Ghostly Encounters: Cultural and Imaginary Representations of the Spectral from the Nineteenth Century to the Present 9780367676957, 9781003132394

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Series Information
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Table of contents
Acknowledgements
Notes on Contributors
List of Figures
1 Introduction – The Lady Vanishes Searching for Evidence of the Ghostly
The Rise of Spiritualism
Encountering the Ghostly
Notes
Works Cited
Part I Romantic and Victorian Encounters with the Ghostly
2 ‘Strength in What Remains Behind’: Wordsworth, Spectral Selves, and the Question of Ageing
Notes
Works Cited
3 Far More Than a Simple Ghost Story: The Complexity of Algernon Blackwood’s ‘Chemical’ (1926)
Notes
Works Cited
4 Wilhelminian Apparitions: Ghosts and Desire between Science, Religion and Art in the German Nineteenth-Century Novel
Works Cited
Part 2 Visual and Material Encounters with the Ghostly
5 The Visual Representation of Ghosts in Early Modern Japan
Ghosts in Buddhism
Paintings of Ghosts in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries
Ghosts in Kabuki
Martial Ghosts
Notes
Works Cited
6 Embodied Shadows: Sculpted Memory, Sensed Presence, and the Third Party
Tylor, Frazer, and Hertz
Surveying Awareness
2011 Responses
2004 Responses
1994 Responses
Embodiment
Christine Valentine and the ‘Third Presence’
Katherine Young and ‘Embodied Shadows’
Dividuality
Grief
Ashes
Mood, Place, and Sculpted Memory
Works Cited
7 Ghostly Presences: Guillermo del Toro’s Crimson Peak
The Nightmare of Presence
Lucille and Her Relationship to Space and Place
The Role of Lucille’s Piano
Edith as the Author of Ghosts
Notes
Works Cited
Part 3 Ghostly Legacies
8 Futurist Ghosts
Notes
Works Cited
9 Ghosts in the City: From Baudelaire to Lydie Salvayre and Hilary Mantel
Works Cited
10 Postscript – Disavowing Disappointment in the Face of Ghosts: From Keats’s ‘Destructive Element’ to Hannah Arendt’s ...
Keats’s Ghost of an Eternal Destruction at Sea and the Modernism of Joseph Conrad
Destruction Turned Historical and Dialectical: Hannah Arendt’s Reading of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness
Works Cited
Index

Citation preview

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Ghostly Encounters

This volume reflects on the ghostly and its varied manifestations, including the uncanny, the revenant, the echo, and other forms of artistic allusion. These unsettling presences of the spectral other occur in literature, history, film, and art. The ghostly (and its artistic, literary, filmic, and cultural representations) remains of burgeoning interest and debate among twenty-​first-​century literary critics, cultural historians, art historians, and linguists. Our collection of essays considers the wider implications of these representations of the ghostly and notions of the spectral to define a series of different, but inter-​related, cultural topics (concerned with questions of ageing, the uncanny, the spectral, spiritualism, and eschatology), which imaginatively testify to our compulsion to search for evidence of the ghostly in our everyday encounters with the material world. Stefano Cracolici is Professor of Italian Art and Literature, Director of the Zurbarán Centre for Spanish and Latin American Art and Associate Director of the Centre for Poetry and Poetics at Durham University. He is author of Il ritratto di Archigynia: Filippo Nuvoloni (1441–​ 1478) e il suo Dyalogo d’amore (2009), and co-​author, with Stefano Carrai and Monica Marchi, of La letteratura a Siena nel Quattrocento. He is completing a monograph on Fabiola: lo spettacolo del martirio (2021). Mark Sandy is Professor of English at Durham University. He is a member of the Centre for Poetry and Poetics, an advisory board member of the Centre for Death and Life Studies, and a co-​founding member of the ‘Romantic Dialogues and Legacies’ research group at Durham University. He is author of Poetics of Self and Form in Keats and Shelley (2005) and Romanticism, Memory, and Mourning (2013). His most recent book explores Transatlantic Transformations of Romanticism: Aesthetics, Subjectivity and the Environment (2021).

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Literary Criticism and Cultural Theory

Conceptualisation and Exposition A Theory of Character Construction Lina Varotsi Knots Post-​Lacanian Psychoanalysis, Literature and Film Jean-​Michel  Rabaté Double Trouble The Doppelgänger from Romanticism to Postmodernism Eran Dorfman Literary Twinship from Shakespeare to the Age of Cloning Wieland Schwanebeck Promiscuity in Western Literature Peter Stoneley (In)digestion in Literature and Film A Transcultural Approach Edited by Niki Kiviat and Serena J. Rivera Trans(in)fusion Reflections for Critical Thinking Ranjan Ghosh Ghostly Encounters Cultural and Imaginary Representations of the Spectral from the Nineteenth Century to the Present Edited by Stefano Cracolici and Mark Sandy For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/​ literature/​series/​LITCRITANDCULT

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Ghostly Encounters Cultural and Imaginary Representations of the Spectral from the Nineteenth Century to the Present Edited by Stefano Cracolici and Mark Sandy

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First published 2021 by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2021 Taylor & Francis The right of Stefano Cracolici and Mark Sandy to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-​in-​Publication Data A catalog record for this title has been requested ISBN: 9780367676957 (hbk) ISBN: 9781003132394 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by Newgen Publishing UK

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For Michael Mack (1969–​2020) ... I sit under clouds (each one Of which has peace) among The ordered oaks, upon The deer’s heath, and strange And dead the ghosts of the blessed ones Appear to me. (Hölderlin)

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Contents

Acknowledgements  Notes on Contributors  List of Figures  1 Introduction –​The Lady Vanishes: Searching for Evidence of the Ghostly 

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1

S TE FA N O C R AC O L ICI A N D MA RK SA N DY

PART 1

Romantic and Victorian Encounters with the Ghostly 

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2 ‘Strength in What Remains Behind’: Wordsworth, Spectral Selves, and the Question of Ageing 

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M A R K   SA N DY

3 Far More Than a Simple Ghost Story: The Complexity of Algernon Blackwood’s ‘Chemical’ (1926) 

25

MIKE PINCOMBE

4 Wilhelminian Apparitions: Ghosts and Desire between Science, Religion and Art in the German Nineteenth-​Century Novel 

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N I C H O L A S   SAU L

PART 2

Visual and Material Encounters with the Ghostly 

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5 The Visual Representation of Ghosts in Early Modern Japan 

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RO S I N A B U C K L AN D

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6 Embodied Shadows: Sculpted Memory, Sensed Presence, and the Third Party 

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D O U G L A S   J. DAVIE S

7 Ghostly Presences: Guillermo del Toro’s Crimson Peak 

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A N N   DAV I E S

PART 3

Ghostly Legacies: Modern and Contemporary Encounters  8 Futurist Ghosts 

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S TE FA N O C R ACO L ICI

9 Ghosts in the City: From Baudelaire to Lydie Salvayre and Hilary Mantel 

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C H R I S TO P H E R   L L OYD

10 Postscript –​Disavowing Disappointment in the Face of Ghosts: From Keats’s ‘Destructive Element’ to Hannah Arendt’s Reading of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness or Hegel’s Dialectics as Colonialism’s Revenant in Twentieth-​Century Totalitarianism 

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M I C H A E L   M AC K

Index 

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Acknowledgements

This critical volume of essays grew out of a lecture series, ‘Ghosts: The Evidence of Spirits’, held in Durham 2015–​2016 under the auspices of the Centre for Visual Culture and Arts, the Centre for Poetry and Poetics, and the Institute of Advanced Study. We are appreciative of the financial and other forms of support from these Centres and the Institute, without which this series would not have been possible. We are thankful for additional forms of support from the Romantic Dialogues and Legacies Research Group and the Centre for Life and Death Studies, both based at Durham. Special thanks are also owed to Colin Harding from the National Science and Media Museum in Bradford, for lending us the spirit photographs of William Hope featured in Ghost Stories: The Evidence of Spirits in Photography, the accompanying exhibition to our lecture series, which was hosted between 6 and 31 October 2015 in Durham’s World Heritage Site Visitor Centre. We are also grateful to Michelle Salyga, Senior Editor at Routledge, for her initial and continuing interest in our project. Many thanks to Laura Morley for all her care, accuracy, and alacrity in copy editing our text in preparation for publication. An equal debt of heartfelt gratitude is owed to Annalia Cancelliere and Katie Harling-Lee for their patience, sharp eyes, and unstinting professionalism in the compilation of the index for our volume. Reflecting the on-​ going and burgeoning debate concerned with representations of the ghostly and spectral manifestations in literary and visual culture, our contributors to the collection consist of both speakers invited to participate in the original lecture series and those who were extended an invitation to contribute to this publication. The editors are grateful to all our contributors for their contributions and continued interest and patience over the duration that it has taken to bring this co-​edited volume to its final completion. Mark Sandy acknowledges Durham University for the award in 2018 of two terms of research leave (including an additional term of leave in Michaelmas), which significantly assisted with realizing this co-​edited project in its finalized form. Much of the research for Sandy’s contribution (­chapter 2) on Wordsworth and the spectral was conducted with the support of a one-​ month Visiting Library Fellowship at the Armstrong Browning Library, Baylor University, Texas, during late August and early September 2017. For their

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x Acknowledgements warmth, generosity, guidance, and expertise I am grateful to Jennifer Borderud, Joshua King, Christi Klempnauer, and Melvin Scheutz at the Armstrong Browning Library. Many thanks also to Nicholas Roe, editor of Romanticism, and Edinburgh University Press for permission to reprint with a slight alteration of emphasis material in ­chapter 2, which originally appeared as ‘ “Strength in What Remains Behind”: Wordsworth and the Question of Ageing’, Romanticism 25.3 (2019): 248–​64. During the preparation of our volume for publication this summer, we received the tragic news of the death of our friend and colleague, Michael Mack, who died on 21 August 2020. Michael passed away at his family home in his native Germany. It is with great sadness and admiration that we dedicate this book to Michael’s memory.

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Notes on Contributors

Rosina Buckland is Curator, Japanese Collections at the British Museum. She read Japanese Studies at the University of Cambridge and obtained her doctorate in Japanese art history from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. She has worked previously at the National Museum of Scotland, Edinburgh and the Royal Ontario Museum, Ontario. Her primary research interest is visual culture of the late Edo period and Meiji era. Stefano Cracolici is Professor of Italian Art and Literature, Director of the Zurbarán Centre for Spanish and Latin American Art and Associate Director of the Centre for Poetry and Poetics at Durham University. He is author of Il ritratto di Archigynia: Filippo Nuvoloni (1441–​1478) e il suo Dyalogo d’amore (2009), and co-​author, with Stefano Carrai and Monica Marchi, of La letteratura a Siena nel Quattrocento. He is completing a monograph on Fabiola: lo spettacolo del martirio (2021). Ann Davies is Professor of Spanish and Latin American Studies at the University of Stirling, where she is the Deputy Dean of Arts and Humanities. She is author of Spanish Spaces: Landscape, Place, and Space in Contemporary Spanish Culture (2012) and Spanish Gothic (2016). Douglas J. Davies is Professor in the Study of Religion and Director of the Centre for Life and Death Studies, Durham University. He is author of Emotion, Identity, and Religion: Hope, Reciprocity, and Otherness (2011) and The Theology of Death (2008). Christopher Lloyd is Professor (Emeritus) in French at Durham University. He is author of Guy de Maupassant (2020), Henri-​Georges Clouzot (2007) and Collaboration and Resistance in Occupied France: Representing Treason and Sacrifice (2003). Michael Mack was Reader in English Studies at Durham University. He was author of Anthropology as Memory (2001), which combines English Studies and anthropology for an analysis of responses to the Holocaust. His German Idealism and the Jew (2003) was shortlisted for the Koret Jewish Book Award. His book Spinoza and the Specters of Modernity (2010) examines the way Spinozist shifts in thought have transformed our

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xii  Notes on Contributors approach to literature, anthropology, and psychoanalysis. His most recent book explores Contaminations: Beyond Dialectics in Modern Literature, Science, and Film (2016). His final book is a study of Disappointment: Its Modern Roots from Spinoza to Contemporary Culture (2021). Mike Pincombe is Professor of Tudor and Elizabethan Literature at Newcastle University. He is currently writing a book titled The Ghost Story, 1875–​ 1975: A Formalist Analysis (2018). Mark Sandy is Professor of English at Durham University. He is a member of the Centre for Poetry and Poetics and a co-​founding member of the ‘Romantic Dialogues and Legacies’ research group, Durham University. He is author of Poetics of Self and Form in Keats and Shelley (2005) and Romanticism, Memory, and Mourning (2013). His most recent book explores Transatlantic Transformations of Romanticism: Aesthetics, Subjectivity and the Environment (2020). Nicholas Saul is Professor of German at Durham University. He is author of Gypsies and Orientalism in German Literature and Anthropology of the Long Nineteenth Century (2007) and Poetry and History in Novalis and in the Tradition of the German Enlightenment (1984). His Interrogations of Evolutionism in German Literature 1859–2011 (Brill) is appearing in 2021.

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newgenprepdf

List of Figures

1.1 William Hope, Mourning Scene, ca. 1920 5.1 Maruyama Ōkyo, Spirit Returning in Incense Smoke, painting on silk, 1784 5.2 Unsigned, Spirit Returning in Incense Smoke, painting on silk, nineteenth century 5.3 Kawanabe Kyōsai, Female Ghost, painting on paper, 1871–​89 5.4 Maki Chokusai, Female Ghost, painting on silk, 1861 5.5 Matsumoto Fūko, Ghost of a Blind Man, painting on paper, late nineteenth century 5.6 Katsukawa Shun’ei & Shunshō, Ima wa mukashi, woodblock-​printed book, vol. 3, 1790 5.7 Utagawa Toyokuni, Onoe Matsusuke as the ghost of Oiwa, woodblock print, 1812 5.8 Utagawa Kuniyoshi, Kabuki scene from Tōkaidō Yotsuya kaidan, woodblock print, 1836 5.9 Katsushika Hokusai, Sara-​yashiki, from the series ‘One Hundred Supernatural Stories’ (Hyaku monogatari), woodblock print, 1831–​32 5.10 Kunimasu, Onoe Kikugorō III as the ghost of Kasane, woodblock print, 1849 5.11 Katsushika Hokusai, Kohada Koheiji, from the series ‘One Hundred Supernatural Stories’ (Hyaku monogatari), woodblock print, 1831–​32 5.12 Utagawa Kuniyoshi, Orikoshi Masatomo and Asakura Tōgo, woodblock print, 1851 5.13 Utagawa Kuniyoshi, Taira no Tomomori on the sea bed, woodblock print, 1851 5.14 Utagawa Kuniyoshi, Yoshitsune’s ships attacked by the ghosts of the Taira warriors, woodblock print, ca. 1851 8.1 Umberto Boccioni, Riot in the Gallery, 1910, oil on canvas 8.2 Giacomo Balla, Trasformazione, Forme, Spiriti, 1918, gouache on paper

8 56 57 58 59 60 61 63 64 65 66 67 68 70 71 108 113

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1  Introduction –​The Lady Vanishes Searching for Evidence of the Ghostly Stefano Cracolici and Mark Sandy

The Rise of Spiritualism August 21st, 1911. A small portrait of little renown outside of art circles hangs in a Renaissance gallery of the Louvre. After the museum locks its doors, a handyman, Vincenzo Peruggia, recently hired to help construct the painting’s glass case, lifts it off its hook, removes the wooden panel from its frame, and carefully wraps it in a cloth. The next morning, he walks out in broad daylight with the Mona Lisa tucked under his arm. An entire day passes before anyone notices Leonardo’s masterpiece of the enigmatic lady is missing –​then she hits the headlines, and almost overnight her name is uttered in every household. The painting has vanished, and the police are left without clues. A multitude of visitors flocks to the museum to stare at the blank wall. Mona Lisa has become the most wanted woman in the world. She left the Louvre as a work of art –​she was to return as an icon (Sassoon 2003). The investigation stagnated. Towards the end of the month, the Parisian newspaper Le Matin launched an unorthodox campaign offering five thousand francs to those ‘occultists, somnambulists, chiromantists, etc., who, via otherworldly means, would help find the Mona Lisa’.1 The following day the editors were inundated with letters and spiritualist reports. A Mme Filine revealed that a blond woman was involved; Mme Loni-​Feignez pointed towards three men, two small and one tall, who were responsible for removing the painting from the wall, acting under the influence of the other two; Mme Berthe maintained, surprisingly accurately, that the theft was performed by a foreign person with auburn hair, recently employed by the museum  –​the painting would already be outside France, perhaps, in Germany, placed in a dark tomb.2 The most dazzling report saw a medium invoking the spirit of Leonardo himself, according to whom the panel had already reached the United States (Le Naour 2012, quoted in Galluzzi 2017, 120–​21). The case was not solved until 1913. In 1912, Eva Carrière (born Marthe Beraud), ‘the most controversial physical medium of the early twentieth century’, who would pass through a series of medical investigations conducted by Charles Richet because of her rare gift of materialisation (Buckland 2006, 131), produced an ectoplasm with Mona Lisa’s features (Bozzano 1967, 116). Years later, Aleister Crowley (born Edward Alexander Crowley), founder of

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2  Stefano Cracolici and Mark Sandy the new occultist religion of Thelema (Bogdan 2015), supposed retrospectively that ‘the thieves who stole the “Gioconda” from the Louvre were probably disguised as workmen, and stole the picture under the very eye of the guardian’ –​for Crowley, this concealment was not the result of skilful camouflage but of the so-​called ‘power of invisibility’, a distinct feature of the authentic magus (1973, 30).3 The fanciful reconstructions of the case found in many occultist reports, Crowley maintained, were due to the ‘failure to employ the correct medium’ (132). The theft of the Mona Lisa captures perfectly the interdisciplinary melange in which the spiritualist discourse was embedded across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In this period, which saw the creation and establishment of new scientific disciplines, those systems of knowledge that could not fit within the mesh of sciences –​be they natural, social, or human –​were relegated either to the fantastic realm of art and poetry or to the hidden one of esoterism. The ‘occultistes, somnambules, chiromanciens’ that Le Matin summoned as informants to offer clues on the whereabouts of the vanished Mona Lisa were all enlisted as practitioners of the ‘au-​delà’. The intensified trade with the afterlife paralleled the increasing professionalisation of society –​as ‘ceux qui savent… ceux qui voient’ (‘those who know… those who see…’) the operators of such new professions were constantly asked to provide scientific evidence to prove the truth of their various ghostly encounters. In an epoch that witnessed the gradual secularisation of society and the rise of a new faith in scientific progress, the spiritualist community embodied the Unknown, and as such could be consulted, as modern oracles or sybils, for solving forensic and very material riddles. It is not by chance that the most authoritative voices in the field were people hitherto relegated to the margin of the academic territory –​women from the Southern Mediterranean (Eva Carrière was from Algeria and Eusapia Paladino was Neapolitan; both were studied by the French physiologist Charles Richet); obscure initiates from Eastern Europe (the Russian Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, for instance, and the Armenian Georges Ivanovič Gurdjieff); or followers of the Cabbala or Hindu religions (Eliphas Lévi or Yogi Ramacharaka). The spiritualist wave that hit Europe and the States from the second half of the nineteenth century contributed to opening up new avenues of scientific enquiry and acted as a rich reservoir of images and ideas to feed the literary, artistic and then filmic avant-​ gardes’ (Leeder 2015). In the introduction to his monumental work on the spiritualist activity of medium Eusapia Paladino, the psychiatrist Enrico Morselli announced in 1908 that the spiritualists numbered already ‘12–​14  millions disseminated in all civilized countries’. The profile of those who believed in spiritualism, he wrote, was particularly diffuse (‘diffusissimo’) in Europe and the United States, comprising mostly members of the middle and high classes but also a large part of the proletariat. Many spiritualist circles were founded and the publications they printed to popularise the ‘spiritualist doctrines’ (‘dottrine spiritiche’) were countless. Several international congresses were convened to discuss the phenomenon, and it was difficult to find rooms large enough to welcome their

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Introduction 3 enthusiastic audiences (‘Si radunano Congressi nazionali e internazionali, ed accolgono adesioni entusiastiche da ogni parte, e non trovano aule abbastanza spaziose per le loro frequentatissime assemblee’). At this moment fundraising campaigns to support the investigation into the Unknown were especially successful (1908, 10–​11). Serious intellectual engagement with this body of beliefs began when the London Dialectical Society created a special commission to investigate spiritualism in 1869. Evidence was provided on the psychic phenomena ‘of trance-​ speaking, of healing, of automatic writing, of the introduction of flowers and fruits into closed rooms, of voices in the air, of visions in crystals and glasses, and of the elongation of the human body’, reaching the conclusion that the attested ‘absence of any proof of imposture or delusion as regards a large portion of the phenomena […] is worthy of more serious attention and careful investigation than it has hitherto received’ (London Dialectical Society 1871, 5–​6). This commission prefigured the foundation in London of the Society for Psychical Research in 1882, whose American branch was directed by William James (Asprem 2015). The Russian Society of Physics had established a similar committee in 1875, with members of the calibre of chemist Dmitri Mendeleev, mathematician Youri Egorov and palaeontologist Vladimir Kovalevsky. In Germany, Wilhelm Wundt and Hermann Ulrici fiercely debated the philosophical question posed by spiritualism on the pages of the Zeitschrift für Philosophie und philosophische Kritik (Sawicki 2017, 302).4 Around the same time, in France, the spiritualist forces subtending Jean-​Martin Charcot’s studies on hysteria were already transformed into literary and artistic subjects (Marquer 2008; Hustvedt 2012, 3–​31).

Encountering the Ghostly With this historical and scientific background in mind and a focus on the transnational dimension of the spiritualist phenomenon, our volume is alert to how cultural imaginings embody an awareness of the presences of those who are not physically there and exhibit a sensitivity to the ghostly in a bid to construct our senses of place, of history, and of belonging to a given community. Our critical collection mediates on the ghostly and its representation, including the uncanny, the revenant, the echo, and other forms of artistic allusion. These unsettling presences of the spectral other are registered by our contributors as occurring in literature, history, film, and the history of art. The ghostly (and its artistic, literary, filmic, scientific, theoretical, and cultural representations) remains of burgeoning interest and debate among twenty-​first-​century literary critics, historians, art historians, and linguists of the nineteenth century, as witnessed most recently in the publication of The Routledge Handbook to the Ghost Story (Brewster and Thurston 2018). Through a series of diverse chapters on art, literature, and film, with a special attention to their scientific, religious, and philosophical underpinnings, our volume traces the wider implications of these multifarious representations of the ghostly (and notions of the spectral) to better understand a number

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4  Stefano Cracolici and Mark Sandy of different, but inter-​ related, cultural and historical concerns. These vital concerns in our collection centre on how individuals, histories, and cultures are haunted by an uncanny awareness (or inexplicable feeling) that compels us to search out the ghostly in our everyday life and encounters. Our volume does not pretend to offer a comprehensive account of every instance of cultural and imaginative representation of the ghostly. Instead, through individual cultural and imaginative examples, it attests to the innumerable instances of those imaginative and cultural encounters with the ghostly. Our initial grouping of chapters explores ‘Romantic and Victorian Encounters with the Ghostly’ in the poetry of Wordsworth, in the Victorian ghost story, and in the nineteenth-​century tradition of the German novel. In the first chapter, ‘ “Strength in What Remains Behind”: Wordsworth, Spectral Selves, and the Question of Ageing’, Mark Sandy revisits Wordsworth’s poetic fascination with the elderly and their ghostly semblances. Wordsworth’s imaginative impulse, Sandy argues, is to idealise the elderly into transcendent figures, which offer the compensation of a harmonious vision to the younger generation for the losses of old age that, in all likelihood, they will themselves experience. Here Wordsworth’s unfolding tragedy of Michael is interpreted by Sandy as reinforcing a frequent pattern, observed elsewhere in Wordsworth’s poetry, whereby idealised figures of old men transform into disturbingly spectral second selves of their younger counterparts or narrators. These troubling transformations reveal that at the heart of Wordsworth’s poetic vision of old age as a harmonious, interconnected, and consoling state, there are disquieting fears of disunity, disconnection, and disconsolation, as well as a ghostly foreshadowing of death. Questions then of being and seeming, what might constitute a poetics of semblance, are central to our next chapter, ‘Far More Than a Simple Ghost Story: The Complexity of Algernon Blackwood’s “Chemical” (1926)’, by Mike Pincombe. Taking its point of departure from a pivotal episode in M. R. James’s ‘An Episode in Cathedral History’ (1914), Pincombe offers a subtly detailed examination of the role played by evidence in the English ghost story from M. R. James to Robert Louis Stevenson. Drawing on the more familiar work of Tzvetan Todorov on le fantastique and the less familiar work of Philippe Hamon on le descriptif, Pincombe recognises the importance of the discovery and interpretation of evidence (derived from the Latin videre meaning ‘to see’) to the ghost story as a form, but also the ways in which the genre places the notion of evidence itself under suspicion. Crucial here to this calling into question of the very idea of evidence is the ghost story’s formal and narrative preoccupation with the confusion between being and seeming, realised by evidentia as a rhetorical figure of description often deployed by the genre. Shifting attention to nineteenth-​century Germany, Nicholas Saul concludes this section by examining the wider cultural ramifications of debates between scientific and religious modes of interpretation and the nature of evidence. With the advent of Darwinism and the triumph of exact science in the latter half of the nineteenth century, Saul notes, German society faced a religious and cultural crisis. In the re-​established Empire the received religious truths

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Introduction 5 embodied in the master narrative of the Bible had been usurped by the new master narrative of The Origin of Species, the dethroning of humankind from its supremacy over creation, and the materialistic struggle for existence. In this context, Saul avers that the new American movement of spiritualism answered German needs by seemingly offering objective evidence of spirit interventions and manifestations, so that the demands of science were satisfied, and the cherished doctrines of afterlife could re-​emerge in a form apparently legitimated by the new epistemological authority. As Saul demonstrates, what actually emerged was desire –​the desire to deny loss and replace the lost in a newly threatening world. In a series of late nineteenth-​century Wilhelmine novels the cult of the spirit was gradually unmasked as the need to believe in illusion itself, and that need was eventually identified with an Orphic and Pygmalionic vision of the artist as secular priest and a pre-​figuration of modern aestheticism. Rosina Buckland’s chapter opens our next section, centred on ‘Visual and Material Encounters with the Ghostly’, with an exploration of ‘Visual Representation of Ghosts and Goblins in Early Modern Japan’. Supernatural creatures, Buckland amply illustrates, were inextricably woven into early modern Japanese society. Their forms ranged from benevolent manifestations of sacred beings, through humorous goblins, to malevolent shape-​shifters and ghosts. These themes were a mainstay of popular visual culture, theatrical productions, and literature, and while the various creatures often provided entertainment they also served to remind people of the importance of religious and folkloric beliefs. These supernatural beings, Buckland argues, provide us with insight into the way Japanese people of the time understood the world around them, as well as that which lay beyond the knowable, sensible world. Buckland’s chapter offers a plethora of examples from the visual tradition, in woodblock prints, paintings, masks, and personal ornaments, exploring both the anthropological meanings and the artistic interpretations to be found in this rich cultural sphere. Turning from the Oriental to the supernatural cinema of Mexican director Guillermo del Toro, and his 2015 film Crimson Peak in particular, Ann Davies explores, in chapter 7, how his movie transforms the spatial tropes of the gothic into a ‘nightmare of presence’ that renders indistinguishable the psychological states from the setting in which subjects find themselves. Through Allerdale Hall the familiar trope of the haunted house, Ann Davies contends, becomes a self-​aware extension of the damaged psyches that comprise its inhabitants and a meta-​theatrical space where the macabre gothic action of a ghostly manifestation of injurious generational transgression enacts itself. Such filmic re-​imaginings of the highly feminised and transgressive gothic space of the haunted house recalls the self-​conscious artistry of the aphoristic phrase of the nineteenth-​century American poet, Emily Dickinson, when she claimed that ‘Nature is a haunted house –​but art –​is a house that tries to be haunted’.5 This shared sense of ghostly otherness or othering is the concern of Douglas Davies’s chapter, ‘Embodied Shadows: Sculpted Memory, Sensed Presence, and the Third Party’, which acknowledges that uncanny feeling we all sometimes

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6  Stefano Cracolici and Mark Sandy have that it seems that someone else is with us. This chapter’s reflections on these sensed presences as spectral companions or ‘embodied shadows’ serves as a coda to this section of our collection, which, with varying emphases, examines those visual, material, and cultural forms that attempt to give shape to the ghostly. With an eye to notions of grief, God, and identity, Douglas Davies combines historical and contemporary anthropological views with empirical and speculative material to explore such sensed presence, especially of the dead. If ghosts embody the remnant legacies of the dead, then, our third and final section, ‘Ghostly Legacies: Modern and Contemporary Encounters’, recognises that the various literary and cultural embodiments of the ghostly other also constitute a bequest of their own. Our next chapter, ‘Futurist Ghosts’, by Stefano Cracolici focuses on Futurism as providing one example of an open attack on the ‘ghostly’. The link, Cracolici assures us, between Futurism and the occult is well charted. He reveals it by looking at the movement’s poetic roots, from Italian scapigliatura to French symbolism; its philosophical implications, from positivism to pragmatism; its spiritualistic matrices, from theosophy to Satanism; and its cultural and scientific underpinnings, from Renaissance magic, alchemy, and physiognomy to Lombrosian psychiatry. Marinetti’s, Balla’s, and Boccioni’s interest for contemporary occult theories allows, Cracolici contends, for an integration of these prophetic and magical elements into the Futurist project of externalising the will. This project, Cracolici suggests, can then be defined as a spiritual process of gaining control over the unknown, external world and its ghostly ‘anti-​artistic’ manifestations. Our next chapter reads into the evolution of the urban and suburban fictional ghost from the mid-​ nineteenth to early twenty-​ first century those conflicts and contradictions that inhere within modernity and are an integral part of its inheritance. Christopher Lloyd’s contribution is alert to how Baudelaire’s ‘Tableaux parisiens’ (the sequence of poems added to the second edition of Les Fleurs du mal, 1861)  energetically celebrates both the sordid grandeur of Second-​Empire Paris and its haunting spectral presence, which are in a constant exchange between self and other, past and present, material presence and symbolic absence. Additionally, Romantic spectres and allegories are inventively updated and relocated in thought-​provoking and highly readable novels by Lydie Salvayre (La Compagnie des spectres, 1997) and Hilary Mantel (Beyond Black, 2005), which are set respectively in the outer suburbs and dormitory towns of contemporary Paris and London. Lloyd interprets both authors as juxtaposing sharply observed satire of contemporary post-​ industrial French and British society with moving accounts of its misfits and exiles whose solipsistic alienation and possession by malevolent ghosts convince us that the spectral other remains an integral part of our human psyche, history, and culture. Our concluding chapter acts as a postscript to the entire collection. It examines the role of ghosts and the ghostly in what Michael Mack defines as a poetics of disappointment. In a masterly, wide-​ ranging contribution, ‘Disavowing Disappointment in the Face of Ghosts: From Keats’s “Destructive Element”

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Introduction 7 to Hannah Arendt’s Reading of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness’, Mack traces the disappointments of modernity and postmodernity back to a Romantic disillusionment with the transcendent or ideal. This inheritance of disappointment in the writings of Spinoza, Keats, Conrad, Spender, and Arendt manifests itself in a number of spectral hauntings, whether they are constituted as the spectre of idealism, the ‘ghostly form of nihilism’, the spectre of dialectics, or the ‘ghostly logic of economical transaction’. Such hauntings reveal, in Mack’s view, the ultimate Spinozist ‘disappointing ghost of nature’, which, paradoxically, gestures towards imperfection and generates a genocidal drive towards the extermination of all superfluous life in the name of realising a universal perfection. Reflecting on the instances, processes, and legacies of these cultural imaginings reminds us that, even as we seek to exorcise our belief in ghosts, we detect their spectral presences everywhere. We may be inclined to think that modernity has freed us from ghosts. But this is not the case. Something of these ghostly forms is sensed by the twentieth-​century American poet, Wallace Stevens, writing, at the close of one of his best-​known poems, ‘of ourselves and of our origins | In ghostlier demarcations, keener sounds’ (2006, 111). Through shifting perspectival, poetic, and philosophical modes of perception at play in his ‘Idea of Order at Key West’, Stevens catches glimpses of a ghostly othering and otherness which, by simultaneously inviting and resisting embodiment, perpetually and inexplicably haunts our being and sense of existence. Even recent scientific discoveries and technological developments open up the possibilities of fresh hauntings by those ghostly and spectral forms that disturb the cultural imaginings of both the past and the present day. Our original invitation to contributors compelled them to gather their thoughts and expertise under the heading of ‘Ghosts: The Evidence of Spirits’. The topic was introduced by what we hoped would be a provocative preamble: We live in a world populated by ghosts. The landscapes and scenes we pass through each day are inhabited –​if not possessed –​by spirits. Our everyday haunts are haunted by them. The rationality which governs our lives, our thoughts, our beliefs urges us to conceal their spectral presence, to demote their evidence; we cannot see them, therefore we deny their existence. This imaginative statement was further qualified in theoretical terms: Ghosts dwell not in our world but, we like to think, in fictional or possible worlds –​in literature, in film, in art. Or, perhaps, in some multiple time dimensions that science might discover. Modernity, it seems, has freed us from ghosts; culture has invented for them the interstitial space of superstition. At a temporal and spatial remove from the Louvre, a modest exhibition, Ghost Stories: The Evidence of Spirits in Photography (Durham, Durham World Heritage Site Visitor Centre, October, 2015), co-​curated by us in the

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8  Stefano Cracolici and Mark Sandy north-​eastern English cathedral city of Durham, displayed a set of nineteenth-​ century spirit photographs from an album unearthed in a Lancashire antiquarian bookshop by a curator of the National Science and Media Museum in Bradford. In this exhibition we experienced the interstitial presence of superstition as more tangibly active than we had previously assumed. The photographs were taken by William Hope (1863–​ 1933), a controversial medium from Crewe in Cheshire, who in 1905 was about to destroy all the plates, fearing that Roman Catholics might hear of his experiments and accuse him of being in league with the devil (Buckland 2006, 183).6 One of Hope’s photographs exhibited in Durham, Mourning Scene (1920, Figure 1.1), shows a Catholic woman mourning for her husband in a chapel of rest and standing by his body, which is wrapped in sheets and laden with flowers. The image of a man’s face has been superimposed over the original photograph. Despite the technical explanation provided in the accompanying panel, the curators of Durham’s World Heritage Site Visitor Centre urged us, to our surprise, to add a warning at the entrance of the exhibition stating that the images could perturb children’s minds –​and it was that photograph, combining a ‘ghost’ with a cross, that was felt responsible for such an imputed reaction. It seems indeed

Figure 1.1 William Hope, Mourning Scene, ca. 1920. Source: The National Science and Media Museum, Bradford.

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Introduction 9 that the encounter with the ghostly ghosts, even if they are merely the product of a technical trick, still unsettles our past and present cultural imaginings of spectral forms.

Notes 1 ‘Le Matin offre cinq mille francs aux occultistes, somnambules, chiromanciens, etc., qui, par de moyens empruntées à l’au-​delà, feront retrouver la “Joconde” ’, Le Matin 28 (10046), 30 August 1911: 1. The article intended to fire up a public debate about the failings of both the museum’s security and the efficiency of the Parisian police: ‘Les conservateurs du Louvre n’ont pas su conserver la Joconde. La justice, la police n’ont pu la recouvrer. Il ne nous reste aujourd’hui de recours dans les somnambules’ (‘The Louvre conservators were unable to preserve the painting. Justice and the police could not find it. Nothing has been left to us today other than turning to somnambulists’). 2 ‘Á la recherche de la “Joconde”: ceux qui savent… ceux qui voient’, Le Matin, 28 (1047), 31 August 1911: 1–​2. The campaign resulted in a fundraising success. 3 Crowley explains this power as nothing supernatural per se, but an ability to act with such an ‘intense conviction and authority’ that one could ‘walk past any guardian, such as a sentry or ticket-​collector, […] so that the man is somehow persuaded that you have a right to pass unchallenged’ (1973, 30). One of Peruggia’s accomplices, Vincenzo Lancelotti, studied therapeutic magnetism in Paris (Galluzzi 2017, 122). 4 Verein für spirite Studien (‘Association for Spiritualist Studies’) had earlier been founded in 1869 in Leipzig by the Polish Count Adolf Lodzia Poninski, the writer August Wilhelm Ritter von Zerboni di Sposetti and the publisher Erasmus Lukas Kasprowicz (Sawicki 2017, 292). 5 Quotation from Dickinson’s letter to T. W. Higginson, 1876 (1986, 225). 6 It was Thomas Colley, Archdeacon of Stockton in Warwickshire, who convinced the photographer to keep the plates. A  few years later he would compose several sermons on spiritualism (Colley 1907), in one of which he professed his faith in the almost prophetic ability of photography: ‘The present inability of the microscope and telescope to see as deep as we would see into the wonders of creation is passing away, and a new process of photography already suggests the possibility of our soon being able to see […] into the realm of the transcendental’ (Colley 1907, 30). On spirit photography, see Gettings 1978 and Jolly 2006.

Works Cited Asprem, Egil. 2015. ‘The Society for Psychical Research’. In The Occult World, edited by Christopher H. Partridge, 266– ​74. New York: Routledge. Bogdan, Henrik. 2015. ‘Aleister Crowley: A Prophet for the Modern Age’. In The Occult World, edited by Christopher H. Partridge, 294–​302. New York: Routledge. Bozzano, Ernesto. 1967. Pensiero e volontà: forze plasticizzanti e organizzanti. Verona: Luce e Ombra. Brewster, Scott, and Luke Thurston, eds. 2018. The Routledge Handbook to the Ghost Story. New York, NY: Routledge. Buckland, Raymond. 2006. The Spirit Book: The Encyclopedia of Clairvoyance, Channeling, and Spirit Communication. Canton, MI: Visible Ink. Colley, Thomas. 1907. Sermons on Spiritualism at Stockton. London: Ellis & Keene.

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10  Stefano Cracolici and Mark Sandy Crowley, Aleister. 1973. Magick. Edited by John Symonds and Kenneth Grant. London: Routledge. Dickinson, Emily, and Thomas Herbert Johnson. 1986. Emily Dickinson Selected Letters. London: The Belknap Press of Harvard Univ. Press. Galluzzi, Francesco. 2017. Fantasmi elettrici: arte e spiritismo tra simbolismo e futurismo. Ospedaletto, Pisa: Pacini editore. Gettings, Fred. 1978. Ghosts in Photographs: The Extraordinary Story of Spirit Photography. Montreal: Optimum. Hustvedt, Asti. 2012. Medical Muses: Hysteria in Nineteenth-​Century Paris. London: Bloomsbury. Jolly, Martyn. 2006. Faces of the Living Dead: The Belief in Spirit Photography. Carlton: Miegunyah Press. Leeder, Murray, ed. 2015. Cinematic Ghosts: Haunting and Spectrality from Silent Cinema to the Digital Era. New York: Bloomsbury Academic. Le Naour, Jean-​Yves. 2012. Le vol de la Joconde. Annecy: Roymodus. London Dialectical Society. 1871. Report on Spiritualism of the Committee of the London Dialectical Society: Together with the Evidence, Oral and Written, and a Selection from the Correspondence. London: Longmans, Green, Reader and Dyer. Marquer, Bertrand. 2008. Les romans de la Salpêtrière: réception d’une scénographie clinique: Jean-​Martin Charcot dans l’imaginaire fin-​de-​siècle. Genève: Librairie Droz. Morselli, Enrico. 1908. Psicologia e spiritismo: impressioni e note critiche sui fenomeni medianici di Eusapia Paladino. 2 vols. Torino: Fratelli Bocca Editori. Sassoon, Donald. 2003. Becoming Mona Lisa: The Making of a Global Icon. San Diego: Harcourt. Sawicki, Diethard. 2017. Leben mit den Toten: Geisterglauben und die Entstehung des Spiritismus in Deutschland 1770–​1900. Paderborn: Verlag Ferdinand Schöningh. Stevens, Wallace. 2006. Collected Poems. London: Faber and Faber.

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Part I

Romantic and Victorian Encounters with the Ghostly

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2  ‘Strength in What Remains Behind’ Wordsworth, Spectral Selves, and the Question of Ageing Mark Sandy

William Wordsworth, as Willard Spiegelman acknowledges, is ‘the first modern spokesman for old age’ in verse (1985, 83). Whether conceived of as a poet of nature, a reviser and editor of his own work, a re-​visitor of his favourite haunts, a champion of social concerns, or even a philosopher manqué, Wordsworth is a writer who, for critics with diverse approaches and perspectives (Bennett 2007; Fry 2008; Gill 2011; Jarvis 2002; Simpson 2009), has a profound investment in the question of ageing. For Wordsworth, the question of ageing is bound up with anxieties about mortality, living on, and youthful fears of failure to attain longevity, as well as worries about what will remain of life if old age is reached (Sell 2014). This last question of bequest, of what remains or abides, strikes a more universal register in Wordsworth’s poetry to ask what is left behind in words or deeds when an individual is faced with the debilitating (physical and mental) frailties of ageing and its inexorable conclusion of death. These larger questions and anxieties about ageing form the remit of Wordsworth’s imaginative, often ghostly, encounters with and depiction of the elderly. This poetic engagement with the aged and ageing is a vein that runs concurrently with Wordsworth’s Rousseauian investment in child-​like modes of consciousness. In the light of his famous credo that the ‘Child is Father of the Man’ (Wordsworth 2000, ‘My heart leaps up when I  behold’, 246), Wordsworth is often championed as the poet of infancy and the Romantic figure of the child. Consequently, Wordsworth’s poetry is read as depicting the child in possession of an imaginative power of perception at odds with those rationalised adult minds that ‘murder to dissect’ (‘The Tables Turned’, 28). Ageing, for Wordsworth at least, as sketched out in the ‘Ode: Intimations of Immortality’, is both a dulling of the mental faculties (and senses) and a falling away from the ‘celestial light’ (2) of infancy into the ‘Shades of the prison-​house’ (67) of adulthood. Yet even in the face of pervasive loss, Wordsworth’s Ode finds compensation in those later ‘years that bring the philosophic mind’ (189). Such a seasoned ‘philosophic mind’, as Wordsworth describes in ‘Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey’, is capable of a calmer and more seasoned engagement with the natural world –​and its ‘still, sad music of humanity’ (92) –​than can ever be realized in ‘the hour /​Of thoughtless youth’ (90–​1).

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14  Mark Sandy Wordsworth’s imaginative instincts are to valorise the condition of old age as a necessary state of living on, which encompasses its own personal and communal consolation for the suffering and loss that is, inextricably, part of the ageing process.1 Crucially, Wordsworth recognises that the price paid for attaining the ‘philosophic mind’ (191) is of growing old and all those limitations, infirmities, and injuries that come with ageing. Yet, in Wordsworth’s poetry, the process of ageing maybe debilitating and painful, but old age is a dignified, rarefied, valorised, and very necessary state of being, every bit as vital as infancy. For Wordsworth, ‘old age’ has the potential to be ‘serene and bright’ (1888, ‘To a Young Lady’, XX, 16), ‘beautiful and free’ (2000, ‘The Fountain: A Conversation’, 43–​4), and, at his most optimistic, ‘Age might [even] take the things Youth needed not!’ (‘The Small Celandine’, 288). Readings of this kind are attuned to how Wordsworth’s poetry depicts a series of subtle, shifting, and contradictory interactions between states of youth and old age.2 These nuances and tensions indicate how Wordsworth’s representation of, and engagement with, the question of ageing complicate in more disturbing ways his imaginative impulse towards a poetic vision of collective compensation. It is possible, as Wordsworth attests, that an older ‘wiser mind /​Mourns less for what age takes away /​Than what it leaves behind’. (‘The Fountain’, 34–​5) That the mature ‘wiser mind’ finds itself grieving ‘less for what age takes away’ and more for what the process of ageing ‘leaves behind’ confronts the reader with a typical Wordsworthian conundrum. We should ‘mourn’ not for what the processes of living, time, and ageing have taken from us, but instead for what remains of our debilitated selves. So that mourning for the remnants of what we have now become is, effectively, to mourn for the loss (‘what age takes away’) of what we once were.3 Through its account of an atrophying life, Wordsworth’s seriocomic ballad of ‘Simon Lee, the Old Huntsman’ is as much concerned with Simon’s decrepit present existence as it is with his (now lost) physical prowess and skill as a young huntsman. The mixed tragic and comic tone of Wordsworth’s ballad belies, too, the mixed sympathies of the narrator’s attitude towards the figure of Simon Lee, who is simultaneously presented to us with empathy and disdain, delight and derision. With the final uprooting of the stump of ‘rotten wood’ (84), the narrator’s response to Simon’s reaction to the event, at best, misreads the old man’s tears and, at worst, is indifferent to them and the genuine grief they represent. A  poem that started out as an exercise in the expansion of sympathies towards the old huntsman ends, ironically, with a failure to comprehend both Simon Lee’s plight and ‘such stores as silent thought can bring’ (74; see Sandy 2013, 38–​39). The product of ‘silent thought’, those ‘stores’, comprised of ‘what age takes away’ and ‘leaves behind’ of Simon’s story and life, form the dwindling and absent-​present essence of Wordsworth’s ballad of ‘no tale’ (79). Reminiscent of those other ghostly figures of Lucy Gray and Martha Ray, Wordsworth’s Simon Lee is reduced to a spectral form which, ever diminishing and ever-​present before us, haunts the margins of society and existence.4

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‘Strength in What Remains Behind’ 15 Embodied by his daily, futile struggle with the tree ‘stump’ (84), the final remnant of Simon’s story and life is removed by the narrator’s ill-​judged act of kindness that renders Simon’s existence bereft of purpose. Futile as Simon’s daily struggle was, his tussle with the decayed tree trunk symbolised his one last lingering attachment to life and the living. Metaphorically, the uprooting of the tree ‘stump’ signifies Simon’s final detachment from life and community. The narrator’s action both short-​circuits the possibilities of wider sympathies that Wordsworth’s ballad seeks to elicit and positions Simon (now left in a state barely recognisable as living) beyond the communal fellowship of others. If, as we are informed by an authorial note, the impression of the historical old huntsman, who inspired ‘Simon Lee’, abided with Wordsworth for some forty-​five years ‘as fresh before my eyes as I  had seen him yesterday’ (690, n. 85) so, too, did the question of ageing and its attendant metaphysical, moral, personal, and social concerns. In later life, Wordsworth associated these moral and social concerns, adversely affected by the passing of the (in his view heinous) Poor Law Amendment Act in August 1834, with images of limited vision and blindness. Looking back in 1835, Wordsworth admonishes against falling ‘blindly into the belief’ that the act was, as its name implied, a ‘renewal of something that existed […] before’ (Wordsworth 1974, vol. 3, 244–​5).5 A personal preoccupation about impaired physical vision was also much on Wordsworth’s mind earlier in the summer of 1834, when he complained of a ‘weakness left’ in his eyes ‘by successive severe attacks’ of inflammation.6 Personal worries about his own poor eyesight and misgivings about wider social reforms may have haunted Wordsworth’s instinctive tendency, throughout his career, to mesh together depictions of the elderly with tropes of circumscribed physical sight and vision. Composed a few months earlier in 1798 than ‘Simon Lee’, Wordsworth’s The Old Cumberland Beggar explores a similar set of concerns about the debilitating effects of ageing, sympathy (and its limitations), acts of kindness (charity), community, and notions of fellowship. These concerns, especially as worked out in relation to the elderly, are persistently present in Wordsworth’s poetical thoughts from ‘Old Man Travelling’ to ‘I know an aged Man constrained to dwell’. The second and later of these two poems, ‘I know an aged Man constrained to dwell’, provides a self-​ conscious return to, and imaginative reworking of, Wordsworth’s earlier subject matter, themes, and imagery in The Old Cumberland Beggar.7 In ‘I know an aged Man constrained to dwell’, Wordsworth’s offers a retrospect of the life of a ‘good old man’ (29) who, no longer able ‘to live on alms’ (6), has been forced to relinquish his freedom and become a ‘Captive’ (24) to a ‘house of public charity’ (2). In happier and slightly less impoverished days, Wordsworth’s narrator relates how the ‘poor’ (5) and ‘aged man’ (1) shared ‘his bread’ (8) and companionship with a ‘Redbreast’ (7): There, at the root of one particular tree, An easy seat this worn-​out Labourer found

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16  Mark Sandy While Robin pecked the crumbs upon his knee Laid one by one, or scattered on the ground. ( ‘I know an aged Man constrained to dwell’, 9–​11) Here Wordsworth positively reimagines the ‘root of an old tree’ (84), from the closing scene of ‘Simon Lee’, as the accommodating ‘root of one particular tree’ to suggest the sense of attachment felt by the ‘aged man’ to place, as well as the rightness in the timing and purpose of the unfolding encounter. What is also conveyed in these lines is a sense of deliberate ease about the ‘chosen spot’ (21) of the mutual interactions between the robin and the old man. At this moment in his life, the ‘worn-​out Labourer’ is still able to act ‘at will’ (5) and freely choose his movements and with whom or even what he shares his limited provisions. There is no doubt that the ‘aged man’ actively elects to share the bread with the bird as, in spite of a ‘tremulous hand’ (20), he carefully configures the individual ‘crumbs upon on his knee’ or scatters them about ‘on the ground’ for the robin’s benefit. It is the same ‘tremulous hand’ which, through ‘season’s change’ (17), ‘caresses’ (20) the redbreast and helps to seal the bond between the ‘solitary pair’ (22). Ultimately, their ‘mutual gladness’ (14) defies the demands of seasonal change, the imposition of spatial and temporal absence from one another, as well as diluting the distinction between the human and animal spheres. ‘Recompense for all that… [is]…lost’ (28) abides not, for the ‘aged man’, in the ‘converse’ (25) of those inmates with whom he is ‘housed’ (24), but through a stoic belief in a metaphysical attachment  –​expressed ‘[b]‌y message sent through air or visible token’ (29) –​to the robin and their shared, sustained, and continual ‘[d]ear intercourse’ (13). It is this conviction that makes possible Wordsworth’s final triumphant statement, ‘[t]hat friendship lasts though fellowship is broken!’ (32). Less positively, such a statement belies the kind of limited consciousness and imaginative capacity which, as Wordsworth writes of the aged and superstitious narrator of The Thorn, ‘produces impressive effects out of simple elements’ (Note to The Thorn, 593). Wordsworth’s insistence on continued friendship in the face of broken fellowship is only realisable if we, as readers, are willing to extend the same expansive sympathy and understanding, displayed by the ‘old man’ towards the bird, to the ‘aged man’ and his stoic conviction in a metaphysical connection between himself and the robin. Put differently, it is only through extending our sympathies to the ‘aged man’ that we can dignify his mute, isolated, metaphorical imprisonment, as an act of stoic defiance from which ‘[s]‌ome recompense for all that he had lost’ (28) can be derived. Without such sympathetic responses, Wordsworth’s elision between the human and animal spheres takes on darker connotations that might strip the ‘old man’ of his dignity and humanity, rendering him little more than a caged, dumb, creature. Wordsworth’s depiction of the touching encounter between the ‘old man’ and redbreast seeks to reinforce his humanity, but the episode self-​ referentially recalls and imaginatively

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‘Strength in What Remains Behind’ 17 recasts more favourably our first, arguably less attractive, sighting of the Old Cumberland Beggar: The aged man Had placed his staff across the broad smooth stone That overlays the pile, and from a bag All white with flour the dole of village dames, He drew his scraps and fragments, one by one, And scanned them with a fixed and serious look Of idle computation… He sate, and eat his food in solitude; And ever, scattered from his palsied hand, That still attempting to prevent the waste, Was baffled still, the crumbs in little showers Fell on the ground, and the small mountain birds, Not venturing yet to peck their destined meal… (The Old Cumberland Beggar, 6–​12;  15–​20) Unlike in the previous bird-​feeding incident (involving Wordsworth’s ‘worn-​ out Labourer’), the figure of this ‘aged man’ lacks any sign of wilful action or mutual intercourse with his surrounding environs. The Old Cumberland Beggar’s mechanical movements suggest an individual now devoid of inner spirit or soul as, like an automaton,8 he scans each scrap ‘with a fixed and serious look’ without really seeing and purely for the sake of some ‘idle computation’. If there is motive here, it is one of seeming self-​centredness. There is no intentional willingness to share the ‘crumbs’, which the mendicant has received (presumably in the form of alms) from the ‘village dames’, with the gathering of ‘small mountain birds’. The anticipated ‘destined meal’ of the birds is an accidental result of an uncontrollable ‘palsied hand’ which, operating as a synecdoche for the Old Cumberland Beggar’s state of indifferent bafflement, causes those ‘little showers’ of crumbs to fall all the more the greater his effort is ‘to prevent the waste’. Wordsworth’s Old Cumberland Beggar may lack the magnanimity and powers of sympathy of the figure depicted in ‘I know an aged Man constrained to dwell’, but his routine presence on country lanes, in the village, and amidst farm buildings elicit ‘acts of love’ (92), kindness, and charity towards him from others. The Old Cumberland Beggar’s unhoused, disconnected, unsympathetic, state, as well as his limited concern with ‘selfish and cold oblivious cares’ (87), acts as ‘[a]‌silent monitor’ (115) to all those he encounters of the ‘peculiar boons’ (118) and benefits of their own housed existences. Reminded that their own modest lives are superior to the ‘vast solitude’ endured by the mendicant, those ‘who live /​Sheltered’ (112–​13) are moved to charitable acts (and an expansion of their sympathy) towards the unsympathetic presence of the beggar. They do so precisely because his homeless existence points up their own housed condition and sense of belonging to a

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18  Mark Sandy family  –​‘[t]‌heir kindred, and the children of their blood’ (133). A  poignant sign of their own safely housed kith and kindred, the sight of the homeless, companionless, and ‘solitary’ figure of the Old Cumberland Beggar transforms complacent thoughts of ‘self-​ congratulation’ (117) to heart-​ felt acts of kindness. The disengaged and unsympathetic routine wanderings of the beggar in themselves turn out to be a mutual –​though, perhaps, an incidental –​act of kindness, which, exemplified in his forlorn and destitute condition, reminds us of the necessity of living ‘a life of virtuous decency’ (126). Lacking adequate provisions and shelter, the Old Cumberland Beggar’s need to receive charitable donations is equally as great as the need for those who give as a validation of what they have (albeit limited food and housing). As a gauge of those virtues and expansive sympathies of which others are capable, as well as an index to those ‘Past deeds and offices of charity /​Else unremembered’ (82–​3), the Old Cumberland Beggar is redeemed, at least, in the eyes of Wordsworth’s narrator, from a homeless, soulless and purely mechanical state. Wordsworth’s narrator informs us that the Old Cumberland Beggar’s moral function as a ‘silent monitor’ assures him a place, although not housed within a community, within the wider fellowship of universal existence: ‘Tis Nature’s law That none, the meanest of created things, Of forms created the most vile and brute, The dullest or most noxious, should exist Divorced from good, a spirit and pulse of good, A life and soul to every mode of being Inseparably linked. (The Old Cumberland Beggar,  73–​9) Whether the beggar, whose limited ‘prospect’ (51) of vision no longer gazes upon the fields or skywards (49–​ 50), is aware of his inclusion in such a fellowship of ‘every mode of being’ is questionable. It is almost as if the Old Cumberland Beggar’s sight no longer sees this world and gazes beyond life to death.9 As Wordsworth’s narrator insists that the ‘meanest’, ‘most vile and brute’, and ‘dullest’ of creations possess a ‘spirit and pulse of good’ (and are connected to a ‘life and soul’), it is feasible that the Old Cumberland Beggar is unaware of his inclusion in this ‘inseparably linked’ metaphysical fellowship. His accidental, unknown housing within this universal fellowship finds a counterpart with both the beggar’s unintentional sharing of ‘his chance-​gathered meal’ with the ‘little birds’ (186) and his casual presence as the ‘silent monitor’ of the virtuous and decent life. Much then depends upon the degree and extent of sympathy the reader is willing to afford the Old Cumberland Beggar in responding to him as ‘a record which together binds’ (81) those ‘unremembered’ past acts of kindness and charitable deeds. We are asked to consider whether our own sympathies are as capacious (or not) as those of Wordsworth’s narrator and the individuals that the Old Cumberland Beggar encounters. Foreshadowing the dilemma of

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‘Strength in What Remains Behind’ 19 ‘I know an aged Man constrained to dwell’, Wordsworth’s later poem asks the reader to question whether its own call for expansive sympathetic response to the figure of the beggar is, ultimately, realisable. In other words, can we accept the central vision, avowed in Wordsworth’s The Old Cumberland Beggar, ‘[t]‌hat we have all of us one human heart’ (145). After all, it is only through the supposed recollection of what we are told is ‘unremembered’, that these serendipitous circumstances, incidental events, and acts of indifference, are fused together in a single harmonious vision of heart and mind, body and soul. Such a vision ensures the housed are grateful for their own blessings and that the increasingly spectral figure of the ‘old Mendicant’ (152) is permitted, with ‘a blessing on his head’ (155), safe earthly and spiritual passage. Wordsworth’s harmonious vision of the aged figure in, to give the poem its full title, ‘Old Man Travelling; Animal Tranquillity and Decay, A Sketch’ shares both an imaginative impulse (as well as genesis) with The Old Cumberland Beggar and many of its concerns and misgivings. Supposedly, the integrity of the Old Man’s inner contentment is fashioned out of the maturity of his many years, as well as his own earthly and spiritual passage. His deliberate, thoughtful motion is beyond physical torment, Wordsworth assures us, through a coalescence of the materiality of his form with the non-​material. The actions of the Old Man’s spectral form are no more consciously regarded by himself (‘All effort seems forgotten’ (9)) than they are by the ‘little hedge-​row birds’ that ‘regard him not’ (2). The fixity of the Old Man’s downward gaze and ‘bending figure’ (5) are features he shares with Wordsworth’s Old Cumberland Beggar and again are suggestive of an inward state of serenity arrived at by one ‘whom /​Long patience has such mild composure given’ (10). Like ‘pain’ (6), even ‘patience’ ‘now doth seem a thing’ (11) that the Old Man can dispense with, as the meditative (and, presumably, suffering) years of his existence have led him to a state in which ‘he is insensibly subdued /​To settled quiet’ (7–​8). Beyond patience, emotional suffering, and physical pain, the Old Man has achieved (as Wordsworth’s original oxymoronic subtitle of ‘Animal Tranquillity and Decay’ hints) a condition virtually outside of human sensibility and one entirely dependent upon the power of nature for its ‘peace so perfect’ (13). Such is the extent of the Old Man’s remove from those more familiar contours of human thought and consciousness, he ‘hardly feels’ (14) or even knows the enviable, at least to ‘the young’ (13), peaceable perfection of his own present mode of being. The envy of the young extends beyond the Old Man’s longevity in years to his capacity to ‘hardly feel’, or for that matter think of, the anxieties and contingencies of mortality that weigh so heavily on youthful minds. Wordsworth’s addendum to the version of the poem published in Lyrical Ballads 1798 may disturb the Old Man’s ‘settled quiet’ by attributing him with speech, but his revelation that he journeys ‘to take /​a last leave of’ his dying ‘son’ (18–​19) reinforces how very real and well-​founded those youthful anxieties are about questions of mortality and ageing. The objective matter-​of-​factness of the Old Man’s words elides sentimentality and avoids any emotional entanglement in the circumstances of his son’s fatal injury or

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20  Mark Sandy the personal relationship between father and son. Even when made to speak mundanely of his own tragic and personal loss as a father, the Old Man retains a sublime aloofness beyond the world of human affairs. Anticipating the inclusion of ‘A Slumber did My Spirit Seal’ in the 1800 edition of Lyrical Ballads, the enviable condition of Wordsworth’s ‘Old Man Travelling’ is of one having passed into a state of consciousness in which there are ‘no human fears’ for ‘a thing that could not feel /​The touch of earthly years’ (‘A Slumber did My Spirit Seal’). As the treacherous undertow of this short lyric by Wordsworth reminds readers, such an imaginative transformation of a human figure into a transcendent ‘thing’ can be a welcome, though troubling, transcendence of thought, feeling, and life. For all the supposed spiritual grandeur of the Old Man’s ‘insensibly subdued’ condition, his transcendence of ‘pain’ and embodiment of a consciousness beyond human thought ultimately speaks more directly to, and less consolingly of, the final condition of his fatally wounded sea-​faring son. It is the ‘dying’ mariner who will be, like the ‘spirit’ of Wordsworth’s lyric A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal, reduced to an insensible clod ‘Rolled round in earth’s diurnal course /​With rocks, and stones, and trees’, beyond consciousness and life itself. By implication, then, the only outcome for the ‘dying’ son is to become a ghostly figure ranked with Wordsworth’s spectral lost company of youthful wanderers, including Lucy Gray and the Boy of Winander, whose untimely demises are prefigured by those semi-​real presences of the travelling Old Man, the Old Cumberland Beggar, and the, eventually, dispossessed Michael. Wordsworth’s narrator of Michael elevates to biblical and epic majesty the subject matter of ‘a history /​Homely and rude’ (34–​5) about a prodigiously elderly shepherd. Partly, this elevation of Wordsworth’s chosen subject is realised by the announcement of Michael as ‘a pastoral poem’ of elegiac tenor, which holds out for a way of living and a rural idyll already consigned to the past. Wordsworth establishes Michael’s mode of life as an exemplum and instigator of a unifying vision of ‘the heart of man and human life’ (33). Perhaps, the figure of Michael captures more fully than any of Wordsworth’s other depictions of old men the integration between the activities of the human and natural spheres. The shepherd exhibits one of the strongest bonds between the land, its people, and the wider community outside of the familial links of his industrious ‘Household’ (95). This harmony of Michael’s ‘living Being’ (5) is encapsulated by the name of ‘the Evening Star’ ascribed to his cottage, visible from all the cardinal points of ‘Grasmere Vale’ (40), by ‘Both old and young’ (146; 141–​3). This celestial naming of the cottage reinforces it as a figurative and literal beacon of harmony and equilibrium to the surrounding neighbourhood and above all, as Wordsworth’s narrator insists, a ‘public Symbol of the Life’ Michael and his family are inwardly committed to. That the inmates of the Evening Star comprise of Michael and Isabel as aged parents and their son, Luke, is mirrored in the outward communal consensus between ‘old and young’ about the naming of their abode.

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‘Strength in What Remains Behind’ 21 Yet the insistence of Wordsworth’s narrator that ‘there are no few /​ Whose memories will bear witness to my tale (134–​5, emphasis added) hints at an undercutting of the full force of that hopeful certitude through the poised ambiguity of ‘no few’, which suggests, simultaneously, many and none. The narrator’s statement seems more assured about those past ‘memories’ of the cottage’s ‘Lamp’ (133) existing once amongst the now effaced neighbourhood than it does about any future community of poets, listeners, or readers bearing witness to, and affirming, the posthumous existence of either the narrator-​poet or even Michael himself. As much as the ‘Lamp’ is a constant and ever-​present ‘Symbol of the Life’ Michael lived, its constancy is dependent upon successive generations corroborating the memory of the ‘Lamp’ as a reassuring and illuminating presence. Through the workings of memory, or even sometimes its failure, the ‘Lamp’ remains both a constant and inconstant source of hope in Wordsworth’s Michael. Appropriately, the ever-​ present absence of the ‘Lamp’ symbolises Michael’s own final tragic condition. It is a tragedy which, precipitated by the inconstancy of Luke’s affections, reduces Michael to a figure of mourning, ritually attending to but never in fact completing the sheepfold (‘And left the work unfinished when he died’, 481) and, finally, a dispossessed revenant fated to roam the land that will never be his home again. In Michael, the bonds between individuals and the land, between father and son, as well as between Wordsworth’s narrator and a future audience, are dependent upon forging an inter-​generational connection. The past incomplete sheepfold speaks to an emotional covenant between father and son, but its present ruined state tells of the tragic moment when, as Wordsworth writes elsewhere, ‘a bond of brotherhood is broken’ (The Ruined Cottage, 84–​5). Wordsworth’s narrator of Michael still believes in a hoped-​for possibility of connection even when confronted, as are we as readers, by the catastrophic opening –​and in many respects final –​scene of the poem. It is a haunted scene where no human dwelling abides (‘No habitation there is seen’(9)) and only the dilapidated sheep-​fold (‘a straggling heap of unhewn stones’ (17)) remains as an emblem of disconnection, abandonment, ruination, and a pervasive ‘utter solitude’ (14). Through the unfolding tragedy of Michael, we learn as readers that this starting-​point of catastrophe is also the poem’s catastrophic close: Luke is estranged from his home, Michael’s estate has passed ‘into a Stranger’s hand’, the cottage swept away by changes in agriculture practices, and all that ‘remains’ is the ‘unfinished Sheep-​fold’. Its incomplete structure stands in for both all that has been irrecoverably lost and monumentalises the fortitude and hopeful, if disappointed, ‘strength of love’ (457) embodied in the figure of ‘Old Michael’ (459).10 Michael’s habit of returning for ‘the length of full seven years’ (479) to the spot of the would-​be sheepfold, but never lifting ‘up a single stone’ (479), outwardly symbolises the depth and strength of his paternal love, as much as it measures the pathos of a love disappointed and unrequited. This habit of Michael’s frequent revisiting of a site of intense emotional hope and loss, of

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22  Mark Sandy potential connection and disappointed relations, prefigures our sense of Michael as a spectral, dispossessed, absent-​presence in the landscape of ‘Grasmere vale’. Through Michael’s regular visits to the site Wordsworth gestures towards the possibility of ‘comfort’ (457), consolation, and the making of the unbearable ‘thing endurable’ (458). More significantly, with the ambivalent remark that ‘Old Michael found it so’ (459), Wordsworth begs the question ‘found’ what so and, by extension, what  –​if anything  –​remains in the end of Michael’s ‘strength of love’ and endurance when confronted with such a catastrophic loss that ‘would’, and perhaps did, ‘break the heart’ (459). This question of the ‘strength in what remains behind’ (‘Ode: Intimations of Immortality’, 185) is addressed at the start of Michael, when the narrator-​poet, no longer ‘a boy’ (27) and old enough not to class himself as ‘youthful’, hopes that those ‘youthful Poets’ (38) ‘Will be my second self when I am gone’ (39). The ‘strength’ of such a hope is questionable, because it resides with the capacity of the narrator-​poet’s present recounting of his boyhood recollection of Michael’s ‘Tale’ to act, symbolically, as a unifying beacon to past, present, and future poets and listeners (or readers), as well as a ghostly touchstone between the older and younger generations. Invariably, Wordsworth’s representations of the elderly are ghostly doubles of their youthful counterparts, readers, and narrators,11 which gesture towards the aged and spectral second selves that these narrators and younger individuals will, eventually, become. Often, then, the presence of these old men as fictionalised versions of the narrator or younger generation take on an idealised or spiritual significance through their, paradoxically, disembodied and dispossessed embodiment in Wordsworth’s poetic vision. In much of Wordsworth’s poetry, the ‘strange half-​ absence’ (The Discharged Soldier, 143) of the old is intended to reaffirm a set of communal values by connecting the young with the elderly through a harmoniously unified vision of ‘wise passiveness’ (Expostulation and Reply, 135). Yet Wordsworth is alert to the limitations of this hoped-​for integrated vision of the old and the young, as he recognises that to overidealise the consciousness of the elderly is to translate them into otherworldly, unfamiliar, spectral figures no longer capable of sympathetic feeling, and estranged from those they were intended to comfort. Through Wordsworth’s intended imaginative transformation of the elderly into symbols of consolation, these figures risk losing their common touch, sense of human relation, and sympathetic understanding for which Wordsworth, initially, valorised them. Each depiction of an old man by Wordsworth risks rendering him, like the Discharged Soldier of undetermined age, though not young, as ‘a man cut off /​From all his kind, and more than half detached /​ From his own nature’ (58–​60). Instead of these transcendent elderly figures offering reassurance and affirmation to Wordsworth as narrator or to the younger generation, they risk transmogrifying into barely perceptible spectres, who disturb the living by speaking of, and from, the grave of our forgotten past origins of life and its ‘Shades of the prison-​house’, as well as those future, unknown, darker demesnes of death.

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‘Strength in What Remains Behind’ 23

Notes 1 For Spiegelman Wordsworth’s treatment of the elderly achieves equilibrium between ‘what is lost and what gained in age’ (1985, 108). For a sense of communal compensation for loss in Wordsworth’s poetry, see Fosso 2004. 2 Gary Harrison notes that readers with different critical agendas have ‘realised both the utopian and reactionary potentialities of Wordsworth’s poetry about the poor’ (1994, 25) and, I would add, elderly. 3 This is the condition of ‘The fate of the disappointed subject’ (81) in Laura Quinney’s reading of Wordsworth’s ‘Ode: Intimations of Immortality’ (1999, 81). 4 For a discussion of spectral presences in Wordsworth’s poetry, see Sandy 2015. 5 See Gill’s editorial note in Wordsworth 2000, 725, n. 365. 6 William Wordsworth, Letter to John Heraud, 10 June, 1834, 2.  Letter in Wordsworth’s hand on three pages and (on the basis of two letters with the same date) considered to have been composed at Rydal Mount. Held in, and quoted with the permission of, the Letters and Manuscripts collection of the Armstrong Browning Library, Baylor University, Waco, Texas. About a year earlier, Emerson’s account of his visit (28 August, 1833) to Rydal Mount notes Wordsworth’s concerns about his poor eyesight (a problem that likely dates back to 1805); see Pace 2004, 230; Spiegelman 1985, 108. 7 See Gill’s editorial note in Wordsworth 2000, 727, n. 372. 8 See Simpson 2009, 63, 72–​73. 9 Compare with Simpson’s remark that ‘the beggar […] is haunted by a sense that he is already dead’ (2009, 71). By contrast, for Cleanth Brooks, the beggar’s suffering produces a cathartic wisdom (1965, 373–​87). 10 For an alternative reading, see David B. Pirie who argues that ‘What has survived is in many ways the very opposite of loneliness. Michael through choosing to be apart from other people, confronts with his “unusual strength” the still present forces of his world’ (2016, 101). 11 Compare with Spiegelman’s sense that these figures are ‘a projected image of our solitude’ (1985, 96). With few exceptions, such as Isabel the ‘comely Matron old’ (Michael, 81) or ‘Old Ruth’ (‘Simon Lee’, 49), Wordsworth’s depictions of the elderly tend to foreground male characters, who mirror the implied gender of those that narrate their stories.

Works Cited Bennett, Andrew. 2007. Wordsworth Writing. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Brooks, Cleanth. 1965. ‘Wordsworth and Human Suffering: Notes on Two Early Poems’. In From Sensibility to Romanticism: Essays Presented to Frederick A. Pottle, edited by Harold Bloom and Frederick W. Hilles, 373–​ 87. New  York: Oxford University Press. Fosso, Kurt. 2004. Buried Communities: Wordsworth and the Bonds of Mourning. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Fry, Paul H. 2008. Wordsworth and the Poetry of What We Are. New Haven: Yale University Press. Gill, Stephen. 2011. Wordsworth’s Revisitings. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Harrison, Gary. 1994. Wordsworth’s Vagrant Muse: Poetry, Poverty and Power. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press.

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24  Mark Sandy Jarvis, Simon. 2002. Wordsworth’s Philosophic Song. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pace, Joel. 2004. ‘Wordsworth and America: Reception and Reform’. In The Cambridge Companion to Wordsworth, edited by Stephen Gill, 230–​45. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pirie, David. 2016 [1982]. William Wordsworth: The Poetry of Grandeur and of Tenderness. London: Routledge. Quinney, Laura. 1999. The Poetics of Disappointment: Wordsworth to Ashbery. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia. Sandy, Mark. 2013. Romanticism, Memory, and Mourning. Farnham, Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing. Sandy, Mark. 2015. ‘  “Ghostly Language”: Spectral Presences and Subjectivity in Wordsworth’s “Salisbury Plain” Poems’. In Romanticism and Philosophy: Thinking with Literature, edited by Sophie Laniel-​ Musitelli and Thomas Constantinesco, 60–​73. London: Routledge. Sell, Roger D. 2014. ‘In Dialogue with the Ageing Wordsworth’. In Literature as Dialogue Invitations Offered and Negotiated, edited by Roger D. Sell, 161–​74. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company. Simpson, David. 2009. Wordsworth, Commodification and Social Concern: The Poetics of Modernity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Spiegelman, Willard. 1985. Wordsworth’s Heroes. Berkeley: University of California Press. Wordsworth, William. 1888. The Complete Poetical Works. With an Introduction by John Morley. London: Macmillan. —​—​—​. 1974. The Prose Works of William Wordsworth. Edited by W. J. B. Owen and Jane Worthington Smyser. 3 vols. Oxford: Oxford University Press. —​—​—​. 2000 [1984]. William Wordsworth: The Major Works. Edited by Stephen Gill. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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3  Far More Than a Simple Ghost Story The Complexity of Algernon Blackwood’s ‘Chemical’ (1926) Mike Pincombe

‘Monty read us a very good ghost story, with an admirable verger very humorously portrayed –​the ghost part weak’ (James 1989, 328).1 So Arthur Benson writes in his diary for 18 May 1913. He and other friends at Cambridge had heard M.R. James read out ‘An Episode of Cathedral History’, and this was Benson’s verdict. So here is a ‘ghost story’ which has a ‘ghost part’ and therefore also some other part which is not the ‘ghost part’. We can call it the ‘non-​ ghost part’. The aim of the present essay is to give some theoretical precision to Benson’s observation, in relation not to the story by James, in fact, but to another tale which is particularly interesting and revealing with regard to the relation to the two parts of the generic ghost story –​and the three parts of one story in particular. It is ‘Chemical’, by Algernon Blackwood. He wrote it in 1926, at the request of lady Cynthia Asquith, who had asked her friends and fellow writers to contribute to an anthology called The Ghost Book. It was ‘the first genuine ghost story he had written in over ten years’, says his biographer (Ashley 2001, 272). In the interval, ‘Blackwood’s writing had taken on a new sophistication, since the last time he had dabbled with something as mundane as a ghost story’. Ashley continues: ‘The story proves to be far more than a simple ghost story’. And that is the problem I wish to investigate in the pages that follow. Does that ‘far more’ get in the way of the ‘ghost story’? The theoretical derivation of a non-​ghost part from the ghost part of a ghost story seems to me an uncontroversial move. But its practical implications are more challenging: How does this move affect the way we analyse the text? On the one hand, we might say that the writer of a ghost story succeeds only when she writes a story which is entirely occupied by the ghost part, in other words, where there is no non-​ghost part to contaminate the ghostliness of the story. In such a case, any non-​ghostly elements would only distract from the itinerary, as it were, laid out by the writer for the reader’s delectation. On the other hand, we might say that the writer deliberately inserts non-​ghost elements into her story, weaving them together with the ghost part for a specific purpose. Other possibilities are also possible, but we have only two hands and we will stick to these two possibilities –​for now. As an opening gambit, I  would suggest that these two alternatives may be reconciled by the simple expedient of abandoning the idea of a positive–​negative

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26  Mike Pincombe polarity stricto sensu. When we talk of a non-​ghost part, we really mean a ‘less ghostly’ part. It may well be that some parts of the story seem to have no connection with whatever it is that makes the ghost part ‘ghostly’. But there are bound to be some parts of the story which seem more or less ghostly than others. In other words, the ‘non-​ghost part’ is at the extreme end of a scale of diminishing ghostliness. In many cases, it will have a real existence in a particular text –​but it is more useful as a theoretical concept, a ‘degree zero’ of ghostliness. Now let us think a little about that word ghost. A couple of years before Blackwood wrote his story for Cynthia Asquith, James wrote an introduction for V.H. Collins’s anthology Ghosts and Marvels (1924). This little essay is full of useful tips for the writer of ghost stories. One is the following: ‘The ghost story is, at its best, only a particular sort of short story, and is subject to the same broad rules as the whole mass of them’ (James 1989, 339). What is so particular about the ‘ghost story’? The answer is obvious: The ghost. But what is a ghost? Here the answer is not so obvious; I shall merely pick one definition among several. As it happens, it is not one which fits many of James’s own stories, but that cannot be helped. It is this: ‘A ghost is a dead person who appears to a living person’.2 In other words, it is a revenant. We can reduce this definition a little further to produce a ‘micro-​narrative’ for the ghost story: /​A dead person appears to a living person/​. This, I suggest, is the ghost part of any particular ghost story. The ghost part is the material of the story as it is centred on the single event described in the micro-​narrative. It has two actors: A dead person and a living person (there may be more than one of each, of course, though there is normally only one dead person). They are bound by the single event of the appearance of one to the other. This event can be construed in two ways. From the dead person’s point of view, the micro-​narrative already given makes the best sense of the event. From the point of view of the living person, we need a new micro-​narrative: /​A living person perceives a dead person/​. The essential event is thus one not only of appearance, but also of perception. Since most ghost stories are told from the point of view of the living person, who is thus the ‘hero’, we shall use the second micro-​narrative as the primary mode of referring to the event. However, over the years, I  have found it more useful to speak of ‘becoming-​conscious’ than ‘perception’, and this slightly awkward phrase will be used as the complement to ‘appearance’.3 Now it is perhaps easier to see how we can distinguish the ghost part from the non-​ghost part, or more accurately the not-​exactly-​ghostly and not-​very-​ ghostly-​at-​all parts. Once we have arrived at a micro-​narrative, we can intuitively judge the proximity of any particular piece of material to it, and thus its ghostliness. For example, /​a non-​living person/​is thematically similar to /​a dead person/​; and so perhaps is /​an almost dead person/​. The complex theme /​life vs. death/​allows for all sorts of more penumbral effects. The concept of a ‘non-​ghost part’, however, is still useful as a proxy for what in many cases turns out to be a rival micro-​narrative, which may well be of more interest to the writer of what is ostensibly a ghost story. That is what is happening in Blackwood’s ‘Chemical’, I think –​what gives it its complexity.

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Far More Than a Simple Ghost Story 27 The ghost part of ‘Chemical’ is nothing special. It is constructed by the author around the standard ghost story micro-​narrative as we have redefined it: /​A living person becomes-​conscious of a dead person/​. The living person is Jim Moleson; the dead person –​the ghost, in fact –​is (was?) a young man called Warley, who haunts the house where he (it?) killed his father twenty years ago, and where Moleson now lives as a lodger. The essential element in the ghost part is ‘the event of becoming-​conscious’, that is, Moleson’s becoming-​ conscious of the ghost of Warley, and this Blackwood divides up into three parts. He thus seems to follow the age-​old ‘Rule of Three’. Here we may pause to note that after James brings up the topic of the ‘broad rules’ of composing short stories, he immediately contradicts himself: ‘These rules, I imagine, no writer ever follows. In fact, it is absurd to talk of them as rules; they are qualities which have been observed to accompany success’. They are ‘non-​rules’, as it were. Still, James goes on to describe the disposition of the narrative in terms of what looks to me like the Rule of Three: Let us be introduced to the actors in a placid way; let us see them going about their ordinary business, undisturbed by forebodings, pleased with their surroundings; and into this calm environment let the ominous thing put out its head, unobtrusively at first, and then more insistently, until it holds the stage. (James, introduction to Vere 1924, vi) The event of appearance (as James construes it) is in three parts, each at an increasing level of intensity: Unobtrusively, insistently, and then dominantly. In a later essay, James calls this last stage ‘the final flash or stab of horror’ (1989, 351).4 Let us analyse ‘Chemical’ in terms of the Jamesian model, staying, for the while, with his emphasis on the essential event as the ‘event of appearance’. It will also be useful to know that the text is written in the first person by a friend of Moleson, to whom our hero tells his story several years after the event. In other words, the text is the record of a conversation, into which parts of Moleson’s tale are inserted verbatim, and parts retold, with commentary, by his older friend, the ‘narrator’. The first appearance of the ghost of Warley to Moleson occurs when Moleson first enters the house. A person pushes past him as he stands there, waiting for the landlady, Mrs Smith, and Moleson takes an instant and intense dislike of this person. It puzzles him, and later that day he recollects a conversation he once overhead in which such inexplicable revulsion was explained as ‘chemical’ (Blackwood 1926, 17) –​hence the title of the story. Moleson doubts this is the case, but he can think of no alternative explanation at the moment. It remains a mystery. The second appearance of the ghost occurs when Moleson comes back to the house early one day and sees a man’s face at the window. By this time, Moleson has had time to think about his situation. He has come to believe that the other person is another lodger, one whom Mrs Smith has turned out of the room he previously occupied in order to make room for Moleson himself.

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28  Mike Pincombe Moleson has never seen this other man again, but he lives in perpetual fear that he might do, for his initial revulsion has calmed down to a state of ‘expectant dread’ (28). But he still does not think the other man is a ghost; when he sees the face at the window, he thinks he sees a lunatic: ‘It was a mad face’ (29). The third appearance, the final flash, occurs when Moleson is disturbed one night, waking in terror in the chair in which he has dozed off, exhausted and strangely paralysed. He thinks it must be the other lodger outside the door of his room; then, remarkably released from his paralysis, he pulls the door open, and sees the other man once again. This time he is pulling a sack containing something large and heavy across the landing to the door of what Moleson has always assumed to be the room to which the other man has been relegated by Mrs Smith.5 Moleson is shocked, tries to steady himself, but loses his balances and almost falls through the other man: ‘there was no substance there at all’ (42). He now sees the face at closer quarters, and his original impression is confirmed: ‘It was a maniac’s face’ (43). But he also notes the following tell-​tale detail. What he had earlier thought was a red scarf around the man’s neck is now revealed as ‘a thin red line of contused blood in the flesh of the neck itself, a line that only a rope, drawn very tightly, could have made’. The man is obviously a ghost, then, and we later discover that Warley was indeed hanged. But, oddly, Moleson does not make the connection as he tells the story to an older friend several years later. Nor does the friend say the word ghost. He just offers Moleson a cigarette and says: ‘What happened then?’ (43). In fact, it is not quite clear whether this is the end of the event of appearance or not. What happened then is that Moleson goes to the door of what he still takes to be the other man’s room, for he has just seen this person open that door, stuff his sack into the space behind it, close it, and then disappear. Then we have what seems to be the true final flash, which is certainly a stab of horror for the listening friend: ‘It was the door of a cupboard –​a rather shallow cupboard’. He paused, then said something that made my blood curdle: ‘That’s why the creature had to shove it in so hard –​stuff it in –​to make it stay –​’ ‘Upright? …’ I gasped, catching the ghastly meaning at last. ‘Upright’, was all he replied. (Blackwood 1926, 45–​6) So is there in fact another ghost in this story? Does Moleson see the ghost of the lifeless corpse of Warley père staring at him from the haunted broom-​cupboard? But the adventure does not end there either. Mrs Smith comes on the scene, candle in hand, and Moleson, in a state of collapse, hears a stream of disconnected fragments of speech: ‘He showed hisself, then, did he? … May God forgive me …’ and something about a ‘broken promise’ and a ‘room I  didn’t oughter ‘ave let to

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Far More Than a Simple Ghost Story 29 anyone …’ And then, as to my shame, I felt myself being helped up from the floor –​for I had no idea that I had let my legs give way like that –​something –​oh, horrible and dreadful –​about ‘… they ‘anged him for it; oh, they ‘anged him at the Scrubs … it was ‘is own father, you see … and now over twenty years ago …’ (Blackwood 1926, 47) Here is the implicit confirmation of the fact that Moleson has seen the ghost of a dead man, plus the rather awkwardly introduced details of the ‘promise’ which seems to be there to explain why Moleson experienced such an impression of hostility in the house. It may be clear from this synopsis of the ghost part of ‘Chemical’ that I find it ‘weak’. For example, to whom did Mrs Smith make this promise? To Warley fils? When he was alive –​or dead? Or to Warley père? For Mrs Smith was once Mrs Warley. Moleson finds that out by accident from his local stationer. He thinks she must have ‘married again, no doubt’ (23). Did she? And what exactly is her relation to Warley fils? In the middle of the story, the narrator says that he suspected that ‘this unpleasant and mysterious lodger: a mad mind certainly, a maniac probably (I had glimpses of a homicidal maniac) […] would turn out to be the son of Mrs. Smith’ (30). However, he was only ‘partly right’; and later we are led to suppose that he was actually her stepson. ‘Chemical’ ends when the narrator explains how he verified the facts of the ‘Warley Parricide’, and ‘the unpleasant details about how the body was found stuffed into a cupboard’ (47). The lawyers put in a plea of ‘homicidal mania’, but to no avail: ‘The Home Secretary, one paper dared to mention, had married again and had stepsons of his own …’ But what does that mean? It all strikes me as rather unsatisfactorily vague. Here, it may be objected, Blackwood is only following the rules. For after all, you say, did not James himself, in the very passage quoted earlier, continue with these words: ‘It is not amiss sometimes to leave a loophole for a natural explanation; but, I would say, let the loophole be so narrow as not to be quite practicable’. Yes, he did; and these words were gratefully noted by Tzvetan Todorov in his Introduction á la littérature fantastique (1970). Todorov argues that ‘the fantastic’ is a state of mind in which the hero and the reader find themselves if they are presented with puzzling narrative situations which offer two explanations: Either they can be explained as natural, in which case the situation is ‘uncanny’ (étrange); or they can be explained as praeternatural, in which case the situation is ‘marvellous’ (merveilleux). Todorov claims that he has been partly inspired by James, whom he describes as ‘an English writer specializing in ghost stories’, and quotes this same passage (though with his own inflection).6 However, Blackwood does not seem to me to be really interested in a ‘loophole’. He does not present the event of appearance as an ambiguous situation, open to one of two interpretations; rather he presents it vaguely. At one point in his tale, Moleson relates his puzzlement at the idea that his fellow lodger

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30  Mike Pincombe must be dragging heavy luggage about outside his door at two in the morning. The whole passage has to be quoted at length: ‘What could it be, this bag, this portmanteau, this heavy bundle so difficult to move? What could it contain? What had he put inside it? Taken?’ ‘Taken?…’ I repeated, not quite following him. ‘Some of the questions, racing through my mind’, he explained, ‘brought a kind of answer with them. That’s the only way I can put it’, he added apologetically, a sop to me, the sceptical recipient of his confession. ‘What had he taken?’ he repeated, looking at me rather hard. I had no notion. ‘But I had’, said Moleson with decision, interpreting my blank expression. ‘I guessed at once –​half-​guessed, at least’. He had me at a loss there, I admit. (Blackwood 1926, 47) Confession or catechism? Moleson seems to expect his friend to guess the truth where he himself had only half-​guessed it, and this even though, in the present of the time of telling, he presumably knows the whole truth. Remember how the narrator is finally able to supply the missing word ‘upright’ when at last he grasps what is going on, when he has learnt his lesson. But at this point, all that Moleson gives him –​and the reader –​are these vaguely portentous hints that all was not as it seemed. Despite my cavilling reservations, ‘Chemical’ is still a decent ghost story, and can be read as such. But it is my view that Blackwood was not really interested in the ghost part. Perhaps he mistook what Cynthia Asquith meant by a ghost story, for several of the other contributions do not concern themselves with a revenant. The ghost part is still articulated in its broad plan in line with the non-​rules of the genre, of course, but it is as if it serves as a material foundation for the story that Blackwood really wanted to tell. The title of any story is always significant in some way. In this case, it seems to point towards the general theme /​natural science/​. Clearly, this theme is attracted to the ghostly centre because the dead person can hardly be regarded as ‘natural’. It belongs to the supernatural realm, which calls up the natural world as its complementary opposite. In any case, this is the clue which I shall trace in order to reveal what I think is Blackwood’s real interest in this tale. The story starts with a general reflection on the part of the author-​narrator, who is not revealed even as ‘I’, let alone Moleson’s friend, until several pages into the text: ‘It is odd how trivial a thing can cause a first, instinctive dislike’ (17). Then we move on to a third-​person Moleson, ‘thinking over the brusqueness of the stranger on the door-​step’, which is the first part of the event of appearance, or  –​as we shall now say  –​the event of becoming-​conscious. Moleson then recalls overhearing a conversation on the topic, in which a ‘very wise old man’ had said to a younger one who had had the same experience: ‘Your dislike […] is probably chemical. Merely chemical’. Moleson is sceptical:

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Far More Than a Simple Ghost Story 31 He had, of course, the layman’s vague knowledge of the loves and hates of atoms, their intense attraction and repulsion for each other, the dizzy rapidity with which they rushed towards, or away, from those they respectively liked or disliked. Had all the atoms of which he was composed, then, turned their backs instinctively upon those which made up the stranger’s body, racing away at a headlong speed that caused him this acute and positive discomfort? Was this instantaneous loathing ‘chemical merely’? (Blackwood 1926, 17) Moleson’s representation to himself of inter-​atomic forces is fanciful, of course, and he does not believe it explains his situation. Who would?7 Later, once he has got to know and like Mrs Smith, whilst his psyche remains in revolt against the stranger, he again reflects at some length on the matter, using his landlady ‘as a means of comparison with the other’: Her rather sombre visage, an overwhelming melancholy in it, though certainly not attractive, woke nothing stronger in him than a vague, tolerant sympathy. […] Whereas the other human being gave him this instinctive, deep revulsion. Chemical? He wondered. For why, if chemical, should one unpleasing soul wake pity, and another, equally unpleasing, stir violent antipathy? … (Blackwood 1926, 20) I have quoted these two passages at length because they demonstrate the tenacity with which Moleson, at this early stage in the text, pursues the complex theme of /​sympathy vs. antipathy/​. Chemistry is not simply used as a straw man to be dismissed in scorn; Moleson does give it serious thought, for it was, after all, the opinion of a ‘very wise old man’. But he is not satisfied. However, after these first few pages, the theme /​natural science/​, represented here by /​chemistry/​, disappears from the story almost altogether. It is as if it was only introduced in order to be set aside, but without Moleson’s having produced an alternative explanation. All that is left is a non-​explanation. Moleson rejects the natural-​scientific answer (Todorov’s étrange), but he does not lurch towards the supernatural (the merveilleux). Nor does he remain in a state of doubt between the two (the fantastique). There is just a blank space where the answer should be. The question remains: Why does Moleson feel repelled by this other person? The story is going to tell us the answer, we feel, but not yet. The reader reads on, but the analyst stops –​and goes backwards into the literary past for a different kind of answer. Blackwood’s ‘Chemical’ is a response to Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886). The points of correspondence are so numerous that we might start anywhere, but let us begin with this one. The narrator asks Moleson what the other man looked like the first time that he saw him: ‘Misshapen!’ he shouted in my face, so that I  jumped. ‘Well, you asked me; and that’s what I  felt about him. But mentally, morally, rather than

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32  Mike Pincombe physically. That’s the impression he made on me’. And then he barked out another word: ‘A monster!’ A little shudder ran over him. (Blackwood 1926, 27–​8) In Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, when Mr Utterson asks his younger friend Enfield to describe the man he saw trampling over a little girl in the street, he replies: He is not easy to describe. There is something wrong with his appearance; something displeasing, something downright detestable. I never saw a man I so much disliked, and yet I scarce know why. He must be deformed somewhere; he gives a strong feeling of deformity, although I couldn’t specify the point. (Jekyll and Hyde 1926, 34) Moleson’s violent response is far removed from Enfield’s quiet reflection, but it, too, is developed from the same episode. When a dry-​as-​dust doctor is called to tend to the girl, he reacts violently to the very sight of Hyde. Enfield says: every time he looked at [him], I  saw that Sawbones turned sick and white with the desire to kill him. I knew what was in his mind, just as he knew what was in mine, and killing being out of the question, we did the next best thing. We told the man we could and would make such a scandal of this, as should make his name stink from one end of London to the other. (Stevenson 1979, 31–​2) Now Moleson, as he writhes in paralysed fury in the chair in the third stage of the event: I was dying to get at the fellow. I was perspiring all over. I felt that if he answered back, showed any insolence, I’d –​strangle him –​just go for him and be done with it. Throttle the devil! I felt my fingers at his throat. (Blackwood 1926, 39) Moleson is filled with murderous revulsion towards the other man in exactly the same way that Enfield and the doctor are by the appearance of Mr Hyde in the tale by Stevenson. Chemical? No –​but also yes. For, of course, Mr Hyde is a chemically altered state of Dr Jekyll. Jekyll’s investigations into the occult basis of the fabric of life had led him to conclude that physical reality was not all that it seemed: I not only recognised my natural body for the mere aura and effulgence of the powers that made up my spirit, but managed to compound a drug by which these powers should be dethroned from their supremacy, and a second form and countenance substituted, none the less natural to me

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Far More Than a Simple Ghost Story 33 because they were the expression, and bore the stamp, of lower elements in my soul. (Stevenson 1979, 83) The drug is made from ingredients which Jekyll purchases ‘from a firm of wholesale chemists’. In other words, it is chemistry that helps him reveal and mobilize a part of him which is perfectly natural, even if it is hidden away in the depths of his psyche. Enfield and the others are revolted by Hyde because in his chemically altered state he is purely evil, whereas his alter ego Jekyll is a mixture of good and evil, just as Enfield and the others are; they are all chemically unaltered. But there is no real chemistry involved here. ‘I will not enter deeply’, says Jekyll, ‘into this scientific branch of my confession’. Partly for reasons of piety, partly because his discoveries were ‘incomplete’. Partly also, of course, because there was no real depth to Stevenson’s interest in salts and powders. Chemistry is a transparent device to let him write about what really interests him. This is not even the philosophico-​ religious aspect of the story, what Jekyll represents as the ‘polar twins’ of good and evil ‘continuously struggling’ in the human psyche (82). The Manichaean aspect of this agon is by no means unimportant, but is less important than the opportunity to write a brilliant tale on the theme of the doppelganger. This theme is a complex one, but perhaps it can be schematised thus: /​A person becomes-​ conscious of another person as himself [or himself as another person]/​. That is what Blackwood found so interesting in Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. The ghost of Warley fils is without doubt a proper ghost, and it is his presence in the story which allows ‘Chemical’ to be classed (if we are concerned about such things) as a ghost story. But he is also, and more importantly, the alter ego of Jim Moleson.8 The narrator says of him: Jim […] was always headstrong, fierce-​tempered, ‘nasty’ once his feelings were stirred, only these feelings were usually for others –​for a lame dog, an injured cat, a bird in a cage, an over-​worked horse. Slights, even insults to himself he could stand, to the point of cowardice, some thought; but this was wrong; he was easy-​going to that point; beyond it he saw red –​ and killed. (Blackwood 1926, 21) Has he actually killed? Almost, as the narrator recalls a little later, when he recalls ‘the two hefty ruffians he fought, half killing one of them, in a Surrey lane when they objected to his interfering on behalf of their overloaded horses’ (31). He is only ‘half a killer’, as it were, one who would kill if he could, but has so far not gone as far as manslaughter. Had he killed the ‘ruffian’, would his lawyers have tried to get him off with a plea of ‘homicidal mania’, one wonders, just as Warley’s lawyers tried to do back in the 1880s? And how odd this murderous fury should be roused by cruelty to animals rather than to people. It is as if he has more sympathy for the beasts than for

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34  Mike Pincombe the human race.9 Yet the narrator solemnly assures us it is otherwise: ‘This savage temper, rarely roused, and then with a curious suddenness, was an item I  overlooked. But it was a human, not merely an animal, temper’. But the reader surely finds it hard to overlook Moleson’s savage temper, so often is it brought to her attention. In the second part of the becoming-​conscious of the ghost, Moleson implies, ‘shyly’, that his ‘vile temper’ would have made him violently attack the other man if he had not left Moleson’s room ‘just in time’. The narrator shivers: ‘I knew he meant it, but I was glad to have been spared the details of an ugly assault. This savage temper in Moleson always alarmed me’ (30). Finally, when Moleson is mysteriously paralysed in the chair in the final part of the event, Moleson realises the truth that has not yet been spoken. Yes, he wants to kill the other man, and imagines himself doing it; and then: ‘I was so angry’, he went on, rather breathlessly now in his excitement, as though he lived over again his fury and exasperation, ‘that I felt murder in me. Positively, I felt myself a murderer’. Curiously, he stopped dead suddenly. A look of shyness came over him. He stared at me, I stared back at him. (Blackwood 1926, 39–​40) Blackwood is writing well here. Here is that ‘shyness’ again, the coy and almost coquettish manner in which this violent man talks of his own murderous desire, even as he pants with excitement at the thought of it, whilst holding the older and thus somewhat vulnerable friend at his mercy. And this is the moment where the narrator guesses the reason for his young friend’s ‘queer shyness’ about this part of his confession: ‘Having that dangerous thing in himself, he recognised it in others too. That sympathy existed’. Moleson takes up the conversation once more: ‘That’s how I  knew’, he muttered, looking down, having guessed my thought. ‘What he was’, I asked, fumbling with my cigarette. ‘A murderer’, he said quietly. (Blackwood 1926, 40) Moleson’s earlier antipathy to the other man has turned to sympathy because he recognises in him a fellow murderer-​at-​heart. No wonder the older friend is nervous. I suggested earlier that the ‘non-​ghost part’ might be a proxy for a micro-​ narrative that was radically different from the ghost part of a ghost story, and that this was the case in Blackwood’s ‘Chemical’. However, it might easily and justly be objected that there is not so very much difference between /​a living person becomes-​conscious of a dead person/​and /​a [living] person becomes-​ conscious of another person as himself/​. There is a paradigmatic substitution of one actor for another, of /​another person as himself/​for /​a dead person/​; but

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Far More Than a Simple Ghost Story 35 the basic syntax remains the same. Even if we expand the micro-​narratives, as perhaps we should, the result is the same. On the one hand we would have: /​ A living person sees something unsettling and thinks it is a dead person/​. On the other: /​A [living] person sees something unsettling and thinks it is himself/​. But the word radical comes from the Latin, radix, or ‘root’. And this ‘root’ is not necessarily to be found in the meta-​language of the micro-​narratives. It is rooted, rather, in the dark and complex reticulation of intentions that motivate the writer to write what he does. I have suggested that, in this story, Blackwood was more interested in exploring the possibilities of the doppelganger theme, quite likely partly in critico-​creative response to the chemical theme of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. The challenge to the artist lay in developing this material in the direction of the ghost story of the revenant kind, which Blackwood may have thought he was being asked to produce by Asquith. This might explain the weakness of the ghost part, and some of the contradictions it involves. For example, Blackwood cannot make up his mind where the first encounter occurs. First, it is ‘on the door-​step’. Then it is ‘just inside the narrow hall’ (19). These are both parts of the liminal zone of the thematic space of /​the door/​. But it does matter whether the event takes place inside or outside the house.10 In the first case, the other man must be outside the house if he is pushing past Moleson to get ahead of him; but it is not quite as necessary if Moleson is already inside the house, and the other man comes up suddenly from behind him. But later, Moleson seems to say that the other man never left the house: ‘he never went out, so far as I saw or knew’ (27). And that is what we would expect from a ghost of the haunted-​house kind. Yet Moleson still imagines the man as having an external existence: ‘When I came down the street I imagined him standing on the door-​step, fumbling with his latchkey’. This is reported as a habitual anxiety, but it is exactly what happens on the occasion of the second encounter: ‘I had a good squint first from a distance to see if the door-​step was free’ (29). It is while he himself is fumbling with his latchkey that he looks up and sees the other man at the window. Here, too, I suspect we see the material influence of the first chapter of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde: ‘story of the door’. The story starts when Enfield points out a door to Utterson, and relates the incident of Hyde and the child. It was through this door that Hyde went to get the money and the cheque to pay his way out of his predicament. Utterson haunts the door until he catches Hyde there one evening, drawing his key to open it and go inside. They talk, but Hyde keeps his back to Utterson, who finally must ask: ‘Will you let me see your face?’ (39). Hyde does and then disappears, leaving Utterson as puzzled about the ‘impression of deformity without any nameable malformation’ that Hyde produces, and how it is still insufficient to explain the ‘disgust, loathing and fear’ which it inspires in the unexcitable Utterson just as it does in everyone else who meets Hyde. Blackwood seems to have been much impressed by this cluster of material details: The meeting at the door, the instant inexplicable loathing, the sense of deformity. That is why Moleson has to meet the other man on the door-​ step  –​but Blackwood’s instinct for the ghost story and its conventions tells

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36  Mike Pincombe him that Warley’s ghost would not venture outside the house itself. So, for that one moment where his ghost-​story instinct takes over, Moleson has to meet him indoors, not on the door-​step. But it is the doppelganger story that is the stronger. We recall Utterson’s memorable line: ‘If he be Mr Hyde, […] I shall be Mr Seek’ (38). Utterson catches Hyde by the door and continues to pursue him in order to discover the relationship between Hyde and Jekyll. Blackwood reverses this situation: Moleson is trying to hide from the other man, to avoid him, and yet the other man seems also to be hiding from him. And their shared identity as homicidal maniacs is still something which the text will only ‘shyly’ hint at. Not just a simple ghost story … To some extent, every ghost story qua ghost story is simple, or better: simplex. It is centred around a single theme, which is /​ghost/​. The theme itself can be complicated, of course; indeed, it has to be complicated, for a ghost is not just any dead person, but a dead person in the moment that they are seen by a living person. So the theme /​ghost/​can only be understood in terms of the scheme /​a dead person appears to a living person/​, which calls up the themes of /​life vs. death/​and /​appearance vs. reality/​, and so on, until a comprehensive thematic network is derived from this single theme /​ghost/​. Some of this material may seem more remotely connected to the original theme, that is, ‘less ghostly’, and some may not be covered by it at all, which is the ‘non-​ghost part’. The ingenuity of mono-​ thematic analysis is such that this non-​ghostly residue might be very small indeed; theoretically, it is quite literally ‘insignificant’ in the analysis of a ghost story qua ghost story. But ‘Chemical’ can also be analysed as a complex short story, one which may be analysed certainly as a ghost story, but also as a doppelganger story. It is an example of the text as a complex emergent structure, one produced by several ‘sets of rules’ operating at the same time. When James refers to the ‘broad rules’ that apply to writing short stories, he quickly qualifies the term and speaks of ‘broad principles’. We could say that the principle of ghost-​story writing is the elaboration of the theme /​ghost/​, and that the rules are those of its elaboration. James states that the ghost (he calls it ‘the ominous thing’) must be only gradually revealed to the hero and to the reader, and this is what we could call a ‘rule’. In the case of complex texts, there is more than one set of rules to follow, either consciously or intuitively; it is out of the combination of these rules, perhaps quite disparate, that a structure emerges. The little contradictions we have noted above  –​inside or outside the house?  –​are produced by Blackwood’s imaginative response to the pressure of different rules and principles. On the one hand, there is the Rule of Three and the theme of the /​haunted house/​; on the other, there is the powerful example of Stevenson’s story, and an example can function perfectly well as a principle, as an innovative theme which is then established as a starting-​point for the writing of new stories. Indeed, and as a closing word, is it not complexity that is the motor of literary evolution? ‘Chemical’ has not proved to be an influential story, and

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Far More Than a Simple Ghost Story 37 it is certainly not one of the stories by Blackwood that regularly turns up in anthologies. Its contradictions emerge by accident, but it is easy to see how a ‘happy accident’ might produce a new genre.11

Notes 1 In a letter to Peter Penzoldt, in 1948, Blackwood referred to his ‘ “ghost stories”, so-​called’, in terms which suggest he was not happy with the designation. Certainly they were ‘not strictly ghost stories’ (Penzoldt 1952, 249). We might note that Not Exactly Ghosts is the title of a set of quasi-​Jamesian stories by Sir Andrew Caldecott (1947). 2 It is derived from OED, ghost, n. 8.a: ‘The soul of a deceased person, spoken of as appearing in a visible form, or otherwise manifesting its presence, to the living’. In 1899, when this entry was written this was the ‘prevailing sense’. I am not sure that it is today. 3 I have sometimes thought the word ‘experience’ might be even better, if one can be properly said to experience a ghost. The living person is not an ‘agent’, after all, but an ‘experiencer’, in semantic-​linguistic terms. Penzoldt has a good line here on our author: ‘To Blackwood it is not so much the apparition, as the experience in itself that counts’ (1952, 242). 4 ‘Ghosts –​treat them gently!’ was written for The Evening News in 1931. 5 We might note in passing here that Blackwood’s story ‘The Kit-​Bag’ (1904)  also features a haunted sack in a Bloomsbury lodging-​house. 6 Todorov translated the passage from Ghost and Marvels as follows: ‘Il est parfois nécessaire d’avoir une porte de sortie pour une explication naturelle. Mais je devrais ajouter: que cette porte soit assez étroite pour qu’on ne puisse pas s’en servir’ (1970, 30). This is not exactly what James wrote. But who could resist that allusion to La Porte étroite! 7 There is an interesting analogy here to Walter Benjamin’s provocative statement to the effect that he thought the closest thing to Kafka was a passage from Arthur Stanley Eddington’s The Nature of the Physical World, in which we read, inter alia, that stepping on to a plank of wood is like ‘stepping on a swarm of flies’ (1929, 342). Atoms are moving about in all directions, so that it must seem amazing that we do not fall through physical matter. Yet even if we did, it would not be ‘a violation of the laws of Nature’ (Benjamin 1969, 142). 8 Cf. Ashley: ‘[W]‌e find him creating an ingenious identity puzzle’ (2001, 272). 9 Even his name ‘Mole-​son’ (not an English name, by the way) suggests an affinity with the animal world. Moles may not be very fearsome, but we learn the following interesting fact from the Wikipedia article: ‘Territories may overlap, but moles avoid each other and males may fight fiercely if they meet’. 10 Recall that Todorov renders James’s ‘loophole’ as ‘porte de sortie’. And it is interesting to note that the plank of wood in the passage from Eddington quoted by Benjamin is also in the liminal zone of the door: ‘I am standing on the threshold about to enter a room’. 11 As it happens, the door-​way, which is the focal point of the contradictions in ‘Chemical’, is one of the locations mentioned in Bakhtin’s discussion of ‘the chronotope of threshold’ (1980, 248–​50). A chronotope is not exactly a genre, but it is a generative principle.

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38  Mike Pincombe

Works Cited Ashley, Michael. 2001. Starlight Man: The Extraordinary Life of Algernon Blackwood. London: Constable. Bakhtin, Mikhail M. 1981. ‘Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel’. In The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, by Mikhail M. Bakhtin, edited by Michael Holquist, translated by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, 84–​258. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. Benjamin, Walter. 1969. Illuminations. Edited by Hannah Arendt. Translated by Harry Zohn. New York, NY: Schocken Books. Blackwood, Algernon. 1926. ‘Chemical’. In The Ghost Book: Sixteen New Stories of the Uncanny, edited by Cynthia Asquith, 17– 4 ​ 7. London: Hutchinson. Caldecott, Andrew. 1947. Not Exactly Ghosts. London: E. Arnold. Collins, Vere, Henry (ed.). 1924. Ghosts and Marvels: A Selection of Uncanny Tales from Daniel Defoe to Algernon Blackwood. London: Oxford University Press. Eddington, Arthur Stanley. 1929. The Nature of the Physical World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. James, Montague Rhodes. 1989. ‘Casting the Runes’ and Other Ghost Stories. Edited by Michael Cox. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Penzoldt, Peter. 1952. The Supernatural in Fiction. London: Peter Nevill. Stevenson, Robert Louis. 1979. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Other Stories. Edited by Jenni Calder. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. Todorov, Tzvetan. 1970. Introduction a la littérature fantastique. Paris: Éditions du Seuil.

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4  Wilhelminian Apparitions Ghosts and Desire between Science, Religion and Art in the German Nineteenth-​Century  Novel Nicholas Saul In German intellectual history there is a long tradition, since the end of the seventeenth century at least and most notably in the work of the founder of modern aesthetics, Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten (1714–​1762), of scrutinising the epistemological or cognitive content of sense impressions, and so assessing their value as evidence before the tribunal of rational judgement (Baumgarten 2007). Famously, of course, the Augenmensch (or ‘eye man’) Goethe, when faced with the conclusions drawn from Isaac Newton’s experimentum crucis, decided spontaneously that the phenomenon may have been interesting but the inference was wrong (Goethe 1981a; see Burwick 1986). What Newton had believed to be the product of the refraction of white light by the prism was in fact merely the result of light’s modification through the graduated different densities of the medium  –​with degrees of translucency, then  –​in various dimensions of the prism. In terms of evidence, Goethe, a subtle observer, was always persuaded that there is more of theory in apparently unmediated sense perception than orthodox science recognised (Goethe 1981b, 406, nos. 295; 432, no. 488; 434, no. 500; 435, no. 509). In fact, he said, Newton had made up his mind about refraction and the intuitively ludicrous notion of white light being made up of colours before he ever experimented, so that his interpretation of the colour spectrum was tautologous as well as ludicrous. Rather, so Goethe claimed  –​perhaps no more plausibly, himself  –​that white light and darkness emerge pure and simple in primary forms from the absolute, and that colours arise from their dynamic interaction in turbid media. That was what the evidence of the prism demonstrated. Colours in this understanding constituted an Urphänomen, a primal and intellectually or sensually irreducible and thus representative sensual phenomenon, of human experience of living nature, as symbolised by his colour circle. Now, whatever we might think about the quality of Goethe’s own, essentially Romantic theory, at least his deconstruction of the evidential value of Newton’s experiment still has vocal defenders (Kötter 1998). In the nineteenth century, of course, the focus on the quality of evidence and our ability to make legitimate inferences therefrom remained, as it was with Baumgarten and Goethe, a keynote of German thought. But the collapse of the German idealist tradition of philosophy after Hegel, D.F. Strauß and Nietzsche meant that Goethe-​style hypotheses, if not his critique, ceased for decades to be acceptable. For the temper of Germany

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40  Nicholas Saul in the nineteenth century was the opposite of Goethe’s idealism: it was an age of harsh doctrinaire materialism, positivism, pragmatism, facts, the cult of exact sciences –​in Ludwig Büchner’s reductive formulation, of the essence of everything, the celebration of matter and force (Büchner 1855). Germany in the nineteenth century was rapidly catching up with its main cultural model and object of envy: Great Britain. It was entering modernity, the new age of steam, iron, the railway, electricity, technology, industry –​all products of the dominance of the empirical natural sciences, which in Germany were experiencing their first Golden Age. Werner von Siemens, founder of today’s industrial giant, emblematically dubbed it the ‘age of science’ (1886, 92). Paul Weindling, distinguished historian of German nineteenth-​ century science, noted that by the end of the century the discourse of natural science in this rigorous Gradgrindian understanding ostensibly enjoyed unchallenged authority over the German public mind (Weindling 1989, 1 –​1 0, 19, 26). As far as science was concerned, there was in fact a good deal more in this rush to scientistic modernity than meets the eye. Let us take the preeminent example of this shift in the German collective mentality: the emergence of Darwinian evolutionism. If we think in Lyotardian terms, of collective thought as being guided by a master narrative (1979), then the irruption into German intellectual life of Darwin’s new master narrative of the origin and development of life through processes of natural selection finally and irrecuperably replaced the established biblical story which founds the Judæo-​Christian tradition and our elementary grasp of history as progress. But those who affirmed the new master narrative faced a problem. For Darwin’s story is of course all change and process. It has no place for goals or even progress, let alone God. The age of science also, as Max Weber famously noted, brings the disenchantment of the world ([1978] 1981). Germans felt keenly the lack of meaning. So what did they do in the ‘era of Darwin’, as the Dawkins of his day, Wilhelm Bölsche, called it (1903, 71)? They did the only thing possible under the circumstances: sought in compensation to recuperate some form of the comforting truths lost in the old story by incorporating them into the new. There proliferated new interpretations (or, better, appropriations) of Darwin, not least by Bölsche himself and his ally Ernst Haeckel, which sought to idealise in some way the difficult implications of Darwin’s theory, to make modernity intellectually and emotionally palatable, notably by intellectualising matter. But that’s another day’s work (Saul 2014). As for the rest: the same ambiguous state, simultaneous affirmation and negation of modernity, is true of everything in nineteenth-​century Germany. In politics, as David Blackbourn notes, nineteenth-​century Germany is a transitional entity on the way to itself, suspended somewhere uncomfortable between the no-​longer and the not-​yet (1998, 271, 302–​98). Germany inherits the aspiration to democracy from the French Revolution, but cannot forget the militaristic and aristocratic feudal past; it strives to become a nation state, but cannot forget the glories of the old empire; it depopulates the land and aggregates population into the new mass conurbations, but still sees the country as Heimat, home; it generates powerful modernist art, but its official culture

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Wilhelminian Apparitions 41 is historicism, as exemplified by the new yet mediaevalising ‘Pickelhaube’ and the historicist pomp of Wilhelminian Berlin, so despised by the radical cultural critic Max Nordau (1883, 1–​35, 1889, 1: 148–​55, 2: 302–​06). In what follows I  am going to discuss spiritualism in Germany in precisely this context of constitutive ambiguity. First, I will be looking at the history, theory and practice of spiritualism, notably in the work of Carl du Prel and Baron Albrecht von Schrenck-​Notzing. Second, I’ll be reading literary representations as interrogations of the spiritualist phenomenon, notably in the work of Wilhelm Bölsche and Thomas Mann. In this context evidence of course is central. I  will therefore also be drawing on the work on optics of renowned German natural scientists Johannes von Müller and Hermann von Helmholtz. My thesis is that nineteenth-​century spiritualism is a key indicator phenomenon of the state of German consciousness in the second half of the nineteenth century. Janus-​faced, it seeks both to satisfy the yearning for received yet lost meaning in the modern world, and yet by the same token to affirm the new episteme of modernity. Thus it attempts to satisfy the evidence criteria of the age of science in order to legitimate its regressive visionary claims in the only way possible under the new epistemic order, as scientific knowledge. But spiritualism also becomes more than that. It is not coincidental that spiritualism at this time is eventually taken up and celebrated by artists of all kinds, from Kandinsky to Rilke. For in spiritualism, as we shall see, artists recognised an activity cognate with their own enterprise. Ultimately, spiritualism played a part in the formation of the new self-​understanding of the artists of aesthetic modernism, which took on the task of the establishment of cultural meaning in the disenchanted world, and especially the role of the exploration of the dark side of the modern psyche. Some history: spiritualism was an extremely widespread and controversial social phenomenon, imported into Britain and the Continent from the USA in the 1850s (Braungart 1997; Pytlik 2005). It was wildly popular in Germany, especially in Leipzig, Munich and Berlin, especially from the 1870s on. I am going to presuppose that you know the basics of spiritualism and its would-​be scientific wing, occultism: the dark side, mediums who link with it, the channelling of energies for table-​rapping, automatic writing and the like, manifestations of lost beloveds. Most important, the doctrine is presented as compatible with modern, empirical, exactly measurable, mechanical, controllable and demonstrable natural science. In the age of the X-​ray and the emerging theory of the identity of matter and energy, spiritualism was able to present itself up to a point plausibly as the religion of the scientific age. Hence it welcomed scientific investigation. Mediums readily acquiesced in being tied up with sealed knots, placed in sacks or locked cages. Their hands were usually gripped so as to preclude trickery. Sceptics and agnostics were invited to séances, minutes were kept and often written by uncommitted observers, such as, for example, both Bölsche (in the 1880s) and Thomas Mann (in the 1920s). Photographers were welcome, in that the indexical qualities of the mechanical image –​rather than its subsequent manipulability –​were held to offer good scientific evidence. Yes, frauds were frequently exposed, notably

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42  Nicholas Saul the American conman Henry Slade, who was famously condemned at London in 1876. (Darwin sent £10 to support the prosecution.) On the other hand Alfred Russel Wallace, co-​discoverer of the classic theory of evolution, was a persuaded and unrepentant spiritualist, since he thought that the rapid progress of cognitive brain evolution was impossible without higher intervention ([1875]1955). Other proponents included FRS William Crookes (inventor of the cathode ray tube), Francis Galton and two leading Germans, the pioneer psychophysicist Gustav Theodor Fechner and the German Wallace, Friedrich Zöllner, Professor of Astrophysics at Leipzig, author of a theory to explain Slade’s feats through his access to a postulated fourth dimension of space, and witness for the defence at his trial (1878; 1880b, 1880a). Now, Carl du Prel (1839–​1899), to whom I  next turn, provided a rather more systematic account from the specialist occultist perspective. He was, like Darwin, a gentleman scholar, influenced on the one hand by Darwin and on the other by Schopenhauer, who famously offers a defence of second sight, ghosts and suchlike based on the autonomous cognitive power of the mind (Schopenhauer 1874), and Eduard von Hartmann, another Darwinian, who is the earliest German proponent of the system of the unconscious, as the impersonal collective force which creatively drives the emergence of the new (Hartmann 1869). Du Prel first came to prominence with a theory attempting to show that the struggle for existence as a principle regulated even the material formation of star systems (Du Prel 1874). By the mid-​1880s he was into his occultist stride, with Philosophie der Mystik, which attempted to mediate legitimate evolutionist thought with the otherness of unexplained psychic phenomena (Du Prel 1885). Freud, no mean Darwinist himself, notably praises its section on dream as late as the second edition of Die Traumdeutung (Freud [1899] 1972, 579–​80 added 1914). Here du Prel finds in the state of somnambulism evidence of the existence of a preconscious and pre-​sensual state of the self, the so-​called ‘transzendentales Ich’ (‘transcendental self’) (Du Prel 1855, 391–​400). This, he argues, is evidence of something in the self which cannot be held identical with its conscious manifestation but which nonetheless accompanies and registers the experiences had during unconsciousness. The self is thus larger and more complex than its manifestation in the domain of consciousness. For du Prel it connects with Hartmann’s unconscious. It outlasts any changes in the state of the conscious self, even death. It is the essence of the human person. But this is not a crass dualism of mind and matter. Du Prel consistently refers his concept to the modern, scientific notion of matter, which posits the ultimate identity of matter and force, and so sees his system as a monism. In his next opus, Die monistische Selelenlehre (1888, 128–​58), he argues in this sense of matter for a thoroughgoing materialistic relation of mind and body. Following Aristotle’s notion of entelechy, the transcendental soul, he claims, actually forms the body it inhabits, so that the outward and visible form of the body reflects its Astralleib, or spirit body. This is possible because the soul possesses an inherent plastic or formative power. Recorded experience, such as the amputee’s feeling that a missing limb is still present, supports this claim of the existence of a spirit body inside the more crude

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Wilhelminian Apparitions 43 material manifestation. Indeed, that classic manifestation of Germanic neurosis, the Doppelgänger, can of course be nothing but the astral body momentarily released from within its outer encasement. And so du Prel can, he thinks, offer a philosophical, quasi-​ scientific account of spiritualist phenomena. Thanks to its organising principle of plastic formative power the soul, we know, can manifest itself in organic cellular material. Under particularly propitious circumstances, an appropriately gifted person, a medium, can connect with the spirit world and channel that spirit’s formative power, to move objects, such as tables, to write automatically through pencil or even new-​fangled typewriters, to transport objects teleplastically, or even to manifest the person of the spirit in its entirety. But it can also select other forms of suitably dense material for its manifestation –​plaster, clay, marble. Lest we miss the obvious connection with the primal artistic myth of Pygmalion: du Prel was well aware of the Pygmalionic connection between aesthetic creativity and spiritualism, indeed he sees aesthetic idealism –​artists’ ability to make the imitated human body manifest seem transcendentally alive and perfected –​as wholly analogous with his spiritual system and expressive of humanity’s innate destiny (1880, 123, 1888, 155). But if that was the ideal, the reality was very different. Thomas Mann’s favourite occultist, Baron Albrecht von Schrenck-​Notzing, was a scion of the ancient Munich aristocracy, but also a trained medical doctor and specialist in hypnotherapy of psychical disorders. He was, incidentally, one of the first to attempt to treat the alleged disorder of homosexuality through hypnotic suggestion. But he made his name through twin books Materialisations-​ Phänomene (1914) and its rapidly following defence Der Kampf um die Materialisationsphänomene (1914). Both were richly illustrated with photographs from his séances in Paris with Eva C. (Carrière). Few, to our eyes, accustomed as they are to computer-​graphic simulations of the real or the fantastic, look plausible as renditions of ectoplasmic emanation. The books, as Thomas Mann noted (1960c), were greeted with enthusiasm and ridicule in equal measure, many critics noting of course that the ectoplasm looked rather like muslin or string and that the faces looked like two-​dimensional cut-​ outs from illustrated magazines. Indeed, much of Schrenck-​ Notzing’s latter book is devoted to an attempt to disprove the charge of fakery. The first had offered signed testimony as to the authenticity of the images. The second, disingenuously, attempted to demonstrate how hard it was to fake the phenomena by contrasting the original photos with Schrenck-​Notzing’s own, admitted attempts at fakery  –​all in yet more photographs, of course, with poor Schrenck-​Notzing blissfully unaware of the tautology in which he was entangling himself, and indeed confusing in a category error one medium with another kind of medium altogether. But none of this stopped Thomas Mann, perhaps the most fiercely intellectual writer in German of the decades around 1900, from being fascinated by occultism in general and Schrenck-​ Notzing in particular. He attended Schrenck-​Notzing’s séances in December 1922 and January 1923 and wrote (and published) minutes at the host’s express wish (Mann 1960b). In these

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44  Nicholas Saul more sympathetic texts he publishes a detailed and typical description of what went on. A chain was formed, the lighting reduced to a single red-​draped bulb, the medium introduced clad in a kind of black knitted body stocking, all to maximize the visibility of the anticipated materialisations. Music, generally of a popular and trivial kind, an accordion, even a music box, was played continuously to establish a relaxed and informal atmosphere. Props –​a typewriter, some bells –​were disposed in convenient places around a table in the centre of a ring. The medium was gripped so as to make him (in Mann’s case) immoveable. And then people waited, often for two hours or more. But it was not as if nothing happened during this period of expectation. Rather, the medium offered theatre. There was physical struggle with something invisibly present, intended, no doubt, as evidence of an inner struggle, there were pantings, gaspings and graspings, and finally, exhaustion and moaning when it was all over. Schrenck-​Notzing can be seen restraining Eusapia Paladino’s convulsive spasm in an earlier image. The truth behind this behaviour, as Mann mercilessly comments (1960c, 150, 153, 170–​71), is indecent –​it of course encodes two aspects of sexuality: orgasm, perhaps at the moment of conception; and birth, of the material phenomenon. Mann gleefully draws the obvious red light analogy –​the séance as substitute for a brothel visit. But despite his extensively noted scepticism Mann, even despite the gibberish of the spirit typewriting and the sheer pointlessness of the bellringing and table-​wobbling –​which was all that the manifestations, on a sober reckoning, amounted to –​believed in what he saw. Indeed, that was what Mann the believer saw as being the essential point. For a man who, coming from Darwinism but also from the tradition of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche and German idealism, saw existence as a conflict of Geist and Natur, occult manifestations were pure plastic reproductive nature, let off the leash of Geist, as it were, to do as it would: that is, mischievous and amoral life energies manifesting themselves precisely in the only way they could, in these trivial, yet –​because morally indifferent –​potentially dangerous forms. Mann like du Prel saw the analogy with Pygmalionic aesthetic creativity (ibid., 169), but for him occult phenomena were intrinsically pathological, an allegory of the dangers faced by the artist as sorcerer’s apprentice. In Der Zauberberg (1924), his great novel of the age, all these elements are compiled into a chapter ‘Fragwürdigstes’ (Mann 1960a, 907–​47; on spiritualism and sexuality here, see Brittnacher 2002), in which a séance not only includes the prophetic vision of WW1, but also, in an irony Schrenck-​Notzing would not have appreciated, the veiled confession of Mann’s own homosexuality, codified as his protagonist’s desire for the ectoplasmically reincarnate person not of a woman, but of Hans Castorp’s beloved friend Joachim. For Thomas Mann, then, the ghosts summoned by spiritualism were not only the Pygmalionic compensatory need to recreate the lost objects of desire, but also the return of the repressed, a confession: the amoral memories of his own homosexuality made present, conscious and public (even if hidden in plain sight). Thirty-​three years earlier, Wilhelm Bölsche had offered his own original analysis of the evidence for and against spiritualism, in a then widely read

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Wilhelminian Apparitions 45 novel Die Mittagsgöttin (1891), with a rather different emphasis from Mann, who nevertheless I believe read and used his novel for Der Zauberberg. Not so many people have heard of Bölsche (Susen and Wack 2012; see also Kelly 1975). But he was a significant figure, a man of letters rather than a specialist, a gifted literary theoretician who both formulated the first version of literary Darwinism –​ Naturalism –​ and circumscribed its limits, a skilled and successful novelist, and above all an insightful and clever theoretician and brilliant populariser of the new theory of evolution. A close friend of the distinguished scientist and anti-​Pope Ernst Haeckel and fellow apostle of monism, Bölsche sold no less than 2.7m books during his lifetime, certainly near the top of the best-​ and long-​seller lists of his day. Kafka, whose fascination with Darwinism is evident in his animal stories, is attested to have read him (Janouch 1968, 92). Die Mittagsgöttin (Noonday Goddess), then, is a semi-​autobiographical novel about a Nietzschean midday crisis in the life of a 30-​year-​old Berlin intellectual and publicist who bears a close resemblance to Bölsche himself. His problem? The meaninglessness of contemporary modern life in the metropolis, a sense of his self merely as a functional centre for distributing energies around his body in order to continue to adapt and survive, existing merely in order further to exist, a mere cell in the superorganism that is Berlin. Wilhelm, who earns his living as a science writer popularising Darwin, thus finds himself drifting against his better judgement into a search for alternatives: spiritualism, of course. Cunningly, however, the plot contains a double ritardando. A sceptical evolutionist, he nonetheless visits a séance, where he is unsurprised to detect a crass fraud. He is thus all the more surprised to find that a fellow participant, a character known only as the Spreewaldgraf, not only shares his scepticism and disappointment at the failure of this cheap con-​trick, but also confesses to being  –​still  –​a believing and practising spiritualist. Intrigued, Wilhelm accepts an invitation to visit the Count at his home in the Spreewald (Spree Forest), around 100km southeast of Berlin. This province serves against the stone desert of Berlin as the novel’s second, contrastive chronotope, for the Spreewald is as lush and opulent in nature as Berlin is sandy and scrubby. This broad landscape, about as large as our own Lake District, is indeed where the River Spree rises in countless springs on its way to the capital. Not for nothing is it known also as ‘Klein-​Venedig’, Little Venice, for it consists remarkably in hundreds of islands punctuating the countless streams of the emergent confluent river, all mysteriously linked. Navigation is exclusively by punt. The natives, Wendish, speak their own, strange and archaic dialect. Here too dwells the ancient Wendish deity, the noonday goddess of the title, a goddess who takes ruthless revenge in the midday sun on those who fail to fulfil their duty. Not for nothing does Wilhelm’s journey from the modern metropolis back to the archaic past echo the journey which Schiller’s spiritseer made to Venice in the famous eighteenth-​century Gothic novel of that name, or that of Thomas Mann’s Gustav von Aschenbach in Der Tod in Venedig (1911) and Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s Andreas (1907–​1927). For in Bölsche as in all these texts the move to the canals of Little Venice in search of meaning also signals the regressive journey of the modern and sceptical self into the inner self, the unmapped

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46  Nicholas Saul domain of the unconscious where meaning may lie hidden. Bölsche’s move, you note, precedes that of his much more renowned fellow modernists. But here is the second ritardando. For at the home of the Count Wilhelm he does indeed encounter the Count’s personal medium, the voluptuous young American waif Lilly Jackson, whom –​like William Crookes with Florence Cook –​the Count has taken into his home, and whose task it is regularly to materialise his deceased eternal beloved Nelly (Helen, of course). But at the very first séance in the castle Wilhelm too can easily detect another fraud: Lilly masquerading as Nelly in a muslin gown. But all this is mere preamble. For now, barren of hope for his modern existence, Wilhelm returns to Berlin, where, however, he has after all a vision which changes his life and turns him, for a time, into a spiritualist. The vision seems to offer incontrovertible evidence of the existence of the other world. Tired and disconsolate in his Moabit bachelor flat that evening, curiously framed against his bookcase between well-​used volumes of Darwin and Schopenhauer, he sees by candlelight the distinct vision of his friend Edmund, breast stained with the blood of the gunshot wound which has killed him. Wilhelm’s conversion follows when a telegram arrives next morning with news that Edmund has indeed been killed in a duel in Magdeburg, apparently at the exact same time as the vision. (There are similar anecdotes in Wallace (1955, 72 – ​7 3) of poor wives who had visions of their husbands’ death in distant colonial wars). The next day finds Wilhelm in the Spreewald, determined further to explore the sources of his self. At last here too spiritualism is ultimately, if sympathetically, exposed as a tragic fraud (Saul 2012). Now Wilhelm, like du Prel before him and Thomas Mann after, recognises that spiritualism, as Pygmalionic desire for the lost other, is at one level little more than the encoding of late-​Wilhelmian repressed sexuality. He notes, for example, that Lilly’s productivity as a medium is drastically reduced when they begin an erotic affair (Mittagsgöttin, 2: 253ff.). And long before Mann his description of the moment of ectoplasmic production at the first Spreewald séance eloquently discloses it as the coded expression of female orgasm: But while (Walter) was still speaking and our eyes remained on the movements of the pencil, Lilly’s face suddenly puckered, her hand sank limply down, –​there was a muffled scream, an arching and bending of her body as if a wave of nervous reflex energy were running down her spinal column, so that her blond plait was brutally jammed for some seconds against the wooden rest, then a second scream, louder and stronger, and at the same time both arms jerked upward, so that the pencil flew in a broad arc from her outstretched fingers, –​and her eyes opened, huge, transfixed, with an expression of nameless terror. […] In its savagery the paroxysm was more frightening than anything which had passed before, it was as if all of us had compulsively witnessed the entire hurricane raging inwardly through the young girl’s nervous system. (Bölsche [1891] 1905, 2: 59–​60, my translation)

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Wilhelminian Apparitions 47 Equally, Bölsche diagnoses the theatrical machinery with which spiritualism operates as the decoding of the spiritualist impulse as the impulse to aesthetic production. Spiritualism, then, is for Bölsche one manifestation of the historical process of cultural secularisation by which the functions of traditional religion are gradually assumed by art, emblem of nineteenth-​century Germany’s predicament. But what of the sensational vision? The novel chronicles Wilhelm’s slow process of critical understanding. He recalls the circumstances, re-​reads his report of the experience, notes the uncontrolled generation of images which his mind is unable to stop (1: 284). In the key passage at the end of the volume, he also notes that all this seems to have occurred in a critical phase of his consciousness, curiously, not in sleep, but that ambiguous phase of half-​sleep between going to sleep and actual full sleep (2: 421). Lilly too is thought to function as a medium in a state of ‘Halbschlaf’, half-​sleep (1: 159, 162–​63.). So why the location of the vision in this domain between sleeping and waking? For those familiar with the German tradition, this points to one particular theory of vision and dream, that of Johannes von Müller, one of the most distinguished psychologists of the nineteenth century, who features together with Hermann von Helmholtz (both mentioned in the novel; 2: 323, 303) as a chief scientific authority in the novel’s pantheon. In his theory Müller, like Goethe before him and Schopenhauer and Helmholtz after him, notes that when we see what we see in our mind is not light itself, but something mediated: In the eye which has long been shut, and so is affected only by inner excitations, these inner meteors often attain an extraordinarily lively quality. Imagination, left to itself, attaches to these undulating and form-​shifting phenomena in the observing field of sight whatever it has already been compelled to envision through external determination, and soon these formerly shapeless light phenomena appear to imagination in determinate forms, which change their shape variously and uncontrollably. Here then occurs with closed eyes through the part of the imagination with the light meteors that which often occurs in daylight, when something we see indistinctly is constructed by the imagination into a definite shape of deceptive liveliness. (Müller 1826, 18–​19, my translation) First, the receptors in the eye itself generate a response to the stimulus of actual light, which is itself not light, but a construction. That information is in turn transmitted to the brain by the optical nerves. Only then is the signal interpreted by the brain. In short: the eye and the brain are not, as we intuitively think, passive and receptive in the act of seeing, but productive and interpretative (Helmholtz 1876). As Goethe, Müller’s inspiration in this, had known all along, theory and perception are often curiously entangled. This productive quality of eye and brain is that which explains for Müller, in a thought later taken up by Helmholtz in his theories of sense-​perception (Helmholtz [1868] 1998, 162–​ 66), how, in that familiar state of relaxed half-​sleep later so valued by Freud,

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48  Nicholas Saul characteristically vibrant and intense images –​Müller calls them meteors –​can spontaneously arise in the eye, independently of external stimuli, particularly in darkness, also when closed. As you see from the citation, Müller suggests that these images are initially prompted by a kind of residue of what has recently been seen –​rather like Freud’s suggestion that dreams are prompted initially by memories of recent experience. Then, however, argues Müller, our imagination, stimulated by events in the eye itself, joins in the game and begins to shape the images as it will, following its own uncontrollable and of course uncensored yet directed urges. Only then does the series of images turn into the dream proper, in sleep: ‘Indeed the images in our dreams […] are nothing other than the extrapolation of these manifestations in the phase before sleep’ (Müller, 24). Moreover, says Müller, now taking a mighty and significant leap: This process is nothing less than the process by which ultimately all religious and aesthetic visions are generated (28, 105–​06) As you can see, Müller’s theory is in its own modest way a precursor of Andy Clark’s work on the Bayesian predictive mind. Whatever this theory of half sleep images is forms Wilhelm’s and Bölsche’s, ultimate scientific explanation for the phenomenon of second sight. In critical-​ analytic reconstruction: Wilhelm’s mind, he reasons, is preoccupied by the events he has experienced in the Spreewald. He knows his room and all its books intimately (II, 422), and so these residues of recent experience trigger the vision in his half-​sleep. But he also knows of, and is worried by, Edmund’s sudden departure to Magdeburg, and he knows too well of both Edmund’s choleric temperament and the duel. Finally he is experiencing an existential crisis and preoccupied by death, all of which has been intensified by the apparent failure of spiritualism to satisfy his yearning for meaning. Out of these ingredients emerges his vision, compounded by the fact that he is dreaming that he is awake. The further realisation that there is a one-​hour time difference between Berlin and Magdeburg (this is, recall, the nineteenth century, without time zones), so that his vision actually occurred before Edmund’s death, merely confirms his analysis of the visual evidence –​and of the evidence for spiritualism. His vision, and spiritualism, are auto-​suggestive self-​hallucination. The end of the novel, then, is a triumph of scientific psychology in the style of Müller and Helmholtz. Except that that, too, is a foreshortening of the intended message of the novel. Let us not forget that Wilhelm is not only a trained scientist but also a practising writer and novelist. It is the progressive aesthetic narrative of novel which has put scientific evidence in its place, but also disclosed the trackless waterways of the modern unconscious. The message of the Mittagsgöttin is of course ultimately that modernist art, whilst not displacing science, anticipates Freud. It is the vehicle for exploring the dark side of the human psyche, which has lost its autonomous consciousness, and it has not stopped doing that since.

Works Cited Baumgarten, Alexander Gottlieb. 2007. Ästhetik. Latin and German edition, translated with introduction, notes and index by Dagmar Mirbach. Hamburg: F. Meiner.

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Wilhelminian Apparitions 49 Blackbourn, David. 1998. The Long Nineteenth Century: A History of Germany, 1780–​ 1918. New York; Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bölsche, Wilhelm. 1903. ‘Die Rede von dem “Zusammenbruch des Darwinismus” ’. In Aus der Schneegrube: Gedanken zur Naturforschung, 58–​92. Dresden: Reißner. —​—​—​. (1891) 1905. Die Mittagsgöttin: Ein Roman aus dem Geisteskampfe der Gegenwart. 2 vols. Jena: Diederichs. Braungart, Wolfgang. 1997. ‘Spiritismus und Literatur um 1900’. In Ästhetische und religiöse Erfahrungen der Jahrhundertwenden, edited by Wolfgang Braungart, Gotthard Fuchs, and Manfred Koch, 2:85– ​93. Paderborn: F. Schöningh. Brittnacher, Hans Richard. 2002. ‘Gespenstertreiben im Rotlicht: Zum Spiritismus in Thomas Manns “Der Zauberberg”’. In Profane Mystik?: Andacht und Ekstase in Literatur und Philosophie des 20. Jahrhunderts, edited by Wiebke Amthor, Hans Richard Brittnacher, and Anja Hallacker, 385– ​412. Berlin: Weidler. Büchner, Ludwig. 1855. Kraft und Stoff: Empirisch-​naturphilosophische Studien in allgemein-​verständlicher Darstellung. Frankfurt am Main: Meidinger Sohn. Burwick, Frederick. 1986. The Damnation of Newton: Goethe’s Color Theory and Romantic Perception. Berlin, New York: De Gruyter. Du Prel, Carl. 1874. Der Kampf ums Dasein am Himmel: die Darwin’sche Formel nachgewiesen in der Mechnanik der Sternenwelt. Berlin: Denicke’s Verlag. —​—​—​. 1880. Psychologie der Lyrik: Beiträge zur Analyse der dichterischen Phantasie. Leipzig: Günther. —​—​—​. 1885. Die Philosophie der Mystik. Leipzig: Günther. —​—​—​. 1888. Die monistische Seelenlehre: Ein Beitrag zur Lösung des Menschenrätsels. Leipzig: Günther. Freud, Sigmund. (1899) 1972. Die Traumdeutung. In Studienausgabe, by Sigmund Freud, edited by Alexander Mitscherlich, Angela Richards, and James Strachey. Vol. 2. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer. Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. 1981a. ‘Farbenlehre’. In Werke: Hamburger Ausgabe, by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, edited by Erich Trunz. 14  vols. 14, 7–307. München: Beck. —​—​—​. 1981b. ‘Maximen und Reflexionen’. In Werke: Hamburger Ausgabe, by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, edited by Erich Trunz. 14 vols. 12. München: Beck. Hartmann, Eduard von. 1869. Philosophie des Unbewussten: Versuch einer Weltanschauung. Berlin: Duncker. Helmholtz, Hermann von. 1876.‘Optisches ueber Malerei’. In Populäre Wissenschaftliche Vorträge, 55–​98. Braunschweig: Vieweg. —​ —​ —​ . (1878) 1998. ‘Die Tatsachen in der Wahrnehmung’. In Schriften zur Erkenntnistheorie, edited by Ecke Bonk, Paul Hertz, and Moritz Schlick, 147–​75. Wien: Springer. Janouch, Gustav. 1968. Gesprache Mit Kafka: Aufzeichnungen Und Erinnerungen. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer. Kelly, Alfred. 1975. ‘Between Poetry and Science: Wilhelm Bölsche as Scientific Popularizer’. Ph.D. Diss., Madison: University of Wisconsin. Kötter, Rudolf. 1998. ‘Newton und Goethe zur Farbenlehre’. Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie 46: 585– ​600. Lyotard, Jean-​Francois. 1979. La condition postmoderne: Rapport sur le savoir. Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit. Mann, Thomas. 1960a. ‘Der Zauberberg’. In Gesammelte Werke. Vol. 3. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer.

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50  Nicholas Saul —​—​—​. 1960b. ‘Drei Breichte über okkultistische Sitzungen’. In Gesammelte Werke, 13:37–​47. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer. —​—​—​. 1960c. ‘Okkulte Erlebnisse’. In Gesammelte Werke, 10:1, 135–​71. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer. Müller, Johannes. 1826. Ueber Die Phantastischen Gesichtserscheinungen. Coblenz: Hölscher. Nordau, Max. 1883. Die Conventionellen Lügen der Kulturmenschheit. Leipzig: B. Schlicke. —​—​—​. 1889. Die Krankheit des Jahrhunderts: Roman. 2  vols. Leipzig: B. Elischer Nachfolger. Pytlik, Priska. 2005. Okkultismus und Moderne: Ein kulturhistorisches Phänomen und seine Bedeutung für die Literatur um 1900. Paderborn: Schöningh. Saul, Nicholas. 2012. ‘Modernity’s Dark Side. Wilhelm Bölsche: Die Mittagsgöttin: Darwinism, Evolutionary Aesthetics and Spiritualism’. In Aesthetics and Modernity from Schiller to the Frankfurt School, edited by Jerome Carroll, Steve Giles, and Maike Oergel, 233– ​53. Oxford, Bern: Peter Lang. —​—​—​. 2014. ‘Darwin in Germany Literary Culture, 1890–​1914’. In Literary and Cultural Reception of Charles Darwin in Europe, edited by Thomas F. Glick and Elinor Shaffer, 46– ​77, 344– ​50. London: Bloomsbury. Schopenhauer, Arthur. 1874. ‘Versuch über Geistersehn und was damit zusammenhängt’. In Sämmtliche Werke, edited by Julius Frauenstädt, 5: Parerga und Paralipomena: 241– 3 ​ 28. Leipzig: Brockhaus. Siemens, Werner von. 1886. Das naturwissenschaftliche Zeitalter: Vortrag gehalten in der 59. Versammlung Deutscher Naturforscher und Aerzte am 18. September, 1886. Berlin: Carl Heymann. Susen, Gerd-​Hermann, and Edith Wack, eds. 2012. ‘Was wir im Verstande ausjäten, kommt im Traume wieder’: Wilhelm Bölsche 1861–​1939. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann. Wallace, Alfred Russel. (1875) 1955. Miracles and Modern Spiritualism: Three Essays. London: Psychic Book Club. Weber, Max. (1978) 1981. ‘Die protestantische Ethik und der “Geist” des Kapitalismus’. In Die protestantische Ethik, 6th ed., 27– ​277. Gütersloh: Mohn. Weindling, Paul. 1989. Health, Race, and German Politics Between National Unification and Nazism, 1870–​1945: Paul Weindling. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. http://​hdl.handle.net/​2027/​heb.01322. Zöllner, Friedrich. 1878. Wissenschaftliche Abhandlungen. 2 vols. Leipzig: Staackmann. Zöllner, Johann Karl Friedrich. 1880a. Transcendental Physics: An Account of Experimental Investigations From the Scientific Treatises of Johann Carl Friedrich Zoellner. Translated from the German, with a Preface and Appendices, by Charles Carleton Massey. London: Harrison. —​—​—​. 1880b. Zur Aufklärung Des Deutschen Volkes Über Inhalt Und Aufgabe Der Wissenschaftlichen Abhandlungen: Mit Notariellen Und Wissenschaftlichen Attesten Zur Rechtfertigung Der Öffentlich Verletzten Ehre Der Herren Slade Und Hansen. Leipzig: Staackmann.

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Part 2

Visual and Material Encounters with the Ghostly

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5  The Visual Representation of Ghosts in Early Modern Japan Rosina Buckland

Japanese culture possesses a rich repertoire of ghosts and demons, dating back at least a thousand years, and emerging from both formalized religion and popular lore. An issue at the heart of any discussion of ghosts, however, is how this phenomenon is to be defined within the broader context of the supernatural in historical Japan. This essay will focus on ‘ghosts’ narrowly defined as apparitions in human form, leaving aside the rich panoply of demons and other supernatural beings, usually termed yōkai. In this understanding, ghosts are ‘the spirits of dead persons in the Other World (takai) appearing in the shape they had in life; whereas yōkai have non-​human form and live in the Different World (ikai)’. Furthermore, ghosts have death as a pre-​condition, whereas yōkai are alive.1 Ghosts are something close to a universal form representing the simultaneous hope for and fear of the continuation of individual identity beyond death. In Japanese traditional belief, the soul of a deceased person must travel from this mortal sphere to the eternal world, but between the two lies a dangerous space where souls may linger. After death, the soul begins its existence as a restless spirit (aramitama) and rituals of purification and appeasement are required by those left behind at set points from the point of death onwards. When the transition is successful and peaceful, the deceased becomes an ancestral spirit (sorei) who oversees the welfare of descendants, but who continues to require attention. However, powerful emotions, such as anger, love, loyalty, jealousy or hatred, can cause a spirit to return to the world of the living in the form of a ghost (yūrei), which will linger until released of its obsession.

Ghosts in Buddhism An early version of the concept of a non-​mortal being in human form can be found in the teachings transmitted to Japan subsequent to the introduction of Buddhism during the sixth century CE. In Buddhist belief there are six Realms of Existence (J: rokudō) through which beings migrate from one lifetime to the next, with ascent to a higher or lower realm dependent on the merit accrued during one’s life based on one’s actions (i.e. karma). The lowest category of the six is the ‘hungry ghosts’. Originating in Indian religion, and termed preta in Sanskrit (meaning ‘dead person’), these are beings whose malicious actions

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54  Rosina Buckland during life condemn them to insatiable hunger and thirst. The concept spread with Buddhism across East and Southeast Asia, being translated into Chinese as ‘hungry ghost’ (C. egui, J. gaki 餓鬼). As further punishment for their past sins, the food they crave is usually repugnant, often faeces. Gaki were believed to live in the world, but were invisible to humans. In paintings, gaki are depicted as distorted human forms, shrunken and hunched, with grossly distended abdomens and scrawny necks. The understanding of the realms of existence was spread in medieval Japan through the Teachings Essential for Rebirth in the Pure Land (Ōjō yōshū), composed in 985 CE by the Pure Land Buddhist priest Genshin. The foremost example of pictorial representation is the ‘Scroll of Hungry Ghosts’ painted in the twelfth century. It presents a gruesome existence for these condemned creatures: clambering unseen over the guests at a banquet to pick at their ears and nose, crouching with arms extended as a woman gives birth, loitering while adults and children defecate in a back street in the poorest area of town, and drinking the fetid waters of a pool in a cemetery. The hungry ghosts endlessly try to gain their fill but are never sated.2

Paintings of Ghosts in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries During the twelfth to sixteenth centuries in Japan, ghosts were not taken up as independent subject matter by painters, although non-​human forms did appear in narrative handscroll paintings, often concerned with the origin myths of Buddhist temples.3 The ghost seeking satisfaction for wrongs suffered during life was a staple figure in the aristocratic form of theatre known as nō, which was heavily tinged with Buddhist teachings and ideas of appropriate memorialization to appease the spirits of the dead. In Japan’s earliest novel, the monumental Tale of Genji, there is a ‘living spirit’ (ikiryō) powerful enough to injure, and even kill. This is the occurrence in Chapter 9 of the Tale, when the furious jealousy of Genji’s neglected lover, Lady Rokujō, causes her spirit to take possession of his new love, Aoi, who is pregnant with his child. In an unnerving scene worthy of any modern-​day horror film, Rokujō’s voice emanates from Aoi’s prostrate form, and the possession steadily weakens her until it finally causes her death. When Lady Rokujō realizes what has happened, she is horrified and her deep remorse leads her to become a nun, but even after her death her spirit continues to haunt Genji and must be appeased. Moving into Japan’s early modern era, by 1615 Tokugawa Ieyasu had asserted his superiority over rival warlords and established himself as supreme military commander, or shogun, ushering in a period of peace which was to last over 250  years. Building on the social stability this permitted, by the mid-​1600s the commercial economy was growing fast, with a concomitant expansion of popular culture, both in the imperial capital of Kyoto and in the shogun’s eastern power centre of Edo (modern-​day Tokyo). There was growing demand for new and stimulating subject matter and this was the point at which ghosts and apparitions began to make an appearance in visual culture, shifting from something truly fearful to a source of entertainment and thrilling frisson.

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Representation of Ghosts in Early Modern Japan 55 The standard ghostly appearance of the Tokugawa period (1603–​1868) is immediately recognizable as a non-​living being: pale features, long, dishevelled hair, clothed loosely in a white shroud, with the lower body rendered indistinct, giving the illusion that the form is weightless and floating. Although it is often asserted that this representation was developed by one particular painter in the late 1700s, the art historian Kenji Kajiya has demonstrated that the earliest known such image dates from as early as 1654, illustrating the possession of Aoi in the publication ‘An Illustrated Tale of Genji’ (E-​iri Genij monogatari; vol. 4). Kajiya argues that this was a pictorial invention, with no literary basis, in order to represent movement and the moment of apparition, the phenomenon of the ghost fading into and out of view, clearly distinguishing it visually from other figures in a scene (Kajiya 2001, 100).4 The painter credited with establishing the genre of the ghost painting, even if he did not devise its visual nature, is Maruyama Ōkyo (1733–​95). Despite the large number of ghost paintings attributed to Ōkyo and his reputation as the founder of this mode, no painting has been unequivocally attributed. As a result, as Yasumura Toshinobu succinctly remarks, their status is as dubious as that of ghosts (Yasumura Toshinobu, in Tsuji 1995, 152).5 Living in the imperial capital, Kyoto, Ōkyo had initially worked for a vendor of Western-​ inspired vues d’optiques, vanishing-​perspective prints viewed through a special optical device fitted with mirror and lens, and Ōkyo himself produced such designs. As an artist, he assiduously pursued sketching from life in order to impart a hitherto unknown degree of realism to his paintings. The contemporary writer Ansai Un’en (1806–​52) recorded that Ōkyo based one ghost painting on a dead woman’s face, and the author Kaneko Seigi (n.d.) related stories of Ōkyo sketching his critically ill wife through the mosquito net, or capturing the appearance of a dead girl’s corpse in the town of Ōtsu (Kōno in Tsuji 1995, 88–​9).6 Thanks to this quest for fidelity to life, he managed to produce uncanny representations of death. At least three versions exist of the work known either as ‘Ghost of Oyuki’ or ‘Spirit Returning in Incense Smoke’ (Hangonkō; Figure 5.1). All are unsigned, and their authenticity has been debated, but that owned by Kudoji temple in Hirosaki City, Aomori Prefecture, is held to be genuine.7 These images conform in many respects to the conventions of the ‘paintings of beauties’ (bijinga) for which Ōkyo was renowned, possessing a calm demeanour with head demurely tilted forward, a plump face with gently drawn eyebrows, eyes and nose, and lips with a touch of red (Tanaka 2018, 92). Given such precedents, the unkempt hair, the white shroud and the inhuman vanishing beneath the waist provide an added shock. The theme of ‘Spirit Returning within Incense’ is recorded on the box inscription of the Kudoji work, and refers to a ghost which emerges from the smoke when incense is burned in memory of the deceased. An image on this theme was first produced on the order of Emperor Wu (Han Wudi; 157 BC E –​87 BCE ) of the Han dynasty in China, in his grief at the death of a favoured consort. The theme was immortalized in the ‘Poem of Lady Li’ by the renowned Song-​dynasty poet Bai Juyi (772–​846), helping establish the romantic image

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Figure 5.1 Maruyama Ōkyo, Spirit Returning in Incense Smoke, painting on silk, 1784. Source: Kudoji temple, Hirosaki.

of this tragic figure, and was adapted into a popular song in Japan in the early modern period. The subject had been represented in the illustrated publication One Hundred Demon Varieties of Past and Present (Konjaku hyakki shūi) by Toriyama Sekien in 1781, just three years before the Kudoji painting.8 The theme is made explicit in another, unattributed painting, which depicts a female ghost clad in a white shroud, holding up her skirts with her right hand, emerging from the smoke that rises from an incense burner placed on a table (Figure  5.2). Unlike Ōkyo’s ghost, which contains a touch of malice around the eyes, this woman’s expression is wistful as she gazes down at an

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Representation of Ghosts in Early Modern Japan 57

Figure 5.2 Unsigned, Spirit Returning in Incense Smoke, painting on silk, nineteenth century. Source: Zenshōan temple, Tokyo.

unseen figure. Petals fallen from the poppy within the vase suggest an atmosphere of decay. The elements of the composition are all Chinese in style: the gold tripod incense burner, a celadon vase, a black lacquer table inlaid with mother-​of-​pearl, and on the floor a circular red lacquer box and a feather fan.9 These examples illustrate that early paintings of ghosts did not necessarily present them as fearsome beings, but rather as sad and wistful. That the vast majority of ghost paintings are of women is commonly understood as a reflection of the limited choices and restricted agency of women living in a feudal, patriarchal. Under Confucian teachings, women were subject to their fathers, husbands and sons, with no independent role in society. When subjected to unkind or cruel treatment, they had no legal resources, and rarely any

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58  Rosina Buckland financial ones. Typically, the harsher the treatment of the woman while alive, the more violent the reaction of the ghost. The imagery possesses an underlying message that cruelty to women is abhorrent, with a Buddhist lesson that harm to any living creature must be atoned for. Furthermore, Tanaka Takako suggests that the high mortality rate of women in childbirth during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries can be seen behind the frequent creation of images of women attached regretfully to the world.10 Earlier ghost paintings are melancholic and regretful, but those of the nineteenth century become more macabre, filled with the sentiment of urami, signalling fury, rage and the desire for revenge. Painters would even draw on their own experience of bereavement to aid them in creating a powerful representation of a ghost. The late nineteenth-​ century artist Kawanabe Kyōsai (1831 – ​ 1 889) pursued an independent course, and though long neglected has in recent years received due attention. He trained in studios of both the official painters-​in-​service to the shogunate and the popular ‘floating world’ style and combined aspects of both to create humorous and often satirical takes on the modernizing society around him. When Kyōsai’s second wife, Tose, died, he supposedly had someone hold up her corpse so that he could sketch it. This somewhat macabre exercise was

Figure 5.3 Kawanabe Kyōsai, Female Ghost, painting on paper, 1871–​89. Source: Trustees of the British Museum.

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Figure 5.4 Maki Chokusai, Female Ghost, painting on silk, 1861. Source: Trustees of the British Museum.

fully in keeping with Kyōsai’s passionate belief in seizing every opportunity to sketch. Kyōsai’s ghost images are by turns hauntingly beautiful, humorous and macabre, and he famously boasted of creating a work like no other for the actor Onoe Kikugorō V (1844 – ​1 903), one of Kabuki theatre’s female role specialists (onnagata), who had especially mastered ghost roles and who collected ghost paintings.11 In one particularly gruesome work, Kyōsai presents a ghost with the exsanguinated flesh of her face and chest turned blue, the area around her lips red with blood, and the hair trailing down her body in fine strands, a clump of which she pulls at tightly (Figure 5.3). Most chillingly, in her right hand she clutches at the topknot of a man’s severed head. Within soft ink tones in the lower part of the painting are suggestions of the spirit flames that accompany her. These flames are thought to relate to the fires which are used to welcome and send off the spirits of the ancestors at the summer remembrance festival of Obon.12 The painting is given a special tone by being signed in gold pigment, with another character in gold in the lower left corner. The images of ghosts created during this period were not necessarily terrifying, and much of the artist’s aim was to provide entertainment value.

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Figure 5.5 Matsumoto Fūko, Ghost of a Blind Man, painting on paper, late nineteenth century. Source: Zenshōan temple, Tokyo.

An interesting example is a painting by the otherwise unknown artist Maki Chokusai (n.d.; Figure 5.4). It presents the usual figure of a woman dressed in a white shroud looming forward, her lower body fading away, with emaciated hands, dishevelled hair, swollen eyes and lips drawn back to reveal the teeth. Yet the ultimate effect of her face is more humorous than fearful. The painting also illustrates a common feature of ghost paintings, where the customary brocade borders around the image, presenting here a design of flowers and grasses and deep blue trims with gold embroidery, are in fact painted by hand (kaki-​byōsō). This technique is employed to achieve a trompe-​l’oeil effect of the ghost floating out of the painting. There was a custom of displaying ghost paintings in summer to send a chill down the spine. This apparently developed out of the earlier custom of ‘One Hundred [Supernatural] Stories’ (Hyaku monogatari), where one hundred candles were illuminated and then extinguished one by one as chilling stories

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Figure 5.6 Katsukawa Shun’ei & Shunshō, Ima wa mukashi, woodblock-​printed book, vol. 3, 1790. Source: Trustees of the British Museum.

were related, leaving the gathered listeners in darkness at the end. During the nineteenth century the entertainer San’yūtei Enchō (1839–​1900) built up a collection of more than one hundred ghost paintings in order to illustrate the supernatural stories which he delivered as part of his act. Over fifty of these survive through donation to Zenshōan temple, located in the downtown Yanaka district of Tokyo, and the tradition of displaying these works in summer continues to this day. One such work from the collection illustrates how this genre of paintings was not limited to representations of female ghosts; male figures do appear, though they are fewer in number overall. Figure  5.5 is an undated work by Matsumoto Fūko (1840–​1923), presenting a male ghost, elderly in appearance. That this is a blind man is indicated by one eye being closed and the other wide open and starkly white, as well as the long stick on which he rests his hands.13 The outermost contours of the figure and the white shroud are conveyed in relief against dense ink shading, and subtle shading on the robes and flesh produces a strong sense of three-​dimensionality. The ghost hovers in a wild moor, with a discarded straw sandal at lower right, and drifting white petals, in thick shell-​white pigment, evoking the lotus blossoms of funerary rites.

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Ghosts in Kabuki By 1800 Edo was one of the largest cities in the world, with a population exceeding one million. With widespread education and high levels of literacy, the city sustained an extensive publishing industry. Hundreds, if not thousands, of books were published each year, with publishers vying to produce the latest, most exciting, and most attractive works, employing artists to provide illustrations to liven up the latest product. In this context, ghosts were a surefire winner, with ample scope for imaginative and chilling depictions. The book of spooks by Katsukawa Shun’ei (1762–​1819), supplemented by his master Katsukawa Shunshō (1726–​1792), entitled Once Upon a Time (Ima wa mukashi) and published in three volumes in 1790, already presents the standard form of the female ghost (Figure 5.6). In the scene reproduced, the family has invited a priest to perform a memorial service one evening in their home (note the lantern at left). They have gathered in front of the Buddhist altar, with memorial tablet placed at centre, but instead of participating in an orderly ritual they are startled by the abrupt appearance of a ghostly form on the staircase, with mouth horridly gaping, hair trailing, and eyes deranged. The four figures cower on the floor in fear, knocking over the incense burner as they scramble away, and now become entangled in the rosary.14 To cater to its very large populace, Edo had an extensive provision of entertainments and street shows, often associated with temples and festivals. Story-​telling theatres, known as yose, were a mainstay of this sector, and in the early nineteenth century a new genre was developed of chilling stories of murders and ghosts, called kaidan-​banashi. These provided rich fodder for theatrical adaptation in the popular form of theatre known as Kabuki. Still popular today, Kabuki was characterized by stylized and often exaggerated acting, together with lavish costumes and stage sets. Supernatural elements added excitement to the performance and ghosts provided the opportunity for spectacular dramatic effects. As theatres competed one with another, audiences came to expect increasingly sensational and disturbing plots. One playwright in particular, Tsuruya Nanboku IV (1755–​1829), played an important role in catering to these expectations, thereby establishing the stock figure of the fearsome female ghost. The popularity of macabre themes goes beyond mere entertainment, however, and can be linked to the social and historical context: art of the supernatural reached a peak in the mid-​19th century because of unsettled social conditions in Japan. From the 1830s onwards there were economic troubles, natural disasters such as droughts and crop failures, leading to rice riots, and fear of a possible invasion by ‘foreign barbarians’ brought on by the very real threat of Russian and American gunboats. Confidence in the political regime was crumbling and the country was beset by local rebellions, often brutally repressed. This general malaise created a public appetite for more graphic thrills, and led to the popularity of sensationalist and bloody images and theatrical presentations during these decades. In addition to the woodblock-​printed books described above, large-​format sheet prints (using standardized paper measuring about 38 by 25 centimetres)

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Representation of Ghosts in Early Modern Japan 63 were a phenomenally popular, affordable, mass-​produced form of imagery. Full-​colour printing had been achieved by 1765 and the technical sophistication and density of colour increased further in the subsequent decades. Publishers competed to issue attractive, topical designs by the top-​tier artists. The Kabuki theatre was a significant source of subject matter for prints, with new performances each month generating constantly updated content for the designs, and fans eager to acquire the latest representation of their favourite stars. Prints were customarily issued as promotional material before a performance had taken place, with the artist conjuring up how the role or scene was likely to appear. The most famous and vengeful ghost in Kabuki theatre is Oiwa, the wraith of a wronged wife who returns to haunt her wicked husband. She appeared in the tragic and gruesome play Ghost Tales from Yotsuya on the Tokaido Road (Tōkaidō Yotsuya kaidan) by Tsuruya Nanboku IV. The plot concerns Tamiya Iemon, an ‘amorous villain’ (iro-​aku), who tires of his wife Oiwa after she has given birth. With his neighbour’s assistance he conspires to poison her, so that he can marry the neighbour’s young, attractive daughter. However, he succeeds only in disfiguring Oiwa horribly, and there are gruesome scenes as she discovers her husband’s treachery; she attempts to comb her hair, only to find it falling out in clumps. Iemon blames Oiwa’s subsequent, accidental death on a servant, Kohei, whom he then murders, and he has his cronies dump both bodies. When Tamiya prepares to receive his new bride, he lifts the veil only to find the frightful visage of Oiwa. Wherever he goes and whatever he does, Oiwa’s ghost haunts him, even appearing in the lantern above his head, which spontaneously combusts.15 One of the earliest representations is by Utagawa Toyokuni, published in 1812, depicting the Kabuki actor Onoe

Figure 5.7 Utagawa Toyokuni, Onoe Matsusuke as the ghost of Oiwa, woodblock print, 1812. Source: Metropolitan Museum of Art.

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64  Rosina Buckland Matsusuke II (1784–​1849) as Oiwa (Figure 5.7). While the figure conforms to the conventions of the ghost –​a hovering form which tapers away to nothing below the waist, with distressed expression and long, unkempt hair, surrounded by spirit flames  –​this early depiction shows none of the facial disfiguration which would become increasingly graphic in later years. The print artist Utagawa Kuniyoshi (1797–​1861) produced relatively few Kabuki prints, but in a splendid three-​sheet design of 1836 he depicts the scene from a performance at the Morita-​za theatre when, subsequently, Iemon goes fishing in the Onbō Canal, and encounters Naosuke, Oiwa’s brother-​in-​law, likewise angling (Figure 5.8). The actors portrayed in these roles are Ichikawa Ebizō V (1791–​1859) and Matsumoto Kōshirō V (1764–​1838) respectively. Just as Iemon is about to slink off, a wooden door floats into view in the canal. When he lifts the straw matting covering it, he is horrified to find the corpse of Oiwa nailed to it. As he turns the door over in order to hide the evidence, it reveals on the other side the corpse of Kohei. This classic moment in the play is achieved by means of a stage trick, known as the ‘rain-​door flip’, whereby the two decaying corpses appear in quick succession. The trick is that the two roles are in fact played by the same actor, with just enough swift make-​up and hair changes made during the flip to produce the required effect. Here, the actor is stated to have been Onoe Kikugorō III (1784–​1849), the actor for whom Nanboku created the Oiwa character, but in fact he did not take these roles in this production. On the bank, Onoe Eizaburō III (1808–​1860) as O-​Yumi watches horrified. The flame suspended in the air above the corpse indicates an other-​worldly presence. The play was a phenomenal success, and is still performed today; this production from 1836 starred some of the most famous actors of the day.

Figure 5.8 Utagawa Kuniyoshi, Kabuki scene from Tōkaidō Yotsuya kaidan, woodblock print, 1836. Source: National Museums Scotland.

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Representation of Ghosts in Early Modern Japan 65

Figure 5.9 Katsushika Hokusai, Sara-​yashiki, from the series ‘One Hundred Supernatural Stories’ (Hyaku monogatari), woodblock print, 1831–​32. Source: Trustees of the British Museum.

In Ghost Tales from Yotsuya, Nanboku drew on local folklore and true stories to create a compelling drama, with all the right elements: a blackguard, a distressed heroine, bloody treachery, and spectral retribution. He played on people’s fears while catering to their desire to be horrified. The play showcases the disturbing psychological aspects of humankind, the dark side which draws and repels us. As the art historian Brenda Jordan wrote: ‘In an age of increasing violence and action in the theater… the story of Oiwa had something to appeal to everyone: a black-​hearted villain, a beautiful suffering heroine, multiple murders, and ghostly revenge. The author… combined fiction with fact and made use of people’s fears and insecurities while catering to their desires to be thrilled and horrified’ (Jordan 1985, 33). Sexual exploitation was a recurrent theme in female ghost stories. One such was the tale of the serving girl Okiku whose master, Aoyama Sessan, falsely accused her of breaking a valuable imported Dutch plate when she refused to sleep with him. He cast her body into a well, from which she rose nightly, endlessly telling off the plates in the set, never able to reach a full count. Katsushika Hokusai’s design of 1831–​32 in the truncated series One Hundred Supernatural

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Figure 5.10 Kunimasu, Onoe Kikugorō III as the ghost of Kasane, woodblock print, 1849. Source: National Museums Scotland.

Tales (Hyaku monogatari) is one of his most imaginative, depicting Okiku as the embodiment of the accursed plates (Figure  5.9). This original interpretation was perhaps inspired by the familiar long-​ necked rokurokubi monster, which the artist included just a couple of years later in volume 12 of the Hokusai manga book series.16 This tale had popular appeal with the figure of the wronged woman endlessly tormenting her murderer, and was adapted for the puppet theatre and the Kabuki stage as Banchō sara-​yashiki. Another wronged woman is Kasane, who first appeared in the printed work Shiryō gedatsu monogatari kikigaki of 1690 but was immortalized by Tsuruya Nanboku IV in the dance piece ‘Iro moyō chotto karimame’ as part of the Kabuki play Kesakake matsu Narita no riken, first performed in 1823. Details of the story varied, but in essence the woman Kasane is possessed by the vengeful spirit of a man named Suke (variously her half-​brother or her father), who was murdered by Yoemon. In the Kabuki play, Kasane and Yoemon are now lovers and she is bearing his child, but as their relationship is forbidden, they are on their way to commit ‘love suicide’. When Kasane manifests her connection to Suke by disfigurement and the same wounds that were inflicted on Suke, Yoemon is compelled to kill Kasane also. A  diptych design by Kunimasu demonstrates how the on-​stage persona of Onoe Kikugorō III, who was renowned for his masterly portrayal of female ghosts, came to serve as the embodiment of the actor himself in his ‘memorial print’, or shini-​e (Figure 5.10). Shini-​e had developed from the late 1700s as another means by which fans could possess an image of the celebrity actors, and another form

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Representation of Ghosts in Early Modern Japan 67

Figure 5.11 Katsushika Hokusai, Kohada Koheiji, from the series ‘One Hundred Supernatural Stories’ (Hyaku monogatari), woodblock print, 1831–​32. Source: Trustees of the British Museum.

for publishers to promote. As the cultural historian Christine Guth has written: ‘shini-​e established a new kind of theatrical relationship with the audience by creating a visual tension between the subject’s historical and stage identities. While offstage pictures expose the man normally hidden behind the role, memorial prints do so by revealing the actor performing even in death’ (Guth 2005, 24). On the right sheet, Kasane’s ghost moves forward out of the frame, clutching at the child she left behind, with thin spirit flames licking around the corner of the image. The wraith moves towards the lotus pond at left, a symbol of the Buddhist Pure Land where souls are reborn. The face clearly bears the long nose of the renowned actor, and the intense blue shading on the face is reminiscent of stage make-​up. Black-​on-​grey characters to the right and left of the head announce the title as ‘The ghost of Kasane’ (Kasane no yūrei). For the pond, light blue printing suggests the surface of the water, and delicate gradated printing has been used for the shading of the lotus leaves. The accompanying poem, composed by Kikugorō just before his death (using his poetry nom de plume, Ōkawa Hashizō), translates as ‘The snow obscuring Mt. Fuji fades away on a summer’s day’ (Natsu no hi ni hakanaku keshi Fuji no yuki), alluding to the transience of all things in this world. In this design, the

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68  Rosina Buckland

Figure 5.12 Utagawa Kuniyoshi, Orikoshi Masatomo and Asakura Tōgo, woodblock print, 1851. Source: Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

line between actor and character, fact and fiction is blurred in ways that would surely have satisfied Kikugorō’s adoring fan-​base. The counterpart male ghost to these renowned females was Kohada Koheiji, similarly wronged (Figure  5.11). He was murdered by his wife’s lover, the theatre drummer Adachi Sakurō, and after the treacherous couple had married they were haunted by Koheiji’s ghost and eventually met unnatural deaths. The character first appeared in ‘A Strange Story of Revenge at Asaka Swamp’ (Fukushū kidan Asaka no numa) by the popular author Santō Kyōden (1761–​ 1816), published in 1803 (Deguchi 1985, 21). The scene of Koheiji looming above the sleeping couple’s mosquito net became a popular subject for prints, but in his design for the series One Hundred Supernatural Tales of the early 1830s, Hokusai takes ghost imagery in a new direction, presenting Koheiji as a ghastly skeleton, with bloodshot eyeballs still in their sockets which glower at his enemies, and supernatural flames licking around his skull. Around his neck hangs a Buddhist rosary, suggesting his morally superior position in this gruesome tale. As Tsuji has written, Hokusai provided his audience with a new kind of ghost: powerful, loud, dynamic, and bold in expression (Tsuji 1995, 9).17 One of the most spectacular designs of a theatrical ghost by Kuniyoshi depicts the actor Ichikawa Kodanji IV (1812–​1866) as the ghost of Asakura Tōgo, returning to haunt his wicked lord, Orikoshi Masatomo (Figure 5.12). The skilful printing of the image contributes to the ghostly quality of its

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Representation of Ghosts in Early Modern Japan 69 subject: thickly congealed blood on the neck, the sharply delineated expression of derangement, the yellow eyes, the wispy hair (requiring extremely fine cutting of the block), the fading away of the body beneath the waist, and the dense black shadow outlining the figure (Clark 2009, 243). Thanks to the print scholar Roger Keyes, we now know this to be the left sheet of a diptych, with Asakura staring down Orikoshi (on the right sheet, played by Bandō Hikosaburō IV; 1800–​1873), who vainly moves to draw his sword, an ineffective weapon against a wraith (Secor and Addiss 1985, 52–​53, 182). The play from which these characters are drawn, Higashiyama sakura sōshi (The Higashiyama Storybook), is an unusual example of Kabuki presenting an episode of class tension, thinly disguised as having occurred in the distant past. The plot was based on a farmers’ revolt of 1653 in Sōma province, where the cruel lord Orikoshi inflicts increasingly heavy taxes on the people of his fief. When their pleas for relief fall on deaf ears, the farmers resolve to take a petition directly to their lord; Asakura Tōgo agrees to act as spokesman, knowing that such an action is illegal. The appeal is summarily rejected and as punishment Asakura and his wife are forced to watch their three sons being beheaded, before they themselves are crucified. Before death, Tōgo vows that his ghost will wreak vengeance on the Orikoshi family. Demand for images of the play was high, and Kuniyoshi produced at least five other designs. In one three-​sheet design he presented the scene in Orikoshi’s mansion as it would have been played out on the Kabuki stage. The lord stands at centre, wearing the purple headband of an invalid as he sinks into madness, besieged every way he turns by the ghost of Asakura, which appears three times. Snakes writhe over Orikoshi’s body, and the faces of his ladies-​in-​waiting have turned to skulls.18 The play was extremely popular, running for more than a hundred days, in a period when the bill usually changed monthly. The events presented in the play were considered dangerous as they called into question the virtue and fitness of the ruling regime, and might encourage organized opposition. That such a play was tolerated has thus been seen as a sign of the authorities’ gradual loss of power at this point (Clark 2009, 239). The presentation of such conflicts offered both stimulation and a form of catharsis, as Secor and Addiss have written: ‘through such dramas… people could at once excite their imaginations and at the same time come to an understanding of how violence and suffering could ultimately be laid to rest’ (Secor and Addiss 1985, 55).

Martial Ghosts The artist Kuniyoshi was known primarily for his masterful warrior prints (musha-​e). His studio produced hundreds of designs on the theme of warriors battling both human adversaries and supernatural beings, proving their superhuman qualities of courage and strength. Strict censorship rules forbad the mention of contemporary events and so artists such as Kuniyoshi drew copiously on the legendary tales of Japan’s civil wars, which occurred during the

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Figure 5.13 Utagawa Kuniyoshi, Taira no Tomomori on the sea bed, woodblock print, 1851. Source: Trustees of the British Museum.

later 1100s and again during the 1330s. Within this genre, Kuniyoshi presented a new category of the mournful ghosts of defeated warriors. Figure 5.13 is macabre yet human in its conception, suggesting the nobility of failure. It presents the ghosts of the great commander Taira no Tomomori (1152 – ​1 185) and his generals on the sea bed. They are plotting their revenge on the forces of their enemy, Minamoto no Yoshitsune (1159 – ​1 189). Beside them is the anchor to which Tomomori tied himself before jumping into the waters following his defeat at the naval battle of Dannoura in 1185. The blue faces and lingering blood stains of battle announce that these are ghosts. The general at left points to the army of crabs they have summoned to attack Yoshitsune’s ship, each with the ghostly face of a dead warrior on its carapace. After his victory at Dannoura, Yoshitsune had been forced to flee the jealous wrath of his half-​brother, Minamoto no Yoritomo (1147–​1199), who feared an attempted grab for power. Having outwitted a surprise attack in Kyoto, he and his men boarded their ship at the coast nearby, intending to head west to the island of Kyushu. Figure  5.14 presents the crisis as they are struck by a great storm, and the ship pitches dangerously into a mountainous wave, with sail collapsing and rigging in disarray. They are threatened by not only natural forces, but also supernatural ones, as on the horizon the ghosts of their felled enemies loom menacingly, rendered in ghoulish silhouette. Only the action of Yoshitsune’s loyal retainer, the old monk Benkei, saves them, as he rubs a string of Buddhist rosary beads between his palms and intones an exorcism (Clark 2009, 90). For centuries Yoshitsune was a revered warrior figure, and he remains so even today, but Kuniyoshi’s print shows there was an awareness that such figures were complex and often haunted.

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Representation of Ghosts in Early Modern Japan 71

Figure 5.14 Utagawa Kuniyoshi, Yoshitsune’s ships attacked by the ghosts of the Taira warriors, woodblock print, ca. 1851. Source: Trustees of the British Museum.

The ghosts of early modern Japanese visual culture originated in religious beliefs, but in a rapidly expanding urban environment they were eagerly taken up by consumer culture as a form of entertainment. Their appeal has never gone away: the annual summer showing of ghost paintings at Zenshōan temple remains popular, and many Tokugawa-​period ghosts have had afterlives in our times, such as the Sara yashiki story which inspired the horror film, The Ring (Ringu), directed by Nakata Hideo and based loosely on the novel by Suzuki Kōji, involving a cursed videotape created by the ghost of a girl who was murdered and her body cast down a well.19 As Stephen Addiss concludes, myths and belief in supernatural creatures have helped people to understand and accept the mysterious elements in the universe, by imparting a sense of order to existence. Beliefs carry important messages within a culture, and these become especially important in times of strife and uncertainty. Furthermore, the very act of depicting supernatural beings serves to limit their power over humans. A demon or monster, no matter how frighteningly depicted, could never be as terrifying as one unseen and only imagined (Addiss 1985, 178). Yet the tendency in visual culture towards playfulness and humour helped mitigate their power even further.

Notes 1 In Tsuji Nobuo (1995, 96), Suwa explains yōkai as animistic spirits (originating in the Jōmon period, 10,000–​300 BC E ) which have turned malevolent towards humans, and yūrei as having developed from ancestor beliefs (of the subsequent Yayoi period, 300 BC E –​300 C E ). Another category is ‘shape-​takers’ (bakemono), defined by Komatsu Shigehiko as “a spirit existence not venerated as a kami and possessed of the ability to assume a different form’ (Yasumura 2000, 154).

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72  Rosina Buckland 2 For images, see http://​www.emuseum.jp/​ (accessed 15 March 2019). For more on this topic, see Orzek 1996. 3 One such example is the ghost which appears in vol. 6 of the ‘Yamanaka Tokiwa’ handscroll set, painted by Iwasa Matabei, c. 1628, in MOA Museum of Art, Atami; see Tsuji et al. 1982. 4 Waseda University has digitized images of this book: http://​archive.wul.waseda. ac.jp/​kosho/​bunko30/​bunko30_​a0007 (accessed 15 March 2019). 5 The attribution to Ōkyo was first made in the 1829 essay “Matsu no ochiba” by Teraoka Yasutaka (Tsuji 1995, 9). 6 The model for the Berkeley work was supposedly Ōkyo’s mistress, an employee of the Tominaga geisha house in the town of Ōtsu, who died young and whose spirit appeared to him in a dream (Jordan 1985, 25). 7 Both Kōno and Yasumura are clear on this attribution. The other two versions are in Zenshōan temple, Tokyo and University of California, Berkeley, reproduced respectively in Tsuji 1995, nr. 1, and Addiss 1985, 25. 8 Waseda University has digitized images of this book: http://​archive.wul.waseda. ac.jp/​kosho/​bunko31/​bunko31_​e0490 (accessed 15 March 2019). 9 Yasumura Toshinobu sees similarities to the beauties of Utagawa Toyoharu (c. 1735–​1814), and suggests the painter was self-​taught, studying the style of the Utagawa lineage for the figure, with elements of the Shen Nanpin style in the poppy blossom and leaves (Tsuji 1995, 158). 10 Tanaka Takako, quoted in Kajiya 2001, 98. 11 For reproduction, see Clark 1993, nr. 29. 12 Suwa Haruo in Tsuji 1995, 105. 13 For other examples of paintings of male ghosts, see Tsuji 1995 and Yasumura 2000. 14 For the full reproduction of all three volumes (JH.163), see the British Museum collections database: britishmuseum.org/collection. 15 This is the ghastly vision conceived by Hokusai in the series One Hundred Supernatural Tales; see impression in British Museum (1921,0511,0.15). 16 Digitized images available at britishmuseum.org/collection (1979,0305,0.428.12). 17 Tsuji mentions also Hokusai’s illustrations for the book Shimoyo no hoshi (1848); see digitized version in Waseda University: http://​www.wul.waseda.ac.jp/​kotenseki/​ html/​he13/​he13_​01299/​. 18 See impression in the British Museum: 2008,3037.19612. For other designs, see Museum of Fine Arts, Boston collections database: https://​www.mfa.org/​collections/​ search. 19 For an examination of ghosts in post-​war Japanese cinema, see Du Mesnildot 2018.

Works Cited Addiss, Stephen, ed. 1985. Japanese Ghosts and Demons: Art of the Supernatural. New York: George Braziller. Clark, Timothy, ed. 1993. Demon of Painting: The Art of Kawanabe Kyōsai. London: British Museum Press. —​—​—​. 2009. Kuniyoshi: From the Arthur R.  Miller Collection. London: Royal Academy of Arts. Deguchi, Midori. 1985. ‘Yūrei: Tales of Female Ghosts’. In Japanese Ghosts and Demons: Art of the Supernatural, edited by Stephen Addiss, 15–​23. New  York: George Braziller.

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Representation of Ghosts in Early Modern Japan 73 Du Mesnildot, Stéphane. 2018. ‘La J-horror, un nouveau Japon spectral’. In Enfers et fantômes d’Asie, edited by Julien Rousseau and Stéphane Du Mesnildot, 146–151. Paris: Flammarion. Guth, Christine M.E. 2005. ‘Memorial Portraits of Kabuki Actors: Fanfare in the Floating World’. Impressions: Journal of the Ukiyo-​ e Society of America, no. 27: 22–​41. Jordan, Brenda G. 1985. ‘Yūrei: Tales of Female Ghosts’. In Japanese Ghosts and Demons: Art of the Supernatural, edited by Stephen Addiss, 25–​33. New  York: George Braziller. Kajiya, Kenji. 2001. ‘Reimagining the Imagined: Depictions of Dreams and Ghosts in the Early Edo Period’. Impressions: Journal of the Ukiyo-​e Society of America, no. 23: 86–​107. Orzek, Charles. 1996. ‘Saving the Burning-​ Mouth Hungry Ghost’. In Religions of China in Practice, edited by Donald S. Lopez, 278–​83. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Secor, James L., and Stephen Addiss. 1985. ‘The Male Ghost in Kabuki and Ukiyo-​e’. In Japanese Ghosts and Demons: Art of the Supernatural, edited by Stephen Addiss, 49–​55. New York: George Braziller. Tanaka, Keiko. 2018. ‘La représentation de la rancune dans les yūreiga, les peintures de spectres’. In Enfers et fantômes d’Asie, edited by Julien Rousseau and Stéphane du Mesnildot, 88– ​99. Paris: Flammarion. Tsuji, Nobuo. 1995. Yūrei meigashū: Zenshō-​an zō Sanyūtei Enchō korekushon. Tokyo: Perikansha. Tsuji, Nobuo, Junichi Shida, Shōtarō Yasuoka, and Matabē Iwasa, eds. 1982. Emaki Yamanaka Tokiwa. Tōkyo: Kadokawa Shoten. Yasumura, Toshinobu, ed. 2000. Nihon no yūrei meigashū. Tokyo: Jinrui Bunkasha.

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6  Embodied Shadows Sculpted Memory, Sensed Presence, and the Third Party Douglas J. Davies

Sometimes it seems that someone else is with us, despite that ‘someone’ being dead. To comprehend this sensed presence is far from easy, inviting several degrees of self-​and cultural reflection, not least in a society where death is, paradoxically, both an increasing rarity and a pervasive presence; where, too, ‘belief’ in the reality of ‘spirits’ divides opinion. In attempting some comprehension of this sensed ‘otherness’, this c­ hapter  –​working on the a priori assumption that spirits and souls do not exist in and of themselves –​combines some historical and contemporary anthropological views with empirical, theoretical, and speculative materials, to explore this sensed presence of the ‘embodied shadows’, who constitute the ghosts of this chapter. While the method driving this descriptive and exploratory chapter is largely anthropological, itself a discipline of many methods, I want to fashion my interpretative approach in alignment with some consideration of the element of mood. This intention seeks to bring a degree of emotional colour to the broad theme of ‘ghosts’, and to foster a degree of explicit reflexivity enabling us to distance ourselves from ourselves. Some theoretical issues, comparative ethnographic material, and empirical data will be the means of achieving this and, in the process, may also help generate haunting perspectives of their own. Among several epistemological and methodological issues and concepts that can be given only brief theoretical mention are those of ‘culture’, as a frame for the phenomena described here, and of ‘enchantment’. Schneider depicts the latter as its own form ‘of our normal condition’ that ‘continues to exist (though often unrecognized) wherever our capacity to explain the world’s behaviour is slim’, and where a sense of ‘the meaning of things … previously thought to be without meaning’ is lodged ‘in strange entities like the unconscious or other ghostly agents’ (1993, x–​xi). Certainly, this chapter’s title, ‘Embodied Shadows’, and its sub-​title ‘sculpted memory, sensed presence, and the third party’, acknowledge such a perspective, and may help illustrate such ‘strange entities’. However, I  begin with several anthropologists, Tylor, Frazer, and Hertz, whose late nineteenth-​and early twentieth-​century interpretative intentions were more immediately pragmatic. Then I  present some social survey material from my own and other people’s research, before briefly taking up some relevant aspects of the notion of embodiment in relation to qualitative research observations. The final section will add a theoretical consideration

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Embodied Shadows 75 of the ‘dividual’ notion of personhood to complement this chapter’s theme of ‘Embodied Shadows’.

Tylor, Frazer, and Hertz Any consideration of ghosts –​broadly conceived, and with an anthropological interest –​demands some reflection on souls as potent symbols animating resources for human encounters, with no better starting point than Sir Edward Burnett Tylor (1832–​1917), whose once highly influential Primitive Culture of 1871 helped lay the foundation for modern anthropology. One of its chief concerns focused on what he called ‘Natural Religion’, those ‘religious doctrines and practices … treated as belonging to theological systems devised by human reason, without supernatural aid or revelation’ (1871, 1: 386). The ‘first branch of the subject’ as he saw it was ‘the doctrine of the soul’ and this, amongst folk of a ‘low level of culture’ was grounded in the two topics of ‘what is the difference between a living body and a dead one’ on the one hand and ‘what are those human shapes which appear in dreams and visions’ on the other (1871, 1: 387). He reckoned that ‘ancient savage philosophers’ answered both questions through their concern with the ‘apparitional-​soul or ghost-​soul’ (idem). Having clarified his interest in ‘Animism’ as the overarching concern with the vitality of humans, animals, and plants, he takes us through nearly four hundred pages of ethnographic references. These embrace incursions into Homer, Cicero, the Church Fathers and Augustine; philosophers, including Descartes and Comte; as well as cases of European and other folklore. Here, too, Sir Isaac Newton and the ‘human sensorium’ come in for comment (1871, 1: 450). Tylor certainly identifies ‘death’ as ‘the event in all stages of culture’ that focuses human concern with the ‘problems of psychology’ (1871, 1: 404), and he observes the significance of ‘Christian hagiology, popular folk-​lore, and modern spiritualism’ as notable factors of relevance amongst ‘the higher races’ (1871, 1: 405). His allusion to ‘modern spiritualism’ is telling, for we know that he would have used the notion of ‘spiritualism’ over that of ‘animism’ had it not already been used for ‘a particular modern sect, who indeed hold extreme spiritualist views’ (1871, 1: 10). There he was alluding to the American-​ derived practice of engaging with spirits through séances, engendered by the Fox family from 1848. For Tylor, ‘the conception of the human soul is, as to its most essential nature, continuous from the philosophy of the savage thinker to that of the modern professor of theology’; this conception is one of ‘an animating, separable, surviving entity, the vehicle of individual personal experience’, and as such it links ‘in an unbroken line of mental connexion the savage fetish-​worshipper and the civilized Christian’ (1871, 1: 453). Sir James G.  Frazer (1854–​1941), Tylor’s near contemporary, also merits recognition here, not –​as might be anticipated –​for his Golden Bough, and its treatment of myth, but especially for his three large volumes on The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead (1913, 1922, 1924), The Fear of the Dead in Primitive Religions (1934, 1936), and an earlier paper on burial customs and the soul (1885). Together these document a near-​universal account of the post-​mortem survival of the soul, while the notion of some profound

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76  Douglas J. Davies relationship between the body and a soul he takes to be ‘one of the finest fruits of philosophy and religion’; one that also highlights the narrow line ‘that divides the meditations of the savage and the sage’ (1913, 361). Almost presaging our contemporary liking for the notion of ‘theory of mind’, Frazer was deeply alert to the intuition of self and experiential knowledge of other people as a resource for belief in immortal souls (Davies, 2008). Rather as with Tylor, Frazer sees dreams as part of the intuitional base for belief in souls, the dream being a time when the soul might leave the body, just as at death it leaves it for good (1913, 27). Ghosts are important for Frazer, who devotes much of The Fear of the Dead in Primitive Religion to many diverse aspects of their relation to the living, as well as to the ghosts of animals (1936, 283–​311, 1913, 245). His interest in the fear that the living may have of their dead, notably in encounters with ghost-​like entities, is closely linked with his view of religion as, itself, largely derived from belief in ghosts. The existence of ensuing religious traditions that frame notions of immortality was something he described as an ‘expensive luxury’ (1913, 469). But, for him, the expense lay in the death exacted by one group when seeking revenge for death caused by another group. He takes this as demonstrated in ‘religious wars and persecutions, which distracted and devastated Europe for ages’, and which were symbolic equivalents of the battles and murders which the fear of ghosts has instigated amongst almost all ‘races of savages’ (1913, 468). For much of Frazer’s death-​ aligned work, ghosts, as dynamic symbols of the capacity the dead wield over the living, play a dominant role. And it is to the role of the dead in deep interaction with the living that we can now turn, albeit with a much more positive outcome, in the work of Robert Hertz. Robert Hertz (1881–​1915), an intimate member of the circle of thinkers surrounding Émile Durkheim’s French group that was given to a creative analysis of social dynamics and the interplay of individual and society, advanced our thinking on how to think symbolically about the dead. In a key text he proposed that Society imparts its own character of permanence to the individuals who compose it: because it feels itself immortal and wants to be so, it cannot normally believe that its members, above all those in whom it incarnates itself and with whom it identifies itself, should be fated to die. (Hertz [1907] 1960, 77) Ignoring here the criticisms that have been raised against his and his Durkheimian associates’ famed reification of society, this typifies their way of thinking and their classification of humanity in terms of what Durkheim called Homo duplex: that double nature of a person that is so well expressed in Hertz’s further notion that while Death destroys the social being grafted upon the physical individual, funerary rites create a new identity for the dead to which the living could relate in new ways. (Hertz [1907] 1960, 77)

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Embodied Shadows 77 This dual classification of a person as ‘social being’ and ‘physical individual’ reflects an underlying trend of duality in much intellectual life, but it also echoes the strange double-​ talk often spoken and heard around news of someone’s death; a double-​talk of absence and presence that resonates with the dynamics of the human sensorium. To that more symbolic way of aligning absence and presence we might, in a somewhat conservative Durkheimian fashion, define ghosts sociologically as that ‘social being’ divested of its physicality. It is precisely this framing of mortality that will occupy the substance of this chapter and which I take forward in a way that Durkheim might understand as ‘social facts’.

Surveying Awareness Given the wider cultural references to ghosts reflected in other chapters of this volume, I now move to three specific case studies drawing from social survey reports of the public in the UK, conducted in 2011, 2004, and 1994 respectively. My intention is to spell out the more speculative possibilities inherent in the apparently crisp facts resulting from questionnaire studies.

2011 Responses The first case is drawn from an IpsosMORI survey conducted between the 1st and 7th of April 2011, for the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science, and published in February 2012. Here I discuss a subset of the larger survey, one that focused on ghosts. This covered a subset of 1,136 persons (54 per cent of the survey’s original cohort of 2,107) ‘who say they were recorded as Christian in the national census of 2011, or would have recorded themselves as Christian’. The key question and responses are evident in Table 6.1. These results can be presented in different ways. First, ghosts would seem to be acknowledged amongst perhaps 37 per cent of the sample, if we align the 15 per cent of assertive respondents with the 22 per cent who have ‘some extent’ of agreement. While that already covers just over a third of respondents, if we also add the 17 per cent of ‘not sures’ this would yield 54 per cent, over half of the sample. Just what to do with the ‘not really’ group is hard to say, and perhaps the best we can do is to see this as belonging to its own kind of cultural imaginary, a motif that is shared and serves a communicative purpose referring to some of the uncertainties of life. It would seem to be a group distinct from Table 6.1 ‘To what extent do YOU PERSONALLY believe in the following?’ Percentage of survey respondents Completely Some extent Not sure Not really Not at all Don’t Not know saying Ghosts 15 Source: IpsosMori 2012.

22

17

14

31

1

—​

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78  Douglas J. Davies the ‘not at all’ respondents who comprised nearly a third of the sample population quite negative to the idea. But, we could offer an interpretation of a slightly different kind and add the ‘some extent’ 22 per cent to the ‘not sure’ 17 per cent and to the ‘not really’ 14 per cent to yield approximately 53 per cent of a vacillating sample. This is extremely interesting in terms of how a significant number of folk are sure and yet unsure of how to categorize their world. While this might indicate all sorts of themes about social change, secularization, post-​modernity or the like we could also argue that it reflects an aspect of life that is, simply, unsure and, perhaps, mystifying. In other words, for many people there are aspects of life that are not cut and dried, or do not succumb to a crisp cultural classification of ‘reality’.

2004 Responses From 2011 we now move back but seven years to 2004 when, during the period from the 8th to the 11th of October, a YouGov survey of 2,116 people was conducted for ITV’s ‘This Morning’ programme. Table 6.2 poses its germane question and results on ghosts. In this Table 6.2 two sets of results are presented; first the response to ‘Do you believe in ghosts?’, and then (in parentheses) the answer to the question of whether the person has ‘personally seen a ghost’. First I take the response to ‘belief in ghosts’. The results are similar enough to our first (2011) case in terms of acknowledged ‘belief’, for the ‘belief’-​type question structures both survey questions. Though this survey did not offer as broad a range of nuanced options as the 2011 case, this 2004 sample gives us a 41 per cent positive and 37 per cent negative (compared with 37 per cent positive and 32 per cent negative in 2011). In this 2004 context we find a 22 per cent group of ‘don’t know’, compared with, say, 31 per cent in the 2011 group. What is obvious is that this 2004 survey did not offer as nuanced a classification as did 2011’s. But the 2011 case does present us with the figures that tell of the difference between men and women, and this breakdown is especially valuable. Even so, ‘belief’-​style questions still offer a relatively blunt instrument in apparently measuring a person’s attitude, their one-​off question–​answer nature can easily Table 6.2 ‘Do you believe in ghosts (and have you personally seen a ghost)?’

Yes No Don’t know Total % Number Source: YouGov 2004.

Total (%)

Men (%)

Women (%)

41 (13) 37 (73) 22 (14) 100 (100) 2,116

28 (8) 52 (81) 20 (12)

52 (18) 24 (66) 24 (16)

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Embodied Shadows 79 hide a variation over a person’s lifetime. If the age of a person is recorded in the survey, that helps; so do data concerning social class and regional or potentially ethnic background. These we do not have in these cases, but we do have the gender divide for 2004, and this is important as we will see again below: for when it comes to questions of death and allied phenomena, the difference between the attitudes of men and women can be very significant indeed. Here then, for the 2004 sample, ‘belief’ in ghosts yields a ‘yes’ profile of 52 per cent of women and 24 per cent of men respondents. This is then, almost perfectly reversed for a ‘no’ response, with 24 per cent of the women and 52 per cent of the men. That is a highly significant pattern of difference. As for the ‘don’t know’ category, we are left with a much more similar picture of 24 per cent of the women and 20 per cent of the men. The overall picture is roughly one in which half of the women and a quarter of the men were positively inclined toward ‘belief in ghosts’, with a similar pattern reversed by gender for those who do not. But, here, again, we should not glide too quickly over the ‘don’t know’ group. In many social surveys the ‘uncertain’ category can be very telling and can press us to think hard about its potential implications. Even if those implications are speculative they are, at least, grounded on an indicative attitude to some aspect of life experience worth pondering further. In this case we can ask what it means to say ‘I don’t know’. Before commenting on these results it will be wise to move to the further data presented, those concerning the seeing of a ghost in person. While 52 per cent of women said they believed in ghosts only 18 per cent reckoned to have seen one. This compares with 28 per cent of the men who ‘believed’, while only 8 per cent reckoned to have seen one. This suggests that a cultural notion of ghosts is held by about half of the female population, even though only 18 per cent considered that they had seen one. In other words, this phenomenon of belief in ghosts does not seem to depend upon direct personal experience. Something of that difference is, we might suggest, captured in the ‘don’t know’ category occupied by some 16 per cent of the women, and 12 per cent of the men. Again, it is not entirely easy to interpret what such an uncertainty expresses. Had people encountered some event that left them unsure of what had taken place? That would seem a reasonable inference and, once again, reflects the sheer complexity of human life, experiences, perceptions, and just how to make sense of them. In practice, one sometimes finds people who speak of strange events in their lives without being able to accord them to some fixed category, still less the categories of the curious social scientist. While we might agree with Shakespeare’s Hamlet and his context of sighting a ghost or some sort of apparition, that there are more things in heaven and earth than Horatio’s philosophy might encompass (Hamlet 1.5. 167–​8), it makes more sense in today’s world of cognitive science to think of the ‘more things’ as processes underlying our perceptive interpretation of our environment beyond what our rational processing immediately grasps. With that in mind, I  take the ‘unsure’ group as expressing just such a grasp of the complexity of things that constrains them from too easy a categorization of life experience. The possibility remains that this 16 per cent of women and 12 per

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80  Douglas J. Davies cent of men in this sample were aware of some experience that caused them to reflect while not coming to a firm decision on ‘ghosts’. And much the same, indeed even more so, could be said of the 24 per cent of women and 20 per cent of men who ‘didn’t know’ whether they ‘believed’ in ghosts or not.

1994 Responses From 2004 we retrace our steps to one of my own research projects, conducted in 1994 on behalf of a very large number of UK local authorities. They were concerned with the rapidly decreasing availability of land, especially in some large civic cemeteries, for future burials (Davies and Mates 1995). As part of that extensively designed survey, some 1,603 persons were interviewed in their own homes in four areas of the UK. Many issues were explored and, as far as this chapter is concerned, these included the experience of the presence of the dead. This theme was not couched in terms of ghosts, because we wished to explore the experiential base of bereaved people without bringing ‘ghosts’ into the discourse. This is an important factor for this chapter, given our concern to think about the nature of cultural classification of experience, and our desire, at that time, to touch on the sensitive area of personal awareness of relations with the dead in as open a way as possible. Accordingly, in Table 6.3, we show the key question asked and the responses given, and do so with a clear distinction on the female /​male divide. Table  6.3 has been organized so as to show the percentage of male and female respondents to each of the categories of those who said they felt such a presence ‘often’, ‘occasionally, rarely or only once’, and those who had ‘never’ had such an experience. Of the total sample of 1,603 only 26 individuals did not answer the question at all, leaving this table with the 1,577 who did. This then resolves into 136 individuals who reckoned to have such an experience often, of whom 83 per cent were women and 17 per cent men; then 430 individuals who had gained such an experience on occasion, rarely, or only once, of whom 66 per cent were female and 34 per cent male; while some 1,011, or 64 per cent, reckoned not to have had such an experience. While this means that roughly 64 per cent of this sample of the UK population at large reckon never to have had such an experience of the dead it still leaves a large minority who have, roughly a third of the population, with the majority of these being women. Table 6.3 ‘Have you felt a sense of presence of someone you know after they have died?’ Presence

Number

% Male

% Female

Total %

Often On occasion, rare, once Never Total number

136 430 1,011 1,577

17 34 55 •

83 66 45 •

100 100 100 •

Source: Adapted from Douglas Davies (1997:139), and Davies and Shaw (1995).

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Embodied Shadows 81 Though at one level such simple statistics offer a bare profile, once we set them on a larger canvas we begin to appreciate something of that kaleidoscope of experience underlying our lives and the lives of those around us. These results resemble those of David Hay and the Sir Aleister Hardy Research Project of the 1970s in publicizing the unusual experiences that thousands of the public had gained but simply never discussed with anyone else before the surveys began to tap their more personal domains (Hay 1982). It is precisely the recognition of this medley of perceptions that underlies part of this chapter’s goal. While some such levels of awareness not only find a relatively easy cultural motif that captures the experience but also a means of expressing it to others, some other experiences are hard to locate within a person’s personal repertoire of thinking about the world, and all the harder to express to others. It is precisely at this point of private–​public engagement here that our argument needs to move into the theoretical domain of embodiment.

Embodiment The notion of embodiment and its application to a variety of phenomena from spirit possession to the divine incarnation of Jesus is one that has come to dominance across social science agendas over several decades (Csordas 1993, 74–​108; Davies 2002, 19–​52). It asserts the integrated complexity of human systems, opposing any simple dualism of mind–​body or the like, and affirms the importance of the interplay of persons with each other and with their natural environments. In other words, embodiment holds an holistic intention of description and analysis. Taking this perspective for granted within this chapter, we can progress further in considering how some cognitive psychological and anthropological approaches may help explain some processes of embodiment that touch on the domain of ghosts. One key phenomenon here is that of the ‘sensed presence’, where, as social animals, we humans are given to a certain ‘over-​detecting agency’ in our environment that assists in ‘modifying’ our behaviour, as Krátký and others pursued in their recent paper aptly entitled ‘It depends who is watching you’ (2016). Our evolution-​fostered capacity for being ever-​alert to the potential harm or help others may visit upon us is one means of triggering this ‘over-​detection’ of agency in things around us, or even imagined to be around us. And it is this that seems relevant for our capacity to sense the presence of the dead, for sometimes feeling that someone else is with us. Here, perhaps, it is precisely our detection of agency that becomes the sculptor of memory, with the ensuing sculptures possessing the power to cast shadows. Analogous material from Aarhus University’s Religion, Cognition, and Culture Mindbank, for example, aligned with the influential notion of prescriptive processing that links cues to people about what they may soon encounter with what they then do report, found that ‘almost half (of their subjects) responded in accordance with the suggestions’ to say that they had experienced another person in the room with them ‘closely followed by a “visual experience of the person” ’ (Andersen et al. 2014, 217–​245). This is reminiscent of the less

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82  Douglas J. Davies rigorous but much earlier work on near-​death experience by Raymond Moody and his ‘apparition chamber’ or psychomateion –​a room with a chair and a mirror  –​described in his book, The Last Laugh (1999). The mirror served as a kind of imaginative screen for someone who might ‘appear’. A hundred volunteers were asked to visualize their dead and most reckoned to come at least ‘mind to mind’ with their dead. Such material indicates the importance of embodied existence with its emotional dynamics, cued imagination, and patterns of identity, themes I pursued in my Emotion, Identity and Religion volume (2011), and whose subtitle ‘Hope, Reciprocity, and Otherness’ now gains significance as these three elements play out through the engagement of the living and their dead in the following examples.

Christine Valentine and the ‘Third Presence’ Christine Valentine’s case studies of grief tell how her interviews with bereaved people seemed to have ‘created space for the deceased person’, while seemingly ‘introducing her to that person’, all within a context where she sensed a certain ‘feeling of his or her presence between us’ (2008, 172). Her reflective analysis takes us beyond Tony Walter’s ‘conversational remembering’ of a dead relative or friend (1996, 7–​25). This is because such a detailed account of what Valentine depicted as a sensed presence between interviewer and interviewed depicts the much-​ignored social fact of how an interpersonal moment seems to become its own form of triadic moment or, in slightly different terms, inaugurates a form of transcendence. Though a potentially problematic term for such small-​ scale occasions, ‘transcendence’ as a description of a shift in the mood of a social interaction makes many appearances in accounts of larger-​scale ritual events. This was established in William Robertson Smith’s The Religion of the Semites (1889) that, in turn, deeply affected Émile Durkheim’s highly influential Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (1915). Both focus on notions of self-​transcendence within ritual contexts as people reckon to encounter their deities. Much could be said on this for wider ceremonial and liturgical events, with Biblical Studies having much to contribute, as with Matthew’s Gospel promise that where two or three people are gathered in Christ’s name he is there in the midst of them (Matthew 18: 20); this is but the tip of an iceberg of encounters framing the first disciples’ bereavement and resurrection experiences of Jesus. Despite the passage of time and shifts in context, it is not surprising that periods of grief can still foster an awareness of this ‘other’ presence.

Katherine Young and ‘Embodied Shadows’ From a different dimension of embodiment theory, Katherine Young’s consideration of ‘the memory of the flesh’ moves less in the direction of self-​ transcendence prompted by conversational reflection with the bereaved, but in what might almost be described as an inner-​directed transcendence of ‘self’: this is easier to narrate than to formulate. Young’s paper offers an account

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Embodied Shadows 83 of the dead that embraces much of this chapter’s title –​‘Embodied Shadows: Sculpted Memory, Sensed Presence, and the Third Party’ –​when telling how some older people come to see, momentarily perhaps, something in their own deportment and behaviour that deeply reminds them of their deceased parents (Young, 2002). We become them, they become us. Such embodied memories are aligned with our sensorium in quite an embracing sense. In a similar vein, Margaret Gibson’s work on inheriting objects of the deceased provides additional material, while her idea that bodies are ‘encrypting machines of the living and the dead’ is highly instructive (2008, 151). Illustrating both of the previous examples, I  recall but one interview captured in an Arts and Humanities Research Council-​ funded project on the transmission of values across generations within clerical families (Davies and Guest, 2007). Since it was not only values that passed on, but also something of embodied contexts of values, we found one rather well-​known (but anonymously documented) retired bishop who spoke of his long-​dead father and of what he had gained from him. Then, as a poignant aside, he pointed to a pen and said that whenever he used it, it was as though his father was writing. I think most of us could offer personal cases of this sort, extending from objects to our bodies, words, and much more. Here, while ‘transcendence’ may seem to be an odd term, it nevertheless brings to the process of memory a moment of heightened awareness of other people, times, and places. Finally, as far as an example of personal transcendence is concerned, I simply record an example drawn from my own fieldwork amongst Latter-​Day Saints. For the Saints, better known as Mormons, the place of an individual within the family is of paramount importance, embracing the dead through both genealogical and ritual work done on their behalf. Over decades of Mormon research I have heard many accounts of the interplay of the living with their dead, for within Mormon theology and aspects of its folklore expression, fostered by the intensity of kinship relations, the dead are not ‘dead’ (Davies 2000, 74, 95). They are active in the post-​mortem spirit world, and may somehow foster their living kin as they seek genealogical data to sustain temple rituals for these ‘dead’ kin. Here the ‘double-​talk’ of the dead, as living, frames some potent experiences of the living kin, not least as they sense their presence within the sacred and emotion-​arousing sacred space of the temples. The LDS idiom that the ‘veil is thin’ there makes the point.

Dividuality This Mormon case, along with the preceding examples, brings us to an inevitable notion of personhood, and to a theoretical position where much is to be gained by discussing not ‘the individual’ but ‘dividual’ personhood: or, we might equally say, of dividual embodiment. To most readers the word ‘individual’ is recognized as normal to English usage despite whatever theoretical frames we might set around it within our own disciplinary worlds. Indeed, the notion of ‘the individual’ lies central to many kinds of discussion of self, selfhood, identity, the post-​modern condition, and the like.

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84  Douglas J. Davies While the word ‘dividual’, by contrast, might well leave many thinking they had misheard what has been said, some social theorists, notably in anthropology, deploy it to some effect. The Chicago anthropologist McKim Marriott is key here for his concern with the axioms or cultural classifications by which scholars approach their subject matter, anthropologists included. Working from his Indian material, he highlighted the complexity of the flow of interaction, including of material substances, between and within what we ordinarily call individuals. He arrived at the assertion that ‘dividual persons … are always composites of the substance-​codes that they take in’, with the notion of ‘substance-​code’ embracing not only for example ‘parentage, marriage, trade, payments, alms, feasts’ but also ‘words, appearances’ and so on (1976, 111). All this draws in a sophisticated fashion from classical Indian thought and daily life –​including food, its cooking, and caste factors that we cannot pursue here. This general perspective has been developed, for example, by Cambridge anthropologist Marilyn Strathern and German anthropologist Sabine Hess. Strathern’s ethnography of Melanesians emphasizes that ‘persons are frequently constructed as the plural and composite site of the relationships that produced them’ (1988, 13). Hess, working on afterlife destinations amongst people of Vanua Lava in the Banks Islands of Vanuatu strongly reflects Strathern’s ‘Melanesian “dividual” now aligned with her own ‘Christian “individual” ’ (Hess 2006, 285). Hess selects Strathern’s complementary assertion that ‘Melanesian persons are as dividually as they are individually conceived. They contain a generalized sociality within’ (2006, 285, citing Strathern 1988, 13). Hess ponders this formulation in opposition to the, now long-​debated, notion of the person in terms of ‘capitalism and individual ownership … the Christian soul in relation to God, and the western psychological value that every person has a “core self” ’ (2006, 288). While, in one sense, this is obvious to us and we could express it in terms of a person’s identity being composed, in part, of the many personal relationships they have had with others, the force of the ‘dividual’ notion lies precisely in prompting, stimulating, catalyzing, or disturbing our ordinary way of considering persons. The notion of dividuality, potentially at least, adds keenness to our observations and theorizing. It brings a new perspective, for example, to Valentine, Young, and Gibson’s observations on sensed presence, self-​image, and memorable possessions. Moreover, dividual theorizing is also applicable to two final phenomena, viz. grief theory and cremated remains.

Grief Two models tend to dominate much contemporary grief theory and its outworking in bereavement counselling. The first is that of attachment and loss –​ often associated with Sigmund Freud and, later, with John Bowlby (Parkes, Stevenson-​Hinde, and Marris 1991). This is also evocative of Elisabeth Kübler-​ Ross and others who advocate stage-​theories of adaptation to grief. This broad view is currently largely out of fashion. The second trend is often identified

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Embodied Shadows 85 as that of ‘continuing bonds’ –​often associated with Dennis Klass and others (Klass and Steffen, 2018), and to some degree it echoes Tony Walter’s advocacy of narrative accounts of bereavement. Discussion often tends to set these apart as either-​or, and tends to regard the latter almost as a paradigm shift from the former (Davies 2017, 53–​78). Much of this debate starts from the notion of the individual and of the living individual’s relation with their dead individual kin, either adapting to the loss of the ‘other’ or retaining ‘bonds’ with them. This very use of the idea of a ‘bond’ is, itself, telling, for it seems to operate on the acceptance of discrete selves and their ties. If, however, we approach this issue through the notion of the dividual person then we assume that elements of the deceased person’s life and actions have obviously contributed to the surviving kin’s complex personhood. This would embrace issues of place of mutual dwelling, words, food, and a multitude of other factors. In Marriott’s terminology, the ‘substance-​code’ of the survivor would be pervaded by materials from the deceased. Just how the dead are now embodied in the living, through their former smell, bodily contact, exchange of body substances –​whether milk, sweat or semen –​or place of co-​habitation, and material goods, becomes more easily obvious. Moreover, the realm of memory is more easily recognized through the dividual model than through the individual model. The living encodes the dead and is not attached to them or bonded to them.

Ashes Such theorizing will always demand care in terms of cultural contexts, and much more would need saying about this. Let me, then, simply mention the contemporary and some roughly forty-​year-​long British cultural practice, one still very rare in other parts of western and Northern Europe, that of taking cremated remains away from crematoria and placing them in locations of family significance. Some years ago, I offered an interpretation of ash-​location which I  summarized in the phrase the retrospective fulfilment of identity (Davies 1997, 31, 188). This phrase opposed what I  saw as the traditional western Christian idea of the eschatological fulfilment of identity of the dead in the future beatific vision of God. That simple and perhaps simplistic division made sense, it seemed to me, in contexts of increased secularization; but, of course, it was also driven by that western notion of the discrete self and the power either of place as a frame to that deceased individual life, or of a continuing bond of the surviving kin with their deceased relative now housed in a favoured place. However, at least one developing aspect of the deposition of cremated remains challenges that view, and also prompts the very dynamics of grief: this is the practice of dividing ashes, with some going to one place or person and some to others. The obvious way of interpreting such behaviour is to see the mode of deposition as reflecting the life-​interests and diverse commitments of the deceased. While that prompts ideas of complex identity it might well be

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86  Douglas J. Davies more easily grasped through the dividual than the individual model of persons. The division of ashes reflects the dividuality of both the dead and their living kin. We might take it further to identify the ashes as ‘substance-​code’ material. Then, instead of the practice of dividing ashes being interpreted as a deconstruction of the ‘relations’ the dead had with the world at large it marks the very complexity of the very dividuality of that person, as well as the complex dividuality of surviving kin who now come to share in those remains. Yet again, cremated remains symbolize a form of embodiment of the deceased while also marking ongoing aspects of the identity of the living. In what is done with ashes we find a variety of forms of sculpting memory.

Mood, Place, and Sculpted Memory Just where cremated remains will be placed depends on families and persons whose dividuality –​that shared identity with others that embraces the dead –​ informs decisions. The nature of ‘places’ then arises as a complex theme of environmental memories, where features of the apparently external environment resonate with one person’s sense of another, a perspective echoing some theorists’ discussions of the uncanniness of place that resembles ‘a ghost that henceforth haunts urban planning’ (De Certeau, Giard, and Mayol 1998, 133). Cremated remains, despite disappearing as far as the general public is concerned, skulpt a place of memory for those who placed them there. For them, the place carries a significance that is well-​depicted in terms of a mood, understood perhaps in Max Weber’s sense of gessinnungsethic, a kind of ‘distinctive religious mood’ in which a value-​driven intention pervades and is pervaded by some emotional sensitivity (1922). While many are familiar with Weber’s application of this kind of concept in his influential account of The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, its more novel application to bereavement might also serve the positive goal of bringing memory, reflective intentions, and emotions together when focused on some place of distinctive significance. In theoretical terms it might even be worth interpreting ‘ghosts’ as the perceptive screens that activate and are activated by distinctive, bereavement-​grounded, and memory-​grounded moods. In conclusion, then, that sense of some ‘dead’ person being with us has invited a variety of interpretations, each offering potential scope for much greater descriptive and theoretical-​interpretative development than is possible in this chapter. What has been set up is a kaleidoscope of possibilities, moving from earlier anthropological notions of animism through some social-​ surveyed attitudes to ghosts, theoretical reflections on embodiment with allied cognitive-​ science scenarios of perception, to anthropologically informed notions of dividual personhood, grief theories, and moods allied with memorial locations for human remains. Of the many ensuing suggestions of these interlinked ideas might be that ghosts are their own ‘substance-​codes’ that help engender dividuality, albeit within an uncanniness that seldom gains public expression.

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Works Cited Andersen, Marc Nicklas, Uffe Schjødt, Kristoffer Laigaard Nielbo, and Jesper Sørensen. 2014. ‘Mystical Experience in the Lab’. Method and Theory in the Study of Religion 26 (3): 217– ​45. Csordas, Thomas J. 1993. The Sacred Self: A Cultural Phenomenology of Charismatic Healing. Berkeley: University of California Press. Davies, Douglas J. 1997. Death, Ritual, and Belief: The Rhetoric of Funerary Rites. London: Cassell. —​—​—​. 2002. The Mormon Culture of Salvation. Aldershot: Ashgate. —​—​—​. 2002. Anthropology and Theology. Oxford: Berg. —​—​—​. 2008. ‘Classics Revisited: Death, Immortality, and Sir James Frazer’. Mortality 13 (3): 287– ​96. —​ —​ —​ . 2011. Emotion, Identity, and Religion: Hope, Reciprocity, and Otherness. Oxford: Oxford University Press. —​—​—​. 2015. Mors Britannica: Life Style and Death Style in Britain Today. Oxford: Oxford University Press. —​ —​ —​ . 2017. Death, Ritual and Belief: The Rhetoric of Funerary Rites. London: Bloomsbury Academic. Davies, Douglas J., and Alastair Shaw. 1995. Reusing Old Graves: A Report on Popular British Attitudes. Crayford: Shaw & Sons. Davies, Douglas J., and Mathew Guest. 2007. Bishops, Wives and Children: Spiritual Capital Across the Generations. Aldershot: Ashgate. De Certeau, Michel, Luce Giard, and Pierre Mayol. (1998). The Practice of Everyday Life, vol. ii: Living and Cooking. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Durkheim, Émile. 1915. The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life: A Study in Religious Sociology. Translated by Joseph Ward Swain. London: George Allen & Unwin. Frazer, James G. 1885. ‘On Certain Burial Customs as Illustrative of the Primitive Theory of the Soul’. The Journal of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland 15: 63– ​104. Frazer, James George. 1913. The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead. Vol. 1: The Belief among the Aborigines of Australia, The Torres Straight Islands, New Guinea and Melanesia. 3 vols. London: Macmillan and Co. —​—​—​. 1922. The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead. Vol. 2: The Belief among the Polynesians. 3 vols. London: Macmillan and Co. —​—​—​. 1924. The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead. Vol. 3: The Belief among the Micronesians. 3 vols. London: Macmillan and Co. —​—​—​. 1934. The Fear of the Dead in Primitive Religion: Lectures Delivered on the William Wyse Foundation at Trinity College Cambridge. London: Macmillan & Co. —​—​—​. 1936. The Fear of the Dead in Primitive Religion: Lectures Delivered on the William Wyse Foundation at Trinity College Cambridge. London: Macmillan & Co. Gibson, Margaret. 2008. Objects of the Dead: Mourning and Memory in Everyday Life. Carlton: Melbourne University Press. Hay, David. 1982. Exploring Inner Space: Scientists and Religious Experience. London: Mowbray. Hess, Sabine (2006). ‘Strathern’s Melanesian “Dividual” and the Christian “Individual”. A perspective from Vanua Lava, Vanuatu’. Oceania, 76 (3): 285–96. Hertz, Robert. (1907) 1960. Death and the Right Hand. Translated by Rodney Needham and Claudia Needham. London: Cohen & West.

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88  Douglas J. Davies IpsosMORI Poll. 2012. The Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science. Klass, Dennis, and Edith Steffen. 2018. Continuing Bonds in Bereavement: New Directions for Research and Practice. London: Routledge. Krátký, Jan, John J. McGraw, Dimitris Xygalatas, Panagiotis Mitkidis, and Paul Reddish. 2016. ‘It Depends Who Is Watching You: 3-​D Agent Cues Increase Fairness’. PLoS ONE 11 (2): 1–​11. Marriott, McKim. 1976. ‘Hindu Transactions: Diversity without Dualism’. In Transaction and Meaning: Directions in the Anthropology of Exchange and Symbolic Behavior, edited by Bruce Kapferer, 109–​42. Philadelphia: Institute for the Study of Human Issues. Moody, Raymond A. 1999. Last Laugh: A New Philosophy of Near-​Death Experiences, Apparitions, and the Paranormal. Charlottesville, VA: Hampton Rads Publishing Co. Parkes, Colin Murray, Joan Stevenson-​Hinde, and Peter Marris. 1991. Attachment Across the Life Cycle. Abingdon: Taylor & Francis. Schneider, Mark A. 1993. Culture and Enchantment. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Smith, William Robertson. 1889. The Religion of the Semites. London: Adam and Charles Black. Tylor, Edward B. 1958. Religion in Primitive Culture. New York: Harper. Valentine, Christine. 2008. Bereavement Narratives: Continuing Bonds in the Twenty-​ First Century. London: Routledge. Weber, Max. ([1922] 1966). The Sociology of Religion, translated by Ephraim Fischoff, Introduction by Talcott Parsons. London: Methuen & Co. YOUGov Poll. 2004. For ITV ‘This Morning’ Programme. Young, Katharine. 2002. ‘The Memory of the Flesh: The Family Body in Somatic Psychology’: Body and Society 8 (3): 25– 4 ​ 7.

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7  Ghostly Presences Guillermo del Toro’s Crimson Peak Ann Davies

Guillermo del Toro’s Crimson Peak (2015) is the director’s version of the classic haunted house narrative. As is appropriate for a narrative based on an almost notoriously female-​coded space such as a house, the narrative of Crimson Peak is dominated by women, both living and dead. The heroine of Crimson Peak is Edith Cushing (Mia Wasikowska), a member of well-​to-​do Buffalo society, although her desire to be a writer is not well regarded by other women in her social circle. Edith falls in love with Thomas Sharpe (Tom Hiddleston), a British aristocrat and entrepreneur looking for funding for his clay mining operations. After the (suspicious) death of her father, Edith marries Thomas and goes to live with him and his sister Lucille (Jessica Chastain) in Allerdale Hall, otherwise known as Crimson Peak because of the red clay that leaches through the soil and tinges the landscape. An uncomfortable ménage à trois develops within the household, while simultaneously Edith encounters monstrous ghosts on a regular basis. Prior to exploring this narrative, this essay touches first on the Derridean concept of ‘dreams of presence’ as theorized by cultural geographer Mitch Rose (2016), in order to propose the haunted house as a ‘nightmare of presence’ in which the relationship between the subject and the space in which the subject dwells or moves is Gothicized and rendered antagonistic but nonetheless remains to tie the subject to the space concerned. The essay considers the relationship of Allerdale Hall to the daughter of the house, Lucille Sharpe, and the damaged daughter figure as representative of the ghostly inadmissible that lies at the heart of the nightmare of presence. It then considers how Edith is interpolated into this setting as a contemporary rendition of the Gothic heroine, in order to render admissible the inadmissible spectre at the heart of the house and represented by the daughter, such a function being integral to the Gothic heroine.

The Nightmare of Presence Guillermo del Toro has explicitly labelled Crimson Peak as a Gothic romance. He glosses the subgenre thus: A curious thing about the genre I  was tackling is that it is tinged with profound melodrama and eminent psychological, dreamlike material but

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90  Ann Davies ultimately (much like a fairy tale) cannot be inhabited by down-​to-​earth, realistic characters. Gothic romance is, in many ways, a portrait of the human mind –​a theater, if you will, of the struggles of our spirit. In that, it is operatic and Grand Guignol-​esque and necessitates a certain gusto on the actor’s part in order to work. Also, within these parameters, the world being created for them, both visually and in terms of sound design, must be recognizable enough to have verisimilitude but grand enough to admit such creatures. (Salisbury 2015, 6–​7) Del Toro conjures up a spatial conceptualization –​a theatre –​that, as he goes on to elaborate, demands certain strategies of behaviour for the occupants (or actors, a term with many intriguing meanings and resonances) and simultaneously delimits what can be both fantastical and believable in such a space. This paper considers spatial conceptualizations in Crimson Peak itself as Gothic romance: given that the film’s title is itself a label given to a space in which, from approximately midway through the film, the key action and conflict takes place, it is apparent that spatial conceptualization is fundamental to interpretations of the film. Space and spatial imagery have always been vital to the Gothic, offering iconic images that provide a ready shorthand for and entry into the mode. As Xavier Aldana Reyes observes (himself writing on Crimson Peak): Certain images that now decorate academic books in the field, such as leafless trees shot against full moons, imposing castle on promontories, chandelier-​wielding damsels in distress marching through dark corridors or gloomy cemeteries, continue to be the most powerful staple metonymic signifiers of the Gothic. (Aldana Reyes 2018, 171) Aldana Reyes’s use of the term ‘decorate’ reminds us of del Toro’s own emphasis on the visual as regards space. The spaces he creates in conjunction with his design team have become increasingly stylized. The realistic spaces of the antique shop in Cronos (1992) and the orphanage of The Devil’s Backbone (El espinazo del diablo, 2001) have given way to the more mannered labyrinth of Pan’s Labyrinth (El laberinto del fauno, 2006) and sets of The Shape of Water (2017). Crimson Peak is, at the time of writing, undoubtedly del Toro’s most Gothic film to date, and the stylization is apparent in the house of Crimson Peak, which at times does indeed look like a theatrical space, with its interior galleries surrounding a central, spot-​lit arena which the central characters enter and exit throughout the sequences taking place in England. It also fits with the director’s preference for the Grand-​Guignolesque. There is a sense of exaggeration, above all in the bleak whites and greys of the outer landscape with the red stain that percolates from the clay pits on the estate –​an exaggerated metaphor if ever there was one, and possibly overstated in the red hues of the ghosts that wander the house’s interior. For Crimson Peak is a haunted house

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Ghostly Presences: Crimson Peak  91 in a long line of Gothic tradition, and the family hall of the upper-​class Sharpes hides family secrets of murder and domestic abuse. Del Toro’s idea was that the house of Crimson Peak should be ‘a character unto itself, a living, breathing entity suffocating those living within its deteriorating walls’. He comments that: We tried to detail the house in a way that gave you the feeling it was a monster. That it was corroding. It was rotting in the middle of that landscape […] The floors are bleeding, the walls ooze red clay, and the cellar feels very much like a rotting womb, like the belly of the beast. The house almost asphyxiates the characters, and it frames them, quite literally, like an insect in a killing jar. (Salisbury 2015, 80) Del Toro thus sees the house in distinct and seemingly contradictory ways. If the house is a character, an actor, in the Gothic melodrama taking place within the film, it is also the theatre within which the action takes place. This contradiction functions as a shorthand for the intricate imbrication of place and people within horror films, and how each informs the other. In this sense, there is no clear separation between character and setting: the subject cannot be subject without a setting with which it interacts to some degree. This interrelation between subject and place can be found in Mitch Rose’s theorization of ‘dreams of presence’, a term he borrows from Jacques Derrida to consider how subjects interact with their landscapes, and the stories they tell of themselves and their settings. Rose understands the dream of presence as a ‘call to care’: ‘A call that is defined by its direction –​that is, by its orientation towards attachment –​rather than in terms of where it arrives (culture, community, nationality, etc.)’ (2016, 543). The dream of presence, on this reading, is an understanding of space as physically present, possibly tangible with potential that is never fully realized but is an ever-​present possibility –​a possibility that nonetheless requires subjective commitment: This is a landscape that is being not constructed but engaged with […] It is a landscape that speaks to people, beckoning them to care. In this sense, it engenders dreams of presence (expressions of care) that allow those living within the landscape to imagine, cultivate, and move towards their world (and their place within it) as present and, in the process, to experience it more intensively. (Rose 2016, 549) If dreams are in themselves benign, however, the specificity of a nightmare of presence suggests an interaction  –​a movement of the subject towards their place in the world, as well as a more intense experience of their surroundings –​ that is inherently antagonistic. While Rose’s definition of dreams of presence may well incorporate tension, conflict and negative emotions, a nightmare of presence is essentially rather than contingently hostile. However, a contingent

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92  Ann Davies hostility may turn into an essential hostility, as can be seen in the backstory of the Sharpes and Allerdale Hall. The contingent hostility of the Sharpe parents turns the space into an essentially malevolent one where all relations with the house and with each other are inherently corrupted, from the murder of the parents by the children, to the incestuous relationship between Thomas Sharpe and his sister Lucille.

Lucille and Her Relationship to Space and Place In this chapter I intend to focus in the first instance on Lucille and her interaction with the spaces in which she finds herself, above all the space of Crimson Peak itself. Lucille is what I term a damaged daughter: a female child or former child who is damaged, disfigured or diseased in some way. The protagonist is impelled to respond somehow to the damaged daughter, recognizing the damaged daughter figure as the key to any explanation of whatever is haunting the house. Lucille is clearly the damaged daughter of Allerdale Hall as a result of abuse by her mother; her monstrosity arises directly from the damage this does. The results of the abuse are her murderous tendencies: she is the killer of her mother, of Edith’s father, of Thomas’s previous wives and of her own baby, and the attempted murderer of Edith herself. Likewise, her incestuous relationship with Thomas indicates unhealthy family relationships that stem from parental abuse, the closeness of the siblings deriving precisely from the malevolence of the parents. The secret of the incestuous relationship, and the child that was the result, is the film’s climactic reveal, rather than the murders of Thomas’s wives. The signs of the damage are manifested in the house, both in its design and décor and in the ghosts that haunt its spaces. The hauntings of Allerdale Hall stem from the abuse done to the daughter figure but also from her consequent desires, so that the ghosts include both her mother but also her baby from the incest with Thomas, as well as Enola, one of Thomas’s previous wives, all of whom were murdered primarily for their money but also for their disturbance of Lucille’s relationship with her brother. The scarlet hue of these ghosts arises from the pragmatic reason that the Sharpes dispose of their corpses in the clay vats of the cellar, and the corpses thus become suffused with the redness from the clay. Symbolically, of course, the red indicates the blood and violence that lie in the foundations of the current Sharpe household. Moreover, the red offers a particular connection to Lucille through the fact that she is constantly marked by it: her red dress at the Buffalo ball scene, the red rose she wears in the park and her red room at Crimson Peak. The ghosts of Allerdale Hall are the direct manifestation of the damage done to and by the daughter figure. It is not therefore surprising that Lucille ends the film as a ghost herself. The red touches that adorn her have by that point disappeared with her death and she is turned to black, suggestive of a final laying to rest of the traumas caused by her damage, though we should bear in mind that to some extent her finale is recounted by Edith as storyteller, who has her own agenda. I shall return to Edith as storyteller below.

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Ghostly Presences: Crimson Peak  93 Allerdale Hall becomes not simply the space but the theatre within which Lucille’s drama takes place: indeed, although Edith is the protagonist and heroine (and author) of her own novel, titled Crimson Peak (as opposed to del Toro’s film Crimson Peak, although the overlap between the two is considerable), this is Lucille’s story, and its theatre is her theatre. Although we first see Lucille far from home, when she and Thomas attempt to court Buffalo society, she seems strongly tied to the house and home as if it were a prison. There is also, of course, the play on the word ‘house’ to mean a family name: here too the relationship between Lucille and her ‘house’ is corrupted since she becomes too close to Thomas, through their incestuous relationship. Emilia Musap (2017), following the ideas of Anthony Vidler, argues that ‘Within the context of Crimson Peak, it is not space per se which is uncanny’: instead, the uncanniness of the house derives from the projections of negative emotions onto it by its inhabitants. Musap adds: The monstrosity of [Lucille’s] sexuality stretches out to the mansion itself as they twist and maim each other. The very architecture of the mansion is fantastically irrational, mirroring the irrationality of Lucille’s desire, whereby domesticity and sexuality become equally displaced and disturbed. The extremity of the repression is proportional to the excessiveness of the uncanny element which are visible in the mansion’s décor. (Musap 2017, n.p.) This coincides with del Toro’s own description already mentioned, the house becoming the theatre of Lucille’s struggles of the spirit: but we also see the inherently negative imbrication of house and occupant, the nightmare of presence which requires both space and the subject to come into being. Lucille’s actions are her ways of engaging with the space in which she finds herself: glossing on what Musap has said, Lucille is not simply projecting her personality on to the house, rather each is producing the other. The horrible secrets hidden within the house are what give Lucille her subjectivity. Her murders of the previous wives, and their burial in the basement of the house, give her subjective control of the house and of Thomas, its titular head, and enable her to prolong her desire for her brother. But this subjectivity is never fully realized, as there is always another wife needed for her money, so that the house, and Lucille herself, can keep going. This wife always points to a potential movement away from the core incestuous relationship that sustains Lucille: the fact that Thomas falls in love with Edith and consummates their marriage confirms that threat as all too real. The deaths of the previous wives are hinted at in the house’s very architecture. As del Toro observes, ‘the shape of the corridor and the shape of the arches is the shape of a human being. It’s a negative space, because my hope is it’s portraying an absence and the father and mother watching over them –​at the same time they are an absence and a presence’ (Salisbury 2015, 108). Edith encounters a ghost of a former wife down that corridor: the ghost functions as both a presence and an absence, existing in crimson form while pointing to the ultimate absence, of death. This presence and absence is something that Lucille

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94  Ann Davies herself will perforce embody at the end, existing in a perpetual state of unfulfilled subjectivity and desire. The house itself is redolent of Lucille’s presence. Her own room is red: del Toro observed of this that ‘Lucille is the mother of all ghosts […] Lucille is the only character you see wearing red in the whole movie and is directly linked to the ghosts. Her room needed to be red […] Lucille is strangely romantic in her own way, so her room is in golds and reds and is a decaying, lush, baroque little world’ (Salisbury 2015, 116). The red unsurprisingly resonates with Lucille as murderer, both through the common connection of red with blood and also because most of her victims lie sunk in the red clay pits of the basement. It also, however, links her with the house (in both senses) because of the importance of the red clay that streaks the snowy landscape and colours the water, and which the Sharpes depend on for any prospect of their own family wealth. (It is notable that the secrets of the house begin to come to light just as Thomas announces a breakthrough in the technology needed to mine the clay.) It also ties her to the red-​dyed ghosts that haunt her home, that provide the missing link that indicates Lucille’s own nightmare of presence. As production designer for the film Tom Sanders observed, Lucille’s moth motif, along with the family crest that includes a skull and the word ‘FEAR’ embedded in the house’s wallpaper, forms an integral part of the house’s décor (Salisbury 2015, 103). Likewise the lift that Edith travels in resembles the killing jars Lucille keeps in her room (Salisbury 2015, 111): these jars are used to kill butterflies, and the butterfly is a motif associated with Edith. In short, Lucille dominates the space of the house in an antagonistic nightmare of presence: the interplay between Lucille and the house serves to disempower Edith. When we first see Lucille, however, the scenes are set in Edith’s Buffalo society. Lucille stands out as distinct from the rest of this society through the colour schemes used in the Buffalo scenes: warm ochre and brown tones inside and out during the day, cream, peach and warm yellows for evening scenes. As Salisbury notes of the production process: ‘America, the New World, representative of the land of opportunity and progressive thinking, was to be all sepia tones, tobacco, gold, and deep earth browns’; while del Toro saw Edith as embodying these values, in particular the wealth suggested by gold, noting that ‘She is a girl that goes from a country that is young and vibrant and full of life […] to a world of stale, lugubrious, decadent relationships and life’ (Salisbury 2015, 24). Lucille is the harbinger of this other world. While both she and Thomas are dressed in black, Thomas’s colour scheme to some extent merges with that of the other men present. Lucille, on the other hand, becomes unduly prominent through her red ball gown as well as the black dress adorned with a red rose that she wears to the park, colours that prefigure the ominous import of Crimson Peak. At the ball scene she is surrounded by women dressed in tones of yellow, cream and peach: her red immobility, seated at the piano, heightens the contrast between her and the mobility of the dancers (particularly Edith as she dances with Thomas). Likewise, in the autumnal walk in the park, Lucille’s costume contrasts with the warm colours of her surroundings. Lucille is thus clearly out of place, while Edith, significantly, appears to belong

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Ghostly Presences: Crimson Peak  95 here: despite her inward protestations at partaking of this society and their disparagement of her literary aspirations, Edith clearly fits in, her colour scheme blending with the others, forming part of a circle of wealth from which Lucille is clearly excluded. This contrast is reversed in the scenes in Allerdale Hall. Sanders, talking of the interrelation of set and costume, notes that ‘We wanted Lucille and Thomas to look like part of the house while they are there […] We didn’t want them to stick out. When we brought in Edith, she was in gold, very butterfly-​like, so she stuck out like a sore thumb’ (Salisbury 2015, 103). Particularly significant here is the ring, set with a crimson stone, that Thomas gives to Edith: the ring in fact belongs to Lucille (who stresses to Thomas that she wants it back), and also appears in the portrait of her mother, underscoring the link between abuse, murder, incest and the exploitation of women for money. The red ring clashes with Edith’s general golden colour scheme, demonstrating that she does not fit in the household of Allerdale Hall. At Crimson Peak, Lucille is the housekeeper both figuratively  –​and in a long line of Gothic housekeepers  –​but also literally, maintaining the family unit and assisting Thomas in his endeavours to get money and make the family prosperous again, albeit through his serial marriages and her murders of the brides. She is the keeper of the keys, which she refuses to surrender to Edith, with the ominous comment that ‘There are parts of the house that are unsafe’. As Musap has noted, Lucille is also mistress of the kitchen, which functions as a site of power and control, since this is where she makes the tea and the porridge with which to poison Edith (Musap 2017). Del Toro here taps into many intertextual references to sinister Gothic housekeepers, above all Mrs Danvers of Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca (1938) or Madame Sebastian (Leopoldine Konstantin) of Alfred Hitchcock’s Notorious (1946), reminding us that the ghosts of Allerdale Hall are also those of gothic literary and cinematic history. (Edith, as putative author of her novel Crimson Peak, thus raises the interesting question of intertextual reference both before and after the fact, since her novel would predate those of du Maurier and others.) In short, for Lucille the house is strongly associated with power. But equally the house shows Lucille’s ultimate failure to maintain the space wherein she has the power, given the decay in the fabric so that the main hall remains open to the elements and, significantly, autumn leaves drift downwards into the space that remind us of Edith’s association with autumnal colours. A  further sign of her increasing loss of control is the fact that she temporarily loses control of her keys, Edith being able to abstract one when Lucille is distracted. It is significant that Edith and Thomas finally consummate their marriage beyond the walls of the house (when the weather forces them to stop overnight in the depot), and thus beyond her control, indicating that Lucille’s control of sexuality is very much bound up with the house. And Lucille is well aware of the dangers of her brother and sister-​in-​law escaping the confines of the house, as her exaggerated loss of temper on their return indicates. The house as a space is therefore empowering to Lucille but her power is restricted to the house, and can be eluded. The ghosts coming out of the fabric of the house also, however, suggest a loss of control: despite her

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96  Ann Davies best efforts, Lucille’s crimes, or damage, become apparent. The house therefore comes to represent Lucille’s nightmare of presence. Her call to care is constant and repetitive through the serial need for moneyed and murdered wives, but its essential antagonism is her need to ‘pimp’ Thomas out to these wives and the consequent suppression of her own desires, themselves caused by the earlier abuse she received within the house. Crimson Peak is her place in the world, the only place where her desires can be fully met and she can be truly herself, but the serial procession of wives through her walls mean that her true self must be disguised again and again, while the malignity of her ensuing relationship with all other household members begins to emerge literally from the ominous fabric motifs and furnishings.

The Role of Lucille’s Piano Lucille’s own antagonistic attachment towards the house is reinforced, however, by the sense of theatrical space within the house and the fact that Lucille herself is a performer, often to be found playing the piano in the central hall that acts as the house’s stage. We first see Lucille at the piano at the ball in Buffalo. It is Lucille whose music allows Thomas and Edith to demonstrate the waltz, another form of performance watched by others, part of her control over Edith by facilitating Thomas’s seduction. Aerial shots of the ballroom underscore the incipient threat of this triangular relationship: as Thomas and Edith waltz together, the camera circles round on high and intermittently picks out Lucille at the piano, the train of her crimson dress spilling out into the dance area, prefiguring the flow of blood to come. At Crimson Peak itself the piano occupies part of the main hall or in effect main stage, and thus the hall functions as Lucille’s arena of performance. Performance –​theatricality –​becomes part of the space, and part of Lucille’s antagonistic nightmare of presence. The house becomes a space for hosting pianos, and the piano becomes Lucille’s initial instrument of manipulation. It functions to separate her –​apparently –​from the courtships pursued by Thomas, and yet is literally instrumental in ensuring matrimonial success. This functionality of the piano underscores Lucille’s peculiar position in the ménage à trois of Crimson Peak and its foreshadowing at Buffalo: it becomes symbolic of Lucille’s unexpressed desire. The marriages of Thomas and his succession of brides seemingly efface the unacknowledged sexual relation between brother and sister, and the piano has a role to play in that effacement, yet it also represents the fact that Lucille is not simply a bystander in these dramas but an active participant. The Buffalo ball scene offers an immediate statement of the ambiguously liminal role of Lucille and her piano: on first sight she is positioned at the side of the ballroom, out of the way of the dancing, and yet both she and the instrument dominate the scene, as she performs a dramatic piano piece for the assembled onlookers. At Allerdale Hall, however, the piano is positioned more centrally, as Lucille’s role in the sexual triangle becomes more overtly dominant. Yet the arena it is positioned within is a decaying one, pointing to that triangle’s imminent collapse: the roof is leaking

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Ghostly Presences: Crimson Peak  97 and lets in leaves and snow.1 If the piano was supposedly a mark of female accomplishment in a well-​to-​do household, its power diminishes along with the strength of the house. The final image of the film prior to the end credits is Lucille, by now a ghost herself, playing a ghostly piano. The house and its household has collapsed, and Lucille is responsible for its downfall by killing Thomas. Her desire remains forever unfulfilled and she now is no more than ghostly memory and/​ or ghostly creation of Edith’s authorial imagination. The piano and its music become the constant, never-​ending expression of her unrealizable desire. The house functions as the theatre for this expression of desire, and the subject and her surroundings are locked in permanent antagonism, a call to care that can never now be satisfied. The camera stresses the link between Lucille and the house in this closing sequence by panning through the central hall of the house to arrive at her ghostly image. Lucille is at the end trapped within the house permanently, a ghost like all of her victims, condemned to play her piano forever. In one sense this is what Lucille herself has willed: Thomas previously suggested they could be free of the house, but only if the triangular relationship with Edith continues. Lucille cannot accept this, for her own desire cannot encompass his love for Edith, and so she stabs him and then runs after Edith, shrieking and covered in blood rather like the other ghosts who inhabit the house. This is thus Lucille’s choice, the consequence of her own actions and an expression of her subjectivity.

Edith as the Author of Ghosts However, she is also trapped in the house by Edith, since one other image of the film’s closing is of a book, called Crimson Peak and written by Edith Cushing. Del Toro leaves the question open as to whether it is Edith who conjures up the ghosts through her own authorship, so that the whole tale is simply a product of her creative imagination. It is perhaps telling that this book is written by Edith Cushing and not Sharpe, as if the whole story, including her marriage, is simply fiction.2 But at any event, it is Edith who traps Lucille in the stasis of Crimson Peak/​Crimson Peak, by shutting her away within the pages of her novel: that final image of the book is of the cover shutting, to close the book and imprison Lucille forever within its pages. We should not forget, either, that Edith stabs Lucille with the pen that her father gave her to write more ghost stories. Edith creates and lives with ghosts just as Lucille does: indeed, she is the one who renders Lucille as a ghost twice over, first by killing her and then by writing about her death and preserving her as such between the covers of her book. Edith has her own creative power that serves ultimately to contain Lucille’s theatrical space –​her ability to write. If the piano represents Lucille, Edith is symbolized by the book and the pen. Edith’s interest in Thomas is expressed in spatial landscape terms at an early stage in the film, as she looks up Allerdale Hall –​complete with picture –​in a book, after her first encounter with her future husband. It is at that point that the ghost of her mother returns, demonstrating

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98  Ann Davies the power of literature to summon ghosts. But literature also serves to contain them. Furthermore, if Lucille’s music represents her own ultimately unfulfilled desires, then literature suggests Edith’s own complex relationship to gender, sexuality and men. Catherine Spooner observes: Edith is an aspirant writer who when taunted with a remark that Jane Austen died a spinster retorts that Mary Shelley died a widow. Creativity is linked not to sexual purity (or frigidity) but to death and survival. (Spooner 2017, 65) Spooner goes on to cite Gilbert and Gubar’s metaphorical penis (2007, 3) to illustrate the idea that Edith uses her pen as a weapon (Spooner 2017, 65–​66). The pen was a gift from her father: Spooner notes in passing that Edith prefers a typewriter, but when it comes to rendering ghosts (through killing and through writing) a pen is a much better tool. A preference for typewriters is, however, no protection because it is through using a typewriter in her father’s firm that Edith first meets Thomas. Edith opts for typewriters so as to disguise her identity as a woman, betrayed through her feminine handwriting. Ironically, however, her use of a pen returns the phallic power to her that she previously eschewed, and thus in a sense disguises her identity: there is a sense of equilibrium restored when Edith stabs Lucille with the pen Mr Cushing gave her, avenging his death at Lucille’s hands. Edith is the one who has power to summon ghosts through her literature. This is signalled from the very beginning, as the first image of the film (after logos of the production companies, suitably saturated in red) is of Edith raising her bloody hand while she tells us in voiceover that ‘Ghosts are real’. The first ghost we see is not from Allerdale Hall but is Edith’s dead mother, who twice warns Edith to beware of Crimson Peak. Edith’s voiceover, alongside the initial image of a book cover labelled Crimson Peak, suggests she is the one with the ability to conjure ghosts and ghost stories into existence, a point reinforced in the early scenes when Edith offers her latest ghost story to a publisher. It is also Edith who establishes the link between place and haunting through reading a book with a picture and description of Allerdale Hall and the Sharpe household, since it is at this point that the ghost of her mother returns for the second time to warn her away from the house (though, as is the way of ghosts, not giving Edith enough information to make the connection). Ghosts appear as soon as Edith arrives at Crimson Peak as if she has summoned them, and it is no coincidence that, on hearing of Edith’s first ghostly sighting, Lucille tells her that she needs to rein in her imagination. Edith further raises a ghost when poking at one of the red clay vats with a stick: as she turns away a red skeleton appears on the surface of the clay. Finally, the appearance of Thomas’s ghost during the final fight to the death between the women conveniently distracts Lucille enough that Edith is able to strike a fatal blow with a shovel. It is therefore Edith as much as Lucille that brings to the fore the nightmare of presence, the explicit antagonistic link between subject and place. Alan McMichael (Charlie Hunnam), who is in love with Edith and eventually

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Ghostly Presences: Crimson Peak  99 comes to her rescue, tells her early in the film of developments in photography in which the ‘ghosts’ of previous photographic subjects are retained in later images. He goes on to suggest that houses retain the impression of their ghosts, and this suggestion clearly resonates with Edith. In her voiceover at the end of the film she argues that ‘there are things that tie them [ghosts] to a place very much like us’, and she looks back for one final sight of Crimson Peak even as she leaves it, while her words play on the soundtrack. The subsequent camera pan through the house leading to the ghost of Lucille at the piano, already mentioned above, is accompanied by Edith’s voiceover as she lists the things that tether ghosts to a place, including crimes, violence, betrayal and love. The stylization of the film that I referred to at the beginning, then, can be seen not simply as del Toro’s style, but as an explicit acknowledgement that this narrative is a specifically artistic creation, a stylization that is as much Edith’s as del Toro’s. Lucille as pianist plays the notes others set out for her, just as she enacts the story that Edith has set out. Both Edith and del Toro have created a character and a world familiar to the extent almost of caricature, and yet a character and a house/​theatre fully redolent of Grand Guignol. Edith recognizes Lucille as the key to this space and, through a deliberate, explicitly mannered form of the Gothic, she is able to contain Lucille within the pages of her book, ensuring that the nightmare of presence, the antagonistic relation to space, persists in perpetuity and that Lucille never achieves full subjectivity. She remains in stasis, playing her ghostly piano forever. Yet the pen does not have it all its own way. As Spooner notes: Crimson Peak […] only talks about itself  –​and other Gothic texts. To suggest that it is therefore vacant or superficial, however, is to miss the point. The plot is not the purpose of the movie, but a vehicle for a visual narrative. The images are the story. (Spooner 2017, 64) The idea that images are the story is highly ironic given Edith’s status as a writer, but brings us back to our starting point of del Toro’s conceptualization of Allerdale Hall and its surrounding landscape, as well as Aldana Reyes’s remarks about Gothic iconography. While the closing of Edith’s book, as the final image of the film, might seem to award to her a total domination of ghostly narrative, that narrative is nonetheless dependent on the theatrical organization of space that del Toro has devised. Indeed, it is at this point that we can argue that Edith and del Toro’s narratives diverge, for if Edith has control of the pen, and if history/​story is written by the winners, then it is nonetheless del Toro who has control of the camera and the film’s look. If Edith tells us right from the beginning that ghosts are real, it is del Toro who makes them real, by rendering them visible through the artistry of himself and his production crew. In particular, the links between the house and the damaged daughter are made manifest through the production design. The motifs of moths and skulls, the note of fear embedded in the wallpaper design and, above all, the constant repetition of the crimson motif all connect the house to Lucille. Even

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100  Ann Davies when out of the house and in Buffalo, Lucille trails the crimson connection, the nightmare of presence, between herself and her home. The images are, as Spooner argues, indeed the story, as they are the nightmare of presence made manifest. For this is Lucille’s story rather than Edith’s: she holds the key (or indeed, keys) to the mystery of the house; it is her desire that is the house’s true secret, and her true relationship to Thomas is the film’s climactic reveal: all the action after this is the tying up of loose ends. In addition, the final note of drama is the panning shot at the end of the film that leads to the ghostly Lucille playing her piano. The final image of the closing book may remind us that Edith is telling the story, but that cannot detract from the fact that it is Lucille’s story she is telling. Jessica Chastain, who played the part of Lucille, observed of her character that she feels safe in the house, the only place she feels she belongs (Salisbury 2015, 60). Chastain’s comment reminds us of the essential relationship between subject and place originally posited by Rose: within the landscape of Allerdale Hall she imagines, cultivates and moves towards the place in the world she desires within that house. She responds to a call to care for it and for those she loves within it. Her despair when Thomas proposes that their love can only continue outside the house is therefore unsurprising. Her commitment to the house is even greater than her commitment to her brother, hence she kills him rather than give up that commitment. Lucille herself is, however, a damaged daughter and her calls to care are inevitably and inherently malign. This is a nightmare of presence rather than a dream of one. And its malevolence reveals itself through the imbrication of ghosts and of horror within the fabric of the house; in the wallpaper, in the family crest, in the arches, in the clay vats, Lucille’s red room and above all in the red clay underground that begins to leach more and more into the landscape. The ghosts of the film were always to be expected of a house (family) that used a skull for its crest. Engagement with the landscape and architecture of the haunted house impels both Lucille and Edith to a more intense experience that they both try to master through the artistry and creativity of music and literature, conduits that both propel and thwart their desires. The house becomes the theatre for the struggle of the spirit to which del Toro referred at the beginning of this discussion, and the house’s very haunting, the ghosts and their spatial reflections, point to the essential antagonism between subject and space that define the nightmare of presence, and which the art of the subject can never quite overcome.

Notes 1 The Internet Movie Database notes a number of goofs in the film, one of which is the fact that although dead leaves float through the ceiling there are nonetheless no trees nearby (https://​www.imdb.com/​title/​tt2554274/​?ref_​=nv_​sr_​1, accessed 28 February 2019). While realistically the leaves should not be present, they are of course symbolically appropriate and may function as themselves ghosts of a healthier environment before industry, red clay and damaged relationships took the landscape over.

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Ghostly Presences: Crimson Peak  101 2 Although a detective in Buffalo discovers evidence that Thomas is already married, suggesting that his subsequent marriage to Edith is not valid, the wife in question is of course dead, so that Edith is indeed legally Lady Sharpe.

Works Cited Aldana Reyes, Xavier. 2018. ‘Guillermo Del Toro’s Crimson Peak’. In The Gothic: A Reader, edited by Simon Bacon. Oxford: Peter Lang. Gilbert, Sandra M., and Susan Gubar. 2007. The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-​Century Literary Imagination. 2nd ed. New Haven: Yale University Press. Musap, Emilia. 2017. ‘Monstrous Domesticity  –​Home as a Site of Oppression in Crimson Peak’. Sic: A Journal of Literature, Culture and Literary Translation 1 (8): www.sic-​journal.org/​ArticleView.aspx?aid=468 (accessed 23 July 2018). Rose, Mitch. 2016. ‘Gathering “Dreams of Presence”: A Project for the Cultural Landscape’. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 24 (4): 537–​54. Salisbury, Mark. 2015. Crimson Peak: The Art of Darkness. London: Titan Books. Spooner, Catherine. 2017. Post-​Millennial Gothic, Comedy, Romance and the Rise of Happy Gothic. London: Bloomsbury.

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Part 3

Ghostly Legacies Modern and Contemporary Encounters

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8  Futurist Ghosts Stefano Cracolici

If ‘ghostly’, in the Gothic, Romantic and then Decadent sense of ‘spectral’, as a quality that might instil fear, terror, disgust and occasionally consolatory longing in a sympathetic reader, does not seem immediately pertinent to the poetic temper of the Futurist movement, ‘ghosts’ are.1 Yet a ‘ghostly’ atmosphere permeates the sulphurous prose of Marinetti’s The Founding Manifesto of Futurism (1909, 49–​53).2 Ghostly are ‘the stokers who bustle in front of the boilers’ hellish fires in massive ships’; ghostly are ‘the black spectres who rummage in the red-​hot bellies of locomotives launched on insane journeys’; ghostly are the ‘drunkards who flounder alongside the city walls, with the beating of uncertain wings’; ghostly is the soundtrack of the nocturnal Milan, when the ‘gloomy silence’ of the night is pathetically interrupted by ‘the attenuated murmur of prayers muttered by the old canal and the bones of ailing palaces creaking above their beards of damp moss’; ghostly, finally, is the ‘flea market’ of Italy around the turn of the century, plagued by the ‘fetid cancer of professors, archaeologists, tour guides, and antiquarians’, cramming the ‘graveyards’ of its ‘museums, libraries, academies of every sort’. The cultural war that the Futurists launched with their manifestoes precisely targeted these lurid Italian zombies: Yes, war! Against all of you who are dying too slowly, and against all the dead who are clogging the streets! […] against your stinking fleeces, you reeking and mud-​coloured flock driven down the old, decrepit streets of the Earth! (Marinetti, Let’s Murder the Moonlight!, 1909, 54) As declaredly Italians –​‘It is from Italy that we are flinging this to the world, our manifesto of burning and overwhelming violence’ (Marinetti, The Founding Manifesto of Futurism, 1909, 52) –​the Futurists proudly rebelled against Italy. Standing like ‘forward sentries […] on the last promontory of the centuries’ (49), they identified their ‘army of enemy stars’ with those creepy revenants that lurked in the ‘horrible shell’ of Italy (50). A momentary look at that ‘shell’ helps dissipate confusion. If Italy was still in vogue also after its unification –​or, better, if it had come into vogue, after being for so many centuries a compulsion  –​this was indeed because of its

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106  Stefano Cracolici magnificent ‘shell’. Already in 1829, Mary Shelley had dreamed of Rome as an entirely deserted city: She becomes the sepulchre of antiquity, and, as a sepulchre, ought to be lonely. Thus, in truth, we have sometimes wished her to become wholly depopulate; we have desired that the profound solitude which reigns without her precincts, should also exist within (Shelley 1829, 130) an attitude that would become commonplace (Luzzi, 2002 and 2008). Charles Augustin de Sainte-​Beuve considered the city as dead: ‘Rome est morte […] comme nation, elle n’a cessé d’être morte… Rome est morte et bien morte’ (‘Rome is dead […] as a nation she has not ceased being dead… Rome is dead and very dead’). It was for him the most comfortable place for cultivating a fixed idea (‘C’est le séjour le plus commode à une idée fixe. On la cultive, on s’en enchante’). The emblematic setting for contemplating such ideas was identified with the city’s subterranean catacombs: ‘chacun, dans cette masse diverse, se creuse sa Rome à lui, sa catacombe, et ne voit qu’elle, et n’est troublé par rien alentour dans ce grand silence’ (‘in this diverse mess, everyone digs his own Rome, his catacomb, and is unable to see anything but that, and is not disturbed by anything around that great silence’). This sharp contrast with the buoyant Paris was evident to everyone (Sainte-​Beuve 1876, 115–​16; see Cracolici 2012). Marinetti wittingly transformed that sepulchre, that catacomb, into a car: ‘I stretched out on my car like a corpse in its coffin, but revived at once under the steering wheel, a guillotine blade that menaced my stomach’ (Marinetti, The Founding Manifesto of Futurism, 1909, 49). The imagery is Gothic, the effect is Futurist: the ‘furious sweep of madness’ that took possession of the suddenly awakened driver, who pushes the car on a hurling race through the meandering streets of the city (‘deep and precipitous as the beds of spring torrents’) to eventually roll it over into a slimy ditch. When the rescuers, like a ‘crowd of fishermen armed with hooks’, haul the car from the mud, they extract only its essence, ‘leaving behind in the depths its heavy chassis of good sense and its soft upholstery of comfort, like scales’ (50). Marinetti and his party remain unharmed and admire the spectacle with their faces covered with ‘a mix of metallic scum, useless sweat, heavenly soot’ (51). In this shabby condition, ‘bruised and bandaged’, they address their scandalous ‘first intentions to all the living men of the earth’ (51, original emphasis). The gothic patina that permeates Marinetti’s prose  –​here exemplified in a fragmented textual mosaic –​serves precisely to exorcize the ‘ghostly’ from the ‘ghosts’ along with the literary dimension, atmospheric allure, and iconic attire of a discourse about Italy that had become pervasive throughout the long nineteenth century. The ‘scales’ of the wrecked car form one figurative manifestation of the ‘ghostly’ carapace of literature. Against this mode of literature, able only to exalt ‘contemplative stillness, ecstasy, and sleep’, the Futurists opposed a poetic gesture conceived as a violent assault against ‘unknown forces

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Futurist Ghosts 107 to reduce them to submission under man’ (51). Such ‘unknown forces’ are the unliterary, unpoetic, unartistic ‘ghosts’ that the Futurists sought to invoke by throwing themselves ‘into the Unknown […] to fill up the deep wells of the Absurd’ (50). In Let’s Murder the Moonlight! (1909b), where the attack on the romantic whiteness of the nocturnal light echoes the poisonous atmosphere of an expressionistic luna mendax (Cracolici 2004, 401–​2; Bachrach 1987; Mittner 1965, 68), Marinetti finds a suitable bridgehead for embarking on such an hallucinatory journey in the agile mirage of a distant madhouse, which suddenly appears ‘high on the ridge of an elegant hill that seemed as frisky as a colt’ (Marinetti, Let’s Murder the Moonlight!, 1909, 56). One of the most fascinating aspects of Italian Futurism is precisely this disenchanted contamination of disparate literary ingredients with the explicit intention of exposing and distorting their cultural matrices. This unscrupulous, uninhibited ability to jostle simultaneously with references of different provenance subverts literary conventions and creates an ideological pastiche populated with incendiary images. On a militant level, this technique chimes with ‘the destructive gesture of anarchists’ (Marinetti, The Founding Manifesto of Futurism, 1909, 51); on a mystical one, it emulates the exoteric procedures of alchemists and magicians. Marinetti compared these exoteric practitioners to Jesus and Buddha read, respectively, through the lenses of Ernest Renan and William Walker Atkinson, alias Yogi Ramacharaka (Cigliana 2002, 174–​75). The belief in hidden forces governing the incessant movement of matter found its philosophical foundation in Henry Bergson’s Matter and Memory of 1896 (‘Matter thus resolves itself into numberless vibrations, all linked together in uninterrupted continuity, all bound up with each other, and traveling in every direction like shivers through an immense body’, 1988, 208), as well as in Albert Einstein’s On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies of 1905. Time and space coalesced into a whirl of multiple possibilities, in which life and the afterlife were coterminous. Such inspired afflatus is absent in other manifestoes. In Umberto Boccioni’s The Plastic Foundations of Futurist Sculpture and Painting (1913), for instance, the attack on Italian cultural history is more bluntly expressed: ‘Our task is to destroy four centuries of Italian tradition’. The resulting void was meant to be sown with new ‘seeds of potential’ found either in primitive or ‘barbarian’ raw elements, which were present in ‘every nation’  –​and, therefore, also in Italy –​or in the ‘anti-​artistic manifestations’ of modern life (emphasis original). Boccioni illustrated the latter through a list of seemingly unrelated specimens: ‘the café singer, the gramophone, the cinema, electrical advertisements, mechanical architecture, nightlife, the life of stones and crystals, occultism, magnetism, velocity, etc.’.3 His Riot in the Gallery (1910, Milan, Pinacoteca di Brera, Figure  8.1) offers an artistic glimpse into such ‘anti-​artistic’ topics. These modern ‘manifestations’ served, in Boccioni’s view, to uncover the laws of a new energy of life (‘the laws which are currently shaping themselves in our renewed sensibility’) and to ‘enter into a new world of definitive values’ (139).4 The common denominator of these catalysts of modernity  –​including crystallomancy, occultism and magnetism  –​were identified with electricity.5

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108  Stefano Cracolici

Figure 8.1 Umberto Boccioni, Riot in the Gallery, 1910, oil on canvas. Source: Milan, Pinacoteca di Brera.

Electricity was responsible for the lighting up of the night, the speeding up of transportation, the building of architectural forms made of new materials. Light, speed, metal –​these were the leading anti-​artistic effects that the Futurists aimed to transfigure into a new art. In 1916, Marinetti would wrap up all three of these elements in a new Promethean religion: Human energy, multiplied a hundredfold by velocity, will dominate Space and Time. Man began by disdaining the isochronal and cadenced rhythm of the great rivers, one which is identical with the rhythm produced by his own footsteps. Man envied the rhythm of spring torrents, which resemble the galloping of a horse. He tamed horses, elephants, and camels in order to manifest his divine authority by increasing his speed. He formed alliances with the most docile animals, captured the wild ones, and ate the domestic ones. He stole electricity and carbon-​burning fuels in order to create new allies in the form of motors. He forged metals, defeated and rendered ductible by fire, to join with fuels and electricity, and thus he created an

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Futurist Ghosts 109 army of slaves, hostile and dangerous and yet sufficiently domesticated, who would transport him swiftly over the curves of the earth. (Marinetti, The New Religion-​Morality of Speed, 1916, 224) If Christian morality had protected humanity against the excesses of sensuality, ‘Futurist morality will protect man against the inevitable decay produced by slowness, memory, analysis, rest, and habit’. In the new Futurist religion (‘If to pray means to communicate with divinity, then run with all speed to pray’, 225), velocity would replace slowness; clairvoyance, memory; synthesis, analysis; motion, rest; adventure into the Unknown, habit produced by convention: ‘I’m launching something that will carry the human spirit to unknown shores’ (Marinetti, Tactilism, 1916, 265). The insistent reference to the Unknown in Futurist manifestoes pointed to both the scientific discoveries of electromagnetism and the exoteric tradition of occultism, without any perceived contradiction  –​the terminology of the former was rapidly adapted to ignite a renewed interest in the latter. Roughly half a century before, Michael Faraday had already warned against the use of scientific theories and terminology to describe the occult phenomenon of spiritism: The effect produced by table-​turners has been referred to electricity, to magnetism, to attraction, to some unknown or hitherto unrecognized physical power able to affect inanimate bodies –​to the revolution of the earth, and even to diabolical or supernatural agency […] as if the earth revolved round the leg of a table. (1853, 8) Yet by the end of the century, the knot between the two registers  –​the scientific and the occult –​had become hard to disentangle. The faith in such ‘hitherto unrecognized physical power able to affect inanimate bodies’ was strong enough to organize phenomena such as ‘the life of stones and crystals, occultism, magnetism, velocity, etc.’ under the same heading. This blend of scientific and occultist perspectives was also a subtend of the Manifesto of the Futurist Science (1916), signed by Bruno Corra, Arnaldo Ginanni, Remo Chiti, Emilio Settimelli, Mario Carli and Nerino Nannetti. The attack here is levelled against the unimaginativeness of the official science, accused of being too sceptical about the occult forces animating the universe: ‘We attract the attention of all the audacious minds toward that less probed zone of our reality that comprises the phenomena of mediumism, psychism, water-​divining, divination, telepathy’ (Corra and Ginna 1984, 208; see Chessa 2012, 55–​56). Guillaume Apollinaire was quick to unmask, in the Mercure de France, the paradox inherent in such a proposition (1916, 756): Leur manifeste ‘la science futuriste’ s’intitulerait plus justement la curieuse ignorance futuriste, car le but qu’ils assignent aux recherches désordonnées,

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110  Stefano Cracolici aux intuitions contradictoires des adeptes de cette bizarre science, c’est l’ignorance absolue […] Fatalement, ils tombent dans le spiritisme.6 (Their manifesto ‘The Futurist Science’ ought more properly to be entitled the curious Futurist ignorance, for the aim that they ascribe to unordered investigations, to the contradictory intuitions of the followers of such bizarre science, is absolute ignorance […] They inevitably fall into spiritualism). In the May 16, 1917, issue of L’Italia futurista, Ginna reinforced the main thesis in an article entitled ‘Il coraggio nelle ricerche di occultismo’ (‘The courage in the investigations about occultism’), in which he pledged for a wider popularization of ‘occultist research’ in the wake of the theosophical works of Madame Blavatsky (Ginna 1917, 2). One month later, Irma Valeria would apply the same argument to art in her ‘Occultismo e arte nuova’ (‘Occultism and New Art’), maintaining that ‘in short, we are all occultists’ (1917, 1; see Chessa 2012, 56). Valeria’s declaration was uttered less as an endorsement of exoteric spiritualism than as an acknowledgement that the so-​called spiritualist powers had already been allegedly accepted as new sensorial abilities (Galluzzi 2017, 210). If the ‘ghostly’ could immediately evoke the languid atmosphere of passéist fiction and the Italian literary tradition as a whole, ‘ghosts’ could equally act as the ‘anti-​artistic’ guides able to ‘carry the human spirit to unknown shores’. The clash between ‘ghostly’ Passéism and Futurist ‘ghosts’ is ironically rendered in Medium as a synthetic drama that Giovanni Cenna wrote for L’Italia futurista in 1916. In a dark room, covered with black tapestry, three men in black suits sit with a pallid woman at a round black table –​a slow, quiet, rhythmic noise suggests the presence of the spirits waiting to be evoked. The medium falls into a trance. A wheezy sound fills the air, striking fear into one of the men. The air around him takes on a bluish colour and the gasping sound becomes frantic and louder –​a white ghost appears within. The spectre cuts the jacket of the petrified man and steals his wallet. Suddenly all noises cease: the scene turns yellow and a splash of green light colours the smirking mask of the ghost –​the rest of the party erupts into laughter (Cenna 1916; see Galluzzi 2017, 211–​12). The sound and light show, in which the ghostly topic was futuristically inflected through aural and chromatic effects, parodied a setting with which the Futurists were already fairly familiar. In his posthumously published memoirs, Great Traditional and Futuristic Milan, Marinetti recalls his pre-​ Futuristic years and the séances organized by the entourage of the art critic and Divisionist painter Vittore Grubicy de Dragon, involving the participation of the Milanese dramatist Enrico Annibale Butti and the medium-​cum-​artist Carlo Melina: Dopo Wagner e la cenetta gli spiriti impongono l’abituale seduta spiritica ed è il pittore Melina barbuto napoletano che la conduce da reali fenomeni

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Futurist Ghosts 111 ad illusori o a trucchi poiché divenuto medium milanese ufficiale dei salotti spiritisti decisi a risolvere l’arduo problema […] Risatine scherzi discussioni pro e contro. (Marinetti 1969, 35) (After Wagner and the little dinner, the spirits impose the usual séance, and it is the bearded Neapolitan painter Melina who leads it from real phenomena to illusionary ones or tricks, for he has become the official Milanese medium of those spiritualist gatherings engaged in solving the intractable problem […] Little laughter, jokes, debates pro and contra). And again: Riprendere le esperienze spiritiste nei saloni a tendaggi meditanti di E. A. Butti quella notte stessa rileggendo le opere di Maeterlinck e al pianoforte Pelléas et Mélisande.7 (ibid., 48) (Resume the spiritualist experiences in the rooms with meditating curtains of E. A. Butti that very night, while re-​reading the works by Maeterlinck and at the piano Pellás et Melisande). Butti’s Milanese soirées usually consisted of spiritualist séances followed by piano recitals –​Wagner was the most played musician (Melani 2006, 134). The symbolist repertoire of Maeterlinck, Ibsen, Strindberg (author of The Ghost Sonata of 1907)  but also Poe tainted those gatherings with ‘ghostly’ colours. In 1909, Butti would adapt Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher (1839) into a play, Il castello del sogno (‘The Dream Castle’), whose dramatic climax is reached in a ‘fantastic orgy’ (‘orgia fantastica’) in which the necromancer Fantasio invokes a host of spectres announced by phosphorescent globes floating above their tombs (Butti 1919, 103–​4; see Pasqualicchio 2014, 14). Maeterlinck and his drama Pelléas et Mélisande (1892), which Claude Debussy transformed into a successful opera (1902), acts here as the artistic sieve through which the young Marinetti filters the ‘ghostly’ atmosphere of his own spiritualist séances. The residue of this almost alchemical extraction offers the imaginary agent for distilling the ‘multiplied man’ out of passéist experiences –​ an ‘inhuman and mechanical type, constructed for omnipresent velocity’: He will be endowed with unexpected organs: organs adapted to the exigencies of an environment made of continuous shocks. Already now we can foresee an organ that will resemble a prow developing from the outward swelling of the sternum, which will be the more pronounced the better an aviator the man of the future becomes, much like the analogous development discernible in the best fliers among birds. (Marinetti Multiplied Man and the Reign of the Machine, 1911, 90–​91)

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112  Stefano Cracolici The process advanced here found in the spiritual energy exteriorized by mediums its explicit model (ibid., 91): You’ll be able to better understand these apparently paradoxical hypotheses by considering the phenomena of externalized will that are continually manifested at spiritualist seances. The choice of ectoplasm, a word coined in 1894 by psychical researcher Charles Richet to describe the filmy or foamy slime oozing from various orifices of the medium during the spiritualist séance (Brower 2010, 75–​90; Brain 2013; Buckland 2006, 349–​50), can be connected with the ‘inexhaustible supply of vital energy’ of the human being suffocated by ‘powerful physiological electricity’ (Marinetti 1911, 90): The day when it will be possible for man to externalize his will in such a way that it is prolonged beyond himself like an immense, invisible arm –​ on that day, Dream and Desire, which today are empty terms, will reign supreme over conquered space and time.8 The idea of ‘externalized will’ linked to the spiritualist ectoplasm opened the way for a juxtaposition of the medium and the artist. If Marinetti could explain the ‘geometric splendour’ of the words-​ in-​ freedom technique in terms of a ‘prolongation, lyrical and transfigured, of our animal magnetism’ (Marinetti 1916, 178), then Bruno Corra and Emilio Settimelli exploited the same formula to offer a method for quantifying artistic value: ‘S I N C E R E A L VA L U E R E S I D E S O N LY I N T H E QUA N T I T Y O F E N E R G Y T H AT H A S B E E N E X T E R N A L I Z E D, T H E A RT I S T W I L L B E P E R M I T T E D A L L F O R M S O F E C C E N T R I C I T Y, L U N ACY, I L L O G I CA L I T Y ’

(Corra and Settimelli 1914, 183, capitals original). We might read in these terms ‘the deep wells of the Absurd’ mentioned in the founding manifesto. Giacomo Balla, whose engagement with spiritism is well known (Matitti 1998; De Marchis 2007, 23–​24), rendered visually such externalized energy in several small paintings titled Trasformazione, Forme, Spiriti (1918, Private Collection, Figure 8.2), which his daughter Elica firmly linked to his spiritualist experiments (Balla 1984, I, 296): In the painting, the spirits, moving in the form of rays from the curvature of the earth, cross blue spaces and transform themselves in other forms on other planes […] Rays of different colour are on the side –​cosmic rays which nurture those forms. (‘Nel dipinto gli spiriti sotto forma di raggi, partendo dalla curvatura della terra, attraversano spazi blu trasformandosi in altre forme su altri piani […] Da un lato raggi di altro colore; raggi cosmici che alimentano quelle forme’)

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Futurist Ghosts 113

Figure 8.2 Giacomo Balla, Trasformazione, Forme, Spiriti, 1918, gouache on paper. Source: Private collection.

These ‘spirits’ have little to do with ghosts, although the spirits which elevate themselves from the earth and transform into other kinds of energy could be read that way. Still in 1928, Balla invoked the word ‘occultism’ in describing himself as having such an elevated spirit to be able to feel what cannot be seen, and even walk without touching the soil: ‘cammino senza toccar terra, talmente il mio spirito è elevato e sento anche quello che non si vede (occultismo)’ (2010, 221). Balla was an assiduous frequenter of the Roman Theosophical Society, directed by Carlo Ballatore, who hosted regular spiritualist séances led by the medium Augusto Politi. During one of these sessions, the participants heard the ghost of a bell ringing and hoped to see it materialized. The medium noted that there was not enough fluid for this manifestation to happen. But as soon as the light went on, they saw ‘a yellow metallic dust, luminous and very subtle as powdered brass’ covering them and the entire room, ‘proving the hypothesis that the objects dematerialize in the moment of their appearance’ (Carreras 1902, 91–​92).9 Rather than communing with the dead or embracing a fully exoteric view of the universe, what the Futurists took instead from spiritualist séances was the pseudo-​positivistic idea of an air saturated by an ethereal invisible fluid upon which a sensitive medium could exert her power. It is this enhanced sensitivity that acts here as the model for understanding the idea of ‘externalized will’ theorized by Marinetti. Such a formula immediately recalls Friedrich Nietzsche, and it has often been read in Nietzschean terms.10 Nietzsche’s Zarathustra certainly influenced

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114  Stefano Cracolici Marinetti’s work, including stylistically (Cigliana 2002, 133).11 But while the founder of the Futurist movement admired the philosopher in Nietzsche, he rejected the philologist in him. Already in 1910, Nietzsche becomes the direct target of Against Academic Teachers (‘Contro i professori’): In our struggle against the professorial passion for the past, we violently reject Nietzsche’s ideals and doctrines. I have no choice but to show how utterly mistaken the critics are in labelling us Neo-​Nietzscheans. Indeed, all you have to do is peruse the constructive part of the great German philosopher’s work to be convinced that his Superman, whose origins lie in the philosophical culture of Greek tragedy, resumes, in his creator, an enthusiastic return to paganism and mythology. Nietzsche, despite his urge toward the future, will continue to be seen as one of the fiercest defenders of the beauty and greatness of the past. He is a traditionalist who walks upon the peaks of the Thessalian mountains, but alas! Terribly encumbered by the longest ancient Greek texts. His Superman is a product of the Greek imagination, spawned from the three great stinking corpses of Apollo, Mars, and Bacchus. He is a mixture of elegant Beauty, the warrior’s strength, and Dionysian ecstasy, which are manifested in the greatest classical art. (Marinetti [1910] 2006, 81) Against Nietzsche’s Übermensch, ‘begat from the dust of libraries’, Marinetti opposed the ‘multiplied man’ –​the ‘Man who is extended by his own labours, the enemy of books, friend of personal experience, pupil of the Machine, relentless cultivator of his own will’ (2006, 81).12 He refused to acknowledge also the influence of Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representation (1818): ‘Thus our frank misogynist optimism is sharply opposed to the pessimism of Schopenhauer, that bitter philosopher who so often offers us the seductive revolver of philosophy in order to destroy in us our profound nausea for woman and love’ (1911, 92); although it was precisely his ‘seductive revolver’ that he embraced as a metaphoric weapon against the ‘ghostly’ Romanticism (‘It is precisely with this revolver that we gaily take aim at the great romantic Moonlight’). Schopenhauer’s later writings, notably On the Will in Nature (1836), with his reflection upon animal magnetism and the redefinition of pure will as independent on the categories of space and time (‘because the will manifests itself in Animal Magnetism downright as the thing-​in-​itself, we see the principium individuationis [Space and Time], which belongs to the mere phenomenon, at once annulled […] the real agent in Magic, as in Animal Magnetism, is nothing but the will’, [1836] 2012, 347; see Wicks 2016, 148–52) appear in fact much closer to the prerogatives of Marinetti’s ‘future man’ (Cigliana 2002, 134–​136). As an alternative to Nietzsche or Schopenhauer, Simona Cigliana rightly proposes the influence exerted on Marinetti by the French occultist revival of the second half of the nineteenth century, sponsored by Alphonse Louis

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Futurist Ghosts 115 Constant, known under the nom de plume of Éliphas Lévi, and Hippolyte Léon Denizard Rivail, writing as Allan Kardec (Cigliana 2002, 136–​37; see also 2010, 526–​31; McIntosh 2011). Distinct from Nietzsche, these famous occultists had the merit of proposing an alternative canon of references away from classical antiquity –​a hidden canon which included, together with the hermetic and cabbalistic traditions, also Indian and East-​Asian philosophies. Not only had Éliphas Lévi helped to disentangle occultism and its spiritualist dimension from popular superstition, he also provided a practical method to channel the power of will and a means to intervene directly on that ‘universal agent’ or ‘ethereal fluid’ or ‘astral light’ that envelops the soul as an ‘ethereal body’ or ‘sidereal phantom’ until it disengages at the moment of death (McIntosh 2011, 149). The ‘ghosts’ could finally be evoked without the ‘ghostly’ atmosphere in which literature had shrouded them over the previous two centuries. In the United States, this revival paved the way for the foundation of the Theosophical Society, which had for its most glittering figure the Russian occultist Helena Petrovna Blavatsky.13 In Italy, instead, the most comprehensive response became formulated within a medical milieu, which was quickly absorbed by literary circles (Capuana 1884; Giannetti 1996; Cigliana 2002, 149–​168; Tropea 2020). In 1908, Enrico Morselli, director of the Hospital of Mental Health and Chair of Experimental Psychiatry and Psychology in Genoa, published the results of his rigorous observations of one of the most studied and debated mediums in Europe  –​the Neapolitan Eusapia Paladino, whose pioneering contribution to physical spiritualism was amply acknowledged also in Arthur Conan Doyle’s The History of Spiritualism (2011, 2: 1–​20; see also Imoda 1912; Buckland 2006, 293–​95). Morselli’s two-​volume work Psicologia e ‘spiritualismo’: impressioni e note critiche sui fenomeni medianici di Eusapia Paladino (‘Psychology and “Spiritualism”: Impressions and Critical Notes on the Medianic Phenomena of Eusapia Paladino’), covering more than one thousand pages, was originally planned as a detailed confutation of spiritualist phenomena, but ended up acting as a full endorsement. Despite the initial reluctance, Cesare Lombroso was forced to admit: I am very ashamed and sorry to have fought with such tenacity the possibility of the so-​called spiritualist facts; I call them facts because I am still against the theory behind them. But the facts exist, and I am proud to be a slave of facts14 (‘Io sono molto vergognato e dolente d’aver combattuto con tanta tenacia la possibilità dei fatti cosiddetti spiritici; dico dei fatti perché alla teoria sono ancora contrario. Ma i fatti esistono ed io dei fatti mi vanto di essere schiavo’, quoted in Cigliana 2006, 198) The image of the madhouse suddenly appearing ‘high on the ridge of an elegant hill that seemed as frisky as a colt’ in Let’s Murder the Moonlight! (Marinetti 1909, 56)  might indeed refer to the psychiatric milieu in which spiritualist

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116  Stefano Cracolici activity was debated in Italy. According to his daughter, Elica, Balla as a youth was an assiduous frequenter of Lombroso’s lectures in Turin and visitor of the local mental hospital to observe his patients. His Divisionist painting The Madwoman (La Pazza, 1905, Rome, National Gallery of Modern Art), part of the Cycle of the Living, in which Matilde Garbini is captured in a spastic pose characteristic of her Huntington’s chorea disease (Cupini and Calabresi 2019), eloquently testifies to this interest. George Huntington’s nineteenth-​century description of the condition later named after him could be read as an accompanying description to the painting: The hands are kept rolling –​first the palms upward, and then the backs. The shoulders are shrugged, and the feet and legs kept in perpetual motion; the toes are turned in, and then everted; one foot is thrown across the other, and then suddenly withdrawn, and, in short, every conceivable attitude and expression is assumed, and so varied and irregular are the motions gone through with, that a complete description of them would be impossible. (Huntington 1872, 318) In the last issue of Poesia, the journal founded by Marinetti in 1905 and that acted as the official sounding board for the movement, Paolo Buzzi offered his Futurist farewell to the recently deceased Lombroso with these lines (1909; see Galluzzi 2017 188): Ave! Mi depongo, fiore del mio bel mare autonomo in tempesta, sulla tua tomba loica democratica d’Uomo che squarciò vivo gli uomini e volle, cadavere, essere squarciato. Ave, Palombaro Antropofago di te stesso, Pilota all’oceano delle ombre –​se tornino o non tornino spiritiche. (Hail! I  prostrate, | flower of my beautiful stormy sea, | on your logical democratic tomb | of a man who when alive tore the men apart | and wanted, as a corpse, to be torn apart. | Hail, Anthropophagus Diver of yourself, | Pilot sailing towards the ocean of the shadows | –​be they coming back or not in spiritualist form). The homage to Lombroso is suggestive of the positivist eye through which the Futurists were acknowledging the existence of ‘ghosts’. Francesco Galluzzi, in a perceptive study referenced throughout this essay, has coined for them the felicitous formula of ‘electric ghosts’ (‘fantasmi elettrici’). The futurist ghosts evoked here are ‘electric’ in the way in which electricity revealed a new way to explore and embody the Unknown. They are certainly not creatures of a dark night, silhouetted by the moon. They are not nostalgic revenants from the past. They are the un-​ghostly, electrifying, ghosts of the future, ‘ascending to

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Futurist Ghosts 117 the highest and most radiant summits’, momentarily invoked by the ‘Lords of Light […] drinking from the quickening sources of the Sun’ (Boccioni, Carrà, Russolo, Balla, Severini, Futurist Painting: Technical Manifesto, 67).

Notes 1 For a recent overview on ‘ghostly’ literature, see Brewster and Thurston 2018; see also Davies 2007; Morton 2017; Cigliana 2018. For the relations between Futurism and the occult, see Lista 1995; Celant 1970; Cigliana 2002; Galluzzi 2017. 2 Unless stated otherwise, the Futurist manifestoes are indicated with their publication year; the pages refer to their English translation included in Rainey, Poggi, and Wittman 2009. 3 Several of these ‘manifestations’ would become matter for further manifestoes, such as Futurist Architecture (1914), Manifesto of Futurist Mechanical Art (1922), Electrical Advertising Signs (1927), or Futurism and Advertising Art (1931). 4 Boccioni’s list of anti-​artistic manifestations echoes the one outlined in the Manifesto of Futurist Painters (1910), published together with Carlo Carrà, Luigi Russolo, Giacomo Balla and Gino Severini: ‘The only living art is that which finds its distinctive features within the environment that surrounds it. Just as our forebears took the subject of art from the religious atmosphere that enveloped them, so we must draw inspiration from the tangible miracles of contemporary life, from the iron network of speed which winds around the earth, from the transatlantic liners, the dreadnoughts, the marvellous flights that plow the skies, the shadowy audaciousness of submarine navigators, the spasmodic struggle to conquer the unknown. And how can we remain unresponsive to the frenzied activity of the great capitals, the ultra-​ recent psychology of noctambulism, the feverish figure of the viveur, the cocotte, the apache, and the alcoholic?’ (1910, 62). Such topics were also popularized in cinema (Lotti 2008; Dall’Asta 1995). 5 On the role of electricity in the occult iconography of Futurism, see Galluzzi 2017. 6 A few pages before, Apollinaire had similarly re-​baptised Marinetti’s ‘nouveau manifeste futuriste’ The New Religion-​Morality of Speed as Irréligion futuriste (‘Futurist Un-​Religion’, 755), revealing the generative recipe of the Futurist genre as a quick and infantile subversion of ‘bon sens’ (‘common sense’). 7 Butti had published in 1902 an adaptation for the Italian stage of Maeterlinck’s drama (De Antonellis 2012, 256; see also Briziarelli 1994; Pasqualicchio 2014). 8 The ‘immense, invisible arm’ chimes here with the ectoplastic hand frequently reported in spiritualist séances. A  year before, in Futurist Painting: Technical Manifesto, Boccioni, Carrà, Russolo, Balla and Severini had already declared such enhanced ability as fully operational in artistic creation: ‘Who can still believe in the opacity of bodies, since our sharpened and multiplied sensibilities have already grasped the obscure manifestations of mediums?’ (1910, 65). 9 The original passage reads as follows: ‘Una sera fu udito il campanello muoversi tintinnando vicino agli sperimentatori, ma mentre questi speravano di vedersi portare il campanello, il medio esclamò: “Non posso, non vi è più fluido bastante!” […] quella sera stessa si presentò al nostro sguardo, appena fatta la luce: una polvere metallica gialla, lucente, finissima come la porporina, sparsa intorno a noi e su di noi, che c’indorava leggermente i capelli, il viso e le mani distendendosi sugli abiti, sul tavolo da esperimenti e su di una parte del suolo’ (Carreras 1902, 91–​92). 10 The doctrine of the externalized will to power would find proper articulation in Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil, the first book published after Zarathustra

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118  Stefano Cracolici

11

12 13

14

(Clark 1990, 212–​42); Butti published in 1909 an essay on Nietzsche’s ideas on art (Butti 1900). Marinetti recalls in his memoirs that in a performance in his apartment by Alberto Olivo, the mentally instable uxoricide who had turned his criminal act into a dramatic piece, the mirror reflecting the image of the actor rendered the face of Zarathustra, ‘the infallible Superman’ (1969, 187); in Olivo’s piece the motive of his brutal murder is the obsessive nightmare of his mother’s ghost reflected in a mirror (Galluzzi 2017, 187). The title Contro i professori (‘Against Academic Teachers’) was specified in ‘Ce qui nous sépare de Nietzsche’ (‘What distinguishes us from Nietzsche’) in the 1911 collection Le Futurisme. For the influence of Blavatsky’s theosophy on Italian Futurism, see Chessa 2012, 17; Celant 1970; Galluzzi 2017, 242–​43; Arnaldo Ginna would later recall with reference to the Roman Futurist group that ‘we all had at hand the theosophy books by Besant and Blavatsky, and also the works on anthroposophy by Rudolf Steiner’ (‘ciascuno di noi aveva tra le mani i libri di teosofia della Besant e della Blavatsky, e poi le opere di antroposofia di Rudolf Steiner’, 1985, 136). On Lombroso’s spiritualist interest, see Zingaropoli and Lombroso 2008.

Works Cited Apollinaire, Guillaume. n.d. ‘La vie anecdotique: La nouvelle Religion de la vélocité, La science futuriste, Umberto Boccioni, Futurisme italien’. Mercure de France 117 (440): 755–​59. Bachrach, Albert Gustave Herbert. 1987. ‘Luna Mendax: Some Reflections on Moon-​ Voyages in Early Seventeenth-​Century England’. In Between Dream and Nature: Essays on Utopia and Dystopia, edited by Dominic Baker-​Smith and C.C. Barfoot, 70–​90. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Balla, Elica. 1984. Con Balla. 3 vols. Milano: Multhipla. Balla, Giacomo. 2010. Scritti futuristi. Edited by Giovanni Lista. Milano: Abscondita. Bergson, Henri. 1988. Matter and Memory. Translated by Nancy Margaret Paul and W. Scott Palmer. New York: Zone Books. Brain, Robert Michael. 2013. ‘Materialising the Medium: Ectoplasm and the Quest for Supra-​Normal Biology in Fin-​de-​Siècle Science and Art’. In Vibratory Modernism, edited by Anthony Enns and Shelley Trower, 115–​44. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Brewster, Scott, and Luke Thurston, eds. 2018. The Routledge Handbook to the Ghost Story. New York: Routledge. Briziarelli, Susan. 1994. Enrico Annibale Butti: The Case of the Minor Writer. Potomac, MD: Scripta Humanistica. Brower, M. Brady. 2010. Unruly Spirits: The Science of Psychic Phenomena in Modern France. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Buckland, Raymond. 2006. The Spirit Book: The Encyclopedia of Clairvoyance, Channeling, and Spirit Communication. Canton, MI: Visible Ink. Butti, Enrico Annibale. 1900. ‘Le idee sull’arte di Federico Nietzsche’. Nuova Antologia 170: 217–​30. —​—​—​. 1919. Il castello del sogno: Poema tragico. Milan: Fratelli Treves. Buzzi, Paolo. 1909. ‘In morte di Cesare Lombroso’. Poesia 5 (7–​9): 57. Capuana, Luigi. 1884. Spiritismo?. Catania: Niccolò Giannotta. Carreras, Enrico. 1902. ‘Il medio Politi’. Luce e Ombra 2 (3): 85–​102.

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Futurist Ghosts 119 Celant, Germano. 1970. ‘Futurismo esoterico’. Il Verri 15 (33–​34): 108–​17. Cenna, Giovanni. 1916. ‘Medium’. L’Italia futurista 1 (4): 4. Chessa, Luciano. 2012. Luigi Russolo, Futurist: Noise, Visual Arts, and the Occult. Berkeley: University of California Press. Cigliana, Simona. 2002. Futurismo esoterico. Contributi per una storia dell’irrazionalismo italiano tra Otto e Novecento. Napoli: Liguori. —​—​—​. 2006. ‘Letteratura, spiritualismo, occultismo tra le due guerre’. In Esoterismo e fascismo: storia, interpretazioni, documenti, edited by Gianfranco De Turris, 197–​ 224. Roma: Edizioni Mediterranee. —​—​—​. 2010. ‘Spiritismo e parapsicologia nell’età positivistica’. In Esoterismo, edited by Gian Mario Cazzaniga, 521–​46. Storia d’Italia: Annali 25. Torino: Einaudi. —​—​—​. 2018. Due secoli di fantasmi: case infestate, tavoli giranti, apparizioni, spiritisti, magnetizzatori e medium. Roma: Edizioni Mediterranee. Clark, Maudemarie. 1990. Nietzsche on Truth and Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Corra, Bruno, and Arnaldo Ginna. 1984. Manifesti futuristi e scritti teorici di Arnaldo Ginna e Bruno Corra. Edited by Mario Verdone. Ravenna: Longo. Cracolici, Stefano. 2004. ‘La luna che uccide: l’espressionismo di La Guardia alla luna di Massimo Bontempelli’. Forum Italicum 38: 400–​416. —​—​—​. 2012. ‘Sotto il segno del martirio: Roma e l’eredità artistica della fede’. In Vínculos artísticos entre Italia y América: Silencio historiográfico: VI Jornadas de historia del arte, edited by Fernando Guzmán and Juan Manuel Martínez, 43–​54. Santiago de Chile: Museo Histórico Nacional, Universidad Adolfo Ibáñez, Centro de Restauración y Estudios Artísticos CREA. Cupini, Letizia Maria, and Paolo Calabresi. 2019. ‘The Madwoman: A Portrait of a Choreic Woman?’ The Lancet 18: 233. Dall’Asta, Monica. 1995. ‘La Vamp e l’Apache. Percorsi iconografici nel cinema nero degli anni Dieci’. Cinegrafie, no. 8: 132–​39. Davies, Owen. 2007. The Haunted: A Social History of Ghosts. Houndmills, Basingstoke, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. De Antonellis, Gianandrea. 2012. Enrico Annibale Butti: l’Ibsen italiano. Napoli: Edizioni scientifiche italiane. De Marchis, Giorgio, ed. 2007. Futurismo da ripensare. Milano: Electa. Doyle, Arthur Conan. 2011 (1926). The History of Spiritualism. 2  vols. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Faraday, Michael. 1853. ‘Table-​Turning’. The Times, 30 June 1853. Galluzzi, Francesco. 2017. Fantasmi elettrici: arte e spiritismo tra simbolismo e futurismo. Giannetti, Valeria. 1996. ‘Capuana e lo spiritismo: l’anticamera della scrittura’. Lettere Italiane 48 (2): 268–​285. Ginna, Arnaldo. 1917. ‘Il coraggio nelle ricerche di occultismo’. L’Italia futurista 2 (12): 2. —​—​—​. 1985. ‘Brevi note su Evola nel tempo futurista’. In Testimonianze su Evola, edited by Gianfranco De Turris, 135–​37. Roma: Mediterranee. Huntington, George. 1872. ‘On Chorea’. The Medical and Surgical Reporter 26 (15): 317–​21. Imoda, Enrico. 1912. Fotografie di fantasmi: Contributo sperimentale alla constatazione dei fenomeni medianici con prefazione del dott. prof. Carlo Richet e numerose fotografie stampate dalle negative originali. Torino: Fratelli Bocca.

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120  Stefano Cracolici Lista, Giovanni. 1995. ‘Futurismus und Okkultismus’. In Okkultismus und Avantgarde: von Munch bis Mondrian 1900–​1915, edited by Bernd Apke, 431–​58. Catalogue of the exhibition, Frankfurt, Schirn Kunsthalle. Frankfurt: Schirn Kunsthalle. Lotti, Denis. 2008. Emilio Ghione: l’ultimo apache: vita e film di un divo italiano. Bologna: Cineteca di Bologna. Luzzi, Joseph. 2002. ‘Italy without Italians: Literary Origins of a Romantic Myth’. Modern Language Notes 117 (1): 48–​83. —​—​—​. 2008. Romantic Europe and the Ghost of Italy. New Haven: Yale University Press. Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso. 1969. La grande Milano tradizionale e futurista. Edited by Luciano De Maria. Milano: Mondadori. —​—​—​. (1910) 2006. ‘Against Academic Teachers’. In Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Critical Writings, edited by Günter Berghaus, 81–84. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. Matitti, Flavia. 1998. ‘Balla e la teosofia’. In Giacomo Balla: 1895–​1911: Verso il futurismo, edited by Maurizio Fagiolo Dell’Arco, 118–​45. Catalogue of the exhibition, Padua, Palazzo Zabarella, 15/​03-​28/​06/​1998. Venezia: Marsilio. McIntosh, Christopher. 2011. Eliphas Lévi and the French Occult Revival. Albany: SUNY Press. Melani, Costanza. 2006. Effetto Poe: Influssi dello scrittore americano sulla letteratura italiana. Firenze: Firenze University Press. Mittner, Ladislao. 1965. L’espressionismo. Bari: Laterza. Morselli, Enrico. 1908. Psicologia e spiritismo: impressioni e note critiche sui fenomeni medianici di Eusapia Paladino. 2 vols. Torino: Fratelli Bocca Editori. Morton, Lisa. 2017. Ghosts: A Haunted History. London: Reaktion Books. Pasqualicchio, Nicola. 2014. ‘Il fantastico nella drammaturgia italiana del primo Novecento’. Brumal: Revista de investigación sobre lo Fantástico 2 (2): 11–​32. Rainey, Lawrence S., Christine Poggi, and Laura Wittman, eds. 2009. Futurism: An Anthology. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Sainte-​Beuve, Charles Augustin. 1876. Chroniques parisiennes (1843–​1845). Edited by Jules Troubat. Paris: Calmann Lévy. Schopenhauer, Arthur. (1836) 2012. On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason, On Vision and Colours, On Will in Nature. Edited by David E. Cartwright, Edward E. Erdmann, and Christopher Janaway. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Shelley, Mary. 1829. ‘Italy as It Is’. Westminster Review 11 (July): 127–​40. Tropea, Mario. 2020. ‘Luigi Capuana spiritista nei saggi, nell’opera letteraria e nel Teatro’. In Luigi Capuana: Experimental Fiction and Cultural Mediation in Post-​ Risorgimento Italy, edited by Annamaria Pagliaro and Brian Zuccala, 241–​ 56. Firenze: Firenze University Press. Valeria, Irma. 1917. ‘Occultismo e arte nuova’. L’Italia futurista 2 (17): 1. Wicks, Robert. 2016. ‘Schopenhauer’s “On the Will in Nature”: The Reciprocal Containment of Idealism and Realism’. In A Companion to Schopenhauer, edited by Bart Vandenabeele, 219–​34. Malden, MA: Wiley-​Blackwell. Zingaropoli, Francesco, and Cesare Lombroso. 2008. Spiriti inquilini: le case infestate fra palcoscenici e tribunali. Edited by Gabriele Mina. Nardò (LE): Besa.

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9  Ghosts in the City From Baudelaire to Lydie Salvayre and Hilary Mantel Christopher Lloyd

Since Baudelaire is rarely associated with contemporary writers like Lydie Salvayre and Hilary Mantel, some preliminary synthesising remarks are necessary to provide a conceptual context for discussion of how these three authors converge and diverge in their treatment of urban and suburban spectres. Ghosts have always dwelled in the city. As Lewis Mumford writes in his classic account of The City in History (1991, 15), ‘The city of the dead antedates the city of the living. In one sense, indeed, the city of the dead is the forerunner, almost the core, of every living city’, for while in prehistoric times nomadic hunter-​gatherers might be dispersed over a wide territory, their dead would occupy a single site: thus cities begin with a burial ground and end as the necropolis of civilisation. The city enlarged all dimensions of life, both material and spiritual: ‘once life was conceived sacrally, as an imitation of the gods, the ancient city itself became, and remained right into Roman times, a simulacrum of heaven’ (Mumford, 86). But ‘Urban man paid for his vast collective expansion of power and environmental control by a contraction of personal life’ (Mumford, 123): property and resources were ascribed to a monarch and dominant minority whose welfare was identified with that of the community, while the majority were subject to forced labour, enslavement, and the monopolisation of food supplies, with planned scarcity used as a means of regimentation. By the mid-​nineteenth century, the industrialised city of laissez-​ faire capitalism ‘was treated not as a public institution, but a private commercial venture’ (idem, 486) to be exploited for maximum profit, producing ‘the most degraded urban environment the world had yet seen’ ( Mumford, 509). From this point onwards, the city no longer imitates heaven but embodies hell, inhabited by the living dead, what Jack London called The People of the Abyss (1903). We probably think of ghosts as the spirits of the dead who return to haunt the living, usually with unpleasant consequences. This definition needs some elaboration and nuancing. By definition, all ghosts that appear in literary texts and other forms of cultural representation are imaginary; whether writers, readers and other creators and consumers of such artefacts believe in the literal existence of spirits in everyday life is therefore not very relevant to this discussion. On the other hand, the textual evidence that evokes the presence of supernatural beings is surely central to any understanding of what purpose they

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122  Christopher Lloyd serve and what their authors have achieved. For example, in nearly all fictional and poetic texts, ghosts clearly belong to a different category (ontologically, epistemologically, ethically) from the ordinary human beings who encounter them. Just what is this category? Of what substance are ghosts made? In practice, many imaginary ghosts are made of little more than words, in the sense that their function is purely metaphorical or allegorical; there is nothing supernatural about the debased existence of the ‘living dead’ observed by witnesses of human misery like Jack London. Nonetheless, as Todorov observes in his authoritative account of the fantastic, the literalisation of metaphors is a defining feature of the genre, as the symbolic acquires its own concrete reality and displaces everyday normality (1970, 82). Historians of the supernatural and paranormal observe that there are many varieties of ghosts, apart from the souls of the human dead who interact with the living. These extend beyond deceased human individuals and include violent energy fields connected to a focus person or object, ghosts of familiar animals or unrecognisable malign presences, as well as metaphorical attributions of ghostliness to scientific discoveries and technological and cultural inventions, such as photography, X-​rays and the cinema. As Roger Clarke notes, ‘There has been a convergence between technology and ghost-​belief for many centuries’ (2013, 275), with contemporary ghosts (and ghost-​hunters) showing an impressive familiarity with high-​tech electronic devices. Clarke asserts that ‘Belief in the paranormal has become a form of decayed religion in secular times: ghosts are the ghosts of religion itself’ (2013, 291). He adds however that various Christian denominations have in past times willingly co-​opted the supernatural; while the Catholic church claimed ghosts were the souls of sinners trapped in purgatory warning the living, Reformation Protestants rejected them as evil spirits. Keith Thomas describes medieval Christendom ‘as a repository of supernatural power which could be dispensed to the faithful to help them in their daily problems’, but insists that even after the Reformation, magic and religion should not be seen as opposed and incompatible systems of belief (1973, 35). Žižek has suggested that the return of the living dead is the ‘fundamental fantasy of contemporary mass culture’; a 2001 Mori poll allegedly found that 38 per cent of British people believed in ghosts and 19 per cent had met one (cited by Davis 2007, 1). Ghost belief has become socially acceptable even to the irreligious, a part of the entertainment and tourist industry, which now define where ghosts are seen: ‘The visitor is now a customer, the place has a brand identity, and the ghost is a desirable lodger rather than an unwelcome guest’ (Davies 2007, 64). Spiritualism is perhaps better able to exploit this fascination than more orthodox religions, whether one sees it as a cynical, commercial enterprise designed to defraud the desperate and gullible or more positively as fulfilling the human desire to make contact with the dead, while much of the prior history of ghosts was about spirits seeking out the living and attempts to prevent or limit their earthly appearance. With spiritualism the tables were turned in more senses than one (Davies 2007, 132).

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Ghosts in the City 123 In recent decades, ghosts have also taken possession of academic critical theory, following Derrida’s coining of the term ‘hantologie’ in Spectres de Marx (1993) (although a vast body of writing on the fantastic and supernatural had already grown up over two centuries since ground-​breaking studies by Romantic critics like Coleridge and Charles Nodier). Ghosts are no longer just literal or metaphorical, but also intertextual, metatextual and deconstructive. As Colin Davis crisply puts it, ‘The ghost pushes at the boundaries of language and thought’ (2007, 13). In a collection of essays on ghosts in French literature and culture (Griffiths and Evans 2009), most of the contributors indeed seem far more interested in spectral literary theory than the paranormal and its manifestations, and certainly unaware of Roger Luckhurst’s warning that the ‘spectral turn’ may be a ‘kind of return of the repressed as empty postmodern pastiche’ (cited by Funk 2013, 159). But such critical speculation may be more illuminating or rewarding than its ostensible object of study: the literary ghost story, what Roger Clarke calls ‘England’s great gift to the world’ (2013, 104). Rereading several dozen ghost stories anthologised by reputable presses by way of background research has proved a somewhat dispiriting experience (Cox 1997; Leithauser 1994), confirming Dickens’s tart observation that ‘ghosts have little originality, and “walk” in a beaten track’, which Luke Thurston glosses as follows: the ghost story is a feast of cliché, its capacity to disturb or innovate fatally hampered by the instant legibility of its stylistic conventions, its ‘beaten track’ of readymade apparitions, non-​mysterious signs and predictable revelations. (Thurston 2014, 50) The editor of an anthology published by Oxford University Press stresses the genre’s consolatory function, to make ‘readers pleasurably afraid’, and warns of the need to avoid the ‘dead hand of formula and custom’ (Cox 1997, xi, xiv). Yet the selection process applied by such compilers is itself curiously parochial and self-​defeating: only Anglophone writers are permitted entry to this smug coterie; some indeed are represented by several stories. The overall impression is of banal ineptitude in plot, style and characterisation: wealthy idlers are visited with retribution of the most implausible sort by ill-​tempered spirits; few stories actually explore ghosts, which are generally a sinister, deadly other, briefly glimpsed, whether human or demonic; the tone is both snobbish and evasive, the effect dull and unmemorable, but also unpleasant and chilling. How refreshing and exhilarating to discover and return to writers who are willing and able to re-​imagine ghosts in innovative and provocative ways and to connect them tellingly to the social, historical world experienced by their readers. If Dickens and Dostoevsky are the great European novelists of the mid nineteenth-​century city (London and St Petersburg), Baudelaire is their equivalent in lyric and prose poetry for Second-​Empire Paris (the authoritarian

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124  Christopher Lloyd and prurient political regime which responded to Les Fleurs du mal by having author and publisher prosecuted and convicted for obscenity in August 1857). The revised edition published in 1861 omitted the banned poems, while adding a new, second section called ‘Tableaux parisiens’ comprising eighteen poems. Baudelaire’s prose poems were published posthumously in a collected edition in 1869. The epilogue to this collection apostrophises the ‘capitale infâme’ as an intoxicating ‘énorme catin /​Dont le charme infernal me rajeunit sans cesse’ (‘Infamous capital… A great whore whose infernal charm rejuvenates me endlessly’, 1970, 232). In his unfinished epilogue to Les Fleurs du mal, Baudelaire famously celebrates the city’s alchemical inspiration in the final line, ‘Tu m’as donné ta boue et j’en ai fait de l’or’ (‘You gave me your mud and of it I made gold’, 1983, 220). He in turn has inspired generations of writers to explore the infernal regions of the city or megalopolis; his contemporary descendants include Lydie Salvayre and Hilary Mantel, although the connections may pass unnoticed by many of their readers. Baudelaire explores the tormented, paradoxical relations between city, self and modernity in highly charged poetic language with a clarity and directness that still seize hold of a receptive twenty-​first century reader (unlike the wilful hermeticism of his symbolist and modernist successors). Victor Brombert enthusiastically presents the poet in ‘Tableaux parisiens’ as ‘the haunted traveler in a world of phantoms, an ailing prophet roaming through the cosmopolis-​inferno’ (1964, 99). Christopher Prendergast remarks more prosaically (but perhaps more accurately) that ‘a great deal of Baudelaire’s city poetry can be read as a transformation of the repertoire of city clichés, the stock of parisianismes deposited in the physiologies and suchlike’ (1995, 139). For example, we tend to think of Baudelaire as the inventor of the flâneur, the alternately passionate and detached investigator of the cityscape who goes ‘botanizing on the asphalt’, as Walter Benjamin neatly remarked (1973, 36); in fact there was a popular journal called Le Flâneur a decade before Les Fleurs du mal appeared. Baudelaire’s city as evoked by Brombert as a place of mystery, chaos and misery, enveloped in vaporous fog, sounds suspiciously Dickensian. But he notes too that it is also a place of sin and spiritual sterility, an embodiment and symbol of a disjointed reality, ironic contrasts and irrevocable alienation. All this appeals greatly to the twenty-​first-​century reader and connects Baudelaire to writers like Salvayre and Mantel who make the consumerist excesses, existential anguish and spiritual desolation of contemporary suburbia a key part of their fictions. Secular materialistic twentieth-​and twenty-​first-​century readers may however be less receptive to the metaphysical substructure of Baudelaire’s work. Walter Benjamin suggests that his ‘Satanism must not be taken too seriously […] it is the only attitude in which Baudelaire was able to sustain a non-​conformist position for any length of time’ (ibid., 23). But more than attitudinising and posturing are involved in the invocation of evil in the title Les Fleurs du mal and so many poems. The epilogue to the prose poems (written in terza rima as a gesture to Dante) also invokes Satan as the ‘patron de ma détresse’, just as the opening poem of Les Fleurs du mal informs the ‘hypocrite lecteur’ that

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Ghosts in the City 125 ‘C’est le Diable qui tient les fils qui nous remuent!’ (‘It’s the Devil who pulls the strings that make us move’, 1970, 232, 155). This is meant to be taken literally rather than as mere provocative Catholic decadentism; an English biography of Baudelaire is called Baudelaire the Damned, because this is exactly how he saw himself (Hemmings 1982). (Reviewers and critics of Mantel’s Beyond Black similarly tend to overlook the demonic elements that are central to this novel and her religious beliefs.) Melvin Zimmerman astutely draws attention to Baudelaire’s preternaturalism, his urge ‘to extend forcibly the limits of the real world’ (Baudelaire 1968, 125). This extension of our perception is indeed one way in which spirits and spectres fit into Baudelaire’s poems and their underlying Christian theology, as the opening lines of ‘Les Sept Vieillards’ announce (the original title was ‘Les Fantômes’, Lloyd 2009): Fourmillante cité, cité pleine de rêves, Où le spectre en plein jour raccroche le passant ! Les mystères partout coulent comme des sèves Dans les canaux étroits du colosse puissant. (Swarming city, city full of dreams, where the spectre accosts the passer-​by in broad daylight! Mysteries flow everywhere like sap in the narrow channels of this mighty colossus) (Baudelaire 1970, 193) Like the beggar and the prostitute, the spectre is a familiar figure in the Parisian tableau, although its demands and message may be fearsome and incomprehensible; the dreams which fill the city belong to a collective unconscious that embraces the living and the dead, the human and the inhuman (the prose poem ‘La Chambre double’ asserts that man-​made artefacts, the mineral and vegetable domains all have their dream-​life and silent language; Baudelaire 1968, 4). Mystery flows through the city’s arteries, sustaining the existence of this super-​ organism in both natural and supernatural dimensions (‘fourmillante’ evokes the fourmilière, the relentless, collective drive and purpose of the ant-​hill, unintelligible to its individual members). The seven ragged and sinister old men whom the poet encounters in the yellow fog become ‘ces spectres baroques’ heading towards an unknown goal, forcing him to flee in terror. Prendergast argues persuasively that, whereas Balzac’s exhaustive inventories of Parisian life can be interpreted by ‘reading essences, fixed identities, into contingent particulars (of place, speech, dress, etc)’ (1995, 2), Baudelaire’s urban poems obstruct the circulation of meaning: Paradoxically, the clearer, cleaner and more uniform the city came to appear physically, the more opaque and mysterious it came to seem socially, as governed by a contingent and chaotic play of forces, transactions and interests, to which one could not attach a correspondingly clear description. (Prendergast 1995, 11)

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126  Christopher Lloyd Or as Richard Lehan observes, ‘Ancient myth gives way to mystery in the modern city’, with a totalising ‘transcendental signifier’ replaced by chance, the uncanny and solipsism (1998, 20, 287). ‘Le Cygne’ (which means literally ‘the swan’ and phonetically ‘le signe’, a sign) shows the poet crossing the Place du Carrousel in Baron Haussmann’s renovated Paris and oppressed by memories of loss, exile and defeat, represented by a series of mythical, imaginary or historical figures who were all displaced from their station: the political exile Victor Hugo; the captive Andromache after the fall of Troy; the caged swan; Ovid; a consumptive negress; and many others left unnamed. This mapping of urban desolation onto frustrated desires, haunting memories, tormented mourning and despair closely matches the environment and mood experienced by the central characters in Lydie Salvayre’s La Compagnie des spectres (1997) and Hilary Mantel’s Beyond Black (2005). It is true that Baudelaire’s poetic protagonist also experiences moments of intense joy and transcendence, denied to the women in these novels, who remain prisoners of their demons both literally and figuratively. But Baudelairean rapture is as transient as Paris or Troy: the opening reverie of the prose poem ‘La Chambre double’ is effaced by the violent intrusion of the temporal world in the form of a belligerent spectre who is identified as ‘un huissier qui vient me torturer au nom de la loi’ (‘a bailiff come to torture me in the name of the law’, Baudelaire 1968, 5). This intrusion by an officer of the law into private space and fantasies is also the scenario employed in La Compagnie des spectres (translated by Christopher Woodall as The Company of Ghosts in 2006), although in a much extended form and in the unromantic setting of a downmarket high-​rise apartment building in the Parisian suburb of Créteil. In fact the location is given precisely as the twelfth floor of 10 cité des Acacias, flat 230: this pointed shift from the centre to the periphery of the metropolis is thematically and socially significant in both Salvayre’s and Mantel’s novels, and merits brief explanatory comment. If the suburb was originally ‘a segregated community, set apart from the city’ (Mumford 1991, 561), the vast expansion of the suburban belt in our time has created ‘a low-​grade uniform environment from which escape is impossible’ (idem, 553). For Anglo-​ Americans, suburbia connotes the loss of community, the intensification of isolation and distress, and ‘favours silent conformity, not rebellion or counter-​attack’ (idem, 584). In France, ‘les banlieues’ have more violent connotations. Even in medieval times, the population outwith the city walls was often ‘turbulent’ and ‘marginal both spatially and socially’; Haussmann’s clearance of slums in central Paris in the 1860s and their replacement by wide boulevards allowed both modernisation and the removal of undesirable classes to the edge of the city (though it failed to forestall the revolutionary uprising of the Paris Commune in 1871, after Napoleon III’s defeat by Prussia). After the Second World War, there was a vast expansion of the suburbs beyond the ring road built on the 1840 fortifications, with ten per cent of the population accommodated in grands ensembles, serried ranks of tower blocks built on vacant land in areas often lacking facilities and transport. That said, Créteil, which is situated ten kilometres south-​east

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Ghosts in the City 127 of the Paris boundary in the Val-​de-​Marne, was actually well developed, ‘on a relatively human scale’, with a shopping centre, businesses and a university accessible by the RER railway; it was ‘a new town in all but name’ (Winchester 1993, 196). In fact it is a close equivalent of the bland, respectable dormitory towns in which Mantel’s aspirational medium Alison and her associate Colette establish their household. The spectres which accompany the protagonists of Salvayre’s novel, however, come from the historical past, rather than the contemporary urban environment as they do in Beyond Black. They are symbols or symptoms of the characters’ traumatic experiences and delusions, rather than autonomous supernatural entities, whereas in Mantel’s novel they arguably belong to all three categories. For all their inventive eccentricity and outlandish events, both novels are rooted in mundane domesticity and their authors’ personal circumstances. Lydie Salvayre was born in 1948 and raised as Lydie Arjona in south-​west France, by parents who were Spanish republicans exiled after Franco’s victory. The narrator of La Compagnie des spectres has a Spanish father, while her grandmother’s household during the German occupation includes Filomena, another refugee. After studying literature then medicine at Toulouse University, Salvayre qualified and practised as a psychiatrist in Marseille. She began writing novels and plays in the late 1970s. Her Goncourt Prize-​winning novel Pas pleurer (2014) is based on her mother’s experiences as an ‘étrangère mal intégrée’ (‘poorly integrated foreigner’; interview by Marianne Grosjean, Tribune de Genève, 5 November 2014) and other accounts of atrocities committed during the civil war. Critics have observed that most of Salvayre’s writing gives voice to socially deprived but impassioned characters who express their anguished alienation (from themselves, others, and society in general) in a series of obsessive monologues written in a polyphonic style, the rhetorical and emotional impact of which is difficult to convey at second hand (whether by summary, brief quotation or translation; see, for example, SubStance). La Compagnie des spectres is notionally recounted from the perspective of Louisiane, an unemployed teenager living as a virtual recluse with her elderly mother, Rose Mélie, whom she considers to be insane. In practice, the book intertwines Louisiane’s egocentric but lucid, expository monologue with the interminable ranting of her mother (who effectively exists in a different temporal and perceptual plane) and the more laconic, pragmatic utterances of the huissier, Maître Echinard (whose inner life remains unknown here, although he is caricatured as a personification of mindless officialdom in a monologue which was published separately as Quelques conseils aux élèves huissiers in 1997). None of these three characters displays any real sympathy or understanding for each other, remaining trapped within their obsessive, solipsistic behaviours. Louisiane’s mother never physically leaves the flat and there is no objective presentation of the contemporary world outside. Despite the squalor, poverty and emotional deprivation in which they live, both women have an unusual awareness of the Greco-​Roman and European classics and an enhanced vocabulary, which are deployed with a verve and humour that make

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128  Christopher Lloyd the text both aesthetically appealing and highly implausible. Thus Louisiane remarks of the squalid kitchen, ‘tout n’était que désordre et saleté, crasse, indigence et pauvreté’ (‘All was disorder and dirt, filth, indigence and poverty’, [1997] 2013, 165), parodying the famous refrain to Baudelaire’s ‘L’Invitation au voyage’: ‘Là, tout n’est qu’ordre et beauté, /​Luxe, calme et volupté’ (‘Everything there is order and beauty, luxury, calm and delight’, 1970, 107). Her mother Rose has inherited her own mother’s wartime trauma, following the brutal murder of her older brother Jean in the village of Venerque in south-​western France in March 1943. The killers were local members of the Milice, a notorious paramilitary organisation established by the French government in the closing years of the German occupation, which targeted in particular anyone suspected of resistance to the collaborationist regime. Rose constantly relives this event in graphic detail (although she did not witness it directly), and over fifty years later believes that Marshal Pétain’s government is still in power, conflating past and present and identifying authority figures like the bailiff as members of the militia. Pétain has become ‘Putain’: an insulting pun playing on the notion that collaboration was a form of prostitution, but also a transformation of the historical personage into a monstrous accretion of evil figures. Although Louisiane rejects these delusions, she admits that ‘ma mere […] m’a infusé cette peur. J’ai peur des hommes, j’ai peur de la nuit où circulent les spectres, j’ai peur du maréchal Putain que ma mère croit vivant’ (‘My mother has infused this fear in me. I’m afraid of men, I’m afraid of the night when spectres roam, I’m afraid of Marshal Putain who my mother believes is alive’). Although her mother’s spectres have become hers, Louisiane is aware that Rose embroiders the past, inventing or incorporating into her ‘fable funèbre’ (‘grim fable’) new details which she gleans from television and the press. Their disembodied existence crushed by toxic memories has made both women into shadows; Louisiane wonders whether the bailiff’s lack of emotional reactions as he doggedly inventories their wretched possessions is a sign that he too is dead, ‘persévérant résolument dans son non-​être’ (‘resolutely persevering in his non-​being’, [1997] 2013, 40 – ​4 1, 72, 126, 133). This metaphorical company of ghosts, however, has no autonomous existence beyond its alienated subjects. Salvayre adopts a medicalised, Freudian stance towards the paranormal, namely that demons and spectres are ‘the projection of mental entities into the external world’ (Freud 1961, 72). Even the transmission of historical trauma across three generations is accredited by psychoanalysts like Abraham and Torok, who use the term ‘phantoms’ to describe ‘the presence of a dead ancestor in the living Ego, still intent on preventing its traumatic and usually shameful secrets from coming to light’ (Davis 2007, 10), although Salvayre’s novel suggests that rationalising and exorcising the ghost in the mind may be a complete failure as a therapeutic process. Dame Hilary Mantel, on the other hand, is far more interested in what exists Beyond Black, in a possible afterlife, and takes some pleasure in portraying doctors and other members of the so-​called caring professions as self-​important, callous and incompetent.

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Ghosts in the City 129 Following her Booker prize winning fictions about Thomas Cromwell, Wolf Hall (2009) and Bring Up the Bodies (2012), memorably dramatised by the BBC in 2015, Mantel is mainly perceived as an historical novelist, although most of her previous work depicted troubled characters living in contemporary England and elsewhere (their troubles sometimes include the supernatural). Her first published novel, Every Day is Mother’s Day (1985), has a plot that is curiously similar to La Compagnie des spectres, since it too is about a reclusive mother and daughter barricaded in a crumbling suburban home and living out a folie à deux. The mother Evelyn is a medium who believes the house is haunted, although what she takes as signs of evil spirits are actually planted by her daughter, who is apparently feigning mental disability after suffering years of abuse. Evelyn’s reports to clients on the afterlife are invariably so grim that she has chosen to retire; she informs a widowed client that ‘your husband Arthur is roasting in some unspeakable hell’ (Mantel 2001, 17). Beyond Black (2005) picks up these themes and configurations, with a maturity and subtlety that replace the melodramatic bleakness of the earlier novel, while retaining its mordant humour. Mantel has written and spoken informatively and interestingly about her formation and attitude towards religion and spiritualism. To judge from her memoir, Giving up the Ghost (2004), her own childhood and upbringing in northern England were as harrowing and dysfunctional as those of her characters. For decades she struggled with a life-​threatening, misdiagnosed illness and uncontrollable weight gain; since early childhood she suffered visions, of ‘formless, borderless evil’ in the back garden or of her deceased stepfather (whose surname she adopted), adding ‘I don’t know whether, at such vulnerable times, I  see more than is there; or if things are there, that normally I don’t see’. Ghosts, or more accurately the traces and glimpses we get of them, she suggests, are the inexplicable minor disruptions and anomalies, ‘the tags and rags of everyday life’. Having abandoned Roman Catholicism after a convent schooling described as ‘a sort of gulag’ (2010, 107, 2, 234, 119), she attended psychic séances that called up the dead, which hovered ‘between therapy, art and entertainment’ (2008, 5), observing of spiritualism, ‘All this –​as a belief system –​I find threatening, unlikely, and slightly repulsive’ (2005, 10 postscript). Discussing the problem of resuscitating personages like Thomas Cromwell, whose inner life is completely unknown and has been effectively effaced from the historical record, Mantel asserts that, for the novelist unleashing her imagination, ‘evidence is lying all around us and we just don’t see it’ (2015); the same might be said of the supernatural. Beyond Black has attracted sympathetic reviews and critical readings, although most critics tend to focus on the book’s social comedy and dextrous satire of contemporary consumerist culture and suburban angst, rather than the dark and extremely disturbing secrets suggested by the title. Thus Victoria Stewart argues that spiritualism’s appeal is practical and psychological rather than religious, with its focus on the medium’s performance and the domestic here-​and-​now (2009). Taking this further, Wolfgang Funk affirms we are shown ‘a thoroughly secular England and the ghosts here are free from connection to

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130  Christopher Lloyd any religious doctrine whatsoever’ (2013, 155). This line of argument overlooks the fact that secularism and ghosts are somewhat unlikely companions, that spiritualism is undeniably a form of religion by most accepted definitions of transcendental belief systems, and that some of its beliefs (particularly in an afterlife and the possibility of salvation and damnation) overlap with orthodox Christianity. Many of the spirits glimpsed in the novel seem to exist in a purgatorial limbo, suspended between their earthly existence and an unknown future. The three central characters in the novel are the successful but clinically obese medium and clairvoyant Alison, her efficient, slender but lovelorn business manager Colette, and Alison’s spirit guide Morris (a misshapen and malevolent ghost, formerly a member of a criminal gang engaged in trafficking Alison’s mother and other women). Colette is never entirely convinced that Morris and his deceased associates really exist; she recalls the following conversation with Alison: Where’s God, she had said to Al, where’s God in all this? And Al had said, Morris says he’s never seen God. He doesn’t get out much. But he says he’s seen the devil, he says he’s on first-​name terms with him, he claims he beat him at darts once. (Mantel 2005, 174) Alison doubts that Morris could beat anyone at darts. But the homely joke and suggestion Morris is lying perhaps distract our attention from various clues planted throughout the novel about Alison’s origins and the theology of the other side. As she retrieves her horrific memories of childhood abuse, Alison recalls meeting Morris’s then living associate Nick, who was ‘in a league of his own’ for evil (Mantel 2005, 121). When Morris and his fiendish gang return from the dead to torment her, Morris tells her that Nick ‘is in charge of the whole blooming world […] We have only been under pupillage with the best’ (Mantel 2005, 387). In a private conversation, the fiends realise that Alison is the daughter of ‘the great man himself!’ (Mantel 2005, 446). Funk is more persuasive when he argues that Mantel’s ‘stories of cultural haunting’ replace our normal ‘reality principle’ with ‘acceptance of uncertainty, of liminal phenomena’, although he either forgets or is unaware that Todorov proposed this as the defining feature of the fantastic two decades before Derrida. Like Rose Mélie, Alison is certainly suffering from unwelcome ‘revisitations of the repressed, intrusions of an un-​reprocessed past into the unsuspecting present’ (2013, 150, 156), which recalls Freud’s conceptualisation of the uncanny. But Freud argues that the repressed returns in a fearsome, unrecognisable form, and regards the supernatural as delusory, to be effaced by rational analysis; whereas Alison recognises the fiends as revenants, even if she has repressed the horrific incidents in which they were involved. Todorov’s argument that the fantastic is sustained by leaving characters and readers in a state of epistemological uncertainty and interpretive hesitation is in fact skilfully illustrated by the narrative economy of Beyond Black. Either Alison’s visions of other-​worldly beings are a symptom of insanity, or they are proof

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Ghosts in the City 131 that there is another dimension beyond the material world which is partially accessible to a few living humans able to reach beyond mundane reality. The text offers us both possibilities, while making considerable effort to make the second option more credible. This too matches a common critical perception of the fantastic, as offered for example by Roger Caillois: ‘Le fantastique suppose la solidité du monde réel, mais pour mieux la ravager’ (‘the fantastic presupposes the solidity of the real world, but in order to destroy it more effectively’). The ‘margin of uncertainty’ requires the accumulation of realistic details to make its subversion of normality plausible (1966, 19, 40). In fact, characters and their domestic environment have a much stronger phenomenological presence in Beyond Black than in the Cromwell books (where they are curiously disembodied and minimalised, unlike their equivalents in the TV adaption or the more conventional Tudor novels of C.J. Sansom). Alison’s obesity makes her a woman who seemed to fill a room, even when she wasn’t in it […] she needed cake and chocolate bars […] to pad her flesh and keep her from the pinching of the dead, their peevish nipping and needle teeth. (Mantel 2005, 3) Her scent Je reviens no doubt reinforces this aura (and she has prudently changed her name from Cheetham to Hart). She tells audiences to view her as an ‘answering machine’ (Mantel 2005, 11), passing on phone messages from the dead, but the consoling, idealised account of the spirit world which she gives to clients omits its more sinister aspects; ‘the true nature of the place beyond black’ (Mantel 2005, 26) is unspeakable, as is her own past, ‘an outline, a black bulk against black air’ (Mantel 2005, 194). She admits that she (re)creates the fiends in her mind, probably because when living, ‘They took out my will and put in their own’ (Mantel 2005, 373). Does this make them illusory? Ordinary people are generally impervious to the dead spirits which surround them, even when they notice their footprints, ‘prints from feet that were joined to no ordinary leg’ (Mantel 2005, 409); other traces include everyday material objects which transit back and forth between this world and the next. Colette appears to have a fractured telephone conversation with her recently deceased mother-​in-​law. Alison, on the other hand, is hypersensitive to the ‘underscape’, the psychic geography of her suburban estate and the denatured towns with their population of ‘the bewildered dead clustered among the skips outside the burger bars’ (Mantel 2005, 266). As a child, she has visions of mutilated body parts, such as a decapitated head or an eyeball rolling down the street like a marble, although she is unable to see Gloria, her mother’s spirit companion, the ghost of a girl murdered by Morris and co (and doubts her mother’s sanity). The final chapter restores some memories of Alison’s appalling childhood (which include her suffering, witnessing or committing rape, sadistic torture, murder, blinding and castration), and indeed of previous reincarnations that ended in her violent death. Perhaps unaware of her probable diabolical

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132  Christopher Lloyd parentage (which is recognised by the fiends in her absence), she resumes her peripatetic career with two more amenable spirit companions who enjoy the endless cycle of the orbital motorway, while Colette returns to her moronic ex-​husband  Gavin. Catherine Spooner situates Beyond Black in a lineage of dystopian psycho-​ geographers like J.G. Ballard, Will Self and Iain Sinclair, who map the existential horrors of non-​places, a suburban ‘landscape in which the living have become indistinguishable from the dead’ (2010, 80). Sinclair’s epic travelogue London Orbital (2002) recounts a pedestrian circumnavigation of the M25, the peripheral motorway that marks the ‘point where London loses it, gives up its ghosts’ (2003, 3). Following Sinclair, the opening chapter of Beyond Black also invokes the suburban wasteland as a liminal zone both geographically and psychically, with its rejects, anomalies and undead creatures, beyond which we can rediscover Baudelaire, as we can too in the novel’s muted Satanism. The urban ghosts of Baudelaire, Salvayre and Mantel are certainly bleak figures, trapped between past and present, life and the hereafter, victims or perpetrators of inhuman atrocities, symbols of individual despair or malevolent historical destiny. But they also offer all too convincing evidence that spirits remain an integral part of humanity’s history and psyche, and that imaginatively at least our encounter with them can be enriching and illuminating.

Works Cited Baudelaire, Charles. 1961. Les Fleurs du mal. Paris: Garnier. —​—​—​. 1968. Petits poèmes en prose. Edited by Melvin Zimmerman. Manchester: Manchester University Press. —​—​—​. 1970. Selected verse. Translated by Francis Scarfe. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Benjamin, Walter. 1973. Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism. Translated by Harry Zohn. London: NLB. Brombert, Victor. 1964. ‘Baudelaire: City Images and the “Dream of Stone” ’. Yale French Studies, no. 32: 99– ​105. Caillois, Roger. 1966. Images, images: Essais sur le rôle et les pouvoirs de l’imagination. Paris: Corti. Clarke, Roger. 2013. A Natural History of Ghosts: 500 Years of Hunting for Proof. London: Penguin. Cox, Michael, ed. 1997. The Oxford Book of Twentieth-​Century Ghost Stories. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Davies, Owen. 2007. The Haunted: A Social History of Ghosts. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Davis, Colin. 2007. Haunted Subjects: Deconstruction, Psychoanalysis and the Return of the Dead. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Derrida, Jacques. 1993. Spectres de Marx: L’état de la dette, le travail du deuil et la nouvelle Internationale. Paris: Éditions Galilée. Freud, Sigmund. 1955. ‘The Uncanny’. In The Complete Psychological Works, translated by James Strachey, 17:219– 5 ​ 2. London: Hogarth Press. —​ —​ —​ . 1961. ‘A Seventeenth-​ Century Demonological Neurosis’. In The Complete Psychological Works, translated by James Strachey, 19:67–​106. London: Hogarth Press.

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Ghosts in the City 133 Funk, Wolfgang. 2013. ‘Ghosts of Postmodernity: Spectral Epistemology and Haunting in Hilary Mantel’s Fludd and Beyond Black’. In Twenty-​First Century Fiction: What Happens Now, edited by Siân Helen Adiseshiah, 147–​61. Houndmills: Macmillan. Griffiths, Kate, and David Evans, eds. 2009. Haunting Presences: Ghosts in French Literature and Culture. Cardiff: University of Wales Press. Hemmings, F.W.J. 1982. Baudelaire the Damned. London: Hamish Hamilton. Lehan, Richard. 1998. The City in Literature: An Intellectual and Cultural History. Berkeley: University of California Press. Leithauser, Brad, ed. 1994. The Norton Book of Ghost Stories. New York: Norton. Lloyd, Rosemary. 2009. Baudelaire’s World. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. London, Jack, The People of the Abyss. London: Journeyman Press, 1992. Mantel, Hilary. 2001. Every Day Is Mother’s Day. Bath: Hall & Chivers Press. —​—​—​. 2005. Beyond Black. London: Harper Perennial. —​—​—​. 2008. ‘That Wilting Flower’. London Review of Books, no. 30 (24 January 2008): 3–​6. —​—​—​. 2010. Giving up the Ghost: A Memoir. London: Harper Perennial. —​ —​ —​ . 2015. ‘Art of Fiction No. 226: Interview with Mona Simpson’. The Paris Review, no.  212. https://​www.theparisreview.org/​interviews/​6360/​ art-​of-​fiction-​no-​226-​hilary-​mantel. Mumford, Lewis. 1991. The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. Prendergast, Christopher. 1995. Paris and the Nineteenth Century. Oxford: Blackwell. Salvayre, Lydie. 2006. The Company of Ghosts: Followed by Some Useful Advice for Apprentice Process-​Servers. Translated by Christopher Woodall. London: Dalkey Archive Press. —​—​—​. (1997) 2013. La compagnie des spectres. Paris: Seuil. Sinclair, Iain. (2002) 2003. London Orbital: A Walk around the M25. London: Penguin. Spooner, Catherine. 2010. ‘ “That Eventless Realm”: Hilary Mantel’s Beyond Black and the Ghosts of the M25’. In London Gothic: Place, Space and the Gothic Imagination, edited by Anne Veronica Witchard and Lawrence Phillips, 80–​90. London: Continuum. SubStance, special section on Lydie Salvayre, 33, no 2 (2004): 1–​61. Stewart, Victoria. 2009. ‘A Word in Your Ear: Mediumship and Subjectivity in Hilary Mantel’s Beyond Black’. Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 50 (3): 293–​312. Thomas, Keith. 1973. Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies in Popular Beliefs in Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century England. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Thurston, Luke. 2014. Literary Ghosts from the Victorians to Modernism: The Haunting Interval. London: Routledge. Todorov, Tzvetan. 1970. Introduction à la littérature fantastique. Paris: Éditions du Seuil. Winchester, Hilary P. M. 1993. Contemporary France. Harlow: Longman.

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10  Postscript –​ Disavowing Disappointment in the Face of Ghosts From Keats’s ‘Destructive Element’ to Hannah Arendt’s Reading of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness or Hegel’s Dialectics as Colonialism’s Revenant in Twentieth-​Century Totalitarianism Michael Mack

Keats’s Ghost of an Eternal Destruction at Sea and the Modernism of Joseph Conrad Keats’s romantic sense of avowed disappointment with ideas and ideals in their empirically real historical formations in as-​yet unexplored spectral ways informs a key trope of modernism: that of the destructive element. In his seminal study The Destructive Element: A Study of Modern Writers and Beliefs Stephen Spender explores modernist writers  –​with a main focus on Henry James –​under what I would call the trope of disappointment. The phrase ‘the destructive element’ derives from the Stein episode of Joseph Conrad’s early twentieth-​century novel Lord Jim. Crucially the destructive element that gives rise to a modernist and postmodernist sense of disappointment –​either avowed or disavowed –​in ways that are as yet undiscovered grows out of romanticism’s disillusionment with idealism, or, more precisely, with what Keats calls in his epistle poem known as ‘To J. H. Reynolds, Esq.’ the elemental heart ‘of an eternal fierce destruction’ (Keats 1970, 325). Conrad would transform this romantic trope of destructive disillusionment with idealism into a key phrase for Spender’s momentous definition of the modern and its ongoing reach beyond postmodernity. Why is Spender’s approach to modernism still relevant for our contemporary situation? Because it describes an ongoing public concern with a post-​idealist, post-​romantic and post-​modern form of the void which Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi first brought to scandalous attention in the ghostly form of nihilism, or, in other words, the assumed atheism and fatalism of Spinoza’s unceasing spectre-​ like haunting of Germany and Europe at large (Mack 2010, 2–​3). Spender calls this ghostly presence of nihilism ‘the consciousness of a void in the present’ (Spender 1935, 15). Far from being an isolated issue for a few troubled and perhaps haunted individuals, this disappointed consciousness of a spiritual and moral void has become a public issue, a matter of politics since the mid-​thirties

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Postscript – Disavowing Disappointment 135 of the last century. Spender implies that this modern issue may contaminate in haunted ways traditional separations between past and present. Spender’s effort to defend the new (modernism) from the old (romanticism and perhaps realism) seems to be itself an anxious manifestation of unacknowledged disappointment. His avowed focus on the new represses an awareness of the actual ghostly presence of the old (literally Keats’s romantic haunting of ‘eternal fierce destruction’ informing Conrad’s modernist ‘destructive element’): What interests me here is what writers write about, the subjects of literature to-​day. So that in the last section I am not defending the young writers from the old writers, I am defending what is, in the widest sense, the political or the political-​moral subject in writing. To me the lesson of writers like James, Yeats, Eliot and Lawrence is that they are all approaching in different ways, and with varying success, the same political subject. Their subject may sometimes seem impossible, for in the chaos of unbelief the time lacks, or has seemed to lack, all moral consistency. (Spender 1935, 15) Spender is at pains to demarcate the radical break of the contemporary, the new, the modern and modernist. There is a sense of an heroic mission of the impossible to deal with this perceived utter novelty of a political situation which is that of emptiness, of a void, left behind by the destructive work of what Jacobi first coins ‘nihilism’ (Gillespie 1996, 65–​101) at the end of the eighteenth (and not in Spender’s early twentieth) century. J. Hillis Miller has traced the ways in which post medieval literature recorded the increasing absence of a communion with nature and God, long before Spender’s writing about a modern void. According to Miller there is a growing divide between the promises of culture and an isolated, empty reality: Reality is conceived of as gross, heavy, and meaningless, the desert of the world before man. But the values which man has created by transforming the world into his own image are mere subjective illusions. They exist only as fragile forms of consciousness, ready at any moment to evaporate, leaving man face to face once more with the desolation of reality. Culture in all its forms is the insubstantial foam upon a great ocean of shapeless matter. (Miller 1963, 11) The modern city is the symbol of this meaningless reality of humanity’s own, anthropocentric making: ‘The city is the literal representation of the progressive humanization of the world’ (Miller 1963, 5). Miller does not take into account the non-​anthropocentric, Spinozist promise of a new world in which old, religiously sanctioned hierarchies and their accompanying injustices and inequalities to do with gender, class and so forth were going to gradually disappear (as indeed they have done in parts of our modern world). Reality is not so much disillusioned but disappointed with such social promises (such as in the French Revolution and in Napoleon becoming a new

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136  Michael Mack emperor), while still keeping them alive so that Jacobi’s spectre of Spinoza reappears as the spectre of communism in Marx’s famous mid-​nineteenth-​ century manifesto (Mack 2010). Critics and theorists (apart from Laura Quinney’s more specialized study of the formal aspects in The Poetics of Disappointment) have so far not discovered a sense of avowed disappointment with these social rather than religious developments, and that not in Spender’s heyday of modernism but at the height of second-​generation romanticism. Miller (1963) and McGann (1985) refrain from exploring the modernist starkness of this sense of disappointment in a romantic poet such as Keats. On the contrary, for Miller romanticism establishes a return to a transcendent God in the form of the artist or the poet: ‘The romantics still believe in God, and they find his absence intolerable. At all costs they must attempt to re-​ establish communication’ (Miller 1963, 13). After the collapse of established, traditional forms of religion, ‘romanticism therefore defines the artist as the creator or discoverer of hitherto unapprehended symbols, symbols which establish a new relation, across the gap, between man and God’ (Miller 1963, 13). However, these new relations are quite tenuous and, more importantly, this precariousness informs the poetic consciousness of romanticism. Crucially, what Miller characterizes as the romantic poet’s role as ‘discoverer’ concerns a void that Spender anachronistically singles out as Conrad’s destructive element, which he places at the foundation of the problematic that modernism is struggling with. This assumed radically new destructive element in actual fact derives from Keats’s romantic poem ‘To J.  H. Reynolds Esq.’ (1818). The modern and the modernist is not that new or modern: paradoxically novelty turns out to be that of a revenant, or return of an old, already last-​century, romantic sight of a dark rather than divine discovery. In Conrad’s destructive element we indeed witness the return of Keats’s ghost. At the end of his poem ‘To J. H. Reynolds Esquire’, Keats establishes a setting with which we are by now familiar from Conrad’s Marlow narrations: that of a home setting. Heart of Darkness opens with Marlow’s London home setting and then moves on to a sea-bound scene. Likewise, in Keats’s poem the home opens up, outward, to the destructive force of the sea: […] I was at home, And should have been most happy, but I saw Too far into the sea –​where every maw The greater on the less feeds evermore, — But I saw too distinct into the core Of an eternal fierce destruction, And so from happiness I far was gone. Still I am sick of it; and though today I have gathered young spring-​leaves, and flowers gay Of periwinkle and wild strawberry Still do I that most fierce destruction see: The shark at savage prey, the hawk at pounce,

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Postscript – Disavowing Disappointment 137 The gentle robin, like a pard, or ounce, Ravening a worm […] (Keats 1970, 325) This long passage is worth quoting at length in order to bring to the fore the implicit sense of haunting that animates it. The at-​home opening promises fulfilment and happiness (‘should have been most happy’) which then undergoes a sense of rude disappointment with the experience of a too-​deep sight of the destruction at sea. The ensuing rhyme of evermore with core highlights the relentless character of an ever-​increasing discovery and awareness of a destructive core rather than a benign revelation at the heart of creation. The core of existence, what Conrad would later call its element, is an ‘eternal fierce destruction’. This discovery renders the home ghostly and uncanny. As part of this destructive, ghostly visitation, the promise of happiness evaporates: ‘And so from happiness I far was gone’. The poetic self has fallen under what could be called the modern, spectral enthrallment of disenchantment. Acknowledging the presence of this romantic and modern spell of disenchantment amounts to avowing of a sense of disappointment from Keats’s promise of happiness to the rude awakening in the ghostly haunting or the empirical destruction at work at sea, which the poetic voice then defines as its discovery of the true elemental core of life and nature. Such discovery does not elevate. It literally sickens Keats’s poetic voice, and in a haunting way that does not seem to let go: ‘Still I am sick of it; […] Still I do that most fierce destruction see’. The ‘Still’ anaphora reinforces the temporal dimension of a haunting that persists over time. There is also a sense of pain that comes across in the elongated, piercing alliterations in the cumulative sound pattern of ‘fierce’, ‘still’, ‘destruction’ and ‘see’. Haunting here is clearly an experience of pain and disappointment, thwarting the promise of either happiness or a cure from suffering the sight of destruction’s core through the gathering of flowers. The romantic promise symbolized by flowers here radically disintegrates into what Conrad’s Stein calls ‘the destructive element’ (Conrad 1986, 200).

Destruction Turned Historical and Dialectical: Hannah Arendt’s Reading of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness Conrad practises a destructive deflation of lofty ideas and romantic promises in an ironic style of writing that leaves the reader on dangerous, shifting ground. The natural sense of touch here transmogrifies into a spectral one of fascination with ghostly presences of disappointment which, in yet another set of disturbing swerves, then have to rely on the idealism of ideas for their uneasy and unconvincing exorcism: Oh, I wasn’t touched. I was fascinated. It was as though a veil had been rent. I saw on the ivory face the expression of sombre pride, of ruthless

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138  Michael Mack power, of craven terror –​of an intense and hopeless despair. Did he [i.e. Kurtz] live his life again in every detail of desire, temptation, and surrender during that supreme moment of complete knowledge? He cried in a whisper at some image, at some vision –​he cried twice, a cry that was no more than a breath –​ The horror! The horror. (Conrad 1973, 111) Ambivalence pervades this quotation as irony does in fact set the tone for the whole texture of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. This stylistic or tonal awareness has so far evaded the theoretical and critical consensus. Indeed, Conrad’s novella serves as mouthpiece for various ideological, philosophical and political or historical positions. To name the most striking of these: as a defence of racism (Achebe 2006) or as its refutation (Said 1994); as a metaphysical revelation of the violence and destruction inherent to the West’s metaphysics (Lacoue-​Labarthe 2012); and, more radically still, as a general apocalyptical uncovering of ‘horror’ as a universal ontology, which is not limited to one political or philosophical tradition such as that of the Occident, as argued by Lacoue-​Labarthe (Miller 2012). What has evaded the critical consensus, however, is the irony inherent in Conrad’s trope of disappointment, which proclaims nothing while promulgating a plethora of possible meanings ranging from imperialism’s pride and its ‘ruthless power’ to the ‘craven terror’ it inflicts on its subjects. All these manifestations ironically withdraw into the meaninglessness of annulled promises in Kurtz’s ‘hopeless despair’. Irony is indeed the Heart of Darkness’s ‘destructive element’. Being destructive, it is constructive precisely through its destruction of myths of idealism, imperialism and progress. It is this diminution, if not extinction of meaning, which displaces Kurtz’s cry into ‘no more than a breath’ of spectral horror, whose real presence is as ambivalent as anything else about Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. Conrad’s novel immediately withdraws what it has put forward. This is how ambivalence and irony work: ‘Irony is acknowledged concealment’ (Nehamas 1998, 67). What irony conceals might be nothing, a void: ‘Irony often communicates that only a part of a picture is visible to an audience, but it does not always entail that the speaker sees the whole. Sometimes it does not even imply that the whole picture exists’ (Nehamas 1998, 67). The uncertainty of whether there is any meaning or reality to be discovered characterizes the ironic style of narration which is that of Conrad’s Marlow. Lacoue-​Labarthe accurately explores how the West partakes of what it projects as its Other: ‘But this horror is less the de facto horror of savagery than the power of fascination that savagery exerts over the ‘civilized’ who suddenly recognizes the ‘void’ upon which their will to ward off the horror rests –​or fails to rest. It is its own horror that the West seeks to dispel’ (Lacoue-​Labarthe 2012, 119). Yet, even this horror of the West dissipates into an exorcism of a ‘saving idea’. The spectral haunting of Kurtz’s horror evaporates with the apparition of another fleeting and ironically self-​cancelling ghostly presence, of the ‘redeeming idea’: ‘What redeems it is the idea only’ (Conrad 1973, 32). Conrad’s Marlow

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Postscript – Disavowing Disappointment 139 avows disappointment with Kurtz’s genocidal colonialism (‘exterminate all the brutes’  –​Conrad 1973, 87)  while at the same time disavowing it, again creating the sense of ironically concealing an empty entity. Idealism paradoxically –​or, in other words, in a self-​cancelling manner –​serves to justify the horror of exterminatory conquests of the Other: The conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter nose than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much. What redeems it is the idea only. An idea at the back of it: not a sentimental pretence but an idea: and an unselfish belief in the idea –​something you can set up, and bow down before, and offer sacrifice to. (Conrad 1973, 31–​32) As in Keats’s sight far into the destruction at sea, here we encounter an excessive look: here, however, into the depth of human destruction rather than animal feeding habits. Emblematic of the trope of disappointment, the passage pulls the rug from under what it is saying: colonial occupation and theft thus serves to realize the unselfish belief in the idea behind such extremely selfish action. Keats’s sight far into the destruction at sea here turns into an excessive look into the horrors of colonialism. The idea itself turns into a superstition, a fetish of sorts before whom one bows down to ‘offer sacrifice’. Progress contaminates with what is its supposed opposite and the assumed rationalism of idealism evaporates in the atavistic practice of sacrifice. Via the preceding analysis of an empty kernel at the heart of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, which ironically promises to reveal what it conceals only to continuously cancel or withdraw the meaning which has been put forward, idealism mutates into colonial exploitation as well as unlimited selfishness, and the progress (of rationalism and ideas) appears to be a radical regression. Indeed, rationalism turns out to be the superstition of occultism. The enlightener Kurtz –​the ‘prodigy’ and ‘an emissary of pity, and science, and progress’ (Conrad 1973, 55) –​is an irrational believer in ghosts. As Jonathan Dollimore has recently argued, Conrad indeed follows Max Nordau’s famous theory of degeneration: ‘In Heart of Darkness, the over-​civilized is seen to have an affinity with the excesses of the primitive. Kurtz embodies the terrible paradox that contemporary degeneration theorists like Max Nordau tried to explain but only exacerbated, namely that civilization and progress seem to engender their own regression and ruin’ (Dollimore 2012, 68). Dollimore here avoids drawing the consequences from Conrad’s radically ironic cancellation of meaning: it is not so much that progress over-​refines itself and thereby mutates into its opposite, but that it is its opposite. This is precisely the topic of Heart of Darkness: how the light of Enlightenment is at the same time its self-​cancellation or withdrawal into darkness. The promise of modernity is simultaneously its disavowed disappointment. This is the significance of the connection between Conrad’s novella and Nordau’s degeneration theory. As Jason A.  Josephson-​ Storm has

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140  Michael Mack recently shown, the modern was indeed enamoured with the atavism of spiritualism and its belief in ghosts: ‘In one significant respect, though, Nordau was right –​not in his idea of degeneration, but in his simpler observation that Western Europe was in the midst of an occult revival. […] In late nineteenth-​ century England, full-​blown spiritualist movements and occult revivals were in place’ (Josephson-​Storm 2017, 184). This paradoxical –​and from a truly rationalist perspective, disappointing –​cohabitation of the scientific with the occult arises from the sobering, non-​anthropocentric, Spinozist implications of Darwin’s discovery of evolution: ‘In Russia as in Britain science was used to evade Darwin’s lesson: humans are animals, with no special destiny assuring them a future beyond their earthly home’ (Gray 2011, 3). In order to avoid ‘the key fact about evolution as described by Darwin’, namely, ‘that it has no aim’ (Gray 2011, 39), science became pseudo-​science and attempted to ‘purge’ humanity of its imperfections. Darwin’s evolutionary findings prove right Spinoza’s critique of teleology as nothing else but a projection of humanity’s wishes and desires (appetites). Being an animal contradicts anthropocentric concepts of humanity’s teleology of perfection with its divine origin as image of God. Here we encounter the disappointing presence of Spinoza’s spectre and the immediate demand to exorcize its presence through the practice of pseudo-​science masquerading as the science of eugenics and spiritualism: Eugenics aimed to rid the world of defective human beings, while Spiritualists believed that the body that awaits in the afterlife would be purged of defects. Eugenics and spiritualism were both of them progressive creeds, claiming that by using new knowledge humankind could attain a level of development higher than anything achieved in the past. (Gray 2011, 81–​82) The turn from science into pseudo-​ science is social and political. It springs from the populist desire to avoid acknowledging disappointment. In spiritualism’s case, there is the clear wish to overcome the disappointing fact of our mortality. In a similar way eugenics attempts to redo our frail –​subject to disability –​and often limited constitution which we share, as Darwin’s discovery of evolution has shown, with our origin, that of animals, of apes, rather than that of an eternal and perfect deity. In the figure of Kurtz, Conrad depicts such a conflation between science, art, progress and a populist politics that displaces real existing disappointment with any given ontological or economic or social condition onto the Other –​ the disabled person, the primitive or savage (the ‘brutes’), the immigrant, the Jew or the Muslim. Marlow does not know the profession of Kurtz: ‘and to this day I am unable to say what was Kurtz’s profession, whether he ever had any –​which was the greatest of his talents’ (Conrad 1973, 115). As readers, we are again left with uncertainty and with the possibility dangling in front of our eyes that there is nothing, that what is concealed is the absence of any profession. Such a lack then ironically turns into overabundance: ‘He was a

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Postscript – Disavowing Disappointment 141 universal genius’ (Conrad 1973, 115). The all-​embracing capacity of the ‘universal genius’ manifests itself in the rather dubious realm of public demagogy. A visitor informs Marlow about Kurtz’s real talent while again concealing the disappointing absence of any admirable qualities, saying that Kurtz should have been what he clearly was  –​a demagogue in populist, colonial politics (proclaiming, as we saw, ‘Exterminate all the brutes!’; Conrad 1973, 87): This visitor informed me Kurtz’s proper sphere ought to have been politics ‘on the popular side’. He had furry straight eyebrows, bristly hair cropped short, an eye-​glass on broad ribbon, and, becoming expansive, confessed his opinion that Kurtz really couldn’t write a bit –​‘but heavens how that man could talk. He electrified large meetings. He had faith  –​don’t you see? –​he had the faith. He could get himself to believe anything –​anything. He would have been a splendid leader of an extreme party’. ‘What party?’ I asked. ‘Any party’, answered the other. ‘He was an –​an –​extremist.’ (Conrad 1973, 115) Progress is a form of regression here and the irrationalism of myth persists in what has been assumed to be a demythologized modernity. The emissary of science and progress believes in ghosts. Talent paradoxically consists in educational ignorance. According to this quotation, Kurtz lacks any scholarly or scientific knowledge (he is an analphabet) and his only talent is a destructive, extremist one: that of a public demagogue who electrifies large populist audiences and persuades them of extremist, violent views. Hannah Arendt indeed develops her theory that fascism and totalitarianism developed out of imperial colonialism with direct reference to Conrad’s Kurtz, the populist demagogue: Like Mr Kurtz in Conrad’s ‘Heart of Darkness’, they [i.e. colonialists and fascists] were ‘hollow to the core’, ‘reckless without hardihood, greedy without audacity and cruel without courage’. They believed in nothing and ‘could get [themselves] to believe in anything  –​anything’. Expelled from a world with accepted social values, they had been thrown back upon themselves and still had nothing to fall back upon except, here and there, a streak of talent which made them as dangerous as Kurtz if they were ever allowed to return to their homelands. For the only talent that could possibly burgeon in their hollow souls was the gift of fascination which makes a ‘splendid leader of an extreme party’. (Arendt 2004, 247) In what, however, consists Kurtz’s populism and extremism? In a fascinating way Kurtz, the populist, extremist politician, informs Arendt’s theory of totalitarianism as the terror of dialectical idealism that does away with any superfluous, natural imperfection inherent in the diversity of nature. Here we encounter Conrad’s contamination of idealism and exterminatory terror, all closely related to the Hegelian progression of dialectics whose relentless

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142  Michael Mack transformation of the negative by the positive, in ever-​more-​perfect syntheses, displaces onto the Other and thereby disavows any disappointing imperfections: The movement of history and the logical process of this notion are supposed to correspond to each other, so that whatever happens, happens according to the logic of one ‘idea’. […] Dialectical logic, with its process from thesis through antithesis to synthesis which in turn becomes the thesis of the next dialectical movement, is not different in principle, once an ideology gets hold of it; the first thesis becomes the premise and its advantage for ideological explanation is that this dialectical device can explain away any factual contradictions as stages of one identical, consistent movement. (Arendt 2004, 605) Factual contradictions are visitations of Jacobi’s spectre of Spinoza, or Marx’s spectre of communism. The ghost is the diversity of new beginnings that hinder the progressive movement of dialectics. Spectral hauntings highlight the regressive return of the past and they thus do not fit into the grand progressive scheme of nature/​history defined in dialectical-​idealist terms. Unlike Conrad, Arendt does not refer to ghosts and Kurtz’s spectral ‘The horror! The horror’. She defends the project of modernity not in ideological terms that narrow down the plurality of nature and history, but in the interest of what she calls the logic of one single and thus totalitarian and extremist idea: An ideology is quite literally what its name indicates: it is the logic of an idea. Its subject matter is history, to which the ‘idea’ is applied; the result of this application is not a body of statements about something that is, but the unfolding of a process that is constant change. (Arendt 2004, 604) She critiques a version of modernity that banishes not so much the occult sphere of ghosts but the empirical plurality and unsystematic messiness of our embodied minds. Whereas ghosts, as revenants, make the past return uncannily and disappointingly in the midst of the lived presence, Arendt insists on the continual renewal of birth, of the renaissance, or what she calls  –​recalling and secularizing Augustine –​new beginnings. It is with the early medieval theologian Augustine and new beginnings that her critique of modernity gone astray as totalitarian terror ends: Beginning, before it becomes a historical event, is the supreme capacity of man; politically, it is identical with man’s freedom. Initium ut esset homo creatus est –​‘that a beginning be made man was created’ said Augustine. This beginning is guaranteed by each new birth; it is indeed every man. (Arendt 2004, 616)

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Postscript – Disavowing Disappointment 143 By connecting her notion of the new and modern to an old, sacred or theological thinker (Augustine), Arendt implicitly allows for the spectral presence of the past within the radical break of new beginnings, of modernity. Elsewhere, in her book On Revolution (1963) she indeed insists that every revolution, to be sustainable, requires ghostly roots in some form of constitutional past or tradition. The American Revolution thus sustains itself constitutionally through its ghostly tie to ancient Rome and Roman constitutionalism (lex). The founders of the American Revolution were the founding fathers of America’s constitution. They bound themselves backward in a spectral revenant of ‘Roman pietas’, which ‘consisted in being bound back to the beginning of Roman history’ (Arendt 1990, 199). For Arendt modernity’s sustainability consists in this spectral co-​presence of the foundational past, of the binding constitutional law (lex) within the individuality of new, revolutionary beginnings: ‘and the outstanding characteristic of the modern age was that it turned once more to antiquity to find a precedent of its own occupation with the future of the man-​made world on earth’ (Arendt 1990, 230). In Between Past and Future Arendt thus insists that human actuality or presence in the world depends on a grounding in the past that could be interpreted as spectral. Thinking acknowledges and relates to the ghosts of the past: ‘Only insofar as he thinks, and that is insofar as he is ageless  –​a ‘he’ as Kafka so rightly calls him, and not a ‘somebody’ –​does man in the full actuality of his concrete being live in this gap of time between past and future’ (Arendt 1977, 13). It is this spectral gap between the past and the present that hinders and disappoints dialectical attempts to force or terrorize the diverse course of natural and/​or human history into the linear shape (from negative to positive to synthesis, and then turning the latest synthesis into a negative again and further progressing thus on this line of dialectics’ logical idea) of what Arendt understands by ideology as the logic of one dialectical idea. In her early American work The Origins of Totalitarianism she responds to the violence inherent in Kurtz’s colonial and, for Arendt, proto-​totalitarian logic of the idea that makes him exclaim in the name of historical progress ‘Exterminate all the brutes’ and then in the ghostly setting of what Arendt would read as a paradoxical modern foreclosing of new beginnings, ‘The horror! The horror!’ Struggling with the unacknowledged myth or ghost within a single-​ mindedly future-​oriented version of modernity that gives rise to totalitarian spectres of populist politics, such as Conrad’s Kurtz, Arendt (as we will discuss in the following paragraph) strikingly employs the term ‘miracle’. Arendt explicitly contradicts mainstream rationalist approaches that read fascism in terms of what György Lukács has called ‘the destruction of reason’ (1968). Arendt’s breaking down of the term ideology as the logic of the idea locates it in close vicinity to the rationalism of idealism. Rather than lacking reason or idea, ideology does not allow for any form of ideational disappointment or hindrance that goes with the arrival of the unexpected or the long forgotten. By precluding the surprising element of the miracle, ideologies close the door to anything that deviates from an a priori linear

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144  Michael Mack arrangement of time, which forces anything to conform to its pre-​arranged outline: ‘Ideologies are never interested in the miracle of being’ (Arendt 2004, 604). Here it is not the uncertain, ironic or quasi-​miraculous entry of a ghost (as in Shakespeare’s Hamlet) but the miracle of thinking which in fact describes what Arendt means by the terms natality (birth) or ‘new beginning’. Thinking is not isolated. It is plural insofar as it is open-​ended, rather than pre-​determined by teleology. Being open it allows for miracles and the return of the past, however disappointing such a revenant of the old may be (such as Hamlet’s ghost, who depicts both family life and the larger state of Denmark as a major disappointment, as something ‘rotten’). It is against this open-​minded and open-​ended background of the plural practice of thinking that Arendt defines logic, rather than pre-​modern or somewhat occult or opaque forms of belief or rituals as the kernel of modern terror and irrationalism: The only capacity of the human mind which needs neither the self nor the other nor the world in order to function safely and which is as independent of experience as it is of thinking is the ability of logical reasoning whose premise is self-​evident. (Arendt 2004, 614) By being cut off from empirical experiences of the world (human and otherwise), logical reasoning is in a position of sovereign terror over what it has separated and cut itself off from. Dialectics qua the logic of the idea rules ruthlessly over the human and natural world in terms of what Arendt’s friend Walter Benjamin depicts as the storm of rapidly onward moving progress. Such a storm, blowing from paradise, renders the same a hell of catastrophic destruction. In contrast to Benjamin’s apocalyptical framework, in Arendt the work of destruction grows out of a rationally conceived teleology that destroys any form of non-​ conforming, and thus disappointing, diversity. The terror of dialectics’ logic destroys the disappointing, unforeseen negativity of new beginnings, taking its cue from Conrad’s Kurtz and his ‘the horror!’ after having ruthlessly pronounced his slogan ‘Exterminate all the brutes’: ‘A terror is needed lest with the birth of each new human being a new beginning arise and raise its voice in the world, so the self-​coercive force of logicality is mobilized lest anybody ever starts thinking –​which as the freest and purest of all human activities is the opposite of the compulsory process of deduction’ (Arendt 2004, 610). It is this forward-​moving compulsory force of logical deduction which is Kurtz’s ‘devotion to efficiency’ (Conrad 1973, 31). Arendt in as-​yet unexplored ways establishes her differentiation between the terror of dialectical logic as efficient ‘brute force’ (Conrad 1973, 31) and the practice of thought, or what she calls the activity of thinking. Crucially, Conrad uses the term ‘thoughtless’ (Conrad 1973, 93) for Kurtz’s ‘unreflective audacity’ (Conrad 1973, 93), and it is precisely this term which

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Postscript – Disavowing Disappointment 145 Arendt will employ, in her famous account in Eichmann in Jerusalem, for her provocative analysis of how someone could do what the main administrator of the Nazi genocide did. I have shown elsewhere (Mack 2009) that in her provocative ‘report on the banality of evil’ Arendt employs an ironic style of writing which the above discussion here has analysed as Conrad’s way of establishing uncertainty about any form of truth or meaning in Marlow’s narration of his main male character’s (i.e. Kurtz’s) disavowed disappointment, so that we are never faced with his terrifying ghost but only with the whisper of breath tenuously exclaiming ‘The horror! The horror!’ That Arendt employs the term ‘thoughtless’, directly taken out of Conrad’s Marlow narration of Kurtz, for characterizing Eichmann’s facilitation of the most horrendous genocide in human history is itself ironic, because it self-​consciously conceals more than it brings into the open. In the context of history’s most shocking mass murder, the word ‘thoughtless’ sounds like an appalling understatement. Within the context of Arendt’s and Conrad’s linguistic register, however, it denotes the utter disregard of diversity which categorically makes possible ruthless genocidal deeds, as proclaimed in Kurtz’s ‘Exterminate all the brutes!’ As a force of efficient, logical deduction, Conrad’s Kurtz is lonely and thoughtless. As we have seen, Marlow’s narration disappoints promises of certain, verifiable actions. We only receive glimpses of characteristics, capacities and fragments of exclamation. Being lonely and thoughtless, Kurtz does not partake of community. He does not seem to have a viable relationship. Not thinking of others, Kurtz separates himself ruthlessly from diversity, which is to say, from the diverse human communities that constitute humanity. Conrad’s Marlow thus describes Kurtz’s ‘loneliness’ and his ‘essential desolation’ (Conrad 1973, 93) and, even more to Arendt’s point about ideology as the efficient but thoughtless logic of the idea, how ‘there he was thoughtlessly alive, to all appearance indestructible solely by the virtue of his few years and of his unreflective audacity’ (Conrad 1973, 93). The ‘gifted Kurtz’ (Conrad 1973, 84) does his public, political work ‘in utter solitude’ (Conrad 1973, 85). We do not hear of or know any details, and there might indeed be nothing substantial  –​because the efficiency of dialectical logic keeps erasing immediate, concrete particulars that obstruct or disappoint its onward rush to ever greater syntheses  –​except that whatever it is epitomizes modern Europe, in what Arendt later –​relying on Heart of Darkness –​theorizes as the terror of logical deduction imposed on the diversity of being, from the post-​Hegelian mid-​nineteenth century onwards: ‘All of Europe contributed to the making of Kurtz; and by-​and-​by I learned that, most appropriately, the International Society for the Suppression of Savage Customs had entrusted him with the making of a report, for its future guidance’ (Conrad 1973, 86). Here is indeed the deductive, single-​minded futurity of promise and hope resulting from the logic of Hegelian dialectical movements, one that suppresses any uncanny ghostly apparitions which might hinder or disappoint its pre-​ determined movement.

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146  Michael Mack The disappointment of what early anthropologists of religion like Edward Tylor and James Frazer labelled tellingly ‘survivals’ has to be done away with, or as Conrad calls it suppressed: The tremendous intellectual change which took place in the middle of the nineteenth-​century consisted in the refusal to view or accept anything ‘as it is’ and in the consistent interpretation of everything as being only a stage of some further development. Whether the driving force of this development was called nature or history is relatively secondary. In these ideologies, the term ‘law’ itself changed its meaning: from expressing the framework of stability within which human actions and motions can take place, it became the expression of motion itself. (Arendt 2004, 598) Having done with the old, modern progression abandons the ground on which the diversity of the new could arise. Law in the traditional sense is the legal framework of a constitution, which Arendt singles out as the achievement of the American Revolution, whose respect for tradition she contrasts with the single-​minded terror fixated on a future promise that she locates in the French Revolution. Law as Roman lex establishes community. In doing so it binds the present to the past –​and, according to Arendt, constitutional law does the work of memory which prevents a thoughtless, lonely rush of progress that ruthlessly erases what preceded the contemporary moment. Crucially, the legal preservation of the past enables the development of new beginnings. It does so by safeguarding diversity from any attempt at dialectically subordinating what may be categorized as negative or disappointing into a line of promising progression which violently erases what preceded it, resembling Benjamin’s storm blowing from paradise: The laws hedge in each new beginning and at the same time assure its freedom of movement, the potentiality of something entirely new and unpredictable; the boundaries of positive laws are for the political existence of man what memory is for his historical existence: they guarantee the pre-​existence of a common world, the reality of some continuity which transcends the individual life span of each generation, absorbs all new origins and is nourished by them. (Arendt 2004, 600) Instead of protecting the diversity of old and new beginnings, what Arendt would call the totalitarian law of Hegelian dialectical motion disregards any content or context, being singularly fixated on the promise of a future. Conrad’s seafaring narrations from the West to the East are crucial for Arendt’s formulation of a critical theory that challenges a modernity that has intensified preceding forms of violence precisely by its dialectical inclusion of the negative (of spectral pasts), only to have them all the more efficiently expelled in final, synthesizing movements. Synthesizing moments are short-​lived and dialectical

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Postscript – Disavowing Disappointment 147 movements relentlessly repeat their own motion, because they subsume the negative into the positive. Any given positive moment in dialectical transit has already passed its moment and becomes a new negative in the form of a spectral synthesis that awaits another subsuming, and so forth. The geographical movement on the seas from the Occidental to the Oriental re-​enacts the categorical and temporal law of dialectical motion that leaves the spectral past behind as disappointment and thus negativity, which makes room for hope and promise. Disappointment has logically to disappear here. Should there be a lingering sense of disappointment remaining somewhere, it has to be disavowed. The non-​western, colonial subjects of Heart of Darkness which might potentially thwart or disappoint the onrush of progress are linguistically deprived of any resisting force (a force implicit in the term ‘enemies’) with which they could put up a fight. They have been rendered bare categories of a progressive law of motion that excludes difference in terms not of resistant enmity but of subdued and incarcerated criminality: ‘[…] but these men could by no stretch of the imagination be called enemies. They were called criminals, and the outraged law, like the bursting shells, had come to them, an insoluble mystery from the sea’ (Conrad 1973, 43). Instead of the protective law (Arendt’s constitutional law, safeguarding old and new beginnings), the proto-​totalitarian, colonial law of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness is ‘the outraged law’ that, by resembling the violent speed that is the ‘bursting of shells’, metaphorically describes Arendt’s cultural theory of dialectical motion or what she calls terror (recalling the French Revolution’s reign of terror): Terror, therefore, as the obedient servant of natural or historical movement has to eliminate from the process not only freedom in any specific sense, but the very source of freedom which is given with the birth of man and resides in his capacity to make a new beginning. In the iron band of terror, which destroys the plurality of men and makes out of the many the One (who unfailingly will act as though he himself were part of history and nature), a device has been found not only to liberate the natural and historical forces, but to accelerate them to a speed they would never reach if left to themselves. Practically speaking, this means that terror executes on the spot the death sentences which Nature is supposed to have pronounced on races or individuals who are ‘unfit to live’, or History on ‘dying classes’, without waiting for the slower and less efficient processes of nature or history themselves. (Arendt 2004, 601) This relentless movement of efficiency and progress operates through categories that turn people into the excluded or eliminated, either as criminals or as non-​human insects (ants). For Conrad’s narrator the colonial subject of Heart of Darkness appears like ants: ‘A lot of people, mostly black and naked, moved around like ants’ (Conrad 1973, 43). In the spectral shadow of Kurtz’s colonialism of ‘The horror!’ we encounter for the first time human life spread

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148  Michael Mack bare to the nakedness of mere life that is spectre-​like, indistinguishable from being lifeless or undead, which Giorgio Agamben calls ‘bare life’ (Agamben 2002, 158). Agamben refers to the notion of bare life to Foucault’s critique of biopolitics as biopower: ‘The ancient right to kill and let live gives way to an inverse model, which defines modern biopolitics, and which can be expressed by the formula to make live and to let die’ (Agamben 2002, 82–​83). Arendt calls terror this efficiency in denying or affirming  –​strictly in accordance with the logic of the idea that separates those who are worthy from those who are unworthy of being alive  –​the right to live. Those who have logically and thus categorically been rendered naked or bare reside in the ghostly sphere in between life and death, being neither alive nor dead. They are what in Auschwitz went under the name Muselmann. According to Agamben the Muselmann inhabits a spectral sphere of uncertainty, blurring the distinction between life and death and rendering both unstable and uncanny: In one case, he appears as the non-​living, as the being whose life is not truly life; in the other, as he whose death cannot be called death, but only the production of a corpse –​as the inscription of life in a dead area and, in death, of a living area. In both cases, what is called into question is the very humanity of man, since man observes the fragmentation of his privileged tie to what constitutes him as human, that is, the sacredness of death and life. (Agamben 2002, 81) The horror that Conrad thematises as a modern, colonial, proto-​totalitarian unacknowledged spectre is an early form of this efficient stripping down of life and death’s sacredness, rendering them both uncertain and ironic in the sense of unstable. As we have seen above, Conrad employs the term ‘naked’ to describe this lack of distinction between thing and living being, between life and death. In Heart of Darkness, colonial subjects are thing-​like –​a ‘mass’ –​ and naked, alive (‘breathing’) and yet almost inanimate, like a flowing mass of fluid or a resting piece of metal (‘bronze’): ‘the crowd, of whose presence behind the curtain of trees I had been acutely conscious all the time, flowed out of the woods again, filled the clearing, covered the slope with a mass of naked, breathing, quivering, bronze bodies’ (Conrad 1973, 108). In ways that have not been explored Agamben’s notion of naked, ‘bare life’ takes up Arendt’s concept of superfluous life that she extracted out of a critical engagement with Heart of Darkness. Now we come to see how the sense of ghostly uncertainty, which pervades Conrad’s Marlow narration in terms of irony, establishes the trope of disavowed disappointment. The disappointing fact (from the perspective, at least, of what Arendt calls the terror of progressive logical motion) is that ‘savages’ are not yet fully suppressed; that they are still alive. Conrad’s narrator Marlow disavows the presence of ‘races and individuals who are’ categorically defined, in negative terms of disappointment, as ‘unfit to live’ (in the Arendt quote above) and who are thus legally condemned to a ghostly, zombie-​like existence

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Postscript – Disavowing Disappointment 149 where the differences between being dead and being alive have become blurred: ‘They were dying slowly –​it was very clear’ (Conrad 1973, 44). The narrative disavows disappointment by casting what it describes (the ruthless brutality of colonialism and Kurtz as its hero or anti-​hero) in a self-​concealing, ironic and highly uncertain mode, where, as readers, we are not sure about whether we encounter objects, animals or human beings, either dead or alive: The thing looked as dead as the carcass of some animal. I came upon more pieces of decaying machinery, a stack of rusty rails. To the left a clump of trees made a shady spot, where dark things seemed to stir feebly. I blinked, the path was steep. A horn tooted to the right, and I saw the black people run. A heavy and dull detonation shook the ground, a puff of smoke came from out of the cliff, and that was all. No change appeared on the face of the rock. They were building a railway. The cliff was not in the way or anything; but this objectless blasting was the work going on. (Conrad 1973, 42) Objectless is the blast of Arendt’s relentless terror of motion. It moves forward and uproots whatever might resist or disappoint it. This objectless teleology of ever-​increasing positivity renders the world world-​less or, as Conrad’s Marlow calls it, unearthly: ‘The earth seemed unearthly. […] It was unearthly, and the men were –​No, they were not inhuman. Well, you know, that was the worst of it –​this suspicion of their not being inhuman’ (Conrad 1973, 69). In this key text of early modernism we already are face to face with our current posthumanist position after what has been called postmodernism. As in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go (or in postmodern and posthumanist films, such as Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner or Steven Spielberg’s Artificial Intelligence; Mack 2016, 191–​215) the suspense here revolves around what we know to be the thrill of the obvious, which is here the unexpected: that those, who are by way of nomenclature or category non-​humans (similar to the clones in Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go) feel and behave exactly like us. Those defined as such are, perhaps, not inhuman, as they are defined by what Arendt calls the logic of the progressive dialectical idea. This means that what has been conceived of as disappointment, as a negative to be subsumed by the movement of the positive, might actually not be disappointing after all. If this were the case, the presumption of the logical ideal would disintegrate and the whole dialectical edifice would collapse with it. This suspenseful  –​or ‘thrilling’, as Conrad’s Marlow puts it in the following short quotation –​recognition of the promise in what has been written off as disappointing, this realization that the colonial subjects are what they are, by dialectical logic, denied to be –​namely humans –​arises slowly, only to be disavowed in the customary stereotyping of the Other as non-​human, ghostly, animalistic disappointment: ‘It [i.e. the realization that colonial subjects ‘were not inhuman’] would come slowly to one. They howled and leaped, and spun, and made horrified faces; but what thrilled you was just the thought of your remote kinship with this wild and passionate uproar’ (Conrad 1973, 69). These ghostly apparitions of caricature resemble

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150  Michael Mack Kurtz’s brutes who, being negative or superfluous –​hindering or disappointing dialectic’s movement of the ‘redeeming idea’ –​are all or totally subject to the terror of extermination. As Arendt makes clear, colonialism operates on the ghostly logic of economical transaction wherein there is no such thing as a stable, abiding form of value. Here everything is ceaselessly in process, as in dialectics, where the logic of the ideas renders any moment transitory. What turned into a (positive) synthesis a moment ago now has to be discarded and superseded as disappointment that we included only to exclude and disavow. Men like Kurtz ‘were representatives of an economy that relentlessly produced a superfluity of men and capital’ (Arendt 2004, 247). Arendt’s analysis of ideology in terms of the logic of the idea refers ironically to the ‘redeeming idea’ –​‘What redeems it is the idea only’ (Conrad 1973, 32) –​of Heart of Darkness that makes possible the violence of extermination. It is the idea of progress as ‘the suppression of savage Customs’ that creates what Conrad calls (in the quote above) the ‘unearthly’, what Arendt describes as the ‘uprooted’ as well as ‘superfluous’ reality of exploitation: ‘To be uprooted meant to have no place in the world, recognized and guaranteed by others; to be superfluous means not to belong to the world at all’ (Arendt 2004, 612). Superfluous life is stripped of dignity, down to the state of being utterly naked that often precedes exterminations. The precondition of such denuding of any sense of dignity is the logical work of categorization: ‘The most persuasive argument in this respect, an argument of which Hitler like Stalin was very fond, is: You can’t say A without saying B and C and so on, down to the end of the murderous alphabet. Here the coercive force of logicality seems to have its source; it springs from our fear of contradicting ourselves’ (Arendt 2004, 609). Diversity is contradictory, and as such it may appear to be negative and disappointing. Kurtz’s spiritualist whispering ‘The horror! The horror’ conjures the Spinozist and disappointing ghost of nature, whose imperfect, diverse manifestations have been (exterminatory or genocide-​like) rationalized as superfluous life: as life of the Others that have to be killed, just as negativity has to turn into a positive synthesis in the anthropocentric cosmos of perfection.

Works Cited Achebe, Chinua. 2006. ‘An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness’. In Heart of Darkness: Authoritative Text, Backgrounds and Contexts, Criticism, by Joseph Conrad, edited by Paul B. Armstrong, 336–​49. New York: Norton. Agamben, Giorgio. 2002. Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive. Translated by Daniel Heller-​Roazen. New York: Zone Books. Arendt, Hannah. 1977. Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought. London: Penguin. —​—​—​. 1990. On Revolutions. New York: Penguin. —​—​—​. 2004. The Origins of Totalitarianism. With a new Introduction by Samantha Power. New York: Schocken. Conrad, Joseph. 1973. Heart of Darkness. Edited with an Introduction by Paul O’Prey. London: Penguin.

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Postscript – Disavowing Disappointment 151 —​—​—​. 1986. Lord Jim. Edited by Robert Gavin Hampson and Cedric Watts. London: Penguin. Dollimore, Jonathan. 2012. ‘Civilization and Its Darkness’. In Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and Contemporary Thought: Revisiting the Horror with Lacoue-​Labarthe, edited by Nidesh Lawtoo, 67– 8 ​ 6. London: Bloomsbury. Gillespie, Michael Allen. 1996. Nihilism before Nietzsche. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Gray, John. 2011. The Immortalization Commission: Science and the Strange Quest to Cheat Death. London: Allen Lane. Josephson-​Storm, Jason A. 2017. The Myth of Disenchantment: Magic, Modernity, and the Birth of the Human Sciences. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.  Keats, John. 1970. The Poems of John Keats. Edited by Miriam F. Allott. Harlow: Longman. Lacoue-​ Labarthe, Philippe. 2012. ‘The Horror of the West’. In Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and Contemporary Thought: Revisiting the Horror with Lacoue-​Labarthe, edited by Nidesh Lawtoo, 111– 2 ​ 3. London: Bloomsbury. Lukács, György. 1968. Geschichte und Klassenbewußtsein: Studien über marxistische Dialektik. Darmstadt: Luchterhand. Mack, Michael. 2009. ‘The Holocaust and Hannah Arendt’s Philosophical Critique of Philosophy: Eichmann in Jerusalem’. New German Critique, no. 106: 35–​60. —​—​—​. 2010. Spinoza and the Specters of Modernity: The Hidden Enlightenment of Diversity from Spinoza to Freud. London: Bloomsbury. —​—​—​. 2016. Contaminations: Beyond Dialectics in Modern Literature, Science and Film. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. McGann, Jerome J. 1985. The Romantic Ideology: A Critical Investigation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Miller, Joseph Hillis. 1963. The Disappearance of God: Five Nineteenth Century Writers. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. —​ —​ —​ . 2012. ‘Heart of Darkness Revisited’. In Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and Contemporary Thought: Revisiting the Horror with Lacoue-​Labarthe, edited by Nidesh Lawtoo, 39– ​55. London: Bloomsbury. Nehamas, Alexander. 1998. The Art of Living: Socratic Reflections from Plato to Foucault. Berkeley: University of California Press. Quinney, Laura. 1999. The Poetics of Disappointment: Wordsworth to Ashbery. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia. Said, Edward W. 1993. Cultural Imperialism. New York: Knopf. Spender, Stephen. 1935. The Destructive Element: A Study of Modern Writers and Beliefs. London: J. Cape.

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Index

Abraham, Nicholas 128 Addiss, Stephen 69, 71 Agamben, Giorgio 148 Aldana Reyes, Xavier 90, 99 Alighieri, Dante 124 American Revolution 143, 146 Ansai, Un’en 55 Apollinaire, Guillaume 109 Arendt, Hannah 7, 137, 141–​50; see also Eichmann, Otto Adolf Aristotle 42 Arjona, Lydie see Salvayre, Lydie Ashley, Michael 25 Asquith, Cynthia 25, 26, 30, 35 Atkinson, William Walker see Ramacharaka, Yogi Augustine, Saint 75, 142, 143 Austen, Jane 98 Bai, Juyi 55 Balla, Elica 112, 116 Balla, Giacomo 6, 112, 113, 116, 117 Ballard, James G. 132 Ballatore, Carlo 113 Balzac, Honoré de 125 Bando¯ Hikosaburo¯ IV 69 Battle of Dannoura 70 Baudelaire, Charles 121, 123, 132; ‘La Chambre double’ 125–​6; ‘Le Cygne’ 126; ‘Les Fantômes’ 125; Les Fleurs du mal 6, 124–​5; ‘L’Invitation au voyage’ 128; ‘Les Sept Vieillards’ 125; ‘Tableaux parisiens’ 6, 124 Baumgarten, Alexander Gottlieb 39 Benjamin, Walter 124, 144, 146 Benson, Arthur 25 Beraud, Marthe see Carrière, Eva Bergson, Henry 107 Blackbourn, David 40 Blackwood, Algernon: ‘Chemical’ 4, 25–​37

Blavatsky, Helena Petrovna 2, 110, 115 Boccioni, Umberto 6, 107 Bölsche, Wilhelm 40–​1, 44–​5; Die Mittagsgöttin (Noonday Goddess) 45–​8 Bowlby, John 84 Brombert, Victor 124 Büchner, Ludwig 40 Butti, Enrico Annibale 110–​11; Il castello del sogno (‘The Dream Castle’) 111 Buzzi, Paolo 116 Caillois, Roger 131 Carli, Mario 109 Carrière, Eva pseud. for Marthe Beraud 1–​2, 43 Cenna, Giovanni: Medium 110 Charcot, Jean-​Martin  3 Chastain, Jessica 100 Chiti, Remo 109 Cicero 75 Cigliana, Simona 114 Clark, Andy 48 Clarke, Roger 122–​3 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 123 Collins, Vere Henry: Ghosts and Marvels 26 Comte, Auguste 75 Conrad, Joseph 7; Heart of Darkness 136–​50; Lord Jim 134–​7 Constant, Alphonse Louis see Lévi, Éliphas Corra, Bruno 109, 112 Cromwell, Thomas 129, 131 Crookes, William 42, 46 Crowley, Aleister [pseud. for Edward Alexander Crowley] 1–​2 Darwin, Charles 4–​5, 40, 42, 44–​6, 140 da Vinci, Leonardo: Mona Lisa 1–2 Davis, Colin 123

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Index 153 Debussy, Claude: Pelléas et Mélisande 111 del Toro, Guillermo: Crimson Peak 5, 89–​98; Cronos 90; The Devil’s Backbone (El espinazo del diablo) 90; Pan’s Labyrinth (El laberinto del fauno) 90; The Shape of Water 90 Derrida, Jacques 91, 123, 130 Descartes, René 75 Dickens, Charles 123 Dickinson, Emily 5 Dollimore, Jonathan 139 Dostoevsky, Fëdor 123 Doyle, Arthur Conan 115 du Maurier, Daphne: Rebecca 95 du Prel, Carl 41–​4, 46 Durkheim, Emile 76–​7, 82 Egorov, Youri 3 Eichmann, Otto Adolf 145; see also Arendt, Hannah Einstein, Albert 107 Faraday, Michael 109 Farmers’ revolt of 1653 in So¯ma province 69 Fechner, Gustav Theodor 42 Foucault, Michel 148 Frazer, James G. 74–​6, 146 French Revolution 40, 135, 146–​7 Freud, Sigmund 42, 47–​8, 84, 130 Funk, Wolfgang 129–​30 Galluzzi, Francesco 116 Galton, Francis 42 Garbini, Matilde 116 Genshin 54 Gibson, Margaret 83, 84 Gilbert, Sandra 98 Ginanni, Arnaldo 109 Ginna, Arnaldo 110 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 39, 40, 47 Grubicy de Dragon, Vittore 110 Gurdjieff, Georges Ivanovič  2 Guth, Christine 67 Haeckel, Ernst 40, 45 Hamon, Philippe 4 Hartmann, [Karl Robert] Eduard von 42 Haussmann, Georges-​Eugène  126 Hay, David 81 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 39, 134 Helmholtz, Hermann von 41, 47–​8 Hemmings, F.W.J. 125 Hertz, Robert 74, 76

Hess, Sabine 84 Hiddleston, Tom 89 Hitchcock, Alfred: Notorious 95 Hitler, Adolf 150 Hofmannsthal, Hugo von: Andreas 45 Homer 75 Hope, William 8 Hugo, Victor 126 Huntington, George 116 Ibsen, Henrik 111 Ichikawa Ebizo¯ V 64 Ichikawa Kodanji IV 68 Ishiguro, Kazuo: Never Let Me Go 149 Jacobi, Friedrich Heinrich 134–​6, 142 James, Henry 134 James, Montague Rhodes 27; ‘Casting the Runes’ and Other Ghost Stories 26–​7; ‘An Episode in Cathedral History’ 4, 25, 29 James, William 3 Jordan, Brenda 65 Josephson-​Storm, Jason A.  139–​40 Kafka, Franz 45, 143 Kajiya, Kenji 55 Kandinsky, Wassily 41 Kardec, Allan pseud. for Rivail, Léon Hippolyte Denizard 115 Katsukawa Shun’ei 62 Katsukawa Shunshō 62 Katsushika Hokusai 65, 68 Kawanabe Kyōsai 58 Kawanabe Kyōsai, Tose 58 Keats, John 7, 134–​6; ‘To J. H. Reynolds, Esq.’ 134, 136–​7, 139 Keyes, Roger 69 Klass, Dennis 85 Kovalevsky, Vladimir 3 Krátký, Jan 81 Kübler-​Ross, Elisabeth  84 Kunimasu 66 Lacoue-​Labarthe, Philippe  138 Lawrence, David Herbert 135 Lehan, Richard 126 Lévi, Eliphas pseud. for Constant, Alphonse Louis 2, 115 Lombroso, Cesare 115–​16 London, Jack 122; The People of the Abyss 121 Luckhurst, Roger 123 Lukács, György 143

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154 Index McGann, Jerome J. 136 Maeterlinck, Maurice: Pelléas et Mélisande 111 Maki, Chokusai 60 Mann, Thomas 41, 43–​4, 46; Der Tod in Venedig 45; Der Zauberberg 44–​5 Mantel, Hilary 121, 124; Beyond Black 6, 125–​32; Bring Up the Bodies 129; Every Day is Mother’s Day 129; Giving up the Ghost 129; Wolf Hall 129, 131 Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso 6, 113, 116; Against Academic Teachers 114; The Founding Manifesto of Futurism 105–​7; Great Traditional and Futuristic Milan 110–​12; Let’s Murder the Moonlight! 105, 107, 115; The New Religion-​Morality of Speed 108–​9; Tactilism 109 Marriott, McKim 84, 85 Marx, Karl 136, 142 Matsumoto Fūko 61 Matsumoto Kōshirō V 64 Melina, Carlo 110–​11 Mendeleev, Dmitri 3 Miller, J. Hillis 135–​6 Minamoto no Yoritomo 70 Minamoto no Yoshitsune 70 Moody, Raymond 82 Morselli, Enrico 2, 115 Müller, Johannes von 41, 47–​8 Mumford, Lewis 121, 126 Musap, Emilia 93, 95 Nakata Hideo: The Ring (Ringu) 71 Nannetti, Nerino 109 Napoleon Bonaparte 135 Napoleon III 126 Newton, Isaac 39, 75 Nietzsche, Friedrich 39, 44–​5, 113–​15 Nodier, Charles 123 Nordau, Max 41, 139, 140 Ōkawa Hashizō pseud for Onoe Kikugorō III  Ōkyo Maruyama 55 Onoe Eizaburō III 64 Onoe Kikugorō III 64​,  66–​8, 67 Onoe Kikugorō V 59 Onoe Matsusuke II 64 Ovid 126 Paladino, Eusapia 2, 44, 115 Peruggia, Vincenzo 1 Pétain, Marshal 128

Poe, Edgar Allan: The Fall of the House of Usher 111 Politi, Augusto 113 Poor Law Amendment Act 15 Prendergast, Christopher 124–​5 Quinney, Laura 136 Ramacharaka, Yogi pseud. for Atkinson, William Walker 2, 107 Renan, Ernest 107 Richet, Charles 1, 2, 112 Rilke, Rainer Maria 41 Rivail, Hippolyte Léon Denizard see Kardec, Allan Rose, Mitch 89, 91, 100 Sainte-​Beuve, Charles Augustin de 106 Salisbury, Mark 94 Salvayre, Lydie 121, 124; La Compagnie des spectres 6, 126–​9, 132; Pas pleurer 127; Quelques conseils aux élèves huissiers 127; SubStance 127 San’yūtei, Enchō 61 Sanders, Tom 94–​5 Santō, Kyōden 68 Schiller, Friedrich 45 Schneider, Mark 74 Schopenhauer, Arthur 42, 44, 46–​7, 114 Schrenck-​Notzing, Albrecht von 41, 43–​4 Scott, Ridley: Blade Runner 149 Secor, James L. 69 Seigi, Kaneko 55 Self, Will 132 Settimelli, Emilio 109, 112 Shakespeare, William: Hamlet 79, 144 Shelley, Mary 106 Siemens, Werner von 40 Sinclair, Iain 132 Slade, Henry 42 Smith, William Robertson 82 Spender, Stephen 7, 134–​6 Spiegelman, Willard 13 Spielberg, Steven: Artificial Intelligence 149 Spinoza, Baruch 7, 134, 136, 140, 142 Spooner, Catherine 98–​100, 132 Stalin, Iosif 150 Stevens, Wallace: ‘The Idea of Order at Key West’ 7 Stevenson, Robert Louis: The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde 4, 31–​33, 35–​36

51

Index 155 Stewart, Victoria 129 Strathern, Marilyn 84 Strauß, David F. 39 Strindberg, August: The Ghost Sonata 111 Suzuki, Kōji 71 Taira no Tomomori 70 Tanaka Takako 58 Thomas, Keith 122 Thurston, Luke 123 Todorov, Tzvetan 4, 29, 31, 122, 130 Tokugawa, Ieyasu 54 Toriyama Sekien 56 Torok, Maria 128 Tsuji, Nobuo 68 Tsuruya Nanboku IV 62–​3, 66 Tylor, Edward Burnett 74–​6, 146 Ulrici, Hermann 3 Utagawa, Kuniyoshi 64 Utagawa, Toyokuni 63–4 Valentine, Christine 82, 84 Valeria, Irma 110 Vidler, Anthony 93 Wagner, Richard 110–​11 Wallace, Alfred Russel 42, 46 Walter, Tony 82, 85 Weber, Max 40, 86 Weindling, Paul 40

Woodall, Christopher: The Company of Ghosts 126 Wordsworth, William 4, 13; The Discharged Soldier 22; Expostulation and Reply 22; ‘The Fountain: A Conversation’ 14; ‘I know an aged Man constrained to dwell’ 15–​17, 19; ‘Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey’ 13; ‘Lucy Gray’ 14, 20; Lyrical Ballads 19–​20; Michael 4, 20–​2; ‘My heart leaps up when I behold’ 13; ‘Ode: Intimations of Immortality’ 13, 22; The Old Cumberland Beggar 15, 17–​19; ‘Old Man Travelling: Animal Tranquillity and Decay, A Sketch’ 15, 19–​20; The Ruined Cottage 21; ‘Simon Lee, the Old Huntsman’ 14–16; ‘A Slumber did My Spirit Seal’ 20; ‘The Small Celandine’ 14; ‘The Tables Turned’ 13; ‘There was a Boy’ 20; The Thorn 14, 16; ‘To a Young Lady’ 14 Wu, Emperor (Han Wudi) 55 Wundt, Wilhelm 3 Yasumura, Toshinobu 55 Yeats, William Butler 135 Young, Katherine 82–​4 Zimmerman, Melvin 125 Žižek, Slavoj 122 Zöllner, Johann Karl Friedrich 42

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