Supernatural Realism

Novel: A Forum on Fiction 42:1 DOI 10.1215/00295132-2008-001 © 2009 by Novel, Inc.

Supernatural Realism

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Few key terms in the vocabulary of literary criticism, and criticism of the novel in particular, have consistently proven to be as indispensable yet elusive, unruly, or downright unmanageable as realism. “realism,” in raymond Williams’s under-statement, “is a difficult word” (257) and, in George Levine’s more sinister formu-lation, a “dangerously multivalent one” (Realistic Imagination 6). While most critics agree that “realism is the dominant style of the modern English novel” (Eagleton 11), the perilous multivalence of the term makes any kind of generalization about the nature or essence of literary realism a high-risk enterprise with dubious pay-offs. accordingly, the impulse to define the term has been tempered by caution and reserve. as Katherine Kearns puts it: “That for every generalization about the [realist] mode there is a disclaimer to be made and a contradiction to assert is the obligatory preface to any recent discussion of the field” (25). critics who attempt to concretize the concept along stylistic, thematic, or other lines invariably make themselves vulnerable to the objection that their historical or theoretical visions of realism are myopic, their definitions, even when formulated open-endedly, too constricted to encompass the broad spectrum of its themes and expressive modali-ties. Erich auerbach perhaps sensed as much when he left realism undefined in what remains one of the most influential critical treatments of realist fiction. The absence of a definition, however, is not necessarily something to brag about, and it is not until the epilogue to Mimesis that auerbach confesses, and then only briefly and deflectively, that “[n]ot even the term ‘realistic’ is unambiguous” but that “to analyze it theoretically and to describe it systematically” (even when one limits realism, as auerbach does, to works that fall into “[t]he category of ‘realistic works of serious style and character’ ”) “would have necessitated an arduous and, from the reader’s point of view, a tiresome search for definitions” (491). The decision to steer clear of definitions may very well be judicious in this case, but one suspects that auerbach’s justification for this move is somewhat disingenuous: it is not the reader but the critic who finds the task in question “arduous” and “tiresome.”

Yet consensus builds itself around silences as much as definitions, and at least one feature of literary realism, at once thematic and methodological, seems so obvious that it barely deserves mention: whatever it endeavored to accomplish or, intentions aside, whatever it actually achieved, realism has historically had very little to do with the supernatural, occult, and paranormal. In fact, “we tend to think of [realism],” Peter Brooks has recently remarked, “as the norm from which other modes—magical realism, science fiction, fantasy, metafictions—are variants or deviants” (5). as literary ambassador for the Enlightenment, realism is thought to exemplify a mode of perceiving, comprehending, and representing persons, objects, and events in accordance with natural laws and rationally expli-cable causal relations. In short, realism is understood to be a kind of radical anti-

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supernaturalism; “[s]upernatural intervention feels, in the context of realist fiction, to be something out of a different genre, the fairy-tale perhaps” (Levine, How to Read the Victorian Novel 95). When a ghost, say, makes an appearance in what is generally regarded as a realist novel, the predominant assumption is that the text is momentarily deviating from its guiding principles, bending or breaking its own rules of verisimilitude and plausibility: it is now doing something else, something contrary to its “nature.” alternatively, and in a formulation that conceptualizes the literary text as a conduit for channeling both dominant and dissenting cultural discourses, the supernatural element is said to have infiltrated the realist novel, subverting its narrative procedures, destabilizing its ideological programs, making havoc of its epistemological and ontological coordinates. In either case the figure of the ghost—a popular synecdoche for the supernatural as a whole—is regarded as that which does not belong in realism as it imagines and projects itself.

correspondingly, supernaturalism’s relation to realism has traditionally been theorized as oppositional, subversive, parasitic. Fantastic literature—for instance, in rosemary jackson’s influential account—“introduces confusion and alterna-tives; in the nineteenth century this meant an opposition to bourgeois ideology upheld through the ‘realistic’ novel” (35). However, even when the target of subver-sion is conceived as monolithic and undifferentiated, as seems to be the case with jackson’s treatment of the ideology of the realist novel, subversion is hardly ever a matter of simple inversion or dismissal. “Fantasy re-combines and inverts the real,” jackson observes, “but it does not escape it: it exists in a parasitical or sym-biotic relation to the real” (20).1 Troping on this reality-bending yet reality-bound parasitism, julian Wolfreys argues that “the spectral is the parasite within that site, or, that para-site, which we call modernity” (2). “The haunting process puts into play a disruptive structure” (6) that defines, among other things, “the very possi-bility of the novel in the second half of the nineteenth century” (11).

If it is difficult, as Wolfreys contends, to think of the nineteenth-century novel apart from the gothic and the ghostly, this seems to be because the novel is inter-nally structured as well as sabotaged by “the gothic as one phantom of an uncon-trollable spectral economy” that “destabilize[s] discourses of power and knowl-edge and, with that, supposedly stable subject positions” (11). But is this wishful stability, in the case of realism, there to begin with, or is perhaps the drive toward the rationalized stability of subject positions, semiotic relations, and epistemologi-cal structures imputed to the realist text in order for us to witness its implosion, the text’s unavoidable failure to be what it ostensibly wants to but never can be? The foregrounding of supernaturalism’s seditiousness, its sabotage of dominant ideologies and narrative modalities, is, I think, at bottom premised less on what realist literature itself has to say about the supernatural and more on a conception of reality grounded in a secular, materialist frame of reference: in the conviction, bluntly put, that rocks and stones and trees, their verbal representations aside, are

1 In a similar vein Francesco Orlando contends that “there is no supernatural that, through the imagination, subverts the entire order of reality but only one that modifies it in part—even when it is in great part. a truly radical alternative is inconceivable, even if it consisted in the pure, anarchic representation of one chaos” (212).

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real, while ghosts and fairies and incubi, regardless of how convincingly or “real-istically” they are represented, are not. The more a literary text is willing to enter-tain the possibility that ghosts really exist, the more likely it is to be interpreted as unwittingly jeopardizing or proactively abandoning its realist objectives and shading off into fantasy and the marvelous.2 Despite the commonly held position that realism is not a mirror reflection of reality but “only a convention” (Watt 32), that it is “not a revelation of nature but a rhetoric and an ideology” (Duncan 6), what ultimately drives the wedge between realism and supernaturalism in criti-cal discourse is a more or less stable consensus about the nature of reality and realism’s proximity to it. a novel featuring ghosts or giants or demons will have a difficult time convincing us of its realism because we know that such things do not exist—or do not exist outside our minds.

my aim here is not to propose an improved, more flexible, and capacious defini-tion of realism, though my argument should be understood as both a prolegom-enon and an invitation to such a project. more moderately, for the time being, I wish to argue that supernaturalism, as far as the nineteenth-century British novel is concerned, is not disruptive but consistently and overtly constitutive of its real-ism. Literary realism, I will maintain, is not haunted by supernaturalism as the parasitic or saboteurial harbinger of ideological, epistemological, and ontological disruption but instead openly collaborates with it, everywhere weaving it into its formal properties, thematic concerns, and critical self-reflections. Supernatural real-ism is not an anomalous offshoot of realism, nor an atavistic remainder of earlier literary traditions, but one of realism’s most conspicuous manifestations, and per-haps not just in the nineteenth century or just in the British novel.

For many critics the appeal of the literary supernatural lies in its provocative unconventionality and nonconformism, its readiness “to voice otherwise unspeak-able truths” (clery 9), truths supposedly denied or suppressed in the realist mode. vexing the status quo wherever it encounters it, supernaturalism (in various guises: fantasy, the marvelous, gothic fiction, ghost stories, and so on) is seen as performing an ideologico-political service inextricable from its aesthetics and fre-quently consonant with the suppressed voices of marginalized groups and dis-courses. In short, supernaturalism articulates what realism cannot or dare not.3 Yet nineteenth-century realism was not only exceptionally flexible about its objec-tives and methods but also routinely mobilized the supernatural as an instrument with which to both formulate and critically interrogate its projects and procedures. For writers as different as charles Dickens, George Eliot, and Henry james, to

2 I am evoking here Tzvetan Todorov’s classification: “The fantastic is that hesitation experienced by a person who knows only the laws of nature, confronting an apparently supernatural event” (25). The marvelous in fiction occurs when the known laws of nature have clearly been violated and must therefore be reconceptualized.

3 By contrast, Terry Eagleton claims that fantasy “is at root a wayward individualism which insists on carving up the world as it pleases. It refuses to acknowledge what realism insists upon most: the recalcitrance of reality to our desires, the sheer stubborn inertia with which it baffles our designs upon it. anti-realists are those who cannot get outside their own heads. It is a sort of moral astigmatism” (4–5).


speak truthfully in and through realist fiction—to attempt “a full and authentic report of human experience” (32), as Ian Watt’s apt definition of realism has it, or to express what F. r. Leavis called “a vital capacity for experience, a kind of reverent openness before life” (9)—meant to speak not unequivocally and dogmatically but polyglossically, in different tongues, one of which was the language of the super-natural. as we are increasingly reminded, nineteenth-century realists were fluent in this language: “[a]vowedly realist novels were full of dreams, premonitions and second sight. It was not simply a matter of stories and storytelling, though, for the material world [the novelists] inhabited often seemed somehow supernatural [. . .] full of invisible, occult forces” (Bown, Burdett, and Thurschwell 1). The point, then, is not that virtually all major novelists of the period (Walter Scott, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Dickens, Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell, james, the list goes on) wrote supernatu-ral fiction—works that, when not dismissively treated as recreational diversions, are often approached as ventures into a foreign (i.e., nonrealist) territory—but that there may be no obvious, unproblematic distinction between their “realist” and “supernaturalist” projects.

Negotiating between breadth of coverage and depth of analysis, and without the intention of minimizing the important differences among various realist texts, I support my claim with three case studies in which the supernatural is pivotal to the novels’ respective realist projects—Scott’s Waverley, Eliot’s Silas Marner, and charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre—and where to speak of the supernatural as alien to and disruptive of the novels’ realism is to read the individual texts, and literary realism generally, against the grain.4 While it might be objected that Waverley, Silas Marner, and Jane Eyre are asymptomatic oddities rather than exemplars of realism, the implication of my argument is that there are many similar oddities among novels commonly regarded as realist and in which binary oppositions such as real-ism/supernaturalism and normal/paranormal are skeptically interrogated rather than reified.

The Post-chaise, the Hippogriff, and the Bodach Glas

By Scott’s own account, Waverley is a sober, sensible, grounded work of fiction. “rooted in reality” is a phrase that suggests itself as a plausible equivalent of Scott’s famous metaphorical description of his novel as “a humble English post-chaise, drawn upon four wheels, and keeping his majesty’s highway,” a vehicle very different from and, Scott suggests, superior to “a flying chariot drawn by hyppogriffs, or moved by enchantment” (24), which is to say the kind of literature in which anything can happen because the writer’s imagination is unconstrained

4 christopher Herbert’s article “The Occult in Bleak House” is a good example of the approach to realism I am advocating. In an astute reading of the novel, Herbert shows how Dickens uses the supernatural as “a many-branched metaphor for his central subject in fiction, the radical newness and strangeness of nineteenth-century life” (103). Yet to accentuate Dickens’s accom-plishment, Herbert contrasts the phantasmagoric quality of Bleak House to something he calls “normal realism” (102) and “ordinary realism” (115). I argue that “normal” or “ordinary” real-ism is phantasmagoric through and through.


by the commitment commonly associated with realist fiction: the accurate rep-resentation of things as they really are or were, as opposed to, in Eliot’s words, “things as they never have been and never will be” (Adam Bede 175). Needless to say, imagining a hippogriff may not be that different from imagining an Edward Waverley, neither of which is real (in the sense of not being an empirical entity) and both of which demand from the reader a suspension of disbelief, a gesture often mystically conceptualized as succumbing to a novel’s work of enchantment, fall-ing under the spell it casts over the immersed reader, and to which I shall return later. moreover, while the imagination cannot be given free reign, it must not be entirely suppressed. The novel’s fictionality—it is neither a deception nor a factual account but a species of writing that subtly, and often uneasily, negotiates between referential and nonreferential modes—hinges on the discrepancy as much as the correspondence between the actual and the imagined.5 Scott is acutely aware of this foundational dialectic, and one of Waverley’s most striking introspective ges-tures is to ponder what may legitimately be imagined and represented in a text that adheres to historical facts yet does not “intrude upon the province of history” (263) and maintains fiction’s privilege of imagining things that never happened. Scott’s novel is in part a metacritical discussion of its own representational modali-ties: a realism that formulates its truth-telling strategies by the very same gestures that it uses to interrogate them.

Waverley’s most direct portal into this introspective dimension is the Bodach Glas, the specter that haunts the Highland chieftain Fergus mac-Ivor and, legend has it, heralds the ghost-seer’s doom.6 as an example of Highland superstition, the ghost is integral to the novel’s conservational agenda, its effort to “preserv[e] some idea of the ancient manners of which” Scott has “witnessed the almost total extinction” (340). more than that, belief in the supernatural is indispensible to our understanding of the political strategizing and layered psychology of pivotal char-acters such as Fergus, who

notwithstanding his knowledge and education, seemed to fall in with the superstitious ideas of his countrymen, either because he deemed it impolitic to affect scepticism on a matter of general belief, or more probably because, like most men who do not think deeply or accurately on such subjects, he had in his mind a reserve of superstition which balanced the freedom of his expressions and practice upon other occasions. (118)

5 aiming to “retrieve novelistic fictionality for analysis but also to explain why we have diffi-culty keeping it at the forefront of our attention, why it incessantly slips behind other features or disappears into terms like narrative and signification” (336), catherine Gallagher shows how eighteenth-century novelists “abandoned earlier writers’ serious attempts to convince readers that their invented tales were literally true or were at least about actual people” yet “also seem to have imprisoned and concealed fictionality by locking it inside the confines of the credible. The novel, in short, is said both to have discovered and to have obscured fiction” (337).

6 On possible originals for the Bodach Glas, see Parsons. as Parsons explains, “bodach means old man, spectre, or hobgoblin in Gaelic, and glas means pale, wan, gray” (95).


Superstition, such as the belief that the dead return in spectral form or that sick-ness can be cured by magic spells, is very much at home in Waverley, not because Scott is uncertain about whether or not there may be something behind it after all (he makes it clear that there is not) but because the novel aspires to be a historically accurate panoramic portrait of a culture in which superstition plays an important role. “[I]t is a historical fact of some importance,” Levine writes of Waverley’s fact fetishism, “that, as ballads, charms, folktales imply, people perceived the world superstitiously and romantically” (Realistic Imagination 87). viewed from this per-spective, references to the supernatural command attention because they con-tribute to the novel’s representation of what Georg Lukács, Scott’s great admirer, described as “the totality of the life-process” (91) captured by the historical novel, namely its “fidelity in the reproduction of the material foundations of the life of a given period, its manners and the feelings and thoughts deriving from these” (167). Yet what makes the supernatural noteworthy (that is, historical fidelity) is precisely what renders it unexceptional. In a text that aims to represent the total life-process of a particular culture at a given historical moment, every historical fact is going to be a fact “of some importance,” and it is difficult to make a case for the unique significance of the supernatural—or superstition, rather, since ghost-sightings in the world of Waverley offer glimpses not of the afterlife but of the everyday life of the superstitious mind.

The Bodach Glas moves closer to the nexus of the novel’s concerns about both literary realism and the nature of reality once we recognize it as the epicenter of questions that undermine the confidence with which Scott debunks the super-natural. can we really say that Fergus is a good example of “men who do not think deeply or accurately” (118)? His machiavellian scheming and pragmatic realpolitik sensibility suggest the opposite. more important, how can we be sure that, as a ghost-seer, Fergus is deluded or suffers from an optical illusion? In fact, the doom that the ghost prophesizes for him is realized, and while it is possible to regard this as a bizarre coincidence, it is also possible to see it as something at once more extraordinary and commonplace. The fulfillment of the spectral curse signifies not the intermittent deus ex machina intervention of the supernatural but its per-petual, generally unremarked presence in and influence on the natural world and human affairs, from the expansive, history-shaping movements of national politics to the more localized affairs of individuals, families, clans. What initially seems to be just one more item in Waverley’s ethnographic inventory emerges as a vehicle for interrogating the novel’s authority on matters ranging from human psychology (how a man such as Fergus can be rational and irrational at the same time) to the grand forces (which may in part be supernatural) that shape history. It is critical, however, to resist the temptation to think of the figure of the ghost as subversive of some a priori anti-supernaturalist realism imported into Waverley or germinating in it as a prototype for what realism will become later in the nineteenth century, and instead to approach it as formative to a realism that unabashedly contradicts itself about how the supernatural ought to be treated in and outside fiction: a real-ism in which such contradictions and ambivalences are too visible, too evidently axial to its discourse on truth and knowledge to be reduced to a simple sabotage of Enlightenment rationality.


Yet the most compelling argument for the importance of supernaturalism to Waverley’s brand of realism has less to do with the text’s ambivalence about spec-tral ontology and more with the ghost as a dubious emblem of the inviolability of the historical record. If the novel is a “post-chaise,” the “highway” it travels is paved with historical facts that steer the narrative away from the imaginary and fictitious and toward the real and actual. “History in Scott,” Levine comments, “is the great plot maker and yet also the redeeming province of fact rather than of his own creative imagination” (Realistic Imagination 93). Yet the novel’s attitude toward history as narrative infrastructure, a rigid framework that channels action and proscribes detours from facts, is more ambivalent than Levine allows. The novel in which history, it has often been argued, makes its first grand appearance as the ultimate plot designer, the narrative blueprint or DNa of historical fiction, also powerfully registers an awareness of alternate plots and highways, alternate histories that can be imagined, even subtly intimated, but not directly narrated in a text in which historical facts are sacrosanct.

“O, my fate is settled,” Fergus mournfully tells Edward after having seen the Bodach Glas. “Dead or captive I must be before to-morrow” (276).7 He is indeed soon captured and later executed, but not before the ghost visits him one last time: another private, for-your-eyes-only viewing that Scott neither corroborates nor debunks. Since Fergus is at once a major actor in the uprising and a larger-than-life embodiment of its morally ambiguous “mistaken virtue” (289), as the Eng-lish colonel Talbot phrases it, the ghost accurately predicts not just the demise of Fergus but also the imminent failure of the jacobite rebellion. The Bodach Glas announces to Fergus and, through him, Edward what Scott’s historically informed reader already knows and some of his contemporaries remember from personal experience: the uprising will fail, it has already failed. Temporal zones and episte-mological barriers collapse; the prediction is also an act of retrospection. courtesy of the Bodach Glas, the characters’ awareness of the historical plot in which they are embroiled expands to fold into the reader’s knowledge of events that are expe-rienced as both yet to come and over and done with: events simultaneously set in the future and the past. That the vehicle for such revelations and dimensional overlaps should be supernatural is not incidental. The supernatural communica-tion between ghost and ghost-seer in Waverley is analogous to—and the immedi-ate vehicle for—the preternatural blending of communal memory and foreboding, retrospection and anticipation, which is the peculiarity of historical fiction: we read the novel as if the historical plot is both completed and forever in the process of unfolding, its outcome somehow both certain and unpredictable.

articulating a revelation beyond the powers of ordinary human knowledge, the Bodach Glas performs an unusual and, for Waverley, crucial metacritical inter-vention: it gives Fergus and Edward not just a glimpse of the future (in a sense, Fergus tells Waverley how one major plot line in the novel will end and what his-tory has in store for the Stuarts and their jacobite supporters) but also a glimpse of

7 as is the habit of ghosts, the Bodach Glas gives Fergus a private viewing. Edward is under-standably skeptical: “How can you, my dear Fergus, tell such nonsense with a grave face?” (276). But when Fergus is captured, Edward reflects: “What, can the devil speak truth?” (279).


their own fictionality, which is to say their helplessness as mere fictional creations to shape the course of their (fictional) lives, let alone the course of (real) English-Scottish history. Earlier, Edward tries to come to grips with his failure to be an active agent in the writing of his personal history but also, more obliquely, with his impotence as a fictional character to influence real historical events when he pen-sively considers, as a suddenly sentient marionette might, “the strangeness of his fortune, which seemed to delight in placing him at the disposal of others, without the power of directing his own motions” (186).

The subservience of the imagination to the inflexible rule of factuality is nowhere more directly expressed than in Flora mac-Ivor’s resignation to predestinarian his-torical determinism. Shortly before the execution of her imprisoned brother, Flora tells Waverley that “it was impossible it could end otherwise than thus” (323), “it” being not only the end of Fergus but also the end of the 1745 rebellion and the his-torical itinerary traced by Scott’s post-chaise novel. The factual historical record is implacably, irrepressibly there as a preordained structure, a narrative convention in its own right, and one by which a conscientious realist-historical novelist as Scott imagines himself to be must abide as a matter of moral obligation and aes-thetic integrity. There is some room for play, of course. It is acceptable for Scott to imagine and represent fictional characters conversing with historical persons; it is even feasible, as Scott will later show in Redgauntlet (1824), to have charles Edward return to England for one more (this time fictitious) try at the throne, twenty years after the events chronicled in Waverley. But the Pretender of 1745 must remain a Pretender in 1765. The course of past world-historical events such as revolutions and rebellions, Waverley proposes, cannot be altered—not in actuality and not in historical fiction.8

Yet if the Bodach Glas signals the impotence of the creative imagination and imaginary creations alike to revise the plot-structuring narrative of history, its message is also that this impotence, as far as fiction is concerned, is self-imposed: the convention Scott adopts toward historical facts is only an adopted convention. Fergus’s fateful encounter with the Bodach Glas stands out as the most fictitious, least realistic incident in the novel. The inviolability of facts, and historical facts in particular, is paradoxically asserted by an encounter between a ghost and a fic-tional character, the moment when the novel is at its farthest from history and real-ity and closest to the hippogriffic literature of unbounded imagination that Scott purportedly eschews. It is a kind of hippogriffic gesture, then, that simultaneously makes the claim for Waverley’s slavish adherence to historical facts, to its chartered post-chaise itinerary, and presents the counterclaim for the absolute freedom of the writer’s imagination that Scott elsewhere proclaims as the novelist’s inalienable right: “[I]t lies within my arbitrary power to extend my materials as I think proper” (115). Such a double gesture is illustrative of the paradox of Scott’s assertion that “the most romantic parts of this narrative are precisely those which have a founda-

8 See mary Lascelles for a distinction between a historical fiction and a fictitious history such as Redgauntlet, which “gives more, and asks more, than historical fiction: it gives visionary insight into what might have been, what very nearly was. It asks unconditional suspension of disbelief” (114).


tion in fact” (340), a paradox not subversive but constitutive of Waverley’s realism and the genre of historical fiction that it is often said to have inaugurated.

Despite its fetishization of historical facts and Scott’s diligence as authentica-tor of the factual basis of his fiction, Waverley is tempted to break its own rules of engagement with history and treat it differently, less diffidently—to perform not just “an esthetic contemplation of history” (14), as avrom Fleishman describes the historical novel genre, but also, more daringly, an imaginative, speculative, revi-sionist intervention in the plot of history. In the 1829 edition of the novel, Scott con-cludes a long note on charles Edward with a confident counterfactual assertion: “On the whole, if Prince charles had concluded his life soon after his miraculous escape, his character in history must have stood very high. as it was, his station is amongst those, a certain brilliant portion of whose existence forms a remark-able contrast to all which precedes, and all which follows it” (407). The histori-cal and narrative possibilities that fan out from this speculative “if” reverberate throughout the novel yet are suppressed, relegated to the small font of annotative ruminations. “as it was” takes precedence over “if”; the factual overrules the coun-terfactual. Even so, Waverley prefigures not just the genre of historical fiction but also counterfactual historiography: the narration of events that never (but could, maybe even should have) happened.9

using the language of the supernatural, Waverley tells the story of what the novel could have been under different circumstances: had the 1745 uprising suc-ceeded, or had Scott been less pedantic about historical accuracy. In doing so, Waverley revises and rewrites itself—if only in a hypothetical, tenuous fashion—into its more speculative, hippogriffic, counterfactual other.10 realism, Scott’s novel suggests, is not just a post-chaise journey but a hippogriffic flight of and into enchantment; not only the mirroring of reality and history but also their imagina-tive transfiguration into fiction, where the factual “as it was” and the fictitious “if” are everywhere in conversation.11

9 On historical counterfactuals, see, for example, Niall Ferguson and Geoffrey Hawthorn. Though Scott’s reflections on charles Edward are generally sympathetic and nostalgic, he concedes that things turned out for the best for Scotland and England. In Redgauntlet he observes that “the principal fault of charles Edward’s temper” was “a high sense of his own importance, and an obstinate adherence to what he had once determined on—qualities which, if he had succeeded in his bold attempt, gave the nation little room to hope that he would have been found free from the love of prerogative and desire of arbitrary power, which characterised his unhappy grandfather” (8).

10 andrew miller has recently argued that “counterfactual imaginings were built into the realistic novel as a part of its very structure” (120). realism is an “intrinsically optative” mode, miller maintains. “In regularly shadowing forth lives for our characters that we do not see, realism reminds us of the singularity of those lives that we do see: it is this life, lived thus, and not other possible lives, formed by other choices, other chances, that the author has decided to represent” (122).

11 In an argument that has affinities with mine, Daniel cottom shows how Scott’s attitude toward superstition in the Waverley novels is “at once rational and superstitiously irrational in its own right” (80):

According to these novels, an interest in superstition can only imply a state of immaturity in which human agency is surrendered to the powers of fate and, by association, the rational progress of the


Ghosts and “Ghosts”

Silas Marner inherits Waverley’s ambiguous handling of spectral ontology and pushes it to the forefront of its engagement with epistemology, language, and the aims and procedures of realism. Part 1, chapter 6, set in the rainbow, raveloe’s inn and agora, opens with Dowlas the farrier interrogating the butcher about the lat-ter’s recent purchase of a cow. Did he buy it from mr. Lammeter? Was it a red Dur-ham? Did the cow have “a white star on her brow?” (46). Infuriated by the butcher’s evasive responses, Dowlas accuses him of lying. The butcher defends himself by saying that he never claimed more than that the cow makes “a lovely carkiss” (47). Snell, the rainbow’s conciliatory landlord, “a man of a neutral disposition, accus-tomed to stand aloof from human differences as those of beings who were all alike in need of liquor” (46), resolves the conflict: “ ‘come, come,’ said the landlord; ‘let the cow alone. The truth lies atween you: you’re both right and both wrong, as I allays say’ ” (47). meandering from one topic to another, the conversation finally escalates into a heated argument between Dowlas and macey the tailor/parish clerk about whether or not ghosts exist. macey claims that they do and dares Dow-las to visit a local haunted house on the night of cliff’s Holiday, when, legend has it, one can “see lights i’ the stables” and “hear the stamping o’ the hosses” and “the cracking o’ the whips, and howling, too, if it’s tow’rt daybreak” (53). Dowlas dis-dainfully replies: “If folks are fools, it’s no business o’ mine. I don’t want to make out the truth about ghos’es: I know it a’ready” (53). Snell again intervenes:

There’s folks, i’ my opinion, they can’t see ghos’es, not if they stood as plain as a pike-staff before ’em. And there’s reason i’ that. For there’s my wife, now, can’t smell, not if she’d the strongest o’ cheese under her nose. I never see’d a ghost myself; but then I says to myself, “Very like I haven’t got the smell for ’em.” I mean, putting a ghost for a smell, or else contrariways. And so, I’m for holding with both sides; for, as I say, the truth lies between ’em. And if Dowlas was to go and stand, and say he’d never seen a wink o’ Cliff’s Holiday all the night through, I’d back him; and if anybody said as Cliff’s Holiday was certain sure for all that, I’d back him too. For the smell’s what I go by. (54)

The transition from cows to ghosts is a Scottian move on Eliot’s part. The “rave-loe mind” (102) is profoundly superstitious, and the supernatural is an obligatory component of the novel’s psychological profiling and sociological study of the vil-lagers. Nor is it incidental that the conversation comically segues from agricultural matters, about which the villagers can speak with authority, to issues about which, poorly educated and mired in superstition, they are presumably incompetent to pass sound judgment, as this adds another layer to their characterization: logic,

middle classes submitted to the arbitrary power of aristocracy. While Scott’s reason can make this diagnosis, however, it cannot provide either the etiology or the cure for this fascination. For this immaturity is not of the past but of the present; it is what is thought to give literature its enchanting, captivating, bewildering influence; and it is a topic treated in all of Scott’s novels, especially in the characters of their heroes. (84)


and especially “analogical argument” (54), is not the forte of the “raveloe mind.” To compare ghosts and cows, or ghost-seeing and cheese-smelling, is to compare the proverbial apples and oranges.

The rainbow chapter is an exemplary instance of a narrative “filler,” as Franco moretti calls it, in which action is retarded and apparently nothing of consequence happens, yet which in this regard is symptomatic of the prevalent thrust in the nineteenth-century novel toward “a generalized reawakening of the everyday” (377), the ascension of the commonplace and banal from the background to the forefront of the narrative. The chapter is also symptomatic of what j. Hillis miller calls Eliot’s “counter-aesthetic of the ugly, the stupid, the real, the frequent, the statistically likely, the near” (Ethics 70)—in other words, the aesthetic of bovine carcasses and pungent cheeses, “the rude mind” with its “primitive wants” (Silas Marner 6). But if Eliot’s filler is an homage to the ordinary, a nuanced and sym-pathetic exposé of the everyday lives of “my everyday fellow-men” (179), as she calls them in Adam Bede, the realm of the ordinary is here conceived as a por-tal into the extraordinary and, importantly, back again (from butchered cows to ghosts to dairy produce), forming a loop or closed circuit in which “ordinary” and “extraordinary” fold into each other as premonition and retrospection blend into one in Waverley by means of spectral intervention. The issue that Eliot raises in this seemingly trivial chapter pertains not so much to cows, ghosts, or cheese but—a major concern in Eliot’s fiction—the way knowledge, about matters ranging from the banal to the bizarre, circulates in story form between speakers and listeners, as well as writers and readers. Not having been present when the cow was pur-chased, the listener (and Eliot’s reader) has recourse only to another’s testimony, the language of one who was there in person and whom one either can or cannot, should or should not trust. The same goes for ghost sightings, those notoriously unverifiable experiences that seem made for translation into riveting, if not true, stories. By establishing an unlikely correlation between the physical and the meta-physical realms, between the ordinary and the extraordinary, Eliot extends the range of epistemological uncertainty to include everything from a red Durham to a ghost who returns once a year on cliff’s Holiday. a ghost-seer is, after all, analogous to a cow-seer. Both tell stories, narratives that one must decide whether to believe or dismiss as lies, tall tales, fictions.

But fictions, in the literary sense of the word, are, as Eliot reminds us with the rainbow chapter, neither wholly true nor wholly false tales but something else. a third position is suggested by Snell’s assertion, now not so ridiculous, that one can believe and disbelieve a ghost-seer’s narrative—just as we tend to believe and disbelieve realist fictions such as Silas Marner. Eliot not only suggests that the nature of reality and people’s perception of it ought to be subjected to skeptical interrogation (that one has never seen a ghost does not legitimate the inference that ghosts do not exist; that one person claims to have seen an apparition is insuf-ficient evidence that ghosts are real), she also exposes the method by which she orchestrates a doublespeak narrative: a story at once true to reality, because rave-loe is a faithful representation of “our old-fashioned country life” (23), and a story that, because there is no such place as raveloe, is merely a story about itself, a story that indirectly confesses that “all language is about language,” as Paul de man puts


it, and thus also a story that cannot help but demonstrate that “the paradigmatic linguistic model is that of an entity that confronts itself” (153).

The question of the reality of ghosts is in Silas Marner inextricable from the question, pursued by Eliot in both her fiction and essays, about the nature and uses of language. “[O]ne word stands for many things,” she writes, “and many words for one thing; the subtle shades of meaning, and still subtler echoes of association, make language an instrument which scarcely anything short of genius can wield with definiteness and certainty” (“Natural History” 282).12 One would be hard pressed to find a better definition of deconstruction’s différance and dissemination, the unending deferral and dispersal of meaning produced by the unending chain of signification. Yet just as only the most naive understanding of deconstruction imagines it as a destructive project, it would be an error to assume that the integ-rity of Silas Marner’s semiotic and epistemological infrastructure is compromised by this semantic instability as Poe’s House of usher is by the “barely perceptible fissure” (Poe 233) that brings it tumbling down. Instead, the deconstructive read-ing is in Eliot’s novel the edifice itself; the fissure is, in a sense, the novel’s semiotic spine and epistemological foundation—the foundation of a fluid and polyglossic rather than monolithic, doctrinaire epistemology. as in Waverley, this is not a case of realism undoing or subverting but deliberately organizing itself as a self-critical discourse on what it might mean for a text to operate referentially and nonrefer-entially at the same time, to deploy a doublespeak that one should and should not regard as truthful.

It is the figure of the ghost—or rather Silas Marner’s treatment of the word ghost—that spearheads the novel’s examination of its signifying modalities, a proj-ect that includes not just the difficult matter of belief in fiction generally and Silas Marner particularly, but also the problematic difference between literal and figura-tive meaning. To answer the question “are ghosts real?” one must first decide on—one must, if possible, reach an agreement with others about—the precise meaning of ghost. For there are literal ghosts (or so ghost-seers claim) and figurative ghosts. Silas is one such figurative ghost, the empty husk of a man ostracized by his reli-gious community and, he consequently feels, abandoned by God. Spectralized by the trauma of “shaken trust in God and man” (14), his ghostly transfiguration is completed with the theft of his hoard of guineas. Having found nothing where his treasure used to be, the distraught Silas makes his way to the rainbow. The dis-

12 more famously, in chapter 17 of Adam Bede, Eliot ruminates: “Examine your words well, and you will find that even when you have no motive to be false, it is a very hard thing to say the exact truth, even about your own immediate feelings—much harder than to say something fine about them which is not the exact truth” (177). This difficulty, Eliot claims, is what at once facilitates and undermines the realistic representation of life in all its subtleties and nuances. In “The Natural History of German Life,” she considers the benefits of “construct[ing] a univer-sal language on a rational basis,” namely “a language which has no uncertainty, no whims of idiom, no cumbrous forms, no fitful shimmer of many-hued significance, no hoary archaisms ‘familiar with forgotten years’ a patent deodorized and nonresonant language, which effects the purpose of communication as perfectly and rapidly as algebraic signs.” Such a language, she decides, “may be a perfect medium of expression to science, but will never express life, which is a great deal more than science” (282).


pute between macey and Dowlas is then interrupted—and instantly resolved—by the sudden appearance of an actual specter: “[E]very man present, not excepting even the sceptical farrier, had an impression that he saw, not Silas marner in the flesh, but an apparition” (55). apparitions continue to haunt Silas Marner. Later, when Godfrey cass is confronted with his abandoned daughter Eppie, it is in the manner of a spectral visitation, the uncanny return of the repressed:

But when Godfrey was lifting his eyes from one of those long glances, they encoun-tered an object as startling to him at that moment as if it had been an apparition from the dead. It was an apparition from that hidden life which lies, like a dark by-street, behind the goodly ornamented façade that meets the sunlight and the gaze of respect-able admirers. It was his own child carried in Silas Marner’s arms. (114)

It is a striking image: a figurative ghost bears in his arms a figurative ghost. Yet it is precisely because Silas and Eppie are experienced as apparitional that they seem more palpable, more undeniably real than if they were represented in corporeal, flesh-and-blood terms only. The realities of past errors and deceptions, the inevi-table return of repressed moral obligations and parental duties, are all paradoxi-cally amplified rather than weakened by spectrality. and it is a paradox that goes a long way to explaining how a ghost-seer’s story can be at once true and untrue, how both macey and Dowlas are correct: “the truth lies between ’em” (54), ghosts do and do not exist. The person who says “ghost” figuratively may see apparitions every day, especially if he is haunted by his past like Godfrey cass; the one who uses the word literally, like macey, may never see one even if, like a pungent cheese, it is right under his insensitive, literal-minded nose. another turn of the semantic screw occurs when we accept the possibility, neither confirmed nor rejected in Silas Marner and Waverley, that the dead do indeed return to haunt the living and are experienced both as literal and figurative apparitions who doubly haunt the ghost-seers: as ghostly bodies (the Bodach Glas, the cliff’s Holiday ghost) and as embodiments of the unexorcized, because unexorcizable, past.

The effect is that we can no longer assume that ghost has, or ever had, only one referent in Silas Marner, or elsewhere for that matter. meaning forks into literal and figurative paths with each signifying gesture; each “word stands for many things.” But it is the word ghost that delivers this lesson in semantic slipperiness more forcefully than any other signifier because Eliot assumes that most of her readers do not believe in ghosts—and then makes sure they realize that they have always believed in them, that it is impossible, in fact, not to believe in ghosts if one believes that people are haunted by a “hidden life.” To speak or write “ghost” or “appari-tion” in Silas Marner is thus to encapsulate the doublespeak of realism on two related levels: realism as a mode that one should both trust and distrust because the truth it communicates is at once nonreferential and referential, a complete half-truth; and realism as a storytelling mode that seeks to address readers straight-forwardly, plainly, unequivocally, yet also draws their attention to the inescapable indetermination of language. raveloe is fictitious, unreal, a mere ghost of a place; raveloe is the distilled essence of actual rural life. Ghost sightings are improbable, extraordinary occurrences; ghost sightings are the stuff of everyday life.


Silas Marner’s realism, I am arguing, is not destabilized but is structured by semantic indetermination and referential ambiguity, traditionally claimed as the specialty of the fantastic mode, which “points out the possibly undecidable and uncanny nature of the very language which we use to dominate and understand our world” (Kelly 55). For it is by virtue of what I have called Eliot’s doublespeak of realism, a term that I use not derisively but, if anything, complimentarily, that she at once implicitly concedes to the objection, often leveled at literary realism, that it is only language—and perhaps, as michel Foucault writes of raymond rous-sel’s work, “a language which only speaks about itself” (168)—and exercises the referential power of realism’s language to transcend itself and, as Levine phrases it, “make contact with the world out there” (Realistic Imagination 8).

“Out there” is in this case a world populated by apparitions, because it is inhab-ited, if not by literal specters, then certainly by people with secrets and regrets, as well as people who, like Eliot, struggle to make themselves understood through the obstacle course of language. That Silas Marner should mobilize the supernatu-ral as a vantage point on its projects and procedures is not odd, then. It is from this position that Eliot and her readers can best survey two terrains at once: the terrain of epistemological uncertainty (how do we know whether a ghost, or anything else for that matter, is real?) and the terrain of linguistic indeterminacy (what exactly do we mean when we say “ghost” and “real”?). Needless to say, these terrains always overlap: theories of knowledge imply theories of signification. But they overlap most thoroughly when one speaks or writes that shortest of ghost stories, “I have seen a ghost.”

What jane Heard

I have left Jane Eyre for last because the segment of the novel that interests me here concerns not so much ghosts and ghostliness (although the novel certainly has much to say on this topic)13 as the paranormal, specifically what later came to be called extrasensory perception (ESP), and because Brontë’s text permits me to reflect once more on the supernaturalism of realism and, from there, to consider the supernaturalism of the language that literary critics frequently use to investi-gate realism’s phenomenology. The episode I have in mind is so familiar that it is almost unnecessary to quote:

The one candle was dying out: the room was full of moonlight. My heart beat fast and thick: I heard its throb. Suddenly it stood still to an inexpressible feeling that thrilled it through, and passed at once to my head and extremities. The feeling was not like an electric shock; but it was quite as sharp, as strange, as startling: it acted on my

13 For example, jane’s friend Helen Burns believes that “[b]esides this earth, and besides the race of men, there is an invisible world and a kingdom of spirits: that world is round us, for it is everywhere” (69). For an insightful discussion of Brontë’s representation of jane as a ghostly woman negotiating power relations with men in “supernaturalized clearings that allow the development, the expansion, and the movement of [. . .] jane’s spirit” (59), see vanessa Dicker-son, esp. 48–66.


senses as if their utmost activity hitherto had been torpor; from which they were now summoned, and forced to wake. They rose expectant: eye and ear waited, while the flesh quivered on my bones.

“What have you heard? What do you see?” asked St. John. I saw nothing: but I heard a voice somewhere cry—

“Jane! Jane! Jane!” Nothing more. (419)

all readers of Jane Eyre know whose voice this is: “[I]t was the voice of a human being—a known, loved, well-remembered voice—that of Edward Fairfax roches-ter; and it spoke in pain and woe wildly, eerily, urgently” (419–20). jane cannot believe her ears, yet is convinced that the voice is no auditory hallucination: she is on the receiving end of an address as undeniably real as if the speaker were in the room with her. rochester later corroborates jane’s experience. He tells her that he heard her voice responding to his call and repeats to her “the very words by which [she] replied” to “the mysterious summons” (448). How is this possible? If jane really hears rochester’s voice and vice versa, do they address each other—and does Brontë here address the reader—in the language of realism, or do these voices articulate something supernatural, paranormal, occult? jane dismisses the super-natural explanation: “ ‘Down superstition!’ I commented, as that spectre rose up black by the black yew at the gate. ‘This is not thy deception, nor thy witchcraft: it is the work of nature. She was roused, and did—no miracle—but her best’ ” (420). The “spectre” of superstition is laid to rest instantly, and what does the job is not jane’s incredulous attitude toward superstition but her unwavering faith in the extraor-dinary range of natural phenomena. at “her best” nature is not miraculous but wondrously manifold and inexhaustible. What are called laws of nature, Brontë suggests, are at best working hypotheses, at worst premature conclusions based on insufficient evidence and limited experience. The “inexpressible feeling” that “thrill[s]” through jane’s body is neither a “miracle” nor “like an electric shock”; it is an experience that cannot be explained by either religious or scientific discourse. But is it also an experience that refuses to be read as realistic?

Brontë’s point here is that a realist writer will not only not jeopardize his or her aspirations to verisimilitude by including what we initially read as an improb-able ESP experience but, on the contrary, will approach a more encompassing and compassionate mode of realistic expression: open-ended rather than hermetically sealed; exploratory rather than just explanatory; flexible rather than doctrinaire about the powers of the mind, the receptivity of the senses, and the force of indom-itable passions. The clairaudient episode is both descriptive and performative. By making something unexpected happen to jane Eyre and in Jane Eyre—something apparently impossible yet, because narrated, because so vividly described, very possible after all—the episode imposes on the reader the moral obligation and intellectual challenge to reconsider what he or she regards in this novel, and nov-els generally, as plausible, credible, realistic.14 The ESP episode is there not just

14 I obviously disagree with Eagleton’s assessment of the ESP scene, namely that it shows how realism can selectively borrow from “less realist forms” when it hits a snag:


to accentuate the strength of jane and rochester’s passionate attachment, which neither distance nor the passage of time can dissolve, but also to remind those who read about them that personal experiences are precisely that, personal, not legisla-tive, not easily generalizable into laws of psychology or nature.

If most of what jane experiences in the course of the novel strikes us as plausible and realistic, then the paranormal remainder comes off as implausible and unre-alistic not because it is “out of character” for her or Brontë’s novel but because it is out of character for us to interpret it otherwise. To draw the line between literary realism and its nonrealist others (ghost stories, fantasy, gothic fiction) is to make an arbitrary distinction based on a limited, ungeneralizable experience of reality (I have never seen a ghost or heard “voices”) and a limited, arbitrary definition of realism (we conventionally agree that realism has properties W and X but not Y and Z). my argument throughout has been that the novels we commonly think of as realist have a remarkably liberal understanding of reality and what a realist novel can or should do to represent it. They also, I have tried to show, routinely deploy the supernatural and paranormal as internally situated promontories from which to survey and critique their own realism—or realisms, rather, because what they articulate and encourage is not blinkered but multiperspectival vision: Waverley’s temptation to reimagine and revise the plot of history while adhering to historical facts; Silas Marner’s semantic oscillations between literal and figurative meaning and its referential/nonreferential dialectic; Jane Eyre’s expansive, open-ended con-ception of nature and reality. Because the nineteenth-century realist novel tends to be hyperconscious of its representational techniques and “persistently drives itself to question not only the nature of artificially imposed social relations, but the nature of nature, and the nature of the novel” (Levine, Realistic Imagination 21), it would hardly be a stretch to read jane’s ESP experience not just as a provocative challenge to the reader’s understanding of nature (it is not only natural to hear voices of absent people, it is a case of nature at “her best,” her most natural) but also a commentary on realism’s mimetic illusionism, its preternatural power to evoke sights and sounds of things or persons physically absent yet nevertheless there to

When realism hits a genuine social problem, it can always resolve it by reaching back to these older forms and borrowing a magical device or two from them. If it is realistically unlikely that Jane will return to the now conveniently marriageable Rochester, a mysterious voice in her ear can always prompt her to do so. The ghostly intimation, the improbable coincidence, the lost and rediscovered relative, the opportune legacy, the timely death: all these tricks of the literary trade are still accessible to a social realism which needs them to smooth its rough edges and resolve otherwise recalcitrant conflicts. (141–42)

Interestingly, even critics disposed to read the ESP experience in less rigid fashion tend to approach it as unrealistic. Distinguishing between “real” and “true” in Jane Eyre, ruth Bernard Yeazell argues that “while the miraculous events which conclude this novel are scarcely realis-tic, they are ‘true’—true to the vision of human experience which informs Brontë’s world, and true to the internally consistent laws by which that world is governed.” The truth in question is “the truth of the psyche” (128), and jane’s psyche in particular: “The true magic of Jane Eyre is not so much a matter of mysterious voices and providential fires as of a vision which [. . .] dialectically unites independence and love and creates a world whose outward design mirrors the internal progress of the psyche” (129).


be seen and heard as if they were in the room with us. a present absence, an absent presence: the foundational paradox of mimesis and realism’s modus operandi.

Brooks’s analogy of choice for a realist novel is a toy, a miniature fashioned after the real thing and so much like it that the difference is experienced as negligible: the realist text is “a kind of reduction—modèle réduit—of the world, compacted into a volume that we know can provide, for the duration of our reading, the sense of a parallel reality that can almost supplant our own” (2). The modèle réduit metaphor accords with Brooks’s investment in realism’s capacity to evoke, in miniature form, the sensuous, physical world: “realism in the etymological sense of res-ism, thing-ism” (20). But a more adequate metaphor for the phenomenology of a realist novel may be the spiritualist medium, a channel, passive and active at the same time, that enables a dialogue between ontological realms and across borders dividing binary opposites: physical and metaphysical, natural and supernatural, normal and paranormal, present and absent. Not incidentally, this is Jane Eyre’s meta-critical contribution to a theory of realism, a theory of itself as a realist novel. To read and, importantly, experience a realist novel is not just like extra sensory per-ception (the reader sees and hears what is absent, or what is present only in words); it is a form of clairvoyance and clairaudience. Both jane Eyre and the reader of Jane Eyre respond to a “mysterious summons.” just as it proves possible for readers of and characters in Silas Marner simultaneously to believe and not believe in ghosts, Brontë’s reader sees and hears things that are not—and yet are—there to be seen and heard. What we encounter in the ESP episode, then, is not a different, hyper-sensitive jane Eyre—a jane suddenly and inexplicably tuned in to supernatural frequencies, as it were—nor a Jane Eyre that violates its principles as a work of real-ist fiction, but an enactment of the reading experience, specifically the experience of reading a realist novel.15 The animating “shock” is the shock of self-recognition: we are reading about ourselves reading.16

Supernaturally Speaking

Finally, I want to suggest that while literary realism regularly “communicate[s] its sense of itself as a bifurcated and inadequate accommodation of any holistic reality” (Kearns 7), what lies at the root of our fascination with realism’s peculiar modalities and effects is not its referential inadequacy, its irreducible distance from reality (because signifiers are not their signifieds, representations can never be

15 mark m. Hennelly, jr. persuasively shows how “the repeated motif of reading” in Brontë’s novel points to “the book’s preoccupation with the problematic phenomenology of reading” (694) and draws attention to the reader’s “task of translating, interpreting, and reading a text” (703).

16 a more detailed reading of Jane Eyre would consider how jane’s clairaudience complements her “bright visions,” images she apprehends with not her corporeal but her “mind’s eye” (109) or “spiritual eye” (125). jane relates such visions to another kind of hearing: she desires “to open [her] inward ear to a tale that was never ended—a tale [her] imagination created, and narrated continuously; quickened with all of incident, life, fire, feeling, that [she] desired and had not in [her] actual existence” (109).


what they represent),17 but instead what is often experienced as realism’s magical, occult capacity to use descriptive, evocative, performative language to conjure up more than language. In fact, the language of literary criticism frequently addresses readers in the idiom of the supernatural and paranormal, of magic, ghostliness, and enchantment: a language particularly conducive to understanding how realist novels do what they do, how they succeed rather than fail in their linguistic and representational projects.

as a point of departure in tracing the history of this critical idiom (a project whose shape I can only briefly sketch here), one might turn to Walter Benjamin’s reflections on the mimetic faculty. “[O]nce the foundation of occult practices” (336) such as astrology, the mimetic faculty, Benjamin claims, has decayed in secular modernity: “[T]he observable world of modern man contains only minimal resi-dues of the magical correspondences and analogies that were familiar to ancient peoples” (334). These residues are preserved, however, in language and writing, which Benjamin regards as “an archive of nonsensuous similarities, of nonsensu-ous correspondences” (335) that formed the basis of divinational reading practices: “reading before all languages, from the entrails, the stars, or dances” (336). Since Benjamin, the work of recovering occult, magical residues in language and writ-ing has generated theorizations not just of realism but of literature and textuality more broadly. allan Gardner Smith, for instance, corroborates certain features of Benjamin’s mystical semiotics when he argues that “the mimetic quality of fiction has affinities with sympathetic magic” (6), but he avoids Benjamin’s questionable claims about graphology and the onomatopoeic roots of language. using a reader-response approach informed by the phenomenological theories of Wolfgang Iser and Georges Poulet, Smith is concerned less with the magical traces one may exca-vate from the physical, printed text and more with that “ghostly text” whose “only full existence is in the mind of a particular reader, during or after the reading” (10). To read literature, Smith argues, is to be haunted, “possess[ed] by the text” (8), which is to say initiated into “a secret knowledge, unparaphrasable and available only to initiates” (14), an intimacy organized around uncertainty and indetermi-nacy, the end result of which is not the transmission of unequivocal truths but “meanings which are not susceptible to rational recuperation” (18).18 Going further, one can pursue the supernatural into a kind of semantic stratosphere where, as in Silas Marner, words such as ghost and haunting are unmoored from any specific

17 Nineteenth-century realism thus exhibits what some critics regard as the distinctive feature of twentieth-century magical realism, namely, as Scott Simpkins describes it, the effort to over-come and supplement realism’s “frustrating inadequacies of language” (140). Failing to do so, magical realism overtly comments on its shortcomings: “[m]agical texts reflect upon their own blind spots, generating a metacritical discourse about their own indeterminate modality” (151).

18 Such an experience, Smith claims, is endemic in gothic literature, which “may actually be a purer variety of fiction (because more simply and directly related to the reading experience), than the apparently innocent mimeticism of ‘realism’ ” (9). But Smith observes that realism itself is not what it seems to be: the rationally unrecuperable elements in a novel such as The Great Gatsby should not be treated as “excrescences on an otherwise irreproachably realistic text, but rather as dramatizations of the issues raised by realism itself” (18).


referent yet (or because of this, rather) determine the very nature and possibility of textuality. Following jacques Derrida’s lead from Specters of Marx and elsewhere, Wolfreys maintains that “all stories are, more or less, ghost stories” (3), because all texts are haunted by traces and echoes of other texts, by “voices [that] are the others of the very texts we read in any given moment” (xii), and because “[t]extu-ality brings back to us a supplement that has no origin, in the form of haunting figures—textual figures—which we misrecognize as images of ‘real’ people, their actions, and the contexts in which the events and lives to which we are witness take place” (xiii).19

Both Smith and Wolfreys test their hauntological theories on realist novels, and it is literary realism rather than fantasy or gothic fiction that typically makes the supernatural integral to the critic’s exploration of the phenomenology of reading. Sometimes this language is itself ghostly, a buried spectral layer that requires exca-vation. There are traces of covert mysticism, for instance, in Lukács’s assertion that “the nature of artistic creation,” especially literature, “consists in the ability of this relative, incomplete image to appear like life itself, indeed in a more heightened, intense and alive form than in objective reality,” an effect that he describes as the text’s power “to conjure up a world of illusion” (91–92). Other critics are more overt in their use of supernaturalism and magic as interpretive devices. For josé Ortega y Gasset, the core of the novel form is wrapped up in magic: “Novel I call the lit-erary prose work” that possesses a “glorious and unique magic,” an enchanting, spell-casting power to “multipl[y] our existence, freeing us from our own self and generously bestowing upon us the gift of transmigration” (91) to other places and times, where we are not quite ourselves and “lead an imaginary life” (93). more recently, j. Hillis miller has described novels as “powerful instruments for conjur-ing ghosts,” spiritualist mediums that channel haunting, unforgettable appari-tions: “the swarming specters of such characters as Fielding’s Tom jones, Stendhal’s Fabrizio, Flaubert’s Emma Bovary, George Eliot’s Dorothea, Henry james’s Isabel, joyce’s Leopold Bloom” (“World Literature” 559). Elsewhere miller comments on the unique ontology of literary specters: “The personage remains alive ever after-ward somewhere in my imagination, as a kind of ghost that may not be exorcized, neither alive nor dead. Such ghosts are neither material nor immaterial. They are embodied in the words on the pages in all those books on the shelves waiting to be invoked again when the book is taken down and read” (On Literature 30). To speak of novels as “conjuring devices for raising all these phantoms” (“World Lit-erature” 559) need not mean to speak obliquely or self-indulgently (since readers are haunted by different spectral pantheons and may experience the same literary ghosts differently). Nor is it necessarily to speak of ghosts figuratively, or only figuratively: the distinction between literal and figurative ghosts is tricky at best,

19 Nicola Bown, carolyn Burdett, and Pamela Thurschwell object that “the metaphorical super-natural that suffuses recent literary and cultural theory” (10), and is constitutive of how Wolf-reys and likeminded critics deal with the ghostly, is problematic: “[S]uch theories unify and flatten out the supernatural: they move too seamlessly over the supernatural into what it signi-fies” (12) and so efface the distinctive supernaturalism of the supernatural and its historically and culturally idiosyncratic manifestations.


as Eliot makes sure we understand. Instead, it is to articulate something about realism that, I have argued, is innate to and formative of it.

The term supernatural realism, then, is a compromise—a pleonasm, really—intended to bypass binary thinking and inject into critical discourse a dose of awareness about the complex relationship between the natural and supernatural, normal and paranormal, that Waverley, Silas Marner, and Jane Eyre openly manifest. just realism ought to be enough but, for the time being, may not be.

Works Cited

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Bown, Nicola, carolyn Burdett, and Pamela Thurschwell. Introduction. The Victorian Super-natural. Ed. Bown, Burdett, and Thurschwell. cambridge: cambridge uP, 2004. 1–19.

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de man, Paul. Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust. New Haven: Yale uP, 1979.

Dickerson, vanessa D. Victorian Ghosts in the Noontide: Women Writers and the Supernatural. columbia: u of missouri P, 1996.

Duncan, Ian. Modern Romance and Transformations of the Novel: The Gothic, Scott, Dickens. cambridge: cambridge uP, 1992.

Eagleton, Terry. The English Novel. malden: Blackwell, 2005.

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Supernatural Realism