Haunted Landscapes

Super-Nature and the Environment Eds: Ruth Heholt & Niamh Downing Rowan & Littlefield Intl 2016 Pb, 256pp, notes, bib, illus, ind, £27.95, ISBN 9781783488810

Haunted Landscapes, edited by Ruth Heholt and Niamh Downing, is an excellent overview of debates surrounding the uncanny, the supernatural and landscape.

I’ll begin by recommending this book, but with one slight caveat; if phrases like ‘diegetic space’, ‘chronotope’ and ‘Affect Theory’ bring you out in hives, this may not be the collection for you. If it’s your thing (it’s definitely mine), then you will love this collection of diverse essays, with its discussions about embodiment and gendering of haunted spaces.

The writers adopt a wide range of approaches, but all have one thing in mind, as the title suggests: the nature of haunting within the landscape. Beyond that they vary greatly, from the Norfolk of WG Sebald, to the contentious geography of Whitechapel. Derrida and his key text

Specters of Marx loom large. There is some validity to arguments that hauntology has run its course and melted into a lazy stereotype. That’s not the case with Haunted

Landscapes. The variety and level of criticism means that many of the papers here feel fresh, and contain new insights.

For example, Daniel Weston’s paper on the landscapes explored by Sebald contains some interesting observations about the distance between Seabald’s writing, and the villages in that part of the country as lived places.

He states that “Ghostly presences and their revenance sup energy and life from depiction and representation.”

Having grown up in the UK rather than on the continent, Derrida’s concept of the Specters

of Marx has always seemed slightly distant.

In Witching Welcome, Ryan Trimm talks about how Britain is haunted by ‘Spectres of Empire’, and for the first time this wider contextualising of hauntology made sense.

Downing’s fascinating discussion of Jim Crace’s Being

Dead is a highlight. His novel concerns a couple who are murdered and left to rot on a beach, that being the start of the story. Downing analyses this work of ecological uncanny with nuance and insight, pointing out “The ecological is a necessarily peculiar spectral realm.” In many ways this felt like one of the most fortean papers in the book, with its emphasis on the boundaries between life and death, and the unsettling borders at the edge of nature.

The following chapter, about haunted landscapes in Victorian English Cities, continues the fortean tone, in relation to belief in ghost lore stating, “One must work with the reasonable assumption that there was a spectrum of engagement, ranging from genuine belief, through the operation of the ‘ironic imagination’[..] to outright scepticism.”

Other essays cover the work of film-makers Guillermo del Toro and Pasikowski, as well as the problematic nature of Heidegger’s work, and the nature of the haunted landscape in Coraline and ParaNorman (Rebecca Lloyd making the point that the way 3D breaches the boundary between audience and film renders both as spectral presences, something that I think will be a recurring theme with Augmented Reality etc).

Were there any problems with the volume? Only minor ones. I feel there was no need for so many of the essays to restate the origin of hauntology (Derrida, ontology etc.) in a book that is most likely aimed at an audience familiar with the concept. A description in the introduction and references back to this would have sufficed.

However, this is an excellent collection. My personal favourite? Rosario Arias’s exploration of Sonia Overall’s

The Realm of Shells, using ideas of embodiment and the sensorial from the work of archæologist Yannis Hamilakis.

A highly recommended collection of academic essays, which will especially appeal to readers who like a bit of phenomenology and landscape theory to digest with their morning cup of coffee. Steve Toase