Abstract
Drawing on archival material from the Harry Ransom Center, De Cristofaro considers Crace’s treatment of the end, as death and apocalypse, in Being Dead (1999) and The Pesthouse (2007). Through analyses of the novels’ narrative structures, De Cristofaro argues that they expose the sense of an ending—our use of endings to make sense of time—as a construct that creates ‘false patterns out of chaos’. Being Dead underlines how no sense of an ending is available in human lives, thus foregrounding the tension between time as lived and time as narrated. The Pesthouse undercuts the sense-making function of the end through the absence of the apocalypse in the narrative and the aftermath, which is far from the utopian renewal central to traditional apocalyptic logic.
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Notes
- 1.
The research for this chapter was supported by a Harry Ransom Center Alfred A. and Blanche W. Knopf Fellowship. My deepest thanks to the sponsors, and to the very helpful and friendly staff of the Harry Ransom Center, in particular, Bridget Gayle Ground, Kate Hayes, Kathryn Millan, and Rick Watson, for providing me access to the invaluable resource of the Jim Crace Papers. Many thanks also to Jim Crace for granting me permission to quote from his Papers and for his kind and generous encouragement. Jim Crace Papers, Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin (henceforth abbreviated as HRC), ‘Juvenilia, early works: notebook with handwritten and typescript notes and fragments, undated’, box 39, folder 2.
- 2.
Jim Crace Papers, Harry Ransom Center, ‘Notebook, undated’ box 3, folder 6.
- 3.
Jim Crace Papers, Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin, ‘Work plan, schedule, notes, 1998, 1999, 2007’ box 3, folder 7; ‘Preliminary chapter synopses and drafts’, box 3, folder 8.
- 4.
Jim Crace Papers, Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin, ‘Work plan, schedule, notes, 1998, 1999, 2007’ box 3, folder 7.
- 5.
Jim Crace Papers, Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin, draft of chapters 1-4, dated 23 October 1998, in ‘Preliminary chapter synopses and drafts’, box 3, folder 8.
- 6.
This challenge to the sense of an ending is already embedded within the novel’s epigraph, one in a long line of Crace’s invented epigraphs, which emphasises how ‘being dead’ is nothing but ‘Putrefaction and Manor/And unrelenting Rot’.
- 7.
In his plan for Being Dead, Crace identifies the narrative strands as follows: ‘A Ten days between lovemaking in the singing dunes and the removal of the bodies—a period of grace’, ‘B The days between Joseph meeting Celice as students and their making love amid the singing dunes’, and ‘C The story of their last day, told backwards, beginning with the murder and ending with Joseph waking in the morning’. He then summarises the chapters under each strand in order—chronological for A and B, and in reverse for C—and then proceeds to mix the chapters of the different strands up. While there are differences between this plan and Being Dead’s published version—for one thing, in the published version the days elapsing between the murder and the removal of the bodies are six, not ten—this work plan evidences that the tension between A (or, ‘necrometer’) and B and C (or, ‘quiverings’) is at the core of Crace’s project from an early stage. See Jim Crace Papers, Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin, ‘Work plan, schedule, notes, 1998, 1999, 2007’ box 3, folder 7.
- 8.
It is interesting to note the passage from the already mentioned draft of Chapter Two dated 23 October 1998—‘To commence their journey as they disembark but then to take them back where they have travelled from, is to turn against that trio of illusionists—the day of judgment, paradise, eternity’ (ibid.)—to the published version ‘To start their journey as they disembark, but then to take them back where they have travelled from, is to produce a version of eternity’ (Being Dead, 5). This shift signals Crace’s intention to not only debunk the theological versions of the sense of an ending but to create his own comforting sense of an ending through narrative , all the while underlining its constructedness.
- 9.
Although, as I outline in note 8, Crace does conceive of the three narrative strands as distinct, Philip Tew notices that the separation between them is not clear- cut, for ‘there are labyrinthine connections and overlapping chronologies’ (Tew 2006, 137), with the strands often coexisting within the same chapter. While I concur with Tew that this entails a complication to teleology, I argue that Crace’s alternation between a forward-moving narrative and two backward-looking narratives foregrounds the tension between time as lived and time as narrated.
- 10.
Jim Crace Papers, Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin, ‘Letter and notes, 1999’, box 5, folder 7.
- 11.
Jim Crace Papers, Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin, ‘Notebook, undated’, box 50, folder 9.
- 12.
Jim Crace Papers, Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin, ‘Notebook 2003-4’, box 11, folder 6; ‘Notes and research, 2003-5’, box 11, folder 7–8.
- 13.
I discuss in more detail the shift in the contemporary apocalyptic imagination from apocalypse as utopian revelation to apocalypse as dystopian catastrophe as a shift that critiques the temporality of the traditional apocalyptic paradigm in De Cristofaro (2018).
- 14.
- 15.
I explore the representational impasse of post-apocalyptic fiction—where impasse emphasises the idea of an aporetic non-passage—in greater detail in relation to The Pesthouse in De Cristofaro (2013). In the chapter, I focus on the temporal aspects of this impasse and the critique of the sense of an ending.
- 16.
Jim Crace Papers, Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin, ‘Notes and research, 2003-5’, box 11, folder 8.
- 17.
Jim Crace Papers, Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin, ‘Notebook 2003-4’, box 11, folder 6.
- 18.
I use the term ‘pioneers’ hardly by chance, as Crace researched this era of American history and westward expansion thoroughly, as evidenced by his notes on G. M. Candler’s The Way West: Transportation in the American West; Frank McLynn’s Wagons West: The Epic Story of America’s Overland Trails; Parke S. Rouse Jr’s The Great Wagon Road: from Philadelphia to the South; and Francis Parkman’s The Oregon Trail. See Jim Crace Papers, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin, ‘Notebook 2003-4’, box 11, folder 6.
- 19.
Ibid.
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De Cristofaro, D. (2018). 4 ‘False patterns out of chaos’: Writing Beyond the Sense of an Ending in Being Dead and The Pesthouse. In: Shaw, K., Aughterson, K. (eds) Jim Crace. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-94093-9_5
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