Abstract
This book examines the relationship between the figure of the ghost and the use of metaphor in two exemplary modern fictions, Toni Morrison’s Beloved and Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude.1 In The Satanic Verses, a novel that bears a family resemblance to both Morrison’s and García Márquez’s novels, Salman Rushdie offers a definition of the ghost that is particularly suggestive for the relationship between spectrality, metaphoricity, and history that this book will trace.2 It is first given by the octogenarian ex-colonial wife, Rosa Diamond, who explicitly denies the specter’s otherworldly nature: “I know what a ghost is, the old woman affirmed silently … And I know what it isn’t, too, she nodded further, it isn’t a scarification or a flapping sheet, so pooh and pish to all that bunkum. What’s a ghost? Unfinished business, is what” (129). Shortly after this, we see Rosa so preoccupied with the “Unfinished business” of her colonial past in Argentina that her imaginative recuperations of the past invade the real world of the present. Her definition of spectrality is repeated in the novel’s final pages in the thoughts of the protagonist, the actor Saladin Chamcha, as he reflects upon his own imaginative recuperations of the past. Saladin earlier used his talents for invention and mimicry to consciously manipulate events to his own ends, but he increasingly feels haunted by his own imaginative creations:
he had a strange sense of being haunted, a feeling that the shades of his imagination were stepping out into the real world, that destiny was acquiring the slow, fatal logic of a dream. “Now I know what a ghost is,” he thought. “Unfinished business, that’s what.”
(540)
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Notes
Toni Morrison, Beloved (1987; London: Picador-Pan, 1988); Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude, trans. Gregory Rabassa (1967; London: Picador-Pan, 1978).
Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses (London: Viking, 1988).
The spectral manifestations in the first gothic novel, Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1765), collected in Three Gothic Novels, ed. Peter Fairclough (London: Penguin Books, 1968), are clearly indebted to Hamlet.
Imagist Poetry, ed. Peter Jones (Hammondsworth: Penguin, 1972) 95.
F.S. Flint, in “Imagisme” (Poetry March 1913, in Jones, 129), claimed that the Imagists “held … a certain ‘Doctrine of the Image,’” although he does not clarify this doctrine. Pound, in “A Few Don’ts by an Imagiste,” claimed that “It is better to present one Image in a lifetime than to produce voluminous works” (Jones, 130). The unsigned “Preface to Some Imagist Poets 1916” which bears the heavy influence of Pound, asserts that “Imagism … means a clear presentation of whatever the author wishes to convey” (Jones, 136). Pound, in a 1915 letter to Harriet Monroe, wrote “Language is made of concrete things. General expressions in non-concrete terms are a laziness” (Jones, 142).
Benjamin Hrushovski, “Poetic Metaphor and Frames of Reference,” Poetics Today, 5.1 (1984): 39. Hrushovski quotes Pound from “Vorticism,” 103.
Both David E. Cooper, in Metaphor (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986) 195, and Roger White, in The Structure of Metaphor: The Way the Language of Metaphor Works (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996) 83, argue that haiku-like forms, where all words function figuratively, are still metaphors.
Donald Davidson, in “What Metaphors Mean,” On Metaphor, ed. Sheldon Sacks (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), uses this example (33), which is from Pierre, or, The Ambiguities (New York: HFS, 1949) 248.
McHale, Postmodernist Fiction (1987; London: Routledge, 1989) 134.
Hélène Christol, “The African American Concept of the Fantastic as Middle Passage,” Black Imagination and the Middle Passage, eds. Maria Diedrich, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Carl Pedersen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999) 165–166.
Toni Morrison, “The Opening Sentences of Beloved,” Critical Essays on Toni Morrisons Beloved, ed. Barbara H. Solomon (New York: G.K. Hall & Co., 1998) 92.
Janet Martin Soskice, in Metaphor and Religious Language (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), defines metaphor as “that figure of speech whereby we speak about one thing in terms which are seen to suggestive of another” (15).
Paul Ricouer, in The Rule of Metaphor: Multidisciplinary Studies of the Creation of Meaning in Language, trans. Robert Czerny (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997), argues that “metaphor consists in speaking of one thing in terms of another that resembles it” (197).
“Metaphor,” Language, Thought, and Culture, ed. Paul Henle (1958; Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1965) 176–181.
Samuel R. Levin, in Metaphoric Worlds (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988), describes metaphor as “expressions that evince a degree of linguistic deviance in their composition. It follows from this deviant character that the ‘claim’ made by such expressions is bizarre, absurd, ridiculous, false, outlandish, non- or contrasensical” (1). White observes that, while not all metaphors are literally absurd, the majority certainly are: “Usually when we try to read a metaphor as a literal sentence, we encounter a sentence which is defective, often grossly so. The typical case of a metaphor presents us with a sentence that, looked at as a literal sentence, is not so much false as nonsensical, and which may even be grammatically incoherent” (205).
Franz Kafka, Metamorphosis (1916), in Metamorphosis and Other Stories (Hammondsworth: Penguin, 1961).
Tzvetan Todorov, The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre, trans. Richard Howard (Cleveland: Case Western Reserve University, 1973) 77.
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© 2009 Daniel Erickson
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Erickson, D. (2009). The Spectral Metaphor. In: Ghosts, Metaphor, and History in Toni Morrison’s Beloved and Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230619753_1
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