In the Forward for Rebecca Schneider’s book Performing Remains she examines the ways in which participating in historical reenactment collapses the boundaries between the past and the present. Schneider makes an important distinction between “artistic” reenactments that “excuse errors and omissions” (10) and “historical” reenactments that strive for authenticity in order to somehow “have touched time” (13). In the novel The Little Stranger the narrator, Faraday, performs his own form of historical reenactment for the inhabitants of Hundreds Hall. His ghost-like performances and the unexplained hauntings both trouble the boundary between the house’s aristocratic past and its present. Though Faraday’s ghostly reenactments of the past strive to “touch time” so that the house’s past will somehow again become its present, his unwilling audience (and performance space) prevent him from achieving the sort of “authenticity” required to fully make the past come back to life.
Ghosts are traditionally described as reenactments of a past moment. However, like Schneider’s Civil War reenactors, Faraday’s haunting replays moments of a history that is not his, but of the house and family that he longs to be a part of. According to Schneider, many reenactors fight “not only to get it right as it was, but to get it right as it will be in the future of the archive in which they see themselves contributing” (10). Faraday too has an important agenda: that of redeeming his mother’s past through a sort of gestural resurrection and thus contributing himself to the house’s archive.
The hauntings bring certain aspects of the house’s past to life. He tells us, “The call-bells had developed a mysterious life of their own, ringing out at all sorts of hours”; these call-bells are no longer necessary in a household with one maid (340). Similarly, one day “the disused mouthpiece” of a speaking tube that used to allow communication between the nursery and the kitchen starts “giving off eerie little whistles” (341). When Faraday investigates the mouthpiece, he is “struck” by the thought that his mother, as a nursery maid, “must have spoken many times into this device, forty years before.” He then has the “irrational idea that, in putting [his] ear to the cup, [he] would hear [his] mother’s voice” (344). In this moment of reenactment, Faraday seems committed to the possibility of touching time, making his mother’s past present, through “the residue of [her] gesture” (Schneider 2).
Furthermore, when the ghost takes the form of little Susan Ayres, both as the little figure that runs down the hall near the nursery and the author of the “s s s s s” scribbles on the walls, it has Mrs. Ayres and Faraday convinced that the past has come again. Mrs. Ayres admits that she expects to see Susan, alive as she once was, and Faraday describes the “bizarre impression that this thing, whatever it was, was in some way familiar; as if its bashful advance towards us was more properly a return” (403). The willingness with which characters like Mrs. Ayres jump to the conclusion that the past has fact returned in ghostly form demonstrates a shared doubt in temporal linearity. For Schneider, the interpenetration of past and present arising from historic reenactment is potentially productive. Yet the other inhabitants’ fear of the hauntings demonstrates how this particular mingling of past and present is terrifying - such “returns” are supernatural not embodied.
The ending of the novel shows that Faraday’s approach to reenactment as striving for authenticity is doomed to failure. The novel’s conclusion, rather than bringing back the past, shows that it is impossible to bring the past forward in time if you are the only soul committed to the reenactment. Rather than bringing back the social distinctions of the past he admires, he has collapsed them in his position as owner/squatter/servant/etc. of Hundreds. The physical decay of the house -- it’s unwillingness to commit to the reenactment -- shows how what it needed to survive was not a continuance of the past but an embrace of the present.
Sarah and Kate signing off!
Word Count: 675
4 comments:
Hi Kate and Sarah,
I'm also interested in the correlations between our blog posts this week and I would like to use this space to address some of the questions that you both ask, as well as raise some questions of my own about your post.
Kate, you make a connection between Oscar and Faraday, which I think is very insightful. I do think Faraday's choice to reenact moments of his mother's funeral connects to Oscar's choice to stay in the DR, ultimately dying in the very cane fields in which his mother was beaten. What's more: the haunting of the home in The Little Stranger seems like fuku; it is ancestral and geographically defined, yet not bound by time. Moreover, the return of the ghosts seems to relate to the idea of passivity in reenactment, since Faraday has no control over their apparitions, especially with respect to time.
What precisely is it about "authenticity" that connects or validates pastness in the present? Can reenactment attempt to change the past to create a new authenticity? Or ignore authenticity completely? (I find myself thinking about Benjamin's notion of an object's 'aura' being destroyed.)
You both ask about fuku being a reenactment. Sarah, you specifically question whether we are reading Schneider differently, since Jenny and I argue that reenactment can occur to someone. I think that since Oscar is individually committed to a reenactment of past time (his family and friends caution him against remaining in the DR because of the fuku's potentially deadly effects), then his actions provide evidence for a reading of cross-temporal time creating "authentic" reenactment by the hands of a curse. He has some agency, to be sure, but if we think of fuku as a character, it is also enforcing/ensuring reenactment upon Oscar.
-Zach
*disclaimer: When I use the terms "Western" or "Non-Western" I actually have no idea what I'm talking about because I'm pretty sure those categories don't actually make sense. But you know what I mean.*
Yay for collaborating across collaborations! I'm glad that you two also considered the supernatural alongside reenactment in this week's writing.
My favorite part of your post this week was the following:
The willingness with which characters like Mrs. Ayres jump to the conclusion that the past has [in?] fact returned in ghostly form demonstrates a shared doubt in temporal linearity.
This idea -- that a belief (however fleeting or filled with doubt) in the possibility of ghosts necessarily involves a questioning of linear time -- makes material one of the threads of Schneider's argument: that the way in which we go about reenactment ("we" referring specifically to a U.S. cultural context) are tied to a perception of past, present, and future that are not at all linear.
Since we can find some correlate of ghosts in the mythos of nearly every recorded culture on Earth, might you two be touching on a Very Scary and Much Maligned Universal? That linear time (a concept long discarded or never used by many non-Western cultures) no longer -- or never has -- held up in a Western context?
Whooooa, can I just say I think it's so cool that you guys view ghosts as reenactments! What an intriguing idea, and one that definitely yields a lot of questions.
I'm sort of wondering about the idea of fidelity, something that Schneider brought up, as you mention. Obviously there are varying degrees of just how faithful one is to the original, but the question of fidelity also comes up in adaptation theory. So, I ask, is it possible to view ghosts not as reenactors, but as adaptations of their former selves?
In some sense, I feel like adaptation allows for more leeway in interpretation than reenactment - and we might perceive that leeway in the fact that the ghosts seem out of Faraday's control - but, then I wonder, perhaps adaptation doesn't have the same spatiotemporal relationship between the past and the present that reenactment does and maybe isn't as good a theory to apply to ghosts. hmmmm.....
My question is as much for Schneider as the post, but I'm interested in the use of 'reenact' in favor of other words like 'resurrect' or 'return' or 'salvage', for instance. It seems to me that the idea of reenacting an event implies a set of rules, an operation like a game. Nonetheless, especially in consideration of Schneider's comment about 'reenactment' potentially effecting a future time, it seems as if imagination is playing a greater role, in that case, than any fidelity to any original (event/thing). Is it that a 'reenactment' (like the scene with the speaking tube) is maybe more a (re)imagination (a fictional construction) than it is a reenactment conducted within some necessary "historical accuracy?" or, even, are they the same thing? what would that mean for the word 'reenactment' itself?
I guess I'm just wondering what exactly the word 'reenactment' connotes or doesn't connote (in opposition to similar words that differ (and why)).
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