Literary Ghosts from the Victorians to Modernism: The Haunting Interval by Luke Thurston (review)

Towards the end of his fascinating study, Luke Thurston remarks that what makes the figure of the literary ghost so “terrifying” is “its sheer originality” (167), by which he means the way that it breaks into and breaks up the orders of fictional discourse, interrupting narrative time for a fatal instant from which the story can never properly recover. In this strict sense, his book is deeply original, haunted by the other scenes of writing that rise unbidden from the recesses of a text to demand a hearing, like an unexpected guest that narrative must struggle to accommodate, no matter how capacious its boundaries.

Thurston begins with a compelling re-reading of the philosopher Gilles Deleuze’s final essay “L’Immanence: Une vie …,”¹ a piece whose attempt to lay bare the elusive inner vitality of being emerges through the medium of an all too brief commentary on a passage from Charles Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend in which the drowned criminal Rogue Riderhood mysteriously returns to life as he lies on what was to be his death-bed.² Returning to Deleuze’s pre-text and shifting the terms of the philosopher’s argument, Thurston pursues the life-in-death resonances of the eerie fort/da game Dickens sets in train with this sinister “waterside character” to reveal a complex spectral economy that commences, tongue-in-cheek, when Riderhood is taken for a lost churchyard ghost seeking earthly hospitality from his social betters (216). Indeed, Riderhood is so impressed by his own strangely fluent indestructibility that he comes to believe, having “come through drowning,” that he will be safe from a watery grave forever—quite mistakenly as we later discover (874). For Thurston, the phantom plays fast and loose not merely with the classic realist text but with the entire process of signification, outflanking the discipline of close reading, turning up in a glimpse, in a flash, in a pure moment of apprehension. Literary Ghosts is littered with defamiliarizing reminders of the vanishing points that riddle every text: names under erasure, anamorphic images, cryptic diagrams, symbols in motion, mathemes, pictographic scripts, and shaded tabulations of overlapping signifiers—visual aids with a vengeance.

The trajectory that Thurston follows runs from Dickens in the mid-1860s, pairing Our Mutual Friend with “No. 1 Branch Line. The Signalman,”³ to a medley of ghost stories by M. R. James and Henry James in whose careful hands the stagy atmospherics of the late-Victorian Gothic revival gradually start to fall away,⁴ marking out a transitional phase before moving into a series of diverse encounters with modernism that follow a more circuitous path, from the still largely neglected May Sinclair via Virginia Woolf and Joyce, before closing with a second Irish writer, Elizabeth Bowen. On one level, there is a modest historicism in this sequence: “the haunting interval” in the book’s subtitle refers to the caesura between “Victorian literature and the modernist moment” (6). Yet elsewhere, this uncanny threshold seems to be caught within specific instances of that shift, as in Thurston’s extraordinary discussion of “No. 1 Branch Line. The Signalman” in which “the disruptive interval of modern technology” blasts through the railway cutting, conveying its cumulative force through the assonances in descriptors like “‘vague vibration,’” “‘violent pulsation’” or “‘vapour,’” words whose insistent “v”s graphically repeat the image of the gorge or defile in which the story is set, nicely underscoring the conceptual structure of the interval itself (90). Beyond these disturbances, other signals are noted. An account of Bowen’s sharp distinction between the intense preoccupation with “what is crazy about humanity” in her short stories and the “calmer, stricter, more orthodox demands” of the novel opens into a movement that runs backwards and forwards in time (147),⁵ for Thurston boldly argues that Bowen’s most adventurous work occurs in the traumatic divide between an empty modernity and a decaying traditionalism that...