Ghost-Humanism; or, Specters of Materialism

Although William Gilmore Simms complained in 1845 that "we can no longer get a ghost story" because "the materialists" have made "the world . . . monstrous matter-of-fact in latter days," it would be more accurate to say that in the mid-to late nineteenth century ghosts and materialist science were mutually possessed, each haunted by the other.¹ Simms's description of the monstrosity of matter-of-factness—and his corollary that the "cold-blooded demon called Science has taken the place of all the other demons"—is telling in this regard, but more indicative is the era's endless fascination with ghostology, or the attempt to identify "a scientific theory . . . reconciling ghosts and natural phenomena" (thereby revealing that "what are popularly called supernatural matters" are, in fact, "directly dependent on . . . natural laws").² Transcending the very disciplinary distinctions that they helped hasten into being, such attempts were everywhere, in short stories and in philosophical tracts, as likely to be conjured by Scientific American as by The Spiritual Telegraph. Admittedly, they often were exercises in exorcism, debunking spirits as optical illusions, atavistic reversions, or mental delusions. With equal if not greater frequency, however, they sought to substantiate ghosts' reality, via everything from the empirical evidence of spirit photography and planchette writing (at times conducted under the auspices of William James and the Society for Psychical Research) to hypothetical proofs involving electrical currents and universal ethers. In each case, ghosts were given flesh—shades brought into the light—through association with known scientific laws and technologies. To borrow Thomas Carlyle's (and M. H. Abrams's) memorable phrase: a natural supernaturalism.³

It is into this shadowy region where "the realm of the unreal" encroaches on the real (and vice versa), where phantasma are ephemerally materialized, that I will trespass briefly.⁴ Rather than stay in the spiritualist interstices between life and afterlife, however, I will turn to other examples of impossible-yet-natural phenomena prevalent in the imagination of the age. Indeed, as the above references to electricity and ethers suggest, myriad spectral presences announced themselves during these de cades: electromagnetism; telegraphy; the telescopic "discovery" of Martian civilizations; Maxwell's thermodynamic demon; non-Euclidean space; fossils of long-extinct species; microscopic hylozoisms and panpsychisms; and invisible macro-biological life forms, among others. Although I will focus here only on the final two, all are examples of non-miraculous orders of being that transcend not only normal human perception but also normal human existence. Insofar as they extend our insight at the very moment our essential blindness—spatial, temporal, cognitive, sensory—is illumined, they capture the most quintessential of late nineteenth-century paradoxes: that humanist endeavors culminate in—are crowned by—posthumanist revelations. For some, this fact signaled the final demise of anthropocentric cosmologies (i.e., the more we see, the less we are), whereas for others it heralded, as in ghostology's demonstration of our scientific immortality, only the extension of human dominion into ever more domains (i.e., the more we see, the more we see of ourselves). After attending to this metaphysical conundrum through select short stories by Fitz-James O'Brien and Ambrose Bierce, I will close with a short meditation on how it is reflected in latter-day new materialisms and neovitalisms, especially in their attempts to found ethical and political principles on radically democratic ontologies. As we will see, the recent nonhuman turn in critical theory is, self-avowedly, a return, a reanimation of central nineteenth-century matters of concern. The question thus becomes whether or not there is new life to be found in channeling the voices of the dead.

Irish American Bohemian, Pfaff's regular, and Civil War casualty, Fitz-James O'Brien published in many genres in his brief life, but he is best remembered today, if at all, for a handful of short stories that interweave the supernatural and the scientific. One of these, "What Was It? A Mystery" (1859), is perhaps the earliest fictional account of an "invisible agency" that is not mystical but biological, "a solid, living, breathing body."⁵ Although narrated by...