I continue looking into the implied theory of ghosts in Reginald Hill’s short story “There are No Ghosts in the Soviet Union”. We’ve discussed the first of the Chislenko premises, and then digressed into a number of complications. It’s time to move on to the second premise. In earlier posts, I have already speculated that a theory of ghosts would include a necessary element of death, a form of recurrence (something from the past reappears in the present), and the intimation of an inevitability. In Hill’s story, too, we have the element of death, and clearly a form of recurrence; but there’s no fateful inevitability.
9. What the four people witness, in a form that resembles a holographic projection, is a murder; so obviously, there’s a death at the center of the episode. At first it’s unclear whether it really happened (rather than just being a case of hallucinations); later it turns out that it did, but seems to have been an accident (that’s how the newspaper account, which Chislenko reads in the archives, describes it). When it is finally revealed that it was murder indeed, the motive emerges as political: it was part of a power struggle between rival factions; the murderer was even a friend of the victim (still is a close friend and adviser to his brother, who has risen through the ranks and is now, as minister, Chislenko’s boss). Thus the approach the plot takes is analytical: it gradually uncovers what happened in the past. The ghost sighting functions first as a trigger and then as a catalyst for the unfolding.
The framing, of both trigger and catalyst, as a ghost recurrence is a classical motif: an unjustly murdered man returns (as ghost) to bring the nature of the crime to light, given that the perpetrator got away with it and is unlikely to come to justice now. (Some further narrative elements support this genre staple, such as the recurring mention of “Friday, the 13th” and various other references to unlucky omens.) This reading of a “higher justice” is confirmed in the ending, when the ghost reappears and confronts the murderer (the still living person) alone in the confined space of the elevator. In their brief verbal interaction he calls himself “a sort of agent”. When asked “for what” he is an agent, he doesn’t reply; these lines are the two ultimate ones that are exchanged between the ghost and the murderer, which implies that the murderer (and the reader) would understand how to interpret this: as a ghost, he’s an agent for a higher power, a kind of ultimate justice. (This last episode as well is accompanied by some “supernatural” signposting, such as the liftman’s noticing that the elevator stopped on its own to admit the murderer — at which point the liftman himself runs away in panic).
With the appearance of the murdered man in the form of a ghost, we don’t just have the ingredient of death, we also have recurrence. That is of course part of the same time-worn motif. (One of the most famous instances is the ghost of Hamlet’s father in Shakespeare’s play.)
There is one curious twist here: when the drive towards higher justice appears in the form of a ghost, that seems partly to stem from a situational feature: the ghostly device comes only into play when there is no more chance that a more normal course would produce an adequate outcome (one that fits justice, thus in this case the crime coming to light and the perpetrator getting punished). But when that happens, when a ghostly intervention, so to speak, becomes the last possible resort and actually gets justice going, the resolution is also no longer a conventional one: it won’t suffice, once we’ve reached that juncture, to simply expose the murderer and trigger a normal course of justice: the ghostly force drives not to punishment in the justice system of the living. It demands death. The perpetrator dies (even if, as in Hill’s story, the rest of the world never learns what really happened, and why; justice only needs to happen, not to be announced).
There seems to be no fateful inevitability here, however, of the kind we’ve registered in Vertigo. No irresistible psychological force drives the perpetrator. It wouldn’t have been unheard of, given the ghost story pedigree: in another famous Shakespearean use of the device, it’s the ghost of Banquo who comes to drive Macbeth’s thoughts. Perhaps one might argue that the ghost sighting drives Chislenko (the story keeping closer to the Hamlet template, then). Despite his various attempts to get rid of the case, at several points it’s his curiosity which wins out and ascertains the slow revealing of the truth. But that’s also not quite correct: Natasha, the first appearance of Serebrianikov, acting on behalf of the minister, and later the minister himself, all press forward to the uncovering of the truth: it’s as if the world at large feels a restless demand to see it unveiled.
But this is not the same form of inevitability: for one thing, none of the characters is reflectively aware of it as a kind of supernatural drive towards resolution, and resolution as another death (that of the perpetrator) at that. More importantly even, it’s not the attempt to avoid repetition of the death that drives the plot towards it. Compare this with Vertigo, where this attempt is made twice, and both times results precisely in what it was aiming to prevent. This structure, which in its perhaps simplest form is encapsulated in the Death in Samarra story, patterns Vertigo, whereas it doesn’t our Hill story (nor Hamlet or Macbeth indeed). One cannot even make the (weaker) argument that the murderer’s machinations to avoid discovery drive it: these machinations in fact, although ultimately ineffective, do slow the revelation down somewhat, even, at the very ending, almost succeed (if it wasn’t for the ghost’s appearing again and “arranging” for the perpetrator’s ultimate “accident”).
I think we must conclude, then, that this “ghost triggers justice” pattern does not involve the same fateful inevitability which the “drive into the next death” pattern in Vertigo exhibits. There, inevitability that forces repetition seems to be one of the distinguishing factors. But perhaps it’s not an essential element in ghost theories as such. For here in the Hill story, the ghost showing seems to spring from a one-time necessity; once its purpose is met, it no longer has any function, and disappears. And this difference, between repeating recurrence and one-time functional appearance, seems to have to do with the deeper motivation: the ghosts in Hill’s story and in Hamlet seek justice or revenge, they are, as the former himself puts it, “agents”. They are not phenomena in their own right, but rather devices: they serve the narrative as an instrument of a higher justice, a tool to expose a crime that otherwise would have gone unnoticed and unpunished (or, in the Shakespeare variants, unrevenged). (It’s an interesting speculation whether this limits their potential to be haunting. The more clearly their function as a device comes out, the less likely they appear to reveal a deeper psychological idea; and it’s the latter rather than the former which has potential to unsettle an audience.) The ghost motif in Vertigo is different, partly because it is respected as a phenomenon in its own right. Even though the ghost story comes in initially as a mere instrument in the plot of Gavin Elster (the villain), it soon assumes a life of its own. The cycle repeats over and over again. It’s never quite clear whether it requires a human seed action to bring it to life in the first place, or whether that trigger is just accidental (or even preordained, from a yet earlier cycle we don’t learn about). But once the cycle is set in motion, it quickly turns out to be self-sustaining and unstoppable. It doesn’t terminate in a satisfactory closure, of justice achieved, but rather fades out on a note of openness, as if there is no reason in principle to believe that it might not have another recurrence in store.
Still, the question remains whether this is essential for the characterization of ghostliness. The Hill text is a satisfactory piece of literature, even if not centrally seen as a ghost story, particularly if we consider that it has a deeper layer that is not so much concerned with that: crime, corruption, and secrecy in an authoritarian society — and qualities of character that can be found even there: from Chislenko’s curiosity, honesty, and humanity that win out eventually every time they come into conflict with the collectivist prescriptions of his world and the hierarchy in which he moves, as well as the minister’s ultimately prevailing will to uncover what happened to his brother, winning over his political machinations. In that sense, Hill’s story, just as much as Hamlet, is not simply a ghost tale, but one about ultimate justice, where the ghost motif is a mere device and its supernatural character just fulfills a function. It’s more difficult for Hill than it might have been for Shakespeare, writing for an audience for which supernatural elements are likely to be questioned on a range of technical questions; hence a number of tweaks he made to get the device working and not too blatantly implausible (some of which are quickly seen through nonetheless). That doesn’t reduce the literary quality, although it limits somewhat the range and depth of what we can learn from it about the notions (especially, that of “ghosts”) which it employs.
