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Article: Phenomenology of the Ghost: Revision in Literary History

1998; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 29; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/nlh.1998.0022

1080-661X

Miguel Tamen,

Phenomenology of the Ghost: Revision in Literary History* Miguel Tamen (bio) Professor Parkins, the protagonist of an all but forgotten ghost story by an all but forgotten ghost-story writer (Mames)unsurprisingly enough sees a ghost. The narrator judiciously concludes: “I gathered that what he chiefly remembers about it is a horrible, an intensely horrible, face of crumpled linen. What expression he read upon it could not or would not tell, but that the fear of it went nigh to maddening him is certain.” 1 A curious thing about the narrator’s stance in the passage above is that he is only certain about the effect of a certain face. What Professor Parkins actually read in that face, the narrator says, is not even a matter of conjecture for him. What Parkins “chiefly remembers” about the ghost is only the event of having seen it (“the fear of it”). From the point of view of Parkins’s own remembrance, he can only testify to an appearance, not to the meaning of what has appeared. In all rigor, in the eye of the terrified beholder, a ghost is even less than an appearance, as appearances are bound to become food for what Kant (a notorious denouncer of ghost seers as well as a contemporary of the rise of the gothic novel) called one’s Understanding; a ghost is an apparition, a force from the past, from which nothing but its incalculable, if invariably unpleasant, effect may follow. Such is, among many others, the version of another little-known early twentieth-century writer Raúl Brandão, who, at the outset of his memoirs, grimly declares that we are simply the prey for images of the dead. Although we “picture ourselves as people who build things, and impose ourselves on things, . . . we only obey the incessant impulse of the dead.” 2 My contention in much of what follows will be that history and history writing are versions of an aspect of this basic predicament, which, apart from the late Freud of Beyond the Pleasure Principle, and the late Marcel of La Fugitive, 3 has survived mainly in ghost stories, namely that of the dissociation between meaning and event, between what we can identify and what we cannot [End Page 295] read. To an appearing ghost we do not ask “What does it mean?” among other things because we do not have the time (an apparition is always either too quick, too powerful, too big, or too small for us to switch into our default hermeneutic mode). What happens when a ghost happens is that, judging from most reliable reports on the matter, one is too frightened by the apparition (even if one can identify it) to ascribe it a meaning. The meager implication of my concerns is that there are some not wholly unrelated puzzles that affect the notion of history writing, which can help us understand why the practice of literary history, while often presenting itself as producing definitive visions of well-established topics, cannot help being a revisionary practice. As the reader might have guessed by now, I will be proposing yet another revision of the notion of “revision.” The only purpose this essay can claim to have, therefore, is that of a momentary dilution of some of the more exuberant hopes for something like a positive literary and historical knowledge. What Is a Ghost? Among the many available classical words for witnessing through contemplation, two are particularly well known and much glossed over: theoria and revisio, which of course led to “theory” and “revision.” Commenting on the use of the first term by John Ruskin in his Modern Painters (“the exulting, reverent, and grateful perception [of pleasantness]”), while acknowledging that there is indeed a link between theory and jubilation, Wlad Godzich emphasizes both the public aspect of theoretical verification, and its relationship with death. “We may recall here,” he writes, “the role of witnesses to the execution of death sentences in the American judicial system.” 4 A theoria, a set of professional witnesses, performs in this case the function of certifying that a certain event has taken place (incidentally without making, or making public, any enquiries as to its...