Académique Documents
Professionnel Documents
Culture Documents
Esther Peeren
Department of Media Studies, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands
© Esther Peeren 2014
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To my brother Jeroen – for knowing how to live to the end
This page intentionally left blank
Contents
Acknowledgments ix
Notes 185
Bibliography 198
Index 208
vii
Figures
viii
Acknowledgments
ix
x Acknowledgments
∗ ∗ ∗
At the start of Oscar Wilde’s ‘The Canterville Ghost’ (1887), the titular
specter is firmly in charge. Lord Canterville tells Mr Hiram B. Otis, an
American minister who wants to buy the ancestral home, that his fam-
ily has not been able to live there ‘since my grandaunt, the Dowager
Duchess of Bolton, was frightened into a fit, from which she never really
recovered, by two skeleton hands being placed on her shoulders as she
was dressing for dinner’ (191). Later on, the reader learns of the many
other triumphal appearances of the ghost, Simon de Canterville, who
murdered his wife and was killed by her brothers in revenge in 1584.
He revels in taking on different spectral guises – Gaunt Gideon, the
Bloodsucker of Bexley Moor; Dumb Daniel, or the Suicide’s Skeleton;
Reckless Rupert, or the Headless Earl – in order to frighten Canterville
Chase’s inhabitants and visitors, sometimes to death. Mr Otis, how-
ever, is not at all disturbed by the revelation that his new home is
haunted. He asserts that he is from ‘a modern country, where we can
buy everything that money can buy’, so that if ghosts did exist, they
would long ago have been acquired for an American museum or road
show (191). His faith in the substantiating power of capitalism and the
laws of nature is tested when a blood stain is found on the library floor
that, despite vigorous treatment with Pinkerton’s Stain Remover and
Paragon Detergent, keeps reappearing. Then, one night, the ghost itself
materializes before Mr Otis with the classic accoutrements of red eyes,
ragged clothes and clanging chains. Far from reacting with horror and
fear, Mr Otis calmly insists that the ghost must in future oil its man-
acles with Tammany Rising Sun Lubricator to keep him from waking
anyone, and afterwards his twin sons pelt the apparition with pillows.
This pragmatic and playful response, considered a gross insult by the
ghost, initiates a power shift: soon, it is no longer Simon de Canterville
1
2 The Spectral Metaphor
who haunts the living, but the living who pester him, while parrying
his continued attempts to frighten them with sang-froid and practi-
cal advice. The role reversal is completed when the twins confront him
with a homemade ‘horrible spectre’ consisting of ‘a white dimity bed-
curtain, with a sweeping-brush, a kitchen cleaver, and a hollow turnip’,
causing him to flee in panic, ‘never having seen a ghost before’ (199).
In Simon de Canterville’s eyes, the new situation is wholly unnatural
and, in rendering him unable to haunt, removes his ‘only reason for
existing’ (204). He falls ill and takes to creeping through the house hop-
ing to go unnoticed. Eventually, Mr Otis’s daughter Virginia takes pity
on him and helps him move on to the Garden of Death.
By disturbing the expected division of roles, Wilde’s parody, aptly
described by Maureen O’Connor as ‘an uneven and disorienting admix-
ture of comedy and gothic melodrama’, all the more clearly brings out
the conventions of the ghost story genre (330). Ghosts are expected to
act as powerful figures of disturbance whose appearance causes may-
hem: in most ghost stories, unsettling questions are raised about the
status of ‘reality’ and the border between life and death, secrets from the
past are revealed, revenge is exacted, bloodlines and inheritances put in
question, and only decisive action on the part of the living can exor-
cize the apparition. Ghosts tend to function as unwelcome reminders
of past transgressions, causing personal or historical traumas to rise to
the surface and pursuing those they hold responsible. This turns them
into existential threats, to be greeted with a mixture of shock and fear,
not the equanimity shown in ‘The Canterville Ghost’. At the same time,
ghosts are the object of intense fascination: any inkling of a haunting
presence is followed by an overwhelming desire to locate it, a frenzied
insistence that it show itself again. In contrast to the indifference and
mockery of the Otis family, the ghost is habitually conjured, chased and
obsessively documented in an attempt to gain access to its secrets, in
particular its knowledge of the realm of the dead. It is the ghost’s dual
association with fear and fascination that makes it so powerful, since the
haunted do not just run from it, but simultaneously seek it out. More-
over, although the notion that the living will find some way to control
or placate the ghost is a staple of supernatural lore, many ghost stories
emphasize that conjuration and exorcism are not guaranteed to be effec-
tive: the ghost can refuse to appear, the one that appears may not be the
one that was summoned and the vanquished ghost might return after
all, as in the familiar horror movie plot. Even in ‘The Canterville Ghost’
it could be said that Simon de Canterville reinstates his dominance in
Introduction: The Spectral Metaphor 3
the end, as the concluding page hints that accompanying him on his
journey to a final death left Virginia a virgin no more.1
At the same time, Wilde’s story shows how the ghost’s almost
sovereign power – deriving from its ability to ignore material and meta-
physical boundaries, its capacity to ‘possess’ the living and its penchant
for revealing secrets and settling old scores – is counterbalanced by vul-
nerabilities. The ghost’s incomplete and intermittent embodiment not
only makes it ungraspable, but often leaves it unable to affect the phys-
ical world directly or effectively. Its power is mostly exercised through
the imagination. Thus, although the Canterville ghost is ascribed an
independent existence and physical presence, he can only conquer
his victims by frightening them into either insanity or a coronary.
Consequently, a change in mind-set on the part of the haunted – a deter-
mination not to show fear or an attempt to understand the ghost and
find out what it wants – often suffices to lessen its disturbing force. The
level of power ascribed to the ghost is, moreover, culturally and histori-
cally specific; some eras and societies are more ghost-ridden than others
and attitudes towards spectral appearances vary widely, as in this case
between the petrified English and the pragmatic, dismissive Americans.
Finally, the susceptibility of ghosts to being involuntarily conjured and
exorcized emphasizes that they are not always autonomous. Simon de
Canterville is turned into the persecuted party by the Otis twins and can-
not extricate himself from the situation without Virginia’s help. What
Wilde’s tale reveals, then, is the ambiguity of the ghost’s relationship to
power: it may appear as a dominant, even sovereign being, but can also
manifest as a figure of compromised agency.
Ghostly figures
Questioning how powerful ghosts are, what exactly they can and cannot
do – to the haunted, but also for themselves – and on which character-
istics and contextual factors their (in)ability to act depends, is not only
important when reading stories like ‘The Canterville Ghost’ that fea-
ture ‘literal’ ghosts, but also when exploring the ghost in a metaphorical
sense, as I will do here. Literal ghosts may be defined as the dead reap-
pearing in some sort of perceptible form to the living. Calling this type
of ghost ‘literal’ does not imply a belief that such reappearances actu-
ally occur; it merely indicates that this meaning of the word is generally
accepted as the most common or straightforward one, forming the basis
for any figurative usage.2
4 The Spectral Metaphor
A search of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) reveals that ‘ghost’ has
accrued many figurative meanings that relate to its literal incarnation
in various ways. In optics, the term refers to Ramsden’s microscopic
eyepiece, which creates its image beyond both lenses instead of in
between them; to secondary telescopic images caused by a lens defect;
to photographic flares; and to spurious spectrographical lines. In cinema
projection, technical flaws may cause the appearance of filmic ghosts,
manifesting as streaks or image extensions. These uses are all concerned
with the physical manifestation of things that, like literal ghosts, should
not be there or are somehow out of place. In biology, a ‘ghost’ is a red
blood corpuscle’s cell wall or cell membrane that has lost its protoplas-
mic contents; in other words, something physically impoverished or
without content: an empty shell. In metallurgy, the segregation of cer-
tain constituents of steel can cause faint bands or ‘ghosts’ to appear on
its surface. This usage singles out the element of translucency, the way
the ghost tends to be only partially visible. The more familiar televisual
‘ghost’ is a displaced, repeated image caused by a duplicate signal trav-
eling by a different path. It brings together multiple qualities ascribed
to the ghost: repetition, displacement and duplication.3 Radar ghosts,
spurious signals for which no source can be located, invoke the air of
mystery and intangibility that surrounds the literal ghost, while the lat-
ter’s association with death and a certain inadequacy (unable to truly
die, it is also not fully alive anymore) underlies its use as a term for a
piece of ‘dead coal’, which instead of burning appears as a white lump
in the fire. Finally, there is the metaphorical use of the ghost in the ghost
writer, who, more or less furtively, writes texts for which someone else
takes credit. Here, carried over from the literal ghost is its ephemeral
nature, its tendency to never fully materialize.
The position of the ghost writer as someone conceived as ghostly
without having died evokes the central question of this book: what
does it mean to live as a ghost, especially when this spectral metaphor
designates a state of dispossession? I will focus on how, in the late
twentieth- and early twenty-first-century British and American cultural
imagination, certain marginalized groups of people are, for various rea-
sons, perceived and/or perceive themselves as in some way ghostly,
spectral, phantasmatic or spooky. Since part of my aim is to counter-
act generalizing uses of the spectral metaphor that assume all ghosts
are alike, these terms will be taken as closely related but not iden-
tical in meaning and figurative force. ‘Specter’, for example, strongly
invokes something visible, even spectacular, through its etymology
(from Latin specere, ‘to look, see’) and tends, in everyday speech, to refer
Introduction: The Spectral Metaphor 5
traditionally finds the most expansive home. With the use of the spec-
tral metaphor grounded in ghost stories told in different imaginative
media, it is there that the most creative scenarios for its re-orientation
from dispossession to empowerment are likely to be found. Scrutinizing
portrayals of living ghosts in novels, films and television series, then,
can suggest new responses to the practices of marginalization arising
in a globalized context increasingly dominated by neoliberal thought,
which, in postulating a universal ability to act autonomously, ignores
the constraints placed on agency, particularly for subjects considered
expendable.
Having outlined the parameters of my investigation into the spectral
metaphor, the remainder of this introduction situates it in the wider
field of spectral studies. This field was established when the ghost, in
the 1990s, evolved from a supernatural phenomenon (fictional or other-
wise) and a specialized, mainly technological metaphor into a concept –
spectrality – adopted as an analytical tool throughout the humanities and
social sciences. I argue for a broad notion of spectrality that enables it to
encompass not only the ghosts of the past (the way history haunts the
present or childhood traumas the subject), but the possible and impos-
sible hauntings of those living ghosts produced in and by the present.
In addition, I elaborate a notion of spectral agency and point to the need
for a re-focalization of the ghost, which has, both in popular culture and
in scholarly considerations of spectrality, predominantly been looked at
from the perspective of the haunted.
Present ghosts
Marx) its catalyst. In this text, Derrida does not profess a belief in the
actual return of the dead, but spins a reading of the literal ghost of the
king in Hamlet and a discussion of the complex, multiple legacy of Karl
Marx into a conceptual meditation on spectrality as a deconstructive
force that disturbs traditional notions of temporality and history – by
collapsing the borders between past, present and future: ‘Time is out of
joint’ – and that transforms ontology into hauntology.7 This neologism
indicates a Being that is never unambiguously or wholly present to itself
and that has a heterogeneous and therefore unlocatable point of origin:
it is ‘the more than one/no more one [le plus d’un]’ (Derrida, Specters xx).
In addition, the specter emerges as a figure of radical alterity, concretized
as the guest, foreigner or immigrant, underpinning an ethics of inter-
subjectivity in which the self, rather than negating or assimilating the
other, is asked to adopt an attitude of open expectancy striving for the
ideal of absolute hospitality, which welcomes without imposing condi-
tions. This ethics is presented by Derrida as the path to ‘learn[ing] to live
finally’ in a more just and responsible manner, in relation to oneself and
one’s own inevitable death as well as to the other (xvii).8
According to Luckhurst, Derrida’s text, to which I will return through-
out this book, transformed the specter into a ‘master trope’ (‘Contempo-
rary’ 527). While the glut of spectral investigations that followed Specters
of Marx seemed to confirm the concept’s critical fecundity, Luckhurst
argues that the ever-widening scope of its application marks its lim-
its. For him, the figure of the ghost loses explanatory value when it
becomes part of a ‘generalized economy of haunting’ that eschews
historical, geographical and methodological specificity (534). Bown,
Burdett and Thurschwell, in The Victorian Supernatural, similarly argue
that metaphorical invocations of the ghost work to ‘unify and flatten
out the supernatural’ by ignoring ‘the ways in which the supernatural
signifies differently at different historical moments’ (12).
Derrida’s hauntology, which, as an alternative ontology, renders all
being and meaning ghostly, and whose function and effects are dif-
ficult to distinguish from those of other deconstructive notions such
as différance, trace and hymen, indeed tends to the general and even
universal, as does his suggestion that
the figure of the ghost is not just one figure among others. It is per-
haps the hidden figure of all figures. For this reason, it would perhaps
no longer figure as one tropological weapon among others. There
would be no meta-rhetoric of the ghost.
(Specters 120)
12 The Spectral Metaphor
Ghosts, as figures of return, are indeed multiple, but they can be specific
at the same time. Hamlet is not haunted by just any ghost, but by the
ghost of his father and this identification, albeit never definitive, secures
the force of the apparition’s injunction. The way popular culture often
pitches ghost against ghost, moreover, shows that such apparitions are
not necessarily reducible to one, especially in places where multiple con-
tested histories converge. Consequently, even a house visited by a new
ghost each night could still be experienced as haunted. This is confirmed
by the way Fenves’s phrase ‘if each night a different ghost haunted a
house’, designed to describe the impossible, nevertheless makes perfect
sense.
Rather than rejecting the metaphor of the ghost as overly general or
necessarily separate from individuality, invocations of spectrality should
include a motivation of how and why this figure is employed and what
is gained or lost in its use. A conceptual metaphor can easily be over-
stretched, especially when it becomes part of an academic trend. Yet the
fact that some of its appropriations and applications have been less con-
vincing or productive than others does not mean that spectrality should
be abandoned altogether or that its abundant presence in late twentieth-
century and early twenty-first-century cultural theory is not, in itself, of
interest.
As Bal notes in Travelling Concepts in the Humanities, ‘concepts are nei-
ther fixed nor unambiguous’ (23). This is doubly true of the specter,
which possesses an inherent indistinctness and ambivalence that forms
the core of its conceptual appeal and scope. Concepts ‘travel – between
disciplines, between individual scholars, between historical periods,
Introduction: The Spectral Metaphor 13
Agency, then, does not imply sovereign control over one’s actions and
their consequences. This does not, however, diminish the importance of
being able to act with a sense of purpose and of being seen to be of consequence.
16 The Spectral Metaphor
Spectral agency
Derrida acknowledges that the present conjures its own ghosts when
he refers to ‘the new structure of the event and of its spectrality that
[techno-tele-media apparatuses] produce [ . . . ]: it is the relation of the
concept of production to the ghost that is in question here’ (Specters 79,
emphasis in text). One type of apparition produced by the spectraliz-
ing new media are politicians turned into ‘mere silhouettes’. Having
lost ‘the essential part of the power and even of the competence that
they were granted before by the structures of parliamentary representa-
tion, by the party apparatuses that were linked to it’, these politicians
are no longer ‘actors of politics’, but ‘TV actors’. The media is seen to
Introduction: The Spectral Metaphor 17
On the one hand, this means that the ghostly ancestor cannot predeter-
mine what will become of his command, as the ending of Hamlet makes
abundantly clear. On the other hand, the fact that ‘one always inherits
from a secret’ indicates that there can be no proprietary relationship to
the ghost. No single descendant can claim ownership of a unified ‘true’
legacy, for no one could ever completely comprehend it.
If it is impossible to fully receive the inheritance, yet equally impos-
sible to avoid it, what, then, is the proper response to the ghost that
lays down the law? According to Derrida, a legacy that presents itself
as commanding and incontrovertible may rightfully be questioned and
challenged. Marx’s ‘burst of laughter [ . . . ] in the face of the capital or
paternal ghost, the Hauptgespenst that is the general essence of Man’,
for example, is considered ‘alive, healthy, critical, and still necessary’
(174, emphasis in text). The same could be said of the Otis boys’ mock-
ing of Simon de Canterville. At the same time, Derrida berates Marx
for having ‘chased away so many ghosts so quickly’ (174). While some
ghosts should be defied, others, which enable the recognition that the
self and the present are beholden to and disjointed by other selves and
other times, should be heeded and respected. The past must never sim-
ply be buried (erased, forgotten, left to the dead) and the other, instead
of being negated or assimilated, ought to be welcomed as other. This is
why there is also something distasteful about the way the Americans in
Wilde’s story treat the Canterville ghost; their dismissal of history and
tradition is too cavalier, too disdainful, too indiscriminate.
Faced with the specter as a figure of vulnerability – one of ‘the ghosts
of those who are not yet born or who are already dead, be they victims of
wars, political or other kinds of violence, nationalist, racist, colonialist,
sexist, or other kinds of exterminations, victims of the oppressions of
capitalist imperialism or any of the forms of totalitarianism’ (Derrida,
Specters xix) – the responsible reaction is to welcome it unconditionally:
at his encounter with the specter fabricated by the Otis twins indicates,
the most effective way to battle a ghost is to appropriate its haunting
force and turn that force against it.
In a response to Specters of Marx entitled ‘The Specter’s Smile’, Antonio
Negri suggests that Marx situated the ghost firmly in the world of the
living by showing how the ‘abstraction of value’ in capitalist produc-
tion ‘vampirizes all of the worker’s labor and, transforming itself into
surplus-value, becomes capital’ (7). Marx saw this ‘spectral movement’,
which renders capital metaphysical and autonomous, as countered by
the ‘non-spectrality of the productive subject’; the undeniable materi-
ality or ‘realness’ of the workers allowed for them to be demystified,
for the magical spell to be undone and the reality of exploitation to
be revealed (Negri 7, emphasis in text). Negri argues that this move
of exorcism is unavailable in the new labor paradigm, where ‘the law
of value has been thrown “out of joint” due to the fact that time
is no longer a measuring gauge of value, nor use-value its real refer-
ent’ (8). The vampire metaphor, however, suggests that the workers’
materiality did not remain intact in nineteenth-century industrialism
either. Vampire attacks, even when said to proceed in a ‘bloodless
movement’, are invasive and take something away from their victims,
leaving them impoverished, weakened, changed (7). The ghostly system
of capitalist production not only renders labor and its value invisi-
ble, but makes workers converge with their labor, so that they can no
longer claim a separate existence, just like a person bitten by a vam-
pire is no longer him- or herself. Thus, the specter – defined by Negri
as ‘the movement of an abstraction that is materialized and becomes
powerful’ – simultaneously produces its inverse, a form of dematerializa-
tion and disempowerment that complicates any appeal to the workers’
solid humanity and stable subjectivity as conduits for demystification
(6–7).16 In addition, it should be taken into account that vampires may
also infect or ‘turn’ their victims, transferring power to them and thus
enabling them to become potential threats; popular culture teaches
that a vampire can kill another vampire much more easily than a
human can.
Yet Negri follows Marx in insisting on the actual as the singular force
able to counteract the ghost. His problem with Derrida’s theory and with
the ‘new spectrality’ of postindustrial labor is that it renders spectrality
so pervasive nothing solid can be set against it:
The new spectrality is here – and we’re entirely within this real illu-
sion [ . . . ] There’s no longer an outside, neither a nostalgic one, nor
22 The Spectral Metaphor
that which does not exist, continues to insist, striving towards exis-
tence [ . . . ] When I miss a crucial ethical opportunity, and fail to make
a move that would ‘change everything’, the very nonexistence of
what I should have done will haunt me for ever: although what I did
not do does not exist, its spectre continues to insist.
(Welcome 22, emphasis in text)
Focalizing ghosts
to learn to live with ghosts, in the upkeep, the conversation, the com-
pany, or the companionship, the commerce without commerce of
ghosts. To live otherwise, and better. No, not better, but more justly.
But with them. No being-with the other, no socius without this with
that makes being-with in general more enigmatic than ever for us.
(xviii, emphasis in text)
The concern is with finding a different, better, way to relate to the other.
Instead of assimilating otherness or exorcizing it, the idea is to live with
it, that is, to allow it to persist as an enigma and, crucially, a poten-
tial threat. In terms of focalization, however, the ‘for us’ that closes the
quote is revealing: the ghostly other is to be looked at in a new way, but
looked at nevertheless.
This indicates that self and other, in Specters of Marx, are not shifters –
in the sense that I can be a self or an other (an ‘I’, a ‘you’ or a ‘she’)
depending on the situation – but are assigned a determined content.
The text’s ‘we’ is always the self and always the one who looks. The line
of sight invariably points from the text’s ‘we’ to ‘certain others who are
not present, not presently living, either to us, in us, or outside us’ (xix,
emphasis in text). ‘We’ are always the haunted ones trying to capture
the ghost’s ephemeral materiality in ‘our’ vision. The assumption that
‘we’ are not, and cannot be, specters in someone else’s eyes complicates
the proposed scenario of being with the ghost. A true being with would
surely entail a certain reciprocity, an attempt to acknowledge the ghost’s
Introduction: The Spectral Metaphor 27
This spectral someone other looks at us, we feel ourselves being looked
at by it, outside of any synchrony, even before and beyond any look
28 The Spectral Metaphor
33
34 The Spectral Metaphor
Forms of invisibility
reside in Britain but not permitted to work or receive rent while her case
is under review; and Okwe is an undocumented migrant not entitled to
be in the country or to work.1 From the perspective of the organ trader,
the three are simply strangers, as he knows nothing of their legal status
or occupation and does not suspect that one of them, Senay, was sup-
posed to be the kidney donor. His remark, though, as one of the only
lines in the film spoken by a white non-migrant character, positions
them, in a more radical manner, as distinctly ‘other’ to an implied ‘we’.
As such, his contemptuous look may be taken as representative of the
larger cultural gaze of white British society.2 It is this cultural gaze and
its refusal to acknowledge or ‘light up’ certain lives that is addressed and
challenged by the alternative ‘we’ construed in Okwe’s defiant response:
‘We are the people that you don’t see. We are the ones that drive your
cabs, we clean your rooms and suck your cocks.’3
Although here Okwe speaks back, in most of the film, as ‘people that
you don’t see’, the three characters take on the status of what I have
called living ghosts. In this case, the quality that dominantly motivates
the figuration is a specific form of absent presence or invisibility. In The
Gift of Death, Derrida distinguishes between two orders of the invisible:
first, there is the visible in-visible, ‘an invisible of the order of the visi-
ble that I can keep in secret by keeping it out of sight’ (90). The visible
in-visible is something that would be visible if it were out in the open,
but that remains unseen because it is physically concealed. Derrida
names the internal organs as part of this order, since they can be brought
to the surface through an operation or accident.4 Notably, he describes
the visible in-visible as something hidden and potentially exposed by
an ‘I’, a subject able to choose what (not) to reveal. The visible in-visible
itself, on the other hand, is objectified and does not seem to possess
any agency of its own. Second, there is absolute invisibility, which ‘falls
outside the register of sight’ (90). This order of the non-visual com-
prises the musical, the tactile, desire, but also the ‘seeing in secret’ of
the paternal or divine gaze that prefigures the specter’s visor effect: ‘God
sees me, he looks at me in secret, but I don’t see him, I don’t see him
looking at me, even though he looks at me while facing me’ (91). Here,
invisibility is either surmounted because the phenomenon can be appre-
hended through other senses or it becomes an asset to be exploited,
a site of domination. The two forms of invisibility come together in
Specters of Marx, where Derrida describes the transitional invisibility
of the specter as ‘a supernatural and paradoxical phenomenality, the
furtive and ungraspable visibility of the invisible, or an invisibility of a
visible X’ (7). The specter’s – apparently voluntary – oscillation between
36 The Spectral Metaphor
are: bodies to either be set to work or cut open to uncover the more
valuable visible in-visible parts inside.7
Like Ellison’s invisible man, Okwe and Senay are reduced to the mate-
rial to the extent that they become hypervisible. What can be most
straightforwardly seen of them is all there is thought to be and, simul-
taneously, all there ought to be, for when their bodies do materialize
outside their labor, they are seen to be demanding that which does
not belong to them: housing, benefits, medical care. This hypervisibility
translates into, on the one hand, a continual danger of capture and, on
the other, utter indifference, since that which is fully exposed to the eye
readily comes to be seen as lacking an interior dimension and therefore
as banal, uninteresting. Thus, when the cleaners working for the Baltic
Hotel present their faces to the surveillance camera for identification
upon arrival, they are not recognized as individuals, but only counted
as generic working bodies. As avisual phantoms, rather than wielding
a visor effect, they are obsessively surveilled. And even when they do
see what others want to keep hidden, their visions do not pose a threat
because they are unable to expose them for fear of drawing attention to
themselves.
The undocumented workers’ ghostliness thus arises from their legal
precariousness, which excludes them from society and prevents them
from showing themselves, and from their participation in globally
undervalued forms of labor, which causes them to be ignored even when
physically present. Sarah Gibson aptly calls undocumented migrant
workers ‘the ghosts of Britain and its economy’ (‘Border’ 700) and
Rebecca Saunders uses the term ‘global foreigners’ to refer to migrant
workers who appear as ‘spectral presences that haunt the circumstances
and discourses customarily gathered beneath the name of globalization’
(88, emphasis in text). Like Freud’s uncanny, the global foreigner func-
tions as a sign of the unconscious that harbors everything that is home
to globalization but that it does not want to recognize as such. Truly see-
ing these ghosts or specters and allowing them to haunt would mean
having to acknowledge uncomfortable truths about the role of clan-
destine labor in sustaining the British economy and the exploitative
treatment of undocumented migrants, who are here asked to literally
dismember themselves in pursuit of a (forged) passport. Okwe, Senay
and Juliette may be seen to embody the ethical imperative to wel-
come without posing conditions that Derrida sees proceeding from the
specter, yet in the film this imperative is not heeded. Instead, as figures
of alterity (racially, nationally, linguistically or religiously other to the
38 The Spectral Metaphor
normative British self) they are disavowed and persecuted, in line with
the panic, fear and xenophobia that governs the immigration debate in
Britain and other Western European countries.
The term ‘ghost’ itself is only used once in Dirty Pretty Things – by
Okwe’s friend Guo Yi, a hospital porter who allows Okwe to stay in
the hospital morgue and who tells him to come there after five o’clock
when there are ‘only ghosts left’. This half-joking reference to the lit-
eral ghosts of the dead metonymically includes Okwe, since he ends
up sharing their space. Okwe’s fondness for spending time in a church-
yard contemplating his dead wife confirms his representational status as
closer to the dead than the living. Visually, his association with a ghostly
translucency is evoked in his almost imperceptible presence as the Baltic
Hotel’s night receptionist, where his uniform makes him fade into the
lobby’s red décor. The film’s opening credits reinforce the association
with ghostly dispossession. White letters with red shadowing materi-
alize on a black screen in a distinctly spectral manner, first gradually
becoming clearer and then fading away again. The letters themselves
are never stable on the screen and instead of being fully formed they
feature small cracks or tears, suggesting fragmentation, brittleness and
vulnerability (Figure 1.1). The addition of red shadowing prefigures the
scene in which Okwe recovers a human heart – a remnant of a botched
organ extraction – from a toilet in one of the hotel rooms, the clear
water gradually staining with blood.
In Dirty Pretty Things, the ghost is evoked not only as invisible or
translucent, but also in terms of what Derrida calls its ‘paradoxical
incorporation, the becoming-body, a certain phenomenal and carnal
form of the spirit’ (Specters 6, emphasis added). Carnality is central to
the narrative, in which living ghosts are not ethereal beings but bod-
ies constantly at work – either laboring or providing spare body parts
for others. This materiality does not, however, ensure notice, let alone
recognition. Derrida’s remark that ‘it is flesh and phenomenality that
give to the spirit its spectral apparition, but which disappear right away
in the apparition’ finds new application here: the immigrant workers’
Figure 1.1 Stephen Frears, Dirty Pretty Things (2002), screenshot (cropped)
Forms of Invisibility 39
The way the Chinese characters employ the term ‘ghost’ is two-sided.
On the one hand, it conveys a sense of xenophobia and ridicule. When
a white British man passes the Chinese workers on the street and spits
at them, the gangmaster, Mr Lin, says with contempt: ‘This Ghost is so
stupid. If we were in China, I’d beat him to death.’ On the other hand,
the westerners in the film are clearly the most powerful: the Chinese
characters depend on them for work and shelter, and have to evade the
gaze of the British authorities. Thus, the gangmaster continues by say-
ing: ‘but he is the type to call the police. Don’t provoke him. Let’s go in.’
The westerner-as-Ghost is akin to Derrida’s sovereign specter, a figure
of domination to whom the Chinese workers are subjected: the peo-
ple at the employment agency have to be bribed with ‘Ghost food’ to
provide jobs and profiting most from the Chinese workers’ labor is not
Mr Lin (who often works alongside them), but the white British land-
lord Robert, who crams as many people as possible into a small terraced
house, and the various British employers, who mostly remain off-screen.
The Chinese workers themselves are portrayed as ghostly in the same
dispossessed sense as the characters in Dirty Pretty Things, only to a more
extreme degree. They cannot show themselves because they are undoc-
umented, a status that is more disabling for them than for the characters
in Frears’s film since they do not speak much English and are heavily in
debt to human traffickers who garnish their wages. They are also invis-
ible in a more literal sense because they live in almost total isolation
on a suburban estate in the provincial town of Thetford (rather than
in a vibrant immigrant London neighborhood like Okwe and Senay)
and work long hours, often at night, in low-paid and low-skilled jobs
that do not involve contact with customers: meat processing, harvest-
ing, cockle picking. Whereas the hotel guests, taxi customers and tricks
of Dirty Pretty Things saw but ignored those providing these services,
the people consuming the goods that go through the Chinese workers’
hands do not have to face them at all. It is, in other words, not just the
worker who is overlooked (made into a non-person), but the work itself
that remains invisible.
In Imaginary States, Peter Hitchcock refers to this repression or dis-
avowal of workers from the production process as aphanisis, from the
Greek aphanes for invisible. His discussion of the transnational pro-
duction of Nike running shoes exposes ‘the contemporary processes
(psychic, social, economic, political) by which workers must be ren-
dered a convenient abstraction – the shoe for the flesh’ (126). The
worker disappears into the product, lingering only metonymically in
42 The Spectral Metaphor
the label announcing the low-wage country where the shoes were made.
The Chinese workers in Ghosts lack even such a tangential connec-
tion, as the products they process will be labeled ‘local’, effectively
erasing the impact of global labor migration. Nor do they have any
way of rematerializing their labor without exposing themselves to the
authorities.
The one form of agency the Chinese workers do possess is their col-
lective power to haunt British society. First of all, this enables them to
act, not so much during their lives as through their shocking deaths,
as a ‘return of the repressed’, revealing the extent to which everyday
British life is underpinned by exploitation.9 While the notion that labor
conditions in distant low-wage countries can be abysmal is generally
acknowledged, what made the Morecambe Bay deaths so disturbing was
that it placed human trafficking and the related dehumanizing living
and labor conditions inside Britain, not just in the big cities but all over
the country. Still, while profound shock was expressed at the deaths and
the tragedy resulted in the Gangmasters Licensing Act, which imposes
stricter regulations for agency work in agriculture, shellfish collecting
and packing, undocumented workers remain vulnerable to exploitation:
penalties for human trafficking are relatively low, it is usually only mid-
dlemen who are convicted while the criminal organizations involved
remain operational and the lack of opportunities in certain parts of the
world ensures a steady supply of people willing to be trafficked.
Second, the visibility of the Morecambe Bay deaths in the British
media calls up the specter of immigration itself, associated with a para-
noid fear of being overrun by parasitic others that looms ever larger
across Western Europe. Visibility in this register, Arjun Appadurai warns,
can culminate in ethnocide:
In one way or the other, we need the ‘minor’ groups in our national
spaces – if nothing else to clean our latrines and fight our wars. But
they are surely so unwelcome because of their anomalous identities
and attachments [ . . . ] globalization, being a force without a face,
cannot be the object of ethnocide. But minorities can.
(Fear 44)
Here, becoming or being made visible does not produce agency but
manifests as yet another mode of oppression: ‘it is through specific
choices and strategies, often of state elites or political leaders, that
particular groups, who have stayed invisible, are rendered visible as
minorities against whom campaigns of calumny can be unleashed’ (45).
Forms of Invisibility 43
genres such as the romance and the thriller, displays high production
values and features relatively well-known mainstream actors.
Lay mentions how Ghosts is designed to ‘change viewer percep-
tions’ (239). It seeks to do this by basing its story on both the actual
tragedy at Morecambe Bay and the undercover investigative journalism
of Guardian reporter Hsiau-Hung Pai, author of Chinese Whispers: The
True Story behind Britain’s Hidden Army of Labour (2008). As such, the
film may be categorized as belonging to the ‘cinema of the affected’,
also known as ‘cinema of duty’. This type of cinema, Angelica Fenner
notes, addresses ‘a hegemonic viewership by evoking the viewers’ pity
and sympathy, emotions which essentially affirm and perpetuate the
static Manichean configuration of oppressor and oppressed’ (qtd. in
Bardan 49). The marginalized are put on display and portrayed as ‘vic-
tims who lack individual autonomy’ (Bardan 49). While the lack of
autonomy may, in certain cases, be an accurate representation, putting
the oppressed on display threatens to transform seeing as recognizing,
acknowledging and validating into looking at as voyeurism, spectacle
and entertainment. In my view, Ghosts and Dirty Pretty Things avoid
looking at suffering instead of seeing it by largely excluding the hege-
monic (white British) perspective from their narratives. Thus, no overt
point of identification is offered up that would serve to objectify the
undocumented workers. In an interview, Frears stated that he ‘went
through a lot of trouble to ethnically cleanse my film of all white people’
(Applebaum). Being forced to align their looks with the marginalized
characters or with a camera that is clearly looking with rather than at
these characters makes it harder for audiences to approach these films
in a voyeuristic mode. In addition, viewers are given a (fleeting) sense
of what it means not to be represented, to remain unseen. Nonethe-
less, it has been suggested that Dirty Pretty Things’ focus on minorities
exploiting other minorities ‘exculpates whiteness’: because they are not
explicitly shown as involved, white audiences do not have to take
responsibility for the dispossession depicted on-screen (Aguiar 75). This
charge ignores the fact that the extracted kidney – the central symbol of
exploitation in the film – is sold to a white man, who, along with the
audience, is explicitly interpellated by Okwe as culpable for consigning
him and his friends to the avisual.
A different problem is that, despite the growing realization that ‘real-
ism’ is itself a construct, a particular narrative and visual mode with its
own discursive precepts, social realism remains attached to a question-
able notion of authenticity as genuineness or even truth and to a direct
equation between seeing, experiencing and knowing.10 Consequently,
Forms of Invisibility 45
Rancière does not say that art can never have political implications, but
that such implications are not guaranteed by the logic of uncovering the
visible in-visible espoused by social realism. Rather, he writes,
Living dead
Mbembe, moreover, does not shy away from western theory altogether.
His analysis of ghostly power and violence, for example, is supported
by references to Deleuze and Guattari’s theory of schizophrenia. Cru-
cially, however, this theory is read against the grain. While Deleuze
and Guattari posit schizophrenia as a potentially constructive agency
capable of constant rearrangement and of ‘scrambling’ all established
codes, Mbembe frames it more pessimistically as intimating that ‘life,
just as sovereignty in the framework at hand, is but a long series of acci-
dents and incidents, events that could have happened but do not occur,
while other that were not supposed to happen do, in effect, take place’
(‘Life’ 23). Deleuze and Guattari’s active formulations – faire entrer, don-
nant, invoquant, enregistrant, acceptant, re-bourrer – are rendered passive
so that the subject cannot use the accidental quality of life to his or
her advantage, but has to suffer it without being able to influence it to
any significant degree. The implication is that while psychoanalysis and
poststructuralism have indeed challenged ingrained western notions of
reason, self-possession and identity as selfsameness, they have inter-
preted the alternatives to these notions in an overly enabling manner.
The positive charge of Deleuze and Guattari’s schizophrenia and
Derrida’s spectrality derives, I want to suggest, from the sense of priv-
ilege and control retained by the western perspective even after the
death of the subject. The possibility to disjoint time and space; merge
past, present and future; select one’s inheritance; and offer absolute
hospitality to an unknown other envisioned by the focalizing ‘we’ of
Specters of Marx may be risky, but it is an exciting, exhilarating risk
that appears manageable to those unlikely to suffer the worst effects
of these dissolutions. Consequently, it never escalates into a danger of
annihilation. Perceived from a different, less existentially secure point of
view, the same characteristics acquire a different meaning. For Mbembe,
the ghost’s power of transformation does not hold out performative
promise but the threat of violence and death, while abandoning the
notion of a stable center of self invokes the potential eradication of life
in death rather than a path to a more just intersubjective ethics. As such,
Mbembe’s work suggests that Derrida and other poststructuralist and
postmodern theorists, because of their focalization ‘through western
eyes’, are too quick to embrace indeterminacy as an improvement on
ontological fixity, when in certain contexts and from some points of
view indeterminacy is the only certainty, acting as a certain means of
oppression.14
For the undocumented migrants of Dirty Pretty Things and Ghosts, life
is indeed a ‘long series of accidents and incidents’ over which they have
50 The Spectral Metaphor
the invisible was not only the other side of the visible, its mask or
its substitute. The invisible was in the visible, and vice versa, not
as a matter of artifice, but as one and the same and as external reality
simultaneously – as the image of the thing and the imagined thing, at
the same time. In other words, the reverse of the world (the invisible)
was supposed to be part and parcel of its obverse (the visible), and
vice versa.
(145, emphasis in text)
hired out’ (‘Life’ 16). Another term used is ‘wandering subjects’. Rather
than referring to the fluid identities western theorists have hyped in
the figures of the nomad, the migrant or Derrida’s specter, the wan-
dering subject is forced into constant flight and desperation by forms
of violence and terror that produce murder, capture, noise, caprice,
dismemberment, subterfuge and ‘the negation of all essential singular-
ity’ (‘Life’ 14). Some of these consequences – caprice, subterfuge, the
negation of the ‘one’ – could be given a positive charge, but not from
Mbembe’s perspective. His likely response to Derrida’s admonition ‘to
learn to live with ghosts’ would be to ask whether it is not more impor-
tant to inquire how those subjects who are produced as living dead can
stop living as ghosts (Specters xviii, emphasis in text).
Yet Mbembe has his own blind spots. Several critics have remarked
on the lack of opportunities for resistance in his model of postcolonial
power. According to Jeremy Weate, On the Postcolony imparts a ‘nega-
tivist and thanatographic’ theory of power (36), while Mikael Karlström
argues that it presents Africans as ‘either dupes of the state episteme or
strategic actors seeking to get what they can from the state’ (63). Because
Mbembe sees the relationship between the autocrat and his subjects not
as oppositional but as convivial, the only strategy envisioned to counter
the unassailable power of the state is a masochistic one, ‘to will one’s
pain and to accept it as a form of enjoyment’ (Weate 34).16 Accord-
ingly, Tutuola is seen to portray a death-world in which ‘[g]hostly power
harasses the subject, screams, beats him mercilessly, starves him for an
instant, and then in the next instant forces him to eat exactly as one
feeds an animal, and makes him drink his own urine’ (‘Life’ 15). The
ghosted subject is left without recourse in the face of ghostly power.
Mbembe’s reading, however, is selective. Tutuola’s My Life in the Bush of
Ghosts, narrated by a boy who accidentally enters the Bush of Ghosts
as he is chased by slave traders, also features benign ghosts that offer
the boy hospitality, friendship, love, marriage (twice) and a son. Thus,
while the boy experiences all the acts of violence Mbembe lists, there
is another side to the story, as he repeatedly escapes those trying to
capture and kill him by using their own ghostly techniques – shape-
shifting, mesmerizing, trickery – against them, and comes to consider
himself one of the ghosts: ‘nobody could identify me again that I am
not a ghost, because I was then nearly become a full ghost and was
doing everything that ghosts are doing and also speaking the language
of ghosts fluently as if I was born in the Bush of Ghosts’ (Tutuola 136).
He is eventually made head of the ghostly court system, and when he
finally finds his way home to his mother and brother, he tells them
Forms of Invisibility 53
Although in Dirty Pretty Things and Ghosts we are not dealing with
the precise forms of sovereignty and autocracy Mbembe analyzes, the
conditions under which the undocumented immigrants live have a
similar capacity to turn them into wandering subjects. First of all, they
wander in a literal sense, constantly on the move between countries
and workplaces. Rosello refers to the characters of Dirty Pretty Things
as ‘transients’, arguing that they exemplify a ‘diasporic consciousness’
that can no longer be thought in terms of a homeland and a singular
point of destination (‘Wanted’ 19). Transients ‘have no pre-established
maps’ and they suffer a ‘lasting temporariness’ that knows no definitive
arrivals, only stops along an indeterminate flow whose direction and
speed often lie beyond their control (20). Sometimes transients choose
to go, but more often they are forced to move on when something hap-
pens to make staying where they are legally, economically or socially
impossible. As a concept, transience aptly conveys the multiple disloca-
tions, uncertain vectors and unexpected interruptions of contemporary
54 The Spectral Metaphor
not put obstacles in their course, to let the flow circulate’ (20). What
is required is an acknowledgement of ‘our’ participation as consum-
ing citizens of developed countries in the global economic system that
encourages human trafficking, as well as a commitment to challenging
the unequal distribution of wealth around the world and within individ-
ual countries. This may entail, in some cases, halting the flow of bodies,
since such a flow, even if desired, does not always signify freedom or
agency.
At first sight, Mbembe’s description of the wandering subject appears
to reinscribe the sense of volition that also inhabits Rosello’s notion
of transience: ‘The wandering subject moves from one place to another.
Journey as such does not need a precise destination: the wanderer can
go about as he pleases. There can be predetermined stages for the jour-
ney’ (‘Life’ 17). Although he adds the qualification that ‘the path does
not always lead to the desired destination’ and points to the vital impor-
tance of ‘the unexpected and the unforeseen’, these possible diversions
appear minor, even exhilarating (17). A few pages on, though, the anal-
ogy between the wandering subject and the ghost takes center stage:
‘The wandering subject has neither a unique form nor a content that has
been shaped definitively. Form and content change constantly, depend-
ing on life’s events’ (23). Here, Mbembe conjures a shape-shifter no
longer able to go as she pleases, but thrown into continuous disarray
by ‘life’s events’. The full erosion of the wandering subject’s agency is
signaled when he writes:
With life’s contours barely sketched out, the wandering subject must
escape from himself each time and allow himself to be carried
away by the flux of time and accidents. He produces himself in the
unknown, by means of a chain of effects that have been calculated
beforehand, but never materialize exactly in the terms foreseen. It is
thus in the unexpected and radical instability that he creates and
invents himself. There is thus no sovereignty of the subject or life as
such. (23)
Far from choosing to move on, the wandering subject ‘must escape’, not
just from others but even from herself. She is not an active agent going
with the flow, but must allow herself ‘to be carried away by the flux
of time and accidents’.20 And while the wandering subject can make
calculations, what materializes will only be a ghost of what was envi-
sioned. Although, as noted earlier, nobody has full control over what
they say or do, the enforced transformations and lack of definition
56 The Spectral Metaphor
beat-up van, she tries desperately to open its dirty window to take one
more look at her son. But the window will not open; she can barely
see through it and the dirt also distorts her own reflection. The cam-
era now frames her in extreme close-up, enclosing her face in its frame
(Figure 1.4). Although there are other people in the van, the camera
only shows Ai Qin staring out of the window at the landscape racing
by. Her inability to get a clear view of the world and herself signifies a
loss of agency: instead of moving of her own accord through a fairly
open space in which she felt a sense of belonging, she is now conveyed
through spaces separate from her yet also confining her.
Ai Qin can observe these places or move through them, but cannot
participate in them as ‘simply a place’: ‘the one occupied by the indige-
nous inhabitants who live in it, cultivate it, defend it, mark its strong
points and keep its frontiers under surveillance, but who also detect in
it the traces of chthonian or celestial powers, ancestors or spirits which
populate and animate its private geography’ (Augé 42). Instead of in a
place comfortingly populated by one’s ancestors – in accordance with
Michel de Certeau’s conviction that ‘haunted places are the only places
people can live in’ (108) – she finds herself confronted with places in
which she has no place, places she cannot occupy or haunt and whose
ghosts she does not recognize. All she can do is disappear, become a
ghost herself.22 Thus, a scene showing Ai Qin and some other undocu-
mented migrants traversing a desolate landscape on foot has a heavy
fog almost completely obscuring them from view, emphasizing their
So far, my analysis of Dirty Pretty Things and Ghosts has focused on the
disempowerment produced by the undocumented workers’ status as liv-
ing ghosts or wandering subjects, but this does not mean no agency
is available to these characters. Even Mbembe’s work envisions some
opportunities for those dispossessed by ghostly terror and violence to
(re)act. In ‘African Modes of Self-Writing’ he refers to the practice of styl-
ization as an African mode of self-definition that avoids the pitfalls of
both Marxist-nationalist paradigms and Nativism or Afrocentrism. Such
stylization consists of gathering together ‘disparate signs’ not to create
a social utopia, but a series of ‘paradoxes and lines of escape’ (‘Ways’
11). In other words, it refers to ambivalent and avowedly poststructural-
ist avenues of resistance in the mode of Foucault’s ‘techniques of the
self’ and Deleuze and Guattari’s ‘line of flight’; never guaranteed to suc-
ceed, but also extremely difficult to police. Yet another form of agency
appears in ‘On the Power of the False’, where Mbembe analyzes the way
Christianity has been transformed into an oppositional force in Africa
through its selective, stylized and syncretic adaptation. In calling this
the ‘heretical spirit’, Mbembe creates an image of spectral agency that
brings together the Christian sense of spirit with its role as a synonym
for the ghost (639). It is important that these forms of agency do not
constitute complete departures from the status quo. In fact, such com-
plete departures are coded as undesirable, as when Mbembe notes that
if the heretical spirit is taken too far it will result in a disabling lack of
stability (639). Stylization and syncretism are based on reworking what
is already there, on taking parts of the oppressive system and recom-
bining them with elements normally excluded.23 In terms of spectral
agency, this would entail shifting the terms of the spectral metaphor
to re-orient it. Thus, in Dirty Pretty Things invisibility-as-negation is
transformed into invisibility-as-subterfuge, enabling Okwe to appropri-
ate Señor Juan’s moniker ‘Mr Sneaky’. Does this work only in relation to
invisibility or can other associated commonplaces of the ghost also be
rearticulated in this manner?
In his reading of Tutuola, Mbembe detects one moment of resistance
to the wandering subject’s lack of sovereignty, when the boy-narrator of
My Life in the Bush of Ghosts yields to the song of remembrance:
Quite often, this song is buried under the rubble of sorrow and
thus prevented from investing existence with a mark of ecstasy
Forms of Invisibility 63
happy moment up with a scene in which the workers are told by the
employment agency that no more jobs are available and Mr Lin, for the
second time, tries to convince Ai Qin to work as a masseuse (code for
prostitute).
In contrast to Ghosts, Dirty Pretty Things has been seen as a film that
empowers undocumented migrants, not just by telling the story from
their perspective, but by envisioning concrete acts of resistance like
the cunning switch between Senay’s kidney and that of Señor Juan.
Frears’s portrayal of undocumented immigrants as sources for black
market organs invokes Mbembe’s association of ghostly violence with
‘generalized dismemberment’. In Tutuola’s work, many of the ghosts
are deformed. Instead of lessening their power, the fact that they have
eyes in the back of their heads or extra limbs that enable them to move
faster, actually increases it. And they use this power to mutilate their
victims in turn: ‘Where ghostly power undertakes to model its victim’s
bodies in its own image, terror can easily be transformed into demiur-
gic surgery – crippled bodies, lost parts, scattered fragments, misshaping
and wounds’ (Mbembe, ‘Life’ 10). Here, the mutilation does not add but
takes away, disables. In Dirty Pretty Things, the illegal organ trade dis-
tributes dismemberment in much the same unequal manner: both the
organ recipients and the organ providers are cut into and have some-
thing removed. The first, however, lose a defective organ and receive a
substitute that, if all goes well, will prolong their life, while the second
lose a working part of themselves, potentially weakening or even killing
Forms of Invisibility 65
them. The organ receiver’s body consumes, while the organ provider’s
body is commodified. Fittingly, Mbembe warns that ‘the work for life also
consists in sparing the body from degeneration into absolute thing-ness’
(‘Life’ 17). Okwe, too, points to the perversity of treating human bod-
ies like objects. Of a Somali man who had his kidney removed in the
hotel, he says: ‘He swapped his insides for a passport.’ And when Senay
contemplates selling a kidney, he angrily tells her: ‘Because you’re poor
you will be gutted like an animal.’ Thus, the film not only critiques the
way in which the organs are harvested, coded by the disposed-of heart
as ‘heartless’, but the very idea of being able to sell parts of oneself.
For Mbembe, though, the way work for life reduces the body to ‘an
assemblage of organs’ yields a twisted form of agency: being forced to
consider one’s body as a product with exchange value that cannot be
claimed as private property allows the subject to hire out parts of its
body to stay alive:
owner’s penis when forced to perform fellatio and Señor Juan being cut
open instead of her. The latter substitution is by far the most forceful
instance in the film of what I have called spectral agency and involves
what Mbembe calls ‘taking the place of ’ (‘Life’ 20). In Tutuola, the boy-
narrator, at one point, is forced to take the place of a corpse, resulting in
the dissolution of his identity: ‘The impassible demon of death has in
essence taken possession of him while he is still alive. Having been made
to pass for the dead, he now finds himself in two different subject posi-
tions at the same time’ (Mbembe, ‘Life’ 20). In Dirty Pretty Things, the
one supposed to take the position of the corpse (in the sense of being
the anaesthetized body on the operating table giving up part of one’s
body to revivify a person who might otherwise die) turns the tables to
have her exploiter take her place.
Several critics consider the resolution of Dirty Pretty Things excessive
in terms of the agency it confers upon the undocumented workers.
Rosello refers to a ‘perhaps all too neat denouement’ (‘Wanted’ 29) and
Benjamin Noys faults the film for ‘construct[ing] a vision of solidarity
amongst its characters and offer[ing] us a relatively “happy” ending’.
He adds that ‘the vision of a community of refugees that [the film]
constructs seems sentimental, and the “resistance” of the refugees lacks
some credibility’ (141). I want to suggest that, far from being founded
solely upon a feeling of solidarity, the community forged in Dirty Pretty
Things is fraught by tension – visible, for example, in Okwe’s disapproval
of Juliette’s profession – and pervaded by mechanisms of exchange.
Almost every relationship is underpinned by financial transactions:
Okwe pays Senay rent to stay at her apartment, Ivan pays Juliette for sex-
ual services and both Ivan and Juliette receive a cut of the proceeds from
the organ sale. Specific circumstances and a momentary convergence of
interests bring the characters together to pull off a single resistive act,
but the community is instantly disbanded when Senay and Okwe leave.
As such, the film hardly suggests that living ghosts will automatically
unite on the basis of a ‘common sense of exploitation and invisibility’
(Noys 141). In fact, little solidarity exists among the sweatshop workers
or the hotel cleaners, and the exploited are also shown to take advantage
of each other – as when the owner of the minicab firm forces Okwe to
diagnose STDs (Sexually Transmitted Diseases) and procure medications.
The experiences of the different characters, moreover, are not portrayed
as identical: gender and the complications of being undocumented are
seen to affect one’s degree of disempowerment.
I would also contend that the film’s ending is neither neat nor par-
ticularly happy. While Señor Juan receives his comeuppance, the organ
68 The Spectral Metaphor
Noys considers Dirty Pretty Things an example of the ‘risk of the refugee’,
a concretization of Giorgio Agamben’s proposed politics of the refugee
that ends up sentimentalizing the refugee’s experience. This politics
of the refugee is closely related to Mbembe’s concept of necropolitics,
which refers to the way particular forms of sovereign power define cer-
tain subjects as disposable. These subjects are concentrated in tightly
controlled spaces of exclusion in which their lives are definitively sub-
jugated to the power of death and their existence is characterized by
terror, constant uncertainty and unfreedom. In their utter vulnerabil-
ity and exposedness, they suffer ‘social death (expulsion from humanity
altogether)’ (‘Necropolitics’ 21). Mbembe distinguishes different histori-
cal examples of such disposable subjects: the slave whose life is ‘a form of
death-in-life’, the colonized ‘savage’ who can be killed without guilt, the
Palestinian subjected to ‘infrastructural warfare’, and those who become
‘collateral damage’ in contemporary armed conflicts (21–9). Each case
70 The Spectral Metaphor
[i]t may well be that the importance of the refugee is how this figure
challenges our fundamental political concepts and exposes how all
Forms of Invisibility 73
our political identities are founded on bare life. The refugee is the
figure of the remnant of bare life that cannot be eliminated, but
always remains. It is this ‘position’ of the refugee that demands that
we invent a new politics. This politics must be realised as both practi-
cal and communal. If we are to deal with our fate as bare life, our fate
as exposed to death, then we must create a new politics beginning
from the remnant, from the refugee.
(142, emphasis added)
76
Spectral Servants 77
either taking their assigned role to the extreme – as when Babel’s nanny
literalizes the notion that she is ‘in charge’ of the family’s children by
taking them to her son’s wedding in Mexico – or by stepping outside
the service scenario and asserting themselves in a different capacity.
In this regard, Upstairs, Downstairs and Gosford Park suggest taking up
Derrida’s connection between the guest and the ghost, spectrality and
hospitality. Unlike the negative effect that the hospitality metaphor has
had on the immigration debate,2 invoking its discourse and practices
in the context of domestic service draws attention to and displaces
the meaning of the servants’ intermediate position in the home, as
both members of the household and outsiders, as hosts-by-proxy and
pseudo-guests, and as oscillating between ‘upstairs’ and ‘downstairs’.
While the boundaries between these two realms are supposed to be
stable, only to be crossed in specific circumstances, in practice masters
and servants repeatedly stray into each other’s territories in unexpected
ways. When the master–servant relation intersects with a situation of
hospitality – when servants become guests or guests become servants –
an opportunity is created to shift the spatial, social and psychological
boundaries of the service relationship. Such shifts enable servants to
achieve a more insistent, individualizing materiality: instead of indis-
tinguishable genies-in-a-bottle lingering obediently in the background
until summoned, they (momentarily) appear as discrete subjects with
bodies, voices and names of their own, entitled to recognition and
respect.
Special training in personal service costs time and effort, and where
it is obviously present in a high degree, it argues that the servant
who possesses it neither is nor has been habitually engaged in any
productive occupation. It is prima facie evidence of a vicarious leisure
80 The Spectral Metaphor
extending far into the past. So that trained service has utility, not
only as gratifying the master’s instinctive liking for good and skillful
workmanship and his propensity for conspicuous dominance over
those whose lives are subservient to his own, but it has utility also
as putting in evidence a much larger consumption of human ser-
vice than would be shown by the mere present conspicuous leisure
performed by an untrained person.
(46, emphasis in text)
substance: ‘they were not pure spirit, they are joined with men as “the
two having weight” ’; and it is sometimes said to be invisible because
of its colorlessness (716). Most significantly, like ghosts, djinn operate in
an apparitional mode – ‘it seems that they were naturally invisible but
could allow themselves to be seen if they so wished’ – and are thought
capable of possessing humans (718).
René A. Bravmann notes that in the popular Arabic imagination, the
djinn can ‘come under the control of an individual, in which case it
becomes his or her guiding principle, enabling the person to achieve
new heights of success in both his secular and religious lives’ (46). This
notion of the djinn as companion or guide was, by way of the story
of Aladdin in Arabian Nights, taken up by western popular culture, most
notably in the American television series I Dream of Jeannie (1965–1970).
According to this reinterpretation, the genie does not decide by itself
when to become visible, but is made to appear, usually by rubbing a
bottle. And it no longer acts as a guide, but as a slave, compelled to
grant its master’s wishes without question. In between manifestations,
it stays out of sight in its bottle. This incarnation of the genie encap-
sulates what is expected of the ideal servant, who has no (perceptible)
personal life and is able and willing – happy even – to comply with the
master’s bidding. It is this image of the ideal servant that the period dra-
mas both conjure and contest. On the one hand, Upstairs, Downstairs
and Gosford Park paint a rather romanticized picture of the loyal ser-
vant, who is treated like (but always only like) a family member and
who takes great pride in being able to serve properly, knowing his or her
place and following the rules. On the other hand, they reveal how the
fulfillment of this ideal requires a complete erasure of the servant’s per-
sonality, desires and perspective. Again, this fits with the genie, which
does not have a view on the world while ensconced in the bottle and is
supposed to focus fully on the master’s wishes when summoned.
But the genie does not always act as expected. It is a Janus-faced
figure associated with servility and trickery, wish-fulfillment and curses.
Tritton explains that ‘sometimes djinn are little more than puckish, but
often they are malevolent and hostile to men’ (723), while according
to Bravmann ‘djinn in particular are described as capricious, taunting
and confusing one moment, then mysteriously altering their charac-
ters to help, guide, and teach’ (46). Upstairs, Downstairs and Gosford Park
show that servants, too, are not always reliable; they may manifest as
‘slippery people’ capable of turning against their masters (Weil qtd. in
Richardson 101). This possibility is enhanced by the extreme proxim-
ity and interdependency of servant and master.5 While live-in servants
82 The Spectral Metaphor
could be tightly controlled while in the house, they led their own lives
on days off and, unlike the isolated genie-in-a-bottle, formed part of a
‘downstairs’ community and wider servant class that gradually become
more insistent on improving its working conditions. The spectral smile
on the face of the waitress in Negri’s anecdote about the Toqueville fam-
ily, cited in my introduction, is considered disturbing and unacceptable
precisely because it indicates her class-based solidarity with the rioting
workers, bringing their revolution into the bourgeois home. A possibil-
ity for agency thus emerges when the docile genie-in-a-bottle turns into
the confusing and capricious djinn, which, Tritton notes, was considered
a member of a society of spirits rather than a singular entity: ‘They were
organized in tribes under chiefs and princes, but single members had
little or no individuality [ . . . ] one of them was dangerous because the
power of his tribe was behind him and would avenge him if need was’
(717). Before discussing further how the genie may escape the bottle, it
is necessary to outline the marginalization of servants’ activities and sto-
ries that the period dramas try to counter, as well as the way the servant
and the ghost have been related.
the eternal ‘third man’ in the private life of his lords. Servants are the
most privileged witnesses to private life. People are as little embar-
rassed in a servant’s presence as they are in the presence of an ass,
and at the same time the servant is called upon to participate in all
intimate aspects of personal life.
(‘Forms’ 124–5)
Lady Marjorie states: ‘Sarah’, adding, when the girl protests: ‘Clémence
is not a servant’s name.’ From then on, the girl is known as Sarah, both
upstairs and downstairs, and she quickly learns to respond to it – the
name even sticks with her when she leaves service and reappears in the
spin-off television series Thomas & Sarah (1979).
The fact that the name ‘Clémence’ turns out to be made up only serves
to underline the dispossession effected by one’s entry into service.11
Mr Hudson cruelly exposes Sarah’s story of being the daughter of a gypsy
princess and a French count thrown out of the house after her mother
died and her father remarried as a fiction. After he figures out that she
cannot read, he forces her to admit that she is from a poor family and
was taken out of school to take care of her siblings after her mother’s
death. The other servants have clearly internalized the notion that ser-
vants are supposed to ‘have no life’, as Mrs Wilson in Gosford Park puts
it, to the degree that they deny one of their own the comfort of a make-
belief history, intended, according to Sarah, to make herself a bit more
interesting, to get her noticed. At the end of the episode, Mr Hudson
tells Sarah that ‘you are what you are. There’s no escape. Not for you or
me’, while Rose, the parlormaid, insists that service is safe and the out-
side world ‘dangerous’. Thus, the situation in which servants can only
exist as spectralized non-subjects with unremarkable names and stan-
dard histories, at the beck and call of their masters, is presented as fixed
and unchallengeable.
However, while servants are dependent on their masters, the reverse
is also true: masters need their servants both for assistance with prac-
tical everyday matters and to maintain their social status. Thus, when
Mr Bellamy and Lady Marjorie, at the end of the first episode of Upstairs,
Downstairs, find themselves alone in the drawing room late at night,
she expresses a profound discomfort about the servants’ invisible effi-
ciency, noting that it is not her but they who run the house and that
‘a lot goes on that I don’t know about’. What scares her even more
is the thought of doing without servants, since this would reveal the
full extent of their dependency. When Mr Bellamy wants to summon
someone to bring them some hot milk, she tells him: ‘I don’t like bells
ringing late in dark corridors.’ Her concern is not so much with dis-
turbing the servants’ rare private time as with the idea that they might
fail to respond: ‘One day, you know, if things go on as they have been,
you might ring and ring and no one would ever come . . . There’d be
nobody there.’ Here, the usually desirable image of the servant as genie
translates into the frightening specter of their complete vanishing, a
prospect directly linked to the fate of the aristocracy itself, which, at the
88 The Spectral Metaphor
beginning of the twentieth century (and even more so from the vantage
point of the 1970s television audience), appeared highly precarious.12
Besides evoking ghostly apparitions and vanishing acts in their nar-
ratives, Gosford Park and Upstairs, Downstairs themselves may be seen as
spectral cultural products mobilizing the anachronistic quality of the
ghost, its appearance as a trace of the past in the present. The lat-
ter series, Carl Freedman argues, invokes the past through a ‘reification
of history’ that expresses ‘intense English nostalgia’ for an age predat-
ing the decline of the British Empire, idealized as socially harmonious
(93, 81). Its
the film’s use of diegetic songs, performed by the Ivor Novello character,
with titles like ‘The Land of Might-Have-Been’ codes the characters
not as objects of nostalgia, but as nostalgic subjects. Their longing for
the past, moreover, is not uncritically validated but thematized and,
through the plot developments, exposed as deceptive and unproductive.
Far from being a realm of safety and stability, the past turns out to con-
tain the germ for the present disorder. Considered from an intra-diegetic
perspective, therefore, these period dramas are far from comforting, but
expose a number of frightening specters, including that of nostalgia
itself.
table. The way the story unfolds, however, emphasizes that she was
never more than a replaceable body to Sir William and that her speak-
ing out did not change this. Much like the Toqueville family’s smiling
maid referenced by Negri, Elsie is quickly fired with no intervention by
Sir William, while her revelation is neutralized by Lady McCordle’s asser-
tion: ‘It’s not as if I didn’t know.’ Drawing attention to herself when she
is supposed to remain unseen and exposing how she has been providing
sexual services causes a momentary disturbance, yet in the end Elsie’s
irrelevance as a person in excess of her body, with genuine feelings for
Sir William, is underlined.
Derrida’s visor effect, which ‘looks at us and sees us not see it even
when it is there’ seems an apt description of the servant’s ability to
observe without being noticed and it is indeed a common fear among
employers that their servants will tell what they witnessed (Specters 6).
Despite live-in servants being largely confined to the residence, they
could not be kept from all interaction with the outside and ‘servant gos-
sip always threatened to pull the tops off houses’ (Lynch 69). Gosford
Park’s Lady Trentham is careful to stipulate that ‘if there’s one thing
I don’t look for in a maid it’s discretion. Except with my own secrets of
course’ and breathes a sigh of relief when Mary proves trustworthy by
refusing to reveal her financial troubles under police questioning. While
their unobtrusive presence at intimate moments certainly gives servants
a measure of power, using it entails risks: the servant can be dismissed
without a reference (as happens to Elsie) or not believed, since servants
are assumed to tell tales. Whereas Derrida associates the visor effect with
sovereignty – ‘To feel ourselves seen by a look which it will always be
impossible to cross, that is the visor effect on the basis of which we
inherit from the law’ (Specters 7) – servants’ looks are never ‘impos-
sible to cross’ and those in service do not lay down the law, but are
often excluded from it. Domestic work is a sector notoriously difficult
to legislate since it involves private households, a problem that is com-
pounded in the present age when domestic work dominantly involves
international migrants, documented and undocumented.17
It is not so much the servant as the master who ‘sees us, and who
makes the law, who delivers the injunction’ and who demands ‘an essen-
tially blind submission to his secret’ (Derrida, Specters 7). Servants are
explicitly, sometimes contractually, forbidden from revealing secrets,
while the master possesses the right of surveillance, which he may
exercise in person or through more sophisticated technologies such as
the so-called nanny cam.18 The master (if not always the mistress, as
Blackford points out) can enter any part of the house at any time,
94 The Spectral Metaphor
while servants have only limited and regimented access. Even in the
congenial Bellamy household, servants are denied privacy in their own
bedrooms, as becomes clear when Mrs Bridges, suffering a mental break-
down after the suicide of her kitchen maid, kidnaps a baby in the street
and takes it to her room (Season 1, Episode 9). The episode is, quite
tellingly, titled ‘Why Is Her Door Locked?’ and Lady Marjorie considers
this locked door and the fact that Mrs Bridges will be unable to cook
for an important dinner party much graver crimes than the kidnapping
of a child. Furthermore, while the Bellamys are generally reluctant to
enter the ‘downstairs’ domain and profusely apologize for their inter-
ruptions, they cannot be turned away. When, in ‘Joke Over’ (Season 5,
Episode 13), Georgina, Lord Bellamy’s young ward, raucously invades
the kitchen with her friends as part of a scavenger hunt, the staff can
only stand by helplessly until they leave and clean up after them. It thus
appears that, rather than being a general attribute of any spectral appear-
ance, the visor effect is unevenly distributed and, in its most powerful
form, intimately linked to a dominant social position.
While most of the disturbing powers Derrida ascribes to the specter
are foreclosed to servants, they can derive some agency from exploit-
ing the combination of their unobtrusive presence and their masters’
indifference to it. What this amounts to is what, in the previous
chapter, appeared as ‘strategizing invisibility’. Precisely because their
masters consider them indistinguishable and uninteresting nobodies
(or, rather, all-bodies), servants may move through the house unno-
ticed and use their unsuspected intellect to advance their own agendas.
In Upstairs, Downstairs, servants sell provisions, harbor a fugitive, steal
small objects, and use their insight into the Bellamys’ secrets to extort
money. In Gosford Park, Mrs Wilson and Robert Parks get away with
murder because the police detective cannot fathom servants having the
motive or the wits to commit such a crime. However, because this strat-
egy relies upon exploiting the existing relationship to the employer, it
does not cause the employer to see the servant and his or her servility
differently.
This passage can be seen to invoke the servant as the ‘stranger who is
already found within’, who is ‘more intimate with one than one is one-
self’ and who ‘invisibly occupies places belonging finally neither to us
nor to it.’ Furthermore, it invokes the uncanny or the ‘es spukt’ not as
properly belonging to the master, as in Freud, but as a force wielded by
this stranger. Such force is not associated with sovereignty or even activ-
ity but appears as ‘undecidable’ and subverts the notion of property that
domestic hospitality simultaneously depends on and puts at risk.
Indeed, the narratives of Gosford Park and Upstairs, Downstairs revolve
around questions of place and property: what are the proper places for
servants and masters to occupy? What happens when they are somehow
out of place? And to what extent do servants belong to their masters and
to the master’s house? While within the service scenario these questions
appear settled, with each party confined to architecturally demarcated
areas and masters taking an openly proprietary stance, the hospitality
frame introduces an alternative distribution of power.
Since servants are often the ones who make it possible to provide
hospitality and who receive and serve the guests, hospitality frequently
intersects with service. Rosello describes the effects of inserting a servant
into the scenario of hospitality. Whereas normally the host, in order to
be considered hospitable, has to serve the guest, when this host has
servants (or a wife) this humbling part of the task can be delegated:
‘the presence of guests creates work that the master of the house is not
prepared to do, but the work still has to be done by a subaltern, who
finds herself transformed into an excluded third by the hospitable pact’
(Postcolonial 123). While the master is able to avoid the most democra-
tizing aspect of hospitality, the servant never truly usurps his place; he
or she enters the hospitality frame as facilitator rather than participant.
But is a pseudo-host all a servant can be?
This question is especially pertinent in relation to servants whose
employer’s home is also theirs and who occupy a separate ‘downstairs’
domain. Both Gosford Park and Upstairs, Downstairs feature large houses
with a trade entrance over which servants have some independent con-
trol. Guests are allowed into the servants’ quarters at their discretion,
although the sanction of the highest-ranking servant (butler, cook or
housekeeper) is required and it is assumed that the master has the last
word about who can and who cannot enter the house. Live-in servants
Spectral Servants 97
in large households are thus able to take on the role of host in a more
meaningful manner, at least with respect to ‘their’ part of the house.
This, however, does not include the servants’ bedrooms, where a strict
no-visitor policy is enforced; in Gosford Park male and female servants
are even segregated on different floors. As noted before, the masters’
acceptance that the downstairs space to some degree ‘belongs’ to the
servants leads them to fall into a guest-like role when they venture
‘downstairs’. Nevertheless, they can at any moment decide to assert
their authority as masters of the house and when they do, the hospi-
tality frame is broken. Even in a house that is also theirs, therefore, the
servant can only be a temporary host or host-by-proxy, fulfilling the
function of gatekeeper without full control of the threshold and exe-
cuting the servile aspect of hosting without the attendant prestige. The
only prestige to be had is a second-hand one, when the master’s prop-
erty offers reflected status. In that case, the convention where ‘the live-in
maid is literally (con)fused with the house she occupies’ may become a
source of some agency, if only in relation to other servants and members
of the lower classes (Rosello, Postcolonial 128).
According to Rosello, the servant is equally incapable of being a guest,
since the service relation is one of employment: ‘although servants share
with guests the right to enter the master’s house, they are precisely not
placed in the position of guests’ (Postcolonial 123). Gosford Park and
Upstairs, Downstairs qualify this by pointing to specific situations in
which the servant does (threaten to) take on the role of guest. One such
situation is the aforementioned one of the indisposed servant, where
the master tries to avoid being turned into a servile host by sending
the servant away to recover. Because servants reclassified as guests are
due precisely the attention, consideration and respect they are normally
deprived of, such reclassifications tend to be actively resisted, explaining
why retired servants were not supposed to remain in the house.
Another instance in which servants become guests is when they
join their master or mistress to stay at another house. In Gosford Park
frequent cross-cuts between similar scenes unfolding upstairs and down-
stairs underline the way in which the hospitality the McCordles show
their guests is paralleled, albeit in noticeably drabber surroundings, by
the hospitality Mrs Wilson shows the visiting servants. The fact that
some of the upstairs guests feel they have to ‘work’ (entertain, dress up,
be polite) to legitimize their stay, and the financial dependency that
characterizes most of the relations between Sir William and his guests,
make clear that we are not dealing with anything close to absolute hos-
pitality and that the hospitality relationship may closely approximate
98 The Spectral Metaphor
the front pew) and the servants (placed apart on a side balcony) are all
appalled when they realize that it is Sarah and that James, with whom
she has been having a relationship, has invited her. Although James
eventually seats her at the back of the church, showing that she is not
quite part of the family, Sarah’s position as a legitimate wedding guest
prompts Mr Hudson, back at the house, to address her as ‘Miss Delice’
(she has started a music hall career under this name) and to allow her to
call him ‘Hudson’. Crucially, Sarah does not fully break with the service
frame: rather than allowing the others to gloss over her former status as a
servant, she deliberately invokes it by coming down to the servants’ hall
and asking James to join her there. The discomfort is enhanced by her
insistence on bringing the roles of servant and guest together, putting
into question their mutual exclusivity.
Sarah’s second appearance as a guest in the Bellamy house (Season 2,
Episode 2) is even more awkward, as she is now pregnant by James.
Since it is unthinkable that Sarah would truly become ‘one of the fam-
ily’, the Bellamys decide to send her to their country estate to have the
baby (she later returns to the Bellamy house, where the baby dies soon
after being born) and to exile James to an army post in India. Although
the episode sees Sarah firmly put in her place (she is plainly told that
being an actress does not make her respectable and that she will never
be allowed to marry James), she is nevertheless treated differently than
when she was a servant. When Mr Hudson takes her to the morning
room, she tells him that she wants to be announced not as ‘Sarah’ – ‘It’s
not my name, it was forced on me and I don’t like it’ – but as ‘Clémence
Delice’. Hudson offers to call her ‘Miss Moffat’ but refuses to announce
‘a former servant of this house by a fancy French name’. In the end, he
simply announces her as ‘Sarah’. However, the fact that her name is now
open to negotiation, that she is asked to sit down in the morning room,
and that the Bellamys acknowledge certain obligations to her indicates
that she is no longer an irrelevant presence. And once again, it is her
dual invocation of both her servant past, by addressing Lady Marjorie
as ‘milady’, and her present status as a guest with a claim on the family,
by referring to James as ‘Jimmy’, that makes her such a disconcerting
figure.
The master–servant relationship is put under further strain when
Sarah, after her baby dies, is hired as a nanny for Elizabeth’s daugh-
ter. Not only does this require more interaction with the family, but
her involvement with the baby hauntingly recalls her own lost child
and her improper connection to James. Later in Season 2, Sarah gets
pregnant again. This time, the father is the chauffeur, Thomas Watson,
100 The Spectral Metaphor
but Sarah refuses to give up the father’s name, hinting at another scan-
dalous involvement with an upper-class man. Thomas, fully aware he is
the father, puts himself forward as savior of the family’s honor with an
offer of marriage and, by making use of Lady Marjorie’s refusal to allow
married servants in her house and hinting that he may reveal some
of the improprieties he has witnessed, manages to get the Bellamys to
give them a 500 pound ‘engagement present’ so they can set up their
own business. While Sarah acts as a force of disturbance by oscillat-
ing between servant and guest, so that she can no longer be ignored,
Thomas plays the role of the trustworthy, genie-like servant to per-
fection, all the while using the family’s disregard for his movements
to gather the information that will enable him to become his own
master.
Sarah and Thomas’s final appearance (Season 2, Episode 13) shows
them claiming the position of guests to confirm that being a ser-
vant is not an unchangeable essence. As the household celebrates Lady
Marjorie’s birthday (the family upstairs with friends and James’s fiancée,
whom he has brought back from India; the servants downstairs), the
doorbell rings and Rose is shocked to see Sarah and Thomas, asking to be
announced to the family. Their arrival through the front door, the con-
fident manner in which Thomas hands Rose his cane and hat, and the
way they leave her stunned as they ascend the stairs, all indicate their
determination to claim hospitality rather than patronage. Lady Marjorie
is shocked when they enter the room, but remains polite, explaining to
the others that ‘Watkins and Sarah were with us here for a while.’ Her
use of Sarah’s first name and Thomas’s last name without ‘Mr’ reveals
that they were servants, and Sarah confirms this by addressing her as
‘milady’. Soon, a scandalized Mr Hudson bursts in, having told Rose:
‘whether they’re actually in service or not is purely academic . . . They
are of the servant class and as such have got no right to go barging into
the drawing room.’ He defines being a servant as something permanent,
a social framing one can never escape, at least not in relation to one’s
(former) masters. However, the more flexible and temporary scenario
of hospitality, which demands that any visitor be treated with respect,
undercuts this notion. Because Thomas and Sarah are already in the
drawing room and have been introduced to the other guests, they have
escaped Mr Hudson’s authority. He can only suggest, haltingly: ‘I simply
wanted to say that if Mr and Mrs Watkins would care to, [awkward pause]
some of the staff downstairs [awkward pause] would very much like to see
you.’ His use of a respectful mode of address confirms their frame switch
Spectral Servants 101
him for invading their territory and spying on them. They consider it
their prerogative to spy on their masters and feel that the one advan-
tage of not being acknowledged as significant is that they can easily
keep secrets about themselves. The servants take revenge on Denton by
leaving him without a valet and spilling coffee in his lap. Denton’s play-
acting is equally resented upstairs, particularly by Lady McCordle, who
now rejects him. The problem is not only that Denton has breached
the sacred boundary between upstairs and downstairs – a maid tells him
‘you can’t be on both teams at once, sir’ – but that he has revealed
that being a servant (and, by implication, being a master) is a role one
can play rather than a fixed, immediately recognizable state of being.
If the positions of master and servant are indeed as interchangeable as
those of host and guest, both the masters’ entitlement and the servants’
subservience cease to be self-evident.
Situations in which the master–servant relationship and the hos-
pitality scenario intersect thus offer opportunities to destabilize the
master–servant relationship. The servant, as guest, is allowed to be more
than a genie and the master, as host, is obliged to provide (some) ser-
vice and care. Servants, however, are not often enabled to become guests
and mostly do so on a temporary basis. Moreover, as shown in Downton
Abbey, where the master’s daughter eventually marries the chauffeur,
who, after her death in childbirth, is allowed to remain as a perma-
nent upstairs guest, individual breaks with the frame do not necessarily
destroy it; rather than fundamentally changing relations between the
Grantham family and their servants, the chauffeur merely becomes one
of the masters, assimilating their role without transforming it. In the
end, it was not individual or even collective action but a number of
broader social developments that caused the servant-supported lifestyle
of the British aristocracy to become untenable for all but a few and
domestic work to be reconceived in terms of assistance rather than ser-
vice: at the same time that the aristocracy dwindled in number and
estate tax and the costs of maintaining large properties rose, live-in ser-
vice became a less attractive employment option (especially for women,
who now had access to many other careers offering better pay and
more freedom) and the rise of the middle class and the development
of machines that made housework much less strenuous meant more
women were able to stay at home and take care of their own chores.
Does this mean that the effort to manifest as more than a genie-in-a-
bottle in order to lay claim to care, attention and recognition of one’s
experience is exclusive to the early twentieth-century servants portrayed
in Upstairs, Downstairs and Gosford Park?
Spectral Servants 103
Globalized servants
not only implies that the planned wedding (which she probably helped
pay for) is somehow not good enough, but can also be seen to appeal
to her assumed willingness to put economic gain before her duties as a
mother; after all, she did leave her children in Mexico to take care of his.
Although Richard apologizes for putting her in a difficult situation, he
refuses to listen to Amelia’s objections or to take responsibility for his
inability to find a family member or friend willing to take care of the
children for a single day.
When Amelia cannot convince her fellow nannies to take Mike and
Debbie (it would be too difficult to explain to their employers), she
brings them with her to Mexico. Everything goes well until they try
to cross back into the United States: Amelia’s nephew, who is driving
the car and appears querulous and drunk, causes the customs official to
become suspicious, as does Amelia’s claim to be ‘in charge’ of two white
children. The nephew panics, runs the barrier and drops Amelia, Mike
and Debbie off in the desert, promising to pick them up later. Walk-
ing through the desert, they get lost and eventually Amelia decides
to leave the exhausted, dehydrated children under a tree while she
looks for help. She waves down a border patrol and, after convincing
the officer that two white American children are in danger of dying,
Mike and Debbie are recovered. Amelia is detained for working in the
United States illegally and convinced to accept voluntary deportation to
Mexico. When she asks how the children are, she is told it is ‘none of
your business’ and although Richard does not press charges against her,
it seems she will never see the children again.
Like the servants in Upstairs, Downstairs and Gosford Park, Amelia is
not supposed to have a personal life that interferes with her duties as
a domestic worker. She is expected to put Mike and Debbie’s welfare
above that of herself and her own children, and is required to take full
responsibility for them, as if they were her own. Yet the ‘as if’ is cru-
cial, for when she takes the notion of ‘being in charge’ literally, her
actions are considered transgressive. Had they returned safely, it is still
unlikely that Richard and Susan would have approved of her taking the
children to Mexico, a country Susan has told Mike is ‘dangerous’. From
her employers’ perspective, Amelia’s disobedience transforms her from
dependable, self-effacing genie-in-a-bottle into malignant djinn. Accord-
ingly, the camera’s highlighting of her smeared make-up and blood-red
dress gives her an ominous, almost devilish appearance in the desert
scenes, especially when shooting her as seen by Mike, who accuses her
of being ‘bad’ (Figure 2.1). Yet the film, which, according to the director,
106 The Spectral Metaphor
Figure 2.1 Alejandro González Iñárritu, Babel (2006): Amelia and Mike in the
desert
was designed as ‘a prism that allows us to see the same reality from dif-
ferent angles’ (Iñárritu 7), also underscores, through wobbly, unfocussed
point-of-view shots from Amelia’s perspective and distant long shots,
her extreme vulnerability, disorientation and desperation to save the
children (Figure 2.2).
Figure 2.2 Alejandro González Iñárritu, Babel (2006): Long shot of Amelia (top
left) lost in the desert
Spectral Servants 107
‘This is a place for “palling up”, as the creatures call it; yet no-one
has made a pal of her. I believe they are leery of her. Someone got her
story from the newspapers, and passed it on – stories will get passed
on, you see, for all our pains! And then, the wards at night – the
women fancy all kinds of nonsense. Someone gives a shriek, says she
has heard queer sounds from Dawes’s cell –’
Sounds . . .?
‘Spooks, miss! The girl is a – a spirit-medium they call them, don’t
they?’ (43)
110
Spooky Mediums 111
Spooky ghosts
Etymologically, ‘spook’ and ‘spooky’ are derived from the Dutch word
for ghost, spook. In English, its meaning is less general. According to
the OED, the noun functions as a colloquial or jocular term for specter,
apparition or ghost. Its irreverent tone is highlighted in the cited con-
versation between Margaret and the matron, who clearly mocks the
112 The Spectral Metaphor
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’ (Bown, Burdett and Thurschwell 1).
In Affinity, Selina cleverly separates out these components, using the
fearful side of the supernatural to make the other inmates leave her
alone, while mobilizing its desirability to draw Margaret Prior and the
kindly matron Mrs Jelf to her in order to have them facilitate her escape
from prison. Through a series of clever manipulations staged with the
help of her secret lover Ruth Vigers, who is also Margaret’s maid and
conveys messages and items to and from Millbank, Mrs Jelf is con-
vinced Selina will materialize her dead son, while Margaret is seduced
into believing that she and Selina share a special affinity capable of gen-
erating sufficient supernatural energy to spirit Selina from the prison
to Margaret’s bedroom. Having obtained money, passports and clothes
for the life abroad Selina has promised her, Margaret finds that instead
of traveling through thin air, Selina escaped through entirely mundane
means (assisted by Mrs Jelf and disguised as a matron) to run off with
Ruth, taking everything with them. In Beyond Black, as noted, Alison
tries to play down the frightening side of her gift, which the novel por-
trays as genuine, but ultimately cannot contain her powers within the
framework of a non-spooky entertainment business. Not only does she
have to contend with the uncouth and unpredictable Morris as her spirit
guide, but fiends from her traumatic childhood persistently haunt her.
After these fiends show up to disturb a group performance, shocking
one of Alison’s fellow mediums into the hospital, Alison finally tells
the audience to ‘expect the unexpected’: ‘When we work with spirit
we are in the presence of something powerful, something we don’t
completely understand, and we need to remember it’ (370–1). Of what
exactly does this incompletely understood ‘something powerful’ con-
sist and how can it be harnessed by the medium as a spooky form of
agency?
Significantly, the term ‘spooks’ is also used to refer to spies, presum-
ably because, like ghosts, they are able to see without being seen.3 The
medium is spy-like in that she, too, is thought to possess superior – and,
crucially, clandestine – powers of perception. Purportedly, the medium
can see that which remains inaccessible to the ordinary eye, including
the realm of the dead. Although the medium’s eyes are usually visible
while this special seeing is in process, the exact manner in which her
advanced visions emerge (or whether they exist at all) cannot be deter-
mined as it is not possible to see what she is looking at by following
her line of sight. Thus, the medium requires no visor to create ‘spectral
114 The Spectral Metaphor
was ‘always one for kissing ladies or bringing them gifts, or teasing
them’. The gentlemen he never cared for. She had known him pinch
Spooky Mediums 115
a gentleman, or pull his beard. She once saw him strike a man upon
the nose – so hard, the nose was bloodied. (152)
The punters all think they are talented now, gifted. They’ve been
told so often that everyone has dormant psychic powers that they’re
only waiting for the opportunity for theirs to wake up, preferably in
public. So you have to suppress them. The less they get to say, the
better. Besides, the psychics need to avoid any charge of complicity,
of soliciting information. Times have changed and the punters are
aggressive. Once they shrank from the psychics, but now the psychics
shrink from them. (362)
The apparitional lesbian is Terry Castle’s term for the way lesbians have
been ‘ghosted’ or ‘made to seem invisible’ by patriarchal culture, which
persistently disavows their presence, disturbed by their circumvention
of the need for men and the aim of procreation prescribed by norma-
tive heterosexuality (4). Even when the lesbian is manifestly there, she
is ‘elusive, vaporous, difficult to spot’, and if she is seen, her sexual-
ity is often reduced to a non-carnal, unthreatening closeness (2). Castle
Spooky Mediums 117
shows how literature, from the eighteenth century onwards, has worked
as a ‘derealization machine’ by approaching lesbianism through spectral
metaphors and narratives involving literal ghosts, thus facilitating their
exorcism and preventing the physical consummation of their desires
(6). Her aim is to bring the apparitional lesbian ‘back into focus [ . . . ]
in all her worldliness, comedy, and humanity’ (3). Significantly, this
refocusing proceeds through the spectral metaphor itself. Its inher-
ent multiplicity is mobilized to make the lesbian re-appear: ‘Take the
metaphor far enough and the invisible will rematerialize, the spirit will
become flesh’ (8). The attempt to obscure lesbianism by rendering it
apparitional backfires because the ghost, by definition, marks a pres-
ence that is not unobtrusive but ‘demanding, importuning’ and, I would
add, enthralling (63). It is impossible to conjure the ghost as a vanishing
entity without also calling up its assertive, material insistence, to recall
Žižek’s term.
Various critics have linked Affinity to Castle’s theory, arguing that it
invokes and amends the ghosting of Victorian lesbians. Rosario Doblas
calls it a ‘spectral novel’ that provides a ‘textual space for imagin-
ing what is absent, or spectralised from historical record’ (103), while
Sarah Parker sees Waters ‘writ[ing] the lesbian back into tangible exis-
tence’ (4). According to Parker, while Margaret remains stuck in ‘lesbian
panic’, unwilling to acknowledge her feelings, Selina and Ruth exploit
the apparitional space of the spiritualist séance to materialize lesbian
sexuality (17).7 However, what Margaret refrains from is not so much
recognizing her feelings as displaying them. And although Selina and
Ruth do consummate their relationship, they never actually appear –
come into public focus – as a couple. As Selina’s final diary entry prolep-
tically suggests, even after their escape from England they will continue
to act as medium and maid in order to defraud wealthy women and sat-
isfy Ruth’s sexual appetites. This raises the question whether, to ensure
full social recognition, as perception and respect, it suffices to become
visible.
For Ruth and Selina, the continued satisfaction of their sexual, social
and economic desires is dependent on keeping their relationship hid-
den from others. If they are to move in refined circles and have access to
attractive wealthy girls, their status as lovers cannot be recognized and
the erotic acts performed during the séances have to occur under spir-
itualist and heterosexual cover. As suggested by the first diary entry of
the novel, which recounts the fateful night leading to Selina’s imprison-
ment, ‘coming into focus’ is to be avoided. When Mrs Brink, alerted by
the screams of the girl accosted by Peter Quick, enters the room holding
118 The Spectral Metaphor
a lamp, Selina warns that the light will hurt Peter. When Mrs Brink nev-
ertheless moves closer, Peter, holding his hands before his face, exclaims:
‘Take the light away!’ Whereas in the texts analyzed by Castle, the
putting up of hands indicates carnal lesbianism’s obliteration, refusal
and blockage, here it is designed to protect. What follows is the dreaded
moment of identification: ‘But his gown was open & his white legs
showed, & Mrs Brink would not take the lamp away until at last it began
to shake. Then she cried “O!” & she looked at me again’ (2). Mrs Brink’s
death from shock prevents the truth she has gleaned from being articu-
lated, enabling Selina and Ruth to remain in the shadows. For them, this
is not only the space of negation to which they are culturally confined,
but a space that, by appealing to spiritualist discourse and its association
with ‘shades of attachment’ exceeding the heterosexual matrix, may be
turned into a spooky realm under their control (Luckhurst, Invention
225). By remaining in the apparitional mode – but as active, spooky
ghosts rather than vanishing forms – they can continue to satisfy their
desires while avoiding social disapproval and social regulation.8
Affinity thus questions Castle’s rigid association between apparitional-
ity and disempowerment, and her unequivocal validation of becoming
visible. While exposing the lesbian in all her worldliness can be liberat-
ing, the novel shows it may also foreclose pleasures and powers derived
from escaping definition. Whereas Castle neglects the potentialities of
reading lesbianism as a flickering or shimmering state capable of tak-
ing many forms, not all immediately recognizable or readable, Affinity,
far from extracting lesbianism from the ghostly, gives their connection
an enabling twist.9 The intersection of the apparitional lesbian and the
spooky medium asserts spectrality as a site of possibility and agency that
also preserves the right to keep secrets. In an eloquent reading of Affinity
that makes a similar point, Rachel Carroll argues that Waters ‘refuses to
satisfy the desire of the contemporary reader for the retrospective mate-
rialisation into late Victorian existence of lesbian identity’ (par. 1).10 I
want to propose that the novel not only refuses to satisfy this desire, but
also formulates a critique of it that emerges in the reading process. The
novel’s ability to pull off the plot-twist of Selina and Ruth’s conspiracy
relies on the reader’s familiarity with and investment in the trajectory
towards visibility validated by Castle and coming-out narratives in gen-
eral. This trajectory is conjured in the novel through oblique references,
such as the repeated use of the word ‘queer’, that are fleshed out as the
reader learns of Margaret’s past erotic intimacy with Helen (now married
to her brother) and becomes emotionally invested in Margaret’s ostensi-
bly blossoming affair with Selina. Readers are prompted to look for and
Spooky Mediums 119
find the ghosted lesbian they have been led to expect in the Victorian
context and Waters’s work in particular. Relishing the chance to partici-
pate in the noble, and titillating, task of restoring the hidden lesbian to
visibility and carnality, they are made to feel in possession of their own
superior form of perception (a literary ‘gaydar’, if you will) until the
novel’s resolution exposes a fatal blind spot. Much like Margaret, read-
ers find themselves duped – by the retrospective unreliability of Selina’s
account, overinvestment in Margaret as the main narrator and focal-
izer, and preconceptions about lesbian fiction – into overlooking Ruth,
the real apparitional lesbian of the story. Through its deceptive narra-
tive structure, the novel undermines the idea that full visibility is the
only viable way to counteract social disavowal and that lesbians of all
eras are easily recognized from the vantage point of the enlightened
present.
The notion of visibility itself also needs to be problematized, as Joan
W. Scott so convincingly shows in ‘The Evidence of Experience’. She
starts by looking at a passage from Samuel Delany’s The Motion of Light
in Water, which, in establishing a direct link between seeing naked male
bodies in a bathhouse and the emergence of a politicized gay iden-
tity, proposes a ‘metaphor of visibility as literal transparency’ (775).
According to this metaphor, ‘seeing is the origin of knowing. Writing is
reproduction, transmission – the communication of knowledge gained
through (visual, visceral) experience’ (776). In Affinity, Margaret’s habit
of noting in her diary what she has seen at Millbank, confident that
she is accurately transcribing her experience, appeals to this same idea.
Taking the evidence of experience as self-evident leaves aside ‘ques-
tions about the constructed nature of experience, about how subjects
are constituted as different in the first place, about how one’s vision
is structured – about language (or discourse) and history’ (Scott 777).
As Margaret belatedly discovers, her experience was mediated not only
through Ruth and Selina’s machinations, but also through the struc-
turing of her vision by her social class (which causes her to disregard
the movements of her maid) and literary education (leading her to cast
herself as Aurora and Selina as Marian Erle in reference to Elizabeth
Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh). Scott’s argument that experience is
constructed rather than foundational also contests the idea that an
authentic, stable form of lesbianism can be rescued from its patriarchal
derealization, since this relies on a refusal to historicize erotic experience
and the notion of sexuality itself.
Affinity emphasizes how the materialization of the apparitional
lesbian in a framework of visibility-as-transparency-and-recognition
120 The Spectral Metaphor
While Selina and Ruth find a spooky agency at the nexus of spooky
mediumship and apparitional lesbianism, Margaret is doubly dispos-
sessed, rendered inconsequential by patriarchal culture because her
feelings for other women and her status as a spinster place her outside
heteronormativity’s reproductive imperative: ‘As a spinster, Margaret is
Spooky Mediums 121
‘too subtle for her’ (289). She then proceeds to align herself with this
subtlety:
see myself as she had made me, I saw what I have become – I saw it,
with a kind of horror’ (309). It is the literalization of the ghost that
induces this dread, since Margaret is no longer evolving, of her own
accord, into a sly, specter-like creature but dependent on the actual exis-
tence of supernatural entities that might turn treacherous. Literalizing
the spectral metaphor in this way also means that any agency associ-
ated with it dissipates as soon as it becomes clear that Selina escaped
Millbank by entirely earthly means.
In the end, it is Margaret’s own perception that lacks subtlety. By
following the spiritualists, who ‘worked from commonsense criteria in
which the facts were deemed to be self-evident. Seeing was believing’
(Owen), and placing her trust in what she perceives as supernatural
without exploring other possible explanations, Margaret opens her-
self up to manipulation. Also factoring into her blindness to Ruth
and Selina’s scheme, I suggest in the next section, is her faith in her
own position as an all-seeing narrator and focalizer aligned with the
panoptical regime of the penitentiary.
Affinity has two narrators, Margaret and Selina, each presenting their
account in diary form. Because Selina’s entries are not synchronous with
Margaret’s but predate them, and because they are shorter and more
fragmentary, the reader is led to privilege Margaret’s account and ignore
the warnings against the logic of seeing is believing that can be read
between the lines of Selina’s text. Her entry for 18 October 1872, for
example, tellingly juxtaposes earnest passages from Common Questions
and their Answers on the Matter of the Spheres by The Spirit-Medium’s
Friend with tips ‘To keep a flower from fading’ or ‘To make an object
luminous’ (72–4). Selina’s diary, moreover, counters the conventions
of the genre by including few personal observations or straightforward
narrativized passages and by breaking with the assumption that it is
written for the author’s eyes only. In the final entry, Selina recounts:
‘[Ruth] is saying “Why are you writing?” & I tell her I am writing for
my Guardian’s eyes, as I do everything. “Him” she says, & now she is
laughing’ (352). This conjures a divine form of the visor effect whose
elevated position, however, is quickly appropriated and brought down
to earth as Ruth’s mockery makes clear that she is the true intended
reader.
Ruth turns out to be the one who ‘operates from the central tower of
the panoptic mechanism that fixes in so completely’ (Brindle 71). Since
124 The Spectral Metaphor
only she has access to both journals (except for the final pages written by
Margaret after her departure), she may be considered the secret focalizer
of the text, the one through whose eyes the reader has been look-
ing without realizing it. As a retrospectively inscribed character-bound
focalizer, her encompassing and controlling vision remains narratively
unmarked until the novel’s end, when Margaret tries to reread her diary,
but ‘seemed to see the smears of Vigers’ gaze upon the pages, sticky
and white’ (348). Crucially, Ruth’s gaze remains ungraspable even at
this point. It can be partially reconstructed by linking her actions to
her familiarity, as maid and lover, with Margaret’s and Selina’s writings,
yet it is never directly exposed. ‘Sticky and white’, her gaze appears as
an ectoplasmic trace, a smeared textual haunting that cannot be fully
captured, responded to or held accountable.
Much as the reader does not recognize Ruth’s true narrative function,
Margaret assumes she is the sole focalizer of her story: ‘I said that that
book was like my dearest friend. I told it all my closest thoughts, and
it kept them secret’ (111, emphasis in text). In addition, she believes
what she writes to be an objective account of the events she has wit-
nessed. It never occurs to her that she might be overlooking certain
aspects because of the way her vision has been structured by her class
and gender or by the reigning distribution of the sensible. On her diary’s
opening page, she goes from noting her father’s conviction that ‘any
piece of history might be made into a tale’, to wondering how to start
‘the story I have embarked on to-day’ to deciding to ‘begin my record
here’, at Millbank’s gate (7). This movement from ‘history’ to ‘tale’ to
‘story’ to ‘record’ exposes the difficulty of categorizing the evidence of
experience. Yet, instead of engaging this difficulty, Margaret glosses over
it in order to maintain her confidence in the accuracy and transparency
of her experience and its transcription. She is an unreliable narrator
oblivious to her own unreliability.
Margaret’s diary is less a record than a re-presentation. Taking to
heart the warden’s insistence that her visits will refine the prisoners –
‘Those poor unguarded hearts, [ . . . ] they were impressible, they wanted
only a finer mould, to shape them’ (12) – she considers herself able
and entitled to (re)form them, in person and in writing. Setting out
to document the prisoners’ accounts of their crimes and their feelings
about their incarceration, she soon grows tired of trying to look through
their eyes and begins appropriating their stories for her own purposes:
‘Margaret assumes paternalistic authorship of the other’s “real” story’
(Kohlke 160). This is facilitated by her tacit reaffirmation of authoritative
Spooky Mediums 125
‘Millbank hush’ (26). This silence is broken by a sigh – ‘a perfect sigh, like
a sigh in a story’ (26, emphasis in text) – which interpellates Margaret as
an inveterate reader and seems to accord perfectly with her own pensive
mood. Margaret feels the sigh working upon her ‘rather strangely’ and,
as if compelled, puts her eye to the inspection slit, forgetting the story
she was told of a matron blinded by a spoon stuck through the hole
(26). While Margaret clearly relishes her ability to gaze at Selina unob-
served and is confident that she can ‘call her to me and have her story
from her’, the text suggests a blinding is indeed taking place, as it is
in fact Selina who organizes the encounter (27). Against the dictates of
the panopticon, Selina takes control by using ‘spiritualism’s penchant
for theatricality’ (Walkowitz 9) to engage in ‘an artistic organization of
the space in which the play is set; an arranging of a limited and delim-
ited section of real time and space’ (Bal, Travelling 97). This literalizes
Foucault’s description of the panopticon’s cells as ‘so many small the-
atres’ and turns the prisoner from actor playing to an imposed script
into director (200). Selina orchestrates the dramatic sequence of silence
and sigh to draw Margaret’s eye and strikes an attractive, devotional pose
reminiscent of ‘a saint or an angel in a painting of Crivelli’s’ to keep her
attention. When it occurs to Margaret that Selina might actually be pray-
ing, a ‘sudden shame’ almost causes her to turn away, but Selina holds
her eye by opening her hands to reveal a delicate flower (27).
This performance destabilizes the panopticon not only because it
causes Margaret to momentarily question her right to observe, but also
because fascination or curiosity is an illicit motivation for looking in
this disciplinary structure. Foucault’s statement that ‘it does not matter
what motive animates [the supervisor]: the curiosity of the indiscreet,
the malice of a child, the thirst for knowledge of a philosopher who
wishes to visit this museum of human nature, or the perversity of those
who take pleasure in spying and punishing’ is valid only as long as
this person remains, invisible, in the central tower (202). As soon as
the observer appears at the prisoner’s level and gazes at him or her
for a non-disciplinary purpose that betrays need, desire or inquisitive-
ness, the prisoner may manipulate the encounter to evolve, against
Bentham’s dictates, from ‘object of information’ to ‘subject of commu-
nication’ (Foucault 200). For Rancière, notably, the affects of curiosity
and attention work to ‘blur the false obviousness of strategic schemata;
they are dispositions of the body and the mind where the eye does not
know in advance what it sees and thought does not know what it should
make of it’ (Emancipated 104–5). Curiosity and attention thus introduce
ambivalence into a system in which the supervisory eye is supposed to
Spooky Mediums 127
she has a way about her – I have noticed it, before to-day – a way of
shifting mood, of changing tone, and pose. She does it very subtly –
not as an actress might, with a gesture that must be seen across a
dark and crowded theatre; she does it as a piece of quiet music does
it, when it falls or rises into a slightly different signature. (86)
She has a very plain smile, and yet her eyes are almost handsome.
She does not trouble me. I have seen her looking curiously at the lock
upon the velvet collar, when she thinks my eyes are turned away [ . . . ]
Sometimes I think my passion must infect her. Sometimes my dreams
come so fiercely, I am sure she must catch the shape and colour of
them in her own slumbers. (305)
her own perspective: ‘There was only my longing – and hers, which so
resembled it, it seemed my own’ (348).
In relation to Chapter 2’s consideration of the spectral servant, Affin-
ity highlights the perils of ignoring the ability of domestic staff to move
around without being noticed, all the while observing the minutiae of
their masters’ lives. Much like the novel draws its readers’ attention to
two apparitional lesbians only to reveal they should have been looking
for a third, it leads them to identify the servant as a familiarly inconse-
quential figure without letting on that Ruth’s role far exceeds this cliché.
Ruth is first likened to a ghost by Selina:
there was a woman standing looking at me! And I saw her, & my heart
went into my mouth – But it was only Mrs Brink’s maid, Ruth. She
had come quietly, not like Betty used to come but like a real lady’s
maid, like a ghost.
(119, emphasis in text)
Vigers. What was she, to me? I could not even recall the details of her
face, her look, her manners. I could not say, cannot say now, what
130 The Spectral Metaphor
shade her hair is, what colour her eye, how her lip curves – I know
she is plain, plainer even than I.
(340, emphasis in text)
You believe that to be a medium you must hold your spirit aside to let
another spirit come. That however, is not how it is. You must rather
be a servant for the spirits, you must become a plastic instrument for
the spirits’ own hands. You must let your spirit be used, your prayer
must be always May I be used.
(261, emphasis in text)
A medium must not simply vacate her body to allow the spirit to pos-
sess her; she must actively let herself be molded the way servants are
supposed to. Ruth’s delight in making upper-class spiritualists take on
this vulnerable role is evident: not only does she ‘use’ the women to get
her sexual kicks (as many masters used their servants), but she willfully
destroys one gentleman’s hat and humiliates another by tipping a live
Spooky Mediums 131
crab in his lap. Thus, the séances become sites of an imperceptible (to all
but Ruth and Selina) yet consequential redistribution of the sensible.
Where Rancière’s examples of such a redistribution, like Castle’s mate-
rializing of the apparitional lesbian, consist in ‘making what was unseen
visible’ (Dissensus 38), Affinity suggests it can also take the form of mark-
ing the invisible as sensible or using its assumed nonsensicality as a
cover for making (another) sense. What Ruth and Selina enable is not
just a different ‘parcelling out of the visible and the invisible’, but a
more radical undermining of the fixed association of the visible with
the sensible and the invisible with the insensible (Rancière, Politics 19).
Again, however, their clandestine redistribution is made possible only
by the conjunction of their different types of ghostliness. Joining a tac-
tical invisibility and a theatrical visibility – the spectral servant’s knack
for moving through private and public space unapprehended and the
spooky medium’s ability to bind (and blind) people by inspiring a mix
of fear and fascination – enables them to produce an apparitional realm
that invests them with spectral agency. This apparitional realm, more-
over, is specific to the novel’s Victorian setting. As I suggest in the next
section, contemporary mediumship, as portrayed in Beyond Black, has a
more tenuous connection to the spooky.
Sideways glances
This vision, which illuminates what is usually left in the dark, finds a
parallel in Rancière’s Short Voyages to the Land of the People, where he
describes how ‘just across the straits, away from the river, off the beaten
path, at the end of the subway line, there lives another people (unless
it is, quite simply, the people)’ (1). For Rancière, by traveling and visit-
ing as foreigners, ‘we’ are offered ‘the unexpected spectacle of another
humanity in its many figures: the return to origins, the descent to the
netherworld, the arrival in the promised land’ (1). This ‘other humanity’
consists of the people, those ‘political subjects of democracy that supple-
ment the police account of the population and displace the established
categories of identification. They are the unaccounted for within the
police order, the political subjects that disclose a wrong and demand
a redistribution of the sensible order’ (Politics 88). Crucially, Alison is
not a foreigner visiting or stumbling upon this realm, but part of it –
and it part of her. Her affinity, even identification, with this marginal
land is immediately indicated: ‘the space the road encloses is the space
inside her: the arena of combat, the wasteland, the place of civil strife
behind her ribs’ (2). The spectral (unseen, unaccounted for) netherworld
of British life, portrayed as harboring ‘outcasts and escapees’ and as a
site of ‘combat’ and ‘strife’, is visible to Alison and internalized by her
because it is where she is from and what she can never leave behind
completely, not even by moving to a new-built middle-class suburban
enclave.
Alison’s mediumship should enable her to convey this obscured real-
ity to others and thus to effect a redistribution of the sensible. However,
because she is regarded as a figure of entertainment who, in order to
maintain her livelihood, should refrain from spooking her public, she
feels able to expose only what people want to see, what already makes
Spooky Mediums 135
sense to them, both of this world and the next. Everything disturbing
she keeps to herself, at great personal cost. What this draws attention
to is the difficulty of claiming a part for those who have no part. The
reigning regime of the sensible, far from being indifferent to being
redistributed, actively discourages attempts to do so. Even for subjects
able to see what is left out of the picture, it is generally easier and
more profitable, in social and monetary terms, to stick to one’s assigned
capacities.
Alison proves highly susceptible to the social imperative that what is
supplemental ought to remain unseen. While possessing perfectly clear
visions of the afterlife (no paradise, but a gloomy realm much like the
world of the living), she does not reveal these to her clients, in order not
to disturb them. If she told the truth, she asserts, ‘They’d run a mile’ (32).
Instead, she offers pacifying words that explicitly deny the possibility of
any shifts in the borders between the visible and invisible or the audible
and inaudible:
‘Put on your happy faces – you’re not going to see anything that will
frighten you. I won’t be going into a trance, and you won’t be seeing
spooks, or hearing spirit music.’ She looked around, smiling, taking
in the rows. ‘So why don’t you all sit back and enjoy the evening? All
I do is, I just tune in, I just have to listen hard and decide who’s out
there.’ (15)
Unlike the Victorian séance sitters, who demanded to see with their own
eyes and touch the apparitions, Alison’s audience will not have to expe-
rience anything unsettling. Only an indirect auditory contact with the
beyond is evoked and brought completely under Alison’s control; con-
tact with the dead is like a radio you can ‘tune in’ to and also turn off.
The medium presents herself not as a servant to the spirits, but as the
one who decides who is there.
Although describing her powers to her audience in terms of manage-
able everyday audio technologies – asking them to imagine her as an
‘answering machine’ (26) – when talking to Colette, her assistant, Alison
reveals what and how she actually sees: ‘Al said there was a knack to see-
ing a spirit. It was to do with glancing sideways, not turning your head:
extending, Al said, your field of peripheral vision’ (36). To see beyond
what is conventionally visible, it is imperative to catch what is in the
margins, what exists on the edges of visibility and is accessible only
to the extraordinary (inner) eye of the medium. Art historian Norman
Bryson has defined the glance as ‘a furtive or sideways look whose
136 The Spectral Metaphor
The world of total visibility carves out a real where appearance has no
place to occur or to produce its divisive, fragmenting effects. Appear-
ance, particularly political appearance, does not conceal reality but
in fact splinters it, introduces objects into it, objects whose mode of
presentation is not homogenous with the ordinary mode of existence
of the objects thereby identified.
(Rancière, Dis-agreement 103–4)
in which the ‘living’ part is effectively crossed out. At the same time,
the novels I analyze, much like Affinity and Beyond Black, envision a
form of agency arising from the invisible by pointing to the haunt-
ing force the missing exert as missing, as well as to the possibility
of self-spectralization as a radical way of absenting oneself from the
intergenerational reproduction of oppressive social systems.
4
Ghosts of the Missing:
Multidirectional Haunting
and Self-Spectralization in Ian
McEwan’s The Child in Time
and Bret Easton Ellis’s Lunar Park
144
Ghosts of the Missing 145
and media exposure. In line with this, the 9/11 missing person posters
not only sought to suggest their subjects’ continued presence, but to
code them as innocent victims and upstanding citizens. References to
the missing’s devotion to their family – ‘Loving Father’ – or possession
of desirable character traits – ‘Outgoing, caring person’ – were designed
to elicit affirmative affective responses (Jones, Zagacki and Lewis 111).
The ‘re-emergence of a kind of public sphere’ that the 9/11 missing per-
sons posters were said to promote, then, is predicated on specific criteria
of admittance(117).
Consequently, not all the missing exude an equal (or any) haunting
force. The dominant conjuration of Wanzo’s racialized and class-specific
‘Lost (White) Girl Event’ or 9/11 (itself overdetermined by distinctions
of class, race and religion) leads not merely to the erasure of social harms
more widespread and deadlier than either stranger-abductions or inter-
national terrorism, but, within the class of the missing, to the neglect of
those who happen to be black, lower-class, male, elderly or considered
in breach of the innocence rule. Such missing persons are more quickly
forgotten or never searched for in the first place, pre-empting their living
on as ghosts. For Avery Gordon, who, in Ghostly Matters, insists on the
spectral presence of repressed histories of subjugation,
Re-solutions of mourning
Kate, the missing daughter in McEwan’s The Child in Time, who was
three when she disappeared during a trip to the supermarket with her
father, is never recovered, but lingers as a spectral presence, an ‘invisible
child’ exerting a powerful haunting force on her parents, Stephen and
Julie (2). She always seems on the verge of reappearing and maintains
a ghost-like presence in the bodies of other children. The novel begins
two and a half years after Kate’s disappearance, when, for her father, the
‘obsessive hunt’ to find her has turned into ‘a longing, a dry hunger’
(2). Continuing to place her in time, as growing, becoming and possibly
returning, keeps Stephen from having to fully acknowledge her loss and
allows him to live on: ‘Without the fantasy of her continued existence
he was lost, time would stop’ (2).
One way Stephen keeps time, his daughter and himself evolving is by
celebrating her sixth birthday. The painful act of buying Kate presents
she will never open is intended as ‘an act of faith in his daughter’s
continued existence [ . . . ] an assertion of her previous life and proper
inheritance, of the truth about her birth’ (146). This attempt to recon-
firm her as his legitimate heir is associated with ‘the symbolic and the
numinous’ (147). Hence, it unfolds as a conjuration in the sense of a
‘magical incantation’, described by Derrida as ‘the appeal that causes to
come forth with the voice and thus it makes come, by definition, what
is not there at the present moment of the appeal’ (Specters 41, empha-
sis in text). Having failed to make Kate appear with his own voice,
Stephen seeks to amplify it by selecting, as Kate’s main present, a walkie-
talkie set, a ‘machine to encourage proximity’ (150). The walkie-talkie’s
limited range, however, belies the conjuration’s performative ability to
conquer and condense space and time, to invoke that which is not
present or close-by until the moment of interpellation. In addition, the
use of walkie-talkies is characterized by rule-governed communicative
turn-taking: one is supposed to say ‘over’ when it is the other’s turn
to speak and ‘over and out’ to finish the conversation. This connects
the walkie-talkie to conjuration as conjurement [Beschwörung] or exor-
cism, designed to ascertain that the dead are really dead (Derrida, Specters
47–8). Since no such confirmation is forthcoming about or from Kate,
the walkie-talkie, rather than bringing her closer, only emphasizes her
insusceptibility to either form of conjuration: she is a specter that can-
not be raised or laid to rest at will. Consequently, Stephen’s attempt
to call on Kate as his rightful inheritor is doomed. He ends up singing
‘Happy Birthday’ to her through the walkie-talkie, hearing his own
150 The Spectral Metaphor
The thick bangs bobbed against her white forehead, her chin was
raised, she had a dreamy appearance. He was looking at his daughter
[ . . . ] He had lost sight of Kate, then saw her briefly as she bent to
retrieve something from the ground. (165)
The description of the girl’s ‘dreamy appearance’ and the way she van-
ishes and then reappears, only for a second, immediately marks this
moment of recognition as phantasmatic. Stephen, however, is deter-
mined to deny this. When the girl tells him her name is Ruth, he
smoothes out the ripple by arguing that his daughter is bound to have
changed since he lost her. Just as a ghost is never identical to when it
was still alive, Kate cannot be expected to have remained the same or
to recognize her father. Stephen, however, blurs the distinction between
plausible changes that could have occurred in time and impossible ones:
‘What was most strikingly new was a brown mole high on her right
cheekbone’ (172). Only when confronted up close with the girl in the
headmaster’s office, where it turns out that she is much older than Kate
would be and sports a nose that, in profile, reveals itself as a ‘gross inac-
curacy’, does Stephen realize she is not his daughter (178). He construes
this as a betrayal on the part of a ‘she’ that encompasses both the flesh-
and-blood girl in front of him and Kate: ‘She was going from him, she
was letting him down’ (178). As Ruth refuses to accommodate Kate’s
shape, the latter slips through his fingers. In a final attempt to recover
her, Stephen seeks solace in a spectral fantasy, imagining ‘Kate’s spirit’
soaring in the sky like ‘some kind of brilliantly colored dragonfly’ and
sweeping down to earth to ‘inhabit the body of a young girl, infuse it
with its own particular essence to demonstrate to him its enduring exis-
tence’ (178). This fantasy compellingly keeps intact the ‘essence’ of Kate,
with other girls as momentary mediums facilitating her materialization.
Later, Stephen arrives at a different reading of the event that causes
him to feel ‘purged’ (179). Reconceiving the encounter with Ruth as a
moment of reality testing, he acknowledges Kate is indeed lost to him:
in which she might have changed in two and a half years, and that
he knew nothing about any of them. He had been mad, now he felt
purged. (179)
While this passage speaks of exorcism and seems to disavow the notion
of Kate as a living ghost, the spectral dimension is not fully evacuated
and melancholia not fully abandoned. The ‘if’ puts exorcism’s efficacy
in question and although Kate is now seen as conceivably changed
beyond recognition, her definitive loss remains unconfirmed. What
occurs, then, is not so much the dissipation of the spectral as its transfor-
mation. Stephen realizes that his naïve fantasy of Kate’s spirit persisting
unchanged is as untenable as the notion of a full exorcism that would
allow him to move on and forget. What comes into view instead is the
distance separating the ghost from the living. Ghosts do not cease to
be when not haunting the living, but, as the ghost of Hamlet’s father
indicates, live on in their own space-time, in which the living cannot
take part. The same goes for the missing, who, if still alive, will not
have remained as they were. By admitting that he cannot keep Kate
by his side in the same intimacy they shared when she was physically
present, Stephen’s attachments to her are reconfigured without being
abandoned.
Notably, in ‘Transience’, written during the First World War, Freud
intimates that completing the work of mourning may lead to the
restoration of the lost object(s). Remarking that the war ‘robbed us of
so much that we had loved, and showed us the fragility of much that
we had considered stable’, Freud disagrees with those ‘prepared for last-
ing renunciation’ and posits that they are ‘only in a state of mourning
about their loss’ (199). Mourning, he asserts, will come to an end, leav-
ing the libido free ‘to replace the lost objects with objects that are, where
possible, equally precious, or with still more precious new ones’ (200).
While this formulation again has the new replacing the old, the essay
closes with an image of recovery in which objects devalued during the
war are recreated: ‘Once mourning is overcome, it will be apparent that
the high esteem in which we hold our cultural goods has not suffered
from our experience of their fragility. We will once again build up every-
thing that the war has destroyed, perhaps on firmer foundations and
more lastingly than before’ (200). The work of mourning, therefore,
can also culminate in the re-establishment of the lost object, albeit in
reconstructed (and therefore never identical) form. The specter signifies
precisely this possibility of a return with a twist. What Stephen recog-
nizes after encountering Ruth is that, if he cannot resurrect Kate, he can
Ghosts of the Missing 153
the woods or hearing her voice whenever I boiled the kettle. I had to
go on loving her, but I had to stop desiring her [ . . . ] I haven’t been
completely successful . . . [ . . . ] But I’ve made some progress. I tried not
to shy away from the thought of her. I tried to meditate on her, on
the loss, rather than brood on it. After six months I began to take
comfort from the idea of the new baby. (254–5)
Notably, Julie’s mourning ‘work’, which is also the term Freud uses, takes
the form of a cessation of action (‘I had to stop’), ostensibly re-tying her
mourning to a passive register coded as feminine. However, the stopping
is now also a doing, as not doing is what she has to do and stopping is the
active form of not doing. Thus, activity and passivity are no longer clearly
distinguished, nor are success and failure to mourn. While the notion
that the new baby offers ‘comfort’ suggests Freudian substitution, Kate
is not fully abandoned. As in Stephen’s earlier purgation, Julie’s relation-
ship to her missing daughter is reconfigured to create room for other
attachments, new (the baby) and old (Stephen). The baby, then, is less a
substitute than a supplement, loved not instead but as well as, while the
pathology of mourning is located in maintaining not any attachments
but exclusive attachments to the lost. Having both found a way to live
with Kate’s continued presence, Stephen and Julie can finally share their
mourning:
they began to cry together at last for the lost, irreplaceable child [ . . . ]
They held onto each other, and as it became easier and less bitter,
they started to talk through their crying as best they could, to promise
their love through it, to the baby, to one another, to their parents, to
Thelma. [ . . . ] while they could never redeem the loss of their daugh-
ter, they would love her though the new child, and never close their
minds to the possibility of her return. (256)
not realize it was me all along? I am here. I am not alive. [ . . . ] This was
my move. Now what is yours?’ (261, emphasis in text). Even if this is
read as Kate’s voice, which it does not have to be, what is expressed
is not closure, but a perpetuation of ghostly ambiguity. The voice claims
to be ‘here’ but at the same time ‘not alive’ and offers not answers or
decrees but questions. Stephen’s interpretation, which does not refer-
ence Kate at all, is that ‘a person [ . . . ] from life itself’ has arrived and
that ‘this increase, this matter of life loving itself’ is all that matters
(261). Individual lives are folded into a comprehensive notion of living,
which becomes the new, reconstructed love object, encompassing both
the new baby and Kate’s lingering, evolving ghostliness.
In this manner, the novel proposes a persistent mourning, painful
yet not pathological, that fits with the revisions proposed to Freudian
psychoanalysis by Jean Laplanche, who, in ‘Time and the Other’, pro-
nounces the division between mourning and melancholia untenable:
‘Where are we to find mourning which would be only conscious, with
no infantile reverberation, no ambivalence and no narcissistic conse-
quences?’ (249). If characteristics ascribed to melancholia always also
inhabit mourning, then mourning is less straightforward than Freud
purports, while melancholia escapes pathology. Calling Freud ‘a real-
ist, for whom the dead are really dead’, Laplanche draws attention to
the spectral dimension of mourning, which renders it intersubjective
(250). Much like Derrida’s appeal for a scholar willing to communicate
with ghosts, Laplanche calls for a psychoanalyst sensitive to the enig-
matic, haunting messages coming to the subject from living and dead
others. These messages can never be fully understood or deciphered,
not even by their own senders, from whose unconscious they spring.
They can, however, be analyzed in a process focused on Lösung (weav-
ing, constructing) rather than Ablösung (the severing of links). The aim
of this process would be re-solution in the double meaning of solving and
dissolving, emphasizing the processual and transformative to suggest
the possibility of multiple, non-definitive outcomes. Aptly, Laplanche’s
argument proceeds by way of a case study involving missing persons.
He merges a patient whose husband could not be located after the
Second World War with Homer’s Penelope waiting for Odysseus’s return.
To stave off the suitors eager to replace her husband, Penelope weaves a
tapestry she undoes every night so that the work the suitors have agreed
to let her finish is unending. Laplanche offers a novel perspective on
this ruse by suggesting: ‘perhaps she only unweaves in order to weave, to
be able to weave a new tapestry’ (251, emphasis in text). Emphasizing
the act of redoing, which provides room for new, potentially different
156 The Spectral Metaphor
Multidirectional haunting
The ghosts raised in The Child in Time not only reconfigure mourn-
ing; they also disrupt the familiar chronology of generational politics
as the parents confront the phantom-form of their missing daughter,
while Stephen comes to haunt his own parents in an extraordinary
scene of multidirectional spectrality that complicates the ways in which
the ghost disjoints time and space, and multiplies the sites of debt and
responsibility. In Specters of Marx, perhaps because of its focus on Hamlet
and the legacies of Marx, haunting unfolds in a surprisingly consistent
direction – from past to present – even though Derrida insists that the
spectral logic of inheritance is ‘turned toward the future no less than the
Ghosts of the Missing 157
past’ (181n2). Once taken up, this turn to the future is twofold. First, as
Wendy Brown writes, it involves the living on of the present: ‘justice [ . . . ]
informs not only our obligation to the future but also our responsibility
for our (ghostly) presence in that future’ (147). Second, it involves what
is to come in the future, which the present must not foreclose or precon-
dition, but welcome unconditionally as ‘the “yes” to the arrivant(e), the
“come” to the future that cannot be anticipated’ (Derrida, Specters 168).
On his way to visit Julie in the countryside – the very visit that will
produce the new baby – Stephen comes across a spot that feels famil-
iar even though he has not been there before: ‘One visit in the remote
past would not account for this sense, almost a kind of ache, of famil-
iarity, of coming to a place that knew him too, and seemed, in the
silence that engulfed the passing cars, to expect him’ (60). In a twist
on the uncanny, Stephen is faced with the frightening spectacle of the
unfamiliar become familiar, and, like a warped clairvoyant, is able to
predict what he will see by looking not into the future but the past: ‘the
call of the place, its knowingness, the longing it evinced, the rootless
significance – all this made it seem quite certain, even before he could
tell himself why, that the loudness – this was the word he fixed on – of
this particular location had its origins outside his own existence’ (62).5
As he approaches the window of the pub that has appeared in front of
him, Stephen’s primacy as focalizer is undermined by his subjection to a
version of the visor effect: ‘He stepped to one side of the window, aware
that he was visible to people he could not see’ (64). Upon managing to
gain ‘an oblique view’, he sees a man and a woman who produce ‘not
recognition so much as its shadow, not its familiar sound but a brief res-
onance’ (64). While the reader, because of Kate’s spectral presence and
the conventional focalization of the ghost described in my introduction,
had assumed to be looking with Stephen as the haunted party, it now
becomes clear that he is the one who is potentially visible to the couple
as an apparition:
Had the couple glanced up and to their left, towards the window
by the door, they might have seen a phantom beyond the spotted
glass, immobile with the tension of inarticulated recognition. It was
a face taut with expectation, as though a spirit, suspended between
existence and nothingness, attended a decision, a beckoning or a
dismissal. (64)
The man and woman turn out to be Stephen’s parents, before his birth,
making this ‘phantom’ an arrivant – ‘that which has not yet arrived’ and
158 The Spectral Metaphor
His eyes grew large and round and lidless with desperate, protesting
innocence, his knees rose up under him and touched his chin, his
fingers were scaly flippers, gills beat time, urgent, hopeless strokes
through the salty ocean that engulfed the treetops and surged
between their roots; and for all the crying, calling sounds he thought
were his own, he formed a single thought: he had nowhere to go,
no moment that could embody him, he was not expected, no des-
tination or time could be named; [ . . . ] Nothing was his own, not
his strokes or his movement, not the calling sounds, not even the
sadness, nothing was nothing’s own. (66)
ghosts are always plus d’un (more than one/no longer one) and, as such,
resist definitive attribution. Stephen’s sense of his spectral encounter as
more than reciprocal leads to
Acts of spectralization
While Stephen and his mother unexpectedly come to haunt each other,
The Child in Time also features deliberate acts of spectralization designed
to exert control over others or over the self in the storylines involving
Thelma’s husband, Charles Darke, who seeks to re-materialize himself
as a child and the novel’s dystopian society’s treatment of its poor.
McEwan’s novel is set in an indeterminate future Britain governed under
the terms of a ‘post-Thatcher conservative extremism’ that has relegated
large groups of people to a licensed practice of begging (Slay Jr. 207).
The unemployed are given ‘bright badges’ and a ‘regulation black bowl’,
and are assigned sites in public space to request money from passersby
(McEwan 3). Effectively, this replaces the welfare system by a strict
neoliberal prescription of ‘self-sufficiency’ from which even children are
not exempted (40). Stephen rather naively assumes that the authorities
expect people to donate – ‘to give money ensured the success of the
government program’ (3) – when the more likely objective is to mark
the beggars as invisible (or senseless in Rancière’s terms) and wait for
them to succumb to disease, cold or hunger. As opposed to Kate’s indi-
vidual disappearance, which generates public sympathy because she is
a valued child taken from parents able to support her, the beggars will
not be missed. Their badge, bowl and the designated spaces they are
allowed to occupy, in set numbers, make them instantly recognizable
as unworthy of attention, disposable. The only reason they are allowed
to show themselves at all is to warn others of the consequences of not
being self-sufficient.
A way for the beggars to counter this social invisibility is to break
the rules by begging in illicit places or forming a crowd threatening not
to ask for money but to simply take it. Thus, a group of beggars with
162 The Spectral Metaphor
He had reached the end of the row of bodies and was looking down at
a familiar face. It was hard, small-boned, for a moment ageless [ . . . ].
The dulled eyes were open and stared past him. It was an old friend,
someone from his student days, Stephen was beginning to think, or
someone from a dream. (227)
Pèresecutions
The way Lunar Park multiplies the ghostly to include virtually all its
characters invokes Derrida’s insistence that ‘[t]here is then some spirit.
Ghosts of the Missing 165
Spirits. And one must reckon with them. One cannot not have to, one
must not not be able to reckon with them, which are more than one: the
more than one/no more one [le plus d’un]’ (Specters xx, emphasis in text).
The many ghosts that persecute Bret, possibly originating in his own
mind, bring the reality of his fragmented identity home to him, forcing
him to live with the fact that he, too, is ‘no more one’. At the same time,
his compounded haunting points to his cumulative, and so far evaded,
responsibility to and for others, including the fictional characters he
has created. The most insistent specters in the novel are the literal ghost
of Bret’s deceased father, who appears as a classically Gothic, if media-
enhanced, figure of fright, and the metaphorical living ghost that is his
son Robby, who mysteriously disappears in the wake of several other
boys in the neighborhood. Like The Child in Time, therefore, the novel
supplements the expected debt to one’s ancestors with the less obvious
debt to future generations.
When Derrida argues that ‘the being of what we are is first of all inher-
itance, whether we like it or know it or not’, he takes the perspective of
the heir (Specters 54, emphasis in text). What this focalization obscures
is that ‘our’ being also equals legacy, as each person is a potential
ancestor. For Derrida, the inheritance and its reception are necessarily
heterogeneous, involving at once choices – ‘one must filter, sift, criti-
cize, one must sort out several different possibles that inhabit the same
injunction’ – and secrets that defy readability (Specters 16, emphasis in
text). The responsibility this imposes to choose and criticize wisely and
to decide which secrets to pursue and which to leave alone extends
beyond the heir to his or her progeny. In Lunar Park, Bret’s obsessive
focus on his relationship with his father leads him to neglect Robby and
to threaten to pass on his poisonous inheritance intact, as a compul-
sion to repeat instead of a message to be (imperfectly and incompletely)
translated. It is to avoid the injunction to ‘inherit from the law’, identi-
fied by Derrida as that of the father, that Robby disappears (Specters 7). By
absenting himself from his lineage, he performs a counter-conjuration
that confounds not only the particular inheritance in question, but the
patrilineal system underlying it.
Ellis’s preoccupation with issues of paternity and changing notions
of masculinity is well-documented. Mark Storey, for example, traces
Patrick Bateman’s savage killings in American Psycho to a ‘crisis of mas-
culinity’ and ‘pomophobia’. Storey argues that Bateman represents a
satire of ‘masculinity with the volume turned up, an identity created
not from internal, subjective coherence but from an uneasy chorus of
166 The Spectral Metaphor
movements were the catalyst for the fort-da game invoked by Derrida
and analyzed by Freud in Beyond the Pleasure Principle. In light of this,
it does not seem unjustified for Gayatri Spivak to call Specters of Marx a
‘how-to-mourn-your-father-book’ (‘Ghostwriting’ 66).
Responding to this critique in ‘Marx & Sons’, Derrida claims Specters
of Marx in fact constitutes an indictment of patrilineal inheritance:
Bret sinks into a depression and ‘saves’ himself by marrying Jayne and
moving to the suburbs with her, Robby and Sarah, Jayne’s daughter by
another man.
While Jayne plays only a bit-part in the narrative’s spectral
shenanigans – the reality of which, according to Bret, she disputes –
six-year-old Sarah is at the heart of them. The first apparently supernat-
ural event occurs during a Halloween party, when Sarah tells Bret that
her electronic Terby toy is mad at him and, later, that it has scratched
her and is flying around her room. When Bret goes upstairs to check,
he hears a ‘guttural squawking’, intimating that what was familiar and
innocuous has become unfamiliar and threatening (51).9 Afterwards,
Sarah draws the Terby ‘swooping down on a house that resembled ours,
angry and in full attack mode’ and reports that ‘he says he knows who
you are’ (151, 163). When Bret receives mysterious email messages from
the bank where he has stored his father’s ashes in a safe-deposit box
and repeatedly spots his father’s cream-colored Mercedes, Sarah reveals
she has spoken to her grandfather and that he ‘isn’t dead’ (109). Bret,
however, does not seem to credit Sarah’s ability to communicate with
the spectral presences and, by implication, his unconscious fears. He
mostly ignores her, except when telling his therapist how disturbing he
finds it that she calls him ‘Daddy’ (86). In Derrida’s terms, it might be
said that Sarah is trying to insert herself into the lineage as a ‘clandes-
tine and illegitimate’ heir, but that her gender and status as a stepchild
lead Bret aggressively and consistently to foreclose this possibility (‘Marx
& Sons’ 231). Crucially, when the assistant of a paranormal researcher
Bret has hired to ‘fumigate’ the house notices a skeletal form coming
out of Sarah’s room, the story is quickly redirected: ‘Actually, the writer
informed me, Sam was wrong. It came from Robby’s room, since Robby
is, in fact, the focal point of the haunting’ (271). The implication is that
for Bret, as for Derrida and Hamacher, the spectral has to remain a form
of commerce between fathers and sons, at least until the novel’s ending,
to which I shall return after discussing Lunar Park’s staging of the ghosts
of the father and the son.
Transgenerational phantoms
As noted above, when Bret’s father dies, he alone is assigned to deal with
his inheritance, which, in an attempt to deny its hold on him, he dis-
misses as ‘worthless’ and ‘invalid’ (15). Rather than fulfilling his debt
to the past by investigating the ‘irregularities’ surrounding his father’s
170 The Spectral Metaphor
death and respecting the latter’s wish to have his ashes scattered at
sea, Bret irreverently locks the ashes in a safe-deposit box ‘in a Bank
of America on Ventura Boulevard next to a dilapidated McDonald’s’
(15). This constitutes an attempt to avoid the ethical encounter with
the ghost by ensuring that the dead stay dead: ‘[The corpse] must stay
in its place. In a safe place [ . . . ] it is necessary (to know – to make certain)
that, in what remains of him, he remain there. Let him stay there and
move no more!’ (Derrida, Specters 9). Or, in Bret’s words: ‘I didn’t want
to keep our father alive’ (278). Throughout the novel, his actions are
geared toward preventing the paternal ghost from haunting by keeping
buried ‘a past I didn’t want to remember’ (170).
In his foreword to Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok’s The Wolf
Man’s Magic Word: A Cryptonomy, Derrida connects the idea that the
deceased ‘must pledge, on his own, warmly, to occupy his place as
dead, not to budge from it’ to their concept of the crypt: ‘The crypt
is perhaps itself that contract with the dead’ (‘Fors’ xxxviii). Bret’s use
of the safe-deposit box literalizes this crypt, which results from the
failed mourning that transpires when the healthy process of introjec-
tions, where the self expands by assimilating (or working through) its
own desires as well as external objects and events, is unsuccessful and
incorporation, where the self takes the object in as a whole and pre-
serves it as a secret never to be revealed, ensues. The ‘secret tomb’
of incorporation, however, is never completely sealed: ‘Sometimes in
the dead of the night, when libidinal fulfillments have their way, the
ghost of the crypt comes back to haunt the cemetery guard, giving
him strange and incomprehensible signals, making him perform bizarre
acts, or subjecting him to unexpected sensations’ (Abraham and Torok,
‘Mourning’ 130).10
In Bret’s case, this haunting takes the shape of an endless, cryp-
tic stream of spectral messages and ghostly appearances. After some
time, he realizes that the mysterious emails from the bank all arrived
at the exact time of his father’s death and that the first one came on
its anniversary; that the film 1941, which keeps playing on the TV
without being scheduled, invokes his father’s year of birth; that the
number of his house, 307, transcribes his own birthday, the seventh
of March; and that the Terby’s name is an anagram of the question
YBRET or ‘Why, Bret?’11 The novel thus enacts the way ‘like a com-
memorative monument, the incorporated object betokens the place,
the date, and the circumstances in which desires were banished from
introjection: they stand like tombs in the life of the ego’ (Torok 114). As
if to reinforce the connection, Bret finds (or hallucinates) a gravestone
Ghosts of the Missing 171
The denial of everything would pull me gently away from reality, but
only for a moment, because lines started connecting with other lines,
and gradually an entire grid was forming and it became coherent, with a
specific meaning, and finally emerging from the void was an image
of my father: his face was white, and his eyes were closed in repose,
and his mouth was just a line that soon opened up, screaming.
(170, emphasis added)
The trauma Bret has incorporated, then, is revealed as not only his own
but also his father’s, just as Stephen’s, in The Child in Time, was his and
his mother’s. This brings together the crypt with the related concept of
the phantom, Abraham and Torok’s figure of transgenerational haunting
that designates an ‘undisclosed family secret handed down to an
unwitting descendant’ (Rand 16).
The phantom is the crypt of an ancestor ensconced in our psyche
(‘in my memories it was all there’), affecting our behavior without our
realization and, usually, without being recoverable. Bret, however, rec-
ognizes it when his childhood memories re-emerge and already appears
to make out his father’s phantom when, early in his account, he writes:
‘as much as I wanted to escape his influence, I couldn’t. It had soaked
into me, shaped me into the man I was becoming’ (7, emphasis added).
Specifically, what has soaked into Bret is his father’s sense of inadequate
masculinity. When Bret receives his father’s Armani suits, this phan-
tom materializes as a literal bloodline: ‘I was revolted to discover that
most of the inseams in the crotch of the trousers were stained with
blood, which we later found out was the result of a botched penile
implant he underwent in Minneapolis. My father, in his last years, due
to the toxic mix of diabetes and alcoholism, had become impotent’ (15).
Impotence not only characterized the father’s sex life, but, metaphori-
cally, also his paternity, and it is this inadequacy that lives on in Bret,
who, after his conversion to suburban family life, notes: ‘it’s been really
hard fitting into this whole world, and all these pressures about being
the man of the house or whatever you want to call it are getting to
me’ (86). The difficulty, if not impossibility, of living up to the nor-
mative ideal of the ‘man of the house’, especially when this ideal has
been destabilized by postmodern questionings of identity as a stable,
coherent category, is what his father’s ghost has returned to warn Bret
about.
Against all initial appearances, therefore, what haunts Bret is not
the all-powerful sovereign father of the phallogocentric tradition –
the imposing ghost handing down injunctions – but the dispossessed
specter of failed fatherhood. This specter cannot order Bret to ‘man up’
and avenge him, since it is precisely the definition of manhood that has
come unhinged. The ghost’s carefully guarded secret is that, despite its
ability to inspire fear, as it does in the early stages of Lunar Park, it cannot
command. All the father can do is warn Bret not to repeat his mistakes
with Robby and leave him to choose whether or not to heed this warn-
ing. Inheritance transforms from order to gift: ‘my father wanted to give
Ghosts of the Missing 173
Self-spectralization
with middle-class life proceeding almost as normal (27). Yet even in this
sheltered context, people are ruled by fear and feelings of inadequacy.
Bret is not the only adult struggling with parenthood, as the mutual
dependency of parents and children is conceived as a crippling burden.
Parents are seen to prevent their children from living their own lives –
Bret says of Robby: ‘his future [is] flattened by my presence’ (116) – while
the adults feel they have invested so much in their offspring that there
should be a payoff: ‘it wasn’t that they weren’t concerned with their
kids, but they wanted something back, they wanted a return on their
investment – this need was almost religious’ (133).12 The parent–child
relationship has become economized, with children treated as specu-
lative commodities. Such commodification, following Derrida’s reading
of Marx’s example of the table in Capital, renders them ghosts of them-
selves: ‘the commodity is a “thing” without phenomenon, a thing in
flight that surpasses the senses (it is invisible, intangible, inaudible,
and odorless)’ (Specters 150). The child disappears in this spectrality-
as-possession, which sees the possessing spirit take center stage as the
possessed struggles to ‘come through’, as horror films put it. Robby
and his friends resist being ghosted in this manner and take recourse
to a different kind of spectrality that reclaims the notion of being ‘in
flight’ not as an upstaging apparitionality but as a deliberate act that
gives notice, rendering visible by calling time on enforced invisibility.
If the intergenerational phantom cannot be exorcized or evaded as long
as the social structures staging it persist, it can, perhaps, be destabi-
lized by withdrawing from these structures and fighting like with like;
ghosts, after all, cannot be haunted or possessed in the same way as the
living.
From the start of the novel, the area where Lunar Park is set is plagued
by a surge in missing children, notably ‘only boys’ (55). They vanish
without a trace and no bodies or suspects are found, but clues to the
fact that these disappearances are chosen and to their motive, abound.
Bret records how ‘Robby seemed lost, as if he didn’t know what to do’,
how ‘his favorite songs had the word flying in the title’ and how ‘no one
was going to take him anywhere (unless he let them, came an unbidden
thought)’ (63, 89, 112). As noted, Bret’s obsessive focus on the pater-
nal specter, which seems to hold a more immediate threat, leaves him
oblivious to the meaning of these observations until after Robby’s disap-
pearance. Only then does he discover the boys were not taken but leave
of their own accord, conspiring by email and sending their belongings
ahead to an unknown place. This place, free of fathers and phan-
toms, they call ‘neverneverland’, redoubling J. M. Barrie’s designation
Ghosts of the Missing 175
for their future (and for their role in the present as the future) they send
a powerful message to those left behind, one that is not immediately
welcomed. After Robby goes missing, Bret notes: ‘I didn’t want expla-
nations, because in those, my failure would take shape (your love was
a mask, the scale of your lies, the irresponsible adult at loose, all those
things you hid, the mindless pull of sex, the father who never paid atten-
tion)’ (298). Still refusing to take responsibility for the ghosts assailing
him from all directions, he cannot recognize Robby’s proposal ‘to live
otherwise, and better’ (Derrida, Specters xviii).
A re-solution arrives when Bret and Robby reunite in the McDonald’s
across from the bank where the father’s ashes were stored. Robby appears
as though ‘something had been solved for him’ and tells his father: ‘I’m
not lost anymore’ (305). Paradoxically, in going missing, he has gone
from being overlooked and commodified to substantiated and cherished
in a non-proprietary mode. Although the past still accompanies him
(Robby drives the same cream-colored Mercedes as Bret’s father), Bret
recognizes it does not possess him: ‘wherever he was going, he was not
afraid’ (306). Instead of promising another repeat of the past, the future
is now unknown and therefore expectant. Bret, too, has changed his life,
leaving suburbia and its imposed heterosexuality behind and supporting
Robby’s return to ‘the land where every boy forced into bravery and
quickness retreats: a new life’ (306).
Lunar Park’s elegiac ending, which has been accused of having ‘noth-
ing in common – tonally, rhythmically – with the rest of the book’
(Mars-Jones) but has also been called a ‘sublime’ illumination (Maslin),
resembles that of The Child in Time in that it, too, unfolds in a com-
prehensive temporality exceeding linearity and realism, and invoking a
sustained yet transformational spectrality. Like Stephen, Julie and the
baby, Bret starts a new life, symbolized by the crypt’s explosion. When,
in a final attempt to placate his father’s ghost, he recovers his ashes from
the bank, ‘the box containing what remained of my father had burst
apart and the ashes now lined the sides of the oblong safe’ (306). Accord-
ing to Abraham and Torok, with the crypt opened and the magic word
revealed, mourning and introjection can finally take place. In Lunar
Park, however, rather than definitively ending the haunting, the magic
word – ‘in the ash someone had written, perhaps with a finger, the same
word my son had written on the moonscape he had left for me’ (306) –
seals a new pact or Verschwörung between Bret, his father and his son
against the oppressive masculine economy of inheritance that induced
the preceding Gothic nightmare.
Ghosts of the Missing 177
When Bret scatters the ashes according to his father’s wishes, this pro-
duces not subservience, placation or exorcism but ‘a phantasmagoria of
love and loss, a fusion of hallucination and wisdom’ (Maslin), enabling
an affirmative reconnection not just to the father but to a wider ances-
try. As in McEwan’s novel, moreover, what ensues is a shared mourning
that emphatically includes women.13 Signaling this new inclusiveness is
a shift in narrative voice from ‘I’ to ‘we’ and ‘you’ (which may be read
as both singular and plural):
In a fishing boat that took us [Bret and his sisters] out beyond
the wave line of the Pacific we finally put my father to rest. As the
ashes rose up into the salted air they opened themselves to the
wind and began moving backwards, falling into the past and coat-
ing the faces that lingered there, dusting everything, and then the
ashes ignited into a prism and began forming patterns and started
reflecting the men and women who had created him and me and
Robby. They drifted over a mother’s smile and shaded a sister’s out-
stretched hand and shifted past all the things you wanted to share
with everyone. (306)
Here the inheritance comes from ‘men and women’ and concerns not
only Bret but his mother and sisters too. The scattered ashes, which
cannot reconstitute the paternal body and are therefore incapable of
handing down authoritative injunctions, form multiple, shifting ‘pat-
terns’, as in Laplanche’s weaving and unweaving. These patterns both
cover the past, easing its burden on the present, and reflect it as that
without which the present would not exist. The expansive vision con-
jured by the ashes – ‘a multitude of images from the past’ (306–7) –
contains revelations and comforts but also obscures through its vast
spatio-temporal scope. Rather than ordering the past or explaining
it in order to ‘move on’, the ashes materialize a continuity that is
simultaneously an initiation:
the sun shifted its position and the world swayed and then moved
on, and though it was all over, something new was conceived. (308)
180
Afterword: How to Survive as a Living Ghost? 181
and Adam turn out to be visible after all, at least to the new occupants’
daughter, Lydia. Far from being afraid, however, she finds the experience
‘amazing’, while insisting that they will have to hone their haunting
skills if they are to drive away her parents: ‘you’d better get another rou-
tine, because those sheets don’t work.’ When the parents do not take
Lydia’s report of a spectral encounter seriously, Barbara and Adam sum-
mon expert help from the realm of the dead in the shape of Betelgeuse,
a maniacal ‘bio-exorcist’ who targets the living. Through his efforts,
the house finally becomes haunted in the proper, perceptible sense.
Yet, once more, the reactions of the living are not as expected. Lydia’s
parents see an opportunity to make money by exploiting people’s fasci-
nation with the paranormal, while Lydia grows more and more sympa-
thetic to the Maitlands. When Betelgeuse threatens to drag the girl into
the afterlife, Barbara and Adam come to her defense and exorcize the
exorcist. Unusually for a ghost story, the film’s upbeat ending sees the
living and the dead happily sharing the house and co-parenting Lydia.
The poignancy of this film lies in its thematization of the literal
ghost’s differentiated functionality, with its normative haunting incar-
nation depicted as a role that requires practice and does not always
have the same effects. This qualification applies equally to the figura-
tive ghosts I have investigated. By focusing on the living specters that
occupy the present rather than on hypothetical returnees from the dead
or victims of historical injustices and forgetfulness, I have sought, in
excess of Derrida’s emphasis on spectral multiplicity and heterogene-
ity (converging in le plus d’un), to expose the specificity of the spectral
metaphor, the way it takes different shapes (and names), invoking a
range of meanings, capacities and effects. Since even the ghost’s literal
meaning, in its entanglement with the supernatural, is neither stable
nor empirically verifiable, its precise sense and system of associations
cannot definitively or fully be established. This distance from actual
experience, I have argued, makes the spectral metaphor a more responsi-
ble figuration of forms of subjectivity than those grounded in the living
practices of particular groups such as migrants or refugees. Moreover,
much like Beetlejuice, which predominantly takes the Maitlands’ per-
spective, I have focused on understanding what it means to be (seen
as) a ghost, adding to the main questions that have governed the theo-
rization of the spectral encounter – how to conquer the ghost or how to
take responsibility for it? – the query: how to survive as a ghost?
The first part of Beetlejuice suggests the obvious answer: one survives
by coming to haunt. However, while in common parlance, in most ghost
stories and in Specters of Marx it is assumed that the power to disturb
182 The Spectral Metaphor
exploited. Thus, in Affinity, Selina and Ruth turn their spookiness into a
source of strength and profit, financial and erotic. If, conversely, the
balance is found to be skewed to the side of disempowerment, the
fact that the ghost, as shown in Beetlejuice, has no fixed ‘functional
parameters’ and may learn to haunt still provides some potential for
agency. In metaphorical use, requiring a secondary interpretative oper-
ation referring to a vast, heterogeneous set of associations, the ghost’s
susceptibility to transformation is enhanced, while those subject to
exploitation or annihilation may counter their spectralization by insist-
ing on their materiality and visibility, on not being ghost-like. This is
what happens in role changes like the one from servant to guest in
Upstairs, Downstairs or from organ donor to organ trader in Dirty Pretty
Things. Claims to materiality-as-mattering also have the more general
purpose of questioning whether it is ethical to metaphor people, who,
as argued in my introduction, have a stake in how they are conceived.
Alternatively, living ghosts whose spectralization works to disappear
them may devise strategies to appeal to the more empowering aspects
of the ghostly epithet in order to come to haunt or find agency in
invisibility.
While the first response seems more straightforward, in situations of
extreme dispossession, such as the one portrayed in Broomfield’s Ghosts,
it is almost impossible to make one’s presence known. Moreover, claim-
ing visibility and full presence can incur severe losses and dangers. In
Affinity, Ruth and Selina would not be able to maintain their relation-
ship or scam in the light of day, while in Babel Amelia’s self-exposure to
rescue the children in her care results in her deportation. On this basis,
I have argued against the unreflective validation of visibility as equal
to emancipation that haunts Castle’s apparitional lesbian and Rancière’s
politics of aesthetics. Visibility and invisibility do not have a generaliz-
able function or meaning, but need to be assessed in specific forms and
contexts. After all, the lurid spectacle of regulated begging in McEwan’s
The Child in Time shows that even the eminently visible can be divested
of a stake in the common, while that same novel, together with Ellis’s
Lunar Park, suggests some missing people (can be made to) exert an
affective force that affords them, or at least the shadows cast by their
felt absence, great social and political impact.
The second response, while more convoluted, acknowledges both
the strength of the spectral metaphor and the difficulty of escaping
the designations through which one is socially (un)recognized. It pro-
poses developing what I have called spectral agency by asserting one’s
ghostliness. Thus, Ruth exploits the fact that, as a maid, she goes
184 The Spectral Metaphor
185
186 Notes
responsible? How will you answer or finally take responsibility for your life and
for your name?’ On the same page, he asserts that ‘learning to live should
mean learning to die, learning to take into account, so as to accept, absolute
mortality (that is, without salvation, resurrection, or redemption – neither
for oneself nor for the other)’ (24, emphasis in text). This reinforces how he
takes the specter not as a figure transcending death, but as one that confronts
with death and with the compounded responsibility for what one takes from
the past (as heir) and leaves for the future (as ancestor).
9. Bal borrows Stengers’s opposition between diffusion, ‘which dilutes and ends
up neutralizing the phenomena’, and epidemic propagation, ‘where each
new particle becomes an originating agent of a propagation that does not
weaken in the process’ (32–3).
10. Rayner notes how ‘a ghost, particularly in the theater, ought to startle an
audience into attention with a shiver’ (xiii).
11. Specters of Marx does not always carefully separate hauntology as that which
characterizes all Being from the specter as a figure of alterity that can signify
either power or dispossession. The difference between the way we are all
always already ghosts of ourselves, inhabited by our coming death, and the
way particular subjects (and other life forms) are excluded from a livable life
is marked in Learning to Live Finally:
We are all survivors who have been granted a temporary reprieve [en
sursis] (and, from the geopolitical perspective of Specters of Marx, this is
especially true, in a world that is more inegalitarian than ever, for the
millions of living beings – humans or not – who are denied not only
their basic ‘human rights,’ which date back two centuries and are con-
stantly being refined, but first of all the right to a life worthy of being
lived.
(24–5, emphasis in text)
it supposes also that one address him, singularly, that he be called there-
fore, and that he be understood to have a proper name: ‘You, what is
your name?’ Hospitality consists in doing everything to address the other,
to accord him, even to ask his name, while keeping this question from
becoming a ‘condition’, a police inquisition, a blacklist or a simple border
control.
(‘Principle’ 7)
14. In her queer reading of spectrality, Freccero similarly stresses that a passive
politics need not be complacent:
Notes 187
the passivity – which is also a form of patience and passion – is not quite
the same as quietism. Rather, it is a suspension, a waiting, an attending
to the world’s arrivals (through, in part, its returns), not as guarantee or
security for action in the present, but as the very force from the past that
moves us, perhaps not into the future, but somewhere else.
(‘Queer’ 207)
15. See, for example, the special issue of Parallax (2001) on the New Interna-
tional, edited by McQuillan, and the contributions by Macherey, Montag,
Eagleton and Ahmad in Sprinker.
16. Žižek notes that ‘the ultimate truth of the capitalist utilitarian despiritualized
universe is the dematerialization of “real life” itself, its reversal into a spec-
tral show’ (Welcome 14). According to Hitchcock, materialism and spectrality
should be thought as implicated in each other. In Oscillate Wildly, he pro-
poses, on the basis of a reading of class in Marx, a ‘spectral empiricism’ that
emphasizes materialism’s status as a theory of becoming rather than being
and the specter’s dissociation from unreality: ‘The reality of class as spec-
tral does not mean it does not exist; it means merely that one grasps the
immaterial as also and already constituent of material reality’ (152, 159).
17. Derrida’s Of Spirit is also based on a lecture (given in 1987 at the Collège
international de philosophie in Paris), but this text seems to cleave closer
to the spoken version and, in places, invokes and questions who it speaks
as/for: ‘I shall hold, in the very dry description of these two paths, only to
what can still say something to us – at least I imagine it can – about our steps,
and about a certain crossing of our paths. About a we which is perhaps not
given’ (107, emphasis in text). In Learning to Live Finally, Derrida, asked about
his reluctance to say ‘we’, answers: ‘I do indeed have a hard time saying
“we,” but there are occasions when I do say it’ (39). He then proceeds to
outline the conditions under which he is able to say ‘we Jews’, ‘we French’
and ‘we Europeans’ (39–42). Derrida’s repeated references to the quandaries
of speaking as or of a ‘we’ make its unreflective use in Specters of Marx, a text
explicitly concerned with intersubjective ethics, more notable.
18. See Bakhtin’s ‘Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity’ and my discussion of
the intersubjective look in Intersubjectivities and Popular Culture (73–82).
19. See also Briefel, who calls this phenomenon ‘spectral incognizance’.
13. Bardan’s reading of Dirty Pretty Things invokes Marciniak’s notion of ‘palat-
able foreignness’ and proposes that especially Senay’s portrayal by Tatou, a
white French actress, ensures that audiences experience ‘a safe encounter
with otherness’ that emphasizes sameness rather than difference (53).
14. See Mbembe’s discussion, in ‘Aesthetics of Superfluidity’, of apartheid-era
Johannesburg as a fragmented city in constant flux where a schizophrenic
provisionality became, for many, the only way of life. He quotes the artist
William Kentridge as saying: ‘I question the cost and pain engendered by
self-multiplicity [ . . . ] There is a kind of madness that arises from living in
two worlds. Life becomes a collection of contradictory elements’ (384n41).
15. Mbembe’s extrapolation from case studies involving Camaroon and Togo
to a general theory of the African postcolony (and, in his book title, the
postcolony) is contentious. In this regard, it is important to note that
Tutuola’s work invokes particular Yoruba folk traditions and that there is
no such thing as a generalized ‘African ghost’.
16. To counter this aspect of Mbembe’s work, Weate, in line with my aims
here, adopts the spectral practice of ‘thinking the invisible’ – ‘excavating the
hidden dynamic within any given situation’ – to unearth a concealed poten-
tial for resistance in On the Postcolony in the notions of play and baroque
practice (36).
17. See my article ‘Everyday Ghosts and the Ghostly Everyday in Amos Tutuola,
Ben Okri, and Achille Mbembe’ for a fuller critique of Mbembe’s reading of
Tutuola.
18. Mbembe does discern some limited opportunities for resistance in the simu-
lacral and ‘fundamentally magical’ regime of postcolonial autocracy, which
create ‘potholes of indiscipline on which the commandement may stub its toe’
(Postcolony 111). According to Syrotinski’s deconstructive reading of On the
Postcolony, while absent from Mbembe’s descriptions of specific regimes,
redemptive potential, in the form of a ‘non-utopian future hope’ that has
parallels to Derrida’s messianic, can be located in his dedication to a ‘writing
Africa’ that goes beyond notions of representational adequacy or political
effectiveness (113).
19. Significantly, in ‘Spectral Housing and Ethnic Cleansing,’ Appadurai instates
an opposition between cosmopolitanism and spectrality as dispossession
by showing how Mumbai’s increasing spectralization (through the growth
of the black economy, more and more uncertain housing conditions, the
fetishization of capital and bouts of ethnic violence) is accompanied by its
decosmopolitanization.
20. I use ‘she’ to counter Mbembe’s insistent use of ‘he’. While this pronoun
may be justified by the fact that Tutuola’s main character is a boy, Mbembe
has been faulted for his ‘unconscious gender bias’ (Weate 39). According
to Butler, Mbembe ignores ‘the question of specifically gendered mean-
ings’ in his discussion of fetishism and, in general, presupposes a gender-
neutral body (‘Mbembe’s’ 69–70). With both Spivak, in ‘Ghostwriting’, and
Hitchcock, in Imaginary States, pointing to the (subaltern) woman as the
primary exploited party in globalized production, and with women consti-
tuting the majority of refugees, Mbembe’s wandering subject is intersected
by gender in ways that demand acknowledgment.
190 Notes
21. Mbembe connects the two when he writes: ‘This critique rests upon the
notion – developed by Tutuola – of the ghost, or better, of the wandering
subject’ (‘Life’ 1).
22. Augé speculates that ‘perhaps the reason why immigrants worry settled peo-
ple so much (and often so abstractly) is that they expose the relative nature
of certainties inscribed in the soil’ (118–9).
23. In Intersubjectivities and Popular Culture, I theorize ‘versioning’ as a similar
strategy of creative recombination.
24. Waldby supplements the commodity model of (legal) organ and tissue
donation by introducing the notion of intercorporeality. She challenges
the perception of donated organs as ‘detachable things, biological entities
that are severed from social and subjective identity once they are donated
or removed from a particular body’, instead emphasizing the relational-
ity produced by the way the donated organ is seen, by many donors (or
their families) and recipients as ‘retain[ing] some of the values of person-
hood’ (240). For Waldby, the ‘material confusion’ of bodies is not necessarily
(only) exploitative but can re-orient essentialist notions of embodied iden-
tity and establish new forms of social exchange (245). In combination with
Mbembe’s remarks, this opens the way to a consideration of organ-selling
as a practice that is admittedly highly problematic but not without potential
for creating a limited form of agency. If the interior body cannot be protected
from exploitation by keeping its borders intact, as Okwe seems to believe, it
can take on a different function in addition to its role as a commodity when
considered as also a site of social exchange.
25. In ‘Ghostwriting’, Spivak challenges Derrida’s conceptualization of Marx as
a clandestine immigrant, noting that ‘this privileging of the metaphorics
(and axiomatics) of migrancy by well-placed migrants helps to occlude pre-
cisely the struggles of those who are forcibly displaced, or those who slowly
perish in their place as a result of sustained exploitation’ (71). Arguing that
the specter, which in Specters of Marx figures a wide range of phenomena,
including deconstruction itself, is like the migrant means diffusing and
generalizing a highly specific and itself not unitary experience. I prefer to
make the reverse move of metaphoring migrants as specters while carefully
specifying which characteristics they do and do not share.
26. See Malkki on the historical emergence of the refugee as a particular, var-
iegated category in international law and the difference between refugees
and exiles. Distinctions also need to be made between refugees, asylum seek-
ers and migrants, since refugees and asylum seekers tend to be perceived
as victims, while undocumented migrants are often considered parasites.
Significantly, in Dirty Pretty Things both main characters are presented as
‘legitimate’ refugees/asylum seekers rather than as ‘economic migrants’ like
the characters in Ghosts.
27. In Precarious Life, Butler critiques Agamben’s generalizations (68). However,
she, too, proposes a politics based on a common vulnerability, in her case a
shared susceptibility to loss and mourning: ‘Despite our differences in loca-
tion and history, my guess is that it is possible to appeal to a “we”, for all
of us have some notion of what it is to have lost somebody. Loss has made
a tenuous “we” of us all’ (20). While Butler qualifies the ‘we’ she constructs
and devotes considerable attention to the way certain lives are considered
Notes 191
more grievable than others, she glosses over important distinctions between
forms of loss and degrees of vulnerability.
5. The perception of danger attached to the close proximity of masters and ser-
vants is especially acute in racialized contexts, as is clear from South Africa’s
1950 Group Areas Act prohibiting black workers from living under one roof
with their white employers (Mbembe, ‘Aesthetics’ 387). In the period dramas
under discussion here, masters and servants share a house, but are separated
by internal architectural boundaries.
6. See the documentary Maid in Britain, broadcast on BBC Four, 28
December 2010.
7. Watson references works by Plautus, Cervantes, Shakespeare, Dickens,
Beaumarchais and Wodehouse. In most of these, servants may indeed ‘talk
back, talk more, and talk to better effect,’ but they remain marginal char-
acters (483). It is, moreover, revealing that every speaking servant Watson
discusses is male.
8. See Robbins for an extensive discussion of the servant-narrator in
nineteenth-century literature.
9. Notably, the reprisal of Upstairs, Downstairs favors upstairs events, as does
Downton Abbey.
10. The association between spiritualism and social redistribution is further
explored in Chapter 3.
11. Since Sarah’s real name is never revealed, I will refer to her as Sarah
throughout this chapter.
12. McClintock relates the ‘servant’s labor of invisibility’ to the middle-class
housewife’s own vanishing act, which involved concealing the work it took
to keep the house clean: ‘Her success as a wife depended on her skill in the
art of both working and appearing not to work [ . . . ] idleness was less the
absence of work than a conspicuous labor of leisure’ (162, emphasis in text).
According to McClintock, only a ‘tiny, truly leisured elite’ could escape this
disavowal, yet I would suggest even wealthy mistresses are subject to a cer-
tain erasure of their labor (161). The 2010 episodes of Upstairs Downstairs, for
example, underline the strain it puts on the lady of the house to manage her
staff with seeming effortlessness.
13. Whereas in the texts Blackford discusses it is invariably the servant who
haunts, Gowing provides a fascinating account of a seventeenth-century ser-
vant haunted by her dead mistress, whose husband repeatedly impregnated
the servant. Gowing emphasizes how female servants and their mistresses
were bound together in their responsibility for men’s sexual exploits and as
potential rivals (it was not unusual for servants to become mistresses). Sig-
nificantly, the servant’s account of her ghostly mistress, when related to a
magistrate, becomes an act of agency, serving to stake a claim to the maid’s
role as part of the family and revealing ‘the authority that supernatural forces
could give the powerless to expose secrets and misdeeds’ (198).
14. Arnado defines maternalism as ‘a system of power relations wherein the
maid is under the mistress’ protective custody, control, and authority’,
characterized by mistress benevolence in which ‘false generosity’ and ‘ide-
ological camouflage’ mask the condition of subservience (154). See also
Hegstrom; Lan.
15. Gosford Park’s narrative is driven by Sir William McCordle’s sexual pursuit
of a series of young female employees and his cruelty in dealing with the
unwanted consequences. Upstairs, Downstairs, too, features several storylines
Notes 193
2. While male mediums also exist and feature as minor characters in both nov-
els, women, from the inception of spiritualism, were construed ‘naturally’
suited for mediumship (Owen; Luckhurst, Invention 214–51). Moreover, as
Walkowitz writes,
the private, homelike atmosphere of the seance, reinforced by the familial
content of spirit communication with dead relatives, was a comfortable
setting for women. The seance reversed the usual sexual hierarchy of
knowledge and power: it shifted attention away from men and focused it
on the female medium, the center of spiritual knowledge and insight (8).
3. Another use of ‘spook’, in American English, is as a derogatory term for black
people. This meaning famously trips up the main character in Roth’s The
Human Stain (2000).
4. Oppenheim charts how spiritualist membership cut across social classes and
servants were often found to have mediumistic talent. Luckhurst qualifies
this notion of spiritualism as a social leveler somewhat by pointing out
that, in the archives of the Society for Psychical Research (SPR), ‘narratives
of dependence on the ability of servants (psychical or not) exist along-
side instances of clairvoyant or premonitory warnings about threats from
nefarious lower-class interlopers’ (Invention 150).
5. On the fraught relation between spiritualism and science, see Luckhurst
(Invention 1–59) and Oppenheim (199–390); on spiritualism as a surro-
gate faith that fell afoul of established religions, see Oppenheim (63–197);
on medicine’s pathologization of especially female mediums, see Owen
(139–67) and Walkowitz.
6. For Rancière, ‘a “common sense” is, in the first instance, a community of sen-
sible data: things whose visibility is supposed to be shareable by all, modes of
perception of these things, and the equally shareable meanings that are con-
ferred on them’ (Emancipated 102). I will explore his equation of the sensible
with the visible later in this chapter.
7. Ruth, in the guise of Peter Quick, selects attractive young girls, who are
invited for private sessions, ostensibly to develop their spiritualist sensibil-
ities, in which they are induced to sexual(ized) contact. This exploits the
way ‘the erotics of the physical séance were centred around the physical
manifestations of bodies which needed to be touched to ensure their materi-
ality’ (Thurschwell 32; see also Oppenheim 21). Since the degree of consent
remains unclear, Parker’s description of these sessions as ‘initiat[ing] several
young women to the delights of the female flesh’ is contentious (10).
8. As Judith Roof notes, ‘that which is capable of being seen is not merely that
which exists but that which is authorised to be read, to be understood, to be
legitimised’ (qtd. in Carroll par. 43).
9. See Steinbock for a pertinent discussion of shimmering as a concept that is
associated with the phantasmatic and exceeds the visual.
10. Carroll’s point that heterosexuality enjoys a ‘normative “invisibility” ’
as ‘supposedly universal and non-problematic’ further undermines crude
notions of visibility as necessarily enabling or invisibility as invariably
dispossessing (par. 34).
11. Whereas Brindle refers to Selina as ‘a shadowy presence in her own text,
which can be read as symptomatic of her powerless role as a pawn for others
Notes 195
to play at will’, I argue that she in fact takes on an active role with regard to
the image she projects, both in her diary and at Millbank (75). The ability to
come across as weak when actually in control of the situation is part of the
spooky agency conferred by her mediumship.
12. Thurschwell describes telepathy as ‘related to love – the desire for complete
sympathetic union with the mind of another’ (14).
13. According to Baer, photography can capture traumatic events through a
certain ‘excess we find within the image’, but this excess is defined as some-
thing that does not show or materialize in any straightforward manner;
as such, it re-enacts precisely the nature of the trauma as unexperienced,
unsubstantiated (11–12).
14. For more on this energy, commonly conceptualized as ‘ether’, see Warner
(253–63).
15. Stewart’s reading of Beyond Black notes how ‘explicit intersections with sci-
ence or religion are often downplayed in contemporary mediumship in favor
of the performative qualities of the practice’ (296). While Stewart interprets
the novel as posing a postmodern challenge to realist narrative aesthetics and
Alison as a ‘conservative figure’ who, like a detective, solves mysteries and
enables the integration of the traumatic past, I suggest Beyond Black disturbs
conventional ways of seeing and making sense by withholding coherent
solutions or seamless integrations (306).
16. For Rancière, too, ‘looking to the side’ is more truly redistributive than the
marxist focus on revealing hidden meanings by looking ‘behind things’
(Short 121).
what “masculinity” means to those caught within its social and psychic fab-
ric of dour resistance and recuperation’ (82, emphasis in text). As an instance
of this exposure, which James articulates through the character of Charles
Darke rather than Stephen, The Child in Time is seen to suggest ‘that the task
of revisioning what it means for men to assume, and be compelled to assume
a gender agency that is definably “masculine” should perhaps start with mas-
culinity’s corporeal installation into what Martin Jay describes as the “scopic
regimes” of patriarchal culture itself’ (89–90, emphasis in text).
4. McEwan’s portrayal of women, in The Child in Time and elsewhere, has gen-
erated much criticism. Roger, for example, argues that his work associates
women, in an essentialist manner, with qualities like a capacity for nurtur-
ing, ‘creativity, sensibility, mystery and participation with nature’ (25). She
also insists that ‘McEwan’s women characters are given objective existence in
a man’s world and their characterisation is a male construct of their woman-
hood. Interest in them is essentially in their “otherness” from men, but this
“otherness” is seen from a man’s point of view’ (11). I would argue that the
way McEwan’s narratives make a spectacle of this male focalization of the
female characters (and its assignment of rigid gender characteristics) means
that it does not have to be taken at face value on the level of the reader.
5. Stephen’s description of the ‘call’ and ‘loudness’ of the place can be linked
to Gunn’s distinction between ‘mournful haunting’, bound to notions of
visibility, spectatorship and archive, and ‘melancholic haunting’, which is
sonorous and related to the recycling of a repertoire ‘in a manner that makes
no distinction between the live and the reproduced’ (‘Mourning’ 102). Like
Laplanche’s weaving/reweaving, melancholic haunting, which precludes the
filing or fetishizing of the traumatic event, refuses to lay the ghost to rest.
The idea of a haunting with origins outside the self is explored later in this
chapter through Abraham and Torok’s phantom.
6. One of the passages cited from The Authorized Child-Care Handbook tellingly
reads:
it was not always the case that a large minority comprising the weakest
members of society wore special clothes, were freed from the routines of
work and of many constraints on their behavior, and were able to devote
much of their time to play. It should be remembered that childhood is not
a natural occurrence. [ . . . ] Childhood is an invention, a social construct,
made possible by society as it increased in sophistication and resource.
Above all, childhood is a privilege. No child as it grows older should be
allowed to forget that its parents, as embodiments of society, are the ones
who grant this privilege, and do so at their own expense (105).
7. On the sexual violence portrayed in American Psycho, see Caputi, who argues
that Bateman’s behavior is grounded in a virulent anti-feminism not ade-
quately critiqued in the novel. In ‘Historical Violence, Censorship, and the
Serial Killer: The Case of “American Psycho” ’, Freccero eloquently rebuts this
argument by way of Butler’s theory of gender performativity.
8. ‘Marx & Sons’ highlights the implicitness of Derrida’s inclusion of ‘the ques-
tion of woman and sexual difference’ in Specters of Marx by first arguing
that the way it pervades ‘the whole analysis of the paternalistic phallogocen-
trism that marks all scenes of filiation’ can only escape a very naïve reader,
Notes 197
but then adding that noticing it requires following a lengthy path through
his previous work: ‘If one follows this path [ . . . ] then the scene of filiation
and its interpretation, and, especially, the reference to Hamlet, the pater-
nal specter and what I call the “visor effect”, begin to wear a very different
aspect’ (231).
9. The uncanniness that follows Bret’s rebirth as a suburban family man,
a role he clearly associates with a domesticating emasculation, can be
linked in a Freudian manner to the castration complex, while the Terby
invokes Jentsch’s assertion that the uncanny is a result of intellectual
uncertainty, ‘doubts whether an apparently inanimate being is really alive’
(Freud, ‘Uncanny’ 201). Two forms of the uncanny are thus brought into
play, with Bret characteristically privileging the one focused on masculinity
and originating with the father of psychoanalysis.
10. Although Derrida found inspiration in Abraham and Torok’s work, there are
significant differences between their theories. Most significantly, whereas
Derrida sees exorcism as a refusal to interact responsibly with the ghost’s
alterity, Abraham and Torok, from the perspective of clinical practice, seek
to end the haunting by unlocking the crypt and bringing its secret into the
open. For extensive comparative readings, see C. Davis’s ‘État Présent’ and
Royle’s ‘Phantom Review’.
11. The relatively straightforward process of decoding the ghostly messages in
Lunar Park contravenes Abraham and Torok’s emphasis on the complexity
of cryptonomy. In their analysis of the Wolf Man’s crypt, for example, the
word that is its key has to be traced through several languages and multiple
semantic displacements.
12. This accords with research cited by Morgado, including Cunningham’s view
that children have come to be ‘seen essentially as expensive and a cost’,
Winnicott and Sommerville’s designation of children as a ‘burden’, and
Zelizer’s notion that rising emotional investment in fewer children leads to
higher expectations and greater degrees of disillusionment (250).
13. The insertion of women into the spectral scenario is marked as belated by the
narrative’s suggestion that the re-solution would have come sooner had Bret
taken more seriously the attempted interventions of Sarah and a neighbor’s
wife, who warns him early on that the boys are disappearing by themselves.
14. That the deliberate mobilization of the powerful trope of the missing child
is not just a fictional scenario is shown by the purported disappearance,
in 2008, of British 10-year-old Shannon Matthews, found almost a month
later, after an extensive search operation and media campaign, drugged and
restrained in the house of her mother’s boyfriend’s uncle. The three adults
(all convicted) had planned to wait for a reward to be announced and then
‘find’ Shannon to claim it, but the mother was also accused of reveling
in the attention and sympathy not normally bestowed upon a lower-class,
unemployed woman with seven children by five different men (BBC).
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208
Index 209
ethics, 5, 10, 19, 27, 29, 32, 37, 95, Freud, Sigmund, 32, 37, 73, 78, 89–91,
138–40, 158, 167, 170, 182, 96, 145, 150, 152, 154–5, 167,
183, 184 188n. 5, 197n. 9
intersubjective, 11, 49, 90, 101, Fullmer, E. M., 188n. 6
187n. 17
ethnocide, 42 Galchen, Rivka, 193n. 1
Ewart, Chris, 65, 66 Galsworthy, John, 82
excess of seeing, 27 Gamble, Sarah, 120, 125
exclusion, 14, 17, 29, 37, 39, 60, gaze, 27, 31, 41, 76, 91, 111, 124,
62, 69, 70, 93, 96, 137, 139, 126–8, 136, 138, 140, 187n. 2
163, 184 cultural, 35, 60, 83, 188n. 2
exiles, 17, 190n. 26 Genette, Gérard, 25
exorcism, 2, 3, 21, 23, 26, 29, 61, 80, genie, 31, 78, 80–1, 86, 87, 90, 92, 95,
90, 91, 112, 114, 116, 117, 149, 98, 100, 102, 103, 108, 109,
151–2, 160, 163, 173, 174, 177, 112, 129
178, 181, 182, 195n. 1, 197n. 10 -in-a-bottle, 30, 77, 79, 82, 91, 94,
expendability, 7, 9, 14, 17, 29, 33, 75, 98, 102, 105
92, 104, 138, 182 see also djinn
exploitation, 17, 21, 23, 30, 33, 37, 42, Ghosheh, Naj, 193n. 17
44, 47, 50–1, 66–7, 69, 80, 91, ghost, passim
178, 184, 189n. 20, 190n. 24, as critique of unmixed, 23, 24
190n. 25 and (dis)empowerment, 8, 9, 27, 28,
of invisibility, 35, 61, 163 33, 48, 53, 56, 59, 62, 111, 112,
of spectrality, 16, 23, 40, 94, 116, 182–3
117, 175, 183, 194n. 7 and dispossession, 4, 9, 38, 53, 75,
exposure, 20, 36, 43, 61, 69, 70–1, 74, 111, 156, 182, 183
82, 111, 127, 140, 195n. 3 and embodiment, 3, 159
to death, 72–3 and fascination, 2, 39, 109, 112,
visual, 37, 86, 118 142, 179, 182
and fear, 2, 3, 5, 14, 50, 112, 131,
142, 172, 179, 182
Fellowes, Julian, 77 figurative meanings of, 4
Fenner, Angelica, 44 as figure of impotence, 51
Fenves, Peter, 12 as figure of return, 10
fetishization, 73, 189n. 19, 189n. 20, gendering of, 147–8, 166, 195n. 2
196n. 5 literal, 3, 4, 5, 8, 9, 11, 24, 28, 38,
figuration, human, 5–6, 34 48, 61, 85, 98, 117, 133, 136,
focalization, 24–9, 30, 34, 40, 43, 165, 181, 182
49, 66, 72, 83, 84, 91, 119, 123, and marginality, 8, 9, 48, 184
124, 134, 147, 153, 157–8, 165, and power of transformation, 49
196n. 4 as present absence, 10
see also re-focalization; haunting, see also auto-ghosting; ghost stories;
focalization of living ghost
foreigner, 11, 19, 103, 134 Ghost Dance (McMullen), 185n. 7
global, 37 Ghosts (Broomfield), 29, 33–75, 76, 78,
Foss, Karen A., 148, 150, 178, 195n. 1 82, 83, 91, 183, 190n. 26
Foucault, Michel, 34, 62, 125–7 ghost stories, 2, 9, 28, 40, 45, 85,
Freccero, Carla, 166, 186n. 14, 196n. 7 147, 181
Freedman, Carl, 88 Ghost (Zucker), 16
Index 211
Gibson, Sarah, 37, 39, 191n. 2 hauntology, 11, 23, 48, 166, 178,
gifting, one-way, 101 186n. 11
glance, 31, 111, 135–6, 140, 141 Hegstrom, Jane L., 86, 101, 191n. 3
globalization, 9, 30, 31, 37, 39, 40, 42, Heimheltz, Hermann von, 132
46, 54, 55, 61, 78, 103, 108, 184, heir, 149, 165, 166, 186n. 8
189n. 20 illegitimate, 169
Goffman, Erving, 86, 95, 193n. 19, heterology, 47, 132
193n. 20 Higgs, Edward, 191n. 1
Gordon, Avery F., 146, 148, 164, Hitchcock, Peter, 41, 187n. 16,
195n. 1 189n. 20
Gosford Park (Altman), 30, 76–109, Hoffmann, E. T. A., 90
192n. 15 Holland, Nancy J., 167
Gothic, 2, 9, 89, 112, 147, 165, 176, homeless, 17, 137
185n. 5 homo sacer, 15, 70, 71
Gowing, Laura, 192n. 13 horror (genre), 2, 9, 112, 174
Guattari, Félix, 49, 62 hospitality, 19, 29, 30, 40, 79, 94,
guest, 11, 30, 79, 95–102, 183, 184, 95–8, 100–1, 102, 184
191n. 2 absolute/unconditional, 11, 19, 20,
pseudo–, 79 49, 95, 97, 158, 186n. 13
Gunning, Tom, 132 conditional, 101
Gunn, Joshua, 9, 185n. 4, politicization of, 191n. 2
196n. 5 without reserve, 18–19
host, 19, 29, 40, 95–8, 102, 184
-by-proxy, 97
Halpern, Richard, 17 pseudo–, 96
Hamacher, Werner, 168, 169, 178 human trafficking, 40, 42, 47, 55,
Hamlet (Shakespeare), 11, 12, 17–18, 188n. 12
48, 112, 152, 156, 158, 166, 167,
197n. 8 imagination, cultural, 4, 8–9, 32, 39,
haunt, coming to, 8, 32, 34, 156, 78, 147, 182, 184
181, 183 immateriality, 10, 53, 80, 187n. 16
haunting, 2–3, 9, 12–17, 20–4, 33, 36, immigrant, 11, 19, 38–9, 66, 187n. 1,
37, 42, 48, 50, 53, 57, 61, 80, 89, 188n. 9, 190n. 22, 190n. 25
90, 95, 101, 107, 112, 121, 122, undocumented, 53, 64
131, 143, 144, 146–9, 152, 155, see also migrant
156, 162–6, 169–70, 172–6, immigration, specter of, 42
178–83, 185n. 4, 192n. 13, incorporation, 170, 172
195n. 1, 197n. 10 paradoxical, 38, 78, 91, 92
focalization of, 26–9, 32, 39, 40, indeterminacy, 36, 49, 145
178, 182 indistinction, zone of, 70
general economy of, 11 inheritance, 2, 17–18, 20, 31, 48, 49,
idiom of, 9, 185n. 4 147, 149, 156, 165, 167–8, 169,
masculine economy of, 32, 168 172–3, 176, 177, 178
melancholic, 196n. 5 see also legacy
mournful, 196n. 5 insistence, 22, 117
multidirectional, 156–61, 178 introjection, 170, 176
textual, 114 invisibility, 7, 10, 13, 20, 21, 22, 29,
transgenerational, 172 30, 31, 33, 35–6, 38, 40, 41, 42,
see also mourning, -as-haunting 43, 47, 51, 53, 67, 77, 81, 86, 87,
212 Index
121, 122, 128, 131, 132, 133, 141, mirror, metaphor of the, 59–60, 63
151, 159, 177, 195n. 13 missing persons, 5, 16, 144–79
re–, 42, 60, 117, 161 and innocence rule, 145, 146, 147
maternalism, 90, 192n. 14 see also Lost (White) Girl Event
Mbembe, Achille, 15, 30, 31, 34, Montag, Warren, 187n. 15
48–52, 53, 55–6, 62–70, 73–5, 108, Morgado, Margarida, 146, 148, 163,
184, 189n. 14, 189n. 15, 189n. 16, 175, 197n. 12
189n. 17, 189n. 18, 189n. 20, Morrison, Toni, 195n. 2
190n. 21, 190n. 24, 192n. 5 mourning, 31, 32, 48, 144–5, 148,
McAllister, J. F. O., 188n. 9 149–56, 167, 170, 176, 177, 178,
McClintock, Anne, 192n. 12 190n. 27, 196n. 5
McCuskey, Brian, 89–90 -as-haunting, 148
McEwan, Ian, 32, 144–79, 183, 195n.
3, 196n. 4 name-taking, 86, 129
see also Child in Time, The Nancy, Jean-Luc, 188n. 4
McGowan, Todd, 107–8 Nash, Julie, 82, 86
McQuillan, Martin, 187n. 15 necropolitics, 34, 69
medium, 5, 16, 31, 85, 109, 110–43, necropower, 34, 70
144, 151, 182, 193n. 1, 194n. 2, Negri, Antonio, 21–3, 33, 93
194n. 4, 194n. 5, 195n. 11, neoliberalism, 9, 65, 76, 161
195n. 15 New International, 20, 187n. 15
spooky, 111, 115, 116, 118, 120, 131 nostalgia, 21, 63, 88–9, 163
see also psychic Noys, Benjamin, 67, 69, 71, 72, 75
melancholia, 150, 152, 155, 196n. 5
mourning-cum–, 153 O’Connor, Maureen, 2, 185n. 1
messianic, 19, 20, 48, 156, 158, 168, Olivier, Bert, 107, 108
189n. 18 Oppenheim, Janet, 185n. 5, 194n. 4,
metamorphosis, 50 194n. 5, 194n. 7
metaphor, 5–8, 21, 34, 54, 59, 70, 74, organ trade, illegal, 64–6, 67–8,
75, 79, 112, 119, 147, 172, 190n. 190n. 24
25, 191n. 2 Others, The (Amenábar), 28
conceptual, 12–13 Owen, Alex, 112, 114, 123, 185n. 5,
dead, 6, 73 194n. 2, 194n. 5
ghost as, 3–4, 6, 8, 9, 11, 32, 40,
73, 165 Pai, Hsiau-Hung, 44
as interaction, 7, 73, 184 panopticon, 123, 125–8, 138
living as, 6 paranormal, 181
and re-orientation, 8, 32, 62 Parker, Sarah, 117, 194n. 7
and system of associated passivity, active, 148
commonplaces, 7, 62 pathema, 23
see also spectral metaphor phantasmatic, 4, 6, 151, 194n. 9
metaphor, to, 7, 30, 74, 183, 190n. 25 phantom, 5, 36, 37, 116, 156, 157,
migrant, 17, 103, 181, 187n. 1, 188n. 168, 185n. 3
7, 190n. 25, 190n. 26, 191n. 2, as intergenerational haunting, 32,
193n. 17 172–5, 196n. 5
domestic workers, 78, 93, 104, 108 -States, 17
undocumented, 5, 16, 29–30, 31, photography, 131–2, 195n. 13
33–75, 76, 80, 91, 109, 112, spirit, 132, 141
141, 182 plus d’un, le, 11, 48, 160, 165, 181
214 Index
politics, 34, 46, 74, 111, 137, 139, 142, Saunders, Rebecca, 37
148, 186n. 14, 190n. 27 schizophrenia, 49, 68, 189n. 14
of aesthetics, 46–7, 183 Sconce, Jeffrey, 185n. 3
of generations, 147, 156, 178 Scott, Joan W., 119, 188n. 10
of inheritance, 147, 178 séance, 85, 89, 114, 117, 129, 130–1,
of memory, 147 135, 194n. 2, 194n. 7
of the refugee, 30, 34, 69–75 Seife, Charles, 193n. 1
see also biopolitics; necropolitics self-spectralization, 32, 143, 148, 164,
Poole, Brian, 188n. 11 173–9, 184
psychic (powers), 31, 116, 132, 133 see also spectralization
see also medium Semino, Elena, 8
servant, 5, 16, 23, 141, 182, 183,
Rafael, Vicente L., 104 191n. 1, 191n. 3, 192n. 5, 192n.
Rancière, Jacques, 31, 46–7, 111, 7, 192n. 8, 192n. 12, 193n. 15,
115–16, 126, 130–1, 132, 134, 193n. 18, 193n. 21
136–41, 161, 183, 194n. 6, class, 82, 88, 91, 100, 104
195n. 16 as genie, 77, 78, 79–82, 109, 112
Rand, Nicholas T., 171, 172 as ghostly/spectral, 30–1, 75,
Rayner, Alice, 10, 186n. 10 76–109, 111, 115, 116, 128,
realism, 44, 136, 140, 160–1, 176 129–31, 135, 142, 192n. 13,
see also social realism 194n. 4
redistribution of the sensible, 31, 111, globalized, 31, 78, 103–8
131, 134–5, 137–43, 163,
uncanny, 78, 89–94
195n. 16
see also domestic workers
redistribution, social, 115, 192n. 10
service, domestic, 77–80, 85, 87, 88,
re-focalization, 9, 29, 39, 43, 46, 74,
93, 95–103, 191n. 3, 193n. 21
123, 178, 182
Sharma, Sarah, 60, 72
see also focalization
refraction, 8 Shenk, D., 188n. 6
refugee, 30, 67, 181, 188n. 7, 189n. Silverman, Kaja, 6–7, 84, 188n. 2,
20, 190n. 26 188n. 3, 188n. 5, 188n. 10
fetishization of, 73 simile, 7
as limit-concept, 71 simulation, 140
see also politics, of the refugee Sixth Sense, The (Shyamalan), 28
remembrance, song of, 62–4 Slay Jr., Jack, 161
re-solution, 155, 161, 176, 197n. 13 social realism, 30, 33, 43–7
revelation, rhetoric of, 33, 43–7 Society for Psychical Research (SPR),
revenant, 14 133, 194n. 4
Richardson, R. C., 81 sovereignty, 15, 49, 51, 53, 55, 59, 62,
Ricoeur, Paul, 7 69–71, 74, 96
Robbins, Bruce, 78, 83, 192n. 8 of ghost/specter, 3, 17, 41, 48, 91,
Roger, Angela, 196n. 4 93, 94, 112, 158, 172
Roof, Judith, 194n. 8 spectator, emancipated, 130
Rosello, Mireille, 40, 53–4, 55, 67, 95, specter, 4, 10–18, 21, 22, 24–9, 35, 37,
96, 97–8, 191n. 2 39, 41, 48, 51, 52, 78, 80, 87, 89,
Rossellini, Roberto, 139 90, 92, 94, 111, 112, 123, 131,
Roth, Philip, 194n. 3 146, 147, 149, 152, 156, 159, 165,
Royle, Nicholas, 185n. 5, 197n. 10 167, 168, 172, 174, 185n. 3,
Index 215
186n. 8, 186n. 11, 187n. 16, spooky, 4, 31, 111–12, 113, 118, 120,
190n. 25, 195n. 1, 197n. 8 121, 125, 131, 133, 140, 142, 164
arch–, 168 action at a distance, 193n. 1
of immigration, 42 agency, 116, 120, 195n. 11
as master trope, 11 -as-scary, 112
of the present, 23, 181 see also medium, spooky
spectral agency, 9, 16–24, 30, 31, 32, Sprinker, Michael, 187n. 15
33, 34, 50, 53, 62, 67, 69, 75, 104, Star, Susan Leigh, 43, 193n. 18
109, 111, 131, 143, 148, 162, 163, Steen, Gerard, 8
175, 178, 179, 183–4 Steinbock, Eliza, 194n. 9
spectral empiricism, 187n. 16 Stengers, Isabel, 186n. 9
spectral heterogeneity, 181 stereotype, 5, 8, 30, 77, 137, 180
spectrality, 9–24, 32, 48, 49, 78, 79, Stewart, Victoria, 195n. 15
91, 94, 108, 109, 118, 121, 122, Stiegler, Bernard, 185n. 7
142, 147–8, 150, 166, 167, 174, Storey, Mark, 165
176, 178, 180, 182, 184, 186n. 14, Strauss, Anselm, 43, 193n. 18
187n 16, 189n. 19 stylization, 62
multidirectional, 156 subject au travail, 51
non–, 21 supernatural, 1, 9, 11, 31, 35, 45, 80,
85, 110, 111–13, 115, 122–3, 136,
-as-possession, 174
147, 169, 181, 192n. 13
spectralization, 15, 16–17, 20, 22, 23,
superstition, 10, 13, 85, 90
30, 43, 53, 61, 66, 75, 78, 87, 104,
syncretism, 62
108, 121, 161, 163, 183, 189n. 19
Syrotinski, Michael, 189n. 18
see also self-spectralization
spectral metaphor, 4, 5, 9, 12, 15, 16,
taking the place of, 67
17, 24, 30, 31, 32, 53, 73, 75, 78,
telepathy, 9, 120, 128, 132, 185n. 5,
108–9, 111, 116, 117, 123, 181,
193n. 1, 195n. 12
183, 190n. 25
threshold experience, 51
spectral multiplicity, 181
Thurschwell, Pamela, 11, 113, 114,
spectral studies, 9 115, 128, 194n. 7, 195n. 12
spectral turn, 9–10, 13–14 Todorov, Tzvetan, 160
specular experience, 51 Torok, Maria, 32, 170, 172, 176, 178,
Spinoza, Baruch, 23 185n. 7, 196n. 5, 197n. 10,
spinster, ghosted, 111, 116, 120–1, 125 197n. 11
spirit, 38, 57, 62, 78, 81, 82, 115, 117, transience, 53, 55, 68
130, 132, 133, 135, 137, 139, 141, translucency, 4, 30, 38, 79, 91, 92, 108
142, 151, 152, 157, 164–5, 168, trauma, 2, 9, 10, 32, 90, 107, 141, 172,
174, 191n. 4 195n. 13, 195n. 15, 196n. 5
heretical, 62 Tritton, A. S., 80, 81, 82, 191n. 4
see also photography, spirit Trotman, Nat, 131
spiritualism, 9, 85, 89, 110, 112–13, Tutuola, Amos, 48, 50–2, 62, 64, 65,
115, 117–18, 120, 121, 123, 126, 67, 189n. 15, 189n. 17, 189n. 20,
130, 132, 133, 141, 142, 185n. 5, 190n. 21
192n. 10, 194n. 2, 194n. 4, 194n. Tyler, Imogen, 73
5, 194n. 7
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, 167, 168, uncanny, 10, 37, 78, 85, 89–90, 91, 96,
189n. 20, 190n. 25 108, 132, 157, 185n. 5, 197n. 9
spook, 5, 111, 112, 194n. 3 unemployed, 17, 161
216 Index
ungrievable, 15 visor effect, 27, 29, 33, 35, 37, 61, 78,
Upstairs, Downstairs (1971–1975), 30, 93–4, 123, 125, 157, 188n. 2,
76–109, 183, 192n. 15 197n. 8
Upstairs Downstairs (2010–2012), 77, voyeurism, 44
192n. 9
Waldby, Catherine, 190n. 24
Walkowitz, Judith R., 126, 194n. 2,
vampire, 21
194n. 5
Veblen, Thorstein, 79
wandering subject, 34, 52, 53, 55–6,
versioning, 190n. 23
62–3, 68, 108, 189n. 20, 190n. 21
violence, ghostly, 30, 64 Wanzo, Rebecca, 145, 146
visibility, 8, 10, 16, 24, 27, 33, 35, 36, Warner, Marina, 185n. 5, 195n. 14
39, 42, 43, 47, 53, 60, 61, 118, Waters, Sarah, 31, 110–43
119, 131, 133, 135, 136, 139, 140, see also Affinity
141, 142, 178, 183, 194n. 6, 194n. Watson, George, 83, 192n. 7
10, 196n. 5 Weate, Jeremy, 52, 189n. 16, 189n. 20
excessive, 36 Weinstock, Jeffrey Andrew, 13–14
hyper–, 37 Weldon, Fay, 195n. 2
refusal of, 61 Wilde, Oscar, 1–3, 12, 18, 182, 185n. 1
social, 5 see also Canterville Ghost, The
-as-transparency-and- Wills, Jenny, 68, 76, 188n. 7
recognition, 119 work for life, 65, 68
as trap, 127, 130, 178
see also invisibility xenophobia, 28, 38, 41, 43
visible in-visible, 35, 36, 37, 43, 46,
47, 50, 80, 121, 144, 178, Zagacki, Kenneth S., 145–6
188n. 4 Žižek, Slavoj, 22, 117, 137, 187n. 16
vision, peripheral, 135 zombification, 74