[The following is excerpted from the Introduction to Modern Death in Irish and Latin American Literature (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020). If you are a college librarian, please order it here or here; if you quite reasonably wish to save your money, you can download the entire book as a free pdf here or here. Besides of course being a shameless book plug, I share this excerpt as a reminder of what’s possible when we allow an LDS perspective to seep into our scholarship, whether consciously or not. My book’s thesis, you see, is that Irish and Latin American writers have, by virtue of their shared Catholic-majority heritage and histories of resisting Anglo-centric imperialism, created much more sympathetic portrayals of the dead than English and Anglo-American writers, who typically portray the dead as either horrific monsters or illusory frauds.
[One might fairly ask how I–a descendant of New England Puritans who is neither Irish nor Latino myself–could arrive at this perspective. The answer, quite simply, is my Mormonism: not only did my missionary service in Latin America inadvertently help prepare me for this project, but LDS doctrine itself preaches that the dead are neither intrinsically scary nor illusory as well. Indeed, we are repeatedly taught that the veil is thinner than we realize; that the dead move upon us “with the spirit of Elijah;” that our hearts must turn towards them as theirs do towards us; that it is our work and our glory to redeem the dead in God’s holy temples; that even the Book of Mormon, the keystone of our religion, is as a voice “whispering out of the dust,” brought forth by the resurrected dead who–like the revenants of Irish and Latin American literature–have been erased from history but are not silenced.
[Nowhere in the book do I do I state any of this explicitly. In fact, I finish this excerpt by stating flatly: “My purpose here is not to speculate upon the veracity of the supernatural, but rather to examine how writers from across Ireland and Latin America have, both in parallel and in concert, deployed symbolic representations of the dead in their various anti-colonial enterprises.” This is a work of Postcolonial literary theory, not theology. Nevertheless, the influence of my religious upbringing is still all the more present for remaining unstated, almost in spite of myself. Whosoever hath ears to hear, let them hear.]
…Across the vast majority of English and Anglo-American literature, apparitions of the dead have largely been classified as strange, hostile, and above all unwelcome. Hamlet and Horatio can scarcely believe their own eyes—or even each other—when the ghost of King Hamlet first appears, as the Prince exclaims in terror, “Angels and ministers of grace defend us!” (Hamlet I.iv). Similarly, Ebenezer Scrooge memorably refuses to credit the apparition of Jacob Marley at first, attributing him merely to his indigestion with a glib, “There’s more gravy than the grave about you” (Dickens 27)—that is, before the shrieking phantasm brings him to his knees. For that matter, Bram Stoker’s Dracula features an undead vampire appearing before a cascade of rationale, scientific Englishmen who are all marked by their repeated failure to comprehend this supernatural horror confronting them until it is almost too late. Likewise, the entire oeuvre of H.P. Lovecraft is defined by the complete incapacity of the rationale Anglo-Protestant mind to encounter supernatural horror without going utterly mad.
Even the benign ghosts of English letters are evaded: The phantom-protagonist of Margaret Oliphant’s 1884 Old Lady Mary, for example, returns to this mortal realm in order to reveal a missing will and correct an injustice; but is frustrated to find her ghostly presence ignored at every turn, save only in whispered village folklore. But then, the ghosts have always struggled for recognition in the Anglosphere: indeed, popular horror novelist and New England native Stephen King has had to caution other aspiring horror writers that ninety percent of everything one writes must feel ordinary, so that when the ghosts finally appear, they feel real—as though such a literary effect were a great difficulty and arduous to accomplish, especially with an English-speaking audience. For these same reasons, the dead in the popular Harry Potter novels by the Englishwoman J.K. Rowling are also incredibly difficult to communicate with and nigh-impossible to access—the one barrier that even their wizards’ mightiest magic cannot transgress.
All across the Anglosphere, there is this implicit understanding that the dead must always be alien and impossible, horrible and terrifying, the sole province of literary thrill-seekers—that, or they must be denied existence entirely. Hence, the ghost-nun that haunts Charlotte Brontë’s Gothic novel Villette must ultimately be revealed to have a perfectly mundane explanation in the end (it was but a disguise worn by someone’s paramour secreting away on a rendezvous); as does the Headless Horseman in Washington Irving’s “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow”, which turns out to be but the story of a late-night prank played at poor Ichabod Crane’s expense. Critical readings of Edgar Allen Poe (as in “The Tell-Tale Heart”) invariably focus upon the unreliability of the narrator, of the mere psychological horror at play here; the possibility of a straight supernatural reading is excoriated at almost every critical turn.
Likewise, the New Critics of the mid-20th century notoriously promulgated an entire reading of Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw wherein the storie’s ghosts are not only nonexistent, but solely a hallucination in the fevered imagination of the governess, who became the very type for an “unreliable narrator” (but then, how could she be reliable, if she has claimed to see ghosts?). Like an old Scooby-Doo cartoon, the ghosts must always be unmasked as but a scam-artist scaring away patrons for the insurance money—and the fact that the motivation for the hoax in those old Hannah-Barbara cartoons was almost invariably economic in nature is indicative of the larger reasons for this Anglospheric exclusion of the dead.
For unlike Ireland and Latin America, England and the United States have historically been majority Protestant, and hence developed a distinctly different relationship with death—as well as with money for that matter, and the two are connected. As Max Weber famously argued in The Protestant Work Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Calvinist Protestantism inadvertently gave rise to a “rationally” ordered form of capitalism, one that systematized the age-old human failing of avarice into an “ethos” wherein the “duty of the individual . . . [is] the increase of his capital, which is assumed as an end in itself” (51). For if, as Martin Luther taught, grace alone and not good works saves the individual—and if, as John Calvin further taught, the elect and the damned have already been determined since before the world was—then naturally, argued Weber, all that is left for the Protestant Christian to do is determine whether one is of the elect or not. (This was no idle consideration; the 18th-century English poet William Cowper, remember, was driven to the depths of depression by his creeping conviction that he was irrevocably damned of God, no matter what he did.) Since one’s priest cannot say who is saved and God will not, then economic productivity becomes the sole remaining factor by which to gauge one’s election—for that same God who determined everyone’s salvation has also determined everything else. Hence, if the Almighty has provided you with an opportunity for profit, then you are not only required but divinely mandated to capitalize upon it as ruthlessly as possible; otherwise, you have betrayed yourself to yourself as one of the un-elect and damned.
As a result, exploitation and extortion no longer became human failings or necessary evils, but an obligation and a duty; henceforth, the Protestant businessman squeezes every last cent not only out of simple avarice, but sheer holy terror. Austerity and efficiency, as opposed to excess and liberality, became the cardinal virtues. Thus, in Weber’s Protestant model, all elements and subjects not obviously engaged in the cause of maximizing economic production are ruthlessly excised as not only extraneous, but sinful and accursed. Consequently, the dead—who are almost by definition economically unproductive—were damned from participation in such a system. Henceforth, any appearance of the dead could only be interpreted as a horrific apparition of the damned, a shadowy threat to the integrity of the prevailing economic order. (It is perhaps no coincidence that the 1984 comedy “Ghostbusters”—and I say this as one with great nostalgic affection for the film—presents us specifically with ghost exterminators: New York-based scientists-turned-entrepreneurs who use their empirical knowledge of the great beyond not to address the great questions of existence or commune with the dead, but to erase them, turn a profit in the private sector, and resist EPA regulation.) Ever after, ghostly apparitions must either be repulsed as terrifying, or dismissed as illusory.
An elegant example of these twin Anglo-Protestant attitudes can be found parodied in Oscar Wilde’s early 1887 novella “The Canterville Ghost,” a tongue-in-cheek satire of the haunted house Gothic. The tale concerns an American diplomat from New England named Mr. Otis, who moves his family into a stately old British manor that has been haunted by a surly phantasm since the 1500s. According to local legend, the titular Canterville ghost is a spirit of great malice and horror, an unrepentant nobleman who once murdered his own wife, for which crime he was tortured to death by her brothers. Ever since, this damned soul has haunted the manor, scaring away every English tenant foolhardy enough to try to move in, and becoming a hiss and a byword throughout the neighboring community. But much to the ghost’s chagrin, this new American family does not become paralyzed with terror, but instead ignore him, downplay his presence, tease him, play pranks on him, and otherwise go nonchalantly about their business as though he was not there. They are simply too busy with the practical concerns of business to bother much with a ghost.
One of Mr. Otis’s first acts, for example, is to clean away a blood stain that has sat on the floor-boards undisturbed for three centuries. When it keeps reappearing each morning, Mr. Otis, rather than become unnerved, is merely non-plussed, and orders it cleaned again with increasing exasperation. Nor is he terrified when the blood stain begins to change color. The blood stain only ceases its reappearance when his youngest daughter, Virginia Otis, confronts the ghost directly, chastising him for stealing her paint-set each night to touch up the blood stain (which explains why it kept changing color: he ran out of red). The surly ghost confesses the petty theft, to his further humiliation.
With characteristic insight, the Irishman Wilde parodies the two poles of Anglo-centric attitudes towards the dead—sheer terror and blithe dismissal—within the same story. For whether the hardnosed Englishman avoids them or the business-minded New Englander ignores them, the dead in either case are marginalized from lived experience entirely. But the Irish attitude is also implicitly foregrounded in this story, as the Canterville Ghost is treated by Wilde as not merely a trope or a symbol but as a real character, one imbued with his own personality, passions, history, and agency. Wilde is not scared of the ghost but nor does he dismiss him—nor does young Virginia, who in the end befriends the poor ghost, learns his tragic story, and helps him make amends with the angel of death so that he can at last pass on to the next life in peace. Of course, only Virginia could do it; she was still too young to be fully indoctrinated into Anglo-Protestant forms of thought. And only Wilde could have written it, for this humanization of the dead is a distinctly Irish approach, one that presupposes the dead are real people—as are the living, for that matter.
For the austere economic logic that consigned the dead to the peripheries of English discourse also frequently consigned the living to join them: when Ebenezer Scrooge sneers of the starving poor with Malthusian contempt, “If they would rather die…they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population,” he is clearly cruel, but not in a manner unusual for his time and place. In fact, less than four years after A Christmas Carol’s initial publication, it was put firmly into practice during the Irish Potato Famine of 1845-49. The Whig Party then in control of English Parliament ultimately opted to forego humanitarian aid and the closure of Irish food exports (policies that had helped stave off a similar famine during the potato blight of 1782), and instead chose to continue the export of cash crops and cattle—often under armed guard—back to England for trade on the open market, while literally a million-plus starved to death in Ireland.
In a gross misreading of Adam Smith, the Whigs preferred to allow the “invisible hand” of the market to feed them. When it of course did not, the Famine was naturally interpreted by many English Protestants as divine retribution, there to reprove the predominantly-Catholic Irish for their supposed “indolence” and unproductivity. As Charles Trevelyan, Assistant Secretary to Her Majesty’s Treasury, proclaimed in 1847: “[The Famine] is punishment from God for an idle, ungrateful and rebellious country; an indolent and un-self-reliant people. The Irish are suffering from an affliction of God’s providence.” For his relief efforts, Trevelyan was knighted in 1848. Overall, these “unproductive” living were consigned to join the “unproductive” dead.
That vicious logic is still with us: in North America, brutally-overworked Hispanic migrant workers are consistently criminalized and characterized by certain sectors of U.S. society as deadbeats, thieves, and freeloaders—“an indolent and un-self-reliant people”—even as they are repeatedly taken advantage of by an economic order that has rigged immigration law against them, so as to ensure a constant pool of cheap agricultural labor that can be easily exploited and deported. They have largely been deemed “surplus population”, un-meriting of even basic humanitarian consideration—as have those tens of thousands murdered in the manifold cartel wars, massacres, disappearances, and death-squad atrocities committed by U.S.-backed dictatorships across Latin America throughout the 20th century. Like the Irish during the Famine, their existence has been treated as extraneous and expendable, as either vermin to be exterminated or an irrelevancy to be ignored—just as the dead have been.
It is no coincidence then, that within the Irish/Latin American archive I have assembled in this project, the dead can, must, and are approached differently. The Catholicism that predominates their nations perhaps renders them far less committed to Protestant epistemologies, and thus better inoculated against such overtly hostile representations of revenants and ghosts. As such, the dead in these Irish/Latin American texts I will be examining are often treated as far more accessible and acceptable, as not a mystery but a given fact of the universe, a commonplace, even quotidian. Their presence requires little explanation or justification, and their right to exist does not hinge upon the demands of the market economy.
In fact, far from monstrous or damned, these dead can provide an implicit sort of comfort and reassurance, that the prevailing global Anglo-centric economic order is not the only system possible—and what’s more, that others can exist outside of it too. As China Miéville argued in an essay on the state of contemporary fantasy fiction, “[with] the advent of the neoliberal There Is No Alternative, the universe was an ineluctable, inhuman, implacable, Weird, place,” with no place for the dead—or anyone else for that matter—nor any other economic system possible save that of the current neo-liberal order. But, continues Miéville, “More recently […] as Eagleton haunto-illiterately points out, the ghosts have come back, in numbers, with the spectral rebuke that there was an alternative, once, so could be again” (Miٞéville). These dead, by their sheer presence, challenges the authority of Margaret Thatcher’s portentous “there is no alternative.” Economic productivity ceases to be the sole arbiter of intrinsic value; Thatcher’s “There is no alternative” is at last overwhelmed with alternatives.
Now to be clear: My purpose here is not to speculate upon the veracity of the supernatural, but rather to examine how writers from across Ireland and Latin America have, both in parallel and in concert, deployed symbolic representations of the dead in their various anti-colonial enterprises. The dead in these works can serve as a repository of historical grievances, a recorder of silenced voices, and as a disruptor of neocolonial discourse. Indeed, literature may just be the ideal medium by which to explore this relationship with the dead, since literature itself is often represented as a dying form, especially when compared to the hegemony of film, TV, and internet (like capitalism, literature is constantly in crisis). But here in the exile of the silent letters on those dead-tree pages, other voices on the cultural margins, ones long silenced and erased by the forces of colonialism, are at last made audible.