Haunting Voices from Beyond: Delog Narratives and Literary Anxieties of Karmic Retribution

Just as works of speculative fiction address social and ecological concerns through dystopian scenarios, delog (revenant) narratives animate Buddhist ethical concerns and the Tibetan imagination about death and rebirth through visceral images of hellish torment. Accounts of a delog’s visionary journeys into the realms beyond death both edify and generate anxieties about the workings of karma. What if a relative is suffering in hell? What if something we ourselves have done leads to such suffering? This paper takes up literary anxiety, the creation of speculative scenarios in literature that invoke anxieties about possible futures. We place the visionary autobiography of delog Kunzang Chökyi Drolma (b. 1869–70) in conversation with the speculative tale Elsewhere (2022) by Alexis Schaitk about mothers who disappear into the mists in order to explore the edge between the known and unknowable and how literary anxieties over local customs can propel liberative pursuits.