Supposing the Germans “Defeated Great Britain in the Present War”: Freud’s Death Drive on Three Levels of Narrative Communication in Vita Sackville-West’s Grand Canyon

Published in 1942, Vita Sackville-West’s Grand Canyon presents an alternative history of the Second World War. The novel is literally suffused with the theme of death, but to discern it, one has to read it between lines. The aim of the paper is to argue that the threat of death is manifested in Grand Canyon on three levels of narrative communication proposed by Manfred Jahn: action, fictional mediation and non-fictional communication. Moreover, the paper proves that the way in which the novel is haunted by death on each of these levels corresponds to Sigmund Freud’s theory of death drive, according to which: (1) the individual’s life-producing instincts (“Eros”) are complemented by his death drive (“Thanatos”); (2) the whole civilisation is led by the death drive of individuals.