Abstract
The phenomenology of place can be extraordinarily uncanny, a constantly haunted ground with regard to the neo-Victorian novel. On the one hand, it is ‘haunted’ by the ghosts of the nineteenth century, which era it seeks to rewrite. On the other hand, those neo-Victorian novels which attend to the city in general, and London in particular, become the sites of unsettling epistemological challenges. The questions arise: How and in what ways do writers of the neo-Victorian re-imagine the representation and perception of London in their novels? How are the modes of representation different? This essay argues that Neo-Victorian representations of the city present a place made of ghosts, of absence, and difference. The second part of the chapter turns to other aspects of neo-Victorian haunting than the city. The image of an undead past that returns in revenant form recurs in contemporary historical novels. Extend the notion of spectrality to the process of reading the past more generally. Casting the text as a ‘silent witness’, I focus on fiction’s potential to animate in phantasmic form voices silenced by the historical record. Here, through the question of re-presentation of the past, I investigate the ethical responsibilities of reading historical representation.
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Notes
- 1.
Though implicitly obvious, there is a distinction to be made between the concept of space and that of place. The distinction is one that philosophers have sought to make as far back as the fifth century, if not before. The arguments and complexities of those arguments are many and varied, but the Greek quasi-concept of chora, though naming neither anything sensible nor intelligible, defines in particular extension of space that makes room for, and gives form to things. Space is thus comprehensible as extension or diastema. Diastaseis, on the other hand, names dimensions, whether architectural or corporeal (human or non-human), even though it is closely related to diastema both linguistically and conceptually (as are space and place). Space thus gives room for the body, and the dimensions of the body determine a given space as place. The extension of this reasoning is that place makes space significant. As with the commentary elsewhere in the notes of this essay on place and non-place, the relationship between space and place is not even, neither balanced nor equal. For ‘bodily extension fits into spatial extension but not vice versa’ (Casey 1997, 94). Space never has or is equivalent with materiality or corporeality. Immaterial and incorporeal, space is indistinct from void. London therefore cannot be defined according to space, at least in literary representations (and neither can any city), because it is a place, composed from so many changing, emergent and residual places, which in turn are determined and come to be representable through the relation and interaction of self (corporeality) and site (materiality), or self and site in tension, in any given place, the dimensions of which give place to meaningful event (meaningful inasmuch as it enters into the place that we name narrative). The consideration of space and place might therefore usefully be extended to a consideration of that which constitutes narrative form. For every narrative emerges from a void, from space, strictly speaking, and, in taking place, constructs place—the places of action, extended through time, and taking time in its extension—and gives place also to those actions, events, and experiences.
- 2.
The ‘aura’ of the gas light is suggestive of Modernist consciousness and phenomenological perception described by Virginia Woolf, in her essay ‘Modern Fiction’: Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end. It is, Woolf suggests in interrogative mode, ‘the task of the novelist to convey this varying, this unknown and uncircumscribed spirit, whatever aberration or complexity it may display, with as little mixture of the alien and external as possible […]’ (Woolf 2009a, 9). Whether or not Carey is consciously borrowing from Woolf’s Modernist, and phenomenological aesthetic, he does present an image of London through this image that captures in its evanescence something of the auratic condition of the city for its modern subjects. Each encounter is singular, and in this, there is the perception of the uniqueness of the experience. While the notion of the auratic belongs to the work of Walter Benjamin, particularly his 1936 essay, ‘Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit’, Benjamin mistakenly assumes aura to be of the object experienced rather than being in the response that shines through the subjective perception. It is, it should be said in passing, the very misperception, of locating aura not in consciousness and the perceiving subject but in the work of art, that leads to Benjamin’s anxiety over technological reproduction of singular works and the anticipated ‘loss’ of aura (see Benjamin 2010).
- 3.
Carey here recalls Wordsworth’s ‘ancient festival, the Fair’, exemplifying how the city erupts ‘Full of one passion, / […] / Mobs, riots, or rejoicings […]’ (Wordsworth 1805, ll. 671–675).
- 4.
Maggs here crosses the same bridge, of course, from which Wordsworth views the city in that other, equally familiar poem of London.
- 5.
At work in the neo-Victorian urban text is a constant oscillation or negotiation between place and non-place, where place is what Pierre Nora calls a ‘lieu de mémoire’ (a site or place of memory; Nora 1995), with non-place being that defined by Marc Augé (1995). Briefly and broadly defined, place is always that which bears prior historical or collective mnemic significance, while non-place is the site where humans gather in transit, urban or architectural spaces the very nature of which is defined by temporary interaction within, and passage through them. London, considered as a single entity, may be read as both place and non-place, though such roles are constantly shifting, especially in narrative, where the non-place in being the passage between specific sites is a copulative enabler, the movement through which bringing significance into being for the subject. This takes place despite the non-place remaining a non-place for the hundreds and thousands of others who are seen, and mingled with, by the subject. Hence the always phenomenal and singular register; place, once invested with significance, with memory, history and narrative cannot return to the condition of non-place, some trace always remaining. Non-place can always be transformed. Airports or malls for example, two spaces defined by Augé as belonging to the category of non-place, can become translated as lieux de mémoire by some event that radically and ineradicably changes the location, a terrorist attack for example. Augé, of course, admits that non-places can have places constituted within them.
- 6.
With regard to magic and illusion generally in neo-Victorian texts, see Heilmann (2010, 18–42).
- 7.
I am employing this phrase to suggest the alterity of a perspective either not commonly taken, or not given or received as the ‘conventionally accepted’ view.
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Wolfreys, J. (2018). ‘A parallel dimension’: The Haunted Streets and Spectral Poethics of the Neo-Victorian Novel. In: Haunted Selves, Haunting Places in English Literature and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-98089-8_5
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