C ATHERINE B ELSEY Phantom Presences: Figurative Spectrality and the Postmodern Condition I Metaphoric Ghosts The ghost of a smile flitted across her face. Gori became a ghost town as Georgian residents fled the advancing Russian troops. The leaves stirred in the ghost of a breeze. At a ghost station the trains never stop. A ghost ship is derelict, found floating without its crew. Racism survives in Britain as the ghost of empire. On 23 January 2009 the front page of The Guardian announced, “Obama shuts network of CIA ‘ghost prisons’.” Inside, the text went on to claim that there were secret centres all around the world, their existence officially unrecognized, holding an unknown number of “ghost detainees.” In fact, that issue of The Guardian was particularly haunted. On the same day Simon Jenkins claimed to have discovered the oxymoronic existence of something called “The Printed Blog” in Silicon Valley. “The ghost of Gutenberg has returned to live in San Francisco,” he crowed. 1 Are these phantasmic allusions no more than dead metaphors, habits of speech that have lost their valency as belief in the supernatural has all but petered out? There are many such buried comparisons. Who now remembers the literal meaning of such familiar phrases as ‘pipe down’ or ‘the game is not worth the candle? ’ ‘Plain sailing’ has largely lost its nautical associations and few people these days would associate ‘broadcasting’ with scattering seeds. Are figurative ghosts as residual, inert vestiges of belief that once had currency in a more superstitious epoch? Although they continue to populate Hollywood movies, where they have had considerable success in Ghost (1990) for instance, or Truly Madly Deeply (1990) and Ghost Town (2008), for most of us ghosts do not actually exist; they are confined, in other words, to fiction. The souls who once walked on Halloween are now impersonated by children, often in costumes that owe more 1 The Guardian 23 January 2009: 18, 35. C ATHERINE B ELSEY 96 to television than to the supernatural. 2 As a child myself at the fair, when I paid for a trip on the ghost train, I counted on terrifying moans and screams, and the sudden luminous appearance, as we rounded a corner, of a skeleton or a mummified corpse in a shroud. Along the walls of the tunnel, fluorescent figures loomed featureless before the petrified eyes of delighted passengers. There was no doubt in my eight-year-old mind that these creatures were illusions. The journey brought fiction to life in three dimensions and was the more thrilling for that. But no one would choose to travel on a ghost train if they supposed its apparitions real. Ghost stories exercise a similar charm: They are enjoyable to the degree that we enter into the spirit of the fiction, knowing all the while that they are not true. “The story had held us, round the fire,” begins The Turn of the Screw, alluding to the tale that prompts the narrative which will constitute the novel itself, and thus proleptically locating its own fable of the supernatural. “It was gruesome, as on Christmas eve in an old house a strange tale should essentially be.” 3 M.R. James, whose Edwardian ghost stories continued to hold audiences spellbound when they were revived in Cambridge in the winter of 2005, designed his self-proclaimed fictions to make people feel “pleasantly uncomfortable; ” 4 he did not expect them to be believed. Oscar Wilde’s Canterville Ghost parodies the whole tradition and J. K. Rowling’s Nearly Headless Nick is much more disarming than frightening. It was as Gothic fantasy that ghosts survived the age of reason, living on behind its back as imaginative inventions. The Enlightenment, in other words, has done its work on revenants, relegating them to fireside tales — or metaphors. 5 And already by the 19 th century even figurative apparitions were evidently for the gullible. Walter Skeat coined the compound ghost-word to denominate terms that had no real existence. Delivering the Presidential Address to the Philological Society in 1886, he was scathing (in a desiccated sort of way) about scholars who had reproduced and given elaborate etymological explanations of verbal forms that did not exist outside scribal errors and misunderstandings. “The unfortunate editors have had, for the most part, no instruction in palaeography […],” he complained. 6 Meanwhile, the meta- 2 Margaret Atwood, Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing (London: Virago, 2003) 144-45. 3 Henry James, The Turn of the Screw, eds. Deborah Esch and Jonathan Warren (New York: W. W. Norton, 1991) 1. 4 Montague R. James, Casting the Runes and Other Ghost Stories, ed. Michael Cox (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1987) 337. 5 I bracket sporadic post-Enlightenment outbreaks of spiritualism. The ectoplasm of the séances represents a manifestation, certainly, but the phenomenon merits separate analysis, not least because spiritualism has its own distinctive vocabulary. 6 Walter W. Skeat, “Report upon ‘Ghost-Words,’ or Words which Have no Real Existence,” Transactions of the Philological Society 26 (1885-7): 366. Phantom Presences 97 phoric spectre of communism that Karl Marx perceived haunting Europe in 1848 was no more, he insisted, than the effect of a horror story, to be replaced by the truth explained in the Manifesto to follow. 7 The pejorative connotations of spectrality lived on. Attacking Cartesian dualism in 1949, Gilbert Ryle admitted to a “deliberate abusiveness” when he described the prevailing belief that the mind was a distinct but shadowy counterpart of the body as “the dogma of the Ghost in the Machine.” “I hope,” he continued, “to prove that it is entirely false, and false not in detail but in principle. It is not merely an assemblage of particular mistakes. It is one big mistake.” 8 Phantom presences had evidently become a byword for superstitious error. And yet, as these instances ironically confirm, figurative ghosts retain an active role in our vocabulary. Spirits continue to haunt linguistic usage to a degree that still bears the imprint of a once-powerful residence in Englishspeaking cultures. Revenants from a more credulous age do not always rest in the graves where rationality supposes it has buried them. Instead, they continue to manifest themselves in the form of images. Apparitions survive in any number of familiar figurative phrases: we still ‘give up the ghost’ metaphorically when we die, even if most of us have lost the belief in the exhalation of a separable and immortal soul with the last breath. ‘A spectre’ can still trouble the feast, while at his Inauguration President Obama promised to “roll back the spectre of a warming planet.” And a man who has lost weight, either literally or so to speak, may appear a ‘shadow’ of his former self. These phrases do not invoke any particular scepticism. What is it, then, that draws us back to figures that are so self-evidently archaic? Perhaps postmodernity relishes a trace of the paradox which is the defining property of ghosts. Belonging to the past but haunting the present, they contradict the familiar distinctions that define our knowledge. Spectres are neither living nor dead in the accepted meanings of those terms: to all intents and purposes inanimate, they walk, nevertheless, like breathing beings; visible, at least sporadically, to mortal eyes and capable of speech, they are barred, all the same, from participation in everyday human contact. At once material and insubstantial, phantoms defy the categories of presence and absence. My Roget’s Thesaurus, invaluable to anyone who wants to speak of ghosts without undue repetition of the term, opens, as it happens, with the antithetical categories ‘existence’ and ‘nonexistence.’ Where do wraiths belong? Marking a loss, their appearance also has the ironic effect of reaffirming the impossibility of restoration. 7 Karl Marx, “Manifesto of the Communist Party,“ Marx: Later Political Writings, trans. Terrell Carver (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996) 1. 8 Gilbert Ryle, The Concept of Mind (London: Hutchinson, 1949) 15-16. C ATHERINE B ELSEY 98 Later, Roget juxtaposes entries for ‘life’ and ‘death.’ Revenants deconstruct that opposition. Skeat’s repudiated ghost-words were no more than the effect of ignorance but they appeared, large as life, on the printed page. The spectre of communism that haunted Europe in 1848 might have been a figment of the imagination, but it still carries a weight of terror today, and with more justification in the light of the subsequent totalitarianism practised in its name. When Arthur Koestler set out to attack the behaviourism he ascribed to Gilbert Ryle among others, he appropriated the philosopher’s graphic image as the title of his own book, The Ghost in the Machine, transvaluing the phrase to reassert an updated cogito. 9 Meanwhile, a phantom pregnancy is imagined and yet can have material effects on the body; a phantom limb arouses physical sensations in the amputee. If figurative ghosts live on in our world picture, then, it is to legitimate thought beyond the binary oppositions that structure logic. We should not be surprised, therefore, to find them also haunting some instances of post-Enlightenment reflection on the human condition. II Modernity Among the works that propelled drama into modernity, scandalous in its own time, Ibsen’s play Ghosts participates in the shift from the literal invocation of the term to the figurative. There are no ghosts in Ghosts, and yet, as the title might lead us to expect, the metaphor of spectrality structures the play. When he seeks the joy of life in opposition to the prevailing morality, Osvald reincarnates his dead father; in trying to make love to Regina, he repeats his father’s sexual adventure in his own home. And his mother shivers, “Ghosts! The couple in the conservatory — walking again.” 10 This theatrical moment at the end of Act 1, coming so soon after Mrs Alving’s revelation to Pastor Manders of her husband’s impregnation of their housemaid, is surely as eerie as any literal haunting depicted in contemporary Gothic fiction. Does it even, perhaps, propel the drama into generic undecidability — of the kind Freud identifies with the uncanny — when mimesis seems to give way to the supernatural? 11 In the event, I think not, but the play certainly pushes at the boundaries of its chosen realism. Ibsen was not happy with the English title: His own Norwegian name for the play, Gengangere, means “Those-Who-Walk-Again.” 12 The dead Captain 9 Arthur Koestler, The Ghost in the Machine (London: Hutchinson, 1967). 10 Henrik Ibsen, “Ghosts,” Ghosts and Other Plays, trans. Peter Watts (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1964) 54. 11 Sigmund Freud, “The ‘Uncanny,’” Art and Literature, ed. Albert Dickson (London: Penguin, 1985) 374. 12 Ibsen 291. Phantom Presences 99 Alving returns in the person of his son, and Osvald’s inherited syphilis represents the penalty for the sins of the father, paid in the next generation. 13 But the revenants of the title go deeper: They also represent the old joyless pieties that haunt the living, the inexorable demands of duty that impelled Mrs Alving to marry without love and Pastor Manders to drive her back to her husband when she appealed to him for refuge. Theology, convention, orthodox morality all deprive people of life, the play proposes, reducing them to a condition the Thesaurus cannot accommodate, identifiable as less than existence but short of nonexistence, neither living nor dead: I’m inclined to think that we’re all ghosts, Pastor Manders; it’s not only the things that we’ve inherited from our fathers and mothers that live on in us, but all sorts of old dead ideas and old dead beliefs, and things of that sort. They’re not actually alive in us, but they’re rooted there all the same, and we can’t rid ourselves of them. I’ve only to pick up a newspaper, and when I read it I seem to see ghosts gliding between the lines. I should think there must be ghosts all over the country — as countless as grains of sand. And we are, all of us, so pitifully afraid of the light. 14 Like Skeat’s and Ryle’s, Ibsen’s revenants are aligned with superstition and falsehood, and yet the tragedy seems less confident that scepticism will dispatch them as Osvald succumbs to the ravages of the disease. The past, in other words, is not easily cast off in the present. Figurative ghosts, dead and buried but reanimated beyond their own lifetime, register the play’s acknowledgement of history’s continuing threat. Ibsen was not the only 19 th -century writer to recognise that the tradition of the dead generations weighed like a nightmare on the brains of the living. 15 Nor was he alone in figuring cultural incursions of the past as phantom presences. A century later, when Jacques Derrida wrote a book in response to the fall of the Berlin Wall, he called it Specters of Marx. Here again, the spirits Derrida conjures up lie at the heart of his argument. Marx’s own writing, he demonstrates, is pervaded — shaped, indeed — by ghosts as metaphors for commodity fetishism, ideology, religion, all seen as emanations of bourgeois economy, and all due to be exorcised, laid by the revolution to come. If the 19 th century supposed that apparitions could be dispelled by the truth, our own epoch, older and wiser, knows better, its major conflicts justified, if not generated, by ideological difference, the ghost of an archaic ethnicity prominent among them. (And how about our own “war on terror,” where one phantasmic fundamentalism has confronted another? ) Derrida’s point is that reason has not so far banished error. Instead, the material consequences of dogma promoted as certainty have had the effect of 13 Ibsen 74. 14 Ibsen 61. 15 Karl Marx, “The Eighteenth Brumaire,“ Marx: Later Political Writings 32. C ATHERINE B ELSEY 100 calling into question the metaphysical opposition between truth and falsehood, conviction as either solid fact or pure fiction, and it follows that deconstruction between binary oppositions and the identification of the trace of the other in the selfsame must be the philosophy for our times. Even if Marx subscribed to a metaphysics of his own, or to what Derrida calls “a — critical but pre-deconstructive — ontology of presence as actual reality and as objectivity,” 16 for us now to dismiss the ghost of Marxism — or ghosts, since there is self-evidently more than one — would be merely to repeat Marx’s own pre-deconstructive gesture. Instead, Derrida urges, we should engage with the spirit or spirits of Marxism. We all inherit from the past, none of us is wholly free from the tradition of the dead generations, he insists. To that degree, we remain the heirs of Marx, and not least in his decentring of the cogito, the undertaking he shared with Copernicus, Darwin, and Freud (and, in his own way, Gilbert Ryle, though his influence was limited and Derrida does not mention him). 17 In that sense above all, deconstruction at once inherits from Marxism, Derrida claims, and develops it, takes it further: Deconstruction has never had any sense or interest, in my view at least, except as a radicalization, which is to say also in the tradition of a certain Marxism, in a certain spirit of Marxism. There has been, then, this attempted radicalization of Marxism called deconstruction […]. But a radicalization is always indebted to the very thing it radicalizes. That is why I spoke of the Marxist memory and tradition of deconstruction, of its Marxist “spirit”. It is not the only one and it is not just any one of the Marxist spirits. 18 And yet what Derrida calls the “arch-ghost” is not in the end Marxism but the cogito itself, the essence of Man, hero of humanism. 19 We cannot, he argues, in the light of Copernicus, Darwin, Freud, and Marx himself, continue to believe in this phantom among phantoms, nor yet, in view of our intellectual heritage, simply dismiss it either, as if by nominating it a fiction we dissipate its power. “They are always there, specters, even if they do not exist” — there to be questioned, learned from, challenged, as well as called to account. 20 16 Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, The Work of Mourning, and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge, 1994) 170. 17 Derrida 97-98. 18 Derrida 92-93. 19 Derrida 175. 20 Derrida 176. Phantom Presences 101 III Uncertainty The metaphor permits a form of debate that welcomes this recognition. For better or worse, ghostly figures, disrupting the complacent antithesis between presence and absence, fact and fiction, return from the past to trouble the current moment and unsettle the distinctions given by our tenses between then and now. There are no ghosts at Strindberg’s “ghost supper,” any more than there are in Ibsen’s play: Only old people who eat together largely in silence because they know the unspeakable secrets of each other’s pasts. 21 Not fully part of the human community, they cannot escape it either, except in death. While metaphoric phantoms allow the intrusion of the past into the present, however, they can also serve to mark an absence. If “I don’t stand a ghost of a chance with you,” as Bing Crosby and after him Frank Sinatra, Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald, and others so melodiously claim, 22 my predicament is doubly hopeless. Unable fully to rejoin the living, a ghost is not the person but inevitably other than the one it represents and whose place it takes. Supplanting the dead, revenants act as reminders of what is irretrievably lost and, if in the first instance ghosts are uncanny, they are also sad, themselves haunted by what they are not. A late work, something of a curiosity, by William S. Burroughs, the short novel Ghost of Chance (1991) is set in Madagascar, where isolation from the continent of Africa has allowed the island a separate evolution. Many of Madagascar’s species are unique, including the lemur, so-called in Latin because its native name means ‘ghost.’ In about 1700, the aptly named Captain Mission, whose colonial regime confirms the native taboo on killing these sad-eyed, vegetarian primates, sets off into the interior in quest of a larger species, known to the indigenous population as Big Ghost. Under the influence of the local mind-altering substance, what he finds in this terrain without predators, cut off from the mainland, is the biological Garden of Lost Chances, full of “creatures too trusting and gentle to survive.” 23 On the other side of the water that protects the island from the continent, Homo Sap, born in time and wedded to killing, follows his characteristic path of destruction. When Homo Sap’s artillery takes over Madagascar, Captain Mission’s settlement is destroyed and his own special ghost-lemur dies in his arms. The ghosts of Madagascar constitute the last trace of an irrecoverable innocence. But in case the island should evoke a Christian Garden of Eden, the 21 August Strindberg, “The Ghost Sonata,” The Father, Miss Julie and the Ghost Sonata, trans. Michael Meyer (London: Eyre Methuen, 1976) 171-72. 22 “I don’t stand a ghost of a chance,” music Victor Young, lyrics Ned Washington and Bing Crosby, 1932. 23 William S. Burroughs, Ghost of Chance (London: Serpent’s Tail, 1995) 38. C ATHERINE B ELSEY 102 text is quick to repudiate any such allegiance. The only god it endorses is Pan and 25 December 00 AD was the moment of his death. 24 Instead, the allegory here is more or less explicitly Lacanian, oddly enough. 25 Homo Sap differs from the ghost-primates thanks above all to language, or what Burroughs calls the representation of a thing “by something it is not.” 26 The Otherness of the symbol introduces a fissure into the human organism, like the channel that separates Madagascar from the mainland. “One side of the rift drifted into enchanted timeless innocence. The other moved inexorably toward language, time, tool use, weapon use, war, exploitation, and slavery.” 27 It is not clear to me that Jacques Lacan himself would have been happy to acknowledge this eccentric offspring of his work, with its heavy ecological nostalgia, not to mention its apology for hard drugs. But he might, I think, have relished the idea of organic existence as a revenant from the unknowable real, lost to the subject constituted in language and yet persisting as a vestige to exert its own pressures from a place that exceeds what we know. Since the drive is made perceptible — to both the subject and the analyst — at the level of the signifier in its Otherness, where it is represented by something it is not, its manifestations threaten the cogito and its phantom presence marks a corresponding absence in the symbolic order, an emanation of the unnameable. 28 But Lacanian ghosts are less palpable than those depicted by Burroughs. When he locates the paranormal in the terrain of the real, Lacan is not inviting us to resort to psychopharmacology or to lament a lost innocence. Nor does he subscribe to otherworldly beliefs. Instead, the supernatural belongs to the unnameable realm beyond the reach of the signifier; it exceeds what culture defines as knowledge and in the process throws into relief the limitations of our culturally-induced understanding. “The gods belong to the field of the real.” 29 A god, Lacan repeats, “is something one encounters in the real, inaccessible,” and the presence of the divine “is indicated by what doesn’t 24 Burroughs 25. 25 There is even a reference to “the Thing” inside Homo Sap: Burroughs 48. 26 Burroughs 48. 27 Burroughs 49. 28 Ironically, in this respect psychoanalysis effectively reverses the image of the Cartesian ghost in the machine repudiated by Lacan’s contemporary, Gilbert Ryle: Ryle’s ghost is consciousness; Lacan’s lost presence organic (Gilbert Ryle, 1900-76; Jacques Lacan, 1901-81). In the same year as Ryle published The Concept of Mind (London: Hutchinson, 1949), Lacan told an audience of analysts in Zurich that psychoanalysis led him to oppose “any philosophy directly issuing from the Cogito.” Jacques Lacan, Écrits, trans. Alan Sheridan (London: Tavistock, 1977) 1). One way or another, dualism was evidently bothering their generation, and not without reason. 29 Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, trans. Alan Sheridan (London: Penguin, 1979) 45. Phantom Presences 103 deceive — anxiety.” 30 This unease is evidence that we have reached the limits of the territory mapped by the language we have learnt, not awe before the absolute. Even Derrida becomes uncharacteristically Lacanian when he identifies a ghost as what “no longer belongs to knowledge,” “an unnameable or almost unnameable thing.” 31 Indeed, Derrida goes so far as to glance at the possibility that uncanny spectrality might be identifiable with das Ding, the psychoanalytic source of the drive to know: “And what if it were the Thing itself, the cause of the very thing one is seeking and that makes one seek? The cause of the knowledge and the search? ” 32 If the gods give names to the unaccountable, however, Lacanian ghosts mark a double loss. Death makes a “hole in the real” that can be filled in the process of mourning by nothing less than “the totality of the signifier.” Apparitions in their very spectrality represent that absence: not the return of what is lost but its irretrievable demise. 33 To my mind, this brings Lacan closer, in the end, to Bing Crosby than to William Burroughs. And closer, too, perhaps, though the connection may be no more than coincidental, to Philip Roth, whose novel Exit Ghost (2007) invokes the metaphor to show its protagonist living what, citing Keats, he calls “a posthumous existence.” 34 At 71, the reclusive novelist Nathan Zuckerman, now impotent, incontinent, and uncertain of his memory, returns to New York to make one last bid for vitality, “to recover something lost.” 35 Painfully for Nathan, the drive persists in an organism not now equipped to obey it: this self-confessed “revenant” in the city is drawn back into the turmoil of life above all by a young woman 30 Jacques Lacan, Television and A Challenge to the Psychoanalytic Establishment, ed. Joan Copjec (New York: W. W. Norton, 1990) 90. 31 Derrida 6. 32 Derrida 173. This is offered as a reading of Freud’s essay on “The ‘Uncanny’” but it also plays a part in Derrida’s argument concerning the obligation to reckon with (figurative) ghosts. Lacan discusses the Thing, archaic object of the drive, in Seminar 7. He himself is more ambivalent towards the desire for knowledge: “Sophocles represents [Oedipus] as driven to bring about his own ruin through his obstinacy in wanting to solve an enigma, to know the truth” (The Ethics of Psychoanalysis 1959-60: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VII, trans. Dennis Porter (London: Routledge, 1992) 272); “I think that throughout this historical period the desire of man, which has been felt, anesthetized, put to sleep by moralists, domesticated by educators, betrayed by the academies, has quite simply taken refuge or been repressed in that most subtle and blindest of passions, as the story of Oedipus shows, the passion for knowledge. That’s the passion that is currently going great guns and is far from having said its last word” (324). The context makes clear that the passion in contemporary question is science, which Lacan denigrates throughout Seminar 7 for the invention of atomic weapons. 33 Jacques Lacan, “Desire and the Interpretation of Desire in Hamlet,” Literature and Psychoanalysis, ed. Shoshana Felman (Baltimore, MD: John’s Hopkins UP, 1982) 38-39. 34 Philip Roth, Exit Ghost (London: Vintage, 2008) 221, 231. 35 Roth, Exit Ghost 104. C ATHERINE B ELSEY 104 who exerts what he describes as “a huge gravitational pull on the ghost of my desire.” 36 Exit Ghost puzzles over the contest between the spectrality of organic being, an inadequate, incomplete actuality, and the symbolising capabilities of fiction. Is there consolation to be found at the level of the signifier? Nathan himself eventually goes back to writing and seclusion, where he becomes the spectator of a dying nature at the desk by the window, looking out through the gray light of a November morning, across a snow-dusted road onto the silent, wind-flurried waters of the swamp, already icing up at the edge of the foundering stalks of the skeletal bed of plumeless reeds. 37 But he does so in order to complete the script of his play, He and She, in which She yields to His overtures. Only in fiction is anything possible. Where else can we “wish what is into what is not,” except on the page? 38 (The writer finds “the imaginary ‘She’ vividly at the centre of her character as the actual ‘she’ will never be.” 39 ) It seems, then, as if art compensates for the living death which is old age, or perhaps for the unrealisable possibilities that constitute existence in its entirety, offering another kind of apparition in their stead. “For some very, very few that amplification, evolving uncertainly out of nothing, constitutes their only assurance, and the unlived, the surmise, fully drawn in print on paper, is the life whose meaning comes to matter most.” 40 But the book does not end there. If the fictional He and She has the last word in Roth’s novel, replacing the gaunt, wintry vegetation of the northern swamp with “the chocolate-milk-colored water” of an imagined bayou, its last word is of a missed encounter. In the play She agrees to come to his hotel but He evades their meeting: “(She’s on her way and he leaves. Gone for good.)” 41 Exit ghost. The signifier does not deliver gratification after all, or not, at least, at the thematic level: Fiction is not, it seems, reducible to a form of wishfulfilment. Instead, it aligns itself with another kind of spectrality, conjuring presences only to record a loss. The defining metaphor of Exit Ghost permits the novel to leave unresolved the question it repeatedly poses: where is life to be found? Its characters are all what the text calls “no-longers” or “notyets.” 42 When, if ever, do shadows give way to substance, whether literal or 36 Roth, Exit Ghost 31, 66. 37 Roth, Exit Ghost 280. 38 Roth, Exit Ghost 273. 39 Roth, Exit Ghost 147. 40 Roth, Exit Ghost 147. 41 Roth, Exit Ghost 292. 42 Roth, Exit Ghost 256-57. Phantom Presences 105 figurative? What is the relation between the human animal subject to decay and the language in which it both finds and loses its proper location? IV Ghost Writers Exit Ghost treats ghostliness not as an archaic survival but as a current condition. In an earlier novel a closely related metaphor framed an investigation of the writer’s place in the text. Amy Bellette, a “wraithlike” figure in Exit Ghost, 43 first appeared in The Ghost Writer (1979), where Nathan, then an aspiring author of 23, sought legitimation from the writer E.I. Lonoff, long dead by the time of the later work but a phantom presence in Amy’s apartment. The Ghost Writer begins, like many good ghost stories, by the fire, as a December dusk falls in a secluded old farmhouse. And yet there are no ghosts in The Ghost Writer either. The characters include a range of candidates for the title role (given as two words), among them the self-sequestered Lonoff, both writer and metaphoric ghost, who has outlived his own success and has since progressively arranged his affairs for the sake of his art in order to avoid living, while his work is reduced in consequence to turning sentences around. Alternatively, perhaps the title alludes to Anne Frank, who haunts Nathan’s imagination to the point where she lives on there, masquerading now as Amy Bellette and driven “to ‘come back’ as the avenging ghost,” 44 but whose Diary retains its power to testify to atrocity only on condition that she did not survive. Anne Frank, the dead child writer, had a story to tell, in contrast to Nathan, who wants to be a writer but, guilty of a safe, suburban childhood in Newark, New Jersey, can only ghost other people’s stories and, even then, is sure he cannot “approach the originality and excitement of what actually goes on! ” 45 How substantial is a shade, this manifestation that might so easily be illusory? The Ghost Writer identifies an affinity between spectrality and writing: ghost as writer, writer as ghost. In the process, it draws out all the paradoxes of the phrase itself. Understood in the technical sense of the term, a ghost writer (one word) is at once present in and absent from the finished work. How material, then, is the ghost’s contribution? On the one hand, in the popular conception the ghost writer, as one who does the writing on behalf of another, is no more than an intermediary between protagonist and reader, while the story belongs to the experiencing subject. On the other hand, from a literary-critical point of view, the ghost-writer is the true maker of the piece of writing we hold in our hands. In that sense, are not all novelists ghost- 43 Roth, Exit Ghost 17. 44 Philip Roth, The Ghost Writer (London: Vintage, 2005) 148. 45 Roth, The Ghost Writer 121. C ATHERINE B ELSEY 106 writers, at once there in the writing and absent from the story, drawing on imagination to invent beyond their experience and tell tales that are not in the end their own? Robert Harris’ bestseller The Ghost exploits this paradox in another key. The narrator here is a professional ghost writer, hired to make readable the memoirs of an ex-prime minister who bears more than a passing resemblance to Tony Blair. So spectral does the ghost writer appear to the other characters that he is never named: His role is too insubstantial, his appellation too immaterial for anyone to remember. At first, then, the distinction seems clear between the protagonist who shaped history itself and the ghost paid to shape the record of that history. At the same time, we are to understand, the quality of the ghost’s writing will make all the difference between the book’s success and failure, determining its readership and sales figures. The novel reflects repeatedly on the symbiotic relationship between ghost and named author. How far does the ghost himself create the recollections his tape recorder elicits from his subject? Whose are the memories readers will eventually encounter? As he works, however, the narrator gets caught up in a plot to bring the former premier to trial for war crimes and, in the event, the central adventure he recounts turns out to be his own. Ironically, the anonymous ghost writer becomes the hero of his own story. By the time his book is finally completed, the truth about the prime minister cannot safely be told. In the event, then, the ghosted memoir, marketed as history, is in practice predominantly fictitious; the ghost’s own tale, as he records it for us, is, we are to understand, true. At the same time, of course, this anonymous narrator is entirely imaginary and the book is a work of fiction. The ex-premier, however, is not exclusively fictitious. Both characters inhabit a popular novel and yet the mystery of the prime minister’s unquestioning allegiance to American policy in the Middle East is rooted in contemporary history. Harris’ book plays wittily with the paradoxes of ghost-writing, including some others that I ca not reveal without spoiling the story. We are left to ponder the possibility that all writing creates much of what it appears to record and at the same time transcribes a good deal of what it seems to invent. Political thrillers may capture the misgivings of their own moment; Philip Roth’s fiction, to return to that, at once imagines and records a social and cultural history of contemporary America. Where exactly is the boundary between fact and fiction, or between history as one kind of story and the novel as another? The insubstantiality that informs the term ghost-writing throws those questions into unexpected relief. Phantom Presences 107 V Intertextual Ghosts If all writers are in a sense ghost writers, all texts are haunted by earlier texts, as the past returns to inform the literary and, indeed, the philosophical present. Four Quartets makes a sudden appearance in Exit Ghost at the moment when the now 71-year-old narrator sees Lonoff’s furniture in Amy’s apartment: I thought, “What! Are you here? ” and then remembered where that very line appears in Eliot’s “Little Gidding,” at the point where the poet, walking the streets before dawn, meets the “compound ghost,” who tells him what pain he will encounter. “For last year’s words belong to last year’s language / And next year’s words await another voice.” How does Eliot’s ghost begin? Sardonically. “Let me disclose the gifts reserved for age.” Reserved for age. Reserved for age. Beyond that I cannot go. A frightful prophecy follows that I don’t remember. I’ll look it up when I get home. 46 He does not. The prophecy Nathan represses includes the loss of sensation, a powerless rage against the folly of others, and then the rehearsal of a life and the exasperation at its public assessment. But while all these conditions are foregrounded by the story in Exit Ghost, the allusion also acknowledges a debt. In the eyes of its compound ghost, T.S. Eliot’s poem of 1942 records “the sudden look of some dead master,” a poet, certainly, and specifically William B. Yeats, perhaps, who had died three years before. Yeats also called on the dead, Homer among them, to tell whether all old men and women raged, as he did then, against old age. 47 Spectre has recourse to textual spectre here in what seems an infinite regress — from Nathan to his fictitious master, Lonoff, from Eliot to Yeats and, beyond him, through all dead writers to Homer. Eliot’s compound ghost, “[b]oth intimate and unidentifiable,” 48 surely represents the cumulative literary tradition that permits individual talent to flourish for a while. Last year’s words are inevitably superseded by next year’s, delivered in another voice, for better or worse, but always in a relation of difference, which presupposes a resemblance, to a textual history that is the condition of writing’s intelligibility. As an evocation of the dead person, an apparition, however palpable, can never resume the identity of the living being. Dis-embodied, not the thing itself, the revenant is irreversibly changed. In that sense, is not all writing haunted? While intertexts inhabit a work, they are at the same time no more than shadows of themselves, rewritten as other than they were. Marx re- 46 Roth, Exit Ghost 169. 47 T.S. Eliot, “Little Gidding,” Four Quartets (London: Faber, 1944) l. 92. William B. Yeats, “The Tower,” The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats (London: Macmillan, 1958) 219-21. Ll.145-46 of “Little Gidding” seem to allude to “Byzantium” (Yeats 280-81). 48 Eliot, “Little Gidding,” l.96. C ATHERINE B ELSEY 108 writes Hegel, Derrida reinterprets Marx. Ibsen’s Ghosts surely rewrites the sagas of his native Norway, where the ancestors come back from their graves, malign and larger than life, to spread pestilence. And perhaps it also invokes Hamlet, that earlier story of a dead father who revisits his son with fatal consequences while his loving mother stands by too helpless to intervene. Roth’s Ghost Writer, meanwhile, explicitly references Swift, Keats, Dickens, Dostoevsky, Chekhov, and Gogol. Other phantom presences play a still larger part in its composition. The novel paraphrases Anne Frank’s Diary and summarises a short story by Henry James about the unforeseen effects of Dencombe’s art. If novelists now see more than their predecessors, it is because they stand on the shoulders of giants. In one of those knowing ironies that make Roth’s novels so pleasurable, the young aspiring writer steps onto the volume of Henry James stories on Lonoff’s desk in order to eavesdrop on the conversation in Amy’s bedroom above: “Ah, the unreckoned consequences, the unaccountable uses of art! Dencombe would understand. James would understand. But would Lonoff? Don’t fall.” 49 Does The Ghost Writer also silently invoke Hamlet in its story of Nathan’s longing for a (literary) father who turns out to be living like a ghost? If T.S. Eliot features in the argument about art and life that is conducted in the pages of Exit Ghost, and if Macbeth and Keats, Ibsen, Chekhov, Conrad, and Hemingway are all accorded more than honorary mention there, the title surely alludes once again to Hamlet. This time the comparison is between Nathan and the old king, Shakespeare’s own Ghost, powerless now to effect his will in his own person but reluctant to surrender control. If so many modern textual wraiths lead back ultimately to that one ghost story, no wonder Hamlet also forms the thread that binds the argument of Specters of Marx. Derrida’s book begins and ends with quotations from the play and reverts at intervals to this text that dramatises a time which is radically “out of joint.” 50 Is Hamlet, then, a point of origin for a culture that acknowledges the continuing but phantom presence of its own past? Yes and no (predictably): Hamlet, too, had its antecedents. But that is another story. VI Postmodernity On the basis of this handful of examples (there are surely others), it seems clear to me that, despite the Enlightenment’s dismissal, ghosts continue to walk, however anachronistically, in the 21 st century, introducing a strangeness into what is familiar. Postmodern morality, politics, and textuality find ways to confront their anxieties in the form of attendant spirits. If we no 49 Roth, The Ghost Writer 117. 50 William Shakespeare, Hamlet, ed. Harold Jenkins (London: Methuen, 1982) 1.5.196. Phantom Presences 109 longer lend credence to literal revenants, then we cannot easily give up their figurative survivors. In the first instance, these metaphoric spectres register a contemporary uncertainty, not only as an additional presence, a memory of the past intruding into the present, but also as a loss, something subtracted from the self-sufficiency of the current moment. The trope casts doubt on the belief in a consciousness fully present to itself, as well as the autonomy of the text. Mysterious, unaccountable or uncanny, phantoms mark the incompleteness of our positive terms and, indeed, our cultural maps. In this way their continuing figurative presence at once menaces our knowledge and allows the possibility of thought beyond the categories orthodoxy legitimates. C ATHERINE B ELSEY 110 Works Cited Atwood, Margaret. Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing. London: Virago, 2003. Burroughs, William S. Ghost of Chance. London: Serpent’s Tail, 1995. Derrida, Jacques. 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