I continue looking into the implied theory of ghosts in Reginald Hill’s short story “There are No Ghosts in the Soviet Union”. Now that we’ve dealt with the pseudoscientific psychobabble, caught up with the underlying metaphysics of persons, and outlined Chislenko’s reasoning, let’s look more deeply into the actual theory of ghosts it implies.
5. As we have seen, that theory has two components: first, a premise that identifies a ghost with a person, or at least treats it as a continued effect of one; and secondly, a number of conditions which also need to hold in order to cast such a continuation of a person as a ghost (the person must be dead, there is something that triggers recurrence, etc.). I’ll start with the first, and look at an important tension it carries with it in our story.
Strawson, whose explication of disembodied egos I have requisitioned as an explanatory foil, already points out the ambiguity with characteristic clarity. To conceive of oneself as a disembodied ego, one would imagine having thoughts, memories, and sense perceptions as present,
whilst (a) having no perceptions of a body related to one’s experience as one’s own body is, and (b) having no power of initiating changes in the physical condition of the world, such as one at present does with one’s hands, shoulders, feet and vocal chords. Condition (a) must be expanded by adding that no one else exhibits reactions indicating that he perceives a body at the point which one’s body would be occupying […]. One could, of course, imagine condition (a) being fulfilled, in both its parts, without condition (b) being fulfilled. This would be a rather vulgar fantasy, in the class of table-tapping spirits with familiar voices. (Individuals, 115)
The line along which Strawson makes the distinction seems to be agency: what he lists under condition (a) is involuntary, condition (b) in contrast denies any causal effects the disembodied ego could intentionally produce in the world. And he is right to be dismissive of the notion of a disembodied ego not having a perceivable body (neither perceivable for themselves nor for others), while still causing physical changes in the outer world. But note that he doesn’t even consider the converse: the idea of a disembodied ego for which condition (a) doesn’t hold (or only holds in one of its parts).
Yet precisely this is what our story seems to describe. It does seem to go with the rejection of Strawson’s condition (b): the ghost cannot interact physically with its environment. And we don’t know anything about the first part of condition (a) — the story doesn’t tell us whether the ghost hallucinates himself to be still embodied or not. But clearly, at least during the sighting episode, there are visual impressions others have of the ghost, and thus the “expanded” part of condition (a) is not satisfied.
And this is plainly inconsistent: if there is no body, no physical interaction at all is possible between the disembodied ego and the external world; therefore, there could be no sighting (or hearing, either). For these sense perception episodes, in the witnesses, depend on light or sound waves, and these are forms of physical interaction. So if a ghost can be seen (or heard), at least episodically as it in fact happens in the story, we must assume that physical interaction takes place, at least sometimes and in some forms.
However, that is still not sufficiently precise, for what happens is something even more mixed up. In the episode which the witnesses observe, one man is pushed into the lift, then falls through its bottom and (presumably) dies. So we have an inconsistent set of three (not two) physical interactions here: first, the visual impression made by the ghost’s body, reflecting light so that he can be seen by the witnesses; secondly, the transfer of kinetic energy when he gets pushed, causing movement that brings his body into the lift; and then third, curiously, the physical non-interaction of his body with the bottom of the lift car, the same that supports the witnesses’ bodies (they don’t fall through it and down the shaft). The strange thing is not just that two men (one of them the ghost) appear out of nowhere and physically interact with each other: it’s that the ghost also falls cleanly through the ground and down the shaft.
Now this is explained (as far as explanations go) by a bit of historical background. In the final portion of the story, we learn that when the man who fell down the shaft died, there was no lift car: it was an empty shaft into which he was pushed when he was murdered. So the weird thing about the third physical interaction is that, although it is against all normal expectations in the present, i.e. at the time when the witnesses observe the “replay” of the killing, it is entirely consistent with the physical state of the setting at the time of the original episode itself. The physical interactions the witnesses observe, both interactions, are past episodes: the killer’s body interacts with the victim’s, and the bottom of the lift car does not support the victim because at the time, the lift car wasn’t there. With this bit of extra hypothesis, the problem of inconsistent physical interactions is back to its normal (still inconsistent) level: the only thing that’s really problematic (i.e., unrealistic) about it is that ghosts should not be visible since they no longer have a body that can reflect light waves.
To account for this, there are two basic options: one is to simply assume by way of authorial fiat that there is no physical interaction except the episodic visual imprint, i.e. Strawson’s “expansion” of condition (a) is dropped (resulting in an incoherent world, governed by suspension of disbelief); the other would be to stipulate a hypothetical “non-physical” (non-causal) source of the visual impression the witnesses have — in other words, a purely “psychic” one, which lets us fall back on the non-explanations we’ve already looked into.
Perhaps it’s a blend of both: the “replay” of a past episode, which the witnesses observe, might not be visible in terms of light wave reflections at all (a video camera, hypothetically, would not record it), but represent a psychic “projection” (in the optical sense, not the psychological sense) from the past, something that creates a hallucination in the same way a dream (or a drug) might produce immersive imagery. But however this is put, it would be an adventurous, speculative hypothesis; it would also be rather implicit in the text. It’s just assumed as part of the story world, not so much to provide a fictional explanation, but rather to stop (or prevent) even asking for one. (Which is entirely fine, of course, as far as narrative credibility or integrity goes.)
But note that the whole problem here arises because of premise (1), the idea that a ghost is the logically derivative concept of a “disembodied” person. Without that, many of the plausibility issues would go away. So what is the exact function of that premise — why does the story need it? Well, it has one overriding type of import: the identification of the ghost with someone from the past, entailing both a history that can be uncovered and a referential anchor (to refer to the ghost and the past, murdered person, as the same individual). If something else could serve these functions, there would be no need to tie the ghost so closely to a concrete person.
