GHOST NOVELS: HAUNTING AS FORM IN THE WORKS OF TONI MORRISON, DON DELILLO, MICHAEL ONDAATJE, AND J.M. COETZEE By JAEEUN YOO A Dissertation submitted to the Graduate School-New Brunswick Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Graduate Program in English Written under the direction of Marianne DeKoven and approved by ____________________________ ____________________________ ____________________________ ____________________________ New Brunswick, New Jersey October 2009 ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION Ghost Novels: Haunting as Form in the Works of Toni Morrison, Don DeLillo, Michael Ondaatje, and J. M. Coetzee by JAEEUN YOO Dissertation Director: Marianne DeKoven This dissertation examines formal innovations in contemporary novels that revise the way reading happens. Reading recent works by Toni Morrison, Don DeLillo, Michael Ondaatje and J.M. Coetzee, I show how these innovative novelists utilize the very impossibility of properly representing others as a narrative device. I argue that the novelists design their works in such a way that reading them becomes an encounter with ghosts that confront the reader. My introductory chapter discusses the use of ghost figures in post-structuralist thought and traces their usefulness back to the Enlightenment. In the first part of the dissertation, I analyze two American novels, Love and The Body Artist to consider the influence of postmodern spectrality that emerges from reproduction of images. The phantom narrator of Love discloses and overthrows the distorted representation of African American women by inviting the reader to witness the ―murder‖ of the Father‘s spirit. Chapter Three proposes that The Body Artist performs a haunting that is marked with the ghostly traces of tele-technologies. By incarnating the specter that comes out of the internet ii on the body of the protagonist, DeLillo attempts to instill in his novel the subversive potential of what escapes visual representation: the body and the spirit. In the second part of my dissertation, I turn to postcolonial fictions to investigate how similar narrative strategies transform the representation of none-western others. My reading of Anil’s Ghost reveal that its convoluted narrative functions like the spiritual ritual it depicts—by suggesting alternative ways to become perceptive to others, it forces the reader to experience the void and grief the disappeared leave behind. In my final chapter I argue that an authorial ghost in Slow Man highlights fissures in the text, including the individual histories of Australian immigrants. Through my analysis of these texts, I demonstrate how these writers seek to return what has been forgotten or dismissed to disturb the reader‘s comfortable and safe reading space with the ―real‖ power of ghosts. Their ghosts break out of the world of phantoms, paradoxically representing the corporeality of others and traversing the border between the book and the reader. iii Acknowledgement Early versions of the chapters in this dissertation were presented at University of Karlstad, the Northeast Modern Language Association conference, and the American Comparative Literature Association conference. I would like to thank my hosts and the audiences on all of those occasions. Parts of the first and the second have appeared in other forms: ―"The Site of Murder: Textual Space and Ghost Narrator in Toni Morrison‘s Love" in Space, Haunting, Discourse ed. Maria Holmgren Troy, Elisabeth Wennö (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), and "A Ghost Book Haunting Itself: Performing Return in The Body Artist" in Perforations 29 (2007). I like to thank my committee members, Richard Dienst, John McClure and Louise Barnett, for their discerning comments, insightful questions, and emotional support. I could not have written this dissertation if it were not for Marianne DeKoven, who have led me intellectually and emotionally from its inception to its completion. I am deeply grateful to her. My warm thanks to my friends and colleagues for their scholarly help and friendly support during various stages of writing this dissertation: Sanja Bahun, Heather Robinson, Malgi Choi, Ji-yeon Lee, Leslie Dovale, Soo Yeon Lee, Sungyeon Park, and Jung-hyun Choi. I thank my husband, Eun-Gu Baik, for his love, trust, and encouragement. He fills my work and life with meaning and hope. I should also like to thank my parents for their inexhaustible love, patience and prayer that have sustained me through all these years. Finally, God, as imperfect as it might be, I dedicate this work to You. I owe everything to You. “Ego sum, nolite timere” iv Table of Contents Abstract ii Acknowledgement iv Introduction 1 Chapter 1 29 Chapter 2 96 Chapter 3 133 Chapter 4 133 Bibliography 169 Curriculum Vita 182 v 1 Introduction If it—learning to live—remains to be done, it can happen only between life and death. Neither in life nor in death alone. What happens between two, and between all the ―two‘s‖ one likes, such as between life and death, can only maintain itself with some ghost, can only talk with or about some ghost. (Specters of Marx xvii) Ghosts of the Enlightenment In the climax scene of the horror movie The Ring, a cursed video tape plays itself. On a TV screen that turns on by itself, a female ghost crawls out of an old well, and continues to come toward the camera until it comes out of the screen and approaches its viewers1. The next day, people who watched the tape are found dead. The horror effect of the movie The Ring is a classic example of the uncanny; the border between what is real and what is spectral is so violently disturbed that the spectator, encountering the ghost through the viewer‘s eyes, experiences the simulacra, the ghostly images on the TV screen, as ―real.‖ At yet at the same time, it bears a peculiarly postmodern twist; its female ghost emerges from and haunts an electronic zone consisted of videotapes and TV screens, and the ghost‘s demand is not justice, nor remembrance, but endless reproduction of the videotapes. Thus the movie The Ring simultaneously inherits and deforms the legacy of the Enlightenment. While the dichotomy of the unreal and the real—‗the unreal‘ is the images on the screen and ‗the real‘ refers to everything outside the screen—is the legacy of the Enlightenment, the female ghost that crawls out of a TV screen with real killing power 1 Originally from a Japanese novel, Ringu, the scene has held the popular imagination so strongly that it resulted in three variations of the movie (Japan, 1998, Korea, 1999, Hollywood, 2002), two serial movies, and numerous parodies on both sides of the globe. 2 signifies a desire to resist and revise it. The same contradictory impulse conditions the structures of the novels that I discuss in my dissertation. As is well known, Freud defines the ―uncanny‖ as a feeling of ‗dread and creeping horror‘ that arises when ‗infantile complexes which have been repressed are once more revived by some impression, or when the primitive beliefs which have been surmounted is seen once more to be confirmed (245).‖ Employing this concept as a historical paradigm, Terry Castle argues that the uncanny was ―invented‖ by the Enlightenment: The very psychic and cultural transformations that led to the subsequent glorification of the period as an age of reason or enlightenment—the aggressively rationalist imperatives of the epoch—also produced, like a kind of toxic side effect, a new human experience of strangeness, anxiety, bafflement, and intellectual impasse (Castle 8). Modern systems of reasoning, generated in the Enlightenment period, inevitably create an unseen realm beyond knowledge. In metaphorical terms, the ―light‖ of the Enlightenment creates ―darkness‖ by banishing what cannot be rationalized, drawing a clear boundary between the ‗real‘ and the ‗unreal.‘ Inexplicable phenomena are internalized as mental problems, and the unreal gets ―repressed,‖ setting off uncanny returns in the future. It is not a coincidence, then, that Freud‘s description of the uncanny in ―The Uncanny‖ resembles that of a phantom, emerging out of unconscious darkness. In Freud‘s schematization, an archaic fantasy or fear, long ago exiled to the unconscious, nonetheless ‗returns to view‘ in a distorted and disguised form; the uncanny is a psychoanalytic term for the return of the ghosts that are evicted to a realm that exceeds theorization. The essay ―The Uncanny‖ displays a wide variety of uncanny figures, all of which intrude on 3 ordinary life, making what was hidden visible. They are uncanny precisely because they subvert the distinction between the real and the unreal, and for the same reason, they are read as symptoms of the fragmented modern subjectivity. Yet the essay ―The Uncanny‖ notoriously fails to elicit an unambiguous definition of the uncanny. According to Hèlene Cixous, Freud‘s mistake in the essay lies in his attempt to substitute the uncanny with the fear of castration in his effort to analyze what is not analyzable by definition. Consequently, Freud reduces the uncanny into a set of controllable referents that are not necessarily relevant. This replacement results in the problematic uncertainty of the essay ―The Uncanny‖ itself (546). Interestingly, Cixous traces fictional devices in ―The Uncanny‖ as the essay attempts to represent the uncanny. In other words, the essay ―The Uncanny‖ itself almost reads like a parable of the Enlightenment. Consequently, Freudian psychoanalysis provides insightful tools in illuminating the fragmentizing impact of the Enlightenment uncanny on human mind. In the following chapters, I first focus on analyzing the characters‘ traumatized psyche in psychoanalytic terms. In the process, it is often discovered that the authors encourage their readers to identify with the troubled selves of the characters in order to let them see that they share the same prejudice or trauma that possess the characters.