Hauntings

On Halloween, it’s interesting to wonder what exactly it is that makes things scary. The Slaves of Golconda have read The Woman in Black this month and it is a classic ghost story that combines all the usual elements – a lonely, isolated house linked to the mainland by a causeway over marshes that flood, local villagers who refuse to speak of the place, tragedies of the past recounted in a bundle of letters, and a ghostly figure in black with a ravaged, wasted face who is out to seek evil revenge. It’s well known territory but sometimes even the most reliable of literary codes and conventions can fail. My son saw the West End production of The Woman in Black on a school trip and I asked him how it was. ‘It was good, and quite scary in parts,’ he said. ‘But there was one moment when the characters were supposed to be saving a dog from quicksand, and there were only these two actors on stage, and no real dog, so watching them trying to pull an invisible dog to safety was quite funny really.’ It’s a terrible bit in the book, one that has real dramatic tension, but I could quite see how it would take some acting skills to express the peril of a drowning dog on a London stage with no dog in sight. Fear, like pain, relies enormously on the power of the imagination to anticipate consequences. But unlike pain, which is best evoked by the instrument that will inflict it, fear needs a dose of the unknown to be effective. We have to not know what will happen next, to be radically uncertain, before fear can really take hold.

Having read so many other wonderful reviews of the book (and just click over to the site if you want to see them), I felt I should do something different and think about what it is that lies beneath the figure of the ghost in literature. The word ‘ghost’ itself originates in the German Geist, which is defined as a spirit, an inspiring principle. To be human is to have a spirit or a soul, and the difficulty of confronting our mortality often leads to the belief that what must remain after death is this very spirit. But ghosts in stories show themselves to be more than just any old human spirit, hanging around still once the party is over. Ghosts are always in limbo, and they induce anxiety or they set tasks for those still living. Literary criticism borrows the mathematical term ‘the indivisible remainder’ to talk about them – it means the bit that gets left over, the small, niggling element that remains when every other part of the equation is finished, after all the other numbers have neatly folded in on themselves and disappeared. Ghosts represent the indivisible remainder of life; problems unresolved, and emotions of fear, rage, horror, distress, that are too big for the grave to swallow them up. The neat and tidy borderline between life and death becomes blurred by the appearance of the ghost, as does the boundary between what is real and what is fantastic. They are there to trouble what ought to be most certain to human life by suggesting that something will always elude co-option into the clear-cut or the fenced-in. It’s one reason why ghost stories so often begin with a scene of exquisite comfort – roaring fires, a happy, assembled company, houses locked up tight against the winter chill. Even, maybe especially, in the most secure environment, fear and horror and grief can find its way in, seeping through the cracks and chinks in the best domestic armour.

But the appearance of the ghost is not always understood as an intrusive threat to mental and emotional serenity. The experience of being haunted is usually described as being indistinguishable from the experience of mental anguish, and associated with melancholia, alienation and anxiety. (Arthur Kipps in The Woman in Black has to be on his own, in the dark and cold, cut off from the possibility of rescue and invaded by a sense of despair for the black fear to really take a hold on him). But this is often only as an imperative to action. Many ghosts come to awaken an ethical imperative in the haunted, to ensure justice for the future as well as appeasement for the past. Whatever has been left undone, whatever cannot be subsumed into family or social history, becomes the burden of the next generation. The Gothic genre is particularly keen on this ambivalence between horror and justice. The vindictive, chain-rattling ghosts of its tales haunt family homes in order to indicate the presence of a terrible secret, usually one that threatens the legitimate transfer of an inheritance.  If there’s one thing the Victorians were really afraid of, it’s that the family bloodline would be corrupted, the money diverted and the house passed on to the undeserving.

So most ghost stories, of whatever kind, press for resolution and closure. For uncovering secrets, healing old wounds and tidying up the essential human boundaries. And they derive their fear factor from the great nebulous unknown that surrounds human anguish and the unexplained pull of the past. What we don’t know DOES hurt us, often in surprising ways.

Burying The Past

Only posting a couple of times a week means I get very behind in my reviews. Several weeks ago now I read a very good psychological thriller, Ghost Song, by Sarah Rayne, who was a new author to me. It was one of those books that gets off to a cracking start and manages to hold your attention easily, even though it was quite long (471 pages) and involved a number of intertwined story lines crossing over from the past into the present. The story revolves around an old music hall in London, the Tarleton, which has been kept shut up and closed down since the start of the First World War, with no sign of a renaissance in sight. The book opens with surveyor, Robert Fallon, making the annual report on the building and visiting it for the first time. He falls into a kind of fascination with the place, despite, or maybe because of, its eerie nature, the rustlings of ghostly presences, and the clumsily built brick wall that cuts off half the understage area and cannot be penetrated. It is obvious that the theatre has a secret deep in its unlit and unlovely depths. We then get transported back to May 1914 with the Tarleton a lively going concern, run by singer songwriter Toby Chance and owned by his parents, the unlikely but devoted combination of a former showgirl and a government minister. Already the theatre is haunted, but it’s Toby’s very present liaison with a high society woman that will lead him into terrible danger. From now on the book works to bring the past forward and to take the present backwards until the mystery is solved.

Bringing together past and present is the Harlequin Society, specialists and consultants on nineteenth-century theatre who have custody of the Tarleton. Researcher Hilary Bryant is determined to uncover its secrets and joins forces with Robert Fallon, whose professional desire to find out what lies behind the wall becomes inseparable from compelling curiosity. Ranged against them, however, is Hilary’s boss, Shona Seymour, who has her own reasons for wanting the theatre to be left untouched, its ghosts undisturbed. Shona’s story develops until it takes equal prominence with that of the music hall, and the deftness with which Sarah Rayne weaves her tales together is really admirable. Shona has grown up in a grim family environment, with a harshly authoritarian grandfather, a mother turning to drink, and a father who is never mentioned. Her one most persistent childhood memory, which returns to her in nightmares, is of mother and grandfather burying a body in the cellar of their cold and comfortless house in Scotland. The parallel that the story sets up here, between cellars, bodies and concealing walls that never quite manage to do their job well enough is, I think, enticingly explored.

Reading the book, it struck me that the essence of the psychological thriller is repetition. There is nothing we fear so much as the mere thought of what was traumatic and troubling in the past occurring once again in the present. Freud termed it Nachträglichkeit, a process in which one’s warning systems become wise after the event and exist forever more on a hair trigger, anticipating wildly at the first indication that similar events may arise. So Hilary and Robert may well be spooked by ghosts and naturally fearful at digging about (literally) in bricked up underground caverns, but it is Shona, who has been here before in a terrifying and unresolved way, who suffers extreme anxiety and blinding panic at the mere thought of the mysterious theatre wall. The psychological thriller pits its protagonists against their deepest fears, and provides overwhelming compulsions as to why they should confront them – certainly they would not do so otherwise. And the reader can sympathise with the fears evoked, with the vulnerability of the protagonists, but also perhaps with the courage they show or else with the certainty that the story will provide a satisfying resolution. But what seemed to strike me most forcibly was how powerful the past is, how tightly it clings and how difficult it is to shake it off. Our entire adult lives are spent wrestling with the ghosts of unresolved things, of nameless fears and unexplained distress, as well as with the direct consequences of our choices and actions.

The ghosts in Ghost Song arise out of all levels of past and present, and they are both malevolent and benign. What I most appreciated about this book was its richness of theme and its clever use of the multi-stand plot. There were a number of twists and turns I didn’t see coming (although I should in all fairness say here that I am quite dense about plot and fairly easily surprised), but all the different stories were gripping in their way and well balanced. And the resolution that arises out of them, the way they interconnect at the conclusion, was most satisfying. This isn’t great literature, but that isn’t always what a person wants to read. I found this an extremely good example of its genre, pacy, engaging, quite spooky at times and very well structured. Is it enough to say I went to amazon afterwards and bought two more books by the same author?

The Blogging Workshop

So, yesterday saw me heading into town for a literary day at the college of my dear friend, Rosy Thornton. A number of talks and workshops had been organized and we were heading up a session on online writing resources, which promised to be fun. It was my first chance to discuss the business of blogging and I’d been looking forward to it. It was a mucky sort of autumn day, wet and windy and warm, and the town was clogged with traffic. For some reason my usual route to the front car park was completely congested, so I ended up arriving late and sneaking in the back of the hall for the talk that preceded our session. When faced with closed double doors, it takes a bit of nerve to open them; one never knows whether a walk of shame across the front of the discussion panel will be the only pathway to a seat. But fortunately I found myself at the top and back of a horseshoe shaped auditorium and could unobtrusively take a seat in what would have been called the ‘gods’ in a theatre.

Down below was a panel of five representatives of the publishing industry, two agents, a first time author, an independent publisher (I think) and the chairman whose role I never did discern. This was an altogether cheerier panel than the one I saw at the Cambridge wordfest back in the spring, mostly due to the resilient good nature of the chairman, and the cool sense of one of the agents. When I arrived the ebook was up for discussion, although interestingly enough, no one had very much initially to say about it. Yes, ebooks were going to be a fixture but the take up of them so far had been very small, only a tiny percentage of the market. The first time author didn’t read ebooks, didn’t know anything about them but was vaguely glad they might exist. The agent provided what I felt was the best comment. She said that the physical object that is the book was still, and would remain, perennially popular as a gift and as a possession. Ebooks were great for educational purposes or for traveling, or for people who wanted to read five crime novels a week and throw them away afterwards. But for other situations the book would remain desirable and viable and in the future she could see that design would become increasingly important (think Persephone books, for instance). Now that seemed to me to be good common sense, as I do despair of a publishing industry that can only think in terms of either/or, thus condemning itself to miss the opportunities of diversification or lose loyal consumers of print. The agent had a very good quote that she thought summed up the book trade from Gramsci, who called for ‘pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will’. Gramsci saw a balance here between the spur to action and the belief in positive change, but I felt it summed up the pessimism of publishing houses, overthinking their situation in unproductive ways, coming up against the stubborn determination of the writing masses to get published regardless.

After this it was time for our session. We had about twenty attendees and they were a good crowd – quite lively and ready to speak out and contribute. A very mixed range of experience on the internet made it tricky to pitch our information – we might have been talking outer Mongolian for half of the audience whereas the other half were well versed and must have found the explanations dull. But we had a good discussion, I felt. Two things struck me particularly about the way the internet is viewed. The first was that people attribute it with far more power than I believe it yet possesses. One man asked whether I had had difficulty with my institution objecting to information I put in blog posts. Seeing as the whole idea of the blog is quite probably a complete irrelevance for the majority of lecturers and apparatchiks at my university, none of whom would be interested in what I had to say (beyond wishing maybe to dispute a point in a conceptual argument), I had to say no. One of the ex-students attending to help us out said afterwards that he had once written something truly mean about Heather Mills on one of his blog posts and wondered about it, but I said that her PR representatives were hardly likely to say, forget The Mirror, forget The News of the World, we’re suing that guy with the blog because what he wrote was well out of order. I understand that some man somewhere was sacked by his firm because of an anonymous and offensive blog post. But, for me, that’s primarily a story about the man and his relationship to his firm, the internet is just the incidental circumstance.

The other thing I noticed was an odd relationship in people’s minds between the internet and use of time. ‘I can’t be bothered to mess about on the internet looking for what I want,’ one man roundly declared. ‘I don’t have time for that. I want to be given the information I want from a reputable authority.’ Now, this is a common stance but not a truly logical one. At the best this presupposes time spent reading a book (if not several books), which of course one may be lucky enough to have in one’s possession, but which must probably be sought from a library, at a substantial cost of time and effort. The question of reputable authority is a highly vexed one, too, but for me authority has to be earned and is not simply given by the fact that the ‘expert’ is called a journalist or an author. There are plenty of deluded ones in both camps out there. And thus trustworthy information requires thought and effort regardless of the media in which it is sought. So this is, I think, a form of resistance against the difficulty of a new learning process. The same person also wanted to know how I could build up an audience, how I got people to link to my blog, this time with the implication of requiring instant gratification. ‘I have to write a decent post,’ I said ‘I have to build up a reputation, over time, the way that any author would and I think that’s just as it should be.’ It is strange how the perceived immediacy of the internet, which IS quick in certain aspects of its functioning, should be then imagined to grant instant celebrity (see back to question of power). As increasing numbers of people get online, the internet is good at reflecting back waves of feeling generated by both real and virtual events, but at the same time it shows how fickle and transient those feelings are. Groupmind can be provoked fast (otherwise known as ‘jumping on the bandwagon’) and I think we are a little bedazzled by that process at the moment. But there is no reason to suspect that what comes out of it has the staying power of wisdom.

Anyway, after this we swapped around and Rosy was going to talk about online writing communities, only she was having all kinds of trouble with the internet reception. Someone Rosy knew from her college (I imagine she was a fellow, although I do not know) came over to try and help us out (I say ‘us’, but you may imagine how much use I could be!). While this was going on, I picked up the discussion threads again, until I realized that both women at my side were whispering ‘Move! Move!’ It turned out that my chair leg was atop the internet cable and I had been innocently but firmly cutting off the signal. And there, ladies and gentlemen, we see the true fragility of the miracle that is technology. We were reconnected and everything progressed very smoothly from that point on. Rosy gave a wonderful talk about sites like WriteWords and Litopia and I must say I had no idea that they offered such a well-organised and useful resource for aspiring writers. Litopia is particularly intriguing as it is run by a literary agent who will give you a webcam critique of your publishing submission (you have to clear a few hurdles first, including posting over 100 comments on the site). Rosy played us part of one (it was over twenty minutes in all), showing a close up of a bearded, bespectacled man (one attendee cried out, ‘It’s Shylock!’) in his messy study, being rather charmingly impudent about a fantasy YA novel, but impeded somewhat by a speech defect. Afterwards, I told Rosy that I felt oddly motivated to get a critique off this man. ‘I really want to hear him tell me I have to let my information ‘theep thwoo the text’,’ I said. ‘Poor Pete!’ Rosy replied, laughing. ‘It was only because he had his new teeth. He doesn’t normally lisp.’

And that, folks, was more or less it. Except that we went to tea after our session where I met the master of the college, a highly particular genus of late blooming academic known as the Absolute Sweetie, who presented me with a bottle of wine for having helped out, which I wasn’t expecting at all. And I chatted with a very nice man who had attended our session and was writing a novel. And I attempted to chat to the agent who had impressed me on the panel earlier, only the second I asked which agency she was at she started to make great protesting noises about how few clients she took on. Even telling her I had an agent already did not seem to dispel the impression I had obviously created of being an unpublished marauder, a kind of intellectual would-be mugger. This ruined the good impression I had originally held of her. So all in all, I had a very good day, and running the session with Rosy was just a delight, but I have yet to revise my low opinion of the publishing industry. To my mind, it’s a problem of culture – business culture. If publishers changed their attitude, sorted their aesthetics out from their accountancy, gained some common sense, became proud of their product, believed in books, stopped nitpicking with their pessimistic intellects, realistically assessed the market and sold to people who actually enjoy reading rather than some vague and vast masses, then and only then we might be getting somewhere.

Reading Lolita

What a garish, ugly, sardonic book this is, and yet it does grip in some unhealthy way. It is, however, the perfect book for critical commentary. It was hard to settle on a passage, as just about any would do, but I picked an almost unobtrusive one so that I would not be distracted by internal shrieks of horror at Humbert Humbert’s dastardly hi-jinks.

‘I decided to marry. It occurred to me that regular hours, home-cooked meals, all the conventions of marriage, the prophylactic routine of its bedroom activities and, who knows, the eventual flowering of certain moral values, of certain spiritual substitutes, might help me, if not to purge myself of my degrading and dangerous desires, at least to keep them under pacific control. A little money that had come my way after my father’s death (nothing very grand – the Mirana has been sold long before), in addition to my striking if somewhat brutal good looks, allowed me to enter upon my quest with equanimity. After considerable deliberation, my choice fell on the daughter of a Polish doctor: the good man happened to be treating me for spells of dizziness and tachycardia. We played chess: his daughter watched me from behind her easel, and inserted eyes or knuckles borrowed from me into the cubistic trash that accomplished misses then painted instead of lilacs and lambs. Let me repeat with quiet force: I was, and still am, despite mes malheurs, an exceptionally handsome male; slow-moving, tall, with soft dark hair and a gloomy but all the more seductive cast of demeanour. Exceptional virility often reflects in the subject’s displayable features a sullen and congested something that pertains to what he has to conceal. And this was my case. Well did I know, alas, that I could obtain at the snap of my fingers any adult female I chose; in fact, it had become quite a habit with me of not being too attentive to women lest they come toppling, bloodripe, into my cold lap.’

So let’s talk about that voice, a disquieting, troubling, silky menace of a voice if ever there was one. You have to concentrate to follow the sinuous verbal meanderings of the narrator, and by concentrating you are obliged to let Humbert Humbert into your mind, where he sits, like a viral contagion. This is a voice of icy chill and volcanic heat, of threatening darkness and yet spirited playfulness. It’s a voice that combines intelligence with vulgarity, cynicism and alienation. It’s the voice that could be beautiful, if it were not for something rotten at its core.

Look at the vocabulary here: prophylactic, pacific, equanimity, cubistic, demeanour, this is not a man who will use one syllable when three or four would suffice. And these are cold, hard-edged words, academic, distanced, intellectual words used to display the mental agility of their speaker against the tacky tedium of the world. But that vocabulary is continually undercut by words that come from other registers and dress themselves in violence – purge, brutal, trash, bloodripe. Our narrator becomes more implicitly dangerous because he coats his language with a veneer of intellectual control; we become aware of that most alarming proposition, that underneath something clever and polished, ugly drives lurk and threaten, pushing at the boundaries of language’s containment and liable to break out.

In fact the whole passage is written – as stupendously, every single passage in this novel is written – in a style that threatens but never reaches, linguistic exhaustion. I’ve never known an author make his sentences work so hard, stuff them so full of every possible pretension. This is bilious, overripe language, driven hard by intelligence, ravaged by pervasive, insidious emotion. We are given to understand, then, that it emanates from a man straining at his own internal leash. A man who suffers from dizziness and tachycardia – his body strained and overwrought. This passage is a good example of Humbert Humbert attempting to rein in his baser desires in such a way that we know from the outset he is doomed to failure. The reader is gripped by the painful anticipation of the limit being reached, the constraint being broken, the implosion or explosion being immanent.

And how do we know this? Well, look at the way he describes marriage, his voice dripping with sardonic disdain. This is not a man who believes in his self-prescribed cure. And look at the way he describes his bride-to-be: there is nothing in the least hopefully romantic about his tone here. Instead he sneers over her painting whilst she chops him into unappetizing body parts – a trick in fact that the narrator repeatedly uses at any moment of perceiving the female body. It’s a strategy for distancing the reality of a woman from her body, and it enables our narrator to lust or revile without troubling himself over the person behind the fleshly façade. The same strategy is used to slightly different effect when he contemplates himself. Physical appearance is everything of value in this novel, but Humbert hates himself. So his own ‘striking but brutal good looks’ are the subject of bitter irony. He could have any woman he wanted, only there are none who fail to disgust him. He shows us his attempt at decency, made by avoiding undesired heterosexual encounters, but his tone is too repellent for us to really gain sympathy with him.

So what do we have here? A man bent and twisted out of shape, forced into endless pretence and driven to the edge of distraction by desires that fall outside the legal limits of society. We have a man who is handsome and smart and learned, but who is physically disintegrating from the strength of repressed emotion. Some people would say we have here a sardonic and darkly comic representation of middling, trivial reality as seen from the perspective of a man relegated to its margins. It depends on how amusing you find the human condition, if we view it as an individual’s destiny to be full of emotion that is rarely matched or assuaged by life’s events. But I suppose I see it as the tragedy of a certain kind of passivity.  Humbert Humbert is so busy dealing with himself, so locked inside his unruly emotions, that he can never have respite from them. In this passage he is about to insert himself into marriage in the same way that his fiancée inserts his knuckles into her picture, and the result will be similarly successful. There is no engagement in what surrounds him, only the alienation of a heightened, hyper-sensitive perception. Humbert carts his suffering carcass of a body around, while his mind scorns and derides and plays clever verbal tricks with it all, and all he can do is wait for the circumstances around him to bring relief. And yet…the relentlessness of that highly particular voice tells us that nothing is going to change. In fact, I expect that things are only going to get worse.

I’m only forty pages in and already I’m not sure whether I can go on, but I seem to keep going. I’m finding it intellectually intriguing, but my soul cringes.