Abstract
This essay examines Bodie, a California ghost town, as a “modern ruin.” Working from a hauntological framework, I first investigate how Bodie enacts a rhetoric of authenticity by inviting personal encounters with the mortality of the town’s missing inhabitants. I then complicate Bodie’s brand of authenticity by identifying how efforts to rouse the ghosts of the past destabilize the ontological security of its present viewers. I ultimately argue that tourists transform the town’s ontological instability into a performance of recursive gaze whose pleasures enable a perceptual management of overlapping temporalities, particularly as visitors imagine themselves among the ghosts of Bodie.
Acknowledgement
The author expresses gratitude to Nicolette Amstutz, Dustin LeBrun, Joan Faber McAlister, and Jenny Wood. Additional appreciation is extended to the Friends of Bodie Facebook group and to students in Professor Wood’s 2018 and 2019 Ruins: Rhetoric and Performance graduate seminars for their contributions to the development of this essay. Finally, the author offers heartfelt thanks to Robert C. Rowland, Jacob Justice, and the anonymous reviewers for their diligent refinement and affirming advice.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. Newspapers of the era recall many spellings and variants of Bodey’s name (Piatt, Citation2003, p. 22). DeLyser (Citation1998), for example, notes three options for his first name: William, Wakeman, and Waterman.
2. While Kuftinec’s (Citation1998) Derridean reading of Mostar offers some inspiration for this essay, my focus on touristic practice diverges from that scholar’s laudable work.
4. See also Bergman (Citation2003, p. 430), Bowman (Citation2010, pp. 194, 212), Conley and Mullen (Citation2008, pp. 181–182), Dickinson (Citation1997, pp. 8, p. 12), Dickinson et al. (Citation2005, pp. 89–90, 101), and Zagacki and Gallagher (Citation2009, p. 186).
5. I am hardly the first person to use the phrase “recursive gaze.” For another application, see Clark (Citation1995, p. 115). I also acknowledge my debt to similar frameworks such as “double articulation” (Dickinson et al., Citation2006, p, p. 28), “reflexive double meaning” (Strazdes, Citation2013, p. 239), and “reflexive layering” (Schmitt, Citation2015). See also Dickinson’s (Citation1997) notion of “pedestrian gaze” (p. 12).
6. Nora’s work has generated “varying attitudes of approbation and opprobrium” (Blair, Dickinson, & Ott, Citation2010, p. 8), earning critique for a tendency toward “magical enclaves” (Katriel, Citation1994, p. 17), dichotomization (Murphy, Citation2005, p. 74), nostalgia (Sturken, Citation1997, p. 5), myopia (Zelizer, Citation1999, p. 204), and neoliberalism (Henning, Citation2006, p. 138).
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