This book has explored the idea that modern, Western secular cultures have retained a belief in the concept of Hell as an event or experience of endless, unjust or unspeakable suffering which occurs in actual, human lives, and which has, in particular, been realised or made immanent in twentieth-century history. Within this historic context, the descent to Hell has emerged as one of the important narratives by which late twentieth-century Westerners come to know themselves as coherent selves. While perception of the different ways in which we are already in Hell is a characteristically late twentieth-century insight, the decision to embark on the journey of descent is one mode of actively responding to the prevalence of the infernal. As Notley's heroine says, ‘“Down” “is now the only way” “to rise”’ (The Descent of Alette, p. 26). From the nineteenth century to the present day, Marx's writings on the capitalist economy, reinforced by psychoanalytic accounts of subjectivity, have contributed to the valence of the idea that a descent into Hell can be the means of recovering – or discovering – selfhood. But these more recent frameworks have combined with earlier literary and religious models of katabatic narrative to produce the notion of a self made ethical by its encounter with the underworld.

By way of conclusion, I wish to discuss a recent, historical example of an infernal encounter being refashioned into the narrative of a journey of descent and return.