Overview: The Many Faces of Immortality

WHAT IF …?” Literary works fascinated or troubled by the idea of life without end are driven by this question. For three centuries at least, ever since the large-scale emancipation from theological authority, such works, rooted in various contexts of intellectual history, have suggested a wide variety of answers, and they continue to do so. Their authors are concerned, in one form or another, with the cognitive potential of reasoned imagination, the “imaginación razonada” that Jorge Luis Borges, in his preface to Adolfo Bioy Casares's novel on the theme of immortality, La invención de Morel, declared to be the prerogative of literary writers. The considerable diversity of their answers to the “what if …?” question does, however, tend to be more confusing than illuminating, at least at first glance. A less bewildering overview may emerge if one selects the works most relevant to the implied condition humaine and arranges them in a coherent spectrum of intellectual and emotional reactions to the fictional experience of immortality in “this world.”

Only rarely do novels or plays offer undiluted euphoria about everlasting life in those earthly paradises that “immortalist” theoreticians have extrapolated from science. This is hardly surprising when one recalls that throughout the nineteenth century writers like Atterbom, Morris, and Yeats had demonstrated that such Edens were deceptive: unlivable in the long term, so that their denizens would sooner or later decide to leave and thereby renounce their immortality (see pp. 31–32). But these writers did not speak for all dramatists and novelists who took up the theme of life without death, least of all those who ruled out the option of a return to mortality. J. M. Barrie, Italo Calvino, and G. B. Shaw managed to perceive enduring positive and even alluring facets of immortality in their works on the subject—without entirely downplaying its drawbacks.