Haunted Networks in The Little Stranger

Last week, I applied Mbembe’s theory of necropolitics to The Little Stranger. Such an argument encounters a hiccup when, as Lee and I discussed in the comments, it becomes unclear why someone seeks power over others and the nature of their success. This week, I find that Latour’s essay offers a valuable way to continue that discussion in a different direction. Latour states that the advent of the internet has meant that “‘to have’ is quickly becoming a stronger definition of oneself than ‘to be’” (121). I would argue that, even in the pre-internet era of Waters’s novel, the concept of having connections within a network rather than “being” something concrete and stable allows a different understanding of the novel. To say that Faraday now is the ruler or sovereign of Hundreds Hall seems inaccurate, as I’ve discussed in previous posts. To say that he has the Hall seems more accurate, as it doesn’t include a qualitative assessment of that ownership.

A connection along the lines of a network also erases the hierarchy indicated by ownership. As I wrote in my first post, I’m not convinced that the Hall hasn’t subsumed Faraday into a part of its own past, as indicated by the final image of Faraday’s face reflected in a cracked mirror in one of the Hall’s passages. If that is true, Faraday is just as much a part of the Hall’s network – its physical being, its past, present, and future owners, its relationship with other similar estates, all of the objects it contains, etc. – as it is part of his.

Indeed, I think this is one of the more valuable things that Latour’s theory of networks can bring to literary analysis and to a novel like The Little Stranger. Ghost stories are, after all, stories about the secret history of the nonhuman, whether that nonhuman is the ghost itself or those inanimate objects that feature in the haunting. Barry Curtis states, “‘The Ideal Home’ is a complex ecology of past and present, interior and exterior, configuring a resolved relationship between structure and inhabitant. The haunted house is a scenario of confrontation between the narrative of the inhabitants and the house.” Therefore, to deploy Latour’s networks in Waters’s novel is to decenter the novel’s focus on its human characters and broaden the scope of its interests.

Network theory allows one to envision the novel as being essentially about Hundreds Hall itself. Faraday’s manipulation of the house – by animating household objects or scrawling mysterious messages on the walls, for instance – changes its “ecology,” but ultimately allows the house to remain existing. As Latour says, “what takes any substance that had seemed at first self contained (that’s what the word means after all) and transforms it into what it needs to subsist through a complex ecology of tributaries, allies, accomplices, and helpers” (5). For the Hall, Faraday is one of these “allies” in its continued existence. In Latour’s An Inquiry into Modes of Existence (I had to read it for my other seminar. Don’t judge.), he describes that any object achieves “continuity through discontinuity.” That is, it performs little changes and adaptations in order to remain the same. Although Faraday’s wresting of the estate from the Ayres family is an example of one of these little discontinuities, it also allows the Hall to continue to exist. The uniqueness of the Hall’s “effort” to continue is revealed in discussions of what similar old aristocratic estates throughout England are undergoing – being split up, sold off, and torn down.

Curtis, Barry. Dark Places: The Haunted House in Film. London: Reaktion Books, Ltd., 2009. Print.

[exactly 600!]