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Introduction: A Land Without Ghosts
- The University of Alabama Press
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Introduction A Land Without Ghosts In 1944, the last year, no doubt, in which it still might have been possible to speak with a straight face of American “innocence,” Fei Xiaotang, a Chinese anthropologist and sociologist on a visit to the United States, observed that America is a land without ghosts: “American children hear no stories about ghosts. They spend a dime at the drugstore to buy a Superman comic book. . . . Superman represents actual capabilities or future potential, while ghosts symbolize belief in and reverence for the accumulated past. . . . How could ghosts gain a foothold in American cities? People move about like the tide, unable to form permanent ties with places, still less with other people. . . . In a world without ghosts, life is free and easy. American eyes can gaze straight ahead. But I still think they lack something and I do not envy their life” (qtd. in Arkush and Lee 179–181). By way of opening, I would like to sketch in some aspects of this perceived “lack” in American culture, frame it, perhaps, complicate it, and try to suggest what has driven me to consider it, what makes a dialogue with ghosts, with the “not there,” for me, compulsory. The Southern, African American, and Appalachian colloquialism “haints,” from which I draw my title, happily condenses the overlapping domains of my investigation.1 A haint is, first of all, a variant of haunt, a ghost. My subject matter consists primarily of the numerous fictional depictions of the spirit world, depictions that seem omnipresent in American fiction, film, and the culture at large over the last few decades. Many critics have noticed the “haunting” of American culture and have remarked on the topical, but largely unexpected resurgence of the gothic genre of late, citing, in addition to many of the works I consider, new genres from the “New Weird” and Slipstream fictions of the 1990s and after to such phenomenal postmodern successes as Mark Danielewski’s much celebrated House of Leaves (2000), which Catherine Spooner terms “the quintessential example of contemporary fic- 2 Introduction tion in the Gothic mode” (41). In her survey, Contemporary Gothic, which discusses a wide range of phenomena from the music of Siouxsie Sioux and other postpunk “goth” performers (Nick Cave, Marilyn Manson, The Handsome Family) to the notorious but crowd-pleasing Body Worlds exhibitions, Spooner highlights the “self-consciousness” and ubiquity of gothic, arguing that is a key feature of “global consumer culture”: “Gothic has now become supremely commercialized, be it mainstream or niche-marketed. Gothic no longer crops up only in film and fiction, but also fashion, furniture, computer games, youth culture, advertising. Gothic has always had mass appeal, but in today’s economic climate it is big-business. Above all, Gothic sells” (23). Spooner reads contemporary gothic against its apocalyptic grain, understanding it, paradoxically enough, as a form embodying the utopian fantasy of an unbridled market, as “pure commodity, pure luxury, pure excess” (153). Even so, I would venture, it is a form of wish fulfillment undercut with panic, acknowledging, however implicitly, that a limitless market is unsustainable. If contemporary gothic is a genre specific to a hyperaccelerated consumer consciousness, it also partakes, as Anna Sonser reminds us, of market dread: “the essential horror of the gothic is not its goblins and vampires but its latent power to address the disenchanted world of production and the commodification of the social” (12–13). Citing otherpopular culture examples from Michael Jackson (whose Gothic freakishness and allure has only been exacerbated by his death) to science fiction , along with writers from Joseph Conrad to Isak Dinesen, Fred Botting, in turn, has catalogued the omnipresence of gothic forms over the course of the twentieth century. Botting accentuates how, especially in “American work, Gothic shadows flicker among representations of cultural, familial and individual fragmentation, in uncanny disruptions of the boundaries between inner being, social values, and concrete reality and in modern forms of barbarism and monstrosity” (156). “In the questioning of narratives of authority and the legitimacy of social forms,” he continues, “postmodern Gothic is akin, in its playfulness and duplicity, to the artificialities and ambivalences that surrounded eighteenth century Gothic writing” (157). We might even go so far as to say that the term gothic has outpaced postmodernism in the contemporary critical vernacular.2 Accordingly, Allan Lloyd-Smith, in an important essay , “Postmodernism/Gothicism,” has indicated the parallels between gothic and postmodern sensibilities and styles. Both genres accentuate indeterminacy , Lloyd-Smith points out, both undermine ontological and...