Reading Hilary Mantel

Haunted Decades

Lucy Arnold

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781350072572
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Modern Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

From the ghosts which reside in Midlands council houses in Every Day is Mother's Day to the resurrected historical dead of the Booker Prize-winning Wolf Hall and Bring up the Bodies, the writings of Hilary Mantel are often haunted by supernatural figures. One of the first book-length studies of the writer's work, Reading Hilary Mantel explores the importance of ghosts in the full range of her fiction and non-fiction writing and their political, social and ethical resonances. Combining material from original interviews with the author herself with psychoanalytic, historicist and deconstructivist critical perspectives, Reading Hilary Mantel is a landmark study of this important and popular contemporary novelist.

1

Not Giving up the Ghost: Preserving the spectral in Mantel’s memoir

In exploring the primacy of the ghost and the situation of haunting to the work of Hilary Mantel, it is unsurprising that the critical gaze should be drawn in the first instance to the publication which seems most immediately and overtly to engage with these themes: her memoir Giving up the Ghost (2003).¹ However, this instinctive critical focus immediately raises a number of issues, falling as it does upon a text highly unusual in Mantel’s oeuvre for its status as life-writing.² A self-declared memoir, Giving up the Ghost participates in a proliferation of autobiographical writing which has been gathering pace since the turn of the century.³ Yet, despite a growing raft of subgenres, the terminology that life-writing has produced is far from clear and stable, even with regard to the terms ‘memoir’ and ‘autobiography’. An examination of these instabilities is necessary if the work undertaken in Giving up the Ghost is to be properly contextualized.

Ben Yagoda’s succinct history of the memoir form refutes the distinction between autobiography and memoir, instead using the terms to mean ‘more or less the same thing: a book understood by its author, its publisher, and its readers to be a factual account of the author’s life’.⁴ Nevertheless, Yagoda traces the evolution of both terms and the historical oscillations between their definitions. To give just one example, Yagoda notes that, while in 1876 Gustave Vapereau asserted that ‘autobiography leaves a lot of room for fantasy, and the one who is writing is not at all obliged to be exact about the facts, as in memoirs’,⁵ Gore Vidal’s memoir, Palimpsest (1996), overturns Vapereau’s definition and understands memoir as ‘how one remembers one’s own life, while an autobiography is history, requiring research, dates, facts, double-checked’.⁶ Furthermore, in recent years the relationship between life-writing, such as memoir, and fictional forms, such as the novel, has been closely interrogated, generating the neologism of ‘autobiografiction’. As Max Saunders puts it, ‘however truthful or candid an autobiography might be judged, it is nonetheless a narrative, and shares its narrative features with fictional narratives’.⁷ Memoir in particular is situated uniquely on the borderland between the fictional and the autobiographical, due to its etymological root in the French mémoire or ‘memory’. As Yagoda points out:

Memory is by nature untrustworthy: contaminated not merely by gaps, but by distortions and fabrications that inevitably and blamelessly creep into it. It is itself a creative writer, cobbling together ‘actual’ memories, beliefs about the world, cues from a variety of sources, and memories of previous memories to plausibly imagine what might have been, and then, in one master stroke, packaging this scenario in the mind as the real one.⁸

Thus, on the one hand memoir is positioned as ‘a factual account of the author’s life’, yet on the other inherently resorts to narrative strategies common to fiction and is built upon inevitable fabrications, some conscious, for example, the generation of conversational material that would be impossible to recall verbatim, and some unconscious, undertaken even in the process of forming memories. Mantel herself acknowledges this model of memory, stating:

When we talk about a memory we are not talking about a fixed entity, but about a process. A memory changes every time we recall it. A memory is a work in progress. It comes to us through our senses and as we perceive we create. And as we remember we re-create.⁹

It is necessary to ask, then, where Giving up the Ghost sits within the complex and often contradictory landscape of contemporary life-writing. Initial indications that the text exceeds the conventions of contemporary memoir are found in the way that Giving up the Ghost not only acknowledges its status as memoir but explicitly comments on the form. For example, in the first few pages the memoir’s speaker states: ‘I used to think that autobiography was a form of weakness, and perhaps I still do. But I also think that, if you’re weak, it’s childish to pretend to be strong’ (p. 6). In terms of the speaker’s own understanding of the work her memoir is to accomplish, and the book’s status within her canon, the text appears initially to adhere to the conventional definition of what such a work seeks to achieve. Early on the speaker says of the text: ‘this story can be told only once, and I need to get it right’ (p. 5), before going on to describe the work as ‘an attempt to seize the copyright in [her]self’ (p. 71) and to relate how ‘the story of my own childhood is a complicated sentence that I am always trying to finish, to finish and put behind me. It resists finishing, and partly this is because words are not enough’ (p. 23). Read together these extracts appear to form a statement of intent, positioning the memoir as an exercise in completion, the generation of a whole and authentic self, claimable only by the speaker. Yet this intention is simultaneously undermined as the memoir acknowledges that such an exercise in completion can only ever be partial due to the insurmountable resistance offered by the insufficiency of language. The speaker goes on to warn that ‘some deceptive sights are seen through glass, and the best liars tell lies in plain words’ (p. 5), before asking ‘is my writing clear: or is it deceptively clear?’ (p. 5). This rhetorical question, with its compound destabilization in which the reader is asked to ascertain the presence of a clarity whose very transparency may be paradoxically misleading, is characteristic of the memoir’s numerous double gestures.

Despite these provocations on the part of the memoir for reading strategies that exceed generic conventions and accommodate the text’s multiple – perhaps undecidable – possibilities, critical responses to Giving up the Ghost have, for the most part, attempted to shut down the text’s ambiguity and multiplicity. These responses are particularly apparent in readings of the ghostly presences which populate the text. A number of conventional ghosts can be found within the pages of the book, from the ghost of the speaker’s stepfather, Jack, descending the stairs on the ope ning page to the ancestral dead ‘peering at their place cards, and shuffling into their chairs’ (p. 252) at the memoir’s close. Yet to assume that the memoir’s titular ghost corresponds with, and is circumscribed by, these traditional phantoms is to refuse the ambiguity of the text. This refusal is only one element of a constellation of naïve readings present in reviews of the memoir, which endeavour both to pin down the class of ghosts which haunt it, and then to exorcise those presences from the narrative or even allege that their exorcism is the project the narrative undertakes.

Early in the memoir the speaker recalls Margaret Atwood’s assertion that ‘the written word is so much like evidence – like something that can be used against you’ (p. 6). This ‘evidential’ treatment of the memoir is the one that has most often been employed by reviewers of the text, who frequently and problematically conflate the author of the book and its speaker. Kathryn Hughes, writing in the Guardian, states that in Giving up the Ghost ‘Mantel has booted out all of those shadowy presences that have jostled her all her life.’¹⁰ In a review for the New York Times, Inga Clendinnen posits the possibility that a traumatic and mysterious encounter involving the young Hilary is simply ‘a “realization” of vulgar Catholic teachings intensified by shame at the masked improprieties within her household’.¹¹ Marianne Brace, writing in the Telegraph, cannot resist the urge to begin her review (strikingly titled ‘Hilary Mantel: The Exorcist’): ‘when Hilary Mantel was seven she met the Devil’,¹² even if she does quickly back away from such a rigid interpretation of the memoir’s account of a possibly supernatural encounter. The same cannot be said of the New Yorker’s blithe assertion that ‘when the English novelist Hilary Mantel was seven years old, she saw the devil standing in the weeds beyond her back fence’,¹³ while a review in Publisher’s Weekly insists that the text’s ‘first and foremost ghost … is the baby [Mantel] will never have’.¹⁴ This statement attempts to establish a linkage in the memoir between haunting and Mantel’s experience of endometriosis and resulting infertility but does so in such a way as to delimit, crassly and reductively, the ghosts within the text. Perhaps understandably, given the impact the illness has had on Mantel, most recently documented in her e-book Ink in the Blood, critical writing on Giving up the Ghost specifically, and on Mantel more widely, has been preoccupied with the author’s experience of endometriosis. The keenness to define and control the ghosts and apparitions in Mantel’s memoir evidenced above, to render unambiguous those elements of the text which are most difficult, is paralleled in this preoccupation with her illness.

While reviews of the memoir have proliferated, academic work on the memoir is limited and much of it displays similarly problematic refusals of ambiguity and a susceptibility to unhelpfully reductive or clinically preoccupied readings. Amy Prodromou’s chapter ‘Writing the Self into Being: Illness and Identity in Inga Clendinnen’s Tiger’s Eye and Hilary Mantel’s Giving up the Ghost’¹⁵ defines Mantel’s memoir as merely an account of illness, an ‘autopathography’.¹⁶ Such a definition has the effect of effacing the complexity of the work and allowing illness straightforwardly to dominate interpretation in the same way as it is represented within the text as dominating the speaker’s life.¹⁷ Alongside this issue sits a further problem: a lack of nuanced engagement with the relationship between Mantel’s life-writing and her fiction. One of the only texts in which this is attempted is Sara Knox’s article ‘Giving Flesh to the “Wraiths of Violence”: Super Realism in the Fiction of Hilary Mantel’.¹⁸ Yet Knox’s piece does not focus solely on Giving up the Ghost; the memoir is only invoked briefly as a point of origin for a moment in Beyond Black. ¹⁹ Clearly such a use of autobiography as origin for fiction is dubious, particularly in this case where the apparent reappearance of the moment, ‘changed but still recognizable’,²⁰ is uninterrogated and understood merely as evidence that ‘the world of Mantel’s fiction is not so very far from the world of her life.’²¹

In contrast to these critical responses, I argue that Mantel’s memoir has been read naively, not only in terms of its operation within the crowded field of contemporary life-writing, but in terms of how the potentially supernatural elements of the text, including its titular ‘ghost’, have attracted a stubbornly literal critical approach. While Giving up the Ghost’s engagement with haunting at first glance seems glib and slight (exemplified by the humorous colloquialism of the memoir’s title), privileging the spectral as a plastic yet principal mode within Giving up the Ghost allows the issues present in the critical approaches outlined above to be addressed. In opposition to these reductive reading strategies, this chapter demonstrates that Giving up the Ghost must be understood not as a straightforward literary memoir but as a conscious and complex response to the changing status of life-writing within the cultural sphere. The book mischievously references a number of subgenres which have proliferated in the field of life-writing, at various moments evoking the spiritual memoir, the memoir of illness and disability and, in one crucial passage, alluding to but dismissing the tropes of the ‘misery memoir’.²² This playful understanding of genre forms only part of Giving up the Ghost’s self-conscious engagement with memoir, however. In addition to telling a story of Mantel’s lif e (and indeed a sincere and moving one), Giving up the Ghost openly works with the memoir’s roots in memory, and the inherent flaws and fictions these roots bring with them, to make available a notion of memory as a ‘creative writer’, complicating and interrogating the contested boundary between autobiography and fiction.²³

In addition to exposing the tense relationship between creativity and authenticity upon which memoir is predicated, playing out the ‘irresolvable conflict between the capabilities of memory and the demands of narrative’,²⁴ Giving up the Ghost is also an elegant exposition of the inextricable connection between the creation of narrative and the creation of self. If Saunders argues that ‘autobiography does not transcribe a self that already exists’, but rather is an ‘act of narration that brings that self into being’,²⁵ Giving up the Ghost chronicles a will to presence through writing which is perpetually deferred and disavows the possibility of a full and stable ‘transcription’ of such a presence. As Linda Anderson, paraphrasing Derrida, has put it, ‘autobiography as a demand for unmediated selfhood is, it seems, doomed to reiterate itself endlessly as text.’²⁶ This deferral and disavowal renders the memoir’s speaker a spectre in her own right, and Giving up the Ghost a ghost story in more ways than one.

In this chapter I propose an alternative mode of responding to the memoir’s multitude of ghosts and spectres which understands the book’s speaker as possessing a spectral existence. Furthermore, that spectral voice is augmented by and refracted through a variety of other hauntings, both thematic and contextual, whose disorganizing and destabilizing effects serve to question the status of life-writing as a project in producing a choate narrative while nonetheless emphasizing its ethical possibilities. From an exposition of the spectral status of Giving up the Ghost’s ‘I’ speaker, I interrogate how the memoir’s intertextual materials form haunting structures that question the notion of a straightforward and uncontested personal identity. Continuing to think about what the complicated and ‘undecidable’ elements of Giving up the Ghost make possible, finally I look to how the memoir fosters a haunting secrecy that produces readings which are, like the speaker’s narrative project, never complete and never stable. Rather than giving them up (whether by exposing, exorcising or debunking them), it is the preservation of ghosts, in all of their forms, that is crucial to this interpretation of Mantel’s memoir.

A ghost, writing: the spectral speaker

The ‘I’ speaker of memoir occupies a slippery and contested place within the field of life-writing in which it makes a claim for authenticity and authority that is frequently problematic and precarious, a precarity which Mantel acknowledges, asking: ‘having been so routinely plural, how can you become a mere one? Where is your self located? Where does “I” live?’²⁷ Working from Virginia Woolf’s assertions about the speaker within autobiography, Pollard puts forward an apt conceptualization of the autobiographical ‘I’, particularly within Giving up the Ghost, as an artificial creation,²⁸ citing Woolf’s definition of the ‘I’ as ‘a convenient term for one who has no real being’.²⁹

One of the crucial elements of Mantel’s memoir that sets it apart from other contemporary literary examples of life-writing is the speaker’s seeming acknowledgement of herself as such a one ‘who has no real being’. If, as Shari Benstock puts it, (in the Lacanian style) ‘… autobiography is a fiction that conceals a lack’,³⁰ in the case of Giving u...