Saving Faraday from Myself: More Latourian Networks in The Little Stranger

In a number of my previous posts, I have tended to focus on the problem of Faraday and his ghost because of its theoretical and thematic trickiness. However, for this last post, I feel that it’s important to refocus on the other main characters of the novel, the Ayres family. In her post from October 26, “Putting Humpty Dumpty Together Again,” Lee uses The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde to question the utility of post-structuralists such as Latour. I agree with Lee that actor-network theory shows that “it is possible to view ‘other individuals’ as interior as well as exterior.” However, I think that her conclusion, that “saying a person, object, thing, idea, or word has infinite meaning [is] the same as saying it has no meaning” doesn’t give enough credit to the usefulness of Latour for literary analysis.

I have already, in an earlier post, explored the usefulness of Latour in describing the networks of influence and connection in Waters’s The Little Stranger, including non-human actors such as the house. On one level, a reading of actor-network theory onto the novel simply allows one to see the influence of Faraday and his poltergeist on the Ayres family. However, a further and more extensive application of ANT allows for, I think, a richer understanding of the novel. I think that some of my Faraday-centric posts paint him as “the bad guy,” a character so enslaved by multiple and powerful desires that he infects the “good” characters with “some dark germ” (463). I hope that this post can use Lee’s view of Latour as well as Mel Chen’s “Toxic Animacies” to, if not redeem Faraday, then to at least complicate an understanding of his character. Chen argues that the ideas of toxicity allow a revelation of “the fiction of [bodily] independence” (274). Chen’s argument calls for a way of seeing that accepts a movement away from the “presumption” of “healthy, individuated bodies, heretofore unadulterated by toxins, and cognitively clear, middle-classed young white lives, presumably floating in suspended ether above the hidden masses, classes, colors, toxins” (273). In Latourian terms, the presumably healthy, self-contained individual actor is always also a network of constructive and destructive forces, both environmental and innate.

To put both Chen and Latour to work in The Little Stranger leads me to ask the question: how healthy and sound are the Ayreses to begin with? Although Roderick is driven suicidal by the hauntings by the end of the book, we learn that even before Faraday enters the house, Roderick was traumatized by the war and came home with “nervous trouble,” a “depression,” in which he “never seemed to sleep. He’d fly into rages, or into sulks. His language was filthy” (119). His mother worries that the war “made an utter stranger of him. He seemed to hate himself, and everyone around him” (120). The mother, too, is troubled by connections other than the one she has with Faraday. The doctor realizes, after she bursts into tears once, how well she typically hides the “burdens she’d been living under for so many years: the death of a child, the death of a husband, the stresses of war, her injured son, the lost estate” (121). Faraday speculates, as the hauntings begin, that Mrs. Ayres’s mind “was vulnerable in some way” (323). Even through the somewhat dubious lens of Faraday’s narration, these moments indicate the connections that both threaten and are already a part of the Ayreses’ subjectivities. Such a reading shows not an absence of meaning, but acknowledges the complexity of the relationships at work in the novel.

wc: 600 

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