Ghost Writers

I love TV shows about ghosts.  I’m always ready to watch people chase some poor wraith through an old hotel, waving electronic meters and pestering it to “give a sign.”  I’m waiting to see the ghost turn around and retort, “Sign this!”

Whether you believe in them or not, ghosts have always played a role in literature.  They seem to tap into a number of our basic desires, needs, and fears.  And they suggest answers to questions about our identity and ultimate destiny.

The big question about ghosts that we’ve often addressed in literature is: what does happen when we die?  Where does all that creativity and energy go?  Our world teems with life; life is so persistent that it seems each individual life must be, too.  It’s unnatural to think it dissipates and vanishes in a poof like mushroom spores.

But ancient man took a dim view of the next world, and some early literature makes being a mushroom spore sound a lot better than being a ghost.  Gilgamesh, a Mesopotamian epic first written down about 2000 B.C., put it this way:

The house where the dead dwell in total darkness,
Where they drink dirt and eat stone,
Where they wear feathers like birds,
Where no light ever invades their everlasting darkness,
Where the door and the lock of Hell is coated with thick dust.

The underworld of Greek literature isn’t much better.  In the Odyssey Ulysses has to visit a bleak Hades to consult the seer Teresias.  The ghosts there have a disconcerting habit of drinking blood, and Ulysses is saddened that he can’t embrace his mother; she keeps disappearing.  His old friend Achilles complains, “I would rather be a paid servant in a poor man's house and be above ground than king of kings among the dead.”  Indeed, a ghoulish existence and a see-through mother don’t make an afterlife worth looking forward to.

But literature generally reflects the prevailing culture; so, although being a ghost is disappointing in the ancient world, by the Middle Ages things are looking up.  The Christian promise of salvation creates a new view of ghosts.  There is a paradise you can earn with good behavior, and you can become a purified spirit.  Dante described such spirits in Paradiso:

Such as through polished and transparent glass,

Or waters crystalline and undisturbed,

But not so deep as that their bed be lost,

Come back again the outlines of our faces

So feeble, that a pearl on forehead white

Comes not less speedily unto our eyes;

Such saw I many faces prompt to speak

And in the poem Pearl an anonymous fourteenth-century poet described a vision of his deceased daughter this way:

Like gold that craftsmen work upon

So shone that maid upon the shore

This is very different from the fatalistic ancients, who were plopped willy-nilly into Hades.  We still have the concept of a heavenly reward, and we value earning things in general.

But that doesn’t mean there’s not still a ghost or two wandering around, especially in literature.  Ghosts are good at telling people things they’d rather not hear.  The ghost of Caesar tells Brutus to watch out at Philippi, Hamlet’s father spills the goods on Uncle Claudius, and Marley's ghost warns Scrooge to change his ways.  It’s enough to make you move and leave no forwarding address.  But would Brutus, Hamlet and Scrooge really rather be clueless?  If you have knowledge, you can act on it and turn it to account; without it, you don’t have that choice.  Ghosts meet our desire to know things that are beyond our senses, such as the future.  We all want to be in charge of our lives, and that requires all the knowledge we can get.  It might be nice if we always had helpful spirits tipping us off.

One of the most compelling emotions is love, so compelling that we commonly accept love lasts beyond death.  It's a romantic notion and an enduring theme in literature.  At the end of Wuthering Heights, people claim to see the spirits of Heathcliff and Catherine wandering over the moors.  They were kept apart in life by poverty and social convention, but when you’re a ghost you can leave all that behind and just enjoy the love.  In Alfred Noyes’ poem “The Highwayman” the hero returns from the grave to find his ghostly lover “plaiting a dark red love-knot into her long black hair.”  And a traditional Scottish poem tells about three brothers lost at sea, who on murky nights drop in on their aged mother.  It’s unthinkable to us that we wouldn’t be with our loved ones forever in one form or another.  And, with earthly obstacles removed, that form might even be better.

Some of the most famous ghosts in literature are manifestations of guilt.  They serve our fundamental need to see people get what they deserve.  So, Richard the Third, the ghosts of your victims are keeping you up the night before the battle?  Tough!  You deserve it.  Shakespeare was a master of ghostly guilt, and one of the best examples is the banquet scene in Macbeth.  Macbeth is the only one who sees the ghost of Banquo.  His friends don’t see Banquo, and even Lady Macbeth doesn’t see him.  Macbeth has dropped some hints about Banquo’s death, but he has told her, “Be innocent of the knowledge, dearest chuck, till thou applaud the deed.”  So the guilt is Macbeth’s alone. He freaks out at the sight of the ghost, not only because of his guilt, but because he is so isolated with it.  He’s driven to horror and misery, and abandoned by all that is human and hopeful.  But he got himself into it.  That’s what he deserves.

Ghosts represent death, but ironically they also represent immortality.  But we want the immortality to be on our terms, not like the poor accommodations of Hades or even the uncertainty of heaven.  In literature we can set the terms of immortality.  Heathcliff and Catherine can finally be together; vengeful ghosts can demoralize Richard the Third and cause his well-earned downfall.  Writing gives us control over the uncontrollable. So the ghosts that scare us in literature may also bring us a sense of comfort and serenity.