Intimations of Immortality: Sémiologies of Ageing and the Lineaments of Eternity in Contemporary Prose

Abstract

‘Turn back time’, ‘age rewind’ and ‘age defy’ are all phrases one may associate with the conspicuous deprecation of old age and the corn-modification of immortality in Western discourses of consumerism. We are in a century where medical and scientific capability combines with evasive or deprecatory attitudes towards the ageing process, and where escapist, transcendentalist or quintessentially ‘science fictional’ conceptions of ageing and time work their way into the everyday vernacular of consumer capitalism. This chapter examines the ways in which developments in prolongevity medicine, the blandishments and sophistry of anti-ageing, and the commodification of immortality in discourses of consumerism are impacting literary representations of time, organic decay, and the meaning of death. I shall discuss what constitutes a realist narrative of ageing in the context of a culture incredulous of mortality, habituated to anti-ageing ideologies, and expectant of their reification. Western culture today is challenging ‘the very language used to articulate the ageing process’ (Biggs, 1999b, p. 66). Paradoxically, humanity has never been more familiar with immortality than in the era where medical and scientific capability render unavoidable, and even extend, the period of life that most inescapably reminds us of our mortality: old age.