Can Ghosts Shape Our Selves?

Some of us are afraid of ghosts. Some are perhaps uncomfortable with the idea of encountering a ghost. Most of us would rather not talk about ghosts, let alone invite them into our homes.

We can think of a few reasons for this reluctance, revulsion, or fear: firstly, ghosts appear to defeat rational explanations. They are also generally prone to behave like Cassandra in Greek mythology who is always full of dire prophesies about things expected to go wrong and is apt to project a dystopian view of the future (which we would rather not know).

But we can see from examples cited in this essay that ghosts have been very much part of our myths, folklore and literary imagination for a long time. Even the advent of an inward-looking modernism hasn’t stopped our writers from including them in their stories. (We could argue that this navel-gazing itself may at times precipitate looking for supranormal explanations for our existential questions.)

Nonetheless… a lot of us have only a love-hate relationship – more the latter than the former – with these spectral beings. One explanation for this could be that ghosts tend to be quite enigmatic; they also hover over that nebulous boundary between the factual and fictive. No wonder therefore that one of the very first questions we feel compelled to resolve is: are they real, or are they something else?

This essay addresses this and other related questions. But while doing so I also stumbled upon the possibility that ghosts could serve a useful role in human lives: they could help define the nature of our selves and what it is to be human.

Ghosts in myths and religion

Ghosts appear to have had a role to play in many of the world’s myths and theories of knowledge from ancient times. For instance,

• In the Roman poet Virgil’s Aeneid (from c. 29-19 BCE), when Aeneas leaves burning Troy to establish another city overseas, his wife disappears in that confusion. She later appears to Aeneas as a ghost to inform him that he should go to a land where the River Tiber flowed. Aeneas then embarks on this quest and meets with numerous adventures. (Britannica, loc. 1346-1351)

• According to the Brittanica of World Religions, the Erinyes aka Eumenides (in the Greek myths), goddesses of vengeance, were originally thought of as ghosts of the murdered. They ascended from Hades to pursue the wicked. (Ibid, loc 16434-16437).

• The akh in Egyptian religion represented the soul of a deceased person who revisited the earth. The soul could assume any form while doing so including that of a ghost. (Ibid, loc 2042).

• Bhuts (aka bhoots) were restless ghosts in Hindu mythology, and they were considered malign if the person had died a violent death and denied funeral rites. (Ibid, loc 7291-7295).

Ghosts in contemporary thought

In (relatively) more recent times, some of the better-known ghosts are to be found in the plays of William Shakespeare. Shakespeare uses them as a literary device for restoring the moral order in the play, for the need to redress our wrongdoing. While we understand that ghosts had a role in five of his plays, the best are arguably in Macbeth and Hamlet. They also share the characteristic of directing a figurative admonitory finger at someone who has committed misdeeds (and to hopefully prevent them from perpetrating more evil in the future).

• In Macbeth, the king’s former friend Banquo (whose death Macbeth had arranged) returns to haunt him. Interestingly, Banquo’s ghost is visible only to Macbeth, not even to Lady Macbeth who has very much been a co-conspirator in Macbeth’s earlier murders. Macbeth is therefore left to suffer in isolation and be tormented by his insecurities. He wonders if “all great Neptune’s ocean [will] wash this blood clean from my hands?”

• In Hamlet, the prince’s friend Horatio refers to the ghost of Hamlet’s murdered father as the “guilty thing”. The ghost wants his son to “Revenge his foul and most unnatural murder”. But (as John Mullan from University College London points out) the ghost complicates his command by demanding that Hamlet be more forgiving of his mother who married Claudius (the usurper of the throne) after the murder.

We also see how ghosts have continued to occupy the minds of contemporary writers and storytellers:

• “Hostile imps and derisive spirits were abroad, she knew. They might play nasty pranks on her… Demons abounded in the village and surrounding mountains. Each house had its familiar spirit dwelling behind the stove.” (Singer, 26)
  • This is one of many similar references in the 1962 novel The Slave by the Nobel Prize-winning Isaac Bashevis Singer set in 17th century Poland with its superstitions and belief in the supernatural. This novel is also an allegory of one man’s struggle to maintain his faith in the face of irrational fear and ignorance.
• In Toni Morrison’s Beloved from 1987 the murdered first child continues to obsess the living as an apparition and is an inexorable reminder to the mother of her act of filicide. This ghostly character is also symbolic – given the historical and social context of American slavery in which the story is set – of the feelings of helplessness and injustice felt by the oppressed.

• There is an enduring superstition or belief that theatres have ghosts. A perhaps related tradition is that of leaving a ‘ghost light’ on when the stage is dark. The Melbourne Theatre Company believes that while some thought the ghost light was used to keep them at bay the light is in fact used to appease the ghosts. The MTC adds (maybe tongue in cheek) that “Traditionally, the light allows ghosts to perform their own drama on the stage at night…”

What genre of plays, we wonder, would this extramundane drama troupe have had a penchant for staging: A morality play that stressed to the audience the importance of subscribing to an ethical framework?  Who was in the audience?

Are ghosts real? Or do they lack any reality of their own?

Ghosts appear thus to have had a larger than walk-on role across human history in the way we have framed our myths and cultures and marshalled our literary imagination. Why is this so? Do ghosts exist? Are they instead like what some would call “explanatory devices” which may not have an ontology of their own but are there for a purpose?

Or are they like other entities in life – viruses, for example – which are subject to conjecture and confound and discomfort us with their liminality? Han Yu, the Tang dynasty poet recognised this centuries ago when he wrote that –

How do they do this?

Ghosts and memories

We all have regrets. There is always an incident (or two, or three) from the past which – thanks to our foolishness or impetuosity – had unpleasant consequences or, worse, severely affected other lives and maybe ours too. How do usually deal with those mistakes, misdemeanours (or crimes)? Our instinct generally is to opt for repression: push that uneasiness, that feeling of regret and repentance, under the carpet and attempt to move on. But does this always work? What dredges up those uncomfortable feelings from the depths of the subconscious by reminding us of the incident every now and then and even puts us figuratively in the dock awaiting judgement? Is “ghost” a term of convenience for representing the agent who performs this function of accusation and scrutiny?

One behavioural trait we usually associate with ghosts is haunting. We could say that haunting is how the maligned dead become ‘agents’ for taking revenge for past suffering. Māori myths, for instance, associate environmental destruction with stories of how dead birds can materialise among the living and act as ill omens. One myth holds that if you dream a parakeet is lying in an oven you may be certain that soon you will die. The shells of hatched parakeets turn into maggots, which turn into lizards, which creep down the throats of sleeping people. (Weinberger 124).

In a similar vein, Ishmael in Moby Dick is less concerned (as Richard J King points out in his Ahab’s Rolling Sea: A Natural History of Moby-Dick) with the science behind the winds that are an integral part of sailing, “but more with them as a metaphor as he tells of how this wind, especially its consistency, steady force, and invisibility, drives the Pequod.” While describing the final hunt Ishmael equates the wind with “the hand of fate or chance or God.”  (96). When referring to a favourable wind that pushes the Pequod in the direction of the whale (and the boat’s eventual annihilation), Ishmael reiterates its role as an instrument of destiny by noting “The wind that made great bellies of their sails and rushed the vessel on by arms invisible as irresistible; this seemed the symbol of that unseen agency which so enslaved them to the race.” (Melville 452).

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These are some of the ideas the Spanish writer Javier Marias too mines in his work of fiction, Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me. Guilt in fact is the central concern of this book, as it is not only with Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Macbeth but also Richard III. The foreboding speech addressed to Richard on the eve of battle by the ghosts of the ones he had needlessly killed is in fact used as a recurring trope by Marias. (The title of the book is in fact derived from this passage from Shakespeare’s play.)

In this story, Marta invites Victor Frances to her apartment while her husband is away on business. After Marta’s two-year old son has fallen asleep, they move to the bedroom. While undressing, Marta suddenly falls ill and dies. Looking back on this incident, Victor feels mixed emotions, especially an inexplicable guilt at Marta’s death.

He later meets some of Marta’s relatives and her husband Dean. Victor suspects that Dean too may have something he may feel guilty about. Before that happens, Victor believes that Dean would himself want to meet him and admit to him his remorse over how callously he had spent the day in London while his wife lay dying. Dean would talk of the ghostly voice in his nightmares that said (repeating the Richard III text verbatim):

Tomorrow in the battle think on me, and fall thy edgeless sword. Tomorrow in the battle think on me, when I was mortal, and let fall thy pointless lance. Let me sit heavy on thy soul tomorrow, let me be lead within thy bosom and at a bloody battle end thy days. Tomorrow in the battle think on me, despair and die. (in Marias 160-161).

Ghosts and selves

The events of the world… are forced upon us and the narrative is the unguessed axis along which they must be strung. It falls to us to weigh and sort and order these events. It is we who assemble them into the story which is us. Each man is the bard of his own existence. (McCarthy 284-5).

The Cambridge Dictionary defines conscience as “the part of you that judges how moral your own actions are and makes you feel guilty about bad things that you have done or things you feel responsible for.” We could say that ghosts are like conscience’s messengers in that they remind us – kings and commoners alike – of our erroneous ways. What’s more, in doing so ghosts also influence the shaping of our self by prodding us about what we need to remember.

Memories after all play a vital role in the making of the self. These memories include those of our childhood, our upbringing, what we achieved (or didn’t, regrettably). The construction of our selves based on our memories is in effect a story about us that we tell ourselves and project to others. It is therefore no wonder that Daniel Dennett describes the self as the ‘centre of narrative gravity’. These narratives “issue forth as if from a single source […]: their effect on any audience is to encourage them to (try to) posit a unified agent whose words they are…” (Dennett 417-8).

But while building this narrative we are also inclined to be selective about what we wish to present; we focus on the good bits and leave out the bad ones. We do this to influence how others think of us. As Victor Frances in Marias’s novel observes, “one sees one’s life as if it were a plot or a mere piece of circumstantial evidence, and one falsifies and distorts it” by employing lies and equivocations. (130).

As King Henry IV in Shakespeare’s play tells his son (the future Henry V) we also rationalise, we justify. In an Orson Welles film version of the drama that Victor Frances watches on TV on a sleepless night, Henry Père confesses to the prince: “God knows… by what bypaths and indirect crooked ways I met this crown; how I came by the crown, O God, forgive!” Victor notes how he (the king) was without doubt a murderer “although, with the years, the dignity of his position has dignified him… just as the Prince ceases to be a dissolute once he becomes a king, as if our actions and personalities were in part determined by people’s perception of us, as if we came to believe that we are different from what we thought we were…” (Marias 129).

We begin to believe that we are different because we spin these narratives almost unconsciously – “just as spiders don’t have to think, consciously or deliberately,” as Dennett tells us, “about how to spin their webs, and just as beavers… do not consciously or deliberately plan the structures they build…” (Dennett 418).

And – as is apparent from examples from legends (ancient and modern) – this is conceivably where ghosts step in. They try to call our attention to the fabrications and obfuscations in the stories we weave and exhort us to weed out the flaws in the narrative before it may be too late.

Ghosts, an abstraction we need

The cultural critic and satirist, H. L. Mencken offered a lighter take on the Cambridge Dictionary’s definition of ‘conscience’ when he described it as “the inner voice that warns you that someone might be looking.”

Someone or something: does it matter which? Also, does it matter if ghosts exist or not? They are after all not alone in terms of this ambiguity. We already have countless abstractions – such as money, corporations, the state, race… and God – that we appear to be able to comfortably live with.

So may be what matters is that it is good to have someone or something (or even a hard-to-define liminal entity) who can hold us in judgement.

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Bibliography

Brittanica Encyclopaedia of World Religions (2006). Chicago: Encyclopaedia Britannica.

Dennett, Daniel C. (1993). Consciousness Explained. London: Penguin Books.

King, Richard J. (2019). Ahab’s Rolling Sea: A Natural History of Moby Dick. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

Marias Javier (1997). Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me. Trans. Margaret Jull Costa. New York: New Directions.

McCarthy, Cormac (2011). Cities of the Plain. London: Picador.

Melville, Herman (1851/1993). Moby Dick. Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Editions.

Singer, Isaac Bashevis (1977). The Slave. Trans. Singer and Cecil Hemley. England: Penguin Books.

Weinberger, Eliot (2016). The Ghosts of Birds. New York: New Directions.

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Venkat Ramanan is a freelance writer and independent scholar from Brisbane, Australia, whose interests include literature, art, philosophy and science. His work has appeared in both online magazines of general interest (including Blue Labyrinths, Epoché, Aesthetics Research Lab and the Punch Magazine) and academic journals. (Details at venkr6b.blogspot.com). He also tweets as @venkr6.