ABSTRACT

WHAT WORTH IS A MAN WHO CANNOT BE HAUNTED

Ghost stories are trying to teach us something about our Selves. Human beings seem to have been creating stories about haunting for as long as we’ve been telling any kinds of stories. I think this is because ghost stories are one way of making sense of our connection to other human beings. They tell us that without the Other, the Self cannot exist. In very real ways, the Self and the Other are constantly creating one another, and so each inevitably contains traces of the other. The marks of the Other and their traces within the Self are what lead to the experience of haunting. These ideas are echoed in the philosophical writings of Martin Buber and Emmanuel Levinas; the psychoanalytic literary criticism of Julia Kristeva; writings on mimetic human behavior from a range of disciplines, including cognitive neuroscience; and the feminist rhetorical theory of Christina Mason Sutherland and Krista Ratcliffe. Through a combination of these different theories, I have constructed a lens through which to look at ghost stories. one that takes into account their biological, psychological and sociological implications. When this lens is applied to the metafictional ghost stories, “The Forbidden,” by Clive Barker, and Ghost Story by Peter Straub, we see that ghost stories and the phenomenon of haunting can be terrifying, but they can also be life-affirming in that they remind us of the profound connection that we share with one another.

Kevin Jensen May 2019

WHAT WORTH IS A MAN WHO CANNOT BE HAUNTED

by Kevin Jensen

A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in English in the College of Arts and Humanities California State University, Fresno May 2019 APPROVED

For the Department of English:

We, the undersigned, certify that the thesis of the following student meets the required standards of scholarship, format, and style of the university and the student's graduate degree program for the awarding of the master's degree.

Kevin Jensen Thesis Author

Steven Adisasmito-Smith (Chair) English

Tim Skeen English

Robert Maldonado Philosophy

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OF MASTER’S THESIS

X I grant permission for the reproduction of this thesis in part or in its entirety without further authorization from me, on the condition that the person or agency requesting reproduction absorbs the cost and provides proper acknowledgment of authorship.

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Signature of thesis author: Kevin Jensen TABLE OF CONTENTS Page

PREFACE ...... 1

CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION: TO BE HUMAN IS TO BE HAUNTED ...... 5

CHAPTER 2: A STORY TO TELL – CLIVE BARKER’S “THE FORBIDDEN” ...... 18 CHAPTER 3: I AM YOU, AND YOU ARE ME, AND SHE IS WE, AND WE ARE ALL TOGETHER – PETER STRAUB’S GHOST STORY ...... 27

CHAPTER 4: CONCLUSION ...... 40

WORKS CITED ...... 44

PREFACE

Sometimes I wonder Why I spend the lonely nights Dreaming of a song

The melody Haunts my reverie And I am once again with you . . .

The themes of Hoagy Carmichael’s song “Stardust,” like the themes of the texts on which I will be primarily focusing here, resonate with something deep inside of people: love, loss, memory, obsession, haunting. The song feels primordial. Ghosts, and their attendant theme of haunting, have been an important part of the narrative traditions of human cultures around the world since antiquity. I argue that ghost stories have not stuck with us for so long for simply arbitrary reasons. Rather, these stories of haunting have played a significant role in our evolving understanding of ourselves as human beings. Ghost stories are trying to teach us a few different things about our selves. First, that the autonomous Self does not exist because our constructions of our Selves are always inextricably tied up with our interactions with, and constructions of, that which we perceive as the Other; this is where the feeling of haunting originates. Secondly, the best of ghost stories also teach us that there are two types of haunting: one that is the experience of a genuine lingering, a mark left by a person or an event or a place on oneself, and another that is merely a reflection of oneself. And finally, they can teach us the importance of listening to one another. Truly listening, and attempting to understand another human being on their own terms, which is a selfless act, as the central protagonists of Peter Straub’s Ghost Story learn; instead of only listening to your own interpretation of another, which just leaves an understanding of something inside yourself, which you then delude yourself into believing is an understanding of the Other, 2 2 as is illustrated by the character of Helen in Clive Barker’s “The Forbidden.” The latter is an example of the phenomenon that, I believe, leads to the more negative experience of haunting: the feeling of being oppressed by invisible, unknown forces, leading ultimately to obsession, and madness. As far as I know, “Stardust” has not typically been read as a tale of obsession. It is one of the most frequently recorded popular American songs, and I’ve yet to hear a version that really embraces the possible darkness of these lyrics. Most versions are certainly melancholy, as is appropriate. Whether I am projecting this or not, I cannot help but see obsession in these lines; I see someone who chooses to live in a dream instead of sharing reality with other human beings; I see someone alone in their room, hearing this one song over and over again, trying desperately to hold onto some feeling that seems to have disappeared. But I didn’t choose to begin with this song only because of what I see as its inherent darkness; I chose, “Stardust,” because it is such a tender song. Ghost stories, indeed ghosts themselves should not simply be horrifying. Living with ghosts need not be a harrowing experience always. As I hope to make clear in the following pages, I believe that ghost stories are extremely hopeful, positive stories. That they attempt to confront aspects of human nature and experience that can be very unsettling only makes the sense of hope that much stronger. I see hope in this idea of, “the stardust of a song.” I don’t know if Hoagy Carmichael was only thinking of stardust as a metaphor for a lingering of the past in the present, or if he was also thinking about the fact that stardust, so to speak, is quite literally a part of human beings, even though it seems fantastical. This thing that feels so distant, that exists in the past, yet that is simultaneously a very real part of you in the present. The stardust is just a remnant of something, but that remnant is not imaginary, and it haunts all of us. I know that most peoples’ first reaction to ghost stories is not positive. Ghost stories force us to confront some of the most unpleasant realities of life. Of course, above 3 3 all, they are stories about our mortality. They make us think about death, and about grieving the dead. They make us think about things we’ve done to others, and about things that have been done to us, and the places where it happened. Often, ghost stories have to do with guilt, or regret on the part of the living with regard to the dead. And it strikes me that the importance we place on our past actions, sometimes to the point of all- consuming obsession, has something to do with mortality, as well. Our knowledge of our mortality places a particular kind of pressure on our lives. Since we have finite life spans, we need to try to get things right while we’re here, which is why some of us obsess over things we’ve done wrong in the past, even if it is irrational. Ghost stories remind us of all these things, and I am not attempting to gloss over or deny that this can be deeply disturbing, depending on the story, and one’s own particular temperament. But these things are still a part of being human, and we all will have to deal with these things in some way or another. Certainly, ghost stories are not the only option for healing psychic wounds. I’m just saying I think they’re an especially useful vehicle for conveying information about these experiences, and the very act of storytelling can be extremely helpful in allowing someone to better manage emotional trauma. In fact, once we have confronted our ghosts and fashioned more honest stories about them by recognizing the extent to which they both are and are not a part of our selves, I believe the experience ceases to be the negative one most traditionally associated with haunting. Instead, it is no more nor less than the experience of being human. I know that someone may object to my insistence on using the word, haunting, to describe what I see as a positive experience. But I insist on still using this word because, while I do believe that the experience, if looked at and listened to honestly, can be more positive than negative, I do not want to deny that there also exists pain, and even horror, in this experience alongside beauty. For me, ghost stories have always seemed to be the most beautiful and hopeful of all the subgenres of horror. Ghost stories presuppose that there is 4 4 more to our lives than material reality, than this flesh and blood and bone, that our lives and our relationships endure beyond our bodies, and this is essentially optimistic.

Haunting contains all of this.

CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION: TO BE HUMAN IS TO BE HAUNTED

What is a ghost? A tragedy condemned to repeat itself time and again? An instant of pain, perhaps. Something dead which still seems to be alive. An emotion suspended in time. Like a blurred photograph. Like an insect trapped in amber. – from the Prologue to Guillermo del Toro’s El Espinazo del Diablo.

I said, ‘Don’t talk to strangers.’ But she always do. She said, ‘I’ll talk to strangers, If I want to, Because I’m a stranger, too.’ -Randy Newman, “Have You Seen My Baby”

At its best, horror is the most positive literary mode we can engage with. It encourages us to undertake the difficult but rewarding work of trying to understand that which is other than ourselves. And when we can understand, we can empathize, and identify, and this transforms us. Ghost stories contain fundamental lessons about what it means to be human; they teach us that empathy is the foundation of being human, while simultaneously warning us against the excesses of empathy. To be haunted is to be human; all of our experiences, all of our relationships leave their mark on us, and we carry them around within us. This is not necessarily harmful; to an extent, being haunted is truly life affirming because it gives us very real proof of our connection to other human beings. However, at some point, empathy can become something else; we can sometimes feel that we are empathizing with another, when in fact we are merely projecting our own psychology onto them, and in this case, we would only be connecting with our selves. And when we believe that we are haunted by something out there, when we are, in reality, only haunted by our selves, this can ultimately consume us. Empathizing, even identifying, with someone or something should not blind us to the reality of that with which we are interacting. 6 6

The ghost story, one of the most popular strands of horror literature, gives us a very rich example of how horror can both nurture our sense of empathy as well as teach us the limits of empathy; stories of being haunted invite us to explore the very nature of empathy itself. When we tell stories about being haunted we are trying to understand the ways in which we are transformed by our relationships with other human beings and by our experiences, in general. I will summarize my primary texts, Clive Barker’s, “The Forbidden,” and Peter Straub’s Ghost Story, more fully in their respective chapters, but I feel that I should at least give brief summaries at this point so that we can situate ourselves. “The Forbidden,” is about a graduate student, Helen, working on her thesis (as we step into our first hall of mirrors), and in the course of her work, the residents of a project building where she has been taking pictures of local graffiti tell her some horrific stories about grisly murders supposed to have taken place there. Helen is haunted by these stories, and she keeps returning to this project building, to listen to the stories of the residents, to take pictures of the graffiti, to, she thinks, understand something about the situation in which its residents live. Although Helen really tries to empathize with the people and the place she is writing about, they really are only stories to her, and horror stories at that. Eventually, her obsession with these stories, her haunt, consumes her in one of the most chilling, beautiful, and self-reflective scenes of horror ever written. The main characters in Peter Straub’s Ghost Story, four elderly men, are haunted for slightly different reasons than Helen is, yet the theme of being consumed by one’s haunt is here, as well. The men in this novel are haunted because of an inadvertent murder, and the subsequent covering up of the murder, in their youth. The ghost, who is not really a ghost, or not only a ghost in the traditional sense of the word, is revived by their telling of ghost stories, and eventually, just as in Barker’s story, their obsession with their stories nearly consumes them. 7 7

Both, “The Forbidden,” and Ghost Story use the structure of the Gothic novel, a genre which has long been acknowledged as being concerned with the relationship between the self and the Other, from Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto to Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre to Edith Wharton’s ghost stories. Unfortunately, in one of the most influential works of modern Gothic criticism, Love and Death in the American Novel, Leslie Fiedler dismisses the ghost story almost entirely even though his analysis of the Gothic can be so clearly reflected in the ghost story. Writing about Matthew Lewis’s The Monk, Fiedler sees the characters and the architectural ruins as haunted reflections of the 18th century world of “collapsed ego-ideals” (131). The reason for the characters’ fear of ruins, Fiedler says, is the suspicion that, “the past, even dead, especially dead, [can] continue to work harm” [italics in original]. Only lines later, though, Fiedler calls the ghost story a, “middlebrow derivative of the gothic romance,” albeit, “one of the most popular” (132). In all, Fiedler gives the ghost story one paragraph in his book-length analysis of the Gothic. Love and Death in the American Novel, published in 1960, renewed critical interest in the Gothic. Before Fiedler’s book, the foundational text of Gothic horror criticism was Freud’s, The Uncanny. Through a discussion of the etymology of the German word, unheimlich, Freud concludes that, “the uncanny [‘the unhomely’] is something familiar [‘homely,’ ‘homey’] that has been repressed and then reappears” (152). What is uncanny is so because we recognize it, we see ourselves in it, and yet we have forgotten or repressed it so that when we are confronted by it, our minds double over on themselves trying to deal with this shock. Some critics have argued that this aspect of Freud’s work places his own writing firmly within the genre of the Gothic, as well. In her essay, “Dr. Frankenstein Meets Dr. Freud,” Maggie Kilgour writes that Freudian psychoanalysis and Gothic literature, “both reveal the dark truth that the autonomous subject is not a unified whole but fragmented and dismembered, internally ruptured . . .” (41). While Freud’s work in The Uncanny largely rings true for me, I will 8 8 focus more on Julia Kristeva’s extension of Freud’s concept with her writings on abjection and dejection.

While Freud wrote about the ability of the uncanny to inspire terror in us, Kristeva’s concept of the abject does not stop at this sense of terror. Instead, she moves beyond the fear of being haunted, and toward the sublimity of haunting, toward the realization of our connection with the Other which also has the ability to affirm our own selfhood. Rather than stopping at terror, Kristeva seems to have known that there was some hope if one is willing to do the work of really looking at their ghosts, and thereby, at themselves. Indeed, she seems to have sensed, before there was evidence to support the idea, that there was a root in our biology for this connection between our selves: beyond the representations of words or things, we find the ultimate marks of the biochemical processes that take place in a subject interacting with another subject: hence these marks are already pre-signs . . . of desire and communication. As speaking beings, always potentially on the verge of

speech, we have always been divided, separated from nature. This split has left within us traces of the pre- or trans-linguistic semiotic processes that are our only access to the species memory . . . These semiotic processes . . . scratch our, on the whole, fragile lucidity, causing our memory to lapse, our minds to whirl, our heads to fill with phantoms. (In the Beginning Was Love 8-9) Our connection with one another pre-exists language, or any other form of representation with which we try to understand our world. A ghost is one such representation which we have created to help us understand the profound connection we share with one another, “the ultimate marks of . . . a subject interacting with another subject.” It is this semiotic process by which we transform the very real traces of the Other within our Selves into a symbol, the ghost. We had to create the ghost in order to 9 9 understand our selves, and our relation to one another. The ghost is a memory of this primal connection between our Selves. This is why Kristeva saw sublimity in phantoms, even if she also saw terror: looking at the ghost is a chance to truly our Selves. Kristeva’s use of the phrase, “biochemical processes,” in describing the “marks” we leave on one another through our interactions, fascinatingly echoes some studies about the biological foundation for the mimetic nature of humanity. In 1977, Andrew Meltzoff published his groundbreaking article, "Imitation of Facial and Manual Gestures by Human Neonates,” in which he concluded that, “[i]nfants between 12 and 21 days of age can imitate both facial and manual gestures” (75). In a later article, he elaborates that these findings, suggest that preverbal human infants immediately register similarities between self and other . . . [t]here is an intrinsic identification that infants feel before they can speak. This felt connection colors infants’ first interactions and interpretations of the social world and impels human

communication and social development. Other people are viewed as ‘Like Me’ from the start . . . it is not derived, but basic – not the culmination of moral sentiments, but the foundation of them. (68) Meltzoff’s studies extend philosophical and psychological writings on Mimetic Theory, which maintains that our idea of the Self is always influenced by, and always influences, the Other. According to Jean-Michel Oughourlian, “if this remarkable force that attracts human beings to one another unites them, that enables children to model themselves on adults, that makes possible their full ontogenesis . . . if this force did not exist, there would be no humanity” (42). I know that these words can sound rather extreme; to claim that this mimetic desire is the foundation of humanity. However, if it is true that our neurobiology is soft-wired to make us identify with other humans, if it is true that this is one of the first things that we do, if it is, “not derived, but basic,” as 10 10

Meltzoff’s studies would suggest, then Oughourlian’s claim is not far-fetched at all. So, it would seem that Kristeva’s assertion that our relationships with one another reveal, “the ultimate marks of the biochemical processes that take place in a subject interacting with another subject,” is quantifiably true. There is a deep, psychological, neurobiological foundation for our desire to interact with one another, to care for one another, and it is that we naturally cannot help but see ourselves in one another, to see our selves reflected in the Self of the Other. Oughourlian, in fact, takes this even further by saying that each of our individual psychologies are not even wholly our own; my psychology as an individual is always being influenced by the psychology of the Other with whom I am interacting. Oughourlian, Rene Girard, and Guy Lefort have coined the term, interdividual psychology, in order to describe, “the interchangeability, the porosity, and the constant interaction between the self and the other. The self . . . is a structure in constant becoming at the heart of continuous exchanges with similar structures” (49). Vittorio Gallese writes that this “stems from our ontological openness to the other, which, in turn, is determined by the fact that the other is already a constitutive part of the self” (102). In this sense, our interpersonal relationships are doing more than just influencing us; our relationships lead to us carrying each other around in our minds, or in our souls, if you will. I argue that what Oughourlian et al. are talking about when they use the term, interdividual psychology, is essentially the same thing that most of us are talking about when we talk about being haunted. A fundamental element of our humanity, perhaps the most fundamental, makes it so that we cannot help but feel irrevocably marked by our relationships to other human beings. In a very real sense, to be haunted is to be human, and to be human is to be haunted. When I use the term, haunted, I am always considering its traditional supernatural connotations through the combined lens of the interdividual psychology and Kristeva’s theory of the abject. 11 11

We carry traces of one another, and because of this we have, “a peculiar sense of familiarity with other individuals,” yet the other side of mimesis is opposition. In fact, in

Rene Girard’s Violence and the Sacred, in which he first discussed his theory of mimetic desire, he focused on the role of mimesis in violence. According to Girard’s theory, mimetic rivalry arises when two people desire the same object, and this is the origin of all violence. So, the origin of all that can draw us together, our biological inclination to see our reflections in one another, is the same thing can drive us apart. And unfortunately, the urge to oppose one another, to dominate one another, has always been a more excessive urge by its very nature; as Yeats said, “the worst are full of passionate intensity.” In the context of Cheryl Glenn’s work, the tension between this inherent drive towards opposition that is within us, and how it seems to so often win out over the inherent drive towards connection that seems to be equally within us, is reflected in the traditions of masculine and feminine rhetoric. In her historiography of feminist rhetoric, Rhetoric Retold: Regendering the Tradition from Antiquity Through the Renaissance, Cheryl

Glenn writes about the history of the dominant modes of discourse in Western civilization, and discusses the value that has traditionally been placed on opposition in popular discourse. We have generally been taught to treat discourse as a fight to be won, with an opponent to be dominated, rather than as a true conversation, with the goal of listening to, and really trying to understand one’s companion. I would argue that it is this mimetic urge towards conflict which has resulted in the valuing of a traditionally masculine form of discourse in the history of most human civilizations. The traditionally masculine form of discourse outlined by Cheryl Glenn, in which domination is the primary goal, in which opposition is valued over connection, has predominated human civilization, even though, it would seem that human beings have just as much of an urge towards connection as we do to opposition. 12 12

It is this inherent biological, psychological, sociological tension between our twin desires for connection and conflict, which leads to our lucidity being so fragile, and to our heads filling up with phantoms, as Kristeva says. When we are drawn to the Other, marked permanently and left with traces of the Other in our selves, yet the surrounding rational culture tells us that we should be opposed, this contradiction turns the Other, who is not even really Other, into an object to be feared, the traditional ghost of our ghost stories, Freud’s Uncanny. This is when haunting begins to become a problem: when we objectify the traces of the Others we carry around within us, whether it is to idealize or demonize them. Human beings have a tendency to exaggerate when telling a story, even when we are telling this story to no one but our selves. And too often when we tell ourselves stories about the others we encounter in our lives, we tend to turn these others into saints or monsters, with not much room in between; and whether we are idealizing or demonizing the people in our lives, we are inevitably dehumanizing them, and in the process, we are making it impossible to truly empathize with them. When we turn someone into a saint or a monster, we take away their humanity, we turn them into a lifeless entity, something unreal, a ghost, and we cannot empathize with something lacking all reality. We cannot look at the Other as something that opposes us. In our interactions, we must practice what Christina Mason Sutherland calls the ethics of care and invitational rhetoric, emphasizing the importance of compassion and openness in discourse. As she notes in her essay, “Feminist Historiography: Research Methods in Rhetoric,” the adversarial, traditionally masculine form of discourse is frequently adopted in academia, even by those of us who think of ourselves as working towards some kind of positive societal progress: [o]ne of the important characteristics of some feminist scholarship has been identified as the ethics of care. It seems inconsistent with such an 13 13

attitude to demonize the opposition . . . On the one hand, many of us [feminists] believe that inclusivity is a virtue in scholarship: no group

should feel itself excluded from the debate. Yet the strident tone adopted by many feminist scholars, the anger, the triumph at the downfall of the enemy---how can this be inclusive? Or are we selective in our inclusivity? Is this just? Does it promote peace and goodwill? Having criticized the white male academic for his typically adversarial position, we must surely try to avoid taking that tone ourselves. (116) The position taken by many feminist scholars, and by others who also work with post-modern theoretical lenses, is attempting to deconstruct the accepted notions of Western tradition by utilizing, paradoxically, the rhetorical tropes of that same tradition; specifically, the insistently adversarial, masculinist position that perceives all rhetorical situations as battles between opposing sides. To take this position is inherently regressive because this antagonistic rhetorical position is part of the foundation of patriarchal society. It is the external manifestation of the idea that the Self precedes the Other. After Sutherland thoroughly criticizes other feminist scholars for utilizing what she sees as traditionally masculinist rhetorics, in a fascinating rhetorical flourish, she then takes a moment to look at what she sees as the value of this traditionally masculinist form of rhetoric, and in doing so, gives us a concrete demonstration of the ethics of care: . . . it seems to me naïve to suppose that we can live in this world without ever using any adversarial form of discourse; nor is force always to be identified with violence. Are we obliged in asserting the value of invitational rhetoric (which I fully support), to deny the value of the traditional form, and to dismiss it as violent? It seems to me that we are falling into the (typically masculine?) trap of the false dichotomy. Why either/or? Why not both/and? . . . We cannot do without this masculine 1 4 14

approach, but it has been too powerful altogether during the scientific era: the feminine side of the personality, which exists also in men . . . needs to

be recuperated and validated. I value this ‘ethics of care’ for its dedication to peace and cooperation. At its best, it does not discount the contribution of the masculine, but recognizes it as insufficient in itself. Here, Sutherland practices the ethics of care, and demonstrates how it is both more compassionate and more nuanced than the traditional masculinist form of rhetoric, all while discussing the values of traditional masculinist rhetoric. I would argue that, in this passage, she also demonstrates how this form of rhetoric is more logically sound. When one is able to put their ego aside for a moment, and acknowledge the truth in another view, while still holding onto one’s own principles, one is then able to articulate more clearly why one held those principles in the first place. When we confront the possibility that there may be truth in the Other, we are also confronted by the truth in ourselves. There are many different kinds of feminist rhetoric, and the three feminist rhetoricians that I will be referencing explore a diverse array of subjects amongst themselves. But the particular strand of feminist rhetoric written about by Glenn, Sutherland, and Krista Ratcliffe does share one essential element: the necessity of openness to the Other. Sutherland uses the phrase, ethics of care, in much the same way that Ratcliffe employs the term, rhetorical listening. “Defined generally . . . rhetorical listening signifies a stance of openness that a person may . . . assume in relation to any person, text, or culture” (1). We must listen rhetorically to our ghosts, and to our selves, if we are to understand our connection to each other. The language that Ratcliffe uses here, “a stance of openness . . . in relation to any person,” reminds me of Emmanuel Levinas’s writing about our responsibility to be open to the Other. In his essay, Totality and Infinity, Levinas extends the philosophical writings of Martin Buber on what he called 15 15 the “I-Thou” relation. For Buber, human life resides entirely within our relationships to one another. There is no such thing as an I without a Thou. The “I-Thou” relation precedes any conception of the self. And for Buber, realizing this profound connection between our selves is the same thing as recognizing the divine. Levinas wrote that when we look at the Face of the Other, when we are truly open to the Other, we gaze into infinity. They use slightly different language but they are saying essentially the same thing: when we recognize that there is no Self without an Other, we are tapping into something unfathomably larger than our selves. Perhaps one of the most distinct differences between their philosophies is that Buber believed that the “I-Thou” relation was symmetrical while Levinas believed otherwise. In this way, Levinas refines Buber’s work by emphasizing the importance of remembering that the Other is not the same as the Self. The Self and the Other are integrally connected, they cannot exist without each other, yet they are not the same, and this is an important distinction which ghost stories try to teach us. In addition to the importance of the distinction itself, ghost stories, at their best, also show us the almost overwhelming beauty and terror, the sublimity, of gazing into the infinite. This is why Kristeva’s concept of the abject is much more hopeful than Freud’s idea of the uncanny; she argued that, “the abject is edged with the sublime” (Powers of Horror 11). There is sublimity in the realization that you are deeply, foundationally connected to that which is also other than you. And importantly, she does emphasize that the Other is still an other; it is both a part of you and it is not. This parallels Gallese’s writing on interpersonal resonance which he describes as, “a process in which the behaviors of others [are] metabolized by, and filtered through, the observer’s idiosyncratic past experiences, capacities, and mental attitudes” (101). If my sense of the Other within myself is always filtered through my own experiences, then is my internalization of the Other really only a story that I tell myself about the Other? How 16 16 much of the Other do I carry around within myself, and how much is just me, or my translation of the Other? I believe that Meltzoff’s studies show us that we do internalize each other in very real ways, and that this is a fundamental element of our humanity. But I would say that the extent to which we internalize the Other is the extent to which we can be honest with ourselves about the reality of the Other; once we begin to demonize or idealize, we lose touch with the Other, and are merely connecting with our translations of others, which is to say we are only connecting with a part of our selves. We must always keep in mind that the Other is a human being with, to use George Eliot’s phrase, an equivalent center of self. Our problems arise when we force ourselves to believe that we can only be one or the other. As our biology and psychology show, we are never just one or the other, we are necessarily a combination of both, however our dominant modes of discourse have solidified this sense of division, privileging the narrative of an autonomous self, leading to the accumulation of phantoms in our heads. One needs to hold onto a sense of one’s self, and not be consumed by the other, by one’s phantoms, yet one must also acknowledge the extent to which one’s self is, always has been, and always will be, the Other. If one does not acknowledge this reality, then one is refusing to take part in humanity, but if one becomes too deeply immersed in the Other, if one embraces their haunt too fully, then one’s self is lost. It is a delicate balance, being a human. But there lies in Kristeva’s writing, as well as in the best ghost stories themselves, and in our own individual hauntings, a way to help achieve this balance. Kristeva writes about the importance, as a psychoanalyst, of listening vigilantly to her patients; I think we each need to listen vigilantly to our ghosts. We need to actively work to remember things and people as they were when we knew them, and not in some hyperbolic, objectified fashion that we have created in our imaginations. But, of course, this work of vigilant listening will also necessarily take place in our imaginations. We will still be telling ghost stories 17 17 to ourselves, but we need to figure out new ways to tell those stories. We need to be able to tell stories about our ghosts, while remembering that we are our ghosts and we are not our ghosts, which means remembering our true relationship to the abject.

CHAPTER 2: A STORY TO TELL – CLIVE BARKER’S “THE FORBIDDEN”

“The subject is swallowed up . . . but the Other, in return, keeps the subject from foundering by making it repugnant. One thus understands why so many victims of the abject are its fascinated victims – if not its submissive and willing ones. – Julia Kristeva, “Strangers to Ourselves”

In Clive Barker’s short story, “The Forbidden,” and Peter Straub’s novel, Ghost Story, the concept of empathy is explored through stories and through haunting, which are inherently connected. These are stories about stories; and specifically, how we use stories about haunting as a medium to better understand our connection with the world outside of ourselves. “The Forbidden,” though not a ghost story in the most obvious sense of the phrase, uses the concept of haunting to talk about how we are affected by each other, by the world around us, by the things we’ve done and the things that have been done to us. After Helen, the story’s protagonist, visits the Spector Street Estate, photographs its graffiti, speaks to its residents and takes notes, she is haunted by the project buildings; which is to say that she is marked by her experience there, and by her interactions with the people, to the extent that she begins to feel that she identifies with them. To be haunted is to be in touch with the world around you, is to have a story to tell; to be haunted is to understand something, or to at least approach some understanding about the world. The Spector Street Estate is a place haunted by the memories of the grisly murders of some of its inhabitants (possibly), and once Helen has spent more time there, listening to people, identifying with the place, she meets horror personified as a ghoulish figure called the Candyman; she empathizes with the horror so fully that the horror embraces her. 19 19

In, “The Forbidden,” Helen is juxtaposed against her lover, Trevor, a fellow academic. Whereas Helen is portrayed as being curious and empathic, Trevor is cynical and antagonistic. When we enter these characters’ lives, their relationship is beginning to unravel because of this very difference: What she had once thought in him a fierce commitment to debate she now recognized as mere power-play. He argued, not for the thrill of dialectic, but because he was pathologically competitive. She had seen him, time and again, take up attitudes she knew he did not espouse, simply to spill blood. (11) It is interesting to note that Trevor, in Helen’s view at least, exploits empathy simply to dominate an opponent in an argument. When we take up attitudes we do not espouse we necessarily have to empathize with these views, if we are to do this effectively anyway. But the kind of rhetoric that Barker describes here, to identify with one side only in the effort to dominate another, is decidedly unempathic. Barker goes on to say that, “more’s the pity, he [was not] alone in this sport. Academe was one of the last strongholds of the professional time-waster. On occasion their circle seemed entirely dominated by educated fools, lost in a wasteland of stale rhetoric and hollow commitment.” Now, one may sense some bitterness towards academia on Barker’s part in these lines, but it is not entirely without reason. The rhetoric which Barker ascribes to Helen and Trevor’s intellectual circle of friends is reflective of the rhetoric which has predominated public discourse in our society since antiquity. In American society, this unwillingness to listen to and try to understand people we perceive as different from ourselves has almost become a virtue. Many of us have immersed ourselves in endless, pointless arguments that only allow for either/or scenarios. Perhaps it has always been like this, and there are certain moments in time when this comes into sharper focus, and this is merely one of those times. Cheryl Glenn 20 20 shows us how this traditionally masculine style of rhetoric, which mistakes argument for discussion, has predominated public discourse for most of the history of Western civilization. According to Glenn, this began to change during the Renaissance, when the ideal of rhetoric was “to bring people together” (137). However, “[b]ecause classical oratory had taught forceful argument and taking sides, even the most diverse discursive genres took on an oratorical cast that reflected the classical pattern.” This style of rhetoric was so deeply instilled in us that, even when we tried to consciously move away from it, we still found ourselves repeating the same patterns. Of course, our civilization has progressed in some positive directions since the Renaissance, and our public discourse is not (always) as overtly masculine now as it may have once been. However, even some of us who would like to think of ourselves as progressive, and as fighting for inclusion, sometimes fall into these same old traps of traditionally masculine posturing; demanding to know, “whose side are you on” and ultimately objectifying the Other, rather than sincerely attempting to understand the Other, the mode of discourse reflected by Trevor in Barker’s story. However, Barker’s characterizations are not quite as simple as they may at first seem. Sure, Trevor remains an unempathic cynic, but Helen turns out to not be quite as empathic as she tries to be. And I do believe that Helen really tries to listen to the stories that come from the Spector Street Estate, unlike Trevor and the other intellectuals who simply dismiss the stories as, “some elaborate fiction.” Unfortunately, Helen does not rhetorically, vigilantly listen to the people of the Spector Street Estate, thus she does not truly empathize with them. Yet she has still been marked, the traces of the Other are a part of her, even if she doesn’t understand them, so she cannot help but be haunted and this is what leads to her self-destruction. Helen is working on her post-graduate thesis project in which she plans to compile photographs of graffiti, and use them to make some sort of sense out of the poverty and desperation of the local project buildings from which 21 21 the pictures are taken. Really, she wants to find a coherent narrative, a story, amongst all of the graffiti: “…she flattered herself that she might find something amongst this litter of scrawlings that previous analysts had not: some unifying convention perhaps, that she could use as the lynch-pin of her thesis” (2). Helen understands that the graffiti is not only a “litter of scrawlings,” but many stories being told on the walls of the project; and she understands that when we tell stories, we identify with those stories, and those stories carry a part of ourselves with them: “[s]o many hands have worked here; so many minds have left their mark.” In these lines, it seems like Helen is so close to really empathizing. Many might say that there is no such narrative to be found in graffiti, as Anne- Marie, one of the residents of the Spector Street Estate, tells Helen in their first encounter. When Helen explains her project to Anne-Marie, she simply says, “It’s not very pretty.” To which Helen replies, “No, you’re right, it isn’t. But I find it interesting” (8). As Helen can see in the graffiti, and as we can see in the story itself, there is a human element in the ugliness that we can see ourselves in, if we are willing to make that imaginative leap; she does see the ugliness of the graffiti, the “brutal simplicity” of its aesthetics, but she also sees the stories of love, and sex, and violence that created the graffiti. It is through this that she tries to empathize, but still comes up short because she only sees them as stories, and not as representations of the experiences of real people; she still sees them as objects to observe rather than as fellow subjects with whom she co- exists. She is fascinated by the abjection of the Spector Street Estate, rather than fully empathizing with it. Even Helen’s exchange with Anne-Marie, if looked at from the latter’s perspective, illustrates her inability to vigilantly listen, as she needs to. Of course, Helen can still be interested in the graffiti and the stories she hears in it, but there is no indication that she takes the effort to understand why Anne-Marie, a resident of this place after all, might find it repulsive. 22 22

Barker seems to be saying that it is, at least to a degree, precisely because of the ugliness that some of us pay attention to something like graffiti on a project wall, or a horror story: this mixture of vulgarity with beauty, our fascination with the abject. The crude appeal of the graffiti is echoed in Barker’s description of the Candyman: He was bright to the point of gaudiness: his flesh a waxy yellow, his thin lips pale blue, his wild eyes glittering as if their irises were set with rubies. His jacket was a patchwork, his trousers the same. He looked, she thought, almost ridiculous, with his blood-stained motley, and the hint of rouge on his jaundiced cheeks. But . . . the cheap glamour did not taint the sense beneath. (32) This is one of the most succinct, insightful articulations of the horror genre that I have ever read. The image that Barker creates for us is both terrifying and “almost ridiculous.” There is a crudeness to the Candyman’s image, just as there is a crudeness to the graffiti, to the folktales that the residents of the Spector Street Estate recount to Helen, and even to this story, “The Forbidden,” itself and all others of its kind, but I would say that there is also a sort of beauty in this image. I fully empathize with Helen’s seduction by the Candyman because I have been seduced, as well, by the crude wonder of this image, and by the story itself. I think that Barker is trying to show us the potential danger of being seduced by this sort of story, which is also the danger inherent in the type of haunting that Helen experiences, which is more projection than anything else. When we find ourselves becoming too enchanted by the darkness, we need to remember, as Helen does, that, “there [is] a monster here, beneath this fetching display” (32). This moment in Barker’s story reminds me of the earlier passage from Sutherland’s essay where she discusses how she feels that the ethics of care is not always enough. Helen tries to practice the ethics of care through much of this story: she pays close attention to the Spector Street Estate, to 23 23 its physical structure and to its people, and whether through photographs, notes, or simply listening, she absorbs its stories; her experience of this place has “marked” her because,

“nobody ever just passe[s] through” (26). She becomes haunted by the Spector Street Estate by practicing the ethics of care, by actively trying to empathize. But for Helen, these people and their experiences are still just subjects in her thesis. Even though she genuinely tries to empathize, and I believe she does try, she still objectifies them. At moments, Helen even seems to be aware of this herself. When she goes back to the project to ask more questions about the murders, and is avoided by the residents, she rebukes herself: “She didn’t belong here, did she? How many times had she criticized others for their presumption in claiming to understand societies they had merely viewed from afar? And here was she, committing the same crime, coming here with her camera and her questions, using the lives (and deaths) of these people as fodder for party conversation” (22). Paradoxically, in this instance where Helen is criticizing herself for her lack of empathy, she is very close to actually empathizing with the residents of the project. Only moments later, though, after another murder has occurred, she shifts to an attitude of condescension that is quite ugly, and oblivious: “These people – still emerging from their homes as the story spread – were exhibiting an appetite she was disgusted by. She was not of them; would never be of them. She wanted to slap every eager face into sense; wanted to say: ‘It’s pain and grief you’re going to spy on. Why?’” (24). Looking at these passages side by side, it is fascinating to see the way they mirror one another. In the first, she is upset with herself for exploiting a brutal tragedy and sees this as an example of why she cannot be accepted by these people, and in the next, she rages at the same people for, as she sees it, exploiting a brutal tragedy, without any sense of self-awareness. I think that Helen is a lost person at this point in the story, she is a stray in the night, as Kristeva puts it. She wants to empathize, but her fascination with the abject, which is 24 24 occasionally interspersed with fear and repulsion, distances her too much to ever be able to go beyond objectification. Because she does not understand this, she is lost in a haze of confusion, and frustration, and fear. In the story, there is a phrase written above the Candyman’s portrait which he repeats to Helen when he appears to her in the climactic scene: Sweets to the sweet. Pondering the phrase’s origin, Helen thinks to herself: “Whatever it had stood for once, it was transformed here, as everything was” (30). Here, the “sweet” is the part of us that tries to empathize with the Other without doing the hard work of vigilant listening that is required to truly accomplish this; the intention is certainly far from malicious, yet the effect is still harmful because it ends up objectifying the Other, and leaving the subject a stray in the night with a haunting of which it cannot make any sense. And the “sweets,” with which we are rewarded are the stories we tell ourselves about these people we have objectified; stories that may make us feel some fleeting kind of pleasure, stories that allow us to live in a haunting of our own creation, but that ultimately have no nourishing substance and, in fact, aid our self-destruction. The Candyman is the embodiment of all stories like this; there is something appealing about him, without a doubt, but if you embrace him too fully, you will lose yourself. So, despite Helen’s attempt to practice the ethics of care in her study of the Spector Street Estate, she falls into the classically masculine discourse of opposition between subject and object. But unlike Trevor, who openly embraces this cynical, antagonistic mindset, Helen believes, for the most part, that she is not guilty of this. As Helen laments, Trevor cannot be haunted because he does not even attempt to care about other people, while Helen can be, and is haunted precisely because she attempts to care. Just a shot at empathy is enough to leave one haunted, but if that’s all it is, and it isn’t followed through with vigilant listening to the Other, then that haunting becomes confusing to the point of agony. When Anne-Marie’s child is murdered, and she is held 25 25 responsible, Helen reaches this point. Helen has spoken with Anne-Marie, looked into her eyes, and into her son’s eyes, but she did not truly conceive of them as being equal subjects; the story of Anne-Marie which Helen created does not mesh with this horror with which she is now faced. Here, Barker takes what is possibly one of the uncanniest horrors imaginable, a parent murdering their own child, and shows the effect of the uncanny on the human mind when it is not being honest with itself, when we have not been listening vigilantly to the Other. Helen, like most of us, I imagine, cannot conceive of a human being doing something so atrocious, and this is what ultimately leads to the appearance of the Candyman. ‘No human being could do this. Only an inhuman monster would be capable of such horror.’ Most of us have this reaction when we encounter similar horrors in the world, and of course, this makes perfect sense that we would try to rationalize things in this way, to protect ourselves. But the truth is that human beings are capable of these sorts of horrors, and if we insist on telling ourselves stories which do not allow for evil to exist alongside good in one human being, instead of listening vigilantly to one another, and to the ghosts that we make of one another, then we will always live inside self-destructive ghost stories. Douglas E. Winter, in his biography of Clive Barker, writes that, “[‘The Forbidden’] makes literal the power of storytelling to give life and meaning to our deepest fears” (376). By the end of the story, the story Helen has created, about the Candyman, and the murders, has become so wholly real for her that she has gone into a completely oppositional stance against the residents of the project. In the final moments, she has weaved a narrative about a conspiracy amongst the residents in which the Candyman is a kind of deity to whom she and others have been offered as sacrifices. She is so driven by her intense obsession to prove that they are the crazy ones, and that she is the one who can see the truth (by the end, she defines herself in complete opposition to 26 26 the residents), that she literally destroys herself by crawling into a bonfire in order to find the body of a child who she believes was another sacrifice.

In the story, and in its film adaptation, Helen’s death is ostensibly a fiery spectacle. But I read it as something very quiet, and intimate. As Helen is trying to grab the child’s body, in what seems to me a lightly surrealist touch by Barker, it seems to always be just out of her reach. When she finally does reach the body, “something land[s] on her arm” (36). At precisely the moment when Helen reaches the goal of her obsession, when she has finally given herself over to her haunt completely, when she has lost her self, the Candyman reappears. The bees which are always in his presence are Helen’s first awareness of it, as she realizes, “the whine she had heard in her ears was not her blood, but the hive.” And then the Candyman embraces Helen, holding her, “lovingly close,” as they die together (37). One can certainly read this as simply a gruesome horror-movie type of ending. But I see it as something happening entirely within Helen’s imagination. The baby that is always, somehow, just out of reach, the fact that Helen’s paranoid fantasy seems to have actually come true, that Anne-Marie has sacrificed her child to the Candyman, all of these details contribute to the overwhelmingly surreal quality of the final sequence which suggests that we have crossed into an entirely subjective realm. The Candyman is a part of Helen; there is the wonderfully chilling detail that what she had thought was the sound of her own blood pumping is, in fact, the sound of, “the hive.” And although the Candyman is the part of her that has lead to the loss of her self, he is still a part of her, which is why this scene is so intimate. She is the fascinated victim of her abjection. CHAPTER 3: I AM YOU, AND YOU ARE ME, AND SHE IS WE, AND WE ARE ALL TOGETHER – PETER STRAUB’S GHOST STORY

Poor Boy, I could never live up to your imagination Poor Boy, I was the crush that killed Poor Boy, I could never live up to your hallucination Poor Boy, I was the crush that killed

I had a dream The trouble always starts in someone’s head And dreams are real When you’re asleep, you may as well be dead . . . – Stuart Murdoch, “Poor Boy”

The corpse . . . is the utmost of abjection. It is death infecting life. Abject. It is something rejected from which one does not part, from which one does not protect oneself as from an object. Imaginary uncanniness and real threat, it beckons to us and ends up engulfing us.

The time of abjection is double: a time of oblivion and thunder, of veiled infinity and the moment when revelation bursts forth. - Julia Kristeva, “Strangers to Ourselves”

Peter Straub’s Ghost Story is, among other things, a gothic novel about the gothic novel. Ghost Story is about a group of septuagenarians living in a small town in upstate New York called Milburn. The men, Ricky Hawthorne, Sears James, Lewis Benedikt, John Jaffrey, and Edward Wanderley, friends since their youth who still meet regularly, have been dubbed by Ricky’s wife, Stella, the Chowder Society. The novel begins one year after Edward Wanderley has died under strange circumstances. In the intervening year, at the Chowder Society’s weekly meetings, the old friends have begun a ritual of telling ghost stories; it is this ritual that revives the memory of an evil deed committed in their youth. When they were young men, a woman named Eva Galli moved to Milburn, and they developed a friendship with her, mostly based around their infatuation and idealization of her. One night, around the time of the 1929 stock market crash and her fiancé’s death, Eva visited the pre-Chowder Society and disturbed all of them by acting 28 28 in an aggressively sexual way towards them. Young Edward Wanderley, the youngest of the five, is so shocked and upset that he rushes her, knocking her down, and she hits her head on a mantel piece, inadvertently killing her. The five friends decide to dispose of her body, and never speak of the incident again until nearly 50 years later, when the spirit of Eva Galli has come back to haunt them and the entire town of Milburn, revived by their ghost stories. At this same time, Edward Wanderley’s nephew, Don, an author of literary ghost stories (much like Straub) is in California, haunted by his own ghosts. Don is haunted by the memory of Alma Mobley, a former lover. After his relationship with Alma abruptly ends, Don finds out that she is seeing his brother David. Shortly afterwards, David dies under strange circumstances, and Alma vanishes. To deal with his haunting, Don tells ghost stories, as well. He writes a slightly autobiographical ghost story called, The Nightwatcher, trying to make sense of the Alma/David situation by turning Alma into the ghost at the center of the story. He is in the process of writing another novel, Dr.

Rabbitfoot’s Revenge, the main character of which, Dr. Rabbitfoot, is another reiteration of Alma Mobley. However, just like the Chowder Society realizes, telling ghost stories does not keep the ghosts at bay; instead it makes the ghosts all the more real. Don is summoned to Milburn by his uncle’s old friends, and becomes the new fifth member of the Chowder Society. It is when Don arrives that they all begin to realize what is happening to them. They are all, Don included, being haunted by Eva Galli, who has returned in multiple forms: first as Don’s Alma Mobley; then, as Ann-Veronica Moore, a young actress visiting Milburn at the time of Edward’s death; and now, as Anna Moss, an intern at Ricky and Sears’s law firm. But even that is not quite the truth, either; Eva Galli, we are told, was just a form taken by one of an ancient race of shape-shifting beings who prey on human imaginations and desires, and it is this being, sometimes referred to as a 29 29

Manitou, who intends to destroy the members of the Chowder Society and everyone connected to them.

The Manitou/Eva Galli very nearly consumes all of the Chowder Society and much of the town of Milburn, until they are able to destroy Anna Moss, its current form. However, some time later, Don finds a little girl who he believes is the new form of the Manitou/Eva Galli, and who says her name is Angie Maule, or Mitchell, it doesn’t really matter. The novel is framed by the story of Don’s trip through the American South, as he kidnaps this girl, who he believes is an ancient evil personified, and tries to bring himself to kill her, and thereby perhaps to finally destroy his ghosts. The trip and the novel end with Don diving deep into his own ghosts in a nightmare-hallucination which ends with him first destroying Dr. Rabbitfoot, into whose likeness he believes the Manitou has now shifted, and then a wasp into which its spirit subsequently transmigrates. Only after this does he seem to feel content, and, “experience[s] a wave of love for everything mortal” (567).

Literary criticism specifically on Straub’s Ghost Story has been fairly limited to this point. S.T. Joshi devotes a chapter to Straub in his, The Modern Weird Tale, and gives a very literal reading of Ghost Story. He asserts that Straub’s own misogyny is the sole reason for Alma Mobley/Eva Galli being the Manitou. If one were giving a literal reading of the novel, this claim could be backed up with evidence from the text, but Joshi then says that he is, “not concerned with the misogyny underlying the entire conception of [the] novel,” because, “it suffers from greater problems than this” (207). For Joshi, these greater problems are that the novel is too derivate of Arthur Machen and that the ending is a cop-out. While Joshi does acknowledge some value in the novel, it does not seem that he thought enough of it to give it much analysis. However, in, “The Postmodern Spirit: The Post-Modernization of the Ghost Figure in Twentieth Century North-American Fiction,” Gerard Collins gives quite an illuminating post-structural 30 30 analysis of the novel that approaches some themes similar to my own. He suggests that, “Eva Galli ‘returns’ (though . . . she has never really been gone) to remind the society

(and all societies) that the told narrative is a theater – a simulation of a reality that never existed” (213). For Collins, this, “told narrative,” is the fantasy of the conservative American patriarchy, as represented by the members of the Chowder Society, which says that there was once a Golden Age that is now fading, or being encroached upon by the world. Collins explains that this fantasy and its accompanying destruction are slightly different for varying members of the Chowder Society: for Ricky, it is the fantasy of an innocent America, represented by Milburn because, “to [Ricky], Milburn’s narrative is that of the American century,” and for Don, it is the fantasy of the autonomous self (221). Collins claims that the frame of the novel, Don’s trip South, is, “a parody of the Great American Road Trip, with the question ‘what is it?’ forming the basis of a search for the supposedly lost self that likely never existed” (229). I will also be looking at the ways in which Straub’s novel explores the questionable authenticity of the Self and its relationship with the Other, as well as the tension between what is real in objective, social reality, and what is real in a subjective, psychological sense, and I particularly enjoy Collins’s connecting of these ideas to larger American archetypes. To be sure, when reading Ghost Story one must consider the many ghosts of American history and culture which Straub invokes: the literary ghosts of The Turn of the Screw, which are the basis for the ghosts that haunt Sears James, who also receives his name from the author of The Turn of the Screw, Henry James; the ghosts of slavery and its legacies as personified by Dr. Rabbitfoot, Don’s literary creation, who comes to life to help destroy the town of Milburn, the fantasy of an innocent America; and the ghosts of indigenous people who once lived in what is now Milburn. As Lewis Benedikt’s friend, Otto -- a German immigrant -- tells him, ghost stories are, “very American sort[s] of stories,” because, “everyone in [them] is haunted . . . and that, my 31 31 friend, is echt Amerikanisch [real American]” (375). However, for the purposes of this analysis, I will be looking at the haunting in Ghost Story in a much smaller, more personal sense, at the level of an individual’s psychology and its relationship with the psychology of others, and of the Other. While I absolutely believe that entire cultures can be collectively haunted, I also believe that, ultimately, haunting is a very personal, intimate experience. In fact, Alma Mobley herself tells Don, “I have lived since the times when your continent was lighted only by small fires in the forest, since Americans dressed in hides and feathers, and even then our kinds abhorred each other” (469). And, of course, this is true; human beings have always been haunted. Haunting is not something particular to modern American culture: “[t]he world is not just haunted in contained spaces; it is haunted everywhere” (Collins 215). Experience marks all of us, and thus we cannot help but be haunted. To be haunted is to be human. That is why Collins’s conclusion that Don’s ghost is the illusion that his self, or that any of our selves actually exist autonomously is the part of his analysis which rings truest for me. The essence of Ghost Story is contained in the words that are spoken to Don by his ghost: “I am you.” These words and their variations (“I am a ghost,” “you are a ghost”) are used at a few moments throughout the novel as signals of Don’s dawning understanding that his ghost is not a wholly external force. However, even when Don is explicitly told this, he still fights against this realization. He still clings desperately to his sense of certainty that he is an autonomous self, rather than an amalgamation of selves. Kristeva writes that when one confronts the abject, “the subject is swallowed up [by the Other] . . . but the Other, in return, keeps the subject from foundering by making it repugnant” (Powers of Horror 9). So, the subject is consumed by its haunting, yet is still in terror of it, thus keeping the subject from ever truly knowing itself; if I am consumed by something that I nevertheless keep at a distance, then who am I? I am, “a 32 32 stray . . . on a journey during the night, the end of which keeps receding” (235). Straub himself has said that, “most of the central figures in [his] stories have denied or forgotten some crucial and determining event that still boils and smokes inside them” (Tibbets 5-6). And of course, that speaks directly to Don Wanderley on his strange, doomed trip through the American South and deeper inside his own haunt. Then again, this idea of someone constantly on the run from themselves is indicative of Don’s character throughout the novel, only becoming most pronounced in its final pages. Even his name, Wanderley, suggests this. Don cannot seem to become too comfortable with any person or place, or if he does begin to feel comfortable, he must immediately leave, or otherwise end the connection which brings the comfort. Don does not want to be haunted. We see this beginning with his relationship to Alma Mobley. While Don is teaching at Berkeley, he begins a relationship with Alma Mobley. It is interesting to note the difference between Alma and Helen, the woman with whom Don had been in a relationship before Alma. Don had been seeing his colleague, Helen, romantically, although he is quite often aware of the fact that he does not really feel any sense of connection with her. He is not attracted to Helen because he perceives her as so completely mundane, yet he continues seeing her because it is more “expedient,” than to stop, and because he believes that she shares his lack of commitment to their relationship. This lack makes the relationship easier for Don to deal with, but we, as the audience uninhibited by the particular vanity of Don’s psyche, realize rather quickly that his perceptions are self-centered and unrealistic. Don tells us that it felt, “as if there were no emotion at all between [them],” and only moments later, Helen’s roommate confronts Don, telling him that he is breaking Helen’s heart, to which he is incredulous. This is one of the first clear moments revealing Don’s unreliability as a narrator. After the confrontation between Helen’s roommate and Don, during which he holds her and the idea that he could be at fault in complete contempt, Helen herself tells Don that she has, 33 33

“been unhappy whenever [she hasn’t] been with [him]” (209). Don ends their relationship shortly thereafter. The human connection which Helen wants is a threat to Don’s own vague sense of self. This keeps him from empathizing with Helen, or her roommate for that matter, and it keeps him from seeing reality, indeed prevents him from living in a shared reality with Helen, or any other human being. This inability to share reality with other human beings is quite literally brought to life in the form of Alma Mobley, and we can see this in the way that Straub introduces her to Don. Shortly after arriving at Berkeley, Don is walking with Helen, trying to comfort her, placing his hand on her shoulder at the moment when Alma Mobley first appears to him. The coincidence of Don’s physical connection with Helen with his first vision of Alma Mobley is a fascinating moment. As soon as Don begins to feel a sort of connection to Helen, the ghost appears: “as we were going down the stairs together, Helen carrying a huge worn briefcase straining with books and essays, me carrying only The House of the Seven Gables, a tall freckled blonde girl [Alma] slipped between us”

(206). There are numerous moments in which Don describes Helen’s practical, academic nature and his own feeling of displacement in academia, often in much more denigrating terms. But this brief description speaks volumes. Helen is weighed down by her books, her briefcase is “worn” by the strain of all of the books and essays. However limited Don’s perception may be, I think it is safe to assume that he is right in his perception of Helen as someone who belongs in academia. Helen is, “stern about literature . . . her interests were in Scots-contemporaries of Chaucer and linguistic analysis” (204-205). This seems like a bit of a University English department in-joke, Straub being an academic himself, but anybody who is a part of that crowd would probably tell you that someone who describes themselves as “interested” in a field as specific as Scots contemporaries of Chaucer, and whose most recent “great read” was Wayne Booth’s, The 34 34

Rhetoric of Irony, is certainly meant to be an academic. Helen is grounded. She knows what she wants and she is consciously, practically working towards it.

Don, on the other hand, feels completely out of place in academia. Here, as in most other parts of his life, he is lost, with no fixed place, and being with someone like Helen who has such a clearly defined sense of self and purpose scares Don because he has become comfortable with being lost, with having no clear sense of self, and he does not see this reflected in Helen. Don is afraid of connecting with a real person, and thus he is afraid of being a real person, which is why he can only have a relationship with an illusion, a ghost. The parallels between what I am trying to do with my analysis of Don’s character, the rhetorical listening or ethics of care advocated by feminist rhetoricians, and Kristeva’s vigilant listening are striking. About her way of working with patients during psychoanalysis, Kristeva writes, perhaps you are obsessed by figments of your imagination, figures of your

desire, stimulating enough to be exhausting, gloomy enough to be depressing. The analyst never looks upon symptoms and fantasies as aberrations but instead sees them as truths of the speaking subject, even if to cool judgment they seem to be delusions. I take them seriously, then, but as references to the past; by reviving them in therapy, I immolate them (In the Beginning Was Love 7) Like Kristeva sincerely listening to the delusions of her patients, if we are to understand this story, we must listen vigilantly to Don’s delusions, and not dismiss them as merely hallucinatory, although they are surely that, as well. “We are here confronted with ‘the omnipotence of thought,’ which, in order to constitute itself, invalidates the arbitrariness of signs and the autonomy of reality as well and places them both under the sway of fantasies . . .” (Strangers to Ourselves 186). In Don Wanderley’s mind, and in 35 35 the mind of anybody experiencing the feeling of haunting, the ghost is absolutely real, and thus interactions with it have very real consequences. And this is what Straub presents us with in this scene: the absolute reality, for Don, of the haunt which disconnects him from Helen and from humanity. The second time that Alma appears is directly after Don realizes that Helen does care for him; in the moment when he is forced to acknowledge Helen’s humanity, his mind immediately disconnects from Helen and focuses on Alma instead. There is nothing seemingly supernatural about either of these appearances by Alma; they are, in fact, completely mundane, and this is what gives the moments such vibrancy when the reader considers that these moments are, in some ways, the beginning of Don’s ghost story. Straub takes the psychological and makes it wholly, physically real, just as Kristeva tried to do with her patients. Part of the reason why Don is attracted to Alma is because of what he initially calls her “spiritual blurriness.” He feels that she has been, “lightly touched by life.” To Don, she is almost like a blank slate; she is strange and mysterious, whereas Helen was, to him, painfully normal. Unlike Helen’s humanity, Alma’s ‘spiritual blurriness’ provides a mirror in which Don can see himself reflected. Don doesn’t know much about Alma, even after their relationship has ended, and while they are together he is often unable to read her. This lack of definition is what Don wants. It allows him to objectify her. He does not have to connect with Alma as a human being because, at least at first, she is not a real human being in Don’s eyes. She is just a spiritual blur which reflects the same blurriness of his own self, and so he is able to continue wandering, never truly looking at another human being or at himself. Don is afraid of standing still, figuratively speaking, and so it is fitting that the climactic moment of his relationship with Alma takes place in a fictionalized version of what seems like Napa Valley, California, which Straub names Still Valley. It is here that the trouble in their relationship begins, as Don sees it. He first begins to have misgivings 36 36 about their relationship when Alma reveals that she is haunted by the ghost of a former lover, Tasker. She tells Don that they are, “in touch . . . constantly,” and when he is visibly unsettled by this, she advises him to, “just think of Tasker as though he were a part of [her]” (231-232). Alma literally uses the language of interdividuality to describe her experience of haunting. Don reacts the way most people probably would to something like this, but for Alma, this is a very normal thing. This is just a part of her life, because she loved this person, and he is a part of her. I see this as a very human moment for Alma; she has allowed herself to be marked by her experiences, she has truly looked into the face of another human being, and she carries traces of them within her. Don, for these exact reasons, sees her haunting as his first sign that things might be over. He immediately begins to abjectify her: “In part, [he] was fascinated by all this . . . but it was also creepy.” The signs continue for Don in Still Valley where Alma quickly settles into their cottage: “I thought she had adapted to the house in some uncanny fashion, had subtly altered from the student of Virginia Woolf to a suburban wife: suddenly I could see her stocking up on chip-dip at the supermarket . . . the sentences about how we would live after our marriage became essays” (236). This vision of domesticity horrifies Don. It is no coincidence that it is this very night that he begins to think of Alma as a ghost. The more mundane, the more human Alma seems, the more unreal she is to him, the less interest he has in her. Finding out that Alma has been so affected by a former lover, and that she has envisioned a future for her and Don, are signs of her humanity. This brings back the fear of connection that drove Don away from Helen, the lack of which had previously made him so comfortable with Alma. Don is afraid of being haunted, so he avoids human connection. One night, while they are in Still Valley, Don tells us that he awakes to find Alma looking out the window, who then says, “I saw a ghost,” although 37 37 he also confides that he is not sure whether that was truly what she said or if it was, in fact, “I am a ghost” (238).

Even though the relationship with Alma ends soon after the trip to Still Valley, Don has already been marked, transformed by her. He is haunted by her memory, yet like Clive Barker’s Helen in, “The Forbidden,” he does not understand this. He sees her as an abject horror, a malevolent being hell-bent on his destruction as well as that of his entire family and the old men back in Milburn. I believe it is more probable that she is just a woman, who Don loved but never really knew, because he only ever romanticized her. To Don, Alma was always just a story even before she became a horror story. And after she vanishes from his life, he is understandably distraught by the remnants of this person, who is now a part of him, but who he still does not know. He has become dejected. The head fills with phantoms: The deject is, in short, a stray. He is on a journey during the night, the end of which keeps receding. He has a sense of the danger, of the loss that the

pseudo-object attracting him represents for him, but he cannot help taking the risk at the very moment he sets himself apart [from the abject]. (Powers of Horror 8) As if Don were trying to be his own Kristevan psychoanalyst, he revives his ghosts in the form of the novels he writes. However, he never truly reconciles himself with these ghosts because, as he acknowledges, “when [he] fictionalized [the facts about Alma, he] inevitably sensationalized them, and in doing so falsified [his] own memories” (203). So he has only further abjectified Alma in his memory, intensifying his confusion. Because he has never truly come to terms with his own haunting, Don continues on this journey through the night, chasing his ghost, until it very nearly consumes him. Like Helen in, “The Forbidden,” Don has been marked by his experience with Alma, but he never understood her. The traces of her self are now a part of Don’s self, so he is haunted but he 38 38 still doesn’t understand why. Instead of acknowledging his irrevocable connection to Alma, Don creates stories in which he turns her into a malevolent, inhuman force. But

Kristeva also said, about the deject pursuing the abject, that, “the more he strays, the more he is saved” (Powers of Horror 8). We can see that this is not true in every case, like in, “The Forbidden,” for instance, but this does seem to mirror Don’s journey in the novel. As Don spends more and more time with his ghosts, he begins to understand their true nature. He reflects on that night on Still Valley, and now believes that what Alma said was neither, “I saw a ghost,” or, “I am a ghost,” but, “You are a ghost” (429). This is, in the chronological timeline of the story, the first signal that Don is beginning to truly perceive the reality of the situation in which he is entangled. Although at this moment Don does realize that the, “unhappy perception at the center of every ghost story,” is that we, ourselves, are the ghosts, this realization does not keep him from chasing after his projections of his ghosts. Like Kristeva’s deject, Don is only able to emerge back into the world of the living by first going as far as he can into the world of his ghosts. In the sequence which frames the novel, but which comes last chronologically, Don is given his final signal. He has kidnapped a young girl named Angie Maule (although he is never quite sure about that, either) who he believes to be the newest incarnation of Eva Galli, Alma Mobley, the Manitou. When he persistently prompts her to say who she really is, she finally tells him the truth: “I am you” (26). Don replies, “No. I am me. You are you,” but the girl insists, “I am you.” This is the ultimate horror for Don. It is the realization that he is not an individual separate from all other individuals, that his self is not autonomous but completely dependent on the selves of others. It is the realization that he has been irrevocably marked by his experiences, by his connections with other human beings. In keeping with Don’s character, he runs away from this realization as fast as he can. 39 39

Don goes further down the rabbit hole of his consciousness, until we are caught up in a disturbingly surreal succession of encounters with a variety of manifestations of the ghosts which haunt Don. Don is on the brink of being wholly consumed by the phantoms he has created in his imagination. All he has been doing is listening to his ghosts, and not living in reality. Straub signals Don’s re-emergence into reality with small concrete details, like Don seeing the dividing lines on the road, and gasping for air. John Clute, who has written extensively on all manner of fantasy literature, calls this the moment of Recognition, a feature which he feels is crucial to, “full fantasy texts” (241). According to Clute, this is the moment when, “the characters in the drama abandon denial, when they begin to shed the amnesia that had been cloaking them . . . Suddenly, they remember who they are . . . They see the Land whole, which itself begins to Return to them” (241-242). Don’s moment of Recognition is represented by a rain shower slashing through his hallucinations. When Don sees the rain, and the lines in the road, when he, “see[s] the Land whole,” he overturns the car he is driving, killing Dr.

Rabbitfoot, who then transforms into a wasp. It is significant to note the way that Don ultimately kills the wasp, though: he closes his fist over it, and stabs his hand repeatedly until the wasp is dead. He has to mangle his own hand, the thing he writes with, tells stories with, in order to destroy the ghost that has been threatening to consume him. Don has to stop telling stories and live in this reality, which, in the end, he seems ready to do, feeling, “a wave of love for everything mortal, for everything with a definite life span – a tenderness for all that could give birth and would die, everything that could live . . . in sunshine” (567).

CHAPTER 4: CONCLUSION

Beside a garden wall, When stars are bright You are in my arms

The nightingale Tells his fairytale Of paradise, where roses grew

Though I dream in vain In my heart, it will remain My stardust melody The memory of love’s refrain

We have to make up stories about ourselves, each other, and the world around us. Creating these stories is a significant part of how we manage our perceptions of reality. So, if we must create stories out of everything we know, then we must try our best to be honest with ourselves about what and who we have known. We need to keep in mind, as best as we possibly can, the reality of the Other and keep from either idealizing or demonizing. Romanticism does us more harm than good. Yet so many of us have an urge to romanticize people and things, particularly when they seem either horrific or beautiful. I wholly empathize with Helen in, “The Forbidden,” and the way that she romanticizes the horror of the Spector Street Estate. Even though I believe that the story is a warning to all of us who have a tendency to romanticize darkness, it is also a very romantic story about storytelling. I mean, whatever you might think about the horror of it, I don’t think the romanticism of a story where telling stories makes stories come alive can be denied. In a way, “The Forbidden,” is partly a love-letter to stories, and to haunting. Yes, Helen is ultimately consumed by her haunting, and I do not believe that Clive Barker is advocating for this, but between Helen and Trevor, who survives, she is clearly the one he would like us to identify with. Helen, misguided though she may be, at least tries to make a connection with something outside of herself and ends up haunted, whereas 41 41

Trevor makes no attempt to empathize with anyone, which is why Helen, “despair[s] of ever seeing a haunted look in his dull eyes” (20). Even at the end of the story, as Helen dies in the Candyman’s embrace, as she wills Trevor to see her in the fire, to give him, “something to be haunted by,” he fails to notice. It seems Barker is saying that we have the choice between either being aloof and disconnected, or to be consumed by haunting. While I don’t think those are the only options, I’ll choose haunted over aloof anyday. While Ghost Story is, in many ways, a cautionary tale, as well, there is more possibility for hope than in, “The Forbidden.” In both stories, the triumph of darkness is illustrated by the living protagonists becoming ghosts themselves. However, in Ghost Story, three of the central characters survive, while in, “The Forbidden,” our protagonist is destroyed by her ghost. Helen is consumed by her haunting while Straub’s protagonist’s learn ways to better manage their hauntings. Although the final pages of Ghost Story do still leave it up to the reader to decide whether Don has truly learned a healthy way to live with his ghosts, or if he will create new ghosts with which to continue terrorizing himself. I like the idea that Don destroying his hand is symbolic of his need to stop writing the novels which objectify his ghosts and dominate his conscience. But then, that reading might imply that we need to stop telling stories in order to live with our ghosts, and this isn’t true at all. Writing about the evolutionary benefits of making stories from trauma, David Sloan Wilson says, Once an experience has structure and meaning, it would follow that the emotional effects of that experience are more manageable. Constructing stories facilitates a sense of resolution, which results in less rumination and eventually allows disturbing experiences to subside gradually from conscious thought. Painful events that are not structured into a narrative form may contribute to the continued experience of negative thoughts and feelings. (31) 42 42

We need to tell ghost stories, so that we can live with our ghosts without being consumed by them. But before we can tell honest ghost stories, which do not objectify our ghosts, we need to look at our ghosts, and listen to them, putting our egos aside as much as we can. And it is difficult to do this. When we confront our ghosts, we look into the face of the infinite, we are confronted with the totality of our existence, in all of its beauty and its terror. No, I think the destruction of Don’s hand is symbolic of a need to stop telling a certain kind of story, but not to stop telling stories completely. Straub clearly knows too much about the importance of storytelling to give quite so cynical of a message. In an interview, Straub once said that when confronting fear through a story, “it can be the cause of panic, dread, tension . . . but also of a very great joy, a kind of bliss that comes from the sense of being able, for a moment, to perceive the actual condition of the world” (Brock-Servais par. 2). This idea, of being able, through the lens of a horror story, to, “perceive the actual condition of the world,” is key to understanding Straub’s work, and the genre of the ghost story in general. The ghost story is trying to tell us about our existence. Like Levinas looking into the Face of the Other, looking into the face of the ghost is looking into infinity, seeing everything for what it is, for a moment. However, unlike Levinas, Straub does not seem to be seeking a sense of transcendence but rather of immanence. For Levinas, “the Other remains infinitely transcendent, infinitely foreign,” and I understand the urge to think this way, because the infinite is largely incomprehensible (194). But when we think about the Other as being transcendent, we are falling into the same trap of objectifying the Other, which will only lead to being consumed by ghosts. The Other is not on some different plane of existence from the Self; the Other permeates the Self and the Self permeates the Other, in a never-ending feedback loop. 43 43

Looking into the Face of the Other, Levinas’s ‘epiphany of infinity,’ should not be thought of as transcendent. It is only when we think of our selves as preceding our connection with the Other that the epiphany of infinity seems transcendent. When we recognize that there is no I without You, then we see that it would be more accurate to say that the Face of the Other is immanent rather than transcendent. The epiphany of infinity permeates our lives completely. It haunts us, always. But even though it is necessary to see this, a human being cannot exist in the infinite. This realization, like any haunting, can consume us if we don’t pull back to the more manageable perspective of the I, of the Self. Indeed, in Levinas’s words, “egoism is founded on the infinitude of the Other” (216). It is only through confronting infinity, looking into the face of the ghost and then stepping back into the present to create a story about the infinite, that we discover our selves. Or maybe it isn’t entirely the present we return to, but somewhere between the past and the present. “One cannot live in the pure present: it would consume us if care were not taken that it is overcome quickly and thoroughly. But in pure past, one can live: in fact, only there can a life be arranged” (Buber 86). For Buber, living wholly in the present would be like living in the infinite. The present is the sublime moment when you see things as they truly are, Don’s moment of Recognition, and too much sublimity is overwhelming, so we must, according to Buber, live in the past, as well, and necessarily more often than we live in the present. To tell our ghost stories honestly, we must live where time is partially collapsed. And we are back to, “Stardust.” The past does exist in the present, what is far away is also near, what seems separate never really is, and our ghosts never are completely gone.

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