Of Ghosts

Growing up in the US, in the Southeast at that, ghosts were, if not humdrum, at least familiar fare. A night growing late might easily come round to spectral stories. If you hadn’t experienced a ghost you knew someone who had or claimed to. Nor did this seem to have any social repercussions of doubts of your sanity or intellect. An apparition did not compromise your respectability, intellectual or otherwise.

Not so France. Or at least the not in Parisian sphere that I know. I had always found it odd, back when I worked for the ministry of culture. In some of the oldest and history-dense buildings in the city, never were wraiths something that came up. If, in my expatriate naiveté I introduced the subject, looks came slant and askance. It must be an American thing, they surmised and dismissed me.

Surely you could argue that we inherit our ghostly inclinations from our British and Irish heritage where apparitions abound. And France had its heritage of the Enlightenment in its most radical forms- not of the Newtonian compromise of the natural and the supernatural for the intellectuals of France. This, for many reasons, but not least because of their longstanding feud with Albion.

It led me to a series of reflections on the nature of national phantoms. What do ghosts do, when we imagine (or experience?) them? They often are pictured at repetitive tasks, digging for a buried treasure, leaping again and again over a castle precipice, walking the grounds of a scene of death. They repeat, incessantly. And what to they repeat? Generally trauma of some kind, a violent death, an unresolved crime, a tragedy.

Live mortal subjects of trauma also repeat things, neurotically, patterns of damaging behavior learned in a childhood or from some shattering event : The sole survivor who flirts with death by means of such hobbies as skydiving and bungee jumping, thereby assuaging his guilt at remaining alive. Or the abused child who grows up and marries an abusive spouse. Repeated behavior is a hallmark of the trauma victim. I know and have often felt like a shade obsessively enacting and re-enacting horrors of my childhood until I unlearned them. The French call this, psychoanalytically, “perlaborer” to work through.

And where do we find the ghosts? Where are hauntings densest and most frequent? For the British Isles I cannot speak. A cursory glance would tell me in castles and abbeys (in some well watered happy hours I did hear about apparitions at Versailles and the Louvre for France) In North America, the scenes are battlegrounds such as Gettysburg, or the trope of the “Old Indian Burying Ground” Scenes again of trauma, a trauma not only of the individual body and mind but that of a whole people, of mass suffering, even of sins committed.

Psyche means “soul” in Greek.

Could ghosts be thanklessly working through collective trauma with ther repetitive perlaborations? Slowly repeating our sins and suffering so that the living might have a chance to heal by learning from the past and so to change the future?

Some recommended reading

“Ghosts of MyYouth” by Jenna Wortham

"The Feminist Powerof Female Ghosts" by Andi Zeisler

Colin Dickey, Ghostland: An American History in Haunted Places, 2016

Edward Parnell, Ghostland :In Search of a Haunted Country, 2019

Books I mean to read:

Arthur Redding, Haints: American Ghosts, Millenial Passions and Contemporary Gothic Fictions, 2011

Caroline Callard, Le Temps des fantômes: spectralité de l’âge moderne (XVIe- XVIIe siècle), 2019