‘Not-All-There’ in the Necropolis: Afterlife and Madness in Urban Novels

Abstract

The paper takes its departure point from a seemingly innocuous idiom that common English parlance uses to describe a person who has lost possession of their rational mind: “not all there.” Interrogating the locality that this deictic “there” implies, the argument juxtaposes it with recent religious scholarship on the Afterlife, which posits that, by extension, from the absence of the risen Christ from the tomb, the Christian subject is essentially similarly ‘not there’. Thus, the paper treads a thin line between sacredness and profanity in attempting to map out the spatial coordinates and configuration of the imaginary realms of the life-less and mind-less, that is, the Afterlife and madness, respectively. This examination is conducted through late 20th-century literary representations of, on the one hand, the Afterlife as an urban netherworld, experienced as infernal and life-negating, and of the city perceived through a schizophrenic mind, which displays an uncanny similarity to Hell: disorienting, dissipating, and ghostly. In this manner, following recent scholarship of embodied cognition, the paper demonstrates an unexpected and hitherto unexplored affinity between the Afterlife as a key concept of conventional religious thought and madness and the mad subject as an oft-reviled cultural, social, and literary figure.