Ghost-Seers, Detectives, and Spiritualists: Theories of Vision in Victorian Literature and Science by Srdjan Smajić (review)

The problem with seeing ghosts is that it is difficult to convince others—or yourself, for that matter—that you have. Authenticating such experiences requires evidence, and, as Srdjan Smajić explains in his compelling book, Ghost-Seers, Detectives, and Spiritualists, this is not easy to come by: “The question of evidential sufficiency...cannot be answered without first coming to an agreement on what counts as evidence, and what kind of vision is involved in ghost-seeing” (39). The adage “seeing is believing” becomes complicated when applied to ghosts because vision can be deceived by optical illusions or misinterpretations of sensory perception. What is more, vision might not manifest itself exclusively as a corporeal sense, but also as a spiritual one, as Victorian critics including Thomas Carlyle and John Ruskin implied. Smajić maps the ways in which nineteenth-century theories of vision informed methods of ghost identification both within and beyond literary texts. Along the way, he discusses the impact of these theories on detective fiction, a genre that, as he persuasively argues, often hybridized with the ghost story. The result is an engaging and informative book that makes a useful contribution to the growing field of phenomenology and Victorian literature.

The book is divided into three parts, which break down into short chapters examining the links between vision and evidence from scientific, philosophical, and literary perspectives. The first part analyzes theories of vision as they apply to ghost-seeing and to the genre of the Victorian ghost story. Beginning with Jonathan Crary’s premise in Techniques of the Observer (1990) that notions of vision in the 1820s and 1830s shifted from a disembodied, camera obscura model to one that emphasized the corporeal presence of the viewer, Smajić teases out the strained relationship between seeing and objective truth. He posits that the multiplicity of models through which vision could be understood influenced the tentative presentation of specters in the ghost story, a genre marked by a careful balance between doubt and certainty. This recalls Tzvetan Todorov’s The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre (1975) (which is only mentioned tangentially here), but Smajić historicizes the idea of hesitation in the Victorian ghost story. Through original readings of narratives by Walter Scott, Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, and Charles Dickens, among others, he concludes that “ocular evidence is at once the most compelling and most questionable form of evidence for the existence of ghosts” (56).

Part II, which I found the most engrossing, shifts our gaze to detective fiction, a genre in which seeing is closely associated with reading. Smajić argues that these narratives entered debates between the view that seeing is an innate form of perception and the view that it requires interpretation and experience to organize sensory information. The latter theory, initially proposed by George Berkeley at the start of the eighteenth century, informed a number of influential Victorian thinkers, including William Whewell and John Stuart Mill. It was also put into practice in the detective fiction of Edgar Allan Poe, Wilkie Collins, and Arthur Conan Doyle, which presents the detective’s vision as incorporating an immediate interpretive mechanism. The genre evinces a “languification of all meaningful content” (122), so that, for instance, the Sherlock Holmes stories exist in a “semiotic dreamland, a fantasy about exhaustive encyclopedic knowledge and boundless archival resources which vouch that no clue will be overlooked or misinterpreted” (124). While the notion that seeing constitutes a form of reading is not new, Smajić’s contention that this connection emerged out of particular theories of vision definitely is.

The third part of the book links detection and spectrality by tracing the development of scientific theories that appeared to legitimate the existence of the spiritual and the occult. Smajić centers on ether theory (the notion that light comes from waves rather than particles) and non-Euclidean geometries that hypothesized...