In ancient China, which we have never seen, the wife of a drowned man expressed her unbearable grief in a poem we still read.
—HIRAGA GENNAI, ROOTLESS WEEDS
The Poet scarce introduces a single Person, who doth not suggest some useful Precept to his Reader, and designs his Description of the Dead for the Amendment of the Living.
—JOSEPH ADDISON, TATLER
At death, you break up: the bits that were you
Start speeding away from each other for ever
With no one to see. It’s only oblivion, true:
We had it before, but then it was going to end,
And was all the time merging with a unique endeavor
To bring to bloom the million-petalled flower
Of being here. Next time you can’t pretend
There’ll be anything else.
—Philip Larkin, “The Old Fools”
Joseph Addison imagined “Futurity” as a foreign country he was certain one day to visit—and therefore very curious about, with none of Hamlet’s dread of the “undiscovered country.”1 Like other vacation travels, its pleasures swelled in anticipation. Yet what if there is no hereafter? Who visits a foreign country she does not believe exists? In the grave, Jonathan Swift rolls his empty eye sockets at Sir Thomas More. Gulliver chatted up the dead, but did not visit their dwellings. The afterlife’s nonexistence once accepted, the skeptic’s project becomes Addison’s—an ideological construction that uses the other side of death to address living needs and desires. Skeptics, freed from the obligation to combat conventional belief, now take their turn on the playgrounds of eternity.
From Lucretius to Shelley, afterlife deniers did not visit otherworldly heavens, though they mocked hell with pleasure. Human deaths, others’ and their own, participated in the cycles of the cosmos, rolled round with “rocks and stones and trees” or splashed with dizzying radiance an infinite moment against the dome of light: “Worlds on worlds are rolling ever, from creation to decay.” Their modern descendants invoke infinite galaxies expanding endlessly or collapsing and exploding, recurrently: our own bodies, and all that lives, made of stardust.2 Temple Grandin, the autistic specialist in animal consciousness, asked if she believed in God or an afterlife, replied, “I have a poster on my wall of the Hubble Deep Field, which shows hundreds of galaxies out in outer space. When I think about those big issues, I just think about that Hubble space poster.”3 W. H. Auden had reservations about being “astraddle/ An ever expanding saddle,”4 but the old four-walled heavens, mirroring human faces, excluding beetles, have been too small for several centuries. The Asian cosmos has more room, about the right distance away. Anti-afterlife genres flourish. In Jim Crace’s Being Dead, corpses rot; in Julian Barnes’ Nothing to Be Frightened Of, the lights go out. In Salmagundi, Nadine Gordimer’s “Afterlife” savages other people’s hopes. A. N. Wilson puts it precisely: “Life After Death: A Fate Worse than Death.”5 As for reunions with one’s dead, the living who want their dead back, want them here, beside them now, returned again to the lives they lived, not deferred to some undisclosed future location.
At the turn into the twentieth century, debunking other people’s afterlives still preoccupied most skeptics, in spite of Shaw’s and Twain’s demonstrations that a visit to heaven or hell offers theist, deist, atheist, socialist, or Christian an opportunity to limn ideals and pose problems. Mid-century saw the post-traumatic stress disorder of the absurd. So many deaths, too many deaths for imagination to house: “Vladimir: Where are all these corpses from? Estragon: These skeletons.”6 Heidegger and Adorno faced off over death as a limit, and Levinas declared death impossible: so much death balked thinking beyond it. Time heals all wounds, erases memories, like kudzu. With the collapse of “godless communism” in the 1980s, a political inhibition on western atheism lifted, freeing skeptical discourse to be at once more dogmatic and more playful.7
By the time the twentieth century passed, un-mourned, away, the afterlife had become almost as interesting to those who did not believe in it, as to those hopeful for evidence from trips to heaven and back. Against Kevin and Alex Malarkey’s The Boy Who Came Back from Heaven, Richard Sigmund’s My Time in Heaven, or Gordon Macdonald’s Glimpses of Heaven, all in a row on a rack at Chicago O’Hare, August 2013, important names in contemporary literary fiction—and film—have visited or approached or sniffed at eternal life: Milan Kundera and J. M. Coetzee, Steve Stern and George Saunders, Spike Jonze and Hirokazu Kore-eda.8 Kore-eda. Kore-eda Hirokazu in Japanese naming order.
Three Americans, one European, one South African, and one Japanese: their afterlives have almost nothing in common and little to do with each other. Yet in each case the afterlife as a conceit opens into the heart of ideology, commandeering death to define what really matters, and in each case the author ends with or leaves behind a woman, young, middle-aged, or old, through whom life continues. (Some tropes have very long afterlives.) Privileging afterlife fantasies, they look through death, nuzzling it en passant, sucking up its power. They know death as life’s ancient partner, pattern maker. Such fantasies turn artists at once most idiosyncratic and most representative, in themselves, their work, and the culture from which they come.
Americans obsess over American materialism, popular culture, and staying alive in Spike Jonze’s film Being John Malkovich (1999), George Saunders’ story “commcomm” from In Persuasion Nation (2006), and Steve Stern’s novel, The Frozen Rabbi (2010). South African J. M. Coetzee in Elizabeth Costello (2003) and European Milan Kundera in Immortality (1990) layer literary afterlives, caught between annihilation and self-assertion, ashamed to believe anything at all, determined to write themselves out of being into Being, for a moment or until overwhelmed by otherness. In his film Wandâfuru Raifu (1998, English title Afterlife) Japan’s Hirokazu Kore-eda goes further. His afterlife conceit reaches out from the characters in the film to ensnare the film’s viewers, whether they like it—or the film—or not.
An improbable afterlife movie, given Hollywood’s abundance, Spike Jonze and Charlie Kaufman’s satiric Being John Malkovich (1999) enacts, even more decisively than Steve Stern’s Frozen Rabbi, the modern American dream of living forever. William Godwin, it will be remembered, attributed his hope for staying alive eternally to the quintessential American, Benjamin Franklin. Sending up celebrity culture with its many pleasures and manageable pains, Jonze’s film proposes reincarnation without death for a privileged few, yet simultaneously celebrates the self’s autonomy and mortality in its own body. Death can be evaded forever, in serial displacements. Whether that evasion is desirable is a question the viewer must answer for herself as she ponders Jonze and Kaufman’s twist on the traditional Hollywood afterlife-movie denouement.
Most American afterlife movies allow characters to come back to life and start their romance all over again, whatever the afterlife conceit. Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life (1946) tries the rule: Capra sends the hero into his nonexistence, from which he returns to resume a re-valued married life. The afterlife may feature clouds, airplanes, and heavenly bureaucrats making mistakes about who dies in Here Comes Mr. Jordan (Alexander Hall, 1941), remade as Heaven Can Wait (Warren Beatty, 1978). In Kafka, such an error would neither be rectifiable nor admitted. Since these are American movies, the functionaries scramble to rectify those errors to ensure customer satisfaction. There may be a lurid hell, borrowing Dante’s frozen heads, with a glossy, kitschy heaven, as in What Dreams May Come (1998), designed for admirers of the art of Thomas Kinkade or Claude Monet. In Defending Your Life (Albert Brooks, 1991), heaven is a resort where transient residents enjoy plush hotel suites, golf courses and entertainment centers, with all-you-can-eat sundae buffets. Bulimics gorge without purging since there is no danger of gaining weight. Wristcutters: A Love Story (Goran Dukic, 2007) designs an afterlife exclusively for suicides, featuring a dreary road trip, depressed Russian families, and a miserable job at Kamikaze Pizza. Cabin in the Sky (Vicente Minnelli, 1943) is only a dream of heaven’s gate and hell’s minions, but a dream with Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, and Ethel Waters’ telling Lena Horne, “Honey, everything you’ve got, I’ve got, and more of it.”
Most of these films address significant political, economic, or moral issues, as Capra does, and each ends with true love starting up all over again. The suicides stir in adjoining hospital beds in Wristcutters: A Love Story or meet after the ball game in Heaven Can Wait or meet as children in What Dreams May Come or go together to the next stage in Defending Your Life. (The un-American source for Wristcutters, Israeli Etgar Keret’s “Kneller’s Happy Campers,” separates the incipient lovers, sending the girl back into the world, leaving the guy waiting for her, hopeful, a little changed, but still alone and trapped.9) Excursions to the afterlife are temporary; the marriage plot is eternal, bringing characters back to life and love. Sometimes the marriage plot links the living and the dead or the dead and the not yet born, as in The Lovely Bones (Peter Jackson, 2009) or Made in Heaven (Alan Rudolph, 1987). Whatever their merits as films, and some have considerable merit, their ideological grounding is firmly in the terrain of Bill and Judy Guggenheim’s remaindered Hello from Heaven! A New Field of Research—After-Death Communication—Confirms That Life and Love Are Eternal (Bantam, 1996), especially the love part. As in Robert Redford’s All Is Lost, in Hollywood nothing is ever lost.
Like other Hollywood afterlife films, Charlie Kaufman and Spike Jonze’s Being John Malkovich proposes love and reproduction as the ultimate value, but love and reproduction line up with mortality against an eternal life that comes at the cost of losing one’s body and sharing one’s consciousness. The film is a favorite of philosophers of the self and aesthetics, medical theorists, and Levinas-inflected theologians, all more concerned with self than the film’s “bizarre immortality,” which is noticed and passed by.10 BJM satirizes every contemporary meaning-making cliché, both inward looking, such as self-actualization, psychoanalysis, artistic self-expression, and gender identity, and outward facing, such as celebrity culture (John Malkovich), artistic success, and true love (Being [a]). What else is there? The desire to live forever, of course, is here too (Being [b]). The secret wisdom of the film is that we are always filled with others’ voices and too much self is dangerous. Whether we would live forever at the film’s price is a question the film’s commentators do not address.
In BJM, eternal life no longer condemns to the condition of Swift’s ghastly, ever-aging, never-dying Struldbrggs (Gulliver’s Travels, Book 3). Long, long ago on the seventh-and-a-half floor of a New York City office building (so not that long ago), a nineteenth-century captain of industry discovered or invented a portal that allows him to occupy a new body when that body reaches forty-four years of age.11 This evasion of death has a downside in eternal middle-age and shape-shifting. One never again has a youthful body, and one loses one’s own. The self that is one’s body vanishes forever. Christians’ new spiritualized bodies at the resurrection were once thirty-three, Jesus’s age when he rose again.12 That body was closer to its prime. Still, at eighty-eight, there is much to be said for shifting out of an eighty-eight-year-old body and slithering down a slippery canal into someone else’s forty-four-year-old (only forty-four!) brain and body, taking it over and adapting it to suit oneself.
An actor’s tour de force, the real-live John Malkovich plays John Malkovich (real-person/actor) as Malkovich, Richard III (very badly), and Uncle Vanya; then John Malkovich as occupied by Craig Schwartz (i.e., John Cusack), the failed puppeteer who finds the portal, and finally John Malkovich as occupied by Mr. Lester (i.e., Orson Bean), Craig Schwartz’s boss, himself occupied by the nineteenth-century captain of industry and master of the portal. Until the portal closes at forty-four, anyone can enter for fifteen minutes and see the world through Malkovich’s eyes, Malkovich prowling the fridge for leftovers, ordering towels by phone, showering. Then the visitor is ejected on to the New Jersey turnpike (with an excellent view of the twin towers of the World Trade Center). The first paying visitor to Malkovich calls himself “a sad pathetic fat man” who wants to escape from himself into anyone else. Maxine (Catherine Keener), a coworker with whom Schwartz has fallen in love, takes the man’s money and sneers, like the viewer, at someone who wants not to be himself. Lotte (Cameron Diaz), Schwartz’s wife, discovers her true masculinity in her passage through Malkovich and demands a sex-change operation, though ultimately she prefers lesbian love to sexual reassignment.
Having established that celebrity, wealth, and success inside someone else produce more happiness than obscurity and failure in one’s own person, the film ends with a coda “nine years later” that juxtaposes the promise of renewed life and the mortal life that will be disrupted by that promise. In the coda, Malkovich’s body is occupied by Lester, yet he retains something of Malkovich’s inner life. He has won the woman Mr. Lester futilely desired (the triumph of love), but he also offers Malkovich’s friend, balding Charlie Sheen, a chance at eternal life through Emily, the new portal. Admiring the photos of Emily on his wall, Malkovich murmurs, “Isn’t she lovely?” Love and friendship thrive in immortality; self takes a hit, but Lester-Malkovich seems delighted at the prospect of becoming a woman, and that desire is more recognizably Malkovich’s than Lester’s. Would the viewer follow him, into Emily?
From Malkovich’s admiration, the film moves to nine-year-old Emily, at a pool with her happy, laughing, loving, mortal mothers, Lotte and Maxine. Emily, conceived while Lotte was inside Malkovich, is the new portal, but she already has a voice inside her that she does not hear. Schwartz, the puppeteer, has been shunted into the new portal and trapped in Emily’s subconscious. (The film does not specify when portals become available for visits—post-puberty, perhaps?) Gazing at her mothers, Emily ignores the puppeteer’s despairing voice inside her, saying “look away, look away.” Then she goes for a swim, moving effortlessly under water, in another medium, controlling her body and her breathing, through all the credits. Antithetical to the puppet’s “dance of despair and desolation” with which the film begins, Emily moves freely, autonomously in the world of the dying, careless of the new realm without death. Any other voice inside her is subject to her.
Yet at forty-four, whatever she has become, Emily will be taken over by “Malkovich,” able at last really to be (inside) a woman, along with whoever wants to join him. He has invited Charlie Sheen, but Flo will surely come, and what of Lotte, who knew Lester, and Maxine, who knew Malkovich? The viewer who regards that prospect with dread has rejected immortality for the sake of the self’s autonomy. If an unsuspecting Emily is taken over as Malkovich was, first by Schwartz and then by Lester, the prospect chills. But what if Emily is complicit, alerted by her mothers and their friend[s]? She gains multiple minds absent from her experience heretofore; she acquires immortality through the next portal. Yet what would the viewer wish? Would s/he go into Emily in order not to die? The viewer who thrills at the prospect, gleeful, embraces new life and new experiences, endless new selves and involutions. The viewer who shudders holds fast to his body as himself. The film’s Möbius strip of modernity keeps both sides in play.
Viewers may approve or abhor the film’s promised reincarnation, but as they are in no danger of experiencing it, its interest is suggestive rather than doctrinal. It evidently allows more persistence of self than other systems of reincarnation. Yet the puppeteer’s presence in Emily intimates the falsity of any antithesis between an autonomous and an other-filled self. Malkovich persists in the invasions of Malkovich, self and other. The multiple discourses through which moderns make meaning, literature, psychoanalysis, media, instantiate the multiple selves made of other voices—cultural, historical, familial—that swim through us. Robert Pogue Harrison calls it The Dominion of the Dead.13 To some of these voices, we attend; others we ignore, and of many, we are not conscious. Those in the nightly queue enjoy Malkovich as virtual-reality entertainment, rather than personal transformation. Moviegoers, of course, have paid good money (but less than $200) for ninety minutes to be with John Malkovich being other people inside John Malkovich. Selves are all very well and good, but they need others.
Nowhere is that clearer than the stunning scene in which John Malkovich enters his own portal. Suspicious of his strange stalker girlfriend Maxine, he breaks into the queue to his brain, pushing to the head of the line, and crawls in. Beyond the dark, lies an elegant dining room, red velvet and black tie, where the chanteuse on the piano, the waiter at the table, the woman shrugging her décolletage, the dwarf entering the room, the men at another table, the words on the menu, the words issuing from the waiter’s mouth—everything and everyone is Malkovich Malkovich. Tall, short, fat, thin, male, female, bent, bespectacled, tattooed, or bereted, a tour de force of identity in difference, everyone looks like Malkovich. Malkovich is all that is written, and Malkovich is all anyone says, or sings, angrily, happily, perplexedly, smugly, seductively. It is the film’s visit to hell: nothing but self, inescapable, omnipresent, all otherness metamorphosed into one’s own shape. The boundaries between self and other disappear, but there is no liberation. This is what happens when it’s “all about me.” How can we adjust ourselves in the mirror of the other when all the others are us? By contrast, Malkovichian renewal cycles through other bodies and other experiences. The film’s final argument, its final image, is not transcendence but immersion in an alien medium with others’ voices already inside us. Whichever version of mortality or immortality the viewer of BJM prefers, its immortality is of this world, and we are invited to recognize the other voices that compose us and enable us to enjoy, or suffer, who we are—from Emily Dickinson and Heloise and Abelard to Elijah the chimp, named, as our precursor, for the Precursor.
In American fictions, dying verges on the unconstitutional: the first guarantee of the Declaration of Independence is life. (The third is, of course, happiness as befits a 1770s document.) As the reluctant, resistant Lazar Malkin of Steve Stern’s “Lazar Malkin Enters Heaven” screamed at the angel of death, “There ain’t no world but this!”14 Why then meddle with angels of death, imaginary beings who make dying more interesting, more companionable, and much more mysterious? Unlike BJM, Stern’s novel The Frozen Rabbi remembers the desire for transcendence and takes off a real, if not realistic, immortality project: the cryogenics movement. (Don DeLillo’s Zero K [2016] is another recent entry.) Stern has noticed that businesses that offer immortality by freezing bodies and thawing them had better initiate their processes only after human immortality has been achieved. Otherwise, the resurrected dead will just—like butterflies—have to die all over again. Perhaps that is why Eugene O’Neill’s Lazarus laughed.
Long interested in very old voices, Stern inverts the body-mind relationships of BJM and injects a young mind into an old body. Better put, the young mind takes on the carapace of the old to be at one with itself and others. As to the afterlife, the desire for transcendence becomes desire as transcendence, and the most fervent imaginings of another world pale against the realities of this perishing one. Yet it is those fervent imaginings that give perishing reality its comedy, beauty, value.
Rabbi ben Zephyr (son of the west wind),15 frozen while meditating out of his body beside a flooding pond in the late nineteenth century, preserved by diligence and guile in his block of ice, defrosts during a power failure in Memphis, Tennessee, in the late 1990s. Introduced to modern culture through the glories of afternoon television, he soon becomes an entrepreneur of enlightenment, offering seminars in Zen Judaism and promoting himself on billboards with the slogan “Feel good in yourself is the whole of the law.”16 His young mentor Bernie Karp, given to spontaneous out-of-body experiences in biology class (cf. Calvin and Hobbes), seeks esoteric, ancient traditions, to the amused contempt of the Rabbi, content with the fleshpots of Memphis. His reading-inspired search for frozen liver having led to the bottom of the family freezer and the discovery of a frozen rabbi, a frozen liver, indeed, Bernie Karp yearns for mystical transcendence, the wisdom of the ages, words of “alternative worlds.” The thawed Rabbi assures him that this life, in America, is Paradise, Gan Eydn (FR 52, 48, 177, 182). The history of the rabbi’s preservation and passage to America suggests that, at least comparatively, he has it right.
Bernie, however, longs for the wisdom that the rabbi happily trades for modernity. With some impatience, the rabbi regales him with the tree of life and its rotten branches, the kabbalistic concepts of “intensity and cleaving,” and the “tzimtzum, God’s retreat from His own universe. Like a landlord, disgusted with the tenants who had trashed his premises, rather than evict them [Isaiah 5:1–10, Matthew 21:33–46, Mark 12:1–12, and Luke 20:9–19], he exits slamming the door. The noise of his withdrawal is the big bang, the shevirah, behind which the whole house of cards collapsed, the dust from the rubble rising to heaven where it caused the Lord to sneeze” (52). Then there are the intersecting other realms of demons and dybbuks, some of whom want to “complete the mitzvot they’d left unfinished on earth,” all that “unfinished business” Americans fret about. Others trick souls on their “posthumous journey toward Kingdom Come: They turned the laws of reincarnation, the gilgul, helter-skelter, giving false direction to souls already bewildered by the mapless thoroughfares of the afterlife” (53). Bernie tingles with desire; the rabbi barely keeps awake: “ ‘It’s from below that the yester horeh, the yearning,’ revealed Eliezer, suppressing a yawn, ‘brings about the completion above’ ” (53).
Yearning for the above also brings about invention below. Revisiting Asgill’s ambitions, one of Bernie’s forebears attempts to harness aerodynamics to enable “a wholesale exodus of the Jews…to make aliyah to the Upper Yeshiva without having to die” (98). The thrashing blades attached to the interior rafters of his house do not open the way to paradise, but do produce a cooling breeze in the room. In America, the house of a rich man on Fifth Avenue is “the hekhalot, the very corridors of heaven as described in the Seder Gan Eyden, though the book had failed to do the place justice” (196). Without the Seder Gan Eyden, the house on Fifth Avenue exhibits merely the meticulously rendered opulence of the gilded age, on view in Edith Wharton or the Frick. The Seder Gan Eyden introduces a form of desire that cannot be touched, that whistles us beyond the material to the ineffable. Yet reality, the passages suggest, has its points. To that house on Fifth Avenue, many are called, but few are chosen.
In The Frozen Rabbi, the afterlife is the terrain of literature and imagination. Death when it comes is definitive. As the rabbi observes, “There ain’t no path; there’s only the end of the road. What you call the path, it’s just messing around” (342). “Messing around” is both rabbinical wisdom and sex, as Rabbi ben Zephyr teaches. The fiction tantalizes with its evocation of possible other worlds but does not venture there. It settles for the shared experience of this loving, dying, babbling, growing world of babies and nightingales and finds its consummation in the trivial, transcendent little death that takes people, for a few moments, out of themselves while into someone else. For all its fond, comic evocation of the bloated materialism of American life, the novel ends in ascetic circumstances, and with a shift to a young woman’s point of view, Stern’s dubious heroine Lou Ella. It is she who finally sees “the harum-scarum rooftops of the shtetls of Paradise [and hears] from a playpen somewhere back on earth the warbling of her baby sister in the tongue of nightingales, whose language Lou understood perfectly” (370). So the head argues for what goes on in our bodies. Stern’s old discourses of the afterlife once linked this world through endless curiosity with a next, elaborating, layering, querying, testing, mirroring, but not reflecting this world. Now that old discourse mirrors its own longing, itself an obscure object of desire.
Not all American writers stay so determinedly in this world as Kaufman and Jonze or Stern. George Saunders’ In Persuasion Nation has a bleaker, sourer take on American life than his peers, and in “commcomm,” the final story of that collection, Saunders engineers an escape that is not escapist. The premise of much of Saunders’ oeuvre is that love, men’s fears for those they love, and their efforts to protect them bring disaster on themselves and hapless others. Evil is a by-product of our best, most intimate motives. Goodness recognizes the claims of others. The story asks what to do with the body of a long dead stranger, defunct for a century or more. The easy, obvious answers—try to identify him and bury him with honor or send him to a museum for study—are complicated by the fact that the body’s finding will derail a perishing community’s last hopes for survival. Work on a facility to replace a closing air base will be suspended indefinitely if the archeologists are called in. Reminding readers that the unhappiness our culture suppresses—be happy; get therapy; take a pill—is in fact inevitable and pervasive, Saunders renews the puzzling Buddhist perception that life is suffering.
The story “commcomm” supposes two sorts of dead people: one sort do not know they are dead.17 The position is logical enough: death is unknowable, the dead can know nothing, so they cannot know they are dead. Murdered by addled, home-invading Latvian crackheads, the narrator’s parents stay in their house with their son. They reenact their murder nightly or revisit pleasant memories in the warmth of a lamp. By day, they sit slack-jawed, like the demented in nursing homes, or they move objects in panicked rages, like the subway ghost in Ghost (Jerry Zucker, 1990). Their eventual fate, if they never learn they are dead, is to tear at each other like ravening birds, Homer’s vultures turning on each other. The other dead, also murdered, know they are dead and have a single opportunity to appear as apparitions with a message to the living before they disappear.18 These dead soon know everything.
The story is named for the narrator’s work at his air base’s department of “community communications.” The base is closing, people are losing jobs or must relocate, a child dies of cancer, a wife is immobilized by a stroke, a husband learns his child is not his own, shops go out of business: painful banalities of every day as communities wither. The dead suspended in this world by the longing and guilt of the living are immensely relieved to learn they are dead; they vanish into little gulps of light (like Ghost again or the radiances of the bardo). The dead, it seems, should not be held hostage by the living. Death recognized is embraced. Those privileged to reappear as apparitions, the evangelical Giff and the unnamed narrator, know they are dead, perhaps because no one else knows enough to keep them in the world. The dead teach others to die. Visiting ended, the dead Giff and narrator speed forward into a cosmic merging as sorrows rise from countless small despairs, around and below them. The dead and the reader take the place of God, hearing prayers that bear upwards, into the air, the innumerable, trivial, agonizing sorrows of the world:
Snow passes through us, gulls pass through us. Tens of towns, hundreds of towns stream by below, and we hear their prayers, grievances, their million signals of loss. Secret doubts shoot up like tracers, we sample them as we fly through: a woman with a too-big nose, a man who hasn’t closed a sale in months, a kid who’s worn the same stained shirt three days straight, two sisters worried about a third who keeps saying she wants to die. All this time we grow in size, in love, the distinction between Giff and me diminishing, and my last thought before we join something I can only describe as Nothing-Is-Excluded is, Giff, Giff, please explain, what made you come back for me?19
At “nothing-is-excluded” consciousness merges. This afterlife is not much to look forward to. Knowledge increases, but not happiness. Self vanishes. The pain of the world permeates consciousness; the apotheosis of empathy makes nothing happen, but extends the horizon of concern, the web of imaginary connection. Neglected children, men losing their self-respect and ability to protect their families, terrors of the mirror: it is enough to make one feel sorry for God. Christian and Buddhist thought merge in this transit of insignificant lives. Giff had been a grape-juice-drinking Passion re-enactor. The agony endured by the Man of Sorrows takes its place not as a unique event suffered by God, but as an emblem of thousands crucified, millions tortured, and not one able to look back upon a life without pain. Still, love shoots through, pain’s reciprocal. Compassion suffers with, not alone.
If American writers thrum the next life to make us cling more wholeheartedly to this one or to move more compassionately within it, J. M. Coetzee in Elizabeth Costello (2003) and Milan Kundera in Immortality (1990) invite us to think more deeply about what being in this one signifies. Their principal characters are writers, Elizabeth Costello and the narrator Kundera, and their afterlives are literary genres, the Kafkaesque parable and the dialogue of the dead. Literature protects them from the problem of belief, and the afterlives they affirm are only the texts they craft for themselves and their readers. Such afterlives might seem to be “just literature,” and indeed they are, for Kundera and Coetzee dread the extinction of literature more than their own or the world’s. Science’s promised un-day looms, Costello lectures, when “all trace of [books and authors] will be liquidated from the master catalogue. After which it will be as if they had never existed.”20 Meanwhile literature is both life and afterlife.
The modern afterlife has long been as you like it; it aims to please. Predictably, for him, Coetzee sends his protagonist Elizabeth Costello to an afterlife she did not want, does not desire, out of a writer she does not care for, Kafka. Restoring judgment at the end of a life, Coetzee turns his afterlife into a demand for a “statement of…belief,” a “confession,” and brings his protagonist to ground (194, 209). There she must engage what she believes and what she does, “who she is,” trailing after, like a lost, hopeful dog. Coetzee uses his afterlife as Temple Grandin her Hubble space poster: to address really big questions. Beyond death, at the gate—or a gate—separating the writer from eternal light, Coetzee subjects his protagonist to a final, meandering, inconclusive—what conclusion could there be?—interrogation of the self, by the self, on behalf of the self, somewhat resentful of others, who do not figure in the self’s construction. Rather than interacting with others in this liminal space, Costello ponders trying to secure a typewriter, to take up novel writing again and to wait for voices to call.
Only two chapters in Elizabeth Costello were written exclusively for the novel: “Lesson 7 Eros” and “Lesson 8 At the Gate”: love and death, divinity and judgment, reality’s last things. Discussions of how and what to write, from narrative realism to the postscript’s rewritten Hofmannsthal, each chapter appeared elsewhere before being corralled. In “Eros,” Costello meditates on gods, goddesses, and their intercourse with men and women. Some of her conclusions are familiar: death gives life urgency and intensity (189; Ūta-napišti lacked both), all beings are called by love (192), the gods are indifferent to us (from Hölderlin [188], rather than Epicurus, who appears near Newton and Nietzsche in the atoms’ whirlwind [192]). Sometimes a vision opens, a pattern unfolds, then closes again (192). There are some quaint reversals. The gods do not hate death (as Sappho and Hesiod thought); they are infinitely curious about it, but timorous, and so they sniff around human beings, whom they dare not abandon (189). As to finality, the novel abhors it, like death. The last “Lesson 8 At the Gate” is the last chapter, since the chapters are called “lessons,” but it is not the end of the novel. Beyond the lessons lies a “Postscript: Letter of Elizabeth, Lady Chandos,” signed “Elizabeth C.” Dirk Klopper suggests the “postscript” is written by “Elizabeth C[ostello],” signing her work as the names rhyme across four centuries.21 Elizabeth Costello made her name as a novelist by rewriting Joyce’s Ulysses from Molly Bloom’s point of view, as The House on Eccles Street, evoking Coetzee’s Foe, Robinson Crusoe with a female perspective. Professional rewriters, at least one of them, perhaps both, rewrite Hofmannsthal.
The surroundings at the gate are unappealing—a dusty, dreary piazza reminiscent of Tennessee Williams’ Camino Real or the tentative outpost of Coetzee’s own Waiting for the Barbarians. The functionaries are not helpful caseworkers, angels, demons, or bodhisattvas, but Kafka’s indifferent bureaucrats. The judges, caricatured, monstrous, severe, mock the petitioner they examine. The writer is allowed a glimpse through the gate, but sees only a bright light, that disappoints: “the light is not unimaginable at all. It is merely brilliant, more brilliant perhaps than the varieties of light she has known hitherto, but not of another order, not more brilliant than, say, a magnesium flash sustained endlessly” (196). The episode sits oddly near the end of the novel not because it introduces allegory (the “lessons” and lectures of which the novel is assembled have accustomed the reader to radical discontinuities), but because of the problem Elizabeth Costello has with her statement of belief. In lesson after lesson, she has maintained the cruelty of humans to animals; she has argued that representing evil re-creates it in ways that are damaging for the writer and reader, so certain forms of evil should not be represented. Lecture after lecture—and this is now number eight—has told us what Elizabeth Costello believes. Nothing should be simpler than for her to submit Lessons 3 and 4, published earlier with replies from Peter Singer and Wendy Doniger, among others, and be on her way. Granted she has wavered, no longer certain what she thinks at the end of Lesson 6 (181), desiring a third way, a synthesis that does not come, over the representation of evil.
This woman of opinions, whom Coetzee has created for her opinions, now disengages from opinions, contemptuously designating them “opinions and prejudices, no different in kind from what are commonly called beliefs” (200). Pushing them away as alien to her ideal self, she insists, against all the evidence the reader has read through, that she has no beliefs. She rejects belief as an impediment to her calling and claims merely to represent voices that come through her, voices of murderers and victims. Without seeming to notice, she renounces her earlier attack on Paul West for his contaminating representation of evil: the scribe of the “invisible” has no moral responsibilities except to the voices.
Revising her statement, having been advised that the judges will be satisfied with passion, Costello tells a story of the death and resurrection of frogs as a river dries up and floods. It is a beautiful story, for which she incurs a dreadful judgment. Her judge says she believes, as a storyteller, in the “spirit of life.” Odysseus sacrificed a black ram at the shore of Hades, a live ram, black blood spilling, ghosts hovering: she has wondered if that would be a “good enough” story for her judges (211). Now she is justly appalled by her own banality: “She believed in life: will she take that as the last word on her, her epitaph? Her whole inclination is to protest: Vapid!” (219). Intellectual snobbery writhes as it sees through itself. She might feel less shame had she chosen an allegory of tapeworms or maggots or the liver fluke, but she did not. She chose frogs, the only endearing plague in Egypt: “And the river shall bring forth frogs abundantly, and they shall go up and come into thine house and into thy bedchamber, and upon thy bed, and into the house of thy servants, and upon thy people, and into thine ovens, and into thy kneading troughs” (Exodus 8.3, KJV). In their little fingers stretching and ending in balls of mucus, she takes pleasure, finds joy.
Still worse, she is asked of the effect of her second statement on her first: does she repudiate it, reconsider it, revise it? “Has she changed her story?” (220). A Humean subject, she knows herself as constantly changing and indescribably constant. She has nothing but contempt for personal memory: “breez[ing] through one’s hearing with anecdotes from one’s childhood…every petitioner [taking] up autobiography, and the court stenographer [washed away] in streams of free association” (223). So she characterizes herself in Lacanian terms, filched from Rimbaud: “I am an other.” Had she quoted Alexander Pope, she might have caught her own difficult relationship to other animals:
Our depths who fathoms, or our shallows finds,
Quick whirls, and shifting eddies, of our minds?…
On human actions reason tho’ you can,
It may be reason, but it is not man:
His Principle of action once explore,
That instant ‘tis his Principle no more.
Like following life thro’ creatures you dissect,
You lose it in the moment you detect.22
Her judges want to pin her down, but all she will do is affirm and not affirm and separate herself from affirmation and denial. They ask, “ ‘Do you speak for yourself?’ ‘Yes. No, emphatically no. Yes and no. Both…. I am not confused’ ” (221). Her judge cannot resist the joke, “But who is it who is not confused?” and the bench collapse in helpless laughter.
“Fidelities” is the word that comes to Elizabeth Costello to save her from the embarrassment of belief (disbelief does not embarrass). As she turns it over, she has a vision of the other side of the gate, the side she is trying to reach—a mangy dog sleeping against the gate and “a desert of sand and stone, to infinity” (224). Cerberus and Shelley meet as Costello rejects the palindrome GOD-DOG as too literary. There is nothing to guard as Ozymandias’s sands stretch far away. She has no vocation for whatever lies beyond the gate: light, a mangy dog guarding nothing, gods who no longer believe in people. If the dog is Cerberus, there seems no one for him to prevent leaving. If the dog is Argo, he awaits someone to recognize. The love of the divine for mortals was the subject of the previous lesson “Eros,” but the gate evokes no desire. It is, like death, merely a barrier. Costello has no curiosity about, invests no imagination in where she is presumably meant to go. Her beliefs, concerns, and quotations—fidelities—lie all this side of the gate. Convinced of her difference, she asks the functionary at the gate if he sees many people like her, in her special situation, and he replies, in the last words of the chapter, “All the time…We see people like you all the time” (225). This is not the answer she wanted, but the rest is silence.
What looks a generous, universalizing gesture “All the time…people like you all the time,” could in these literate days mean merely how many writers line up at the gate. Nor does the novel Elizabeth Costello end there. Coetzee backs off from his imagined afterlife—surely the end?—to demand salvation through writing from the overwhelming pressure of sensory experience: a world burgeoning with too many frogs. Turning the page, the reader passes beyond Costello, beyond her rewriting Joyce and Coetzee’s rewriting Kafka, to one or both of them rewriting Hofmannsthal. The gate’s dreary, arid vision abuts the flourishing excess of Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s Letter of Lord Chandos to Sir Francis Bacon, This 22 August, A.D. 1603 (1902). Hofmannsthal’s eloquent Lord Chandos will write no more, he has lost his words, he tells Bacon.23 The world brims with the wordless ecstasy of being: cart tracks winding over a hill, a stunted apple tree, a beetle. Now and then, something opens, beyond words; Lord Chandos prefers experience to words.
Fullness, presence, love, everything means: Costello/Coetzee’s equally eloquent Elizabeth, Lady Chandos cannot bear it. Out of the rush of experienced, wordless revelation she cries to be saved from her raptures and his revelations and infinite presences. “Drowning, we write out of our separate fates. Save us” (230). What saves is the writer’s craft, a work of this world, not the next: “Yet he writes to you, as I write to you, who are known above all men to select your words and set them in place and build your judgements as a mason builds a wall with bricks” (230).“[A]s a mason builds a wall with bricks”: to last, to keep in, to keep out, to hide, to protect, to house, inanimate words. Words cannot express the experience of the inexpressible, but words evoke both the experience and the inexpressible if they be properly “set in place…as a mason builds a wall.” Costello likened her belief in her books to the belief of a “carpenter…in a sturdy table, or a cooper in a stout barrel” (208). With words, tentative, repetitive, circling, Elizabeth expresses unspeakable feelings called up only through words. She demands that words in turn control, compose, confound that experience that they alone have permitted the reader to share or to comprehend. “Save us.” Can words “save”? Salvation once referred to a final judgment before God, at the gate, anticipated by Hofmannsthal’s Chandos. The novel’s structure rejects the afterlife as its ending, as an ending. A textbook supplement, the “postscript” asserts the essential problem of the relation between experience and language, and, repudiating afterlife, returns to a dying, duplicated world of words. As Sir Richard Steele observed, a lady’s letter seldom expresses her mind until the postscript. As renaissance letter, as Hofmannsthal letter, as Costello doubling, as Coetzee doubling, as piece already published, this “after writing” precedes the novel it comes after many times over. All the action, all the writing, is this side of the gate.
“Only the light soul hangs in the air,” says a Polish woman to the newly arrived Elizabeth Costello, as she smokes, luxuriating in laughter at the idea that there is only one gate to the next world (EC, 213–14). Milan Kundera’s Immortality (1990) is playful—a toccata of immortalities.24 The immortality the title has in mind is fame, the survival after death of the name that identifies a person. For “major” immortality, many people recognize the name; in “minor” immortality, only a domestic circle knows the name, and in “ridiculous” immortality, ludicrous death makes an anecdote: Tycho Brahe of a burst bladder, “Kundera” fearing (hoping) he might copy Musil and collapse while lifting weights. What ought to survive as evidence of life is the art produced by “immortals,” dead men whose names we know. Those dead men, however, here Hemingway and Goethe, hanging somewhere in the air, discover to their dismay that no one any longer reads their works. The works have been displaced by biography, interest in the author’s person, a shift that delights Kundera’s characters Paul and Bernard. (Blame Hume, and his “My Own Life.”) Even “major” immortality moves toward the erased “master catalogue” that Elizabeth Costello fantasied and dreaded.
Traditional Christian immortality had nothing to do with fame, and the anonymous afterlives of immortal souls, Christian or other, have no place in Kundera. His characters toy from time to time with traditional afterlife concepts as if to signal their transition to other modes of immortality. Invited in a dream by an interplanetary visitor to decide whether she and her husband wish the next life to reunite them, the heroine Agnès affirms that she and her husband (Paul) desire never to meet again. Samuel Johnson observed that couples would meet again in heaven or divine wisdom would determine that it was better they not meet. Happiness followed in either case. For Agnès, Johnson’s afterlife is a dream and science fiction, and it is to be settled as she likes. If not in a next life, why tomorrow? The afterlife fantasy illuminates Agnès’s relation to her marriage and sets her on a path to another life, in this world.
Another traditional afterlife fantasy, the dialogue of the dead is revived between Goethe and Hemingway as each complains of what is made of him by the hostility of his admirers. Disembodied voices, in the air, nowhere, Hemingway complains of female schoolteachers, Goethe of the schoolmaster’s rod. Devoted critics and biographers root for trash, snorting and grunting in self-delight at the discoveries they expose. Hemingway cringes. He at least was spared the ubiquitous camera Kundera knows and Agnès dreads: “in the end one single stare will be instituted that will not leave us for a moment, will follow us in the street, in the woods, at the doctor’s, on the operating table, in bed; pictures of our life, down to the last detail, will be filed away to be used at any time, in court proceedings or in the interest of public curiosity…. The eye is everywhere. The lens is everywhere”(29, 30). (These videotapes of our lives Kore-eda’s Afterlife tucks away in storage.) That eye has always belonged to an author’s power over characters, though authors may choose from time to time to blink, to look away, to conceal.
Immortality’s lightest joke about immortality is Goethe’s denying that authors are “in” their works while Kundera diligently writes himself as “Kundera” into his novel as the author of his novel so as to be inescapably “in” the work. Laura, Agnès’s sister, demands “the only real life: to live in the thoughts of another. Otherwise I am the living dead” (156). At the center of the fiction, the greatest of the immortals present in the work, Goethe, explains to the denser Hemingway that dead authors cannot be found in their works at all, since they no longer exist. If they cannot be found in their own, can they be found in someone else’s? And in what sense were “they” ever there at all?
And I’ll tell you something else. I am not even present in my books. He who doesn’t exist cannot be present. [Hemingway calls that too philosophical. Goethe explains:] Forget for a moment that you’re an American and exercise your brain: he who doesn’t exist cannot be present. Is that so complicated? The instant I died I vanished from everywhere, totally. I even vanished from my books. Those books exist in the world without me. Nobody will ever find me in them. Because you cannot find someone who does not exist. (214)
Goethe’s argument suggests that Kundera will be “in” his novel until he dies. After that, readers will find “Kundera” there, but not Kundera, who is and is not “Kundera.” Writing himself “in” beside Goethe and Hemingway, no more really there than they are, Kundera expects eventually to be as absent, or as present, as Goethe and Hemingway in their immortalities and in his book. The conceit gains its charm from “Kundera”’s being so much less interesting a character than Agnès, his heroine,25 and indeed he gives the last gesture of the novel to her.
While the immortality the title has in mind is fame, the immortality the text has in mind is less articulate. Gestures, ideas, moments, images, impressions, experiences, feelings (memes) pass from person to person. In the text an initial gesture, the wave of an old woman at a swimming pool, arouses in the author/narrator an “immense, inexplicable nostalgia” (7). From that woman’s gesture, the author/narrator creates the character Agnès and passes the gesture from character to character. Goethe’s “Wayfarer’s Night Song II” passes between Agnès and her father:
On all hilltops
There is peace,
In all tree-tops
Hardly a breath.
Birds in the woods are silent.
you too will rest.
(Wandrers Nachtlied II)
Über allen Gipfeln
Ist Ruh,
In allen Wipfeln
Spürest du
Kaum einen Hauch;
Die Vögelein schweigen im Walde.
Warte nur, balde
Ruhest du auch. (26–27)
Not unlike Robert Frost’s “Stopping by woods on a snowy evening,” peace, silence, a stilled moment imply death, but also triangulate an intensely experienced awareness of the instant’s fragility. Of this poem, the author/narrator considers that its purpose is not to astonish, “but to make one moment of existence unforgettable and worthy of unbearable nostalgia” (27), like the vanished moment of the old woman’s gesture.
“Homo sentimentalis” is the novel’s central section (the fourth of seven). Sentimental man Kundera defines not as “a man with feelings (for we all have feelings), but as a man who has raised feelings to a category of value” (194). Yet the man of sentiment shifts quickly to “inexplicable indifference” when the performance is over (195). As François Ricard observes, Agnès opposes living to being. In living there is no happiness, “carrying one’s hurting self through the world.” In being rests deep, silent happiness: “Being: becoming a fountain, a fountain on which the universe falls like warm rain.” In such a moment, Ricard continues, self is erased, the peace of Goethe’s poem descends, and there is “no more world, no more laughter or love, no more paths or exile. And no more novel.”26 In His will is our peace. That is not, however, where Kundera ends things. The novel ends not with rest, not with being, but with the active, painful, restless yearning that the novel claims as its origin and that the author now hands off to the reader. A “moment of…unbearable nostalgia” impelled the novelist into invention, and the novel ends as it creates another such moment. The kind of experience that set the novel off, once private, often described, is at last forced on the reader.
Early in the novel, Agnès is horrified by the ugliness of the life around her, and she imagines going to a florist, as Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway actually did. She will buy “a forget-me-not, a single forget-me-not…. She would go out into the street holding the flower before her eyes, staring at it tenaciously so as to see only that single beautiful blue point, to see it as the last thing she wanted to preserve for herself from a world she had ceased to love” (21). The aestheticized moment shuts out other people much as the novel’s characters persistently withdraw from husbands, lovers, sisters, jobs, life. Unlike Mrs. Dalloway, Agnès never buys her flower, and she dies in a freakish auto accident reported early in the novel on the radio. After her death, to that early moment of longing for beauty the novel returns. To celebrate his novel’s conclusion, the author/narrator revisits the health club where the idea was born. Emerging from this place of origin, the novel impossibly allegedly already finished, “Kundera” concludes:
The cars were honking their horns, and I heard the shouts of angry people. It was in such circumstances that Agnès longed to buy a forget- me-not, a single forget-me-not stem; she longed to hold it before her eyes as a last, scarcely visible trace of beauty. (345)
A forget-me-not is a tiny, undistinguished, almost-wild flower, blue or white (the name is the same in French, though the “ne-m’ oubliez-pas” can also be called “mouse’s ear”); Agnès wants a blue one. Circling back to a moment long before Agnès’s accidental death, this evocation of an episode that never happened produces “unbearable nostalgia” for what is passed and passing. Goethe’s poetic effect the novel partly achieves, “to make one moment of existence unforgettable and worthy of unbearable nostalgia” (27). Kundera absorbs Goethe, with uncredited assistance from Virginia Woolf. The page offers up to remain with us as if we saw it something we never saw, that the novel never represented, the forget-me-not “before her eyes.” “Kundera” recalls a moment of longing that he invented (and never fulfilled) in which the object, the flower, obscures the longing that is his actual subject, making the longing “scarcely visible.” Inventing Agnès’s longing, inventing Agnès, “Kundera” creates that momentary stillness in the midst of chaos, and they share the “forget-me-not.” “Kundera” also recognizes that after we put the book down, his exquisite moment with Agnès and her forget-me-not will be forgotten. Still, the pair hold her un-held flower toward us.
Kundera’s sleight of immortality makes the merely imagined more real, more memorable, more provocative of deep emotion, than the real. That is, it does what literature always aspires to, though with a meta layer more than usual, created by putting the “author” into the work. An artificial memory has been created for us, reminding us that the literary project is always to make words become experiences, then memories. A work that does not live in the thoughts of others, through the metempsychosis of reading, is, as Laura says, “the living dead.” As John Dryden mocked modern playwriting plagiarists, they make love to their predecessors the Egyptian way, and “join the dead living to the living dead.”
Kundera and Coetzee situate the self before death vis-a-vis literature—what an author does, why he does it, what claims a reader has on the writer. Unlike Coetzee’s astringent, thick self-examination, Kundera’s mille-feuille of immortalities privileges the ephemeral moment in its passing. The Japanese, specialists of the “floating world,” have a phrase for that aesthetic, mono no aware—sensitivity to the ephemeral, to the pathos of things in their passing. It is a feeling, an emotion, a value, and an aesthetic (mono: things, aware: sensitivity, sadness, pathos). It is more evident in Kundera than in Kore-eda, where it is ostinato, not theme.
Kundera’s trick of handing off his remembered (invented) moment to his reader, Hirokazu Kore-eda’s film Wandâfuru Raifu (1998, English title Afterlife) multiplies through a dozen filmed characters, who in turn transmit the impulse to the film’s viewers. Asking its characters for a memory, the film elicits the autobiography Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello despised: “breez[ing] through one’s hearing with anecdotes from one’s childhood…the court stenographer [washed away] in streams of free association” (223). It then requires that the memory selected be filmed. Just as self discovers its core to itself, that twist reveals a social construction of self as imbricated with others. Like burial, movie making depends on other people. Filming the memory reveals, as Kore-eda put it, that “the self is not just something internal.”27
Kore-eda’s invention, the film’s peculiar afterlife conceit, is very simple: the dead are invited to choose a single memory to take with them into eternity and given several days to make the choice. No one knows what eternity is like, but one will be there with/in one’s memory. The memory is filmed collaboratively, the film screened, and the dead vanish into eternity, taking the memory with them, leaving behind the archived film, as well as the workers who continue making others’ memories into film, unless they decide to choose a memory, too.
The film’s is perhaps the most valuable afterlife invention since the demise of the real ones. It models the insignificant and unimportant and passing moment as sources of value, and it impels its viewers quite irresistibly to perform the self-evaluation that death is famous for inspiring. A young American, defending the film from attack, observed that “It isn’t often a movie changes the way you think about your life.” This movie’s imitation of an action provokes imitation of its action, soliciting judgment about the value, meaning, or futility of one’s own life and, inferentially, others’ and those modeled in the multiplex.
A documentary filmmaker making only his second feature film, Koreeda interviewed some five hundred ordinary Japanese and asked them for not their “best” or “happiest” memory (as reviewers often describe it), but the “most important.”28 Those documented memories, interwoven with actual memories of cast members and invented memories and relationships, represent lives and moments of exemplary ordinariness. A bell’s tinkly sound, an afternoon on a bench, the smell of cold, the glint of light on a bus pass: nothing much, nothing unavailable to anyone. No one remembers a Nobel Prize or dating John Malkovich.
The film looks like no American idea of heaven or Japanese image of the Pure Land: no heavenly birds sing, no celestial music sounds, no fragrances waft through the radiant light, no bejeweled streams pass by beautiful flowers springing up, or trees covered with bells.29 In the opening shot, figures emerge through mist into an exquisitely defined geometrical space and then materialize into a wabi-sabi aesthetic: the imperfect, rough, marred, unfinished, unpolished of a drab institutional building. (Wabi, rustic, like Yūtei’s small fenced house among the mansions, sabi, withered, like the morning glories and creepers in autumn, in Habian’s description.) Nature’s greens are muted, snow turns to slush; browns, beiges, dark blues, indigo, Kyoto colors. Paint peels, dust-motes hang in the air, the bath rusts, a fuse blows when hairdryers are turned on simultaneously on filming day. Nothing glossy, no techno-orientalist, glitzy nineties Tokyo of Lost in Translation (2003), no lurid Technicolor impressionist heaven (What Dreams May Come, 1998), no evocation of high-status glamor (Being John Malkovich, 1999; Albert Brooks’ Defending Your Life, 1991): the space is as democratic as the memories and the camera.
That camera is egalitarian, participatory, and doubled (when one cinematographer and his crew film another cinematographer and his crew filming scenes in the film).30 As Timothy Iles observes, the camera establishes itself immediately as a participant in the scene.31 It walks upstairs behind two characters chatting in the opening shot, stands shoulder to shoulder with the case workers while the week’s tasks are assigned, moves around among the people waiting to be called at their seated level, looks at the employee calling names from their position. Interviewing, the camera occupies the interviewer’s chair, at first cutting rapidly from person to person for exposition of the film’s project, then spending more time with the interviewees as they recount their memories.32 From time to time, the camera just stops.
The camera lingers, paused on long shots down vacant halls with peeling paint. It gazes at a name tag hanging from a doorframe. It watches a garden in which nothing is happening. It looks at a lamp in the moonlight. It considers the snow.33 In continuous speech, the camera jumps just a little, a tiny cut, to remind viewers the camera is there. Medium shots, straight on or from slightly below, dominate; figures walk to the edge of their frame, wheel just in time or walk out of range and return. The mise-en-scène is down-at-heels and technologically challenged (that blown fuse, a rotary phone, film reels). Three times the screen goes black, as if there has been an ending, a Mizoguchi or Ozu episode, and three times the film resumes.
What Kore-eda’s deliberate intermittent slowness permits, and other techniques prevent, is introspection. When the camera stops and gazes down an empty hallway for what seems a long, long time, viewers may squirm—why is this camera stopped, why is nothing happening? Jarringly, (non-Japanese) audiences are invited to look at the play of light and shadow within an unfamiliar aesthetic. The film’s project has, however, given viewers an idea. One young viewer reported finding the movie so boring that he just started running through his memories, searching for his own moment.
Those moments validate lives that might be called unlived, within a reassessment of twentieth-century Japanese social and political history, an homage to Japanese (and American) filmmaking, and a valorization of Japanese aesthetic and cultural traditions. The first person interviewed wants only to forget, not to remember, and chooses a dark room where he hid as a child. The second fingers a problem with the setup that Americans might think peculiarly American: “just one?” The huge (to a child) rice balls a kimono-clad woman remembers making with her family in a bamboo grove appeared at a specific historical moment. The Great Kantō earthquake (1923) took 140,000 lives and set off riots massacring Koreans and Korean-Japanese; the woman also remembers the “false rumors” about the Koreans.34 WW II is death and defeat (1945). An old soldier remembers surrendering hopefully to the Americans, cadging a cigarette and upping his demands from salted rice to chicken. Beyond lie the salary men, sex workers, and rebellious youth of postwar prosperity and the Disneyland invasion, but the memories are always simple. An old man’s suicide attempt at twenty, thwarted by silvery-blue light glinting on the railroad tracks; a valley girl’s day at Disneyland with friends traded in for a moment with her head in her mother’s lap. (Shiori, the counselor, told her she was the thirteenth teenager to choose Disneyland this year.)
Lying with one’s head in one’s mother’s lap is a moment to which “happy” or “best” scarcely applies.35 The moment is suffused with feeling, but the significant emotion is surely not “happiest,” or “best,” or even “important.” The girl says she does not in fact remember the moment very well. Such a moment, however, Yosa Buson (1716-1784) chose to end his linked song sequence “Spring Breeze on the Kema Embankment” (“Shunpu Batei Kyoku,” 1777), with a gesture to another poet, Taigi (1707–1771):
Perhaps you know this hokku by Taigi, now dead:
Home for three days,
she sleeps again beside
Sleep, death, impermanence: only the poets are conscious of this moment as it passes, and one of them is now gone, too. The film preserves as it parodies such typical motifs. Cherry blossoms are pink paper; an allusion to the moon is not understood, but the privileged art form is film, from Ozu’s tatami shots through a recitation of American movies, to a title from Frank Capra. “Wandâfuru raifu” is “wonderful life,” and the film nudges its viewers away from grand gestures towards small wonders belonging only to one person, often in solitude, to what gives a life value. Film is also the film’s pivot.
Requiring that the memory be filmed pulls the viewer out of the self into relation with others. Some viewers object, strenuously, to this objectification of a private delight. They prefer to hug their memory in secret, to themselves. There are also videotapes, one for every year of a person’s life, supplied to those who find choosing difficult, like Watanabe, the well-dressed salaryman, who wants “evidence of life.” Why not just spot the moment on the tape and replay it, select your memory and go? Why enlist a film crew to stage and reenact the memory, especially when someone else will have to act your part if you are old and the memory when you were young?
Visually contrasted with film (a contrast occasionally elided in critical commentary on the film37), the videotapes, on cassettes, are grainy and pixilated, objective security-camera records of a life, from an undefined point of view, Agnès’s dread realized. Viewers of their own lives are cautioned that the videos will not correspond to their memory of an event. “What really happened” as recorded on the video is external to memory. By definition precisely not what memory recalls, video is an alien medium of capture. To watch in solitude an external record of one’s own life, to push the button at a particular point, and to vanish is to be a passive consumer of someone else’s point of view, controlled by surveillance camera. Such a life is recognized, not remembered: it is not one’s own.
Filming reveals aspects of memory we are ordinarily unconscious of—its selectiveness, its forgetfulness, its constructed-ness. A woman finds her fiancé on a bridge after the war. Knowing there must have been hundreds of people in the road, on that bridge, she remembers seeing only the man she had been certain would return alive. In her memory, they were alone, just the two of them. Characters filming their memories are troubled as memory’s uncertainty presses itself upon them. How did the elderly woman hold the handkerchief when she was a little girl dancing in a red dress? Instructing another little girl, distressed, she cannot remember. The schoolboy on the bus the day before the last day of school, when summer stretches all possibility yet untouched, was his cap on or off? Puzzled, the middle-aged man he became sinks into a seat, meditative, solemn, as taped traffic sounds evoke a vanished self and moment. Filming the memories reveals the nature of memory as nothing else can: that memory is contingent, constructed, and fallible, the mind’s creation.
Obscured by the medium itself, filming also means that someone is always watching, the most powerful (internal and external) form of social control. The memory one chooses must be a memory one is willing to share and to reenact before others. Foucault would disapprove. (It is easy to imagine the film crew’s initial eagerness to film exhibitionist scenes and their subsequent, “you’re the thirteenth person this month to choose….”) The film’s plotting reenacts the imbrication with others demanded in filmmaking by way of two thwarted love triangles that intersect in the last third of the film: Watanabe, Mochizuki, and Kyoko, two men and a woman; Mochizuki, Kyoko, and Shiori, a man and two women.
Imitative desire saves Watanabe, the best-dressed of the week’s dead. Searching his “so so” prosperous life on seventy videotapes for “evidence of life” and a worthy memory, Watanabe revisits his ambitious youth, when he wanted to make a difference, followed by his arranged marriage and windowed corner office. Wielding binoculars hidden in his clear desk, he gazes into the distance, always looking elsewhere. Watching his tapes with his counselor, the young and very handsome Mochizuki, killed just before the end of World War II, Watanabe realizes what Mochizuki does not suspect he knows—that Mochizuki was the dead fiancé whose grave Watanabe’s wife visited annually. Seeing his life and marriage through other eyes, the eyes of someone denied both and whose life would have meant for Watanabe another life, at least another wife, enables Watanabe to re-value a life, self, and relationship he despised as nothing special, a promise unfulfilled. Someone’s finding his domestic life worth watching makes worthwhile that life’s having been lived.
Mochizuki, when he learns that Watanabe knew, rejects Watanabe’s interpretation of his silence. Mochizuki experiences himself as isolated, detached, disconnected from others. His coworker, Shiori, a young woman with a crush on him, has watched him watching Watanabe’s tapes and teased him about Kyoko. She insists he is involved without even knowing it, speaking for both herself and Kyoko, and she tracks down Kyoko’s memory film among the stored-away reels. The elderly Kyoko and a young Mochizuki in uniform share an autumnal park bench. Then, on Kyoko’s videotapes, they locate the precise moment she chose, in the same park, on the same bench that Watanabe chose. Poor Watanabe has set off into eternity with a woman who did not choose him, who chose someone else, in the same place, at another time. He was right to have been a little jealous all those years and has been cuckolded for eternity. Yet Mochizuki has figured in the ultimate happiness of both wife and husband, once as beloved memory, once as catalyst.
That recognition of imbrication enables him to choose, to Shiori’s chagrin, a memory of himself alone on the same park bench in the filming studio, filmed by his coworkers’ being filmed waving good-bye to him. Instead of reciprocal recognition, Kore-eda unobtrusively proposes La Ronde. Every person chosen chooses someone else to be with forever, a cosmic cuckolding to embitter the moral that it may (have to) be enough to be part of someone else’s happiness.
And what of those who do not choose? This afterlife depends on those who reject nirvana’s elusive promise: all those filmmakers and caseworkers. The harried workers resemble hapless, exasperated bodhisattvas, without their selfless motives. They each have personal reasons of their own for declining to move on, yet they do assist others. Their motives vary: attachment and responsibility to a living child (Kawashima), lack of attachment to anyone (Mochizuki), terror of abandonment (Shiori), responsibility “for [one’s own] life” (Iseya), or the pleasures of music, go, and work (Nakamura, the station chief) or of conversation, elegant bronzes, and Earl Grey tea (Sugie). The numerous filmmakers who suddenly appear to create the films evidently stay around to continue making movies.
Like all those filmmakers who have refused to choose, Shiori continues entangled with others, who will forget her when they choose their own memories. Father-less, bereft, she makes a quietly feminist move from girl-with-a-crush to young woman-with-work and purpose. She has advised the teenage girl that her memory has been used before, listened silently as her male colleagues talk about their earliest memories, tried out in the bath the suggestion that immersion can reduce anxiety and restore the womb’s security, moved in solitude through a populous city that does not see her, showed Mochizuki what he had meant to Kyoko in his absence, and suffered his loss. With Mochizuki gone, Shiori emerges as a counselor in her own right. If a protagonist had to be designated, it is this solitary young woman at the margins who moves to the center, filled with anticipation, awaiting her first client’s entrance, as the film ends. Kore-eda concludes not with disappearing selves, but with the on-going work of making movies of the lives and stories and moments of others. Shiori looks toward a door about to be opened by a new, never before seen or encountered person entering eternity.
From this afterlife religion has been removed, but it perhaps requires a Japanese Buddhist context to be imagined in the first place. (Granted, Kore-eda has said that the initial idea for the film came while transcribing some television footage in an editing room, “when I had an odd sensation: what if after you die you sat in front of a TV monitor watching endless images from your own life?”38) The absence of hell and everyone’s ending up here surprises Iseya, a lanky, smirking, spiky-haired youth in leather pants and purple-ruffed shirt, who finds fault with the concept (Why memory? Boring) and refuses to choose. The Japanese began satirizing hell in the eighteenth century (having acquired it only in the sixth century CE). Hiraga Gennai’s Rootless Weeds (1763) parodies hell’s expansion by shady real-estate dealers, while contemporaneous prints show the boiling torture cauldrons covered with spiderwebs, the demons playing cards, and Enma picking his nose—nobody has arrived in hell in so long. Hellish imagery remains current, as in the lurid cult film Jigoku (Hell, 1960). In the film, the next stage remains as obscure as nirvana or enlightenment. No one knows what it is like, but here it is achieved by attachment to one memory/thought, and detachment from all others.
Comically, benignly, the film turns a traditional Buddhist preparation for death into going to the movies. In the Pure Land Buddhism that developed in the Heian period (794–1185), the monk Genshin codified the procedures to follow to be reborn in the “pure land” of Amida Buddha. Once there one’s own Buddhahood was assured. Concentration at the last moment on Amida Buddha was essential: a stray or mistaken thought could send one to an evil realm of rebirth. So one looked at an image of the Buddha, visualized the Buddha, and chanted the nenbutsu. In a secular modern context, what activity better promotes absolute concentration than watching a movie of one self? Staring at a screen in the dark, one disappears into the film, which remains other. The “last-moment thought” is both outside and inside, like the Buddha. Such a death is available to any of us who choose in our last moments to think of what we loved, if our last moments permit our doing so.
Kore-eda’s afterlife borrows death to validate a moment or sequence of insignificant moments. Yet he also instructs us in what matters, in what we should value, which he leaves—with perfect confidence—in our hands. We will not choose wrong. We look into ourselves for what we want to find right or lovely—loved—about our lives. Often we find others there, or dependence on others. If we look past ourselves to the filmmaker making our film and his own, we find ourselves, where we often are and like to be, at the movies.
These current afterlives are all in their ways didactic; they moralize the life of the present, though no more than any other fiction. What special brief are they looking to find by entertaining a world beyond the life of this one? These fictions juxtapose this teeming life with an immortality they simultaneously deny and invoke. Their purposes are various—Coetzee draws the writer into herself, into the final place of demands on responsibility and being; Kundera into a wry acceptance of immortality’s passing; Stern into wondrous stories to be told while otherwise staying alive; Saunders into the pathos and pain of being. Kaufman and Jonze move from New York to California and dive into a pool. Kore-eda provokes his viewers into the life assessment of traditional judgmental afterlives and invites us to accept the insignificance of our passing by.
No one believes in the afterlife he considers. Coetzee’s afterlife is too literary and allusive to be mistaken for an actual hypothesis, as Costello herself observes. Kundera and Stern are explicit—lest we be confused or tempted or doubt their anti-afterlife bona fides—that nothingness lies at the end of the road. Saunders may have a hankering after his vision of merging with all being, but it is doubtful that he believes in the adventures of his chatty staying and returning dead. The dead, of course, do stay and do return, as the Chinese poet Yiwu Liao observes, “I have had many dreams about people who have been dead a long time, but their souls are still among us.”39 Their souls are, as “John Malkovich” knows and Fukansai Habian complains, in our heads. Like Kundera’s Agnès, they will disappear when we do.
No one is concerned that absence of belief in an afterlife encourages immorality or devalues life and deprives it of meaning. It is true that many of the behaviors endorsed in Kundera and Stern, Coetzee and Saunders, Jonze and Kore-eda would once have been regarded as desperately immoral. Fornication is pervasive, and Kundera and Jonze permit adultery. Would they concur with Samuel Scheffler’s thought-experiment—that without the immortality or continuing existence of our species, moral valuation and meaning would cease? Certainly, they value life’s on-goingness, and the recurring trope of the young woman starting anew sustains Scheffler’s argument. Yet for human valuing, the life that continues need not be human. It need not even be life. Elizabeth Costello should find in the disappearance of the human species the salvation of the animals, the gray whales, the frogs. Only the beetles need no assistance from human absence. Other beings may people other stars, but they are not required for Temple Grandin to experience awe before the stars.
Moral evaluation and meaning of course cease without people. As Emmanuel Levinas reinterprets Genesis 1–4, there was no good until the woman took the fruit and made humans able, unlike nature, to differentiate good and evil. Until there are no people, or other moral evaluators and meaning-makers, morality and meaning continue. Scheffler’s apocalyptic thought-experiment impels him to a more impassioned and ingenious sense of global responsibility, not accidentally but inevitably. Thinking about what happens at death does that to people. As we elaborate what happens “after,” we articulate our profoundest values and adjust how we fit in the cosmos. It is a universal phenomenon in every sense.
As for “wonderful life,” that is what anti-afterlife ideology is all about. That is what embarrasses Elizabeth Costello, and Kore-eda puts in a foreign language, what Stern and Jonze possess and evokes Kundera’s nostalgia. Even sardonic Philip Larkin pins Dante’s multi-foliate rose, “million-petalled,” between Lucretius and Epicurus’s two oblivions, “being here” and not there. Yet denying the life to come and affirming the life that passes suppose considerable complacency about the way things are. Surely there are many people for whom life is not wonderful. Kore-eda knows some want only to forget. Saunders finds misery rising everywhere. Larkin describes old age as driveling and drooling, though not abandoned in a ditch, before and after his lament for atoms separating. The bumper sticker “Life happens” means nothing good.
It is possible to deny a life to come and disparage the life in place. As Samuel Beckett has it, “fuck life.” His characters speak of dust and dead children, “the face in the ashes,” and being gone.40 Rockaby’s recorded “Voice” calls up death: “rock her off/ stop her eyes/ fuck life/ stop her eyes/ rock her off/ rock her off.” His Henry considers not heaven, but hell, in terms Addison and Steele would find familiar: “Ada, too, conversation with her, that was something, that’s what hell will be like, small chat to the babbling of Lethe about the good old days when we wished we were dead. Price of margarine fifty years ago. And now. Price of blueband now!”41 “The good old days when we wished we were dead”: Kundera’s nostalgia dogs even Beckett and his Henry “mad to talk.” Beckett’s women are old and sterile, the old trope recurring as antithesis. No suicides, though: old men, old women, mere mouths keep on. Keeping on, turning despair over and over, twisting it like a strand of hair, a rope of sand, a prayer, the nonsense syllables soothe, like any mantra, like a rosary told on beads of syllables.
So “That Time” ends, “not a sound only the old breath and the leaves turning and then suddenly this dust whole place suddenly full of dust when you opened your eyes from floor to ceiling nothing only dust and not a sound only what was it it said come and gone was that it something like that come and gone come and gone no one come and gone in no time gone in no time” (234). Narrative disintegrates to babble, but babbling the babble soothes. Repeated, varied, babbled syllables restore the soul. Try it. Read Beckett’s last two lines aloud. Lexical associations make syntax unnecessary. Or “A Piece of Monologue”: “The dead and gone. The dying and the going. From the word go. The word begone…. on all sides nowhere. Unutterably faint. The globe alone. Alone gone” (268). Globe gone. Keeping the words in play, vowels lengthening and shifting, reminds Coetzee’s readers that words do not oppose experience but constitute their own. Beckett plays the lexemes of mortality salience like an organ toccata, touching every key. “Birth was the death of him” (263): the thought is dismal, the repetition consoling, the paradox inspiriting, enlivening, the commonplace joyful and bitter. No spurned or spurning lover of “wandâfuru raifu” (the thing, not the movie), Beckett models that sad lover, angry at having been born, angrier at not being dead, angriest at having to die. It brings out the best in him. “Not I” knows, as the curtain falls, “hit on it in the end…then back…God is love…tender mercies…new every morning…back in the field…. April morning…. face in the grass…nothing but the larks…. pick it up—” (223). Croak murmurs, pausing, in “Words and Music,” “The face. The face. The face. The face.” Music in the stage direction waxes “warmly sentimental, for about one minute” (131). Life is a miserable gig, but at least it does not last forever.
The desires and attachments that lead us to create other worlds because we want more of this do not cease with the knowledge that there is no other world. Such knowledge only increases the poignancy of longing, itself a form of pleasure. Tracing and erasing imaginary worlds speaks the unrequited love that all beings have for their world. There is community in the dark. “I will go to him, but he will not return to me.”