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A.S. BYATT'S THE JULY GHOST AS A GHOST STORY Olga I. Grafova
Candidate of Philology, Senior Lecturer in the Department of Linguistics and Translation
Perm State University
614990, Russia, Perm, Bukirev Str., 15. [email protected] Anna V. Senchuk
Bachelor of Translation and Translation Studies , Perm State University
614990, Russia, Perm, Bukirev Str., 15. [email protected]
The article centers upon a short story The July Ghost written by a contemporary British writer A.S. Byatt. The short story is analyzed in terms of the genre of a ghost story. The theoretical framework is Jacques Derrida's theory of hauntings as well as Lacanian and Freudian theories. The authors investigate the features of the ghost story genre and some peculiar features of the story that appear to be deviations from the genre. Philosophical approach and psychoanalysis help to understand the idea of the story and to go deep into the poetics of it.
Key words: Byatt, ghost story, short story, character, genre, hauntology.
It has been pointed out by some critics that whether The July Ghost could be placed in the ghost story genre is a debatable question [Campbell 2004]; however, according to conventional definitions of the genre, the short story in question possesses most, if not all, of the formal qualities that characterize a ghost story as being such. Without delving too deep into the question whether genres are things that exist in the real world or if they are a mere invention of critics (and publishers?), the formal criteria that constitute a ghost story are usually agreed to be as follows: the dead have to return to the world of the living, more often than not in a terrifying manner. This act is intimately connected with the notion of haunting, widely understood as an instance of the ghost's boundness to a particular place, person or even an object [Brewster, Thurston 2017]. It is very important to highlight that the short story was not so much investigated abroad [Rossen 2003; Campbell 2004]; in Russia it was analyzed as a fairy tale in terms of the image of a child
© Grafova O.I., Senchuk A.V., 2020
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[TopramoBa, EowapeBa 2006]. The theoretical framework that seems appropriate to turn to when dealing with hauntings is, without a doubt, that of Jacques Derrida's hauntology, on which the critical approach of this essay is going to be based; that will allow for a detailed discussion of several important aspects of ghost stories in general, and The July Ghost in particular, namely the ontological status of the ghost, the meaning of time and the function of memory in the context of a haunting. In addition to the mentioned areas of interest, we will also attempt to tie in Derrida's notion of the work of mourning, a reworking of the Freudian term, bringing psychoanalysis into the discussion, which will perhaps warrant a brief examination of Lacanian mechanisms of desire and their dependence on linguistic structures. There will also be a focus on the instances when A.S. Byatt strays away from the narrative conventions of the ghost story, and what those deviations accomplish in her iteration of the genre.
The titular apparition is that of Imogen's, the protagonist's landlady, beloved son who has died in a traffic accident. Although the situation when a revenant appears not to the person with whom they share personal history but to an outsider is not so unusual, it is the relative benevolence of the ghost that makes it so, as well as Imogen's fervent wish to see the ghost: not out of some masochistic desire to be frightened or insatiable curiosity that sometimes predicate the characters' encounters with the uncanny, but rather out of a profound feeling of loss, out of inability to grieve the death of her child and out of an enduring desire to see him one more time. This is not a common affect of a person experiencing a haunting, quite the opposite: conventionally, the ghostly apparition is a symbol of some hidden horror of the past, of injustices and unpunished crimes, and upon encountering the ghost, characters usually express terror, revulsion as well as a distinct impulse to exorcise the revenant [Zieger 2001: 378-81]. Both Imogen and the protagonist, however, demonstrate warm feelings towards the ghost: Imogen longs to see him, and the protagonist enjoys his company and likes the boy; there is no evil associated with him. It has been pointed out that contemporary ghosts, unlike their Victorian predecessors, are strangely normal. They do not try to pull the characters into the world of terrors; rather, they paradoxically become a part of the everyday [Buse, Stott 1999]. It is precisely this strange sense of displaced normalcy that characterizes the titular ghost: he climbs the trees, lays on the grass and keeps to himself, which is the oddest part. He does not really intervene with the other characters' lives, expect for the final scene where he tries to convince the protagonist to stay, quite non-threateningly, in a childlike manner. He remains enigmatic, his intentions impossible to decipher (although the protagonist tries to do just that, it is unclear whether he just projects
his own desires onto the otherworldly entity), however, in his own uncanny way he is normal, whatever the word might mean in reference to a ghost.
Sometimes, such apparitions tend to illustrate and symbolize not only specific horrible events, but the order of things of the past [Brewster, Thurston 2017]. And that interpretation seems to fit the story in question quite well: the ghost of the boy appears to want to reinstate the familial situation that his death had destroyed, and the situation in the present seems to start following some of the principles of his old family life; that can be noticed through lines of dialogue where the protagonist repeats the words of Noel, Imogen's husband, starting to fill his role as partner and father. In doing so, in wanting to be reborn (at least, according to the protagonist's understanding of the ghost's needs), he disturbs the linear progression of time, an ability characteristic to such apparitions. By being the ghost of the past, he preemptively makes it impossible to restore any past order of things, since the past can never be fully present (accounting for the uncanny being and non-being of the ghost); and, as Derrida puts it, "age already in the past is in fact constituted in every respect as a text ... such the age conserves the values of legibility and the efficacy of a model and thus disturbs the time (tense) of the line or the line of time" [Derrida 1967: lxxxix-xc] The narrative structure of the story itself has a circularity to it, the events almost forming a time loop; we also encounter an interesting instance of employing a literary device of including a story within the plot, however, instead of the usual functioning of this device where we hear the events narrated by one of the characters, in this particular case the entirety of the story is described by an omnipotent extradiegetic narrator, who on several occasions questions the reliability of the protagonist's account: we are told explicitly what parts of the story he chooses to omit, and the version of the events he is telling is described as being "bowdlerized". It is noteworthy that he chooses to give a rational interpretation of what has been happening, completely ridding the story of the otherworldly apparition, and instead reading it as a symbol for Imogen's lingering sense of loss, her inability to move on as well as her need to "complete" her mourning process which is, of course, impossible without the protagonist's help. Because of this account that he chooses to give paired with the fact of him being the only one able to see the ghost, some critics have asserted that it is an example of a person needing narrative structure to make sense of the events in their life, and thus creating stories of which they are at the center [Campbell 2004].
There are a lot of variety in what stories we choose to tell ourselves to cope with traumatic events, particularly with loss of a loved one, be it death or "voluntary absence". We see the protagonist engage in constructing such a narrative in regards to losing his girlfriend, whose sudden departure had struck him worse than if she were to have died. He thinks about how she had
planned to leave him, how she always though him incapable of decisive action, and out of spite he decides to do just that, setting in motion the events of the story. Imogen, on the other hand, refuses to structure her tragedy into a story, instead trying her hardest to let go of the past without meaningfully engaging with it, having caged herself in this liminal space of unfinished grieving, rendering herself unable to move on. Her desire to see the ghost could be interpreted as the desire for closure, and her inability to do so as her repressed emotions impeding her grieving process. This would be a Freudian reading of the story, where the subject is unable to complete the process of mourning in order to move on, instead being stuck in the state of melancholia or depression: experiencing numbness, unwillingness and inability to open up and recover from the traumatic event, which would explain Imogen's detachment from her husband, who reminds her of their son's death and with whom it is painful for her communicate in any meaningful way. The protagonist, due to his own feeling of loss and his arguably healthier coping strategies, is able to perceive Imogen's block and emotional repression, and his impulse is to organize all of that into a coherent narrative, thus creating a ghostly apparition that symbolizes his own need for acceptance and companionship, his own attraction to Imogen and desire to stay with her. This leads to a breakthrough in Imogen that is illustrated by her increasing emotion instability and expressiveness, meaning that she is finally addressing her trauma. The protagonist here fulfills the role of a psychotherapist, and the semi-romantic scenario unfolding between them is a very frequent one, namely that of transference, albeit an incomplete one [Freud 2006: 310-326].
A complementary Lacanian reading would help better understands the mechanisms guiding the particular process of grief and mourning that lies at the heart of this story. If we turn to Lacan's terminology, what the boy's ghost is to Imogen is The Thing, the unforgettable Other, the shadow of it in her consciousness. She is left to circle around it, never able to attaint it; instead, the desire is transferred to what is called objet petit a, that which does not grant the ultimate fulfillment which the subject is seeking, but that relieves some of the tension accumulated by desire. In her inability to see the ghost herself, to resolve her inner conflict, Imogen transfers that desire to the protagonist, who serves as a type of conduit between her and the ghost. Present here is the Lacanian motif of absence as being the driving force of desire; the experience of loss and the painful absence of the Other are the essential characteristics of both main characters. As Imogen desperately desires to see the ghost, the protagonist is filled with longing for his ex-girlfriend, and in the same manner, he transfers these feelings to someone more present, less removed from him. The relationship that unfolds between them is primarily of a discursive nature: their interactions mostly consist of having conversations,
more precisely of the protagonist reporting what he has seen to Imogen, feeding her desire for discursive pleasure. Here we can see the working of metonymy: Imogen, unable to see her son, derives comfort from his clothes, hearing about his clothes, hearing the protagonist talk describing his clothes: this chain of signification and her movement along it is the source of her pleasure. The situation in which Imogen identifies herself with her trauma, saying that her inability to engage in a sexual act is due to the fact that "sex and death don't go", can also be analyzed as a case of metonymy: the meaning of her son's death is transferred to her along the signifying chain, she herself takes on some of the qualities of a walking corpse. She has to live with the ghost in two senses of the word: there is an apparition in her house, and there is an aspect of herself that has died with her son, a ghost inside of her.
Derrida provides us with a different framework for understanding mourning, however, insisting that, opposite to the Freudian assertion, it is impossible to complete this process: "a mourning in fact and by right interminable, without possible normality, without reliable limit, in its reality or in its concept, between introjection and incorporation" [Derrida 1994: 121]. He posits that the exorcism can never solve the issue with lingering ghosts; the ghost, much like the trauma associated with it, must always be lived with. Were the process of mourning to complete, that would constitute a second death to the already dead, dissolving them in the subject's memory; the work of mourning, however, is carried out by a continuous act of interpretation without ever achieving epistemological completion. I believe that distinction to be of outmost importance to understanding the ghost in this story as well as the characters' relationship with it; unlike the majority of the ghost stories, the apparition is never banished in the end, the order of things is not restored to the status quo [Ricciardi 2003]. The ghost persists, it lingers, it demands attention and work from the ones interacting with it; once more, the ghost must be lived with in a literal sense: it persuades the protagonist to stay, although whether successfully or not remains an open question.
This approach to mourning is precisely what helps us understand why the attempted sexual act between Imogen and the protagonist that was supposed to remedy the situation as well as pacify the ghost had failed: there is no clean completion to the work of mourning, no end point where we can finally rid ourselves of the ghostly presence and turn it into a content memory.
Another concept intimately connected with the work of mourning is Der-rida's hauntology, which refers to the manner in which the past haunts the present, creating intrusions in the order of things, disrupting the linear progression of time, questioning that which is established as certain and possessing a ghostly quality to itself: the past is always between presence and absence, life and death. In this manner, ghosts can be read as hauntological
beings, neither dead or alive and fundamentally unknowable, defying episte-mological conventions. The ghost or, in Derridean terms, the spectre occupies a paradoxical space between being and non-being; it is neither a body nor a soul, yet somehow it is both [Derrida 1994]. In the story in question, the characters ponder what kind of being the apparition is, trying to classify it within the conventional structures of knowledge and failing. The protagonist even admits the fact that the boy's semi-existence eludes any hypotheses Imogen and he might suggest to make sense of the situation. Byatt's ghost is characterized primarily by the clothes he is wearing and his smile; there is an eerie corporeality to him, and the protagonist is tempted to try and touch him on several occasions: however, he cannot even attempt such an action because of the inherent impossibility of it. The protagonist, it seems, understands the otherworldliness of the boy, his occupying a liminal space between the living and the dead and being, perhaps, empirically as well as theoretically unknowable. He wonders if the apparition corresponds to any kind of essence, yet that can never be proven or disproven; there is no knowing the ghost. Imogen, on the other hand, turns to esoteric literature in her desire to know, to understand the apparition, to rationalize what has happened with her son and what is happening between her, the protagonist and the ghost now. For Imogen, there is a sense of shame associated with turning to occultism to understand the strange events; she berates herself for every expression of such weakness. Instead, it appears, she thinks it necessary to bury her dead son twice, to let go of his memory. She even went so far as to get rid of all the photographs of her son, effectively trying to erase his memory after the erasure of his body; coincidentally, what she talks about longing is his presence, his corporeality, even an uncanny and liminal one as that of a ghost.
An interesting characteristic of the boy is that he never speaks, communicating instead with movements, gestures and facial expressions; it is unclear whether that reveals something about what the boy was like when he was alive, or if the absence of speech is an aspect that has to do with the loss that is inherent to a revenant. However, even though the boy himself does not communicate through speech, it seems that with his apparition, words and narratives start form an uncanny echo chamber in the story, where characters start repeating each other's words and sentiments, where events begin to tie into loops with no clear beginnings or ends. The boy's apparition causes a disjunction of time that makes its linear progression impossible: the story starts with a situation almost identical to the one that set in motion the events of the story within the plot. It sometimes seems like the characters are possessed by each other: the protagonist repeating the words of Imogen's absent husband, the friendly American girl occupying the same symbolic and narrative role as Imogen once did, the protagonist thinking about his ex-girlfriend
while attempting to have sex with Imogen. Interacting with the ghost leads to a rupture of temporality: time closes in on itself and gains features that liken it to eternity.
What we see in The July Ghost is a preoccupation with death, with its articulation, temporal effects and lingering psychological traumas. As Paul de Man once stated, "death is a displaced name for a linguistic predicament" [De Man 1984: 67-81] - that seems to be how on one level Imogen understands the death of her son, pondering the linguistic structure of the phrase "he is dead". The ghost, it seems, can also be seen as a linguistic predicament: Imogen stumbles, saying "he is - was - a most likeable boy", the revenant disrupting the linearity of time as well as tense [Davis 2005: 373-379]. The spectral returning of the ghost that highlights the need to engage in the work of mourning lets us see that death does not always lead to a permanent demise in ontological and existential terms, and that following the logic of haunting, one can discover that the simple binary of life and death can be no less of an illusion than a grief-induced ghostly apparition. The disturbances of times and tenses caused by a revenant from an always already happened past make comings and returnings an irrelevant and meaningless concept; the anachrony of the ghost is what helps us understand that the work of mourning one's dead can never truly be complete.
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« ИЮЛЬСКИЙ ПРИЗРАК» А.С. БАЙЕТТ КАК ИСТОРИЯ О ПРИВЕДЕНИИ
Ольга Игоревна Графова
к. филол. н., старший преподаватель кафедры лингвистики и перевода Пермский государственный университет
614990, Россия, Пермь, ул. Букирева, 15. [email protected] Анна Владиславовна Сенчук
студент факультета современных иностранных языков и литератур («Перевод
и переводоведение»)
Пермский государственный университет
614990, Россия, Пермь, ул. Букирева, 15. [email protected]
Статья посвящена рассказу «The July Ghost» современной английской писательницы Антонии Сьюзен Байетт. Рассказ исследуется с точки зрения жанра рассказа о привидении. Теоретической базой статьи является хонтология Жака Деррида, а также теории Зигмунда Фрейда и Жака Лакана. Авторы исследуют жанр рассказа о привидении и некоторые особенности сюжета, которые во многом отклоняются от изучаемого жанра. Философский подход и психоанализ помогают понять идею рассказа и углубиться в его поэтику.
Ключевые слова: Байетт, рассказ о привидении, сюжет, герой, жанр, Деррида, хонтология.
