SOURCE: Moody, Nickianne. “Death.” In Terry Pratchett: Guilty of Literature, edited by Andrew M. Butler, Edward James, and Farah Mendlesohn, pp. 99-111. Reading, England: The Science Fiction Foundation, 2000.

[In the following essay, Moody reflects upon Pratchett's literal personification of Death as a lead character, asserting that Death serves as an anchor to the fantasy occurring around him.]

When the outline of this book was first plotted, the obvious way in which to structure it was to invite contribute chapters on the relatively discrete sequences which have emerged. Consequently, this chapter is intended to consider the sequence in which Death takes the leading role, rather than Death as a character within the Discworld. However, Death's position as a linking character is important, because it points to the mutability of the Discworld series which Penelope Hill identified in her chapter on the Unseen University: the limitations, or rubric, to which Death operates seems to differ according to whether he is a walk-on character or is the focus of the plot. These differences relate to the nature of causality, narrative, and the function and structure of history in the sequence.

In the Death sequence, history is fixed and immutable. Attempts to meddle with history and the paradigm of historical inevitability can lead only to disaster: in Mort the rescue of a princess leads the universe to attempt self-correction; in Soul Music when an external power interferes, the very initiation of the universe is threatened. Historical inevitability controls perception to the extent that only magic (in Soul Music) can persuade people to accept that which history has not created. In this model, this is a Calvinistic, predestined world, but it is also one which values the individual's role in history. On the Discworld, the actions of individuals matter.

And this is where it gets confusing, for if history and the fate of individuals is predetermined, what then can we make of a Death who, in one of his walk-on parts in the Witches sequence, is prepared to sit down and gamble for the life of a small child (Msk, 97-102). If the child's survival is already assured, does Death merely play games with those he gambles with? Similarly, in the first two novels, The Light Fantastic and The Colour of Magic, Death keeps taunting Rincewind's near misses with his presence. But this would imply a Death without compassion, and this is clearly not the case: the reaper man cares for his corn. Is this then, as Penelope Hill suggests, an alternate Discworld, in which historical inevitability is not the guiding paradigm? One hint that this might be the case is the role of the history monk in Small Gods. He, too, appears to function within a predestinarian model, but as we discover at the end of the book, history, even when already written down, can be deflected. And this time, the universe does not seem to protest.

The answer, if there is an answer, may lie in the role which belief plays in the Discworld novels generally, and this sequence in particular. We are repeatedly told that humans see only what they want to believe: adults do not see Death; they do not see the Princess Keli (M, 151) because they believe she should be dead; and they do not see the Hogfather because adults believe such belief to be inappropriate (H, 309). Thus while events cannot change belief and expectations, belief and expectation can change events. Thus, Granny Weatherwax keeps a child alive because she believes she can. The history monk can deflect the course of history because his actions generate belief in something else, and most tellingly, Death can regenerate the Hogfather, who is himself intrinsic to the predestinarian universe (he makes the sun rise) by regenerating human belief.

Death's function, both as character and as fulcrum, is therefore to keep history and the story on track. His absence distorts history (Mort and Soul Music) and creates chaos in the story which is Discworld (Reaper Man and Hogfather). Death functions as anchor: he comes to all of us, and he is the beginning and the end of all narratives, even if he is off stage. His role in story and the construction of story also illuminates another aspect of the Death sequence, and that is the reliance on fairy tale.

Although many of the Discworld novels begin with acknowledgedly derivative plots, only the Death novels refrain from their subversion: if historical inevitability structures the actions of Death (the character), then it is narrative causality which structures the plots of the Death sequence. In the fairy tale world, the apprentice must betray his master, he must be either forgiven or defeat him (both seem to happen in Mort), and even the sight of a fluffy dressing-gown with a skeletal rabbit on the pocket cannot deter/prevent the apprentice from marrying his master's daughter. In Soul Music the people must dance at the sound of the magic fiddle (guitar) and the player, enchanted by his instrument, will die of exhaustion. That this musician is saved seems to be at the expense of his music: like the girl in the red shoes, salvation can only be achieved with extreme sacrifice—amputated feet or an amputated talent. We are reminded that to adore the martyr is to celebrate, not to overreach death: would Buddy Holly have chosen fame over life?

In Hogfather we go back to some of the oldest of the fairytales and some of the newest: the Hogfather reminds us of the blood and gore of both pagan and Christian legends—he is the blood sacrifice transmuted into the dionysian blood feast and from there, enchanted yet again, into the sterile and meaningless world of Christmas gifts, yet at the end, restored to potency, he cannot escape the ritual death. Tied into the novel are other tales: the simpleton who inherits the world, the dark and fantastical threats we issue to children, and most poignantly, the tale of the little match girl, the one incident of subversion we are offered. It is surely no coincidence that of all the tales recounted in Hogfather, this is the one whose traditional ending requires that we pray for heaven instead of demanding justice. Its poignancy is particularly strong when we remember Death's response (recalled several times) to Mort's remark ‘There's no justice’: ‘THERE'S JUST ME’ (M, 49).

Not all of what Pratchett seems to be doing in the Death sequence can be related to the fairy tale or to mythology. Popular fiction is a commercial enterprise in which cultural criticism maybe unexpected. Nonetheless in order to be successful fiction has to be accessible, inclusive and challenging. Mass appeal can only be achieved if the fiction contains multiple rather than single points of view. Moreover it needs to allow for interstices where different perspectives can negotiate the text for their own points of recognition and enjoyment. To understand Pratchett's Death Sequence—Mort (1987) Reaper Man (1992), Soul Music (1994) and Hogfather (1996)—we have to examine external industrial and cultural contexts as well as their internal realisation within these narratives. The late 1980s saw the consolidation of a specific trend in science-fiction bookselling and publishing which marked a serious attempt to dismantle the unusual interchange between writers, editors and readers that had made it a distinct and relatively autonomous popular genre. Science-fiction publishing became fiercely market-driven. There was a return to the fantasy trilogy format which encouraged hardback sales and provided authors with contracts financing a stable period in which to work, and science fiction shelves changed category in the 1980s and became ‘fantasy and science fiction’. The iconography of fantasy dominated the genre. Pratchett's material and diegesis proved itself to be a successful formula amongst this fiction, and in targeting its proposed audience i.e. juvenile and male.

However to become the success he is, Pratchett had to appeal beyond these niche or cult markets. Therefore, it really is significant that Death is a seven-foot skeleton with robes, a scythe and a pale horse. The popularity of the medieval setting existed right the way through the 1980s and across most genres of writing including detective fiction and the romance. Pratchett's visualisation of a medieval figure of death is thus in accordance with the preoccupations of the period in which he was writing: medieval death was indeed what people expected to see. Umberto Eco has asserted that the explanation for the attractions of neo-medievalism is straightforward. The renewed interest in the Middle Ages is ‘a quest for our roots’ (Eco, 1987: 65). He argues that in the Middle Ages is ‘the root of all our contemporary “hot” problems, and it is not surprising that we go back to that period everytime we ask ourselves about our origin’ (Eco, 1987: 65). Although he criticises popular fiction for misunderstanding the extent of this desire to assess ourselves in relation to the medieval origins of technology, the city, national identity, romantic love and commerce, Eco stresses that popular fiction is culturally resonant with these concerns. The fascination with the Middle Ages is its state of imperilment; a recognisable civilisation that has been lost and the imagination of which is marked by insecurity. Exploring warfare, city building, science and spirituality in this fictional space helps us to engage with the end result in our own time which seems so impervious to change. All the same there is the uneasy acknowledgement that social life is undergoing dramatic transformations. The cultural climate of the 1980s and 1990s found it very difficult to imagine the future, and therefore popular fiction takes on a dominant mode of nostalgia: even the fictional future takes on the look of the medieval, or at least the pre-industrial, in the highly popular works of science fiction writers like Lois McMaster Bujold or David Weber.

Pratchett looks as if he fits within this generic marketing trend with his reference to academic enclaves, barbarians, witches, dragons and guilds, even though he himself actually sees Ankh-Morpork as ‘pretty much an early Victorian city’ (Young, 1993: 6). So although the writing existed in parallel to the medieval fantasy of the 1980s, its social comedy has a more recent and incisive basis. That is not to say that Discworld does not accommodate quite a few fancies from the medieval imagination: the Unseen University, witchcraft, kingdoms, great battles and pet dragons all fit in with this trend. However, in comparison with rather chaotic and haphazard magic, the fumblings of wizards and the cautiousness of witches, Death's ability to suspend natural laws seems very practical. In fact his magic is probably the most desirable as it enables him to extend and expand time. He uses magic on a daily basis to manipulate time and step outside Mortal existence, allowing him to travel around Discworld at will simply so that he can accomplish all the work that has been piled upon him. Death becomes a character that interests us because devotion to duty does not prevent him from taking the time to wonder at the demise of a tube worm and from remaining in tune with the world around him. The moments when magic is associated with Death are awesome rather than comic inviting readers to speculate on the ambiguous cultural values attached to the meanings of lives lived in Discworld if not their own.

As people see only what they expect, Death generally appears as part of the dramatis personae in traditional medieval guise; encounters between humans and Death take place between the dying and a scythe-wielding Great Leveller. But when a Discworld novel features Death as a character rather than an interlude it is the mundane rather than supernatural implications of his presence which are explored. The comedy of the Death sequence is not just located in making fun of the final taboo, but rather in Death's attempts to re-train for other roles and occupations. In this the Death is rather reminiscent of the films of the Carry On … team: made in Britain between 1958 and 1978, they either parodied popular film formulas—Tarzan, the Bond series or horror—or more satirically, social institutions such as hospitals, the army or empire and cultural practices such as holidays, dating agencies and trades unions. Superficially they appeared to raise minimal social criticism, but their subjects reveal sites of deep-rooted social and cultural conflict. By the 1980s the values upon which their comedy rested no longer appealed to their audience. During the 1980s the Conservative Party redefined the relationship between the welfare state, the nationalised industries and the working citizen as well as the nature of work itself in a rapidly de-industrialising economy. Pratchett's bestseller status lies in part in his ability to identify the nature of this alteration which influenced and rewrote existing cultural values. The humour of the Carry On … team made fun of the bureaucracy and ideology that supported the social policy of the post-war democratic settlement embodied in the Welfare State. As this was replaced and the class-based humour of the Carry On … films began to look dated, Pratchett appears to have used the Death books (and to an extent, as Penelope Hills has indicated, the Unseen University sequence) to examine at what emerged in its place. Taking the enterprise logic and policy of our own times, he creates a similar atmosphere of bathos and absurdity, minimising the innuendo but nonetheless achieving a very similar affect. The Discworld series as a whole, but the Death sequence in particular, might be understood as theatre of the absurd.

Journalists and reviewers who see the basis of Pratchett's fantasy writing in everyday life and the ideological negotiation of power have commonly referred to him as the Dickens of the twentieth century. Dickens lambasted the impact of cultural values on everyday lives and the unyielding face of state power and public office: building his humour into edifices of ridiculous comic proportions that allowed both a pleasure in the absurd and the articulation of social criticism to take place in mass-market fiction. Dickens's novels examine how individuals become complicit in social injustice and the powerful rhetoric of authoritarian populism, and the Death Sequence makes a similar appeal. Thus the sequence targets those characteristics of government in the 1980s which allowed it to achieve successive re-election during a prolonged economic crisis, such as the effective ventriloquising of the electorate through logos and slogans. Sites of confrontation were removed or renamed: metaphors drawn from business and management theory became ubiquitous. It was only within this obfuscatory paradigm that policy could be addressed or contested. Nationalised industry and the Welfare State which had underpinned the British hegemonic consensus of the post-war democratic settlement was gradually dismantled ‘on the people's behalf’.

Thus the Auditors of Reality decide to remove Death because he is a potential threat to them and their policing of the Universe, but issue the following ‘public service information broadcast’ to disguise the self-serving nature of their actions:

There will be a short transitional period before a suitable candidate presents itself, and then normal service will be resumed. In the meantime we apologise for any unavoidable inconvenience caused by superfluous life effects.

(RM, 307)

The academics of the Unseen University and the citizens of Anhk-Morpork are powerless to protest. Metaphors in Discworld have the visible power that in ours they wield more subtly. The absence of Death and his ‘welfare services’ causes humorous distress to those who are displaced and bewildered by entering an interim status between living and being dead.

The narratives which structure the stories in which Death is a central focus make their appeal because of their consideration of a range of cultural issues. Death as a character is able to interrogate and disrupt certain cultural discourses of the period which are very British but also address a broader economic experience.

While the Death Sequence is constructed around the meaning of fairy tales, of myth, and of urban legends, and the role of narrative and story in the construction of our lives, the Death novels are also about work and its re-definition during the 1980s at a time of high unemployment and anxiety about the nature of working life and adult responsibility. For many of us, work is the root of our identity, and Death, an anthropomorphic personification, is the embodiment of his work. Without it, can Death actually exist?

The Death sequences offer four commentaries on work and the structure of work. In Mort Death takes on an apprentice; in Reaper Man Death is forced into retirement; in Soul Music Death's granddaughter takes over the family firm; and in Hogfather Death takes over a job that is not his own and for which he neither has the training or the experience (a reference, perhaps to the increasing pressure on the employee to join the ‘flexible’ labour force, which replaces stability with the cold comfort of continual retraining). Mort and Soul Music bring Death as an older character into contact with a younger one so that an exchange of perspectives can take place, the younger character learning the skills and philosophy behind Death's job. Apprenticeship to Death's job is construed in human terms as necessary, steady work in an established business (M, 20), with prospects of taking over the firm. Death himself sees the apprenticeship offering skills, a career structure, prospects and a job for life (M, 191). In Mort Death is the boss, an employer who ‘TALKS IN A HEAVY VOICE’ (DD, 1). Death is impressive and intriguing rather than frightening to the young apprentice. The initial stages of the book do more than just set out his job description i.e. the nature of ushering souls into the next world, they also concentrate on aptitude for a vocation which ultimately Mort does not have. The narrative relies upon the fact that the training offered is rather perfunctory, leaving Mort to learn on the job, which results in a serious error of judgement (a frequent source of humour in all apprentice narratives and in the real life initiation rites which many apprentices had to suffer).

Despite the realistic approach which Death insists upon, this notion of employment is ironic for the contemporary reader. Death takes on an apprentice at the point when the practice is seen as inefficient, outmoded and uneconomic. Death's most important lesson for his apprentice is the compassion of his trade: a quality which seems remarkably poignant as its place in welfare services has been eroded by dwindling resources and the diminishing committment to communal, structured, responsibility.

In Reaper Man, the first of the sequels, Pratchett clearly recognised the anachronism inherent in Mort. Death's retirement is compulsory: he is dismissed with a golden egg-timer and a grudging word of thanks. The very qualities which he brought to his job—compassion and individual service—are no longer deemed desirable. His job is to be mechanised and proletarianised: stripped of its skill; the care which Death as an artisan brought to his craft is to be replaced by the inexorable quality of the production line or the combination harvester. Individuality is no longer prized: the Auditors of Reality remove Death from his position because they are concerned that sometimes he wonders about his job rather than just carrying out his duties: Death is the employee with initiative. The Auditors of Reality expect a more suitable candidate to take over the job that Death has relinquished. Death's proposed replacement enjoys his work because he is neither accountable nor compassionate; he is an old-style Great Leveller who uses the royal ‘we’ to talk about his activities and believes that ‘the reaper does not listen to the harvest’ (RM, 417). But this is Discworld, and in the battle between the old and new incumbents, a metaphor for the struggle between old and new technologies Death kills both the harvester and the new Death, restoring the balance and preserving the pastoral nature of the Discworld economy for at least another thirteen books (we have to wait until The Fifth Elephant for industrialisation to arrive for good). Death's appeal to resume his position is made to his master Azrael. Death asks for time to return Discworld to balance, and his request ends with a response to the earlier statement made by the young and callous newcomer when Death asks: ‘“what can the harvest hope for if not the care of the Reaper Man?”’ (RM, 447). So although the conclusion to the narrative makes use of a very consensual device of the clockwork universe overseen by an entity which can rewind the mechanism, the issues underpinning the supernatural story are more contentious in the desires it articulates. The fantasy set out by Pratchett in the novel proposes that the business of life and death should be overseen by an agency that actually cares about its clients rather than its own pleasure or indeed the interests of shareholders. Thus, the Conservative rhetoric of national interest which persuaded voters that we were all shareholders in the Great British enterprise who would sink or swim together (Hall, 1988: 49) comes to have a very real meaning in the Death sequence.

In the third Death novel, Soul Music, the character is once again AWOL, having taken himself off to rethink his working life. More significantly Soul Music is also about intergenerational conflict. Death's granddaughter has been raised by ‘“modern methods. Logic. And thinking old stuff is silly”’ (Albert, SM, 86), to keep her it is supposed from thinking about complex ideas especially history. So when she is called upon to take over Death's job because he has gone off to join the Klatchian Foreign Legion she needs to be convinced of her family responsibilities. Soul Music's employment rhetoric is focussed on the discussion of duty and responsibility, of the value of old knowledge and on what terms the world can be changed. More significant is that Death's angst about job security provides a background for the musicians in the main storyline of Soul Music, who are trying to put a band and a career together. Here the infrastructure of work in a tertiary economy is presented as farcical and almost grotesque. The villain in Soul Music, Mr Clete, is mortal; Mr Clete is the ultimate bureaucrat in the Guild Economy, who is following his own path to power through the administrative systems of Ankh-Morpork's guilds. We are introduced to him as he denies the young musicians a licence to work. In the Discworld's parallel world most service occupations including those of Beggars, Thieves, Strippers, Assassins, Priests, Sacerdotes and Occult Intermediaries have their own guilds which run schools and hospices as well as regulate trade. These are the gatekeepers to jobs and to public administration which various characters attempt to access through entreaty. The Guild members believe themselves to be part of a necessary social service with the codes of conduct, examinations, quality audit and career structure of other professions in the city. Thus the Thieves' Guild was able to replace the City Watch as the major law enforcement agency maintaining socially acceptable levels of thefts and muggings (to ensure this arrangement all citizens have a social duty to be robbed or assaulted according to the quota). However, the Patrician permits the guilds—which might be a threat to his authority—because they organise services and utilities which keep the city running and taxable. Once workers move outside the guild structure, the guilds are no longer useful to the Patrician. Thus Mr Clete is responding to a very real threat. The entire scenario perceptively dissects the situation in the 1980s when the Conservative government dismantled the unions. The strikes of 1979 had conclusively proved that the unions were no longer useful to governments as a means of negotiating with and at the same time controlling workers. At the same time, the rising numbers of women and non-white immigrants in the workforce, to whom too many unions had refused admission, created a large pool of workers hostile to the closed-shop system. Like the Patrician, Mrs. Thatcher could recognise an unstable situation when she saw one and, in the name of freedom and free enterprise, unpicked what had become a dubiously closed system of employee protection.

Hogfather, although a continuation of the theme of apprenticeship and inheritance (clearly Pratchett is not an equal opportunity employer), is to a far greater extent about the rightness of employment and the need for some types of work to be done. Death maintains space for the missing Hogfather while his daughter fills his own space, and Banjo comes to full realisation only when he finds his niche as the new tooth-fairy. Hogfather is a reinforcement of the conceit intrinsic to this sequence (and to the roles of Granny Weatherwax and Vimes): that work and identity are synonymous. However, it would be a mistake to assume that Pratchett links work and identity with happiness. The only recurring character who is really happy in his work is C.M.O.T. Dibbler. Dibbler understands enough about the fluctuating environment to attempt to make a killing. Dibbler's ability to latch on to the fads that arise from a universe out of kilter make him the antithesis of Death. Dibbler's activities in the background to the Discworld stories intensify their economic rationale. In Soul Music, for a brief while of madness, Dibbler becomes a music promoter who is the only one to profit from the situation (a role reprised from Moving Pictures). As the ultimate short-term entrepreneur Dibbler aides and abets stray beliefs and world views which become physically manifest forces on Discworld and require others to contradict and bring under control. The epitome of this is Dibbler's business opportunity in Reaper Man. Whilst not technically committing a crime, Dibbler sells on and so spreads the glass souvenirs which have the potential to hatch into a predatory mall life form. So serious is the threat of the mall to Ankh-Morpork that Dibbler does not even attempt to sell anything to the assembled crowd watching the lifeform's grand opening. The ensuing chaos is overlooked by the Auditors of Reality, who are more concerned with the threat that Death poses to human perspective and the source of their power.

Happiness is not the central concern that links identity and work in the Death sequence, but there is an insistence that everyone has their place, however undercutting the potential oppressive message is another, more liberating one that we do not need to be bound by a job's demands and conventions. We may draw our identities from our role in life, but we still have the capacity to be more.

The Auditors (in Reaper Man) seek to proletarianise Death because, ‘After hundreds of thousands of years of mindless reaping, the Death of Discworld began to take an interest in his job’ (DD, 1). His empathy with his clients infects him to the extent that he understands and suffers from the ennui which confronts many workers, and in Mort, Death goes in search of both fun and humanity. The acquisition of a junior employee has allows Death time for leisure. and to observe the interactions of humans. Rather than accompanying his apprentice until he is secure in the job, Death works his way through human life's greatest pleasures, fishing, dancing, gambling and drink. Ironically, his reaction to much of this is that of many individuals, forced into ‘fun’: activities, and the conjugation of the compound verb ‘to-have-fun’ is one of the best parts of Mort (156-159). Inevitably, this type of ritualised enjoyment is not Death's cup of tea. He is a simple soul and in the end happiness is achieved through the discovery of a new vocation, another line of work in the service industry where his ability to offer comfort for the recently deceased is transmuted into the ultimate comfort of good food for both humans and cats (M, 194-195). Eventually, of course, Death's sense of duty compels him to come back and take over the job for which he is uniquely suited. After all, Mort has endangered an entire kingdom of people. But Death's interest and curiosity about humanity has left a legacy. Determined to be more than simply an anthropomorphic personality, Death chooses to use his retirement in Reaper Man to learn more. By Soul Music he is reconstructing the boundaries of his identity: Death's garden is still wholly black, but it is surrounded by golden corn, a memory of something that by his very nature Death cannot forget; there is a bathroom which emulates, but does not function, like a real bathroom; and there is the swing, which was built by someone who understand logic but not the essential swingness of a swing, nor the essential human-ness of what it means to be human (SM, 299-230). The key to Death is that from his silver-backed hair-brushes to the garment he dons to play the Hogfather, he is triving to be more than his role would allow. Nowhere is this more evident than in his responsiveness to mortality. Death's supernatural visage and awesome power is compromised by his fascination with humans and his kindness to kittens; the emphasis is always on his fascination with and attempt to comprehend the ordinary dullness and unfairness of life. All the stories in the Death sequence debate the meaning of the mundane world of employment. All of the Death sequence stories extrapolate on the consistent qualities of Death: professionalism and compassion in a chaotic and uncertain world. Death the immortal is also Death the observer of the human condition, risking the dangers of involvement for the benefits it brings. The assassin Teatime (in Hogfather) eschews involvement or identification with humanity: in this lies his madness. Death, the loner, reinforces the point that the most valuable of human traits are social.

One would expect that the repetitive use of Death as a character would lead Pratchett to speculate on the spiritual aspect of death and the afterlife. However, the conceits associated with Death largely start out as mundane concerns. Texts that use elements of nostalgia should not necessarily be seen as conservative. The use of nostalgia as a mode of expression in popular fiction of the 1980s becomes a way to imagine a possible future by fantasising about having the power to act in the past. Changing the past is only a step away from radical fantasies about changing the present. Pratchett's comic reviewing of the rise of Hollywood in Moving Pictures or the invention of rock and roll in Soul Music reveals that external forces and ideas determine both the production and participation in popular culture which can themselves be challenged. The character of Death is very fond of saying that there is no justice—instead there is ‘“just us”’—and the resolution of the novels commonly results from a decision being made by a central character and not just the completion of an action which ends the drama.

On Discworld, reality is in constant flux as different worldviews arise from the Dungeon Dimensions, competing time lines or parallel universes and struggle to become the common sense of social life. Our heroes Death, Granny Weatherwax and Susan Sto Helit have the ability to detect these forces which attempt to change the world by persuading the populace to alter their current perception of their way of life. The effects are profound: reality and the balance of power in Discworld regularly changes swiftly and bloodlessly. The political theorist Antonio Gramsci would have recognised the Dungeon Dimensions route to power by popular consent as hegemony and popular culture as a suitable site of struggle for a shifting ideological understanding of everyday life. Both the Discworld and political discourse are permeable: the more real one is, the more the world recognises one's existence, the more one can move through its cracks and negotiate its conventions. On the Discworld, this permeability is very literal and both Mort and Susan learn to manipulate the real to change the perception of those around them. Much of the Death sequence is thus taken up with a contention about the nature of the real, and with a battle for control of human minds—made most explicit in Hogfather which is startlingly reminiscent of the reshaping of political discourse, and hence the perceptual paradigm, in the 1980s and 1990s.

CONCLUSION

Popular fiction is often dismissed as escapist and an easy accomplishment, but to achieve bestseller status a writer has to realise a heterogeneous appeal at least across class, gender and age perspectives. Bestsellers achieve their status by being culturally resonant. Popular fiction can have a social function that extends beyond the passivity implied by escapism. J. G. Cawelti argues that literary formulas allow readers to explore the contentious and ambiguous nature of existing social values and attitudes, because the audience is allowed to explore in fantasy the boundary between the permitted and the forbidden and to experience in carefully controlled circumstances the possibility of transgressing this boundary (Cawelti, 1976: 35-6, 35). In this way, popular fiction has a role to play in the assimilation of cultural change. The taboo and the forbidden in this instance are the desire to throw over working life altogether and also to express anxiety about the devaluing of professionalism, vocation and security in working life. Like much other popular and especially political humour of the 1980s, Pratchett creates chaos from the discourse of managerial double-talk, and it is the character of Death who really understands the individual distress and anxiety that this caused in ordinary everyday life.

Raymond Williams notes that ‘culture’ derives from a Latin term for tending crops or animals that extends its usage metaphorically in the sixteenth century to refer to the cultivation of the mind (1976: 76). The Greek roots of ‘hegemony’ are similar and also suggest mastery through winter pruning and training the vine or the tree so that it will grow and bear its fruit according to the convenience of the cultivator. The importance of Gramsci's concept of hegemony is that the establishment of dominant order is constantly re-negotiated. We do not live in a single culture but amongst cultures that continually realign themselves and contest the dominant culture. So a hegemonic cultural order is one that ‘tries to frame all competing definitions of the world within its range’ (Clarke et al., 1976: 38); that is it uses its power to set the boundaries and the terrain within which ideas and conflicts are to be resolved. A hegemonic consensus is theoretically made to be broken and thus cultural values, behaviours and relations are all subject to cultural change. Decisions about the right way to live and work can be contested and arise as new social and moral crises which will be resolved through material and cultural change. The distinction between pre-war and post-war social experience in Britain is a key example of this change and motivating ideological belief in ‘the people's war’. The areas of popular culture that fascinate Pratchett, the movies, musicals during the 1980s, rock and roll in the 1950s, carnival and crisis are all sites for the negotiation of hegemonic consensus. The resolution to social and cultural crisis, which happens here, will then be realised in the policies, laws and attitudes taken by state and individual towards the groups that concern Pratchett i.e. the young, the elderly and the unemployed.

One of the cultural conventions of Pratchett's writing is the renaming of contemporary experience in terms which are humorously anachronistic to his medieval or Victorian Discworld. The logical euphemisms are not just amusing; they have their own consequences. ‘Music with rocks in’, used in Soul Music, is the start of a joke which plays out its history arriving at a declaration of public nuisance and accusation of being injurious to health and morals which is assuaged by the Discworld entrepreneur's immediate willingness to pay a music tax (SG, 696-7). The more fantastic the situation the more dramatic the impact of the linguistic manipulation, so that death can become undeath and ideas once spoken can become monsters. This type of word play manifests the political power of language in the contemporary society of the 1980s and 1990s which masked, re-branded and diffused criticism of unemployment, redundancy, retirement, employment relations and failing work safety standards taking place during this time.

The humour in the playfulness is resonant with the practices of authoritarian populism gaining consent for the removal of established social patterns and expectations. After all, the most dramatic magic in our universe is the power of advertising. Pratchett offers readers the opportunity to trace the rapid ideological evolution of cultural change and its logical inconsistencies, to acknowledge its power but also its tenuous nature. The situations that arise on Discworld are not just dispelled by right minded heroes but also odd collective undertakings of marginal groups such as the Pixies in Carpe Jugulum, the Fresh Start Club in Reaper Man and various other groupings of the elderly, the unemployed and those outside Discworld's structures of power. Often their stories are synchronic to those of the hero rather than fully integrated with the main narrative. These representations set Pratchett apart from other fantasy formations of the period. The accelerated and therefore visible machinations of cultural change are the taboo territory that makes Pratchett a bestseller and will continue to do so while this period exists in living memory.

Cultural theory of the 1980s is itself subject to a pervasive and chaotic new world-view. The three ‘p's of postmodernism—parody, pastiche and play—are used to explain neo-medievalism and to see it as a creative force legitimating popular culture. Pratchett could well be responding to this new form of cultural expression which comes to dominate our leisure in theme parks, music videos and popular fiction during this period, but it could be that instead of just conforming the Discworld's cultural resonance is located elsewhere. In The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte Marx outlines how the French Revolution relied on an account of the Roman Republic and Empire to establish an ideological legitimacy for a fundamental cultural transformation. The Conservative government in the 1980s and the speeches of Margaret Thatcher in particular referred to Victorian values as a touchstone for their social policies and Pratchett's novels are able to effectively deconstruct this rhetoric to be received in a popular rather than political mode. The regular coupling of Pratchett and Dickens also brings home time after time that the Victorians themselves hankered for feudal order and happiness.

Death brings us back to the ultimate reality which is that we do have agency albeit not under circumstances of our own choosing. We can resist the temptations of the Dungeon Dimensions, but that this is a very complex and dangerous action. Although personally hated, the Patrician's status quo is attractive to all groups. At the centre of an effective hegemonic consensus based on the provision of stability Lord Havelock Vetinari is very difficult to overthrow. No claim is being made that Death is Marxist in either his outlook or sensibilities, although The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte is very useful in exploring his character. One only has to look at the Domain he is attempting to create for himself and to remember that it is difficult to be kind to cats during revolution. Rather analysing Pratchett's writing in these terms serves to remind us that:

[…] just when they seem engaged in revolutionizing themselves and things, in creating something that has never yet existed, precisely in such periods of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service and borrow from them names, battle-cries and costumes in order to present the new scene of world history in this time honoured disguise and this borrowed language.

(McLellan, 1977: 300)

The world that Death is trying to create for himself at Mon Repos comprises the empty signifiers of family values, leisure pursuits, relationships and a belief in a future that is incompatible with transient working and private lives. Death's Domain is a place where things tend not to change. In mocking Death's production of inert simulacra such as ‘the bathroom he created where the ropes weren't hollow and the towels were rock hard, having been created for the purpose of hanging on a towel rail rather than being soft’ (DD 4) and enjoying his inability to understand human life we are both acknowledging and dismissing our own concerns and fears about a rapid period of cultural transformation. Each story reminds us that personal values define characters far more than their cultural trappings. In this way by insisting upon and achieving an integrity for the character of Death, Pratchett disrupts the terrain proposed by political rhetoric of the 1980s and 1990s which had established itself as the only agenda for debating everyday life, social change and consensus.

List of Abbreviations

CJ: 1999. Carpe Jugulum. London: Corgi.

COM: 1985. The Colour of Magic. London: Corgi.

CP: 1993. The Carpet People. London: Corgi.

D: 1991. Diggers: The Second Book of the Nomes. London: Corgi.

DC: 1995. Discworld Companion. London: Gollancz (with Stephen Briggs).

DD: 1999. Death's Domain.

E: 1996. Eric. London: Vista.

ER: 1987. Equal Rites. London: Corgi.

FE: 1999. The Fifth Elephants. London: Transworld.

FOC: 1997. Feet of Clay. London: Corgi.

GG: 1990. Guards! Guards! London: Corgi.

GO: 1991. Good Omens. London: Corgi (with Neil Gaiman).

H: 1997. Hogfather. London: Corgi.

IT: 1995. Interesting Times. London: Corgi.

J: 1998. Jingo. London: Corgi.

JB: 1997. Johnny and the Bomb. London: Corgi.

JD: 1994. Johnny and the Dead. London: Corgi.

LC: 1999. The Last Continent. London: Corgi.

LF: 1986. The Light Fantastic. London: Corgi.

LL: 1993. Lords and Ladies. London: Corgi.

M: 1988. Mort. London: Corgi.

MAA: 1994. Men at Arms. London: Corgi.

MP: 1991. Moving Pictures. London: Corgi.

Msk: 1996. Maskerade. London: Corgi.

OYCSM: 1993. Only You Can Save Mankind. London: Corgi.

P: 1990. Pyramids: The Book of Going Forth. London: Corgi.

RM: 1992. Reaper Man. London: Corgi.

S: 1989. Sourcery. London: Corgi.

SA: 1993. The Streets of Ankh-Morpork. London: Corgi (with S. Briggs).

SG: 1993. Small Gods. London: Corgi.

SM: 1995. Soul Music. London: Corgi.

T: 1990. Truckers: The First Book of the Nomes. London: Corgi.

W: 1991. Wings: The Third Book of the Nomes. London: Corgi.

WA: 1992. Witches Abroad. London: Corgi.

WS: 1989.Wyrd Sisters. London: Corgi.