1 Ghost armies
Memory, landscape and social haunting
This chapter examines the issue of hauntings that have social effects and consequences. Ghosts are summoned up time and time again; in political practice, in the social sciences, in fiction and film. We look at the question of memory and haunting and at ways in which ghosts are a form of remembrance and recomposition. The chapter also moves beyond a parochial and provincial sense of specific, empirical ghosts in specific landscapes and houses towards a general, more global sense of repetition and social haunting.
In elucidating the landscapes of ghosts and haunting it matters little whether one believes in ghosts or not. Ghosts are congealed entities enclosing social and historical substance. They both conceal and display things to us about our social world. They happen upon and traverse the physical material landscapes that we, as living beings, also happen upon and traverse. They seize and inhabit living human frames and haunt specific landscapes. Human societies are obsessed with and frightened by ghosts and haunting in a world which we continue to think of as one of materialism, logic and rationality. The ghost has its own logic, meaning and substance if we could only fathom it. It provides a clue as to who we are, where we have come from and our aspirations for our social futures. But it also reminds us of what we feel guilty about as individual and social beings, our obsession with our regrets, the remembrance of past crimes that can only be dealt with in the language, discourse and landscape of haunting. It may also be the case that the ghost offers us a warning, or is asking us for something.
In the first section of the chapter we begin to look at the human landscapes of haunting and situate the human itself within a genealogy and history of haunting. Beginning with the work of Rainer Maria Rilke and Friedrich Schiller we can start to think about the human aspect of social haunting and why it matters socially. In the second section we begin to think about the haunted house, space, castle and the buildings within the haunted landscape. By understanding the nature of the house and housing we can locate our desires and fears within specific moments and locations within the house. We continue the chapter by beginning to reflect upon the very materialist doctrines that sought to banish ghosts and phantasms – that of Marx and Marxism. Ironically the ghost and the dead have been very well-served by Marx – he never surrendered his obsession with social haunting. In conclusion we begin to think about ghosts and their specific landscapes.
Haunting and the abyss
We have no reason to mistrust our world, for it is not against us. Has it terrors, they are our terrors; has it abysses, those abysses belong to us; are dangers at hand, we must try to love them…Perhaps everything terrible is in its deepest being something helpless that wants help from us.
(Rilke 1962: 69)
In an extended passage from one of his early letters Rainer Maria Rilke examines the status of the ‘lost messiah’ and in doing so creates one of the clearest revelations of the relationship between the individual human being, one’s ancestors and the entirety of human history. Rather than seeing the messiah or god/human as something which happened in the past Rilke chooses to see the new human as coming, as part of our social futures. We as humans living now are the brief and fluctuating efflorescence of a hitherto existing humanity. But our ‘being’ is utterly decisive for the humans that will come after us. Our lives are part of the gestation of future humanity and also for the gestation of the perfect, future singular human. This is the result and consequence of the congealed history of the dead of all the past generations, ‘encompassing everything within himself’ (Rilke 1962: 49–50).
How different the descent of history would have been if that messiah himself or herself had already come and been many generations before us – rather than efflorescence we would be the dying remnants and detritus of perfection, the material effects of something which had already passed. But for Rilke we are building that human, as that human will be built by generations before and after us who will contribute to their substance. In this letter from Rome in December 1903 Rilke writes of the centrality of the ghosts of the dead and their remnants out of which a future humanity is forged – ‘And yet they, who are long gone, are in us, as predisposition, as burden upon our destiny, as blood that pulsates, and as gesture that rises up out of the depths of time’ (Rilke 1962: 50). Our cultural predispositions, destinies, biological materiality, social gestures are a product of those ‘depths of time’ and of the ‘long gone’ who continue to inhabit us and our physical but fleeting human frames. Everything is gestation then and the genesis of social forms and human mentalities out of the detritus of previous beings (29). Even the mutations of humanity (59) of which the ghost is of course its prime monstrous being.
In a different passage this question of mutation and transmutation becomes of central significance to the idea of social haunting and specifically of the socially haunted house. Rilke talks of the terrors of the abyss as our terrors, that which we must love, be warned by, or are asking us for our help (Rilke 1962: 69). For Rilke this idea of mutation can be illustrated by the idea of the unknown guest in the house.
We could easily be made to believe that nothing has happened, and yet we have changed, as a house changes into which a guest has entered. We cannot say who has come, perhaps we shall never know, but many signs indicate that the future enters into us in this way in order to transform itself in us long before it happens.
(Rilke 1962: 64–65)
Like the house, the human frame is subject to a visitation. It may be that we see the ghost, its traverse of a moor, its face at a window, even as a guest at a dinner party. It is also the case that, for Rilke, ghostliness is about the inhabitation of the dead within us and our inhabitation, once dead, in the human frames and mentalities of future human beings. Our predispositions and gestures continue, however mutated and trans-mutated into those who come after us. We may not be remembered but we become part of the congealed social memory of future generations. Because this is not official or even recognised memory we can talk of this congealed social memory as deflected, vernacular and unintended re-membering and rearticulation. Very clearly that process that Rilke talks of, of gesture and mutation, is quite literally a disarticulation of our bones and mentality, the powerful dismembering of our disjecta membra – our scattered fragments of social humanity and its rearticulation in new human frames (and houses). Rilke also warns against the return of the ghost – ‘Do not return. If you can bear to, stay dead with the dead. The dead have their own tasks’ (Rilke 1987: 87).
One evening the character Brigge, himself simply a thinly veiled version of Rilke, is sitting for dinner with his family. All of a sudden a slender woman in a light-coloured dress steps into the room from the darkness. There is a scene at the table, particularly in the reaction of Brigge’s father. They all see her but she is undisturbed and walks the length of the room and out of the door at the opposite end. It is simply a visit from Brigge’s relative Christine Brahe. As Brigge says – ‘In those days I knew nothing about her story. I didn’t know that she had died a long, long time before, as she was giving birth to her second child, a boy, who grew up to a terrifying, cruel fate: I didn’t know that she was a dead person. But my father knew’ (Rilke 1985: 36). It was not the only time she returned to perturb the inhabitants of the house. Brigge decides to go and look for her portrait in the house, but it has been put away. It seems that the reason she is walking the house is to find it as she wants to gaze upon herself. Brigge and another child decide to offer her a mirror but she no longer remained ‘inside’ the house (116–117). Christine’s indifference to the living is remarkable. She has her own intentions which have little to do with the living who watch her pass through the room. But neither is she immaterial. Christine looks as substantial as any other human figure in the room. The fact that she is seeking her reflection in the mirror signifies her sense of confusion, dislocation or even narcissism.
In the house of the Schulin’s other ghosts are encountered. As Brigge says,
I was overcome, for the first time in my life, by something like the fear of ghosts. I realized that all these well-defined grownups, who just a few minutes before had been talking and laughing, were going around stooped over and occupied with something invisible; that they admitted there was something here that they couldn’t see. And it was terrifying to know that it was stronger than all of them.
(Rilke 1985: 144)
Even the old valet of the Brahe’s is an intimate with the ghosts. For Brigge ‘His family had always trafficked with spirits, and Sten was especially predestined for this kind of commerce’ (Rilke 1985: 149). Christine Brahe is indifferent to the living and has her own reasons for being in that house which has little to do with intervention into the affairs of the non-dead. She is an intercalating ghost inhabiting the fractures and empty spaces of the house and only rarely and indifferently impinging on the lives of those still alive. But then there are others, like Sten, who commerce and traffic with those spirits who try to raise the dead or cast out the ghosts from the brain of the living. These necromancers and conjurers are the originators of political, social and commercial projects designed to use the dead for their own nefarious ends. As Walter Benjamin has noted, in an idea to which we will return, even the dead are not safe from the ‘enemy’ (1969: 257).
The varieties of haunting and those who seek to use that haunting for social ends indicate the complexity of apparition and appearance. There is a dialectic between the visible and the invisible, between appearance and essence, presence and absence. There is a continuing obsession with haunted paintings and mirrors, like the relentless search of the ghostly Christine Brahe. Perhaps most importantly in trying to address the questions of haunted landscapes and the role of social memory is the relationship between the earth and the firmament – the kinds of cosmologies in which the haunting takes place. These cosmologies are both part of social history and natural history but are also enduring parts of haunting experiences which can transform the nature of the landscape and the moon and stars in the sky. Further, like animism, the ghost and the rogue soul can come to inhabit the very rocks and trees of the landscape, houses, and mountains. Like the strange fruit hanging from the trees the ghosts of Ibo slaves return to haunt us time and time again – slaves who took their own lives because in doing so their refugee souls would be born again in Africa and would no longer be captive to the white ghosts of the slave traders. The haunting comes as a warning and a remonstrance but it also offers us a moment of emancipation from captivity.
The fact that entities are scattered in places needs further definition and elaboration. Haunted landscapes are simply those spaces which the ghost traverses. In her analysis of the ‘textual eruptions of haunting’ María del Pilar Blanco (2012: 7) has examined this sense of space and the kinds of borders, boundaries, epochs and continents in which the haunting takes place. For Blanco ‘This dynamic version of haunting seeks to look at ghosts as representations not of occluded pasts, or buried secrets, but as manifestations of an increasing awareness of simultaneous landscapes and simultaneous others living within unseen, diverse spaces in the progressively complicated political and cultural networks of hemispheric modernization’ (7). What Blanco calls ‘ghostwatching’ (1) is situated in the idea of pan-American landscapes of haunting – the ‘haunted frontier space’ of the Americas (4). Noting that the ghost is a representation and manifestation of ‘simultaneity’, as Blanco says, we can also develop this into the idea of the ghost as representative as well as representation.
If representation is a discursive construction from within our cultures, the ghostly representative brings us messages and signals (of guilt, distress, captivity, horror, death) from another space – one that is simultaneous with our own but not equal to it or contiguous with our world. The landscape of haunting and non-haunting exists in the same locations, spaces and landscapes as those of non-haunting, but it is itself removed from the non-haunted world even if simultaneous with it. We can talk of these not only as fabricated and fictive landscapes, as the productions of and eruptions within texts, but as the imaginary landscapes in which we are all situated if we could only see the ghosts that were proximal to us, inhabiting the very same spaces. Indeed they often share our houses and castles with us and even our beds.
Approaching the haunted house
So souls can fly about the place, like Tinker Bell?
(Mitchell 2015: 173)
Perhaps the most significant fictional rendition of the idea of transmigration is that of the recent literary journey of David Mitchell. His series of novels, with recurring characters, are obsessed with the spaces and process of souls taking refuge in another’s being. They arrive there either to control it or to seek sanctuary as a refugee. One of the recurring motifs of the haunted house tale has been the idea that the house or castle stood still in space and time for the duration of its haunting. We will return to his idea of transmigration at a later point but one of the suggestions that Mitchell makes and that re-occurs at different stages in his work is the idea of the lacuna (2015: 173), a space separated from time or in which time as we know it is suspended. For Mitchell this takes the form of what he calls the Orison (itself taken as a concept from the ghostly hauntings of Hamlet). The Orison is the staging of the haunting and of the transmigration (Mitchell 2015: 174), often itself a theatrical, illusory rendition of the world beyond – what Mitchell calls ‘A copy. A shadow theatre’ (177). Further, the lacuna of the Orison is itself part of a complex series of apertures, passages and fractures between worlds – specifically that border between the living and the dead, or between those who endure and conform to the temporal world and those who are ‘atemporal’ suspended, migratory souls (197). Often the lacuna is the haunted house or the dark moor – spaces and landscapes in which the ordinary world is suspended and we become the playthings of something more mysterious and not subject to the same laws of space and time as we are. Or at least as we are at the moment before we too become part of the dead (and therefore the gestation of future humanity in a Rilkean manner).
Transmigration is most crucially about mutation, change, shift – either in time or across spaces and worlds and it involves the shift within or the transfer of souls from one to another. Michel Tournier in his retelling of the Bluebeard myth expresses the replacement of a pure spirit by a dark soul as it happens within a single body, entity and human frame. This transformation happens after he witnesses the death of his beloved Jeanne D’Arc, herself the witness to voices and hauntings – ‘A beaten, broken man, he went on and buried himself in his fortress in the Vendee. For three years he became a caterpillar. When the malign metamorphosis was complete, he emerged, an infernal angel, unfurling his wings’ (Tournier 1983: 35). In this case Gilles de Rais was transformed into the murderous monster of folklore. In other cases we see the psychological intensity of multiple personality, or in the hearing of voices as if they were somehow within us but different beings from us. It is not accident that Bluebeard had a castle with many rooms, neither that it was situated within a vast landscape of forests. Forests in which he sought for and made captive children.
Often we hear the ghost within the house or castle or sometimes we see the ghost as it passes down the stairwell or as it stares at us from the rectory window. But we can also talk of the spirit which inhabits us. Rather than this being the spirit of a single, sad and lost entity it is the spirit of world history itself – the zeitgeist or world-spirit inhabiting the human frame of a Wallenstein, a Napoleon or a Trotsky. Equally the ghost may not even have a human form. We have ghost animals like the black dogs of folklore, or ghost ships like the Flying Dutchman and even ghost castles that appear and reappear but have no material existence. There are Roman ghost armies tramping through cellars or armies on the hunt for souls through the night (Schmitt 1998). There are many words, each with a nuanced understanding of the ghost, its memory and its landscape – revenants, wraiths, fetches, apparitions, wisps. Sometimes they are corporeal and can invest themselves in a material presence, more often they are fleeting and insubstantial. Sometimes, as in the lore of the Fetch, the apparitions that appear to us are still alive but in a place many miles from us, often offering us a warning or a message that they are about to pass from the world of the living and want to say a final goodbye.
The invocation and appearance of ghosts and spectres in castles is an easily recognisable motif in literature since the origin of the Bluebeard myths in the French fairytale and in early medieval accounts of the ‘turning castle’ of Arthurian romance. One of the most intriguing accounts lies in the early work of Julien Gracq whose castle of ‘Argol’ raises important aspects of the social study of haunting not least in the relationship between buildings and the landscapes within which they are situated. Likening both the castle and the forest to a sonorous ship’s hull and a sonorous pavilion (Gracq 1991: 16, 87) Gracq describes a haunted castle and forest in terms of listening, the sonorous body receives the sounds of the storm and the wind through the woods. For Gracq the listening body is a ‘prism of total reflection, where sound would be accumulated instead of passing through’ (95). Further, not only does the body receive sound, other souls are reborn in the human frames of the book, accumulated as spirits within others.
The murdered Heide becomes reborn and subsumed within Albert – ‘Out of the depths of that night now hidden from her by the sudden cataract of great waters, out of her annihilation, little by little, she was reborn in him’ (Gracq 1991: 116). Stripped of her body, destroyed in a savage act of murder, she has become disincarnated and can only survive and linger if the other body, that of Albert, receives her. Her murderer Herminien becomes obsessed after her death with the archives of the castle in order to find some clue to where her soul has gone, little knowing that it has been reborn within Albert his friend. Finding an ancient parchment Herminien wends his way through secret passages through the castle to an unknown destination, forgotten by living memory which in fact turns out to be Heide’s chamber, but which is itself disincarnated and empty (151–155). This in turn leads Gracq to a reflection on the landscapes of haunting:
The transfiguring power, the overwhelming efficacy of certain apparitions – by no means chimerical – suddenly rising up on the pavements, in an empty room, in a forest, at the turn of a road, the capacity they possess of infinitely setting their stamp on all those who are caught in their snares, such notions have today become so familiar that it seems incongruous to dwell upon them.
(Gracq 1991: 171)
This returns us to Mitchell’s lacuna or Orison and the ‘shadow-theatre’ in which the ghost performs. For Gracq ‘The always alluring repertory of crumbling castles, noises, lights, spectres ...
