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Those the Dead Left Behind Gentrification and Haunting in Contemporary Brooklyn Fictions

2019; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 46; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/saf.2019.0005

2158-5806

James Peacock,

Memory, Trauma, and Commemoration

Those the Dead Left BehindGentrification and Haunting in Contemporary Brooklyn Fictions James Peacock (bio) Introduction: Haunting Brooklyn Jonathan Lethem describes Brooklyn as “a place where the renovations that are so characteristic of American life never quite work. It’s a place where the past and memory are lying around in chunks even after they’ve been displaced.”1 What intrigues one about his comments is the imbrication of the material and the abstract or spectral: memory enduring as chunks. This is an essay about hauntings in contemporary Brooklyn fictions: specifically, hauntings caused by changing socioeconomic relations as Brooklyn gentrifies (or attempts to “renovate,” to borrow Lethem’s evocative word). My specific interest is in the supplementarity of the material and spectral realms in gentrification, or, to express it more picturesquely, how the physical chunks depend on the ghosts and the memories and vice versa. Although I refer to many novels published since 2000, the three analyzed in detail are Kate Christensen’s The Astral (2011), Ivy Pochoda’s Visitation Street (2013), and Jacqueline Woodson’s Another Brooklyn (2016). Of these, it is only Pochoda’s that can be called, in any conventional generic sense, a ghost story: characters communicate with the dead, and sections toward the end are narrated from a drowned teenager’s point of view. However, all three might be dubbed ghost stories if one agrees with Avery Gordon that “stories concerning exclusion and invisibilities” are ghost stories and that the ghost is a “social figure” assuming many forms and providing esoteric evidence of social transformations.2 [End Page 131] In gentrification stories, ghosts—whether they take the form of two unfashionable poets “in a hipster bar,” the walls of a waterfront dive “covered with buoys and life preservers,” or pregentrification memories of white families departing for the suburbs—inspire what Gordon calls a “transformative recognition” of the ways in which gentrification’s material processes rely on marginalization and occlusion.3 Numerous studies, including Neil Smith’s The New Urban Frontier (1996), Suleiman Osman’s The Invention of Brownstone Brooklyn (2011) and Peter Moskowitz’s How To Kill a City (2017) have shown this, albeit with widely differing levels of polemic. And countless Brooklyn fictions, from Paula Fox’s biting bourgeois satire Desperate Characters (1970) to recent comedies of Brooklyn motherhood such as Lucinda Rosenfeld’s Class (2017), have depicted the struggles of competing demographics in neighborhoods at various stages of gentrification. Whether framed, like Fox’s, as frontier narratives or, like Kitty Burns Florey’s Solos (2004), as urban picturesques or, like the motherhood comedies, as combinations of the two, these novels, ultimately, all explore power relations and capital’s role in community formation. Haunting is a revealing approach to these issues—and one rarely taken before now—because it complements observations on power and the concrete political, social and economic effects of gentrification. It does so by using literature’s multiple interior perspectives to offer meaningful glimpses of gentrification’s affective and spiritual consequences, phenomena much more difficult to grasp positivistically. This is why Gordon evokes Raymond Williams’s “structure of feeling,” correctly calling it “the most appropriate description of how hauntings are transmitted and received.”4 Structures of feeling are means of conceptualizing complex negotiations between social formations already established and understood and “the kind of feeling and thinking which is indeed social and material, but each in an embryonic phase before it can become fully articulate.”5 In so doing, Williams negotiates a path between institutions defined as external and objective and present, subjective lived experience, thus avoiding “the twin pitfalls of subjectivism and positivism.” If Gordon explores “the structure of feeling that is something akin to what it feels like to be the object of a social totality vexed by the phantoms of modernity’s violence,” then she shares this interest with many contemporary novelists writing on Brooklyn’s gentrification.6 Literature has a special part to play in this, as reading, interpretation, and enjoyment produce a particular affective sociality. Moreover, the novel’s abiding interest in multiple subjectivities and its potential for combining lyricism with ethnography can allow for a nuanced treatment of gentrification in all its messiness and avoid...