That means they are haunting me still, and really – what more can one ask of a ghost? But these are the phantoms that kept me turning pages, the ones I never forgot when I finished the book. The ghosts I list here may not be what we usually think of when we hear the word “ghosts”. “In literature,” says the writer Tabitha King, “the ghost is almost always a metaphor for the past.” This is true for literal ghosts who manifest in graveyards, and it’s true for figurative ghosts who are no more substantive than insistent memory. A ghost in literature could be the kind we meet in Hamlet, in other words, a spooky dead king seeking vengeance, but it also could be something subtler, something real, such as the absent mothers who emotionally haunt so many of Alice Munro’s protagonists. Literary ghosts didn’t have to scare what they had to do was haunt. As a student of Hannah’s back in the day, I took these words to heart. Something haunts the work and the reader turns the pages to find out what it is.
All stories, he’d say, are ghost stories. When Barry Hannah, the late novelist of the American south, taught fiction workshops, he would begin by writing those two words on the blackboard.
0 kommentar(er)
