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Here is the thing and it will be with you for the rest of your life
As I go on disorganizedly tracking the emergence of tropes that interest me, tonight in proto-Stone Tape we have Joseph Jefferson Farjeon's Mystery in White: A Christmas Crime Story (1937):
"Now if, by your expression spooks and ghosts, you imply conscious emanations, aftermaths of physical existence capable of independent functioning of a semi-earthly character, well, then I probably do not believe in that sort of thing. There are others, of course, whose opinions I respect, who disagree with me. They consider that you, sir, are doomed to exist perpetually in some form or other. That is, perhaps, a depressing thought. But if, by spooks and ghosts, you imply emanations recreated by acute living sensitiveness or intelligence from the inexhaustible store-houses of the past, then I do believe in that sort of thing. Inevitably. [. . .] What is a simple gramophone record but a record of the past?" he demanded, tapping the bore on the knee. "Caruso is dead, but we can hear his voice to-day. This is not due to invention, but to discovery, and if the discovery had occurred three hundred years ago I should not have to travel to Naseby to hear Charles the First's voice—if, that is, I am to hear it. But Nature does not wait upon our discoveries. That is a thing so many ignoramuses forget. Her sound-waves, light-waves, thought-waves, emotional-waves—to mention a few of those which come within the limited range of our particular senses and perceptions—all travel ceaselessly, some without interruption, some to find temporary prisons in the obstructions where they embed themselves. Here they may diminish into negligible influences, or—mark this—they may be freed again. The captured waves, of course, are merely a fragment from the original source. Potentially everything that has ever existed, everything born of the senses, can be recovered by the senses. Fortunately, sir, there will be no gramophone record of your recent expletive; nevertheless, in addition to its mere mark on memory, your 'Bosh' will go on for ever."
Since this novel also contains psychometry (a bed, a chair, and a hammer all contain imprints of their associated deaths, imperceptible to most but distressingly present to the psychically sensitive chorus girl who makes up one-sixth of the small snowbound cast of this supernaturally tinged mystery), I'm starting to wonder if that's the actual origin of the idea of ghosts-as-recordings, generalized from individual objects to buildings and landscapes. Then again, maybe it particularized the other way round. Or they evolved independently and dovetailed. Really the problem is that I'm trying to answer this question without a deep dive into the history of parapsychology and I might have no alternative. It just interests me so much as an idea that so thoroughly permeates the field I read and write in, I can't remember where I first encountered it. Anyway, I don't just want to know when it entered parapsychology. When did it become one of the recognized literary modes of ghost?
"Now if, by your expression spooks and ghosts, you imply conscious emanations, aftermaths of physical existence capable of independent functioning of a semi-earthly character, well, then I probably do not believe in that sort of thing. There are others, of course, whose opinions I respect, who disagree with me. They consider that you, sir, are doomed to exist perpetually in some form or other. That is, perhaps, a depressing thought. But if, by spooks and ghosts, you imply emanations recreated by acute living sensitiveness or intelligence from the inexhaustible store-houses of the past, then I do believe in that sort of thing. Inevitably. [. . .] What is a simple gramophone record but a record of the past?" he demanded, tapping the bore on the knee. "Caruso is dead, but we can hear his voice to-day. This is not due to invention, but to discovery, and if the discovery had occurred three hundred years ago I should not have to travel to Naseby to hear Charles the First's voice—if, that is, I am to hear it. But Nature does not wait upon our discoveries. That is a thing so many ignoramuses forget. Her sound-waves, light-waves, thought-waves, emotional-waves—to mention a few of those which come within the limited range of our particular senses and perceptions—all travel ceaselessly, some without interruption, some to find temporary prisons in the obstructions where they embed themselves. Here they may diminish into negligible influences, or—mark this—they may be freed again. The captured waves, of course, are merely a fragment from the original source. Potentially everything that has ever existed, everything born of the senses, can be recovered by the senses. Fortunately, sir, there will be no gramophone record of your recent expletive; nevertheless, in addition to its mere mark on memory, your 'Bosh' will go on for ever."
Since this novel also contains psychometry (a bed, a chair, and a hammer all contain imprints of their associated deaths, imperceptible to most but distressingly present to the psychically sensitive chorus girl who makes up one-sixth of the small snowbound cast of this supernaturally tinged mystery), I'm starting to wonder if that's the actual origin of the idea of ghosts-as-recordings, generalized from individual objects to buildings and landscapes. Then again, maybe it particularized the other way round. Or they evolved independently and dovetailed. Really the problem is that I'm trying to answer this question without a deep dive into the history of parapsychology and I might have no alternative. It just interests me so much as an idea that so thoroughly permeates the field I read and write in, I can't remember where I first encountered it. Anyway, I don't just want to know when it entered parapsychology. When did it become one of the recognized literary modes of ghost?
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I have a friend who has been involved in "ghost hunting" with a group that does its best to hold to scientific standards as they can.
From what I understand from her, these "recordings" differ from other types of hauntings in that real "ghosts" refuse to accept death. Those are the ones that speak in terms of EVP or throw things like poltergeists.
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What's the oldest novel you've seen it in? I am not doing anything so systematic as studying the trope of residual hauntings, but I'm interested in knowing how far back it goes—the obvious assumption is that it becomes possible as a concept with the advent of phonograph technology, but I'm curious if that's actually true. Mystery in White is very direct about the link, which is part of what got my attention.
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But I'm sure I knew about it well before then. I'd have to think on that. I've always liked supernatural themed things, so I might actually have to look through my bookcase to see.
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Cool!
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Do not feel obliged, but I appreciate anything you can turn up!
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I don't know about how far back the idea goes, though. I can't even remember what I read last year properly.
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I'll let you know what I find! I never thought much about it myself until I realized there's a non-horror version of the idea in A Canterbury Tale (1944)—see footnotes to this post—and that meant it predated the wave of '70's parapsychology that includes The Stone Tape (1972) and The Legend of Hell House (1973) and even Sapphire & Steel (1979–82) and that made me curious.
There's a ghost trapped in a repetitive pattern in Margaret Oliphant's "The Open Door" (1882), but the story doesn't use the metaphor of recording and in fact the exorcism depends on breaking the ghost out of its pattern, at which point—however briefly—it can be affected by the words of the living like the conscious person it once was. That feels like something slightly different, more psychomachic, to me.
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I like running across this sort of thing.
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Hey, that's neat. I had never read anything of Farjeon's before, just seen (and really enjoyed) a movie he'd provided the story for.
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Your phrasing made me realize that I may have encountered this idea first in Diana Wynne Jones' A Tale of Time City (1987), which doesn't have ghosts in the sense of spirits of the dead, but is full of ghosts as marks on time:
"They happen because the City keeps using the same piece of space and time over and over again. If a person does the same thing often enough, they leave a mark in the air, like the ones you just saw. Habit-ghosts, we call them. There's another kind called once-ghosts—I'll show you some of those later . . . [They] happen when whatever they're doing is so important or so emotional that they leave a mark like the habit-ghosts."
I want to say one documentary might have mentioned the idea of these ghosts as "imprints" on the locations originated with the inventor of the phonograph, or with some kind of wax roll sound recording technology, but I can't swear to it, and I recall no names.
I appreciate the suggestion nonetheless and I'll let you know if I find anything that supports it!
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This is the part where I'm trying to avoid diving into the history of parapsychology! Even though the other thing I've been wondering is how closely this remnant-based approach to ghosts parallels the development of paleontology and archaeology as fields . . .
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That doesn't answer the part of the question where it entered into the literary field and made itself comfortable, but it might give you a timeframe. I don't recall seeing it in the genre I've read from the 19th century, but it might all have been too early. I recall the documentary linked that type of "haunting" not only to ancient places that have seen continuous human use, but to archaeological dig sites and battlefields. Maybe adventure fiction of the very late 19th/early 20th century might be a useful genre to explore, in addition to the detective fiction and ghost stories?
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See above to
Maybe adventure fiction of the very late 19th/early 20th century might be a useful genre to explore, in addition to the detective fiction and ghost stories?
I mean, I don't see how it can hurt me.
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You recced The GHost camera too me ages ago, and I have it on my DVR via Talking Pictures. I'm gradually working my way through all the films I have recorded, gradual being the word...
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That in itself will get tricky because any number of classical hero cults revolve around people who were at least partly human once, but I really think there's a shift to this kind of palimpsest/phonograph/fossil conception and it may narrow down to the nineteenth century no matter what, but I still want to know what it comes out of and when it gets into fiction!
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At a party hosted by a magician, the human guests are invited to choose something to be transformed into for the duration of the party—various guests choose to be a (small) motor-car, William Shakespeare, or a cisswapped version of themselves. One kid asks to be a ghost – Mr. Leakey attempts to dissuade him, pointing out that he’s eventually going to be one anyway, whereas this is probably his only opportunity to be a gorgonzola cheese, etc. The kid sticks to his choice, and spends the party happily walking through solid objects.
At one point he falls through a chair, or something, and only his legs are visible. The narrator comments that ghosts are really funny when you can only see their feet, and adds that this happens more often than you’d think – he then recounts a story about an old manor house that during some renovations changed the level of the floor, and how the Cavalier ghost that always walked in that section of the house subsequently appeared to be wading through the floor, or to be a pair of phantom feet sticking down through the ceiling if you were in the room below.
*I keep forgetting Haldane was mostly known as a geneticist, and supposedly the originator of the saying “If you attempt to study God through His creation, you will rapidly conclude He has an unhealthy fascination with beetles.”
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I hope if it's not true, at least people believe it. Tanith Lee's "The Ghost of the Clock" (2003) is about exactly that kind of haunting, albeit one created deliberately rather than accidentally, and rather more horrific than Kent Allard.
Kipling's "The House Surgeon" (1909) involves a house haunted not by a death on its grounds, but by the feelings of the living about the death on its grounds, which I have always loved.
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The ka is the thing that makes you alive; the ba is the thing that makes you the person that you are. One is the difference between living and dead and the other is the difference between you and anyone else. (This is not taking into account the half-dozen other conceptual pieces of an ancient Egyptian person.) Does that help?
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I also felt sorry for the clerk who has such an active imagination and spends so much of the book being feverish!
I can't tell what I would think of Thirteen Guests without reading it, either, although phonetic dialogue, whether Cockney or Chinese, is never appreciated.
I'm gradually working my way through all the films I have recorded, gradual being the word...
I do not wish to rush you! Enjoy whatever when you get to it.
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I think that's not inaccurate. The ka is personalized—everyone has their own animating force, breathed into their body at the moment of birth—but it's not the personality.
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I read a more recent one once that did phonetic Welsh and if there had been any more of it, I might have been the next one to commit murder. (Just say no, children. :lol:)
It has been a while, as you can tell, but I seem to recall that my feelings were mixed on his writing because I was a bit :-/ at the start of Thirteen Guests but it actually worked out pretty well (apart from the phonetic accent, but he's hardly the only author guilty of that crime) whereas Mystery in White had pretty much the best ingredients of any mystery novel anywhere and didn't seem inclined to do anything I wanted it to do with any of it by the end. I suspect he would probably be a good source for a story for a film! I could see either of those being improved in adaptation.
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