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4. The Ghost Walks
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You don’t have to believe in ghosts in order to see them. What you make of what you see is another matter entirely. One person’s mysterious apparition is another’s optical illusion. Horatio’s reaction on seeing the ghost of King Hamlet walking the night seems to me a most commendable one, in that his scepticism has not disabled his imaginative capacity to entertain wonders: ‘I might not this believe,’ he admits to the more credulous Marcellus, ‘Without the sensible and true avouch/Of mine own eyes’ (I, i, ll.56–8). That Horatio, who had previously dismissed the ghost as a mere phantasm, now trusts in the testimony of his own eyes suggests, at least to me, that he would have been a devotee of cinema, in which the eyes are actively enlisted to vouch for the existence, immaterial as they are, of the people, animals, objects, landscapes and movements projected on the screen. These cinematic presences, which have all the semblance but none of the substance of life, possess the power to beguile the sensible Horatio in all of us. Our eyes, growing accustomed to the dark, are arrested and often enraptured by the phantoms of life inhabiting the screen, giving ourselves over to their reality despite our settled, everyday and proudly modern convictions that such things, like ghosts, for instance, cannot actually be. Even when encountered in outlandish comic form – the form in which ghosts and spirits are typically encountered in early cinema – they retain vestiges of the power to suggest that there is more in heaven and earth than is met with in our philosophy, certainly more than is met with in the course of our ordinary and solidly corporeal lives. It is a suggestion that cinema is more effective in dramatising than theatre, since it can show us ghosts that look and act like ghosts; that is, like apparitions who are eerily transparent and capable of fading slowly away or disappearing as suddenly as they had appeared. Such feats are beyond the capabilities of the flesh-and-blood actor who, however well-lit or 57 4. The Ghost Walks Joyce and the Spectres of Silent Cinema MARIA DIBATTISTA costumed to suggest a phantom presence, can never continually project the illusion that he is blessed – or cursed – to strut his hour on the stage as a diaphanous, incorporeal and instantly dissolvable body. To take an obvious example, no theatre actor, no matter how skilful, can, like the most humdrum cinematic ghost, convincingly vanish in a puff of smoke. I will comment more appreciatively on the significance of such ghostly feats a bit later in this essay. These reflections on ghost-forms and their singular shape-shifting powers bear on Stephen Dedalus’ original interpretation of Hamlet as a ghost story in which Shakespeare meditated on his own artistic identity. Stephen begins his demonstration of how and why Shakespeare came to play the ghost of Hamlet’s father with a definition calculated to broaden and even vex our conventional notions of what ghosts are. A ghost, he proposes, is ‘one who has faded into impalpability through death, through absence, or through change of manners’ (U, 9.147–9). The virtue of this definition, which is at once ingenious and useful in identifying the many ways one can become a ghost, is that it can accommodate all varieties of spectral life, including, I would venture, the spectral life of cinema, in which bodies can fade into impalpability, but also can rematerialise (and of course dematerialise again) in the blink of an eye. This definition certainly justifies the otherwise incongruous presence of ghosts in a novel that purports to be, among other things, an epic of the body. The ghosts who haunt the characters and saunter, like the shade of Parnell, on the streets of Dublin are familiar presences that have not yet fully shed their earthly features or character. Even the newly deceased, already mouldering corpse of Paddy Dignam, presumably dead and buried in ‘Hades’, is recalled to his old haunts in ‘Circe’ to explain the post-mortem mysteries into which he has just been initiated: ‘metempsychosis . Spooks’ (U, 15.1226), his recognisable ghost-form explains to Bloom, who wonders why he is speaking with the voice (but with none of the Biblical authority) of Esau. Ghosts, in fact, are accorded a special status in Ulysses. They share the same narrative space as living characters and threaten at times to overwhelm and subdue them. They retain their...