Freedgood 2014

Freedgood, Elaine. "Ghostly Reference." Representations 124 (Winter 2014): pp. 40-53. Web.

• [Epigraph] There is but one world and its division into disconnected spheres is not due to being as such, but to the organization of human knowledge of being. - Theodor Adorno, Stars Down to Earth
• 40 Ghosts are for some of us literal and for some of us only allegorical: I want to think of them as both at once, in order to consider what I call ghostly reference. Ghostly reference is a malleable aspect of representation, a formal nexus that allows for the free play of belief and the production of worlds - two necessary conditions for the formation and sustenance of the liberal subject, as I will discuss in what follows. Refusing to give up the ghost slows ghostly reference to a halt, allowing us to think about the materiality as well as the meaning of the ghost.
• 41ff case studies - primitive ghosts (Amos Tutuola, Palm Wine Drinkard and My life in the Bush of Ghosts) and allegorical ghosts (Shakespeare, or what he's been made into)
  • frame isn't long diachrony 1600-1950 but C20 Anglo-American lit crit (so first half C20)
• 42 As an example of an African mind, his apparent beliefs and ideas were part of the value of his work in a way that Shakespeare's or Dickens's ghosts are not literally valued, or, for that matter, literally "read."
• Shakespeare's ghosts, also derived from folklore, literary sources, and Christianity, are rationalized and allegorized very early on in the project of Anglo-American literary criticism[.]
  • Look up: Elmer Soll, 1907 PMLA
• 43: Here [even in New Historicist accounts like Greenblatt and Belsey] metaphor and meaning replace the living dead in whom Elizabethans routinely believed, despite the banishing of purgatory by the Protestant church; we do not explore the heterodoxy at the heart of our canon, the set of beliefs that make our "greatest" writers completely unlike us, and perhaps unbearably so.
• Tutuola and Shakespeare are emblems of two problems in literary criticism: literal reading of a text that is assumed itself to be only literal and allegorical reading of a text that is itself assumed to be only allegorical.
• 44: The primitive, the genuine African lives in one world; the liberal subject, on the other hand, requires many, in part to disavow the many deathworlds that can be variously construed, in the flexing of genre, as reality or fantasy, history or fiction, as rupturing diegetic and ontological break the world into worlds.
• ...it is hard to take them [Victorian ghosts] figuratively: their ghosts do not resolve into "meaning" very well, they are not "haunting" in the way that Hamlet's father or Tutuola's television-handed ghost stay with us long after we have finished reading.
• ...although many Victorians believed in ghosts, Victorian ghost stories don't tend to. Or, more precisely, they refuse to settle the issue of belief.
• 45: If the dominant mode of Victorian fiction -- realism -- relies on visibility, legibility, and thoroughgoing epistemological closure, the ghost story questions the evidence of sight, the possibility of reading that evidence accurately. More important, it refuses to decide on whether or not we can truly "be in touch with those we cannot touch" (in Frances [sp., Francis] O'Gorman's memorable phrase). The "ghost" problem is not solved: we are left with two distinct ontological realms at the end of the ghost story: the one in which ghosts do exist and the one in which they do not. We inhabit that ruptured space, and so do many characters who do not know what they have seen, or if what they have heard of what someone else has seen is true. The ghost story is metaleptically ruptured by the intrusion of belief into disbelief, and of disbelief into belief.
  • metalepsis: serial application of tropes (sometimes, specifically, metonymy) -- rhetorical figure consisting in the metonymical (associational) substitution of 1 word for another which is itself a metonym; generally any metaphorical usage that results from a series of figurative substitutions (e.g., Marlowe's Faust, "was this the face that launched a thousand ships and burnt the topless towers of Ilium?")
• I want to argue that this metaleptic fracture emblematic of the ghost story is actually similar to the dominant realist mode. It is not an anomaly: rather it is a feature of fiction that realism tried and tries to naturalize. That is to say, the realist novel wants to refer to real people, events, and places, yet it also wants to distribute lots of fictional people, things, and places among that real stuff, creating a seemingly endless integration of two very different diegetic and ontological worlds.
• 46: But like these self-reflexive fictions [modernist/postmodernist], these Victorian writers also produce the largest form of metaleptic rupture those self-undermining fictions point out in themselves: the problem between the two ontological levels - the fictional and the referential - must coexist and cannot be melded together.
  • thus "ghostly reference": the uncanny visibility of the fictional in the referential ontological level (or, presumably, vice versa)
• The ghost story, like other fictions that cannot bring representation and the world represented into alignment, epitomizes and indeed emphasizes this problem. If it is a problem.
• What seems like a kind of narrative dislocation, lack of resolution, or epistemological crisis might also be viewed as the perfect liberal narrative form.... This is the ultimate liberal experience as described by Elaine Hadley in Living Liberalism: the point of liberal cognition is to have private, apparently self-generated opinions. We think what we choose to think, each by each.... The liberal citizen and its leaders are ghostly because they must be capable of an abstracted, formalized, and spiritualized disembodiment.
• 47: "Ghost tales," Schmitt writes, "reinforced the economic implications of penance." Ghosts, in short, are bourgeois.
  • Jean-Claude Schmitt, Ghosts in the Middle Ages (Chicago, 1998)
• The "precision" of book-keeping in two columns can only be beautiful if both columns are exempt from the exfoliations of connotative meaning, and from the (multiple) interpretations that will produce it. Denotation must be that which ends with a definition, a deictic [reliant on context] "this [48] is that." When we say, as we often do, that Middlemarch is "encyclopedic," we don't really mean it. If we did, we would understand that to interpret it requires expanding on it, not shrinking it. "Reading" Middlemarch means reading the vatican art, the stethoscopes, the emeralds, the muslin...Just as a beginning. If lists have meaning, our labor will have to be decommodified and unalienated, because it will be endless. Any kind of mastery will be hopeless. Readings will be absolutely temporary and obviously makeshift.
• 49: Fiction is the space in which this kind of experience can be reported: it is the space in which belief and unbelief can coexist, or in which believing is a process rather than an accomplished creed, and in which readers and characters can maintain radical ontological flexibility.
• 50: Ghostly reference offers us a form of endlessly shifting semiotic play: the play of reference, the play of meaning, and the play of belief each shield one another from any final resolution. We do not have to finally or fully believe in the ghost, or the history, that haunts it. Perhaps a more principled ghost busting would, in general, involve taking literal ghosts figuratively and figurative ghosts literally.
• 51: On the one hand, the detective story, like the mainstream of Victorian fiction, seems to resolve the world for us into legible people, places, and events; on the other hand, the ghost story makes all resolutions optional.... This footloose trans-diegetic travel forms a kind of haunting obverse metaphor for the literal instability of habitation of Tutuola's "deads" and ghosts, and for the Sioux who would not give up the ghost [leading to Wounded Knee]. Liberal subjects are at home everywhere and anywhere; subjects outside this formation are homeless, consigned to live "life in a fleeting mode," in which not only place but "particular being" - human or animal, alive or dead - is temporary. That is perhaps one of the consequences of liberal freedom, and one of the consequences of liberal individualism, which has always been available only in very limited, and local, supply.
  • I'm unclear on the wider political implications -- perhaps because I don't know the Hadley?