December 24, 2021
This newsletter will appear on Christmas Eve Day, so of course it’s going to be about Christmas, despite the obviousness of the choice. In fact, I’m going to be even more obvious and write about Dickens’s A Christmas Carol (1843), but I do promise to try to get a little deeper than the holiday specials. I urge my students to follow the advice of science fiction writer Theodore Sturgeon, whose motto was “Ask the next question,” which is the question that most people wouldn’t think to ask. So the question for today is, why is there a tradition of telling ghost stories at Christmas? After all, there is no rationale latent in the holiday itself, as there is for the Halloween-All Soul’s holiday period. It’s a Victorian tradition, although preserved as late as Robertson Davies’ High Spirits (1983), which collects the ghost stories that Davies actually read aloud at the annual Christmas party at Massey Hall in the University of Toronto. Davies was himself a kind of ghost of Christmas past, intent on getting us to revalue all things Victorian, as I can attest, having been a student in his graduate seminar on Nineteenth Century Drama. I vividly remember sitting at the seminar table in his study in Massey, with the Collected Works of C.G. Jung directly behind me. For some people, anything Victorian is either kitsch or imperialism, but Davies was not one of them, and neither am I. To a Jungian intuitive type, the ghost tales are intuiting something about the holiday season, on a level deeper than commercialism and sentimentality.
This newsletter is being written on the day of the winter solstice on December 21, the shortest day and therefore the longest night of the year. The date of Christmas is arbitrary, and it would make more sense to celebrate it on the solstice, the day of the birth of the light that shines in the darkness at the very moment of the dark’s greatest domination. The date of New Year’s is likewise arbitrary, and, to the mythological schemes clustering at this period, we may add the Feast of the Epiphany on January 6, celebrating the revelation of the Christ child to the Wise Men as if he were himself the newborn star they had followed out of the East. The notion that we are celebrating not just one holiday but a span of time that encompasses several events and holidays related somehow on a symbolic level is manifest in the twelve days of Christmas, from Christmas Day to January 6 or “twelfth night,” even if that does not technically cover the solstice. But we see the pattern: the new light in the darkness signifying a new hope miraculously born out of the most implausible circumstances, at the most unlikely moment, a birth that renews time and restores human nature to its original unfallen form of cheerfulness, compassion, and good will toward all.
The anthropologist Victor Turner spoke of a “liminal period” created by some religious rituals, including some new year’s festivals, an uncanny period outside the normal boundaries of time and space, sometimes occurring during the intercalendrical days between the end of the old year and the beginning of the new. The transforming power enters the world through such a nexus out of the realm of darkness itself. A deep part of our imagination is conditioned by thousands of years in which the night was not just ordinary darkness but a hidden realm, ambiguous, frightening, and yet alluring, what Loren Eiseley called the night country in his book of that title. It is ghost country, the country where the dead may still walk.
Ghosts, about which I’ve already written a previous newsletter, raise the issue of human identity, and especially the anxieties we have, however repressed, about whether we are in fact real. To quote another eminent Victorian, Thomas Carlyle, in the significantly-titled chapter “Natural Supernaturalism” in his Sartor Resartus, that masterpiece of profound Victorian eccentricity:
Again, could anything be more miraculous than an actual authentic Ghost? The English Johnson longed, all his life, to see one; but could not, though he went to Cock Land, and thence to the church-vaults, and tapped on coffins. Foolish Doctor! Did he never, with the mind’s eye as much as the body’s, look round him into that full tide of human Life he so loved; did he never so much as look into Himself? The good Doctor was a Ghost, as actual and authentic as heart could wish; well-nigh a million of Ghosts were travelling the streets by his side….we start out of Nothingness, take figure, are Apparitions….O Heaven, it is mysterious, it is awful to consider that we not only carry each a future Ghost within Him; but are, in very deed, Ghosts!
Sartor Resartus, or “the tailor re-tailored,” plays upon a metaphor of the world of appearances cloaking a world of essential reality, the “thing in itself,” which Kant called the noumenal (see the previous newsletter), disguising it as clothes disguise the body. He is also playing upon the fact that in German Geist means either “ghost” or “spirit,” depending upon context, as in English we may refer either to the Holy Ghost or the Holy Spirit. Underneath all the respectable layers of Victorian clothing that we call the phenomenal world is a naked world of ghosts, of spirits.
There are times that we feel ghostly, feel anxiously that our identity is a contingent and precarious thing. The Ghost of Christmas Past may appear to show us how our identity was created by a series of choices that we made in earlier life. Scrooge is shown how he lost the love of his life because he chose money over her. If I had made different choices, my life would have been different: this is the realization of the speaker in Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken,” an epiphany that happens out in the solitude of the dark woods, the night country. But the more radical implication is that I would myself have become a different person. In Henry James’s ghost story “The Jolly Corner” (1908) a man comes face to face with the person he would have become had he remained a businessman in the United States instead of living a rather dissipated life in Europe, and is shocked and traumatized by a figure described as odious, evil, and missing two fingers.
Which brings me to the fact that I just saw Spiderman: No Way Home, which I enthusiastically recommend. Reviewers can rarely resist the temptation to say at least something condescending about such movies, for fear their reputation will suffer for having been seduced not only by naïve popular culture but by the capitalist entertainment machine. However, art films and realistic novels find it difficult to raise issues that call the nature of realism into question: James himself had to take a holiday into the ghost tale in order to raise them. We make different choices and thus become someone different from what we might have been. However, the same is true of other people and of the elements of our environment: the idea that causality is not linear but a garden of forking paths has led to the theory of a “multiverse,” where different outcomes have led to an infinite number of realities.
So the Marvel universe is now becoming the Marvel multiverse, and it is that transformation that drives the plot of Spiderman: No Way Home, which tries to explain why we have had eight Spiderman movies set in three somewhat different realities featuring three versions of Peter Parker that are distinctly different personalities. I am not giving away anything I have not seen reported all over the media to say that the last third of the movie is a tour de force in which three versions of Peter Parker confront one another with astonishment, then bond together to defeat the villains. What so easily have become an annoying gimmick is given emotional substance by the fact that each Peter Parker has lost someone as a result of a decision of his own whose tragic consequences he will have to live with for the rest of his life. For Toby Maguire’s Peter it is Uncle Ben; for Andrew Garfield’s it is of course Gwen Stacy; for Tom Holland’s it is someone whose identity I can’t divulge or it really would be a spoiler. There are three ghosts in A Christmas Carol, each of which embodies a potential reality. There are, in a sense, three ghosts in Spiderman: No Way Home, because each Peter Parker is a ghost to the other two, a potential identity never actualized in that Peter’s universe. There is even a background song whose lyrics insist on the importance of the number three, suggesting that the creators might be toying with the suggestion of a consubstantial trinity in which all three figures are ghosts instead of merely one of them, as in the Christian Trinity.
However, in A Christmas Carol itself there is what at first seems a contradiction to the idea of identity as an outcome of a labyrinth of causality, an interplay of chance and choice. Northrop Frye has a brilliant essay, “Dickens and the Comedy of Humours,” showing how the non-realistic, stylized characterization in all of Dickens’ work is a development of the tradition of the comedy of humours that runs from Ben Jonson and, in a more complex way, Shakespeare through dramatists like Molière and novelists like Fielding and Cervantes up to the comic strip type-characters of our own day—which brings us back to the theme of the last newsletter, that of a typology of human personalities based on certain fixed characteristics. The less realistic and more formulaic the comedy, the more the characters are bound to be types, expanding far beyond the mere four that the Renaissance derived from Hippocrates and Galen. Scrooge is a type, and in fact a very common type, the miser.
The typical plot of a comedy of humours often focuses on the attempt to release a central character from some obsessive mode of thought or behavior, as Scrooge is released from his miserliness. So identity, rather than the outcome of a complex process, is a rigid mask. And release from the humour is not a gradual growth but a sudden metamorphosis, an abrupt change of identity like taking off a mask. This mode of characterization is subject to habitual complaints from readers and critics for whom causal modes of explanation are realistic. Sudden transformations in real life lead to the suspicion that the change is not genuine; when they occur in literature they are often dismissed as wish fulfilment. And so of course it is with Scrooge, especially by critics of a Marxist bent, frustrated by the message that the evils of Victorian capitalism could be remedied if the capitalists merely had a change of heart brought about by ghosts or some other emissaries of the opiate of the masses.
Nonetheless, however superficial its treatment in some brands of popular entertainment, there is a deep psychological reality lurking in the concept of the humour type. Scrooge ruins his life with his miserliness, but why did he become a miser in the first place? The Freudians can tell us that: their series of developmental phases, from oral to anal to genital, contain an implicit typology. When people become fixated on one of the phases, their personality begins to revolve around it obsessively, resulting in a fixation that is very like that of the old psychology of humours. Miserliness is in fact a product of development arrested at the anal phase. Toilet training, learning control, is the beginning of the human will to power. The miser is one kind of control freak, as even popular slang recognizes in the phrase “Don’t be so anal.” In other words, the miserly humour or character mask is a defense. The whole idea is to arrest the metamorphic flux of identity into something comfortingly constant and predictable. Humour psychology has a social dimension as well, leading to a psychoanalytic explanation of capitalism, not in Freud himself but in what is still one of the great books of the Sixties even if it appeared in 1959, Norman O. Brown’s Life Against Death, one section of which bears the eyebrow-raising title “Studies in Anality.” Dickens is fairly explicit in his portrayal of Scrooge as a representation of capitalist mentality, which is driven less by greed than by fear. When such a fixation is released, there may be not a gradual improvement but a sudden reversal.
This bears examination because the psychology of cult behavior exhibits the same dynamics: fixated, obsessive devotion to a charismatic leader or an ideological cause secretly motivated by a need for safety and anxiety about change. Such mass psychosis is highly contagious, as we have seen in recent years when a third of the United States has become demonically possessed, except that the demons are psychological rather than supernatural. The need is for a kind of exorcism: people are “not themselves,” as we say, and when whatever possesses them is cast out, they may revert quickly from wild mob to dazed, bewildered citizens. I stress this as a kind of qualified, cautious hope: terrifying as the wave of irrationality sweeping across the country presently may be, such mass phenomena can blow themselves out quickly, like a sudden, violent storm, under the right circumstances, if the causes can be removed.
The conversion experience in religion shares the same dynamics. It is a kind of positive possession: Paul describes his inner state after his conversion as “I, yet not I, but Christ in me.” Falling in love in the swept-away fashion of so many romances and pop songs is a similar phenomenon, and in fact sometimes borrows the imagery of religious conversion. There are secular social analogues to the conversion experience, including Woodstock, which was perhaps not so secular after all: the lyrics to Joni Mitchell’s “Woodstock” begin “I came upon a child of God” and end by speaking of the need to “get back to the Garden.” The common pattern in all these phenomena is change of identity by sudden metamorphosis.
So far we have been speaking of identity on the surface level of ordinary experience, whether we think of it as developing causally or through transformative epiphanies. But there is a depth dimension to the question. By identity, we normally mean the ego, the “I,” our sense of conscious awareness. But where does the ego come from? That is a different question from how the ego develops once it has come to be, one that leads back to the occasional anxieties about our ghostliness. The ego is a complex, as depth psychology puts it, sustained by a certain level of energy. When that level of energy diminishes, as when we are tired, we fall asleep, and the ego disappears. Even when we are nominally awake, ego consciousness flickers, goes in and out, and at odd moments we are “not all there.” They warn you when you start teaching that the human attention span is twenty minutes, and when you are in front of a group of students you can often tell which ones are really there and which have checked out: they blink on and off like a set of Christmas lights. That is common knowledge, and harmless enough. What I find more troubling are gaps that no one talks about. I think we find Alzheimers so terrifying because it dramatizes something that happens to us all the time, something we largely minimize or repress because we find it deeply disturbing. Freud spoke of the psychopathology of everyday life: there is a kind of Alzheimers of everyday life in which much of our conscious experience simply disappears. I laugh at my students’ tendency to blip out in class, but I am somewhat shocked to realize that I can recall only a few moments of the hundreds of hours I spent in classrooms over many years. I retain knowledge from classes of which I do not have a single memory of actual class time, and I know it was not because the classes were boring.
Where has it all gone? And where have I gone? So much of me has simply vanished, leaving not a wrack behind. Other experiences point in the same direction, namely, downward into some kind of dark oblivion. I read the essays that I wrote in college fifty years ago, listen to the voice in them and ask, “Who are you?” It is like listening to a recording of your voice: I, yet not I. I feel no need for actual time travel: for me it would be enough if someone invented a device by which I could simply see my own past, to remember what really happened, especially at certain moments, even if sometimes what I saw appalled me, like a personal reality TV. It was not long ago that friends reminded me that once, when I had gone through a very bad time, I had cut myself off from them and everyone so thoroughly that one night they showed up at my door in an intervention. I have absolutely no memory of that intervention, and I find that more frightening than the self-destructive state of mind I was in at the time. Alcohol, of course, provides a chemical assist for this kind of blackout, and I no longer drink because it is bad enough that you don’t remember the next day, but what is really intolerable is not the idea of losing consciousness. No, it is that I did not black out: I remained awake, but not as an ego consciousness. Rather, as a consciousness that was I, yet not I, doing and saying things that I did not remember later—at least once, something unforgivable, which is when I stopped, and will never touch alcohol again.
Memories slip out of sight; the whole ego slips out of sight. Yet they do not cease to exist: we know this because they return. The ego returns every morning when we wake up, and Alzheimer’s patients sometimes have moments of temporary remission, waking from a near-catatonic state to something like normal awareness. Long forgotten or repressed memories can suddenly return, so where have they been? Depth psychology says “the unconscious,” in which modern psychology does not believe. Neither do the AI people, who do not even believe in consciousness: it is—we are—information printed on organic circuitry. Even the idea of an “unconscious” is an illusion, much less more directly mythical notions such as a night country, what in The Productions of Time I call an Otherworld. That verges uncomfortably on “occultism,” which literally means the belief in something hidden. However, like all productions of the imagination, the Otherworld is not something to be “believed in”—yet it is not something to be disbelieved either, for skepticism is merely the other side of literalism.
What are we to make of a reality that is not a literal reality but has its own truth nonetheless? Especially since our own identity seems to be an extension of it, the ego being a kind of avatar born from a larger identity and returning to it, in sleep and other forms of unconsciousness, perhaps in death. As I have said, such speculations appear more readily, and in a more uninhibited form, in popular culture than in literary fiction. By synchronicity—itself an Otherworld concept—in an article about the new sequel The Matrix Resurrections in Entertainment Weekly (January, 2022), we read that “Star Carrie-Anne Moss says her experience on The Matrix made her examine the very concept of reality. ‘Who are we, if we’re not all the labels that we put on ourselves at a soul level?’ she asks.” Well might she ask, for the brothers who made the original Matrix films have come out as trans and are now women. Whatever aesthetic value the films may or may not have, they are valuable in raising questions that matter to people who do not have degrees in philosophy or literary theory, questions about identity and the survival of identity.
Which brings us back to the solstice again, the time when the light seems to be engulfed by the darkness. That eclipse can happen to whole civilizations, not just to individuals. When World War I broke out in 1914, British Foreign Secretary Edward Grey said, “The lamps are going out all over Europe. We shall not see them lit again in our lifetime.” In 1939, at the outbreak of World War II, W.H. Auden wrote in his elegy on W.B. Yeats:
In the nightmare of the dark
All the dogs of Europe bark,
And the living nations wait,
Each sequestered in its hate;
Intellectual disgrace
Stares from every human face,
And the seas of pity lie
Locked and frozen in each eye.
It is possible that we have arrived at such a crisis again. But in the moment of the imminent triumph of darkness, we light our lights, as if to signal to something else. If we do not have faith, yet we hold stubbornly to our hope that something might signal back, a kind of SETI of the interior world, the realm that Yeats called a “fabulous, formless darkness.” Everything that we have lost has disappeared into that world, but the hope is that nothing is lost, but rather changed—“Into something rich and strange,” in the words of Shakespeare’s song about a young prince’s supposedly drowned father. Also that out of the “matrix,” the womb of the darkness, something may yet be born, symbolized by a miraculous child who is also a shining star.