Output details

Going, Going, Gone

Johan Huizinga’s Waning of the Middle Ages (1924) comments on the dread of death amongst Christians in the middle ages by recounting the myth of Lazarus’s life after his first death; he wanders the earth dreading dying once again. My story is the first-published in a series I am writing structured around tales of Lazarus, because (intentionally misremembering the Bible) he is the only person who has returned from the dead, and therefore knows what death is like. While he lives, he knows for certain what is to come when it is over; what he knows, however, we can never know. So, I use various Lazarus narratives and myths to underpin my stories as a way of foregrounding the limits of human knowledge about endings.

Peter Brooks’s Reading for the Plot (1984), examines the ‘strange logic’ of reading narrative which involves the ‘anticipation of retrospection’. In narrative ‘everything is transformed by the structuring presence of the end to come’, but also we read line-by-line in a ‘kind of present’. Brooks says that in life, the future is open and unwritten in a way that narrative isn’t. I have used the allusions to Lazarus to foreground life’s similarity to narrative; the tragic, determined element of life (we die) but also, in later stories, to suggest that narrative itself is rather more open and defies time in two senses – the physical text is there, paradoxically determined and complete in front of you, to be read any way you wish, to be re-read, but also because the text can exist long after the author and (in the story world, the fictional characters) have died. My overall aim in these interlinked stories is to say that our only guaranteed form of afterlife is through the narratives and images we make ourselves.