Simon Hay

Nervous Conditions, Lukács, and the Postcolonial Bildungsroman

This essay asks what it means to call Tsitsi Dangarembgas Nervous Conditions (1988) a postcolonial bildungsroman. It argues that there is a fundamental contradiction in the term between the pressures and practices of bildung (education; development; formation), on the one hand, and the project of postcolonial emancipation, on the other. Managing contradictions is a standard feature of the bidungsroman, though, and the essay argues that what makes Nervous Conditions interesting is the way it addresses this particular core contradiction. What marks Dangarembgas novel as distinct from earlier European bildungsromans is, first, its relationship with its revolutionary moment, that is, to the Zimbabwean independence struggle, and, second, its deployment of narration and description, or of realist and naturalist narrative modes, in representing an epistemology of postcolonial resistance.

‘I had not Thought Death had Undone so Many’: Modernism and the Ghost

This chapter focuses on the intersection of the ghost story and modernism. There are two related parts to this encounter: the ghost story becomes something slightly different, under the influence of modernism; and within modernist texts, outside of the ghost story, the figure of the ghost takes on new functions.

A Failed Modernity: The Ghost Story as the Bad Conscience of the Historical Novel

This chapter focuses on Sir Walter Scott’s ghost stories, chiefly on his most famous story, ‘The Tapestried Chamber’ (1828). But it begins with another, less well-known tale, ‘The Highland Widow’ (1827), because a reading of that story helps to establish the relationship between ghost stories and historical novels. It is the underlying argument of this book that the ghost story, like any genre, needs to be understood in relation to other genres with which it is, at any given historical moment, in conversation or competition. And the first such genre, with which the modern ghost story is contemporaneous and that it sets out to complicate, to counter, or even to contradict, is the historical novel. This chapter, then, begins by identifying some of the characteristics of the form through a reading of ‘The Highland Widow’; it then draws a set of comparisons with Scott’s historical novels as a means of highlighting the specific work of the ghost story; and it ends with a closer examination of ‘The Tapestried Chamber’ to demonstrate the significance of the differences between the two genres.

Introduction: Even the Dead Will Not Be Safe

This book is mostly about the form of modern ghost stories, rather than their content. But these can only be separated in an abstract sense, and working out the stories’ form, at different historical moments, will require paying attention to their content as well. At the level of content, ghost stories repetitively address a set of socio-historical concerns that we need to take into account before we can really extrapolate from them anything significant about form. Thus, I am going to take a few pages now to explore and explain those socio-historical concerns, and some of the ways the modern English ghost story addresses them. I will also explain something of what each of these terms — ‘modern,’ and ‘English,’ and ‘ghost story,’ as well as ‘history’ — mean, in the context of this book.

Supernatural Naturalism: The Golden Age of the Ghost Story

The period from the 1880s to the 1920s is widely considered the ‘golden age’ of the ghost story. In this period, so criticism has it, the ghost story reaches a mature form, a consistent quality, and a literary complexity that had been promised but not (or at least not consistently) achieved earlier, and that — depending on which critics you read — is either sustained with variations through the twentieth century, or is never again achieved within a sadly declining genre (for example, Sullivan 1978; Briggs 1977).

Fragment and Totality: The Ghost Story and Early Victorian Realism

The early Victorian period, which is to say the middle decades of the nineteenth century, was a period in which many of the characteristic parameters, figures, tropes and tricks of the ghost story were codified. Sheridan Le Fanu’s ghost stories introduced many of these characteristics, and Dickens, especially through his editorship of All the Year Round, standardized them. The Christmas special edition, with its series of related stories by multiple authors, held together by a coherent narrative frame, became a conspicuous framework. Largely through Dickens’s efforts, the ghost story shifted to the center of the Victorian reading public’s attention.

The Ghost Story and Magic Realism

In the second half of the twentieth century, indigenous and minority writers and artists have regularly found the figure of the ghost useful. Toni Morrison’s Beloved is the most widely known representative of one way that writers use the figure of the ghost, in which it retains more or less intact its nineteenth-century European function: the ghost is a restless soul, a walking trauma, and the book’s impossible project is the responsible remembering and representing of that traumatic history. But ghosts serve no single kind of usefulness in these narratives, because for one thing ‘indigenous and minority’ is an already-infelicitous pair, running together radically different historical experiences. Graham Huggan’s analysis of Guyanan and Caribbean ghost stories is perhaps most deliberate in running the two together: Ghost stories in the Caribbean often have a dual purpose: they revive in order to dispel the ghosts of a past conceived by Europe, a history couched in the paralyzing terms of dispossession and defeat …. At the same time, they reclaim a past anterior to European conquest, a history whose outlines blend with those of originary myth, and whose ghosts are not horrifying apparitions from another, unwanted era but welcome catalysts for the recovery of a buried ancestral consciousness. (p.129) Indigenous history, a history of association with the land, and Afro-Caribbean history, a history of rupture in the Middle passage, come (on Huggan’s analysis) in these stories to figure each other.

Conclusion: Ghosts and History

As a genre, modern ghost stories are concerned with historical trauma, its remembrance and its lingering consequences. In these stories, the ghost is something that returns from the past, something that irrupts into the present, disrupting both the present’s presumed separateness from the past, as well as its stable inheritance of that past. There are two paradigmatic historical traumas that the modern ghost story responds to. The first is the transition from feudalism to capitalism, and the consequent shift in power from the aristocracy to the bourgeoisie. And the second is in effect a repetition of the first, as under imperialism different parts of the world experience the violent transition to modernity. Though the first transition, if it has a historical moment at all, happened some two hundred years earlier than the modern ghost story achieves its stable form, belatedness is consistently one of the characteristics of the modern ghost story. And regardless of whether that is an accurate or helpful model for understanding social change in the 19th century, it is overwhelmingly the narrative that ghost stories tell, and these are the terms in which they tell it.