Title: Critical Essay on "The Afterlife"
Source: Poetry for Students. Ed. David A. Galens. Vol. 18. Detroit: Gale, 2003. From Literature Resource Center.
Document Type: Critical essay
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Full Text: COPYRIGHT 2003 Gale, COPYRIGHT 2006 Gale
A writer once said that nineteenth-century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, who claimed that "God is dead," was a great religious thinker not because he pondered the metaphysics of Christian theology--he did not--but because in his scalding critiques of Christianity he addressed genuine religious questions such as "How should human beings live?" Collins, in his serio-comic book of poems, Questions about Angels, also addresses weighty religious questions without being religious. In poem after poem, he considers the ways in which religious imagery has become entangled with human thought and desire and ferrets out the meaning of such entanglements. In "The Afterlife," for example, Collins draws on the ways in which life after death has been represented in a number of religions in order to underscore the essential mystery at the heart of all belief systems and to emphasize the relationship between imagination and belief. By privileging the imagination over real belief in religious ideas, Collins participates in the modern inclination to see in literature and art a kind of secular salvation.By privileging the imagination over real belief in religious ideas, Collins participates in the modern inclination to see in literature and art a kind of secular salvation.
Imagination is at the root of belief. Although some people claim to have had visions of the afterlife, to have seen the dead, to have seen God, most believers content themselves with imagining how the afterlife might appear, based on its depiction in religious and historical texts. It is the human capacity to imagine that Collins really emphasizes in his poem. He begins this process by asking readers to imagine themselves going about the mundane activities of daily life, "preparing for sleep, brushing your teeth / or riffling through a magazine in bed." These are the times when people daydream the most, when they review their day and think about their future. All of the poem's images are associated with the end of the day and preparing oneself for bed. Just as readers prepare to end their day, the speaker suggests, the dead prepare to begin theirs.Collins's unusual twist in the poem is that "everyone is right" in their beliefs about life after death. The dead begin their journey in the afterlife just where they left off in life, getting what they expected. Thus begins Collins's satiric jabs at the idea of belief itself. By using the view of relativism to structure his poem, Collins makes fun of much contemporary political thinking associated with ideas of tolerance. Relativism is a philosophical position often associated with thinkers such as Ludwig Wittgenstein, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and Richard Rorty. Relativists commonly hold that one thing (e.g., morals, beauty, knowledge, etc.) is relative to a particular framework or standpoint (e.g., culture, history, language, etc.) and deny that any standpoint is privileged over another. Critics of relativism assert that thinkers such as those named above claim that all belief systems are equally true and often blame relativists for the erosion of moral standards in contemporary society.
Collins's poem can be labeled relativist in that it asserts the afterlife of each individual is relative to his or her belief. Collins, however, is not serious in his claim. Rather, he uses the idea of relativism to challenge the very notion of an afterlife. He begins this challenge by calling on the authority of Lazarus, a biblical character best known for coming back from the dead. Collins turns Lazarus's silence about his experience into a secret the speaker of "The Afterlife" divulges to readers. Part of the charm of the poem is that it uses the Bible's authority to debunk its own representation of the afterlife.
At a time when calls for diversity can sometimes paralyze the mind's capacity to discriminate among even wildly varying choices, Collins illustrates the extreme of such thinking. His fantasy of an afterlife that pleases everyone exemplifies a kind of response that many might consider "politically correct," in that no one is wrong and everyone's belief is not only honored but validated.
However, this is a fantasy, and Collins makes sure readers know that. By showing that Lazarus's secret about the truth of the afterlife corresponds to the "alcove in your head," Collins highlights the link between the imagination and belief. Specifically, he demonstrates how the latter is a consequence of the former. Thinking itself is abstract, as is belief, and neither could exist without the capacity of the mind to form images, to give shape to the tumult of desire that propels human beings forward on a daily basis. The images Collins chooses satisfy as they entertain, titillate, and offend. They are at once hilarious and blasphemous.
Because the poem is about the afterlife, death plays a key role. Throughout the poem, the dead talk, they sing, they eat, but they never seem truly dead. Even when they "lie on their backs in their coffins," they still desire. Collins's genius is in domesticating the idea of death, making it palatable through his cartoonish depictions of the afterlife. The dead are not really dead but part of the continuum of life. He illustrates this idea in other poems in the collection as well, including "The Dead," the poem immediately following "The Afterlife." In the former poem, the dead watch over the living "Through the glass-bottom boats of / heaven as they row themselves slowly through eternity."
Collins's representations of the afterlife draw on images taken from popular culture, as much as they do hallowed religious texts and, as such, they illustrate the supremacy of the imagination, what poet Wallace Stevens called "the power of the mind over the possibility of things." Rather than affirm the continuation of individual identity after death, Collins's images play with the idea, manipulating readers' desire for such possibility while simultaneously caricaturing it. In the popular poem, "Sunday Morning," which spells out the significance of the imagination for modern society, Stevens writes, "Death is the mother of beauty." By this, Stevens means that the inevitability of death gives value and beauty to life, and that human beings should find meaning in the sensuous experience of earthly things rather than waiting for a reward in the afterlife. Collins echoes this sentiment in the last stanza of his poem by describing the death of those who died believing in nothing.
The rest just lie on their backs in their coffins
wishing they could return so they could learn Italian
or see the pyramids, or play some golf in a light rain.
They wish they could wake in the morning like you
and stand at a window examining the winter trees,
every branch traced with the ghost writing of snow.
The moral of the poem, then, is that the living should appreciate life, taking advantage of the opportunities they have and not spend it imagining what might come after death. Ingeniously, Collins bookends the various descriptions of the afterlife with the image of a person ending his day and beginning a new one, thus giving shape to both the journeys of the dead and the living. In addressing the reader, the speaker is also addressing himself. The "winter trees" and "the ghost writing of snow" evoke death's presence in life, its reminder both to be aware of the possibilities of the present and to honor the past.Source Citation
Semansky, Chris. "Critical Essay on 'The Afterlife'." Poetry for Students. Ed. David A. Galens. Vol. 18. Detroit: Gale, 2003. Literature Resource Center. Web. 18 Jan. 2011.
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