Durham E-Theses Narrative and the afterlife in modern ction the meanings of life after death Bennett, Alice How to cite: Bennett, Alice (2008) Narrative and the afterlife in modern ction the meanings of life after death, Durham theses, Durham University. Available at Durham E-Theses Online: http://etheses.dur.ac.uk/2468/ Use policy The full-text may be used and/or reproduced, and given to third parties in any format or medium, without prior permission or charge, for personal research or study, educational, or not-for-prot purposes provided that: • a full bibliographic reference is made to the original source • a link is made to the metadata record in Durham E-Theses • the full-text is not changed in any way The full-text must not be sold in any format or medium without the formal permission of the copyright holders. Please consult the full Durham E-Theses policy for further details. Academic Support Oce, Durham University, University Oce, Old Elvet, Durham DH1 3HP e-mail: [email protected] Tel: +44 0191 334 6107 http://etheses.dur.ac.uk 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,1 literary 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 &}>, ·""·- 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.