 40
Baudelaire, 80, 85, 194
Beckett, Samuel, 169, 26, 102, 213
n. 7, 205 n. 12
Endgame, 17, 102, 213 n. 7
How It Is, 1718
Waiting for Godot, 17
belief, 114, 41, 64, 76, 132, 1646,
16879, 182, 18991, 1967,
201 n. 1, 208 n. 5
see also faith
Benjamin, Walter, 38
Bergson, Henri, 51, 58
berzah, 51, 120
Bierce, Ambrose, 110, 207 n. 4,
208 n. 12
The Moonlit Road, 207 n. 4,
208 n. 12
Blanchot, Maurice, 3940
Bloch, Ernst, 104, 107
bodies (physical), 45, 8, 524, 56, 58,
104, 11415, 118, 141, 143, 186,
208 n. 8
Borges, Jorge Luis, 478, 56, 211 n. 8
Bosch, Hieronymus, 8
9780230364240_14_ind.indd 223 4/17/2012 1:37:06 PM
PROOF
224 Index
Bradley, Arthur and Andrew Tate, 196
Brooks, Peter, 3641, 76, 94, 1013, 149
Buddhism, 9, 1214, 119, 1212, 205
n. 9, 211 n. 2, 213 n. 8
Bull, Malcolm, 30
Butler, Samuel, 98, 107
Calvino, Italo, 45, 84
Mr Palomar, 45, 84
causality, 68, 725, 83, 87, 957, 103,
10810, 130, 1567, 164, 177,
213 n. 8
Chateaubriand, 10, 12
childrens literature, 2, 173, 189
see also young adult literature
Christianity, 4, 910, 12, 25, 76, 119,
1223, 168, 189
Christie, Agatha, 104
The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, 104,
210 n. 4
Coetzee, JM 16, 197, 201, 208 n. 5,
213 n. 3
Elizabeth Costello, 16, 197, 201,
208 n. 5, 208 n. 7, 213 n. 3
Cohen, Joshua, 141, 148, 155, 2023
A Heaven of Others, 141, 148, 155,
2023
Cohn, Dorrit, 128, 140, 142, 1445,
198, 212 n. 1, 212 n. 2, 212 n. 8
concentration camps, 57, 208 n. 5,
208 n. 8
contrapasso, 11
Crace, Jim, 100
Culler, Jonathan, 118, 1235, 211 n. 4
Currie, Mark, 412, 48, 745, 91, 198,
213 n. 2
About Time, 41, 48, 91
Postmodern Narrative Theory, 198,
213 n. 2
damnation, 45, 8, 35, 73, 151
Dante, 5, 7, 11, 18, 3441, 68, 1512,
167, 176, 178, 183, 205 n. 12,
207 n. 10, 213 n. 4
Dasein, 81, 83
Davies, Robertson, 49, 99102, 111, 201
Murther and Walking Spirits, 49,
98100, 111, 11314, 134, 201
Dawkins, Richard, 166, 196
De Man, Paul, 1578, 212 n. 4
dead narrator, 6, 18, 20, 98120,
12447, 1508, 164, 178, 195,
198, 211 n. 9
deixis, 20, 149, 153, 160, 1678,
185, 192
DeLillo, Don, 16, 267, 195, 206 n. 3
demons, 7, 115
Derrida, Jacques, 2930, 42, 74,
7781, 845, 90, 197
Given Time I: Counterfeit Money, 74,
7885
Memoires for Paul de Man, 90
Specters of Marx, 77
descent narrative, 4, 9, 11, 62, 95, 99,
116, 1503, 162, 168, 173, 176,
1789, 181, 183, 187, 205 n. 8,
205 n. 11, 213 n. 3
detective fiction, see murder mystery
Disch, Thomas, 134, 187, 200
The Businessman: A Tale of Terror,
134, 187, 200
Doleel, Lubomr, 172, 1845, 190
drama, 9, 168, 38, 58, 83, 180
Endgame, 17, 102, 213 n. 7
No Exit, 6, 16, 67
Waiting for Godot, 17
Duncan, Glen, 100, 122, 130, 202,
210 n. 2, 211 n. 3
Death of an Ordinary Man, 101, 122,
130, 202, 211 n. 3
I, Lucifer, 123,
Dunne, J.W., 61, 208 n. 9
Nothing Dies, 61, 208 n. 9
Durham Peters, John, 133, 141, 146
Dr Faustus, 8
Eagleman, David, 159, 1646, 170,
187, 197, 203, 212 n. 5
Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives,
159, 1645, 187, 196, 203
Eagleton, Terry, 166
Eddington, Arthur, 48, 51
Einstein, Albert, 51, 612, 678, 74,
208 n. 10
election, 55, 156
eternity, 15, 30, 325, 46, 51, 557,
59, 62, 64, 72, 74, 95, 120, 124,
1512, 164, 178, 183, 198
9780230364240_14_ind.indd 224 4/17/2012 1:37:06 PM
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Index 225
Falconer, Rachel, 11, 356, 1502,
162, 204 n. 5, 213 n. 4
faith, 1, 14, 20, 22, 40, 436, 823,
107, 123, 148, 166, 16970, 1723,
177, 179, 182, 18991, 193, 1967
famous people, 5, 9, 115, 170, 187,
213 n. 4
fantasy fiction, 168, 170, 173, 178,
1812, 1879, 212 n. 2
Faulkner, William, 19, 119, 199
As I Lay Dying, 119, 199
Fenn, Richard K., 1113, 76
foetuses, 1456, 186, 189
fictional worlds see worlds, fictional
film, 18, 134, 139, 209 n. 5, 211 n. 5
first-person narration, 81, 104, 1078,
119, 126, 12930, 1323, 145,
149, 1539, 162, 167, 178, 186,
194, 198, 212 n. 8
Fludernik, Monica, 159
free indirect discourse, 94, 138,
211 n. 1
Freud, Sigmund, 78, 869, 101
Genette, Grard, 60, 901, 93, 154,
175, 198, 212 n. 1
genre, 20, 33, 77, 99, 10116, 193,
206 n. 2
ghost story, 12, 20, 83, 98103,
10916, 156
ghosts, 17, 18, 77, 79, 81, 85, 99101,
11014, 11718, 127, 1335, 138,
1412, 1546, 169, 213 n. 3, 210
n. 6
gnosticism, 79
gods, 79, 357, 3940, 50, 567, 67,
81, 90, 11533, 136, 1401, 146,
164, 166, 175, 1834, 187, 197,
204 n. 2, 211 n. 1
Golding, William, 19, 51, 5560,
635, 199, 207 n. 4
Pincher Martin, 19, 50, 57, 60, 635,
69, 199
Gray, Alasdair, 14, 16, 19, 168,
17985, 188, 200
Lanark: A Life in Four Books 14, 16,
19, 168, 17985, 200, 208 n. 6,
208 n. 7, 213 n. 4
Greenblatt, Steven, 75, 78
heaven, 115, 31, 357, 4951, 57,
102, 105, 132, 1401, 143, 148,
153, 161, 204 n. 1, 204 n. 2, 205
n. 8, 212 n. 6
Heidegger, Martin, 50, 81, 197
hell, 911, 14, 16, 312, 356, 48, 51,
567, 62, 64, 67, 70, 95, 11416,
141, 1503, 167, 170, 173, 180,
184, 204 n. 1, 204 n. 2, 208 n. 7,
213 n. 5
Herman, David, 70, 83, 162, 212 n. 2,
213 n. 2
Hinduism, 12
Hitchens, Christopher, 166, 196
Hitler, 115, 181, 187
see also famous people
Holquist, Michael, 11213
Homer, 925, 123, 213 n. 4
horror fiction, 100 ,109, 114
hotels, 56, 7981, 87, 177, 209 n. 3
infinite time, 16, 57, 60, 648, 71, 184
Islam, 13, 119
James, Henry 100, 11012
The Turn of the Screw, 100, 110
Jameson, Fredric, 589
Jordan, Neil, 1546, 194, 202, 211
n. 3
Shade, 1546, 194, 202, 211 n. 3
Josipovici, Gabriel, 54
Judaism, 148, 161
karma, 11, 13
Kermode, Frank, 2239, 46, 556, 109,
179, 206 n. 1, 206 n. 4
Kick- Ass, 99
Kierkegaard, Sren, 149, 153, 157,
212 n. 3
Kingsley, Charles, 189
Le Goff, Jacques, 11, 25, 367, 75,
176, 207 n. 10, 209 n. 1, 210 n. 6
Levi, Primo, 68, 204 n. 5
Lewis, C.S., 1879, 213 n. 3
Lewis, Wyndham, 67, 16, 19, 51, 579,
199, 207 n. 1, 208 n. 6, 213 n. 3
The Apes of God, 199, 207 n. 1
Childermass, 579, 199, 207 n. 1
9780230364240_14_ind.indd 225 4/17/2012 1:37:06 PM
PROOF
226 Index
Lewis, Wyndham continued
The Human Age, 6, 16, 19, 51, 579,
69, 199, 207 n. 1
Malign Fiesta, 6, 199, 207 n. 1
Monstre Gai, 6, 58, 199, 207 n. 1
life- writing, 31, 111, 125, 149, 1534,
158, 161, 192, 195, 197
Luckhurst, Roger, 110
Lukcs, Georg, 38, 196
Lyotard, Jean Franois, 193,
207 n. 12
Machado de Assis, Joaquim Maria,
149, 199, 212 n. 1
The Posthumous Memoirs of Brs
Cubas, 149, 199, 212 n. 1
maps, 8, 106, 167
Mauss, Marcel, 81
McDannell, Coleen and Bernard Lang,
56, 9, 14, 204 n. 4, 210 n. 1
McEwan, Ian, 67, 128, 196, 211 n. 3
McHale, Brian, 65, 18214
mediums, 110, 1134, 1301,
1334, 182
see also sances; spiritualism
memento mori, 3, 20, 23, 378,
406, 73, 77, 79, 823, 91, 97,
164
memory, 11, 38, 40, 435, 60, 76,
845, 967
metafiction, 96, 197
historiographic, 189
Milton, John, 8, 176
Molony, Rowland, 2
After the Death of Alice Bennett, 2
Moore, Lorrie, 163, 165
Moore, Susanna, 99, 106, 201
In the Cut, 1069, 201, 210 n. 5
murder, 6, 29, 60, 66, 68, 87, 989,
103, 105, 11013, 120, 1545,
157, 208 n. 8
murder mystery, 18, 20, 98116, 157,
210 n. 3
Nabokov, Vladimir, 113, 132, 142,
200, 212 n. 7
Transparent Things, 132, 1424, 200,
212 n. 7
narratee, 105, 127, 153, 161, 189
narratorial knowledge, 93, 11723,
125, 12933, 1379, 1445
see also omniscience
Nelson, Victoria, 101, 113
New Atheism, 166, 191, 196
Notley, Alice 1417, 205 n. 11
Close to Me & Closer (The Language
of Heaven), 14
The Descent of Alette, 15
OBrien, Flann, 19, 5970, 199200,
211 n. 5
The Dalkey Archive, 62
The Third Policeman, 19, 51, 5970,
199200, 211 n. 5
omniscience, 12, 11746, 154, 163,
211 n. 1
oscillationism, 668, 164
Palahniuk, Chuck 100, 11416, 129,
134, 187, 203, 208 n. 7, 213 n. 5
Damned, 100, 11416, 129, 134,
187, 203, 208 n. 7, 213 n. 5
Pamuk, Orhan, 49, 11920, 126, 201
My Name Is Red, 49, 11920, 126,
195, 201
paradox, 59, 71, 72, 74, 81, 183, 195,
205 n. 13
Pavel, Thomas, 1723, 1767
personhood, 124, 126, 129, 142, 186
Phelan, James, 163
Phelps, Elizabeth Stuart, 56, 106,
199, 204 n. 4
The Gates Ajar, 5, 106, 199, 204 n. 4
phenomenology, 32, 478, 501, 55,
69, 74, 81, 91
plot, 1112, 18, 20, 3243, 4950, 64,
68, 701, 78, 89, 98116, 1212,
132, 143, 14950, 157, 159, 178,
206 n. 8, 209 n. 2, 210 n. 3
Poe, Edgar Allan, 18,
poetry, 1516, 205 n. 11
poets in hell
see famous people
possibilianism, 1646, 197
post- humans, 3, 126, 193
posthumousness, cultural, 37, 403,
1937
narratorial see dead narrator
9780230364240_14_ind.indd 226 4/17/2012 1:37:06 PM
PROOF
Index 227
postmodernism, 21, 423, 65, 75, 82,
115, 1256, 182, 185, 193
post- structuralism, 70, 74, 190
predestination, 725, 85, 90, 129,
136
preterition, 55, 73
see also damnation, election
prolepsis, 20, 69, 8995, 195, 197
Pronicheva, Dina, 87
Pullman, Philip 1656, 168, 171,
1736, 179, 189, 1967, 201
The Amber Spyglass, 1736, 186,
201
His Dark Materials, 168, 1736, 201
The Northern Lights, 171, 174
The Subtle Knife, 175
purgatory, 4, 6, 1014, 25, 32, 367,
51, 556, 58, 7280, 90, 122, 124,
135, 142, 151, 1767, 183, 207
n. 10, 208 n. 5, 209 n. 1, 211 n. 2
reincarnation, 4, 6, 1011, 1314, 67,
723, 150, 1523, 168, 170, 184,
186, 188
Richardson, Brian, 1258, 15963,
171, 198, 212 n. 1, 212 n. 2, 213
n. 2
Ricoeur, Paul, 33, 39, 41, 4751,
59, 70
Time and Narrative, 33, 47, 96
Rimmon- Kenan, Shlomith, 934
Robinson, Kim Stanley, 13, 202
The Years of Rice and Salt, 13, 202
Royle, Nicholas, 40, 445, 77, 79, 119,
1314
Rushdie, Salman, 132, 150, 196
Ryan, Marie- Laure, 1715, 177, 181
Sartre, Jean- Paul, 6, 16, 24, 26, 67,
153, 212 n. 3
No Exit, 6, 16, 67
Words, 24
Satan, 8, 11416, 1224, 129, 170,
205 n. 6
Sayers, Dorothy L., 109, 113
Scarborough, Dorothy, 113
Sconce, Jeffrey, 1334
sances, 11314
see also spiritualism; mediums
Sebold, Alice, 6, 99100, 1057, 166,
202, 210 n. 7, 211 n. 9
The Lovely Bones, 6, 99101, 1057,
113, 115, 202, 210 n. 7,
211 n. 9
Lucky, 1056
second- person narration, 64, 149,
153, 15866, 212 n. 6
secularism, 1, 14, 21, 191, 197
Self, Will, 10, 16, 145, 161, 168,
17980, 1869, 201
How the Dead Live, 10, 145, 161,
168, 17980, 1869, 201, 208 n. 7
Shell, Marc, 76
sin, 46, 10, 13, 56, 63, 66, 68, 73,
144, 152
Sin City, 18, 99
Smith, Ali, 6, 16, 73, 7884, 202, 207
n. 13
Hotel World 6, 73, 7884, 96, 103,
202, 209 n. 2, 207 n. 13
soul, 46, 10, 13, 32, 358, 46, 55,
757, 109, 11920, 122, 124, 126,
135, 142, 144, 186, 204 n. 2, 206
n. 5
space, 79, 11, 15, 51, 54, 57, 70, 75,
143, 148, 1679, 1767, 17981,
184, 188, 207 n. 10
Spark, Muriel, 189, 25, 40, 436,
73, 77, 79, 80, 82, 84, 1223,
129, 1335, 139, 145, 200,
209 n. 2
The Comforters, 18, 1223, 1335
The First Year of My Life, 145
The Girl I left Behind Me, 18
Hothouse by the East River, 25,
200
Memento Mori, 40, 43, 45, 77,
7980, 209 n. 2
The Portobello Road, 18
spiritualism, 5, 132
see also sances; mediums
Steiner, George, 7
Sternberg, Meir, 118, 123, 211 n. 4
Sterne, Lawrence, 144, 149
Tristram Shandy, 144, 149
Stewart, Susan, 71
structuralism, 126, 172, 198
Sunset Boulevard, 18, 99
9780230364240_14_ind.indd 227 4/17/2012 1:37:06 PM
PROOF
228 Index
Tambling, Jeremy, 1936
Tan, Amy, 100, 102, 110, 120, 12931,
202, 210 n. 5
Saving Fish from Drowning, 100,
102, 110, 120, 12931, 202,
210 n. 5
Taylor, Charles, 12, 14, 205 n. 8
The Secular Age, 14
Sources of the Self, 12, 205 n. 8
telepathy, 110, 118, 12941
The Tibetan Book of the Dead,
188, 197
theocentrism, 9, 1415, 99
compare anthropocentrism
Thomas, D.M., 6, 71, 74, 856, 200,
208 n. 5
The White Hotel, 6, 71, 74, 859,
200, 103, 200, 208 n. 5, 209 n. 3
torture, 4, 78, 67, 153
see also abominable fancy
transworld travel, 185, 187
trauma, 6, 77, 88, 100, 107, 113,
210 n. 6
Turner, Alice K., 4, 5, 8
unnarratable, 16, 59, 1078, 155
Vonnegut, Kurt, 1257, 146, 200
Galapagos, 1258, 1467, 200
Wagar, W. Warren, 27, 30, 206 n. 4,
206 n. 5
Wallace, David Foster, 1359
Infinite Jest, 1359
Walsh, Richard, 1245, 1278,
18991, 212 n. 1, 213 n. 2
Winterson, Jeanette, 823
Lighthousekeeping, 823
women, 29, 1057, 146, 205 n. 11,
206 n. 11, 210 n. 5
worlds, 153, 162, 16791, 196, 205 n.
13, 212 n. 5
fictional, 70, 84, 139, 153, 160, 162,
16792, 197, 209 n. 3, 212 n. 2,
213 n. 6
possible, 70, 16991, 197
you narration, see second- person
narration
young adult literature, 115, 211
n. 9
see also childrens literature
Zamora, Lois Parkinson, 289, 206
n. 6
zero focalisation, 168, 175
Zoroastrianism, 4
9780230364240_14_ind.indd 228 4/17/2012 1:37:06 PM
PROOF