A History of the Modern British Ghost Story (review)

Simon Hay's A History of the Modern British Ghost Story attends closely to how form is embedded in historical contexts and carries residues of its original moment. Following Fredric Jameson's The Political Unconscious, such an approach engages with literature as negotiating imaginary resolutions to real problems. It reads genre as a record of imaginative attempts to overcome contradictory social orders, economic systems, and modes of production. It also reads genre as a place where those contradictions can be recorded as irresolvable, and where the tension between the past and the present can safely be played out and safeguarded. Hay focuses on the tension between the genre of the ghost story, as it changes over two centuries, and the modes it overlaps: the historical novel, realism, naturalism, the imperial novel, modernism, and magic realism. The result is a nuanced and clear performance of top-notch Marxist criticism in the Jamesonian vein. Hay's command of the history of the ghost story and of the novel is enviable, and the clarity of his analyses extremely persuasive.

Hay begins: "Ghost stories are a mode of narrating what has been unnarratable, of speaking such history belatedly, of making narratively accessible historical events that remain in some fundamental sense inaccessible" (4). Whereas the other genres Hay describes attempt to narrate a relationship to history that would allow it to make sense, the ghost story records the failure of such attempts and inscribes the messy bits that resist such efforts. The historical novel, as exemplified by Sir Walter Scott, provides the first point of comparison, not least because Scott often embeds ghost stories within his novels. Both the historical novel and the ghost story acknowledge the traumatic loss of a way of life in the movement of history. While the historical novel glosses that loss in the key of nostalgia, the ghost story refuses this domestication and insists that the historical trauma can at best be repressed: "Where the historical novel offers the possibility of recuperation in its narrative conclusion, the ghost story invites, only to deny, precisely such a possibility" (53).

The argument about early Victorian realism runs similarly. Where realism's project is to map the social fully, rendering visible those elements that are routinely invisible, making the private public and therefore common and comprehensible, the ghost story records what realism represses. Ghost stories are in this sense "meta-realist; not a version of realism, but a commentary on realism" (83). Where a realist novel might give us the image of a man drinking green tea in London, at once implying and eliding the whole apparatus of empire, a ghost story such as Sheridan Le Fanu's "Green Tea" records the reality of empire in a horrific key. It critiques and fleshes out the realist account by being more realist, by showing the limits of what realism's epistemology can present.

Nuancing the consensus view that naturalism did not really take hold in England, Hay argues that the late-nineteenth-century ghost story produces a version of what he calls "supernatural naturalism" (91). Thus re-casting Julia Briggs's insight that the turn of the twentieth century produced a shift towards the psychological ghost story, Hay argues that the naturalist ghost story concerns itself with "the truth of the individual" (92) instead of the social totality. This move makes the ghost story both less critical and less politically interesting for Hay, even as it marks the perfection of the genre between 1880 and 1920. Such ghost stories turn upon the fetishistic relationships between people (usually aristocratic) and objects, with an eye to individual psychological histories rather than social embeddedness.

Hay writes that imperialist ghost stories, unsurprisingly, record the repressed history of violence and alternative epistemologies erased by imperialism. Hay breaks imperial ghost stories down into three types, all of which cover similar ground in terms of their relationship to history and to triumphalist imperialist narratives. The first contrasts native superstition with white rationalism to demonstrate either...