Hauntology E-Book

Merlin Coverley

• Herausgeber: Oldcastle Books
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 416

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020

Beschreibung

Ghosts and spectres, the eerie and the occult. Why is contemporary culture so preoccupied by the supernatural, so captivated by the revenants of an earlier age, so haunted? The concept of Hauntology has evolved since first emerging in the 1990s, and has now entered the cultural mainstream as a shorthand for our new-found obsession with the recent past. But where does this term come from and what exactly does it mean? This book seeks to answer these questions by examining the history of our fascination with the uncanny from the golden age of the Victorian ghost story to the present day. From Dickens to Derrida, MR James to Mark Fisher; from the rise of Spiritualism to the folk horror revival, Hauntology traces our continuing engagement with these esoteric ideas. Moving between the literary and the theoretical, the visual and the political, Hauntology explores our nostalgia for the cultural artefacts of a past from which we seem unable to break free.

Leseprobe

Introduction

The ghosts are swarming at the moment. Hauntology has caught on. It’s a zeitgeist. Mark Fisher (2006)1

Hauntology may be a thing of the past, but this of course means that it will always be with us. Mark Pilkington (2012)2

Ghosts and spectres, the eerie and the occult. Why is contemporary culture so preoccupied by the supernatural, so captivated by the revenants of an earlier age, so haunted? The answer to this question is to be found through an examination of what one critic has described recently as ‘perhaps the most important, political-philosophical concept we have right now’: hauntology.3 This is a term that was first coined in the early 1990s by the French philosopher, Jacques Derrida, in his discussion of the enduring legacy of Marxism. Since then, however, hauntology has evolved and entered the cultural mainstream, becoming a shorthand for the ways in which the past returns to haunt the present. Today its use is widespread, its effects visible across a broad spectrum of academic and popular culture, from film and television to music, the visual arts and literature, as well as informing our understanding of the political currents that have shaped our recent history. Despite its growing familiarity, however, hauntology remains a term whose origins and antecedents are unclear, and whose meaning is stubbornly obscure.

‘I believe that ghosts are a part of the future’, claimed Jacques Derrida in 1983.4 This statement was a prophetic one, for ghosts were to become an integral part both of Derrida’s future and our own, thanks in large part to the publication of his Specters of Marx in 1993. The title of Derrida’s book, which I shall be discussing in detail in a later chapter, recalls the opening line of The Communist Manifesto of 1848 by Marx and Engels: ‘There is a spectre haunting Europe, the spectre of Communism’. Marx’s famous proclamation marks the moment at which a spectre was invoked that has been haunting Europe and the wider world ever since, lending retrospective validation to the paradox at the heart of hauntology, in which certain futures have the potential to haunt us even before they have come to pass. As a result, it is 1848, that year of revolutionary near-misses, which marks the beginning of my own account of hauntology and its precursors. It is in Derrida’s maddeningly opaque book that we find the textual origin of hauntology, or rather l’hantologie, a pun on hauntology and ontology that loses much in translation, through which Derrida expresses his belief that being and haunting are interwoven concepts, the ghostly coming to invade every aspect of our lives, from the political and the technological to the cultural and the literary: to be is to be haunted. Derrida’s resuscitation of Marxism was a response to those on the political right in the early 1990s, such as Francis Fukuyama, who had proclaimed the final victory of western liberalism and with it the end of history. Derrida used hauntology, his science of ghosts, to demonstrate that far from this being the case, the spectre of Marx, like all ghosts which have yet to be laid to rest, would return, repeatedly, disrupting the present and continuing to remind us of another possible future. In fact, so influential was Derrida’s account that the figure of the spectre was soon to escape the confines of his text, triggering a ‘spectral turn’ in the academic study of the ghost. A subject which had hitherto been largely dismissed as unworthy of serious critical attention now returned with a vengeance, as ghosts, spectres, revenants and all manner of occult entities came to haunt seemingly every aspect of our culture. As we shall see, ours is by no means the first historical period to be preoccupied by the ghosts of its past, but in the western world, at least, the 1990s was the beginning of such a moment, one in which hauntology, accompanied by the uncanny, the eerie and the weird, first came to public prominence.

If it was the 1990s which witnessed the emergence of hauntology in its first incarnation, it was to gain what Mark Fisher called its ‘second (un)life’ in the middle of the following decade.5 The name of Mark Fisher is one that will recur throughout this account, for if Derrida is the father of hauntology then it is Fisher who played the greatest role in bringing this concept within the purview of popular culture. In correspondence with his friend, the music journalist Simon Reynolds, in 2005 Fisher began to refer to hauntology on his blog, k-punk, as a means of describing this spectral resurgence, and in particular his belief that the first decade of the twenty-first century was experiencing what he described as the ‘failure of the future’, as cultural time decelerated and went into reverse, overwhelmed by a nostalgia for the pop-cultural artefacts of our recent past.6 From these beginnings, hauntology soon emerged as a means of highlighting this cultural, and increasingly political, impasse, a failure of social imagination that left us seemingly unable to envisage any other society than our own.

No sooner had it re-emerged, however, than some critics began to distance themselves from the term, fearing that hauntology was in danger of attracting an unwelcome degree of mainstream recognition, and with it the misuse and oversimplification that often accompanies such overexposure.7 But since his untimely death in 2017, Mark Fisher’s work has reached a new audience, thus ensuring hauntology’s most recent and prolonged return to fashion. Once again, the term has evolved, outgrowing its earlier manifestation as a musical micro-genre and recasting itself in a more overtly political role. By placing the present in conjunction with the recent past, hauntology highlights the shortcomings of the former, identifying the political failings of the present by returning to those moments when a different path might have been taken, turning points whose promise remains unfulfilled and which continue to offer us hope for the future. For Fisher, one such moment was that of the early 1970s, as the revolutionary spirit of the counterculture began to subside and the neoliberal world we inhabit today first started to emerge. At the end of his life Fisher was working on a project that he hoped would recuperate the lost potential of this era and in doing so provide a means of challenging what he saw as the deadening ubiquity of life under late-capitalism.

In both Derrida’s and Fisher’s conceptions of hauntology, the crucial element is that of time. For Derrida, the return and repetition of the past in the present is manifested through the figure of the revenant, that which returns each time as if it were the first, unchanging and insistent, demanding a reckoning for a message that went unheard or was ignored. For Fisher, as we shall see, there are two opposing temporal currents intrinsic to hauntology: the no longer and the not yet.8 The former haunts the present from the past, an event, idea or entity whose moment is past but which continues to make its presence felt. The latter haunts the present from the future, through the unfulfilled promise of that which never came to pass but which may yet do so. In both instances, their impact is felt now, in the present, either through repetition or anticipation. The very idea of the ghost as that which comes from the past to manifest itself in the present and yet which belongs to neither, simultaneously both absent and present, challenges our belief in the unbroken progression of linear time. Hauntology foregrounds such temporal disjuncture or ‘dyschronia’, questioning whether we truly experience time in so straightforward a manner as the linear model suggests. Instead, both Derrida and Fisher see history as one characterised by repetition and disruption, as the past recurrently irrupts into the present, forcing us to reconsider events and ideas we might have regarded as safely consigned to the past. Fisher goes further, arguing that since the closing decades of the twentieth century, cultural time has faltered, dragged to a standstill by the ever-growing weight of our recorded past; not so much the end of history as an excess of history, beneath which we struggle to move forward.9

One way in which the repetitions and discontinuities of history are manifested is through the emergence of new technologies which allow us to record and replay the past. This is a process whose uncanny effects began to be felt in the nineteenth century as new forms of media such as telegraphy, photography and later cinema allowed us to capture and control time, bringing the past back to life and allowing us to revisit it at our leisure. As we shall see, it was innovations in Victorian stagecraft which first allowed the ghost to take on a seemingly corporeal form, enabling audiences to visualise what contemporary expressions of supernatural belief such as Spiritualism could only hint at. The evolution of such ghostly media is one which forms a backdrop to many of the precursors of hauntology, from the role of television and early computer technology in the residual haunting of TC Lethbridge and Nigel Kneale, to the haunting obsolescence of Space Age technology depicted in the work of JG Ballard. In recent years, an increasing preoccupation with analogue technology has become a staple element of hauntology, as we contrast the imperfections of earlier recording techniques with the timeless anonymity of the digital. Of course, this strand of what Fisher has labelled the ‘technological uncanny’ reached its zenith with the emergence of internet technology.10 It was in cyberspace that the ever-growing archive of the recorded past first became instantaneously accessible, releasing a seemingly endless deluge of recorded time from which it seemed no aspect of the past, however trivial, was able to escape. According to Fisher, it was directly as a result of this technological revolution in the early years of the twenty-first century that hauntology re-emerged, as a cultural and political response to the atemporality of a present in which the past no longer dies.

In the face of what may appear a growing obsession with excavating and examining the cultural detritus of our recent past, hauntology is often viewed as little more than a new form of nostalgia. In her history of the subject, which I will examine in a later chapter, Svetlana Boym charts the evolution of nostalgia in all its forms, as it moved from a longing for one’s homeland to an urge to return to an earlier era, often that of the reassuring rhythms of one’s childhood. This transmutation in the subject of one’s nostalgia from place to time, has culminated in the epidemic which has engulfed us in recent years, as increasingly we turn away from the present in favour of the styles and ideas of an earlier age. Manifesting itself principally through music but displaying its effects across a myriad of forms, nostalgia has morphed into ‘retromania’, Simon Reynolds’s term for this obsessive grip the recent past now holds over us. Such an analysis is not new to hauntology, however, being a central component of Fredric Jameson’s celebrated formulation of postmodernity in the 1980s. What hauntology has identified in subsequent decades is, then, less a change in content than in degree, as the formal nostalgia that Jameson first described has since grown to an overwhelming extent, expanding to fill our cultural horizons and effectively denying a foothold to the new. As a result, Fisher claims, nostalgia has now become so ubiquitous as to be taken for granted, effectively losing its meaning as it no longer has anything against which it might be measured. In such circumstances hauntology may be regarded as post-nostalgic, describing a world in which the present can no longer be experienced as anything other than a sum of its pasts. And yet, as the concluding chapter of this book explores, in an era as obsessed with recycling its past as hauntology suggests, it seems there is one particular past towards which we are unerringly drawn. From the folk horror revival, to the fictions of Alan Garner and Susan Cooper, from The Stone Tape to Scarfolk, it appears that there is only one decade, both culturally and politically, that hauntology wishes us to revisit: the 1970s. If, however, this is an era that hauntology appears to hold in preference to all others, it is less the result of what that society achieved than the promise it failed to deliver. The early 1970s are now seen as exemplary of the unfulfilled potential hauntology wishes to revive. This is not a nostalgia for the past but one directed towards the lost futures it encapsulates.

In his recent book on the work of Mark Fisher, the author Matt Colquhoun employs a splendid neologism, one of which Derrida himself would surely have been proud: ‘Blobjective’. Colquhoun uses this term to describe the way in which capitalism absorbs all it comes into contact with, bringing otherwise disparate elements within its orbit: ‘The goal, for Mark’, he writes, ‘was to stay one step ahead of capitalism’s consolidatory forces and its “blobjective” nature. Alternatives were of no use if they could be immediately folded back into the system they were attempting to escape from.’11 In as far as its appropriation of cultural forms appears as rapacious as that of capitalism itself, it seems to me that this is a term equally applicable to hauntology, in which all that comes within its reach is likewise rendered hauntological. As a result, everything from Marx and Engels’s Manifesto to The Wicker Man, the works of Arthur Machen to those of WG Sebald, have since been drawn within its borders. In both its academic format and even through its repurposed popular incarnation, discussions of hauntology often encourage an overly narrow understanding of the term, alongside a lament at what are considered the pernicious effects of mainstream recognition. It seems to me, however, that it has been precisely through such recognition, as its carefully policed boundaries are at first threatened and then overrun, that terms such as hauntology, rather like its intellectual cousin, psychogeography, come into their own, mutating in new and unexpected ways, broadening their conceptual depth and range of reference, and bringing ideas and figures into conjunction that might otherwise have never been brought together. In this respect, rather than persisting in a misguided and ultimately futile attempt at maintaining conceptual purity, we should instead welcome the results of hauntology’s rampant blobjectivity as it hoovers up an eclectic and ever-growing mixture of canonical and pop-cultural elements.

As readers of this book will soon discover, this is a principle I have employed in marshalling the wide range of material which either anticipates, encapsulates or reiterates the formal characteristics of temporal disjunction, the technological uncanny and a nostalgia for lost futures common to hauntology. At first glance it will be clear that in doing so I have largely privileged the literary and the theoretical over the audio and the visual, a choice wholly at odds with hauntology’s latter-day origins in the music of a small group of artists on the Ghost Box label and elsewhere. Thankfully, however, this decision has been rendered largely academic by two books published in 2011: Simon Reynolds’s astonishing Retromania, in which he painstakingly details the emergence of hauntology in the music of the early twenty-first century; and Rob Young’s equally encyclopaedic Electric Eden in which hauntological music is seen as the most recent manifestation of the English folk tradition. But just as music, through the very manner of its recording and dissemination appears to foreground many of the ghostly characteristics attributed to hauntology, so too may the literary be regarded as a similarly spectral form, its ‘unheard voices and unspoken perspectives’ communicated to us from beyond the confines of the printed page.12

In line with hauntology’s desire to unearth those points in time at which lost futures may be reanimated, I have chosen three such moments with which to begin the chapters of this book, each of them heralding an era during which our conception of time was to undergo a profound reappraisal: 1848, 1921 and 1989. Thus my opening chapter begins in the Victorian London of Marx and Dickens, a city haunted not only by the spirit of revolutionary change taking hold across Europe but by an array of ghostly phenomena closer to home, as the façade of secular rationalism was threatened by the emergence of Spiritualism and other supernatural beliefs. Such beliefs were articulated not merely through the stories of Dickens and his contemporaries but found their visible manifestation on the stage through such pioneering theatrical devices as Pepper’s Ghost, innovations which were soon to be reflected in the similarly uncanny transformation of urban life itself. But such changes were to be overshadowed by an equally revolutionary recalibration of time, as the theories of Darwin and others vastly extended the Victorians’ sense of the prehistorical past, opening up the dizzying expanse of deep time. In the closing decades of the century, the fears and anxieties such changes had provoked were reworked in the tales of writers such as Vernon Lee and Arthur Machen whose fictional explorations of the cyclical nature of the mythic past and the atavistic return of our evolutionary forbears undermined the idea of history as one of unbroken progression. In the final years of the nineteenth century, the nascent discipline of psychoanalysis would seek to explain such anxieties; in his celebrated essay on the uncanny, Freud explored a phenomenon which is still perplexing us a century later. It is, however, MR James, the final figure of my opening chapter, whose work most clearly embodies the temporal disruptions and uncanny repetitions that have since been recognised as the hallmarks of hauntology.

The subject matter of this book is almost entirely English, for as one critic notes, hauntology is a peculiarly English phenomenon, bound up with the haunting and haunted landscapes of the English countryside and the ambivalent response they continue to evoke.13 Nowhere is this more clearly demonstrated than in the work of Alfred Watkins, with which I begin my second chapter. It was in Herefordshire in 1921 that Watkins experienced the epiphany that was to result in his theory of ley lines, a temporal and topographical reordering of the English landscape that was to inaugurate an esoteric tradition that continues to this day. The 1920s were a time of great temporal experimentation, as an array of writers and mystics sought to establish a new theory of time with which to replace the model dismantled by Einstein and others a generation before. Chief amongst them was the now all but forgotten JW Dunne, whose theory of serial time was both impossibly abstruse and hugely influential. Drawing upon his own experience of precognitive dreams, Dunne was led to conclude that past, present and future could be accessed by us all, allowing us to revisit the events of our lives in any order we wish. The paranormal consequences of such a theory were to be outlined by Dunne’s successor, TC Lethbridge, who employed a similar temporal model in his theory of residual haunting, in which he proposed that materials such as stone could record and store moments of heightened emotional intensity through time, which might then later be replayed. It was this theory which was to form the basis of perhaps the most resonant of all hauntological texts: Nigel Kneale’s television play, The Stone Tape. Kneale’s contribution to hauntology will be explored alongside that of another figure whose works have been memorably translated to the screen, Alan Garner. Garner’s idiosyncratic account of what he calls ‘inner time’, a perpetual present experienced through myth and the rituals of primitive religion, informs both The Owl Service and Red Shift, two novels whose characters are compelled to re-enact events from a time alien to them. Britain’s mythic past re-emerges once again in the novels of Susan Cooper, as the familiar landscapes of the present become the backdrop to an elemental struggle for the control of time. Finally, the myths of the past give way to those of the near future in the work of JG Ballard, an author whose preoccupation with temporal paradox is displayed in an array of fictional futures in which time decays, regresses or ceases altogether.

My final chapter begins in 1989, some months before the fall of the Berlin Wall, as Francis Fukuyama announced the final victory of Western liberalism and with it the end of history. It was in response to Fukuyama’s provocative thesis, that Jacques Derrida published Specters of Marx in 1993, arguing that we had been too hasty to consign Marxism to its grave and predicting that we would continue to be haunted by his ideas. Quoting Hamlet, Derrida’s epigraph reads ‘The time is out of joint’, a striking encapsulation of the meaning of his newly minted neologism, hauntology, and one which would subsequently prove considerably easier to understand. Derrida’s concept swiftly developed a life of its own. The past, as he had suggested, refused to remain quarantined from the present and instead returned in unsettling and disruptive ways. In The Rings of Saturn, his melancholy recollection of a ramble through the East Anglian countryside, the author, WG Sebald, seems positively overwhelmed by the ghosts of the past, which at times threaten to negate his memory and undermine his health. Both here and in my discussion of his final novel, Austerlitz, the boundary between past and present, between memory and history, appears decidedly porous, Sebald’s own recollections often indistinguishable from those whose stories he uncovers. Perhaps Sebald’s narrator, one might speculate, is suffering from a malady similar to the nostalgic illnesses Svetlana Boym describes in her book The Future of Nostalgia. I will be drawing upon Boym’s work in my account of the epidemic of nostalgia that appears to have taken hold in recent times.

Nostalgia gives way to retromania in Simon Reynolds’s account before I turn to Laura Grace Ford’s refreshingly hard-edged series of drifts through the streets of 1990s London, an uncommon example of hauntology in action and one in which the decaying urban landscapes she reveals seem startlingly at odds with the predominantly rural settings to be found elsewhere in this book. Coming in her wake, my discussion of the work of Mark Fisher brings us full circle, his invocation of Marx and the leftist social projects of the post-war years reaffirming the spirit of political engagement from which hauntology first emerged. Fisher’s work concludes with an unexpectedly hopeful vision of a future revitalised by the spirit of the 1970s, the decade to which I return in my final chapter. The linear chronology which I have observed throughout finally arcs back as it approaches the present to re-emerge in the early years of the 1970s, an era celebrated today through the folk horror revival, the most recent cultural expression of hauntology.

In his collection of essays, Ghosts of My Life, Mark Fisher acknowledges the different ways in which hauntology is now employed: ‘There is the specific sense’, he explains, ‘in which it has been applied to music culture, and a more general sense, where it refers to persistences, repetitions, prefigurations. There are also more or less benign versions of hauntology.’14 As Fisher’s comments suggest, hauntology ought not to be regarded as monolithic but rather as a plural manifestation of the many different ways in which our culture and our politics are shaped by the revisions and repetitions of the past. Over recent decades, hauntology has itself been the subject of such revisions, as fluctuations in intellectual fashion result in a cycle of acclamation and dismissal, a process suggestive of the similarly episodic manner in which the past may return to haunt the present. Indeed, it appears that hauntology’s changing fortunes may be symptomatic of its subject, as if this concept has come finally to mirror the very condition it seeks to describe. Could it be that we are now haunted by hauntology itself?15 The following account will seek to establish the role of hauntology in our present, outlining the future it may help to enable, as well as exploring the many versions of its past.

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Notes

1 Mark Fisher, ‘Hauntology Now’, k-punk, 17 January 2006 at http://k-punk.abstractdynamics.org/archives/007230.html

2 Mark Pilkington, ‘Hauntologists mine the past for music’s future’, boingboing, 12 October 2012 at https://boingboing.net/2012/10/12/hauntologists-mine-the-past-fo.html

3 Tom Whyman, ‘The Ghosts of our Lives’, New Statesman, 31 July 2019.

4 Jacques Derrida in Ghost Dance, dir. Ken McMullen, Channel Four Television, 1983.

5 Mark Fisher, ‘What is Hauntology?’, Film Quarterly, Vol. 66, 1 (Fall 2012), 16-24, p. 16.

6 Fisher, ‘What is Hauntology?’, p. 16.

7 In 2011, James Bridle warned: ‘Hauntology, already old, is about six months away from becoming the title of a column in a Sunday supplement magazine; of going the way of psychogeography.’ See James Bridle, ‘Hauntological Futures’, booktwo.org, 20 March 2011 at https://booktwo.org/notebook/hauntological-futures/

8 Fisher, ‘What is Hauntology?’, p. 19.

9 Mark Pilkington sounds a more hopeful note, suggesting that ‘rather than an all-consuming black hole, the vast weight of the past will slingshot us into a new, weird, and always-haunted future.’ See Pilkington, ‘Hauntologists mine the past for music’s future’.

10 ‘Hauntology is not just some lazy, hazy term for the ethereal’, Fisher writes, ‘hauntology isn’t about hoky atmospherics or “spookiness” but a technological uncanny.’ See Mark Fisher, ‘Phonograph Blues’, k-punk, 19 October 2006 at http://k-punk.abstractdynamics.org/archives/008535.html

11 Matt Colquhoun, Egress: On Mourning, Melancholy and Mark Fisher, London; Repeater Books, 2020, p. 88.

12 See Katy Shaw, Hauntology: The Presence of the Past in Twenty-First Century English Literature, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018, pp. 15-19.

13 See Shaw, p. 2.

14 Mark Fisher, ‘The Slow Cancellation of the Future’ in Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures, Winchester: Zero Books, 2014, 2-29, p. 28.

15 Andrew Gallix writes: ‘hauntology is not just a symptom of the times, it is itself haunted by a nostalgia for all our lost futures.’ See Andrew Gallix, ‘Hauntology: A not-so-new critical manifestation. The new vogue in literary theory is shot through with earlier ideas’, The Guardian, 17 June 2011.

Part I: Hauntings

A spectre is haunting Europe – the spectre of Communism.

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto (1848)1

The dread word, GHOST, recalls me.

Charles Dickens, The Haunted Man and the Ghost’s Bargain (1848)2

London, 1848

‘The year 1848 is turning out well’, proclaimed Engels in February of that year, as he gleefully reported the outbreak of revolution on the streets of Paris: ‘Our age, the age of democracy, is breaking. The flames of the Tuileries and the Palais Royal are the dawn of the proletariat. Everywhere the rule of the bourgeoisie will now come crashing down, or be dashed to pieces.’3 A few weeks earlier, a 23-page pamphlet, written in German, had been published anonymously by the German Workers’ Educational Society at Bishopsgate in London. Its impact was negligible, at least at first, but the spectre revealed by Marx in his Communist Manifesto had now been released, or rather the hobgoblin, as Helen Macfarlane’s first English translation of 1850 was to proclaim: ‘A frightful hobgoblin stalks throughout Europe. We are haunted by a ghost, the ghost of Communism.’4 Thankfully for Marx, and also for Jacques Derrida, who was to be spared the indignity of writing a book entitled Hobgoblins of Marx, Macfarlane’s translation was soon superseded. The timing of the publication of Marx’s Manifesto may have been fortunate but the radical sentiments it espoused could do little to bolster the impact of the uprisings of 1848 which failed to take root and were remembered subsequently for having promised rather more than they delivered. Despite revolutionary outbreaks in France, Germany, and across Europe, Britain’s liberal government was largely a passive spectator to events, and aside from the activities of the Chartists, who staged a mass meeting on Kennington Common in April 1848, there was little sense of imminent revolt. Then, as now, it seems, Britain cast a largely sceptical eye upon the behaviour of its European cousins, and continued with business as usual. Shortly after the publication of his Manifesto, Marx’s peripatetic existence continued with his expulsion from Belgium, soon followed by his deportation from France; with his options now dwindling he finally arrived in London in August 1849.

The author of The Future of Nostalgia, Svetlana Boym, has written: ‘Outbreaks of nostalgia often follow revolutions.’ Through such examples as the French Revolution of 1789 to the more recent ‘velvet’ revolutions in Eastern Europe, Boym notes how such events ‘were accompanied by political and cultural manifestations of longing’, often for the stability which preceded such periods of upheaval. But what of failed revolutions? Here, claims Boym, the nostalgia one feels is redirected towards ‘unrealized dreams of the past and visions of the future that became obsolete. The history of nostalgia might allow us to look back at modern history as a search not only for newness and technological progress, but also for unrealized possibilities, unpredictable turns and crossroads.’5

This surely is the nostalgia that would have afflicted Marx during his long London exile until his death in 1883, certainly not a longing for the apparent solidity of a pre-revolutionary past but rather a mourning for what might have been, for precisely that sense of an unrealised future which has since been identified as the hallmark of hauntology. For Marx never lived to see the widespread acceptance of the beliefs he espoused in his Manifesto and while revolutionary unrest continued to erupt sporadically throughout Europe during the nineteenth century, it was the events of 1848, the year zero of hauntological thought, which marked the turning point that never came to pass.6

The environment that Marx and those of his fellow revolutionaries who had fled Europe for the UK would have encountered in London would have been quite alien to them. The prevailing sense of nostalgia in Victorian London was directed not towards a revolutionary past (or future) but instead harked back to the utopian medievalism of ‘Merrie England’, a mythical reimagining of a long-distant past which, while repeatedly recreated, had never actually existed. Alongside this sense of the national past as a sort of never-ending Arthurian pageant, Victorian England was also subject to a powerful and newly emergent sense of the supernatural. In this respect, quite apart from its revolutionary history, the year 1848 is also significant, if largely unremembered, for quite different reasons.

On 31 March 1848, as public unrest continued across Germany and Austria, the Fox family in the small town of Hydesville, near Rochester in upstate New York, were experiencing domestic unrest of their own, as their home had become plagued by unexplained rappings. On this particular evening, however, these were so vigorous that the family called in their neighbours to witness the event. Sensing that these mysterious noises must have an otherworldly origin, an impromptu séance was soon underway, as the family and their neighbours began a tentative exchange of questions and answers with their supernatural visitor. He revealed himself to be the spirit of a peddler who claimed to have been murdered in their house. As rumours of the ‘Rochester Rappings’ grew more widespread, similar outbreaks began to occur across New York and what was soon to become known as the Spiritualist movement had begun. Years later, in 1888, Margaret, the youngest of the three daughters of the Fox family, acknowledged that she and her sisters had engineered a hoax (she later recanted her confession) but by then it was far too late. Spiritualism, in essence the belief that the spirits of the dead exist and can communicate with the living, had been embraced by the public both in the US and Europe, and 31 March 1848 remains the founding date of the movement. At first glance, these events would appear to have little in common with political upheaval in Europe, and yet as European socialists fled to the US after the failings of the 1848 uprising, many of them found a home with like-minded radical and reformist thinkers, and it was in such an environment that Spiritualism first flourished; prominent spiritualists were later to include such socialist thinkers as Robert Owen and Alfred Russel Wallace.

Spiritualism didn’t reach London until 1852, with the arrival from the USA of the medium, Maria B Hayden, but the city that Marx had made his home was to prove extremely fertile ground for supernatural beliefs of every kind, from mesmerism and Spiritualism to Theosophy and psychical research. Despite the widely-held perception of the Victorian era as one of predominantly secular thought, the reality was somewhat less rational:

The Victorians were haunted by the supernatural. [...] Disembodied voices over the telephone, the superhuman speed of the railway, near instantaneous communication through telegraph wires: the collapsing of time and distance achieved by modern technologies that were transforming daily life was often felt to be uncanny. The mysterious powers of electricity, the baffling feats of mesmerists and apparently real communications from the dead elicited by Spiritualist mediums made the world seem as if it were full of invisible, occult forces. [...] The supernatural was both fearful and terrible and ardently desired; it was a spooky sense that there was more to the world than the everyday, and an intimation that reality might be transfigured by something above and beyond.7

As we shall see, the London of this period was a melting pot of radical ideas which were to become embedded within the wider culture of the day, from revolutionary politics to the challenge to scientific and religious orthodoxy presented by Darwin. And just as 1848 may now be identified as the hauntological year zero, so too can London be pronounced its ground zero, the city of Marx and his Manifesto, and one home to spectres of its own.

Dickens, the Haunted Man

If 1848 was a significant year for Marx and Engels, as well as for the Fox family in New York, the same might also be said for Charles Dickens (1812-70). In February, Dickens reviewed Catherine Crowe’s bestselling compendium of ‘true’ ghost stories, The Night Side of Nature; or, Ghosts and Ghost Seers (1848) for The Examiner. Crowe’s casebook of anecdotes and stories was dismissed by Dickens on the grounds that rather than being metaphysical in origin, the spectres that Crowe ‘revealed’ had in fact a physiological basis and were merely the symptoms of a diseased imagination. Ghosts, claimed Dickens:

Always elude us. Doubtful and scant of proof at first, doubtful and scant of proof still, all mankind’s experience of them is, that their alleged appearances have been, in all ages, marvellous, exceptional, and resting on imperfect grounds of proof; that in vast numbers of cases they are known to be delusions superintended by a well-understood, and by no means uncommon disease.8

Despite his reputation as one of the foremost practitioners of the ghost story and a writer whose entire body of work is infused with references to the ghostly and the supernatural, Dickens remained an ardent sceptic of the kinds of unexplained occurrences that fascinated Crowe and her audience. Dickens was a collector of ghostly ephemera and yet the roots of his obsession lay in his desire to find common sense or rational explanations for extraordinary events and to challenge what he saw as the fraudulent attempts of mediums to dupe a gullible public. In the Victorian London of the mid-nineteenth century there was an insatiable demand for all things supernatural (a demand that Dickens’s own works played a significant role in fuelling) and it was in response to this unbridled demand that the Ghost Club, one of the first paranormal research organisations, was founded in 1862. Originating in a group of Cambridge academics in the 1850s, the Ghost Club was dissolved following Dickens’s death in 1870, although in later incarnations it was to attract such figures as WB Yeats and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and it continues to this day.9 As an early member, Dickens and his fellow enthusiasts set out to debunk the spurious claims of mediums, spiritualists and their sympathisers. Yet such attempts were not always as straightforwardly scientific as they claimed, and Dickens himself was not immune to the often contradictory attitude towards the supernatural displayed by his Victorian contemporaries. He was, for example, a believer in the therapeutic benefits of mesmerism, and despite his misgivings was a regular attendee of séances. It is in his fiction, however, that Dickens demonstrates an attitude towards the occult frequently at odds with his publicly voiced scepticism, an ambivalence most famously articulated in A Christmas Carol (1843), in which Scrooge and the ghost of Jacob Marley act out a dialogue between their creator and his public:

‘You don’t believe in me,’ observed the ghost.

‘I don’t,’ said Scrooge.

‘What evidence would you have of my reality beyond that of your senses?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Scrooge.

‘Why do you doubt your senses?’

‘Because,’ said Scrooge, ‘a little thing affects them. A slight disorder of the stomach makes them cheats. You may be an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of an underdone potato. There’s more of gravy than of grave about you, whatever you are!’10

A Christmas Carol was the first of Dickens’s celebrated ‘Christmas Books’ and his ghosts of Christmas Past, Present and Yet to Come foreground the theme of temporal dislocation, between what is and ought to be, what was and what might have been. Here, as in so much of Dickens’s fiction, it is greed and the corrupting power of money which stunts spiritual (and physical) progression, leading characters such as Scrooge to live their lives in a manner contrary to their true selves.

‘Marley was dead, to begin with.’11 From the opening line we are forewarned of what lies ahead, of the ghost as revenant, that which is compelled to come back, in violation of the natural passage of time. But of all the ghosts that he is to encounter, it is the ghost of Christmas Yet to Come that Scrooge fears the most, for despite offering him the possibility of redemption, it shows him the fearful consequences of the life he has chosen: ‘“Ghost of the Future!” he exclaimed, “I fear you more than any spectre I have seen. But as I know your purpose is to do me good, and as I hope to live to be another man from what I was, I am prepared to bear you company, and do it with a thankful heart. Will you not speak to me?”’12 These ghosts may appear essentially benign, indeed positively angelic in offering Scrooge the chance to reclaim his better nature, but there is another more malevolent haunting at work in Dickens’s tale, an equally invisible but insidious and all-embracing spectral underworld of relationships, exchanges and circulation: the capitalist system itself. The links between the spectral and the economic are manifest throughout Dickens’s work, for as one critic explains, at a time in which paper, in the form of promissory notes, could be redeemed for gold, increasingly paper money became perceived as a ghostly entity in contrast with ‘real’ money, a spectral quality that lends itself to the entire system of invisible transactions on which capital depends.13 It is only by presenting the possibility of counteracting the spell cast by this malevolent web of invisible transactions, that Dickens is able to present his readers with an alternative conception of their future (and their present), a utopian vision with which to challenge the prevailing ideology of his day.

So endlessly has Dickens’s most famous story since been retold and reimagined that the characters themselves have escaped the confines of the text to haunt the public imagination. In this respect, A Christmas Carol takes its place alongside those other canonical texts which inhabit a kind of virtual afterlife somewhere between fiction and reality. The story has itself become a revenant, and one which returns punctually each Christmas. As a result, Scrooge and Marley, Tiny Tim and Bob Cratchit, have come to resemble the ghosts whose story they share, in as far as they now haunt our own culture, condemned to enjoy (or endure) a perpetual Christmas, a Christmas that for us it seems can no longer be truly experienced or understood without reference to their ghostly presence. Yet despite the seeming ubiquity of Dickensian haunting in popular culture, his supernatural tales with their barely disguised moral message have not inspired universal affection. The writer China Miéville, for example, has argued that rather than reflecting the (ghostly) spirit of the age, Dickens’s ghosts are enfeebled and already outdated remnants of the past, describing them as ‘apotheoses of the instructional ghosts of the preceding century – out of time, rearguard in their sentimentality. Themselves haunted by the future. They are not so much convincing, morally, as performatively flourished. These are not modern ghosts, but the last, already-dead walking dead of a dead epoch, bobbed about on sticks.’14 In describing Dickens’s ghosts as ‘instructional’, however, Miéville is merely acknowledging the moral conservatism of all traditional ghost stories in which ghosts perform a social function in upholding the societal and moral norms of the day. For while hauntings and hauntology itself may since have acquired a political radicalism born of association with Marx and sustained through popular culture, it should be remembered that ghosts themselves are more traditionally associated with the retribution of past wrongs, and the unexpiated guilt of sins for which they (or we) are yet to atone. Ghosts, as Philip Ball reminds us, are ‘the invisible police, all-seeing agents that patrol norms and boundaries. In this respect traditional ghosts are not emissaries of chaos, but are on the contrary social conservatives.’15

In Dickens’s work, ghosts and hauntings abound. In stories such as ‘The Signal-Man’, written for the Christmas edition of the magazine All the Year Round in 1866 (and the subject of Lawrence Gordon Clark’s memorable television adaptation in 1976), Dickens relived his traumatic experience of the Staplehurst train crash the previous year. The tale is of a lonely signalman haunted by a spectre whose every appearance forewarns him of an accident he is powerless to prevent, including that which will result in his own death. Dickens uses the emerging technology of the Victorian telegraph network as the medium with which to transmit his ghostly communications. In this respect, as Adam Scovell has suggested, ‘The Signal-Man’ may be read as a pioneering example of the hauntological interaction between pre-digital, analogue technology and the supernatural.16Bleak House (1853) is a similarly, if less explicitly, haunted work, whose twofold narration interweaves past and present in a manner which appears to subject the living to the same temporal imperatives that govern their ghostly counterparts; one in which the supply of ghosts is constantly replenished through Dickens’s habit of introducing characters only to have them die almost immediately (Jenny’s baby), not long afterwards (Jo) or to be dead at the point of discovery (Nemo). In Great Expectations (1861), we find what is surely the foremost example of literary dyschronia, as time slows to a standstill within the confines of Satis House, an atemporal zone in which Miss Havisham exists in a perpetual present, the clocks forever frozen at 8.40 am as she relives the moment at which she first learns that she is not to be married. On visiting Satis House and meeting its spectral inhabitant, Pip experiences a profound sense of dislocation: ‘So unchanging was the dull old house, the yellow light in the darkened room, the faded spectre in the chair by the dressing-table glass, that I felt as if the stopping of the clocks had stopped Time in that mysterious place, and, while I and everything else outside it grew older, it stood still.’17

‘As a term,’ Steven Connor writes, ‘“haunting” has an almost disappointingly innocuous past.’18 From the sixteenth century onwards, he informs us, the term was used to describe those persons possessed by spirits but gradually it became assigned less to people than to the places they inhabited. By the time at which Dickens was writing, the word ‘haunt’ was most commonly used simply to describe a location which one frequented. As the nineteenth century progressed, however, the spaces such a ‘haunt’ might evoke moved away from the natural world to a more urban and domestic setting, the family home. Within such a setting, the home and its inhabitants could become identified with one another as place and person became increasingly interchangeable. Who then was the haunter and who the haunted became less easy to discern. It is this sense of an almost claustrophobic proximity between the ghost and their subject that lies at the heart of Dickens’s fifth and final Christmas book, The Haunted Man and the Ghost’s Bargain, which was published in December 1848, a coincidence of dates that recurs throughout this book, returning us repeatedly to the year of Marx’s Manifesto.

With its preoccupation with temporal continuity and the power of memory to shape the personality, Dickens’s novella shares many of the concerns of its more celebrated predecessor, A Christmas Carol, and yet The Haunted Man is a much darker and less sentimental work. Its protagonist is haunted in a manner even more unsettling than that experienced by Scrooge, for the ghost encountered here is that of his own ghostly double. Like Scrooge, the embittered chemist Redlaw is similarly tormented by his past, memories of hurt and injustice denying him the ability to take any pleasure in the present. One evening, however, he is subject to a ghostly visitation, an all-too-familiar embodiment of his desire to extinguish the past:

As the gloom and shadow thickened behind him, in that place where it had been gathering so darkly, it took, by slow degrees, – or out of it there came, by some unreal, unsubstantial process – not to be traced by any human sense, – an awful likeness of himself.

Ghastly and cold, colourless in its leaden face and hands, but with his features, and his bright eyes, and his grizzled hair, and dressed in the gloomy shadow of his dress, it came into his terrible appearance of existence, motionless, without a sound. As he leaned his arm upon the elbow of his chair, ruminating before the fire, it leaned upon the chair-back, close above him, with its appalling copy of his face looking where his face looked, and bearing the expression his face bore.

This, then, was the Something that had passed and gone already. This was the dread companion of the haunted man!19

Thanks to his phantom doppelgänger, Redlaw is offered the chance to be rid of his memories, an apparent blessing that comes at a cost – he will thenceforth pass on his gift of forgetfulness to everyone with whom he comes into contact. Haunting soon becomes a contagion as Redlaw moves through the city, spreading his curse of forgetfulness as he passes. Of course, the message that Redlaw finally learns is that in memory lies compassion. Good and evil, joy and suffering, are inextricably linked and, in extinguishing his memories, Redlaw denies himself and those he encounters the ability to experience either. Redlaw is haunted by loss – he grieves for the deaths of his beloved sister and the woman he hoped to marry, who was seduced by his best friend – and in this respect he mirrors his creator. At the time of writing, Dickens was mourning the death of his own sister Fanny, who died in September 1848. These are the memories that Redlaw (and Dickens) struggle to contain: ‘I saw them, in the fire, but now,’ he murmured. ‘They come back to me in the music, in the wind, in the dead stillness of the night, in the revolving years.’20 Loss is the major theme of Dickens’s tale – of love, family, of memory itself – but the traces that such absence leave behind persist and can never be fully eradicated. ‘I have the power to cancel remembrance’, claims Redlaw’s spectral double, ‘to leave but very faint, confused traces of them, that will die out soon’.21 But Dickens’s tale emphasises the persistence of memory, for regardless of the spectre’s claim to the contrary, traces do remain and we can never fully escape our past as Redlaw believes: ‘The past is past,’ said the Chemist. ‘It dies like the brutes. Who talks to me of its traces in my life? He raves or lies!’22 Yet Redlaw is mistaken and he is unable to fully efface his deepest sense of self. In the end, it is only music which has the power to recall Redlaw to himself, for on hearing a familiar strain of Christmas song ‘some dumb stir within him made him capable, again, of being moved by what was hidden, afar off, in the music.’23 As hauntology in its current manifestation would attest, music has a unique and restorative power to evoke the past, to reach emotional depths and to provoke memory in a manner seemingly denied to other media.

Both A Christmas Carol and The Haunted Man explore a mourning for failed potentialities, alongside a recognition of the spectral nature of memory itself: ‘in the likenesses of forms and faces from the past, from the grave, from the deep, deep gulf, where the things that might have been, and never were, are always wandering.’24 But the lost futures that Dickens’s describes here and throughout his work are those which a Victorian readership would have recognised rather more literally than the nostalgic recall of our recent past evoked by hauntology today. In an era of high infant mortality, this mourning for unrealised futures is directed not towards the cultural or political landscape of mid-Victorian Britain but rather at an absent population exemplified by figures such as Paul Dombey, Little Nell and (in another future) Tiny Tim. The Haunted Man may have been the product of that fateful year, 1848, haunted both by spectres of communism and Christmases yet to come, but Dickens’s novella was to have an unexpected afterlife of its own, a ghostly presence beyond the pages of his book.

Pepper’s Ghost

‘The best ghosts have always been theatrical ghosts’, claims Jim Steinmeyer in Hiding the Elephant