It’s Easter weekend, so naturally resurrection is on my mind. According to the story of Christianity, Christ, who is crucified on Good Friday, rises from the dead three days later. This event is celebrated on Easter Sunday, and in many Christian Churches lasts for several weeks thereafter. Interestingly, the Bible contains no actual reference to a resurrection as such – rather, Jesus predicts that it will happen, and when he is seen walking around some days after his crucifixion, we are left to assume that such a resurrection has indeed occurred.
If we are to take the Bible as a literary text, which it is, what does it have to say about the preoccupation of literature with death? In a way, Jesus is the archetypal mythic hero: not only does he sacrifice himself graciously, taking on all the sins of humanity and suffering on their behalf, but he lives to tell the tale. But first, he has to die.
Writers, on the whole, tend to be obsessed by death. Not only the spectacle of death itself, but its effects on the people around it who are sadly still alive. It’s not hard to see why: death, along with birth, is the defining event in a person’s life. Anxieties, fears, and speculation collect around death in great quantity; also hope – hope about what happens after death, or more specifically, hope that what happens after death will be good. In Christianity, as in other religions, the hope is that after death the soul moves from the Earthly realm to a higher, utopian plane of existence which they call Heaven. That is, if you have been good enough in your time on Earth to deserve it. And if you haven’t, well, Hell or Purgatory awaits you – and if you’ve read Dante’s Inferno, you’ll know it’s not pretty. So you’d better fall into line. Or, as in religions which believe in reincarnation, such as Buddhism, you are doomed to an endless cycle of reincarnation until you reach Enlightenment, at which point you are permitted leave of the prison of corporeality.
Above all, though, death is a mystery. None of us know what happens after it, whether we are religious or not, and no-one can know until they have experienced it themselves. By then, of course, it’s too late to do anything about it.
In her book Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing, Margaret Atwood lists various reasons why writers write, including, among other things, “To satisfy my desire for revenge”, “To justify my failures in school”, and “To thwart my parents” – but chief among them, and the one which gives the book its title, is the desire to somehow communicate with the dead, and in so doing, bring them back to life somehow. Her view is that writers in the course of their work move between the lands of the living and the dead; they inhabit both as a matter of necessity. Writers, in this way, are liminal creatures: they are simultaneously involved in worldly affairs and at a remove from it, enough to be able to write about it; and in addition to this, they have one foot in another world entirely. Or, we might say, other worlds, plural.
Atwood’s contention is that “not just some, but all writing of the narrative kind, and perhaps all writing, is motivated, deep down, by a fear of and a fascination with mortality – by a desire to make the risky trip to the Underworld, and to bring something or someone back from the dead.” This is a tall order, but it’s something the writer nonetheless feels that they must do. The dead “know the past and the future”, and therefore have the kind of knowledge the living do not. The dead also “persist in the minds of the living”, because they “have some very precious and desirable things under their control” – namely, the stories.
Writers can make this journey to the Underworld and negotiate with the dead, but not without some kind of exchange – that is to say, a cost. Despite their power, the dead are “hungry and unsatisfied”, and what they want is blood, meaning lifeblood. We give this to them in the form of offerings, and in return they give us the knowledge they are willing to impart. Given that all narrative writing is about time fundamentally, the fact that the dead are beyond time means that their knowledge is very important.
This descent, metaphorical or, in some cases, literal, is essential for the process of storytelling. Atwood puts it this way: “The story is in the dark. [...] Going into a narrative… is a dark road. You can’t see your way ahead. [...] The well of inspiration is a hole that leads downwards.”
One of the most immediate ways writers can deal with the dead is through the lens of historical fiction. The genre, by its very definition, deals with people who are of the past and no longer alive. It is a communication with the dead through time and through the page and through narrative. Necessarily some interpretation of the facts is made, and the literal historical truth is allowed to be bent somewhat – in other words, artistic license reigns supreme. But this is what all history is anyway: an incomplete interpretation of events. Unless you were there, it’s impossible to really know what happened.
It’s likely that when you think of historical fiction, one of the first examples that comes to mind is Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall trilogy. The three books – Wolf Hall, Bring Up the Bodies, and The Mirror and the Light – take place in the tumultuous, volatile court of Henry VIII, centering around the sharply clever and conniving Thomas Cromwell, who was chief minister to the King. Spoiler alert: by the end of it he is without a head.
Mantel gave a series of lectures in 2017 for the BBC on historical fiction, called Resurrection: The Art and Craft. She goes over her beginnings as a writer – originally wanting to be a historian, she moved sideways into being a novelist as an alternative method of dealing with the past. The strength of historical fiction, she argues, is that it allows both writer and reader to fill in the gaps left by the historical record, and imagine the inner lives of these figures which the records are simply not privy to. She also argues that history itself is a construction, based on real events, so why shouldn’t the novelist interpret it as they see fit?
The title of the first lecture in the series, “The Day Is For the Living”, is taken from a phrase Mantel’s great-grandmother was known to say: “The day is for the living, and the night is for the dead.” And as we know, the story is in the dark. Mantel echoes many of the sentiments expressed above – the dead are not here but also here, they remain present in the minds of the living, they are restless and make demands of us, and they have access to something we (the living) want to know. “Using fiction and drama,” she says, “we try to gain that understanding.”
It is also apparent that death and fiction are closely intertwined. “As soon as we die,” says Mantel, “we enter into fiction. [...] Once we can no longer speak for ourselves, we are interpreted. And when we remember – as psychologists so often tell us – we don’t reproduce the past, we create it.” Narrative, then, is a way of taking the past and making it the present again — of reversing time, confounding it. Crucially, you can take people who are dead and make them alive again, that is, alive in the mind of the reader.
Atwood’s Negotiating with the Dead also started its life as a lecture series, given at Cambridge in 2000, so it seems that when writers turn their attentions to writing, death tends to come up. It certainly would appear to be a universal subject among writers. My first novel, which I’m currently working on, begins with a death, as many novels do. Death is a very useful device for getting a plot going. It moves people to action against their will. It makes things happen. The ripples extend far beyond the person who has died, and it has the power to bring what was formerly shrouded in darkness into the light.
Perhaps this is what the impulse to travel to the land of the dead is for: to make something known that before was unknown. What you bring back from the land of the dead becomes known to the land of the living. It becomes spoken, recorded. And usually it is something which is important to know, and also dangerous to know, for it has the power to disrupt, even to completely upend one’s life. This is useful in a novel, however.
I want to end by returning to Atwood’s book, and the point she makes about the journey to the land of the dead being a kind of rite of passage, which the writer must take if they are to come up with a story worth telling. Writers do this in an obvious, metaphorical way, but in reality all people do it in some way, at some point in their lives. We are all confronted with the reality of death when the people we love die, as they inevitably will. “All must descend to where the stories are kept”, Atwood writes. And all people are storytellers – you’ll know this is you listen to the things people say when you get in a room with them for long enough, and preferably if they have a drink in them to help it slip out more easily. They just don’t happen to be the kind of person who writes down their stories.
And ultimately we will all take that final journey, the one out of this world into the great Beyond, to join the land of the dead ourselves. We can’t all be Christ, and even he couldn’t live forever. As Atwood says, “we’re all on the same train trip, and it’s a one-way ticket, so you might as well have something good to read on the way.”
Sources:
Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing. Margaret Atwood. Virago. 2003.
“The Day Is For the Living”. The Reith Lectures. Hilary Mantel. BBC Radio 4. 2017.