Ghostly Encounters

Cultural and Imaginary Representations of the Spectral from the Nineteenth Century to the Present

Mark Sandy, Stefano Cracolici, Mark Sandy, Stefano Cracolici

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000295474
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Collections
• Index: Literature

This volume reflects on the ghostly and its varied manifestations including the uncanny, the revenant, the echo, and other forms of artistic allusion. These unsettling presences of the spectral other occur in literature, history, film, and art. The ghostly (and its artistic, literary, filmic, and cultural representations) remains of burgeoning interest and debate to twenty-first century literary critics, cultural historians, art historians, and linguists. Our collection of essays considers the wider implications of these representations of the ghostly and notions of the spectral to define a series of different, but inter-related, cultural topics (concerned with questions of ageing, the uncanny, the spectral, spiritualism, eschatology), which imaginatively testify to our compulsion to search for evidence of the ghostly in our everyday encounters with the material world.

1Introduction – The Lady Vanishes

Searching for Evidence of the Ghostly

Stefano Cracolici and Mark Sandy

The Rise of Spiritualism

August 21st, 1911. A small portrait of little renown outside of art circles hangs in a Renaissance gallery of the Louvre. After the museum locks its doors, a handyman, Vincenzo Peruggia, recently hired to help construct the painting’s glass case, lifts it off its hook, removes the wooden panel from its frame, and carefully wraps it in a cloth. The next morning, he walks out in broad daylight with the Mona Lisa tucked under his arm. An entire day passes before anyone notices Leonardo’s masterpiece of the enigmatic lady is missing – then she hits the headlines, and almost overnight her name is uttered in every household. The painting has vanished, and the police are left without clues. A multitude of visitors flocks to the museum to stare at the blank wall. Mona Lisa has become the most wanted woman in the world. She left the Louvre as a work of art – she was to return as an icon (Sassoon 2003).

The investigation stagnated. Towards the end of the month, the Parisian newspaper Le Matin launched an unorthodox campaign offering five thousand francs to those ‘occultists, somnambulists, chiromantists, etc., who, via otherworldly means, would help find the Mona Lisa’.¹ The following day the editors were inundated with letters and spiritualist reports. A Mme Filine revealed that a blond woman was involved; Mme Loni-Feignez pointed towards three men, two small and one tall, who were responsible for removing the painting from the wall, acting under the influence of the other two; Mme Berthe maintained, surprisingly accurately, that the theft was performed by a foreign person with auburn hair, recently employed by the museum – the painting would already be outside France, perhaps, in Germany, placed in a dark tomb.² The most dazzling report saw a medium invoking the spirit of Leonardo himself, according to whom the panel had already reached the United States (Le Naour 2012, quoted in Galluzzi 2017, 120–21).

The case was not solved until 1913. In 1912, Eva Carrière (born Marthe Beraud), ‘the most controversial physical medium of the early twentieth century’, who would pass through a series of medical investigations conducted by Charles Richet because of her rare gift of materialisation (Buckland 2006, 131), produced an ectoplasm with Mona Lisa’s features (Bozzano 1967, 116). Years later, Aleister Crowley (born Edward Alexander Crowley), founder of the new occultist religion of Thelema (Bogdan 2015), supposed retrospectively that ‘the thieves who stole the “Gioconda” from the Louvre were probably disguised as workmen, and stole the picture under the very eye of the guardian’ – for Crowley, this concealment was not the result of skilful camouflage but of the so-called ‘power of invisibility’, a distinct feature of the authentic magus (1973, 30).³ The fanciful reconstructions of the case found in many occultist reports, Crowley maintained, were due to the ‘failure to employ the correct medium’ (132).

The theft of the Mona Lisa captures perfectly the interdisciplinary melange in which the spiritualist discourse was embedded across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In this period, which saw the creation and establishment of new scientific disciplines, those systems of knowledge that could not fit within the mesh of sciences – be they natural, social, or human – were relegated either to the fantastic realm of art and poetry or to the hidden one of esoterism. The ‘occultistes, somnambules, chiromanciens’ that Le Matin summoned as informants to offer clues on the whereabouts of the vanished Mona Lisa were all enlisted as practitioners of the ‘au-delà’. The intensified trade with the afterlife paralleled the increasing professionalisation of society – as ‘ceux qui savent… ceux qui voient’ (‘those who know… those who see…’) the operators of such new professions were constantly asked to provide scientific evidence to prove the truth of their various ghostly encounters.

In an epoch that witnessed the gradual secularisation of society and the rise of a new faith in scientific progress, the spiritualist community embodied the Unknown, and as such could be consulted, as modern oracles or sybils, for solving forensic and very material riddles. It is not by chance that the most authoritative voices in the field were people hitherto relegated to the margin of the academic territory – women from the Southern Mediterranean (Eva Carrière was from Algeria and Eusapia Paladino was Neapolitan; both were studied by the French physiologist Charles Richet); obscure initiates from Eastern Europe (the Russian Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, for instance, and the Armenian Georges Ivanovič Gurdjieff); or followers of the Cabbala or Hindu religions (Eliphas Lévi or Yogi Ramacharaka). The spiritualist wave that hit Europe and the States from the second half of the nineteenth century contributed to opening up new avenues of scientific enquiry and acted as a rich reservoir of images and ideas to feed the literary, artistic and then filmic avant-gardes’ (Leeder 2015).

In the introduction to his monumental work on the spiritualist activity of medium Eusapia Paladino, the psychiatrist Enrico Morselli announced in 1908 that the spiritualists numbered already ‘12–14 millions disseminated in all civilized countries’. The profile of those who believed in spiritualism, he wrote, was particularly diffuse (‘diffusissimo’) in Europe and the United States, comprising mostly members of the middle and high classes but also a large part of the proletariat. Many spiritualist circles were founded and the publications they printed to popularise the ‘spiritualist doctrines’ (‘dottrine spiritiche’) were countless. Several international congresses were convened to discuss the phenomenon, and it was difficult to find rooms large enough to welcome their enthusiastic audiences (‘Si radunano Congressi nazionali e internazionali, ed accolgono adesioni entusiastiche da ogni parte, e non trovano aule abbastanza spaziose per le loro frequentatissime assemblee’). At this moment fundraising campaigns to support the investigation into the Unknown were especially successful (1908, 10–11).

Serious intellectual engagement with this body of beliefs began when the London Dialectical Society created a special commission to investigate spiritualism in 1869. Evidence was provided on the psychic phenomena ‘of trance-speaking, of healing, of automatic writing, of the introduction of flowers and fruits into closed rooms, of voices in the air, of visions in crystals and glasses, and of the elongation of the human body’, reaching the conclusion that the attested ‘absence of any proof of imposture or delusion as regards a large portion of the phenomena […] is worthy of more serious attention and careful investigation than it has hitherto received’ (London Dialectical Society 1871, 5–6). This commission prefigured the foundation in London of the Society for Psychical Research in 1882, whose American branch was directed by William James (Asprem 2015). The Russian Society of Physics had established a similar committee in 1875, with members of the calibre of chemist Dmitri Mendeleev, mathematician Youri Egorov and palaeontologist Vladimir Kovalevsky. In Germany, Wilhelm Wundt and Hermann Ulrici fiercely debated the philosophical question posed by spiritualism on the pages of the Zeitschrift für Philosophie und philosophische Kritik (Sawicki 2017, 302).⁴ Around the same time, in France, the spiritualist forces subtending Jean-Martin Charcot’s studies on hysteria were already transformed into literary and artistic subjects (Marquer 2008; Hustvedt 2012, 3–31).

Encountering the Ghostly

With this historical and scientific background in mind and a focus on the transnational dimension of the spiritualist phenomenon, our volume is alert to how cultural imaginings embody an awareness of the presences of those who are not physically there and exhibit a sensitivity to the ghostly in a bid to construct our senses of place, of history, and of belonging to a given community. Our critical collection mediates on the ghostly and its representation, including the uncanny, the revenant, the echo, and other forms of artistic allusion. These unsettling presences of the spectral other are registered by our contributors as occurring in literature, history, film, and the history of art. The ghostly (and its artistic, literary, filmic, scientific, theoretical, and cultural representations) remains of burgeoning interest and debate among twenty-first-century literary critics, historians, art historians, and linguists of the nineteenth century, as witnessed most recently in the publication of The Routledge Handbook to the Ghost Story (Brewster and Thurston 2018).

Through a series of diverse chapters on art, literature, and film, with a special attention to their scientific, religious, and philosophical underpinnings, our volume traces the wider implications of these multifarious representations of the ghostly (and notions of the spectral) to better understand a number of different, but inter-related, cultural and historical concerns. These vital concerns in our collection centre on how individuals, histories, and cultures are haunted by an uncanny awareness (or inexplicable feeling) that compels us to search out the ghostly in our everyday life and encounters. Our volume does not pretend to offer a comprehensive account of every instance of cultural and imaginative representation of the ghostly. Instead, through individual cultural and imaginative examples, it attests to the innumerable instances of those imaginative and cultural encounters with the ghostly.

Our initial grouping of chapters explores ‘Romantic and Victorian Encounters with the Ghostly’ in the poetry of Wordsworth, in the Victorian ghost story, and in the nineteenth-century tradition of the German novel. In the first chapter, ‘“Strength in What Remains Behind”: Wordsworth, Spectral Selves, and the Question of Ageing’, Mark Sandy revisits Wordsworth’s poetic fascination with the elderly and their ghostly semblances. Wordsworth’s imaginative impulse, Sandy argues, is to idealise the elderly into transcendent figures, which offer the compensation of a harmonious vision to the younger generation for the losses of old age that, in all likelihood, they will themselves experience. Here Wordsworth’s unfolding tragedy of Michael is interpreted by Sandy as reinforcing a frequent pattern, observed elsewhere in Wordsworth’s poetry, whereby idealised figures of old men transform into disturbingly spectral second selves of their younger counterparts or narrators. These troubling transformations reveal that at the heart of Wordsworth’s poetic vision of old age as a harmonious, interconnected, and consoling state, there are disquieting fears of disunity, disconnection, and disconsolation, as well as a ghostly foreshadowing of death.

Questions then of being and seeming, what might constitute a poetics of semblance, are central to our next chapter, ‘Far More Than a Simple Ghost Story: The Complexity of Algernon Blackwood’s “Chemical” (1926)’, by Mike Pincombe. Taking its point of departure from a pivotal episode in M. R. James’s ‘An Episode in Cathedral History’ (1914), Pincombe offers a subtly detailed examination of the role played by evidence in the English ghost story from M. R. James to Robert Louis Stevenson. Drawing on the more familiar work of Tzvetan Todorov on le fantastique and the less familiar work of Philippe Hamon on le descriptif, Pincombe recognises the importance of the discovery and interpretation of evidence (derived from the Latin videre meaning ‘to see’) to the ghost story as a form, but also the ways in which the genre places the notion of evidence itself under suspicion. Crucial here to this calling into question of the very idea of evidence is the ghost story’s formal and narrative preoccupation with the confusion between being and seeming, realised by evidentia as a rhetorical figure of description often deployed by the genre.

Shifting attention to nineteenth-century Germany, Nicholas Saul concludes this section by examining the wider cultural ramifications of debates between scientific and religious modes of interpretation and the nature of evidence. With the advent of Darwinism and the triumph of exact science in the latter half of the nineteenth century, Saul notes, German society faced a religious and cultural crisis. In the re-established Empire the received religious truths embodied in the master narrative of the Bible had been usurped by the new master narrative of The Origin of Species, the dethroning of humankind from its supremacy over creation, and the materialistic struggle for existence. In this context, Saul avers that the new American movement of spiritualism answered German needs by seemingly offering objective evidence of spirit interventions and manifestations, so that the demands of science were satisfied, and the cherished doctrines of afterlife could re-emerge in a form apparently legitimated by the new epistemological authority. As Saul demonstrates, what actually emerged was desire – the desire to deny loss and replace the lost in a newly threatening world. In a series of late nineteenth-century Wilhelmine novels the cult of the spirit was gradually unmasked as the need to believe in illusion itself, and that need was eventually identified with an Orphic and Pygmalionic vision of the artist as secular priest and a pre-figuration of modern aestheticism.

Rosina Buckland’s chapter opens our next section, centred on ‘Visual and Material Encounters with the Ghostly’, with an exploration of ‘Visual Representation of Ghosts and Goblins in Early Modern Japan’. Supernatural creatures, Buckland amply illustrates, were inextricably woven into early modern Japanese society. Their forms ranged from benevolent manifestations of sacred beings, through humorous goblins, to malevolent shape-shifters and ghosts. These themes were a mainstay of popular visual culture, theatrical productions, and literature, and while the v...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Information
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on Contributors
• List of Figures
• 1 Introduction – The Lady Vanishes: Searching for Evidence of the Ghostly
• Part I Romantic and Victorian Encounters with the Ghostly
• Part 2 Visual and Material Encounters with the Ghostly
• Part 3 Ghostly Legacies: Modern and Contemporary Encounters
• Index