A writer of ghost stories (whose name escapes me now) once said, “I’m not so interested in ghosts—I’m interested in the people who see them.”
The idea that some people see ghosts and others do not is not new, and is quite a popular one now, thanks to a slew of “reality TV” shows featuring various psychics, mediums, and other sensitive types. Some people, according to this notion, just happen to be “sensitive” to ghosts the way other people are sensitive to shellfish and ragweed.
There is, of course, another explanation of why some people tend to see ghosts, and it’s been around at least since Shakespeare’s time. According to this explanation, people see ghosts because they are under intense psychological/emotional stress, or are suffering from psychosis or some other form of mental illness. In other words, they are “seeing things” that aren’t really there.
What does this mean for a writer of ghost stories? Specifically, for a writer of modern ghost stories?
As a writer, I confess to favoring the psychological approach. I want to know (and want you to know) who my characters are first, what’s going on in their lives, in their hearts and minds. What is the thing that’s leaving them open to an “intervention” from the other side?
The hazard for a writer who concentrates on the psychology of his human characters is that it can drain the energy from the supernatural element of your story—or, in some cases, push it out altogether.
That has happened to me on more than one occasion. I’ll start out writing what I think is a ghost story, then get to the end and discover that the ghost never showed up. This is what David Longhorn, editor of Supernatural Tales, calls “an almost ghost story.” And it’s a perfectly respectable and powerful type of story to write and read.
But subtlety can also be a vice in a ghost (or horror) story. Or, as a friend of mine said after seeing ‘The Blair Witch Project’, “When I spend my money on a movie like that, I want to see something!”
Another friend of mine recently remarked about how brilliantly Shakespeare “personified” the psychological torments of his characters as “ghosts.” I agreed, but also felt that there was something simplistic, even dismissive about his comment. Yes, I thought, Shakespeare’s ghosts” are rooted firmly in the deepest guilts and fears of his living characters. That’s where their raw power comes from. But is that all they are?
To put it simply, if a ghost can be explained away so easily, then it probably doesn’t belong in the story in the first place.
To have any real power at all, a spirit, any kind of spirit, must be more than a metaphor or a symbol. When I hear someone say that Banquo’s ghost is symbolic of Macbeth’s guilt, or that the ghost of Quint is a metaphor for the governess’ repressed sexual hunger, I flinch. For the characters who come face to face with them, these terrifying apparitions are not symbols or metaphors. They are experiences, vivid, powerful experiences that do not ‘represent’ something else, but demand to be taken seriously at face value for what they are.
By the way, this has nothing to do with the question of whether or not ghosts “really exist”—that’s a debate for another type of post (and maybe another type of blog). This is about having respect for what you’re writing about. And for your reader.
Our job as writers is to provide our readers with an experience. In other words, to make them believe.
For ghosts to feel real, they need to resist our easy explanations. They need to have a little unpredictability, a little wildness. They need to shock us as much as they shock the character who sees them.
One of the oldest truisms in writing is, “Show, don’t tell.” That’s good advice for a writer of ghost stories. Don’t just give me a Freudian explanation or psychological rationale. Show me the ghost.
As one who has seen ghosts, and felt their presence, and seen their disruptions on the living scene, I believe they exist outside of living people. I also take your ideas, David, a little further to say that they are both real and imagined, both experience and metaphor.
The power of imagination is strong and intuitive enough to release experience from its confines, and make us see into the beyond. The beyond has its own ecology and population, and we will see only a part of it. Metaphor is a way to put into perspective the experiences that frighten and disturb. Metaphor has other games to play, but it can take me away for long enough to see something I had not seen before. I can return to the experience and see better not what happened, but what happened to me.
A great post that makes me feel like I’m only halfway there with my response to it. You are right that vivid experiences have enough strength not to be represented. Not everything needs an agent. (root meaning “to drive, do, act”) Our experiences are us, and our telling of them represents us. How we represent our representations is the gray area, the grey matter.
I think that there are spirits and energies out there, and our thoughts are either telling us what we experience or finding an equivalent to help us figure it out. That has to do with personality and brain health and soul. That doesn’t necessarily have to do with literature on the subject, nor critical analysis of it, nor interpretation. I haven’t really responded to that part of this post, yet.
Good to read you.
Thanks, Amy–great response! (Actually, as you’ll see, I somehow posted the article before I’d finished writing it…so, again, mysterious forces are at work!)
I love what you say about metaphor being a way to put into perspective experiences that frighten or disturb. That’s counter (rightly, I’d say) to the common wisdom that metaphors are windows into the “real truth” of things (pointing toward what things “really are”).
To push this a little farther, it may be that the modern psychological explanations for “unexplainable” events may themselves be not that different than the myths that ancient people made up to explain why the sun is swallowed by the earth every day, etc. Not that contemporary psychological explanations aren’t “more realistic” than ancient myths, but that humans tend to make use of them in the same way, to stave off our anxiety in the face of experiences that feel too powerful for words.
Again, I’m interested in what these things have to do with writing, with communicating experience as truthfully and compellingly as possible.
Thanks.
I agree with this post! The psychological explanation is too reductionist for me but I think the finest ghost stories (and the kind of horror I like to write) has that underpinning. But there must also be that sense of the supernatural–the unknowable at work. Robert Aickman was a real master of treading this line, I think. Other fine examples, IMNSHO, include Oliver Onions’s “The Beckoning Fair One” and, for novel-length fiction, Shirley Jackson’s “The Haunting of Hill House.”
Thanks, Lynda! I agree (though not everyone wold, I suspect)—the finest ghost AND horror stories have strong psychological “underpinnings”. Certainly, your stories do, as do Glen Hirshberg’s, and others.
What struck me as I was writing this (and thinking about it earlier) was that one exception to this rule (and it’s a huge one) seems to be M.R. James. We typically know very little about his main characters. We are not told much (or anything at all) about their personal lives (about whether they have suffered the death of a child, are ridden with guilt over some past betrayal or terrible act, etc.). In fact, one might say James’ main characters are pretty much interchangeable—all (usually ) career academics who are traveling on work-related business or on holiday (from said work-related business). So we do not see the “personal factor” (the psychological wound, etc.) that invites the supernatural into their lives. Which (some might say) is precisely what makes James’ apparitions and visitations so terrifying—that very unpredictability I was writing about and advocating.
This whole post actually came after I saw ‘The Woman in Black’ and was impressed by the scene in which the main character (Kipps) goes through an intensive and exhausting effort to “appease” the vengeful ghost (finding and returning the missing body of her child to her, etc.) only to find that what he did DOESN’T WORK!!! I really liked how that character’s assumptions about “knowing” ghosts (how they behave, how to deal with them) were completely knocked on their ass. (Unpredictability. Wildness.)
Here is where I shamefacedly admit to never having read Onions. I will now (before his ghost rises up to haunt me..!)
Thanks!
Hirshberg is an excellent modern example. And it’s funny you should mention James. I like James very much but I love him far less than do his devotees, and I wonder if that’s for the reasons you discuss here. Not that I think his approach is inferior (it’s M.R. James, fer crying out loud!) but I think on that basis connects with me perhaps a little less, despite all the trappings–steeped in history, the academic characters, the ghosts!–that have me written all over them.
Yes, do read “The Beckoning Fair One!” It’s perpetually on my top 10 list of horror short stories (although I guess it’s technically a novella) and an excellent ghost story in the mold which we’re discussing. And let me know when you do!
“When I hear someone say that Banquo’s ghost is symbolic of Macbeth’s guilt, or that the ghost of Quint is a metaphor for the governess’ repressed sexual hunger, I flinch.” Yup. & I get very, very tired of the “Did she or didn’t she really see a ghost?” as well as ghosts that are so deeply wrapped up in somebody’s state of mind that there’s simply no scare there.
Thanks, Karen. I like what you say about ghosts that have been so wrapped up in psychologizing “that there’s simply no scare in them.” It brings to mind the possibility that some “high-minded literary ghost-story types” might actually deny that “scaring” readers is a worthy or respectable goal.
Kind of reminds me of the defense that D.H. Lawrence’s attorney’s used in his obscenity trial (for Lady Chatterly), that his book was not obscene or pornographic because the sexual scenes were not intended to arouse anyone sexually. As if prompting those kind of gut-level, physical responses from readers is nothing any serious writer would be interested in.
I do like ghosts to be scary because that is my personal reaction to what I think are ghosts, and I am enjoying this discussion here of stories I have not read. I am going to jump in and say that I do also like the non scare ghosts of magical realism, which more often are not scary, and rather, an accepted circumstance. Sure, they represent something in the storytelling way, but in the story of the lives, they are just as real to the living as they had been when they were living. In writing, the ghost is sometimes easier to depict than the reaction to it, I am finding.
I read a Rachel Ingalls novella years ago that I took as a ghost story, and which in recent rereading, may actually not be. I am so disappointed. That novella, “Friends in the Country”, was both funny and eerie, and I find I revert with pleasure to my original reading of it, and to my “revelation” at the climax of what had really happened. That has more to do with how I like to be tricked in a story–and not in life–and how the dead can do it best.
Lynda, I have yet to read Glen’s ‘The Janus Tree’, which I’m looking forward to. And yes, I’d bet a double espresso that it’s the lack of psychological “underpinnings” that’s behind your less-than-fervent admiration for James.
Where James excels (I believe) is (1) his apparitions and (2) his innovative depiction of human fear. The scene in The Mezzotint where the characters return to the room and find the “skip” sitting and staring at the mezzotint (and the things he says) literally made me drop the book. And his description in Canon Albrecht’s Scrapbook of the old etching of the demon being brought before Solomon (the expressions on the soldiers’ faces) is bone chilling.
I’m off to find Onions..!
The Mezzotint is truly one of the scariest stories I’ve ever read! Ugh, I get all shivery now just thinking about it.
Absolutely! The scary bits are so strong that I forget about all the lame “golf-humor” James drops in throughout the early parts of the story. It’s a textbook example of how to paint a powerful, indelible image with just a few words. James was wonderful at that.