A History of the Modern British Ghost Story (2011) by Simon Hay
Quote Notebook
A History of the Modern British Ghost Story (2011) by Simon Hay
Chapter 1 A Failed Modernity: The Ghost Story as the Bad Conscience of the Historical Novel
History, sympathy, and the narrative frame in Scott’s ghost stories
‘The Tapestried Chamber’
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Scott’s ghost stories, as we saw with ‘The Highland Widow’ and as we shall see with ‘The Tapestried Chamber,’ insist on the limitations of such a spectatorial position, and insist on what gets left out of such narratives. It is in this sense that ghost stories are more insistently historical than the novel-form that bears that name.
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Scott’s most famous ghost story [‘The Tapestried Chamber’] allows us to think that it is a historical novel in miniature, only then to subvert that perception, a subversion it undertakes mostly by refusing the narrative resolution that novel conventions offer or even demand.
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Her body is, effectively, a micro-allegory for her own presence here as a ghost; like the hideous passions which have left ‘traces’ on her body, she too is a trace of the ‘most hideous passions’ of the building’s past.
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The story, then, gives us a ghost whose presence functions as a ‘trace’ of an earlier generation’s ‘hideous passions.’ And it matters, in this instance, that the ghost is a woman – the only woman in the story – and that she unmans, like nothing else in his life, not even war, this brave and gentlemanly officer.
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The ghost appears at this nexus of desire and repression, the femininity repressed by the homosocial bonds celebrated in upper-class English masculinity, as well as the repressed homosexual desire, provided we qualify this observation with the recognition that what we call homosexuality has not really come into social existence at this moment.
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[....] we need to pay attention to the story’s mechanism for obtruding the past upon the present, which means we need to ask a pair of questions: What history does the story deem salient? And what characterizes the present as something distinct from that past
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[....] about the end of the American war, when the officers of Lord Cornwallis’s army, which surrendered at Yorktown, and others, who had been made prisoners during the impolitic and ill-fated controversy, were returning to their own country to relate their adventures and repose themselves after their fatigues, there was amongst them a general officer, of the name of Browne—an officer of merit, as well as a gentleman of high consideration for family and attainments. (p. 15)
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The supernatural action is centrally concerned with the relations between history, modernity, and Englishness.
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Proper Englishness and the village both are residual, in Raymond Williams’s terms, remnants of a previous order that persists only in such threatened pockets.
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History, then, is not so much something that passes, but rather something you can find in certain places, something identified with a past that persists into the present, something tied up with an ideal of Englishness that modernity threatens to erase. Such a narrative depends on the model of heterochronicity that characterizes the historical novel, in which different temporalities, marked as ‘modern’ and ‘pre-modern’ or ‘industrial’ and ‘traditional,’ coexist simultaneously.
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here, Englishness finds itself divided; there’s a feudal version, existing in miniature, and a vast, modern, worldand sea-ruling version, in the midst of which the former exists only as residue and fragment.
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The building itself is heterochronic [....] heterochronic version of modernity, the aesthetics of a past of stability and order understood to offer a kind of salvation to a ‘modern’ Englishness of industrialization and improper gaiety, the Englishness exhausted and defeated in the Americas.
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The picture gallery is an instance of a present constructing a narrative of the past by which it explains its relationship to that past, one word for which is ‘tradition’: ‘an intentionally selective version of a shaping past and a pre-shaped present, which is then powerfully operative in the process of social and cultural definition and identification’ (Williams 1977, p. 114).
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Lukács on Scott’s historical novels is helpful: Scott finds in English history the consolation that the most violent vicissitudes of class struggle have always finally calmed down into a glorious ‘middle way.’ Thus, out of the Saxons and the Normans there arose the English nation, neither Saxon nor Norman; in the same way the bloody War of the Roses gave rise to the illustrious reign of the House of Tudor, especially that of Queen Elizabeth; and those class struggles which manifested themselves in the Cromwellian Revolution were finally evened out in the England of [his] today, . . . by the ‘Glorious Revolution’ and its aftermath. (p. 32)
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the consolation offered by the conclusion of Scott’s historical novels is withheld in his ghost stories.
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she figures the pre-Hanoverian aristocracy, and thus what the story lumps together as the pre-modern feudal past, a past that the story seeks in its descriptions of the village and Woodville’s castle to cast as a past of tradition and order, about which we should be nostalgic, but which the ghost disrupts.
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The ghost is a figure from the feudal past that haunts the modern Hanoverian present, ‘haunting’ here marking the refusal to allow for the easy separation between the two. It is the sense of continuous inhabitance of the house by this family, the sense of historical persistence itself, which is the horror, though it is also what Browne finds so attractive
57:
unlike in his historical novels, the setting here is one of English defeat, of imperial practices reaching a kind of limit. Rather than the triumph of modernity over the pre-modern, the odd reference to prisoners-of-war reminds us of the brutality and violence that mark modernity, even at the highest levels.
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The pairing of Woodville and Browne works in many ways like the marriage plot of many eighteenthand nineteenth-century novels: an overcoming of class divisions
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social arenas in which aristocrats and high commoners can coexist.
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the story presents this class compromise as a resolution always fraught.
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The story is marked far more strongly by the undercurrent of rivalry between the two men, the scion of the aristocratic family and the ‘gentleman of high consideration for family’ but no land or name (p. 15), than it is by their friendship.
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between them Browne and Woodville have failed to put the ghost to rest.
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everything about the property and castle is governed by the air of melancholy that the general finds so delightful in the haunted room. Though mourning and melancholy are similar states, the key difference between them is that melancholy is some kind of failed mourning, a mourning become interminable, become (seemingly) dissociated from the lost object being mourned, and so internalized (Freud 1995).
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Melancholy, we can say in shorthand, is failed mourning.
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On the surface, then, ghost stories seem to do a much worse job of representing history than do other narratives, certainly much worse than historical novels. In the historical novel, ‘history’ is what gets narrated to us as story, what gets concluded by the end, wrapped up and made coherent and thereby safe to inherit.
[....] Scott’s ghost stories register history more pungently than historical novels do. Ghost stories register History in a Hegelian or structural sense, as what marks the absolute outer limits or parameters of what can be said and done and understood.
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The historical novel is interested in history only insofar as it can make history safe or painless, only insofar as we can comfortably reflect back on how we have progressed from it to where we are.
[....] The ghost story, on the other hand, narrates for us – or rather, sets out to fail to narrate – history in this sense: as what hurts, what haunts, what sets limits to what we can and cannot do, what exceeds our ability to control. Whenever you have history, in this sense of the term, you have ghosts.
[....] Scott’s ghost stories....
offer a better way of doing history. So reading the ghost story has consequences for how we think about or tell literary history.
[....] Lukács is wrong [....] Lukács is right to defend Scott’s novels as explaining the ‘transformations of history as transformations of popular life,’ rather than purely or even primarily transformations in the lives of the elite, and that in doing so the novels give us ‘the totality of national life’ (p. 49). But he is wrong to claim that ‘the historical novel can reflect historical reality adequately’ (p. 47)
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Historical transformations are presented to us, in the historical novels, in such a way as to make the past safe for our inheritance, an inheritance that functions on the model of capitalist consumption. Only the ghost story insistently draws our attention to what refuses inheritance, to what refuses consumption; to the ghost, as marker for the limits of what a particular historical moment can make sense of. Only the ghost story, that is to say, genuinely historicizes the idea of social or national totality, by its refusal of the move to historicization.
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his ghost stories bring before readers what is ‘alien and unintelligible’ about their world in terms of what cannot be erased by readerly sympathy.
[....] something modernist about the ghost story from the very start: its refusal of narrative conventions, its convoluted narrative frames, its opacity and unsureness, its refusal of story, its failure to offer resolution.
[....] historical novel’s experimental shadow and antagonist.
[....] Lukács was wrong about modernism, too, when he accuses it of having given up on history and on the possibility of representing the totality. Or at least, we will see that he is wrong about the version of modernism that was already available in the modern ghost story from its beginnings,
[....] I have argued that Scott’s historical novels and his ghost stories both narrate the transition from feudalism to capitalism, and that the stories themselves give us to understand that transition as the arrival of modernity.
[....] we would be better off, for the most part, ditching the term ‘modernity’ entirely. Modernity is not capitalism, should not be so readily collapsed into it, into the system which follows from feudalism. Rather, he says, modernity is a caesura or felt suspension, and so the trace left by the trauma of the transition to capitalism.
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Modernity, he [Jameson]is saying, is two things: a kind of ghost; and a story.
[....] The historical novel is a crucial narrative of modernity because it replaces the old with the new, the lord with the bourgeois.
[....] successful cancellation through sublation of the feudal.
[....] ghost story poses contradictions without resolution (a negative dialectics, in Adorno’s terms, opposed to Hegel’s cozy Aufhebungs), insisting that the traces of that trauma can never be erased, will always persist
[....] will always not just carry the traces of the trauma of its inception, but will in fact be those traces, will never be anything except the narratives we tell ourselves to try to forget, to repress, that traumatic transition.
[....] Fredric Jameson (1988) uses the term ‘cognitive mapping’ to describe the work a literary text does to make imaginable for its readers such a historically changing social totality. A piece of literature ‘maps’ to the extent that it provides an understanding of the social relations that structure one’s society, social relations that, in the ordinary course of a person’s life, remain invisible.
Jay
9 December 2023