Kursat
K. Pekgoz
“Ghosts”
and “Ghosting”
Freud
began his inquiry into the unheimlich
by consulting the dictionary: in imitatio
Freudi, I would like to do the same. The Oxford English Dictionary enumerates
a total of thirteen entries under “ghost (n).” -- as if in playful deference to
triskaidekaphobia. OED begins with equating “ghost” to “the soul or spirit, as
the principle of life,” but soon complicates and muddies this picture by
listing alternative meanings: “ghost” can apparently signify both “person” and
“corpse” (the latter being “obscure”). As if this were not paradoxical/chiasmatic
enough, we are soon told that the word can signify either “a good spirit” or
“an evil spirit.” The commonsensical meaning, however, seems to be “the soul of
a deceased person, spoken of as appearing in visible form, or otherwise
manifesting its presence, to the living” [cf. εἴδωλον in
Greek; also σκιά, similar to the Dantean ombra].
There is a parenthetical comment warning us this is the “prevailing sense”
today. The final entry, which is the 13th, supplies the following: ghost is a person “who secretly does
artistic or literary work for another person, the latter taking the credit.” Ghosts
are banished from the copyright regime: they must lurk in the shadows while
god-authors who can sell their names bask
in full incarnate glory.
But
when this most canonical of dictionaries fails to supply some of the more
contemporary meanings of “ghost,” I had to turn to the Wiktionary, which
enumerates, among others, the following meanings under “ghosting:”
1.
The practice of hiding prisoners from inspection from
(possibly hostile) outside inspectors.
2.
Ghost imaging [backing up a hard drive]
3.
A form of identity theft in which someone steals the
identity, and sometimes even the role within society, of a specific dead person
(the “ghost”) who is not widely known to be deceased.
While
the premodern “ghost” is a treacherous creature wandering with the neutral
angels or amidst the fires of purgatory, the (early) modern ghost is not only
quite metropolitan but also seems to be preoccupied with questions emanating from
the Shakespearean text. Prisoners.
Inspection. Identity theft. Copies. Copyright. Dictation. Espionage.
Dictatorship. In attempting to interpret Hamlet,
it is impossible not to think of these ghosts trapped in the dictionary. But
perhaps the opposite is also true. “Shakespeare” is a name with such a
superlative, hypercanonical author-function behind it that we may perhaps
advance the slightly perverse claim that the “modern” ghost is a dictation of
Shakespeare. Marjorie Garber reminds us that it is the ghost of “Shakespeare”
(to use Garber’s scare quotes) whereby the Western “canon has been fixed
against self-slaughter:” it is a far less ambitious claim to make that Hamlet’s
ghost dictated his own dictionary entry.
Another
observation: while the word “ghost” is surrounded by many semiotic rivals in
and out of the thesaurus, its most immediate opponent is a word which has
haunted Western metaphysics from its very foundation: this is spirit, from Latin spiritus (breath), similar to πνεῦμα in
Greek. What separates spirit from spectre, or ghost? Spirit is pure
abstraction, the plaything of every idealist from Plato to Descartes to Hegel.
But Derrida warns us in his introduction to the Specters of Marx “that the spectre is a paradoxical
incorporation, the becoming-body, a
certain phenomenal and carnal form of the spirit. It becomes, rather, some
“thing” that remains difficult to name: neither soul nor body, and both one and
the other” (9).
I
will now advance the claim (however precarious) that there have been three
persistent predicates which often affixed themselves to “ghosts” through the
history of Western metaphysics. The first predicate would be translucence. As delineated by Derrida,
if spirit is invisible and transparent and flesh perfectly opaque,
spectre/ghost must exist on a dimension of semiotic translucence. The contrast
between Geist and Gespenst in German, spirit and ghost in
English, pneuma and psyche in Greek all indicate the same
dichotomy. What does the ghost in Hamlet signify? The message seems
straightforward enough: avenge thy father. But the spectral medium resists the
simplicity of the message. Ghosts live shady lives in perpetual exile. Granted,
translucence as a semiotic concept has been much valorised in Western thinking,
from St. Paul (“we see through a glass, darkly”) to Coleridge’s ταυτηγορικον and
to Derrida himself on différance. But the ghost/spectre enjoys a far
less glorious form of embodiment than
incarnation proper: the Christ is both flesh and spirit, enjoying the fullness
of both hypostasis and parousia, whereas ghosts are marked by
vacuity and absence.
The
second ghostly predicate would be enclosure.
Like actors bound to the stage, ghosts are unable to escape their haunted
mansions: perhaps this is why they are so suitable to the tragic sentiment?
This predicate is surprisingly consistent, and one may pick up examples ranging
from the Antigone of Sophocles, where
the unburied body of Polyneices causes his ghost to roam without rest, to the
Tim Burton classic Beetlejuice, where
the ghosts of Barbara and Adam cannot leave the boundaries of the house they
had occupied before death. At some point in Western history, even the representational
space on the stage was woefully limited, thanks to the Aristotelian unities.
The
third predicate would be repetitiveness.
Ghosts are Freudian neurotics who feel compelled to repeat their actions until
an external agency can intervene and make things right. It is perhaps amusing
to think that the ghost of old Hamlet would keep haunting the same haunt, not
unlike a sentry in eternal patrol, had not young Hamlet eventually confronted
him. On the level of metaphor, ghosts are particularly suitable creatures to
drama if we accept Carlson’s claim that the theatre is necessarily more repetitive
than other forms of art: not only does he claim that “the theatre’s reuse of
already familiar narrative material is a phenomenon seemingly as old as the
theatre itself,” a phenomenon which has “involved retelling stories from sacred
and secular writings,” but also that “the ubiquity of and extent of such
recycling is distinctly greater in the tradition” as opposed to “narrative
cycling” in literature (44). One might
perhaps claim that in literature, recycling occurs in a Derridean fashion, in a
never-ending vortex of difference and differentiation. But the spectre of
spectacle which presides over the stage is less Derridean and more Freudian: it
is a repetition which threatens to recoil upon itself, and Carlson warns us
that too much repetition, especially in the recycling of actors familiar to the
audience, can lead to loss of relevance and critical weight in the performative
arts.
Ghosts
abound in all writing, of course, but Carlson’s peculiar claim is that it is
the metaphor par excellence for dramatic representation. While it is impossible
to accept any such claim in an absolute sense, when we compare the dynamics of literature
and drama, the metaphorical antagonism between spirit and spectre becomes
apparent. Literature is not bound spatially and is far less dependent on
individual performance. I would also agree with Carlson that drama is
inherently more repetitive than writing. One might perhaps assert, if with a
touch of Derridean playfulness, that if literature is the domain of spirits,
then the stage is full of ghosts.
Works
Cited
Carlson, Marvin. The Haunted Stage: the Theatre as Memory Machine. The University of
Michigan Press. 2001. Print.
Derrida, Jacques. Trans. P. Kamuf. Specters of Marx: the state of the debt, the
work of mourning, and the new international. Routledge Press. 1994. Print.
Freud, S. (1919). “The ‘Uncanny’. The Standard Edition of the
Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XVII (1917-1919): An
Infantile Neurosis and Other Works, pp. 217-256.
"ghosting." Wiktionary, The Free Dictionary. Dec
2014. Web. 22 February 2015.
"ghost, n." OED Online. Oxford University Press,
December 2014. Web. 22 February 2015.
"ghost, v." OED Online. Oxford University Press,
December 2014. Web. 22 February 2015.
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