little green ghouls

Hauntology, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Warwickshire towns, and past wounds

cw: bad relationships, violence, weight loss

This is not a particularly groundbreaking opinion, but the last sentence of The Great Gatsby is, for me, the best line of the entire book. It is so dripping with irony, with bleak self-awareness, and yet also with a fatalism that we are indeed inevitably consigned to being borne back ceaselessly into the past, because that is just what humans do. I’ve never had a tattoo before, but if I had the pain tolerance I would get this last line inscribed on my inner eyelids so I could see it when I shut my eyes. Maybe instead I could get it tattooed across my lower back, as apparently it’s a lot less painful on the more fleshy bits, but then I wouldn’t be able to read it myself. An F. Scott Fitzgerald tramp stamp. I first read the book during A-level English, which makes the last sentence feel particularly prescient – who knew as I read it that it would be a time I would dwell on so frequently, to my own detriment, boats against the current? Fitzgerald, probably.

I recently returned to Cádiz in the very south of Spain, where I was supposed to live for five months. Instead my time there was decimated to only five weeks, as I caught the last plane out of Jerez before the borders shut in March 2020. I moved there when I was nearly 21, when I had already lived alone in Paris for four months, and in many ways it was the most free I had ever been. Coming back now, though, with my family, has been healing but also incredibly difficult in many ways: I felt like I had been catapulted back into the body of my 20-year-old self, with all the same concerns and surroundings, except I’m 23 and I’m about to start a real professional career and I’ve put on weight due to my antidepressants and I’m developing frown lines and my hair is thinning and I can actually talk to people without shaking. I’m not a child anymore. I feel old and haggard.

I had a dream about my ex while I was there. I say a dream because it didn’t feel like a nightmare at the time, but the reaction to it was delayed, and I spent the next few days feeling like my chest had been tied in a tourniquet and someone had poked a needle into my lungs to suck all the air out. It’s been five years since we unceremoniously parted ways - I can’t say “broke up,” because we were never officially together - and nearly six since we met, when he was in his second year of uni and I had still not taken a single A-level exam. I lost an inordinate amount of weight and felt like he was the only person in the world who understood and desired me, even though he would leave me crying and bruising in the school toilets the day after (I asked for it), would leave me on read for three weeks at a time, and responded to my ‘I miss you’ text with ‘I’ve kind of missed seeing you too.’ It was the most love I thought I would ever receive. I was a child then. And it all still feels very unfair to me.

I’m writing this in a bagel shop in Leamington Spa that I used to frequent in my first year of university. The prices have gone up and the portion sizes have decreased, and I’m very acutely aware of the fact that I have just moved away from the beautiful city where I did my master’s and back to the area where I spent my teenage years, where I met my ex, and where I spent my undergraduate degree, as I only went to university ten minutes down the road from my old school. My partner and I lived in a house here in our second year of uni which had a room that we exclusively referred to as The Mould Room, because the walls were caked in so much black fungus that we were convinced we would shrivel and die if we set foot in there. The other guy who was supposed to be living there dropped out and didn’t pay any rent for months, and we nearly got taken to court. For a house with a room we cordoned off for being a biohazard. We had each other, though, and nothing else really mattered. I can feel myself starting to get so sad that I will probably need to go home and lie down in a minute, because being here feels like I am trying desperately to shove a square peg into a round hole. I don’t want to be stuck circling the drain of closed chapters, whether it’s the good times I yearn for or what happened to me years ago, but at this point it feels as if the past won’t let go of me, like there is this magnetism drawing me towards the familiar and the damage and the familiar damage because it makes me feel something and maybe I deserve to be sad.

They say Leamington Spa train station is one of the most haunted places in the UK, complete with a basement on platform three which hasn’t been used in years, and a staircase that somehow leads to nothing. The town is also the birthplace of Aleister Crowley, which may just be more evidence of its ability to produce the worst vibes possible. I dipped my toe into hauntology while writing my dissertation back in May, especially Colin Davis’ article on ghosts and trauma in French Studies. Davis asserts that

Hauntology supplants its near-homonym ontology, replacing the priority of being and presence with the figure of the ghost as that which is neither present nor absent, neither dead nor alive. Attending to the ghost is an ethical injunction insofar as it occupies the place of the Levinasian Other: a wholly irrecuperable intrusion in our world, which is not comprehensible within our available intellectual frameworks, but whose otherness we are responsible for preserving. [1]

If phantoms are indeed, as Davis posits, a force which is ‘intent on preventing its traumatic and usually shameful secrets from coming to light,’ then perhaps the memories of this shame and distress inhabit both planes of existence too: it is so present as to feel concrete and yet so intangible that it truly belongs in a spectral realm, within our own personal narratives which shadow us. After all, as Julian Wolfrey adds, ‘all forms of narrative are spectral to some extent.’ [2] Davis’ conceptualisation of the force which silences secrets in the present mostly refers to the phantoms of ‘dead ancestors still living in the Ego,’ but what if these ‘ancestors’ could simply be iterations of our past selves, begging and pleading with us not to open a whole can of worms buried deep in our subconscious? I certainly feel like I have left parts of myself here: little green ghouls which roam the streets of Leamington Spa, traversing the staircase to nowhere, tucking themselves into bed at night in the basement of the station. They only approach the frontier between the human realm and the spirit realm when I return to meet them again, staring into a transparent perspex screen that separates us.

I haven’t talked to a therapist about what happened with my ex. This overpriced iced mango and coconut drink that I bought just so I could sit in this Caffe Nero is making me feel sick. Anyway. When I arrived here on the bus I realised that the leaves on the trees were brown and brittle, and some were falling off already, even though it’s only mid-August and it’s nearly 30 degrees. I always love Septembers when the temperature starts to drop and the leaves start to fall while the sky is still crisp and bright, because that was how it was when I met my partner. Thrumming with the potentiality of starting university, killing off my past self who was being puppeteered by a grown man and rebirthing myself by falling in love again. This year it feels premature. The heat is unbearable, the death is coming early, and I am not ready to move on and be someone else. I don’t know what it means that my only feeling is overwhelming dread and that ancient wounds are reopening. I set out to write about them as a form of catharsis, but I can’t bring myself to go any further, and I can’t bring myself to be angry at him, because he has his own phantoms too. I am so tired that the only way I can talk about it is via glib tweets punctuated with a ‘lmao’ on my private Twitter account. The weight of it feels like a hydraulic press on my chest.

One day I might burst.

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[1] Colin Davis, Hauntology, spectres and phantoms, French Studies, Volume 59, Issue 3, July 2005, Pages 373–379, https://doi.org/10.1093/fs/kni143

[2] Julian Wolfreys, Victorian Hauntings: Spectrality, Gothic, the Uncanny and Literature (Basingstoke, Palgrave, 2002).