Consciousness, Literature and the Arts

Archive

Volume 12 Number 2, August 2011

___________________________________________________________________

SMAJIĆ, SRDJAN, Ghost-seers, Detectives, and Spiritualists: Theories of Vision in Victorian Literature and Science, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2010, xi + 262 pp., ISBN 978-0-521-19188-3.

Reviewed by

Francisco Javier Sánchez-Verdejo Pérez

University of Castilla-La Mancha (Spain).

We could ask ourselves if nineteenth-century ghost stories and detective fiction have anything in common. According to Srdjan Smajić both are preoccupied with seeing and knowing. In this sense, and moving between well-known works (Sherlock Holmes stories, John Stuart Mill’s System of Logic) and less familiar texts (physicists P. G. Tait and Balfour Stewart’s The Unseen Universe [1875], Algernon Blackwood’s “A Victim of Higher Space” [1917]), Smajić uncovers connections among a wide range of nineteenth-century topics and genres, including visual epistemology, the physiology of sight, spiritualism, non-Euclidian geometry, and occult detective fiction.

Srdjan Smajic’s Ghost-Seers, Detectives and Spiritualists: Theories of Vision in Victorian Literature and Science is a study which looks at the links between the narrative techniques of ghost stories and those of detective stories in the nineteenth century in the context of contemporary theories of vision and sight. Smajic makes explicit how the visual was a problematic category and examines "the ways in which ghost and detective fiction are structured by and in connection with contemporary philosophical and scientific work on visual perception" (3). Ghost-Seers, Detectives, and Spiritualists does so in 3 parts –across 13 chapters and a short final coda– which consider ghost stories and the extensive literature on visual illusions, the semiotics of sight in relation to detective fiction, and the unseen world of spiritualism and the occult. Smajic’s key claim is that vision, for the Victorians at least, allowed access to the seen as well as to the unseen (to the occult or to the world of spiritualism, for example). These, Smajić argues, are forms of vision that are both material and immaterial, and the discourses of vision that emerge in science and philosophy provide “a spectrum of models and theories” (18) rather than one dominant visual mode. While there was a number of scientific works that might explain away ghosts and spectres or optical anomalies there also existed “an alternate discourse on sight and ghost-seeing whose proponents contrasted the limited capabilities and built-in flaws of the corporeal eye with the more reliable and valuable insights of inner, intuitive, spiritual seeing” (19). Smajić deepens our understanding of the seen and the unseen through extensive reading of philosophical, scientific and literary texts.

The book begins with an opposition: detective fiction and ghost stories, Smajić suggests, seem to have little to do with one another. The former is apparently the genre of the rational and the material, in which all mysteries can be explained; the latter is the genre of the irrational and the anti-scientific. The first and second parts of the book are structured by this opposition. Part I, "Outer Vision, Inner Vision: Ghost-Seeing and Ghost Stories" deals with nineteenth-century debates on ghost seeing to approach contemporary ghost stories. In order to highlight the optical theory in ghost fiction, Smajic first contextualizes the ghost story. He defines what a spectre is and brings to light the connection between spectres and contemporary debates about ghosts and the Victorian ghost story. Because most ghost stories of the period are concerned with nineteenth-century theories of vision, they highlight the relationship between vision and knowledge, seeing and believing. Smajic’s historicist reading offers a thoroughly informed approach to Victorian science in culture and to the ways in which literature is informed by other disciplines. The blending of fictional and non-fictional narratives to define ghost stories in relation with theories of vision is often fascinating and is a good illustration of the constant need to look at texts through lenses that bear in mind the importance of context. Smajic also focuses on Victorian anti-ghost treatises, such as Scott’s Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft (1830), which defines the ghost-seer as a patient suffering from a reality-distorting disease, or David Brewster’s Letters on Natural Magic (1832). Such treatises typified the idea of sight as constructed as a corporeal sense. On the other hand, other texts aimed at dismantling the claims of materialist science, and Smajic analyses Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus (1831), Catherine Crowe’s The Night-Side of Nature; or, Ghosts and Ghost-Seers (1848), or William Howitt’s The History of the Supernatural (1863), which all distinguished between two ways of seeing, criticising "the myopic worldview of materialist science" (42), in order to resist the definition of vision in mere physiological terms. The fictional narratives Smajic looks at range from Louisa Molesworth’s "The Story of a Rippling Train" (1887) to Dickens’s "N°1 Branch Line: The Signalman" (1866) or Ellen Price’s (Mrs Henry Wood’s) "Reality, or Delusion?" (1868). Thus in Part I, Smajić argues that many nineteenth-century ghost stories are governed by an “aesthetic of ambiguity” (48); notably, the ghost stories of authors such as Scott, Dickens, and Le Fanu call into question the reality of their ghosts by referring to scientific explanations of ghost-seeing as nothing more than a physiological problem with the eye.

Part II, "Seeing is Reading: Vision, Language and Detective Fiction" moves away from the examination of optical illusions and the unreliability of sight in ghost stories to probe their epistemological basis, as highlighted in detective narratives by Edgar Allan Poe, Wilkie Collins and Arthur Conan Doyle. In this part, Smajic shows that if the detective is "a master-semiotician, an expert interpreter of a textualized visual world" (6), and if detective fiction precludes non-rational forms of knowledge and dismisses the supernatural, it simultaneously "consistently displays signs of affinity with clairvoyance and telepathy, intuitionism and spiritualism" (6). This shift from seeing to understanding and knowing is most exemplified in detective fiction. If ghosts were seen by nineteenth-century physiologists as illustrations of the eye’s potential to be deceived, Victorian epistemologists and philosophers of science (John Stuart Mill, Herbert Spencer, G.H. Lewes) explained that ghost-seeing had more to do with the interpretation of sensation. Smajic presents the detective’s quest as an epistemological adventure in which sense perception leads to knowledge of the truth. However, if detectives are expert readers, the detective is constantly aware of the fallibility of empirical vision. This paradoxical construction of ratiocination shows a "vacillation between ocularcentrism and anti-ocularcentrism [as] constituent of a broader reconfiguration of the discourse on fiction, to which Victorian detective-fiction writers contributed as much … as contemporary epistemologists and philosophers of science" (73). Smajic looks for keys to read the struggle between ocularcentrism and anti-ocularcentrism in detective fiction in non-literary approaches to this subject, such as George Berkeley’s An Essay Towards a New Theory of Vision (1709), John Stuart Mill’s A System of Logic (1843) or Herbert Spencer’s The Principles of Psychology (1855). Smajic’s study of Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone’s "parodic critique of detective fiction’s epistemological claims and ocularcentric fantasies" (111) is enlightening, especially as Collins embeds narratives in the same way as he multiplies perspectives and watchers throughout the novel. In the Holmes stories, on the other hand, Collins’s uncertain semiotic landscape is turned into "a semiotic dreamland, a fantasy about exhaustive encyclopaedic knowledge and boundless archival resources which vouch that no clue will be overlooked or misinterpreted" (124). In Part II, Smajić shows that detective fiction is in fact anxious about whether careful observation of the world leads to accurate knowledge of it. While the ghost story seems to enquiry into the reality of ghosts, the detective story is haunted by the possibility of non-rational and non-empirical ways of knowing. Thus, the two genres complement each other.

Part III, "Into the Invisible: Science, Spiritualism and Occult Detection" compares the detective’s method with the practices of spiritualist mediums. Analysing in particular Sherlock Holmes’s clairvoyant-like episode and his ideas about reincarnation, Smajic sees The Hound of the Baskervilles (1901–2) as a transitional text, hovering between a detective narrative and an occult text, both faithful to detective fiction’s epistemology. Refashioned "as a professional investigator of the occult, a firm believer in things supernatural, endowed with keen intuition and extrasensory perceptions" (136), the turn-of-the-century detective seems to bring to light older connections with ghost fiction. This part deals with a genre Smajić calls occult detective fiction and describes as a “hybridization” (31) of both the detective and the ghost story. But this analysis appears only after discussions of the ether, non-Euclidean and higher-dimensional geometry, and spiritualism. Extra-sensory perception may seem like a topic for spiritualists, but as Smajić points out, it was also emphasized by men of science. Occult detective stories are propelled by a convergence of science and the paranormal. Starting from Le Fanu’s Martin Hesselius, the occult detective acknowledges the existence of the supernatural but takes a scientific attitude towards it. As Smajic makes clear, it was most particularly research into the invisible world (such as theories of light and energy) which offered the spiritualists means of fighting scepticism. Among the most famous occult detectives, we find Le Fanu’s Martin Hesselius. Such occult detective stories did not just deal with external supernatural forms but with layers of the psyche, and Smajic closes his study on how spiritualist researchers integrated the developing discourse on the unconscious with other fields of science.

Ghost-Seers explores the study of how literature intersects with nineteenth-century vision and visuality contributing to the study of the nineteenth-century supernatural thanks to Smajić’s work, since he provides us with forgotten texts and unexpected connections. The book describes a remarkable series of nineteenth-century scientific books that attempted to explain ghost-seeing as the result of a malfunction in the eye, from physician John Ferriar’s Essay Towards a Theory of Apparitions (1813) to J. H. Brown’s Spectropia (1864). This explanation of ghosts as an ocular malfunction was widely known to Victorian readers, and Smajić shows that understanding its prevalence is crucial to appreciating the way that Victorian ghost stories swing between science and spiritualism, which may sound today like a dreamlike theory may have once conversed with more credible science. For instance, in The Unseen Universe (1875), Tait and Stewart claim that the ether is an invisible spiritual world in which each individual possesses an immortal counterpart, a speculation that sounds now like science fiction.

Those who study the genres of ghost-stories and detective fiction should take a look at this book, as well as specialists in nineteenth-century theories of vision and knowledge. The most obvious thing ghost stories and detective fiction have in common is their marginality: they stand on the edges of the canon, or outside. If, as Smajić seems to claim, a special relationship links these marginal genres to the theories of vision that he discusses, this relationship prompts larger conclusions about the intersections of literature and science and about the importance of studying such non canonical texts in order to understand these intersections.

To sum up, this is an original study of two very popular forms of fiction in the nineteenth century –ghost stories and detective stories– and the similarities between them in the context of theories of vision and sight. Srdjan Smajić argues that to understand how writers represented ghost-seers and detectives, the views of contemporary scientists, philosophers, and spiritualists have to be taken into account: these views raise questions such as whether seeing is believing, how much of what we “see” is physical, and if there may be other ways of seeing (intuitive or spiritual) that let us perceive objects and beings inaccessible to the bodily senses. This book makes a real contribution to the understanding of Victorian science, and the ways in which literature influences knowledge, and vice versa, that is, knowledge affecting literature.

RESOURCES

DeWit, Anne, URL : http://www.nbol-19.org/Reviews_PDF/0196_Smajic.pdf.

Talairach-Vielmas, Laurence, URL : http://www.miranda-ejournal.fr/1/miranda/article.xsp?numero=3&id_article=article_14-1413.