Alice Rayner,
Ghosts: Death’s Double and the Phenomenon of Theatre.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006.
ISBN: 0 8166 4545 0
$US22.50 (pb)
207pp
(Review copy supplied by University of Minnesota Press)

Alice Rayner, associate professor of drama at Stanford University, declares that the project of her book is “making sense of ghosts” (x), which suggests she intends to render the supernatural comprehensible to the rational mind. While her efforts are fascinating, the book’s foundation in psychoanalytical theory was an obstacle for my rational mind; readers who are more comfortable than I am with this approach will no doubt avoid this problem.

Ghosts have become “central figures for emerging critical, philosophical and social epistemologies”, Rayner writes, connecting their increasing appearance in intellectual contexts to “millennial anxieties” (xxiv-xxv). By ‘ghosts’, she refers, first, to theatrical representations of human spirits that return to the world of the living, such as Hamlet’s father. But she also refers to ghosts more obliquely and metaphorically, pointing out that theatre itself, in ghostly fashion, “takes its shape as a double of the world, which appears, disappears, and reappears through performance” (xv). She refers, too, to the “ghosts of history” in theatrical works (Ireland’s troubles, seen as haunting Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, for example) (42).

Chapters are based on themes such as repetition, the double, matter, and memory (xxviii). Rayner writes of mourning, trauma, forgetting, and of the psychoanalytic notions of “incorporation” and “introjection” (62-4). Revealing the enduring cultural power of ghosts, she considers a range of responses to loss and sorrow, such as Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial and Civil Right Memorial (34), the Oklahoma City National Memorial, a response to that city’s bombing attack (116-8), and Michael Arad’s “Reflection”, a proposal for a memorial to the dead of the World Trade Centre (34). She extends the discussion to disturbing artworks such as Brian Goggin’s 1997 Defenestration (99-100). As well as Hamlet and Godot, theatre pieces include Ionesco’s The Chairs (118-30), and Suzan-Lori Parks’s The American Play (85-93). One chapter (155ff) also considers ghosts in films, looking especially at Gaslight (USA 1944), The Sixth Sense (USA 1999), and Vertigo (USA 1958). Rayner also considers aspects of theatre such as lighting, props, and the theatrical curtain, and the ways these structure theatrical experiences.

A satisfying feature of Rayner’s writing is that it frequently presents the prosaic in a startling new way. For example, an extended section on chairs – those most domestic and familiar objects – begins:

Chairs are among those basic human object that echo the human body. Inanimate reproductions of the human lap, with enveloping arms (or not), chairs duplicate the parental lap and the safety (or not) of its enclosure. . . . Its angles follow the skeletal joints of a body halfway to collapse, expecting the bending of the knees and the hinging of the hips. . . . an empty chair speaks of a future arrival or a loss. . . . The pathos of an empty chair holds both memory of a loss and anticipation of return in all the particularity of a person, in character, in quality. It remembers both authority and vulnerability. A chair, in short, is also a memorial device. (110-112)

In allowing us to see anew, her writing itself functions as she claims theatre works on us. “One function of art,” she writes, “is about that moment of unforgetting when the familiar world suddenly seems strange and new or impossible” (xix).

While her arguments are bracing and original, sometimes their connections to the topic of ghosts proves elusive, partly because of the nature of ghosts, partly too because of the ephemeral nature of theatre – indeed, of experience itself. Rayner herself admits that it is “virtually impossible to answer the question, what is a ghost?” (xii), She continues:

A ghost is no-thing. It is not the sort of object that can be examined, unearthed, analysed. . . . Ghosts animate our connections to the dead, producing a visible, material, and affective relationship to the abstract terms of time and repetition, sameness and difference, absence and presence. (xii-xiii).

However, the book’s elusiveness also arises from the opaque language and convoluted constructions of theoretical discourse, which often lead to awkward passages:

. . . theatrical doubling invokes two dissimilar elements and finds points of overlap, such that the double negative “not not” and the dualism “is and is not” do not so much present an ontological truth as they indicate the limits of dualistic thought. (xii)

The sections of the book that “sang” for me were those where the ideas were grounded in Rayner’s own experiences of performance or memorials, rather than textual analyses or accounts based on other’s responses to performances, such as reviews. For example, she describes her experience of watching, in 2000, the Gate Theatre from Dublin perform Waiting for Godot. Although she had seen many other productions, this one was “‘perfect,’ which is to say so actual and simple that I wondered how all productions of Waiting for Godot had not been that way” (42). In capturing the specificity of that performance, that singular event, Rayner’s writing itself takes on a force that, for me, made it stand out.

However, it also raised questions about audience response and “ghosts.” Rayner identifies many kinds of ghosts conjured up by this production: the “ghosts” of previously seen performances; what she had learned about the play in college; and “the ghosts of Irish history” (42). This last set of ghosts she connects, via the actors’ Irish accents, with “her own traumatised grandfather, the starving masses of the famine, Beckett, my Irish friends. . .” (47). Her response, then, provoked and was provoked by her own personal “ghosts” – what she brought to the theatre that night – and was not the response of every audience member, who may not have an Irish grandfather or friends. I find it difficult to see how she can make a case that all in the audience could access either “the traumatic history of Ireland informing the text,” or “the trauma of famine among the living. . .a manifestation of the unavoidable facticity of all that is lost but maintained as ‘all the dead voices ‘ are heard in the speaking body. . . .” (47).

Jeannette Delamoir,
Central Queensland University, Australia.

Created on: Saturday, 2 June 2007