June 13, 2025

I finally got around to reading George Saunders’ Lincoln in the Bardo, which won the Booker Prize in 2017. I don’t find the time to read much contemporary fiction, but I have wanted to read this novel since it was published, since I am no doubt one of the relatively few who knows what that word in the title refers to. In Tibetan Buddhism, the Bardo is the realm between death and rebirth. So for eight years I have wanted to know what in the world (or out of it) Tibetan Buddhism could possibly have to do with Abraham Lincoln. That dramatic disjunction describes the technique of the book. On the one hand, it is historically grounded, based on actual sources that are quoted throughout the work, often in place of standard narrative exposition. On the other hand, it is a wild phantasmagoria of scenes set in a realm in which, as the reader slowly realizes, the appearance of things and characters changes according to the mental state of the perceiver at any given moment.

It reminded me very much of William Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, which I have been talking about lately on the Expanding Eyes podcast. In one of the scenes that Blake calls “Memorable Fancies,” a conventionally pious Angel, at Blake’s request, shows Blake his eternal lot. They behold an Abyss in which vast spiders pursue their prey. When Blake asks what is his eternal lot, the Angel says, “between the black & white spiders.” In other words, you’re guilty and damned, you sinner. The Angel flees, but Blake remains, whereupon the scene turns to a pleasant bank beside a river with a harper. Finding the Angel again, Blake says, “All that we saw was owing to your metaphysics.” Then he shows the Angel his own lot. He opens the Bible, and inside is a great pit filled with monkeys who pluck the limbs off their prey and then devour the torsos. The Angel complains, “Thy phantasy has imposed on me & thou oughtest to be ashamed.” Blake answers, “We impose on one another, & it is but lost time to converse with you.” That is, for one thing, a political parable for our time. But it also describes Saunders’ version of Bardo, where, as Blake says, as the Eye, such is the Object.

But situated between historical realism and satiric grotesquerie is what Saunders has said inspired the novel, the true account of how Abraham Lincoln was so distraught after the death of his son Willie at the age of 11 that he entered the crypt at night alone and held his son’s body in his arms. These scenes of overwhelming grief are so heartrending that they are almost unbearable. Lincoln in the Bardo is written in an experimental style, yet it is anything but what John Gardner called postmodernist “jazzing around.” It is an intensely emotional book, and the satiric fantasias act to counterbalance a melancholic mood that could easily tip into the sentimental. The title is subtle, for while on the literal level it is Willie, after his death, who is in the Bardo, in another way it is Lincoln who has wandered outside ordinary reality into a mysterious borderland. And it is he, not his son, who is faced with the task that faces the dead souls, that of letting go. They have to learn to let go of life. He has to learn to let go of his son. It is from this theme of letting go that the depths of emotion in this novel arise.

Interviewers are frustrating. So often they maddeningly neglect to ask the witheringly obvious questions. Are they really that oblivious, or are they trying to avoid going too deep? Questions such as: “Where in the world did you pick up this Bardo notion? Do you actually believe in it? Is your use of it accurate?” I have not found any interviewer in which Saunders addresses the first two questions, but I can somewhat answer the third. The source of the concept is a text, the Bardo Thödol, that its translator took the liberty of titling The Tibetan Book of the Dead, after the famous Egyptian Book of the Dead. Its actual title means something like Liberation through Hearing in the Intermediate State. But it is not a bad extension, for both the Tibetan and the Egyptian books are intended to be read to a dead person as an instruction manual about what to expect and how to behave after death. They are, in that sense, words intended to wake the dead, although the awakening is mental and not literal resuscitation. One of the great works of 20^th-century literature, James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, is usually considered a dream-book, everything in it being the dream of some character who never awakens, but it takes place in a strange and metamorphic state that is also another version of Bardo, as its title indicates. The “wake” is both a funeral and an awakening, so that Finnegans Wake is itself a book of the dead. Its satiric symbol for that awakening is the earwig, which maddens people by burrowing into their ears and making a noise. While we are in a satiric frame of mind, I would add, facetiously, that lecturing into the ear of a corpse, hoping that something will penetrate, is an all-too-apt metaphor for teaching. That statement is not meant entirely facetiously. The urgency of trying to awaken people to a wider life is quite serious.

Saunders’ version of the Bardo is very much his own, although it is in the spirit, so to speak, of the original. Those interested in the original may approach it by way of Jung’s “Psychological Commentary on The Tibetan Book of the Dead,” to my mind one of his best performances. Tibetan Buddhism is based on the idea of reincarnation according to one’s karma. The ideal, however, would be to escape the endless wheel of rebirth, which is a wheel of illusion, to jump off the merry-go-round by achieving enlightenment. The Bardo Thödol lists six phases or mental states, three of which occur in the Bardo period. It is the very first that provides the moment of potential escape. It is called the Chikhai Bardo and occurs at the moment of death. The dead person will see a “Clear Light” which is the One Mind, the only true reality. To identify with it would mean to cease to identify with limited ego consciousness and thus be translated out of ordinary “reality” altogether. Most people, however, will fail to do so because they are possessed by desire and fear, and will therefore pass onward to the second state, the Chönyid Bardo, which is one of “karmic illusion”—that is, of illusions manufactured by one’s karma rather than by oneself as an individual. Jung identifies these as manifestations of his archetypes, so that this phase is a passage through the collective unconscious. However, Jung says, “the contents of the Chönyid Bardo reveal the archetypes, the karmic images which appear first in their terrifying form. The Chönyid state is equivalent to a deliberately induced psychosis” (520). Jung quotes from the text:

Then the Lord of Death will place round thy neck a rope and drag thee along; he will cut off thy head, tear out thy heart, pull out thy intestines, lick up thy brain, drink thy blood, eat thy flesh, and gnaw thy bones; but thou wilt be incapable of dying. Even when the body is hacked to pieces, it will revive again. The repeated hacking will cause intense pain and torture. (520)

The nightmare imagery resembles both that of Blake’s Memorable Fancy and some of the imagery of Lincoln in the Bardo, where people suffer a kind of bizarre Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome manifesting itself in physical symptoms deriving from various ways they have suffered in life, through death in war, through rape, through physical accidents such as having a beam fall on them. A man who nursed unacted desires, to echo a Blake aphorism, and died frustrated has to lug around a huge member. Jung is not “psychologizing” a religious text about the supernatural. The point of his commentary is that all reality is psychic—we have no access to anything beyond the psyche. His second point is that Buddhism in general, and the Bardo Thödol in particular, agree. When I say, using Romantic vocabulary, that the imagination is the home of human life, “imagination” means the same as Jung’s “psyche.” It is a house of many mansions, and we never leave home.

Most people will simply not agree with this. Most people are literalists. Even if they are scornful of the naiveté of the fundamentalists, they are fundamentalist about some solid, given reality that is out there and resistant to our desires and will. That is why, when such people die, they often do not realize that they are dead. They are so convinced that the only reality is the subject-object state of “realism” and common sense, that which Blake calls the “cloven fiction,” that it is inconceivable to them that they are no longer in it. They are like the cartoon characters who run off a cliff but continue to hang suspended in mid-air—until they look down. This is true of the majority of the people in Saunders’ version of Bardo. At one point, when a crowd of them suddenly realize they are dead, they are astonished and start popping out of existence like huge flash bulbs. Likewise the tour de force recognition scene in M. Night Shayamalan’s The Sixth Sense (1999) consists of the main character and the audience realizing simultaneously that he has been dead for the entire film. When he realizes, he ceases to exist.

At any rate, the Chönyid Bardo, with its terrors and tortures, is the realm of the archetypal powers we call the gods, its imagery being that of a Last Judgment by the gods and a consignment to various punishments for misdeeds during life. Again, the West literalizes such imagery, but the Bardo realm is ultimately a realm of illusion to be escaped from. The last of the three stages is the Sidpa Bardo, in which, as described by Jung, “the dead man, unable to profit by the teachings of the Chikhai and Chönyid Bardo, begins to fall a prey to sexual fantasies and is attracted by the vision of mating couples. Eventually he is caught into a womb and born into the earthly world again. Meanwhile, as one might expect, the Oedipus complex starts functioning. If his karma destines him to be reborn as a man, he will fall in love with his mother-to-be and will find his father hateful and disgusting. Conversely, the future daughter will be highly attracted to her father-to-be and repelled by her mother” (515).

Modern depth psychology, trying to trace human identity back to its source, actually traces the birth-path backwards. The patient, as Jung says, “journeys back through the world of infantile-sexual fantasy to the womb. It has even been suggested in psychoanalytical circles that the trauma par excellence is the birth-experience itself—nay more, psychoanalysts even claim to have probed back to memories of intra-uterine origin” (515). Suddenly we are back at the theme of a recent newsletter about life before birth. Jung slyly suggests that it is too bad that Freudian psychoanalysis stops there. If it had carried the regression one step further backward, they would arrive at the Chönyid Bardo, in other words the collective unconscious. But the motivation is, for the dead person in the Sidpa stage, the will to be born, driven by desire, enslaved to desire. I don’t know whether Saunders read Jung, but the inhabitants of his Bardo are locked into the lust, anger, greed, fears, and ambitions that they have imported from their lives, just as the denizens of Dante’s hell are still trapped in the mental state of their particular sin. The difference is that there is no rebirth in Saunders’ system—nor, for that matter, do we know whether there is any enlightenment, whether those who pop out of Bardo have transcended to a higher level of existence or have merely been pricked like soap bubbles. That is the major difference between the Bardo Thödol and Lincoln in the Bardo.

There is not much in Western religion to correspond to the Bardo, with the partial exception of the Catholic doctrine of purgatory, about which more in a moment. But societies worldwide believe in ghosts—that is, in souls that either return to this world from, well, somewhere or are stubbornly remaining here, refusing to depart. I have written a whole newsletter about ghosts, but hope the present one is from a new angle. Besides, that’s the point, that ghosts return. Why do ghosts return or remain as unwanted guests? There is in fact a question about whether “ghost” and “guest” are etymologically related. The linguists say no. “Ghost” means spirit, as in the German “Geist,” which is why the Holy Spirit is also the Holy Ghost. “Guest” is related to a root that could mean both “host” and “guest,” the latter being an outsider who was a potential risk. Thus, in Latin, hostis, enemy or stranger, and hospes, guest or host, are related. But some people insist there is a metaphorical connection even if there is no linguistic one, thus preferring the spirit to the letter. Ghosts are guests, usually unwanted. In a brilliant essay called “The Uncanny,” Freud observes that the German word for “uncanny” is unheimlich, literally “unhomelike.” The uncanny is the feeling of the familiar invaded by something strange and ominous. Ghosts are invaders of that sort—inhuman and possibly demonic and yet at the same time intimate, a family member or lover become uncanny.

But why do ghosts haunt the land of the living? Individual ghosts are driven by a variety of motives. First, some ghosts are filled with anguished regret for life unlived, or for life lived badly. To be dead is to be able to look back upon your life and see it as a completed pattern rather than something still in process and changing, which means to pronounce a kind of individual last judgment upon it. The dead, however, are normally silent, and cannot communicate that judgment. They can do so indirectly, however, through the device of the epitaph. The critic Geoffrey Hartman has a fine essay about the literary convention called the inscription. In “Wordsworth, Inscriptions, and Romantic Nature Poetry,” he defines the inscription as

anything conscious of the place on which it was written, and this could be tree, rock, statue, gravestone, sand, window, album, sundial, dog’s collar, back of fan, back of painting. It ranged in scope and seriousness from Pope’s inscription on the collar of the Prince of Wales’ dog: “I am his Highness dog at Kew / Pray tell me sir whose dog are you?” to Thomas Warton’s “Verses on Sir Joshua’s Painted Window at New College.” (207-08)

Wordsworth’s first published poem was an inscription, “Lines left upon a Seat in a Yew-Tree.” This notion of an inanimate object that speaks includes the epitaph, in which a gravestone speaks with the voice of the dead person. The epitaph is thus a kind of ghost, a particularly ghostly ghost, as we might say, a merely momentary voice. Hartman notes that Wordsworth has a whole essay “Upon Epitaphs” (210). The epitaph may possess the threatening quality of traditional ghosts when the message is “do not disturb,” as in Shakespeare’s famous epitaph, “Cursed be he that moves my bones.” But the ghost may often attempt to sum up the life lived, occasionally with regret, as in Keats’s epitaph for himself, “Here lies one whose name was writ in water.” Using poetic license, Edgar Lee Masters expands the idea of the epitaph as remembrance of things past in Spoon River Anthology (1915), to which Lincoln in the Bardo has been compared. Each poem in the Anthology is an epitaph expanded into a dramatic monologue unfolding a whole life story.

In a sense, the only character in Lincoln in the Bardo who is not a ghost is Lincoln. Other living characters appear only in quoted historical sources and are not, with a couple of vivid but momentary exceptions, fleshed out as characters. The real drama takes place in the Bardo, where the dead characters regret bad luck and bad choices made, or are simply so attached to their previous lives that they cling to them like a child suffering from separation anxiety. Life unlived is a chief motivator of ghosts. Occasionally the ghosts are not fated to mere tragic regret. A minor classic of modern fantasy is Peter Beagle’s A Fine and Private Place (1960), written when the author was only 21 but witty and wise beyond his years. It’s a romantic comedy that takes place in a cemetery, featuring two couples, one dead and one living. The dead couple have only met now that they are dead, and learn that it’s never too late to fall in love. They go off together in the ending, which is left open, but there is hope they might be together for whatever comes next. They are contrasted with a man who has been hiding out in the cemetery for 20 years because he is afraid of life. He is taken in hand by a hilarious Jewish woman who came originally mourning her dead husband and no doubt saves him from a life of regret beyond the grave.

The second reason ghosts return is because of an act of violence or a curse that often has resulted from violence, one obvious example being Hamlet, Sr., murdered by his own brother, who attempts to play the role of nemesis, the agent that in Classical tragedy rights the moral balance when some crime has disturbed it. The question is which realm Hamlet’s father is on parole from. Shakespeare’s Protestant audience was not supposed to believe in purgatory, but if Hamlet, Sr. is a damned soul, or, worse, a demon in disguise, Hamlet should not be listening to his counsels. But plenty of ghosts linger because time is out of joint. In a late novel by Robertson Davies, Murther and Walking Spirits (1991), the narrator is murdered on the first page upon catching his wife in bed with her lover. The twist of the novel is that the narrator’s survival as a ghost turns out to have a greater purpose than revenge. Justice is done, but the ghost has no part in it. The killer, racked with guilt because he had not meant to kill the narrator, confesses privately but is not turned over to the authorities. His punishment is according to the spirit rather than the letter: he must live with the guilt of the murder all his life. The real purpose behind the narrator’s survival is so he can deepen his sense of connection with humanity through his own ancestors. He is shown a series of films (he was a film critic) that dramatize for him the life of several generations of his ancestors, whose stories are based on Davies’ own ancestry. The films amount to a Bardo in all but name. They are a version of the dreamlike experiences of souls in Bardo whose real purpose is a kind of education. Not only love but also liberal education occurs beyond the grave—who knew?

Another character who speaks from beyond the grave, Spoon River fashion, is the narrator in a remarkable country-folk ballad of 1959, “Long Black Veil,” who was executed after being falsely accused of murder. He refused to exonerate himself because his alibi was that he was having an affair with his best friend’s wife. The wife is thus guilty of his death because she did not speak up. Her punishment is exactly that of the murderer in Davies’ novel, to live with the guilt all her life. The title is explained in the refrain:

Now she walks these hills, in a long black veil 
She visits my grave, when the night winds wail 
Nobody knows, nobody sees 
Nobody knows, but me

Everyone who is anyone has covered the song because it is so powerful, including Johnny Cash, Dylan, Nick Cave, and the very odd combination of Mick Jagger with the Chieftains, who titled their 1995 album The Long Black Veil.

But the third and perhaps most powerful motivation for belief in ghosts and a realm beyond death is simply the desire for immortality. It is sometimes one of the most evil of human desires, the desire to be “as gods.” It is the desire that led Tom Riddle to become Voldemort, and the wizard Cob to open a breach with the land of the dead that is sucking the life out of Earthsea in The Farthest Shore (1972), the third novel of Ursula K. LeGuin’s classic fantasy series. At other times, the human attempt to achieve immortality is treated as merely doomed and tragic, as in the Gilgamesh Epic, whose hero, grieving the death of his best friend Enkidu, quests to find the magic plant that confers immortality but ultimately fails. Yeats wrote a number of poetic dramas modeled on the Noh plays of Japan. These are intensely stylized and non-realistic, the dancers wearing masks and singing and chanting the dialogue, and they often feature encounters with ghosts out on the liminal borderline of reality. Yeats’s first plays influenced by Noh drama were published in 1921 as Four Plays for Dancers and include “At the Hawk’s Well,” in which the Irish epic hero Cuchulain has sought out a well whose water only runs very seldom. However, he is distracted from his quest by a hawk-woman and misses the flowing of the waters. Yeats was not the only one to be influenced by Noh drama. Another was Benjamin Britten, whose first Noh-influenced work, Curlew River (1964), was based on an actual Noh play, in which the ghost of a dead boy appears above his tomb to assure his grieving mother that “The dead shall rise again.”

The purpose of the Bardo realm lies in its place in the system of karma. Instead of reliance upon a Savior, karma gives humanity a chance at its own salvation through repeated rebirths. If you fail the final exam, you may retake the course any number of times. But salvation in Tibetan Buddhism consists in transcending this world altogether. Some Western attempts to conquer time and death, in contrast, find ultimate value in life in this world. The central quest in the work of one of the giants of science fiction, Robert Heinlein, is the attempt to conquer time. Heinlein was preoccupied with death as the limit of the human condition from his first published story, “Lifeline,” in 1939. It is a slight story, but its subject is indicative. A man invents a machine that can tell people exactly when they are going to die. The point is the disruption this would cause in society, starting with the insurance companies. In Methuselah’s Children (1941, 1958) he invented the Families, who are enormously long-lived by virtue of a genetic mutation. Heinlein continued the story of the Families’ leader, Lazarus Long, in later books such as Time Enough for Love. But long life is not enough. The hero of Beyond This Horizon (1941) lives in utopia, but life is robbed of its meaning because there is no certainty about survival after death. He rests content only when he learns at the end that there is not only survival but a system of reincarnation through which his unborn child is going to be the rebirth of an old wise woman who has just died. In other stories, Heinlein explores the possibilities of time travel. In the famous tour de force “All You Zombies—” (1959), through a combination of time travel and sexual reassignment, all the characters turn out to be the same character. In this and later stories, Heinlein seems to be groping towards a vision of what Northrop Frye calls interpenetration, in which, when time and space are transcended, a total, cosmic identity is revealed that includes humanity, nature, and God, as well as past, present, and future, one symbol of which occurs in “All You Zombies—“, that of the ouroboros, the serpent with its tail in its mouth.

A less sophisticated but equally clever science fiction writer, Philip José Farmer, spun a five-volume series out of one spectacular concept. In the Riverworld novels, every human being who ever lived is resurrected by an alien race along the shores of a ten million mile long river, for purposes unknown. This gives Farmer the chance to make his protagonists famous people in history: Robert Francis Burton in the first novel, Mark Twain in a later one, resulting in an enjoyable romp. The purpose of the aliens is to provide a kind of moral proving ground for resurrected dead people, making Riverworld an eccentric twist on the idea of a Bardo realm.

But there are reasons for believing in ghosts and survival beyond death that derive less from the plight of the dead than from the needs of the living. According to the historian Jacques LeGoff in The Birth of Purgatory (1984), the notion of purgatory was partly inspired as a comfort for bereaved loved ones who feared for the fate of their departed in an age when fear of damnation was intense. Purgatory was not only a middle realm in which those who sincerely repented could ultimately be redeemed, it gave those left behind something they could do to help those they loved. By praying and having Masses said for the dead that they hoped were in purgatory, they could shorten their sentences. Purgatory resembles the Bardo in providing a chance of salvation, but differs from it in that the dead have already endured judgment and will ultimately be saved. They are only doing their time. But the dead in the Bardo seem both to have and not to have free will, generating a paradox similar to that of Christian predestination. Christians both have free will and are predestined by God. I am no expert, but the dead in the Bardo would seem to be in a similar position. They are told to choose the white light in the first stage, and yet, if they are determined by their karma, is their failure to choose it inevitable? What good does it do the priest to read the Bardo Thödol over the body of the dead person if that person’s fate is karmically preordained? I am not sure what the answer to this is.

Something about the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries led to a widespread anxiety about the fate of the dead and efforts to communicate with them beyond the grave. Lincoln was not the only parent to be intensely grief-stricken. Darwin was devastated by the loss of a daughter who was about the same age as Willie Lincoln, and never fully recovered from it. The promises of Christianity no longer seemed as convincing in the light of modern skepticism, and the public cast around for alternatives, ones that did not depend on blind faith but were based on actual proof and real experience. One of these was spiritualism, deriving in part from the writings of the 18^th century visionary Emmanuel Swedenborg (satirized by Blake in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell). Jung’s early professional work was in a psychiatric clinic, but he did independent research on séances and mediums, which were enormously popular for a time. Unless I missed something, Lincoln in the Bardo does not mention the most famous séances of all, those organized by Mary Todd Lincoln, prompted by the death of her son and attended by her husband. Presumably these lay outside of the time frame of the novel. Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain takes place in a sanitorium in which those who have been diagnosed with tuberculosis are isolated. The protagonist, Hans Castorp, is not only recuperating physically but undergoing what Mann referred to as “hermetic pedagogy.” One chapter dramatizes a séance in which the ghost of his dead cousin is so convincingly summoned that Hans turns on the light and flees the room.

Other methods of communication with the beyond included the Ouija board and automatic writing. Yeats developed a whole symbolic system and theory of historical cycles, or gyres, as he called them, out of the automatic writing of his wife, publishing it as A Vision (1925, 1937). Rather inconveniently, Mrs. Yeats later admitted that she had cheated. Fraud was of course rampant in spiritualism. Browning’s “Mr. Sludge, the Medium” is a long dramatic monologue by a con artist who has just been caught, his method of defense being to progressively cast doubt on all methods whatsoever of ascertaining the truth about anything.

Insofar as a vision of the afterlife is one of either stasis or an endless cycle, it is really a vision of hell. The former is represented by Sartre’s No Exit with its moral: hell is other people. Endlessly cyclic visions are Nietzsche’s “eternal return of the same,” which Nietzsche rightly saw as a horror. A recent newsletter spoke of Borges’ “The Circular Ruins,” in which a man dreams a son into existence but removes from the son’s memory the knowledge that he is only a dream. He sends him to be sacrificed by fire, but the son is invulnerable to the flames and apparently sends fire back to destroy his “father.” But at the end, the man, unhurt by the flames, realizes that he too is merely someone’s dream. It is like an ironic version of the phoenix myth, played out by doubles who may really be consubstantial, versions of one identity. In terms of the Bardo Thödol, this is the Sidpa Bardo, even though the Oedipal aspect of the conflict has been repressed by the will to power of what amounts to a magician. It is a frequent objection to Frye’s work that he overstresses the resemblances among literary works. Yet the resemblances are there, and we may learn something if we try to figure out why they are there. One of Yeats’s last plays, Purgatory, concerns another ironic cycle of repetition involving apparitions and father-son murder. The title is utterly ironic, since no one is purged of any sin. An old man admits to his son that 16 years ago he murdered his father, a brute who drunkenly impregnated his mother, hoping that the murder would atone for the mother’s lust in giving in to the father and thus free her from purgatory. A thoroughgoing nihilist, he then murders his son to prevent him from passing on the family’s bad traits in what some critics view as a kind of one-man eugenics movement. But it is all in vain: he hears the hoofbeats of his father’s horse approaching the house, and knows it is all going to play itself out again. The old man’s real desire should have been to kill his father before the father impregnated his mother, so that he himself would never have been born. But of course that would mean that he never existed to kill the father.

This kind of labyrinth is the Bardo dreaming-back when the attempt at transcendence fails. Thus, in its most ironic versions, the dead in the Bardo realm do not merely fail to recognize that they are dead but find it impossible to know whether they are alive or dead. The title of Gene Wolfe’s literary fantasy novel Peace (1975) is even more ironic than Yeats’s Purgatory. The narrator of Peace is another murderous old man who seems trapped in a house that keeps changing its dimensions. Gradually we realize that he is dead and not only refuses to admit it but keeps changing the details of his past history, probably to deny not only to the reader but to himself the full extent of the evil things he has done. He never gains the slightest insight, and, for that matter, neither does the reader. I put a fair amount of work into trying to figure out the truth behind the narrator’s evasions and contradictory plot details, but finally came to the conclusion that Wolfe has made it undecidable. Peace may be the most extreme unreliable-narrator story in literary history. It is one of the most disturbing novels I have ever read, and I don’t disturb easily. It is a vision of Bardo without the escape into rebirth, only the endless repetition of a nightmare. Being inside that house, that man’s mind, is like being trapped in the mind of a schizophrenic.

Saunders gives no indication of whether he “believes in” Bardo. Do we believe in it? That depends. Some of the material we have been examining suggests that a clear distinction between the world of the living and the world of the dead is too simple. Grief or any extreme mental state may take you to a strange borderland, a condition known as the liminal, yet another topic glanced at in previous newsletters. The liminal state is where an Otherworld intersects with this one, and reality becomes uncanny. When that happens, the quick and the dead may change places. Northrop Frye has essays on Dickens and Henry James that converge on a single theme. Different as they were, both Dickens and James wrote ghost stories. Both used the popular formulas of the ghost story as vehicles for an underlying vision that in fact informs all their fiction. In “Dickens and the Comedy of Humours,” Frye writes,

Few can read Dickens without catching the infection of his intense curiosity about the life that lies in the dark houses behind the lights of his loved and hated London. We recognize it even at second hand: when Dylan Thomas’s Under Milk Wood opens on a night of private dreams we can see an unmistakably Dickensian influence (235)

When that curiosity intensifies, it turns into a vision of a hidden Otherworld:

There is a hidden and private world of dream and death, out of which all the energy of human life comes. The primary manifestation of this world, in experience, is in acts of destructive violence and passion. It is the source of war, cruelty, arrogance, lust, and grinding the faces of the poor....It also produces the courage to fight against these things, and the instinctive virtue that repudiates them. (236-37)

Different as it is stylistically, the fiction of Henry James is based on much the same premise. In “Henry James and the Comedy of the Occult,” Frye says,

Such as story as The Sacred Font brings the relation of reality and realism into sharp confrontation: either there is some hidden reality that the narrator’s fantasies point to, however vaguely and inaccurately, or there is no discernable reason for setting them forth at all. This principle, which runs through all of James’s work, gives the occult stories a particular significance. A ghostly world challenges us with the existence of a reality beyond realism which still may not be identifiable as real. (121-22)

We begin to see that the Bardo is an exotic (to us) Eastern version (I’m sure that Saunders is going to be accused of “appropriation” at some point) of something that appears in Western writing, though not always as an explicit religious symbol. If we could understand that oracular last sentence of Frye’s, we might gain insight into something akin to Bardo that has rather large implications. In a James story, the hidden world behind ordinary appearances is often accessed through intensity of observation. In James, as Frye points out, “there is no such thing as a trivial incident: an immense amount of significance is always present potentially” (112). James counseled writers, “Try to become someone on whom nothing is lost.” At a certain intensity of awareness, “reality” begins to dissolve and become ghostly.

Frye quotes William James as saying that his brother’s later novels were made out of “impalpable materials, air and the prismatic interfaces of light, ingeniously focused by mirrors upon empty space.” Frye’s comment is, “William is saying that Henry’s characters are treated as though they were ghosts, moving through ghostly incidents and settings in a transparent world” (113). In other words, at a great enough pitch of intensity, the duality of real world and Otherworld disappears, and we may say, “Why this is Bardo, nor am I out of it.” This is the technique of T.S.Eliot’s The Waste Land. The narrator, Tiresias, sees all of London, all of contemporary life, as a ghost world. Of the crowd flowing over London Bridge, he says, “I had not thought death had undone so many,” a line from Dante’s Inferno, even though the crowd is not literally dead. Tiresias is a kind of ghost, and the poem is his Bardo-like dreaming, so that he embodies all the characters. Yet Eliot is no occultist: the poem’s medium, Madame Sosostris, has a bad cold. Yet there is something occult, something hidden, some Grail that might appear if we could obey the poem’s counsel of compassion.

What is this occulted secret? That is exactly what the whole Western “esoteric tradition” is looking for, and in fact often believes it has found. Yet in a way it remains hidden even when found, for those who believe they possess a “hidden wisdom” often write in an impenetrable language, sometimes deliberately, wanting to guard the secret from profanation at the same time they desperately want to reveal it. But one version of the secret would consists of the answer to the question, “Who ordained all this?” That is true of Bardo. The real answer is that the visions the dead person is seeing and suffering in the Bardo are the creations of his own greater Self, of a psyche far larger than ego consciousness, but the dead person does not know that. If he did, he would transcend the Bardo state, wake up from the dream. So he remains surrounded by a mystery, in a condition that Thomas Pynchon correctly identified as “paranoia,” the origin of conspiracy theories. Maybe that is why the Bardo Thödol has been so oddly popular in recent times. We feel that we are trapped in some kind of shifting, uncertain, uncanny state, wandering as if it a dream. Or as in the realm of the dead. Another work that strikingly resembles the Bardo experience is Jean Cocteau’s film Orpheus (1950), in which Orpheus receives what seems to be code from a car radio, but the code makes not sense. He descends into a very Bardo-like underworld to rescue his Eurydice, but he cannot get a straight answer from anyone about who is in charge.

Certain “signs and wonders” in our lives seem to be clues as to what it all means, but they remain tantalizingly enigmatic. We long for someone to read a book into our ear to tell us what it is all about, and how to get out of here.

Now that we possess his private notebooks, we know that Northrop Frye had a secret desire all his life to write fiction, though he never followed through with it. The most prominent plot idea, which he harbored for over 20 years, was to have been a novel about what he called “chess in Bardo.” He never explained what this meant. Interested readers may consult Northrop Frye: Religious Visionary and Architect of the Spiritual World (2004) by my co-editor of the Frye notebooks, Robert D. Denham. It contains and extensive section on what the Bardo meant to Frye, as well as being the best guide I know of to Frye’s visionary side. The phrase “chess in Bardo” summons up for me an image like that of the knight playing chess with Death in Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal. Chess is an agon, a contest, and the unknown other player holds the secret that he would reveal if the dead person wins the contest. Chess has a curious association with recognition scenes. At the end of Shakespeare’s Tempest, the young couple Ferdinand and Miranda are “discovered” playing at chess (a section of The Waste Land is called “A Game at Chess”), without any obvious reason for it in the plot. But Prospero the magician has in fact been manipulating all the other characters on the desert island like a chess player—and Prospero is to them very much a returning ghost, someone they thought had died 12 years before. He is acting as a ghostly nemesis, but his judgments include mercy as well as justice. Frye was deeply influenced by the treatment of The Tempest in an early book by Colin Still significantly titled Shakespeare’s Mystery Play (1921)—which had an introduction by T.S. Eliot. It’s all connected—there is such a thing as a good conspiracy theory.

Frye was ready to give up his ambitions to write a Bardo novel when he read Charles Williams’ All Hallows Eve, saying that Williams had already done it. In that book, two women find themselves wandering in an empty, dreamlike London, not realizing they are dead. Eventually, however, one woman finds herself caught up in a battle against evil, in the form of a black magician who has the usual ambition of dominating the universe. This suggests something that the Bardo Thödol does not talk about, the possibility of return to the land of the living after having achieved enlightenment, as a kind of Boddhisattva, or at least as someone who will work towards introducing into the cycle of rebirth some kind of progress. Yet another work inspired by the Bardo is Kim Stanley Robinson’s science fiction novel The Years of Rice and Salt. All of Robinson’s work is about history and the possibility of progress in history, usually through science. In The Years of Rice and Salt, a set of characters return time after time to the Bardo in order to be reborn into a new historical era in which some kind of progress might occur. The idea of returning from beyond death in order to teach, to clarify, to help, perhaps to write a book that will wake people up, is a powerful one. It occurs in a remarkable way in Blake’s poem Milton, in which Milton, dissatisfied with the errors which he now perceives in Paradise Lost, returns from beyond death to this world, enters into Blake, and becomes his inspiring spirit.

Something like this forms the climax of Lincoln in the Bardo. When Lincoln works his way to breaking the attachment that was trapping his son in the Bardo realm and himself in a mental tomb of grief, we realize that his grief has not been some random, stupid accident. It was his karma: it has enlightened him. He sees what the Buddha taught, that all life is sorrowful, the melancholy that everyone speaks of about Abraham Lincoln, the melancholy that drove him to do what he did:

His mind was freshly inclined toward sorrow; toward the fact that the world was full of sorrow; that everyone labored under some burden of sorrow; that all were suffering; that whatever way one took in this world, one must try to remember that all were suffering (none content; all wronged, neglected, overlooked, misunderstood), and therefore one must do what one could to lighten the load of those with whom one came into contact; that his current state of sorrow was not uniquely his, not at all, but, rather its like had been felt, would yet be felt, by scores of others, in all times, in every time, and must not be prolonged or exaggerated, because, in this state, he could be of no help to anyone and, given that his position in the world situated him to be either of great help or great harm, it would not do to stay low, if he could help it. (303-04)

And he returns to focusing his mind on winning the war that he has been neglected, a war that will create sorrow in hopes of ending sorrow.

And his triumph also helps liberate the dead in the Bardo. Lincoln’s epiphany leads to their own—and yet their liberation is not a rejection of life as a futile wheel of desire. Instead, in a passage that sounds like Rilke, they see, they feel how precious life is in the moment in which they must lose it, feel it because they must lose it. They see:

Geese above, clover below, the sound of one’s own breath when winded.
The way a moistness in the eye will blur a field of stars; the sore place on the shoulder a resting toboggan makes; writing one’s beloved’s name upon a frosted window with a gloved finger.
Tying a shoe; tying a knot on a package; a mouth on yours; a hand on yours; the ending of the day; the beginning of the day; the feeling that there will always be a day ahead.
Goodbye, I must now say goodbye to it all.

The passages goes on and on, until:

None of it was real; nothing was real.
Everything was real; inconceivably real, infinitely dear.
These and all things started as nothing, latent within a vast energy-broth, but then we named them, and loved them, and, in this way, brought them forth.
And now must lose them.
I send this out to you, dear friends, before I go, in this instantaneous thought-burst, from a place where time slows and then stops and we may live forever in a single instant.
Goodbye goodbye good—

If there is truly a book of the dead, it will contain something like this. Ending on “good.”

References

Denham, Robert D. “Mahayana Buddhism: Bardo.” In Northrop Frye: Religious Visionary and Architect of the Spiritual World. University of Virginia Press, 2004. Chapter 4, 136-41.

Frye, Northrop. “Dickens and the Comedy of Humours.” In The Stubborn Structure: Essays on Criticism and Society. Methuen, 1970. 218-40.

Frye, Northrop. “Henry James and the Comedy of the Occult.” In The Eternal Act of Creation: Essays, 1979-1990. 109-29.

Hartman, Geoffrey H. “Wordsworth, Inscriptions, and Romantic Nature Poetry.” In Beyond Formalism: Literary Essays, 1958-1970. Yale, 1970. 206-30.

Jung, C.G. “Psychological Commentary on The Tibetan Book of the Dead. In Psychology and Religion: East and West. 2^nd edition. Translated by R.F.C. Hull. Volume 11 of The Collected Works of C.G. Jung. Princeton, 1969. 509-28.