“Herein lies perhaps, among so many others, an indelible lesson of Marxism. There is no longer, there has never been a scholar capable of speaking of anything and everything while addressing himself to everyone and anyone, and especially to ghosts. There has never been a scholar who really, and as scholar, deals with ghosts. A traditional scholar does not believe in ghosts—nor in all that could be called the virtual space of spectrality. There has never been a scholar who, as such, does not believe in the sharp distinction between the real and the unreal, the actual and the inactual, the living and the non-living, being and non-being (“to be or not to be,” in the conventional reading), in the opposition between what is present and what is not, for example in the form of objectivity. Beyond this opposition, there is, for the scholar, only the hypothesis of a school of thought, theatrical fiction, literature, and speculation.” — Jacques Derrida, Spectres of Marx
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The first ghost story—the first extant one, anyway—comes down to us from ancient Egypt in the form of pottery fragments (scattered between museums in Turin, Florence, Vienna, and Paris . . .)—the story, too, is fragmented: missing, crucially, the beginning. For the most part, the story proceeds in the familiar way: a man has spent the night (perhaps ill-advisedly) next to a tomb and has been visited (perhaps inevitably) by a restless spirit; the first fragment we possess only implies all this, picking up the story proper when the man visits the high priest to relay his experiences, after which the priest takes over communicating with the ghost to figure out what he wants (even the earliest ghost story is really two stories: the haunting and the reason for it—immediacy and mediation); what the ghost wants is what we would expect: restitution or revenge (a matter of point of view); the fragments cut off before we learn whether the high priest is successful in helping the ghost achieve his ends. The Egyptians believed (as far as we can tell) in something like a multi-valent soul, that the human person was not one thing, but many, and that while, in life, one was stuck being one, access to the collectivity within that unification—the continued unfolding of that experience of contradiction—became possible in the afterlife (the proper funereal rites would aid in this process, and they were important in ensuring the soul, after death, did not die again), where, as akh, the dead could continue acting on/in the world (indeed, akh means something like “effective entity”).
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In the early part of the last century, M.R. James perfected a certain kind of ghost story: a subtle approach to the supernatural, almost always narrativizing encounters between an unknowable past and an over-confident present; the medium of this encounter being, usually, some object unearthed or stumbled upon by a professorial type, an item like the titular object in “The Mezzotint,” which reveals its horrors without having them fully explained, and, ultimately, consigning the object and its secret to the oblivion of the archive in order for the protagonist to get some peace and quiet once again.
“Proportion must be observed,” James wrote, considering it a sin to step “over the line of legitimate horridness,” to “drag in sex,” which is “tiresome enough in the novels,” though he also cautioned against being “mild and drab,” allowing for a “modicum of blood, shed with deliberation and carefully husbanded.” James’ approach lent itself well to the constraints of television, and from 1971-78, the BBC broadcast annually A Ghost Story for Christmas, five of which were adaptions of James’ tales (and all but one of which were directed by Lawrence Gordon Clark). The series had been prefigured by an adaption of “‘Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You My Lad’” for their Omnibus program.
In that story, an ontographer pokes around the ruins of a Templar preceptory while on holiday for his archeologist colleague and comes across a bronze whistle with a strange inscription; that evening he plays it, creating a tone with “a quality of infinite distance,” a distance that begins to close all around him as he is pursued by a spectral figure which eventually takes form in the sheets of the unused second bed in his hotel room. A protestant colonel arrives just in time to dispel the ghost. The sheets are burned.
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The film director Kiyoshi Kurosawa looks at ghosts differently. He makes them, first of all, products of the present: our world of technological development, that world in which real and unreal have seemingly dissolved. . In Pulse (2001), the Internet serves as the medium by which his ghosts make themselves available here and now. This quality of their presence differentiates them from the classical ghost story (of Britain or of Egypt): in the Japanese ghost story, per Kurosawa, “ghosts are simply a foreign presence. They don’t attack, they don’t kill, they don’t threaten human life; they are just there. And they show up in your daily life rather nonchalantly. They don’t make a terrifying entrance.”
This is perhaps the paradigmatic shot of Kurosawa’s cinema, whether or not the film concerns ghosts (or horror) at all: a figure standing, framed in such a way that one finds oneself searching for a wrong presence in the negative space of the frame.
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For the launch of Night Call, we are looking for ghost stories fictional, actual, theoretical, and critical; any engagement with the spectral is of interest, but particularly those in what we might—not unproblematically—call the experimental vein.
Submissions are open 10/1-10/31. Please send prose works as a doc or docx attachment to nightcallmag@gmail.com. See our about section for more details on submissions. Accepted pieces will run from December 19th through January 6th, but all submissions will be considered for publication at a later date in the new year.
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