The semester is winding up, so I don’t have much to say. Keeping my eyes focused on Gaza and New York City for the moment. Not a lot of room for anything else, but fiction helps. Fiction helps.
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Rereading it in preparation for the class, I was struck by a simple but surprisingly deep question: what does it mean for something to be haunted? Not on the surface, but as part of a deeper cultural question. What does it make sense to think of as being haunted?
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The root of this, I believe, lies in the privileging of “realism” over other modes of expression in aesthetics. By this, I mean the idea that art is supposed to be a mimetic reproduction of things that would “really happen”. Leaving aside, of course, the number of really-occurring events that get you treated as insane if you acknowledge.
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What seems obvious to me is that, around the time that film was emerging as an art form, the construction of prose fiction changed rather dramatically. The primary difference of most 20th Century literature from 19th Century and earlier literature is the filmic quality.
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The past thirty years has been quite a ride: in the 1990s, one of the biggest phenomena on television was the X-Files, which wrestled with the hidden weirdness of the 20th century (mostly in the form of aliens.) At the core of the UFO mythos was a nominally apolitical distrust of authority – the government was hiding something from us. They were hiding the truth. Of course, much of this distrust was coupled with (the publicly disavowed) white supremacist ideology. This gave us what could be called the Interbellum Consensus, sitting as it does between the Cold War and the War on Terror: the UFOlogical Weird and the Militiaman Hauntological.
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