Afterlife and Narrative Alice Bennett preview

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Contents

Acknowledgements vi

1 Afterlife Now 1

2 Dead Endings: Making Meaning from the Afterlife 22

3 Killing Time: Narrating Eternity 474 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

1Afterlife 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 anddiverse 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 afield 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 arenafor 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 conventionsof 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 beexplored. 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 ina 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, whichis 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 featuresof 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 inthe 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 theologicalissues 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 lastthings 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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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 theirown 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, inThe 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.3This 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 thereare 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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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 theplayground 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,5but

the hotel is an equally common contemporary trope that has received

far less critical attention. The hotel has been a particularly potent andmultivalent symbol because of its potential to represent any aspect of

the afterlife: its temporary nature becomes a symbol of purgatory, or

the bardobetween reincarnations; its (literally) unheimlichqualities 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 HotelWorld(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

whichMonstre Gaiis 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 thepost-war books of Lewiss work,Monstre GaiandMalign 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, inIn BluebeardsCastle(1971), actually suggests that hells dematerialisation into meta-

phor was responsiblefor 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 needto 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 departmentstore, 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 onewho has no involvement in or responsibility for the evils of the world,

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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 curiouslymodern 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 Delightsalso 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.6Ballards 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 ownskull (140). We probably only need to go back to MarlowesDr Faustusor

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 (overcrowding, waste, decay: all

the messy business of embodiment), rather than supernatural monsters

or devils actively torturing the damned, then the next step in an afterlifecharacterised by the possibilities for mans inhumanity 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 theuniverse, 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 determinedonly 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 Historydescribes itself as a work on the social and culturalhistory 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 andthe 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, massculture 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 andridiculous, while hell becomes pantomime or pornography.

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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 ofthe 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 SelfsHow 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 cannotbe 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 orreincarnatory 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 thedead to walk the earth. With this complexity, argues Le Goff, came

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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 askedfrom survivors in a last will and testament. The culmination of this

relationship is identified in The Birth of Purgatoryas 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 temporalconfigurations 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 asalready 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

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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 developing 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 bardobetween 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 bysin.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 concernedwith self-responsibility and self-creation.

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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 nineteenthcentury (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 inA 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 movefrom 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 manyother 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 . . . inthe all-at-once way . . . that we know it . . . (1995: 54)10

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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 theafterlife. 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 thatwriting 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

TheDescent 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 lesshumanely:

Poetry has had many uses in the past which are denied it now. It told

stories, for example, often more quickly & more essentiallythan 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 imposetheir 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 Aletteis an attempt to

make the physical existence of the poem superfluous, to create a holystory, that is told again & again, that is known in the air, that satisfies

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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 narrativescapacity 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 GraysLanark: A Life in Four Booksand J.M. Coetzees

Elizabeth Costello, for instance, both make more or less explicit reference

to Lewiss work in the afterlives they imagine. The other two major

influences from the earlier part of the twentieth century are Jean-PaulSartres 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 lifeand turns them hellish in infinite time, I want to place Samuel Becketts

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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 thedeathliness 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 wasyesterday, 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 bythe 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 andWaiting for Godot, that most interrogated the dramatic consequences

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and possibilities of having figures from the afterlife present on the stage.

How It Isis 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 Isreads 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 affinityfor 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 structuringprinciple 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 deadnarrator is essentially a punchline, and it almost seems as though, for

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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 theterritory 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 GraysLanark:

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

Policemanand GoldingsPincher 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 lifeand 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.

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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 experimentalactivities 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 thenarrative 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 attributesand 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

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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 uppost-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.

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Index 225

Falconer, Rachel, 11, 356, 1502,

162, 204 n. 5, 213 n. 4faith, 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. 2Faulkner, William, 19, 119, 199

As I Lay Dying, 119, 199Fenn, Richard K., 1113, 76foetuses, 1456, 186, 189fictional worlds seeworlds, fictionalfilm, 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. 8Fludernik, Monica, 159free 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, 156ghosts, 17, 18, 77, 79, 81, 85, 99101,11014, 11718, 127, 1335, 138,1412, 1546, 169, 213 n. 3, 210

n. 6gnosticism, 79gods, 79, 357, 3940, 50, 567, 67,

81, 90, 11533, 136, 1401, 146,164, 166, 175, 1834, 187, 197,

204 n. 2, 211 n. 1Golding, 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 Books14, 16,19, 168, 17985, 200, 208 n. 6,

208 n. 7, 213 n. 4Greenblatt, 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. 6Heidegger, Martin, 50, 81, 197hell, 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. 2Hinduism, 12Hitchens, Christopher, 166, 196Hitler, 115, 181, 187

see alsofamous peopleHolquist, Michael, 11213Homer, 925, 123, 213 n. 4

horror fiction, 100 ,109, 114hotels, 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, 110Jameson, Fredric, 589Jordan, Neil, 1546, 194, 202, 211

n. 3

Shade, 1546, 194, 202, 211 n. 3Josipovici, Gabriel, 54Judaism, 148, 161

karma, 11, 13Kermode, Frank, 2239, 46, 556, 109,

179, 206 n. 1, 206 n. 4

Kick-Ass, 99Kierkegaard, Sren, 149, 153, 157,

212 n. 3Kingsley, Charles, 189

Le Goff, Jacques, 11, 25, 367, 75,176, 207 n. 10, 209 n. 1, 210 n. 6

Levi, Primo, 68, 204 n. 5Lewis, C.S., 1879, 213 n. 3Lewis, Wyndham, 67, 16, 19, 51, 579,

199, 207 n. 1, 208 n. 6, 213 n. 3

The Apes of God, 199, 207 n. 1Childermass, 579, 199, 207 n. 1

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226 Index

Lewis, Wyndham continuedThe Human Age, 6, 16, 19, 51, 579,

69, 199, 207 n. 1

Malign Fiesta, 6, 199, 207 n. 1MonstreGai, 6, 58, 199, 207 n. 1

life-writing, 31, 111, 125, 149, 1534,158, 161, 192, 195, 197

Luckhurst, Roger, 110

Lukcs, Georg, 38, 196Lyotard, Jean Franois, 193,

207 n. 12

Machado de Assis, Joaquim Maria,149, 199, 212 n. 1

The Posthumous Memoirs of BrsCubas, 149, 199, 212 n. 1

maps, 8, 106, 167Mauss, Marcel, 81

McDannell, Coleen and Bernard Lang,56, 9, 14, 204 n. 4, 210 n. 1

McEwan, Ian, 67, 128, 196, 211 n. 3McHale, Brian, 65, 18214

mediums, 110, 1134, 1301,1334, 182

see alsosances; spiritualismmemento mori, 3, 20, 23, 378,

406, 73, 77, 79, 823, 91, 97,164

memory, 11, 38, 40, 435, 60, 76,

845, 967metafiction, 96, 197historiographic, 189

Milton, John, 8, 176

Molony, Rowland, 2

After the Death of Alice Bennett, 2Moore, 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. 8murder mystery, 18, 20, 98116, 157,

210 n. 3

Nabokov, Vladimir, 113, 132, 142,200, 212 n. 7

Transparent Things, 132, 1424, 200,

212 n. 7narratee, 105, 127, 153, 161, 189

narratorial knowledge, 93, 11723,

125, 12933, 1379, 1445

see alsoomniscience

Nelson, Victoria, 101, 113New Atheism, 166, 191, 196Notley, Alice 1417, 205 n. 11

Close to Me & Closer (The Languageof Heaven), 14

The Descent of Alette, 15

OBrien, Flann, 19, 5970, 199200,

211 n. 5

The Dalkey Archive, 62The 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, 186Phelan, James, 163Phelps, Elizabeth Stuart, 56, 106,

199, 204 n. 4

The Gates Ajar, 5, 106, 199, 204 n. 4phenomenology, 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. 11poets in hell

seefamous peoplepossibilianism, 1646, 197post-humans, 3, 126, 193posthumousness, cultural, 37, 403,

1937narratorial seedead narrator

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Index 227

postmodernism, 21, 423, 65, 75, 82,

115, 1256, 182, 185, 193post-structuralism, 70, 74, 190

predestination, 725, 85, 90, 129,136

preterition, 55, 73

see alsodamnation, electionprolepsis, 20, 69, 8995, 195, 197

Pronicheva, Dina, 87Pullman, Philip 1656, 168, 171,

1736, 179, 189, 1967, 201

The Amber Spyglass, 1736, 186,201

His Dark Materials, 168, 1736, 201The Northern Lights, 171, 174

The Subtle Knife, 175purgatory, 4, 6, 1014, 25, 32, 367,

51, 556, 58, 7280, 90, 122, 124,

135, 142, 151, 1767, 183, 207n. 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. 2Ricoeur, Paul, 33, 39, 41, 4751,

59, 70

Time and Narrative, 33, 47, 96Rimmon-Kenan, Shlomith, 934Robinson, Kim Stanley, 13, 202

The Years of Rice and Salt, 13, 202Royle, Nicholas, 40, 445, 77, 79, 119,

1314Rushdie, 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, 67Words, 24

Satan, 8, 11416, 1224, 129, 170,

205 n. 6Sayers, Dorothy L., 109, 113Scarborough, Dorothy, 113Sconce, Jeffrey, 1334

sances, 11314seealsospiritualism; 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, 1056second-person narration, 64, 149,

153, 15866, 212 n. 6

secularism, 1, 14, 21, 191, 197Self, 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, 76sin, 46, 10, 13, 56, 63, 66, 68, 73,

144, 152

Sin City, 18, 99Smith, Ali, 6, 16, 73, 7884, 202, 207

n. 13

Hotel World6, 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, 206n. 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, 1335The First Year of My Life, 145The Girl I left Behind Me, 18

Hothouse by the East River, 25,200

Memento Mori, 40, 43, 45, 77,

7980, 209 n. 2The Portobello Road, 18

spiritualism, 5, 132

see alsosances; mediumsSteiner, George, 7

Sternberg, Meir, 118, 123, 211 n. 4Sterne, Lawrence, 144, 149

Tristram Shandy, 144, 149Stewart, Susan, 71

structuralism, 126, 172, 198Sunset Boulevard, 18, 99

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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. 8telepathy, 110, 118, 12941

The Tibetan Book of the Dead,188, 197

theocentrism, 9, 1415, 99

compareanthropocentrismThomas, 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 alsoabominable fancytransworld travel, 185, 187trauma, 6, 77, 88, 100, 107, 113,

210 n. 6Turner, 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. 5Wallace, David Foster, 1359

Infinite Jest, 1359Walsh, Richard, 1245, 1278,

18991, 212 n. 1, 213 n. 2Winterson, Jeanette, 823

Lighthousekeeping, 823women, 29, 1057, 146, 205 n. 11,

206 n. 11, 210 n. 5worlds, 153, 162, 16791, 196, 205 n.

13, 212 n. 5fictional, 70, 84, 139, 153, 160, 162,

16792, 197, 209 n. 3, 212 n. 2,213 n. 6

possible, 70, 16991, 197

you narration, seesecond-personnarration

young adult literature, 115, 211n. 9

see alsochildrens literature

Zamora, Lois Parkinson, 289, 206n. 6

zero focalisation, 168, 175

Zoroastrianism, 4

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Afterlife and Narrative Alice Bennett preview

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