Hell in Contemporary Literature

For my father

Alexander Graham Falconer

Hell in Contemporary Literature
Western Descent Narratives since 1945

Rachel Falconer

Edinburgh University Press

# Rachel Falconer, 2005, 2007

Edinburgh University Press Ltd

22 George Square, Edinburgh

First published in hardback by

Edinburgh University Press in 2005.

Typeset in Sabon by
Hewer Text Ltd, Edinburgh, and
printed and bound in Spain by
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A CIP record for this book is

available from the British Library

ISBN 978 0 7486 3443 9 (paperback)

The right of Rachel Falconer

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has been asserted in accordance with
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Hell is neither here nor there,
Hell is not anywhere,
Hell is hard to bear.

W. H. Auden,
`Hell' (September, 1939)
 Contents

Acknowledgements ix

Introduction: Descent and Return ± the katabatic imagination 1

1 Hell in Our Time 13

Is Hell a fable?
Hell as the modern condition
Descent and dissent in modern philosophy

2 Chronotopes of Hell 42
Generic features of katabatic narrative
Bakhtin's Inferno: visionary versus historical chronotopes
Unspeakable wisdom
Conversion versus inversion
Infernal inversion: Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano
The absolute and `my absolute': Sarah Kofman's Smothered Words

3 Auschwitz as Hell 63
Pathways through a life: The Search for Roots
Black holes and the biblical Job
A constellation of chronotopes: If This Is a Man
Threshold crossing into Hell
Auschwitz as education
The visionary world
On trial in Hell
Sea-voyage and shipwreck
The intersection of pathways

4 Surviving with Ghosts: Second-generation Holocaust Narratives 89

Bog-boys and fire-children
Vertigo and luminosity: W. G. Sebald's Austerlitz
From depth to ascent: Anne Michaels' Fugitive Pieces
viii Hell in Contemporary Literature

5 Katabatic Memoirs of Mental Illness 113

Down the rabbit hole
Parallel worlds and protest culture: Susanna Kaysen's Girl, Interrupted
The schizophrenic HyperReal: Carol North's Welcome, Silence
Falling into grace: Lauren Slater's Spasm: A Memoir with Lies

6 Engendering Dissent in the Underworld 144

Gender dynamics in the descent to Hell
Inside the hero's descent: Gloria Naylor's Linden Hills
Hell and utopia: Marge Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time
Dante upside-down: Alice Notley's The Descent of Alette

7 Postmodern Hell and the Search for Roots 172

Karl Marx's katabasis
Postmodern Capitalist Hell: Alasdair Gray's Lanark
Lanark's search for roots
Can realism lead fantasy out of Hell? Can fantasy help realism?

8 East±West Descent Narratives 196

Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now and Western descents to the East
Salman Rushdie's disoriented subjects
The migrations of Orpheus in five acts:
Rushdie's The Ground Beneath Her Feet
Threshold crossing
Ground Zero
Looking back
Dismemberment
Return of another

Epilogue: Katabasis in the Twenty-First Century 224

September 11th: the first circle
Afghanistan and Iraq: there and back again (again)
Global fear and its inversions

Appendix: Primo Levi, `Map of reading' 232

Bibliography 233

Index 253
 Acknowledgements

This book was completed with the generous support of the Arts and
Humanities Research Board, which granted me a Research Leave Award
from September 2003 to February 2004. I would like to thank Francis
Ford Coppola and American Zoetrope Studios for their permission to
reproduce a still from Apocalypse Now on the cover of this study.
Grateful thanks, also, to Martin Sheen for generous permission to
reproduce his likeness in this still. Thanks are due to the Penguin Group
(UK) and Ivan R. Dee, Publisher, for permission to reproduce the
illustration, `Black Holes', from Primo Levi's The Search for Roots (p.
9) in the Appendix of this study. An earlier version of Chapter 3 was
originally published as `Selfhood in Descent: Primo Levi's The Search for
Roots and If This Is a Man', in Sue Vice (ed.), Immigrants and Minorities,
21, 1±2, Special Issue: Representing the Holocaust (March/July 2002),
pp. 202±30 (http://www.tandf.co.uk). Chapter 8 includes sections of a
longer article published as `Bouncing Down to the Underworld: Classical
Katabasis in The Ground Beneath Her Feet', in Sabina and Simona
Sawhney (eds), Twentieth Century Literature, 47, 4, Special Issue: Sal-
man Rushdie (Winter, 2001), pp. 467±509. Thanks to Twentieth Century
Literature and Immigrants and Minorities (a Frank Cass journal) for
permission to reproduce this material.
I would particularly like to thank Jackie Jones, my editor at Edinburgh
University Press, for overseeing the progress of the manuscript with such
scrupulous care and sound judgment. Thanks also to Carol Macdonald of
Edinburgh University Press, for all her work on the production side of the
project. I am very grateful to my readers, Dr Nicola King of University of
the West of England, Bristol, Dr David Pike of American University and
Dr Galin Tihanov of Lancaster University for their valuable suggestions
and support of the project in its initial stages, as well as their own
outstanding research into, respectively, the descensus in modernist lit-
erature, memory and narrative, and Bakhtinian theory. I am indebted to
x Hell in Contemporary Literature

my colleague Dr Sue Vice for reading through drafts of Chapters 1, 3 and

4, and more generally for our conversations about Holocaust literature,
dating back many years. I would also like to thank other colleagues at
Sheffield, particularly Shirley Foster, Jonathan Rayner, Neil Roberts and
Erica Sheen, all of whom offered valuable suggestions as to where to find
the best Hells in literature and film. I would also like to thank Alastair
Renfrew for first drawing my attention to Lanark many years ago; Roger
Starling, for discussions of Levinas, Derrida and Lyotard at the `Narra-
tives of Disaster' Conference in MuÈnster, 2003; Adrian Harding for
extolling the virtues of Alice Notley's The Descent of Alette at the `Poetics
of the Subject' Conference in Aix-en-Provence, 2003; and Kiera Vaclavik
for inviting me to speak at the `Undergrounds' Conference at the Uni-
versity of Manchester, 2003, where I learned from Baryon Tensor
Posadas about the katabatic novels of Haruki Murakami. Warm thanks
to Janey and Jeremy Knowles for giving me a home in Cambridge, MA,
which enabled me to use the Widener Library.
From its gestation nearly a decade ago, the present study has been
enriched by the enthusiasm, intelligence and insight of many under-
graduate students in my Literature of Descent seminars at the University
of Sheffield. I have also been privileged to work with some very gifted
postgraduates in contiguous areas of research. In particular, Brendan
Stone's PhD research into autopathography and narrative has contrib-
uted valuable insights to Chapter 5 of the present study. I would also like
to thank Nicole Campbell, Aideen Fitzpatrick, Julie Scanlon, Brendan
Stone and Kiera Vaclavik for their valuable comments on drafts of
various chapters. For their patience and support, I would like to thank
my friends and family, especially my mother Ann Falconer, Julia, Tom,
Jenny and Sara. My father, Graham Falconer, has been the indispensable
Virgilian guide who steered this book through its penultimate stages,
reading through the entire manuscript and making innumerable sugges-
tions and improvements. In token of my heartfelt thanks, this book is
dedicated to him.
 Introduction

Descent and Return ±

the katabatic imagination

Speaking on television on the anniversary of September 11th, Mayor

Rudolph Giuliani described New York City, the night after the attack on
the World Trade Center, as `Hell, what Dante must have meant when he
described Hell'. In such a context, this familiar allusion is striking in spite
of, or perhaps because of, its very conventionality. A Catholic invokes
`Hell' and `Dante' in the same breath, incidentally omitting reference to
any sacred text. Like many present-day Catholics including the current
Pope, Giuliani doesn't claim to believe in a theological Hell, an actual
place of eternal torment to which sinners are sent in the afterlife.1 But the
invocation of the name of `Hell', together with the appropriation of
Dante, constitute something more than a literary allusion. The double
invocation aims to seal off the event from others, to claim for it a unique
status, to transform it from a historical occurrence into a mythic absolute.
In this book I argue that, like Giuliani, many secular Westerners retain a
vestigial or quasi-religious belief in Hell: Hell as the absolutely horrific
experience from which no one emerges unchanged. In the Western
imaginative tradition, even more important than the notion of Hell as
a sacred space is our belief in the journey through Hell, the idea of the
transformative passage, the destruction and rebirth of the self through an
encounter with the absolute Other. The arc of such a journey only
becomes visible retrospectively, when remembered and narrated. Having
survived the journey, the survivor gains the perspective to identify it as
Hell, as the unimaginable, unspeakable experience, the caesura which
severs present from past selfhood. While Hell as a space remains un-
fathomable, we invest the narrative of the journey through Hell with
potent meaning. Like Coleridge's wedding guest, we are at once repelled
by and drawn toward stories of those who have returned from the abyss.
More than Hell itself, then, it is this narrative of a descent and return in
which we apparently continue to `believe'.
Why should this be so, in the predominantly secular cultures of the
2 Descent and Return ± the katabatic imagination

West? In this book, I will argue that we are still very much governed by a
`katabatic imagination', that is a world-view which conceives of selfhood
as the narrative construct of an infernal journey and return. The ancient
Greek term for the story of a hero's descent to the underworld is
katabasis, which means literally `a going down'.2 Etymologically, `kata-
basis' could refer to a place from which descents are made, such as a cave
mouth, or to a military manoeuvre involving a descent. Both of these
etymological senses are relevant to recent political events, including the
bombing of Afghanistan (which aimed, as President George W. Bush put
it, to smoke the enemy terrorists out of their holes) and the invasion of
Iraq by British and American-led military forces in 2003. But metaphori-
cally, katabasis (or in Latin, descensus ad inferos) was used by the Greeks
more particularly to refer to a story about a living person who visits the
land of the Dead and returns more or less unscathed.3 The well-known
Greek and Roman heroes who made such a journey include Orpheus,
Theseus, Jason, Heracles, the goddess Demeter, Homer's Odysseus and
Virgil's Aeneas. The Greeks may also have known of the older Sumerian
and Akkadian descent heroes such as the king of Uruk, Gilgamesh, or the
goddess, Inanna.4 In the Christian tradition, the conversion of Saul into
the apostle Paul is allegorised as a descent and return. Indeed every
Christian's experience of conversion may be understood as a shadowy
imitation of Christ's own descent into Hell and reascension. The perva-
sive influence of this tradition on the modern Western psyche is, as we
shall see, both literary and religious.
Undoubtedly the katabatic writer of most far-reaching influence on
contemporary Western literature is Dante Alighieri, who seamlessly
combined the ancient Greek and Roman with the medieval Christian
traditions of descent narrative.5 Dante's Inferno famously begins, `Mid-
way on the journey of our life, I found myself in a dark wood' (Inf.1.1±2).
In these lines, the `I' is both singular and archetypal, at once an individual
character and a figure for `our life'. For the modern secular reader, the
`I' is also an autobiographical, narrativised self; it is me the reader, made
coherent by the organising powers of narrative. For the Western reader,
the appropriation of Dante's model to the `dark woods' of modern
life ± mid-life crisis, divorce, redundancy, cancer, AIDS or, most recently,
terrorism ± comes naturally. Dante's infernal journey is always poten-
tially the modern reader's own life story, since it helps us to see the flux of
our own experience as a comprehensible narrative. Like the man in Karen
Blixen's story, who looks out from his window to find that his footprints
in the snow have created the pattern of a stork, we look up from reading
Dante to find inferno-shapes in our own lives.6
If Dante's Inferno feels contemporary, this is not only because it
 Introduction 3

embodies a vast inheritance of Western literary and theological myths,

but also we are accustomed to thinking about the modern psyche, and the
political and social economy, in katabatic terms. As has often been
pointed out, Freud and Marx were very much influenced by classical
ideas about the underworld, and even more by the idea of a heroic descent
into this underworld.7 In this study, I shall be discussing Western descent
narratives written between 1945 and the present, nearly all of which
reflect this mixed inheritance of views about infernal journeys from
Dante, Greek and Roman myth, Judeo-Christian theology, Freud's theory
of the unconscious and Marx's theory of economic base and super-
structure. Freud and Marx are themselves inheritors of nineteenth-
century katabatic ideas that the truth about ourselves, about our species
origin, lies deeply hidden underground. As Rosalind Williams has convin-
cingly shown, the development of mining and archaeological excavation
in the nineteenth century contributed to the prevalence of these ideas.8
Darwin's theory of evolution is a story of humanity's descent from the
Earth's creatures rather than the gods of the sky. What was even more
distressing for his contemporaries, his theory of devolution postulated
that we are always capable of regressing, of descending in a different
sense, to a more primeval state.9 Added to this nineteenth- and early
twentieth-century inheritance are the very considerable influences of later
writers on Hell, as well as underworld myths borrowed from other
theological systems such as Buddhism and Hinduism. And it is not only
theology, literature, archaeology, anthropology, psychology and eco-
nomic theory that have contributed to making Hell feel like a reality
to the modern, secular imagination. As I will argue in Chapters 1 to 3, the
sheer pressure of twentieth-century history itself has convinced many
people of the view that Hells actually exist, and survivors do return,
against all probability, to pass on their experience. Dante's description of
his journey through Hell is a strikingly vivid, engrossing narrative in its
own right. But there are many additional factors that contribute to a
twenty-first-century reader's sense of recognition when he or she first
encounters the medieval pilgrim lost in the wood.
In classical katabasis, the descent to Dis or Hades is about coming to
know the self, regaining something or someone lost, or acquiring super-
human powers or knowledge.10 The descent requires the hero to undergo
a series of tests and degradations, culminating in the collapse or dissolu-
tion of the hero's sense of selfhood. In the midst of this dissolution comes
the infernal revelation, or the sought after power, or the spectre of the
beloved. The hero then returns to the overworld, in some cases succeed-
ing, in other cases failing to bring back this buried wisdom, love or power
from the underworld. In Dantean and medieval Christian katabasis, the
4 Descent and Return ± the katabatic imagination

traveller's sinful self dies upside down at the bottom of Hell, and a new
self emerges, walking upright in the grace of God.11 Many contemporary
writers have drawn upon this hinged narrative structure, with its descent
to a zero point followed by a return, in order to convey some aspect of
what Rushdie has called `the felt shape of human life' (The Ground
Beneath Her Feet, p. 543). Among the major contemporary `katabasists'
who, for reasons of space, have not been included in the present discus-
sion are Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, Haruki Murakami, Doris
Lessing, Toni Morrison, Seamus Heaney, Paul Muldoon, Tony Harrison
and Derek Walcott. Similarly another book could (and should) be written
on post-1945 katabatic film, which would include examples from the art-
house cinema of Vincent Ward and Jan SÏvankmajer to Hollywood
blockbusters such as the Star Wars epic cycle and The Matrix trilogy.12
One point which I hope the present study makes clear is that Western
culture is saturated with the idea of a self being forged out of an infernal
journey.
In katabatic narratives written after 1945, while the descent to Hell still
functions as a quest for knowledge, reparation of loss or superhuman
power, the descent occurs within a context which, unlike their classical
predecessors, is already understood to be infernal. Post-1945 descent
narratives are notably fatalistic, often beginning with the protagonist at
the bottom of Hell. In Primo Levi's If This Is a Man, we are `On the
Bottom' by Chapter 2; in Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, the narrator is
already immured underground when he begins his story; in Lowry's
Under the Volcano, the protagonist is already dead in Chapter 1. As we
shall see in Chapter 8, one of the key differences between Coppola's film
Apocalypse Now and the early twentieth-century novella on which it is
based, Conrad's Heart of Darkness, is that Captain Willard begins his
descent from Saigon rather than the West. Early in the film, Coppola's
Willard is roused to consciousness by two fellow American soldiers, one
of whom says to the other, `give me a hand here, Captain. We got a dead
one'.
Post-1945 descent narratives aim to show that we have already reached
the end, although this fact is obscured by a surface of comfortable
pseudo-realities. In such narratives, rather than making the traditional
crossing from historical to eternal realms, descent heroes are found
peering through cracks, ripping back curtains, opening trapdoors to find
infernal worlds contingent and coterminous with our own. Both worlds
are represented as equally real. More frightening still is the possibility
that, as E. L. Doctorow claims, once the trapdoor to that other, deeper
reality is thrown open, it can never be closed.13 In such cases, the function
of the descent journey can no longer be to overcome and subjugate the
 Introduction 5

dark realm. Rather the protagonist's task, as we find in Gray's Lanark

and Rushdie's Ground Beneath Her Feet, is to acquire the ability to live
with the double-vision or to stand astride the two realities. So while Hell
is embedded in twentieth-century history and consciousness, it may still
take a descent journey to bring that reality home to us. The descent thus
exposes the infernal nature of individual psyches, as well as twentieth-
century institutions, governments and histories. At the same time, and
more optimistically, by framing the experience of Hell as a journey of
descent and return, many contemporary descent narratives articulate
their resistance to this apparently inescapable infernal condition. If Hell
has become a historical phenomenon, then it need no longer be regarded
as a mythical or theological absolute. It can be resisted, transformed and
even ± as in Naylor's Linden Hills, Notley's The Descent of Alette and
Whedon's TV series, Buffy the Vampire Slayer ± ultimately destroyed.
Katabatic narrative offers contemporary writers a positive structure for
representing the process by which a self is created out of adversity. But
there are also a set of problems specifically associated with this narrative
tradition of which we should be wary, especially in the present climate of
fear generated by terrorism and the polarisation of Eastern and Western
nations. Many descent narratives represent otherness as absolutely Other;
the rejection of the demonised Other is the necessary flipside to the
creation or preservation of a self. Dante's ascent via the torso of the
immured Satan, in Inferno, 34, illustrates this point graphically. Infernal
journeys are also traditionally narrated retrospectively, from a position of
supernatural authority. Descent narrators are the survivors of atrocity,
the escape artists from Hell. The extremity of their experience and the fact
that they survived gives them the right to speak and not be contradicted
by their merely mortal listeners. Moreover, neither the past self nor any
other participant within the descent narrative possesses the same degree
of authority as the narrator, because traditionally it is only the narrator
who survives the experience. As C. S. Lewis's gloomy earthman put it,
`many fall down, and few return to the sunlit lands'.14 Such narrators can
and often do claim to be the bearers of revelatory truth, even and
especially in secular contexts. Infernal revelation can then become the
means to justify acts of retribution and vengeance, as has arguably been
the case with the Western response to September 11th. In recent years,
popular Hollywood epic films have faithfully reproduced this traditional
katabatic narrative dynamic. In Star Wars and The Lord of the Rings, the
enemy is a familiar other who must be transformed into, and rejected as,
the absolute Other in order for the hero to return from the underworld. In
these film cycles, the hero is the bearer of a sacred truth, for which
millions of the enemy must be sacrificed so that a few good souls will
6 Descent and Return ± the katabatic imagination

survive. The narrative dynamic operating here is similar to that which

governs Virgil's Aeneid, in which the hero's descent to the underworld
teaches him his destiny: that he must found the empire of Rome at some
cost to others' lives and his own humanity. The texts discussed in this
book, however, call into question many of the problematics associated
with the classical and medieval descent narrative tradition. In doing so,
they are not simply modernising a literary tradition, but also making us
think about our own infernal experiences in a different way. In the
aftermath of a catastrophe, there often appears to be only one way out of
Hell, something that must be done whatever the price. The narratives
discussed here suggest that, on the contrary, there are as many routes
through Hell as there are minds to imagine them.
This is an idea which Primo Levi's writing on Auschwitz conveys with
particular clarity and force. From his well-known autobiographical
works such as If This Is a Man, The Truce and The Periodic Table
to his novels, occasional essays and prefaces, Levi showed that living
through Hell need not be transformed through the filters of memory and
narrative into a sacred, fixed or absolute experience. The title of my first
chapter, `Hell in Our Time' is taken from Levi's Auschwitz testimony,
If This Is a Man (p. 28). In this chapter, I explore the proposition
suggested by Levi, Steiner and many others, that in the twentieth century,
Hell was made immanent in history. I test out this idea against the
evidence of a broad spectrum of twentieth-century experiences and
writings, not all of them literary, and not all of them related to major
historical events such as the two world wars and the creation of the death
camps. Cutting across this cultural analysis, I adopt a more formalist
approach to Hell in Chapter 2. My aim there is to demonstrate that
however we define Hell, whatever we think being in Hell means, our ideas
are shaped by the conventions and dynamics of narrative. Formally
considered, Hell is what Bakhtin defined as a chronotope, a generically
distinct representation of time and space in narrative. As such, it repre-
sents the image of the human subject in particular and distinctive ways.
Once we recognise this, however, we are in a position to challenge the
traditional chronotopic representations of Hell as temporally fixed and
spatially distanced, hence to be feared and revered as a theological
absolute.
In Chapter 3, I discuss Primo Levi's classic testimony, If This Is a Man,
as a descent narrative in which Hell is represented as a juxtaposition of
many chronotopes, each of which reveals a different image of the human
subject. This is a deliberately belated approach to If This Is a Man; that is
to say, I am not trying to capture the searing, visceral impact the text
makes on a first-time reader, although the text itself was composed from
 Introduction 7

`an immediate and violent impulse' to communicate the experience of

internment, as Levi informs us in the Preface (pp. 15±16). But much has
been written on If This Is a Man already, including its allusions to Dante's
Inferno. There is little need for further allusive or empathetic readings of
the text, especially when Levi himself conveys this kind of response so
much more effectively. What I am interested in exploring is the retro-
spective Levi, the testimonial writer perceived through the filter of his
own, later reflections on the Holocaust and our own increasing distance
from the historical event. Levi's writing can be seen to work against the
sacralisation of Hell that occurs in some other examples of memorialisa-
tion and writing about the Holocaust. Chapter 4 develops this theme of
belatedness, or afterwardness, by contrasting two fictional novels about
the Second World War: Michaels' Fugitive Pieces and Sebald's Austerlitz.
These two novels were written at the distance of a generation or more
from the experience of the war itself (1996 and 2001 respectively). Here it
is the traumatic recollection of childhood memories that constitutes the
descent into Hell. The contrasting ways in which Austerlitz and Fugitive
Pieces represent war trauma illustrate how memories of Hell can work to
entrap survivors or unexpectedly release them from unbearable aporia.
Chapters 5 and 6 move on to consider more recent, and more personal
examples of Western descent narrative. In Chapter 5, I discuss the
autobiographical or semi-autobiographical accounts of mental illness
written by recovered patients/writers such as Susanna Kaysen, Carol
North and Lauren Slater. All these writers frame their experiences of
mental illness within the narrative structure of a descent into Hell and
return. These actual survivors of mental illness present us with very
different accounts of the experience than do leading theorists of madness
such as Jameson, Deleuze and Guattari. In various ways, they demon-
strate that the return from such a Hell need not be a matter of choice
between Cartesian self-certainty and postmodern self-doubt. If madness
has long been associated with underworlds, so too has femininity. The
classical descent narrative is frequently (though not exclusively) gendered
as the journey of a male hero into the female Earth via a female sacrificial
victim. In order to illustrate how this gender dynamic has been disrupted
and redefined in recent years, Chapter 6 analyses fictional descent
narratives written by women such as Gloria Naylor, Marge Piercy and
Alice Notley, in which a female character descends into the underworld.
Following on from Notley's critique of patriarchal capitalism in The
Descent of Alette, Chapter 7 examines the continuing relevance of the
Marxist idea of a descent to the underworld of the workplace in a
postmodern, and some might add post-Marxist, context. Alasdair Gray's
Lanark demonstrates how descents into Hell operate within social and
8 Descent and Return ± the katabatic imagination

economic contexts in which the `base' is no longer held to be synonymous

with reality and truth, and in which underworld revelation often turns out
to be as duplicitous, as fantastical as the chimerical desires pursued by
capitalist consumers in the overlying `superstructure'. Here, as elsewhere,
our condition appears to be inescapably infernal, and yet Gray's novel
is one of the great narratives of resistance to capitalist Hell produced in
the last quarter century. In Chapter 8, I discuss Rushdie's The Ground
Beneath Her Feet as a revision of the myth of Orpheus in terms that
reverse not only the geographical coordinates, but also many of the
cultural and theological assumptions of traditional and modern descents
from the West into an infernal East. Rushdie's richly positive representa-
tion of East±West relations, and descent journeys from one region to the
other, provide a stark contrast to the Bush administration's polarised
world-view, in which certain Eastern states have been characterised en
bloc as an `axis of evil'.15 As a recent study of Eastern conceptions of
contemporary America demonstrates, demonisation occurs in the other
direction as well.16 On the anniversary of September 11th, the Iranian
state-owned newspaper Al-Iktisadi showed a picture of the burning
World Trade Center, with the headline, `God's punishment', written in
red letters.17 In this way Orientalism clashes head to head with Occi-
dentalism, and the chance for a positive threshold crossing into another
country and world-view gets lost. In the epilogue I briefly consider the
events of September 11th and their aftermath in the light of the descent
narrative tradition. I suggest different ways in which the political re-
sponses to September 11th may be interpreted as attempts to narrativise
the experience of Hell, suffered on the day of the terrorist attack on New
York City.
My treatment of the idea of the infernal journey draws on a mixture of
thematic and theoretical approaches. The latter is likewise a hybrid of
different schools of criticism. For example, in Chapters 2 and 3, I employ
Bakhtin's concept of the chronotope, while taking issue with his theory of
carnival in Chapter 8; I am indebted to Derrida's reading of Marx, in
Chapter 8, and to other theorists noted in the discussion along the way.
My ideas about modern and post-1945 Western identity are particularly
influenced by two very different yet equally magisterial studies, Charles
Taylor's Sources of the Self and David Harvey's The Condition of
Postmodernity. On the subject of narrative self-fashioning, Paul Ricoeur's
three-volume Time and Narrative and later writings, Nicola King's
Memory, Narrative, Identity and Adriana Cavarero's Relating Narratives
have always been close to hand. Susan Neiman's Evil in Modern Thought
helped me to clarify some of the historically distinctive aspects of
twentieth-century underworld journeys. Outside of classical and medie-
 Introduction 9

val scholarship, there are few full-length studies of the descent narrative
in different historical periods. The descent hero figures importantly in
Joseph Campbell's mono-mythic study, The Hero with a Thousand
Faces. In The Dream and the Underworld, the archetypal psychologist
James Hillman writes about classical underworld myths, using these to
develop a method of psychological analysis which he is at pains to
distinguish from Freud's. More recently, Evans Lansing Smith has applied
this archetypal approach to the myth of the descent journey, in such
studies as Rape and Revelation: The Descent to the Underworld in
Modernism and The Hero Journey in Literature.18 While fascinating
in their own right, these archetypal analyses of katabatic narrative are
antithetical to the historically contextualised approach adopted in the
present study. Hillman and Smith are interested in descent myths for the
universal psychological truths they can reveal, whereas I am interested in
them for precisely the opposite reason. Contemporary descent narratives,
as I aim to show, often resist any movement towards transcendence of
the particular and the historical. The two studies of modern underworld
journeys with which I find myself most in sympathy are Rosalind
Williams' Notes on the Underground: An Essay on Technology, Society,
and the Imagination which broadly explores nineteenth century attitudes
towards underworlds of different kinds, and David Pike's Passage
Through Hell: Modernist Descents, Medieval Underworlds which argues
for the centrality of the descensus ad inferos to early twentieth-century
modernist literature and philosophy.
In The Secular Scripture, Northrop Frye makes even more sweeping
claims for descent narrative. He argues that descents account for two of
the `four primary movements in literature' (p. 97). Either we begin on
earth or in heaven and descend, or we begin in Hell or Earth and ascend
(these two latter types of narrative would be anabases, or `goings up'). All
stories, in Frye's view, are `complications of, or metaphorical derivations
from, these four narrative radicals' (ibid.). If this is true, it is hardly
surprising that so many descent narratives have been produced in the
fiction, film, poetry and drama of the latter half of the twentieth century.
But as I hope to show, katabasis is not only a structural category of
narrative literature; it also expresses a particular world-view, one which
pertains as strongly to our present historical situation as it has to various
times in the past. In The Discarded Image, C. S. Lewis characterised the
world seen through medieval eyes as a vertically hierarchised one. To a
medieval viewer, Lewis argued, the night sky would appear very different:

Remember that you now have an absolute Up and Down. The Earth is really
the centre, really the lowest place; movement to it from whatever direction is
10 Descent and Return ± the katabatic imagination
downward movement. As a modern, you located the stars at a great distance.
For distance you must now substitute that very special, and far less abstract,
sort of distance which we call height: height which speaks immediately to our
muscles and nerves. The Medieval Model is vertiginous . . . To look out on the
night sky with modern eyes is like looking about one in a trackless forest ± trees
forever and no horizon. To look up at the towering medieval universe is much
more like looking at a great building. (pp. 98±9)

Yet it would seem that after the events of 2001 we are very aware of the
vertiginous heights of buildings, as well as the vast gulf that separates
living conditions in the developed and developing worlds. If the night sky
is trackless, both the world and the individual psyche have upper and
lower realms in the contemporary secular imagination. Our experiences
are retrospectively narrated as journeys up and down through historical
catastrophe, through the depths of the psyche and the material world.
`We are on a kind of stair', writes Ian Hamilton; `The world below / Will
never be regained: was never there / Perhaps. And yet it seems / We've
climbed to where we are / With diligence, as if told long ago / How high
the highest rung.'19 If this is a story told us long ago, it is nevertheless one
which can be radically changed, as the narratives discussed in this study
will demonstrate.

Notes

1. `Hell is not a ``place'', nor a punishment imposed by God, but a self-

exclusion from communion with God,' paraphrase of a Papal statement
made in 1999, by Hazel Southam and Nicholas Pyke. Evangelical denomi-
nations, though, still insist on the literal existence of Hell. See Southam and
Pike, `Weep and Gnash Those Teeth: Hell's Back', The Independent on
Sunday, 2 April 2000, p. 3.
2. Liddell and Scott, A Lexicon Abridged from Liddell and Scott's Greek-
English Lexicon. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982.
3. Raymond Clark defines katabasis as: `a Journey of the Dead made by a living
person in the flesh who returns to our world to tell the tale'. See Catabasis:
Vergil and the Wisdom Tradition, p. 32.
4. On Homer's possible knowledge of the Epic of Gilgamesh, see Clark,
Catabasis, pp. 23±4. On the cyclic poems recounting the descent of Inanna,
Queen of Heaven, see Penglase, Greek Myths and Mesopotamia, pp. 17±31.
5. For a broader analysis of medieval katabatic and anabatic (ascent to heaven)
narratives, see Zaleski, Otherworld Journeys. On Dante's synthesis of
classical and Christian traditions, see Freccero, Poetics of Conversion,
pp. 1±28, 62±9. For a range of essays on Dante's influence on modern
literature, see Havely (ed.), Dante's Modern Afterlife.
6. See Cavarero's analysis of Karen Blixen's stork story, in Relating Narratives,
pp. 1±4. As I argue in Chapter 1, it is only the first of Dante's cantiche that is
 Notes 11
read with this sense of recognition. Dante's Paradiso, by contrast, feels to
many readers like an alien place and concept.
7. See Hillman, The Dream and the Underworld, on Freud's debt to under-
world myths and to Virgil's Aeneid. On Marx's debt to the descensus ad
inferos tradition, see Pike, Passage Through Hell, p. 216, where Walter
Benjamin's debt to Marx and Virgil is discussed. Benjamin glosses Marx's
image of the workplace as hell, with its hidden sites of production, with the
marginal note, `cf. Dante's inscription on the gate of hell'. This passage is
also discussed by Williams, Notes from the Underground, pp. 48±9.
8. See Williams, `Excavations I: Digging Down to the Truth', Notes from the
Underground, pp. 22±50.
9. On Darwin's theory of devolution, or reversion to earlier states of evolution,
see The Descent of Man (1874), pp. 37±63.
10. Raymond Clark distinguishes between the `wisdom' tradition of mortal
beings crossing into the afterlife, and the `fertility' tradition of gods descend-
ing into and returning from the Land of the Dead; see Catabasis, p. 32.
11. See Freccero on the `upside-downing' of the Christian in conversion narra-
tives such as Dante's (The Poetics of Conversion, pp. 180±5).
12. On the descent topos in contemporary films such as La JeteÂe, Third Man,
Kanal, Kusturica's Underground and The Matrix, see David Pike's forth-
coming monograph, Subterranean Cities. See also David Pike, `Urban
Nightmares and Future Visions', in Wide Angle, pp. 9±50. On the katabatic
films of Australian director Vincent Ward, see Jonathan Rayner, `Paradise
and Pandemonium', and Michael Wilmington, `Firestorm and Dry Ice: The
cinema of Vincent Ward'.
13. In The Book of Daniel, E. L. Doctorow writes that it was `the master
subversive' Edgar Allen Poe who `wore a hole into the parchment and let the
darkness pour through . . . When Poe blew this away through the resulting
aperture in the parchment the darkness of the depths rose, and rises still from
that small hole all these years incessantly pouring its dark hellish gases like
soot' (p. 183).
14. Lewis, The Silver Chair, p. 140.
15. In Book 5 of Tolkien's The Return of the King (the final volume of the
trilogy, The Lord of the Rings), Chapters 9 and 10 describe the gathered
Men of the West riding together to defy Sauron, Lord of the evil Eastern
empire of Mordor.
16. Ian Buruma and Avishai Margalit, Occidentalism: The West in the Eyes of
Its Enemies (2004).
17. Anon., `Chirac and Putin Voice Sympathy, Iraq Cites God's Will', The
Guardian, 12 September 2002, International Section, p. 4.
18. Smith's most recent publication on the subject, The Myth of the Descent to
the Underworld in Postmodern Literature, came to my attention as the
present monograph was going to press.
19. Alan Bennett quotes Ian Hamilton's poem in his diary entry, published in
The London Review of Books, 2 January 2003, p. 3.
 Chapter 1

Hell in Our Time

Is Hell a fable?

After he has sold his soul to Lucifer, Marlowe's Dr Faustus says to

Mephistophilis, `I think Hell's a fable'. And Mephistophilis dryly re-
sponds, `Ay, Faustus, think so still, till experience change thy mind'
(Doctor Faustus, II, 1, 130±1). The dramatic irony of this exchange rests
on the assumption that Faustus is wrong and the audience knows it.
Faustus himself seems more ready to defy Hell than disbelieve in it; after
all, he is conversing with a demon he has just summoned from the
underworld. The medieval premise of this Renaissance play, that a region
of eternal torment exists, might seem completely alien to a modern
audience.1 But is there a sense in which Mephistophilis' reply remains
true for us? Does experience teach us that Hell exists?
On the face of it, this idea seems implausible in the context of a modern,
secular culture. Even religious communities in the West have modified
their views on the subject of a punitive afterlife. According to the current
Pope, Hell as a literal place to which sinners are sent after death is no
longer part of official Catholic doctrine.2 Piero Camporesi begins his
study of Hell in visual art by firmly separating pre-modern from modern
views on the subject: `We can now affirm with some justification that hell
is finished, that the great theatre of torments is closed for an indetermi-
nate period, and that after almost 2,000 years of horrifying performances
the play will not be repeated' (The Fear of Hell, p. vi). But like Milton
justifying God, Camporesi's spirited declaration raises doubts. One
thinks of Norman Taylor, a lecturer on the occult in Hayer's film Night
of the Eagle (1961), who begins his introductory lecture by writing `I DO
NOT BELIEVE' on the blackboard. Moments later a Satanic eagle bursts
into the lecture room and pinions Taylor against the board, where his
body obscures the word `NOT' in the sentence above.3 If Hell really is
finished as Camporesi says, why does the fact need affirmation or
14 Hell in Our Time

justification? If the play is not to be repeated, why insist repeatedly on its

closure? (`We need to realise once and for all that we have entered a post-
infernal age' (p. vii).) On the contrary, as one follows Camporesi's
fascinating account, one has the distinct sense that nothing about the
underworld is `once and for all'. Each historical phase in the visual
representation of Hell which Camporesi describes can also be found in
twentieth-century art and literature. For example, the classical concept of
an ordo poenarum, a system which distinguished crimes punishable by
extreme cold and those punishable by fire (Fear of Hell, p. 5), is evident
in Gloria Naylor's novel, Linden Hills. The Hell that Camporesi terms
`pneumatic' (the `world of pallid, bloodless and pagan shadows who
drifted in cold and lifeless air . . . like souls, birds, errant breezes, labile
and inconsistent figures, and frozen breaths from damp ravines' (p. 14)) is
evident in Alice Notley's The Descent of Alette, in several of Margaret
Atwood's dystopias, in Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon and Beloved,
and in countless contemporary Gothic novels and films. The crowded,
chaotic spaces of the Catholic Baroque inferno still provide the dominant
images of Hell in our time, in factual as well as fictional accounts of
ghettoes, war camps, prisons, hospitals, undergrounds, mines and other
spaces of entrapment.
After the Baroque period, Camporesi writes, `Hell was likened to a
slaughter-house, a hospital, a torture chamber, all these variations of
Catholic infernality come together in the predominant morphology of the
drain through which the flesh, contaminated by the infected spirit, falls'
(p. 15). Sadly, this image of Hell as a receptacle for contaminated human
rubbish also survives in our time. In Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time,
for example, a poor Latino woman watches gulls wheeling over the New
York State mental hospital where she is to be confined, wheeling `as over
other refuse grounds . . . She was human garbage carried to the dump'
(p. 32). In all these post-1945 examples, as we shall see later, the name of
Hell is invoked to locate such horrifying spaces. The novels and poems I
have cited should not be discounted just because they are fictions; they are
still representations of what real life is already like for some, or (in the case
of dystopias) the way things might become in future. Nor should they be
ignored because the name Hell is being used metaphorically. While this
may be partially, or in some cases wholly, true, it was also true to an extent
for medieval orthodox texts. Medieval Christians believed Hell to exist,
but elsewhere, beyond this life; Hell could only be invoked into the present,
then as now, by the power of the imagination. Indeed, it might be argued
that although medieval Christians believed in the existence of Hell, only
secular moderns believe in Hell. Only for us is Hell actually here, whether
in the mind, or in actual, twentieth-century historical events.4
 Is Hell a fable? 15

Nor is it necessarily the case that twentieth-century advances in science

and technology have made it impossible to believe in regions of infinite
darkness and negation. `Today the vertical depths of cosmic space have
ousted those of the abyss', Camporesi staunchly declares; `Space travel . . .
has rendered any journeys downward both obsolete and useless' (p. vii).
But the abyss can also be found in cosmic space. Seven years after the
publication of Camporesi's study in Italian, in a completely different
corner of the universe, the physicist Kip Thorne was inviting readers to
imagine `a hole in space with a definite edge into which anything can fall
and out of which nothing can escape; a hole with a gravitational force so
strong that even light is caught and held in its grip; a hole that curves
space and warps time' (Black Holes and Time Warps, p. 23). Black holes
in space are not science fiction but scientific predictions now widely
accepted by astrophysicists as real. The black hole closest to earth is
located near the star Vega; only about the size of Los Angeles, it has a
mass that makes it ten times heavier than our Sun. Astronomers have
named it Hades, the ancient Greek name for the underworld (pp. 24, 29).
In the writing of Primo Levi, a scientist and Holocaust survivor, Ausch-
witz is figured as a black hole in modern European history (see Chapter
3). Moreover, contemporary science is discovering more about dark
matter all the time, and not just in the `depths' of outer space. Research
centres like the Boulby Underground Laboratory, located a thousand
metres under the North Yorkshire Moors, have been set up to study the
invisible dark matter that apparently makes up ninety per cent of the mass
of our universe. So the concept of the infernal abyss continues to exert its
influence on modern history and science, and not just metaphorically.5
This to say nothing of modern religious fundamentalism, the dominant
culture in many parts of the Arab world and increasingly influential in the
United States. Witness, for example, the extraordinary if controversial
success of Mel Gibson's film, The Passion of the Christ (2004). In her
testimony of near-death experience, Beyond the Darkness, the Christian
writer Angie Fenimore complains that her kind of testimony is becoming
far too common. She takes pains to emphasise that her own narrative is
the genuine record of a visionary descent to Hell and return. Fenimore
clearly believes in this region of eternal punishment ± and the fact she
actually went there: `Its floor was firm but shrouded in black mist swirling
around my feet, that also formed the thick, waist-high barrier that held
me prisoner . . . I knew that I was in a state of Hell' (p. 94). Fenimore's
realistic narrative recalls the graphic infernal journeys of medieval times,
as well as the rhetorical strategies of seventeenth-century Puritan pro-
phecy. But it is perhaps not surprising to find the medieval legacy so
vividly present in contemporary Christian writing. What is more surpris-
16 Hell in Our Time

ing is that secular cultures are also permeated with images of Hell and
allusions to infernal journeys. Thus a fire killing over a hundred people
in an underground station in Taegu, South Korea, was described by
witnesses as being `close to Hell'.6 A survivor of the Tokyo subway gas
attack on 20 March 1995 told the writer Haruki Murakami in an
interview, `what I saw was ± how shall I put it? ``hell'' describes it
perfectly.'7 More recently, the journalist John Simpson described the sight
of Baghdad, after being bombed by the US in March 2003, as a scene
from Hell.8 The number of such allusions raises the question: why has the
idea of Hell survived to such an extent in modern secular cultures? One
could say that twentieth-century history makes it hard for us to do
without a concept of Hell. To know even the basic facts about the
trenches of the First World War, the Stalinist purges of the 1930s, the
Nazi death camps, Hiroshima and the devastations inflicted by AIDS is to
admit that, to paraphrase Voltaire's remark about God, if Hell hadn't
existed, we would have had to invent it.9
But the invention has not come from nothing. In retaining the name of
Hell, we have also retained the traces of earlier religious ideas. In In
Bluebeard's Castle, George Steiner suggests that the loss of belief in a
religious Hell caused greater shock waves in Western Europe than the loss
of belief in Heaven (p. 48). He attributes the rise of totalitarianism in the
twentieth century at least in part to the collapse of metaphysical depth in
the European psyche. Thus

it may be that the mutation of Hell into metaphor left a formidable gap in the
co-ordinates of location, of psychological recognition in the Western mind.
The absence of the familiar damned opened a vortex which the modern
totalitarian state filled. 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. (p. 48)

Steiner cites the many extraordinary resemblances between the spatial

organisation of the Nazi concentration camps and traditional Western
iconographies of Hell; in both, we find the `technology of pain without
meaning, of bestiality without end, of gratuitous terror' (p. 47). It was the
achievement of the twentieth century to bring this familiar, constantly re-
imagined space into material reality: `the concentration and death camps
of the twentieth century, wherever they exist, under whatever regime, are
Hell made immanent. They are the transference of Hell from below the
earth to its surface' (p. 47). Steiner's claim for the immanence of Hell in
modern European history is one with which many Holocaust survivors
and writers would agree. It is a far stronger claim than the truism
expressed by Keith Thomas, for example, that `whilst we live in the fear
 Is Hell a fable? 17

of hell, we have it' (Religion, p. 203). For Steiner, Hell isn't simply a
private mental phobia. We have made it historically real, in the way Keats
wrote of Adam's dreaming: `he awoke, and found it truth'.10
Nevertheless, for modern Western cultures Hell is still a truth that
needs to be conjured into existence. As Charles Taylor argues in Sources
of the Self, no moral framework can be taken for granted any longer as
the framework which everybody shares (p. 17). No one can assume that a
particular historical event or personal experience or horrific vision will
embody Hell for someone else. We invoke the name of Hell to conjure a
sense of collectively recognised evil; but more than this, Hell is the name
we give to the absolute evil that defines the limit of the known or
thinkable world. But how is the limit to be drawn, and who has the
authority to name it? Often our very insistence on the name of Hell
betrays a certain hesitancy or resistance, whether in the speaker or the
addressee. As he passes through the gate into Auschwitz, the haÈftling
Primo Levi thinks, `This is hell. Today, in our times, hell must be like this'
(If This Is a Man, p. 28). Even for such a time and place, the simple
declarative sentence is not enough. Levi feels the need to persuade himself
and us with a qualification (`in our times'), an imperative (`must be') and
an iteration of the name. Again and again, one comes across this repetitive
stutter over the name of Hell in contemporary discourse. It is evident in
the passage quoted from Steiner above (where the name is repeated and
italicised) and in Rudolph Giuliani's 2002 memorial speech about Sep-
tember 11th. The stutter is unmistakably audible in this letter from a
prisoner on death row to a friend on the outside:

I have spent 21 years in continuous incarceration. I am 40 years old. I have no

desire to foresee hell in any other form; for I have already discovered it. This is
a literal `hell-hole'. It is a LIVING HELL. If the fires do not consume me, I
hope to someday be free; to tell of my terrifying experience. That such a HELL,
under no circumstances, can be the answer. Not ever.11

Prisoners on death row in the United States are referred to as `dead men'
(they usually are men, rather than women). Robbins' film, Dead Man
Walking (1995), explored some of the horrific conditions of their
existence. But as the above extract shows, the `dead man' feels a
desperate need not only to make his circumstances known, but also to
convince us that what he is experiencing is an absolute evil in human
experience. `Death Row is much more than a place filled with despair,
uncertainty, sordidness, indifference and futility. It is the dungeon of hell
that awaits all individuals sentenced to death' (Welcome to Hell, p. 75).
By claiming this is `the dungeon of hell', I do not think the prisoner is
engaging in the futile exercise of comparing evils, ranking his as the worst.
18 Hell in Our Time

Rather what seems important is that this evil be recognised as something

beyond the thinkable or acceptable. It is a polemic gesture that not only
demands our concurrence, but internally reinforces the distinction be-
tween the self and the experience of the infernal. Naming something `Hell'
has an apotropaic function, like placing a hex sign on a barn; it is saying,
this is not me, not where I belong.
But whether or not one accepts Camporesi's view that the West is
finished with Hell, his study of the iconographic tradition underlines one
important fact. The inferno is a historically determined timespace; its
physical and moral topographies are constantly developing and changing.
While the medieval idea of Hell as a region of punitive justice is still very
much with us, modern usage of the name tends to focus on the suffering of
the damned. The prisoners on death row who talk about Hell clearly
mean to convey the extremity of their suffering and not to suggest they
deserve it in a divine scheme of justice. Sometimes this shift in what Hell
means to an audience can be explained by the change in the narrator's
status. As in the case cited above, it is the inhabitant of the underworld
who identifies Hell rather than a Dantean visitor. But even when an
observer names some horrific experience Hell, this description is generally
intended to rouse sympathy for those suffering inside. When Giuliani
and the journalist John Simpson respectively described New York and
Baghdad as scenes from Hell, neither was implying that the carnage was
deserved. Dante's Hell bears the famous inscription on its gateway:
`Justice made me'. In direct contrast, modern Hells are places of injustice
where the innocent suffer. In answer to Job's question, `why does the just
man suffer?' we hear the uncompromising reply: hier ist kein warum,
there is no `why' here. This is the guard's reply to Levi's request for
information in Auschwitz (If This Is a Man, p. 35). In Charles Taylor's
view, modern identity involves securing three central moral goods:
autonomy, affirmation of ordinary life (a `term of art' for `the life of
production and the family') and the avoidance of suffering (Sources of
the Self, pp. 12±13). The modern emphasis on Hell as a place of unjust
suffering indicates that the underworld still functions mythically as the
space in which the self is unmade, but what unmakes us now is the failure
of a human community rather than divine wrath.
In this context, it is well to remember that inferno and hell are terms
whose meanings have dramatically changed over time. According to
Hans KuÈng, up to the early middle ages, inferna means, quite simply
and neutrally, the realm of the dead, that is of all the dead (as in the
Hebrew `Sheol' or ancient Greek `Hades').12 Likewise, the German HoÈlle
and the English `hell' are at first neutral terms, stemming from the old
Norse hel, hehlen meaning to `cover' or `conceal'; both terms are
 Is Hell a fable? 19

etymologically related to HoÈhle or `cave' (ibid.). The ancient Greek term

for a heroic descent to the underworld, katabasis, also referred originally
to any physical descent, through a cave mouth or other such entrance,
into the earth. It is only later, in medieval scholasticism, that inferna and
`hell' come to mean the realm of the non-blessed below, the special place
for those who are finally damned; the Hebrew term for this realm is
`Gehenna' (p. 158). In the twentieth century, Freud's remarkably influ-
ential theory of the unconscious has helped to shift modern definitions of
Hell closer to these etymological roots. The underworld is once again what
is covered or concealed, although now it is concealed within an individual's
body and psyche, or within the history of a community or nation. In
Freudian and Lacanian pyschoanalytic theory, what we conceal are the
forces that unmake us, that dismantle the subject at source. If, as Charles
Taylor argues, `being a self is inseparable from existing in a space of moral
issues' (p. 112), then the psychoanalytic account of subjectivity is not in
itself sufficient as an explanation of what constitutes a self. But the two
approaches, psychoanalytic and philosophical, can both be brought to
bear on our modern understanding of Hell. Repeatedly what we find in
modern accounts of Hell is the spectacle of the self being destroyed by
suffering, by the absence of autonomy, and by the severance from `ordin-
ary life', in other words the absence of Taylor's key `moral goods'. We will
return to Freud and the philosophers in the next section.
But before considering how the modern underworld has been theore-
tically conceptualised, we should explore further how it has been experi-
enced and narrated. Spatial confinement is a primary feature of most Hells,
modern and pre-modern. In a sentence with chilling import for modern
history, the seventeenth-century Jesuit Jeremiah Drexel computes the
appropriate spatial coordinates for Hell: `If 30 or 100,000 million persons
were condemned to hell, and if this prison was one German mile in each
direction, that is to say, high, wide and long, it would be amply sufficient to
house such a large number. A prison should above all be narrow, since
spacious living is a part of freedom.'13 One of the appalling aspects of the
Nazi death camps is the fact that so many people were crammed into such
concentrated spaces. The transport trains were physically overcrowded to
the infernal degree described by Drexel above. Primo Levi describes `a
human mass, extended across the floor, confused and continuous, sluggish
and aching, rising here and there in sudden convulsions and immediately
collapsing again in exhaustion' (If This Is a Man, p. 24). But with the
crematoria, the camps could accommodate millions of people in just a few
square miles. Their singularity, in the astro-physical sense, consisted of
their capacity to collapse space and time in this horrific way.14
Loss of autonomy also entails metaphysical constraint: divesting the
20 Hell in Our Time

self of its ability to connect with and influence others. The exercise of free
will is meaningless in a vacuum, so one way to destroy the will is to place
it in solitude. By this means, the `ordinariness' of human interchange is
also destroyed. Primo Levi wrote that the worst aspect of Auschwitz was
the way it set one prisoner against another: `in the Lager . . . everyone is
desperately and ferociously alone' (If This Is a Man, p. 94). For prisoners
on death row, `solitary confinement' combines two tortures destructive to
the psyche: `You are locked up in a five-foot by eight-foot cell all of your
own . . . No one really knows what loneliness is until they come to the
row' (Welcome to Hell, p. 61). In infernal space, the body is often said to
feel heavy and sluggish, dragged down by despair. Conversely, and often
simultaneously, it feels unnaturally light, even weightless, once cut off
from social interaction. Lightness is the sign of a damned soul in descent
narratives from the Aeneid (6.411±14) to Paradise Lost, where Satan is
told, `read thy lot in yon celestial sign / Where thou art weighed, and
shown how light, how weak,' (4.1011±12), and from Liana Millu's
Smoke Over Birkenau, in which the weightless exit via the Chimney is
universally feared as the worst death, to Primo Levi's The Truce, where as
a free man, Levi is surprised to feel his bed sink under his weight (p. 379).
A suicidal woman confined to a closed psychiatric ward expresses the
paradoxical condition of heavy lightness in Hell: `The top of my head
feels quite light but the thread that runs down from my head to my
stomach is soaked in deep despair. Maggots in my belly multiply. Rotting
flesh' (Linda Hart, Phone at Nine, p. 19). As is clearly the case here, Hell
is traditionally meant to be felt viscerally, in flesh and body. Medieval
visions of Hell (and Purgatory) were always represented as actual, bodily
journeys, and sometimes the traveller not only observed but experienced
the tortures of the damned. In Otherworld Journeys, Carol Zaleski
distinguishes the infernal narrative from medieval visions of Heaven,
which were generally static tableaux observed in dreams only, while the
body remained motionless (p. 93). Dante's Paradiso was one of the rare
exceptions of a journey through Heaven although, as is clearly apparent
from Botticelli's drawings of the third cantica, even Dante's Paradise is a
less visceral place than Hell or Purgatory.15 That Hell was meant to be
experienced in the flesh, as a difficult, dangerous journey, is still very
much evident in Milton's description of the fallen angels exploring Hell
for the first time:
. . . through many a dark and dreary vale
They passed, and many a region dolorous,
O'er many a frozen, many a fiery alp,
Rocks, caves, lakes, fens, bogs, dens, and shades of death
Paradise Lost, 2.618±21
 Is Hell a fable? 21

As commentators have pointed out, the last line is rhythmically clogged,

obstructive to the reader in a way that mimes the impeded movement of
the angels through the underworld. This is one paradox of Hell, that
bodies are physically afflicted even though the bodies themselves are
insubstantial, shades of former existences. Indeed, for some seventeenth-
century theologians, the body of the damned could become a Hell in itself.
Drexel cites Coelius Rhodiginus: ` ``the body was like hell, in which tides
run riot, and gales rage, and there the burning hot spells of the sum-
mer'' '.16 Another paradox of Hell is that, although a region of death, no
one ever dies here; on the contrary, it is the `shades of death' that are
fearful, rather than death itself.
The corporeality and immanence of the infernal journey distinguishes
this genre of narrative from the via negativa of Buddhist and Christian
traditions. In Christian religion, `negative theology' is that which attempts
to describe God through negative statements (He is unimaginable,
incomprehensible, illimitable), rather than positive ones (He is the
God of love, omnipotence, omniscience).17 Those pursuing a knowledge
of God via this mode of thought, the via negativa, rigorously exclude the
ephemeral and the physical; the aim is to achieve a calm, meditative,
transcendental state. In Poustinia, for example, Catherine de Hueck
Doherty describes her spiritual enlightenment as a journey through the
desert, in which the desert is an altar on which the self is offered. The
process of enlightenment entails cutting oneself off from the physical and
social world: `For the poustinik, the most powerful of all his thoughts and
prayers should be to empty himself as Christ emptied himself by his
incarnation. We will never reach that depth, but that is the poustinik's
vocation' (pp. 139±40). Doherty likens divine revelation to the discovery
that one has a terminal illness. In that moment, `All the things that we
have dreamt about, desired, perhaps 98 percent of them fall away in an
instant . . . When one is visited by God, a kenosis [Greek, emptying-out]
takes place, and all our plans and projects perish before our eyes' (p. 134).
The via negativa combines physical privation with religious ecstasy; it
feels good to have the ephemera of life, love, plans, ambitions crumble
into sand. By contrast, the journey through Hell is painful not ecstatic
(pace Sade); the emptying of selfhood is not necessarily a desired out-
come, but very often an unlooked for, and unwilled, transformation.
Katabatic narratives do not necessarily aim to transcend material ex-
istence, as does the Christian via negativa. On the contrary, as we shall
see, the result of the katabatic journey can be a fuller, more intense
participation in actual, bodily existence.
One of the ways that Hell disrupts human chronicity is by destroying
the natural limit to life, the ordinary distinction between living and dying.
22 Hell in Our Time

The effects on a sense of chronicity are immediate and pervasive. In

remembering serious accidents or disasters, many people describe the way
time seems to slow down or stop at the moment of crisis. But however
extreme the experience, can one say that this sense of arrested time is
anything like the theological concept of an eternal Hell? Camporesi
argues, for example, that `the obsession about the perpetuity of
punishment . . . has dissolved' (p. 25). Doctrinally he may be right,
but his position cannot account for the way people actually experience
suffering. Most accounts register a radical shift in time-sense: an arrest of
chronological flow, an emptying out of future possibility, a sense of being
cut adrift of history. For example, this death-row prisoner writes:

Sometimes I feel like a ghost in here, Ruth . . . I find myself caught between the
world of the living and the dead . . . We're the people who've been completely
transformed by the legends and myths. We're the replacements, the ones they
warn their children about, the ones who're supposed to come from nowhere
and get you in the dark if you're not good. (Welcome to Hell, pp. 100±1)

Cut off from any interaction with the outside world (excepting the letter
itself), the prisoner says he is like a myth, a creature outside historical
time. With no future orientation, the self is destroyed from within: `There
are no real dreams here . . . And as dreams are the sap of life, your roots
soon dry, your structure decays and rots' (p. 107). The prospect of
imminent death does nothing to diminish that sense of existing in eternal
time, as this comment reveals: `When fighting the death penalty [people
outside are] too often satisfied with just keeping someone alive, even if
they're locked in Hell for all of eternity' (p. 98). The experience of
suffering and unjust punishment feels like an endless condition, and to
this extent the experience is properly described as infernal.
In any case, the theological idea that Hell had to last forever was always
a contentious one. As D. P. Walker explains, the doctrine of a static Hell
(that is, where the moral life is frozen and no repentance is possible) was a
necessary corollary of the argument for Hell as a deterrence to crime in
this life. `It is only by making this earthly life the unique period of trial
that the greatest possible moral weight can be thrown on our present
actions and the greatest force be given to the fear of hell' (The Decline of
Hell, pp. 23±4). On the other hand, a static Hell raises problems
theologically, since if the damned do not technically continue to sin,
there ceases to be a strong justification for their eternal damnation (p. 24).
Hence even Renaissance orthodox theologians hedged their bets on the
issue of Hell's eternity. The scriptural authority for the existence of Hell in
the Christian tradition comes from Matthew 25 and Revelations 14 and
20. In Matthew, Christ is quoted as saying he will send the wicked to `the
 Is Hell a fable? 23

everlasting fire, everlasting punishment' (to pur to aionion, kolasis

aionios) but as Walker points out, aionios can mean age-long as well
as eternal. The idea of perpetual punishment, without the possibility of
release, turns out to be difficult to justify theologically since `the ability to
sin presupposes some measure of free will and hence the possibility of
repentance' (Decline, p. 25). Arguably, then, the modern penal system
which includes the death penalty and life sentences where `life means life'
has done a more thorough job of inventing eternal punishment than
orthodox Christian theology itself.
A quasi-religious sense of inevitability, as well as eternity, may also
attach to twentieth-century secular Hells. When Steiner argues that the
Holocaust is Hell made immanent in history, he is not arguing that the
Holocaust constituted a new kind of Hell. On the contrary, it is a Hell
that is already familiar to us from the history of European art and
literature. Like Dante's Inferno, he argues `the death camps constituted
a complete, coherent world . . . There were regulated gradations of
horror within the total, concentric sphere' (In Bluebeard's Castle,
p. 47). The camps at Belsen struck the newly arrived prisoners as familiar,
Steiner argues, because they were a `deliberate enactment of a long,
precise imagining' (p. 47). Bohdan Wytwycky likewise finds similarities
between the concentrically arranged circles of the medieval Hell and the
organisation of the camps; both had `different circles into which victims
were consigned and in which they suffered a variety of cruel fates'. (The
Other Holocaust, p. 17). According to Wytwycky, the three lowest circles
were occupied, in ascending order, by Jews, gypsies and Slavs; upper
circles housed the Volksdeutsche (expatriate Germans), political prison-
ers and ordinary criminals (p. 18). Each circle had its distinct horror;
while the majority of Jews and gypsies died in gas chambers, most Slavs
were either shot, starved or worked to death (p. 19). Such detailed
resemblances to the regions of torture in medieval religious art lend a
sense of uncanny, mythic inevitability to the twentieth-century death
camps.
Medieval orthodox Hell and extreme suffering both alter the relation
between an individual and his or her death, and in this sense both types of
Hell are experienced as eternal and inevitable. In The Amber Spyglass,
Philip Pullman offers the striking idea that a person walks around her
whole life with her own death at her shoulder (p. 275). What this image
underlines is the importance of death as a natural and individuating
presence in each life. Fear of Hell is not so much a fear of death as a fear of
having your death taken from you. For example, this prisoner discusses
the difference between facing death freely and having it owned by
someone else:
24 Hell in Our Time
It used to be that death was like a familiar to me, a part of nature and part of
life . . . Redline! the edge, the border between life and death and when you get
on that line, when you stand on it you're close enough to see death as it is. I've
been there so damn many times . . . Unfortunately, that's all changed now.
They've stolen death. (Welcome to Hell, p. 83)

If in pre-modern times damnation was at least a sign of divine justice in

operation, in modern times the reverse is most likely to be true. Now Hell
is the state one enters when facing a death that is meted out arbitrarily,
senselessly. Anyone who assumed that the death penalty in the United
States was severe but just, for example, would be seriously under-
informed. Consider the following statements by Arriens:

A map of the United States shading in the executing states is virtually a map of
the Confederacy in the Civil War. The four main executing states are Texas,
Florida, Georgia and Louisiana. (Welcome to Hell, p. 30)

Defence lawyers maintain that no one able to buy proper counsel gets the death
penalty. It is the black, the poor, the under-educated and the retarded who are
particularly at risk . . . no white man had ever been executed for the murder of
a single black victim until September 1991. (ibid., p. 31)

Just one out of every 100 convicted murderers is sentenced to death. These are
by no means always the worst offenders. Just under 50 per cent of those on
Death Row are from minorities, compared with a national average of 12 per
cent. (ibid., p. 31)18

When the prisoners of death row refer to their condition as Hell, they
mean not only that they are suffering endlessly, but that their punishment
is capricious and arbitrary. In conventional medieval theology, the
punishments of Hell are not only justly deserved, but instructive to those
on the outside. The medieval descent to Hell narrative is didactic in
function; the narrator's aim is to scare his audience into better behaviour.
At the same time, the narrator must demonstrate that the good Christian
traveller emerges unscathed from Hell. Thus the fourteenth-century
Vision of Tugdal has Tugdal question his divine guide:

Lord, if it pleases you, tell me . . . why are they [the righteous] led into hell?
The angel replied: if you wish to know why the righteous, who must not suffer
punishment, are taken to visit hell, this is the reason. They are taken so that
having seen the torments from which they have been spared by divine grace,
they will be more ardently fervent in their love and praise of the Creator.19

Similarly, Dante's Ulysses shipwrecks at the foot of Mount Purgatory

because, allegorically, he has aspired too far as a pagan in a Christian
universe. It may be tragic that he dies `as pleased Another', but in contrast
 Hell as the modern condition 25

to the fate of the prisoners cited above, Ulysses' death is at least a

meaningful one ± not least to Dante, who will learn to curb his own,
very similar intellectual hubris (Inferno, 26.141).
Once again, it would seem that the twentieth century has surpassed
medieval orthodoxy in achieving the infernal goal of unmaking identity.
As Adorno writes of the Holocaust, `The administrative murder of
millions made of death a thing one had never yet to fear in just this
fashion . . . in the concentration camps it was no longer an individual
who died but a specimen' (Negative Dialectics, p. 362). A person who
dies as a specimen cannot be aware of the dehumanising event, but to
witness another's death in this manner is properly infernal. The key moral
goods that Taylor identifies with modern Western identity (autonomy,
absence of suffering, the affirmation of ordinary life) are all different
facets of a notion of respect ± for oneself, but especially for the other
(p. 12). Abandoning the idea that the other's life has a meaningful shape is
also to lose oneself. Sarah Kofman writes that the camps turned death
into something banal, anonymous and public. For the detainees, `the true
abjection is . . . to give up wanting to keep ``the other'' ± (the) self and
others ± alive, to become indifferent to the death of the other, a shocking
indifference that would, in effect, mark the advent of a new species of
man' (Smothered Words, p. 62).20 Being in Hell is existing where death
has ceased to matter. By 1945 three different political systems, fascism,
communism and liberal democracy, were implicated in mass murder: in
the death camps of Eastern Europe, the Soviet gulags and at Hiroshima.
To say they were all implicated is `not for a moment to equate them', as
Neiman writes (Evil in Modern Thought, p. 253). If Hiroshima showed
us that humanity has the capacity to destroy itself, it did not institutio-
nalise human degradation in the way the Nazi death camps did. But in
different ways and at different levels, all these modern Hells manifest a
`shocking indifference' to the other's death. We might well take our cue
from Mephistophilis, then, and assert that twentieth-century experience
has taught us Hell exists.

Hell as the modern condition

Most people think of Dante's Inferno as a sequence of scenes displaying

increasingly severe punishments for a graded series of sins. Dante must
obviously have approved of this system, because he elaborated on
Catholic doctrine by developing his own complex scheme of contrapasso,
which is generally understood as a form of retribution exactly suited to
the nature of each sin. Kenneth Gross, however, advances a convincing
26 Hell in Our Time

argument that contrapasso does not mean `retribution', but rather a

reverse or retrograde step (from the Latin contra, `against', and passum,
`pace, step'). `The states of the damned, then, can be read not so much as
simple retributive punishments,' Gross argues, `but instead as various
incarnations of false love or as emblems of false, downward, or parodic
conversion.'21 Dante's method becomes less objectionable to a modern
reader, Gross believes, if we understand that the poet's intention is to
reveal the horrifying nature of the crimes themselves, not to illustrate how
each will be punished in the afterlife. Thus Pope Boniface, whose soul
Dante meets in Hell while still alive on Earth, becomes the very exemplum
of how Dante's underworld relates to the living overworld (Inferno, 19).
An analogous example in contemporary cinema would be The Matrix
(1999). Once Neo has broken through the vast complex of images (the
apparently real) generated by `the matrix', he discovers what reality (or
the film's conception of `reality') has actually become: a vast factory
producing energy from human slaves.
This interpretation of Inferno crosses what looks like an otherwise
unbridgeable divide between medieval and modern conceptions of Hell.
Of course for Dante, the infernal is only one possible continuum of the
real; there are divine conversions in Purgatorial and Paradisal reality, as
well as the retrograde conversions of the world in its infernal aspect. It
seems to be a distinctive feature of secular modernity to associate truth
and reality with the underworld alone. In the Epilogue of Alasdair Gray's
Lanark, the fictional editor comments `Modern afterworlds are always
infernos, never paradisos, presumably because the modern secular ima-
gination is more capable of debasement than exaltation' (p. 489). In her
essay `Negotiating with the Dead', Margaret Atwood argues that `it's by
the inmates of the Inferno, not in the Purgatorio or the Paradiso, that
Dante is told the most stories, and also the best ones' (Negotiating with
the Dead, p. 156). Anyone studying the reception of Botticelli's `Drawings
of Dante', exhibited in 2002 at the Royal Academy in London, would
have to concur. The drawings were exhibited in three adjoining rooms,
one room for each cantica: Inferno, Purgatorio, Paradiso. The Inferno
room was packed, daily, with a double queue of people inching their way
past the illustrations, often bad-temperedly elbowing others out of the
way or complaining about being thus elbowed. Botticelli's illustrations of
Inferno were likewise densely packed with writhing, jostling, bad-tem-
pered humanity. The Purgatorio room (and likewise the drawings there-
in) attracted about half the number of viewers. As for Paradiso, most
viewers were too exhausted by the time they got there to do more than
throw a cursory glance round the room from the doorway. And Botticelli
himself seemed exhausted by the time he got to drawing the Paradiso.
 Hell as the modern condition 27

With the exception of an intricate Heavenly rose, most of the canvases

were achingly blank but for a cherub or a Beatrice tiptoeing across a cloud
wearing an expression of deathly serenity. Borges's view is that the ending
of Dante's Paradiso is the most infernal of all three of the cantiche,
because here at the very end, Beatrice bestows on Dante the briefest of
glances, before turning and leaving him.22 But painful as the Paradiso
may be, the idea of Hell seems to have survived the transfer to secular
modernity in the way that the idea of Paradise has not. The notion of Hell
raises fundamental questions about the limits of the human, and the sense
of our own, individual interiorities, in a way that Paradise no longer does.
As Dostoevsky's devil declares, `It's reactionary to believe in God in our
age. But I'm the devil. You can believe in me.'23
If, as Charles Taylor argues, no moral framework is shared by everyone
in the modern period, then modern identity is in part defined by its need
to be constructed and affirmed. To be a modern self is to find oneself `on a
quest' for identity.24 The quest for a moral framework is bound up with
the quest for selfhood, for `being able to find one's standpoint in this
space, being able to occupy, to be a perspective in it' (Sources of the Self,
p. 112). My argument throughout this book is that the katabatic journey,
which is structured as a descent to the interior and return, has become one
of the principal ways of `telling the self' in modern times. The prominence
of the katabatic model is, I think, directly linked to what Taylor calls the
`inward turn' of modern identity:

Our modern notion of the self is related to, one might say constituted by, a
certain sense (or perhaps a family of senses) of inwardness . . . We think of our
thoughts, ideas, or feelings as being `within' us, while the objects in the world
which these mental states bear on are `without'. Or else we think of our
capacities or potentialities as `inner', awaiting the development which will
manifest them or realize them in the public world. The unconscious is for us
within, and we think of the depths of the unsaid, the unsayable . . . as inner.
(Sources of the Self, p. 111)

What Taylor does not discuss, although it is everywhere implicit in his

analysis, is how often the coming-to-self narrative is expressed as a
journey of negation followed by discovery and empowerment. It is
striking how many of Taylor's quintessentially modern writers, for
example T. S. Eliot, Pound, Joyce, Mann and Proust, narrate the quest
for selfhood as a descent to Hell and return.25 From The Waste Land to
the Hell Cantos and the Hades chapter of Ulysses, modernist texts have
represented the material and spiritual dislocations produced in and by
Western capitalism as an infernal condition, often directly comparable to
Virgil's or Dante's underworlds. Indeed, Taylor concludes the paragraph
28 Hell in Our Time

quoted above with a reference to Conrad's novella, perhaps the most

widely read of all modern katabases (Sources of the Self, p. 111). The
modern nexus of associations between evil, inwardness and truth, semin-
ally epitomised in Conrad's title Heart of Darkness, may be one of the
peculiar results of splicing together the moral topographies of religion
and Freudian psychology.26 With Marlow, we tend to assume that our
innermost desires will be evil to a degree too horrific to contemplate.
Particularly for `anti-subjectivist' modernists like Pound and Eliot, writes
Taylor, the `turn inward may take us beyond the self as usually under-
stood to a fragmentation of experience which calls our ordinary notion of
identity into question' (p. 462). Thus the concepts of Hell and the
unconscious have dovetailed together in modern secular thinking as in
modern literature. The irony of this would not be lost on Freud, who
described religion as an infantile obsession, one that `surely was destined
to be surmounted' (The Future of an Illusion, p. 233).27
The descent to Hell figures importantly in the writing of the first half of
the twentieth century, as David Pike's excellent study, Passage Through
Hell, demonstrates. But in my view, the Second World War marks a kind
of watershed, at least in Western philosophical thinking, after which no
metaphysical condition seems conceivable except the infernal one. If the
victims and survivors of the Holocaust experienced Hell as a material
reality, then we who inherit the legacy of the Holocaust live on in a
spectral world of infernal memories. Haunted by such an event ± even by
the possibility of such an event, we feel dispossessed of our identities,
disoriented and trapped in the realms of Dis or Hades. Still more
profoundly for some, the Holocaust made manifest what was (and is)
implicitly infernal about modernity from the turn of the twentieth century
to the present day. Thus Adorno argues that the modern condition is to be
homeless, lacking an assurance about one's place in the world; the
Holocaust confirmed this condition, but did not create it:

The house is past. The bombing of European cities, as well as the labour and
concentration camps, merely proceed as executors, with what the immanent
development of technology had long ago decided was to be the fate of
houses . . . Today . . . it is part of morality not to be at home in one's home.
(`Refuge for the Homeless, Minima Moralia, p. 39)

But if the whole of the twentieth century is included in this dystopian

vision, the vision itself took shape in the second half of the century
(Adorno's Minima Moralia was published in 1951). This view of the
`infernal' twentieth century gathered momentum in the wake of the Second
World War, and retrospectively recuperated memories of the First World
War, as well as the underworld-oriented theories of Freud (especially
 Hell as the modern condition 29

concerning the unconscious and the death drive), Darwin (the evolution
and devolution of species) and Marx (especially his analysis of the
destructive energies of capitalism).28 I will argue here that after 1945,
Hell acquires two distinctive characteristics. First, it becomes a perma-
nent, immanent condition (either universal or, for some, particularised).
And, somewhat conversely, it is temporally or spatially dislocated from
the present ± a past horror, a future threat or a disaster happening now
but elsewhere. These two contrasting characteristics arise out of the
extreme nature and the vast scale of human suffering in the twentieth
century. If, as Steiner argues, the Holocaust was Hell made immanent, it
was also a Hell that, for sheer horror, could not be looked at directly at
the time. And as the temporal distance between us and the event grows,
it begins to seem even more incredible: a historical fact, and yet an
impossibility.
The idea of an infernal century appears to have taken shape in the
aftermath of the Second World War. If one were looking for a more
precise date for the threshold crossing into this doomed perspective, one
might well choose the year 1947. In this year, four great descent
narratives were published in three different Western languages: Ralph
Ellison's Invisible Man, Primo Levi's If This Is a Man, Malcolm Lowry's
Under the Volcano and Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus. The reflection
`too late, too late, we are all ``down'' ' (If This Is a Man, p. 27) applies in
different ways to all four of these works. In each case, the Hell represented
is historically and materially specific, yet it has also become inescapably
intrinsic to the modern human condition. Lowry's Under the Volcano is
both critical and fatalistic about the rise of fascism in Mexico during the
late 1930s. The oblique representation of Nazism in Mann's Doctor
Faustus in part mystifies their rise to power. Ellison's `invisible man'
leaves readers pondering whether a black man's position in 1940s
America can be altered for the better, or whether it serves in this text
as a figure for the modern condition of alienation. Levi's If This Is a Man
is explicit about the sufferings of the deportees in Auschwitz, but is eerily
silent about the perpetrators of violence and torture. His companion
volume, The Truce, ends with Levi waking from a dream with the
fatalistic consciousness that `nothing is true outside the Lager' (The
Truce, p. 379). This nightmare state of mind might be taken as the late
twentieth-century view of Hell: we know it is a dream from which we
have recently awoken, yet it still feels present within and around us.
Hannah Arendt famously argued in Eichmann in Jerusalem that the
worst Nazi crimes occurred as a result of banal, routine decision-making.
This surprising absence of malicious intent is what Susan Neiman,
following Arendt, identifies as the single most important feature of evil
30 Hell in Our Time

in contemporary times. Thus, Neiman writes, `In contemporary evil,

individuals' intentions rarely correspond to the magnitude of evil indi-
viduals are able to cause' (Evil in Modern Thought, p. 273). That we can
feel such evil, or the possibility of evil, in the mundane rhythms of
ordinary life is arguably a specific legacy of the Holocaust. As Wislawa
Szymborska writes in the first stanza of `Hatred':

See how efficient it still is,

how it keeps itself in shape-
our century's hatred.
How easily it vaults the tallest obstacles.
How rapidly it pounces, tracks us down.
(Forbes (ed.), We Have Come Through, p. 41)

The infernal as the invisible texture of existence (Dis as upper Hell,

housing banal evil) is a major theme in the writing of Emmanuel Levinas,
who in turn has influenced postwar philosophers such as Derrida,
Lyotard and Blanchot. Disagreeing with Heidegger (for whom nothing-
ness is empty, the antithesis of being), Levinas argues that being itself has
a horrifying presence. He postulates being as an anonymous state that
pre-exists `existents' (individuals, subjects). At certain times, for example,
when we lie awake at night, we become aware of this anonymous being;
Levinas names it, il y a or `there is'. At such times, we feel threatened and
haunted by a `mute, absolutely indeterminate menace'.29 And this can
happen even, and especially, when there is no tangible cause for alarm. In
such cases, it is being itself which is horrific:

It is like a density of the void, like a murmur of silence. There is nothing, but
there is being, like a field of forces. Darkness is the very play of existence which
would play itself out even if there were nothing. It is to express just this
paradoxical existence that we have introduced the term `there is'. We want to
call attention to this being a density, an atmosphere, a field, which is not to be
identified with an object that would have this density . . . We want to call
attention to the existential density of the void itself, devoid of all being, empty
even of void, whatever be the power of negation applied to itself. (`There is',
Levinas Reader, p. 35)30

One might ask why this pre-subjective existence, this `nothingness of

being', should be menacing rather than simply neutral. But the date of
publication of `il y a' (1946/47) and the fact that Levinas, a Lithuanian of
Jewish parents, spent the Second World War in German labour camps
must have some bearing on the question. As the survivor never mentally
leaves the camps behind, so this `existence without existents' is an
inescapable condition which does not cease with the individual's death.
In the same essay, Levinas argues that what is horrific about Shake-
 Descent and dissent in modern philosophy 31

speare's Macbeth is not the murder of the king, but the fact that murder
and dying make no difference to consciousness. The murderer finds no
release in his act of negation because the ghost will return to haunt him;
thus, `Horror is the event of being which returns in the heart of this
negation, as though nothing had happened' (p. 33). Someone is killed, yet
it is `as though nothing had happened'; the horror continues. With every
appearance of Banquo's ghost, Macbeth will be returned to the murder
scene, hence the traumatic scene of his own unmaking as well as
Banquo's. Despite an avowed dislike of psychoanalysis, Levinas is clearly
influenced by Freud's writing on trauma in Beyond the Pleasure Principle
(see Critchley, below) where the concept of the death drive is formulated
to explain the astonishing desire of traumatised patients to return to and
relive the scene of trauma. Freud reasoned that this apparently perverse
desire could only be explained by the possibility that we are driven by
something beyond the pleasure principle, a stronger and more elemental
drive to witness and achieve our own extinction. For Levinas, however,
this traumatic `event of being' is not necessarily a negative one, as we shall
consider in a moment.
In their different spheres, Freud and Marx already had well developed
theories of an underworld where truth resides. In part, this was their
nineteenth-century inheritance, as Rosalind Williams has shown in Notes
on the Underworld. Das Kapital reads in parts like a nineteenth-century
ghost story; for example, `capital is dead labour which, vampire-like, lives
only by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more it sucks'
(Capital, Vol. 1 [1867], 1976, p. 242).31 Where many postwar philoso-
phers part company with Marx and Freud is not so much on the matter of
whether or not the underworld exists (the unconscious, the material base
of capitalism) as on the question of how human subjectivity relates to it.
How do we access this hugely destructive, underworldly truth? Do we
descend to it, and if so, how do we return? Do we return? Or alter-
natively, does it come to us; are we dragged down unwillingly? And what
is the effect on the psyche (or the economy or the state) of such an infernal
encounter?

Descent and dissent in modern philosophy

In Evil in Modern Thought, Susan Neiman argues that there are broadly
speaking two schools of philosophy on the problem of evil. One believes
that evil must be meaningful; the other holds it to be meaningless (she
places Leibnitz, Kant and Marx in the first category and Hume, the
Marquis de Sade and Schopenhauer in the second). A similarly broad
32 Hell in Our Time

distinction can be applied to the way people think about Hell and their
relation to it. On one side are those who think something of value can be
gained from the descent to Hell; on the other are those who think that the
experience is purely negative, indeed that to transform suffering and loss
into something positive is unethical. I would define the first school as
essentially the katabatic one, deriving from the classical tradition of a
descent to Hell to acquire wisdom or to regain something lost. This
classical tradition dovetails smoothly into the Judeo-Christian tradition
of descending into Hell although not into visionary accounts of Heaven.32
Judaic descents include the sufferings of Job and Jonah in the belly of the
whale; Christian descents include the conversion of Saul/Paul on the road
to Damascus, Christ's crucifixion as well as the risen Christ's descent to
Hell and return to Heaven. As John Freccero has shown, Augustine's
Confessions and Dante's Inferno famously hybridise the classical and
Christian traditions of descent, by combining Virgil's description of the
descent of Aeneas to Hades in Aeneid, 6 with the New Testament account
of Saul/Paul's conversion in Acts 9 and 22 (on Freccero's `poetics of
conversion', see Chapter 2). In the way they transfer this biblical and
classical material to first-person autobiographical narratives of mental or
spiritual breakdown and recovery, Augustine and Dante are arguably the
progenitors of modern illness memoirs, examples of which are discussed
in Chapter 5.
The second school, for whom the infernal journey is valueless, would
appear to be the secular fall-out from the Judeo-Christian belief in Hell;
according to this view, Hell is a place of eternal torment but without
orthodox religion's traditional rationale for the suffering. But classical
katabasis also accommodates this `no-value' school of descent. For
example, in the sixth book of Virgil's Aeneid, Aeneas ascends from
Hades with a clear vision of his imperial destiny, spelled out for him
by the ghost of his father Anchises. But in Aeneid, 7, Juno rouses the
underworld witch Allecto, who in turn goads the Latin queen Amata and
her son Turnus into waging war against Aeneas. In Passage Through
Hell, David Pike compares the descent of Aeneas and the rousing of
Allecto with Benjamin's analysis of modernist excavations of the past
(p. 9). According to Benjamin, modernist excavation typically constitutes
either a `tiger's leap into the past', devouring and appropriating the past,
or a `leap into the open air of history', unleashing a revolutionary power
to turn back and destroy the present.33 Pike argues that the descent of
Aeneas to Hades constitutes a tiger's leap, an appropriation of the past,
while Juno's rousing of Allecto is an open-air leap which threatens to
overturn the hero's imperial destiny.
And conversely, many secular writers retain the `wisdom' tradition's
 Descent and dissent in modern philosophy 33

assumption that infernal suffering can be made meaningful. Such a

horizon of expectation is evident in the many secular adages pertaining
to suffering and recovery: for example, that `whatever doesn't kill you is
good for you' or that `you have to hit rock bottom before you can get
better'. Value derived from extreme suffering is the implicit theme of a
recent collection of `Survivors' Poetry', edited by Peter Forbes and
published under the pithy title, We Have Come Through: 100 Poems
Celebrating Courage in Overcoming Depression and Trauma (2003).
While many of the poems individually describe descents to Hell, the
collection as a whole is also organised as a meta-narrative of a descent
and return.34
The centrality of these questions to postwar philosophy has ensured
that the ancient stories of katabatic heroes such as Job, Oedipus,
Odysseus and Orpheus are frequently revived in discussions of how
(or whether) the modern subject is constituted. As I see it, the chief
philosophical disagreement ± articulated in terms of a narrative of descent
± is how one interprets the subject's return from Hell. As the examples
cited generally refer to male descent heroes, we will gender the subject
masculine for the moment (but cf. Chapter 6). Does he return with
knowledge of himself, understanding the causes of suffering (as in the
example of Oedipus)? Or does the encounter with the demonic leave him
a stranger to himself, without an answer to the question why the innocent
should suffer (Job)?35 Does he return safely, achieving his heart's desire
(Homer's Odysseus ± though not Dante's), or does the underworld rob
him of love, wholeness, selfhood (Orpheus)? Moreover, if we take as a
given that the modern, and especially the postmodern, condition is to be
surrounded by, steeped in, the infernal, still there remains the need to
negotiate with this sense of pervasive menace, and more particularly, with
Hell's eruption into the material world, with actual instances of disaster,
war or terrorism. In an anniversary speech on September 11th, the
Canadian prime minister Jean ChreÂtien represented the attack as just
such an eruption of the collective unconscious into the actual world: `We
saw the dark side of human nature unleash itself savagely, showing itself
in all its horror, showing itself to a world which was overwhelmed.'36
If underworld forces are constantly brimming up to meet us, then we
are forced into some kind of negotiation with Hell, whether passively or
actively. Some form of descent is therefore more than ever necessary, as is
the return from Hell. Deconstructionists sometimes insist on there being
no return possible for the would-be ethical subject, but this seems to me to
overstate and thereby weaken their case. For example, in `The Jewish
Oedipus', Lyotard writes in praise of a `dispossession without return'.37
But it is rarely the person who is still in Hell, whether the homeless, the
34 Hell in Our Time

schizophrenic or the starving deportee, who becomes the ethical subject

that Lyotard celebrates here. Even to think ± let alone lecture, publish, be
paid to think ± about infernal dispossession presupposes a degree of
distance from the experience. The truer contrast would appear to be
between those for whom the journey can be made meaningful retro-
spectively, and those who refuse to `make sense' of it. To invoke Derrida's
neologism, the descent journey is either an ontology or a `hauntology',
either a story of how subjects are made (integral, coherent, consistent) or
how they are unmade (haunted, traumatised by the past, dispossessed of a
future).
In `The Jewish Oedipus', Lyotard contrasts the `language of knowl-
edge' with the `truth-work' of deconstruction (p. 395). In this context, the
first might be classed as an ontology and the second as a hauntology. If
the `language of knowledge' attempts to control and seal off unconscious
desires, deconstruction aims to unbind the unconscious, to make as
visible as possible something that is, by definition, hidden. Lyotard
presents the contrast in terms of two different kinds of descent narrative.
In the following extract, for example, deconstruction behaves like an
Orphic hero, descending to find the ghost of his wife in Hades:

The work of deconstruction comes to meet the other work, that of the
unconscious, by dismantling the bastion of signification. The anti-logic of
meaning will find, in this area stretched between the ennui of words forever
dwelling on reasons, the screen on which to trace its figures; not the figure
itself, it is lost like Eurydice, but the figure's lateral peripheral inscriptions.
(p. 396)

The unnamed figure of Orpheus is important here, because he is a descent

hero who fails in his quest to revive Eurydice and whose art stems from
the experience of loss. If one were to pursue the analogy with Orpheus
further, however, it would become clear that the hero named deconstruc-
tion does return, though without possession either of the `language of
knowledge' or the lost beloved.
Instead, Lyotard develops his thesis with a contrast between Sophocles'
Oedipus and Shakespeare's Hamlet. Lyotard argues that the former aims
to acquire the language of knowledge and in Freudian terms fulfils his
desire by killing his father. And the latter `knows himself dispossessed of
origin . . . knows himself possessed by an Other who has spoken';
haunted by his father's ghost, Hamlet's Freudian desire remains unful-
filled (p. 402). For Lyotard, the difference between Greek and Shake-
spearean tragedy is that the former recuperates loss into a `language of
knowledge', while the latter refuses or fails to complete this economy of
recuperation. Lyotard takes `Hamlet's non-fulfillment of the paternal
 Descent and dissent in modern philosophy 35

word as the modern's difference from the Greek' (p. 398). Besides
Oedipus, the other hero who fits Lyotard's portrait of `the Greek' is
Homer's Odysseus. Citing Levinas, Lyotard denounces the `odyssey of
knowledge' as `an odyssey of the Self, as a desire simply to be tempted, to
have been tempted, and to come out intact from the ``test' '' (p. 404). For
deconstructionists, it is better to be haunted than tempted. The gift of the
unconscious `consists in that, through it, the subject is taken, possessed'
(p. 405). In contrast to the Homeric odyssey, Lyotard describes the
deconstructive journey as `Confronting the Odyssey of the eye, which
is locked in the sun, the dispossession without return' (p. 405). But one
should be sceptical about this reasoned, densely allusive claim to a
dispossession of reason and knowledge. Moreover, Lyotard weakens
his case against `the Greek' by invoking another Greek myth of descent,
that of Icarus, to support his reading of Hamlet.
Such reservations aside, for `hauntologists' it may be more appropriate
to speak of a return to Hell rather than a return from it. If pre-conscious
existence is a region of horror, if this is where we come from, then every
instance of Hell returns us to where we really belong. Thus in a footnote
to `il y a', Levinas praises Blanchot's Thomas L'Obscur (1941), in which
`the return of being to the heart of every negative movement, the reality of
irreality, are there admirably expressed' (`There is', p. 36). But even such
a return to the infernal has a purpose beyond that of being dispossessed
per se. As Simon Critchley explains:
The Levinasian subject is a traumatized self, a subject that is constituted
through a self-relation that is experienced as a lack . . . But this is a good thing.
It is only because the subject is unconsciously constituted through the trauma
of contact with the real that we might have the audacity to speak of goodness,
transcendence, compassion, etc. . . . Without trauma, there would be no
ethics . . . Without a relation to that which summons and challenges the
subject, a summons that is experienced as a relation to the Good in a way that
exceeds the pleasure principle and any promise of happiness . . . there would
be no ethics. (Ethics±Politics±Subjectivity, p. 195)

Ethics stem from the horrifying contact with il y a, or the Lacanian

underworld of the Real. Only by realising the lack in ourselves, the non-
coincidence of identity and desire, are we saved from the closed circle of
egotism. Critchley here explores Levinas's debt to Freud, specifically the
concepts of traumatic repetition and the death drive (`that [which]
exceeds the pleasure principle'). Such a debt is surprising, given Levinas's
declared aversion to psychoanalysis. But it serves to demonstrate that like
many descent narratives, the Freudian one of the descent to the uncon-
scious can be read as an odyssey of the self or an odyssey of dispossession,
an ontology or a hauntology, according to the predilection of the reader.
36 Hell in Our Time

`Hauntology' is a term Derrida invents to co-opt Marx to deconstruc-

tion, as Levinas and Lyotard, in their different ways, co-opt Freud.38 But
in Derrida's Specters [sic] of Marx, the appropriation clearly works both
ways. If the ontological basis of Marx's critique of capitalism needs
deconstructing, then so does deconstruction need its political vision
sharpened by the remnant or spectre of Marxism in Europe post-
1989.39 Both halves of the argument are structured as descent narratives.
In the first, Marx would have us descend through the spectrality of
capitalism to retrieve the fundamental use value concealed at its base: a
descent and return from Hell to `true' selfhood. According to Marx, `one
must win out over the specter, have done with it' (Specters, p. 132). In the
second, Derrida would concede the value of spectres to divorce us from
ourselves; but Marx himself would be summoned as a spectre to haunt
capitalist Europe, to remind us of our accountability to ideals of justice
and human dignity. This second descent allies us with Dis, with the
socially disoriented and economically dispossessed.
The opening sentence of Specters of Marx might be taken as a
paraphrase of the descent hero's situation at the start of the journey:
`someone, you or me, comes forward and says: I would like to learn to
live finally' (p. xvii). Most katabatic heroes would ask themselves, `but
how?', which would then initiate the underworld search for a reply.
Descent heroes learn to live from those who are capable of giving them a
perspective from beyond life. Less traditionally, Derrida asks `finally but
why?' Why should one seek the finality of an answer, and anyway who
could really teach someone to live? Specters thus immediately calls into
question the descent hero's desire for extra-mortal knowledge. Derrida
does not dismiss the need for an underworldly journey altogether,
though. On the contrary, `learning to live' is important, and the under-
world turns out to be the only suitable place to pursue such an inquiry: `If
it ± learning to live ± remains to be done, it can only happen between life
and death. Neither in life nor in death alone' (p. xviii). Giving a positive
value to the infernal condition of living on after death, Derrida argues
that we must learn to live on, sur-vie, with ghosts, if we are to develop any
kind of responsibility towards the past or otherness:

It is necessary to speak of the ghost, indeed to the ghost and with it, from the
moment that no ethics, no politics, whether revolutionary or not, seems possible
and thinkable and just that does not recognize in its principle the respect for
those others who are no longer or for those others who are not yet there,
presently living, whether they are already dead or not yet born. (Specters, p. xix)

Like Lyotard, Derrida is alluding specifically to the ghost of Hamlet's

father. Hamlet again figures as the modern dislocated subject, for whom
 Descent and dissent in modern philosophy 37

the time is `out of joint'. But Derrida's image of the subject en-seÂance also
has contemporary, as well as ancient, resonance. The idea that no ethics
can be considered just unless it recognises respect for the dead is surely a
reaction to the mass murders of the twentieth century which failed to do
precisely that. Furthermore, the image of speaking with ghosts returns
us to Homeric descent, this time positively. In the nekyia of Odyssey,
11.34±41, Homer describes Odysseus not descending to Hades, like
Theseus or Heracles, but summoning ghosts from underground to the
edge of a pit so that they can tell him more about his past and future.40
Odysseus, then, is a model of one who lives on, or survives, in the
company of ghosts. His opposite would be someone who `does not know
death, and does not want to hear about it', someone who insists on
`absolute life, fully present life', which for Derrida is an `absolute evil'
(Specters, p. 175).
The choice laid out in Specters of Marx seems to be between returning
from Hell to live in and for the present alone or surviving diachronically,
feeling the `non-contemporaneity with itself of the living present' (p. xix).
But this is not quite the same as the choice Lyotard offers his readers,
between triumphalist return from the underworld and refusing to return
at all. In Derrida's text, Orpheus is once again a key mythical analogue,
because he fails but returns from Hades haunted by loss. For some
philosophers, notably Plato's Phaedrus, Orpheus's failure to fail com-
pletely, his decision to return rather than remain in the underworld with
Eurydice, is a sign of his moral cowardice.41 But this is an absolutist view,
one that insists on fully present death as much as fully present life. For
some writers, fully present death is, in any case, an impossibility. Rainer
Maria Rilke's poem `Orpheus. Eurydike. Hermes' starkly conveys the
lack of companionability in the underworld. Hermes, conducting Eur-
ydice out of Hades, sees that Orpheus has looked back; `the god laid hold
of her, and, with an anguished / cry, uttered the words: He has turned
round! ± / she took in nothing, and said softly: who?'42 To the ghost of
Eurydice, the descent of Orpheus means nothing. As Adriana Cavarero
writes, Rilke's Eurydice is `by now a creature of the subterranean world,
perfect and indifferent. She is the sublime figure of absolute un-relation'
(Relating Narratives, pp. 103±4). Any suicide mission by Orpheus would
thus have been pointless, as there are no relations with the other in Hades,
only indifference.
On the border between Hades and the overworld, Orpheus turns and
looks at Eurydice. His gazes transforms her, and she dissolves from flesh
to spirit before his eyes. Derrida's `backward glance' (Specters, pp. 131,
133) likewise transforms Marx into a spectre before the reader's eyes; this
ghost is then summoned to haunt the present-day political scene (p. 174).
38 Hell in Our Time

Derrida conjures a `spirit of Marxism', disembodied from the dogma of

party and proletariat, that yet retains something of Marx's original
project:

a certain emancipatory and messianic affirmation, a certain experience of the

promise that one can try to liberate from any dogmatics and even from any
metaphysio-religious determination, from any messianism. And a promise
must promise to be kept, that is, not to remain `spiritual' or `abstract', but
to produce events, new forms of action, of practice, of organization. (p. 89)

Allowing this spectre to survive in us, Derrida suggests, we can continue

to resist capitalism's most egregious injustices, particularly the prejudicial
nature of current international law (p. 83). For Derrida, then, the descent
journey to `speak with ghosts' becomes a form of active political dissent
rather than a passive relinquishing of desire and voice to Dis. In response
to injustice or loss, do we choose dispossession, absolute presence or
active dissent? As Derrida's recent work, including The Work of Mourn-
ing as well as Specters of Marx, demonstrates, the narrative of the journey
to Hell continues to inform the way we respond to calamity, both
personally and collectively, in contemporary Western cultures.

Notes

1. In a review of a revival of Marlowe's play at the Young Vic Theatre in March

2002, Michael Billington inquired, `Why is it that modern, secularised
audiences should relish an apparently broken-backed play that depends
upon a medieval belief in heaven and hell?' In Billington's view, the play `may
use the devices of the medieval morality play . . . but it is set in an eternal
present in which material wealth, scientific knowledge and sexual fantasy
become the objects for which we trade our own integrity' (`Carry on Doctor',
The Guardian, 13 March 2002, Arts Section). In my view, the popularity of
Doctor Faustus in the twentieth century is one indication of the way that
medieval images of, and beliefs in, Hell persist in the modern, secular
imagination.
2. `Hell is not a ``place'', nor a punishment imposed by God, but a self-
exclusion from communion with God,' paraphrase by Hazel Southam
and Nicholas Pyke of a Papal statement, 1999. Evangelical denominations,
however, still insist on the literal existence of Hell. See Southam and Pike,
`Weep and Gnash Those Teeth: Hell's Back', The Independent on Sunday, 2
April 2000, p. 3.
3. See Darryl Jones, Horror: A Thematic History in Fiction and Film, p. 184.
4. In Middleton's Women Beware Women (1620±24), the jilted Leantio
compares his anguish to the infernal torments of the damned, in a passage
that seems remarkably modern: `'tis an affliction / Of greater weight than
youth was made to bear, / As if a punishment of afterlife / Were fall'n upon
 Notes 39
man here' (III, 3, 253±56). But note the pre-modern `as if'; the analogy
between present and afterlife suffering remains just that, an analogy, rather
than an actualisation.
5. See also Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the
Dark, and Roger Shattuck, Forbidden Knowledge, pp. 173±228.
6. BBC Radio 4 News at One, 19 February 2003. See also Jonathan Watts,
`Failed Suicide Attempt Started Korean Tube Fire', The Guardian, 20
February 2003, Special Report: North and South Korea.
7. Haruki Murakami, Underground: The Tokyo Gas Attack and the Japanese
Psyche, p. 14.
8. John Simpson, BBC Radio 4 News, 6 April 2003, on the scene of a convoy of
US and Kurdish soldiers hit by `friendly fire': `This is just a scene from hell
here. All the vehicles on fire. There are bodies burning around me, there are
bodies lying around, there are bits of bodies on the ground.'
9. In EpõÃtre aÁ l'auteur du livre des Trois Imposteurs [1768], Voltaire wrote `si
Dieu n'existait pas, il foudrait l'inventer' (Oeuvres CompleÁtes de Voltaire,
ed. Louis Moland. Paris: Garnier, 1877±85, vol. 10, pp. 402±5).
10. John Keats, `Letter to Benjamin Bailey' (22 November 1817), in H. E. Rollins
(ed.), The Letters of John Keats. Cambridge, MA, 1958, vol. 1, p. 185.
11. Jan Arriens (ed.), Welcome to Hell: Letters and Other Writings by Prisoners
on Death Row in the United States, p. 61.
12. Hans KuÈng, Eternal Life?, p. 158.
13. Drexel, L'inferno prigione (1641), cited by Camporesi, The Fear of Hell,
p. 62.
14. Kip Thorne explains, `a singularity is a region where ± according to the laws
of general relativity ± the curvature of spacetime becomes infinitely large,
and spacetime ceases to exist. Since tidal gravity is a manifestation of
spacetime curvature . . . a singularity is also a region of infinite tidal gravity,
that is, a region where gravity stretches all objects infinitely along some
directions and squeezes them infinitely along others' (Black Holes, pp. 450±
1).
15. On the rarity of Dante's journey through, as opposed to vision of, Paradise,
see Zaleski, Otherworld Journeys, p. 59.
16. Coelius Rhodiginus is quoted by Jeremiah Drexel, in De cultu corporis
(1658), in Hieremia Drexelli, Opera Omnia, Lugduni (1968), t. II, p. 412,
and cited by Camporesi, Fear of Hell, p. 36.
17. Edward Craig (ed.), Routledge Encyclopaedia of Philosophy. London:
Routledge, 1998, p. 759. See also under `via negativa' in Mircea Eliade
(ed.), The Encyclopaedia of Religion London: Macmillan, 1987, vol. 15,
p. 252.
18. See also a study by The Economist on the death penalty in the US:
`Executions: Dead Man Walking Out', The Economist, 10 June 2000,
pp. 25±8.
19. The Vision of Tugdal (vulgarised in the fourteenth century), cited by
Camporesi, The Fear of Hell, p. 54.
20. Compare Primo Levi, If This Is a Man, pp. 177±8.
21. Kenneth Gross, `Infernal metamorphoses', p. 46.
22. Borges refers to the end of Paradiso, where Beatrice smiles briefly at Dante,
then disappears into the Rose of Paradise. According to Borges, Dante
40 Hell in Our Time
invented the Commedia so as to imagine himself together with Beatrice,
`hence the appalling circumstances, all the more infernal for taking place in
the empyrean: the disappearance of Beatrice . . . the fleetingness of her
glance and smile, the eternal turning away of the face' (The Total Library:
Non-Fiction, p. 304). On Borges' reading of this passage, see also Manguel,
Into the Looking-Glass Wood, pp. 63±4.
23. Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, cited by Neiman, Evil in Modern
Thought, p. 279.
24. Taylor, Sources of the Self, p. 17; the phrase is from Alasdair MacIntyre's
After Virtue.
25. On the descent in Proust, see Thanh-VaÃn Ton-That, `Proust et OrpheÂe:
Avatars et MeÂtamorphoses d'un Mythe'.
26. See, for example, Marlow's description of the African wilderness as `some-
thing great and invincible, like evil or truth, waiting patiently for the passing
away of this fantastic invasion' (Conrad, Heart of Darkness, p. 85). See also
Chapter 8.
27. See also Neiman, Evil in Modern Thought, pp. 227±37.
28. As a visual symbol of the way the Second World War gathered into itself
memories of the First World War to produce an image of the actual world as
Hell, think, for example, of the famous scene in Abel Gance's 1938 film,
J'Accuse. After serving in the trenches of the First World War, Jean Diaz
watches in horror as Europe slides towards the Second World War; in a
desperate attempt to prevent it, Diaz summons the ghosts of the war dead
from the graves and fields of France to accuse contemporary Europe.
29. Levinas, `There is: existence without existents' (1946), The Levinas Reader,
ed. SeÂan Hand, p. 31.
30. Jean Paul Sartre's Huis Clos (1944) famously presents the opposite view to
Taylor's, notably in a concluding phrase, `l'enfer, c'est les autres' (Hell is
other people). Here too, the influence of Sartre's Being and Nothingness
(1943) seems undeniable.
31. On Marx and vampires, see Chris Baldick, In Frankenstein's Shadow,
pp. 121±40. On nineteenth-century vampirism in general, see James Twitch-
ell, The Living Dead.
32. See Carol Zaleski, Otherworldly Journeys, pp. 26±42.
33. Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, p. 261. Cited by Pike, Passage Through
Hell, p.19.
34. Peter Forbes (ed.), We Have Come Through: 100 Poems Celebrating
Courage in Overcoming Depression and Trauma. This collection of poems
is structurally arranged so as to describe the narrative arc of a descent and
return, from the threshold crossings of Part I (`Scenario for a Walk-on Part')
to the anatomies of Hell in Parts II and III (`Why We Go Mad' and `Welcome
to the Club') to the reascents of Parts IV and V (`Aftermath and Redemption'
and `Survival Strategies'). Interestingly, Parts IV and V offer alternative views
of the return journey, the one emphasising spiritual transcendence, the other
secular accommodations and adaptations.
35. In The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Joseph Campbell offers a notably more
optimistic (though in my view unconvincing) interpretation of Job's story:
here, `the hero transcends life with its peculiar blind spot and for a moment
rises to a glimpse of the source. He beholds the face of the father, under-
 Notes 41
stands ± and the two are atoned . . . to Job himself the revelation appears to
have made soul-satisfying sense' (pp. 147±8).
36. Anon., `Chirac and Putin voice sympathy, Iraq cites God's will', The
Guardian, 12 September 2002, International Section, p. 4.
37. Lyotard, `The Jewish Oedipus', Genre, p. 405.
38. For `hauntology' see Derrida, Specters of Marx, p. 10.
39. See Critchley, Ethics ± Politics ± Subjectivity, pp. 143±82, and Chapter 7 of
this study.
40. Clark distinguishes katabasis from (1) visionary ecstasis, where the soul
travels, but the body stays at home; (2) nekyia, where the dead are called up
in seance; and (3) fertility rites, in which a god descends rather than a mortal
human being (Catabasis, p. 34). But in the later history of the tradition, such
clear-cut distinctions are not always maintained.
41. Plato, Symposium, Oxford Classics, p. 12. See also Chapter 8 for Rushdie's
views on Plato's interpretation of Orpheus.
42. Rainer Maria Rilke, `Orpheus. Eurydice. Hermes', in Requiem and Other
Poems, trans. J. B. Leishman.
 Chapter 2

Chronotopes of Hell

In the last chapter, I discussed what Hell might mean to a contemporary

secular Westerner. Here I would like to shift the focus to what narratives
of Hell characteristically do and, in terms of their formal attributes and
generic characteristics, how they work. In Bakhtin's view, literary genres
are defined by their chronotopes, their distinctive representations of time
and space and the human image within that timescape.1 Of the two
elements that comprise a chronotope (time and space), the most impor-
tant one for defining the particular characteristics of a genre is time. In
Gary Saul Morson's paraphrase of Bakhtin, `each narrative genre im-
plicitly manifests a specific model of temporality.'2 To say of an experi-
ence or event that `it was Hell' is to evoke a generic horizon of expectation
in the listener or reader. `Hell' itself is a chronotope whose most familiar
inherited temporal and spatial features include: narrow constraints on
spatial movement, an absence of future orientation, experienced by an
individual both separate and alienated from his or her environment and
from other people, despite often being crowded into close proximity with
others in an undifferentiated mass. But if we are to appreciate the ways in
which contemporary writers have challenged and redefined the horizons
of traditional katabatic narrative, we need to examine this generic
inheritance in considerably greater detail.

Generic features of katabatic narrative

Although often found as an episode embedded in other types of narrative,

the story of an infernal journey may still be described as a distinct genre in
itself in that it codifies a particular world-view, operates according to a
certain narrative dynamic, and draws upon an inherited set of motifs and
imagery. For example, in any Western katabatic narrative, the reader
would expect to find one or more of the following images or motifs:
 Generic features of katabatic narrative 43
1. a person lost in a wood, labyrinth or trackless ocean;
2. a guide from the otherworld sent to recover the person lost;
3. a series of initiatory rites;
4. the discovery of a talisman such as Virgil's famous golden bough;
5. a threshold crossing, often through some gateway inscribed with an
apotropaic message (for example, Dante's `Abandon hope');
6. a river crossing, usually in a leaky or damaged boat;
7. flocks of damned souls crowding the shore like birds or leaves;
8. a bad-tempered ferryman;
9. monsters and demons that flagrantly hybridise classical and Judeo-Chris-
tian iconography (as in the opening and closing scenes of Thomas Kyd's
The Spanish Tragedy (1585±87));
10. a Lethean lake of forgetfulness;
11. regions of Hell/Hades subdivided into circles or compartments by different
kinds of threshold boundaries;
12. fiery and frozen zones;
13. a series of graded punishments increasing in severity as the traveller
descends lower;
14. distortions of time (such as accelerations, mythic arrest of time, or
regression to primal scenes, traumatic repetitions, or schizophrenic split
or multiplied realities);
15. distortions of space (such as the telescoping of distances, compression and
contraction, or extreme changes in gravitational fields);
16. a graded series of tests that the traveller must overcome, culminating in an
encounter with the demonic Other (usually Dis/Hades, Satan or some
other manifestation of abjection, terror or despair) and/or the beloved
Other (such as Orpheus's lost Eurydice); if the latter must be retrieved, the
former must be suppressed in order for the descent hero to return safely to
the overworld.

Finally, when (or if) the hero does return, he or she usually does so with
surprising rapidity and ease, despite explicit warnings to the contrary. In
perhaps the most often quoted lines in all katabatic literature, the
Cumaean sibyl warns Aeneas: `facilis descensus Averno . . . sed revocare
gradum . . . hoc opus, hic labor est' (`the descent to Avernus [Hell] is easy,
but to retrace your steps, this is the task, this the difficulty' (Aeneid,
6.126±29)). But as Eduard Norden has pointed out, this is only true in a
limited sense; it is easy to go to Hades by dying, but difficult to cross over
when alive; and the return journey in most cases occurs swiftly and with
little hindrance.3 Aeneas slips out the ivory gate of false dreams instead of
the horn gates of truth (Aeneid, 6.898). Dante narrates his return to the
surface in under seven lines, and here the rapidity of the narration, rather
than the journey itself, conveys the impression of an unimpeded return.4
Moreover, according to Charles Singleton's calculations, Dante and
Virgil reach Satan's torso at six in the evening, but they leave the
monster's body at six in the morning ± of the same day.5 Dante
44 Chronotopes of Hell

orchestrates this temporal loop so as to round off his protagonist's

journey which began on Good Friday, on Easter morning. In fact, the
tricksiness of the return, either the return leg of the journey itself or the
narration of the return, is a standard feature of descent narratives. In
Milton's Paradise Lost (1667), Satan meets an unexpected lack of
resistance when he approaches Hell's exit gates, which `on a sudden
open fly / With impetuous recoil' (Paradise Lost, 2.879). In Jules Verne's
Journey to the Centre of the Earth (1864), the trio of explorers reach the
end of their supplies of food and water and are facing certain death many
miles underground when a volcano erupts, catapulting them safely, if
improbably, to the Earth's surface.6 As Camporesi's The Fear of Hell
shows, the iconography and topography of Hell is constantly changing.
But rather than shrinking, the storehouse of infernal motifs appears to be
growing all the time. To the above collection of traditional underworld
topoi and imagery, new motifs that have become generically defining for
contemporary literature would have to be added, including images or
ideas derived, for example, from Stevenson's Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
(1886), Eliot's The Waste Land (1922), Conrad's Heart of Darkness
(1899), and Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland (1897).
In infernal journey narratives, a living protagonist descends into the
land of the Dead in pursuit of wisdom, love or power. The katabatic
`world-view' holds that these moral goods (or evils) are to be found
underground rather than in the heavens or in the familiar, daylight world.
Contrary to what one might expect, however, this world view is not
inherently gloomy or tragic; there are comedic as well as tragic katabases.
Descent heroes, typically, can choose to go or be forced against their will,
they can succeed or fail in their quests, and they can return or remain
trapped in the underworld. None of these outcomes is generically pre-
scribed, any more than a realist novel has to end happily or sadly. In some
versions of the Orpheus myth, such as the medieval romance Sir Orfeo
(c.1488) or Gluck's Orfeo ed Euridice (1762), the poet regains his wife
from Hades; in others, he comes back alone. When Mozart's Don
Giovanni was first performed in Prague in 1787, the opera concluded
with a comic sextet celebrating the damnation of the Don. Seven months
later, in Vienna, Mozart cut this final scene, ending instead with Gio-
vanni's defiance as he is dragged off to Hell, thus transforming the descent
narrative from a classical comedy into the Romantic Promethean tragedy
familiar to nineteenth- and early twentieth-century audiences.7 Terry
Eagleton distinguishes tragedy, with its awareness that `change is bought
at [to]o steep a cost', from what he calls the `barracks-room view
[that] . . . suffering makes a man of you.'8 The katabatic world-view,
however, can accommodate both these perspectives. For example, Wes-
 Generic features of katabatic narrative 45

tern publishing markets are currently flooded with biographical accounts

of what Pamela Stephenson (Billy Connolly's wife) calls `creative illness',
one that crushes you but from which you recover to become an un-
expectedly brilliant comic.9 But should you not recover, your story might
still be told as a tragic descent narrative by a surviving relative. Marlowe's
play Dr Faustus (1588±89) qualifies as a descent narrative, in my view,
since although Faustus does not recover from his Fall, the other players
and the audience do. There has to be a return in katabatic narrative, but it
need not be the hero who returns.10 In Malcolm Lowry's Faustian novel
Under the Volcano (1947), the descent of the British consul Geoffrey
Firmin is narrated by a friend who survives the consul's death.
In essence, whether comic or tragic, the narrative dynamic of katabasis
consists of three movements: a descent, an inversion or turning upside
down at a zero point and a return to the surface of some kind. Descent
narratives characteristically function like springs or hinges; there is al-
ways a kick-back movement, generated by the force of an underworld
encounter. When embedded in other forms of narrative, notably classical
epic, the katabatic episode performs this hinge function for the text in
which it is embedded. The descent not only provides a major turning
point in the plot, it also frequently transforms or converts the text from
one world-view into another. The descent thus performs a caesural
incision on the narrative as a whole, cutting it into a `before' and an
`after' or, as in Tolkien's The Hobbit (1937), a `there and back again'. In
Epic and Empire, David Quint argues that there are two categories of epic
narrative: those produced by history's winners like Homer and Virgil, and
those produced by history's losers such as Lucan, Ercilla and d'AubigneÂ.
(An example of English `loser's' epic would be Abraham Cowley's The
Civil War (1643), a Royalist epic produced during the Republican
commonwealth period.) But more often, the dialectic between winning
and losing operates within the epic itself, where the descent episode
functions as the nadir, the ground for a polemical shift of perspective, a
turning point at which the epic stops thinking of itself as a loser, as it
were, and the hero is transformed from victim to moral crusader. The
descent to Hades in Book 6 of Virgil's Aeneid divides the Odyssean and
Iliadic halves of the Roman epic; but more importantly, it transforms
Aeneas from plaything of the gods into agent of Rome's imperial destiny.
When thus embedded as an episode in another narrative, the katabatic
journey functions as the linchpin of the larger narrative. This is also the
function of non-embedded descents, though in a different sense. When
Dante writes that he finds himself lost `midway' in life, he indicates that
his narrative will represent only a fragment of that lifelong story. But
while fragmentary, the descent narrative will contain the revelatory
46 Chronotopes of Hell

turning point, by which the whole of his life will be illuminated. As John
Freccero has pointed out, Dante's representation of the pilgrim's con-
version imitates such narratives as Acts 9 and 22, and Augustine's
Confessions, where conversion is represented as `tantamount to a death
of their former selves and the beginning of new life'.11 This quasi-deathly
experience bestows a special advantage on the narrators of conversion
texts. Most autobiographical narrators have a limited vantage point on
the meaning and shape of their own lives because they are still in the
business of living them. But the converted narrator sees his or her former
self as belonging to a prior life altogether; the pre-conversion past is
absolutely closed off from the present and therefore open to being
authoritatively interpreted. Religious descent narratives are typically
organised around the moment of conversion, in which the old self is
enfolded into the new. The rest of the life story automatically becomes
redundant, and is often left untold since it is the conversion itself that
determines the meaning of the whole.
Within the descent narrative itself, the hero's encounter with Dis or
Satan at the bottom of Hell thus constitutes a conversionary turn in
microcosm. Such a turn occurs in the final canto of Inferno, when the
guide Virgil takes Dante on his back, climbs onto Satan's thighs, turns
them both upside down and proceeds to climb upwards toward Mount
Purgatory in the southern hemisphere. Thus Dante writes:

As was his pleasure, I clasped him round the neck, and he took advantage of
time and place, and when the wings were opened wide he caught hold on the
shaggy flanks; down from shag to shag he descended between the matted hair
and the frozen crusts. When we had come to where the thigh turns just on the
thick of the haunch, my leader with labor and strain brought round his head to
where his shanks had been and grappled on the hair like one who is climbing,
so that I thought we were returning into Hell again. (Inferno, 34.70±81)

This upside-downing episode converts the sinner whom we meet lost in

the dark wood into the `saved' poet. The Dante who emerges on the other
side is the new man who is capable not only of pursuing his journey up
through Purgatory and Paradise, but also of turning back and retro-
spectively narrating his journey through Hell.
This type of religious conversion can be represented in various different
ways. For some protagonists, the experience consists of a heavenly flight,
for others a purgatorial journey. Katabatic religious conversion char-
acteristically occurs on the road downwards; the new self is born from
fire, like the legendary phoenix, out of extreme physical suffering or
psychological despair. Here, as David Pike notes, `conversion conflates
the two moments [death of the old self, birth of the new] so that God
 Bakhtin's Inferno: visionary versus historical chronotopes 47

himself is encountered at the nadir of the descent.'12 This process occurs

in contemporary religious autobiographies as well as medieval ones. In
Beyond the Darkness (1995), for example, Angie Fenimore describes her
experience of descending to Hell following an attempt to commit suicide
through drug overdose. In Hell she experiences despair followed by a
certainty that she is in the presence of both Satan and God. She returns
with the conviction that they are equally present in the material world:
`Just as God and Jesus Christ are real, a being of darkness, Satan, truly
exists. He has conclaves of dark angels and we are their prey' (p. 135).
With the self-authorising certainty of a Dantean narrator, she knows by
the proof of her own feelings that this must be absolutely true: `a powerful
energy rose in me, confirming that my new insights were true' (p. 137).
Here, as Freccero writes of Inferno, the conversionary descent and return
enacts `the transformation of the problematic and humanistic into the
certain and transcendent' (The Poetics of Conversion, p. 25). On this
basis, we might conclude, therefore, that the central dynamic of katabatic
narrative consists of a radical shift of temporal perspective from historical
to theological or mythic time.13

Bakhtin's Inferno: visionary versus historical

chronotopes

Dante's transcendent vision reveals, in extraordinarily intricate detail, the

entire structure of God's triple-tiered, infinite cosmos. Paradoxically,
however, he weaves this totalising vision out of stories and conversations
with dead people. In `Forms of Time and of the Chronotope', Bakhtin
explores the conflict between two opposing chronotopes in Dante's
Inferno. The Inferno's distinctive model of temporality consists of its
almost unique juxtaposition of two chronotopes, the one realist and
historical and the other extra-temporal and evaluative. Of these two, the
dominant one is undoubtedly the extra-temporal chronotope, that which
defines the genre of vision literature. Bakhtin writes that in the Commedia

everything must be perceived as being within a single time, that is, in the synchrony
of a single moment; one must see this entire world as simultaneous. Only under
conditions of pure simultaneity ± or, what amounts to the same thing, in an
environment outside time altogether ± can there be revealed the true meaning of
`that which was, and which is and which shall be' . . . To `synchronize diachrony,'
to replace all temporal and historical divisions and linkages with purely inter-
pretative, extratemporal and hierarchicized ones ± such was Dante's form-
generating impulse, which is defined by an image of the world structured
according to a pure verticality. (The Dialogic Imagination, p. 157)
48 Chronotopes of Hell

To be able to view the cosmos `extra-temporally' and `simultaneously' is

to see it as only God can. This is the humanly impossible perspective for
which Dante reaches in the Commedia.14 It is the assumption of this
perspective that gives Dante the authority to anatomise the system of
divine punishments as an expression of God's absolute justice in Hell. We
hear Dante adopt this perspective most audibly in Canto 11, when Virgil
takes Dante to a vantage point overlooking lower Hell, and explains to
him the region's structures and systems of punishments. This evaluative,
extra-temporal perspective is something more than ordinary retrospec-
tion, since even the damned souls reflect on their pasts. What the damned
souls in Inferno lack is any kind of perspective, any ideological frame-
work that would make sense of their suffering (in contrast to the souls in
Purgatorio who, like Freccero's religious converts, are able to read their
past lives as part of a totalising, ideological framework). It is in this sense
that Bakhtin contrasts the `evaluative' with the `historical' chronotope. In
his view, it is the visionary chronotope that generates the Inferno's formal
and evaluative symmetries, its cathedral-like structure and its graded
circles of sins and torments.
A similarly extreme verticalisation of the historical world can still
occasionally be found in contemporary descent narratives. For example,
Gloria Naylor transposes Dante's gradation of sins onto the black, middle-
class suburb she represents in Linden Hills. Ralph Ellison's Invisible
Man (1947) is an underworld narrative which describes a near complete
circle, beginning with the words, `The end is in the beginning' (p. 9) and
concluding with `The end was in the beginning' (p. 460). The end is also the
beginning in Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano (1947). Lowry's first
chapter ends at 7 p.m. on the Day of the Dead, while the rest of the
narrative unfolds between 7 a.m. and 7 p.m. of the preceding year leading
up to that day; to underline this numerological symmetry, a horse branded
with the number seven turns out to be instrumental in the protagonist's
death, while a clock strikes seven times as he dies. Martin Amis takes
infernal circularity a step further in Time's Arrow (1991), a novel about the
Holocaust narrated in reverse chronology. The protagonist, Tod Friendly,
develops from a seemingly kind, generous doctor at the start of the novel
into the ruthless Nazi killer he was fifty years previously. In this overly
determined story, as the title of the first chapter underlines, `What goes
around comes round' (p. 11). In many contemporary descent narratives,
the normal forms of time by which protagonists measure experience are
represented as blocked or arrested; such temporal arrest includes the
reversal of ordinary clock-time, suspension of historical development or
seasonal change, and the blockage of any Proustian transformation of
memories and reflections into a sense of selfhood.
 Bakhtin's Inferno: visionary versus historical chronotopes 49

In a celebrated passage in Mimesis, Erich Auerbach traced the origins

of the nineteenth-century realist novel to Dante's damned but still
defiantly historical souls.15 Similarly for Bakhtin, the verticalising, formal
and evaluative structures of Inferno are countered by realistic and
historicising energies in Dante's epic:

But at the same time, the human beings who fill (populate) this vertical world
are profoundly historical, they bear the distinctive marks of time; on all of
them, the traces of the epoch are imprinted . . . Therefore the images and ideas
that fill this vertical world are in their turn filled with a powerful desire to
escape this world, to set out along the historically productive horizontal, to be
distributed not upward but forward. (The Dialogic Imagination, p. 157)

For the most part, the damned souls avoid introducing themselves to
Dante as emblems of particular sins. In Canto 33, Count Ugolino assumes
Dante knows his crime (betrayal of his city); instead he wants to tell Dante
how it feels for a father to watch his children, who were imprisoned with
him, die of starvation. Whatever the specific theological reason for their
being in Hell, the damned souls want to tell Dante about much more: their
own memories of abjection, of descent and aspiration, their victories and
betrayals. This is why a first-time reader of Inferno often has difficulty
recognising which sin is being illuminated in each circle of Hell. The
untheological, storytelling impulses of the damned are governed, in
Bakhtin's terms, by a `historical' chronotope, as opposed to an `evalua-
tive' one.
Like many twentieth-century commentators, however, Bakhtin seems
to have got caught up in the Inferno and to have lost sight of the rest of the
Commedia at this point in his argument. Only in the first cantica could
the souls be described as fixed in place, but `filled with a powerful desire
to escape'. The souls in Purgatorio are unfixed, and those in Paradiso
have no desire to escape. The two temporal perspectives, the `evaluative'
and the `historical', are most strongly and starkly opposed in Inferno,
which is one reason for the first cantica's forceful impact on its readers.
In my view, this chronotopic conflict is one of the defining features of
traditional katabatic narrative (including Inferno), in which an observer
travels through Hell and converses with those who are lost to the
ordinary world. Dante draws the reader into this conflict of chronotopes,
invoking sympathy for the damned on the one hand and admiration for
the divinely ordered, absolutely just cosmos on the other. Eventually
however, as Bakhtin concludes, the evaluative chronotope wins out over
the historical one; `the artist's powerful will condemns [the once historical
damned soul] to an eternal and immobile place on the extra-temporal
vertical axis' (p. 157).
50 Chronotopes of Hell

Bakhtin's concept of opposing chronotopes in Dante's Inferno provides

us with a way of formally accounting for some of the conflicting ways the
name of Hell is invoked in secular contexts today. `Hell' is commonly
understood to represent both an extra-temporal absolute, and an experi-
ence to be survived (or not) and knitted together in a narrative. As we saw
in the previous chapter, many contemporary references stutter over the
actual naming of Hell, a hesitation that seems to indicate that people are
no longer quite sure what is meant by the term, or even whether it belongs
in a historical, secular context. On the other hand, the very repetition of
the name suggests that a widespread belief in an absolute beyond the
historical still exists. As Bakhtin's analysis shows, one of the functions of
descent narratives may well be to transform the personal and historical
into just such a mythical absolute.

Unspeakable wisdom

A third reason for hesitating over the naming of Hell, however, is that the
word is invoked only to refer to situations that are beyond description or
ordinary comprehension. In this case, remembering that hel means `cover'
in old Norse, the term is used to cover a horror that cannot be spoken.
This leads me to consider a further aspect of infernal revelation, one not
entirely accounted for either by Freccero's theory of conversion or
Bakhtin's analysis of Dante's visionary chronotope. Raymond Clark
persuasively places katabasis within a tradition of wisdom literature.
But if katabatic literature is concerned with the acquisition of wisdom, it
is a particularly charged kind of wisdom, an impossible, unspeakable
insight. This is particularly true for twentieth-century descent narratives;
one thinks immediately of Kurtz's inarticulate cry when gazing through
the rent veil of Europe's colonial dream: `the horror, the horror!' (Heart
of Darkness, p. 139). But it is also the case in many ancient katabases. In
Aeneid, Book 2, Dido asks to hear about the fall of Troy, arguably the
first katabatic episode in the Aeneid. Aeneas begins his narration of the
fall with these words: `Infandum, regina, iubes renovare dolorem' (`it is
an unspeakable grief, O queen, that you ask me to renew' (Aeneid, 2.3,
my trans.). In other words, recalling and narrating the journey constitutes
a descent to Hell in itself; if the sibyl is wrong in Book 6 about the manner
of Aeneas's return from Hades, she still may be right about the pain it will
cost him to remember the experience.16 She says, `sed revocare gradum'
(`but to retrace your step') is the difficulty. But as well as `retrace',
revocare can also mean `to call to mind' or `remember'.17 So perhaps
she is alluding to the difficulty he will face remembering not only the
 Unspeakable wisdom 51

descent to Hades, but the loss of Troy, Creusa, Dido and others on the
journey to Rome. The sibyl adds that Aeneas should go, `if your mind is
filled with such a love, so great a desire, to swim the Stygian lake twice,
and twice look upon black Tartarus' (Aeneid, 6.133±5). Again, the
primary sense of this comment is that everyone gets to see Hades once,
when they die. But in a secondary sense, she refers to the traveller's
obsession on his return to share his experiences with others and relive the
experience through narrative; `who but a madman would do this?'
inquires the sibyl. The wisdom acquired on the underworld journey cries
out to be shared, yet at the same time it is unspeakable; it cannot be
communicated.
In Dante's Inferno, the conflict between synchronic and diachronic
chronotopes is played out in every circle of Hell and in every conversation
Dante has with a damned soul. But it is also internalised within Dante
himself as a psychomachia between the overawed, near-sighted, sym-
pathising protagonist and the far-sighted, omniscient narrator he is to
become by the end of the poem. This is a subject about which Bakhtin has
surprisingly little to say, although it is within Dante that the synchronic
wins out over the diachronic, and an ahistorical vision fills the imagina-
tion of a historical being. Many critics have commented on Dante's
audacity in claiming to know God's wisdom and justice in the Commedia.
For example, Freccero argues that Dante could see in his own conversion,
`the figura of God's redemptive act, the master-plan of all history' (Poetics
of Conversion, p. 26). And Barolini writes that Dante's adoption of

the vantage of scriba Dei [God's scribe] confers a breathtaking advantage . . .

From it the poet is able to claim knowledge of the truth not only with respect to
the historical moment but also sub specie aeternitatis [by the measure of
eternity], for to know what happens after death, in the context of the Christian
afterlife, is to know what every action really accomplished . . . what every
thing, in short, really signifies.18

While this may be true, fewer readers have noted what it costs Dante or
the average medieval Christian to believe that God's justice towards
humanity is absolute and already fixed sub specie aeternitatis. Dante
betrays his personal bias by placing his political enemies in Hell, but he
also condemns to Hell his own earlier work, his former emotional
attachments, political hopes and ideals. As Bakhtin points out, even
the poet's own `historical and political conceptions, his understanding
of both progressive and reactionary forces of historical development (an
understanding that was very profound) are drawn into this vertical
hierarchy' (The Dialogic Imagination, p. 157).
J. L. Borges was one reader who acutely understood the cost of Dante's
52 Chronotopes of Hell

vision to the poet himself. For Borges, not only is the brevity of Dante's
encounter with Beatrice in Paradise an infernal loss, but in coming to
understand God's infinite justice, Dante also has to accept the fixity of his
own place in the divine plan. In his short story `Inferno I, 32' (1960),
Borges likens Dante to a leopard in a zoo. In a dream, God tells the
leopard the reason for his imprisonment: `You shall live and die in this
prison, so that a man I have knowledge of may see you a certain number
of times and never forget you and put your figure and your symbol into a
poem, which has its exact place in the weft of the universe' (Collected
Fictions, p. 322). Just as the leopard is there so that Dante will see and
write about him in Inferno, 1.32, so Dante must suffer exile and lone-
liness for the Commedia to come into being. And unlike the leopard,
Dante has to understand and accept God's reasons for making him suffer.
In `The Maker' (1960), Borges similarly suggests that the onset of
blindness in Homer constitutes a descent journey that `makes' him as
a writer (Collected Fictions, pp. 292±3). And as Homer's withdrawal into
his childhood memories uncovers a series of distinctly Borgesian images
and themes, the descent journey of the Greek poet is implicitly that of the
blind writer Borges as well.19

Conversion versus inversion

The descent hero's conversion at the bottom of Hell is also a kind of

sentence on the rest of his life. Once the meaning of his present, past and
future life is revealed, the hero's selfhood becomes a fixed and finalised
entity. No other inner development or external change can be meaningful
once this conversion point is passed. In this sense, the position of the
converted hero is comparable to that of Calvino's Mr Palomar, who has
decided to live as if he were already dead: `This is the most difficult step
for one who wants to learn how to be dead: convincing himself that his
own life is a closed whole, all in the past, to which nothing can be added,
nor can changes in perspective be introduced into the relationship among
the various elements' (Mr Palomar (1983), p. 111). But what if this turn at
the bottom of the descent journey was understood, not as a revelatory
experience leading to transcendence of the historical, material world, but
as a radical shift of perspective leading down, again down, into the
material world? Such an inversion would not yield access to divine truth,
but nor would it lead to the death of the historical self.
The overturning of Dante himself provides an excellent example of
katabatic inversion rather than conversion, if one adheres to a strictly
literal reading of what happens in the final canto of Inferno. The guide
 Conversion versus inversion 53

Virgil explains in response to Dante's question, that they turned upside-

down when they passed through the centre of the Earth: `when I turned
myself you passed the point to which all weights are drawn from every
part' (Inferno, 34.110±11). So the primary reason for their turning upside
down is a physical one; they have entered the Southern Hemisphere. But
weights are drawn to the Earth's centre in the Southern Hemisphere as
well. Dante's guide seems to be implying something more about their
change of physical condition. In this nether sphere, it appears that they
are able to travel lightly and swiftly, `caring not for any rest' (34.135).
Allegorically, this is because Dante has rejected the sins and sinners of
Hell. But psychologically, this is simply the point where Dante loses his
fear of Hell. He does not express any sense of revelation, infernal or
otherwise, when he has passed the turning point. Instead, he looks back to
see Satan's legs protruding from the ice, and confesses that he feels
`travagliato' (`perplexed', Inferno, 34.91). Far from being weighed down
by this puzzle, he accepts Virgil's explanation about the absence of gravity
at face value and follows his guide without further comment. Moreover,
technically speaking, Dante does not actually reascend from Hell; he
keeps travelling downwards, to emerge on the other side of the Earth.
Reading against the theological allegory of Inferno, 34, then, we find
the possibility of a different form of inversion in Hell. This literal or
secular katabatic turn consists of an inversion of perspective on the
infernal condition, rather than a rejection and transcendence of that
condition altogether. Katabatic inversion is experienced as a disburden-
ing gesture, which consciously casts off gravitas along with (in Dante's
case) the Earth's gravity. Interpreted thus, the inverted hero's lightness is
not a sign of his damnation (as suggested in Chapter 1), but of his
newfound freedom.20 Rather than bringing theological certainty about
the pattern and meaning of one's life, such a secular shift of perspective
can work to circumvent the disabling aporiae of the underworld.
Katabatic inversion thus inverts the hero's sense of entrapment into one
of liberation or insight. It is the extremity of the condition that produces
the underworld insight, even though we are still bound by the narrative
dynamics of coil and recoil, the hinge movement characteristic of kata-
batic conversion. In this regard, the affinity Bakhtin found between two
ostensibly dissimilar writers, Dante and Dostoevsky, is important. Bakh-
tin writes that both writers fold diachronic into synchronic world-views.
Thus

in the subsequent history of literature, the Dantesque vertical chronotope never

again appears with such rigor and internal consistency. But there are frequent
attempts to resolve, so to speak, historical contradictions `along the
54 Chronotopes of Hell
vertical' . . . there are attempts to lay open the world as a cross-section of pure
simultaneity and coexistence . . . After Dante, the most profound and con-
sistent attempt to erect such a verticality was made by Dostoevsky. (The
Dialogic Imagination, p. 158)

But in Dostoevsky's writing, such an enfolding of history into simulta-

neity does not result in a totalising, religious absolutism. On the contrary,
Bakhtin attributed to Dostoevsky the invention of what was in his view
the most democratising literary form that yet existed: the polyphonic
novel. In such works, argues Bakhtin, authors are `liberated from their
monologic isolation and finalisation, they become thoroughly dialogised
and enter the dialogue of the novel on completely equal terms with other
idea-images' (Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, p. 92). Clearly, this does
not happen in Dante's Inferno, where the damned souls are never truly on
equal terms with the protagonist because they are fixed in Hell whereas
Dante is merely passing through. But in Dostoevsky's The Brothers
Karamazov, The Devils and The Underground Man (to name but a
few examples), the descent to Hell produces another kind of descent both
for the characters and the narrators, descent as `a liberation from
monologic isolation and finalisation'. If the arrest of time and space in
Hell unmakes the self, it can also be the means of laying open the world.

Infernal inversion: Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano

The conflict between historical and theological or mythic chronotopes

still governs many descent narratives written after 1945. For example,
there is a powerful juxtaposition of opposing temporalities in Malcolm
Lowry's Under the Volcano. Lowry intended his novel to be read as a
modern Inferno, as was clear to some of his earliest readers.21 His
characters appear imprisoned in net of fatal correspondences and formal
symmetries from which no escape seems possible. Like Dante's inter-
woven rhyme scheme, the terza rima, Lowry's branching syntax appears
to `mimic a kind of simultaneity' with `each sentence . . . as it were, a
microcosm' creating `a kind of ``absolute time'', an interminable con-
tinuum in which everything can happen at once.'22 Like Dante's, Lowry's
`powerful will' condemns his central protagonist to a fixed place and
meaning in a magnificently over-determined, fictional timescape. Geof-
frey is to embody `the very shape and motion of the world's doom'.23
Indeed this character's fate is sealed from the beginning, since the novel
begins after his death. But after the opening, retrospective chapter, Lowry
abandons the vantage point of scriba dei and returns us via Laruelle's free
indirect discourse to Geoffrey's immediate perspective and inner thoughts
 Infernal inversion: Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano 55

a year earlier. From this ground level perspective, Geoffrey's death

appears to result from a series of tragic and farcical mishaps ± had he
not lost his passport and been mistaken by the police for another man, he
might never have been charged with spying ± as well as from his own self-
destructiveness and the climate of fear pervading Mexico in the years
before the outbreak of the Second World War. While many aspects of
Lowry's style and the novel's form impose a strict synchronicity on his
material, there is nevertheless a strongly linear, diachronic narrative that
runs counter to such synchronous totalisation.
These opposing chronotopes, the particular and historical versus the
mythic and synchronous, collide most dramatically in Chapter Seven,
where the Consul undergoes an `upside-downing' experience analogous to
Dante's at the end of Inferno. Geoffrey drunkenly boards a fairground
Ferris wheel, chiefly to escape the unwanted attentions of a group of
Mexican children. This gesture is heavily weighted symbolically. Lowry
names the Ferris wheel `La Machine Infernale', alluding to Cocteau's play
of that name, in which another hero, Oedipus, unwittingly destroys
himself.24 As Lowry explains in his Preface to the novel, the wheel
`demonstrates the very form of the book' and can also be considered as
`the wheel of Time' or alternatively, `the wheel of law, the wheel of the
Buddha . . . the symbol of the Everlasting Return'.25 Moreover, Lowry
writes, `the drunkenness of the Consul may be regarded as symbolising the
universal drunkenness of war, of the period that precedes war, no matter
when' (Preface, p. 35). Geoffrey is powerless to resist either this weight of
symbolism or the motion of the wheel itself as it tosses him up and down:

The confession boxes, perched at the end of menacing steel cranks, zoomed
upwards and heavily fell. The Consul's own cage hurled up again with a
powerful thrusting, hung for a moment upside down at the top, while the other
cage, which significantly was empty, was at the bottom, then, before this
situation had been grasped, crashed down, paused a moment at the other
extremity, only to be lifted upwards again cruelly to the highest point where for
an interminable, intolerable period of suspension, it remained motionless ± The
Consul, like that poor fool who was bringing light into the world was hung
upside down over it, with only a scrap of woven wire between himself and
death. There, above him, poised the world, with its people stretching out down
to him, about to fall off the road and on to his head, or into the sky. 999.
(Under the Volcano, p. 225)

Thus pinioned upside down, Geoffrey epitomises Bakhtin's image of a

historical being eternally fixed in place within a verticalising, extra-
temporal chronotope.26 The episode foreshadows the Consul's death
at the end of the novel, when he is thrown down a ravine named
Malebolge after Dante's eighth circle of Hell.
56 Chronotopes of Hell

But unlike Dante's damned souls, the Consul knows he symbolises the
world's doom. In fact, it is he who grandiosely imagines the world on the
edge of catastrophe and himself as its `poor fool'. In raising the prota-
gonist to the level of authorial self-consciousness, Lowry creates a
polyphonic inferno in the manner of Dostoevsky. If Geoffrey finds himself
trapped in a Hell of his own making, he is also capable of changing his
mind about what entrapment means. Before the Ferris wheel stops, it
spins into reverse. The Consul finds this motion even more sickening:

Oh, the Consul said, oh; for the sensation of falling was now as if terribly
behind him, unlike anything, beyond experience . . . he was being emptied out,
returned empty, his stick, his passport . . . what did it matter? Let it go! There
was a kind of fierce delight in this final acceptance. Let everything go!
Everything particularly that provided means of ingress or egress, went bond
for, gave meaning or character, or purpose or identity to that frightful bloody
nightmare he was forced to carry around with him everywhere upon his back,
that went by the name of Geoffrey Firmin, late of His Majesty's Navy, later still
of His Majesty's Consular Service, later still of ± (pp. 225±6)

But here Geoffrey's fear changes to `fierce delight' at his own helplessness.
Letting his passport and other documents fall from his pockets, he gives
up on his old self, `everything . . . that went by the name of Geoffrey
Firmin'. But rather than being born into a new self, as in conversion, he
feels released from having to be a self at all. From this point in the novel,
the Consul stops fighting his desire for alcohol and gives up hope of
winning back Yvonne, his wife. The ride on the infernal wheel does lead
to the Consul's death, although inadvertently. While the Mexican chil-
dren gather his scattered documents for him, his passport goes missing. At
the end of the novel, when he is mistaken for a Jewish communist spy and
arrested, he has no means of proving his true identity, which leads to his
conviction and execution. Thus the first turn of the wheel induces a cry
for help (a `999') from Geoffrey. But the second turn inverts the cry into a
sign of the devil (`666'). After this episode, Geoffrey embraces his infernal
condition, declaring a little later, ` ``I love hell . . . I can't wait to get back
there'' ' (p. 316).
The Consul's inversion amounts to more than a merely passive ac-
quiescence to fate. As the above paragraph shows, he experiences this
`upside-downing' as a kind of liberation. From the moment he staggers off
the wheel, he acts with notably less reserve, especially toward the novel's
Mexican characters. The children who were his tormentors have become
his allies, gathering all his possessions for him (except the fatally lost
passport). He goes into a cantino to drink, and there an old woman asks
in broken English, `Where do you laugh now?' The Consul responds,
The absolute and `my absolute': Sarah Kofman's Smothered Words 57

`You mean ``live'', SenÄora Gregorio, not ``laugh'', con permiso' (p. 230).
But `laugh' and `live' are equally correct, in this instance. This woman,
who reminds Geoffrey of his mother, acts as an underworld guide to re-
initiate him into the Hell in which he has elected to live. Sherrill Grace has
argued convincingly that Under the Volcano is governed by a `condition
of containment'.27 But equally one might observe that the novel's most
powerful images of flight all stem from the minds of characters trapped in
the darkest places.28 The Consul's reflections on drinking in a dark, dingy
cantina could be applied to the way katabatic inversion works in the
novel as a whole: `here . . . life reached bottom. But here also great
wheeling thoughts hovered in the brain' (Under the Volcano, p. 204).

The absolute and `my absolute':

Sarah Kofman's Smothered Words

Written in the decade leading up to the Second World War and completed
in 1938 in Oaxaca, Mexico, Under the Volcano hovers on the edge of the
conceptual shift that Steiner describes in In Bluebeard's Castle (see
Chapter 1). Susan Neiman also sees the Holocaust as one of the events
in modern history which fundamentally altered the general Western
perception of human nature. In Evil in Modern Thought, she argues
that after Auschwitz, human nature becomes inexplicable and possibly
unknowable (p. 240). Many would argue that once this threshold has
been crossed, totalising narrative structures such as Dante's have become
unusable and inadequate. On the other hand, when Hell enters the
historical world, it does not leave its mythic properties at the door.
The catalogue of motifs and images associated with traditional Hells and
Hades may strike many contemporary readers as outmoded. But the
inherited iconography and, more especially, the chronotopes of katabatic
narration continue to shape our perception of historical Hells in profound
ways.
In Smothered Words (1998), for example, Sarah Kofman writes that
the Holocaust survivor who has lived `on the brink of Hell (winter, the
cold, hunger, lice)' both wants to describe the experience and cannot.29
Like those of Aeneas, the survivor's memories are infandum, unspeak-
able. The Holocaust survivor, writes Kofman, feels `an infinite claim
to speak, a duty to speak infinitely, imposing itself with irrepressible
force, and at the same time, an almost physical impossibility to speak, a
choking feeling' (pp. 38±9). Her own narrative reflects this suffocating,
inner conflict, as does Robert Antelme's L'espeÁce humaine (The Human
Race), the text with which she engages in Smothered Words. Holocaust
58 Chronotopes of Hell

testimony frequently adopts an ascetic, documentary style, which is

sometimes crossed with the negative sublime. Such narration deliberately
falls short of describing an experience deemed beyond all description.
Language can only gesture towards something immense lying beyond.
And in fact, even such inadequate language is compromised by its
debasement in the death camps. As Antelme writes of the prisoners'
speech, `Mire and slackness of language . . . Sentences succeeded one
another, contradicted one another . . . all jumbled together . . . every-
thing that's expressed comes forth equalised with everything else, homo-
genised like a drunkard's puke.'30
For some survivors and second-generation Holocaust descendants,
however, this `duty to speak infinitely' can become a kind of Dantean
cage. The unspeakability of the death camps is gradually transformed into
a negative absolute, by which all future actions and events are over-
shadowed and even predetermined. In other words, in some Holocaust
memorialisation, the static chronotope of vision narrative wins out over
the diachronic and particularising chronotope, just as in Dante's Inferno.
In the context of Holocaust writing, such a resolution needs to be resisted,
since it deprives victims of the Holocaust their historical addressivity in a
way that painfully echoes their erasure from history by Nazi Germany.
Kofman, however, distinguishes between the absolute of history, repre-
sented by the death camps, and the individual's `relation with the infinite',
which she declares, cannot be circumscribed by any humanly constructed
power relation. Kofman's father, a rabbi, was killed in Auschwitz for
refusing to work on the Sabbath (`they could not bear that a Jew, that
vermin, even in the camps, did not lose faith in God' (p. 34)). In her view,
Kofman's father maintained `a relation with the infinite' even in a place
where the power exercised over him seemed infinite (Smothered Words,
pp. 34±5). If Auschwitz is understood as a Hell of `extreme powerlessness
and violence', there remains to the prisoner the possibility of `a relation
beyond all power' (p. 34). Once Hell is made immanent in history, it loses
the power to judge or define us infinitely.
Should one, then, regard Auschwitz as an instance of absolute evil, or
the Holocaust as the absolute evil of our time? On this question, Kofman
expresses herself very precisely; she writes that her father's death is `my
absolute, which communicates with the absolute of history' (pp. 9±10).
Both these phrases `my absolute' and `the absolute of history', are
oxymoronic in the way they juxtapose the individual against the uni-
versal, the timeless against the timely. The connecting verb `communi-
cates with', moreover, carefully avoids subsuming personal history into a
fixed notion of the absolute. Kofman's readings of Antelme, interwoven
with reflections about her own family history, take the reader on a
The absolute and `my absolute': Sarah Kofman's Smothered Words 59

journey through Hell. Her direct gaze at the absoluteness of the Holo-
caust constitutes the rock bottom encounter, the hinge moment of this
infernal journey. But this aporetic encounter results in a katabatic
inversion, rather than the conversion to an absolute, and absolutely
predictable, view. In the following two extracts, for example, we see
her executing a turn away from the seemingly self-evident notion that
some of us are capable of becoming absolutely evil:

These limits to the power of the SS man prove that he is locked in the same
species and the same history as the detainee, that he is neither a god nor a
monster. For his will to kill stems from a power that is proper to man, the
simple correlate and opposite of his power to succour the man who is
impoverished and without shelter, the Other in his extreme destitution and
distress. (Smothered Words, p. 68)

If, at that moment when the distance between beings is at its greatest, at the
moment when the subjugation of some and the power of others have attained
such limits as to seem frozen into some supernatural distinction; if, facing
nature, or facing death, we can perceive no substantial difference between the
SS and ourselves, then we have to say that there is only one human race. (ibid.)

Both these statements contain powerful mental inversions, in which an

infernal, unthinkable situation is transformed into an idea that can
liberate us. The power of the SS implies a `correlate and opposite' power;
an image of human solidarity lies couched in the image of a `supernatural'
distance separating prisoner from SS officer. The duty to `speak infinitely'
looks here like an insistence on infinite openness in the face of absolute
historical closure. Neither of the above quotations could be mistaken for
a position of facile optimism; they are, rather, polemical inversions of the
historical evidence that would appear to lead inevitably to a deadlocked,
nihilistic world view. In the context of descent literature, what is sig-
nificant is that Kofman's historically unwarranted declaration of faith in
the individual and collective human spirit is formulated as a recusatio, an
affirmation by way of denial. This rhetorical figure and this katabatic
mode of thought can be seen at work in her summation of Antelme's The
Human Race which, she writes, is `punctuated by two affirmations, each
as tenacious as the other: against the division desired by the Nazis, the
affirmation of unity; against the will to anonymity and indistinction,
the affirmation of the singularity and incompatibility of choices' (p. 72).
This is one of the viae negativae of descent literature, characteristic of
katabatic inversion; it leads to a complex historical vision, rather than a
transcendence of history altogether.
Another writer on the Holocaust who polemically affirms these two
paradoxically opposing values ± unity against division, and singularity
60 Chronotopes of Hell

against anonymity ± is Primo Levi. In the following chapter, I will show

how in Levi's writing, Auschwitz is transformed from a mythic absolute
into a complex network of journeys, all of them unfinished, all of them
lived, historical and to an extent imaginable. Like Blixen's stork pattern in
the snow, such a reading of Levi emerges more clearly as the distance
between us and the events he describes grows greater. But if the distance
grows, so too does the need for this kind of perspective on historical
catastrophe. In the first years of the twenty-first century, there have been
attempts on many fronts to translate `my absolute' into the absolute,
which in turn legitimises acts of `absolute justice' that stand outside
human law (detaining prisoners without trial at Guantanamo Bay, for
example). My reading of Levi will try to show that there is nothing
inevitable about this shift from the particular to the visionary chronotope.
As Viktor Frankl, another Holocaust survivor wrote, `the ability to
choose one's attitude to a given set of circumstances' is `the last of human
freedoms'.31

Notes

1. The `chronotope' in Bakhtin's coinage signifies the representation of `time-

space' in a text; more generally, it is a term which highlights `the intrinsic
connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships'. See Bakhtin, `Forms of
Time and of the Chronotope', The Dialogic Imagination, p. 86.
2. Gary Saul Morson, Narrative and Freedom: The Shadows of Time, p. 5.
3. Eduard Norden (ed.), Aeneid VI, p. 159.
4. According to Pike, the unexpected ease of ascent in many descent texts is a
figure for the dynamics of the present text's appropriation and revision of a
literary predecessor. See Passage Through Hell, pp. 11±12.
5. In his commentary on Inferno, Singleton notes, `there is . . . a difference of
twelve hours between the two hemispheres, with respect to the meridian of
Jerusalem and to the other directly opposite it. But by assigning evening to
the meridian of Jerusalem and morning to the other one, Dante makes it
twelve hours earlier in the hemisphere opposite to Jerusalem . . . This
arrangement is completely arbitrary on the part of the poet, but by setting
the clock back twelve hours he gains an entire Saturday (Holy Saturday at
that) for the climb from the center' (Dante, The Divine Comedy, Inferno:
Commentary, vol. 2, p. 641).
6. This novel by Jules Verne compellingly translates many of the classic topoi of
katabatic narrative into a science fictional medium. The improbable rise to
the surface takes place in Chapter 42 (p. 199), after a free fall of many miles.
Like Dante and his guide, Axel and his uncle pass through the earth so that
their compass swings into the opposite direction (Chapter 43, p. 204). They
re-emerge on the surface, `upside down' in an Italian paradise. For a study of
katabasis in another of Verne's novels, see Kiera Vaclavik, `Strange Doings
Underground: the Descent of (Wo)Man in Jules Verne's Les Indes Noires
 Notes 61
and Rider Haggard's King Solomon's Mines', MA thesis, Department of
French, University of Manchester, 2001.
7. The first performance took place in Prague, on 29 October 1787. Among
other changes and additions, the Vienna performance on 7 May 1788,
omitted the comic sextet at the end of the opera. The truncated Vienna
version was retained well into the early twentieth century. I am grateful to
Graham Falconer for this reference.
8. Terry Eagleton, The Idea of the Tragic, pp. 57±8.
9. Stephenson used the phrase `creative illness' in a BBC Radio interview. Her
biography, Billy, relates Billy Connolly's unhappy family life and past
alcoholism.
10. My view differs from Raymond Clark, who excludes from the katabatic
tradition all descent narratives in which the hero fails to return (Catabasis,
p. 34).
11. John Freccero, The Poetics of Conversion, p. 25.
12. David Pike, Passage Through Hell: Modernist Descents, Medieval Under-
worlds, p. 29.
13. Similarly, David Pike explains, `the most characteristic strategy of the
descent is to stress its own complexity and novelty in contrast with a simple
and outmoded past, a past newly constituted as such by the new act of
descent. In other words, the newest elements in the constellation are
legitimated, rendered as the dynamic description of a historical present,
when the previous constellation is represented as a single and static mythic
past that is being surpassed' (Passage Through Hell, p. 2).
14. Borges parodies Dante's totalising perspective in his short story `The Aleph'
(1949), in which a poet, Daneri (portmanteau of `Dante Alighieri'), is given a
glimpse of the universe, in its entirety and all at once, when he looks into a
magical stone (the `aleph'). See Borges, Collected Fictions, pp. 274±86. For
an excellent analysis of Borges's critical reading of Dante in this story, see Jon
Thiem, `Borges, Dante, and the Poetics of Total Vision', pp. 97±120.
15. Eric Auerbach, Mimesis, pp. 151±76.
16. In Negotiating with the Dead, Atwood argues that all fiction-writing is a
kind of descent into the underworld (p. 140).
17. Definition 13b, in The Oxford Latin Dictionary, ed. P. G. W. Glare. Oxford:
Clarendon Press.
18. Teodolinda Barolini, The Undivine Comedy: Detheologizing Dante, p. 53.
19. In the solitude of blindness, Borges' Homer finds the key images of the Iliad
and Odyssey, but also the `coin in the rain', the `bloodied knife', the
`labyrinths of stone' (`The Maker', Collected Fictions, p. 293) that are
found, respectively, in `The Zahir',`The South', `The Circular Ruins' and
many other stories by Borges.
20. Compare Calvino's essay, `Lightness' in Six Memos for the Next Millennium,
pp. 3±30.
21. For a study of the allusions to other literary hells in Lowry's Under the
Volcano, see Robert Heilman, `A Multivalued Poetic Fiction' (1947), in
Bowker (ed.), Malcolm Lowry, pp. 64±9; and Lowry, `Preface to a Novel'
(1948), in Bowker (ed.), Malcolm Lowry, pp. 29±35.
22. See Brian O'Kill, `Aspects of Language in Under the Volcano', in Bowker
(ed.), Malcolm Lowry, pp. 36±57.
62 Chronotopes of Hell
23. This description of the Consul is from the first draft of the novel; see Bowker
(ed.), Malcolm Lowry, p. 12.
24. Jean Cocteau, La Machine Infernale (1934).
25. Lowry, `Preface to a Novel' (1948), in Bowker (ed.), Malcolm Lowry, pp. 32±3.
26. In his Preface, Lowry writes that `the spiritual domain of the Consul is
probably Qliphoth, the world of husks and demons, represented by the Tree
of Life [emblem of the Cabbala] turned upside down and governed by
Beelzebub, the God of Flies' (p. 34). But in his innocence, the Consul also
resembles `the poor fool', Christ, who descends to Earth to save humanity, as
well as the hanged man in the Tarot pack.
27. Sherrill Grace, `The Luminous Wheel', in Bowker (ed.), Malcolm Lowry,
pp. 152±71 (p. 154).
28. On the `centrifugal movement of all these images' see O'Kill, `Aspects of
Language in Under the Volcano', p. 46.
29. Sarah Kofman, Paroles suffoqueÂes (1987, literally `suffocated/suffocating
words'), translated by Madeleine Dobie as Smothered Words. Kofman's
book addresses Robert Antelme's L'espeÁce humaine (1978).
30. Antelme, The Human Race, p. 135, quoted by Kofman, Smothered Words,
p. 50.
31. Viktor Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning, p. 86.
 Chapter 3

Auschwitz as Hell

Primo Levi is a writer who, by his own admission, `strive[s] . . . to pass

from the darkness in to light.'1 He repeatedly emphasises that retro-
spectively, he derived positive value from his year of imprisonment at
Auschwitz.2 I would argue that what he has to say about Auschwitz is
informed by certain premises: that meaning can be derived from nihi-
listic experience, that reason can help us to compass insanity, that while
language might fail to communicate the fullness of horror, it should
nevertheless be used, because silence is self-internment and an expression
of despair in other people. In my view, Levi is a katabatic writer for
whom Hell is refashioned into a journey and a process through which
one gains a more complex and rigorous understanding of selfhood in
extremis.
To align Levi with the `talkers' rather than the `silent' survivors of
a journey into Hell is to situate his writing somewhere in relation to
the tradition of Dantean katabasis.3 Levi's major allusions to Dante's
Inferno, along with his explicit verbal echoes of the poem, have already
been discussed by Risa Sodi and others.4 In brief, Levi alludes to Dante
both to verify his own experience of Hell ± what Dante imagined, the
prisoners actually experienced ± and to underline the important contrasts
± Dante's Hell is an expression of divine Justizia, Auschwitz of human
injustice. Like Dante, he presents himself as an observer of Hell, and as
we shall see, he also exploits the distance between the naive ingeÂnue in
the camp (Dante's pilgrim or protagonist) and the survivor-witness he
became (Dante the poet or narrator). Levi also reads Dante in the
romantic Italian tradition, in which damned souls such as Farinata,
Brunetto Latini and, above all, Ulysses express the unconquerable human
spirit that cannot be broken by their confinement in Hell.5
The particular Dantean aspect of Levi's writings I would like to focus
on here, however, is their habitual verticalisation of experience, their
attempt to map a historical, biographical experience onto a reflective,
64 Auschwitz as Hell

evaluative plane. As we saw in the previous chapter, Bakhtin conceptua-

lised such a process as a powerful tension created by the juxtaposition of
two opposing, generically defining chronotopes, the historical and the
visionary. Looking beyond Dante, what Levi shows is that the journey
through Hell can be multi-layered, discontinuous, revelatory, aporetic,
but not finalised. As a survivor, he never achieves the position of out-
sideness which would transform observation into revelation. But given
this premise, what is interesting about Levi's katabatic writing is its
demonstration of how, within the journey, the insider's perspective can be
shifted, multiplied and inter-illuminated with that of others. In this sense,
Levi's katabatic narratives are comparable to the distillation process
described in The Periodic Table: `a metamorphosis from liquid to vapour
(invisible), and from this once again to liquid; but in this double journey,
up and down, purity is attained, an ambiguous and fascinating condi-
tion.'6 I wish to argue that the multiplication of perspectives in If This Is a
Man produces just such a katabatic distillation of experience, and that the
layering of perspectives is one major way in which Auschwitz is trans-
formed into an `ambiguous and fascinating' chronotope.
The Search for Roots illustrates this process more readily, both because
the text is less familiar (it was first translated into English in 2001) and
because anthologies do not raise the same generic expectations as auto-
biography and Holocaust testimony. The Search is a late, self-reflective
work by Levi, culminating many earlier experiments in autobiographical
narration. Levi habitually framed these experiments in autobiography as
descents into the underworld. The `personal anthology' of The Search
comprises a series of extracts taken from Levi's favourite books, arranged
roughly in the order he read them; the contours of a `life' thus emerge
through the history of a lifetime's reading. Read as quasi-autobiography,
the anthology provides new light on Levi's earlier testimonial writing on
Auschwitz. Here I wish to use The Search as a filter to re-read If This Is a
Man, to demonstrate how the katabatic journey on which the reader of
Levi's writing embarks can be understood as a manifold experience, a
testing of different routes simultaneously rather than a quest for singular
revelation.

Pathways through a life: The Search for Roots

The Search is, as it were, an anthology of autobiographies, rather than a

narrative tracing a single, linear continuity of selfhood. One can easily
trace at least five quasi- autobiographies, the first being the order in which
the thirty textual extracts appear in the anthology. This order replicates
 Black holes and the biblical Job 65

the chronological history of Levi's reading, although Levi admits to

tampering with the order `to contrive contrasts' and `stage . . . a dialogue
across centuries' (p. 8). Against this temporally linear narrative of a
developing taste and world-view, Levi provides us, in contrast, with a
spatial map of the work (the `work' itself comprising a network of texts
and the possible meanings created in the spaces between their contigu-
ities). This map, reproduced in the Appendix of this study, appears at the
end of the Preface in The Search. The map is spheroid in shape, and
comprises four descending arrows which are joined at top and bottom of
the sphere. Levi suggests that the map traces `four possible routes through
the authors in view' (The Search, p. 8). We are invited, then, not to follow
a single journey but, as we are reading, to tease out four different
journeys, four contrasting sets of preoccupations, moods, intellectual
positions. The four arrows are respectively labelled: salvation through
laughter, man suffers unjustly, the stature of man and salvation through
knowledge. These lifelong preoccupations are not ranked or numbered,
but the two `salvation' arrows form the outer axes of the sphere, while the
two pertaining to `man' run through its centre. Generically speaking, the
texts named on each axis fall roughly into four different groups: comedy,
tragedy, epic and science. The map can be read both vertically ± on the
tragic axis, for example, we find Eliot, Babel, Celan, Rigoni Stern ± and
horizontally; taking a cross-section of the four axes at their lowest (and
perhaps darkest) points, we find Aleichem, Stern, Saint ExupeÂry, Arthur
C. Clarke. Every extract has a place on both vertical and horizontal
planes (note that Rigoni Stern appears twice in the above example). But as
we make these interconnections, the important point to remember is that
the map is comprised of arrows, not lines, in other words, that the
business of forging connections is itself a temporal journey. In The Search,
retrospective evaluation of the journey turns out to be part of the
chronological process, and chronological development involves constant
reflection, evaluation and comparison. Nor does one kind of insight
cancel out another; for example, Rabelais' not wanting to accept human
misery (p. 77) coexists alongside the knowledge that the Yiddish culture
which produced Aleichem's Tevye has been entirely destroyed (p. 148).

Black holes and the biblical Job

Where, then, does Levi situate Auschwitz in this multiply stranded

autobiography? His year at the concentration camp was obviously not
an experience in which much reading figured. But given the central
importance of this experience to any reading of Levi's life narrative,
66 Auschwitz as Hell

how is its influence felt on his personal history of reading? Is there a sense
of a reading consciousness that alters from `before' to `after'? Or is the
task of the narrator, and then the reader, to recuperate or reorientate texts
read before?
One novel does relate directly to the time Levi spent at Auschwitz. This
is Roger Vercel's Tug-Boat which, as Levi explains, is `important to me
for my private reasons, symbolic and charged, because I read it on a day
(18 January 1945) when I expected to die' (The Search, p. 6). In the linear
sequence of extracts, the Vercel extract appears almost at the mid-point
(thirteenth of thirty texts). On either side, it is flanked by texts that either
appear on, or may be inferred to belong to, `the stature of man' (epic)
axis. Thomas Mann's Tales of Jacob precedes it; Melville's Moby Dick,
Saint ExupeÂry and Marco Polo follow immediately after. These titles
demonstrate how easily questions of sequence become enmeshed in
evaluation; from the order of texts, the reader has moved to their
reordering on the map of the Preface. But another, more surprising point
deserves emphasis. If Vercel is taken as the sign of the year at Auschwitz,
this caesural text does not attract to itself the darkest, most pessimistic
extracts in the anthology. On the contrary, it is grouped with texts
illustrating how `a man can remake himself'.7 Even on the axis of `the
stature of man', Vercel does not appear as the lowest point on the map.
So, while this extract is undoubtedly charged with negativity for Levi,
there is also a certain buoyancy surrounding its placement in a narrative
trajectory. This is the first indicator of the complexity of Levi's chron-
otopic representation of Auschwitz.
A further layer of complexity is revealed by the positioning of signs for
`Auschwitz' on the Preface's `map of reading' (see Appendix). As Calvino
suggests, the Book of Job (positioned at the top of the sphere) reminds
us that `the journey of Primo Levi passed through Auschwitz' (The
Search, p. 222) because Job is the archetypal `just man oppressed by
injustice' (The Search, p. 11). And as Calvino also notes, `Black Holes' (at
the bottom of the sphere) constitute a point `no less charged with
negativity' (The Search, p. 222). Introducing an article by the astrophy-
sicist Kip Thorne in the final extract, Levi draws attention to the
metaphorical significance of these dense, Charybdic pools of gravity in
our universe: `In the sky there are no Elysian Fields, only matter and light,
distorted, compressed, dilated, and rarefied to a degree that eludes our
senses and our language' (The Search, p. 214). Like the Book of Job,
Black Holes become tropes for an alien, hostile or indifferent universe. So
on the map, Auschwitz figures (spatially) at top and bottom, and
(temporally) at beginning and end, of all four axes of descent. So should
one conclude that every autobiographical journey Levi makes begins and
 A constellation of chronotopes: If This Is a Man 67

ends with Auschwitz? Such an interpretation would crucially miss out on

the counterbalancing energies of the anthology, the conceptual shifts
from light to dark, and dark to light, that we are invited to make along
vertical as well as lateral axes of development. Better, I think, to view
these two poles as initiating and attracting all movement and develop-
ment of the autobiographical subject on its descent journey.8
In any case, as with the Vercel extract, we find that the `negative poles'
at top and base of the diagram, exert a powerful, positive charge. Turning
to the headnotes of `Job' and `Black Holes', the reader discovers Levi
affirming human powers of resistance and endurance. The introduction
to `Black Holes' provides an excellent example of Levi's habit of mentally
inverting `darkness towards light':

certainly we are immeasurably small, weak and alone, but if the human mind
has conceived Black Holes, and dares to speculate on what happened in the
first moments of creation, why should it not know how to conquer fear,
poverty and grief? (The Search, pp. 214±15)

In a katabatic inversion of the kind found in Kofman's writing (see

Chapter 2), Levi turns our ability to conceptualise such infinite phenom-
ena as black holes into a hypothesis that we also have the capacity for
infinite good. Here it is the scientist's ambivalent imagination that reaches
beyond fear, to find pleasure in gained knowledge.9 This inverted
perspective on black holes brings Levi's anthology to a close. The final
words are given to Thorne: `the future does not seem unpromising' (The
Search, p. 220). Auschwitz, then, figures at top and bottom, at the
beginning and the end of the descent journey, while also occupying a
place somewhere in the middle. These points constitute so many negative
centres but they are also charged with positive energy. The way these
positionings play off against each other is a formal indication that
Auschwitz cannot be said to occupy one fixed meaning or value in Levi's
autobiographical narratives. Within The Search's multiply stranded
autobiography, Auschwitz is the interior chronotope which destabilises
the whole, which sends Levi repeatedly on his katabatic journey.

A constellation of chronotopes: If This Is a Man

A similarly productive intersection of perspectives and temporalities

seems to me to inform Levi's most famous work, his Holocaust testimo-
nial narrative If This Is a Man. Following the model of multiple auto-
biographical narratives developed in The Search, I will argue that If This
Is a Man offers us five distinct but overlapping representations of the
68 Auschwitz as Hell

protagonist Levi on a descent journey. As in The Search, each of these

images of the prisoner-as-traveller is in part defined and shaped by the
pressure of different chronotopes with their contrasting horizons of
expectation. Viewed in this way, `Auschwitz' is irreducible to a singular
place, experience or event in If This Is a Man; it becomes a constellation
of chronotopes, within which the haÈftling develops along a number of
different narrative trajectories. The major chronotopes in the narrative of
this infernal journey might be identified as: threshold, education, vision,
trial and shipwreck.

Threshold crossing into Hell

The chronotope of the threshold governs the first four chapters of If This
Is a Man, which describe Levi's deportation from the outskirts of Turin
to Auschwitz. This chronotopic representation of Auschwitz offers us a
series of absolute contrasts, between `up here' and `down there', be-
tween the rational and insane, human and infernal, historical and
mythic. The descent protagonist, Levi's former self, is constrained
within the particular spatio-temporality of the threshold chronotope.10
Here there is no possibility for interior development, and little sense of
time as dureÂe. The condition of threshold existence is handled much
more starkly than in Dante's Inferno, even though the narrative mo-
mentum of the medieval text is entirely dependent on threshold cross-
ings. In Inferno, the damned souls may be trapped on the nether side of
the threshold, but the pilgrim himself develops through his repeated
threshold encounters.11 But in Levi's text, there is no orchestration of
crossings-over, no gradual crescendo towards a final, definitive break,
because the first crossing is already final. Levi is already `Sul Fundo', at
the bottom of Hell, by the beginning of the second chapter. All thresh-
olds crossed thereafter are experienced not as a deepening of the
experience, but as an absurd repetition of this singular, absolutely
definitive crossing into Hell.
No inner development, and little individuation, of the protagonist is
possible in the Lager, or concentration camp, when it is thus represented
as an infernal threshold. Historical time appears to have ceased, and the
prisoners cross over into a mythic time, in which everything seems always
to have existed in this infernal state. In an unmistakable echo of Dante's
Inferno, Levi registers the shift to mythic time at the moment of reading
the sign over Auschwitz's gate: `we saw a large door, and above it a sign,
brightly illuminated (its memory still strikes me in my dreams): Arbeit
Macht Frei, work gives freedom. We climb down' (p. 28). Like Dante,
Levi omits any description of an actual crossing (Dante's pilgrim faints
 A constellation of chronotopes: If This Is a Man 69

before the gate and wakes up in Hell). Instead a new paragraph and shift
of verbal tense indicate the profound alteration in his metaphysical
condition. For a modern-day reader, the debilitating impression of
deÂjaÁ-lu is particularly intense at this point. If we know anything of
Auschwitz (or Dante), we are already familiar with the words over the
gate. We thus participate in the uncanny as defined by Freud, an
encounter with the unknown with which, fearfully, we already seem
to be familiar.12 This is the dominant mood of the threshold chronotope,
a nightmarish sense that tells us Auschwitz has always existed and always
will. The Lager as myth occupies an eternal present and has infinite
capacity to haunt us. This is the uncanny representation of Auschwitz
with which Levi concludes The Truce: `I am in the Lager once more, and
nothing is true outside the Lager' (p. 379).
The chronotopic image that epitomises the timescape of the threshold
in Levi's writing is the goods train used to transport prisoners to the
camps.13 When representing his own deportation, Levi strikingly de-
scribes the train as already familiar:

Here, then, before our very eyes, under our very feet, was one of those
notorious transport trains, those which never return, and of which, shuddering
and always a little incredulous, we had so often heard speak. Exactly like this,
detail for detail: goods wagons closed from the outside . . . for a journey
towards nothingness, a journey down there, towards the bottom. (p. 22)

The train journey conducts the prisoners from historical reality into the
realms of myth. In an essay in The Drowned and the Saved, Levi writes
that `almost always, at the beginning of the memory sequence, stands the
train, which marked the departure towards the unknown not only for
chronological reasons but also for the gratuitous cruelty' (p. 85).14 For
Levi, Auschwitz as threshold has gates open, as it were, on both sides of
the temporally localised event; `we are all in the ghetto . . . close by the
train is waiting' (The Drowned and the Saved, p. 51). As a chronotopic
image, the freight train represents the instability of the ground on which
the Holocaust survivor's sense of identity is based. Remembering that the
gates of this threshold chronotope are still open to us, that the moment of
absolute loss is repeatable in our own futures, we are right to find this
conceptualisation of Auschwitz profoundly unsettling. But, as in The
Search, this represents only one of a number of possible pathways
through Levi's infernal journey.
70 Auschwitz as Hell

Auschwitz as education
Besides experiencing Auschwitz as threshold, the reader of If This Is a
Man may also trace the pathway of a developing identity within the
generic horizons of what might be described as an infernal Bildungsro-
man. Here the reader hears a new note in Levi's intertextual dialogue
with Dante's Inferno, a work which Freccero has described as the `first
novel of the self' (The Poetics of Conversion, p. 58). By positioning his
former self at the start of an infernal journey involving duration and
internal change, Levi sets that self on the pathway of Dante's pilgrim.
But at the same time, he refuses to resurrect the Inferno's play of
subjectivities, the living pilgrim (subject-in-process) against the souls
of the dead (fixed and finalised subjects). The story of his own `educa-
tion' is read alongside the experience of a collective crossing over. The
central theme of If This Is a Man is not Levi's singular survival, despite
the title of the American edition, Survival in Auschwitz. Nevertheless,
one of its chronotopic trajectories might be identified as the metamor-
phosis of Levi the haÈftling. In the Afterword, Levi compares his experi-
ence to `a friend of mine, who . . . says that the camp was her university.
I think I can say the same thing' (If This Is a Man, p. 398). Unlike the
threshold crossing into Hell, this educative journey becomes visible only
retrospectively; it is activated by the gaze of the narrator on his former
self.
The inter-illumination of the threshold chronotope by the education
chronotope within the text is evident, for example, in the exchange
between Levi and the Austrian sergeant Steinlaus (If This Is a Man,
p. 47). The interview with Steinlaus prompts the beginning of a different
way of conceptualising `damnation', one which involves awareness of a
journey through darkness, not just a point of arrival sul fundo. The fact
that Levi is left asking questions after the interview reveals this change of
consciousness; his questions are directed towards possible future beha-
viour (`would it not be better . . . ?', p. 47). When Auschwitz is con-
ceptualised as an educative space, a sharply accelerated biographical
trajectory comes into focus: the development of the haÈftling from naive
newcomer, a `high number' (signifying the newest arrivals into the camp),
into a vecchio or old-timer. In Chapters 1 through 4, the perspective of the
`high number' predominates; a gradual shift in attitude is discernible: `by
now we are tired of being amazed. We seem to be watching some mad
play, one of those in which the witches, the Holy Spirit and the devil
appear' (p. 31). From Chapters 4 to 9, this naive spectator recedes from
view and in his place, emerges the vecchio, an alien, bleak and toughly
comic figure. The vecchio is no Dantean pilgrim travelling across the
 A constellation of chronotopes: If This Is a Man 71

canvas of the underworld. He is now part of its fabric; he belongs to Hell.

The character zone of Levi as vecchio is not constituted as an individual
consciousness or discourse; his idiolect is represented as one strain of a
monstrously hybrid language which is epitomised in the multilingual
naming of the Carbide Tower, `Babelturm, Bobelturm' (pp. 78±9). From
Chapter 11 to the final chapter of If This Is a Man, Levi's extra-diegetic
journey from vecchio to narrator begins to surface. Thus two trajectories
play off against each other. On the one hand, the reader witnesses Levi as
vecchio becoming mentally tougher and more resourceful. On the other
hand, the narrator-to-be is increasingly ashamed of his Lager identity; the
latent theme of self-blame becomes most audible in the penultimate
chapter, `The Last One'.
It should be emphasised that the educative chronotope under consid-
eration here is developed alongside the representation of Auschwitz as
threshold rather than subsequently. In the book's opening paragraph, the
reader is immediately made aware of the distance between Levi as
protagonist and as narrator of this autobiographical narrative:

I was twenty-four, with little wisdom, no experience and a decided tendency ±

encouraged by the life of segregation forced on me for the previous four years
by the racial laws ± to live in an unrealistic world of my own, a world inhabited
by civilized Cartesian phantoms, by sincere male and bloodless female friend-
ships. (p. 19)

The gap between the protagonist and narrator revealed in this opening
paragraph raises generic expectations of a linear autobiographical nar-
rative, with a trajectory soon to be developed which will link together
these two vastly different consciousnesses. At the same time, however, the
chronotope of emergence and education is already destabilised by the
nature of this type of autobiography (testimony), where the discontinu-
ities of identity are expected to be vast and possibly unbridgeable. There
are also elements of the threshold chronotope visible here, where former
and present selves inhabit worlds on either side of the looking glass. And
disconcertingly, it is the pre-camp Levi, whose experience lies closest to
the reader's, who inhabits the dream world, the world of `Cartesian
phantoms'. The Levi who knows the world for what it is is the vecchio,
the old-timer at Auschwitz.
Furthermore, Levi's narrative begins by representing his `educatable'
self in a triangulation of perspectives (rather than the two ± the before-
and-after ± selves of conventional autobiography).15 The three first-
person perspectives combine in the paragraph quoted above: the
twenty-four-year-old idealist, the twenty-five-year-old Lager vecchio,
and the twenty-seven-year-old narrator. A remarkably short temporal
72 Auschwitz as Hell

span divides these three characters; nevertheless each holds a radically

different world-view. The shift in perspective is not unidirectional, from
the twenty-four year old to the present-day narrator, as one might expect.
Much that the vecchio learns to value is regarded by the narrator as a
darkening, a betrayal of former identity. In fact, all three perspectives are
subject to ironic deflation or critique by each other. In the following
sentence, for example, the irony works in two directions: `At that time I
had not yet been taught the doctrine that I was later to learn so hurriedly
in the Lager: that man is bound to pursue his own ends by all possible
means, while he who errs but once pays dearly' (p. 19). The vecchio
mocks the new inmate, inferring that his punishment is `justified' (p. 19);
but the survivor-witness invites us to condemn the vecchio's wisdom,
insisting on a different system of values. The `university' of Auschwitz
thus instigates an unceasing dialogue between world-views that are in
many respects irreconcilable and incompatible.

The visionary world

Counter-pointing the one above, a third chronotopic representation
surfaces in the second section of If This Is a Man (Chapter 4 to Chapter
9); this chronotope represents the Lager as a fully realised other world,
existing in parallel (like Dante's three realms) to our actual, material
one. In this respect, Levi's narrative demonstrates the chronotopic
features of the genre of vision literature, though it must be added that
for Levi, `vision literature' encompasses Lucretius and Darwin as much
as it does Dante.16 Here, the reader is approaching Auschwitz, as it
were, along the fourth of The Search's `pathways', the axis of `salvation
through understanding'. It has often been noted that this section of If
This Is a Man is organised into the structure of a chemist's report, and
that the narrator's tone in Chapter 9 is that of a scientist presenting his
data; for example, `we would also like to consider that the Lager was
pre-eminently a gigantic biological and social experiment' (p. 93).17 In
The Mirror Maker, Levi describes Dante as a poet-scientist. It is within
this visionary chronotope that the reader finds Levi reproducing some-
thing resembling Dante's `scientific' or systematising imagination (The
Mirror Maker, p. 172). Like Dante in the eleventh canto of Inferno, Levi
in his ninth chapter delivers an overview of the infernal world he has
travelled through. Again such a systematic representation would only be
available to Levi retrospectively. Like Dante, he not only describes but
also delivers a moral assessment of the landscape through which his
former self has travelled. Of the two `categories' of men he identifies in
this chapter, `The Drowned and the Saved', the first derive their
 A constellation of chronotopes: If This Is a Man 73

appellation from Dante's sommersi (these are the Inferno's damned

soothsayers; compare If This Is a Man, p. 93, and Inferno, 20.3). Just as
Dante classifies the damned, Levi also identifies three classes of the
`saved' (a highly ironic use of the term, in this context). Levi's categories
of the `saved' include: the `organisator', `kombinator' and `prominent'.
These three classes are not organised in any Dantean hierarchy, but a
system of gradation enters the analysis of prisoner types in The
Drowned and the Saved (the book which derives its title from this
ninth chapter).
In the Inferno, the shift from the pilgrim's experience of an infernal
journey to the poet's assumption of divine knowledge about Hell is made
possible by one non-negotiable premise: the damned are fixed in Hell
forever, while Dante the pilgrim moves through it as a living, unfinalised
being. In Levi's case, this necessary ontological breach between the former
self ± who will survive ± and the `drowned' is a point from which the
narrative repeatedly slides away. But it is within his representation of
Auschwitz as infernal realm, within the vision chronotope, that Levi
comes closest to assuming this problematic asymmetrical relationship
with the `drowned'. In this chapter, it is only the drowned who are sul
fundo, who have `followed the slope to the bottom' (p. 96). He and the
`saved' have a fundamentally different experience of Hell, one that in each
case can be narrated. Ontologically worse off than Dante's damned souls,
the drowned, in this chapter, have `the same story, or more exactly, have
no story' (p. 96).
Here is Levi, reluctantly assuming the position of Dante's pilgrim vis-aÁ-
vis the damned:

They crowd my memory with their faceless presences, and if I could enclose all
the evil of our time in one image, I would choose this image which is familiar to
me; an emaciated man, with head dropped and shoulders curved, on whose
face not a trace of a thought is to be seen. (p. 96)

Perhaps the most horrific aspect of this description is the alterity of the
`emaciated man', the fact there is no possibility of reaching his interior
being. In fact, `this image', which has indeed come to signify the `all the
evil of our time', may be a singular or plural entity; it simply cannot be
grasped with any specificity. There is an abyss that separates the con-
sciousness of the survivor from this majority. At the same time, however,
Levi also internalises this image. Chronotopically, this `visionary' figure
comes to occupy a place in Levi's threshold consciousness. The `famil-
iarity' of the image and its (or their) capacity to haunt his memory are
indicators of a hybridisation of perspectives between poet-scientist and
sufferer.
74 Auschwitz as Hell

Moreover, Levi's notion of `gradating sins' in If This Is a Man should

also be carefully distinguished from Dante's. Whereas Dante ranks the
damned according to a system of justice which claims to discover their
essential natures, Levi instead observes the material conditions leading to
loss of individuality and humanity. Levi dismisses as fascistic the pro-
nouncement on human essence (`that man is fundamentally brutal') and
deduces a much more limited principle from a particular set of examples
(that `in the face of driving necessity . . . instincts are reduced to silence').
To illustrate the three classes of the `saved', Levi narrates the histories of
four men: Schepschel, Alfred L, Elias and Henri (p. 98). Although one
could argue that these characters are retrospectively finalised by Levi's
tripartite classification, the use of present tense narration reduces the
distance between observer and protagonist (`Schepschel has been living in
the Lager for four years' (p. 98)). There is veiled judgment of these `types'
but Levi nevertheless offers due space to their opposing world-views. This
is particularly so in the case of Henri, whom Levi clearly dislikes, but
restrains himself from judging: `one seems to glimpse, behind his un-
common personality, a human soul, sorrowful and aware of itself'
(p. 106). Of all four `examples', Henri's is the one allowed to stand
most open-ended though also set at greatest distance from the rest of
Levi's own narration (`I would give much to know his life as a free man,
but I do not want to see him again' (p. 106)). The `Henri' of Levi's text is
Paul Steinberg who, fifty years later, found his own words to describe the
`pathway' he chose to `salvation' in his memoir, Speak You Also: A
Survivor's Reckoning.

On trial in Hell
The aporia disclosed along the pathway of the vision chronotope is that
representing the `drowned' of Auschwitz requires an abhorrent but
necessary outsideness, a position vis-aÁ-vis the dead that too easily
borders on superiority. This aporia triggers another lateral shift in
Levi's text, a fresh attempt to make Auschwitz intelligible through a
new spatio-temporal configuration: the timespace of the trial. As with
the educative chronotope (and that of the voyage, considered below),
the trial brings individual selfhood, both former and present, to the fore
of Levi's narrative. The trial chronotope predominates in `The Chemical
Examination' (Chapter 10), `October 1944' (Chapter 13) and `The Last
One' (Chapter 16). Its contiguity with the chronotope of the vision
(chemical examination of the haÈftling immediately superseding the
narrator's scientific `report') is an indication that what is lacking along
the vision `pathway' is a sense of immediate and individual addressivity.
 A constellation of chronotopes: If This Is a Man 75

In dialogue, Bakhtin observes, every utterance demonstrates a distinc-

tive `addressivity' [obrashchennost'] or `quality of turning to someone'
(Speech Genres, p. 99). In the visionary chronotope that governs Inferno
11 and the ninth chapter of If This Is a Man, the speakers (respectively,
Virgil and the narrator Levi) address themselves to the subject of Hell;
both are physically and attitudinally at some distance (though not
removed from) the experience of being in Hell itself. This attitudinal
distance is the problem that is taken up in the configuration of Ausch-
witz as a trial. In contrast to the vision chronotope, the trial is dialogic in
structure. Within this timespace, the protagonist is oriented outwards,
to another character in the work, to the text's narratee or to the actual
reader.
Levi's configuration of Auschwitz as a trial scene is, however, further
complicated both by the absence of due legal process and by the interplay
of different temporalities represented in the text. Historically, death
camps such as Auschwitz existed to execute sentence without trial. Hence
the trial scene in which the prisoner finds himself is morally unfounded
and legally absurd.18 In addition, there is an irresolvable temporal
asymmetry in the dialogue between the defendant and his opponents.
The narrator defends his former self against his former accusers, who will
never hear his defence. At the end of `The Chemical Examination', Levi
writes `he would be amazed, the poor brute Alex, if someone told him that
today, on the basis of this action, I judge him and Pannwitz and the
innumerable others like him, big and small, in Auschwitz and everywhere'
(p. 114). This apostrophe is delivered to the reader, but it is also squarely
aimed at Levi's accusers within Auschwitz (here, Pannwitz and the Kapo
Alex). Indeed, the `you' whom the self most urgently desires to confront
is, in a sense, the one who is guaranteed to be absent. Equally asymmetric
is the former self's appeal, through the narrator, to readers who were
never there, who did nothing to intervene at the time, however empathetic
they might be latterly.
In later works, particularly The Drowned and the Saved, Levi as
survivor and narrator invites his readers to pass judgment on Auschwitz
as `a trial of planetary and epochal dimensions' (p. 121).19 But the
temporally symmetrical address of The Drowned and the Saved is
developed from the visionary chronotope that governs Chapter 9 of If
This Is a Man (also entitled `The Drowned and the Saved'); the later work
also offers more direct judgment, being written at a greater temporal
distance from the experience. In If This Is a Man, Levi says that he
`refrained from formulating judgments' of an explicit kind, though he also
emphasises that the implicit judgments are there.20 One reason for the
difficulty of passing judgment in If This Is a Man is that the offenders
76 Auschwitz as Hell

whom Levi would accuse are conspicuously not the ones being put on
trial.21 These complexities are worth stressing at the outset, because the
trial chronotope (like that of vision literature) is a spatio-temporal
configuration which invites the protagonist to seek reparation or closure.
But the trial scenes of Auschwitz cannot be reconfigured to produce such
closure. The first chapter of If This Is a Man repeatedly stresses the
arbitrariness of sentencing on the instant of their arrival (`they did not
interrogate everybody, only a few' (p. 25)). Nothing could contrast more
forcefully with the soul's arrival at the gates of the otherworld in classical
and medieval religious katabases, where the sentence the soul receives is
meant to be total and impartial.
The asymmetry of the dialogue in the demonic trial scenes of Auschwitz
partly explains the obsessive orientation towards the past on this parti-
cular pathway through Hell. As suggested above, the different tempor-
alities brought into play within the trial chronotope make it difficult to
construct a self in dialogue with another, due to the difficulty of bringing
accuser and accused into one timespace. But there are positive aspects to
this retrospective orientation, for example in the way it provides a
counterbalance to the aporia of threshold perception. As Levi writes
in The Mirror Maker, `living without one's actions being judged means
renouncing a retrospective insight that is precious, thus exposing oneself
and one's neighbours to serious risks' (p. 119). On arrival in the Lager,
the prisoners relinquish not only any hope of future time, but also all
connection with the past. The trial chronotope is the timespace in which
that connection with the past is reforged. This happens on two narrative
levels: extradiegetically, the narrator Levi explores the nature of the trial
of his former self, and diegetically, the haÈftling Levi rediscovers a pre-
Lager identity, newly accented by his condition in the Lager. This process
bears only superficial resemblance to the essentially conservative affirma-
tion of a pre-existent self, which Bakhtin identifies as characteristic of the
trial chronotope in romance narrative.22 In Levi's narrative, the `affirma-
tion' of a past self is reaccented by the present, and fully dialogic.
Although the `I' may resist an alien `you', the two subject-positions
act as catalysts for internal change, each in the other.
The central episode in If This Is a Man which demonstrates this process
is the examination Levi undergoes before the SS chemist, Dr Pannwitz.
Midway through the process of being `tried' on his knowledge of
chemistry, the haÈftling reconnects with a pre-Lager identity. Under
questioning, he recognises

this sense of lucid elation, this excitement which I feel warm in my veins, I
recognize it, it is the fever of examinations, my fever of my examinations, that
 A constellation of chronotopes: If This Is a Man 77
spontaneous mobilization of all my logical faculties and all my knowledge,
which my friends at university so envied me. (p. 112)

At first glance, this looks like a straightforward affirmation of pre-

existent selfhood. But as the scene unfolds, one quickly senses a more
complex process working itself out. Levi at first rejects any possibility of
kinship with his examiner, who looks at him, as if `across the glass
window of an aquarium between two beings who live in different worlds',
the dehumanising gaze somehow expressive of all `the great insanity of
the third Germany' (pp. 111±12). But the `fever' to which Levi succumbs
is produced, as becomes clear, by a recognition of the shared body of
knowledge between two men. The prisoner Levi sees on Pannwitz's desk a
copy of Gatterman's A Practical Manual for Organic Chemists, a text-
book that, in The Search for Roots, Levi describes as `the words of the
father . . . which awake you from your childhood and declare you an
adult' (p. 74). This sign of a common patronage opens a communicative
link even across the aquarium window. A connection is indicated, for
example, in the hybridisation of two languages that takes place in the
consciousness of the prisoner during the course of the interview. He
imagines how the doctor must be unable to see him as human and a
scientist, and then becomes lost in his own trapped thinking. Levi the
narrator represents the thoughts of his former self during the interview
thus: `in my head, like seeds in an empty pumpkin: ``Blue eyes and fair
hair are essentially wicked . . . I am a specialist in mine chemistry'' '
(p. 112). The contrast of world-views may appear absolute and unbridge-
able. But notice that Levi's syntax has taken on a German inflection;
`mine chemistry' is not only the syntax of Pannwitz, but also of Levi's own
paternal text, Gatterman's Organic Chemistry.
Levi writes that as he entered the doctor's office, he felt `like Oedipus in
front of the Sphinx' (p. 111). The analogy is physically apt, since the
Greek name means, literally, `swollen footed' and Levi has already
contrasted his hobbling, clogged gait with the leather-shod Alex, `as
light on his feet as the devils of Malebolge' (p. 113). But also, the answer
to the riddle of the Sphinx is `man', and what horrifies Levi about
Pannwitz is the apparent inability of the doctor to see him as a man
(`that look was not one between two men' (p. 111)). Particularly arresting
is that Levi felt he `would leave a dirty stain [una macchia sporca]
whatever I touched' under such a gaze and in such a `shining, clean
and ordered' place (p. 111). This sense of being infected and contagious is
intimately connected, I would argue, to the internal `fever' Levi begins to
experience as the examination in chemistry gets underway.
The comparison Levi makes between Oedipus and his former self
78 Auschwitz as Hell

deserves closer attention, especially with regard to the `dirty stain' which
attaches to the haÈftling on trial. Steinberg alludes to a similar sense of
having been polluted or corrupted by his experience in the Lager, as do
others. But much more specifically, this sense of being stained or polluted
attaches itself to particular incidents which are framed, retrospectively in
their narration, as trial scenes. Steinberg enters upon such a chronotope in
his narration of an episode in which he slapped the face of a fellow
prisoner, an old Polish Jew: `that incident, a banal event in the daily life of
a death camp, has haunted me all my life . . . the contagion had done its
job, and I had not escaped corruption' (Speak You Also, pp. 126±7). This
sense of lingering contagion seems to be one of the forces driving
Steinberg, after a silence of fifty years, finally to put his experience into
autobiographical narrative: `I'm purging myself as I write, and I have a
vague feeling not of liberation, but of fulfilled obligation' (p. 63). In his
Preface, Levi expresses what he hopes will be the result of reading If This
Is a Man: `it should be able to furnish documentation for a quiet study of
certain aspects of the human mind' (p. 15). But the effects of reading the
book contrast markedly with Levi's explanation for writing the book; the
`need to . . . make ``the rest'' participate in it, had taken on . . . the
character of an immediate and violent impulse' (p. 15). Both texts raise
the question, then, in what sense is the prisoner `stained' by entering such
a demonic trial? And does narration of the experience, descent through
the Hell of remembering, offer any real possibility of purgation, as
Steinberg seems to suggest in the passage quoted above?
The comparison Levi draws with Oedipus invites us to consider these
questions within particular generic horizons before considering them
generally. In Sophoclean and Aeschylean tragedy, one who has spilt
the blood of his kindred is said to be miaros, that is blood-guilty and
infectious.23 In Greek philosophy, one had to have intentionally com-
mitted the crime to acquire this miasma, whereas in Greek tragedy, the
stain attaches itself to the accused, regardless of whether or not he or she
has committed the crime intentionally.24 Thus famously, in Sophocles'
Oedipus the King, Oedipus asks Tiresias to help him find the miaros
whose presence has brought the plague on Thebes.25 For the protagonists
(and perhaps the audience), it makes no difference whether or not
Oedipus intended to commit parricide and incest. He may have been
victim of the gods or fate (or in modern parlance of unconscious drives),
but he is still personally miaros and therefore responsible for the corrup-
tion he brings to the city. As opposed to the tragedians themselves,
Aristotle seem to have thought that the miaron was an unfitting subject
for tragedy, because such repugnant acts were incapable of being purged
through pity and fear.26 The classical context thus helps to formulate two
 A constellation of chronotopes: If This Is a Man 79

questions for Holocaust testimony: how can moral pollution attach itself
to the consciousness of an innocent individual, one who has neither
intended nor perpetrated any crime? And secondly, is such miasma
purged through the act of shared communication, or (as Aristotle implies)
does communicating it further spread the plague?
Addressing the first of these questions, we might now reconsider the
haÈftling's `fever' experienced during the examination by Dr Pannwitz. As
already pointed out, Levi's `recovery' of former selfhood is, at least in
part, triggered by the presence of an Other who is capable of recognising
and understanding that self. But in my view, this moment of recognition
not only unites two minds in the narrative present of the interview. It also
travels, like an electric shock, back to Levi's pre-Lager selfhood, so that a
Dr Pannwitz insinuates itself into Levi's memories of being a student, of
being examined and held to account; a genuine hybridisation of perspec-
tives takes place in at least one of the participants.27 The chapter entitled
`Zinc' in The Periodic Table provides a chemical analogy to this process;
there Levi celebrates the properties of the metal in its impure state.
Impure, as opposed to pure, zinc acts as a catalyst for other chemical
substances, inducing in them a radical metamorphosis. From the proper-
ties of pure and impure zinc, Levi suggests, one might derive two
opposing principles: `the praise of purity, which protects from evil like
a coat of mail; the praise of impurity, which gives rise to changes, in other
words to life' (p. 34). Levi's praise of impure zinc comes, in this later
quasi-autobiography, at a point corresponding to his segregation from
fellow students at university due to the introduction of Mussolini's racial
laws. In those days, Levi came to feel that as a Jew, he was the catalyst for
life-enhancing change in others: `I am the impurity that makes the zinc
react' (p. 35). So the haÈftling who might `stain' anything he touched is
also the `fever' that might produce a living reaction from Pannwitz. But
as a corollary, Levi himself is also catalysed, metamorphosed by the
encounter.
Within the consciousness of the haÈftling, a transitory meeting of
minds seems to have taken place. If the encounter is dialogic, however,
it is so for only one of the interlocutors of the dialogue. Pannwitz gives
no indication that he recognises Levi as a fellow human being, a fact
underscored by the Kapo's humiliating treatment of Levi as he leaves the
room. And Levi, too, lapses into polarised categories by the end of the
interview: `the excitement which sustained me for the whole of the test
suddenly gives way and, dull and flat, I stare at the fair skin of his hand
writing down my fate' (p. 113). Hopelessness swiftly obliterates the
fleeting sense of a shared recognition between fellow scientists. But the
moment of recognition turns out to be far more destabilising and
80 Auschwitz as Hell

dangerous to Levi's retrospective sense of identity than it does to the

prisoner at the time. Unlike the scientifically dispassionate Levi who
narrates within the generic horizon of the vision chronotope, here
Levi knows that he has been touched, that is stained, by the Lager's
values, through this moment of intimate connection and recognition.
In an episode that produces similarly unsettling after-effects,
Steinberg remembers slapping the old Polish Jew and realises retro-
spectively that `the contagion had done its job, and I had not escaped
corruption.'
One could also argue that within this chronotope a reader may also
acquire a greater measure of addressivity as well. This brings us to the
second question raised earlier, about the effects of exposing an audience
to such `stained' narrative. Certainly, Levi is keenly aware of the pollutive
effects of the knowledge he bears. His collection of poems is entitled Ad
Ora Uncerta (1984), and the title is taken from Coleridge's The Rime of
the Ancient Mariner (`Since then, at an uncertain hour, / That agony
returns, / And til my ghastly tale is told / This heart within me burns.').28
Associating himself with Coleridge's mariner, Levi thus acknowledges
that the survivor's need to communicate may take precedence over the
audience's need to hear. But if there is a sense in which we are `inflicted'
with survivor testimony, it is also true that learning to carry this `infec-
tion' may connect us in uncommon ways to history and to each other.
Executing a characteristic, katabatic inversion, Levi suggests that if we are
infernally `stained' by the history of twentieth-century atrocity, we are
also connected by the same process to the century's greatest human
achievements:

Just as every person, even the most innocent, even the victim himself, feels some
responsibility for Hiroshima, Dallas, and Vietnam, and is ashamed, so even the
one least connected with the colossal labor of cosmic flights feels that a small
particle of merit falls to the human species, and so also to himself, and because
of this feels that he has greater value. For good or evil, we are a single people.
(The Mirror Maker, p. 108)

Sea-voyage and shipwreck

Returning to The Search for Roots, one finds textual extracts of trial
scenes that crowd the second of Levi's suggested pathways, `man suffers
unjustly'. Shifting laterally across to the third pathway, `man retains
stature', are mostly tales of adventures at sea. Here the reader is in the
region of what I would call the fifth major chronotope of If This Is a
Man.29 In this context, `the man who retains stature' for Levi is epito-
mised in the figure of Ulysses (primarily Homer's and Dante's).30 As
 A constellation of chronotopes: If This Is a Man 81

Cicioni explains, the Italian, Romantic interpretation of Dante's Ulysses

is of an `individual whose ``virtue'' lies in his striving to push human
``knowledge'' further, and who maintains his sense of identity even in
Hell.'31 Levi's admiration for this traditional figure might be further
particularised, however; in my view, Levi's Ulysses embodies the qualities
of ingenuity, adaptability, cunning, intellectual curiosity, hunger for the
unknown, love of collective endeavour and desire to share and commu-
nicate knowledge, to narrate his experience. In If This Is a Man, two
chapters present us with the protagonist as Ulyssean wanderer within a
chronotope of the Lager conceptualised as a spiritual voyage ending in
shipwreck: `The Canto of Ulysses' and its inverted image, `Kraus'.32
Just as the second and third pathways of The Search are contiguous and
in the case of some extracts, indistinguishable, so the chronotopes of trial
and voyage in If This Is a Man intersect and overlap in numerous ways.33
Most obviously, the key `trial' chapter (`Chemical Examination') is
immediately succeeded by the `voyage' chapter (`Canto of Ulysses'). Both
chapters present us with a haÈftling who attempts a reconnection with a
pre-Lager self, who submits his present self to trial and judgment, and
who in that trial scene willingly risks profound metamorphosis. In `The
Canto of Ulysses', the intellectual voyage of discovery on which haÈftling
Levi embarks ± teaching his French guide, Jean Samuel, something of
Italian and of Dante's Commedia ± constitutes a trial of no less sig-
nificance than the examination in chemistry discussed earlier. Like that
previous episode, the walk to the soup queue with Jean Samuel may be,
and has been, interpreted by many critics as a critical moment of self-
affirmation. In The Drowned and the Saved, Levi himself says that the
incident `made it possible for me to re-establish a link with the past,
saving it from oblivion and reinforcing my identity' (p. 112). But as I
emphasised earlier, this episode does more than reaffirm a pre-existent
self. Dante's lines, though presumably memorised in an earlier stage in
life, return to him as utterly strange and new. From memory, he recites the
speech of Ulysses to his crew, which urges them to set sail again, this time
out of the known world: ` ``Think of your breed; for brutish ignorance /
Your mettle was not made; you were made men, / To follow after
knowledge and excellence'' ' (If This Is a Man, p. 119; Inferno,
26.118±20). But as he recites it, he hears this exhortation `as if I also
was hearing it for the first time. For a moment I forget who I am and
where I am' (If This Is a Man, p. 119). Critics have debated at length how
to interpret the `flash of intuition' the prisoner Levi experiences shortly
after this recitation. On one hand, the prisoner's intuition into what is
`perhaps the reason for our fate, for our being here today' (p. 121) seems
to constitute a moral victory over a system which denies the prisoner the
82 Auschwitz as Hell

right to question `why' (`hier ist kein warum' (p. 35)). On the other hand,
the Dantean intuition is as ephemeral as is the sense of intellectual
achievement won in the previous chapter.34 They reach the soup queue
before Levi has been able to articulate this intuition for his friend (p. 121).
So the narration of this episode holds these two opposing selves in
tension: the Levi who dares to set sail and the Levi who `shipwrecks'
against reality in the chapter's final paragraph. The Levi who emerges
from this `sea-trial' is thus an ambivalent and hybrid figure, both a
creature of the Lager and one who aspires to escape it.
To this extent, one might argue that trial and voyage chronotopes trace
virtually identical pathways in Levi's If This Is a Man. But in the
chronotope of sea-voyage, there is no sense of miaron, or what has been
referred to as survivor's guilt. This change in emphasis might be described
(again with reference to the four pathways of The Search) as a move one
degree closer to the fourth, scientific pathway, `salvation through under-
standing'. As already noted, Levi's Ulysses is above all the intellectual
adventurer, who risks all in the pursuit of knowledge. In contrast to
Coleridge's mariner and Kafka's Joseph K, this Ulyssean adventurer is
heroically undisturbed by the complexity of his motives. In `Hatching the
Cobra', while he warns nuclear researchers not to hide behind the
hypocrisy of scientific neutrality, Levi concludes in Ulyssean vein, that
`basic research . . . can and must continue: if we were to abandon it, we
would betray our nature and our nobility as ``thinking reeds,'' and the
human species would no longer have any reason to exist' (The Mirror
Maker, p. 214). The sense of moral release, for the infernal traveller, is
palpable in this shift from trial to voyage chronotope.
Comparing the spatio-temporal horizons of the voyage chronotope
against those of the threshold, it becomes clear why, simply at a formal
level, this shift of chrontope brings with it a sense of moral release. As
does the threshold, the voyage chronotope presents the protagonist with a
precise and palpable border, a line of absolute demarcation between this
and another state of being. Speaking to Jean, Levi glosses Dante's phrase
in this way: ` ``I set forth'' . . . it is throwing oneself on the other side of a
barrier, we know the impulse well' (p. 119). But this `setting forth' across
a `barrier' contrasts with threshold crossing in a number of crucial ways.
First, the crossing is willed, not enforced. Secondly, what lies on the other
side of the barrier is the opposite of the Freudian uncanny; it is unknown
and uncharted, not mythic and familiar territory. If threshold crossing
leads the prisoner into mythic time, that is a time empty of all future, then
the voluntary Ulyssean `setting forth' precipitates him into an arena of
genuinely open-ended time. Third, the traveller who crosses the threshold
and sets forth on the voyage experiences, in each case, a sudden sense of
 A constellation of chronotopes: If This Is a Man 83

gravitational release (Levi refers to Dante's Geryon as the monster who

`escapes weight' (If This Is a Man, p. 171)); but this crossed-over
condition of `weightlessness' bears a different value within each chron-
otope. The weightless `exit via the chimney' is the absolute yet inescapable
horror faced by the prisoner, trapped in Auschwitz as the threshold
between human and non-human, between history and myth.35 But for the
Ulyssean voyager, weightlessness is the condition of the survivor, one
who adapts, improvises, thinks and moves lightly. This is the mood in
which both Levi and Jean conduct their journey towards the soup queue,
cunningly mapping a circuitous route so as to extend the burdenless
outward leg of the journey. In `The Man Who Flies', Levi argues that the
ease with which astronauts adjust to the absence of gravity demonstrates
the extraordinary adaptability of the human species (The Mirror Maker,
p. 172). The orientation of this observation is towards the future, both its
impending dangers and its potential for advancing scientific knowledge.
But since the voyage of Dante's Ulysses ends in shipwreck, can such a
journey be governed by a future-oriented chronotope? Levi's eleventh
chapter concludes with a quotation from the final line of Inferno, 26,
` ``And over our heads the hollow seas closed up'' ' (p. 121). In If This Is
a Man, the speaker of this line must be the narrator rather than the
protagonist Levi, who has by now fallen silent in the soup queue. At this
point in both Dante's and Levi's texts, then, there is a split in selfhood;
there is an `I' who drowns and another `I' who continues to speak.
Glancing briefly across the range of Levi's writing, one finds that the oft-
invoked image of shipwreck is applied with notable inconsistency to his
own life history. For example, in the Preface to The Mirror Maker, Levi
calls himself `a man who survived a shipwreck and has retained an
interest in shipwrecks ever since' (p. 4, my trans.). But in the Afterword
to If This Is a Man, Levi writes that he has `avoid[ed] that total
humiliation and demoralisation which led so many to spiritual ship-
wreck' (p. 398). Neither of these representations are consistent with the
image of the haÈftling Levi, over whose head the seas do apparently close
up at the end of the eleventh chapter of If This Is a Man. What is being
worked out here, I think, is a response to the sliding, asymmetric
addressivity of the trial chronotope. Within the space of the trial, the
temporal distance between former and present selves continually col-
lapses, returning both narrator and narratee to the time of judgment.
Within the chronotope of the voyage, by contrast, the doubled journey
of diegesis and narration splits apart; a loophole opens up before the
narrator, while the protagonist (Levi's former self) remains fully ad-
dressed by and accountable to the histories of the `drowned'. While
Dante's Ulysses shipwrecks and dies as protagonist, he survives as
84 Auschwitz as Hell

narrator to relate his journey in Inferno, 26. And while Levi the haÈftling
shipwrecks in his attempt to recite all of Ulysses' speech, Levi the
narrator successfully conveys to his interlocutors the vital importance
of this hour of conversation.
Moreover, in the shift of perspective from trial to voyage chronotope,
there is a significant adjustment to the text's dialogic construction of the
relation between `I' and `you', between narrator and narratee. Unlike
Coleridge's mariner, the Ulyssean narrator assumes his audience desires
to hear his story; this is equally true of Homer's and Dante's Ulysses.36
This mutually responsive relation between narrator and narratee is
mirrored, in both Dante's and Levi's texts, in the way one protagonist
addresses another. In contrast to the interview with Pannwitz, in
Chapter 11 both participants engage willingly and eagerly in conversa-
tion. Jean encourages Levi to speak of Dante, just as in the Inferno,
Virgil with formal courtesy requests the Greek to speak. As noted above,
Levi's Ulysses is a natural `talker'; his desire is to narrate his history, to
name himself even when his audience is a hostile one. Thus in The
Search, Levi selects the passage in which Homer's Odysseus, disguised
under the appellation `no name', makes himself known to his enemy,
Polyphemus:

He could have escaped in silence, but he prefers to take his revenge to the limit:
he is proud of his name, which up till now he has kept quiet about, and proud
of his courage and ingenuity. He is `the man of no account', but he wants to
make known to the tower of flesh just who is the mortal that has defeated him.
(The Search, p. 22)

In The Search, the Cyclops perhaps represents fascism's brutal and

unintelligent face; Levi confronts such a `tower of flesh' in the Kapo
who takes him to see Pannwitz. In that chapter, Levi only releases his
Ulyssean pride, the desire to name himself, at the level of narration. Not
until the following chapter does the protagonist come to `name' himself
through the recollection and recitation of Dante.37

The intersection of pathways

As before, the chronotope of the Ulyssean sea-voyage does not cancel out
alternative chronotopes. Anxieties about audience reception remain un-
alloyed, as Levi directs his last thoughts not to readers outside the
experience, but to Charles, a fellow survivor. The Truce also concludes
on a note of apprehension, as Levi relates the recurrent nightmare of
return to a family who refuses to listen to his story. But near the end of
 Notes 85

The Truce, Levi describes his homeward crossing into Italy in terms that
recall the multiplicity of pathways we have been exploring:

As the train, more tired than us, climbed toward the Italian frontier it snapped
in two like an overtaut cable . . . we knew that on the thresholds of our homes,
for good or ill, a trial awaited us, and we anticipated it with fear. We felt in our
veins the poison of Auschwitz, flowing together with our thin blood . . . We
felt the weight of centuries on our shoulders, we felt oppressed by a year of
ferocious memories . . . With these thoughts, which kept us from sleep, we
passed our first night in Italy, as the train slowly descended the deserted, dark
Adige Valley. (The Truce, p. 378)

This paragraph contains the resonances of all five chronotopes I have

been discussing here. There is the sense of threshold crossing, of a journey
of education with its mid-line `caesura' (the snapped cable), the sense of
forever inhabiting an infernal, visionary world (Auschwitz `in our veins'),
and alternatively of being placed on trial, of embarking on a voyage that
may end in the submersion of identity (the `weight of centuries', oppres-
sion of memories, `the poison flowing'). Finally all these chronotopes are
gathered into the narrative trajectory of an unfinalised katabatic journey
(`the train slowly descended'). Turning back to The Search, we might say
that Levi is approaching the base point of his spherical map, that he is
about to encounter his Black Hole. But while this may be true, we also
know from reading The Search and If This Is a Man, that even on that
route there are many different pathways open to the journeying prota-
gonist, narrator and reader. In Levi's company, we will have become
canny and subtle travellers, able to make the lateral shifts necessary for
survival, resistant to despair, curious about what metamorphoses lie
ahead, excited by the prospect of an unfinalisable journey. Katabasis
will have become a mental habit, a mode of existence, a timespace for
discovering unlooked for connections, for making good the claim that `we
are a single people'.

Notes

1. Primo Levi, The Mirror Maker, p. 127.

2. See Levi's If This Is a Man, p. 398; Ferdinando Camon, Conversations with
Primo Levi, pp. 60±1; and The Drowned and the Saved, p. 114.
3. Even more particularly in the tradition of Dante is Levi's aim to represent
Hell in clear and accessible writing. Levi thought that Paul Celan's obscure
writing style was `to be pitied rather than imitated'; generally, one should
aim for clarity: `since we the living are not alone, we must not write as if we
were alone. As long as we live we have a responsibility: we must answer for
what we write, word by word, and make sure that every word reaches its
86 Auschwitz as Hell
target.' Levi, `On Obscure Writing', in Other People's Trades, pp. 161±2. See
also Eugene Goodheart, `The Passion of Reason'.
4. See Risa Sodi, A Dante of Our Time; L. M. Gunzberg, `Down Among the
Dead Men: Levi and Dante in Hell'; Zvi Jagendorf, `Primo Levi Goes for
Soup and Remembers Dante'; Mirna Cicioni, Primo Levi: Bridges of Knowl-
edge; Nicholas Patruno, Understanding Primo Levi; Anthony Rudolf, At an
Uncertain Hour; and Judith Woolf, The Memory of the Offence, especially
Chapter 5, `A New Inferno', pp. 51±64.
5. On this point, see Cicioni, and Judith Woolf, The Memory of the Offence,
pp. 58±9. Woolf suggests another major parallel, that Levi's persona in If
This Is a Man is `in the most serious sense, a comic persona; it signals a
rejection of the nihilism and bitterness which ate up Jean AmeÂry' (p. 58).
6. Primo Levi, The Periodic Table, p. 58.
7. This quotation is from Levi's description of Conrad, a very important writer
for illustrating `man retaining stature' (The Search, p. 63).
8. Calvino writes, `Between these two poles . . . Levi traces . . . four lines of
resistance to all forms of despair, four responses that define his stoicism' (The
Search, p. 222).
9. On changing attitudes to technology and science in the twentieth century
generally, see Shattuck, Forbidden Knowledge: From Prometheus to Porno-
graphy.
10. On the chronotope of the threshold, whose `most fundamental instance is as
the chronotope of crisis and break in a life', see Bakhtin, `Forms of Time and
of the chronotope', The Dialogic Imagination, p. 248.
11. On the other hand, Dante knew that, theologically speaking, there are
only three classes of souls, the damned, the saved and those who may yet
be saved. Technically speaking, there is only one threshold crossing in
Inferno, and that is the crossing into Hell. Theologically, the damned soul
is sul fundo when he crosses the gate marked `lasciate ogne speranza', and
Dante the pilgrim reaches that place very early on in the third canto of the
poem.
12. Sigmund Freud, `The Uncanny', The Complete Psychological Works of
Sigmund Freud, vol. 17, p. 220.
13. In terms of its chronotope, the train journey constitutes a demonic inversion
of the chronotope of the road, which Bakhtin describes in `Forms of time'
(The Dialogic Imagination, pp. 243±5). The names of stations, spied through
the slats, are signs that mark, instead of the possible digressions and subplots
of a conventional adventure narrative, how the deportees are now absolutely
cut off from such narrative possibilities.
14. It might be added that the freight trains must figure as a dominant motif in
Holocaust writing, because for those selected immediately to be gassed, this
train journey was all there was; the sum total of their experience was this
transportation out of historical time.
15. It is partly because of this element of foreclosure or `entelechy' (fulfilling a
pre-existent form) that Bakhtin viewed the genre of autobiography as lacking
the potential to develop polyphony. See, for example, The Dialogic Imagi-
nation, p. 141. See Adriana Cavarero, Relating Narratives, p. 84, for another
critical estimate of autobiography.
16. On the chronotope of the vision, see Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination,
 Notes 87
pp. 155±7. On Levi's high estimation of Lucretius, see Peter Forbes,
`Introduction' to Levi's The Search, pp. ix±x.
17. See Kofman on the concentration camp as a `limit-experience' which tests
humanity in a crucial way (Smothered Words, p. 60); and for a further
development of this theme, see Todorov, Facing the Extreme.
18. Levi was fascinated by Kafka's The Trial, though also resistant to it. See
`Translating Kafka', The Mirror Maker, pp. 126±30.
19. Levi thus addresses his German readers in The Drowned and the Saved: `I am
alive, and I would like to understand you in order to judge you' (p. 143).
20. Camon, Conversations with Levi, p. 13. See also Dalya Sachs, `The Lan-
guage of Judgement: Primo Levi's Se questo eÁ un uomo'.
21. I can think of only one case, one issue, on which Levi suspends judgment
completely: `I ask that we meditate on the story of the ``crematorium ravens''
with pity and rigour, but that a judgment of them be suspended' (The
Drowned and the Saved, p. 43).
22. Bakhtin argues that the trial of the hero in conventional romance narrative
involves the hero affirming his identity against alien forces. The identity he
affirms is pre-existent to the moment of trial itself; hence his heroism consists
of the strength to resist change. The reaffirmed self of romance narrative is
thus ahistorical, or more exactly anti-historical. See The Dialogic Imagina-
tion, pp. 105±6.
23. Instances of the term in Greek tragedy include: Sophocles, Oedipus at
Colonnus, 1374, Antigone, 172; Euripides, Iphigenia in Taurus, 1229,
Hippolytus, 316±18.
24. The tragedians' usage of the term miaros was somewhat different to Plato's
and Aristotle's; the latter understood it to mean someone who had inten-
tionally committed a crime. For Aeschylus and Sophocles, the miaros seems
to have been one who had committed a crime, whether intentionally or (like
Oedipus) not.
25. Sophocles, Oedipus the King, in Sophocles I: Oedipus the King; Oedipus at
Colonnus; Antigone, p. 313. Compare (applied to Oedipus himself): Oedi-
pus at Colonnus, 1374.
26. Aristotle wrote, the `repugnant' (to miaron) `arouses neither fellow-feeling
nor pity nor fear' (Poetics, 13.35 (1453a)). For Aristotle's well-known theory
of katharsis, see Poetics 6.28.
27. Levi learned from correspondence with another SS chemist, Dr Mueller, that
Dr Pannwitz might not even have been responsible for Levi getting the job in
the Auschwitz laboratory (which helped keep him alive in the winter of
1944). See The Periodic Table, p. 219f.
28. The quotation is also used as an epigraph for two other works by Levi: Lilit
and Other Stories and Moments of Reprieve.
29. For Bakhtin, this chronotope would probably form a sub-class of the
adventure chronotope. But it is clear that the voyage at sea had a particular
meaning and resonance for Levi, which is epitomised in Dante's account of
the last voyage of Ulysses.
30. Losey, Jagendorf, H.S. Hughes and Sachs interpret Levi's Ulysses in line with
the standard Italian Romantic reading of Dante, in which Ulysses is seen a
noble character, unjustly condemned to Hell. By contrast, Risa Sodi takes a
medievalist approach to Levi's Ulysses, arguing that `Farinata, Bruno Latini,
88 Auschwitz as Hell
and Ulysses . . . have less to do with Levi's victims and more to do with his
oppressors. They, too, suffer and it is just that they suffer' (A Dante of Our
Time, p. 62). I find Sodi unpersuasive on this point, though, especially given
Levi's positive remarks about Ulysses made elsewhere (for example, The
Search, p. 22).
31. Although Cicioni argues, I think correctly, that in If This Is a Man, this
traditional interpretation is juxtaposed and held in tension with an image of
`human existence in Auschwitz' (Bridges of Knowledge, p. 34).
32. But as Tony Judt points out, the presence of Ulysses, `Levi's favorite literary
figure and alter ego', is not confined to Chapter 11 of If This Is a Man. Judt
notes that Polyphemus appears as the BlockaÈlteste in charge of the showers,
and that numerous allusions to Ulysses's adventures appear in The Truce and
The Periodic Table (`The Courage of the Elementary', p. 32).
33. An example of sea-voyage as trial in The Search is Melville's Moby Dick,
about which Levi writes, `the hunting of the whale is felt as a sentence and a
justification of man' (The Search, p. 118).
34. For example, Jagendorf rightly questions whether the prisoner Levi experi-
ences any revelation of an epiphanic nature, and even if he does, how
significant this revelation is if it cannot be passed on. Jagendorf's reading
emphasises the lacuna [. . .] cloaking the nature of the prisoner's intuition
(`Primo Levi Goes for Soup', p. 43).
35. Compare Millu's Smoke Over Birkenau, p. 22.
36. On Homer's Ulysses being moved to tears by hearing his own story narrated
by another, see Cavarero, Relating Narratives, p. 17.
37. Levi writes elsewhere, `we . . . speak also because we are invited to do so
[like] Ulysses, who immediately yields to the urgent need to tell his story . . .
at the court of the king of the Phaeacians' (Drowned and the Saved, p. 121).
 Chapter 4

Surviving with Ghosts: Second-

generation Holocaust narratives

Bog-boys and fire-children

In Toni Morrison's Beloved (1987), Sethe is haunted by the flesh and

blood ghost of her murdered infant; this ghost is represented as a grown
woman who mysteriously surfaces out of the water at the beginning of the
novel (p. 50). Like Dante at the bottom of Hell, Beloved exists somewhere
between life and death (`I am not dead I am not' (p. 213)).1 Her existence
is temporally arrested (`it is always now there will never be a time when I
am not crouching and watching' (p. 210)). And she is ready to surface
from the depths at any point, to remind Sethe (and the reader) of her
unjust death and the horrific beginnings of African American history. A
number of novels about the Second World War also begin with children
rising from graves of mud and fire to haunt the living with their first-hand
knowledge of atrocity. William Golding's Darkness Visible (1979) begins
in the middle of the London Blitz. His protagonist, a boy later given the
name Matty, emerges from a street engulfed in flames: `where now,
humanly speaking, the street was no longer part of the habitable world ±
at that point where the world had become an open stove . . . right
there . . . something moved' (Darkness Visible, p. 12). So impossible is it
that a human child could have survived such conditions that Matty seems
to be partly supernatural, a spectre sent directly from Hell. Looking into
the flames, a fireman thinks he is looking at `a version of the infernal city'
(p. 11). Because of his badly scarred face and body, Matty causes
revulsion in people wherever he goes and eventually adopts a self-punish-
ing Evangelism which leads inadvertently to at least one person's death in
the novel.2
If Matty emerges from the inferno into a world beyond hope, Anne
Michaels' first-person narrator, Jakob Beer, is exhumed to find himself in
more fortunate circumstances. At the beginning of Fugitive Pieces (1996),
Jakob pictures himself as a very small child, burrowing his way out of
90 Surviving with Ghosts: Second-generation Holocaust narratives

rubble after his native Polish city, Biskupin, has been reduced to sand.
Comparing himself to `Tollund Man, Grauballe Man', he describes how,
`bog-boy, I surfaced in the miry streets of the drowned city' (Fugitive
Pieces, p. 5). In this novel, `no one is born just once,' but returning from
the grave is not necessarily a good thing: `if you're lucky, you'll emerge
again in someone's arms; or unlucky, wake when the long tail of terror
brushes the inside of your skull' (p. 5). The child Jakob turns out to be one
of the lucky ones. Discovered, `stiff as a golem' (p. 12), by a Greek
geologist named Athos, he is smuggled out of Poland and raised in safety
on the island of Zakynthos. But Jakob himself is haunted by another
child, the ghost of his fifteen-year-old sister Bella, who was killed by Nazis
while Jakob hid in a cupboard.
In Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse 5 (1969), Billy Pilgrim is another
`Tollund Man', an American soldier who happens to be on the ground in
Dresden when the Allied forces bombed the city to rubble (Slaughter-
house 5 (1969)). Billy miraculously survives the bombing but is stunned
out of his wits by the enormity and senselessness of the destruction. This
experience turns the man into a post-infernal child, as Billy abandons
reason or logic for the uncomprehending perspective of an imaginary race
of aliens, who dismiss all human tragedy with an indifferent shrug, `so it
goes'.3
And finally, W. G. Sebald's Austerlitz (2001) describes the story of a
Holocaust survivor who, on reaching his retirement years, is suddenly
made ill with the urgent desire to know the child he once was and the
family to whom he belonged before his evacuation from Czechoslovakia
to Wales. Near the end of his long odyssey across Europe, he is given a
photograph of himself as a young boy. He only partially recognises the
boy as his former self: spectrally present, but a different being, inhabiting
a different world. The boy looks out at Austerlitz with challenging and
accusing eyes, suggesting that it is partly his, the ghostly boy's, will that
has driven Austerlitz to exhaustion and illness in an attempt to piece
together his lost past.
In Freudian terms, these ghostly children are signs of the return of a
repressed trauma, distant or displaced from the immediate context of the
narrative. As children who survived or just evaded the Holocaust,
Austerlitz and Jakob Beer had little understanding of the events they
witnessed at the time. The narratives in which they appear are fictions,
not testimony, so in this sense too, their experiences are a degree removed
from the actual, historical atrocity.4 Yet these child-like apparitions
indicate that displaced trauma returns to interrupt the present, flooding
it with images from another temporality: arrested, mythic and seemingly
eternal. Such children do not grow up; they appear and disappear, always
 Bog-boys and fire-children 91

as they were at the time they were lost. Since their perspective on horror is
innocent and uncomprehending, their questioning gaze can instantly
undermine any retrospective illumination or evaluation of historical
events which a distanced, adult observer may have acquired since the
events themselves took place.
The appearance of such ghosts propels the narrator and/or central
protagonist of the narrative deep into a Dantean dark wood, a state of
estrangement and confusion, from which only a descent journey into the
ghost's home territory can release them. Reading descent narratives like
Austerlitz and Fugitive Pieces in these terms invites comparison with
psychoanalytic accounts of, and methods of treating, traumatic memory.5
Indeed, the psychoanalytic method of probing the hidden past to uncover
forbidden or unbearable truth is itself a form of descent narrative; indeed,
as James Hillman has shown, in developing this form of therapy, Freud
was profoundly influenced by his reading of Virgil's Aeneid and other
classical narratives.6 As Nicola King pointed out in Memory, Narrative,
Identity, Freudian psychoanalysis embraces two contrasting models of
memory: the archeological and the constructivist (p. 5). The one more
fully developed by Freud himself is the archaeological model, in which the
remembering consciousness digs backward in time to uncover an en-
crypted source of psychic pain (Memory, p. 12). The second approach,
developed by Jean Laplanche and others from Freud's concept of nach-
traÈglichkeit (`afterwardsness'), is the constructivist model, in which the
trauma is produced retroactively by the remembering consciousness
(Memory, p. 20). In the constructivist scenario, a `primal scene' does
not become traumatic until some later event triggers feelings of horror
about the earlier scene. In the context of the present enquiry, however, it
is important to remember that both models require the analyst and
analysand to initiate a descent journey into the past; the difference lies
in the way they locate the source of pain, respectively, either within or
outside the encrypted, primal scene. Though closely related to these
psychoanalytic models, the emphasis in such haunted descent narratives
as Beloved, Darkness Visible, Austerlitz and Fugitive Pieces is somewhat
different, in that the source of trauma is not represented as inert matter,
shaped by the backward look of the analysand, or buried deep within his
or her unremembered past. In these haunted narratives, the underworld is
an active presence; it expresses itself in a human form, with its own
agency and will. The descent journey in such narratives is more markedly
represented as a dialogic process, where the hero meets the ghost halfway
along the underworld road.7
In this chapter, I will focus mainly on two such haunted or, to use
Derrida's term, `hauntological' descent narratives: Sebald's Austerlitz and
92 Surviving with Ghosts: Second-generation Holocaust narratives

Michaels' Fugitive Pieces.8 I have chosen these two novels in particular

because they provide contrasting treatments of the descent through
memory, history and imagination to confront the trauma that Primo
Levi, and millions of others, suffered directly. In the previous chapter, we
saw how Levi's Holocaust testimony, when read through the filter of a
later, more distanced work (The Search for Roots), represented Ausch-
witz not as a monolithic, absolute evil, but as a multi-layered constella-
tion of chronotopes, through which many different routes through Hell
are traceable by the contemporary reader. However complex this repre-
sentation is, the relation of later generations of readers to the Holocaust is
not static but ever-changing. To those who come after Levi, who have had
no direct experience of the event or contact with survivors, the landscape
of this Hell will have changed again. And for a second generation, one of
the distinctive characteristics of the Holocaust is its looming absence,
`looming' because its influence is still pervasively present, although
increasingly beyond the reach of immediate experience. As William Bronk
writes in `The Feeling', `One has a feeling it is like / that war whose last
battle was fought long / after the treaty was signed. The imminence /
relates to a past doom' (We Have Come Through, p. 32). The fact that
this unspecified `past doom' has come unmoored from a specific address
in time and space is precisely what gives it the power to haunt the
speaker's present. Bronk returns us here to a `feeling' very like Levinas's il
y a, the generalised sense of horror pervading every aspect of experience
that was discussed in Chapter 1.
Indeed, several recent studies have suggested that contemporary Wes-
tern culture is essentially traumatic, at once dislocated from the specific
sources of trauma and destined to go on reliving it.9 While dissenting
from this view of generalised trauma, Dominick LaCapra concedes that
`the after-effects ± the hauntingly possessive ghosts ± of traumatic events
are not fully owned by anyone and, in various ways, affect everyone'
(Writing History, Writing Trauma, p. xi). LaCapra himself is at pains to
distinguish between the `victims of traumatizing events and commenta-
tors (or those born later)' (p. xi). Following his suggestion and to preserve
the distinction between direct Holocaust testimony such as Levi's If This
Is a Man, and literature about the Holocaust such as the two examples
discussed in this chapter, I will refer to the latter as second-generation
Holocaust narratives. It would be a serious distortion, however, to treat
the distinction between testimonial and second-generation narratives as
simply a distinction between fact and fiction, since Holocaust testimonies
such as Levi's draw upon existing literary traditions and generic con-
ventions while second-generation narratives are often obsessive about
accumulating historical facts within the framework of fiction.10
 Bog-boys and fire-children 93

In psychoanalytic terms, Jakob Beer and Austerlitz might both be

described as traumatised subjects, whose recurrent mental distress forces
them to return to the past, in order to confront the sources of their pain.
As I have suggested, Jakob and Austerlitz are driven to undertake this
journey by underworld forces that appear to possess their own, separate
wills and desires. The question facing both these descent protagonists
is not simply whether they can uncover the hidden truths of the past,
but how, and whether, they can learn to survive with their ghosts.
Broadly speaking, Austerlitz traces a journey through Hell that resists all
closure; Austerlitz's ghosts refuse to be appeased, and the protagonist
himself is hollowed out, rendered spectral, by the growing burden of
loss. In contrast to this tragically inflected narrative, Fugitive Pieces
represents a comedic journey, in which the underworld ghosts release
their hold on the protagonist, who goes on to find new love and hope in
later life.11
While in psychoanalytic terms, the contrast between these two texts
might be described as the difference between traumatic repetition and the
successful working through of trauma, in fact the resolution of both these
narratives is more ambivalent than either of these clinical outcomes might
suggest. I have described Fugitive Pieces as a comedic narrative, but the
novel is also deeply melancholy in tone, especially in Part II, which treats
of the posthumous influence of Jakob Beer's work. And Austerlitz, while
tragically unresolved, nevertheless contains passages of astonishing
luminosity which linger well beyond the space they are given in the
narrative. Taken together, the two novels also provide contrasting ex-
amples of the contemporary, secular sublime. With virtually no para-
graph breaks in over four hundred pages, Sebald's Austerlitz conveys the
sense of exhausted linguistic excess that compulsively covers over and
conceals what it cannot name or possess.12 On the other hand, Michaels'
fragmented prose, often set out like poems in short, widely spaced
paragraphs ± Michaels was already an established poet when she wrote
this novel ± gestures to the silences behind her broken and `fugitive'
words. Both novels avoid the traditional forms of narrative closure that
might be said to seal over past trauma.13 As discussed in Chapter 2,
descent narratives are generically prone to tricksy exits, but neither of
these novels forces a spectacularly swift or facile conclusion on the reader.
In one case, the descent protagonist re-emerges from the Hell of his past;
in the other, there is no return for the central protagonist but there is one
for the narrator and reader. In both novels, the infernal journey consists
of a quest for knowledge and understanding of a horrifying past. While
this quest remains largely unfulfilled, Jakob and Austerlitz both gain
partial knowledge and an unspeakable wisdom from their sojourn among
94 Surviving with Ghosts: Second-generation Holocaust narratives

underworld ghosts. What matters is not the arrival but the process of
descent, and in Jakob's case, of reascent.

Vertigo and luminosity: W. G. Sebald's Austerlitz

W. G. Sebald's Austerlitz (2001) tells the story of a retired architectural

historian who, after a career of more than thirty years as a lecturer in
Britain, sets out to discover the history of his childhood in Eastern
Europe. As a Jewish child, he had been evacuated from Prague to
Llanwddyn, Wales, in the late 1930s. Given a new name, Dafydd Elias,
he lives an alias existence, with a new family, community and nationality.
He successfully suppresses all memories of the past until he reaches
retirement years. The novel begins with his search for roots that leads
him on a katabatic journey across Europe, first to Prague where he meets
his old nurserymaid, Vera RysÏanovaÂ, and visits the Czech concentration
camp of TerezõÂn, and then to the new BibliotheÁque Nationale in Paris,
where he hopes to recover documents relating to his father's disappear-
ance. Austerlitz's quest is an impossible one; with every revealed clue, his
sense of irrecoverable loss deepens. The knowledge he gains seems to flow
through him like sand, and this, he comes to think, is true of every aspect
of human experience. In a summation that echoes Lyotard's idea of
`dispossession without return', the narrator reflects, `the darkness does
not lift but becomes yet heavier as I think how little we can hold in mind,
how everything is constantly lapsing into oblivion with every extin-
guished life, how the world is, as it were, draining itself' (p. 31).14
But while this theme is expressed in different ways by a number of
characters, the novel continues to amass an extraordinary amount of
factual detail pertaining to European architectural and military history,
the history of Prague during the Nazi occupation, Welsh communities
during the war and Paris in the 1960s. We also hear extensively about
Austerlitz's student days, his recurrent attacks of hysterical epilepsy, his
intellectual interests and his closest friendships. In the unnamed narrator,
Austerlitz finds a kindred spirit to whom he can confide the details of his
difficult and painful journey. As in Conrad's Heart of Darkness, the
reader learns of Austerlitz's story through the frame narrative of the
narrator's own, distinctly similar descent journey. But unlike Kurtz,
who remains invisible and almost inaudible at the heart of Marlow's
narration, Austerlitz is vividly present in the narrator's discourse. The
narrator reports his words directly, with only a terse `he said' here and
there tagging many pages of Austerlitz's first-person narration. And
again unlike Kurtz, Austerlitz is neither geographically distanced nor
 Vertigo and luminosity: W. G. Sebald's Austerlitz 95

temporally sealed off from the narrator's account of their travels. They
meet by chance in Antwerp, Paris and London, at random intervals over a
period of years; at each meeting Austerlitz resumes the biography of his
past and the story of his present quest. The narrator meanwhile pursues
his own, more inchoate and haphazard journey, almost living, it would
seem, to bridge the hiatuses in Austerlitz's narration. Along with the
many hypodiegetic narratives embedded in Austerlitz's narration, this
delicate but extensive tapestry of first- and third-person histories stretches
right across the deepening abyss of silence and oblivion to which the
world, in Austerlitz's view, is inescapably tending.
Throughout Austerlitz, as in other Sebald novels, the sense of vertigo
produced by gazing into this abyss of silence is pervasive and sometimes
terrifying.15 At the same time, however, vertiginous terror also yields to
luminous images of scenes and faces from the hidden past. In one inset
narrative, for example, Austerlitz describes his friend Alphonso's research
into the habits of night-flying moths. These moths appeared to leave trails
of light behind them, `in all kinds of curlicues and streamers and
spirals . . . which did not really exist, explained Alphonso, but were
merely phantom traces created by the sluggish reaction of the human eye'
(p. 131). These trails of moth light might be taken as a metaphor for the
way forgotten faces and memories surface with ghostly luminosity from
what would appear to be impenetrable darkness: `it was such unreal
phenomena, said Alphonso, the sudden incursion of unreality into the
real world, certain effects of light in the landscape spread out before us, or
in the eye of a beloved person, that kindled our deepest feelings' (pp. 131±
2). Neither the terror of darkness nor the intensity of luminous recogni-
tion is permanent in Austerlitz. Indeed, each emotion seems to be drawn
to the other extreme, so that vertiginous terror is constantly lapsing or
katabatically inverting into recognition and vice versa.
Throughout this ongoing process Austerlitz never reaches a rock-
bottom point of abject fear or revelatory knowledge (the equivalent of
Kurtz's cry, `the horror, the horror!'), yet his descent journey does not
lack shape or sense of progression. It takes place in two distinct stages as
Austerlitz travels first to Prague in search of his lost mother and his
childhood self, and then, after an interlude in London, to Paris in search
of his lost father. At each stage, an episode of mental breakdown or
overwhelming sense of alienation is followed by the perception of a two-
way traffic passing between the ordinary world and an underworld of
spirits. This perception most often leads to an encounter with some
concealed or otherwise mysterious horror. It is usually at this stage that a
guide, sometimes human, sometimes otherworldly, appears to conduct
Austerlitz either safely past the danger or deeper into the abyss. Examples
96 Surviving with Ghosts: Second-generation Holocaust narratives

of the former include the violet-eyed archivist, Teresa AmbrosovaÂ

(p. 209), and Penelope Peacefull, the antiquarian bookseller (p. 199).
These minor characters with their irenic last names are pale imitations of
the novel's Beatrice, Marie de Verneuil, a much-remembered friend of
Austerlitz's youth, whom he sets out to find, along with the traces of his
father, at the end of the novel. Generally under the aegis of one such
guide, Austerlitz experiences a moment of luminosity comparable to
the moth light alluded to above, which is followed or preceded by a
vertiginous vision of revealed rather than veiled horror. From this more
terrifying encounter, Austerlitz recovers, though shakily. After an inter-
val, the second stage of the journey is initiated, and the cycle begins again.
In the frame narrative, the narrator undergoes a similar series of experi-
ences, in a parallel journey that leads from alienation or breakdown to
horror at some veiled otherness, supernatural guidance, luminous insight
and eventually the confrontation with revealed horror. As in Levi's The
Search for Roots, the protagonist never arrives at the bottom of the map;
the katabatic process merely shifts laterally from one phase of life to the
next, or one character's life-story to another's. In order to demonstrate
Sebald's innovative transformation of traditional katabatic topoi, I would
like to focus on three of these experiences in more detail: the threshold
crossing from dark wood to Hell proper, the vertiginous confrontation
with horrifying otherness and the experience of luminous recognition set
off by darkness.
Regarding the threshold crossing, one might begin by recalling that,
unlike Aeneas and other classical heroes, Dante does not initiate the
journey into Hell; he finds himself lost, and soon learns that his descent
has been decreed by the soul of his beloved Beatrice. In Freudian psycho-
analysis, the unconscious is said to exert its pressure subterraneously,
without the individual's conscious consent or understanding. At the start
of their journeys, both the narrator and Austerlitz are subject to sudden
and inexplicable illnesses, which a psychoanalyst would describe as the
work of the unconscious as it displaces the effects of unacknowledged
trauma in their respective pasts. The narrator `had begun to feel unwell'
on the train to Antwerp (p. 1). And more forcibly for Austerlitz, `it was as
if an illness that had been latent in me for a long time were now
threatening to erupt, as if some soul-destroying and inexorable force
had fastened upon me' (p. 173). This volcanic and inexorable force can be
understood, in Austerlitz's case, as the gigantic recoil generated by
accumulated suppressions of a prewar identity: `I sensed that in truth I
had neither memory nor the power of thought, nor even any existence,
that all my life had been a constant process of obliteration, a turning away
from myself and the world' (p. 174). But in another sense, this dislocation
 Vertigo and luminosity: W. G. Sebald's Austerlitz 97

has its source in the repressed memories not just of Austerlitz's past but of
an entire buried world. If this is so, the immediate causes of Austerlitz's
mental breakdown are external (as in Dante's Inferno) as well as internal
(as in Freud's account of psychic disorder). As for the narrator, we never
learn exactly why he feels unwell. He may be an evacuee with a similar
suppressed history or, as seems likely, he may have absorbed Austerlitz's
story to the extent that his friend's illness has become his own by the time
he begins his narration. If this is so, then the narrator is also a figure for
the reader in the text, saddened and made wiser, like the wedding guest in
Coleridge's `Ancient Mariner', by listening to Austerlitz's story.
In so far as he is both an individual character and an embodiment of
postwar alienation, Austerlitz embarks on a Dantean journey that is at
once personal and archetypal, remembering Dante's first line: `midway on
the journey of our life' (my emphasis). Unlike Dante, however, Austerlitz
is drawn down by the will of the underworld, rather than sent down by
celestial imperative. Another typically modern feature of his journey is
its belatedness. Austerlitz is much older than the middle aged Dante;
`I . . . was only now being born, almost on the eve of my death' (p. 194).
For these reasons, Austerlitz is less of a stranger to the underworld than
Dante. Like the silenced ghosts of his past, he loses the power of coherent
speech; `if language may be regarded as an old city full of streets and
squares . . . then I was like a man who has been abroad a long time and
cannot find his way through this urban sprawl any more' (pp. 174±5).
Aeneas and Dante find it difficult to narrate the descent journey, having
returned from Hell; but for the haunted Austerlitz, speech becomes
difficult on the journey itself. He resembles the Balzacian character,
Colonel Chabert, whom he discovers towards the end of the novel, when
reading in the BibliotheÁque Nationale.16
Paraphrasing Balzac's plot, Austerlitz explains how the colonel is
mistaken for dead in battle, and then `years later, after long wanderings
across Germany . . . risen from the dead, so to speak, [he] returns to Paris
to claim his rights to his estates, to his wife . . . and to his own name'
(p. 394). Austerlitz has also been living under an alias (Dafydd Elias) and
cannot now lay claim to his real identity. Like Chabert, `he is presented as
a ghostly figure' (p. 394). As early as the sixth form he is told his birth
name, Jacques Austerlitz, by a headmaster but this information makes his
former identity more mysterious rather than less: `I was convinced that no
one else bore that name, no one in Wales, or in the Isles, or anywhere else
in the world' (pp. 94±5). He learns that it is the name of a famous
Napoleonic victory (p. 97), and much later, at the Austerlitz railway
station in Paris, he has an image of his father departing from the station to
an unknown destination. The name therefore links him to his father's
98 Surviving with Ghosts: Second-generation Holocaust narratives

disappearance and to European history, but in ways that he finds obscure

and beyond his reach.
From this dark wood of illness and alienation, Austerlitz begins his
descent journey proper. He finds his entrance by chance, during his
nocturnal wanderings across London. Liverpool Street Station, `with its
main concourse fifteen to twenty feet below street level, was one of the
darkest and most sinister places in London, a kind of entrance to the
underworld' (p. 180). Under this site, we later learn, lie the burial grounds
of Bedlam Hospital, which makes Austerlitz wonder whether the accu-
mulated pain and suffering of the mentally ill are still to be felt in the
station's deep concourse (pp. 182±3). As Austerlitz travels down the
steeply banked escalators, he begins to search for familiar faces `among
the passengers coming towards me in the tiled passages, on the escalators
plunging steeply into the depths, or behind the grey windows of a train
just pulling out' (p. 179). And when he learns about the Bedlam Hospital
burial grounds under Bishopsgate and Liverpool Street, he feels `as if the
dead were returning from their exile' (p. 188). Immediately after this, on
an obscure impulse, he enters the disused and soon to be demolished
Ladies' Waiting Room of Liverpool Street Station (p. 192). Here he
suddenly remembers his arrival in Britain, as a child evacuee, and the
room seems to him to `contain all the hours of my past life' (p. 192). At
this point, the reader begins to feel that the `series of coincidences' leading
to this and other revelations is the work of an invisible agency, the
subterraneous pressure exerted on the living by many millions of unjustly
condemned souls. Thus Sebald distinctively represents the katabatic topos
of the threshold crossing as one that flows both ways between under- and
overworlds. If Austerlitz is drawn into the abyss, this is in part because the
souls of the dead gather at such underworld entrances, compelling the
living to descend as they ascend. In Negotiating with the Dead, Atwood
points out that the dead always return because they want blood (p. 149).
In Sebald's novel, however, the dead return for the same reason that the
living descend to Hell, to gain secret or forbidden knowledge and
wisdom.
The narrator is likewise drawn to the underworld by an obscure
compulsion, as he relates at the start of the novel. He travels from the
UK to Belgium `partly for study purposes, partly for other reasons which
were never entirely clear to me' (p. 1). In Antwerp he visits the Noctur-
ama, a zoo housing small, nocturnal animals, and is struck by the intense
gaze of the caged animals: `several of them had strikingly large eyes, and
the fixed, inquiring gaze found in certain painters and philosophers who
seek to penetrate the darkness which surrounds us purely by means of
looking and thinking' (p. 3). This textual description is supplemented by
 Vertigo and luminosity: W. G. Sebald's Austerlitz 99

four inset photographs, two of animals' eyes, two of philosophers', all of

which stare fixedly out of the page at the reader. Unsettled by the animals'
eyes, he makes his way to Antwerp Centraal Station, where he meets
Austerlitz. Once again, one has the sense that this life-changing encounter
has been orchestrated for the narrator by some invisible agency. In this
case, the ghostly presence makes itself felt through the mute inquiry of the
caged creatures. Austerlitz's friend Marie remarks later in the novel that
`captive animals and we ourselves, their human counterparts, view one
another aÁ travers une breÁche d'incompreÂhension' (pp. 368±9). From
pigeons trapped underground to muzzled dogs in Prague, the many small
creatures in Austerlitz convey the impression of a living, human world
filled with the mute suffering of other species. The effect of the nocturnal
animals' eyes on the reader is still more haunting, because the photo-
graphs show only fragments of four, unidentified faces. The lack of titles
or other means of identification, along with their sometimes oblique
connection to the immediate narrative context, divest the photographs in
Austerlitz of the authenticating power they possess in other narratives.17
The photographed faces stare questioningly at the reader, just as the
reader puzzles over the images, attempting to place them in the textual
narrative. In the first chapter, it appears to be the Nocturama's staring
eyes that propel the narrator towards his life-changing encounter with
Austerlitz.
Austerlitz himself becomes the narrator's underworld guide, explaining
the architectural history and changing topography of Hell in the over-
world. His lengthy commentaries on Breendonk, together with drawings
and plans of the fortress, function in this way, as the narrator's intro-
duction to Europe's recent, infernal history. Austerlitz's general theory is
that fortresses, ostentatious palaces, museums, railway stations and other
architectural structures in which military or economic power is concen-
trated will bring danger and suffering to those whom the buildings were
originally designed to protect. Designed as a protective fortress and
turned into a Nazi penal camp in 1940, Breendonk illustrates the
principle `that the largest fortifications will naturally attract the largest
enemy forces, and that the more you entrench yourself the more you must
remain on the defensive' (p. 19). Drawn in by Austerlitz's commentary,
the narrator soon visits Breendonk himself. Expecting a `star-shaped
fortress' (an image recurrently associated with rationally constructed
penal architecture), the narrator instead approaches `something hunched
and misshapen: the broad back of a monster, I thought, risen from this
Flemish soil like a whale from the deep' (p. 25). (In theological commen-
tary, Jonah's whale is often glossed as a figure for the Devil, an associa-
tion Melville exploits to the full in Moby Dick.18) Breendonk turns out to
100 Surviving with Ghosts: Second-generation Holocaust narratives

be more irrationally, infernally evil than the narrator had been led to
expect. Entering the fortress is, for him, a descent into the Hell mouth.
The absence of rational design, and the inversion of the building's original
function from protective fortress to torture chamber, marks Breendonk
out as a particularly twentieth-century form of gateway to Hell. As we
saw with Levi's allusions to Dante, the concentration camp horrifically
inverted traditional, theological conceptions of Hell, by turning it into a
place which expressed a demonic inversion of divine Justizia. The horror
of a place that witnessed the torture of the philosopher Jean AmeÂry and
many others deepens when one learns that it was originally constructed as
a place of refuge (p. 33).
In the previous two chapters, I discussed the characteristics of katabatic
religious conversion and secular inversion, both of which typically occur
at the lowest point, the ground zero, of the descent journey. Whether
involving the physical `upside-downing' of the hero, as in Inferno and
Under the Volcano, or some radical mental inversion of perspective, as in
Levi's The Search for Roots, the turn effects a reversal of the descent
narrative's downward trajectory. In Austerlitz, at Breendonk and later at
the new BibliotheÁque Nationale, we witness the demonic reversal of this
process, the collapse of apparently solid ground into a psychological or
historical abyss that produces a sense of vertiginous terror in the pro-
tagonist. The other kind of inversion, from descent to return, also occurs
in Austerlitz, but there is no sense of rest or security to be gained from
these moments of uplift, because the vertiginous turn downwards can
recur anywhere and at any time. At best, one can hope for the kind of
security exemplified in the family of fallow deer which Austerlitz photo-
graphs for Marie: `a living picture of mutual trust and harmony which
also had about it an air of constant vigilance and alarm' (p. 68).
In such places as Liverpool Street Station and the fortress at Breendonk,
time seems to silt up in thick layers and place to become porous and
insubstantial. The narrator is reminded of childhood fears by the smell
of soft soap and an iron hook hanging from a ceiling at Breendonk
(pp. 32±3). These remembered scenes, a laundry room and a butcher's
shop, are not terrifying in themselves, but recalling them magnifies his
horror of the fortress; `no one can explain exactly what happens within
us when the doors behind which our childhood terrors lurk are flung
open' (p. 33). The narrator leaves Breendonk feeling seriously ill. And in
a similar way, Austerlitz feels `something rending within me' (p. 193) at
Liverpool Street Station, when the sight of the Ladies' Waiting Room
reminds him of his arrival as a child evacuee to Britain. In both episodes, a
trapdoor has been opened to the buried past which cannot subsequently
be closed.
 Vertigo and luminosity: W. G. Sebald's Austerlitz 101

As Austerlitz pursues his journey eastwards across Europe and down-

wards into his past, he becomes increasingly subject to attacks of vertigo
or `disjunction, of having no ground beneath my feet' (p. 154). But if he is
saddened and horrified by the history of the war, this journey also brings
him closer to the ghosts of his parents whom he so desires to find. By the
time he reaches Prague, he feels that the border between under- and
overworlds has become permeable, `as if time did not exist at all, only
various spaces interlocking according to the rules of a higher form of
stereometry, between which the living and the dead can move back and
forth as they like' (p. 261). He comes to see that the unreality of ghosts is
nothing more than the effect of a screen separating two parallel worlds; as
they seem unreal to us, `so we who are still alive are unreal in the eyes of
the dead . . . only occasionally, in certain lights and atmospheric condi-
tions, do we appear in their field of vision' (p. 261). Visiting the remains
of the ghetto at TerezõÂn, he becomes convinced that the dead still exist
beside the living: `it suddenly seemed to me, with the greatest clarity, that
they [the dead] had never been taken away after all, but were still living
crammed into those buildings and attics' (p. 281).
Occupying the still centre of Austerlitz's terrors and hopes is the
concentration camp of TerezõÂn, where his mother most probably met
her death. Approaching the remains of the camp through the adjoining
village, he photographs rows of closed doors and windows (included in
the text, pp. 267±74), all connoting how the knowledge he seeks is sealed
off from him. In TerezõÂn itself, however, the last trapdoor is opened, but,
paradoxically, the knowledge he gains, while clarifying some aspects of
the past, at the same time increases his sense of bewilderment. Poring over
the display cases, the photographs and the documentation, he thinks,
`I understood it all now, yet I did not understand it, for every detail that
was revealed to me as I went through the museum . . . far exceeded my
comprehension' (p. 279). Austerlitz finds no trace of his mother in the
photographs or documents at TerezõÂn. When he retraces his evacuation
route to Britain along the Rhine, he finds the repeat journey `hardly less
terrifying than the first' (p. 319). And finally, when he attempts to find
documents relating to his father at the new BibliotheÁque Nationale, he
finds that the new building almost wilfully obstructs his efforts and he
abandons them in exhaustion.
If this is the spiral downwards from which Austerlitz never finally
recovers, his journey nevertheless brings him to moments of rare clarity
and understanding, as well as an intense sense of kinship with the
underworld's suffering and questioning ghosts. While his questions about
the fate of his parents go largely unanswered, he does make almost
miraculous discoveries about who they were, how they lived in Prague
102 Surviving with Ghosts: Second-generation Holocaust narratives

and how they coped during the Nazi occupation. Vera RysÏanova is able
to share detailed and intimate memories of their last days, as well as
photos of his mother's theatre and himself as a child. Most miraculously
of all, after many months of feeling unable to master or organise his
speech, he discovers he can understand and speak Czech fluently. Time
and again, he has the sense in Prague that he has found a place where he
belongs. Deeply buried memories come back to him `luminously', as if
haloed with benevolent power (p. 221). When Vera unearths a photo of
Austerlitz as a boy, tucked in the pages of the Balzac novel, he sees the
same luminous quality in the image, with `the boy's curly hair, spectrally
light around the outline of his head' (p. 259). Austerlitz finds it mysterious
how certain photographs `surface from oblivion . . . as if the pictures had
a memory of their own and remembered us' (p. 258). It is as if the page
boy wanted to be found.
Yet when confronted with this photograph, Austerlitz is not straight-
forwardly able to lay claim to a former, `authentic' identity. In the photo,
he sees not the lost self for whom he has been searching but a stranger,
theatrically dressed as a royal page for an event which he does not
remember. Like many of the other photographed faces in the novel, the
page boy looks directly and questioningly at the viewer. From his anterior
temporal perspective, the boy seems to anticipate the tragedy ahead,
challenging the viewer to intervene; thus Austerlitz `felt the piercing,
inquiring gaze of the page boy who had come to demand his dues, who
was waiting . . . for me to accept the challenge and avert the misfortune
lying ahead of him' (p. 260). The gaze is estranging for a number of
reasons: first and foremost, Austerlitz knows he is powerless to avert
what, from his perspective, has already happened; and secondly, the boy
in the photograph, though appearing to possess a will of his own, fails to
recognise Austerlitz as himself. He challenges him as a stranger to his own
imminent tragedy. The sense of not belonging, therefore, returns with full
force: `I have always felt as if I had no place in reality, as if I were not there
at all, and I never had this impression more strongly than on that
evening . . . when the eyes of the Rose Queen's page looked through
me' (p. 261). Thus Austerlitz finds that, not only is it impossible to lay
claim to the dead, but also any encounter with their spirits is likely to
dispossess the living.
Despite what he learns from Vera about his parents, this experience
and the visit to TerezõÂn leave Austerlitz depressed and once more dis-
located from reality. A second kind of vertigo assails him, as he becomes
convinced that the demands of the dead for justice and coherence can
never be met by the living. He recovers at the Romford asylum in
Denbigh, however, and is soon ready to embark on the second stage
 Vertigo and luminosity: W. G. Sebald's Austerlitz 103

of his journey, to Paris in search of his father. This section of the novel is
mostly taken up with memories of his youth in Paris, with the onset of
hysterical epilepsy and the saving ministrations of Marie de Verneuil.
After one such attack, he is nursed back to health by an eighteenth-
century book on healing which Marie finds for him (`by immersing myself
in the better world of this little book . . . I regained my lost sense of myself
and my memory' (p. 379)). Together he and Marie listen to circus
performers who manage to conjure an `extraordinarily foreign nocturnal
music . . . out of thin air' and for the first time in his life, Austerlitz feels
his heart `contracting in pain or expanding with happiness' (p. 383). The
little book and the circus music are luminous interventions in the
gathering dark; while they belong to Austerlitz's past, the fact that he
is able to retrieve such memories alleviates the weight of his present
impasse in the labyrinths of the new library.
Austerlitz's departure from Paris is a Ulyssean setting forth into the
unknown from which it seems unlikely he will return. He hands the
narrator the keys to his house in London and his photographs (`which,
one day, would be all that was left of his life', p. 408). The narrator's
return to the fortress at Breendonk appears to bring the narrative full
circle to its beginning. Once again, he experiences vertiginous horror at its
infernal appearance. But this time he does not cross the moat or pass
through the dark gate into the fortress. He remains on a bank beside the
moat and begins to read a book, Dan Jacobson's Heshel's Kingdom, given
to him by Austerlitz (p. 412). Jacobson relates the flight of his family from
Europe to South Africa and his own visit to see the diamond mines near
where they lived. The chasm of the mines was `Jacobson's image of the
vanished past of his family and people which, as he knows, can never be
brought up from those depths again' (p. 414). Such an image might also
serve for the lost past in this novel which, as Austerlitz finds, can never be
compensated for or recovered. On the other hand, the gift of this book,
from Jacobson to Austerlitz and from Austerlitz to the narrator who reads
it in lieu of descending into Hell, illustrates the way that characters are
sustained by this interlinking of narratives across a chasm of loss.
Whereas Morrison's Beloved ends with the reflection that `it was not
a story to pass on', Sebald's Austerlitz shows stories being passed on right
up to the last page of the novel. And as Austerlitz concludes, with the
narrator having read only as far as Chapter 15 of Heshel's Kingdom, the
reader is left with the sense that this passing on of stories will continue
indefinitely.
104 Surviving with Ghosts: Second-generation Holocaust narratives

From depth to ascent: Anne Michaels' Fugitive Pieces

Canadian poet Anne Michaels' first novel Fugitive Pieces (1996) is, like
Austerlitz, a descent narrative which attempts to piece together fragmen-
ted memories of the Second World War. As in Golding's Darkness
Visible, Michaels follows the unfolding of this process over two genera-
tions. Her novel relates two connected but distinct descent narratives: in
Part I, the history of a poet named Jakob Beer, who is rescued from a
Polish city by Athos Roussos, a Greek geologist (both men later emigrate
from Greece to Canada); and in Part II, the life of a young Canadian
lecturer named Ben, who is inspired by reading the poet's memoirs to
begin his own descent into the past, beginning on the Greek island where
Athos had raised Jakob. The two parts, the one relating Jakob's life and
the other his influence after death, are linked by a prefatory paragraph
which explains the circumstances of the poet's death: Jakob had been
fatally injured when struck by a car in Athens at the age of sixty. Thus, as
in Austerlitz, the central protagonist's narrative is told as a ghost story, a
story about someone who from the beginning the reader knows to be
irrecoverably lost.
Like Austerlitz, Jakob Beer is a fictional child survivor of the Holo-
caust. If his story is haunting, he is also haunted by the past. Whereas
Austerlitz sought to recover lost memories, Jakob knows and remembers
too much; as a small child, he had been a witness to his family's murder by
Nazis. But like Austerlitz, for whom knowledge served `as a substitute or
compensatory memory' (p. 198), Jakob has buried his memories of his
family's death under an `avalanche of facts: train schedules, camp
records, statistics, methods of execution. But at night, my mother, my
father, Bella, Mones, simply rose, shook the earth from their clothes, and
waited' (p. 93). This state of false consciousness is eventually disrupted, as
in Austerlitz, by the intervention of the dead. Here, too, ghosts have their
desires, their own reasons for surfacing from the past (`It's no metaphor
to feel the influence of the dead in the world' (p. 53)). Not only do human
ghosts retain memory and desire, so too do the places where tragedy has
occurred: `place itself longs. Human memory is encoded in air currents
and river sediment. Eskers of ash wait to be scooped up, lives recon-
stituted' (p. 53). The dead souls of Fugitive Pieces are more quiescent than
those haunting Austerlitz; as the above quotation indicates, what they are
patiently waiting for is to be pieced together by the living.
Jakob's descent journey, then, has a double aim: to recover himself (his
mental health and sense of identity), and to piece together the `fugitive
pieces' of his murdered family, in particular his sister, Bella. His descent
 From depth to ascent: Anne Michaels' Fugitive Pieces 105

journey thus combines two traditional katabatic aims, to recover the self
and to recover the lost beloved. The myth of Orpheus is one important
model for such descents, but there are many others. In Areopagitica
(1644), Milton compared the task of the seventeenth-century truth-seeker
to that of the Egyptian Isis, who wandered the world, gathering up the
limbs of the mangled body of Osiris (Milton, Complete Prose, Vol. 2,
p. 549). The myth of Isis, allegorised as a truth-seeker, provides perhaps
the closest mythic analogue to Jakob Beer's story. Like Isis, Jakob gathers
up fragmentary images of his sister Bella, and Ben in turn collects and
publishes Jakob's memoirs, which constitute the bulk of the novel. The
character in the novel who initiates the retrieval of the `fugitive pieces' of
the past is Athos Roussos, the geologist who excavates the buried boy
Jakob from the rubble of the demolished city.
As we have seen, several different kinds of descent journey are
represented in Fugitive Pieces: geological excavation, poetry writing,
travel from central Europe to the cradle of Mediterranean civilisation,
and travel from old Europe to the New World (and back again). But the
unifying thread in all this is Jakob's narrative which comprises a descent
journey in three, relatively distinct stages: (1) his apprenticeship with
Athos; (2) writing the poems for his collection, Groundwork; and (3) his
relationships with two women, Alex and Michaela. The fourth stage of
the descent concerns his afterlife, when the young lecturer Ben becomes
the curator (excavator, preserver and carer) of Jakob's memory. Athos
initiates the first stage of the descent and plays the role of Virgil (`my own
private guide and companion' (p. 97)) to Jakob's Dante. The geologist
teaches Jakob the katabatic principle that `truth speaks from the ground'
(p. 143); learning how to read geological eras through rock formations is
Jakob's first lesson in reading and preserving the past. For a survivor who
distrusts human communication, too, the language of geology is trust-
worthy because it is non-verbal.19 `This was my truth', Jakob writes, `that
my life could not be stored in any language but only in silence' (p. 111).
Geology eases Jakob away from traumatic repetition of the past, because
its aim is in a very literal sense to reveal, not bury, the earth's secrets.
Moving from the Greek islands to Toronto, Jakob and Athos discover a
modern, New World city that is nevertheless scarred with ravines and
cliffs that expose its primordial past.20 So Athos shows Jakob `Toronto
cross-sectioned; he ripped open cliffs like bread, revealing the ragged
geological past' (p. 98). When thus measured in geological time, Jakob
finds that twentieth-century history shrinks, if not into insignificance, at
least into a manageable perspective; as he says, `Athos's backward glance
gave me a backward hope' (p. 101). This saving shift in perspective
arising from geological exploration can also be found in many other
106 Surviving with Ghosts: Second-generation Holocaust narratives

modern descent narratives, from Jules Verne's Journey to the Centre of

the Earth to Margaret Atwood's Surfacing.21
If Dante aspires higher than his pagan guide, Jakob `aspires' lower. He
regains the will to live in Athos's care, and in the chapter `Vertical Time'
(Part I) he even finds temporary parent surrogates in Athos's Athenian
friends. In the Inferno, the verticalisation of time condemns the damned
souls to Hell forever; in the afterlife, sins committed once are revealed to
have an infinite consequence. In Austerlitz, the pervasive sense of vertigo
is always a fear of falling into an endless depth. Fugitive Pieces inverts
the demonic value attached to this depth image, and turns vertical time
into a figure for redemption. Rather than unfolding in a linear sequence,
history stacks up with repeat encounters, characters and choices (hence,
`verticalises'). But in Michaels's novel, this means that the self-defining
moment of choice and loss will come round again. In his first wife, Alex,
he sees the features of his murdered sister, and this repetition disturbs
him. But later echoes of his sister will be welcomed as signs of her
presence surviving in his new life.
The rationalist Athos helps Jakob through the first stage of his recovery
by helping him to search the past dispassionately and scientifically. After
Athos's death, Jakob writes, `In his research, Athos descends so far that he
reaches a place where redemption is possible, but it is only the redemption
of tragedy. // I knew that, for me, the descent would go on and on'
(p. 120). In Terry Eagleton's view, tragedy goes lower than this and its
redemptive powers are stronger.22 But Michaels indicates her more
restricted definition of tragedy in the next section of this passage. Jakob
adds, `in my thinking I started with the last question, the ``why'' he hoped
would be answered by all the others. Therefore I began with failure and
had nowhere to go' (p. 118). The tragic imagination, Michaels implies,
organises experience rationally; its aim is always to answer the question
why just men and women suffer. But such tragic reasoning is an
ineffectual tool for Jakob, whose loss is deeper, and who also has to
answer not only for his own trauma, but that of his family.23
Over the next stage of his descent journey, Jakob opens himself to the
influx of these other, ghostly agencies. These he collects in poems, which
a friend describes as `ghost stories', later to be published under the title,
Groundwork. As the katabatic title suggests, these poems concern
Jakob's past, his upbringing on Zakynthos, his lost city in Poland and
the scene of his family's murder. The poems themselves are not repro-
duced in the text, appropriately enough, as Jakob explains that they are
intended to convey the silences behind their words (p. 112). He uses
English in verse as `a sonar, a microscope . . . to capture elusive meanings
buried in facts' (p. 112). Or, more desperately, he wants `a line in a poem
 From depth to ascent: Anne Michaels' Fugitive Pieces 107

to be the hollow ney of the dervish orchestra whose plaintive wail is a call
to God' (p. 112). His friend Maurice comments, ```These aren't poems,
they're ghost stories''' (p. 163). For the reader, too, they are ghostly,
sensed perhaps only in the lyricism of Michaels' prose. More importantly,
they are ghostly to Jakob; at this stage he allows himself to be haunted by
the primal scene of his sister and parents' deaths. He begins to pull away
from his first wife, Alex, both because she is a wordsmith, a punster, while
he is trying to work `with silences' and because she wants him to set aside
the past. Instead, he becomes fixated by the scene of murder, `focused on
that historical split second: the tableau of the haunting trinity ± perpe-
trator, victim, witness' (p. 140). As long as this `tableau' remains fixed,
singular and absolute in his mind, Jakob will remain traumatised, living
an eternal Hell. But he comes to see that the historical second is always
already `split': `Every moment is two moments' (pp. 140, 161). Quoting
Einstein, Jakob explains that every occurrence contains both the event
which in itself is amoral, and the witnessing of the event, which is moral
and judgmental (p. 161; see also p. 138). In the `tableau' of aggressor±
victim±witness, each of these figures is an actant in the event; but each
can also impose their own interpretation of the event, which happens
at the time but also retrospectively through memory. Jakob looks
at photographs of Nazis with their victims and sees recorded there a
`precise moment of choice' (p. 166). In such moments, Jacob thinks, the
aggressor knows that his actions are contradictory, that he is killing
human beings as if they were inhuman. In order to carry out the act, he
has to resolve the contradiction and choose to believe his victim is
inhuman. Jakob says, `There's a precise moment when we reject contra-
diction. This moment of choice is the lie we will live by' (p. 166). But if the
event is separable from its interpretation, then it is not absolute or
inevitable. As the example of Athos demonstrates, others faced with
the same situation acted differently. Thus, `If the evil act can't be erased,
then neither can the good' (p. 162). The burden of interpretation gets
passed on to the witness, whose choice is whether to remember the evil or
the good act, and how to interpret the amoral event. At this point, Jakob
begins to exploit the logic of katabatic inversion which we discussed in
earlier chapters; thus `we look for the spirit precisely in the place of
greatest degradation' (p. 167).
The most daring passage in the novel is that which probes deepest into
Holocaust history, to represent the deaths in the gas chambers. Unlike
Levi, Michaels does not shrink from describing how the bodies looked
and imagining the last thoughts and cries of the dying. Riskiest of all, she
reads the upturned faces and limbs on the bodies as a gesture of
aspiration, an impulse towards ascent even in this most abject of deaths.
108 Surviving with Ghosts: Second-generation Holocaust narratives

She has Jakob imagine, `When they opened the doors, the bodies were
always in the same position. Compressed against one wall, a pyramid of
flesh. Still hope . . . The terrifying hope of human cells. // The bare
automatic faith of the body' (p. 168). The kind of faith Michaels describes
here is beyond the redemption offered by formal tragedy because it is
beyond human reason or conscious choice. But it is also beyond any
religious faith in the soul's transcendence; it is `the moment when our
faith in man is forced to change, anatomically ± mercilessly ± into faith'
(p. 168). By `bare automatic faith', Michaels seems to mean the basic
instinct to life found in atoms, molecules, the smallest units of organic
matter. Spirit itself, she suggests, is divisible into sub-human parts, each of
which contains the instinct to live, to ascend. Only in this sense does this
`moment of utmost degradation' contain `the most obscene testament of
grace' (p. 168).
If this is grace, though, it lacks a human face. As a response to human,
mass-scale murder, it seems to me wholly inadequate. But I see this
passage as a culmination of the second stage of Jakob's descent journey
rather than its resolution. Jakob himself indicates that he cannot sustain
this atomistic vision (`Even as I fall apart I know I will never again feel this
pure belief' (p. 169)). The third stage of his journey is the Ulyssean one; it
involves narrating his despair to someone else and entering her narrative
in turn. Like Ulysses before the Phaeacians, Jakob finds an eager and
willing listener in Michaela, who becomes his second wife. She evinces an
`empathetic unsettlement' in LaCapra's terms, a responsiveness to Jakob's
trauma that falls short of total identification (Writing History, p. 41). On
the other hand, she offers him her own temporal depths: `in Michaela's
eyes, ten generations of history' (p. 178).
Fugitive Pieces demonstrates, then, that the haunted Jakob cannot
escape Hell just by coming to terms with his own, individual loss. The
decision to `cross over the boundary of [another's] skin' (p. 185) is as
crucial as deciding to read (or make) history positively. Jakob reads
Michaela's past as an alternative history to his own, one that can offset
his without effacing it: `in Michaela's face, the loyalty of generations,
perhaps the devotion of a hundred Kievan women for a hundred faithful
husbands . . . in her hair the scents of fields and pines, her cold, smooth
arms carrying water from springs' (p. 178). Most importantly, hers is a
history without massacres; `there is no tinge of death in Michaela's skin'
(p. 181). As a result of his involvement with Michaela, Jakob's relation-
ship with his own ghosts changes. From the first, he is anguished by the
thought that they may not even welcome his traumatic obsessions; it
might be `as painful for them to be remembered as it was for me to
remember them' (p. 25). Eventually he discovers that he has misunder-
 From depth to ascent: Anne Michaels' Fugitive Pieces 109

stood his dead sister's signals; `like other ghosts, she whispers; not for me
to join her, but so that, when I'm close enough, she can push me back into
the world' (p. 170).
Contrary to Austerlitz, then, Fugitive Pieces represents a descent
journey in which the underworld willingly releases its hold on the hero.
In fact, it is only by making the return journey that the hero can put the
dismembered ghost to rest. His relationship to Bella, his lost sister, thus
changes in time but it is never set aside. If he achieves a degree of self-
possession, Jakob, like Austerlitz, remains possessed by others. This is
demonstrated in the briefer Part II of the novel, when Jakob's story is
relived in the next generation. Ben's circumstances bear an uncanny
resemblance to his mentor's: he discovers he has lost a sibling in the
Holocaust; this puts a strain on his marriage; and he is eventually healed
in Greece. Michaels emphasises the parallels between the two lives, by
repeating the Dantean titles of the subsections in Part I (`Drowned City',
`Vertical Time') in Part II. Like Jakob, Ben balances his sense of loss, not
by shutting out the past, but by digging into other, contiguous histories.
He remembers the forgotten words of his (living) wife, Naomi, `If I can't
find you, I'll look deeper into myself. If I can't keep up, if you're far ahead,
look back. Look back' (p. 292). Unlike Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse 5,
Fugitive Pieces represents looking back not as a sign of failure but as one
of connection.
Besides demonstrating the idea that people do not wholly possess their
own lives, one might wonder why the second part of the novel is necessary
and what it adds to Jakob's story. On the model of Paul Celan's famous
poem, `Death Fugue' (1947), Fugitive Pieces imitates the fugue form's
repetition of central motifs. On this fugal principle, Michaels writes that
`good is proved true by repetition' (p. 162). Discovering that Jakob's
insights mirror his own, Ben in Part II reflects that `truth grows gradually
in us, like a musician who plays a piece again and again until suddenly he
hears it for the first time' (p. 251). This technique of thematic repetition,
borrowed from the formal repetition of the fugue form, conveys Mi-
chaels' understanding that `questions without answers must be asked very
slowly' (p. 159).24
What emerges here through repetition are the hidden histories of the
Holocaust, such as Jakob's rescue by Athos or Jakob's slow recovery to
health. Michaels does not ignore the vertiginous nature of loss, repre-
sented so powerfully in Sebald's Austerlitz. But Fugitive Pieces also
measures depth of grief in terms of the upward arc of the journey.
Ben reflects, `It's not a person's depth you must discover, but their
ascent. Find their path from depth to ascent' (p. 250, emphasis in
original). In Paradise Lost, Milton describes Jacob's ladder as a gateway
110 Surviving with Ghosts: Second-generation Holocaust narratives

through which a constant stream of traffic passes between mortal and

immortal realms:

The stairs were such as whereon Jacob saw

Angels ascending and descending, bands
Of guardians bright, when he from Esau fled
To Padan-Aram in the field of Luz,
Dreaming by night under the open sky,
And waking cried, This is the gate of heaven.
Paradise Lost, 3.510±15

Such is the constant, depth movement between memory and the present
which Jakob Beer experiences, although for him the ladder is simply the
gate of living. Together Austerlitz and Fugitive Pieces demonstrate that
looking back at the Holocaust from a distance of thirty years or more, it
may still not be possible to discover a ground zero to this experience, nor an
exit gate that would provide closure or coherence to this twentieth-century
manifestation of Hell. Nevertheless, without resorting to mythic absolutes,
one can show that this Hell was actually lived, that it can be imagined and
narrated, and that such narratives must indeed be passed on.

Notes

1. Compare Dante's `I did not die and I did not remain alive' (Inferno, 34.25).
2. Golding's life (1911±93) spans almost the entire length of the twentieth
century and much of his work reflects on its horrors. From his most famous
work, Lord of the Flies (1954), to his posthumously published novel, The
Double Tongue, Golding characteristically yokes together the sacred and the
secular, investigating religious faith in the context of historical tragedy, and
blending realist and mythic narration. As Bakhtin wrote of Dante, Golding
habitually juxtaposes historical chronotopes with those of vision literature.
The title of Darkness Visible is borrowed from Milton's description of Hell
fire in Paradise Lost, 1.62±7.
3. Billy's incomprehension over the bombing of Dresden is echoed by the
pessimistic, autobiographical narrator, who introduces the novel with a
comparison to the Biblical story of Lot's wife: `Lot's wife, of course, was told
not to look back . . . But she did look back, and I love her for that . . . So she
was turned to a pillar of salt. So it goes.' The narrator goes on to underline
the parallel with his own backward look at the war; `this book . . . is a
failure, and had to be, since it was written by a pillar of salt' (Slaughterhouse
5, p. 16). Abel Gance's famous film, J'Accuse (1938), also represents ghosts
of soldiers returning to accuse the living (see my Chapter 1, note 28).
4. On fictional representations of the Holocaust, see Sue Vice, Holocaust
Fiction. London: Routledge, 2000. On fictional narratives of trauma, see
Whitehead, Trauma Fiction.
 Notes 111
5. On Fugitive Pieces and memory, see Nicola King, ` ``We come after'':
remembering the Holocaust', in Roger Luckhurst and Peter Marks (eds),
Literature and the Contemporary, pp. 94±108. On representing trauma in
Austerlitz and Fugitive Pieces, see Whitehead, pp. 117±39 and 48±80,
respectively.
6. See James Hillman, The Dream and the Underworld, Chapters 2 and 3.
Hillman points out that Freud makes the unconscious responsible for intense
suffering, as does the region of Tartarus (p. 17); in `The Psychopathology of
Everyday Life', he describes the descent to the id through the cracks and
crevices of consciousness, in terms of heroes finding their way into Hades
through caves and holes (p. 18, apropos of which, katabasis, the Greek term
for an infernal descent journey, can also mean simply a `cave-mouth'); the
unconscious is said to be extra-temporal, like Hades (p. 19); and the Ego
behaves like a traditional descent hero who `must meet the raging demands
of the repressed, where ``wishes appear to rise up out of a positive Hell'' '
(p. 19, quoting Freud's Introductory Lectures, p. 143); the epigraph to
Freud's Traumdeutung is also from Virgil's Aeneid (`if I cannot move heaven,
I will move Acheron [the underworld]'). In sum, Hillman argues, Freudian
psychology is persuasive `because of the metaphorical substructure in the
theory, which evokes in our memorial psyche the archetypal realm of the
underworld' (p. 23).
7. In the underworld, Aeneas meets Deiphobus, a son of Priam killed in the
Trojan war, `his whole body mangled and his face cruelly torn, the face and
both hands, ears lopped from his head, and nostrils shamefully slit' (Aeneid,
6.494±7, my trans.). Aeneas excavates Hades for knowledge of his future,
but he is also shocked into remembering his past. The challenge to overcome
the trauma of such encounters has to be faced again in the difficult narration
of the descent journey.
8. For Derrida's `hauntology' see Specters of Marx, p. 10.
9. See, for example, Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative
History; James Berger, After the End: Representations of Post-Apocalypse;
Paul Antze and Michael Lambek (eds), Tense Past: Cultural Essays in
Trauma and Memory; and LaCapra, Writing History, pp. 10±11.
10. But on testimony as a new kind of history-writing, see Felman and Laub,
Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature.
11. See also Ann Parry, ` ``. . . to Give . . . Death a Place'': Rejecting the
Ineffability of the Holocaust: the Work of Gillian Rose and Anne Michaels'.
12. The two separate journeys of Austerlitz, to Prague and Paris, are separated
by an asterisk break (*) in the text. Clusters of inset photographs also break
up the flow of words throughout the novel at irregular intervals. With the
exception of such interruptions, the narrations of Austerlitz and the narrator
proceed without rest or pause.
13. LaCapra argues that the working through of trauma in narrative can
sometimes seem specious, producing `an unwarranted sense of spiritual
uplift' as in (in his view) the ending of Spielberg's film, Schindler's List
or the second half of Benigni's film, Life is Beautiful (Writing History, p. 14).
14. On `dispossession without return' see Lyotard, `The Jewish Oedipus', p. 405,
and my Chapter 1. On the `defeat' of memory, see W. G. Sebald, `Memory's
Defeat', trans. Michael Hulse, PENA, 1 (2), 2001, pp. 77±9. See also Carol
112 Surviving with Ghosts: Second-generation Holocaust narratives
Bere, `The Book of Memory: W. G. Sebald's The Emigrants and Austerlitz';
and Tess Lewis, `W. G. Sebald: the Past is Another Country'.
15. Vertiginous time-space is arguably the dominant chronotope of a number of
Sebald's novels, especially The Emigrants (1996), Vertigo (1999) and After
Nature (2002).
16. Honore de Balzac, Le Colonel Chabert (1832).
17. See also Stefanie Harris, `The Return of the Dead: Memory and Photography
in W. G. Sebald's Die Ausgewanderten'.
18. Melville's Moby Dick (1851) is a seminal descent narrative itself, and is
alluded to in Gray's Lanark, Levi's The Search for Roots and other con-
temporary katabases.
19. See Meira Cook, `At the Membrane of Silence: Metaphor and Memory in
Fugitive Pieces'.
20. See also Paul Malone, `The Geography of Identity in Anne Michaels' Fugitive
Pieces'.
21. On nineteenth-century geological excavation as a descent into Hell, see
Rosalind Williams, Notes On the Underground, particularly Chapter 2,
`Excavations I: Digging Down to the Truth.'
22. See, for example, Sweet Violence, p. 41, where apropos of Hegel's Phenom-
enology of Spirit, he describes tragedy as a `via negativa of self-division' and
`a whole-hearted surrender of itself to its opposite' in which `Spirit finally
triumph[s].' Likewise Christ's death is tragic, if it is understood as living
through `the destitute condition of humanity . . . to the extreme limit of a
descent into the hell of meaninglessness and desolation' (ibid., p. 37).
23. For a study of Michaels' novel as a form beyond tragedy, see Annick Hillger,
` ``Afterbirth of Earth'': Messianic Materialism in Anne Michaels' Fugitive
Pieces'.
24. On the doubled form of the novel, see also Barbara Estrin, `Ending in the
Middle: Revisioning Adoption in Binjamin Wilkomirski's Fragments and
Anne Michaels' Fugitive Pieces'.
 Chapter 5

Katabatic Memoirs of Mental Illness

In Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia (1998), Marya Horn-

bacher writes, `I went through the looking glass, stepped into the nether-
world, where up is down and food is greed . . . It is ever so easy to go.
Harder to find your way back' (p. 10). This amalgam of allusions to
Virgil, Dante and Lewis Carroll is a common feature of contemporary
autopathographies, or memoirs of mental illness.1 Such narratives re-
present Hell as a condition of actual, contemporary Western existence,
and not only a concept of the afterlife imagined by theologians, mytho-
graphers or writers of fiction. Unlike the second-generation Holocaust
narratives that were discussed in the preceding chapter, these personal
memoirs describe infernal states of which the writers have, or claim to
have, first-hand knowledge and experience. Nevertheless, it is striking
how frequently these autobiographical accounts of mental disorder,
addiction, neurosis and psychotic breakdown are structured and narrated
as journeys of descent into the underworld and return.
Contemporary Western culture has not only been characterised as
traumatic, as noted in the previous chapter; it has also been described as
generally psychotic. Whereas the early twentieth-century subject was
alienated, the postmodern subject is typically schizophrenic, according
to such theorists as Fredric Jameson, David Harvey, Gilles Deleuze and
FeÂlix Guattari.2 As Deleuze and Guattari claim, `the schizophrenic
deliberately seeks out the very limit of capitalism; he is its inherent
tendency brought to fulfilment, its surplus product, its proletariat, and
its exterminating angel' (Anti-Oedipus, p. 35). If schizophrenia is indeed a
`surplus product' of Western capitalism,3 its effects are also experienced
by non-Western subjects as well. In Rushdie's The Satanic Verses, for
example, the Bombayite Gibreel Farishta develops a form of cultural
schizophrenia when he migrates to Britain; `his sense of self' becomes split
`into two entities, one of which he sought heroically to suppress' (p. 340).
For Gayatri Spivak, Rushdie's novel demonstrates how `empire messes
114 Katabatic Memoirs of Mental Illness

with identity', and she gives The Satanic Verses a notional subtitle,
`imperialism and schizophrenia'.
Other critics, however, have objected to the appropriation of the
schizophrenic as the symbol of a general cultural psychosis. In Shattered
Selves, for example, James Glass argues that by making a cultural hero
of the schizophrenic, Deleuze and Guattari are guilty of `distort[ing] a
process that in its reality portrays loss, despair, impotence, and futility.
The actual, physical face of madness is never shown in Anti-Oedipus'
(p. 148). Glass may be less than accurate when he suggests that most
poststructuralist descriptions of the fragmented self are celebratory; for
example, the painfully disabled `schizo' of Anti-Oedipus can hardly be
equated with the ecstatically dispersed self of Roland Barthes' text of
bliss.4 As Mark Currie points out, for Deleuze and Guattari `the
schizophrenic is not so much nature's poststructuralist sociologist as
the product of a schizoid culture.'5 Nevertheless, Glass is right to remind
us that genuine, individual psychosis is of an entirely different order of
suffering, and needs to be clearly distinguished from the general, cultural
malaise of advanced capitalist countries. The slick, morally vacuous,
murderous protagonist of Bret Easton Ellis's American Psycho (1991)
inhabits a Hell far shallower than anyone who has actually suffered
from psychotic disorder, as the memoirs discussed here amply demon-
strate.
Yet there are undeniable connections between actual sufferers and
what Deleuze and Guattari term the schizoid cultures in which they live.
In Anti-Oedipus, they suggest that `schizophrenia is the exterior limit of
capitalism itself or the conclusion of its deepest tendency' (p. 246). It is for
this reason, they point out, that schizoid capitalist cultures are para-
doxically so intolerant of real schizophrenics; `capitalism only functions
on condition that it inhibit this tendency, or that it push back or displace
this limit, by substituting for it its own scale' (p. 246). Or, in the terms of
the present discussion, schizophrenics and other sufferers of mental
disorder inhabit the Hell that contemporary Westerners fear most, as
being potentially the most familiar and the most estranging threat to
Western conceptions of individual identity.
Furthermore, in suggesting that schizophrenia is the exterior limit or
future vanishing point of capitalism, Deleuze and Guattari call attention
to the sense of displaced temporality that features so strikingly in
contemporary, Western autobiographical accounts of mental illness. In
Girl, Interrupted, Susanna Kaysen remembers feeling that when the
patients of McLean's Hospital watched news reports of the Vietnam
War, they were seeing something unfold on TV that they had already
experienced for themselves:
 Katabatic Memoirs of Mental Illness 115
Things happened that had not yet happened in the world we'd come from.
When they finally happened outside, we found them familiar because versions
of them had already been performed in front of us. It was as if we were a
provincial audience, New Haven to the real world's New York, where history
could try out its next spectacle. (Girl, Interrupted, p. 28)

Kaysen goes on to describe incidents of skin scalding and bare-handed

killing at the hospital which anticipated the military brutality in Vietnam
and Cuba that the patients later witnessed on TV. In Gary Saul Morson's
view, contemporary postmodern narrative is afflicted with the `disease of
too much presentness', one of whose manifestations is a sense of `desic-
cated present tense', where the present is experienced as a prologue or
epilogue to another time.6 In Kaysen's narrative, the psychotic patients
appear to be suffering from a temporal disease that is akin to this
postmodern desiccated present, but is even more closely linked to the
time sense of Dante's damned souls, who can predict the future but are
ignorant of the immediate, historical present.
Many contemporary accounts of mental illness are strikingly reminis-
cent of the Hells of classical and medieval Christian katabases. In Beyond
the Darkness (1995), for example, mental illness is represented as a form
of living death, as Hell is for the damned souls in Dante's Inferno; Angie
Fenimore writes that during her suicidal depression, `I saw myself as dead
in every sense that really mattered' (Beyond the Darkness, p. 73). And in
Prozac Nation (1994), Elizabeth Wurtzel recalls, `I was certain, quite
certain, that I was already dead. The actual dying part . . . was a mere
formality' (p. 19). If the deeply depressed are `the walking, waking dead',
as Wurtzel describes them, then their condition is not unlike the shades
who inhabit the Land of the Dead, paradoxically unable to die themselves
(ibid., p. 19).
Like the souls in Dante's Inferno who experience their metaphysical
tortures viscerally, mental illness memoirs vividly convey how psychic
disorder can be experienced as bodily torment. Linda Hart's Phone at
Nine Just to Say You're Alive (1995) is a journal recording an eleven-
month struggle with schizophrenia, suicidal depression and psychosis. In
the journal, Linda records smelling rotting corpses and imagines `infes-
tations of vermin' on the floor and on meat left out in the open (pp. 43,
89). She feels her own body `rotting away' (p. 194) and her stomach
distending with maggots (pp. 194, 206±7, 233). She associates this `hell'
of physical contamination and dissolution with illustrations of Dante's
Inferno which she remembers from childhood; `There were people with
severed limbs sitting beside boiling swamps' (pp. 20±1).7 The landscape
of her illness is similarly infernal, with `deep dark fog, murky swamp
lands' such as one finds `on holiday with the Devil' (p. 20). Her sense of
116 Katabatic Memoirs of Mental Illness

horror is pervasive and ill-defined, as Levinas describes the horror of il y a.

On bad days, Linda's separate torments accumulate into a composite
nightmare: `Salt water, snot, soggy tissues, huge stone, maggots, voice
telling me vile things' (p. 212), a vision corresponding to what Levinas
calls `the return of being to the heart of every negative movement' (`There
is', p. 36).
Another distinctive characteristic of late twentieth-century mental
Hells may be that they feel insignificant compared to the `real thing'
which, again like Levinas's il y a, is felt to have happened somewhere
outside the patient's individual frame of reference. This does not lessen
the suffering of those who pass through such Hells; in fact, it would
appear to make it worse. Sarah Kofman described her father's death in
Auschwitz as `my absolute', a personal absolute that intersected with `the
absolute of history'. On the other hand, in Wasted, when Marya's mother
says accusingly to her anoretic8 daughter, `you looked like an escapee
from Auschwitz' (p. 175), the comparison seems shockingly incommen-
surate; in this case Marya's absolute worst experience fails to intersect
with history's absolute. In his memoir, Lewis Wolpert describes the
depressive state as `absurd' because `the feelings and thoughts of the
depressive can bear so little relation to reality' (Malignant Sadness, p. 2).
Yet he still thinks of depression as `the worst experience of my life. More
terrible even than watching my wife die of cancer' (p. vii). In Girl,
Interrupted, Kaysen feels that her psychosis is a middle-class luxury
(`we were safe in our expensive, well-appointed hospital, locked up with
our rages and rebellions') compared to the suffering that went on in
Vietnam (`They got cracked skulls, black eyes, kicks to the kidneys'
(pp. 92±3)).
And yet if the modern, Western sense of identity depends on securing
individual autonomy, affirming one's ordinary working and family life
and avoiding suffering, as Charles Taylor suggests, then a serious mental
illness may well be regarded by many Westerners as the worst form of Hell
because it deprives the sufferer of his or her psychic autonomy (Sources of
the Self, pp.12±13). This is, at any rate, how psychic breakdown is often
perceived in Western cultures, though elsewhere it may be understood
differently. In his memoir of depression, for example, Lewis Wolpert
points out that the common term for depression in Japan is `interpersonal
fear' (taijin kyoufu), a fear of mingling with other people lest they find your
presence physically or in some other way offensive (Malignant Sadness,
p. 34). Depressive Indian patients also experience more physical and fewer
psychological symptoms than Western patients; for them, the primary
treatments are drugs, herbal medicine and family support networks rather
than psychotherapy of the individual patient (p. 168).
 Katabatic Memoirs of Mental Illness 117

But if loss of psychic autonomy merits the name of Hell in Western

discourse, still the narration of mental illness in terms of a journey to Hell
may strike some philosophers as misguided. To impose a narrative of any
kind on madness, particularly one that describes self-loss as part of a
linear journey (albeit a vertiginous one) is to `normalise', to make
invisible, the psychosis itself. It might be argued that the descent journey,
with its hinge-movement of conversion, its doubling back of the present
on past selfhood, epitomises what all narration does to the subject; by
imposing a retrospective unity on experience, it creates a false illusion of a
metaphysically centred selfhood.9 Many memoirs of survival, whether of
psychological or physical privation, do represent the self triumphing,
sometimes naively, over adversity.10 Narrating the experience as a
descent to Hell suggests that it is radically life-altering, and that its
significance radiates outward to illuminate and explain the whole of a
life, although the rest of the life story may remain untold in the illness
memoir.11 From her sojourn in Hell, Angie Fenimore thus acquires an
orthodox Christian perspective on human life when she discovers that
`our time is but a heartbeat in the eternal scheme of creation, and yet it is
the crucial moment of truth, the turning point. It determines how our
spirits will exist forever' (Beyond the Darkness, p. 130). Just as the brief
span of a human life determines the fate of an eternal soul, so the descent
to Hell is the critical turning point in a human life which can determine its
overall shape and meaning.
Regarded in this light, the descent journey into madness is therefore
particularly suspect from a poststructuralist perspective, for a variety of
reasons. On the one hand, Derrida holds that madness is unrepresentable
in any Western discourse including the language of psychiatry, because
that discourse itself is rational.12 And on the other hand, Baudrillard
argues against the narrativisation of the descent, and particularly the
attempt to recover a self from the abyss. In `Paroxysm', for example, he
urges us to `push the paradox to the limit', the implication being that one
should embrace psychotic disorder rather than resist its disorienting
effects.13 But both these positions, the one insisting madness is beyond
language and the other that refuses to contemplate a return from mad-
ness, are in a sense as absolutist as the metaphysical position that would
insist on fully present, entirely coherent selfhood. Madness is beyond
language, but by the same token, everything is beyond language, since
the signifier always falls short of the signified. As for Baudrillard's
Nietzschean argument that radical philosophy should `push to the limit'
of cultural breakdown, it seems to me untenable in a twenty-first-century
context, when the world has already witnessed mass insanity beyond the
limit at Auschwitz, Hiroshima and elsewhere.
118 Katabatic Memoirs of Mental Illness

Of what value, then, is the organisation of psychotic disorder into a

narrative of infernal descent and return? At a general level, contemporary
studies of the relationship between narrative and medicine suggest that
narrating the experience of madness may have a therapeutic effect on the
psychotic patient. This theory is well supported by Hart's journal which,
she writes, `has kept me on the edge of sanity. Without it, I believe I would
have tipped over into the chasm of madness from where I could not be
reached' (Phone at Nine, p. 205). In this journal, the quest for a coherent
self is pursued day by day rather than imposed retrospectively as part of a
polemical resistance to the experience of psychosis. To the charge that
therapy places too much emphasis on the patient's recovery of socially
normative behaviour, one might cite any number of illness memoirs
where the recovered patient is far from socially conformist. In Phone
at Nine, for example, the reader witnesses Linda emerging as a Farinatan
rebel in Hell;14 the more she recovers, the more she challenges her
institutionalisation. She refutes her diagnosis as inaccurate (p. 231),
criticises the inadequacy of her therapeutic treatment (p. 238) and resists
the staff's tendency to reduce her from person to a patient with no rights
(p. 208).
One could, however, cite contrary evidence suggesting that illness
memoirs do not so much cure the patient as relive his or her self-dispersal
in language. In what Andrew Wernick has aptly described as the `soft
inferno of simulation', memoirs about food addiction can evince a
corresponding addiction to linguistic excess.15 Hornbacher's memoir
exhibits, at a formal and stylistic level, all the traits with which she
characterises people with eating disorders (`extreme', `highly competi-
tive', `perfectionistic', `tending toward excess' (p. 6)). Thus, for example,
Wasted has two different subtitles, quotations from other katabatic
writers heading every chapter, effectively two endings and innumerable
fatal, revelatory turning points (despite her explicit disavowal that the
memoir will contain any sudden revelations at all (pp. 279, 280).16 In a
similar form of simulation, memoirs about depression can be `difficult,
demanding', `self-involved' and `self-indulgent', all characteristics that are
symptomatic of depressive illness, according to Elizabeth Wurtzel in
Prozac Nation (p. 316). Moreover, it may be that contemporary readers
devour such memoirs, not out of an altruistic desire to understand mental
disorder better, but so as to simulate the experience of illness for
themselves (and hence, on the analogy of how capitalism displaces
schizophrenia, to block out real sufferers, or the thought of actually
developing the illness in reality17).
So while for some, the narration of the descent is a form of therapy, for
others it can be a continuation of the Hell of illness. All the same, it is not
 Down the rabbit hole 119

necessary to choose between the two opposing philosophical positions

outlined in the first chapter: descent as either self-possession or dispos-
session. Of relevance here is Daniel Dennett's striking definition of
selfhood in terms of the Newtonian principle of gravity. While a centre
of gravity `has no mass . . . no color . . . no physical properties at all,
except for spatio-temporal location', it nevertheless performs a `defined,
well delineated and well behaved role within physics'.18 So too, the self
may be understood as an organisational impulse, one that gathers itself
into a notional centre, or perhaps more than one centre, of gravity. If
centred selves, like centres of gravity, are fictions, they are nevertheless
useful and functional ones. As we know from the overturning of Dante
and Virgil at the end of Inferno, descent narratives specialise in tracing the
self's journey past a gravitational centre; the strange lightness of the
damned, discussed in Chapter 2, is often a sign this zero point has been
passed. Pursuing Dennett's analogy, we might further describe the descent
to madness as a journey through and beyond the self's gravitational
centre. Dante's ascent from Hell may be understood either as a journey
which doubles back on itself and/or one which carries on down (in
Dante's case, to the opposite hemisphere). Likewise, while katabatic
illness memoirs generally conclude with a re-ascent from Hell, there is
considerable ambiguity surrounding the orientation of the return journey.
In mental illness memoirs, as in other katabatic narratives, there must be a
return, but it need not be the same self who returns.
Within the katabatic framework, then, there is room for much varia-
tion in the way psychosis and/or the recovery of health may be narrated.
Far from evincing transcendent certainty about their surviving selves,
most mental illness memoirs in fact express doubt whether their authors
will be able to maintain a sense of `normality', and often fall short of
explaining precisely how they recovered their health. In such texts, the
boundary between normal and underworld selves is often represented as
extremely unstable and permeable. Moreover, as we shall see in the
following section, the journey down is not often conceived of as a single
pathway, with a singular revelation and return. On the contrary, mental
illness is represented as a descent to the underworld on a number of
different levels, some of which are resolvable and some not.

Down the rabbit hole

Freud's concept of the tiered psyche, with the conscious mind overlying
the unconscious, not surprisingly weighs heavily in narratives which
represent mental disorder as a state into which one descends. In other
120 Katabatic Memoirs of Mental Illness

places and other periods, insanity may have been experienced as an aerial
flight or the touch of God's hand, but since Freud, autobiographers of
mental illness most often evoke a dark, downward journey.19 The
Freudian concept of the unconscious is usually found hybridised with
other katabatic models, notably Stevenson's Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
(1886) and Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland and Through the
Looking Glass (1897).20 Writers and directors, such as Jan SÏvankmajer
in his surrealist film, Alice (NeÏco z Alenky, 1987), have reinterpreted the
nonsense logic governing Carroll's Wonderland as an expression of
the illogic of the psyche's underworld. `Down the rabbit hole', the title
of the first chapter of Alice, becomes a metaphor for the descent into the
Freudian unconscious in many twentieth-century narratives of mental
disorder. In his short film, Down to the Cellar (1982), SÏvankmajer
conveys even more effectively than in NeÏco z Alenky the sense of a
child's innocence under threat through exposure to a subterraneous
world of sexual and psychological violence. In Hornbacher's memoir,
all three of these literary intertexts (Stevenson and both Carrolls) combine
to produce an image of eating disorder as `a shimmery, fun house mirror-
covered hell' (p. 7) in which `the person who jumped through the door
and grabbed me . . . was, unfortunately, me. My double image, the evil
skinny chick who hisses, Don't eat' (p. 10).
In mental illness memoirs, the experience of illness can be represented
as Hell on a number of different levels. Frequently, the mental institution,
or more precisely a graded series of institutions, constitutes the material
world of Hell through which a mental patient descends. For example,
Hart's journal represents the asylum and psychiatric ward in which she is
hospitalised as a material inferno with upper and lower realms. The
journal begins in medias inferni, in the Lower Hell of Brendon Ward, a
secure unit for dangerous patients, where Linda is detained after attempt-
ing suicide. Linda calls Brendon a `hell hole' (p. 37) and believes she has
been sent there as punishment (p. 14). Her incarceration is indeed
infernal, rather than purgatorial, in the sense that it is patently not
intended to cure the patient; Brendon Ward provides constant surveil-
lance and drug treatment, but offers no psychotherapy or even conversa-
tion to its inmates. Linda is later moved to a psychiatric ward in a general
hospital. This Upper Hell is presided over by a consultant psychiatrist
Graham Drake, who doubles as Charon and Minos, administering drug
treatments (which Linda thinks are too extreme) and ordering certain
patients to be ferried across to Brendon. In this Upper Hell, the `punish-
ments', though less severe, appear to be equally arbitrary and unjust.
Patients are refused information about the long-term side effects of their
drug treatments so that, while being exhorted to show adult self-control
 Down the rabbit hole 121

over their symptoms, they are required to submit like children to their
medication (p. 263). Such gradation of mental institutions and psychiatric
wards can be found in other memoirs, such as Carol North's Welcome,
Silence and Hornbacher's Wasted.
On another level, the illness itself is represented as a Hell into which the
patient descends, enduring a succession of worsening symptoms, and
these too may be graded in the manner of Dante's Inferno. For example,
Hornbacher represents bulimia and anorexia as, respectively, Upper and
Lower Hell. With bulimia, Marya enters the upper circles of Hell for the
violent (bulimia `acknowledges the body explicitly, violently' (p. 93)),
becoming both the perpetrator and victim of the damage inflicted on her
body. Echoing Dante's shift from the fiery regions of upper circles to the
frozen lake of Circle 9 (Lowest Hell), Marya describes her passage from
bulimia to anorexia thus:

Past the border of a fiery life lies the netherworld. I can trace this road, which
took me through places so hot the very air burned the lungs. I did not turn
back. I pressed on, and eventually passed over the border, beyond which lies a
place that is wordless and cold, so cold that it, like mercury, burns a freezing
blue flame. (p. 95)

In contrast to Dante's fearful pilgrim, however, Marya longs to reach this

ultimate stage in the downward journey. With her inverted, underworldly
perspective, she interprets the chill of anorexia as a `strange state of grace'
(p. 6), which ensures a `complete removal of the bearer from the material
realm' (p. 153). This `state of grace' is represented in quasi-religious
terms, as Marya compares herself to the medieval martyr, Saint Margaret
of Cortona, who starved herself to death in 1297 (Cortona's `A Letter to
her Confessor' is quoted in Wasted, pp. 125±6). While Cortona died for
her faith, Marya suggests that her desire for grace has been deflected onto
the body through cultural pressures; `had I lived in a culture where
``thinness'' was not regarded as a strange state of grace, I might have
sought out other means of attaining that grace' (pp. 6±7).
A third pathway through Hell is the route traced by the patient,
sometimes guided by a friend, doctor or therapist occupying the Virgilian
role, to recover an original source of the psychosis. Hart's journal, for
example, documents the descent through memory to confront an early
source of trauma (her Virgil is Sheila, a friend who has survived psychic
disorder herself). These analeptic passages are set off from the rest of the
journal in italic case. While Hart excavates buried memories, recovering
them in reverse chronological order according to the classic Freudian
model, Lauren Slater constructs her earliest memories in her unreliably
narrated memoir, Spasm, to which we will return below.21 On a fourth
122 Katabatic Memoirs of Mental Illness

pathway, the body itself may participate dynamically in the descent

journey, like that of the medieval sinner's body, described by Coelius
Rhodiginus `in which tides run riot, and gales rage'.22 In Wasted,
Hornbacher reflects that eating disorders may be a way of transforming
an otherwise banal, shapeless existence into `a GRAND EPIC' (p. 281). In
her anoretic phase, her body becomes the epic Marya longs for; she begins
a countdown of her weight, and observes her body disappearing down the
numerological scale:

and then I hit bottom and thought:

I think I'm dead.
Finally.
Fifty-two.
Then everything goes white. (p. 271)

Here, Marya's self-willed disappearing act also demonically imitates the

shape-shifting of Carroll's Alice, who (in a bulimic phase?) burgeons to a
height of nine feet and then anoretically shrinks to the size of a mouse.
When Alice realises that holding the White Rabbit's fan is reducing her in
size, she drops it immediately, `just in time to save herself from shrinking
away altogether' (Alice in Wonderland, p. 17). Marya's self-inflicted
white encounter brings her similarly close to the vanishing point.
As we can see, mental illness narratives may trace different paths on
their downward journeys. Nevertheless all the memoirs discussed in this
chapter have one striking feature in common: the traits that take the
protagonist down to Hell are, by and large, the same traits by which they
emerge (if they emerge) from Hell at the end. In Marya's case, the trait
that is subject to katabatic inversion is `obstreperousness' which, as she
herself explains, `as a character trait is extremely exploitable in the
energetic annihilation of one's own body and individual self, [but] is
also very useful in other pursuits. For example, life' (p. 277).
In the remainder of the chapter, I would like to focus in greater detail
on three memoirs of mental illness: Susanna Kaysen's Girl, Interrupted,
an account of personality disorder; Carol North's Welcome, Silence,
which is based on the experience of schizophrenia; and Lauren Slater's
Spasm, which deals with epilepsy. In this discussion, for the sake of
clarity, I will refer to the actual writer (including the writer of any extra-
diegetic material such as Forewords and Afterwords) by surname and the
narrator and former-self-as-protagonist by first name, while fully ac-
knowledging the fact that the clear-cut distinction between protagonist,
narrator and author of an autobiographical narrative is one of the first
things such memoirs call into question. They also invite the reader to ask
whether a life-narrative can ever be `about' a single illness, or if the
Parallel worlds and protest culture: Susanna Kaysen's Girl, Interrupted 123

specific names we give to mental disorders in any way account for the
complexity of the sufferer's experience. All three of these memoirs
problematise commonly accepted Western cultural distinctions between
mad and sane, outside and inside, reliable and unreliable histories and
discourse, in ways that are sometimes reminiscent of the anti-psychiatry
movement of the 1960s, notably in the work of R. D. Laing and David
Cooper. All three, moreover, follow the dynamic of katabatic inversion,
in which an unexpected shift of perspective transforms an infernal
impasse into an exit route, or alternatively an entrance into a newly
enticing underworld.

Parallel worlds and protest culture: Susanna Kaysen's

Girl, Interrupted

In Girl, Interrupted (1995), Susanna Kaysen describes her two-year stay

at McLean's Psychiatric Hospital in Boston, MA, at the age of 19±20,
during which period she suffered from an illness vaguely diagnosed as
`character or personality disorder' (p. 59). Narrated twenty-five years
later, the journey of excavation in this memoir consists mainly of
travelling the distance from present narrator to past self. In a prefatory
biographical note, Kaysen explains that her memories of the period came
back to her only many years later, after she'd obtained her 350-page
patient file from the hospital, which she managed only with the help of a
lawyer. If a lawyer was needed, the file was presumably not obtained
without a struggle, and by including frequent extracts from these medical
documents in her first-person narrative, Kaysen reproduces on a textual
level the hostility between her former self and her doctors. The inclusion
of transcribed medical records in the midst of her first-person narrative
duplicates the way in which, as a young girl, her life story was interrupted
by impersonal, authoritative discourses.
But more than the descent into memory, the onset of the disorder itself
is represented in Kaysen's memoir as a threshold crossing into another
world. Echoing Virgil's sibyl, she begins with an address to her readers:
`people ask, How did you get in there? . . . All I can tell them is, It's easy'
(p. 5). For Kaysen, mental disorder is one parallel universe among many
worlds of the powerlessness, `worlds of the insane, the criminal, the
crippled, the dying, perhaps of the dead as well. These worlds exist
alongside this world and resemble it, but are not it' (p. 5). In the parallel
world of mental disorder, she writes, `the laws of physics are suspended'
and bodies occupy time and space differently (p. 6). Susanna tells us that
her `insanity comes in two basic varieties: slow and fast'. As in many other
124 Katabatic Memoirs of Mental Illness

representations of infernal time in prisons, camps and asylums, here the

`slow' form of insanity is experienced as a temporal viscosity: `Experience
is thick. Perceptions are thickened and dulled. Time is slow, dripping
slowly through the clogged filter of thickened perception' (p. 75). Alter-
natively, as in representations of advanced capitalist time such as Alasdair
Gray's Lanark, the other form of insanity is experienced as temporal
velocity: `there is too much perception, and beyond the plethora of
perceptions, a plethora of thoughts about the perceptions and about
the fact of having perceptions' (p. 75). Like the commodity emptied of use
value in late capitalism, these once meaningful thoughts are made mean-
ingless through excessive, accelerated circulation (p. 78).23 Whether fast
or slow, the thoughts circulating in Susanna's mind are psychologically
and/or theologically hellish: `here comes the I'm-no-good thought. That
takes care of today . . . The next thought, the next day, is I'm the Angel of
Death' (p. 77). Kaysen's representation of `crazy' time and space thus bear
some of the key hallmarks of infernal chronotopes encountered elsewhere
in this study.
In Gracefully Insane, McLean's is described as `the hospital of choice for
the occasionally mad artists of Boston'.24 As is fitting for a graduate of
McLean's, whose former patients include Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton and
Robert Lowell, Kaysen is keenly aware of the generic categories of narrative
in which her descent memoir might be classed. In `Etiology', she invites the
reader to choose an interpretative frame for her protagonist:

This person is (pick one):

1. on a perilous journey from which we can learn much when he or she
returns;
2. possessed by (pick one):
a) the gods
b) God [. . .]
d) the Devil [. . .]
5. bad, and must be isolated and punished,
6. ill, and must be isolated and treated by [. . .]
7. ill, and must spend the next seven years talking about it;
8. a victim of society's low tolerance for deviant behaviour;
9. sane in an insane world;
10. on a perilous journey from which he or she may never return.
(Girl, Interrupted p. 15)

Besides satirising a number of clicheÂs about mental illness, this `Etiology'

also concisely summarises the major late twentieth-century variations on
the traditional narrative of the descent to Hell. Modern Hells are both
material and psychological realms; the protagonists of modern descents
are classed as either `ill' or `bad' or `victims'; they feel themselves to be
Parallel worlds and protest culture: Susanna Kaysen's Girl, Interrupted 125

supernaturally possessed; God is glimpsed in Hell rather than Paradise;

they expose the unreality or insanity of the everyday world; and they `may
or may not' return from the underworld.
Representing her mental illness as a quest journey, Kaysen is inevi-
tably influenced by Dantean themes and images, but Carroll's under-
worlds also provide an important intertext. Kaysen's memoir takes its
title from a painting by Vermeer, in which a teenage girl looks up from
her music lesson, as if at some intervention outside the frame. Susanna
sees the painting hanging in the Frick Gallery in Boston first as a
teenager herself and then sixteen years later. The girl in the painting
is effectively Kaysen's Alice, looking out at her younger self from the
wrong side of the looking glass, and warning her (p. 166) against
`tumbling down a shaft into Wonderland' (p. 41). Only on the later
visit does Susanna realise how the girl in the painting foreshadowed her
own mental breakdown; both were `interrupted in the music of being
seventeen' (p. 167). While there are no direct references to Alice herself
in this memoir, there is nevertheless an insistent Carrollian theme about
the dangerous attractions of tunnels and doorways leading to `crazy'
worlds. Thus Kaysen writes, `most people pass over incrementally,
making a series of perforations in the membrane between here and
there until an opening exists. And who can resist an opening?' (p. 5, see
also p. 159). Like Wurtzel in Prozac Nation, Kaysen records a specific
shift from thinking about mental disorder as a playful non-reality, to
`real' insanity (see p. 104). Once across the threshold, however, the
`crazy' world appears less like a Victorian nursery fantasy and more like
the two-tiered inferno found in other illness memoirs: `our double-
locked doors, our steel-mesh window screens, our kitchen stocked with
plastic knives . . . our bathroom doors that didn't lock: All this was
medium security. Maximum security was another world' (p. 47). Like
Dante's devils and damned souls, the hospital staff are as much Hell-
dwellers as the patients. For example, Susanna's companions agree that
`Mrs McWeeney [a nurse] was a crazy person who had to earn a living.
We weren't trying to get her decertified, we just wanted her off our
ward' (p. 90). The various patient disorders are implicitly hierarchised,
like sins: `Cynthia was depressive; Polly and Georgina were schizo-
phrenic; I had a character disorder' (p. 59). Susanna initially thinks of
her illness as one of the lighter `sins' in this tiered system of disorders:
`when I got my diagnosis it didn't sound serious, but after a while it
sounded more ominous than other people's' (p. 59). Like SÏvankmajer's
little girl in the cellar, Susanna soon understands her predicament to be
very serious.
But her experience of disempowerment in hospital paradoxically
126 Katabatic Memoirs of Mental Illness

produces a strong, dissenting voice. What she initially dissents from is her
own self, or the self that produces `a Muzac medley of self-hatred themes'
(p. 78). But eventually, she also dissents from her doctors' diagnosis, both
as a patient at the time and later as narrator. She challenges the account in
her files of the consultation which led to her admittance to McLean's;
`That doctor says he interviewed me for three hours. I say it was twenty
minutes' (p. 71). Unlike North's Welcome, Silence and Slater's Spasm,
considered below, these discrepancies are not put down to patient
delusion. Her own alternative account is given full, authoritative weight,
and readers are challenged to choose between the two: `Do You Believe
Him or Me?' (p. 71). Later, she points to the rift between medical
treatments, on the one hand, of a mind ± which is understood as a
system of vertical tiers, divided into superego, ego and id ± and on the
other hand, of a brain ± which is comprised of chemicals and wired like an
electric circuit (pp. 141±2).
This dissenting stance also has an insistent political dimension. Together
the patients watch news coverage of the Vietnam War, and they empathise
with the powerless who seem to be falling into a parallel world like theirs,
`tiny bodies [who] fell to the ground on our TV screen: black people, young
people, Vietnamese people, poor people' (p. 92). They watch the war for
signs of a power inversion that would signal a change in their own lives: `we
were expectant. The world was about to flip, the meek were about to
inherit the earth or, more precisely, wrest it from the strong, and we, the
meekest and weakest, would be heirs to that vast estate' (p. 93). Most of the
patients are deeply upset, for themselves as well as the tiny screen figures,
when this fails to happen. The older narrator obviously has a clearer
understanding of what was actually happening in the war than did the
patients watching TV at the time. But there is a continuity of attitude
between protagonist and narrator, a basically left-wing scepticism that
informs her rational as well as mentally disordered thoughts. In fact it is
this dissenting frame of mind, or `state of contrariety' that seems to propel
her into madness and McLean's in the first instance: `All my integrity
seemed to lie in saying No. // So the opportunity to be incarcerated was
just too good to resist. It was a very big No' (p. 42). Yet in 1967, the year of
her admittance, many `sane' people were saying `no' politically, to the
American wars in Vietnam and Cuba, and socially, to the accepted sexual
mores of earlier eras. And in `Elementary Topography', Kaysen implies
that her doctor admits her to hospital as much for their political differences
as for the state of her health:

Even in lives like his, professional lives lived out in the suburbs behind
shrubbery, there was a strange undertow, a tug from the other world ± the
 The schizophrenic HyperReal: Carol North's Welcome, Silence 127
drifting, drugged-out, no-last-name youth universe ± that knocked people off
balance. One could call it `threatening,' to use his language . . . It's a mean world
out there . . . He can't in good conscience send her back into it. (pp. 39±40)

Susanna does enter this other world, though not in a manner she expects.
But in her critique of her diagnosis and the deconstruction of her medical
notes, Kaysen implicitly sustains the dissenting dialogue between over-
and underworlders, even after her return to health.
On one level, this is a memoir with a clear resolution, and a definite
recovery to health, even though Kaysen expresses this in sceptical tones
(`my misery has been transformed into common unhappiness, so by
Freud's definition I have achieved mental health' (p. 154)). The recovered
Susanna is extremely wary of borderline states, with their shimmery
tunnels leading back down into Wonderland. She insists on a clear
separation between herself then and now, between the crazy and the
sane: `insane people: I had a good nose for them and I didn't want to have
anything to do with them. I still don't' (p. 125). But Kaysen ironises this
recovered self's position, by overstating and exaggerating her intolerance
of ambivalence. What the memoir as a whole suggests is that the under-
world perspective, that of the politically and socially powerless, may well
be the more insightful or truer one. Vermeer's painting, finally, epitomises
this underworldly vantage point: `the girl at her music sits in another sort
of light, the fitful, overcast light of life, by which we see ourselves and
others only imperfectly, and seldom' (p. 168). Susanna spends a finite
time in the underworld, two years of her adolescence, but twenty-five
years later, she retains something of her underworldly perspective on her
girlhood illness, the medical establishment and US politics in the 1960s, as
well as the 1990s, the time of her narration.

The schizophrenic HyperReal: Carol North's Welcome,

Silence

Carol North is a psychiatrist who suffered from severe symptoms of

schizophrenia as a younger woman. Her memoir, Welcome, Silence: My
Triumph over Schizophrenia (1987) describes the onset of symptoms in
her high-school years, the periods of hospitalisation and psychiatric
treatment which interrupted her college and medical school educations,
the worsening of the symptoms, and finally her unexpected return to
health. In the Preface, North describes the memoir as her `personal
story', recalled partly from her diary of the time, her own and others'
memories and her medical records (p. 11). As the subtitle of the work
indicates, this is a memoir with a strong linear narrative, tracing a
128 Katabatic Memoirs of Mental Illness

descent into illness, with threshold crossing into a supernatural world, a

prolonged period on the `rock-bottom' of mental illness (p. 121) and,
very much in line with one strand of the katabatic tradition, a mir-
aculous and singular re-ascent to the ordinary world. The medical
records have been assimilated into the linear narrative, unlike other
memoirs that reproduce medical documents verbatim in order to chal-
lenge them more polemically (such as Girl, Interrupted, Hornbacher's
Wasted and Jenefer Shute's Life Size, a fictional memoir of anorexia). In
Welcome, Silence, half-remembered conversations are expanded into
fictional dialogue.
The memoir is set within a frame narrative in which Carol, recovered
from her illness and now a medical student, enters a psychiatric ward for
schizophrenics and confronts her own memories and fears. So this is a
narrative which, on the one hand, preserves a very clear boundary
between then and now, sick protagonist and healthy narrator, and on
the other hand, evinces deep understanding of, and empathy for, those on
the other side of the boundary, both her former self and present sufferers
of schizophrenia. In the frame narrative, the first patient Carol meets says
to her, ` ``You-are-no-doctor-Carol-North-you-are-the-Devil'' ' (p. 21).
To which her response is, `I thought he looked like the devil' (p. 22).
This lightly comic touch is typical of North's memoir. The exchange
encapsulates both the contiguities and the gaps between their perspec-
tives; while each thinks the other is devilish, only for the patient is this a
reality (not `looked like' but `you are'). Likewise, North's descriptions of
her schizophrenic hallucinations are astonishingly vivid and immediate.
But at the same time, the narrator preserves an ironic distance from her
younger self, a distance heightened by her shift of roles from patient to
trainee doctor in the intervening years. As a patient, Carol sees the world
in terms of gods and devils, but as narrator, she maintains a balanced
view of the medical profession, voicing criticism and praise of particular
treatments and doctors. Far from glamorising her schizophrenic symp-
toms, North makes us feel the welcome of her return to ordinary
consciousness.
Here too the psychiatric hospital provides the physical topography for
the descent journey. Like other memoirists, Carol associates the smells of
the psychiatric ward with feelings of panic and hopelessness, `an over-
whelming sense of despondency bordering on despair' (p. 20). Her
admittance to hospital is represented as a threshold crossing into another
reality: `A set of double doors swallowed me head first. Is this the
entrance to Infinity? Here goes . . .' (p. 89). The hospital belongs to
an earlier era, `some medieval mistake' (p. 88) in which infinite worlds are
conceivable. Whether she is crossing into Hell or Heaven, Carol is at first
 The schizophrenic HyperReal: Carol North's Welcome, Silence 129

unsure; `I didn't know whether existence in the Other World would be

divinely magnificent, beyond human description, like heaven, or whether
it would be like the worst imaginable hell' (p. 101). But if the latter, then
her heroic task is to resist; `if it threatened to be hellish, I would have to
try to prevent it' (p. 101).
But more important than any physical topography is Carol's repre-
sentation of schizophrenia itself as a nether world. In her memoir,
schizophrenia is affiliated with the land of the dead, and as in medieval
theology, this land is morally hierarchised into distinct regions of good
and evil. As a child, Carol recalls, `I sensed a spiritual connection between
myself and the dead' (p. 52). When listening to the Beatles song, `Here
Comes The Sun', she would see an otherworldly, morally duplicitous sun,
which `switched back and forth between being a good sun and an evil sun
threatening to engulf me' (p. 65). To the schizophrenic, this other world is
considered to be the real one, or as Carol calls it, the HyperReal. North's
use of this term appears to telescope together two concepts: the Platonic
Real, or the ideal world of forms of which our reality is but a distorted
reflection, and Baudrillard's Hyperreal, the condition of postmodern
capitalism in which `the real is no longer possible'.25 For Baudrillard,
hyperreality is not Plato's idea of truth beyond the surface of things, but
rather a hyped-up pseudo-reality, in which the image `bears no relation
to any reality whatever: it is its own pure simulacrum' (p. 173). To the
narrator Carol, the delusions of her former self are pseudo-realities or
simulacra. But to Carol the schizophrenic patient, her delusions are real in
the Platonic sense. Hence her quest is to get behind the surface of the
ordinary world, to access this hidden realm of ideal forms. She explains
that her attempted suicide was an effort to cross over into the Hyperreal;
`mine was a case of torment caused by my selective sensitivity to planes of
existence beyond ordinary reality. The point of my actions hadn't been
expressly to kill myself . . . The real issue was my need to break through
to the ultimate reality' (p. 70). This ultimate reality also resembles the
Freudian unconscious, in that irreconcilable truths coexist alongside each
other; `on the Other Side I found that incompatible Truths could coexist
without creating dissonance' (p. 190).
Thus in Carol's hallucinations, the worlds of Freud, Plato and Bau-
drillard are hybridised to become part of a private, psychic drama. Carol
resists her doctors' initial diagnoses, claiming `my problem was special,
like no one else's in the world; in fact, it was out of this world' (p. 107).
Like Neo in The Matrix,she feels she has a heroic role to play in mediating
between the two worlds; either she has to disabuse us of our faith in a
false reality (if the other world is good), or (if it is evil) she has to resist the
other world's incursion on ours.
130 Katabatic Memoirs of Mental Illness
The unpleasant feeling that things are not as they seem crept over me . . . I
realized that special relativity had seized the world . . . and transported all
people through time and space into the realm of the dead. Only somehow I
hadn't made it; I had been dropped off prematurely in limbo, in a parallel
existence where I was able to see what had happened to everyone else and yet
was incapable of doing anything about it. (p. 78)

The patient Carol thus understands her position in the HyperReal world
to be that of the descent hero in Hell: an observer rather than a
participant, a weighted soul among the weightless shades of the afterlife,
exempt from judgement but also powerless to change any aspect of the
netherword. Her Dantean role is not to intervene, but to understand and
communicate her unique vision: `only God and certain enlightened beings
could absorb such contradictions without imploding in on themselves like
a black hole' (p. 190).
But despite her special role as observer and mediator between the two
worlds, Carol is not exempt from physical torture in HyperReality, which
in this respect is more infernal than paradisal. Like Susanna in Girl,
Interrupted, as well as the souls driven by tempests in Dante's Vestibule of
Hell, she suffers from an inner sense of accelerated time that makes all rest
impossible: `my body was electric, buzzing: a sixty-cycle hum, serving as
conductive material in a communications network that allowed forty
billion messages to zoom back and forth between parallel universes and
Other Worlds' (p. 116). Time also `accordions itself' between meals,
leaving her no space or desire to eat (p. 117). Added to this, are the hostile
voices which, as in Hart's memoir, seem to want to fragment her mentally
and physically. ` ``We're winding up your muscles'' ', they tell her,
` ``Tighter and tighter and tighter, till they'll tear away from your bones'' '
(p. 120). Like Linda Hart, too, she feels her body is housing gigantic,
swelling insects that would eventually burst from her organs (p. 127).
What distinguishes Carol North's memoir from many others, however,
is the humour with which she conveys her experience of this terrifying,
HyperReal dimension. Often, this is expressed through the use of free
indirect discourse, which creates an ironic distance between the two
Carols, the younger patient and the older narrating self. Thus in the
following example, one hears the narrator's disbelief even as she records
the protagonist's insistence on credibility. The protagonist Carol is
standing on broken glass, having smashed a vending machine in an
attempt to pinpoint the source of its humming,

Although the connection was subtle, I was astute; I could see the master plan
here. I was standing on a cosmic junctional point where Other Worlds crossed
through ordinary existence, and the broken glass was my ticket to a great seat
in the auditorium of Infinity. (p. 135)
 The schizophrenic HyperReal: Carol North's Welcome, Silence 131

At other times, the humour is broadly farcical, as she describes the antics ±
a word that in itself associates theatrical farce with madness ± of the other
patients on the chronic ward. On the day of their first, apprehensive visit
to the ward, there is a commotion among the patients that confirms her
parents' worst preconceptions about mental illness: `Just at this inap-
propriate moment, the greasy meatloaf lady came running through the
dayroom without a stitch of clothing on, sat right down on top of a
depressed fat lady who was passively vegetating in an easy chair, and then
urinated right on the poor lady's lap' (p. 113). This kind of demonic,
grotesque farce is characteristic of Dante's so-called `gargoyle' cantos
(Inferno, 21±2), in which devils and damned souls chase each other
through vats of boiling tar. It is a gallows humour that finds release from
suffering through explosive laughter. Infernal farce of this kind is also a
marked feature of Keenan's hostage memoir, An Evil Cradling, as well as
many other accounts of mental torment.26
The outcome of Carol's psychomachia is not prescripted, or not, at any
rate, from her (the patient's) point of view. Unlike Fenimore's Beyond the
Darkness, it is not bound to a theological or psychoanalytic explanatory
narrative. At an advanced stage of the illness, she recalls how `the Beings
inserted cognizance into my head, the realization that my own self had
dissipated into God and dispersed as a drop of water into a rain puddle.
Suddenly I hated God, I hated being God. I had to get back to being
myself' (p. 190). The inversion of perspective that starts her on the road to
health comes from within the delusionary mentality of her illness (`I hated
being God. I had to get back').
The narrator Carol never evinces any doubt that her miraculous escape
from this tortuous HyperReality is to be welcomed. After the failure of
many different kinds of treatment, both chemical and psychoanalytic,
over a period of eight years, she is finally, quite suddenly cured by renal
dialysis. The treatment lasts for twenty weeks, but her symptoms clear up
after only two weeks. Carol writes, `for days I marveled that the Mean-
ings and the Meanings behind Meanings had vanished' (p. 309). In
contrast to Baudrillard (as paraphrased by Wernick), North represents
the `soft inferno' of the HyperReal as a region with specific limits, beyond
which lies ordinary reality. It is neither a metaphysical nor a general,
cultural condition to which we are fatally bound. Nevertheless, Carol's
recovery is represented as exceptional and unexpected; when the same
treatment is administered to other patients, it fails to produce similar
results. While doubts remain about the medical explanation, the memoir
as a whole suggests that, as we saw in the example above, Carol recovers
through exercising precisely those characteristics which were sympto-
matic of her illness. Just as in her delusional phase she saw herself
132 Katabatic Memoirs of Mental Illness

occupying a unique role as mediator between two cosmoi, so after her

recovery, she feels that she has a special calling to the psychiatric
profession. In this profession, as the frame narrative suggests, her
particular role will be to mediate between two worlds, having an intimate
knowledge and experience of both. In the return to the frame, she relates
how a schizophrenic patient tells her, ` ``You seem to understand every-
thing I say ± and I can tell you mean it right from your heart. You've
helped me more than any doctor I've ever had in the last twenty years'' '
(p. 314).
While a patient, she had demonstrated maniacal energy, once cycling
ninety-five miles in scorching heat, and well into the night, just to visit her
doctor in a neighbouring city (p. 159). But it is the same marathon energy
that makes her determined to keep out of institutions whenever she can,
that drives her to apply to one medical school after another, although
many reject her because of her history of schizophrenia. A chorus of
doctors describe her as unusually determined (p. 142), `intensely moti-
vated' (p. 139), with `too much motivation, drive, and goal-directedness'
for a typical, schizophrenic patient (p. 315). Medically, this gives rise to
questions about whether the diagnosis of schizophrenia was correct in her
case. In terms of narrative logic, it raises questions about the carefully
preserved boundary between Carol the patient and Carol the doctor.
While being refused entry to medical school, Carol never has any self-
doubt that her mission is to help people in this line of work. She writes,
`Granted I might have looked crazy to others, but I knew better' (p. 160).
But against whom is the irony of the indirect discourse directed in this
case? Is `knowing better' a sign of her craziness or lucidity in her illness?
Once again, the narrative provides an example of katabatic inversion
rather than transcendent conversion; the protagonist survives through
exercising infernal capacities, but in an inverted direction, away from
escape and towards participation in the ordinary world.

Falling into grace: Lauren Slater's Spasm: A Memoir

with Lies

Lauren Slater's Spasm: A Memoir with Lies (2000) is an autobiography of

epilepsy told by an unreliable narrator. In the Afterward, as well as in
various asides to the reader in the memoir itself, Slater insists that the
narrator who goes by her name is indeed her autobiographical self. But as
a child of the postmodernist era, she believes that autobiographies can lay
claim to no more than a `narrative truth' about the experience of illness,
as she explains in the Afterword (p. 219).27 Unlike North, Slater does not
 Falling into grace: Lauren Slater's Spasm: A Memoir with Lies 133

attempt to reconcile her subjective experience with an objective, clinical

diagnosis, nor does her memoir claim to be `rooted in the latest scientific
``evidence''' (p. 223). Throughout Spasm, Slater gives the name of
`epilepsy' to her experience of psychic upheaval, `the subtleties and
horrors and gaps in my past for which I have never been able to find
words' (pp. 219±20). But her panics, seizures and blackouts also stem
from a more general, existential fear about the lack of solid ground
beneath her feet, a moral framework or consensually acknowledged
truth. In this respect, Slater's memoir provides another contrast with
the two memoirs discussed above. For Carol North, there is a normal,
ordinary reality beyond the Hell of schizophrenic HyperReality, just as
for Susanna Kaysen there exists a moral world beyond the demonic
insanity that took the US into war in Vietnam: we may not yet have
emerged from that insane world-view, but her critique implies that a
moral, non-infernal world does exist and that we could conceivably
return to it. In contrast, Slater's memoir registers the modern subject's
fear of emptiness, of there being no world beyond the present, unstable,
epileptic one. As Charles Taylor puts it, the loss of a given, moral
framework in twentieth-century experience can produce `a terrifying
emptiness, a kind of vertigo, or even a fracturing of our world and
body-space' (Sources of the Self, p. 18). In Spasm, Lauren fears this
shiftiness, the lack of any fundamental truth or moral framework, in her
relationships ± particularly with her mother, but also with herself and her
slippery, true-or-false memories of past selves. Partway through the
memoir, Lauren records being diagnosed with Munchausen's disease,
or compulsive lying. Within the metaphorical framework provided by
these two psychic disorders, epilepsy and Munchausen's, Slater attempts
to convey how it feels to inhabit a self in whom one has no basic trust, a
self who begins her life-story with the provocative, doubt-inducing line, `I
exaggerate' (p. 3). As Alasdair MacIntyre writes of secular moderns
generally, Lauren is on a `quest' ± for a believable, moral framework and
a trustworthy self.28 On the basis of this existential uncertainty, Slater
argues in the Afterword, `there is only one kind of illness memoir that I
can see to write, and that's a slippery, playful, impish, exasperating text,
shaped, if it could be, like a question mark' (p. 223).
In the context of the present discussion, what is particularly striking
about Slater's memoir is that, while illness may be `the ultimate narrative'
(p. 222), the ultimate illness narrative is one that can be shaped as a
journey of descent and return. Her memoir is divided into four parts,
named after the four stages of an epileptic seizure, which together trace a
classic katabatic movement from threshold crossing (`onset') and dis-
solution of selfhood (`rigid stage') to zero point (`convulsion') and return
134 Katabatic Memoirs of Mental Illness

(`recovery'). In `onset', she describes her difficult relationship with her

parents: her father, a brilliant but volatile teacher of Hebrew, and her
clever, frustrated mother, `a hostess, a housewife, a schemer, an ideolo-
gue, [who] wanted to free the Russian Jews, educate the Falsaschias, fly
on the Concorde, drink at the Ritz' (p. 5). As a child Lauren develops
symptoms of epilepsy, and finding that they appeal to her mother's sense
of melodrama, she learns to exaggerate the attacks. She is sent to St
Christopher's, a Catholic school named after the patron saint of epilep-
tics, in which epileptic children are taught how to fall without hurting
themselves. In `Part 2: the rigid stage', her epilepsy worsens; diagnosed
with Munchausen's, she also undergoes, or lies about undergoing, an
operation on her brain which appears to cure the grand mal seizures. In
`Part 3: the convulsive stage', she attends a school for young writers in
Vermont, and has an obsessive affair with one of the instructors, also
named Christopher. And in `Part 4: the stage of recovery', she attends
Alcoholics Anonymous sessions, inspiring the group with a dramatically
staged confession; when she finally admits she is not an alcoholic, they
gently refuse to believe her real confession.
One important way in which Slater's memoir differs from Baudrillard's
Nietzchean postmodernism with its exhortation to embrace the limit is
that in Spasm the protagonist desperately wants to inhabit a solid,
dependable, fact-based reality. She struggles against a continual process
whereby the facts of her life are exposed as fictions. For example, at the
writer's camp in Vermont, Lauren decides to write autobiographical
stories about her childhood rather than the lurid melodrama which
got her accepted into the camp and sees this decision to reject fantasy
in favour of the real as something of a watershed in her life. She proceeds
to write a story about a cherry tree she remembers from childhood.
Although her memories of this tree in her garden are vivid and symbo-
lically important, her mother flatly insists it never existed. Is she to trust
her mother's version of the past? Lauren's mother might also have
merited the diagnosis of Munchausen's: `from my mother I learned that
truth is bendable, that what you wish is every bit as real as what you are'
(p. 5). The child Lauren's craving for solid truths, `for something safe and
solid and absolutely absolute' (p. 68), becomes inextricable from her
desire for recognition and love from her volatile mother (`Please please let
her be pleased . . . I watched her like I should have watched my sinking
sickening self' (p. 13)). Moreover, although her parents are orthodox
Jews, Lauren herself finds her family religion alienating; `I couldn't
connect to the high, clean whiteness of it all, the stern uprightness, I
stinking and dark, a girl straight out of Gomorrah' (p. 195). Rather than
connecting her to a communal, cultural history, Judaism intensifies her
 Falling into grace: Lauren Slater's Spasm: A Memoir with Lies 135

sense of alienation. Later she comes to identify instead with the `broken'
figures of Christian faith: Christ on the cross and St Paul seized (as some
conjecture) by epilepsy on the road to Damascus.29 At the AA meeting,
realising that her true confession has been less persuasive than her faked
one, Lauren fumes (`I felt furious, I mean furious that nothing would ever,
ever change for me, that I would never land on the literal' (p. 212)) and
despairs (`Inside of me, my heart crashed off a cliff again' (p. 207)).
Everything about her experience inclines Lauren to agree with Kierke-
gaard, a well-known epileptic, whom she quotes as saying, ` ``The greatest
lie of all is the feeling of firmness beneath our feet'' ' (p. 163). This was
also a view held by the existentialist philosopher Jean Paul Sartre who,
like Kierkegaard, had a professional interest in epilepsy (it is a central
theme in his monumental study of Flaubert).30 Lauren eventually comes
to see her past, her family and the entire material world as epileptic: `The
earth is a huge head, and it has tidal waves, erosions, seismic shudders
that forever change its unfixed shape' (p. 214). Her response to this
perception is at first Sartrean, in that she tries to compensate for
inescapable, existential uncertainty by living her life `from death to birth',
as Sartre tells us he determined to do in Les Mots.31 From the onset
through to the rigid stage of her journey, Lauren mostly regards her
epileptic seizures as a memento mori, as signs of the fragility of her
existence and the destructibility of anything she holds dear. Midway
through the rigid stage, she attends the funeral of a neighbour and
imagines falling into the open grave. Or rather, she tells us she did fall
in: `I buckled my knees, let my limbs loose in the way I had learned, and I
collapsed down into the deep hole, the empty grave' (p. 57). At this point,
she thanks all those who have contributed to making her well, in
particular Leonard Kriegel for the inspiration of his book of essays
Falling into Life, she climbs out of the grave, and with the flourish of
hitting puberty at exactly that moment, announces the end of the memoir.
And then she retracts this tale as a falsehood; `I thought about falling in. I
imagined myself falling in' (p. 59). In contrast to Sartre, one might say,
she finds she is unable to sustain the finality of the retrospective view. The
philosopher's closural perspective is enticing but false for a protagonist
who continues, wildly and messily, to fall into life rather than a literal or
conjectural open grave.
In the convulsive stage, another perspective on epileptic seizure or
crashing descent begins to emerge: that it is not a premonition of death,
but the paradigmatic experience of living itself. Here Lauren comes to
associate the auras preceding her seizures with periods of intense crea-
tivity in her writing. The auras heighten her pleasure in language and her
visual imagination; under their influence, `each pulse of pleasure was a
136 Katabatic Memoirs of Mental Illness

word, and the words were turquoise, as beautiful and complex as the
coral in the Caribbean Sea' (p. 111). Dostoevsky, Van Gogh and Lewis
Carroll are invoked as fellow sufferers of the disease, who came to depend
on their auras for producing creative work (pp. 23, 112). In this stage too,
she `falls' in love with the writer Christopher Marin. When the affair ends
unhappily (Marin is frightened off after he witnesses one of her seizures),
Lauren writes, `If only I could learn to live here, in the chasm he cut, in the
void out of which our world was born, if only I could. // I can' (p. 158).
The little tank-engine shift from `if only I could' to `I can' constitutes a
katabatic inversion, a radical shift in perspective on the idea of the
epileptic fall to earth.
For Lauren, this change of perspective means much more than a passive
acquiescence to the conditions of her illness. While never glamorising
epilepsy, nor hiding the ugliness and the sordidness of the seizures, she
comes to see her illness as a fundamental expression of her longing for, as
well as her distance from, solid ground. In a reversal of the symbolic
negativity associated with female gender (to be discussed in greater detail
in the next chapter), Lauren realises, `you are born with a hole in you,
genetic or otherwise, and so you seize at this, you seize at that' (p. 156).
Epilepsy forces her into a recognition of this longing, but also reveals the
longing to be a source of strength rather than a loss: `epilepsy does not
mean to be possessed, passively; it means to need to possess, actively'
(ibid.).
In the fourth, recovery stage of her journey, Lauren learns to exploit the
double perspective ± perhaps an epileptic one? ± of Dante's `I did not die
and I did not remain alive' (Inferno, 34.25). After her experience at the
AA meeting, Lauren is confused and angry as

my fact blew away, and I found myself back in the world I knew best, the
strange, warped world, a world of so many stories ± I am an alcoholic I am not
an alcoholic; I am an epileptic I am not an epileptic ± a world peopled with
princes, with color, with cities of salt and perpetual, perpetual possibilities,
plots unfolding one into the other. (p. 212)

In the mid-section of this passage, Lauren represents herself stranded

between two versions of reality (`I am an alcoholic I am not an alcoholic'),
an aporia that can never be resolved as her `others' (the AAers) will never
confirm the inner narrative she has of herself. This in-between-ness
resembles Milton's pagan god, Mulciber (or Hephaestus) who in Paradise
Lost is portrayed arrested in mid-fall from Heaven, `from morn / To
noon he fell, from noon to dewy eve, / A summer's day' (Paradise Lost,
1.742±4).32 But unlike Mulciber, who crashes into the solid ground of
Lesbos and the poet's Christian judgment, Lauren never hits the ground
 Falling into grace: Lauren Slater's Spasm: A Memoir with Lies 137

of the literal or of unshakeable religious faith. But the second part of this
passage orchestrates a katabatic turn on the aporia of narrative undecid-
ability. As she realises she can't resolve her double vision, her anger
dissolves into delight at the openness of narrative possibilities. The
backward look of Lot's wife (alluded to in the phrase `cities of salt')
becomes a positive example of the way the world, like Scheherezade's
thousand and one stories, offers the self an infinity of contiguous,
enfolded, sometimes mutually contradictory, narrative constructions.
Of course, the idea of the self as an intersection of infinite narrative
possibilities can be regarded as a demonic condition rather than a positive
one. In Borges's famous story, `The Garden of Forking Paths', a murder
takes place in one of an infinite number of possible temporal universes;
but this single act, committed in a single, obscure corner of that labyrinth
of narrative possibility, is the one act that must, fatally and inevitably,
condemn Stephen Albert, the central protagonist, to death.33 As Peter
Brooks comments, the figure of the Borgesian labyrinth serves to illustrate
how the forking paths and crossroads of narrative are `both random and
determined' (p. 319). But while Brooks defines plot as the combination of
Freudian pleasure principle and death drive, a combination which trans-
lates into a tension between the conflicting drives toward deferral and
closure, it is really the death drive that predominates in his conception of
narrative identity. Citing Benjamin, for whom `death is the sanction of
everything that the storyteller can tell,' he states, `it is my simple
conviction . . . that narrative has something to do with time-bounded-
ness, and that plot is the internal logic of the discourse of mortality.'34 But
Stephen Albert only `has to' die in `The Garden of Forking Paths' because
he is caught in a textual labyrinth in which his death is decreed in
advance. In Borges's figure of the labyrinth, as Adriana Cavarero points
out, `it is not lives that produce stories; it is rather the stories that produce
the characters who believe that they are alive' (p. 124). In Cavarero's
view, narrative fulfils another desire, not the desire for closure or the
certainty of the near-death perspective, but the desire to know the
beginning of one's own story. Thus

the beginning . . . is the essential chapter in which the self becomes narrated
before even knowing herself to be narrated. The unity of the self, which the
desire for narration makes manifest, finds in the others' tale her indispensable
incipit, but never her final pleasure. (Relating Narratives, p. 86)

In any case, Borgesian ramified time can be interpreted less determinis-

tically than Brooks suggests. For example, in an essay on Dante, Borges
dismissed as a `false problem' the disagreement among scholars over
whether Count Ugolino, depicted in the lowest circle of Inferno, had
138 Katabatic Memoirs of Mental Illness

eaten his children before he died or not. In Borges's view, Dante's

ambiguous explanation is meant to leave the matter undecidable; `Ugo-
lino devours and does not devour the beloved corpses, and this undulat-
ing imprecision, this uncertainty, is the strange matter of which he is
made.'35 One might object that even if we don't know whether Ugolino
ate his children or not, Ugolino himself does; it is precisely this condition
of having chosen which identifies him as a damned soul. (According to a
1995 report from the Church of England, `Hell is not eternal torment, but
it is the final and irrevocable choosing of that which is opposed to
God.')36 But this is the redemption, such as it is, that the `ambiguous time
of art' (`Ugolino', p. 279) can offer Dante's Count; it can preserve him at
the fork in the road, the condition of not yet having chosen. As Calvino
noted in a commentary on this essay, `the concept of ramified time is dear
to Borges because it is the one which dominates in literature.'37 Slater's
Spasm suggests furthermore that real lives may be understood as ambig-
uous, undecidable stories, rather than stories to be read backwards, from
the condition of having chosen.38
In this more positive sense, then, narrative truth allows Lauren to
rewrite herself continually, to remain unbounded by the closural or `death
drive' of narrative. This, too, is an insight that traditionally derives from
an underworld journey. In Hades, the classical hero seeks to discover not
only the secret of what happens after death, but also the mystery of where
we come from.39 The last fall in Spasm is represented as a birth scene
rather than a plummet towards death. The closing paragraph of the
memoir rewrites the earlier scene, in which Lauren pretends to fall into an
open grave. She concludes:
You give up the ground, which you never really had to begin with, and
something else takes over, and that something, with or without a face . . .
that's the one fact I will ever and only have. I have the fact of falling . . . I will
not win . . . If I am a gymnast, I will miss my mark, and fall, in my pale blue
leotard, straight into the hole. Alice is there. The queen is there. My mother is
there . . . I fell, and gave up the ground, and for that split second, spinning in
utter space, I was nowhere, I was nothing, my mouth open round, like a zero,
like 0, out of which the baby is born, the words spill, the planet pops, the trees
grow, everything rising; real. (p. 216)

Here Slater refigures the earlier, Sartrean (imaginary) fall towards death,
as a fall into recognition of her beginnings (where she will meet her
mother and the childhood heroine, Alice). And it is from this point of
beginnings that the hinge-movement of katabasis can operate, the fall
becoming a rise, the fiction becoming `real'. But the claim to have
discovered the real remains openly provisional; the only fact asserted
with any certainty here is `the fact of falling'. Unlike many illness
 Falling into grace: Lauren Slater's Spasm: A Memoir with Lies 139

memoirs, Spasm does not hide the fakeness of its ending or the con-
structedness of her self-representation.
In claiming epilepsy as a metaphor for the contemporary, postmodern
condition, Slater lays herself open to the charge of fetishising mental
illness as Deleuze and Guattari were accused of having done in Anti-
Oedipus. But unlike Deleuze and Guattari, Slater is careful to distinguish
between private histories, such as hers, which can afford to speak
metaphorically of her own experience, and public ones, about which
we should strive to reach a consensus and to name literal facts; even in the
latter case, the ground is never solid but `we have to make choices to the
best of our knowledge, name genocides and loves and hungers even while
falling through them' (p. 220). And Slater does claim to write from direct
experience, if not of epilepsy, then of mental disorder. She assures the
reader, `I have been ill for much of my life' (p. 222). Her memoir enacts a
katabatic turn on the experience of mental illness, so that a passive fall,
a `seizure', becomes an active descent, a seizing of life with both hands.
In a manoeuvre that will be explored in greater detail in the following
chapter, she also makes the reversal dependent on the cooperation of her
implied reader. As she once sought her mother's approval, so Lauren
repeatedly invokes the reader's agreement and approval of her slippery,
unreliable narrative: `even if I wanted to tell you this (and I do not want to
tell you this; fall with me, please)' (p. 213). If memoirs are narratives
which ask the question `who am I?', they depend on the possibility of
hearing `one's own story narrated by another', as Cavarero argues
(Relating Narratives, p. 136). Where the `I' is presented as fractured,
undecidable, narratable rather than already narrated, the other is `no
longer the rhetorical site of interrogation, but rather its decisive hinge'
(ibid.).
At the beginning of this chapter, I raised the question whether mental
illness memoirs tended to reinforce the idea of a metaphysically unified
self, because of their emphasis on the need for recovery of mental integrity
and health. In terms of the katabatic tradition, do these descent texts
validate only those aspects of the journey which give credence and
authority to the present, narrating self? Close reading of illness memoirs
suggested this not to be the case. The narrators of these texts recognise the
fragility of mental health. The histories they relate demonstrate that the
self is not something lost and gained in isolation, but rather constructed
dialogically ± sometimes in fierce opposition to, sometimes with the
empathetic support of others. None of these memoirs celebrate schizoid,
seismic and fragmented states of mind as desirable in themselves. What is
celebrated is the identity that emerges as a distillation of the experience of
seizure, engulfment or fragmentation.
140 Katabatic Memoirs of Mental Illness

And, as we have seen, there is much more at stake in these memoirs

than developing a `core sense of self', at least if that is understood as
pertaining only to the individual's personal history and immediate
circumstances. Glass thinks we should not expect too much of fragmented
selves and fractured egos; these cannot be the `vanguard of new political
collectivities' (p. 16). He may be right about current sufferers of mental
illness, but those who have written retrospectively about their experiences
often highlight collective values and ideals. Kaysen's Girl, Interrupted is
openly critical of the pro-war culture that turned a blind eye to so many
different social underworlds in the 1960s, and still does today, while
North's Welcome, Silence questions the psychiatric treatment of chroni-
cally ill patients. Slater's Spasm explores the illnesses of epilepsy and
Munchausen's as metaphors for understanding the contemporary, ex-
istential condition. In all these memoirs, the experience of living through
mental illness is represented as a descent into an infernal underworld.
In all of them, too, the return from Hell depends on an inversion of
perspective, a clarification and a reorientation of values, leading not to
transcendence but to an affirmation of the everyday, material world.

Notes

1. On writing the self in contemporary autopathography, see Brendan Stone,

`Starting to Speak', PhD thesis, University of Sheffield, 2004. See also
Thomas Couser, `Autopathography: Women, Illness and Lifewriting',
Auto/Biography-Studies, 6:1, Spring, 1991, pp. 65±75.
2. See Jameson's The Political Unconscious and Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-
Oedipus. For a comparative analysis of the alienated modern subject and the
schizophrenic postmodern one, see David Harvey's The Condition of Post-
modernity, pp. 3±120 (especially pp. 41±65). See also Mark Currie, `Culture
and schizophrenia', in Postmodern Narrative Theory, pp. 96±114.
3. Gayatri C. Spivak, `Reading The Satanic Verses', p. 114.
4. Barthes' text of bliss is one `that imposes a state of loss', `that unsettles the
reader's historical, cultural, psychological assumptions' (The Pleasure of the
Text, pp. 14, 37).
5. Mark Currie, Postmodern Narrative Theory, p. 103.
6. Gary Saul Morson, Narrative and Freedom, pp. 173±233. On other post-
modern, temporal foreshortenings, see Ursula Heise, Chronoschisms, pp. 6±
7, 44±77.
7. Hart refers to the dismembered souls in Dante's Inferno, 10.
8. `Throughout this book, I make a distinction between the words anoretic and
anorexic. Though in common parlance the word anorexia is often used to
describe a person . . . the technically correct usage of anorexic is as an
adjective ± i.e., it describes a type of behaviour . . . whereas anoretic is a
noun, the medical term for a person diagnosed with anorexia' (Hornbacher,
Wasted, p. 2).
 Notes 141
9. Derrida critiqued the concept of a centred self, one which might be said to
exist prior to action or discourse, in Writing and Difference (see p. 280). Kim
Worthington summarises some pre-postmodern ideas of selfhood: `the belief
in an I that thinks, in thoughts prior to linguistic expression, and in language
as a neutral medium of communication ± where the core of the self is posited
as a prelinguistic datum' (Self as Narrative, p. 67).
10. See, for example, Lance Armstrong, with Sally Jenkins, It's Not About the
Bike: My Journey Back to Life. London: Yellow Jersey, 2000.
11. Compare Freccero's discussion of conversion narrative, which likewise
accounts for the whole of a life's significance, while only directly relating
one episode within it. See The Poetics of Conversion, p. 25, and Chapter 2 of
the present study.
12. Taking issue with Michel Foucault's Histoire de la folie aÁ l'age classique
(Paris: Gallimard, 1972), Derrida writes that `all our European languages,
the language of everything that has participated, from near or far, in the
adventure of Western reason ± all this is the immense delegation of the
project defined by Foucault under the rubric of the capture or objectification
of madness' (Writing and Difference, p. 35). For a discussion of the
disagreement between Derrida and Foucault about whether madness can
be represented in psychiatric or any rational discourse, see Bernard Flynn,
`Derrida and Foucault: madness and writing', in Hugh J. Silverman (ed.),
Derrida and Deconstruction. London: Routledge, 1989, pp. 201±18.
13. Baudrillard, `Paroxysm: interviews with Philippe Petit', in Selected Writings,
p. 290. When asked by Petit to clarify what he means by `push the paradox to
the limit', Baudrillard replies, `pushing to the limit means acknowledging this
[the system's] irreversibility and pushing it to the limit of its possibilities, to
the point of collapse. Bringing it to saturation point where the system itself
creates the accident' (ibid., p. 290).
14. Farinata, the unrepentant Florentine leader, appears in Dante's Inferno 10.
On his significance in Inferno, and the subsequent development of realist
literature, see Erich Auerbach, Mimesis, pp. 151±76, and my Chapter 2.
15. On the transition in capitalist cultures from `representation' to `simulation'
of reality, see Jean Baudrillard, `Simulacra and simulations', in Selected
Writings, p. 173. The phrase, `soft inferno of simulation' is coined by
Andrew Wernick in a review of Mike Gane (ed.), Baudrillard Live: Selected
Interviews. London: Routledge, 1993. See Wernick, `Baudrillard's remain-
der', in Reviews: R007, 17 November 1993, eds. A. and M. Kroker.
Available online at: www.ctheory.net/text
16. For one example of such a turning point, see Wasted, p. 64: `my life split in
half, finally and definitively, right there, seventh grade.'
17. See Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, p. 246.
18. See Dennett, `The Self as a Center of Narrative Gravity', p. 103. I am grateful
to Brendan Stone for this reference.
19. On aerial journeys into the afterlife, see Zaleski, Otherworldly Journeys,
pp. 45±60.
20. In Forbidden Knowledge, Roger Shattuck suggests that the fables of Car-
roll's Alice in Wonderland and Stevenson's Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde epitomise
contrasting twentieth-century reactions to technological and scientific ad-
vancement; the first infantilises while the second demonises the new and
142 Katabatic Memoirs of Mental Illness
unfamiliar (p. 3). For the female descent journey into madness, there are
well-known literary precedents such as Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Yellow
Wallpaper and the poems of Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton; the connection
between representations of women and representations of madness was first
explored in Gilbert and Gubar's seminal study, Madwoman in the Attic.
21. On the two contrasting models of memory, archaeological and constructi-
vist, see Nicola King, Memory, Narrative, Identity, pp. 5±20, and Chapter 4
of the present study.
22. Coelius Rhodiginus, quoted by Jeremiah Drexel, in De cultu corporis (1658),
cited by Camporesi, Fear of Hell, p. 36. See Chapter 1, note 16.
23. On the temporal accelerations of late capitalism, see David Harvey, The
Condition of Postmodernism, and my Chapter 7.
24. Alex Beam and Alma Bond, Gracefully Insane. Boulder, CO: Public Affairs/
Perseus Books Group, 2002, p. 247.
25. Baudrillard, `Simulacra and simulations', in Selected Writings, p. 180.
26. Keenan recalls exchanges with fellow hostage John McCarthy during their
imprisonment in Beirut, in which `profound meditations often degener-
ated into an exchange of foul-mouthed banter. ` ``You talk like you were
born with marleys in your mouth'' . . . ``Marleys? . . . What in the name
of fuck are you talking about, you ridiculous Irish aborigine.'' ``Marleys,
you brain-dead piece of shit, are little coloured glass balls that children
play with.'' . . . We hurled this abuse with such pretended vehemence and
at other times with such perverse eloquence that the force of it and the
laughter pushed back the crushing agony of the tiny space' (An Evil
Cradling, pp. 126±7).
27. On self as narrative, see Paul Ricoeur, `Life in Quest of Narrative' and
`Narrative Identity', in David Wood (ed.), On Paul Ricoeur, pp. 20±33, 188±
200; and Kim Worthington, Self as Narrative.
28. Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue, p. 203.
29. Thus Lauren thinks, `churches are places for the two-tongued and the
fainters, for broken bodies.' She cites Jesus' healing of the epileptic boy
(p. 195), and thinks of Christ himself as an epileptic, his body broken by the
cross (p. 170).
30. See Jean Paul Sartre, L'Idiot de la famille: Gustave Flaubert de 1821 aÁ 1857,
5 vols (The Family Idiot: Gustave Flaubert from 1821 to 1857, 3 vols in
English, 1971±72).
31. See Les Mots (Paris: Gallimard, 1968), p. 171, in which Sartre resolves to live
`from death to birth', becoming `my own obituary.' See also Peter Brooks'
discussion of this passage in Reading for the Plot, pp. 94±5, in the context of
an argument that narrative possesses an innate death-drive, or desire for
closure. In line with this idea, the film Magnolia follows the histories of
several characters through flawed lives to the point where all the characters'
plot lines intersect at the moment of their deaths. The booming narratorial
voice-over, `Use that regret, use it!' drives home Sartre's point that one can
construct a moral framework by living retrospectively, in the shadow of
one's own death. (The film also revives the overtly didactic function of the
medieval journey to Hell narrative.) To the archetypal psychologist James
Hillman, `to live fully into the consequence of the finalistic view means to
bear the perspective of Hades and the underworld toward each psychic
 Notes 143
event. We ask: what is the purpose of this event for my soul, for my death?'
(The Dream and the Underworld, p. 31).
32. This passage, with its rhythm of arrested judgment followed by Christian
correction, is the subject of a celebrated analysis of Paradise Lost by Stanley
Fish, in his Surprised by Sin: The Reader in Paradise Lost. Berkeley, CA:
University of California Press, 1971.
33. Jorge Luis Borges, `The Garden of Forking Paths', Collected Fictions, trans.
Andrew Hurley. London: Penguin, 1998, pp. 119±28.
34. Benjamin, `The Storyteller', in Illuminations, p. 94, quoted by Brooks in
Reading for the Plot, p. 22.
35. Borges, `The False Problem of Ugolino', The Total Library: Non-Fiction,
p. 279. Gary Saul Morson's concept of `sideshadowing', imagining what
might have happened in a historical episode where the outcome is already
decided, gives an ethical inflection to Borgesian ramified time. See Morson's
discussion of sideshadowing in Dostoevsky and Tolstoy in Narrative and
Freedom, Chapter 3.
36. Report quoted in `Weep and Gnash Those Teeth: Hell's Back', The In-
dependent on Sunday, 2 April 2000, News, p. 3.
37. Italo Calvino, Why Read the Classics? London: Jonathan Cape, 1999,
p. 242. A recent archaeological excavation in Italy claims to have discovered
the body of the historical Ugolino; DNA tests on the body suggest that
Ugolino had not, in fact, eaten human flesh before he died. See `Digging up
the Dead', The Economist, 6±12 March 2004, p. 44. If the claim is true, then
on this occasion, science has managed to extricate the human image from the
ambiguous, infernally ramified time of literature.
38. For a wider discussion of the aesthetics of undecidability, see Graham
Falconer, `Flaubert, James and the Problem of Undecidability', Comparative
Literature, 39:1 (Winter, 1987), pp. 1±18.
39. For example, in the underworld, Aeneas is shown flocks of souls crowding a
river bank, jostling to cross over and be born into another life. At this
Pythagorean vision of reincarnation, the melancholy hero wonders, `why do
these poor souls have such a fierce desire for the light?' (Aeneid, 6.721, my
trans.).
 Chapter 6

Engendering Dissent in
the Underworld

As we saw in Chapter 1, the twentieth century has frequently been

characterised as an infernal one, both by writers who lived through its
worst horrors and ± since it is by no means clear that we have emerged
from it ± those who are currently reflecting on it retrospectively. Against
that background, I have tried to show that descent narratives can function
either as the means of constructing an escape route from, or alternatively
discovering a radical shift of perspective on, this historically infernal
condition. However, in the traditional katabatic narrative, such descent
journeys are not equally available to all. Female characters, by definition,
are usually excluded from descent because they are already in the under-
world; indeed, the underworld is symbolically what they are. Narratives
of the Orpheus myth, for example, usually dispatch Eurydice to the
underworld in the opening lines or paragraphs, if she is not discovered
there already from the outset; in a sense, she has always already died.1 Or,
as Cavarero wryly observes, `Orpheus inaugurates the stubborn tradition
[of love poetry], which wants the loved woman to be a dead woman'
(Relating Narratives, p. 94). While certain non-Western myths (such as
the descent of Inanna to wrest power from the underworld goddess
Erishkigal) ascribe the heroic role to a female character, it is only quite
recently that mythic descent heroines have begun to gain currency in
Western literature and culture.

Gender dynamics in the descent to Hell

In the majority of ancient Greek myths which, as is now generally

acknowledged, were to prove so influential on Freud and his successors
in the psychoanalytical field, the descent hero is gendered male and the
object of the quest as well as the medium through which the quest is
realised is gendered female. Freud's account of the psyche's development
 Gender dynamics in the descent to Hell 145

to mature adult consciousness follows the young boy on the successive

stages of a journey to selfhood, through identification with the mother,
horror at her sexual lack, rejection of the identification and entry into the
patriarchal role.2 Lacan's account of the psyche is synchronic rather than
diachronic, but the stratification into female underworlds and male
overworlds remains the same. It is the Woman's definition as `lack' that
serves, symbolically, as the ground of patriarchal culture.3 For Lacan, real
women (as opposed to the symbolic Mother) have a choice: they may
consent to being fantasised by male subjects as feminine objects of desire,
acceding to what Angela Carter describes as the metaphysics of sexual
difference in which `man aspires; woman has no other function but to
exist, waiting' (The Sadeian Woman, p. 4). Alternatively, as Drusilla
Cornell writes in her gloss on Lacan, we can `reposition ourselves on the
side of the masculine, appropriate the phallus, and thus become lawyers,
doctors, professors . . . But then we will not be able to express our power
as feminine' (p. 91).4
Such an alternative would appear to return us to the philosophical
crossroads that was outlined in Chapter 1. For Lyotard, and some other
postmodern theorists, the contemporary Western subject can respond in
one of two ways to the twentieth century's infernal dislocations: it can
claim possession of transcendental knowledge, the metaphysics of pre-
sence, and thus find an escape route from Hell; or it can admit its
dispossession and choose to remain fragmented, disoriented, under-
worldly. Some feminists would argue that this dilemma presupposes a
white, male, middle-class subject because, as Nicole Jouve tersely notes,
`you must have a self before you can afford to deconstruct it'.5 My own
view is that the dilemma facing a woman on entry into the patriarchal,
symbolic order constitutes a heightened form of the more general
twentieth-century dispossessions discussed by Levinas and Lyotard. In
this reading, feminine dispossession should be regarded as a paradigmatic
instance of twentieth-century dislocation rather than an exceptional one.
Unlike the Dantean pilgrim who exclaims `I did not die and I did not
remain alive', and whose sense of self ± the ipse, as opposed to the idem,
as Paul Ricoeur distinguishes them in `Narrative and Identity' ± is
preserved in the question, `who am I?', the traditional female would-
be subject asks, rather, `what am I for?' (Milton's Eve indirectly receives
an answer to the latter question when she overhears the archangel
Raphael telling Adam: `Male he created thee, but thy consort / Female
for race' (Paradise Lost, 7.529±30)). Even in the most extreme cases of
deliberate dehumanisation of which the twentieth century affords such
dreadful examples, the gendered dynamic of descent is not erased. Thus in
Primo Levi's poem, `If This Is a Man', one cannot help but notice the
146 Engendering Dissent in the Underworld

greater abjection of the female prisoner than the male: `Consider if this is
a man . . . / Who does not know peace / Who fights for a scrap of bread /
Who dies because of a yes or a no. / Consider if this a woman, / Without
hair and without name . . . / Her eyes empty and her womb cold / Like a
frog in winter' (If This Is a Man, p. 7).6
In contemporary literature, the feminine continues to be largely ex-
cluded from the symbolic realm, in which an ipse can ask `who am I?',
with whatever degree of anxiety about the possible answer, while the
relegation of the feminine to the underworld is cast as the necessary
corollary to a male hero's descent and return from Hell. To illustrate the
strength of this traditional dynamic, three brief examples will suffice,
although many more could be adduced. In The Wind-up Bird Chronicle
(Nejimaki-dori kuronikuru, 1994), Haruki Murakami recounts the story
of Toru Okada, a man whose search for his missing wife leads him on a
labyrinthine journey through the literal and psychic depths of modern-
day Tokyo. Okada learns from his encounters with various semi-super-
natural women that to recover his wife he has first to know the depths of
his own soul. He explores this psychic terrain by shutting himself up for
days in the bottom of a deep dry well. His personal quest to understand
his dark side becomes interlaced with stories of sadistic brutality com-
mitted by Japanese soldiers in the Second World War. This magnificent
and complex tale is nevertheless very simple and archaic in its treatment
of gender. All the female characters in the novel are socially marginalised,
the bearers of historical insight but never the actants. Like Persephone,
the lost wife has become a sexual slave; in Kumiko's case, the Hades
figure is her own charismatic and socially powerful brother. She too has
to discover a deeper sense of identity in order to break free. But her dark
side is specifically and limitedly sexual. We do not follow her journey,
which in any case is mostly a passive waiting game. She will be free only
when her husband knows himself and recognises her sexual nature.
A similarly gendered dynamic operates, too, in Colum McCann's This
Side of Brightness (1998). This is a double-plotted Orphic story of a
black, turn-of-the-century New York City underground tunnel digger
and his descendant, now living in the tunnels his ancestor helped to dig
(an Orpheus, then, trapped underground). At the end of the novel, the
descendant, known as Treefrog, emerges from the tunnels to resume a
social existence in the `visible' world. But this modern Orpheus can return
to the overworld only when he finds a Eurydice to leave behind. Treefrog
has a brief affair with Angela, an addict trapped in an abusive relation-
ship with her dealer. Finding that she cannot be easily reasoned out of a
heroin addiction, he leaves her: `he blows her a kiss and then goes on . . . a
great lightness to his body, not a single shadow cast in the tunnel. And at
 Gender dynamics in the descent to Hell 147

the gate he smiles, hefting the weight of the word upon his tongue . . . a
single word, resurrection' (p. 248).
Finally, in Kleinzeit (1974), a comedic version of the Orpheus myth
(where Eurydice is freed from the underworld), Russell Hoban represents
a white, middle-class Orpheus who is hospitalised with a serious illness,
but returns from this underworld, bringing with him the nurse who helps
him through to recovery. Hoban suggests that Kleinzeit's illness is an
excessive, masculine ambition to succeed in the world. From his con-
versations with the angelic `Sister', he comes to see how `men are rotten
clear through with being animate. Women on the other hand have not
quite lost the health of the inanimate, the health of deep stillness. They're
not quite so sick with life as men are' (Kleinzeit p. 150). In Hoban's
reinterpretation of the Orpheus myth, his Eurydice (Sister) is praised for
possessing the paradoxical vitality of deathliness. The lack of subjectivity
in Sister is illustrated in her brief exchange with God:
It is my opinion, she said to God, that nobody is healthy.
Look at you, said God. Who could be healthier?
Oh, women, said Sister. I'm talking about men. (p. 19)

Sister appears to be excluding herself from criticism, but she is also

excluding women from the subject position of one who can be directly
addressed: `Look at you', says God; `Oh, women', she replies. There is a
similar slippage of address, from `you' to `they', in Freud's undelivered
lecture, `Femininity' (1933). In a now notorious passage, Freud turns to
his imaginary audience with this address: `nor will you have escaped
worrying over this problem ± those of you who are men; to those of you
who are women, this will not apply ± they are themselves the problem.'7
For Freud, women are `the problem', just as for Hoban, women are
healthily inanimate. In both cases, the real subject of the descent is
masculine. Notwithstanding Judith Butler's caveat that `a ``theory of
self'' [is] . . . not reducible to a theory of gender', it can hardly be denied
that twentieth-century psychoanalysis, with its rich inheritance of kata-
batic myths and narrative structures, encourages us for the most part to
do precisely that, i.e. to conflate the symbolic category of `Woman' with
that of `not-self'.8
Whereas the descent to Hell provided male writers of the twentieth
century with a narrative structure capable of conveying the dispersals and
dissolutions of modern identity while at the same time paradoxically
claiming both authority over the fragmented self and a place in the
patrilinear tradition, contemporary Western women writers are drawing
on katabatic narrative to express the uneasy and contradictory relation-
ship between female subjectivity and patriarchal culture.9 Some of these
148 Engendering Dissent in the Underworld

women writers exploit the underworldly, `feminine' position to critique

different aspects of Western capitalism, especially its embrace of pre-
modern, patriarchal ideologies. Some, too, are more aware of a para-
doxical relation to Western capitalism than others. For Angela Carter,
Western advances in science and technology (particularly relating to birth
control) are the very ground that make modern, female subjectivity
possible. In `Notes from the front line', she writes:

The sense of limitless freedom that I, as a woman, sometimes feel is that of a

new kind of being. Because I simply could not have existed, as I am, in any
other preceding time or place. I am the pure product of an advanced,
industrialized, post-imperialist country in decline. (Shaking a Leg, p. 40)

But while accepting, even revelling in the phantasmagoria of postmo-

dern capitalism ± the infernal aspects of which will be explored in the
next chapter ± Carter is also aware that its liberating excesses are not
free of gender power relations. In the beginning of The Infernal Desire
Machines of Doctor Hoffman (1972), she imagines a phantasmagorical,
capitalist city much like the futuristic New York into which Evelyn
descends in The Passion of New Eve. But Dr Hoffman, the Satanic
producer of entropic desires, is clearly no less patriarchal and author-
itarian than the enlightenment rationalist Minister of Determination
whom he deposes. Paradoxically demanding `absolute authority to
establish a regime of total liberation' (p. 38), Dr Hoffman also unleashes
the repressed, persecutory fantasies of a patriarchal, racist society. In
Hoffman's enticingly liberated city, as Aidan Day points out, `there is
not only promiscuous criminality, grotesquery and violence, but speci-
fically there is uncontrolled violence, spiritual and physical, against the
female' (The Rational Glass, p. 81). In The Passion of New Eve,
Evelyn's subjection of his black girlfriend, Leilah, underlines the same
point equally clearly.
Given the tenacity with which patriarchal fantasies inhere in Western
capitalism, some contemporary women writers have represented the
descent to the underworld in positive terms, as the means of escaping
this patriarchal, capitalist overworld entirely. In Joan Barfoot's Gaining
Ground (1978), for example, a middle-class, professional, married wo-
man named Abra withdraws, without warning, from her family, job and
city life to take up subsistence farming in a remote cottage in northern
Canada. It is only here, freed from marital and maternal bonds as well as
the need to earn a living, that she is able to imagine and live through a
non-exploitative relation with the natural environment. Much of the
novel recounts her descent into a `natural' state and the slow metamor-
phosis by which she is transformed into the wild-looking, inarticulate
 Gender dynamics in the descent to Hell 149

creature her daughter is horrified to encounter in the opening chapter. At

the end of the novel, she is momentarily persuaded by her daughter to
leave the cottage. But seat-belted in the car, she is suddenly overwhelmed
by the fear of returning to her old entrapments: `I am struggling, fierce
now and full of fear, not just panic but far-deep fear, to get free' (p. 197).
It is the wild animal's instinctual fear of the cage that compels Abra to
turn her back permanently on family, work and social existence in a
modern, capitalist city.
While representing the feminist descent (and/or dissent) from capital-
ism in similar terms, that is as a retreat from a modern, Canadian city, to
the northern wilderness, Margaret Atwood's Surfacing (1972) is more
specific in its critique of patriarchal power relations governing Western
capitalism. The unnamed, first-person narrator is psychically alienated as
the result of a recent abortion. She meditates ghoulishly on images of dead
gods (p. 39) and severed women (pp. 70, 102), and associates herself with
these truncated beings: `I was the wrong half, detached, terminal. I was
nothing but a head, or no, something minor like a severed thumb; numb'
(p. 102). Unlike Carter, for whom modern birth control is sexually
liberating, this protagonist has been manipulated into playing a part
in her married lover's fantasies. Because a child would be an embarrass-
ment to him, she submits to the operation, which is likewise conducted by
male doctors, `technicians, mechanics, butchers, students clumsy or
sniggering practicing on your body' (p. 74). Made monstrous by this
technological feat of non-birth, she feels implicated in the patriarchal
fantasy of dominance over nature, especially the processes of reproduc-
tion. This complicity invades her like a kind of demonic impregnation:
`they had planted death in me like a seed' (p. 138). By the lakeside in
northern Quebec, she witnesses a similar readiness to dominate when an
American party of fishermen kill and disembowel a heron: `Why had they
strung it up like a lynch victim . . .? To prove they could do it, they had
the power to kill' (p. 110). These `Americans' become metaphors for the
patriarchal violation of nature, with which she again feels `a sickening
complicity, sticky as glue, blood on my hands' (p. 124). Later, she realises
`it wasn't the men I hated, it was the Americans, the human beings, men
and women both' (p. 148). In this carelessly brutal exploitation of the
environment, she sees her own dystopic future: `they're what's in store for
us, what we [Canadians] are turning into' (p. 123). When a horrifying,
foetus-like object floats up to her from the depths of the lake, she
undergoes a mental breakdown (p. 136). She flees from her friends,
forgets who she is and regresses to a wild state, becoming fearful of all
enclosures. In this underworld, she comes to understand her father, who
has mysteriously disappeared some months previously. She realises that
150 Engendering Dissent in the Underworld

he too has been displaced by this patriarchal rape of the earth; wherever
he is, `he wants it ended, the borders abolished, he wants the forest to flow
back into the places his mind cleared: reparation' (p. 180). But the
narrator regresses further and deeper; she ceases to be a subject, enters
the Lacanian underworld and carries on down: `I lean against a tree, I am
a tree leaning . . . I am not an animal or a tree, I am the thing in which the
trees and animals move and grow, I am a place' (p. 175).
In contrast to Barfoot's Abra, however, Atwood's heroine remains in
this pre-organic, pre-linguistic state for only five days. Regaining human
consciousness, she knows she has no choice but to re-enter the social
world. She is clear now, though, that her complicity in the abortion, and
in larger terms the destruction of the natural environment, was a matter
of her own choice. In the end she determines to `give up the old belief that
I am powerless and because of it nothing I can do will ever hurt anyone'
(Surfacing, p. 185).10 Yet her descent to a feral state has left her with a
different understanding of the environment which she can henceforth use
to position herself against the patriarchal instinct to dominance. This,
again, is represented in terms of her capacity to give birth, though this
time to a vital, rather than a deathly, vision: `I bring with me from the
distant past five nights ago the time-traveller, the primaeval one who will
have to learn, shape of a goldfish now in my belly, undergoing its watery
changes' (p. 185). About this child/idea, she thinks optimistically, `it
might be the first one, the first true human; it must be born, allowed'
(p. 185).
One of the limitations of this type of descent narrative, however, is its
failure to acknowledge how inescapably capitalist are the subjects for
whom this frontier vision looks so enticing. Both Abra and Atwood's
narrator are city women who descend into a mythicised natural world
unpopulated by other human beings. Rather than confront the Hell of
their actual, material lives, they seek a utopian solution derived from a
mythic underworld unconnected to their own worlds. The problem is not
the invocation of a utopian perspective; I would agree with Seyla
Benhabib that utopian visions have a significant role to play in ethical
feminist literature and philosophy.11 The problem is rather that in these
two descent narratives, the utopian vision does not evolve out of a
historical engagement with patriarchal capitalism, but rather out of
an act of seemingly total abstention. But such gestures beg the question,
what pressures led these city characters to idealise a state of wilderness?
What urban imagination has prompted the protagonists' flight, and what
financial security, generated by a job in the city, has allowed the dream to
be realised? It is partly this fantasy of a non-patriarchal, non-exploitative,
natural underworld that Carter satirises in The Passion of New Eve,
 Inside the hero's descent: Gloria Naylor's Linden Hills 151

although neither Barfoot nor Atwood represent these otherworlds as

mythic matriarchal realms, an idea that Carter travesties with particular
gusto.
In the remainder of this chapter, I would like to examine in greater
detail three descent narratives in which the route to female subjectivity is
down through patriarchal Hell, requiring a historically situated heroine's
direct engagement with its fantasies and its nightmares: Naylor's Linden
Hills, Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time and Notley's The Descent
of Alette. Carter once wrote that `a free woman in an unfree society will
be a monster', and in some respects the heroines of these four descent
narratives do turn out to be monstrous beings (The Sadeian Woman,
p. 27). Three are murderers, one becomes a terrorist, another ends up
dead.12 But monstrous as they are, they challenge the Lacanian view that
female characters (not to mention women writers and readers) can only
choose between masculine possession of subjectivity and feminine sub-
jection or dispossession. The choice of texts for discussion is necessarily
selective; other descent narratives that could be invoked to challenge or
qualify Lacan include: Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, Angela
Carter's The Passion of New Eve, Janice Galloway's The Trick Is to Keep
Breathing, Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye and Sula, Gloria Naylor's
The Women of Brewster Place, Jeanette Winterson's The Passion and
Monique Wittig's Across the Acheron.

Inside the hero's descent: Gloria Naylor's Linden Hills

Perhaps no contemporary katabatic narrative illustrates more graphically

than Gloria Naylor's Linden Hills the plight of a would-be heroine
trapped inside the narrative of a male katabatic quest for self-knowledge.
Linden Hills (1985) traces the journey of two young, African-American
writers down through the streets of a wealthy, black suburb called Linden
Hills. Taking on odd jobs as they descend, the boys are witness to the
different ways in which the Hills residents betray their racial, sexual and
personal identities in the pursuit of material wealth and social accept-
ability. At the centre and lowest point of this steeply tiered system
of crescent drives lives Luther Nedeed, owner of the thousand-year
(biblically symbolic of eternal) leases on Hills real estate. It is the
Nedeed dream, dating back five generations, that sustains the Hills
community: the dream of an autonomous, powerful black empire within
the heart of white America. The boys' descent through Linden Hills is a
fairly straightforward recasting of Dante for a contemporary, African-
American context. While there are precedents in African-American
152 Engendering Dissent in the Underworld

literature for rewriting Dante (Imamu Amiri Baraka's The System of

Inferno, Ellison's Invisible Man and Morrison's Sula preceded Linden
Hills), hers is by far the most intricately worked out imitatio of Inferno.13
One of the boys, Lester Tilson, is the Virgilian guide; a resident of the
upper tiers of Linden Hills, he is marginally a member of this infernal
community. The other, the novel's male central protagonist, is the
Dantean Willie Mason, a working-class outsider, an oral rather than a
literary poet and (the reader is led to assume) the future chronicler of this
infernal realm. The details of the residents' `sins' and the nature of their
contrapassos have been discussed at length by other critics and need not
be rehearsed here.14
The most striking and original aspect of Naylor's novel is the secondary
plot, which eventually takes over the primary one, concerning the mental
descent journey of Luther Nedeed's wife, Willa, secretly locked away in
the basement of her husband's house. It is Willie Mason who prophe-
tically senses the presence of a woman, concealed somewhere in this
inferno; the implicit goal of his journey is to recover this lost Eurydice, or
(failing that) to discover an artistic form capable of narrating her story
(their complementarity is emphasised in the similarity of their names).
Willa Nedeed, then, is a character who is triply immured in a locked
basement, her husband's corrupted dream of black autonomy and the
descent journey of Willie Mason. The reason for her disgrace is that
Willa, dark-skinned herself, has given birth to a pale-skinned son,
whereas the patriarchal Nedeed dynasty requires a dark-skinned son
from a pale-skinned mother (paleness symbolising `nothingness' to the
Nedeed men). Each dark-skinned, first-born son inherits the name of the
father, Luther Nedeed (connoting `de Eden'15), and this name, together
with the son's dark skin, signifies the unbroken continuity of the patri-
linear Nedeed empire. Willa's pale progeny offends Luther because
symbolically it reveals what he already fears to be true: that the dream
of his ancestors has long since been betrayed and is now indistinguishable
from the (white) American dream of material success.
Taking her readers inside the damaged consciousness of the incarcer-
ated Willa, Naylor explores the process by which this Lacanian `nothing',
uncannily haunting both Nedeed's failed patriarchal dream and Willie
Mason's desire for a non-white European epic form, becomes a someone
in her own eyes.16 By situating Willa's descent inside the male narratives
(which are themselves implicitly located inside white America and the
European katabatic epic tradition), Naylor suggests that the female
journey is both more profound and more significant, the latter because
until Willa finds her voice, her husband's vision will continue to collapse
into that of white, capitalist America, and Willie's art will continue to fall
 Inside the hero's descent: Gloria Naylor's Linden Hills 153

short of its European predecessors'. In this sense, Willie's spatial descent

through Linden Hills, at first the dominant plot of the novel, turns out
to be the Virgilian sideshow to the dramatic, Dantean descent of
Willa's mental journey through the past. Naylor also suggests that the
feminisation of the male katabatic tradition, while important, will not be
sufficient to disrupt its patrilinear circularity; Willie needs to confront
Willa as a subject, not the object of his quest, before he can be profoundly
changed.17
Cut off from the possibility of a spatial journey, Willa descends in
time, leafing through the detritus in the basement to construct coherent
narratives of the Nedeed wives through four generations. Three wo-
men's histories emerge from the fragmentary evidence afforded by
notes inside a family Bible, recipes for enemas and aphrodisiacs, and
mutilated photo albums. Willa's concern to recover the materiality of
these women's lives contrasts sharply with Luther's obsession with the
vision rather than the lives of his ancestors. Her painstaking recon-
struction of these `her-stories' constitutes the first step in Willa's
descent journey, whose goal is self-knowledge in the most primary
sense: knowledge that she is a self. Ricoeur has argued that `the
appropriation of the identity of the fictional character by the reader'
is one form of self-knowledge, that understood as self-interpretation
(p. 198). Willa is just such a reader, gaining an intuition that her own
experience is interpretable, potentially narratable, through her reading
of these earlier lives. Even though all of these examples trace a
downward trajectory towards self-obliteration, they are still narratable
lives. It is by their example that Willa reaches upward to the null-point
described by Ricoeur, where the self can ask, `Who am I?' and receive
the reply, `nothing'; Willa stared `at the gaping hole [in the photo-
graph] that was once Priscilla McGuire, she reached her hand up and
began to touch her own face' (p. 267).
By rejecting this initial, intense identification with Priscilla, however,
Willa slides away from the Lacanian sentence of being `nothing' to the
possibility articulated by Cornell of being `anything'. Once again, this
shift in consciousness is represented as a recognition of the material limits
of the body, in this case temporal: `she knew she was dying . . . She could
feel it happening: the passage of air through lung tissues that disintegrated
a little with each breath; heart muscles that pumped and weakened'
(p. 266). Even this negative possibility, that one can properly die, is a
relief to the feminine spectre, trapped in a patriarchal fantasy. Here one
might say that Willa enters the Lacanian mirror-stage, studying her
reflection in a pot of water: `there was the outline of her hair, the shape
of the chin . . . the profile of her nose and lips . . . No doubt remained ±
154 Engendering Dissent in the Underworld

she was there' (p. 268). But approached thus from below, the mirror stage
functions in a somewhat unusual way, not to split the self but to confirm
its material existence. The sight of her mirrored image provokes neither
anxiety nor exultation (as it does in the Lacanian infant). Instead it
produces two responses from Willa: she drinks (confirming her physical
presence), and she thinks (confirming herself as an ipse): `raising the rim
to her lips, she began to drink the cold, rusty water . . . She would take
small sips, very small sips ± and think' (p. 268).
The final stage in Willa's progression towards recognition of herself as
an ipse is the act of laying claim to her past. Here she shoulders the
responsibility for her descent down the twelve steps into the basement:
`that action was hers and hers alone. The responsibility did not lie with
her mother or father ± or Luther' (p. 280). Like Atwood, Naylor implies
that if women are spectralised by patriarchal fantasies, this is partly
because they comply with it. In Willa's case this self-judgment seems
almost defiantly inaccurate. It might be argued that Willa consciously
chose the desirable alliance with the rich Nedeeds, that coming from a
comfortably off family, she had other choices. But clearly patriarchy
reduces and distorts the choices that even wealthy women can make.
Naylor herself illustrates this with the example of Lauren Dumont, a
successful business woman and prominent Linden Hills resident, in short
one who has chosen to join the `masculine symbolic'; she too is driven
insane and kills herself. One could also question the judgment on
philosophical grounds; is an action ever solely possessed, `hers and hers
alone'?
On the other hand, Willa's acknowledgment of responsibility is stra-
tegically narrow and literal: she admits to walking down the basement
steps of her own volition, not to ruining her own life. This sense of
possessing a will then virally infiltrates her unconscious being. Sleeping,
she descends further,

an unconscious journey in toward the power of will that had crept alone in
primordial muck eons before being clothed with fins, scales, wings, or flesh.
Then . . . out, toward the edge of the universe with its infinite possibility to
make space for the volume of her breath. (pp. 288±9)

When Willa wakes from this sleep, she brings with her the primordial
identity that Atwood's time-traveller also retrieves from a prehistoric
past. In Willa's case, the primordial self is gendered; later, in her stub-
born, almost witless, re-ascent, she will be compared to a giant Amazo-
nian wingless ant queen, blindly dragging `her bloated egg sac as long as
at least one leg is left uncrushed' (p. 300; see also p. 289). Like the queen
army ant, she will be treading a warpath that specifically destroys and
 Inside the hero's descent: Gloria Naylor's Linden Hills 155

consumes male predators: `the deadly tarantula, the sleeping crocodile,

the rifle-bearing hunter' (p. 297).
Teresa Goddu has objected that these images associate Willa with
an atavistic maternal impulse in a way that essentialises gender and
demonises motherhood.18 The last stage of Willa's journey, which ex-
tracts the infinite possibility of being an `anything' from the experience of
solitary self-reflection, does suggest that gender identity is something one
extracts from the self like a buried splinter, rather than something one
discovers in the performance.19 But in other ways, Willa's newfound
sense of identity and will are relational constructs rather than Cartesian
self-discoveries. As we have seen, she is first radicalised by reading the
former wives' histories. Upon waking from the above mentioned sleep-
vision, she is delivered again into a specific, social context. Over the
tannoy she hears her husband say, `It's Christmas Eve, Mrs. Nedeed', and
with these words she is `immediately affirmed into a season and a
direction' (p. 289). She affirms that she wants nothing more than to
be `Mrs Nedeed', to clean her kitchen and her house (p. 280). In interview
with Toni Morrison, Naylor has said that Willa's decision came to
her, the author, as a surprise; she had planned a more radical, feminist
enlightenment for her protagonist, `but Willa refused to do it'.20 On the
one hand, then, what looks like a surprisingly conditioned response
demonstrates Willa exercising her free will against her author's wishes.
On the other hand, however, it demonstrates the accuracy of Butler's view
that gender identity does not exist before the performance of it, and that
we can only act within the limits of the social discourses that pre-exist and
construct us.21
When Willa emerges from the basement, she appears to be exactly the
monster that Carter predicts will be born in an unfree society: `her hair
tangled and matted, her sunken cheeks streaked with dirt . . . breasts and
stomach . . . hidden behind . . . sheer white lace' (p. 298). Despite his
empathetic nature, Willie freezes in horror at this Gothic apparition,
which he sees at exactly the moment Willa sees herself (in a mirror behind
him). Not understanding or being able to guess at the history that
produced such a monster, he fails to recognise Willa or intervene in
the disaster that follows. Luther tries to wrestle her back downstairs, but
her trailing lace catches fire. Together with the corpse of their son, this
unholy trinity is consumed in flames. In handing the task of narrating the
story on to the two boys, Naylor disappointed some of her readers; but
regardless of whether or not Willa should have escaped the novel's
apocalyptic ending, it is still her decision to walk upstairs that leads to
the destruction of this particular, patriarchal empire.
156 Engendering Dissent in the Underworld

Hell and utopia: Marge Piercy's Woman on the Edge

of Time

Naylor usually takes her subject matter from working-class black ex-
perience (as for example in her highly successful collection of short
stories, The Women of Brewster Place). The focus on middle-class
alienation in Linden Hills is exceptional in her writing, and the allegorical
anatomisation of middle-class `sins', in my view, lacks some of the power
of her realist writing. More forcefully than Linden Hills, Piercy's novel
conveys the sense of the constant drag downwards that patriarchal,
corporate America exerts on its urban poor.22 Her protagonist, Connie
Ramos, is thirty-seven years old and an unemployed Mexican-American
living in New York City. The violent opening chapter of the novel
portrays Connie attempting to shelter her pregnant niece from the
younger woman's abusive pimp/husband and a male accomplice. Both
women are beaten up; the niece is forced back into prostitution and
Connie is carted off to hospital, where she is then sectioned to a
psychiatric hospital in upper New York State.
Piercy represents Connie's journey upstate as a descent into Hell. In
terms that explicitly echo Dante's pilgrim at the beginning of Inferno,
Connie reflects, `here she was with her life half spent, midway through her
dark journey that had pushed her into the hands of the midwife in El Paso
and carried her through the near West Side of Chicago, through the
Bronx' (pp. 30±1). Her journey to the hospital is the more infernal
because she has been sectioned here once before. There is an uncanny
sense, then, of the inevitable return, of the underworld being the place
where she belongs; `was there a once? The dreams surely began with an
original; yet she had the sense, the first morning she awakened remem-
bering, that there were more that she had not remembered, a sensation of
return' (p. 33). For Connie, passing through the hospital gates is like re-
entering the Hell mouth:

The gates swallowed the ambulance-bus and swallowed her as she left the
world and entered the underland where all who were not desired, who caught
like rough teeth in the cogwheels, who had no place or fit crosswise the one
they were hammered into, were carted to repent of their contrariness or to
pursue their mad vision down to the pit of terror. Into the asylum that offered
none, the broken-springed bus roughly galloped. (p. 31)

Unlike the memoirists discussed in the previous chapter, Connie is

institutionalised not because of mental illness, but because of her poverty
and the brutality of a medical system that takes at face value a nephew's
 Hell and utopia: Marge Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time 157

accusation of her violent insanity. More explicitly than those texts, then,
the psychiatric hospital is represented here as the lowest circle of a
patriarchal Hell, where the punishment meted out is both unjust and
misogynistic. Although a fictional work, Piercy's representation is closely
based on a historical account of medical treatments of women, as Sue
Walker has shown.23 Her psychiatric institute is a Hell made immanent in
history; it is a `place of punishment, of sorrow, of the slow or fast murder
of the self' (p. 31). Like Dante's Inferno, the psychiatric institution is a
vertically stratified, entirely separate world; `each patient rose and
dropped through the dim rings of hell gaining and losing privileges, sent
down to the violent wards, ordered to electroshock, filed away among the
living cancers of the chronic wards' (p. 83).
While Piercy makes it clear that women like Connie have been
institutionalised on the basis of their gender, there is also huge discri-
mination on the bases of wealth, race and class. When Connie is
transferred to a teaching hospital, she sees evidence of genuine medical
care being extended to middle-class, short-term patients who receive
proper assessment and a sensible drug regime; they are not stripped of
their independence and their wards are left unlocked (pp. 194, 340). But
for Connie and the other Latino inmates, the teaching hospital proves to
be a lower Hell than the psychiatric institute. Without their consent, they
are made the subject of crude psychological experiments, including
having radio controlled implants placed in their brains to control their
behaviour. Piercy shows that the women are treated in this fashion simply
because they can be; poor, black and female, they are considered socially
expendable (see pp. 32, 280).
While Carter argued that the specularisations of Western capitalism
can be particularly beneficial to women, Piercy's novel makes clear that
these benefits are also very much dependent on class and wealth.24 For
unemployed, Latino women like Connie, the US patriarchal, corporate
system provides no such opportunities for gender reinvention:

Whoever owned this place, these cities, whoever owned those glittering glassy
office buildings in midtown filled with the purr of money turning over, those
refineries over the river in Jersey with their flames licking the air, they gave
nothing back. They took and took and left their garbage choking the air, the
river, the sea itself. Choking her. A life of garbage. Human garbage. She had
had too little of what her body needed and too little of what her soul could
imagine. She had been able to do little in the years of her life, and that little had
been ill paid or punished. (p. 280)

But if corporate capitalism is socially and economically stratified, in

Connie's view the basic unit of this exploitative system is the inequality
158 Engendering Dissent in the Underworld

between men and women. In hospital, she sees the surgeons as demons:
`Cold, calculating, ambitious, believing themselves rational and superior,
they chased the crouching female animal through the brain with a scalpel'
(p. 282). And in the outside world, she reflects, `All my life I've been
pushed around by my father, by my brother Luis, by schools, by bosses,
by cops, by doctors and lawyers and caseworkers and pimps and land-
lords' (pp. 98±9). If Hell is to be changed, Piercy suggests, the change has
to begin with a dismantling of this hierarchical power relation between
the sexes.
More explicitly than Willa, Connie suffers the psychic rape that to the
archetypal mythologist is ground for revelation in the underworld.25 Like
the other inmates, Connie is sent to the operating theatre for brain
surgery. Semi-conscious throughout, Connie experiences the operation
as a physical and psychic loss of identity: `terror cut through the veils of
the drug like a needle penetrating the bone supposed to protect her fragile
spongy brain. How much of her was crammed into that space?' (p. 281).
After the operation, her sense of dislocation intensifies: `she felt distanced
from her own life, as if it had ended with the implantation of the
dialytrode. She could not resume her life. Therefore Connie was no
more' (p. 302). If this is the nadir of her descent, it is important to note
that she is transformed by the experience, not because she learns to like it,
but because she discovers she can fight it.
Unlike Barfoot's Abra and Atwood's narrator, Connie Ramos cannot
simply abscond from the patriarchal Hell in which she is constituted as a
non-self. Like Willa, she is radicalised from her position inside Hell,
although the means by which she is transformed are different. Whereas
Willa conjures a self from the fragmented records of past women's lives,
Connie is metamorphosed by time-travelling into a gynandric, socialist,
utopian future.26 In the company of an androgynous guide named
Luciente, Connie visits (or dreams) the village of Mattapoisett, home
to some six hundred people in the year 2137. Since Connie's Hell is urban
and hierarchised, her utopia is rural and egalitarian. Wealth is distributed
among the inhabitants equally. Madness still exists but here `going down'
is devoid of social stigma (p. 65): `our madhouses are places where people
retreat when they want to go down into themselves ± to collapse, carry
on, see visions, hear voices of prophecy, bang on the walls, relive infancy'
(p. 66). Likewise every aspect of the relation between the sexes, from
romance to conceiving, bearing and raising children, to the sharing of
space, work and wealth has been reimagined by this utopian community.
The patriarchal nucleus of the traditional Western family unit is broken
down and restructured. Each child is born in a tube and has three
mothers, including males and females. With hormone supplements, both
 Hell and utopia: Marge Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time 159

sexes are able to breast-feed the infants, and all three adults share in the
raising of the child. The reinvention of sexual relations forms the basis for
Piercy's vision of a more just and egalitarian society. As Luciente tells
Connie, `the gift is in growing to care, to connect, to cooperate. Every-
thing we learn aims to make us feel strong in ourselves, connected to all
living' (p. 241). The goals of Luciente's world are not economic growth
but ecological renewal: `someday the gross repair will be done. The
oceans will be balanced, the rivers flow clean, the wetlands and the forests
flourish. There'll be no more enemies. No Them and Us' (p. 328).
To a later generation of readers, some of these ideals will seem not only
impracticable but undesirable. But in my view, her 1970s utopian vision is
still compelling because it presents a historicised vision of the future.
Mattapoisett is not a perfect state; it is just one headed in a better, more
sustainable, more equable direction. The ideal future is out of Luciente's
reach, as she tells Connie, `I can't know that time ± any more than you can
ultimately know us. We can only know what we can truly imagine'
(p. 328). Connie also visits an alternate, nightmare future, in which the
present capitalist Hell has worsened and intensified. In this dystopian
future, Luciente has become Gildina, and patriarchal capitalism has
reached its logical extreme. Mattapoisett has become literally a vertically
tiered city, with different levels for different income brackets:

The richies don't live down here . . . The air's too thick, like they say. Not in
here, of course, Middle- and upper-level flacks are all conditioned. But you
should see where I was born! You're born coughing and you pass off to Geri
coughing, like they say. I always thought the sky was yellow till I came here.
(p. 291)

What matters for Piercy is not how realistic or plausible these utopian and
dystopian futures are, but how they move the heroine to take action in
her immediate circumstances. If in Lacan's view self-consciousness is
structured in terms of an anticipated belatedness, a future anterior sense
that strictly limits the subject's present existence, then futurist narratives
such as Connie's sci-fi dream-visions have an important role to play in
disrupting this sense of temporal predetermination.27 In between the
time-travelling episodes, Connie continues her fight to survive in the
mental hospital. The intermittent conversations with the two women
from her possible futures give her the strength to resist the numbing
effects of the dialytrode which, eventually, the doctors are forced to
remove.
Whereas Willa regains her historical being through an engagement
with the past, Connie enters the historical present by learning to imagine
possible near futures. Thus, I would take issue with Shands' argument
160 Engendering Dissent in the Underworld

that linear, historical time is being `sabotaged' by a kind of `women's

time' in this novel (p. 79). Shands cites Kristeva, who identified two types
of time linked with female subjectivity: `the ``cyclical'' and the ``monu-
mental,'' the former being linked with ``cycles, gestation, the eternal
recurrence of a biological rhythm'' and the latter ``all-encompassing and
infinite like imaginary space'''.28 But `monumental' time is precisely what
defines the patriarchal, capitalist Hell that Connie is trying to escape. And
while the community of Mattapoisett aligns itself with ecological and
biological `life rhythms', it also has a strong sense of a historical past and
future. In my reading of Piercy, Connie's aim is to return to chronological
time, not escape from it. Once she begins to fight against her doctors,
Connie finds her entry into the future blocked. Whether externally or
unconsciously produced, the visions force Connie to return to her present.
Once again, this descent journey ends with a monstrous new birth.
Having poisoned and killed the four doctors, Connie hardens herself
against emotion and hope: `war, she thought. I'm at war. No more
fantasies, no more hopes. War' (p. 338). The final chapter consists of
excerpts `from the Official History of Consuelo Camacho Ramos',
detailing the history of her medical treatment at Rockover and the
teaching hospital. As in Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, the concluding
medical report interrupts the narrator's focalisation through Connie, and
cuts her off from the reader. But the History also reveals that Connie does
survive. Since she cannot escape Hell, she becomes a terrorist of the
underworld.

Dante upside-down: Alice Notley's The Descent of

Alette

Alice Notley's narrative epic, The Descent of Alette (1992), describes the
descent of the eponymous heroine through a series of underworlds, from
a nightmarish subway filled with trapped, half-metamorphosed souls, to
the palace of a tyrant who keeps them forever travelling underground. Of
all the descents discussed in this chapter, Alette is the only one to adopt
the mythic model of a female descent journey, that of Inanna, although, as
we shall see, there is also a sustained, critical dialogue with Dante's
Inferno.
Notley's underworld is bisexual, housing a `first mother', a tyrannous
patriarchal god and (not the same thing) a `first father'. For Notley, the
`first mother' is a positive figure, but her heroine must negotiate with
all three of these divinities, female and male, before she can leave the
underworld. That is to suggest that Notley represents the individual as a
 Dante upside-down: Alice Notley's The Descent of Alette 161

sexually hybrid being, containing male and female attributes, masculine

and feminine characteristics. The principal task of her descent heroine,
Alette, is to integrate the characteristics of her `first parents' in herself. By
successfully hybridising their strengths, she will acquire the power to
overthrow the tyrant who rules both under- and overworlds. At the
beginning of her descent journey, Alette meets a woman like Barfoot's
Abra, who has voluntarily withdrawn from society. ` ``Under'' ``my
shawl'' ``I try to be, I'' ``am'' / ``another world'' ``a woman's world ±
'' ', she says to Alette, before walking unsteadily away, ` ``afraid'' ``we
would corrupt her'' ``corrupt her world''' (p. 14). Alette, however, rejects
this decision to withdraw into the self, or into a monolithic view of
gender. Moreover, rather than fearfully withdrawing from a society
which appears to be beyond all hope of change, Alette's journey brings
her into confrontation with the worst aspects of the capitalist city from
which she comes. She acquires the art of disobedience by travelling
through Dis (Hades).
In her essay The Poetics of Disobedience, Alice Notley describes
The Descent of Alette as `an immense act of rebellion against dominant
social forces, against the fragmented forms of modern poetry, against the
way a poem was supposed to look.'29 Alette's unusual form expresses the
poem's reach towards a difficult and hard-won sense of wholeness. The
narrative is divided into four untitled books, and each of these contains
about forty untitled sections (or cantos) of stanzaic, unrhymed, long-lined
verse. What is unusual is Notley's use of double quotation marks to mark
off the rhythmic units or feet in the line. When these are combined with
single quotation marks to distinguish different speakers, the lines fairly
bristle with punctuation. In a prefatory note, Notley explains that the
marks are intended to make us read slowly (which they certainly do), and
articulate the verse rhythm at a specific pace. Furthermore, they are a
reminder that the poem's speaker, Alette, is not the author, and that the
narrative is `not a thought, or a record of thought-process, this is a story,
told' (`Author's Note'). Given the poem's emphasis on the speaker's `I',
both these points are important. In interview, Notley has expressed a
preference for the term `soul' rather than `self' (which she dismisses as
narcissistic);30 for her, a soul is `a corporeal reality or solidity', `a very
tangible . . . mystical place'.31 In The Descent of Alette, the protagonist's
identity is remarkably fluid. At times she seems to represent a plurality of
characters (` ``I saw that'' ``my hands' outlines'' ``were several'' ``&
seemed blurred'' ' (p. 47)); at other times, she is defiantly individual.
According to Notley, the poem is `narrated by an I who doesn't know her
name and whose name when she finds it means appendage of a male
name [in French, -ette is added to masculine words to make them feminine
162 Engendering Dissent in the Underworld

and/or diminutive, as in babette, for example]' (The Poetics of Disobe-

dience, p. 1). `Alette' is also a portmanteau word derived from `Alice
Notley', but Notley insists that `her important name is I. I stand with this,
and with the urgency that saying I creates, a facing up to sheer presence,
death and responsibility, the potential for blowing away all the gauze'
(Poetics, p. 1). The quotation marks around Alette's narration thus
reinforce the point that she is a constructed character, that what integrity
she achieves is provisional and relational. Likewise the poem strives
towards epic wholeness, but the intrusive punctuation prevents the reader
from assuming this to be a natural, universal or inevitable form.
Mikhail Bakhtin controversially argued that lyric poetry tends toward
monologism, creating a speaking `I' whose authority is never challenged
by other voices.32 In this respect, The Descent of Alette could be described
as an anti-lyric poem. Not only anti-lyric, Alette might even be described
as anti-language, with its shackled poetic feet and crippled long lines. In
The Poetics of Disobedience, Notley writes, `like many writers I feel
ambivalent about words, I know they don't work . . . I tend to think
reality is poetry, and that it isn't words' (p. 3). The unusual verse form of
Alette makes readers feel this distrust of words, yet also conveys the
narrator's desire to get beneath words to a subterraneous, sublinguistic
`reality'. The subterraneous reality is solid and corporeal though, not a
world of disembodied, Platonic, ideal forms. In Alette, language must be
escaped because it belongs to someone else: ` ``The tyrant'' ``owns form'' '
(p. 25); ` ``All stories,'' ``all drama,'' ``all poetry'' come from / here now'''
(p. 134).
The `tyrant' is a fictional character in Alette's underworld, the demonic
Other whom Alette must kill to return safely to the surface. Allegorically,
he represents a broad swathe of evils: the political and economic leader-
ship of Western capitalism, the spirit of corporatism generally, and the
` ``endless male / will'' ' expressed in Western art and culture (p. 6).
Linguistically speaking, the `tyrant' is also any literary tradition to which
Alette's descent narrative might be aligned. In a subsequent epic narrative,
entitled Disobedience (2001), Notley writes about literary `Greats': `Fuck
'em ± / they aren't ``great'' on the newly discovered / planet beneath
Orion; and deep deep inside me, in the caverns / I haven't heard of them.
I've only heard of the unnamed there' (Disobedience, p. 97). In interview,
Notley disavows the influence of Dante on Alette (`I wasn't reading Dante
when I wrote it'),33 although she proceeds to outline the ground of her
poem's substantial dialogue with the Commedia: `I was trying to stand
Dante on his head ± I was trying to reverse things so that the Paradiso was
down instead of up, and was dark instead of light.'34
The topography of Alette's underworld does indeed constitute an
 Dante upside-down: Alice Notley's The Descent of Alette 163

`upside-downing' of the Commedia, although one might counter that this

strategy of inversion is itself Dantean and characteristic of katabatic
narrative more generally. The first book of Alette discovers the prota-
gonist trapped underground, in a surreal subway system filled with
hybrid, metamorphosing creatures: a woman and child on fire (p. 25),
a man turning into a fish (p. 16), a woman becoming an eagle (p. 26),
people encased in ghosts (p. 12), ant-faced and spidery crowds and a
drugged female serpent (p. 13). Like the damned souls in Inferno, these
people live an eternity of suffering; ` ``It is a kind of'' ``forever:'' ``nearly
since'' ``the world / began'' ' (p. 90). But Notley's infernal subway is not a
place to which people go in the afterlife nor is it a condition suffered by a
few unfortunates. It is an allegorical representation of the way life already
is in Western capitalist countries. Alette simply wakes to find herself
in this twentieth-century, infernal condition. In an echo of the first
line of Inferno, she begins, ` ``one day, I awoke'' ``& found myself on''
``a subway, endlessly''' (p. 3). And yet, by juxtaposing `one day' with
`endlessly', she suggests that there is a historical beginning to this
condition, and there may conceivably be an end.
Like the pilgrim, Alette discovers that ` ``Down'' ``is now the only way''
``to rise'' ' (p. 26); but as her condition is already infernal, she has to
journey deeper into Hell, and indeed underneath Hell itself. Like other
descent heroes, she is told that hers is a rare journey, with an uncertain
outcome: ` ``We don't know how / you'll return'' (``It has been doneÐ''
``Stories vary'' ``as to what / happens . . .'') ``But you will'' ``descend''
``into an unknown'' ``unlit world''' (p. 41). But Alette's journey takes her
first to a purgatorial middle ground (Book Two), and then to an under-
ground paradise (Book Three). Purgatory here consists of a network of
caves (as in Carter's The Passion of New Eve) which ` ``are something
like'' ``our middle depths'' ``or middle psyche''' (p. 47). Passing through
these caves as if through a series of dreams, Alette learns more about the
history leading to her infernal condition; she begins to remember elements
of her own past and survives a number of threatening encounters. The
caves are full of other suffering souls who differ from those in the infernal
subway mostly in their recognition that they are trapped within the
tyrant's rule and consciousness. Eventually, Alette passes from these to a
deeper place, where she becomes at once a singular and plural being. Thus
Notley relocates the whole of Dante's immortal cosmos underground,
and realigns the triptych of cantiche into a single, downward trajectory.
But while Alette consciously inverts the topography of Dante's Comme-
dia, it also embraces the whole trajectory of Dante's spiritual journey to a
degree that is very rare in a late twentieth-century descent narrative.35
The primary characteristic of Notley's Hell (Book One) is the condition
164 Engendering Dissent in the Underworld

of existing in and for another's will. Thus the tyrant encases souls in suits
made to fit himself: ` ``he encased many'' ``men not so'' ``uncomfortably''
// ``But others,'' ``especially women,'' ``looked as if they'' ``suffered from''
// ``trying'' ``to fit inside'' ``this other''' (p. 12). This situation is exacer-
bated in a capitalist system of exchange value, since the virtual products
of white-collar labour are immeasurable and can therefore potentially
enslave us endlessly; ` ``see them'' ``perform actions'' ``without objects'' //
``As if in pantomime'' . . . ``Perform motions'' ``of working'' // ``Work
invisible'' ``keyboards'' ``carry invisible'' ``files'' ' (p. 19). Working in this
system leaves us fragmented and alienated from our bodies and minds;
instead we have a ` ``Life of bits & pieces'' / ``cars & scenes'' ``discon-
nected'' ``little dreams'' ``False continuum'' / ``mechanical time''' (p. 4).
As in Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time, ecological destruction is
perceived to be a by-product of this patriarchal, capitalist alienation:
` ``we cannot rise, as we should'' ``We cannot pass through'' // ``the
tyrant's world's new fabrics'' . . . ``He has changed'' ``the chemical''
``composition'' ``of everything'' ``but spirit'' ``but our souls'' . . . ``we are
all // trapped below'' ``We can only go'' ``down'' ``farther down ± '''
(p. 26). In such an economy (as we shall see in the next chapter) all are
ghosts, but women are more so than others: ` ``for ages'' women have
``danced'' ``Nothing'' ``but sex'' while their heads ``played audience'' ``to
the achievements'' ``of males''' (p. 91).
If the fragmentation of female subjectivity is the root of the problem,
then her psychic re-memberment is also the means by which society can
heal itself. In The Passion of New Eve, Carter's fictional Hollywood icon
Tristessa is a perpetually grieving figure, carrying the burden of her
culture's grief. In Alette (as in Atwood's Surfacing), women also carry
the guilt for imperial wars and exploitation of the poor. But Alette's first
step towards emancipation is to learn to reject this burden. She objects,
` ``I've never'' ``been allowed'' / ``to participate'' ``in the decision to go to
war ± '' . . . ``How dare he'' ``implicate me'' ``In such evil?'' ' (p. 51). By
the time Alette reaches the deepest level of her underworld, she has
inverted grief and complicity into a radical sense of lightness: ` ``I felt
unburdened'' ``& even buoyant''' (p. 86). It is precisely because she has
not been allowed to participate in the atrocities of the past that Alette can
enter history lightly at the end of the poem.
The lowest layer of Notley's Hell/Paradise (Book Three) is the place of
Alette's ` ``deepest origin'' ' (p. 47), a dark forest with a deep black lake at
its centre. Here she meets a headless woman, her `first mother', and a
talking owl, her `first father', who describe the original fragmentation of
gender and the fall into `history as eternity'. Her first heroic task is to
restore the head of her `first mother'. Following Lacan, Notley represents
 Dante upside-down: Alice Notley's The Descent of Alette 165

this figure as a fragmentary, pre-Symbolic being, lacking autonomous

agency almost since the dawn of human history. This figure tells Alette:

I endured'' ``that dance'' ``I danced'' ``& I dance'' ``Nothing'' ``but sex''
``My head gradually'' ``over ages'' ``disattached from'' ``my body'' ``as if
by the will'' ``of everyone'' ``My body'' ``still danced thenÐ'' ``but my
head'' ``played audience'' ``to the achievements of males'' ``See it there?'' '
[. . .] Then one day'' ``I walked carrying'' ``my own head'' ``down through
darkness below the earth,'' ``to this place'' ``And was forgotten,''
``Mostly forgotten,'' ``above the ground'' '
(p. 91)

Alette retrieves the first mother's head and restores it to the truncated body,
and here she assumes her underworld task is complete. ` ``I thought my
journey'' ``might end with you'' ', Alette says, but the first mother replies,
` ``you must take action elsewhere'' ' (p. 99). Alette still has to experience
the proper death denied to the Lacanian spectre of the feminine.
As when Dante arrives within sight of the heavenly Rose in Paradiso,
the black lake at the centre of Alette's underworld is the symbolic space in
which Alette undergoes a blissful, rather than a demonic, metamorphosis.
And yet, the goal of such a transformation in Alette is not towards
transcendence of the material world, but fully inhabiting it. Just before
her ordeal in the lake, Alette sits listening to voices coming from a nearby
wood and reflects that she may be in something like heaven: ` ``Perhaps
heaven'' ``is voices, . . . ``speaking voices,'' ``not singing voices'' ``Perhaps
// paradise'' ``is just like this'' ' (p. 103). That they should speak, not sing,
underlines Notley's distance from Dante's vision, and indeed that of
classical epic which is traditionally sung not spoken.36 Alette, who is now
also partly the first mother (p. 102), suffers a `little death' at the hands (or
talons) of her owl-father. Shortly afterwards, she is thrown into the
` ``infinitely'' ``deep'' lake' which, the owl tells her, ` ``connects with'' ``the
great darkness,'' ``connects with'' ``one's death'' ' (p. 105). Here Alette
loses consciousness of everything but ` ``Fire &'' ``my screaming'' '
(p. 108). Although ``effectively dead'', her senses revive while she is still
in the lake. She feels that she has become,

``pure sight'' . . . ``seeing,'' ``with no object''

``whatsoever'' ``Nothing to see,'' ``nothing to be:'' ``There was'' ``an other
thoughÐ'' ``the light which lit me'' ``& I loved it'' ``most purely''
``though I'' ``was also it'' `` `Is this'' ``the deepest darkness?'' ``I [/]
asked it'' ``It is,'' ' ``it said,'' ``in no voice at all''
(p. 111)

In this paradisal ecstasis, Alette feels the barrier between self and other
dissolve, or rather finds it to be non-existent. She both is, and loves, this
166 Engendering Dissent in the Underworld

other. The apex of Dante's paradisal journey is such a meeting with the
beloved; by placing it here at the nadir of the descent and displacing the
demonic Other to another, unessential position, Notley clearly signals her
revision of Dante's Commedia. The after-effects of feeling ` ``at peace
with'' ``being'' ' (p. 111), moreover, are quite different for Alette and for
Dante in Paradise. While Dante's happiness disappears when he is made
to return to earth, Alette shivers ` ``with pleasure'' ``to be entrapped'' ``by
flesh'' ' (p. 113). In Alette, the separation of body and soul is an infernal
condition; just as the two genders should be integrated in each of us, and
as each should feel a connection to an amoral, animal state of being, so we
should exist in the flesh, not separate from the limitations of time and
historical circumstance.
These ideas, clearly not Dantean ones, align the poem with her other
major literary model, the descent of Inanna, whose influence Notley
willingly acknowledges.37 In this Sumerian narrative, the goddess Inanna
has to shed one layer of clothing after another as she descends to confront
her sister Erishkigall who is Queen of the underworld. Each layer also
represents an aspect of her strength, so that by the time she gets to
Erishkigall she is powerless to overcome her enemy. Like one of her cast-
off clothes, she is hung on a peg for many days until finally someone begs
for her release. After this, she seizes the immortal power she came for, and
returns to the overworld to rule for many years as a wise and just queen.
In other words, Inanna descends not to escape the world, but to extend
her power in it. Her reasons for confronting Erishkigall are earth-bound,
practical ones. Alette's willing return to the flesh in Book Three, and to
ordinary existence in Book Four, are similar to Inanna's return in that
both heroines embrace, rather than transcend, material reality.
Alette's entry into history, via the tyrant's death, is a violent one. But
Notley represents this as a different order of violence. Before killing him,
Alette reflects, ` ``I understood'' ``what to do now'' ``& searched myself'' //
``for a cruelty'' ``& temporary'' ``heartlessness'' ``I didn't know of'' / ``in
myself:'' ``my owl self'' ``had to do this'' . . . ``But I thought'' ``my /
woman's body'' ``had factually'' ``to do this'' ' (p. 143). As we have seen in
earlier narratives, Notley strategically hybridises her heroine with an
animal species, to give her the power and moral right to change the
human species as a whole. Moreover, the murder is not literal but figural;
if in Carter's New Eve the mythic Mother turns out to be a `figure of
speech' (p. 184), here the patriarchal tyrant turns out to be another
mirage. Alette locates the heart of the tyrant in a magic shrub and tears it
up by the roots. When the sleeping tyrant wakes to find himself dying, he
reproaches Alette, ` ``How could you be'' ``this cruel?'' // ``And do you
not'' ``kill yourself?'' ``your own culture . . .'' ``soul's breath?'' ' But Alette
 Dante upside-down: Alice Notley's The Descent of Alette 167

replies, ` ``I'm killing no one'' ``You are not real'' ' (p. 144). The tyrant is
one of many ``forms in dreams'' (p. 144) who can be dispatched by an
artist capable of imagining different forms. In this inversion of Lacan's
concept of the specular feminine, Notley specularises the patriarch and
then dispatches him as an unnecessary and outmoded idea of otherness.
Dante's pilgrim experiences a fleeting vision of paradise by learning to
accept divine will as his own. By contrast, Notley's Alette rediscovers
paradise by steeling herself to commit murder and to be disobedient to
any form of external authority. If Dante aims to demonstrate the justness
and beauty of the cosmos as seen by God, Notley's protagonist sees its
ugliness, destroys Hell, and changes the world forever.38 As Alette leaves
the tyrant's house, she sees the tormented souls, previously trapped in the
subway, flooding up to the open air:

``The street was'' ``already'' ``filling up'' ``with people''

``They knew he must be dead'' ``Stood staring into'' ``the clear air:''
``it was early'' ``in the morning'' ``The sky was jeweled blue, rich blue''
` ``What we can have now','' ``a woman said,'' ``is infinity'' ``in our lives''.
(p. 147)

In orthodox Christian theology, `infinity' is specifically a feature of

paradisal time, whereas infernal time is `endless'. In restoring `infinity'
to the lives of the damned, Alette is completing the trajectory of Dante's
journey from Hell to Paradise (with the obvious contrast that she saves
not only herself, but all those trapped in Hell). But the oxymoronic
phrase, `infinity in our lives', makes clear that is a mortal, human
condition, not an unearthly one.
Some readers may find, despite the radiance of the final lines, that the
return to historical time is too easily achieved in the fourth book of Alette.
The surprising facility of the return is, as we have seen elsewhere, a
marked feature of katabatic narratives. But as with Slater's Spasm
discussed in the previous chapter, Alette lays bare the constructedness
of its ending. Alette's return from Hell is so impossibly victorious, so
richly complete, that it cannot, in my view, be mistaken for reality. But in
its utopian invocation of the possibility of `infinity in our lives' it cuts
across late twentieth-century expectations of doubled, irresolute, murky
or ambiguous endings. In the Petrarchan clarity of its vision (`the sky
jeweled blue'), it defies the need for compromise, prevarication, double
standards or tolerance of oppression. Notley has the boldness to imagine
a katabatic heroine who can invert the darkest of all possible worlds into
a realm of buoyancy and light.
While this chapter has presented a wide spectrum of views on the
gender dynamics of the descent to the underworld, it is also important
168 Engendering Dissent in the Underworld

to acknowledge the common ground shared by all these katabatic

narratives. A common starting point seems to be that patriarchy, and
patriarchal capitalism, offer women a half life at best, a state of in-
between-ness which for many equates to an existence in Hell. Further-
more, one might venture a further generalisation that a common goal of
the descent includes discovering a mode of being that is relational rather
than fathomlessly self-reflexive, and materially grounded in history rather
than transcendent. The three narratives I have chosen to discuss in greater
detail also share a utopian impulse, although these are worked out in very
different contexts and with different degrees of hybridisation with other
generic world-views, whether realistic, science fictional or visionary. This
utopian strain is important because, to borrow a sentiment from a
character considered in the next chapter, neither a subject nor a society
can come into being before it is imagined.39

Notes

1. In Virgil's Georgics, Eurydice dies as a result of stepping on a poisonous

snake while fleeing from Aristaeus. This scene is narrated in three lines
(4.457±9), while the response of Orpheus fills another eighty (460±529).
2. See, for example, Freud, `Femininity', in The Essentials of Psycho-Analysis,
pp. 412±32.
3. See Juliet Mitchell and Jacqueline Rose (eds), Feminine Sexuality: Jacques
Lacan and the Ecole Freudienne.
4. Cornell, `What is Ethical Feminism?', in Benhabib, Feminist Contentions,
p. 88.
5. Jouve, White Woman Speaks with Forked Tongue, p. 7. Judith Butler,
however, challenges the assumption that you must `have' a `self' before you
act; see her `For a Careful Reading', in Benhabib, Feminist Contentions,
pp. 134±5.
6. On gender representation in Holocaust literature, see Joan Smith, `Holocaust
Girls', Misogynies, pp. 86±96; and Dalia Ofer and Lenore J. Weitzman,
Women in the Holocaust.
7. Freud, The Essentials of Psycho-Analysis, p. 413.
8. Drusilla Cornell, however, makes `upside-down' use of Lacan in her psycho-
analytic approach; she reasons that `if woman is lack . . . she can ``be''
anything' (Feminist Contentions, p. 87). This is a thesis that Angela Carter
explores provocatively in The Passion of New Eve, where a man in drag
epitomises ideal femininity and a castrated misogynist becomes the new
century's Eve. But even Carter's Eve, synthetic woman par excellence
(p. 125), calls a halt to the endless challenges of gender metamorphosis.
Finally, she wonders, `should we . . . put [all the symbols] away, for a while,
until the times have created a fresh iconography?' (p. 174).
9. See also David Pike's analysis of the descent narratives of Christine de Pizan
and Virginia Woolf (Passage Through Hell, pp. 134±202).
 Notes 169
10. For a similar view, see Heilbrun, Writing a Woman's Life, pp. 16±17.
11. Benhabib, `Feminism and Postmodernism', Feminist Contentions, p. 30.
12. Compare Alasdair Gray's Poor Things, a reworking of Mary Shelley's
Frankenstein, in which a beautiful, humane female monster named Bella
becomes free once she realises she is the product of a human creator.
13. Naylor continued this practice in Mama Day, which is a rewriting and
revision of Shakespeare's The Tempest.
14. See, for example, Catherine Ward, `Linden Hills: A Modern Inferno'; Nick
Havely, ` ``Prosperous People'' and ``The Real Hell'' in Gloria Naylor's
Linden Hills'; Margaret Earley Whitt, Understanding Gloria Naylor; Luke
Bouvier, `Reading in Black and White: Space and Race in Linden Hills'; K. A.
Sandiford, `Gothic and Intertextual Constructions in Linden Hills'; Virginia
Fowler, Gloria Naylor: In Search of Sanctuary. Fowler summarises Naylor's
debt to Dante under three headings: Naylor re-imagines Dante's moral
geography, adapts his narrative strategy of the journey into and through
Hell and offers an allegorical warning to her African-American readers
(Gloria Naylor, pp. 61±2). One might add that unusually, for a twentieth-
century narrative, Naylor represents Hell as a just place; each of the self-
betrayals perpetrated by the characters living in Linden Hills earns the
betrayer an exactly appropriate psychological torment. In contrast to Mor-
rison's Sula, the novel's other major textual influence, Linden Hills applies
Dante's concept of contrapasso with rigorous literalness.
15. Nedeed is an inversion of de eden, because ` ``the Nedeeds are the Satanic
rulers of this false paradise'' ' (Naylor, quoted by Fowler, p. 64; Ward,
p. 70n). Nedeed males also conceive children under the sign of Capricorn,
because the goat's sign is traditionally associated with the Devil (Fowler,
p. 70). Nedeed's street address is 999 Tupelo Drive, which upside-down is
666, the biblical sign of Satan (Ward, p. 69n; Fowler, p. 64). Tupelo is both
named after a Mississippi town, from which the Nedeeds originate, and a
pun on Dante's `two pillars' at the entrance to the lower city of Dis (Bonetti's
interview with Naylor, quoted by Fowler, p. 64).
16. Willie rejects the totalising canvas of Milton's Paradise Lost, saying to
himself, `it would take an epic to deal with something like What has this
whole week meant? He'd have to leave that to guys like Milton. No just find
something small and work from there' (Linden Hills, pp. 275±6).
17. Willie is represented as in some respects the feminine poet, complementary to
the masculine Lester. The homosocial, possibly homosexual, nature of their
friendship has been explored by Henry Louis Gates in `Significant Others'.
Notably, the exit of the boys together from Linden Hills echoes the departure
of Milton's Adam and Eve from Paradise. Compare Milton's closing lines
with Naylor's: `They hand in hand with wandering steps and slow, / Through
Eden took their solitary way' (Paradise Lost, 12.646±9); `Each with his own
thoughts, they approached the chain fence . . . Hand anchored to hand, one
helped the other to scale the open links. Then, they walked out of Tupelo
Drive into the last days of the year' (Linden Hills, p. 304).
18. Teresa Goddu, `Reconstructing History in Linden Hills', p. 226.
19. Compare Judith Butler who asks, `what notion of ``agency'' will that be
which always and already knows its transcendental ground, and speaks only
and always from that ground? To be so grounded is nearly to be buried: it is
170 Engendering Dissent in the Underworld
to refuse alterity, to reject contestation' (Judith Butler, `For a Careful
Reading', in Feminist Contestations p. 131). On katabasis in Naylor's earlier
work, see Montgomery, ` ``The Fathomless Dream'': Gloria Naylor's Use of
the Descent Motif in The Women of Brewster Place'.
20. Naylor, `A Conversation: Gloria Naylor and Toni Morrison', p. 211, in Danille
Taylor-Guthrie (ed.), Conversations with Toni Morrison, pp. 188±217.
21. `A subject . . . is performatively constituted . . . To be constituted by
language is to be produced within a given network of power/discourse
which is open to resignification . . . ``Agency'' is to be found precisely at such
junctures where discourse is renewed' (Judith Butler, `For a Careful Read-
ing', Feminist Contestations, p. 135).
22. Piercy has also experimented with katabatic narrative structures and motifs
in other novels, for example: Going Down Fast (1969) and He, She and It
(1991).
23. In Marge Piercy: An Overview, Sue Walker discusses Piercy's debt to Phyllis
Chesler's Women and Madness (1972), a historical investigation into the
medical treatment of women diagnosed as mentally ill.
24. Compare Cornell: `the word ``feminist'' is itself intimately related to the
democratic revolutions in the West. But it is precisely the ``westernization'' of
the term that has made some women of color suspicious that it cannot be
separated from its Western roots, and more specifically from the Imperialist
imaginary' (`Rethinking the Time of Feminism', Feminist Contentions,
p. 147).
25. On this theory, see James Hillman, The Dream and the Underworld, p. 49;
and Evans Lansing Smith, Rape and Revelation, pp. 2±3, 30 and passim.
26. While Piercy herself describes this utopian state as androgynous, Shands
argues that it maternalises men, so that its `operating principle might be
called ``gynandric'' rather than gynocentric or androgynous' (The Repair of
the World, p. 76). For an overview of the critical debate over the novel's
genre, see Shands, pp. 65±6.
27. For a feminist analysis of Lacan's concept of future anteriority, see Cornell,
Feminist Contentions, p. 153.
28. Kerstin Shands, The Repair of the World, p. 79, quoting Kristeva, `Women's
Time', pp. 18±19.
29. Alice Notley, The Poetics of Disobedience, p. 1.
30. Alice Notley, `Interview with Maureen Holm', p. 2.
31. Alice Notley, `Interview with Jennifer Dick', p. 4.
32. Bakhtin, `Discourse in the Novel', The Dialogic Imagination, pp. 296±7.
33. Notley, `Interview with Jennifer Dick', p. 5.
34. Ibid., p. 5.
35. Notley cites the Paradiso as her favourite book of the Commedia, which in
itself is an unusual preference for a late twentieth-century writer. See Notley,
`Interview with Jennifer Dick', p. 5.
36. For example: `Sing, goddess, the wrath of Achilles' (Iliad, 1.1); `Of arms and
the man I sing' (Aeneid, 1.1); `Of man's first disobedience . . . Sing, Heavenly
Muse' (Paradise Lost, 1.1ff.).
37. On the influence of the Descent of Inanna on Alette, see Notley, `Interview
with Maureen Holm', p. 2.
38. Unambiguously victorious conclusions are more characteristic of children's
 Notes 171
descent narratives than highly politicised, feminist ones. Recent examples of
the former include Kenneth Oppel's Firewing, Pullman's The Amber Spy-
glass and Rushdie's Haroon and the Sea of Stories.
39. What Thaw actually says is, `if a city hasn't been used by an artist not even
the inhabitants live there imaginatively' (Lanark, p. 243).
 Chapter 7

Postmodern Hell and

the Search for Roots

In Alasdair Gray's Lanark, the ceiling of artist Duncan Thaw's studio is

scrawled with quotations, two of which read:

GOING DOWN TO HELL IS EASY: THE GLOOMY DOOR IS OPEN

NIGHT AND DAY. TURNING AROUND AND GETTING BACK TO
SUNLIGHT IS THE TASK, THE HARD THING. Vergil

HUMANITY SETS ITSELF NO PROBLEM WHICH CANNOT EVEN-

TUALLY BE SOLVED Marx
(Lanark, p. 283)

Gray yokes together Virgil and Marx (along with Freud, Dante, Blake
and many other katabatic luminaries) in order to underline the ways in
which postmodern capitalism may be understood as a contemporary,
secular form of Hell.1 In the other narrative strand of this mammoth,
passionately socialist, sardonically self-questioning novel, the hero La-
nark lives in a dystopian city without sunlight or love. The task he sets
himself is to understand how the city came to be like this, and how it, or
he, can be returned to the ordinary paradise he sometimes remembers
from an earlier life. Lanark's Unthank is a fantastical, futuristic version of
Thaw's 1950s Glasgow, which Gray represents as similarly lacking in
human affection, freedom and creativity. As his name suggests, Thaw's
task is to release the frozen core of humanity in himself and his environ-
ment. He proves to be a spectacular failure in this, and his alter ego, or
perhaps post-ego, Lanark fares little better. And yet the novel as a whole
is richly affirmative of ordinary virtues and pleasures: individual auton-
omy, breathable air, the affection between a father and son, light and
architectural grace. While it is important, as we found with Notley's
Descent, to understand the infernal condition to which Western society
and economics can reduce us, it is even more necessary to recognise the
transformative possibilities of the journey through Hell.
 Karl Marx's katabasis 173

Lanark is one of many contemporary novels that represent aspects of

Western, and Western-style, capitalism as Hell. While capitalism has
brought Westerners many benefits, it has also produced some of the
world's worst contemporary evils, including vast inequalities between the
rich and poor, the virtual and actual enslavement of millions of people to
sustain an affluent few in the West, as well as global environmental
damage. The Glasgow of Gray's adulthood is a classic example of a post-
industrial city, with a definite `before' and `after' identity. `Before', there
was well-paid, above-ground work in the shipbuilding industry; by
English standards, the shipworkers were well educated and politically
active. `After', there was virtually no work for anyone; 1970s Glasgow
was a victim of global capitalism and its consequences. The damage to the
environment represented in the fantasy section of Lanark also reflects
what was happening to Scottish natural resources at the time. The
apocalyptic fires and floods that threaten to overwhelm Unthank at
the end of Lanark are produced not by God but by irresponsible
politicians and businessmen. Gray, like other writers, portrays nuclear
`accidents' as manifestations of Hell on earth.2 No one living in Glasgow
in the 1960s, as Gray did, could be unaware of the fact that the American
Polaris submarines, with their primed nuclear missiles pointing at Russia,
were anchored 20 miles down the Clyde. Glaswegians were, by definition,
a prime target for a pre-emptive counterstrike, and the CND was
particularly active locally. Gray's first readers, then, might be expected
to agree with Steiner's view that the twentieth century is the first to
perceive advancements in science and technology as infernal as well as
enlightening (In Bluebeard's Castle, p. 103).

Karl Marx's katabasis

As we saw in the previous chapter, the feminist critique of patriarchy

often broadens into an attack on capitalism's global exploitation of the
poor. But the idea that the entire capitalist economic system, together
with the postmodern culture it has helped to produce, constitutes a
spatially tiered, temporally arrested, punitive, ethically bankrupt Hell
is one that can be traced, directly or indirectly, to Marx's writing. As
Derrida writes, `all men and women, all over the earth, are today to a
certain extent the heirs of Marx and Marxism,' that is heirs of a world-
view or totalising project that is uniquely `non-religious' and `not mytho-
logical' (Specters, p. 91). Twentieth-century experience teaches us that
Hell exists in the material world, but Marx provides us with the secular
framework for understanding and narrativising that experience.
174 Postmodern Hell and the Search for Roots

And yet, like Freud's, Marx's materialist vision continues to draw

much from the medieval Judeo-Christian conception of a vertically tiered
cosmos. On the most basic level, in Marx's Capital the bourgeois
capitalist economy is represented as a two-tiered system consisting of
a superstructure, where capitalists exchange commodities to create sur-
plus value, and a base, where labourers manufacture products with a
concrete use-value, which acquire the phantasmagorical exchange-value
of commodities once they enter the capitalist market. Like the two-tiered
psyche (conscious and unconscious) conceived by Freud, the different
levels of Marx's bourgeois economy are separated from, and largely
invisible to each other. The consumer of the commodity cannot know the
true cost, in terms of human labour, of what she is about to consume
because the product's use-value is concealed beneath its market-deter-
mined price. Marx's strategy of resistance to this blind exploitation of
human labour is one of exposure and demystification. By exposing the
base to the superstructure, the real conditions of labour to the consumers
of commodities, capitalism's spectral powers could be overcome. Again,
there is strong parallel here with Freud, for whom probing the uncon-
scious is meant to relieve the psychotic patient's symptoms.
Along with Williams and Pike, what I would stress here is that the
resistance to capitalist economics requires a descent journey into the
underworld, which for Marx means the workplace, the site of production
itself.3 Thus near the beginning of Capital, he takes his reader by the
hand, as it were, and leads him down into Hell:

Let us therefore, in company with the owner of money and the owner of
labour-power, leave this noisy sphere, where everything takes place on the
surface and in full view of everyone, and follow them into the hidden abode of
production, on whose threshold there hangs the notice, `No admittance except
on business'. Here we shall see, not only how capital produces, but how capital
is itself produced. The secret of profit-making must at last be made bare.
(Capital, pp. 279±80)

As Pike shows, Walter Benjamin interprets this passage as the start of a

classical-medieval descensus ad inferos, and the `no admittance' sign as an
echo of Dante's famous inscription, `abandon all hope, you who enter'.4
Like the protagonist Dante, Marx's implied reader has to be exhorted to
recognise his true self in the underworld:5

If . . . the German reader pharisaically shrugs his shoulders at the condition of

the English industrial and agricultural workers, or optimistically comforts
himself with the thought that in Germany things are not nearly so bad; I must
plainly tell him: De te fabula narrator! [this story is being told about you]
(Capital, `Preface to the First Edition', p. 90)
 Postmodern Capitalist Hell: Alasdair Gray's Lanark 175

Marx wrote that `in all ideology men and their relations appear upside-
down as in a camera obscura'. To see them right side up, we must
examine not their thoughts and utterances, but their `historical life-
process' (`Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Econo-
my', p. 32). This passage reproduces in secular terms an image of upside-
down-ness that is common in religious conversion narratives, most
notably Dante's Inferno. Looking back on the journey through Hell
from the end of the cantica, the reader is meant to understand that the
character Dante has been travelling upside-down up to the point where he
reaches the bottom, or base, of Hell. It is not until he has grasped the
thighs of the labouring Satan that he is able to see the world aright and
upright. Earlier in the twentieth century, Benjamin re-read Marx's
infernal workplace as a transformative space into which one descended
to release the forces of revolution (see Pike, Passage Through Hell,
p. 212). The question must be raised, though, whether this vertically
stratified representation of capitalism pertains as well to the global
economics of the late twentieth century and if not, whether Marx's
proposed descent to the underworld of the workplace retains any of
its transformative potential for the rootless, postmodern subject. Would a
descent to the workplace have any effect on the hero of Bret Easton Ellis's
American Psycho (1991)? As the first chapter indicates (with the words
`Abandon Hope All Ye Who Enter Here' scrawled in red letters on the
wall of a bank), he already lives in Hell, yet he continues to exist, slick,
brand-conscious and murderous, without any indication that he is cap-
able of sinking into despair, pity or Marxist enlightenment.

Postmodern Capitalist Hell: Alasdair Gray's Lanark

Addressing the first part of the question raised above, then, one might
ask: in what ways do contemporary writers represent late twentieth-
century, flexible postmodern capitalism specifically as an infernal
condition? In the following discussion, I adopt the distinction that
David Harvey makes between Fordian or modern capitalism (pre-
1970) and flexible postmodern capitalism (post-1970).6 The latter,
Harvey writes, `rests on flexibility with respect to labour processes, . . .
greatly intensified rates of commercial, technological, and organizational
innovation, . . . [and] ``time-space compression'' ' (The Condition of
Postmodernity, p. 147). While rigid or Fordian capitalism produced
fixed hierarchies in the workplace that could easily be associated with
Dante's circles of Hell, it is really only with flexible capitalism that we get
the terrifying collapses of time and space which are the chronotopic basis
176 Postmodern Hell and the Search for Roots

of the infernal (that is, the eternally suffering) condition.7 In Chronos-

chisms, Ursula Heise argues that rapid advances in science and technol-
ogy have contributed to a distinctly postmodern sense of time, in which
we have to contend not only with the `shortening of temporal horizons'
but also with `the co-existence of radically different times scales from the
nanoseconds of the computer to the billions of years in which contem-
porary cosmology calculates the age of the earth and the universe' (pp. 6±
7). Such vastly contrasting timescales can scarcely be comprehended, and
yet contemporary science holds them to be equally, incontrovertibly real.
As Borges intimates in `The Aleph', to be able to be everywhere at once,
see all things at once, experience all forms of time at once, is to see the
universe as God sees it; but for a human being such a perspective would
be infernal rather than divine.8
Whereas in `The Aleph', `Borges' and his rival Daneri speculate about
an alternative reality in which spatial distances and temporal distinctions
have collapsed, the inhabitants of Unthank actually live in a world which
is hurtling toward this postmodern vanishing point. In the fourth book of
Lanark, those with any form of income live in cars rather than houses;
their windscreens are giant TV screens which project into the car images
of home interiors, gardens, even holiday scenery, as well as local and
international news (pp. 446±54). Although thus permanently mobile,
Unthank citizens never actually go anywhere because simulated reality
has made travel redundant. Space becomes violently unstable at the end
of the novel, when huge sections of the city are pitched at odd angles due
to recurrent earthquakes. But the temporal dislocations are even more
striking, illustrating a `widening and deepening of capitalist social rela-
tions with time' which Harvey argues is characteristic of Western econo-
mies since the 1970s (The Condition of Postmodernity, p. 344). The two
things that everyone in Unthank wants are money and time, as the many
advertising billboards indicate (`MONEY IS TIME. BUY TIME FOR
YOUR FAMILY FROM THE QUANTUM CHRONOLOGICAL.
(THEY'LL LOVE YOU FOR IT)' (p. 432)). And yet ironically, no one
has either of these desired goods. There is no sunlight with which to
measure days or seasons, and by Council fiat the clocks have all been
stopped, so no one `has' time. Lanark's job as a grade D inquiry clerk in
Book 4 is to `give the appearance of listening closely' and to `kill hope
slowly, so that the loser has time to adjust unconsciously to the loss'
(p. 439). As Gilchrist explains to Lanark, `it's impossible to pay a monthly
or yearly sum when we can't even measure the minutes or hours' so no
one is ever paid an actual wage (p. 437). Instead, the society operates by a
system of credit which deducts energy from the future life of the debtor.
In postmodern capitalism, writes Harvey, `the future has come to be
 Postmodern Capitalist Hell: Alasdair Gray's Lanark 177

discounted into the present' (The Condition of Postmodernity, p. 291). In

Unthank, this principle operates literally. As a result of his credit deduc-
tions, Lanark begins to experience rips and tears in the chronological
sequence of his life toward the end of Book 4.9 Leaving his wife and baby
son in the Cathedral for what appears to be a short interval, for example,
he returns to find the boy half-grown and his wife living with another
man. Due to the instability of time, Lanark finds it impossible to sustain
real relationships; instead he is repeatedly drawn to or seduced by robots
masquerading as female secretaries or prostitutes. Even food in Unthank
fails to provide real sustenance. Those on security benefits are fed `three-
in-one' bread, which tranquilises against the cold but damages the
intelligence of the consumer. When Lanark hears about this he says,
`This is Hell.' Jack, a new acquaintance, laconically replies, `there are
worse hells' (p. 432).
The existence of better and worse hells is a theologically unorthodox,
but recognisably Dantean notion to which Lanark adapts very quickly.10
This jostling, overcrowded, unstable city of chimeras and flat-screen
fantasies is not democratically unreal. On the contrary, time, space,
technology and political power are hierarchised to an extreme degree.
If capitalism is carnivalesque, then in Lanark, as in Angela Carter's The
Infernal Desire Machines of Dr Hoffman, the carnival is firmly controlled
from the top down. Unthank itself is held in thrall by the Council and the
Institute, a seat of government and a scientific research centre located
beneath the city. This tiered system suggests, in more general terms, how
capitalism's collapse of spatial distances (through faster travel times,
speedier deployment of local labour supplies and so on) leads to new
spatial hierarchies. As Harvey writes, `the diminution of spatial barriers
results in the reaffirmation and realignment of hierarchy within what is
now a global urban system' (The Condition of Postmodernity, p. 295). In
Lanark, it is the buried centre of power, the Dis of this dystopia, which
dominates Unthank and Provan, and all the other cities constellated on
the mountain slopes above it. Even within Unthank, it would be difficult
to remain unaware of the hierarchisation of space. The city itself is hilly,
and virtually every movement described within it is vertical. Characters
are depicted ascending and descending stairways, canal banks, and
hillsides. The normal way to leave Unthank is downwards, through
mouths that gape open suddenly in floors, back streets and cemeteries
to consume the weakest of its inhabitants. Thus in Gray's novel, post-
modern capitalism assumes the form of Dante's funnel-shaped Hell.
Moreover, in the third book of Lanark (which is also the first part of
the novel, where the reader actually begins), Gray depicts nearly all his
characters suffering from what he elsewhere describes as `Dante's bad
178 Postmodern Hell and the Search for Roots

mental states' (Axelrod, `An Epistolary Interview', p. 2). There are four
diseases afflicting the population of Unthank in Book 3. Each disease
represents a character imbalance, an excess or lack of certain qualities;
thus `dragonhide' (coldness, too much regard for one's self) contrasts with
`mouths' (no sense of self at all), and `twittering rigour' (dogmatism,
excessive national pride, devotion to high principles) contrasts with
`leeches' (parasitical behaviour, no principle at all). Those who are worst
affected by disease are swallowed by the gaping Hell-mouths that channel
them down into the sinks of the Institute. There they are recycled into the
food, heat and electricity which sustain the Institute and Council. Gray's
`bad mental states' are not morally hierarchised (as they are in Naylor's
Linden Hills, for example) but those suffering from the diseases of excess
(dragonhide, twittering rigour) are less easily recycled, therefore they are
less likely to end up as human food, and more likely to be inducted into
the Institute±Council complex as doctors or political delegates. At what-
ever level they survive, however, the populations of Unthank, Provan and
all the other cities constellated around the Council exist so as to sustain
this underground centre of scientific, technological and political power.
Thus Lanark represents capitalist exploitation as infernal, with its cease-
less feeding off weaker and undefended peoples, spaces and natural
resources.
But the most frightening aspect of Gray's postmodern Hell is that it
inflicts suffering casually, without malevolent intent. Unlike the night-
mare future Orwell imagines in 1984, for instance, there appears to be
nobody in charge of Gray's Hell. Like Naylor's fifth Luther Nedeed,
Gray's ninth Lord Monboddo is the patriarch who ostensibly governs
both Council and (eventually) research institute. But while he crests the
wave of capitalist expansion, Monboddo does not govern its behaviour.
He neither approves nor disapproves of the Hobbesian principle that
drives his nation-state, expressed in the statement, `man is the pie that
bakes and eats itself, and the recipe is separation' (p. 411 and elsewhere).
When, at the end of the novel, Lanark accuses Monboddo of creating a
cannibalistic society, the leader replies fatalistically, `it is a sad fact of
human nature that in large numbers we can only organise against each
other' (p. 550). Lanark retorts that this social organisation is not natural
but consciously constructed; `our nations are not built instinctively by our
bodies, like beehives; they are works of art, like ships, carpets and
gardens. The possible shapes of them are endless' (p. 550). In the
frontispiece illustration to Book 4, Gray reproduces Hobbes's image
of the state as Leviathan, along with a quotation encircling the giant's
head: `By Arts Is Formed that great Mechanical Man called a State,
foremost of the Beasts of the Earth for Pride' (p. 355). But if this monster
 Postmodern Capitalist Hell: Alasdair Gray's Lanark 179

with closed eyes was produced by human artifice, by Lanark's time, it has
an internal momentum that far exceeds any individual, human control.
As a symbol of evil, this blind, mechanistic giant is both distinctively
postmodern and recognisably medieval. Dante's Lucifer is notably lacking
in rationality or will, in contrast with early modern representations such as
Milton's in Paradise Lost (1667) or Daniel Defoe's in The History of the
Devil (1726). And in postmodern narratives, it is often a monstrously
corruptive system rather than an individual intention or act that is
represented as evil. The modernist in Borges concedes the possibility that
the labyrinthine universe really does make sense, really is perfectly ordered
by a divine Being ± although if it is so, this can only be horrific for us
mortals. But at least the Borgesian labyrinth, for example in `The Garden of
Forking Paths', is a complex structure created by a rational mind. Likewise,
in Borges's stories, every labyrinth has its minotaur (even if, as in `Aster-
ion', the minotaur is the first-person narrator himself). But for Thomas
Pynchon, in Gravity's Rainbow and The Crying of Lot 49, the labyrinth is
an infernal figure for the world's lack of telos or meaningful pattern. In The
Crying of Lot 49, Oedipaa descends paranoically through a labyrinth of
clues pertaining to her former lover, the US Postal Service, and her own
identity, but she never discovers an exit or a centre to this ontological
maze.11 There is no centre and no Minotaur in Barth's short story `Lost in
the Funhouse' and other classic American postmodern fictions.
While the infernal labyrinth is not an invention of postmodernity, any
more than is the concept of a mechanistic state and economy, these
images express something of the paradoxical nature of living in a
specifically postmodern economy.12 We are free to go in whichever
direction we choose, but none of them leads out of the market. Lanark's
future wife, Rima, refuses to eat the food in the Institute once she realises
it is made from processed human flesh. Midway through her journey,
however, she gives up on her protest, because there is nothing else to eat
and seemingly no other system in which to live. In response to the global
economic disaster caused by his state's irresponsible exploitation of
natural and human resources, Monboddo designs what he calls his
`Laputa project' (after Swift's fantasy realm in Gulliver's Travels), which
rather than regulating capitalist expansion, extends it vertically into outer
space. Although aborted, this project raises the nightmarish possibility of
the skies being hierarchised into layered cities, as happens in Connie's
dystopian future, in Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time and in Gray's
short story `The Axletree' (Unlikely Stories, Mostly, pp. 67±84, 233±71).
But if this is a representation of a possible, dystopian future, the state as
mechanised beast is also an allegorical representation of the present
economy, especially when viewed from `below'. To a death-row prisoner,
180 Postmodern Hell and the Search for Roots

`it's almost as if this machine, the corrupt system, has gained a life of its
own like some malevolent god that everyone is terrified of, afraid to defy'
(Welcome to Hell, p. 29). To preserve his sanity, the prisoner has to
believe `that God is going to free me from within the belly of this beast'
(Welcome to Hell, p. 26). Not unlike this actual prisoner, fictional Thaw
imagines global corporations swelling and consuming each other until
nothing survives but one gigantic flea louse, `a titan curled round the
equator like a grub round a pebble' (Lanark, p. 233).
In a lecture on Baudelaire's `Satanic Verses', Jonathan Culler argues
that Baudelaire's characterisation of Satan has a particular contemporary
relevance, though many have dismissed this aspect of the modernist poet's
work as outmoded. If, as Baudelaire foretold, we have reached a time in
which `everyone feels the Devil and no one believes in him', perhaps we
should understand by this term not an individual agent of evil, but all
those impersonal forces, `history, classes, capital, freedom, public
opinion . . . which seem to control the world and give events meaningful
and often oppressive structures' (p. 19). Baudelaire's prophetically con-
temporary Satan, argues Culler, is not an individual, sentient being, but
all these `infernal accumulations we characteristically feel but seem
unable to control' (p. 20). But if the Devil is defined as broadly and
as vaguely as the `infernal accumulation of impersonal forces' leading to
oppression and exploitation, is there any point in retaining the medieval
rhetoric? Does this rhetoric provide us with any leverage that would help
to demystify postmodern capitalism once we have granted its spatio-
temporal resemblances to classical and medieval underworlds? This leads
me to the second part of the question I raised earlier: does Marx's idea of
a descent journey through the economy retain its usefulness, its didactic
function and its promise of revolutionary transformation in the context of
postmodern capitalism? For Marx, the workplace was Hell but it was
incontrovertibly real; it was the source of true value and ontological
being, in contrast to the phantasmagoria of cultural exchange. But from
the postmodern perspective, everything ± even the workplace, even one's
apparently core identity ± is constructed, a product of exchange, phan-
tasmagorically infernal. But if our economic condition is inescapably
infernal, is a descent journey desirable or possible? `After all,' David Pike
writes, `one cannot descend from hell' (Passage Through Hell, p. 217).

Lanark's search for roots

Descending from Hell, however, is precisely the task facing Gray's

eponymous hero. In Book 3, Lanark decides to leave Unthank by
 Lanark's search for roots 181

voluntarily jumping into one of its Hell mouths. He undergoes the

experience of disorientation, annihilation and rebirth suffered by most
katabatic heroes when they reach the base of Hell:

The sides [of the gullet] contracted and crushed him harder than ever. Most
senses abandoned him now. Thought and memory, stench, heat, and direction
dissolved and he knew nothing but pressure and duration. Cities seemed piled
on him with a weight which doubled every second . . . all time, space and mind
would end unless he moved but it had been aeons since he could have stirred
toe or eyelid. And then he felt like an infinite worm in infinite darkness.
(Lanark, p. 49)

After this, Lanark wakes up in the Institute; his dragonhide is cured but he
has entered a much more infernal world. He has to eat recycled human
flesh, and as a doctor, to make sure his dying patients are not cured.
Lanark insists on leaving the Institute, but finds the Council still more
corrupt. Next, he takes himself with Rima down an Oz-like, yellow-lined
road through an `inter-calendrical zone', where they get lost in time,
separated, give themselves up to despair and then encounter themselves as
separate people occupying different time zones (Lanark, pp. 375±97).
This dispiriting experience is followed by a number of other abortive
attempts to escape or transcend their infernal condition. Finally, though,
Lanark decides that they will be best off in Unthank; `it may be bad but
the badness is obvious, not gilded with lies' (p. 552). Lanark's multiple
descent journeys lead full circle to his original Hell.
Lanark is a socialist novel written in a decade when the British Left was
losing political credibility (published in 1981, it anticipated the Thatch-
erite decade to come); it is also a Scottish nationalist novel written around
the time of the failure of Scottish devolution in 1977. In my view, Lanark
is not so much a postmodernist novel, as a critical forecast of what
Glasgow might become if it yields to the hyper-capitalism approaching
like a tidal wave from the south.13 Lanark desperately wants to return to
a prosaic time before Unthank's, a time regulated by clocks, meaningful
employment and family relationships. But even Lanark's desire for roots
may be understood as a product of his postmodern experience of amnesia
and rootlessness. As Harvey points out, postmodern capitalism can
paradoxically produce a desire for anti-postmodern roots, for `secure
moorings in a shifting world' (The Condition of Postmodernity, p. 302).
But, writes Harvey, `the irony is that tradition is now often preserved by
being commodified and marketed as such. The search for roots ends up at
worst being produced and marketed as image, as a simulacrum or
pastiche' (p. 303).
So if `wherever capitalism goes, its illusory apparatus, its fetishisms,
182 Postmodern Hell and the Search for Roots

and its system of mirrors come not far behind,' then where, asks Harvey
`can real change come from?' (pp. 344±5). Gray's response to this
question in Lanark comes close to the position articulated by Derrida
in Specters of Marx, in the sense that both writers katabatically invert
rather than attempt to transcend or reject outright the speculative logic of
capitalism. Marx thought of money as possessing spectral powers,
explains Derrida. In Capital, he expressed the wish to be rid of the
ghosts of antiquated modes of production: `We suffer not only from the
living, but from the dead. Le mort saisit le vif! (`the dead man seizes
the living!', `Preface', Capital, p. 91). Ideally not only these remnants, but
the whole spectrality of capitalist exchange would be dialectically over-
come by the revolution of the working class. If Marx's vision no longer
seems credible in the West after 1989, Derrida suggests that we are not yet
finished with Marx. Precisely now, when it is apparently `too late for
Marxism', the spirit of Marx should be invoked, to resist the injustices of
unregulated, global capitalism (Specters, p. 88). So from the underworld
of earlier twentieth-century history, Derrida paradoxically conjures the
ghost of a ghost-hater to haunt our postmodern, already spectral econ-
omy. Specifically, what should be revived is Marx's spirit of self-critique
and his sense of needing to `bear witness' to justice (p. 88). The conjured
ghost of Marx should be distinguished, however,

from other spirits of Marxism, those that rivet it to the body of Marxist
doctrine, to its supposed systemic, metaphysical or ontological totality . . . to
its fundamental concepts of labor, mode of production, social class, . . . its
apparatuses (projected or real: . . . the dictatorship of the proletariat, the single
party, the State, and finally the totalitarian monstrosity.) (Specters, p. 88)

So it is not the solid body of Marxist doctrine, but the disembodied,

secular messianic promise in Marx's writing to which we are all heir in
Derrida's view.
And Derrida is not alone in thinking this. Among other philosophers,
Terry Eagleton revives the spectre of Marx in Sweet Violence: The Idea of
the Tragic. Eagleton proposes an `idea of the tragic' that combines
Freudian/Lacanian, Marxist and theological models of the descent to
Hell (for examples, see pp. 233, 145 and 37, respectively). For Eagleton,
the serious function of tragedy in a postmodern context is to remind us
that even global capitalism can be brought down to earth: `The structure
of a world increasingly governed by the greed of transnational corpora-
tions is one which has to be broken in order to be repaired' (Sweet
Violence, p. 296). Rather than tragedy, David Harvey favours a return to
realism and the `counter-attack of narrative against the image' (The
Condition of Postmodernity, p. 359). But ironically, the genre that seems
 Lanark's search for roots 183

to be mounting the most insistent challenge to capitalist excess currently is

not realism or tragedy but the one most sympathetic to capitalism's entire
`illusory apparatus', that is fantasy.
Lanark begins with fantasy and only later shifts to realism, in my view,
because the former is the genre that is most closely mimetic of late
twentieth-century experience within a flexible capitalist economy. Tran-
sient celebrity such as Lanark achieves in Book 4 is the reality of our
world; a sense of historical connectedness and narrative coherence is
arguably harder to find. In the context of speculative capitalism, realism
is the fantastical genre, providing the illusion of material solidity and
permanence that the actual world lacks. Out of chronological sequence,
Lanark begins with Book 3, in medias res, not because the entire story
cycle is known in advance as in traditional Homeric epic, but because
Lanark is a hero who does not remember his origins (arriving in Unthank
at aged twenty-one, he has no memories of his prior existence). He is
therefore a typically postmodern, amnesiac subject, but he is striving to
become real (or at least realistic).
Having failed to find a way out of Hell by descending to the Institute
and refusing to join the Institute in its infernal task of recycling human
energy, Lanark demands to be given a personal history. He is granted an
oracle which, contrary to convention, narrates his past rather than the
future, and at this point in the novel, Gray switches genres to realistic
narration (p. 123). With the Oracle as guide, Lanark thus descends into
the story of Duncan Thaw, the protagonist of the central sections of the
novel, Books 1 and 2 (Lanark's four books are arranged unsequentially,
3, 1, 2, 4, although the chapters are numerically sequenced from 1 to 44).
Before this, the Oracle tries two other genres, modernist stream of
consciousness (adopting `the voice of a precocious child', p. 104) and
documentary narrative (adopting `a dry academic voice', p. 105). But
Lanark insists on having both a dramatised narrator (`who are you
anyway?') and a specific, social context (`Could you not start by telling
me something of the geographical and social surroundings?' p. 105). In
other words, nothing but realism will satisfy him.
Before immersing Lanark in the realistic Glasgow of the 1950s,
however, the Oracle makes a brief detour through his own life, beginning
with his unhappy old age and ending with his recollection of contented,
infant consciousness (pp. 107±17). This compressed narrative mirrors
Lanark's own life, but in the extreme form of a fable; it provides an
exemplum not only of Lanark's past but his future. Due to an unloved
childhood, the Oracle tells Lanark, he came to prefer abstract numbers to
human affection; the pursuit of profit in a virtual marketplace suited him
perfectly, until he began literally to lose his place in the material world. In
184 Postmodern Hell and the Search for Roots

the last stages of abstraction, even `the pressure on my feet [from the
ground] vanished. I neither fell nor floated. I had become bodiless in a
bodiless world. I existed as a series of thoughts amidst infinite greyness'
(p. 111). This is one of the possible futures awaiting Lanark's world, and
as the Oracle shows, it stems directly from a past like Thaw's: security in a
mother's love, abandonment, expectancy of epic grandeur met by dull-
ness and narrow poverty, compensatory fantasies, the lure of money and
abstract numbers. Thaw-Lanark and the Oracle follow a similar `path
from the sunlit roses' of the nursery to the `grey void' of the working
world. The Oracle specifically identifies his endlessly drifting condition as
infernal: `Death is the only dependable exit, but death depends on the
body and I had rejected the body. I was condemned to a future of
replaying and replaying the tedious past . . . I was in hell' (p. 116).
From Lanark's point of view, the switch to realistic narration repre-
sents the possibility of discovering an explanation for his present con-
dition and a possible return path to Thaw's sunlit world. But the running
title to the Prologue (`Can Lanark Lead Him [the Oracle, and possibly
Thaw] Out of Hell? Can He Help Lanark Out of Hell?' (pp. 116±17))
suggests a more complex relation between the realist and fantastical
sections than Lanark yet realises. If a disappointed realist (the young
Oracle or Duncan Thaw) can conjure infernal fantasies, then the process
can also work the other way; desperate fantasists (such as Lanark) can as
hopelessly dream of social realist utopias. A return to straight social
realism is neither possible nor desirable, as Lanark demonstrates; rather,
Gray invokes the spirit of realism to haunt, disrupt and reinvigorate the
postmodern, fantastical world.
If Lanark had expected an easy exit from Unthank via realist enlight-
enment from Duncan Thaw, the first major obstacle he encounters is
Thaw's own intense hatred of and resistance to Glasgow's postwar, social
realist ideals. Thaw's father, who survived trench warfare in the First
World War, has an optimistic, secular belief in historical progress;
` ``modern history is just beginning. Give us another couple of centuries
and we'll build a real civilization!'' ' Even if ` ``a few damned power
cliques start an atomic war'' ', humanity will survive and ` ``ordinary folk
will . . . start the steep upward climb once more'' ' (p. 295). But Duncan
Thaw rejects this Scots determination to thole it, come what may; ` ``I'm
sick of ordinary people's ability to eat muck and survive . . . Only human
beings have the hideous versatility to adapt to lovelessness and live and
live and live while being exploited and abused by their own kind'' '
(p. 295). If Thaw senior can cautiously justify Stalin's brutal regime in the
1930s, Duncan Thaw denounces the Soviet solution as the worst of
patriarchal nightmares (p. 297). When challenged to produce his own
 Lanark's search for roots 185

solution, Thaw articulates the spirit of a Marxist world-view, stripped of

its material apparatus and even its textual authority; Thaw admits, `I
haven't read Marx but ± '' ' (p. 325). But if, as Derrida argues, Marx's
spectre enjoins us to bear witness to justice, then Duncan Thaw is one of
Marx's haunted heirs. What the world needs, he declares, is `memory and
a conscience' (p. 296). Lanark carries this socialist ideal forward into the
fantastical sections of the novel. His primary aim in the slate-clean
Institute is to remember who he was and what the world once was,
and his conscience militates against recycling human flesh for a living.
In contrast to Lanark, however, Thaw disdains the ordinary challenge
of earning a living. What he craves is the power of myth and fantasy to (as
he sees it) transform reality on a global, or national, or at least city-wide
scale. In the novel's most celebrated passage, Thaw claims that Glasgow
will not be recognised as a magnificent city `because nobody imagines
living here' (p. 243). Thaw is a fantasist capable of imagining entire
fictional worlds, but they all suffer from being disconnected to his actual
world or anyone in it. In all his fantasy worlds, he governs as the sole
dictator; sometimes he is a benign, sometimes an evil leader. The single
element that constantly disrupts Thaw's fantasies is chronological and
historical time, the kind of time that Lanark's fantastical world lacks. As a
painter, Thaw chooses a visual over a narrative form of storytelling, but
his epic murals of biblical and mythic scenes repeatedly give way to a
narrative impetus. The human subjects depicted therein begin to move
(`They fled along towpaths, over bridges, and collected on heights'
(p. 279)), the elements of water and fire burst out of the frame, and
time and again the paintings refuse to be completed. Thaw tries to achieve
the total perspective of Dante as God's narrator, or Borges's infernal
aleph. Painting Glasgow's Blackhill locks, for example, he attempts to
represent the scene `from below when looked at from left to right and
from above when seen from right to left' (p. 279). In the church mural, the
last work he paints before his death, he wrestles with Old Testament
scenes, attempting to make them more just and complete than the biblical
narrative itself. Thaw claims, `we're making our own model of the
universe'; his model, unlike God's, `must be made perfect. When a thing
is perfect it is eternal . . . its perfection is safe in the past' (p. 337).14 The
patriarchal God, whom Thaw defies, repeatedly interferes with the
youth's ambitious project, meddling with his sense of justice and just
proportion, marring the completed scenes by introducing another narra-
tive development. Thus `his trouble began in the background where
history was acted in the loops and delta of the river on its way to the
ocean. The more he worked the more the furious figure of God kept
popping in and having to be removed' (pp. 320±1). Thaw becomes
186 Postmodern Hell and the Search for Roots

obsessed with the idea of giving back to God His own creation, `when I've
put it in decent order'. For a hallucinatory hour or two, he even feels like a
divine Creator; `as he lay with closed eyes his mind circled the chancel
walls with lazy power' (p. 338). But what he fails to notice is that God
interrupts his work, not to insist on perfection, but to introduce im-
perfection and dynamic narrative development. In other words Thaw's
God expresses Himself as human time, the very element Thaw is deter-
mined to exclude from his painting.
Time is what could and to a degree does humanise Thaw, eroding
his arrogant confidence in the solitary artist's genius. A little earlier,
Thaw breaks down when he finds two photographs of his dead mother.
In one photograph, she is youthful, in the other middle aged, and Thaw
wonders, `were they [people's faces] like different sides of the globe with
time turning the gaunt face into the light while the merry one slid round
into shadow? . . . He thought, ``Oh no! Oh no!'' and felt for the only time
in his life a pang of pure sorrow without rage or self-pity in it' (p. 316).
And in the final weeks of his life, he does meekly accept help and food
from two parishioners he previously dismissed as trivial-minded. But his
unwillingness or inability to connect with people, particularly with the
woman he loves, Marjorie Laidlaw, finally drives him to madness. In a
chilling revision of Dante's last canto, Thaw feels the city of Glasgow
assuming the funnel shape of Hell around him: `the city was forcing itself
into the sky on every side. Factory, university . . . ridges of tenements,
parks loaded with trees ascended until he looked up at the horizon like the
rim of a bowl with himself at the bottom' (p. 348). Here while crouching
like Satan at the base of this Hell, he hears the strange, crow-like voice
which leads him to either murder or believe he has murdered Marjorie.
Thaw finally achieves his wish by escaping the temporally determined
world and escaping into a realm of pure fantasy.
But having conjured a mythical Hell, Thaw hits its rock-bottom and
there experiences something of a katabatic inversion. The inversion is
firstly physical and geographic: `he thought of going to London, of sliding
down the globe into the cluttered and peopled south, but at the station
the needle of his mental compass swung completely and pointed to the
northern firths and mountains' (p. 351). As we have seen elsewhere,
Thaw feels the lightness of the damned; but in this context, the northern
orientation also indicates his determination not to escape a Scottish
inferno by fleeing to England. His katabatic inversion is also mental.
For once he resists asking his father for financial support. And although
his death by drowning may have been suicide, the final scene represents
him fighting against the tug of the sea. Echoing Achilles' hubristic
wrestling match with the river Skamandros (Iliad, 12.233±4), Thaw cries
 Can realism lead fantasy out of Hell? Can fantasy help realism? 187

out to the waves, `you can't get rid of me!' And since the only clue to
Lanark's previous existence is the sand in his pockets, the sea arguably
does not `get rid of' Thaw but rather transforms him and sends him back
as Lanark. In this line of interpretation, Thaw's bloody-minded determi-
nation to keep fighting is what produces the Lanark of the fantastical
books.

Can realism lead fantasy out of Hell? Can fantasy help

realism?

Perhaps the metamorphosis into Lanark is Thaw's `way out' of Hell, as

the title of Chapter 29 suggests. But is Thaw's story of any use to Lanark?
And more broadly speaking, are the descent into earlier twentieth-century
history and the genre shift from fantasy to realism useful as strategies of
resistance to postmodern disorientation? The Oracle tersely concludes
that Thaw `botched his end' and consequently `set no example' (p. 219).
Lanark, too, finds the conclusion to the Thaw narrative `unsatisfying'. To
commit suicide after murdering someone would be just, but Lanark says
he cannot respect `a man who drowns himself for a fantasy' (p. 357);
fantasy, after all, is what Unthank produces to excess. When Rima objects
that the Oracle's narrative was about her past, not Lanark's, the reader
cannot help but wonder whether the realist section of the novel is
anything other than a character's fantasy (p. 357). But any reader
who has reached this stage of Lanark knows not to accept one character's
opinion as certain or authorial truth, first, because that opinion will
probably be contradicted by someone else, and secondly, because the first
character will probably change his or her mind.
Lanark and Rima's scepticism about Thaw's narrative seems designed
to provoke debate about the efficacy of searching for roots in the past or
in social realism. The lack of critical consensus about how the two halves
of the novel are related is another indication that the novel intends to
provoke dialogue rather than provide single answers to these questions.
Cairns Craig, for example, argues that the novel's splitting of a central
protagonist into two characters reflects the schizophrenic divisions of
Scottish culture in the 1970s.15 In Stevenson's view, entropic forces
eventually pull the novel apart, while for Lumsden and Bernstein,
narrative closure prevails over entropy.16 Lumsden interprets closure
as a retreat into conservatism, while Bernstein sees it as redemptive. The
interpretive debate takes place inside the novel as well. Gray has his
fictional author, Nastler, say in the Epilogue that Thaw is based auto-
biographically on himself, while Lanark is Thaw `with the neurotic
188 Postmodern Hell and the Search for Roots

imagination trimmed off and built into the furniture of the world' (p. 493).
Nastler's editor questions the compositional integrity of the novel,
arguing that the Thaw and Lanark sections are only `cemented by
typographical contrivances' (p. 493). But Nastler maintains that the
fantastical narrative is a macrocosmic repetition of the realist one: `the
Thaw narrative shows a man dying because he is bad at loving. It is
enclosed by your [Lanark's] narrative which shows civilization collapsing
for the same reason' (p. 484). But as we learn, even the `author' Nastler
does not have the final word. He is surprised to learn that Lanark has a
son, and the ending to Lanark's narrative does not go according to his
plans. Unthank narrowly escapes the apocalypse he has prepared and
Lanark lives to see light and time returning to the city.
In terms of narrative sequence and causality alone, the two sections of
the novel can be, and have been, interrelated in different ways. A number
of possibilities could be and have been suggested. First, Lanark may have
invented Thaw to give himself a biographically plausible past. In this case,
only the fantastical sections are intended to be read as `real'. Secondly, the
character Lanark may be a fiction, hallucinated by Thaw while he lies sick
in hospital. In this case, when Lanark is described dying in Book 4, what
is actually happening is that Thaw is dying in hospital. Yet again, Thaw
may have died in the sea at the end of Book 3, but in his dying moments
dreamed up Lanark as his might-have-been future self. These last two
readings would suggest that only the realist sections are intended to be
read as `real'. Fourthly, Thaw may really be Lanark's younger self. This
would explain Lanark's sense of deÂjaÁ-vu when glimpsing Provan in
sunlight (`all my life I've wanted this, yet I seem to know it well'
(p. 471)) or hearing news of his own imminent death (`Like a mother's
[Thaw's mother's] fall in a narrow lobby, like a policeman's hand on his
shoulder [Thaw's anticipated arrest], he had known or expected this all
his life' (p. 559)). If this were so then, both sections of the novel would be
equally `real', but Glasgow would have shifted to a more extreme, more
fantastical stage of capitalist socio-economics. Finally, the two worlds
might be understood to coexist simultaneously, either as micro- and
macrocosmic versions of the same reality, or as an allegorical version of
Glasgow (Unthank) side by side with a realistic version of present-day
Glasgow. Alternatively, Unthank might be Glasgow in the eternal realm,
already suffering the contrapasso of Glasgow's bad mental states. This
would explain Gray's emphasis on micro- and macrocosmic correspon-
dences, his tendency to view individual characters as worlds (p. 316) or
landscapes (p. 511). Each of these readings is critically defensible. Thaw's
example suggests to me that the search for roots cannot recover an
integral past identity; what it can uncover are different desires and an
 Can realism lead fantasy out of Hell? Can fantasy help realism? 189

altered perspective on the present. What is particularly important is that

Lanark's and Thaw's worlds are shown to be chiastically interdependent.
In postwar, prosaically-minded, petit-bourgeois Glasgow, Thaw desires
epic-scale vision, absolute truth and mythic finality. Thaw's desperate
imagination therefore conjures Unthank on the verge of apocalyptic
destruction. In fantastical Unthank, Lanark desires realism's chronolo-
gical coherence and the prosaic moral goods of light, daily employment
and human love. Lanark's nostalgic desire for a pre-fantastical past
conjures the Oracle's vision of Thaw in postwar Glasgow. Taken to-
gether, the two narratives show how capitalist socio-economies are
fuelled by contradictory human desires, for mythic permanence and
for historical change, for individual heroism and epic fantasy as well
as for material security and commonly acknowledged moral values.
I have suggested that Thaw articulates a spectral Marxism in his desire
to bear witness to an ideal of human justice, and that Lanark inherits this
uncompromising stance. A second way in which Lanark conjures Marx is
by submitting every interpretive device, every choice of form and struc-
ture, every moral value articulated in the novel to a relentless self-critique
(compare Derrida, Specters of Marx, p. 88). Of all the katabatic narra-
tives discussed in this study, Lanark is the most relentlessly self-ques-
tioning. Structurally, as we have seen, the realist and fantastical sections
of the novel raise many questions about narrative coherence and integrity;
the fantastic books ironise the generic assumptions of realism and vice
versa. But this spirit of self-critique pervades the novel at every level.
Gray's characters spend most of their time embroiled in arguments, about
everything from religion, politics and art to asthma, sex and food. The
fictional editor of the epilogue notes that Lanark is influenced by three
postwar socialist novels by Orwell, Koestler and Mailer, representing
`dialogue under threat' (see Gray's footnote 6, p. 489). But Gray's novel
can also be related to an older tradition of dialogic katabasis, which we
find, for example, in the Book of Job, Blake's The Marriage of Heaven
and Hell and Dostoevsky's polyphonic novels.
Mikhail Bakhtin argues that `in its structure Job's dialogue is internally
endless, for the opposition of the soul to God ± whether the opposition be
hostile or humble ± is conceived in it as something irrevocable and eternal'
(Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, p. 280). And Dostoevsky emulates
this open-ended structure, Bakhtin argues, creating characters as `free
people, capable of standing alongside their creator, capable of not
agreeing with him and even of rebelling against him' (p. 6). Likewise,
Gray's protagonists ostentatiously rebel against their biological, theolo-
gical and literary creators, as well as political and spiritual leaders.
Lanark argues with Ozenfant, Monboddo and his author, Nastler. Value
190 Postmodern Hell and the Search for Roots

judgments made by one character are constantly opened to question,

ridicule or contradiction by another. Dialogue is thus more often a forum
for disagreement than accord in Lanark, just as dialogism is for Bakhtin.
In Gray's novel, dialogue functions as a katabatic inversion of the
principle of separation on which capitalist exploitation of labour oper-
ates. Most of the events in the novel have ambiguous or inconclusive
outcomes; we never learn, for example, whether Thaw was a murderer,
whether he committed suicide or even whether he died in the sea. Much
more significant than the unresolved crises of plot are the arguments they
provoke among the novel's characters.
Moreover, unlike the dialogue in Inferno, no one position is privileged
clearly over another's. For example, from one perspective, Thaw's battle
with temporality seems misguided and in any case doomed to failure. But
Gray draws us into this hubristic perspective, making us feel its validity.
The contest between image and narration, space and time, takes place on
other levels, for example in the relation between the five frontispiece
illustrations and the narrative to which they allude in the novel. Quite the
reverse of imposing hermeneutic closure on the narrative as Lee argues,
these drawings heighten the conflict between image and narration.17 All
five illustrations contain static, heraldic elements, with space being
distributed vertically through columns, upheld swords, pairs of allego-
rical figures sitting or standing upright, and so on. The blazon effect is
heightened by the use of boxed captions and inset frame within the
drawing's main frame. But some of the illustrations, particularly the title-
pages for Books 1 and 4 (one realist and one fantastical book) contain
strong narrative elements as well. The title page to Book 1 is particularly
dramatic in its juxtaposition of heraldic and narrative representations.
Here the heraldic space, marked off by a pair of columns, is represented
being overwhelmed by an influx of narrative activity: the jaws of a whale
opening, the sky darkening, lightning striking, Hobbes's Leviathan
looming in from the right of the drawing, Glasgow being flooded by
the rising sea and tiny figures gesturing energetically in all directions. Of
course, this impression of movement is created, in part, by the words I
have chosen to describe the images. But Gray's juxtaposition of different
types of imagery provokes the reader's engagement in this formal conflict,
as do his verbal descriptions of Thaw's visual art. As Nastler points out,
even the conventional marks of narrative are static; only the reader's
moving eye and mind infuse them with temporality (p. 485). In the
Epilogue, the distribution of print into three columns for lecture and
dialogue, marginalia and footnotes again forces the reader to choose
between lateral and vertical movements, down and across the page.18
If the illustrations and typography force us into a debate over forms of
 Can realism lead fantasy out of Hell? Can fantasy help realism? 191

representation, the conflicts and arguments between characters also draw

us into dialogue over the fundamental values represented in the novel.
Nastler wants to have written `a story in which adjectives like common-
place and ordinary have the significance which glorious and divine
carried in earlier comedies' (p. 494). This statement elevates modern
demotic realism over Dante's divine comedy (although it omits to credit
Dante with creating a middle style for his contemporary readers).
Nastler's affirmation of ordinary values is echoed by several of the
fictional characters. Lanark's son, for example, tells his father, `the world
is only improved by people who do ordinary jobs and refuse to be bullied'
(p. 554). Lanark has his doubts about this sentiment, however. Earlier, he
rejects the daily struggle for ordinary dignity as fine empty talk (p. 55).
Compared to Thaw, he is much more willing to undertake `ordinary
jobs'; as argued above, Lanark is trying to recover precisely the spatial
and temporal ground which makes the `commonplace' life possible. But
he is still drawn to the epic perspective, to broad landscapes and riotous
colour, preferably viewed from a great height and distance. Thaw and
Lanark both conspicuously lack heroic qualities, but the novel as a whole
takes seriously their quixotic search for epic grandeur. As the Oracle says
of his mother, `She expected splendour. Most of us expect it sometime or
other' (p. 115).
While Thaw fails to become a famous artist, and Lanark fails to achieve
political renown, their failures are integral to the sense Lanark conveys of
a dialogue that is still ongoing and a historical process that is still far from
complete. Lanark demands of Nastler, `I want to know why your readers
in their world should be entertained by the sight of me failing to do any
good in mine' (p. 485), a question which applies even more forcibly to
the Thaw section of Lanark. Nastler's feeble answer, that `failures are
popular', may be intended as an ironic comment on Glaswegian cultural
negativity in the 1970s, but it cannot account for Lanark's enormously
positive impact on Scottish readers and writers from the time of its
publication to the present day. As mentioned above, the katabatic
narrative of endless dialogue is modelled on the Book of Job as well
as Dante. And the story of Orpheus likewise provides a classical model for
Lanark's representation of a failed, or more importantly incomplete,
descent journey. The failure of the protagonists to achieve their epic
ambitions does not invalidate those ambitions; rather it shows that they
are rarely achieved individually or in the space of a single life. When Gray
has Rima object that Lanark tailors the Oracle's narrative to suit his own
needs, he lays his novel open to a dialogue with other (non-male)
perspectives, as Janice Galloway suggests in her Introduction to the
2001 Canongate edition of Lanark.19
192 Postmodern Hell and the Search for Roots

Moreover, Lanark demonstrates that when the epic ambition is pur-

sued unilaterally, its realisation may turn out to be a nightmare. Thaw
sees this in his nearly finished church mural, and denounces it as the
`warped rat-trap world of a neurotic virgin' (p. 340). If a return from Hell
is possible, Lanark suggests in Marxist spirit, the return will depend on a
mutually shared vision of a just society. In the early twenty-first century,
such an idea is hardly a commonplace one, whatever Nastler says. The
trilogy of Matrix films traces the much more prevalent narrative of a
singular hero's journey towards fulfilling his preordained, Christ-like
destiny.
It is possible, of course, to mythicise failure as well as success, though
this is perhaps more likely to occur in Britain than North America. But
Lanark does not just represent failure, or infernal repetition of the same
questions. The surprise escape from apocalypse at the end of Lanark
indicates, first, that there is a causal as well as an allegorical or typological
relation between the two parts of the novel (the descent to 1950s Glasgow
has somehow had a steadying effect on unstable Unthank) and, second,
on a personal level, that Lanark manages to improve on Thaw's life. The
repetitions of the father±son conflicts in the novel are not circular but
cyclical. Moreover, Thaw dreams of creating an ordered cosmos, `a
harmony of soft blue, brown and gold enlivened here and there by sparks
of pure colour . . . bodies in a depth of tender light, sharing space with
clouds, hills, plants and creatures' (p. 340). And Lanark gets to experience
this vision directly: `Drunk with spaciousness he turned every way, gazing
with wide-open mouth and eyes as light created colours, clouds, distances
and solid, graspable things close at hand' (p. 558).
At the end of the novel, things are changing rapidly in Unthank,
although not due to Lanark's political contretemps with Lord Mon-
boddo. Sludden restarts the clocks, announcing, `Eternity, for Greater
Unthank, is drawing to an end' (p. 453). Rather than swallowing up the
human population, Monboddo agrees to exploit Unthank for its oil
reserves. Sludden is deposed, millions of lives are saved, and the city
descends into factionalism and anarchy. Amid all this chaos, Lanark
dreams that he sees his son climbing Ben Rua and reaching the summit in
sunlight. This vision is enough to make him forgive `Mr cause' or God,
not for the world's suffering (`If the poorest orphan in creation has reason
to curse you, then everything high and decent in you should go to Hell')
but for his own: `This is my best moment. Speaking purely as a private
person, I admit you to the kingdom of Heaven' (p. 515). As Craig argues,
this episode illustrates history repeating itself as redemption, because
earlier, Duncan Thaw climbs Ben Rua to spite his father and experiences a
bitter disillusionment on its summit.20 Moreover Lanark's fantasy for
 Notes 193

once blends into reality, as his son Sandy appears at his side when he
wakes up. Like Aeneas carrying his aged father out of Troy, Sandy helps
Lanark to the safety of high ground, `labouring uphill for the slope of the
floor was against them' (p. 554). The high ground is the Glasgow±
Unthank Necropolis, the return to which constitutes another redemptive
repetition since it is here that Lanark began the first of his many descent
journeys into Hell (p. 46).
In Lanark, the postmodern distortions of time and space, the ravenous
growth of corporate capitalism and the divisiveness of an individualist
ethos produce in the eponymous hero an opposing desire for rootedness,
for a sense of place, meaningful work and close human relationships.
Lanark's search for these ordinary moral goods leads him into a series of
descent journeys, the most extensive of which is a journey into his own
(real or imagined) past. For the reader, this journey into Thaw's history
also requires a generic shift from fantasy to social realism. But Thaw
resents the economic hardship and, more especially, the narrow cultural
expectations of Glasgow in the 1950s. His desire to escape this ship-
wrecked and flightless existence inverts the original direction of Lanark's
search for roots. In a fantastical existence, our desires are for ordinary
moral goods and material groundedness, but a realist culture also
produces an intense desire for fantasy, myth and epic grandeur. The
one set of desires unendingly inverts into the other, and there appears to
be no escape from this infernal sense of incompletion. On the other hand,
several lines of continuity are established between the two worlds and the
two dissatisfied protagonists. Thaw and Lanark are inheritors of certain
values which, following Derrida, I have characterised as spirits of Marx-
ism haunting postmodernity. Among those values are an ideal of justice, a
habit of self-critique and a belief in the necessity of interdependency and
dialogue. As in other narratives discussed in this study, Lanark drama-
tises a shift in perspective on the infernal condition rather than a heroic
escape from Hell altogether. In Gray's novel, a spectral realism is
deployed to haunt the fantasy-bound, postmodern capitalist imagination.

Notes

1. Other katabatic narratives alluded to in Lanark include: Dante's Inferno

(Lanark, p. 204), the Biblical books of Job (p. 187) and Jonah (p. 47, p. 488),
Milton's Paradise Lost and Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress (passim),
Blake's Marriage of Heaven and Hell (pp. 204±9, p. 499), Goethe's Faust
(p. 399), Thomas Mann's Doktor Faustus (p. 391) and Melville's Moby
Dick (the whale appears on the title page frontispieces to Books 3 and 1;
Lawrence's essay on Moby Dick is cited on p. 497). To these allusions in the
194 Postmodern Hell and the Search for Roots
diegesis, the Epilogue adds an extensive list of Lanark's `plagiarisms', many
of which represent Hells of one kind or another and descent journeys to
underworlds, for example, Hobbes's Leviathan (p. 489), Freud's lectures and
case studies (p. 488), Coleridge's The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (p. 487),
Jung's Night Journey of the Hero (p. 491), Kafka's The Trial (p. 491), H. G.
Wells's science fiction (p. 498) and children's katabases such as The Wizard
of Oz, Alice in Wonderland (p. 487), The Water Babies (p. 491), The Golden
Key (p. 493) and The House With Green Shutters (p. 486). Gray also places
Lanark in the tradition of `dialogue under threat', along with Orwell's 1984,
Koestler's Darkness at Noon and Mailer's Barbary Shore. Lanark's repre-
sentation of the afterlife as infernal rather than paradisal is `plagiarised' from
Wyndham Lewis's The Human Age, Flan O'Brien's The Third Policeman
and William Golding's Pincher Martin. Glasgow and Unthank are both
identified as Necropoles or cities of the Dead (p. 191), of destruction (p. 483)
and Hell (pp. 45, 46, 160).
2. In this vein, too, Peter Reading juxtaposed scenes of post-nuclear devastation
and urban vagrancy with allusions to Dante's Inferno in his jeremiad,
`Perduta Gente' (1989).
3. Williams and Pike both discuss this passage from Marx's Capital as a
modern descent into Hell journey; see Williams, Notes on the Underground,
pp. 47±8; and Pike, Passage Through Hell, p. 216.
4. Marx is quoted by David Pike in Passage Through Hell, p. 216, as part of an
analysis of how Walter Benjamin interprets Marx's Capital as a descensus ad
inferos, pp. 203±47.
5. In the same way, Reading's narrator points the finger at his middle class
reader in `Perduta Gente': `Don't think it couldn't be you ± /bankrupted,
batty, bereft' (Collected Poems, p. 173).
6. See Harvey's analysis of Fordian or pre-1970s modernist capitalism
(pp. 125±40) and postmodern or flexible capitalism (pp. 142±200) in The
Condition of Postmodernity.
7. Taylor Hackford's film The Devil's Advocate (1997) portrays the head of a
powerful New York City law firm John Milton (Al Pacino) as a modern day
Lucifer. Pacino's Milton hires Floridan lawyer Kevin Lomax (Keanu Reeves)
and tempts him into a life of high profits and shady legal dealing. The law
firm is represented as a capitalist Hell of the rigidly Fordian kind. The
company is patriarchally structured, its workforce strictly hierarchised. The
lawyers' (all male) wives are given money but absolutely no autonomy; they
all become Milton's mistresses. The spatial symbolism of the film is Fordian,
with Pacino tempting Reeves on the rooftop of a commanding skyscraper
and Reeves eventually renouncing his tempter on a spiral staircase leading
down to the ground and a virtuous life among `ordinary folks'.
8. See Chapter 2, note 14.
9. Compare J. Hillis Miller's celebration of postmodern, anti-linear narrative
forms in Ariadne's Thread, Story Lines. New Haven, CT: Yale University
Press, 1992, pp. 1±25.
10. Milton's Belial, too, points out there are worse Hells (Paradise Lost,
2.196±7).
11. See also David Seed, The Fictional Labyrinths of Thomas Pynchon. Basing-
stoke: Macmillan, 1988.
 Notes 195
12. On earlier representations of infernal and divine labyrinths, see Penelope
Doob, The Idea of the Labyrinth from Classical Antiquity to the Middle
Ages.
13. Cf. Randall Stevenson, `Alasdair Gray and the Postmodern', in Crawford
(ed.), The Arts of Alasdair Gray, pp. 48±62.
14. Cairns Craig criticises this hymn to `grave-yard art' which achieves perfec-
tion only in the past. See Craig, `Going Down to Hell is Easy: Lanark,
Realism and the Limits of the Imagination', in Crawford (ed.), The Arts of
Alasdair Gray, pp. 90±107 (p. 102).
15. Craig, `Going Down to Hell is Easy', p. 92.
16. See Stephen Bernstein, Alasdair Gray; see also Randall Stevenson, `Alasdair
Gray and the Postmodern' (pp. 48±63) and Alison Lumsden, `Innovation
and Reaction in Alasdair Gray' (pp. 115±26), both in Crawford (ed.), The
Arts of Alasdair Gray.
17. See Alison Lee, Realism and Power: Postmodernist British Fiction, p. 99.
18. Vertical typography is employed still more dramatically in Gray's 1982,
Janine, to signify Josh's descent into madness (pp. 179±85).
19. An extract of Galloway's introduction to Gray was also published as
`Glasgow belongs to us', in The Guardian, 12 October 2002, Review.
20. On this scene, see Craig, `Going Down to Hell is Easy', p. 106.
 Chapter 8

East±West Descent Narratives

A week before the start of hostilities in Iraq in March 2003, a BBC

reporter interviewed American soldiers about their mental preparations
for war. Among the images filmed by the camera crew, and televised on
BBC News on 10 March, was that of an American soldier sitting in the
desert, reading Dante's Inferno in an English translation. One can only
speculate as to why that particular US soldier was reading the Inferno at
that moment in Iraq. What seems more certain is that by televising the
image of the soldier reading Dante, the BBC was inviting us to think
about the invasion of Iraq in terms of a Dantean descent to Hell.
Moreover, given the widespread public protests in Britain against the
war and the BBC's willingness to challenge the government on its decision
to invade, one might also conclude that this figure of the descending
military hero ± the new crusading pilgrim with his Dante in hand as a
guide through Hell ± was intended to be viewed as an ambivalent figure.
For whom would this Western descent narrative prove to be Hell: for
Saddam's regime, for the Iraqi people or for the Western invaders
themselves? Despite the differences in historical contexts, comparisons
with Vietnam were ubiquitous in the US and UK media. Beside the
American soldier and Dante, then, many viewers may have sensed the
ghostly presence of another descent hero, Captain Willard, played by
Martin Sheen in Francis Ford Coppola's anti-Vietnam war film, Apoc-
alypse Now (1979).

Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now and Western

descents to the East

Like Conrad's novella Heart of Darkness (1899), on which it is closely

based, Apocalypse Now represents the descent of a Western, imperial
hero into a demonic Southern/Eastern underworld.1 The hero's task in
 Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now 197

both cases is to retrieve the empire's lost beloved. In Marlow's case, the
beloved is the brilliant entrepreneur, the ivory trader Kurtz; in Willard's
case, it is the brilliant military commander, Colonel Walter Kurtz (played
by Marlon Brando). Willard's quest is the more insidiously double-edged
from the start, as he is sent both to kill Colonel Kurtz (the beloved Other)
and to celebrate Kurtz's illustrious military record. Made four years after
the end of the war, Coppola's film laid bare one of the katabatic principles
underpinning the American war in Vietnam, that in the descent to the
demonic East, America would come to know its true, heroic self. Both
Conrad's novella and Coppola's film portray the reversal of this imperial
katabatic objective. In confronting Kurtz, Marlow and Willard instead
come to know that they are dispossessed, that the military dream of
impregnable selfhood is a delusion, that the demonic lies in the heart of
the West, not the alien East.
The opening sequence of Apocalypse Now conveys on many different
levels the contemporary Western sense of dispossession, of being always
already in Hell. We first hear the extradiegetic music of Jim Morrison and
The Doors singing, `this is the end, my friend'. Against the backdrop of
the Vietnamese jungle, American military helicopters are first heard, then
seen, approaching. A chopper blade fades into an image of a ceiling fan.
Willard's face appears, upside down; he is smoking and staring at the fan
with glazed eyes. To the right of Willard's upside-down face there appears
the dim and fleeting outline of a Buddha's head, right-side up, which is
quickly displaced by the sound of Kurtz's voice, caught on tape-recorder.
The Doors' song, the military helicopters and the trees in flames combine
to represent Vietnam as a scene of apocalyptic destruction, brought on by
the American presence in Vietnam. Willard's upside-down face bears the
blank, crazed expression of a descent hero already transformed into a
damned soul. The film notably lacks the frame narrative of the novella, in
which Marlow is first portrayed, telling his sea yarn to a group of listeners
on board the Nellie, a ship moored at the head of the Thames. Having
returned from the journey up the Congo River, Marlow therefore sits
poised on the threshold of another descent into river darkness. But
Apocalypse Now lacks even this sense of a threshold crossing into Hell;
Willard is in Saigon, and inside Hell, from the start. The displacement of
the Buddha's head by the sound of Kurtz's voice also connotes that this is
a narrative of Western damnation which will lack any redemption from
the East.
In `Contingent Foundations', Judith Butler compared the US media's
coverage of the 1991 Gulf War to a camera strapped on the nose of a
smart bomb. `The visual record of this war,' she wrote, was `not a
reflection on the war, but the enactment of its phantasmatic structure'
198 East±West Descent Narratives

(Feminist Contentions, p. 44). The fantasy was that the divine word of the
military, masculine, Western subject could immediately be translated into
a deed, an action `whose obliterating power at once confirms the
impenetrable contours of its own subjecthood' (p. 45). By contrast,
the UK media's coverage of the war in Iraq in 2003 lacked none of
the anxious consciousness of the possibility, if not of military defeat, then
of psychological dispossession. This was another descent into the same
enemy territory. Could the son (George W. Bush) fulfil the military dream
that had eluded the father (George Bush Sr)? What effect would this
unilateral action, whether legal or not, have on the credibility of inter-
national law and the authority of the UN? What Brandoesque bulk might
loom out of the desert to teach us that Western aspirations in the East
were as demonic as the devil we were intending to depose?
The trouble with this kind of anxiety, however, is that it is easily
reabsorbed into the military dream of (self-)possession. For a start, the
risk of dispossession is measured only in terms of possible damage to the
Western self, never to the Eastern other. The Other, in fact, is hardly
registered at all by the dispossessed military subject. Just as in Heart of
Darkness, Africa fades into a metaphor for the darkness of the European
soul,2 so in Apocalypse Now, Cambodia is finally reduced to a stage-set
for a ritual re-enactment of T. S. Eliot's death of the Fisher-King.
Moreover, the risk of dispossession can be used to make the heroic
military descent into Hell seem all the more heroic. Along with Platoon
and Full Metal Jacket, Apocalypse Now is watched by American soldiers
in their preparations for war because such films, the soldiers say,
`celebrate the terrible and despicable beauty of their fighting skills'.3
As I argued with respect to the gender dynamics of descent in Chapter 6,
the imperial or military narrative of a Western descent into the demonic
East cannot be dismantled by the metamorphosis of the Western subject
alone. Inside the Western narrative, there needs also to be recognised the
voice of an Eastern subject, pursuing the trajectory of its own descent.
The descent of a Western, military, masculine subject to a demonic East
is just one strand of a broader family of narratives in which the journey
eastward is represented as a descent into the underworld.4 More broadly
speaking, this sub-genre of katabatic narrative figures the descent across
the globe either eastward or southward as a journey into the uncon-
scious.5 From E. M. Forster's A Passage to India to Tolkien's The Lord of
the Rings (which unsurprisingly enjoyed a huge revival in Jackson's
trilogy of film adaptations, screened from 2001, as the military action
began in Afghanistan and Iraq), the dark subcontinent is represented as
the source of the West's evil and its truth. For Conrad's Marlow, the
Congo represents `something great and invincible, like evil or truth,
 Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now 199

waiting patiently for the passing away of this fantastic [Western, imperial]
invasion' (Heart of Darkness, p. 85). The territory represented in Western
twentieth-century literature and film as the sub-continental unconscious
to the West stretches across a vast range of actual geographical regions,
from South America to Africa, India, Korea and China. Many of these
representations are positive, and celebrate the Eastern or Southern un-
conscious as the source of Western creativity, universal psychic truths or
hidden sexual desires. Of a 1950s trip to India, for example, Octavio Paz
enthusiastically recalls `falling into that panting maw', in which the
universe appeared to him as `an immense, multiple fornication'.6 Whether
fearfully like Miss Quested, or wisely like Mrs Moore in Forster's A
Passage to India, Western subjects are portrayed being drawn to the edge
of an Eastern or Southern abyss from whose depths can be glimpsed the
exotically dark, mythically hydra-headed, seethingly promiscuous shapes
of the Western unconscious.7
Since September 11th 2001, terrorist attacks by Islamic fundamen-
talist organisations have added fuel to this conception of the East or
South as the unconscious of the Western subject. Viewed within the
katabatic structure of Marxist or Freudian thought, the Islamic terrorist
is a symptom of the repressed Western unconscious.8 Islamic funda-
mentalist terrorism is one major manifestation of the subterraneous,
viral forms of evil about which Western subjects are currently most
anxious; other forms are medical (cancer and AIDS) or technological
(computer viruses).9 The `viral' evil of terrorism, however, is perceived
to derive from an Eastern or Southern source which then infiltrates the
Western subject, erupting to the surface from within and below. This
particular conception of the demonic East or South has an extraordi-
narily vigorous currency today, in part because, I would argue, it draws
upon so many different strands of katabatic mythic and organisational
narrative structures, including Marxist, Freudian and Lacanian concep-
tions of the underworld. Joss Whedon's representation of `The First', the
original architect of evil, in Buffy the Vampire Slayer provides a good
example of a popular Western representation of viral evil. The First
announces its arrival in the town of Sunnydale, California with a cryptic
message to Buffy: `from beneath you it devours'.10 In Buffy, the First
exerts pressure on Buffy and her friends subterraneously, either by
appearing in the form of a close friend who has died or by causing
dissention and self-doubt among the Slayer `potentials'. The First's
supporters consist of prehistoric vampires forged underground out of
earth, bones and blood, and blind, scythe-bearing monks who multiply
in number whenever one of them is caught and killed. Unlike Tolkien's
orcs and wraith-lords, these agents of the First are not explicitly Eastern
200 East±West Descent Narratives

or Southern in origin, but they are a nameless, viral, terroristic form of

evil, attacking `from beneath' with the intention of destroying all forces
for good, beginning with the quintessentially Western, kick-ass heroine,
Buffy.
Within the framework of the Orientalist (West to East) katabatic
narrative, first theorised by Edward Said, no symbolisation of the Eastern
subject is possible, because to be Eastern is to exist in the realm of the
unconscious.11 Just as women must choose between masquerading
masculinity and accepting non-subjectivity in the patriarchal economy,
so the `oriental' must either mimic or accept subjugation by the Western
subject.12 According to Gayatri Spivak, no reconceptualisation of the
Western self (she uses this term rather than subject) can alter the plight of
the Eastern non-self within this imperial economy, `because the project of
imperialism has always already historically refracted what might have
been the absolute Other into a domesticated Other that consolidates the
imperialist self.'13 As I have argued, Heart of Darkness and Apocalypse
Now are explicitly anti-imperialist narratives that nevertheless can be
reabsorbed into the psychic drama of the Western, imperial subject. Most
contemporary postcolonial theorists would, of course, reject the premise
of a choice between mimicry and subjugation for non-Western subjects.
But if the Orientalist economy is to be dismantled, it is not enough for the
Western, imperial subject to welcome disruption and dispossession by its
Eastern unconscious. The trajectory of another katabatic journey needs to
be recognised, that of the Eastern subject's journey into the West.14
Salman Rushdie's fiction is particularly important in this regard, because
it explores the idea of an Easterner's emigration to the West in terms of a
descent to the underworld. Moreover, in representing the migrant's
journey, Rushdie draws on the katabatic models of both Western and
Eastern myth and literature, and thus hybridises the frequently monologic
structure of the katabatic quest to `know oneself'.

Salman Rushdie's disoriented subjects

In The Jaguar Smile (1987), Indian-born Rushdie expresses his sense of

sharing a common, underworldly perspective with Nicaragua and other
Latin American countries:

Those of us who did not have our origins in the countries of the mighty West,
or North, had something in common ± not, certainly, anything as simplistic as
a unified `third world' outlook, but at least some knowledge of what weakness
was like, some awareness of the view from underneath, and of how it felt to be
there, on the bottom, looking up at the descending heel. (p. 12)
 Salman Rushdie's disoriented subjects 201

Much of Rushdie's fiction explores the contours of that Eastern and

Southern consciousness, with its understanding of what the world is like
when `viewed from underneath'. As the retrospective past tense of the
above passage indicates (`how it felt to be there'), Rushdie is an Easterner
who has completed the Western transitus, who has for many years lived
and worked in the West. His perspective on the journey from East to West
is therefore, in some respects, westernised, but Western identity in his
fiction is always constructed, always internally displaced. He is therefore
in an ideal position to trace the westward, migratory journeys of self-
discovery that counterpoise, disrupt and sometimes violently transform
the descent journeys to the East we have so far been considering.
For a start, Rushdie's Indian characters are exceptionally prone to
violent displacement and disorientation themselves. The Ground Beneath
Her Feet (1999) begins with an earthquake erupting in Mexico on
14 February 1989. Straightaway, Rushdie has the ground crack open
to devour his rock-star heroine, Vina Apsara, on the same date that
Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa against Rushdie for the alleged
blasphemy of The Satanic Verses. But long before (and after) Rushdie's
nine-year exile from the visible world, his characters were dodging the
threats of Scylla and Charybdis, of being shattered to pieces or drowned.
In the final pages of Grimus, the entire world is obliterated by misty
whirlpools. `Midnight's children', the generation born at midnight on
India's independence day, are likewise drowned in the `annihilating
whirlpool of the multitudes' (Midnight's Children, p. 463). In Haroon
and the Sea of Stories, the ocean is choked and clogged by a stream of bad
stories. As for the threat of psychic and physical dismemberment, The
Satanic Verses begins with the explosion of a plane in mid-air, from which
the two Indian protagonists, Saladin and Gibreel, fall to earth, landing in
London. In The Moor's Last Sigh, Vasco Da Gama carries a needle inside
his body that works its way inward until finally `he simply burst' (p. 432).
In The Ground Beneath Her Feet, the narrator Rai describes human life as
a `bouncey-castle sequence of bumpings-into and tumbling apart' where
`our lives disconnect and reconnect, we move on, and later we may again
touch one another, again bounce away' (p. 543). But even this is a slighter
view of the dislocations to which characters are actually subjected in the
novel; some have their brains knocked out with cricket balls, others are
suffocated with pillows and still others are blown up with bombs. The
`felt shape of human life' in The Ground Beneath Her Feet is one of a
violent sequence of bomb-blasts and drownings.
In The Ground Beneath Her Feet, Rai defines disorientation (`loss of
the East') in terms of the loss of a navigational reference point: `lose the
east and you lose your bearings, your certainties, your knowledge of what
202 East±West Descent Narratives

is and what may be, perhaps even your life' (p. 176). In the context of a
descent narrative, disorientation also suggests, of course, an orientation
towards Dis or the underworld. Thus Rushdie prepares the ground for
what looks like a defence of the postmodern dispossessions mourned by
Lacan and celebrated by Baudrillard, among others: `what if the whole
deal ± orientation, knowing where you are . . . what if it's all a scam? . . .
Suppose that it's only when you dare to let go that your real life begins?
When you're whirling free of the mother ship?' (pp. 176±7). Despite the
American sci-fi imagery, however, this disorientation differs significantly
from the postmodern dispossessions of the subject described by Lacan,
because the other world that seizes and disorients the migrating subject is
not the extratemporal, mythic realm of the unconscious, but rather
another equally present, actual, historical world. Near the end of The
Ground Beneath Her Feet, Rai is contacted by an alien being who leaves
him a message on video. She explains that the recent spate of earthquakes
in Mexico and elsewhere are signs of their two worlds colliding, neither
more real nor more self-conscious than the other. But only the one world
will survive the collision: `you will continue and we will come to an
ending, to the edge, to grief' (p. 508). The migrant subject, the one who
has floated free of the mother ship, knows itself to be vulnerable to other,
competing subjectivities; nothing in this metamorphic world is to be taken
as pre-existent, or natural, least of all the actual, geographical coordinates
of the psychic journey of descent.
For many of Rushdie's migrant characters, geographical border cross-
ing constitutes a threshold crossing from one reality into another. In this
scenario, the East figures as the original Paradise and the West becomes
the Hell into which the traveller descends. In The Ground Beneath Her
Feet, the three main characters, Ormus (Orpheus), Vina and the narrator
Rai all emigrate from Bombay to the West, Ormus and Rai living for a
time in England and then all three settling in New York City. Theirs is a
three-tiered journey, from the Paradise of 1950s multicultural Bombay at
the world's periphery, to the Limbo of 1960s Britain (`it may pretend to
be swinging but I know it's just plain hanged' (p. 251)) at the world's rim,
to the Inferno of New York City at the centre of the modern world.
Beneath this (to Rushdie) quintessentially American city, a lower and
more powerful Hell opens up: `death-worshipping Mexico' (p. 456),
where the Greek gods are made to look weak and ineffectual (compared
to Mexican gods, says Vina, ` ``Apollo's just a theatre, Poseidon's an
adventure, Hermes is a fucking silk scarf' (p. 456)). In The Satanic Verses,
having been dropped from the sky into London, Saladin is immediately
pitched into the city's social underworld where he suffers beatings by the
police and other racial discrimination; under the pressure of this cultural
 Salman Rushdie's disoriented subjects 203

demonisation, he is gradually transformed into the very devil the Lon-

doners fear. Meanwhile, Gibreel is pressed towards an opposite trans-
formation, becoming an archangel, a prophetic dreamer and, eventually,
Saladin's nemesis. Each of these metamorphoses occurs as a result of
competing cultural pressures on the migrant subject and the choices he
makes in response to such pressure.
The migrant's westward journey is thus represented in conjunction and
competition with other journeys, other descents in search of selfhood. At
the same time that Ormus, Vina and Rai are drawn westward in The
Ground Beneath Her Feet, America is being drawn to the East. Rushdie
redraws American history to accommodate the immigration of his three
protagonists to New York. It is just after the Vietnam War:

in this bereft moment, rudderless America is unusually open to the paradoxes

of Ormus's songs; open, in fact, to paradox itself, and its non-identical twin
ambiguity too. The U.S. Army (and its rock songs) went into one East and
came out with a bloody nose. Now Ormus's music arrived like an affirmation
from another East to enter the musical heart of Americanness, to flow into the
river of dreams. (p. 378)

The first East, that of Vietnam, dispossesses the Western subject, but the
second East (in Rushdie's fiction) is welcomed with open arms, as an
affirmation of the subject. But this process is no longer unilinear and
unidirectional. Ormus has also sought out the West to affirm the music
surfacing from his own unconscious. Rushdie's conceit in this novel is
that the Parsi Indian boy Ormus knows the lyrics of Elvis and Bob Dylan
before he hears them singing the songs; in his own mind, and soon in
everyone else's, he is the `secret originator' of American rock music
(pp. 89, 95±6). On one level, Ormus (or Rushdie) is simply claiming that
1960s rock music was universal, not Western; it crossed all frontiers and
`belonged equally to everyone' (p. 96). But the novel's initial conceit is
far stronger than this. Ormus's foreknowledge suggests that this Wes-
tern music about crossing frontiers comes into being only because it is
first dreamed up in the East and for the East. Thus when Ormus seeks
out New York, it is not to mimic Western music (or subjectivity); it is to
find the music that already emanates from his own unconscious. The
transformational space in which these two descent journeys intersect,
the West seeking a new East, the East seeking itself in the West, is New
York City, which predictably, turns out to resemble Rushdie's lost
Paradise, `impure old Bombay where West, East, North and South
had always been scrambled, like codes, like eggs' (pp. 95±6). About
New York City, Vina objects, `It can't be the edge as well as the center'
(p. 378).15 But Yul Singh, the Dis of this infernal city, responds, `Sure it
204 East±West Descent Narratives

can, my pretty . . . take a look around' (p. 378).16

The migrations of Orpheus in five acts: Rushdie's The

Ground Beneath Her Feet

In The Ground Beneath Her Feet, Rushdie retells the myth of Orpheus
and Eurydice as a contemporary love story about a pair of Indian rock
musicians. The Bombayite Ormus (Rushdie's Orpheus) and the Greek-
American-Indian Vina (his Venus or Eurydice) migrate to New York and
together form VTO (denoting `Vina to Ormus', among other things). This
fictional band has acquired legendary fame by the time the novel begins
and recalls the Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, the Beatles, Madonna and
other British or American rock stars. Rushdie's primary model for the
journey of the singers from India to the West is Virgil's narration of the
descent of Orpheus to the underworld in Georgics, 4.315±566 (this text is
recounted by Rai at the start of Ground Beneath, pp. 21±2). There are
also supporting allusions to Dante's Inferno; the narrator, Rai, a Bom-
bayite photographer in love with Vina, begins his recollection of her life
with this consciously Dantean gesture, ` ``So I stand at the gate of the
inferno of language, there's a barking dog and a ferryman waiting and a
coin under my tongue for the fare'' ' (p. 21).
In adopting these Western models for his westward descent narrative,
Rushdie sets himself against the position articulated by Frantz Fanon in
The Wretched of the Earth. Fanon dismisses Greco-Roman myth as
irrelevant to the actual experience of intellectuals from formerly colonised
nations. `At the moment that the native intellectual comes into touch
again with his people,' Fanon writes, `all the Mediterranean values . . .
become lifeless, colourless knick-knacks . . . because they have nothing to
do with the concrete conflict in which the people is engaged' (pp. 38±9).
But for Rushdie, myths are stories that can be claimed and rewritten by
different cultures in different contexts. Like the music celebrated by the
novel, they are in some respects crossers of all frontiers. In any case,
Ormus Cama is a mythological hybrid, derived from a fusion of the
Western Orpheus with the Eastern Hindu god of love, Kama, who is
rescued from the underworld by his wife, Rati, goddess of music (p. 148).
And, as Vina points out, their relationship also bears resemblance to the
Mexican myth of the snake-god Quetzalcoatl, who flies to the sun and
shakes it until it rains musicians. Vina tells Ormus, `I'm the snake-god,
and you, you are the music' (p. 94). Vina is even more of a mythological
hybrid than Ormus. Since she dies in the first chapter, broadly speaking,
she represents the Eurydice of the novel, the lost beloved whom Ormus
 The migrations of Orpheus in five acts 205

recalls in music and Rai, `standing at the gate of the inferno', attempts to
revive by narrating the novel. To an extent, Vina is also a contemporary
icon of tragic female celebrity, recalling Marilyn Monroe and Princess
Diana (the former satirised by Carter in the figure of Tristessa in The
Passion of New Eve).17 But in Rai's representation of her, Vina herself
refuses any shadow of tragedy; she emerges as a larger-than-life figure, a
human goddess resembling the Hindu Rati, Sumerian Inanna, Greco-
Roman Demeter and Venus, as well as the Egyptian pharaoh Queen
Hatshepsut. Increasing the dizzying effect of this layering of mythic
analogues, Rushdie makes the characters aware of the correspondences
and has them debating their competing claims to various mythical
characters' roles. For James Wood, the characters' awareness of their
mythical analogues detracts from their credibility and depth. `Self-aware-
ness kills the novelistic,' he argues, contrasting Ormus and Rai unfa-
vourably with the unselfconsciously mythic Stephen Daedalus of
Ulysses.18 On the other hand, one could make the case that a novel,
and especially a postmodern novel, is most novelistic precisely when its
characters become most self-aware.19 And the important point in Rush-
die's novel is that mythic identity is not a given; it is actively and
dialogically chosen, as one among competing narratives. The three
protagonists, Ormus, Rai and Vina, all contend for the starring role
of Orpheus. Ormus is the brilliant lyricist and guitarist, Vina the divine
singer and Rai the photographer of catastrophes and death scenes, and
the chronicler of VTO's rise (or rather descent) to fame. All three lose
their heart's desire, and search an underworld to recover their loss or
sublimate it in art; all are fundamentally transformed by their underworld
encounters.20
While The Ground Beneath Her Feet celebrates, even polemically
insists on, the hybridisation of Eastern and Western myths, Virgil's
Georgics, 4, is undoubtedly the major sounding board for the novel's
dialogue with the katabatic narrative tradition. Fittingly, the descent of
Orpheus in Virgil's Georgics also provides a counterpoint to an imperial
descent narrative, that of Aeneas to Hades (narrated in Virgil's Aeneid, 6).
That the later, epic descent of Aeneas is intended to contrast with the
earlier narrative of the singer's descent seems clearly indicated by the
Aeneid's verbal and thematic echoes of Georgics (for example, Virgil's
original name for Creusa, the wife of Aeneas, was Eurydice).21 In terms of
the present discussion, we might identify Virgil's Orpheus as the dis-
possessed subject, the one made vulnerable by loss and eventually claimed
by the underworld, and Aeneas as the self-possessed, imperial subject
who sublimates his loss (of Creusa, Troy and later Dido) into a dream of
patriarchal empire.22 In Chapter 6, I discussed the limiting gender
206 East±West Descent Narratives

dynamics of traditional katabasis, encoded, for example, in the Orphic

model of descent (Eurydice is always already lost so that Orpheus can
return as the famous musician). Given this general framework, however,
Virgil is relatively even-handed in his treatment of the pair of lovers. His
Orpheus is also lost from the beginning of the narrative, which is related
retrospectively to Aristaeus by Proteus; Orpheus's death by drowning is
described in terms that echo the second death of Eurydice, dissolving into
mist; and both lovers' ghosts are appeased by the sacrifices of Aristaeus.
For Virgil, if not for Ovid or later writers, Orpheus is the hero dispos-
sessed by loss, who lives but is later claimed by the underworld to rejoin
his wife.
During the fall of Troy, by contrast, Virgil's Aeneas is told by his
household gods to escape the city with his family. Emblematising the
structure of the patriarchal family, he carries his father on his back and
holds his son by the hand, and he tells his wife to follow behind. In the
darkness, confusion and noise, Creusa is lost and, as Aeneas sorrowfully
recalls, `nor did I look back for my lost one, or cast a thought behind'
(Aeneid, 2.741). Once he notices she is gone, Aeneas does go back for
Creusa. But rather than an underworld god, ready to bargain over terms,
he meets the larger-than-life ghost of his dead wife, who insists on his
departure for the greater glory of Rome. He learns that `the mission is
what matters', as Buffy puts it.23 Aeneas reluctantly takes possession of
himself and his destined future. The descents of Orpheus and Aeneas thus
represent contrasting responses to the questions that pressed upon Virgil
and his contemporaries, witnesses to a recent, violent change of govern-
ment from Roman Republic to Augustan empire. In what sense does
retaining an attachment to the past, the lost Other, dispossess present
selfhood? On the other hand, what are the costs of self-possession, and
singularity of political vision?
Like Virgil's Aeneid, Rushdie's The Ground Beneath Her Feet pre-
sents the descent of a contemporary Orpheus in counterpoint to an
imperial descent narrative. As mentioned above, when Ormus descends
into America, he finds America returning from the Hell of Vietnam
coming to meet him from the opposite direction. America's loss of self-
esteem finds its echo in Ormus's loss, first of Vina's love and then of her
life. Rather than present this situation as a choice between possession
and dispossession, however, Rushdie complicates the Orphic model by
triangulating its perspective. In addition to Orpheus (Rushdie's Ormus),
we have the perspective of Aristaeus (Rushdie's Rai), in Virgil's text the
survivor of both lovers' deaths, a compromised figure (his pursuit of
Eurydice led to her death), but one who nevertheless is able to return to
ordinary life, who is not transformed into either an immortal artist or an
 The migrations of Orpheus in five acts 207

epic, imperial hero. Moreover, Rushdie's Ormus chooses neither self-

possession nor dispossession by the underworld. Rather, he resists a
series of contrasting forces, some of which threaten to contain and
finalise his sense of self, others which threaten a dispersal of selfhood. In
response, he alternately risks crossing the threshold into other worlds,
and withdraws defensively into his private, imaginary world. In a
typically Rushdian gesture, Rai borrows from theology to express a
secular rhythm of psychic dispersal and retrieval. Drawing on Greek
kenotic theology, Rai says that at times, `we experience kenosis, an
emptying' in which `things lose meaning, they erode'; then in a succeed-
ing cycle, we reach `plerosis, the filling of time with new beginnings', `a
time of superabundant power, of wild, fruitful excess' (p. 113).24 In
Rushdie' treatment of the Orpheus myth, the descent to know the self
and recover the beloved articulates just such a diastolic±systolic rhythm.
The descent of Ormus (with corresponding descents by the other two
characters which, for reasons of space, will not be discussed in detail
here) falls into five distinct stages: first, the threshold crossing into the
underworld (migrating westward); second, the encounter with Dis at the
nadir of the descent (confronting patriarchs of the music business,
Western-centrism and other obstacles); third, looking back to Vina
(which parallels Rai's backward look to Bombay); fourth, psychic
dismemberment (losing the self to music, the lost Other, the music
audience's need for transcendence); and fifth, the return of another (in
this case not Ormus, but Rai).

Threshold crossing
Orpheus's descent into Hades is not so much a confrontation with death
(that comes later in the story) as a transitus into another reality. Its
equivalent in Judeo-Christian theology is the pascha of Passover or
Easter, and in Parsi religion, the passage of the soul across Chinvat
Bridge.25 This is the type of border-crossing Rushdie explores repeatedly
in The Ground Beneath Her Feet, The Moor's Last Sigh and The Satanic
Verses, whose modern analogue he finds in the migrant's disorienting
passage across Western borders. On the flight from Bombay to London
(Ground Beneath, Chapter 9), Ormus feels as if he is passing through an
invisible skin or membrane in the sky. When he disembarks from the
plane, he finds that the solid world has melted into air: `as his own feet
move gingerly forward, he feels small pieces of England solidify beneath
them. His footprints are the only fixed points in his universe' (p. 268).
From this point, Rushdie begins to re-angle the novel's relation to
historical reality, so that the reader is also disoriented by a familiar
208 East±West Descent Narratives

yet defamiliarised world. As Ormus composes his early hit song,

`Shouldn't Be This Way' (p. 184), the reader finds that Kennedy is not
killed in Dallas, Nixon was never President, Lou Reed is female, and
Britain joined America in the war against Vietnam (this last distortion
has, of course, become easier to imagine after September 11th).
Whatever pleasure Rushdie's readers derive from these distortions of
history, however, Ormus hates, fears and resists these initial feelings
of disorientation. As reality cracks and splinters under his feet, Ormus
reacts by contracting into himself: `never look down . . . That way you
won't see the danger, you won't plunge through the deceptive softness of
the apparent into the burning abyss below' (p. 268). It is at this
threshold stage that the migrant feels most exposed to what, in
the West, is characterised as viral evil: forces that attack by stealth,
devouring `from beneath you'. In The Satanic Verses, when Gibreel first
arrives in London, he feels exposed to this other, subterraneous reality:
`the visible world . . . seemed to be sticking up through the atmosphere
like a profusion of hot icebergs, and he had the idea that everything
continued down below the surface of the soupy air' (p. 21). Fokkema
described Rushdie's characters in The Satanic Verses as tragic post-
modern constructions, internally fragmented and lacking autonomous
essence.26 But this is really to describe their perception of the Western
environment, not their inner consciousness. Both Gibreel and Ormus
resist tragic, postmodern self-dispersal. Autonomy is an ideal that
Ormus clings to when everything around him challenges his right to
exist.

Ground Zero
Autonomy is not the endpoint of Ormus's journey, but the first stage in
the `bouncey-castle' sequence that constitutes a migrant's life-shape in this
novel. The next decisive stage of his journey is the encounter with the
Western patriarch (in the Orphic myth, the hero's encounter with Dis,
King of Hades).27 At least two characters occupy the Hades role in The
Ground Beneath Her Feet: first, Mull Standish, who produces a radio
programme from a boat moored off Lincolnshire (p. 271), and second,
Yul Singh, the powerful, wily producer who heads an entertainment
empire based in New York City.
While rooted in contemporary British offshore pirate station reality,
Mull Standish's boat is an allegorically stagnant Argo in which Ormus
will never sail anywhere. Likewise, Singh fleeces Ormus and Vina
financially (pp. 373±409), and engineers the pact of celibacy between
them, seeing that it will be good for business (pp. 346±72). But while both
 The migrations of Orpheus in five acts 209

men attempt to fashion their brilliant proteÂge into a singularly purposive,

marketable icon, Ormus stubbornly resists being thus steered. Standish
accuses Ormus of drifting artistically, and advises the threshold-crosser to
commit himself to one direction: `What's the most dangerous thing you
can do? Do it. Where's the nearest edge? Jump off it' (p. 303). But faced
with such an ultimatum, Ormus refuses to comply:

What I want the music to say is that I don't have to choose . . . I need it to show
that I don't have to be this guy or that guy, the fellow from over there or the
fellow from here . . . I'll be all of them, I can do that. Here comes everybody,
right? (p. 303)

Technically, Ormus avoids `having to choose' by evolving a system of

`bouncing down' sections of music from four mixer tapes onto one
(p. 300). This system involves risk, because once `bounced down', the
original recording cannot be recovered. Either the polyphonic sound
works, or nothing remains but a cacophony of musical scraps. In this
way, Ormus develops his `dazzling plural voice' (p. 299). In New York,
VTO continues to develop this pluralist sound. Critics hail their music as
a mingling of Apollo and Dionysus, a marriage of the Spiritus Humanus
with the Spiritus Mundi (pp. 392±3). Together Ormus and Vina give a
voice to the desire for border crossing, or still more, for the dissolution of
boundaries between Eastern and Western worlds.
Tim Parks takes the quotation above, about `bouncing down', to be a
statement of Rushdie's own aesthetic. This aesthetic, writes Parks,
requires `everything . . . to be maintained in a fizz of promise, potential,
multiplicity, and openness' (pp. 12±13). But in my view, this is to mistake
one stage of this Orphic katabasis for another postmodern aesthetic, this
time in its comedic aspect: that if the self lacks essence, it can play at being
anything it likes. But when Ormus bounces all these voices down onto one
single tape, he is not becoming many voices; all the parts are still sung by
Ormus. What he is immediately responding to is the threat of self-
limitation and finalisation. At a similar stage in the narrator's descent,
a master photographer advises Rai, ` ``Find your enemy. When you know
what you're against you have taken the first step to discovering what
you're for'' ' (p. 223). Rai and Ormus both follow this advice to the letter
(in doing so, they claim their likeness to the novel's many fist-shaking
gods, including Shiva, Dionysus, Prometheus, Jason, Medea and Quet-
zalcoatl). Since the fatwa of 1989, the threat of being silenced as an artist
has been a recurrent theme of Rushdie's fiction. Rushdie has complained
that the reception of his work was distorted and obscured by the `dark
theological cloud' that descended over The Satanic Verses.28 All the same,
the threat of silence produced an untethered fury of sound from Rushdie
210 East±West Descent Narratives

as a writer, just as such a threat produces a dazzling plural voice from

Ormus in The Ground Beneath Her Feet.29
But if `promise, potential, multiplicity' is not Ormus's own aesthetic,
perhaps it is that of the novel as a whole? Rai tells Vina that `metamor-
phosis is what supplants our need for the divine' (p. 461). And certainly,
Rushdie suggests that the concept of metamorphic identity can get us
beyond the idea of singular, revelatory conversion. This idea is supported
by Marina Warner's thesis in Fantastic Metamorphoses, Other Worlds.
Warner argues that `metamorphic writing' flourishes `in transitional
places and at the confluence of traditions and civilisations' in periods
of cross-cultural fertilisation and migration (p. 18). Texts like Ovid's
Metamorphoses dramatise the Pythagorean concept of metempsychosis,
in which souls are continually reborn into different physical forms. The
self told in such metamorphic writing is fluid, unfinalised, migratory, a
hybrid of different cultures in transitional stages. In contrast to much
postcolonial theory today, metamorphic writing represents the exchange
between different cultures in positive terms emphasising the attraction,
fascination and pleasure felt on both sides in confronting otherness
(p. 20).30 In later European history, argues Warner, metamorphic writing
was suppressed and distorted by Judeo-Christian and later Freudian
emphasis on the importance of a unified, integral self (p. 203). Once
the Judeo-Christian schema is imposed on the colonial encounter, the
`protean energies of transformation and sexuality are translated into
hellish imagery' (p. 35).31
Unlike the converted, religious hero, the migratory metamorph recog-
nises no singularity or finality of experience. For Dante, arriving at the
nadir of descent reveals the true self, which must then be brought to the
surface intact, untouched by further experience. By contrast, the meta-
morphic journey is endless, the soul constantly pressed into one new form
after another. As Ovid's Pythagoras says at the end of Metamorphoses,
`Nor does anything retain its own appearance permanently. Ever-inventive
nature continually produces one shape from another' (15.251±2). Ted
Hughes described Ovid as a writer interested in `passion where it
combusts, or levitates, or mutates into an experience of the supernatural'
(Tales From Ovid, ix±x), a description which applies remarkably well to
Rushdie's fiction. Rushdie's admiration for Ovid is evident throughout
The Satanic Verses and The Ground Beneath Her Feet. And mutation,
whether essential or superficial, is undoubtedly a driving force in Ground
Beneath, which Warner cites as an example of metamorphic writing
(Fantastic Metamorphoses, p. 208). When Vina and Ormus complete
their `journey to the center of the earth' (Ground Beneath, p. 373), what
they discover at Ground Zero is a transmogrifying Pleasure Island,
 The migrations of Orpheus in five acts 211

presided over by an arch-metamorph, Yul Singh. In this carnivalesque

space, genders, races, fictions and histories mutate into each other,
producing strange and comically hybrid forms. Here Ormus meets
guitarists who think they are from Mars, rock-fans who worship the
Divine Mother Goddess-Ma, and an Amos Voight character who runs a
studio called Slaughterhouse-22 (pp. 376±7).
But while it is undoubtedly the centre of metamorphic energy in the
novel, `Sam's Pleasure Island' is not the novel's destination, any more
than it is the Orphic hero's. By the time he gets to New York, Ormus has
already passed beyond this purist strain of Pythagoreanism. Having
sworn himself to ten years of celibacy without Vina, Ormus's music
speaks of private loss; the Quakershaker album is `celibate misery speak-
ing, the . . . pain of unconsummated love'.32 The theme of loss and death
at the heart of the book is what renders its metamorphic energies infernal
at every shift and turn. For this reason Virgil's account of Orpheus, rather
than Ovid's equally famous version, is the more important intertext for
The Ground Beneath Her Feet. In Metamorphoses, 10, Ovid's Orpheus
leads a rich existence after the death of Eurydice, becoming not only a
famous musician, but also a respected shaman, a pederast and an
intradiegetic narrator of other tales of marvelous transformation. Only
in Virgil's account is death experienced as a calamitous, irreversible
transformation, and a caesura in the life of the survivor.
In any case, in my view, Warner does somewhat overstate the case
for unalloyed metamorphic writing. The idea of reincarnation, of meta-
morphosis beyond death, whether considered as a pagan, Buddhist
or Christian concept, allows the believer to pursue the path of self-
enlightenment from here to eternity, with little need for addressivity, for
a sense of accountability to time or place. In this respect, Warner's idea
of metamorphosis resembles Bakhtin's early theory of carnival (later
discarded), in which `the human body not as the mortal husk of an
individual bound to suffering, and articled to an end, but as the collective
great body of the people.'33 Recognising no individual selfhood, carnival
is indifferent to death, or rather `kills and gives birth' in the same `ironic
and gay' spirit (Rabelais and His World, p. 435). But as Morson and
Emerson point out, `individual responsibility entirely disappears from
view when the individual is merged into the great body of the feasting
people'.34
Warner comments that Ovid `often seems remarkably indifferent to
responsibilities and judgment' (p. 39), but the reverse is surely true of
Rushdie's fiction. Few characters are as opinionated, as politically aware
and as quick to judge as Rushdie's. Indeed for Rushdie, metamorphosis
seems to be precisely that force which precipitates his characters into
212 East±West Descent Narratives

taking a stand, making an irrevocable choice. Hours before her death, Rai
tries to convince Vina that metamorphosis is a kind of human-scale
`revelation' (p. 462). He is talking

not about the ordinary, quotidian changes . . . nor even about the adaptive,
chameleon natures which have become so common during our migrant
century; but about a deeper, more shocking capacity, which kicks in only
under extreme pressure. When we are faced with the Immense. At such a hinge
moment we can occasionally mutate into another, final form, a form beyond
metamorphosis. A new fixed thing. (p. 461)

Ever the opportunist, Rai is attempting to persuade Vina to abandon

Ormus, to accept the `hinge moment' and become his (Rai's) lover. The
pressure he exerts has unexpected results, however. Thrown off-balance
by Rai, she sets off on a night spree with an unknown Mexican and both
are killed in the earthquake. Vina's `form beyond metamorphosis' turns
out to be death, which for him is a final severance. As he has said to Vina,
`We're not all shallow proteans, forever shifting shape. We're not science
fiction. It's like when coal becomes diamond. It doesn't afterward retain
the possibility of change . . . It's done' (p. 462). At the Ground Zero of
this novel, Ormus reacts to Yul's manipulations by insisting on his right
for his music to be `everybody'. But faced with the dissipating, protean
energies of Yul's underworld court, Ormus withdraws into himself and
his private narrative of desire and loss. In this way, Rushdie does not
reject the metamorphic world-view altogether, but he gives the notion of
shape-changing a new historical weight, a greater sense of finality and
accountability.

Looking back
With the death of Vina in Mexico, Ormus faces a different order of loss,
and his response to this `pressure of the Immense' is again different. This
is the moment when, for Ormus, `coal becomes diamond'; he finally
decides what he is for, and he is `done'. This section of the novel
corresponds to what I have identified as the third decisive moment in
Orphic katabasis, when the hero looks back at his beloved. Virgil
describes Orpheus, when he looks back, as `immemor heu!' (`alas,
unmindful', in Fairclough's translation, or `forgetful' (Georgics,
4.491)). Primarily, this points to the fact that Orpheus has forgotten
the one prohibition, but it may also be inferred that Orpheus is immemor
in the sense that his very devotion will change the nature of the thing he
loves. For Rushdie, looking back on the home country is a central and
fundamental aspect of migrant experience. In Imaginary Homelands, he
 The migrations of Orpheus in five acts 213

writes that `Exiles or emigrants or expatriates' are often `haunted by some

sense of loss, some urge to reclaim, to look back' (p. 10). More than this,
the propensity for backward-looking is what makes migrants of us all.
Thus `the past is a country from which we have all emigrated . . . its loss is
part of our common humanity' (p. 12). So looking back becomes an
indispensable part of the `great work' of living. According to Rai, it is the
secular artist's alternative to theology: `turn right on this forking path
and you find god; turn left and there is art, its uncowed ambition, its
glorious irreverent over-reach . . . our imagemaking is an indispensable
part of that great work of making real' (p. 466). But given that the past is
something we continually `make real', how does one reconcile individual
with collective memory? Rushdie defends the historical errata of
Midnight's Children, claiming that `whenever a conflict arose between
literal and remembered truth, I would favour the remembered version'
(Imaginary Homelands, p. 24). But in The Satanic Verses and The
Ground Beneath Her Feet, he dramatises the conflict between warring
imperatives: to attempt to retain one's private vision of the past, or to
allow it to change, to allow oneself to change with relation to it, to allow
the present and the collective to modify the individual's past. In The
Satanic Verses, Rushdie presents this as a choice of faith between two
kinds of ideas: one that `compromises, does deals, accommodates itself to
society' and one that is `cussed, bloody-minded, ramrod-backed' that
would `rather break than sway with the breeze' (p. 335). Saladin is the
Aristaean hero who chooses the first of these ideas (`the inconstant soul,
the mutability of everything' (p. 288)), while Gibreel is the Orphic hero
who chooses constancy and, consequently, is broken. Thus the narrator
explains:

Gibreel . . . wished to remain, to a large degree, continuous ± that is, joined

to and arising from his past . . . so that his is still a self which, for our
present purposes, we may describe as `true' . . . whereas Saladin Chamcha is
a creature of selected discontinuities, a willing re-invention; his preferred
revolt against history being what makes him, in our chosen idiom, `false'.
(p. 427)

By making Saladin the `jackpot boy' (Ground Beneath, p. 563) and

Gibreel the one who dies, The Satanic Verses weighs in favour of
discontinuity over the continuous soul. But this is perhaps to be expected
from a narrative purportedly narrated by Dis, Shaitan or Satan (the royal
`we' in the quotation above).
In The Ground Beneath Her Feet, Vina's death is a second loss (after
the celibacy pact); it is loss squared for Ormus. Now he is under pressure
to answer whether, for him, `death is more than love or is it' (p. 202). In
214 East±West Descent Narratives

Plato's Symposium, in a passage somewhat misrepresented by Rushdie,

Phaedrus argues that Orpheus was a coward because he lacked the
courage to kill himself, to rejoin Eurydice in the underworld.35 Rushdie,
however, is unequivocal on this point: suicide is never a gift of love. He
has Ormus and Rai choose instead between two types of `making real':
remaining as fixed and faithful to the past as possible on the one hand,
and allowing the present to infiltrate and adulterate the memory on the
other.
Although polar opposite types, Rai and Ormus both respond as
Orpheus does, by looking back. Rai says, `Ormus and I . . . are both
trying to cling to the reality of the woman we loved, to preserve and
deepen her memory. And yes, we both yearn for resurrection, for her
impossible return from the dead' (p. 477). After Vina's death, Rai's
thoughts turn back to India; home and lover are thus associated in a single
nexus of desire. Rai desires:

Home as another lost jewel, as something else swallowed up, by time, by

choice. As something else now unavailable, glowing up through the water like
sunken gold, breathing painfully under the plowed earth like a lover gone
down to Hell. (p. 492)

But Rai succumbs to the instinct to make Vina `mean' something. He

mounts a photographic exhibition in her memory, and then essentially
gets on with the business of living. This is to look back `forgetfully', to
accept that such backward looking changes and distances the lost beloved
(incidentally, it also reproduces the traditional gender dynamic of the
Orphic descent; by her death, you shall know yourself). Ormus's choice is
represented as the more difficult to sustain. After Vina's death, he rejects
the external world almost entirely. In his music, he recreates a distilled
image of the past (`All my life, I worshipped her. Her golden voice, her
beauty's beat. How she made us feel, how she made me real, and the
ground beneath her feet' (p. 475)); and in life, he attempts to recreate Vina
by hiring impersonators to perform in her place. Ormus chooses his
fantasy of the past as reality:

The show, the music, was home. Outside that fiction, the cosmos was a fake.
He stood on his imagination, on what he had conjured out of nowhere, what
did not, could not, would not exist without him. Now that it had been made,
he existed only within it. Having created this territory, he trusted no other
ground. (p. 559)

Ormus's backward look, then, constitutes his most centripetal act. He

affirms himself and the consistency of his own vision, in defiance of
Vina's changefulness and even her death. Paradoxically, by refusing to
 The migrations of Orpheus in five acts 215

relinquish her memory, Ormus also effaces the reality; like Virgil's
Orpheus, he is immemor, forgetful in his remembrance.

Dismemberment
Like the emigrant from Bombay who creates an `India of the mind',
Ormus turns the Vina of his imagination into his sole reality. In this way
the artist contributes to the `great business of making real'. But the final
turn of the Orpheus myth demonstrates how the opposing dynamic
continues to exert pressure; we are continually made real by the material
world. What I referred to as the fourth defining moment of Orpheus's
journey is his sparagmos or dismemberment at the hands of an angry
mob. In Georgics, 4, Proteus explains how Orpheus was resented for his
indifference to women after Eurydice's death; finally, he is ripped limb
from limb by Bacchantes (Georgics, 4.520). These women cast the
severed limbs of the poet into the River Hebrus. The head of Orpheus
continues to sing as it floats downstream. One interpretation of this
conclusion is that art is immortal, able to transcend death. At the
equivalent moment in Dantean katabasis, the inverted pilgrim begins
to climb up toward the antipodean sky, where transcendent grace lifts
him out of a state of sin. But another interpretation of Orpheus's death
suggests that the final movement is not towards transcendence, but
downwards into human hands and the Heraclitean river of time. In
my reading of The Ground Beneath Her Feet, Rushdie opts for the second
of these interpretations.
The major representation of Orphic dismemberment in the novel is the
appropriation and distortion of Vina's memory by millions of fans after
her death. Rai thus describes her posthumous deification: `Vina in death is
assailed by a second seismic force, which swallows her up all over again.
Which swallows her up and regurgitates her in a thousand thousand
hideous pieces' (p. 477). In medieval commentary, the sparagmos of
Orpheus is frequently glossed as a prototype of the Christian Eucharist.
Rushdie likewise represents Vina's metamorphosis as a form of sacrificial
offering to a divine power. But the divine power here is not God the
Father but humanity, collectively amassed to express its insatiable `need
for last things' (p. 467). In this novel, religious worship has been
transmuted into secular forms of adoration, which are ritually enacted
in secular, democratic venues; `The favored centers of congregation are
not the high places of the world; not the palaces, parliaments, houses of
worship or great squares . . . The crowds begin, instead, to gravitate to
stadiums, arenas, parks, maidans' (p. 481).
This representation of the secular religious spirit differs from Judeo-
216 East±West Descent Narratives

Christian theology in its emphasis on the plurality of the god to be

worshipped and the dialogic construction of secular adulation. To take
the latter point first: VTO fans make gods of Ormus and Vina, particu-
larly Vina after her death. But to the musicians, the massive audiences
they face are also gods: demanding, fickle, merciless, sometimes blood-
thirsty gods. Mira discovers this when a crowd turns against her for not
being able to reproduce Vina's particular quality of voice. Sensing their
hostility, Mira takes a dive straight into the audience while Rai strains to
see what is happening:

I can't see what she can ± the anger in many of the faces below her helpless
body ± I can't feel the hands that are starting to claw at her body . . . when she
stands up we can all see the cuts on her midriff, her back, even her face, her
long dark hair is blowing wild and ragged at her back and the bustier has gone,
but she won't stop singing, she doesn't miss a beat. (p. 551)

Mira's scornful reaction to rejection is what, in Rai's view, convinces

everyone she will be a star in her own right. So the relation between star
and audience is dialogic, not only in the sense that each has to appease the
divinity of the other, but also in the sense that this relationship is often
agonistic, edgy and self-defensive. Moreover the star's deification is
always risky, because the god that bestows her divine status is itself
multiple, subject to fractious disagreement, and possessive in a myriad
different ways. Thus the crowds are initially placated by the memorial
concerts devoted to Vina: `in the packed stadiums, the sound systems
offer her music to the crowds. This gift is accepted' (p. 481). But later, just
as happened to Princess Diana, Vina's image is seized upon by millions
and finally ripped to shreds.
Playing at Knebworth in November 2003, as part of a national tour,
the British popstar Robbie Williams performed in front of a colossal
backdrop representing himself as a winged Lucifer. While Robbie gyrated
at the front of the stage, the backdrop combusted into virtual flames,
creating an image of the demonic star, still furiously singing, being
dragged down to Hell. An ocean of fans watched this spectacle with
what seemed like paroxysms of joy. Rushdie's Ground Beneath Her Feet
explores the heart of this phenomenon, the secular but quasi-religious
desire for collective engulfment in a sacred spectacle. As Ormus realises, it
is the desire for metamorphosis into the extra-temporal realm of myth or
fantasy that survives in the secular imagination. Rushdie suggests that
individually, we have a need for superheroes and semi-divinity, and
collectively we create this aura of religiosity around certain people,
events, sights or sounds. But the collectivity also then acquires the power
and substance of a hydra-headed god, one that requires its quotient of
 The migrations of Orpheus in five acts 217

human sacrifice. Succumbing to the desire for this kind of sacred

metamorphosis is risky and dangerous, but it is at least a dialogic and
democratic process, in Rushdie's view.
In his 1994±95 world tour with Mira, Ormus achieves an almost
miraculous balance between two opposing appetites, his own desire for
the Vina of his imagination and her fans' desire for `Vina Divina', the
projection of a mythic icon that can be collectively adored. Once again,
the audience is represented as a dangerous, even bestial god which the
artist must placate. The title of the touring performance is Into the
Underworld, which suggests that for Rushdie, Orpheus's confrontation
with the Bacchantes constitutes a final stage in his descent to Hell, this
time to confront a mass of humanity rather than a single, patriarchal
underworld god. Because of the bright lighting, Ormus can only see the
first few rows of the audience

and beyond it a great roaring beast he had to tame, to play as if it were an

instrument, but this was something he knew, this was his real life. The lion
tamer in the lion's cage, putting his head in the jaws of the beast, knows that
this is his true reality . . . So also Ormus in the bubble of the show was perfectly
comfortable, perfectly at home, and by general consent his performances were
extraordinary, his guitar never more achingly clear . . . his singing never so
subtle or so strong. (p. 559)

Previously encased in a sound-proof bubble on stage in order to protect

his damaged ears, Ormus has come to embody the artist's detachment
from the real world. But on the Underworld tour, Ormus arranges to
have this bubble craned out over the heads of the audience. As a result,
`bubbled Ormus no longer seemed separated from the action; the bubble
became a metaphor of life, of his continued membership in the world of
the living during his adventure in the country of the dead' (p. 561).
By this means, the self-sealed memorialist is brought into a kind of
community with the heterogeneous crowd. What catastrophe does
for Ormus, then, is to force him out of the migrant's, and the
artist's, condition of metaphysical weightlessness into a new social
connection.36
Under the gaze of the crowd, Ormus becomes the consummate
singer ± that is, a complete and finalised artist. The Underworld tour
is Dis-oriented, in that Ormus uses it as a bridge to come closer to Vina, to
be finished and complete, like her: `each night's show was not only a gift
to Vina but a step towards the oblivion, the not-being, where she lay with
his joy in her keeping' (p. 560). When a Vina impersonator shoots and
kills Ormus, Rai offers us this explanation: `I think [Vina] came and got
him because she knew how much he wanted to die' (p. 571). Besides
218 East±West Descent Narratives

rehearsing the old dynamic (that Eurydice lives in the underworld), this
explanation, if true, would simply turn death into life upside-down,
erasing the sense of tragedy, the need to face consummate endings.
But this metamorphic perspective is finally neither affirmed nor denied.

Return of another
How does love or art survive death? By repeating itself in a new historical
configuration, the last section of Rushdie's novel suggests. `Certain
patterns recur, seem inescapable' Rai says. `Fire, death, uncertainty.
The carpet whipped out from under us to reveal a chasm where the
floor should have been' (p. 313). Against these fatal explosions and
drownings, Rushdie works the love-triangle of Vina±Ormus±Rai into a
new pattern. Rai, the photographer of historical catastrophes, survives
the catastrophe of Vina and settles into a rooted, ordinary life. In the last
chapter, Ormus and Vina are dead, but Rai has found hope (`Rai'
meaning hope, p. 18) in the young Mira, who, happily enough for
him, looks remarkably like Vina and differs chiefly in her fidelity to
him. Rai has also become Music to Mira (p. 573), and Mira's child Tara
looks even more like Vina, except that she shares Rai's tone-deafness.
Many readers may find this conclusion yields too great a prize to Rai, the
`jackpot boy'. But these recombinations of previous patterns and char-
acters serve to demonstrate that art survives, not through transcendence,
but by being unpluggable, by repeating itself in new generations and new
versions of old cities.
As a whole, then, The Ground Beneath Her Feet reconciles the position
of the backward-looking descent hero with that of the forward-looking
one who finally chooses metamorphosis over fidelity to the past. The
sense of rootedness in ordinary life is provisional, and Rai's family,
consisting of himself, Mira and her child, is a `family of the modern
epoch: elective alliances against terror or despair' (p. 567). One might
point out that the ordinariness which Rai settles for is specifically
American in emphasis; it consists of `drinking o.j. and munching
muffins . . . having the tv on at breakfast' (p. 575).37 But in more general
terms, this is a polemically secular response to the intrusions of the
`Immense' upon the fabric of everyday existence. It is not that Rushdie
denies the potency of such underworld forces. On the contrary, by the end
of the novel, even the rationalist Rai believes in multiple, palimpsest
realities. But the underworld is no longer conceived of as solely demonic;
nor are its revelations absolute or final. As Rushdie later wrote in
response to the events of September 11th, `how to defeat terrorism?
Don't be terrorized.' In his reascent from Hell, Rai passes by the fork in
 Notes 219

the road leading to a tragic, traumatised fixation with the past, and he
passes the fork leading to an absolutist break with the past. His route
leads him back to ordinary pleasures (`kissing in public places, bacon
sandwiches, disagreement, cutting-edge fashion') such as any New Yor-
ker might experience today. In this novel, New York is both edge and
centre, both quintessentially western, and another manifestation of
Rushdie's paradisal 1950s Bombay. As Rai says, `a kind of India happens
everywhere . . . everywhere is terrible and wonder-filled and overwhelm-
ing if you open your senses to the actual's pulsating beat' (p. 417).
Rushdie's fantastical fictions tend eerily to anticipate historical events,
and his two turn-of-the-century novels, The Ground Beneath and Fury
(2001), are no less prescient in the way they represent subterraneous
forces ripping through the fabric of ordinary New Yorkers' lives.38 But
even these novels did not foresee the way in which a terrorist attack on the
World Trade Center on September 11th, 2001 would be interpreted as an
eruption of Eastern Hell in the heart of the Western world. Nor can he
have foreseen how this experience would precipitate a full-scale assault by
a Western coalition of nations on the forces of darkness imagined to be
lurking like rats or swarming like insects in the numberless, nameless
holes and caves of northern Afghanistan and the trackless deserts of
Iraq.39 In the Epilogue, I consider the ways in which the events of
September 11th and its aftermath have taken the shape of a new, and
at the same time depressingly familiar, descent journey into the East in
search of a lost, Western identity.

Notes

1. On Conrad's Heart of Darkness as a narrative of descent to the underworld,

see Thale, `Marlow's Quest' (pp. 154±61), Lilian Feder's `Marlow's Descent
Into Hell' (pp. 162±70), and Robert Evans, `Conrad's Underworld' (pp. 171±
84) collected in Stallman (ed.), The Art of Joseph Conrad.
2. Chinua Achebe has argued that Conrad represents `Africa as setting and
backdrop which eliminates the African as human factor. Africa as meta-
physical battlefield devoid of all recognizable humanity, into which the
wandering European enters at his peril.' See `An Image of Africa', p. 257. For
a less extreme, postcolonial reading of Heart of Darkness, see Robert
Burden, Heart of Darkness, pp. 78±82.
3. In his memoir, Jarhead: a Soldier's Story of Modern War (New York:
Scribner, 2004), Anthony Swofford, a lance corporal in a US Marine Corps
platoon stationed in the Gulf in 1991, recalls that his platoon watched
American war films for three days before the start of the Gulf war: `We
concentrate on the Vietnam films because it's the most recent war, and we
rewind and review famous scenes ± Robert Duvall and his helicopter gun-
220 East±West Descent Narratives
ships in Apocalypse Now; Willem Dafoe getting shot by a friendly and left on
the battlefield in Platoon; Matthew Modine talking trash to a streetwalker in
Full Metal Jacket . . . Vietnam war films are all pro-war, no matter what
Kubrick or Coppola or Stone intended.' (This edited extract from Jarhead
was published in The Guardian, as `The Sniper's Tale', 15 March 2003,
Weekend Section.)
4. See Henk Vynckier, `Exotic Hades: The Representation of Alien Lands as
Underworlds in European Literature'.
5. For a discussion of Conrad's Heart of Darkness and its relation to Darwinian
and Freudian thought, see Cedric Watts, A Preface to Conrad, pp. 92±5. For
psychoanalytic readings of Heart of Darkness, see Albert J. Guerard, Conrad
the Novelist, pp. 1±55, and Peter Brooks, Reading for the Plot, pp. 238±317.
6. Octavio Paz, `Introduction' to Henri Michaux's Miserable Miracle, p. xi.
Michaux's mescaline-induced meditations, first published in French in 1972,
constitute a mental descent journey of a modernist kind. Michaux explores
the psychedelic edges of his consciousness in the confident modernist belief
that the greatest art is produced from willed acts of self-annihilation.
Michaux's contrived breakdowns, to me, read like masquerades of actual
drug addiction, but many writers, like Paz, have written glowingly of
Michaux's verbal collage descriptions and illustrations of hallucinogenic
states.
7. In his essay, `On Adventure', Rushdie notes that in modern times, the
tradition of adventurous `Houdini' travel of the kind intended to stimulate
`change, difference, strangeness, newness, risk and achievement', has become
`by and large a movement that originates in the rich parts of the planet and
heads for the poor' (Imaginary Homelands, p. 224).
8. For an economic analysis of this global movement from West to East and
South, see Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity, pp. 294±6.
9. See Baudrillard, The Transparency of Evil, p. 81.
10. Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Season 7, Part I, Episode 2 (`Beneath You').
11. See Edward Said's Orientalism.
12. Homi Bhabha argues that the mimicry by the colonised of the coloniser's
discourse is `a form of defensive warfare'; `When the words of the
master become the site of hybridity ± the warlike sign of the native ± then
we may not only read between the lines, but even seek to change the often
coercive reality that they so lucidly contain' (`Signs Taken for Wonders',
p. 104).
13. Gayatri Spivak, quoted by Benita Parry, `Current Theories of Colonial
Discourse', p. 38.
14. The coming-to-self of an Eastern subject can, of course, be represented in the
terms of an absolutist conversion narrative as well. See Ian Buruma and
Avishai Margalit, Occidentalism: The West in the Eyes of Its Enemies.
15. Inconsistencies in the spelling of `center/centre' are one of the symptomatic
features of this `Hello, America' novel.
16. The novel's central conceit that rock music originated in Bombay may be
outrageous, but locating the start of the infernal journey in the East is
historically defensible. The two oldest katabatic narratives extant are the
Sumerian cyclical epic poems of c.3500±2500 bc, recounting the descents
of Inanna (or Ishtar), Queen of Heaven, and Gilgamesh, King of Uruk
 Notes 221
c.2700±2500 bc. That Hesiod and Homer knew versions of these Meso-
potamian myths is widely accepted among classical scholars (see Clark,
Catabasis); in a sense, then, the music of the underworld did infiltrate the
West from the East.
17. `I'd actually devised the book, and, indeed, written an earlier version of what
happens after Vina's death before Princess Diana's accident . . . but then the
real-life event happened, which was on a scale so much greater than anything
I'd envisaged. It shocked me because it seemed as if it jumped off my pages
into the real world . . . Princess Diana's accident . . . made me think again
about what I'd written and actually rewrite it on a bigger scale' (interview
with Peter Kadzis).
18. James Wood, `Lost in the Punhouse', p. 98.
19. According to Bakhtin, the novel's particular function is to make every other
literary genre `more conscious; it forces them to better perceive their own
possibilities and boundaries, that is, to overcome their own naivete ' (Pro-
blems of Dostoevsky's Discourse, p. 271). Just as Rushdie allows his
characters to mythicise themselves, so (he argues) a textual representation
of rock-music allows author and reader to mythicise their own rock sound.
To the question, ` ``Est-il difficile, pour un eÂcrivain, d'eÂcrire sur la musique?'',
Rushdie responded, ``C'est la pire difficulte qui soit, car les lecteurs ne
peuvent pas entendre la musique . . . Mais, finalement, cette contrainte
preÂsentait un grand avantage: je n'ai pas eu aÁ deÂfinir preÂciseÂment l'identiteÂ
musicale de mon groupe. Son identiteÂ, metaphorique, refleÁte l'histoire du
rock'n'roll'' ' (interview in Le Monde, `Livres: Salman Rushdie, enfant du
rock'). Having argued the benefits of non-actualisation, it is curious that the
author then welcomed U2's recording of a song called `The Ground Beneath
Her Feet', based on Ormus's lyrics in the novel.
20. Vina has claim to be Orpheus (as Rai tells her, p. 460), in that she rescues
Ormus from the underworld three times in the novel. At the age of twelve,
she rescues Ormus by persuading him to stop listening to the whisperings of
his dead twin brother and to start writing music (Ground Beneath, pp. 112±
3). Later, she wakes him from a three-year coma (p. 321). Finally, Vina
returns from the grave to fetch Ormus down into the underworld; or so Rai
interprets Ormus's death (he is gunned down by a Vina-impersonator
(p. 571)).
21. See W. W. Briggs, `Narrative and Simile from the Georgics in the Aeneid',
Mnemosyne Supplement, 58, 1980, pp. 1±109 (99).
22. Although some Virgil critics read the descent of Aeneas as a journey of
dispossession as well. For an overview of this `Harvard pessimist' school of
interpretation, see W. R. Johnson, Darkness Visible.
23. Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Season 7, Part 2, Episode 17 (`Lies my parents told
me').
24. On Gottfried Thomasius's kenotic theology, see Gaster and Welsh, God and
Incarnation in Mid-Nineteenth Century German Theology (cited in my
Chapter 1).
25. On the Judeo-Christian transitus at Easter (where pascha means `crossing'),
see Freccero, The Poetics of Conversion, p. 67. Ormus's mother compares
her flight to London with the Parsi soul's passage across the Bridge of
Judgement: `We, too, are travellers between the worlds, we who have died to
222 East±West Descent Narratives
our old world to be reborn into the new, and this parabola of air is our
Chinvat Bridge' (p. 255).
26. Fokkema, `Post-Modern Fragmentation or Authentic Essence?: Character in
The Satanic Verses', pp. 51±63.
27. The equivalent episode in Inferno is when the pilgrim comes face to face with
Lucifer, in the lowest circle of Hell (Inferno, 34).
28. Rushdie, interview with Kadzis.
29. Compare Rushdie's recent novel about New York City entitled Fury.
30. Such an attraction is epitomised in the figure of Cortez, `when with eagle eyes
/ He star'd at the Pacific ± and all his men / Look'd at each other with a wild
surmise', in Keats' `On Looking into Chapman's Homer' (1816, ll. 11±13;
The Norton Anthology of English Literature, ed. M. H. Abrams. London:
Norton, p. 769).
31. See Warner, Fantastic Metamorphoses, p. 36, for a critique of Dante's
emulation and demonisation of Ovid.
32. Rushdie here cites the Orpheus of Milton's `L'Allegro', `Untwisting all the
chains that tie / the hidden soul of harmony' (p. 390; L'Allegro, ll. 143±4).
33. Morson and Emerson's paraphrase, see Mikhail Bakhtin, p. 93; see also
Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, p. 435. Although Pythagoras is more a
mystic than materialist philosopher, his doctrine of metempsychosis is often
elided with Heraclitus's concept of time as unending flux (that you can never
step in the same river twice. For Bakhtin, the presiding genii of carnival are
Rabelais' `youth of antiquity' and Heraclitus's `playing boy' (Rabelais and
His World, p.147; see also pp. 82, 435). Compare Warner's reading of
Kafka's metamorphoses, in which Ovidian optimism `withers in the grip of
twentieth-century despair; and a Judaeo-Christian hierarchy of being, with
unclean beasts . . . at the very bottom, replaces the Heraclitean vortex'
(p. 114). For a comparison between Pythagorean and Heraclitean philoso-
phies, see Cornford, From Religion to Philosophy, pp. 182±201.
34. As Morson and Emerson go on to argue, in carnival, `There is no longer a
self, there is only the carnival mask; other people can accomplish what ``I''
can if they adopt my festive clothes. Carnival as a whole appears to offer a
perfect ``alibi for being'' ' (Mikhail Bakhtin, p. 95).
35. Orpheus `found a way to enter Hades while still alive'. Plato, Symposium,
p. 12 (see also my Chapter 1). Tim Parks strongly objects to Rushdie's
description of Plato as the `ayatollah of love'. He rejects Rushdie's reading of
Plato entirely: `We shall pass over the bullying techniques of agglomeration
and inflation . . . It is the sheer rashness of Rushdie's writing that takes the
breath away. I shall not presume to come to Plato's defence' (The New York
Review, p. 16).
36. The subject feels `responsibility' [otvetstvennost'] at the moment `where the
ought-to-be (obligation) in principle confronts me within myself as another
world.' Bakhtin, `Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity', in Holquist and
Liapunov (eds), Art and Answerability, p. 119. The `addressivity' [obrash-
chennost'] of an utterance is its `quality of turning to someone' (Bakhtin,
`The Problem of Speech Genres', Speech Genres and Other Late Essays,
p. 99).
37. When, at the end of such a novel, Rushdie attempts to convince his readers
that ordinary love is better than Love on the heroic scale, I am reminded of
 Notes 223
Rushdie's own reaction to the ending of The Wizard of Oz, which tries to
persuade us (in Rushdie's view) that the dream of Home (`There's no place
like home') is better than the dream of Away. Rushdie asks, `How does it
come about, at the close of this radical and enabling film, . . . that we are
given this conservative little homily? . . . Are we to believe that Dorothy has
learned no more on her journey than that she didn't need to make such a
journey in the first place? . . . `Is that right?' Well, excuse me, Glinda, but is it
hell' (Rushdie, The Wizard of Oz, pp. 56±7).
38. In The Satanic Verses, the poet Baal foresees that his godless narratives will
`in all probability mean his death' (p. 379), as the publication of the novel
very nearly led to the end of Rushdie's. Anticipating the planes' collision with
the Twin Towers, The Satanic Verses also begins with his two central
characters metamorphosing into each other as they tumble from the ex-
ploded carcass of an airplane. The Ground Beneath Her Feet depicts the
death and apotheosis of a Diana-like celebrity, months before Princess
Diana's fatal car crash. See note 17.
39. Art Spiegelman's cartoon strip, `In the Shadow of No Towers', parodically
represents terrorists as clouds of hornets attacking Uncle Sam and a pair of
chubby children (the `cuddly Tower Twins'). Uncle Sam blasts them with
insecticide, but finds he has mistakenly poisoned an `Iraknid' (a spider
bearing the face of Saddam) instead. See `In the Shadow of No Towers',
15±30 November 2002.
 Epilogue

Katabasis in the Twenty-First Century

This book has explored the idea that modern, Western secular cultures
have retained a belief in the concept of Hell as an event or experience of
endless, unjust or unspeakable suffering which occurs in actual, human
lives, and which has, in particular, been realised or made immanent in
twentieth-century history. Within this historic context, the descent to Hell
has emerged as one of the important narratives by which late twentieth-
century Westerners come to know themselves as coherent selves. While
perception of the different ways in which we are already in Hell is a
characteristically late twentieth-century insight, the decision to embark
on the journey of descent is one mode of actively responding to the
prevalence of the infernal. As Notley's heroine says, ` ``Down'' ``is now
the only way'' ``to rise'' ' (The Descent of Alette, p. 26). From the
nineteenth century to the present day, Marx's writings on the capitalist
economy, reinforced by psychoanalytic accounts of subjectivity, have
contributed to the valence of the idea that a descent into Hell can be the
means of recovering ± or discovering ± selfhood. But these more recent
frameworks have combined with earlier literary and religious models of
katabatic narrative to produce the notion of a self made ethical by its
encounter with the underworld.
By way of conclusion, I wish to discuss a recent, historical example of
an infernal encounter being refashioned into the narrative of a journey of
descent and return. The political context of terrorist attacks on Western
cities from 2001 to the present, and the US-led military response to these
attacks, should underscore the continuing relevance of the narratives of
descent we have been discussing. Moreover, the ways in which September
11th and its aftermath have been fashioned into the narrative of an
infernal encounter and a heroic, retaliatory raid on the underworld
should convince anyone still needing to be convinced that Hell, in our
time, is much more than a fable.
 September 11th: the first circle 225

September 11th: the first circle

The attack on the World Trade Center in September 2001 was for many
survivors and witnesses an instance of Hell made immanent at the start of
the new century and millennium. Witnesses of the two planes crashing
into the Twin Towers, the steel skyscrapers crumpling in a wave of heat,
the dust clouds choking the city, registered both shock at the unexpect-
edness of the catastrophe and recognition of its infernal magnitude.
Uncannily, this contemporary instance of Hell seemed to manifest many
of the images and topoi of already imagined medieval visions of Hell, as
well as recent Hollywood disaster movies such as The Siege (1998),
Towering Inferno (1974) and the Die Hard series (1988±2005), which
had fictionalised just such a devastating terrorist attack. From Dante,
Bosch, Brueghel and Michelangelo, as well as these more recent fictions,
one recognised the heat and flames (`opulently evil, with their vampiric
reds and blacks'1), the crowds of souls amassing in terror, the verticalisa-
tion of space into distinct levels or circles of entrapment, the physical
torments of burning, suffocation and dismemberment, even the still living
bodies fatally plummeting to earth from the windows of the towers.2 The
novelist Peter Carey was in New York City on the day and described the
faces of those returning from the scene as survivors of an otherworldly
journey: `you could recognize these people straight away, the blankness,
but also sometimes the frank appeals for human contact . . . These people
have felt horror, they are like no other crowd I have ever seen'; they had
`see[n] hell arrive just down the road'.3 When another novelist, Jay
McInerney, described New York as a Dantean `city of the dead', he
was referring not only to those who died in the attack, but also to those
who descended into its horror and survived.4 And perhaps even more
medieval than modern was the Western perception of a demonic will
orchestrating the tragedy; rather than the modern era's banality of evil, as
Susan Neiman noted, here was evil expressed with `awesome intention-
ality'.5 In the classical katabatic tradition, the analogous episode is the
witch Allecto's furious eruption from the underworld, who for sheer love
of destruction causes civil war in Italy and wreaks havoc and death on
Aeneas's allies (Aeneid, 7.323±571).
Not only an instance of Hell, however, September 11th was interpreted
by some commentators to be a sign of a pre-existent infernal condition.
Blind to the toll of Western capitalism on the developing world, it was
argued, Americans were forced to confront the truth of this evil as it
exploded to the surface on September 11th. As Martin Amis concisely put
it, `America, it is time you learned how implacably you are hated' (`Fear
226 Katabasis in the Twenty-First Century

and Loathing', p. 2). Although vilified for their views, the writer Susan
Sontag and historian Chalmers Johnson argued that American-led glo-
balisation had produced its own nemesis in fundamentalist terrorism.6
Invoking a comparison with The Matrix, where Neo wakes up to the
reality of his post-Apocalypse world, Slavoj ZÏizÏek averred that the
destruction of the Twin Towers should return us from the fantasy of
the digitised First World, to the Third World's `desert of the real'.7 More
generally, September 11th was viewed as a nightmare awakening from a
dream of security and peace, an awakening that brought to the surface the
accumulated memories of the century's worst horrors. In his 2003 comic
strip, `In the Shadow of No Towers', Art Spiegelman (author of the
Holocaust strip, `Maus') represents his autobiographical persona drown-
ing in a sea of newsprint, an electric drill splitting open his skull, as
paranoid reflections on the century's atrocities overwhelm him: `the killer
apes learned nothing from the twin towers of Auschwitz and
Hiroshima . . . And nothing changed on 9/11. His ``president'' wages
his wars and wars on wages ± same old deadly business as usual.'8 Like
Primo Levi waking from a dream in which he wakes up to find himself
once more in Auschwitz, Spiegelman's persona experiences September
11th as the traumatic return of earlier, twentieth-century atrocities.9 He
becomes paralysed by a wave of undifferentiated fear, which returns him
`to the heart of every negative movement' (cf. Levinas, `There is', The
Levinas Reader, p. 36).
Whether interpreted as an instance of underworldly, fundamentalist
Hell disrupting Western secular democracy, an eruption of Western
capitalism's repressed unconscious, or a traumatic return to the century's
accumulated memories of atrocity, September 11th made it clear that the
time is now undeniably out of joint, that the Western world has changed,
become more fearful. Spiegelman's strip represents America after Sep-
tember 11th as an upside-down world, in which sword-rattling creatures
crowd the skies, armed with Bibles, wooden swords and guns, crying
`redemption!', `pre-emption!' and `Halleluiah! We're falling up!'10 He
sees the country as schizophrenically split into two nations, one red (pro-
war and/or Republican) and the other blue (anti-war and/or Democrat).
Like the alien in Rushdie's The Ground Beneath Her Feet, he watches in
horror as the reality of `blue America' fragments and disappears.11 After
September 11th, then, America, Britain and other Western democracies
woke up to find themselves in a twenty-first century Hell. As we have seen
elsewhere in this study, this awareness of being in Hell prompts the
beleaguered subject to respond by journeying down deeper into Hell, in
the hopes of mastering, or escaping, or righting this upside-down world
by means of a via negativa. When Martin Amis described September 11th
 Afghanistan and Iraq: there and back again (again) 227

as only `the first circle' of Hell, he meant primarily that things could have
been much worse. But recuperated into a narrative of descent, September
11th became the `first circle' in a different sense: a point of departure, a
threshold crossing, from which the epic journey of descent would begin.

Afghanistan and Iraq: there and back again (again)

The US and UK military assault on Taliban strongholds in Afghanistan in

2001±2, and the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, can be read as a descent
narrative of epic scale and ambition. In broadest terms, the heroic aim of
the descent was to wage `war on terror', a phrase which revealingly
confuses the demonic object of the quest (the terrorists) with the damaged
subject to be salvaged from the journey (the terrorised). While the
imperialist legacy of this katabatic journey from `civilised' West to
monstrous, hydra-headed East was clear from the start, it remained
(and still remains) open to interpretation whether this would be a
narrative of possession or dispossession, a unifying victory for Western
subjectivity, or a dispersal of subjectivity in a chimerical underworld of
disappearing demons and WMDs. Invoking the inner logic of katabasis in
his speech to the Labour Party Conference in October 2001, Prime
Minister Tony Blair determined `that out of the shadow of this evil,
should emerge lasting good'.12 The legacy of September 11th should be `a
new beginning where we seek to resolve differences in a calm and ordered
way'; and towards that aim, `the action we take [in response to September
11th] will be proportionate; targeted'.13 Similarly, President George W.
Bush promised a measured, rational response, saying, `we're angry at the
evil that was done to us, yet patient and just in our response'.14
On 19 September 2001 more than a hundred US combat and support
aircraft, and a naval taskforce were dispatched to the Middle East and
Indian Ocean. This military operation was given the codename `Operation
Infinite Justice' (later changed to `Operation Enduring Freedom'), recalling
the famous inscription over Dante's gates of Hell (`JUSTICE MOVED MY
HIGH MAKER', Inferno, 3.4). On 30 October 2001, in a revival of
Vietnam war tactics, US B-52 bombers carpet-bombed the area north of
the Afghan city of Kabul, and on 11 January 2002, captured prisoners
were flown to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where they were (and at the time of
writing still are) held without trial or recourse to US or international law.
On 5 September 2002, the new leader of Afghanistan, Hamid Karzai,
narrowly escaped an assassination attempt, allowing US and UK admin-
istrations to claim that their targeted, military action had been largely
successful. As a narrative of self-possession, the next stage of the journey
228 Katabasis in the Twenty-First Century

becomes somewhat confused. With no immediately discernible casus belli,

the US and UK declared war on Iraq, denounced by George W. Bush in
2002 as a `rogue state' in an `axis of evil'.15 Baghdad sustained a night of
heavy shelling, designed to induce `shock and awe' in the enemy. This was
the US military's way of saying, in Buffy's terms, `They want an Apoc-
alypse? Well, we'll give 'em one.'16 Saddam's regime collapsed with
unexpected swiftness and Western TV audiences had the satisfaction of
seeing an American soldier clambering up a colossal statue of Saddam, like
Dante climbing out of Hell on Satan's torso, to drape an American flag
over the fallen dictator's face (hastily replaced by an Iraqi one, after
shouted instructions from below). In what should have been the final
episode in this descent to Hell narrative, Saddam Hussein himself was
discovered, trapped like a `rat in a hole', arrested and taken into custody by
US soldiers. Here, then, was George W. Bush fulfilling the patrilinear
dream of the father, George Bush Sr, who had tried and failed to subdue
Saddam in 1991. And this was the sought-after closure on September 11th:
a tyrant brought to justice, the underworld beaten into submission.
On the other hand, the same narrative could be read as a journey of
dispossession, a descent without return. In pursuit of the elusive demon
Osama bin Laden, the US and UK rained down a fortune's worth of
bombs on a poverty-stricken, already bomb-blasted country. While many
terrorist cells were reportedly destroyed, the main architects of September
11th apparently escaped killing or capture in Afghanistan. In the Iraq
war, the ostensible reason for the offensive strike by the US and UK, that
Saddam possessed weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) capable of
being deployed against the West in forty-five minutes, was not substan-
tiated by any subsequent discovery of stockpiled weapons in the defeated
country. Like Osama, the WMDs simply vanished into thin air. Most
bewildering of all, the humiliating capture of Saddam failed to stem the
tide of resistance to the `American occupation' of Iraq. Iraqi insurgents
persisted in characterising their Western deliverers as imperialist aggres-
sors and infidels. Just as the killing of Duncan brings Macbeth no relief
from his fears, so the capture of Saddam signally failed to assuage
Western fears of terrorism.17 Indeed, many people in the US and UK
began to wonder to what extent Saddam had anything to do with al-
Quaeda, or any of the terrorist groups orchestrating suicide missions in
New York, Bali, Madrid and elsewhere. Even the `moral' victory in Iraq,
the overthrow of a genocidal dictator, has been flawed by subsequent
events. The `people of Iraq' turn out not to have been souls trapped in
Hell, awaiting Western deliverance; rather than flowing up toward to the
light of Western democracy, Iraqi subjects are pursuing the history of
their own grievances, with many leaders demanding the restitution of
 Global fear and its inversions 229

religious law. And George W. Bush, whose sole objective on the eve of
American elections was to see this narrative end by June, 2004, once
again found himself and his soldiers lost in an Eastern labyrinth.

Global fear and its inversions

The argument of this book, however, has been to demonstrate that

katabatic narratives can yield more complex and nuanced understandings
of the self in extremis than either of these stories, the one of possession,
the other of dispossession. Theologically speaking, Hell is a region not of
death itself, but of the fear of death, and this, specifically, is what
September 11th brought to Western countries, and thence to Easterners
fearing reprisals from the West. Around three thousand people died in the
attack on the World Trade Center on September 11th, which in the
history of natural and man-made catastrophes is not a high figure (forty-
two thousand died in the Iranian earthquake on 26 December 2003, but
this event did not contribute to a global climate of fear). As Wole Soyinka
has explored in his 2004 Reith Lectures, a climate of fear has distorted,
exaggerated and compromised the legality of Western responses to
September 11th and subsequent terrorist attacks.18
While the literary texts I have been considering in this study are not
political tracts, they do, in my view, shed a more subtle and refracted light
on recent events in America and the Middle East than either of the
narrative constructions I have sketched out above. Realising that, in
Critchley's paraphrase of Levinas, `without trauma, there would be no
ethics', looking back on September 11th can also be the means of
deepening our understanding of the catastrophic forces to which many
people in the developing world are vulnerable in their everyday lives: not
only terrorist attack, but civil war, despotism, poverty, disease and
starvation (Ethics±Politics±Subjectivity, p. 195). Primo Levi regarded
Auschwitz as the Black Hole of modern European history, but he turned
this image of absolute, singular negativity into a sign of human related-
ness. If Islamic fundamentalist terrorism is currently the West's Black
Hole, then this image too can be inverted into a sign of our connectedness
to the East. If every historical moment is split, as Anne Michaels suggests
in Fugitive Pieces, then the memory of September 11th can also return us,
not to the trauma of Western dispossession, but to the unfinished
narrative of Palestinian subjectivity. Instead of chasing demons eastward
or westward, leaders of Western and Arab countries might take this crisis
as a sign of the need for a return to the necessary, difficult task of creating
an internationally recognised Palestinian state. (A different fork in the
230 Katabasis in the Twenty-First Century

road was taken by Ariel Sharon who, by ordering the assassination of the
spiritual leader of Hamas, Ahmed Yassin on 22 March 2004, `opened the
gates of Hell', according to a Hamas supporter.19) If, as Slater writes in
Spasm, the Earth is best understood as a seismic and unstable ground,
then we should recognise the quixotic nature of Western attempts to
defeat or cure terror; what we have, as Slater writes, is `the fact of falling'
(p. 216). Like Alette, who painstakingly pieced together the fragments of
her mythic first parents, leaving the tyrant to the final act where he could
then be dismissed as unreal, Western leaders might now begin to
reassemble, from the wreckage of the Twin Towers, the shattered frag-
ments of international law and multilateralism. Having repeatedly failed
in his attempts to achieve heroic epic stature, Gray's Lanark eventually
wins what is in any case his real heart's desire, ordinary sunlight,
breathable air and human love. After September 11th, responding to
the UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan's call for a united stand on `what
we are against', Salman Rushdie asked himself, `what are we for? What
will we risk our lives to defend?' Rushdie's checklist underlined the
importance of ordinary, daily freedoms: `bacon sandwiches, disagree-
ment, literature, generosity, water, a more equitable distribution of the
world's resources, movies, music, freedom of thought'.20 In The Ground
Beneath Her Feet, he showed how a descent journey into the West, or
East, could be the means of a threshold crossing into a richer, more
complex engagement with historical, material reality. The twentieth-
century's descent into the underworld may not be over yet, but there
are many routes through it which still beckon the adventurous traveller.

Notes

1. Martin Amis, `Fear and Loathing', The Guardian, 18 September 2001, G2,
p. 2.
2. On the last image, compare Steve McQueen's film, Caribs' Leap (2002),
which portrays an entire community of Caribs leaping from Morne Sauteurs
in Grenada rather than be colonised by the French in 1651.
3. Peter Carey, `We Close Our Eyes and Say a Prayer, Although I Don't Know
Who I'm Praying to. There Is No God', The Observer, 23 September 2001,
p. 24.
4. Jay McInerney, `When Seeing Is Believing in the City of the Dead', The
Guardian, 6 October 2001, Saturday Review, p. 12.
5. Neiman contrasts the old-fashioned evil of September 11th, in which `the
clearest use of instrumental rationality was matched by the clearest flaunting
of moral reasoning' with Arendt's famous thesis about the banality of evil in
the Holocaust (Evil in Modern Thought, p. 283; citing Arendt, Eichmann in
Jerusalem).
 Notes 231
6. Susan Sontag, The New Yorker, `First Reactions', 24 September 2001;
Chalmers Johnson was criticised for implying that `America had it coming'
in his book, Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire.
London: Time Warner, 2002.
7. See Slavoj ZÏizÏek, `Welcome to the Desert of the Real', in Welcome to the
Desert of the Real, Five Essays on September 11 and Related Dates.
8. Art Spiegelman, `In the Shadow of No Towers', Episode 8, London Review
of Books, 25: 13, 10 July 2003, pp. 20±1.
9. See Primo Levi, The Truce, in If This Is a Man (1995), pp. 279±80.
10. Spiegelman, `In the Shadow of No Towers', Episode 7, London Review of
Books 25: 10, 22 May 2003, pp. 20±1.
11. Spiegelman's persona says, `when the planes hit those towers I got knocked
into some alternate reality where George W. Bush was president'; now, `my
``leaders'' are reading the book of revelations . . . I'm reading the paranoid
science fiction of Philip K. Dick' (ibid., Episode 7, pp. 20±1).
12. Tony Blair's speech was published in full in The Guardian. See `Text: Tony
Blair's statement', The Guardian, 7 October 2001, Special Report: Attack on
Afghanistan.
13. Ibid.
14. George W. Bush, `The Network of Terrorism: An Attack on the Civilized
World', speech delivered on 11 October, 2001; available online at http://
usinfo.state.gov/products/pubs/terrornet/ (accessed 16 November 2001).
15. George W. Bush, 2002 State of the Union Address. The term `axis of evil' was
coined by speechwriters David Frum and Michael Gerson and was intended,
Frum said, to remind Anglo-Americans of their Second World War enemies,
the `axis powers'. See Julian Borger, `How I Created the Axis of Evil', The
Guardian, 28 January 2003, G2. On the absence of a casus belli, see David
Hare, `Don't Look for a Reason', The Guardian, 12 April 2002, Comment
and Letters.
16. Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Season 7, Part 1, Episode 10 (`Bring on the night').
17. In Levinas' reading of Shakespeare's Macbeth, this realisation comes to
Macbeth as a return of being to the horror of il y a (`There is', The Levinas
Reader, p. 33; see also my Chapter 1).
18. Wole Soyinka, `The Changing Mask of Fear', was the first of a four-part
lecture series entitled `The Climate of Fear'. Lecture 1 was delivered at the
Royal Institution, London, 9 March 2004, and broadcast on BBC Radio 4, 7
April, 8.00 p.m.
19. George Wright, `Israel Assassinates Hamas Leader', The Guardian, 22
March 2004, Special Report: Israel and the Middle East.
20. Rushdie, `Let's Get Back to Life', The Guardian, 6 October 2001, Saturday
Review.
 Appendix

Primo Levi, `Map of reading', from The Search for Roots: A Personal
Anthology, trans. Peter Forbes. London: Allen Lane, p. 9. Reproduced by
permission of Penguin Books Ltd and Ivan R. Dee, Publisher.
 Bibliography

A note on the dates: in the case of pre-contemporary texts, the date of

original publication is given immediately after the author's name, fol-
lowed by the date of the edition cited and/or consulted in this study in
closed parentheses. In the case of contemporary (post-1945) texts, the
date in parenthesis refers to the date of the edition cited; the original
publication date is given at first mention in the study.

Primary Texts

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234 Bibliography
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 Primary Texts 235
Carter, Angela (1996) Burning Your Boats: Collected Short Stories. London:
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Television and Filmography

Alice (NeÏco z Alenky) (1987) dir. Jan SÏvankmajer.

Apocalypse Now (1979) dir. Francis Ford Coppola.
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 Index

n stands for note

`Abandon Hope,' 174, 175 art, 13, 23, 190

abortion, 149±50 in Lanark (Gray), 185±6
Achebe, Chinua, 219n2 see also Botticelli; Vermeer
Achilles, 186±7 ascent, Michaels' treatment of, 107±
Acts 9 & 22, 46 8; see also return from Hell
Ad Ora Uncerta (Levi), 80 Atwood, Margaret, 14, 26, 98, 106,
Adorno, Theodor, 25, 28 149±50, 154, 160, 164
Aeneas, 2, 6, 32, 43, 45, 50±1, 96, Auerbach, Erich, 49
97, 111n7, 143n39, 193, 205, Augustine, St, 32, 46
206 auras as times of creativity, 135±6
Afghanistan, 2, 198, 227 Auschwitz, 6, 15, 20, 29, 58, 60, 92,
Africa, 198, 219n2 116, 117, 229
African-American literature, 151±2 as Hell, 63±88
Alette see Descent of Alette, The see also concentration camps; Levi
(Notley) Austerlitz (Sebald), 7, 90, 91±2, 93±
Alice in Wonderland (Carroll), 44, 103, 104, 109
120, 122 autobiography, 27; see also
Amber Spyglass, The (Pullman), 23 autopathography
American Psycho (Ellis), 114, 175 autopathography, 113±43
Amis, Martin, 48, 225, 226±7 defined, 113
Ancient Mariner, The Rime of the Avernus see Hell
(Coleridge), 1, 80, 82, 84, 97
anorexia see eating disorders Bakhtin, Mikhail, 6, 8, 42, 47±50,
Antelme, Robert, 57±8, 59 51, 53±4, 64, 75, 162, 189±90,
Apocalypse Now (Coppola), 4, 196± 221n19, 222n33
200 Balzac, Honore de, 97
archaeology, 3 Barfoot, Joan, 148±9, 150
architecture, 99 Barolini, Teodolinda, 51
Arendt, Hannah, 29, 230n5 Barth, John, 179
Areopagitica (Milton), 105 Barthes, Roland, 114
254 Hell in Contemporary Literature

Baudelaire, Charles, 180 Captain Willard, 4, 196±7

Baudrillard, Jean, 117, 129, 131, Carey, Peter, 225
134, 141n13, 202 carnival, 8, 177, 211, 222n33 and
BBC, 196 n34
being (il y a), 30, 35, 92, 116 Carroll, Lewis, 44, 120, 122, 125,
Beloved (Morrison), 14, 89, 103 136
Benhabib, Seyla, 150 Carter, Angela, 145, 148, 149, 150±
Benjamin, Walter, 11n7, 32, 137, 1, 155, 157, 163, 164, 166,
174, 175 168n8, 177, 205
Bernstein, Stephen, 187 Cavarero, Adriana, 8, 37, 137, 138,
Beyond the Darkness (Fenimore), 15, 144
47, 115, 117, 131 Celan, Paul, 85n3, 109
Bhabha, Homi, 220n12 Chabert, Colonel, 97
BibliotheÁque Nationale, Paris, 101 ChreÂtien, Jean, 33
Billington, Michael, 38n1 Christianity, 21
black holes, 15, 66, 67, 85, 229 Christ's crucifixion, 32, 135
Blair, Tony, 227 chronicity see time
Blake, William, 189 chronotopes, 8, 42±62, 68±85, 175±
Blanchot, 35 6
Blixen, Karen, 2, 60 defined, 6, 42
body, imagery of, 20±1, 115 in Lanark (Gray), 193
Borges, Jorges Luis, 27, 39n22, 51± Levi on Auschwitz, 66
2, 137±8, 176, 179 see also time
Botticelli, Sandro, 20, 26±7 Clark, Raymond, 41n40, 50
Breendonk fortress, 99±100, 103 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 1, 80, 82,
British Broadcasting Corporation, 196 84, 97
Bronk, William, 92 colour prejudice, 29
Brooks, Peter, 137 Commedia see Divine Comedy, The
Buddhism, 21 (Dante)
Buffy the Vampire Slayer (Whedon), concentration camps, 16, 19, 23, 25;
5, 199±200 see also Auschwitz; Breendonk;
Bush, George W., 2, 8, 198, 227, TerezõÂn
228, 229 Conrad, Joseph, 4, 28, 94, 196
Butler, Judith, 147, 155, 197±8 contrapasso
and Dante, 25±6
Calvino, Italo, 52, 66, 138 in Lanark (Gray), 188
Cambodia, 198 in Linden Hills (Naylor), 152,
Campbell, Joseph, 9, 40n35 169n14
Camporesi, Piero, 13±15, 18, 22, 44 conversion, 32, 46±7, 175
cannibalism, 179, 181 versus inversion, 52±4
capitalism, 27, 149, 150, 157, 162, Cooper, David, 123
163, 164, 172±3, 224, 225±6 Coppola, Francis Ford, 4, 196±200
schizophrenia as product of, 113, Cornell, Drusilla, 145, 153, 168n8
114 corporeality, 20±1, 115
see also Marx, Karl Craig, Cairns, 187, 192
 Index 255

`creative illness,' 45 Notley, 162, 163, 166

Critchley, Simon, 35 see also Dante; Inferno, Purgatorio
Crying of Lot 49, The (Pynchon), and Paradiso (its three parts)
179 Doctor Faustus (Mann), 29, 38n1
Cuba Doctorow, E. L., 4
Guantanamo Bay, 60, 227 Doherty, Catherine de Hueck, 21
war in (1967), 115, 126 Don Giovanni (Mozart), 44
Culler, Jonathan, 180 Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 27, 53±4, 136,
189
Dante Alighieri, 1, 45±6 Dr Faustus (Marlowe), 45
affinity with Dostoevsky, 53±4 Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (Stevenson,
Botticelli drawings of, 26±7 R. L.), 120
contrapasso, 25±6 Drexel, Jeremiah, 19
see also Divine Comedy, The Drowned and the Saved, The (Levi),
Darkness Visible (Golding), 89, 104 75, 81
Darwin, Charles, 3, 29 dystopias, 14, 28, 149, 159, 177; see
Dead Man Walking (Robbins), 17 also utopias
death, 23
death row (US), 17±18, 20, 22, 23± Eagleton, Terry, 44, 106, 182
4, 179±80 earthquake, imagery of, 201
deconstruction, 33, 34, 35, 36, 145 eating disorders, 113, 118, 120, 121,
Defoe, Daniel, 179 122
Deleuze, Gilles, 7, 113, 114, 139 education chronotope, 70±2, 85
Demeter, 2 Einstein, Albert, 107
Dennett, Daniel, 119 Eliot, T. S., 44
depression, 33, 116, 118 Ellis, Bret Easton, 114, 175
Derrida, Jacques, 8, 30, 34, 36±8, Ellison, Ralph, 4, 29, 48
117, 141n12, 182, 185, 189, epic, 45, 165, 191, 192
193 epilepsy see Spasm (Slater)
descensus ad inferos see katabasis ethics, 35, 37
descent see katabasis Eurydice, 34, 37, 144, 146±7, 152
Descent of Alette, The (Notley), 5, Rushdie, 204
7, 14, 151, 160±8, 172, 224, see also Orpheus
230 evil, 29±30, 31±2, 37, 225, 227
Devil see Satan axis of, 228, 231n15
Devil's Advocate, The (Hackford), see also Neiman
194n7 eyes, imagery of, 98±9
devolution, Darwin's theory of, 3
dialogue, 189±90, 191, 194n1 failure to ascend, 192
Diana, Princess of Wales, 205, 216, Fanon, Frantz, 204
221n17, 223n38 fantasy, 183, 185, 186, 197±8
Dis see Hades and realism, 184, 187±93
dismemberment, 215±18 fascism, in Mexico, 29
Divine Comedy, The (Dante), 39n22, Faust, 13, 29, 38n1, 45
47±8, 51, 52, 191 feminism see gender
256 Hell in Contemporary Literature

Fenimore, Angie, 15, 47, 115, 117, Girl, Interrupted (Kaysen), 116, 122,
131 123±7, 130, 140
films, 4, 15, 17, 142n31, 194n7, Giuliani, Rudolph, 1, 17, 18
225 Glasgow, 172±3, 181, 184, 185,
katabatic, 4, 11n12 186, 188, 189, 190, 191, 193,
war, 40n28, 196, 198, 219n3 194n1
see also Apocalypse Now; Buffy Glass, James, 114, 140
the Vampire Slayer; J'Accuse; God, 125
Lord of the Rings, The; Matrix, in Lanark, 185±6
The; Star Wars; SÏvankmajer, Jan Goddu, Teresa, 154
flesh, imagery of, 20±1, 115 Golding, William, 89, 104, 110n2
Forbes, Peter, 33 Grace, Sherrill, 57
Forster, E. M., 198±9 gravity and self, 119
fortress of Breendonk, 99±100, 103 Gray, Alasdair, 5, 7±8, 26, 124,
Foucault, Michel, 141n12 169n12, 172±3, 175±87
Fowler, Virginia, 169n14 Gross, Kenneth, 25±6
Frankl, Victor, 60 Ground Beneath Her Feet, The
Freccero, John, 32, 46, 47, 51 (Rushdie), 4, 5, 8, 201±19, 226,
Freud, Sigmund, 3, 19, 28±9, 31, 35, 230
111n6, 119±20, 144±5, 147, ground zero, 100, 110
174 Ground Zero (Rushdie), 208±12
Aeneid's influence on, 91 Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, 60, 227
uncanny, the, 69, 82 Guattari, FeÂlix, 7, 113, 114, 139
Frye, Northrop, 9 Gulf War (1991), 197±8
Fugitive Pieces (Michaels), 7, 89±90,
91±2, 93±4, 104±10, 229 Hackford, Taylor, 194n7
fugue, Michaels' use of, 109 Hades, 3, 28, 30, 36, 37, 38, 46,
fundamentalism, Islamic, 15; see also 111n6, 138, 161, 177, 202, 208
September 11, terrorism Hamilton, Ian, 10
Hamlet, 34±5, 36±7
Gaining Ground (Barfoot), 148±9, Handmaid's Tale, The (Atwood),
150 160
Galloway, Janice, 191 Hart, Linda, 20, 115, 118, 120±1,
gas chambers, 107±8 130
Gatterman, Ludwig, Practical Harvey, David, 8, 175, 176±7, 181±
Manual for Organic Chemists, 2
A, 77 haunting see ghosts
gender, 7, 144±71 Heart of Darkness (Conrad), 4, 28,
geology, 105±6 44, 50, 94, 196±7, 198±9, 200
Georgics (Virgil), 205 Heaven see paradise
ghosts, 35, 36, 89±112, 90, 91; see Heise, Ursula, 176
also Marx, Karl Specters . . . Hell
(Derrida) Catholic, 1, 13, 14
Gibson, Mel, 15 Christian, 2; Biblical sources, 22±3
Gilgamesh, 2, 220n16 Church of England, 138
 Index 257

funnel-shaped, 177, 186 il y a, 30, 35, 92, 116

iconography, 44 Imaginary Homelands (Rushdie), 213
immanence of, 6, 16, 21, 29, 157, immanence of Hell, 6, 16, 21, 29,
225 157, 225
Judeo-Christian, 32 Inanna, Queen of Heaven, 2, 144,
meanings of, 18±19, 50 160, 166, 220n16
medieval, 14, 18, 23 India, 198, 199
nineteenth century, 3 mental illness in, 116
postmodern, 8, 172±95 Infernal Desire Machines of Dr
secular, 16 Hoffman, The (Carter), 148, 177
size of, 19 infernal journey genre defined, 42±3;
topography, 44 or see katabasis
twentieth century, 4, 5, 6, 8, 14± Inferno (Dante), 2±3, 5, 18, 24±5,
15, 16, 18, 25, 28, 29, 144 46, 49, 53, 96±7, 119, 137±8,
Heracles, 2, 37 175, 190, 196, 210
heraldry, 190 concentration camps, 23
Heshel's Kingdom (Jacobson), 103 `gargoyle cantos,' 131
Hillman, James, 9, 91, 111n6, 142± Gray, 177±8
3n31 Hornbacher, 121
hinge-movement, 4, 45, 59, 138, 212 hybridity in, 32
Hiroshima, 25, 117 Kaysen, 125
History of the Devil, The (Defoe), Levi, 7, 63, 68±9, 72±3, 74, 75,
179 80±1, 83
Hoban, Russell, 147 Lowry, 54, 55
Hobbes, Thomas, 178, 190 and mental illness, 115
Hobbit, The (Tolkien), 45 Naylor, 151±2
Holocaust, 28, 29, 30, 48, 57±60, Notley, 160
230n5 Piercy, 156
gender in literature of, 168n6 Rushdie, 204
second generation narratives, 7, Slater, 136
89±112 see also Divine Comedy, The
see also concentration camps; If intuition, 81±2
This Is a Man (Levi) inversion, 59, 100, 175, 197
homelessness, 28 versus conversion, 52±4
Homer, 2, 35, 37, 45, 52 infernal, 54±7
Hornbacher, Marya, 113, 116, 118, katabatic, 67, 107, 123, 163, 167,
120, 121, 122 186, 190
hostage memoirs, 131, 142n46 Invisible Man, The (Ellison), 4, 29,
Hughes, Ted, 210 48
humour, 130±1 inward turn, 27±8
Hyperreal, 129, 130, 131, 133 Iraq war (2003), 16, 18, 196, 198,
227±8
If This Is a Man (Levi), 4, 6±7, 17, Isis, 105
18, 19, 20, 29, 64, 67±85, 145± Islamic fundamentalism, 15; see also
6 September 11; terrorism
258 Hell in Contemporary Literature

J'Accuse (Gance), 40n28, 110n3 Levi, Primo, 4, 6±7, 15, 17, 18, 19,
Jacobson, Dan, 103 20, 29, 60, 63, 92, 145±6, 226,
Jaguar Smile, The (Rushdie), 200 229
Jameson, Frederic, 7 black holes, 15
Jason, 2 Leviathan, 178±9, 190
Job, 18, 32, 33, 40n35, 66, 67, 189, Levinas, Emmanuel, 30±1, 35, 116,
191 145
Jonah, 32 Lewis, C. S., 5, 9±10
Joseph K, 82 lightness, 20, 53, 119, 186
Journey to the Centre of the Earth Linden Hills (Naylor), 5, 14, 48,
(Verne), 44, 60n6, 106 151±6, 178
Jouve, Nicole, 145 Liverpool Street Station, London, 98,
Juno, 32 100
looking back, 37, 109, 110n3, 137,
Kafka, Franz, 82 212±15
katabasis, 41n40, 174 Lord of the Rings, The (Tolkien), 5,
descent journeys, 21, 27, 28, 31±8, 198, 199±200
133±4, 180±1 Lowry, Malcolm, 4, 29, 45, 48, 54±7
meanings of, 2, 19, 111n6 Lucifer see Satan
three movements of, 45 Lumsden, Alison, 187
in twentieth century, 224±31 Lyotard, Jean FrancËois, 30, 33±5, 37,
katabatic imagination, 1±11 94, 145
katabatic narratives
allusions in Lanark (Gray), 193n1 Macbeth (Shakespeare), 30±1, 228
features of, 42±3 McCann, Colum, 146
oldest extant, 220n16 McInerney, Jay, 225
Kaysen, Susanna, 7, 114±15, 116, MacIntyre, Alasdair, 133
122, 123±7, 133, 140 Magnolia (Anderson), 142n31
Keenan, Brian, 131, 142n26 Mailer, Norman, 189
Kierkegaard, Sùren, 135 Mann, Thomas, 29
King, Nicola, 8, 91 Marin, Christopher, 136
Kleinzeit (Hoban), 147 Marlowe, Christopher, 13, 38n1, 45
Koestler, Arthur, 189 Marukami, Haruki, 146
Kofman, Sarah, 25, 57±9, 67, 116 Marx, Karl, 3, 7, 8, 29, 31, 173±5,
Kriegel, Leonard, 135 224
Specters of Marx (Derrida), 36±8,
labyrinth, 179 182, 185, 189, 193
Lacan, Jacques, 19, 35, 145, 151, Matrix, The (Wachowski Brothers),
152, 153±4, 159, 164±5, 167, 4, 26, 129, 192, 226
168n8, 202 memory see trauma
LaCapra, Dominick, 92 mental illness, 7, 113±43; see also
Laing, R. D., 123 psychiatric hospitals
Lanark (Gray), 5, 7±8, 26, 124, in Austerlitz (Sebald), 95, 97, 102±
172±3, 175±87, 230 3
Lee, Alison, 190 in India, 116
 Index 259

Metamorphoses (Ovid), 210, 211 Occidentalism, 5, 8, 186±223

metamorphosis, 64, 81, 148±9, 163, Odysseus, 2, 24±5, 33, 35, 37, 63,
165, 187, 216 80±4
Rushdie, 202±3, 210, 211±12 Oedipus, 33, 34, 35, 55, 77±8
Warner, 210 Oracle (in Lanark), 183±4, 187, 191
Mexico, fascism in, 29 Orientalism, 5, 8, 196±223
miaros, 78, 87n24 Orpheus, 2, 8, 33, 34, 37, 44, 144,
Michaels, Anne, 7, 89±90, 91±2, 229 146±7, 191, 212, 214, 215, 217,
Michaux, Henri, 220n6 222n35
Midnight's Children (Rushdie), 201, Ormus (Rushdie's Orpheus), 202,
213 204±12
Milton, John, 13, 20, 44, 105, 109± see also Eurydice
10, 136, 145, 169n17, 179 Orwell, George, 178, 189
Mirror Maker, The (Levi), 72, 76, 83 Osama bin Laden, 228
mirrors, imagery of, 153±4 Other, the, 5, 34, 198, 206
Morrison, Toni, 14, 89, 103 Ovid, 210, 211
Morson, Gary Saul, 42, 115,
143n35, 211 Palestine, 229
moths, imagery of, 95, 96 paradise, 26, 27
Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 44 Paradise Lost (Milton), 20±1, 44,
Mr Palomar (Calvino), 52 109±10, 136, 145, 169n17, 179
Munchausen's disease (compulsive Paradiso (Dante), 20, 26, 27, 39n22,
lying), 133, 134, 140 162, 165, 167; see also Divine
music, 203, 204, 209, 216 Comedy, The
Parks, Tim, 209
Naylor, Gloria, 5, 7, 14, 48, 151±6, Passage to India, A (Forster), 198±9
169n14, 178 Passion of New Eve, The (Carter),
Nazism, 29, 58; see also 148, 150±1, 163, 164, 166,
concentration camps; Holocaust 168n8, 205
Negotiating with the Dead (Atwood), Passion of the Christ, The (Gibson),
98 15
Neiman, Susan, 8, 25, 29±30, 31±2, Paul, St, 2, 32, 135
57, 225 Paz, Octavio, 179
Night of the Eagle (Hayer), 13 penal system, 23; see also death row
9/11 terrorist attacks see September Periodic Table, The (Levi), 6, 64, 79
11 personality disorder, 122, 123±7
1947, 29 Phone at Nine Just to Say You're
1984 (Orwell), 178 Alive (Hart), 20, 115, 118, 120±1
Nocturama Zoo, Antwerp, 98±9 photographs, 101, 102, 103, 186
Norden, Eduard, 43 Piercy, Marge, 7, 14, 151, 156±60,
North, Carol, 7, 121, 122, 126, 170n22, 179
127±32, 133, 140 Pike, David, 9, 28, 32, 46±7, 174,
Notley, Alice, 5, 7, 14, 151, 160±8, 180
172, 224 Plato, 129, 214, 222n35
nuclear weapons, 173 Poe, Edgar Allen, 11n13
260 Hell in Contemporary Literature

Poetics of Disobedience, The Said, Edward, 200

(Notley), 161, 162 Sartre, Jean Paul, 40n30, 135
Poor Things (Gray), 169n12 Satan, 5, 27, 44, 46, 47, 179, 180,
poverty, urban, 156 186, 216
Prague, 101±2 Satanic Verses, The (Rushdie), 113±
prisoners see death row 14, 201, 202±3, 208, 209, 210,
Prozac Nation (Wurtzel), 115, 118, 213, 223n36
125 Saul see Paul, St
psychiatric hospitals, 120±1, 156±7 schizophrenia, 113, 115, 122, 127±32
Bedlam, London, 98 and capitalism, 113, 114
McLean's, Boston, 114±15, 123, science and technology, 15, 141n20,
124, 126, 128±9 173, 176; see also black holes;
see also mental illness Gatterman
Pullman, Philip, 23 Scottish culture, 187
punishment, 23; see also death row Scottish nationalism see Lanark
Purgatorio (Dante), 26, 48; see also (Gray)
Divine Comedy, The sea-voyage chronotope, 80±4, 85; see
purgatory, 26, 163 also shipwreck
Pynchon, Thomas, 179 search for roots, in Lanark (Gray),
Pythagoras, 210, 222n33 180±7
Search for Roots, The (Levi), 64±5,
Quint, David, 45 66, 67, 69, 80, 81, 84, 85, 92,
96, 232
re-ascent see return from Hell Sebald, W. G., 7, 90, 91±2
Real, the, 35, 129 selfhood, 2, 3±4, 18, 19, 27±8, 117
realism, 49, 183, 184, 187±93 and gravity, 119
and fantasy, 187±93 and mental illness, 139±40
return from Hell, 1, 33±7, 43, 44, postmodern, 141n9
45, 94, 119, 167, 192, 193 self-questioning, 189
Rhodiginus, Coelius, 21, 122 as soul, 161
Ricoeur, Paul, 8, 145, 153 September 11, 1, 5, 8, 17, 33, 199,
Rilke, Rainer Maria, 37 223n38, 224±7, 228, 229, 230
Rime of the Ancient Mariner, The Rushdie, 218±19
(Coleridge), 1, 80, 82, 84, 97 Shakespeare, William, 30±1, 34
Robbins, Tim, 17 Shands, Kerstin, 159±60
roots, search for, in Lanark, 180±7; Sharon, Ariel, 230
see also Search for Roots, The Shattuck, Roger, 141±2n20
(Levi) ch.3 shipwreck, imagery of, 193; see also
Rushdie, Salman, 4, 5, 8, 113, 200± sea-voyage chronotope
19, 230 Simpson, John, 16, 18, 39n8
affinity with Latin America, 201 Singleton, Charles, 43, 60n5
fatwa against, 201, 209 Slater, Lauren, 7, 121, 122, 126,
132±40, 167, 230
Saddam Hussein, 196, 228; see also Slaughterhouse 5 (Vonnegut), 90,
Iraq War (2003) 109
 Index 261

Smith, Evans Lansing, 9 Theseus, 2, 37

Smothered Words (Kofman), 57±9 This Side of Brightness (McCann),
socialism see Lanark (Gray) 146
Sodi, Risa, 63 Thomas, Keith, 16±17
solitude, 20 Thorne, Kip, 15, 39n14, 66, 67
Sophocles, 34 threshold chronotope, 68±70, 71, 82,
Soyinka, Wole, 229 85
sparagmos see dismemberment threshold crossings, 8, 197
Spasm (Slater), 121, 122, 126, 132± Kaysen, 123, 125
40, 167, 230 North, 128±9
spatial compression, Hell as, 19 Rushdie, 202, 207±8, 230
spectres see ghosts Sebald, 96, 98
Spiegelman, Art, 223n39, 226 Through the Looking Glass
Spivak, Gayatri, 113±14, 200 (Carroll), 120
staining (pollution), 77±9, 80 time, 106, 107, 115, 130, 159±60,
Star Wars (Lucas), 4, 5 176, 177, 185, 186; see also
Steinberg, Paul, 74, 78 chronotopes
Steiner, George, 6, 16±17, 23, 29, arrested, 21±2
173 infernal, 123±4, 167
Stephenson, Pamela, 45 in Inferno (Dante), 60n5
Stevenson, Randall, 187 ramified, 137±8, 143n35
Stevenson, Robert Louis, 44, 120 reversed, 121, 142n31
suicide, 214 Time's Arrow (Amis), 48
Surfacing (Atwood), 106, 149±50, Tolkien, J. R. R., 45, 198, 199±
164 200
survivors trains, imagery of, 19, 69, 85, 86n13
descent and return, 33 and n14
guilt, stain see miaros trauma, 7, 31, 33, 35, 90±1, 92±3,
SÏvankmajer, Jan, 4, 120, 125 96±7, 121, 226, 229
Szymborska, Wislawa, 30 trial chronotope, 74±80, 82, 83±4,
85
Taylor, Charles, 8, 17, 18, 19, 25, Truce, The (Levi), 6, 20, 29, 69, 84±
27±8, 116, 133 5
telling the self, 27; see also Tug-Boat (Vercel), 66, 67
autopathography Tugdal, 24
TerezõÂn, 101, 102 Twin Towers see September 11
terrorism, 199, 224±30; see also tyrant, the, 162, 164, 167
September 11
in Piercy, 160 Ulysses see Odysseus
testimony, 6, 7 Ulysses (Joyce), 205
Holocaust, features of, 57±8 uncanny, the, 69, 82
see also Beyond the Darkness unconscious, the, 19
(Fenimore); If This Is a Man Under the Volcano (Lowry), 4, 29,
(Levi) 45, 48, 54±7
Thaw, Duncan see Lanark underworld see Hades; Hell
262 Hell in Contemporary Literature

United States politics see war, in Vietnam, 114±15, 126, 133, 196±
Cuba (1967); war, Vietnam 7, 203, 206, 227
utopias, 150, 158±9, 167, 168; see war films, 40n28
also dystopias use in training of US soldiers, 196,
198, 219n3
vampires and Marx, 40n31 Warner, Marina, 210
Van Gogh, Vincent, 136 Wasted: a Memoir of Anorexia and
Vercel, Roger, 66, 67 Bulimia (Hornbacher), 113, 116,
Vermeer, 125, 127 118, 120, 121, 122
Verne, Jules, 44, 60n6, 106 Wasteland, The (Eliot), 27, 44
verticalisation, 48, 49, 53±4, 55, 63± weightlessness, 20, 53, 119, 186
4, 106, 190 Welcome, Silence (North), 121, 122,
and capitalism, 175, 179 126, 127±32, 140
and mental illness, 126, 157 Wernick, Andrew, 117, 131
vertigo, 95, 96, 100, 101, 102, 103, whale, imagery of, 99
112n15 Whedon, Joss, 5, 199±200
via negativa, 21, 59, 112n22 Willard, Captain, 4, 196±7
Vietnam War, 114±15, 126, 133, Williams, Robbie, 216
196±7, 203, 206, 227 Williams, Rosalind, 3, 9, 31
Virgil, 6, 32, 121, 205, 211, 212, Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, The
215 (Marukami), 146
vision chronotope, 72±4, 75, 85 wisdom literature, 50
Vision of Tugdal, 24 Wizard of Oz, The (Rushdie),
visual images see art; films 223n37
Vonnegut, Kurt, 90, 109 Wolpert, Lewis, 116
Woman on the Edge of Time
Walker, D. P., 22, 23 (Piercy), 14, 151, 156±60, 179
war, 55 women see gender
in Afghanistan (2001±2), 2, 198, Wood, James, 205
227 workplace as Hell, 7, 11n7, 174,
in Cuba (1967), 115, 126 175, 180
First World, 40n28 Worthington, Kim, 141n9
Gulf (1991), 197±8, 219n3 Wurtzel, Elizabeth, 115, 118, 125
Iraq (2003), 16, 18, 196, 198, Wytwycky, Bohdan, 23
227±8
Second World, 7, 28, 29, 89, Zaleski, Carol, 20
146 zoo, imagery of, 98±9