I’m discussing the implied theory of ghosts in Reginald Hill’s short story, “There are No Ghosts in the Soviet Union”, and in particular the first of the premises whose truth is simply assumed in that theory: that a ghost is a person (or in some sense a continuation, possibly “disembodied”, of a person). Since we’re at it, I might as well make a cross-referencing remark about this idea.
I have already criticized something like this premise in an earlier post, when I discussed the theory of ghosts implied in Vertigo. The thought there was that no single character in the movie could be unambiguously identified as the ghost (or more precisely: as the person whose ghost the ghost is).
But that argument, of course, has it backwards: the film, so to speak, simply doesn’t make the basic mistake of starting from that assumption. That might count as an indicator that something is wrong with the assumption, but it doesn’t tell us what exactly the mistake would be. The current exhibit (Hill’s story) does make the assumption, and here we can study more closely what makes it problematic.
The theory of ghosts that governs Vertigo is importantly different from the theory here. On that theory, premise (1) is false, and premise (2) would have to be significantly recast. It’s probably evident enough that I am much more in sympathy with the implied theory in Vertigo than the one we’re discussing right now. But sometimes it can be helpful to investigate a dead end, largely for the reason that learning where it is mistaken can be more instructive than looking at theories which avoid that particular mistake in the first place. (However, I also plan to go into some more fiction which likewise doesn’t make the assumption, to reinforce the point I made about Vertigo.)
