Ghosted (I went looking for a haunting)

ABSTRACT

I went looking for a haunting in a spectral scene woven through a book and a bench: Toni Morrison’s Beloved, and the Toni Morrison Society’s Bench By the Road in Sullivan’s Island, South Carolina. This essay is about the ghosts I did not see when I sat on the bench and sought their absent presence. I went looking for a haunting, but the ghost didn’t come until later, when I stopped looking and went home to write. I seek (futilely) to recapture the moment of the ghost’s arrival, before grappling with what it means to perform hauntological memory beyond any attempt to write the ghost.

KEYWORDS:

• Haunting
• ghosts
• re-membering
• performative writing
• Toni Morrison

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Carole Blair and Jonathan Gray for their comments on earlier drafts of this work, in a graduate seminar and at NCA, respectively. I am grateful to Della Pollock for reading (and serving as interlocutor for) every (re)iteration of this paper. I also wish to thank the two anonymous reviewers and editor, Craig Gingrich-Philbrook, for their invaluable feedback on a previous version of this essay.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. “Bench By the Road Project”; see also “Bench Histories” for details about each bench dedicated to date.

2. Relatedly, Avery Gordon associates Benjamin’s concept of jetztzeit, or “now time” with haunting: “The work and the power of the story lie in giving all the reasons why the reasons are never quite enough … why haunting rather than ‘history’ (or historicism) best captures the constellation of connections that charges any ‘time of the now’ with the debts of the past and the expense of the present” (142).

3. As Powell and Shaffer argue, the ghost’s repetition “is the repetition of performativity” (16).

4. Naomi Mandel traces Morrison’s discussion of Beloved’s epigraph, which commemorates the victims of American slavery, including those who died during the Middle Passage, and concludes that the dedication “is deliberately posited as a vague approximation that serves the purpose of evoking a vast array of dead bodies rather than counting and accounting for the bodies themselves” (583).

5. This account is taken from the Cincinnati History Library and Archives (“Margaret Garner”). For a more detailed account, see Gordon (151-160).

6. Gordon calls the daughter “Scilla or Priscilla” (154); other sources refer to her as both Cilla and Priscilla.

7. Gordon cites Walter Benjamin to describe the “profane illumination” of haunted moments, “ghostly signals” that are “flashing half-signs ordinarily overlooked until that one day when they become animated by the immense forces of atmosphere concealed in them” (204). I see the flash as an animation not of a “half-sign” but as a constellating moment of ghost and living body.

8. As Powell and Shaffer argue, following Derrida, “We cannot sense the ghost as a subject or an identity that resides in understanding as knowledge” (13). I offer now (from experience) that to know this theoretically does not preclude us from seeking that understanding.

9. I am not engaging Phelan here to make an argument about the “present” life of performance. My reading also differs from Powell and Shaffer, who critique Phelan by arguing that “haunting imagines performance as never disappearing,” and through their engagement with the concept of haunting “write toward production” (2).