A Literary Hauntology: Channeling the Supernatural in Alan Garner’s Thursbitch

[page 33] Abstract: This article discusses Alan Garner’s novel Thursbitch (2003) by developing a decidedly literary hauntology, drawing upon Derrida’s Spectres of Marx (1993). It argues that Garner textually channels spectrality via a neo-shamanic authorial persona, by using a dual timeline narrative which employs psychogeographical characterization and animistic landscapes. The analysis focuses on the role of disjointed chronology, spectral repetition, and the haunting of readers, exploring how Garner’s work transcends mimetic representation in order to evoke an affective experience of haunting. It demonstrates that spectrality serves ethical functions, offering critiques of capitalism, institutionalized inhumanity, and environmental degradation, while invoking justice for the past and future alike. Garner’s psychogeographical framework embeds his characters within a shared history and a specifically local topography. The essay proposes that Garner’s text, through its performative neo-shamanism, allows readers to engage actively with spectral Otherness, forging a liminal space between passive-aesthetic consumption and ethical confrontation, wherein the spectral becomes both a site of imaginative empathic engagement and an appeal to transformative justice.

Keywords: literary hauntology, spectrality and ethics, psychogeography, neo-shamanism, animistic landscapes

Alan Garner’s Thursbitch (2003) presents a realistic text deeply imbued with supernatural phenomena. At heart, it is a late Modernist novel, characterized by its use of psychogeography, with characters actively engaging in this form of exploration in the Pennine valley named in the title. Garner draws inspiration from local Cheshire legends, creating a landscape filled with animistic qualities, where cosmic nature spirits interact with humanity in non-chronological ways, and ghosts go beyond linear chronology. The characters’ reported visions provide evidence of the existence of a spiritual realm, but the enigmatic nature of the ghosts they encounter repeatedly [page 34] exceeds their understanding. In the author’s unique approach to shamanism and psychogeography, the blend of Minoan and Celtic religion, Siberian shamanism and local folklore creates a distinctive form of spirituality. This spiritual fusion resonates with Mircea Eliade’s concept of primordial spirituality, and yet challenges the universalist claims associated with it. Adding authenticity to the text, a lecture by Garner, discussing the actual geography of the Thursbitch valley but also relating local supernatural experiences of the author, continues to be made available online, as do hiker’s blogs (responding to both this lecture and the novel) and online maps referencing the novel. Such paratextual material also addresses the consumer fetish of the magical in the context of capitalism, suggesting that reader engagement with the novel may foster a form of participatory democracy. The novel thus explores a duality between materialist interpretations and the supernatural, while highlighting the text’s repetitions and disruptions of causality that contribute to its spectral nature: via the readers’ immersion into the spectral reality of Thursbitch, the text channels the supernatural into a shared, real world. Yet Garner’s novel also serves as a critique of the leisurely consumption of landscapes, the historical movement of enclosure, capitalist exploitation, and institutional inhumanity, anchoring them, too, firmly in our shared reality. Ultimately, the ghostly elements in the novel symbolize a call for justice, making this novel a seminal text for an analysis grounded in Derrida’s hauntology.

Hauntology, the study of hauntings and the representation of the supernatural, originates as an academic pursuit in Derrida’s foundational Spectres of Marx (1994), which paradoxically posited that spectrality could not be represented and in turn could not be the subject of scholarly attention. Such preliminary objections must be cleared out. We must begin by speaking with the ghost of Derrida to arrive in turn at a different understanding of haunting texts and haunted readers than that of mimetic representation: a performative method, [page 35] entailing a shamanic author persona—of which Garner’s novel provides an excellent example.

At the heart of the concept of spectrality lies the problem of the supernatural’s supposedly impossible representation. Derrida’s theory of hauntology asserts, and scholars such as Ruth Heholt follow (4), that specters, balancing forever/repeatedly between being and not being, representing a present absence, disjointing “time, history, world” (Derrida 21) to an achronic “incoercible differance” in which “the here-now unfurls” (37), of necessity preclude any possibility of representation. Coming face to face with the spectral thus means facing the “very possibility of the other” (26). Moving away from the focus on the textual, which (ironically) Derrida’s reading of Hamlet as well as Marx maintained, Heholt traces the specter further as affect and subjective experience, “the body’s immersion in the world; beyond consciousness, beyond, sometimes, even recognized emotion” because “paradoxically, given the immaterial nature of ghosts, there is no haunting without a material bodily experience of it (Heholt 3). And in particular, if that which haunts is unseen, it must be felt” (5). Situating hauntings into the emotive, haunted subject opens the possibility for a subject’s exposure to experiences beyond the immediate. For, if haunting demands an “interpretive presence” (5) first and foremost, if it needs interpretation and experience, spectrality may be created (by a performative act of poiesis) through affects evoked in readers of texts.

Reading is by definition an encounter which is both physical and sensual (the weight and smell of a book, the voice-impression of an audiobook, the sleeky smoothness of an e-reader), and which employs chronological exposure to conceptual impressions to create affect. This chronology of textual experience, page by page, word by word, needs to be understood as welded to the text’s simulation of an achronic ontology. Preliminary to the actual reading experience, a text is known, indeed can only be encountered, as of the past as well as of the future, already there to be (re)visited, (re)experienced. Using this evocative power of the encounter, such [page 36] texts would therefore not attempt to represent the uncanny in the widest, Freudian sense of the term, in order to create the affect of haunting—thus differentiating them from the tradition of the Gothic, for example—but focus instead primarily on channeling spectrality to and for their readers, who can then experience haunting. As a manifested embodyment of differance, texts may thus indeed haunt their readers.

Spectrality cannot be thought without justice, Derrida insisted, “without the principle of some responsibility, beyond all living present, before the ghosts of those who are not yet born or who are already dead, be they victims of wars, political or other kinds of violence, nationalist, racist, colonialist, sexist, or other kinds of exterminations, victims of the oppressions of capitalist imperialism or any of the forms of totalitarianism” (xviii). This universal ethical demand on the spectral experience is predicated by Derrida on the encounter of the other, which strikingly has been shown a feature of reading that has tangible ethical implications: reading actually improves altruism and empathy.1 There is something especially alluring and indicative in the fraught relationship between readers’ willing suspension of disbelief (pace Coleridge) and the simulacra of supernatural realist fiction. And yet, Derrida maintains, “There has never been a scholar, who really, and as a scholar, deals with ghosts. A traditional scholar does not believe in ghosts—nor in all that could be called the virtual space of spectrality” (12).

Derrida further weakens his argument by considering scholars especially incapable of speaking to the ghost, as they are “theoreticians, or witnesses, spectators, observers, and intellectuals” and thus believe erratically that “looking is sufficient” (11). Yet Horatio (Derrida’s example) speaks to the ghost, and as Derrida insists, also “with it” (xviii) and not merely at it. The ghost responds by fleeing, and by refusing to answer. More to the point, therefore, would have been an argument that recognized how scholarly analysis may address the spectral and even attempt an interaction. [page 37]

At core, Derrida’s argument here posits a connection between rationality and the materialistic real, which would also run counter to the representation of the immaterial and irrational spectral; the spectral in such a reading in turn suddenly appears confined to the realm of belief rather than liberated to affect and experience irrespective of a belief system. Freud, in contrast, speaking of the uncanny, asserts:

The imaginative writer may have invented a world that . . . differs from the real world in that it involves supernatural entities such as demons or spirits of the dead. Within the limits set by the presuppositions of this literary reality, such figures forfeit any uncanny quality that might otherwise have attached to them. . . . Not so, however, if the writer has to all appearances taken up his stance on the ground of common reality. By doing so he adopts all the conditions that apply to the emergence of a sense of the uncanny in normal experience; whatever has an uncanny effect in real life then has the same in literature. (156)

Far from implying belief, which Gordon impugns as attempts of “‘reality-testing’ that we might want to perform in the face of hauntings” (53), Freud is very careful to state that only an “uncanny effect” is the aim of a text’s extending its grasp into the world of “normal experience,” thus reaching beyond its own textual “literary reality.” Readers’ belief is thus not an issue in generating a haunted affect, as scholarly belief is not an issue in tracing, approaching, and describing such a textual effect.

At best, then, I suggest that tracking—an interpretive act of reading as well as a peripatetic process—can replace dialectic or anatomy as a scholarly method to textual hauntology. To be able to create the affect of haunting in readers demands of texts the (re-)production of specific features of the spectral, traces of which will remain evident. As readers encounter these features chronologically in the course of their reading experience, they in turn actively need to recognize them for their revenant ontology, otherness, and disjointure—and in this process of the encounter with the supernatural-in-fiction, their subjective belief-system can easily be considered [page 38] suspended. (As well, this is at heart an appeal not to omit the a priori condition of reading from considerations of scholarship.) After all, as Derrida also points out, “the one who says ‘I am thy Father’s spirit’ can only be taken at his word” (7). The spectral, the revenant, taking Derrida at his word, cannot exclusively be repetition, return. This would only occasion aesthetic pleasure and not evoke the supernatural as such. Most rhetorical figures consist of repetitions and variants of repetitions. Spectral traces in texts must then additionally also indicate ruptures, disjointings—in linear chronology, causality, or laws of physics (e.g., descriptions indicating floating, passing through solid objects, etc.). These ruptures focus reader attention on the presence of the spectral other, and such repetition, besides providing aesthetic pleasure, can become indicative of the spectral. In turn, this form of processual interaction evinces channeling by authors as well as agency by readers, without either of which the e/affect of spectrality could not be created.

Such an author function can well be described as “shamanic” in Eliade’s sense of the term. Mortuza identifies shamanic features specifically for contemporary British poetry (43); the ecstasy of lyrical poetry has already been seen by Eliade as akin to the shamanic (cf. Beck Kehoe 42). The text that this article considers, however, is fiction and prose. Employing the term “shaman” in such a literary context demands clarification. To identify a contemporary poetic persona as “shaman,”2 one needs first to distinguish such a concept from its actual anthropological source and usage. 

Briefly, “shamanism” will be used here to indicate what anthropologists more precisely term “neo-shamanism” in the wake of Mircea Eliade. Anthropologists consider that Eliade “slanted his work toward Western individualized personal fulfillment” (Beck Kehoe 42) and operated on the assumption of a

fundamental or essential experience of spirituality; it is the mystical immanent ‘sacred’ manifesting itself. By this reasoning, Upper Paleolithic humans twenty thou-[page 39]sand years ago and supposedly ‘primitive’ people in less-developed regions today would have the same basic religious experience, i.e. shamanism generated by ecstatic trance. (Beck Kehoe 42)

This concept continues imperialist global-scale generalizations, as Beck Kehoe repeatedly points out, disregards social context, local traditions, religious background, or ritual purpose (15, 35, 45, passim) and instead encourages a “loose and facile labeling of much non-Western healing and divining as ‘shamanic’” (35): “In effect, Eliade wrote as if he were exploring the history of religions, but his presupposition, that ‘primitive peoples’ of today exhibit a religion similar to the beliefs and practices of very ancient humans, placed their religions in a time warp outside history” (39). While Beck Kehoe’s condemnation of Eliade is scathing, supposing contemporary non-Western cultures to be a living relic of whichever period of (pre)history a Western critic would wish to see embodied in them (in Eliade’s case: an ur-spiritual one) is a strategy of scholarship that can be traced back to the Victorians and their attribution of savagery to other peoples. Both the denigration and the idealization have been refuted as different sides to the same achronic instrumentalization of the other (seminally, in the case of Orientalism, see Said; on indigenous Americans, see Krech III; on the “ecologically Noble Savage” emerging in the 1990s, see Ellingson 342ff.).

The ongoing ubiquity of this a-historic, universalizing concept of (neo-)shamanism in contemporary discourse cannot be denied (cf. Hudson 24, 34); indeed, Garner’s text, too, displays it. Within such a neo-shamanic understanding then, the shaman “serves as a bridge between reality and transpersonal realms” (Houston vii), “becoming the channel for creatures and spirits, for the animates of nature and the designates of gods” (viii). A remnant of the anthropological shaman’s primary focus on service to the community (cf. Beck Kehoe 42) can be found in neo-shamanistic demands to use one’s individual spiritual enlightenment “to heal the body and regenerate the social order” (Houston xiii), a healing of social ills by the rebellious [page 40] individualistic outsider, which Beck Kehoe in turn derides as “formulaic, conventionalized unconventionality” (33). In this way, a poetic-performative rather than mimetic, a channeling rather than representational shamanism “takes the dwindling role of organised religion into account but does not diminish the possibility of a spiritual aura” (Mortuza 29) while not demanding belief either from practitioner or from reader.

To actively engage with the shamanic channeling of the supernatural in texts, readers will need to be aware of inhabited landscapes, which they share with ghosts as revenants of their mutual histories. Psychogeography thus features as a literary tradition and practice in Garner’s novel, defined by Coverley as

the act of wandering, the spirit of political radicalism, allied to a playful sense of subversion and governed by inquiry into the methods by which we can transform our relationship to the urban environment. This entire project is then further coloured by an engagement with the occult, is one that is as preoccupied with excavating the past as it is with recording the present. (14)

And thus, again, texts channeling and evoking the supernatural in their readers need to be grounded in or reach out to a common, shared reality (cf. Freud above) because otherwise they would only provide poetic otherness, and the revenant would remain aesthetic titillation. The spectral needs the assertion of a shared history and (specific and local; cf. Bell 102, Luckhurst) topography to acquire a political dimension as well as to appeal to justice, so that psychogeography as a method in turn can “open . . . up the layers of place to reveal the ghosts of the past” (Richardson 12) by “imaginatively reinforcing and texturing a sense of the known” (Bell 104). Richardson ties psychogeography additionally to “the complexity of the palimpsest terrain of post-modernity” (12); the text considered in the following, however, will show that the shamanic, as Mortuza contends, is more late Modernist: responding to high Modernism by “late modernist poetics that investigates the occult as a pseudo-religious category of [page 41] anthropological shamanism, and constructs a discursive site to explore its elusive claim and access to an imaginary impossibility (eg. the divine)” (48).

Alan Garner’s Thursbitch thus provides a recognizably late Modernist novel, in which characters employ and the text itself performs psychogeography. Garner employs local Cheshire legends to represent an animistic landscape, in which cosmic nature spirits interact achronically with humanity, and ghosts transcend linear chronology. His characters’ reported visions confirm this spiritual reality, yet the ghosts encountered remain inexplicable to them.

Claims that such a text points to a haunted reality that shamanic authors and active readers share chime in with Gordon’s assertion that haunting has become a “generizable social phenomenon of great import” (7), a “transformable recognition” (8). Already in its beginnings in Situationism, psychogeography pointed to the “value of intense, emotional connections to places and landscapes. In retrospect, it is apparent that this intensity was a product, at least in part, of the anger and melancholy of loss” (Bonnett 77).3

Environmental concerns in the light of the dire consequences of the Anthropocene and resistance to capitalist forms of exploitation of resources also inform Garner’s novel. Loss and nostalgia may explain additionally why spectrality in such texts is of the type that Hudson has identified as “intercalating,” i.e., ghosts who insert themselves “in the places in between, the fractures, the gaps, but [do] not seek to subsume or alter [their] social territory. This is a ghost of hiding, exile and indifference” (10).

The threat of becoming transfixed, catatonic, when faced with an inescapably unjust past, the grasp of which on our shared future cannot be evaded, or with what Derrida has termed the visor effect of spectrality, as “we do not see who looks at us” (6), is thus not only a question of nostalgia or antiquarianism or even more explicitly conservative but might also show the more immediate impact of the achronic as such. Agency is after all predicated on progression in time, [page 42] regardless of whether that time is conceptualized as circular or linear. Hudson, speaking more generally of hauntology, for example cautions that

the appearance of such recompositions and phantoms brings forth the dead into the present, mystifying reality with its recourse to the imaginary. Whilst a dialectic of imagination and reality, and the abstract and empirical, is part and parcel of any understanding of a historical moment, the reality of this kind of historical degeneration is to subdue life and dispense with progress. (62)

This points to a currently still unresolved paradox in hauntology, between the demands of action embodied in specters, the appeal to work as “power of transformation” (Derrida 9) or “future potentialities” that demand “actions and decisions from the living” (Shaw 12), and the flattening of time by achronic spectrality. Situated at the confluence of psychogeography and hauntology, the achronic may open an additional imaginative space, yet this space will be one which flattens the chronology of history. As Hudson puts it, “This horizontalisation and compression of historical time where the sediment and strata of historical experience emerge all at once in the same spatial location is often a feature of the experience of haunting” (xvii). “Compression of historical time” is also an eminent method of the shamanic channeling of the supernatural via texts, and one already remarked upon for Garner’s writings (cf. Hudson 19).

To sum up, the textual, shamanic channeling of a supernaturally animated landscape can be tracked by several features. Characters in these texts will experience but not comprehend hauntings and/or supernatural manifestations, while narrators will not provide classification—unless they are explicitly defined as the autobiographical, shamanic persona of the author. Shamanic authorial personae further can be expected to use disruptive, disjointing repetition figures at several textual levels to evoke a spectral affect in their readers. Political critiques in the text will serve as a form of primary authentication, by tapping into the shared politico-economic [page 43] reality of author and reader alike. Another primary form of authentication will occur by grounding these texts in real-life topography, historiography, and the knowable. In turn, readers are required to show an active yet also empathic reading, one that identifies the otherness as well as the emotional urgency of spectrality.

As repetition also engenders familiarity, I here touch upon a second problem of textual hauntology that I would like to call its eerie paradox. Mark Fisher defines the eerie as “constituted by a failure of absence, or by a failure of presence. The sensation of the eerie occurs either when there is something present where there should be nothing, or is there nothing is [sic] present when there should be something” (61). Interestingly, the eerie is “fundamentally tied up with questions of agency” (11), which makes it particularly pertinent for shamanic texts and their above-noted paradox of agency vs. nostalgia. Ontologically, this emerges as a defining feature of textual hauntings as opposed to hauntings in the wider, cultural sense: readers who encounter new, unfamiliar landscapes in shamanically channeling texts will, with growing repetition and textual familiarity in the chronological course of their reading experience, attain a vicarious homecoming in the eerie, which may well be part of the larger, aesthetic appeal of such texts and suspend their spectral, disjointing appeal to justice in a more comfortable consumption. Various further reaches of these texts into culture can therefore be shown to straddle the divide between the assertion of the spectral in a shared reality (e.g., by other authors’ responses to these texts) and the possibility of consumption in real-life experience (e.g., by walking tours), both methods of further textual authentication.

Garner’s novel is structured along two timelines, one in an unspecified, contemporaneous present, the other in the 18th century. In the present, Dr. Sal(ly) Malley, a geographer and academic who suffers from a neuro-degenerative disease, and her friend and medical doctor Ian, a Jesuit, go on several walking tours through Thursbitch, a valley in the Pennines. [page 44] These visits take place over a number of years, during which Sal’s health progressively deteriorates. On their last walk, facing her imminent institutionalization in a hospice, Ian leaves Sal to die of cold exposure at her own request. In the 18th-century timeline, the jagger John Turner, known as Jack, peddles salt and various goods with his pony train across the area, ranging as far as London. He also functions as the shaman of the local community of Saltersford, but relapses to Methodism after the death of his wife, Nan Sarah. Stung by a bee during his sermon at the inauguration of St. John (Jenkin) chapel, he returns to his senses and continues his work both as jagger and as shaman. He dies in unusual circumstances, of cold exposure in a Christmas blizzard in 1735.

These two timelines intersect through achronic ghostly apparitions. They further interact through animistic manifestations in bees, bull dung, and snakes. While Jack experiences visions that explain the cosmic nature spirits present in the valley, Sal and Ian in the present do not recognize the supernatural manifestations that they encounter during their walking tours. Though they both clearly understand the valley as other, noting its unusual magnetic, geographic, and topographic features, and—especially Sal—feel drawn towards it, they lack Jack’s visionary access to the supernatural. In a differentiation between animist and ghostly spectrality, however, all characters do not recognize their ghostly encounters as supernatural.

At first sight, Jack’s shamanism is of a surprisingly traditional kind. He supervises the community’s and his own use of fly agaric and bilberries (Thursbitch 41) to induce communal visions and drinks his own urine as medicinal second dose and sedative (61; for this practice, see Beck Kehoe 64). During these visions, he leads antiphonal chants and rituals with his community. From a conversation with his father, it becomes evident that Jack is the chosen follower of an earlier local shaman, John Pott, who met with his death in a similar ritual (48). [page 45]

One of the distinctive features of neo-shamanism is a conceptualization of spirits as only benign while traditional shamans grapple with indifferent or even hostile spirits to service their community (cf. Beck Kehoe 86). Jack Turner’s visionary encounters with spirits take the shape of a hare, snakes, and a bull, and the rituals he carefully observes to propitiate these spirits, as well as John Pott’s reported death, indicate that his shamanic work comes at great personal risk. In the ritual he leads, the bull spirit of Thursbitch is manifested to and sacrificed by the community:

The bull came to Jack’s side and he laid his arm along its neck. “Noble Bull. Worthy Bull. We live each other’s life and die each other’s death.” . . . “See at white Bull! Bonny Bull! As lives on hill tops; striding Bull as lives on hill tops! Lord over all as close the eye!” The people sang. “Io!” . . . The people ran. They fell upon the bull with their strength, tearing, baying, gnawing, as the bull flailed, held by the rope, five paces from the stone. (56-57)

Jack and the community’s drug-induced visions are written as an animistic, magic reality (“the bull came,” “they fell upon the bull,” “the bull flailed,” etc.), yet Garner is careful to check this supernatural manifestation in the very next chapter by use of a variable focalizer. Nan Sarah, whose pregnancy barred her from a share in the drug, observes the same ritual, and her realist sobriety dissolves the supernatural manifestation of the earlier chapter to an impression first and a metaphor next:

Nan Sarah could not see what was happening. . . . Something was in the field. It grew from the mass [of the people], and was it, yet made it more, drawing the dark writhing to its own purpose, the yelling to its own tongue. What was there grew to reach the moon and gave one cry such as Nan Sarah had not heard in all her days: the cry of both man and bull. Then it came apart and came towards her down the hill, turning back to those she knew . . . knowing of nothing but what they themselves had done and seen. . . . “Jack!” Nothing answered. She went to the stone. He lay beside it. His clothes were torn, and he had been bitten and [page 46] clawed. Even in the moonlight she saw the blood coming from his mouth and swollen eyes. (59-60)

Readers are only seemingly left with a choice at this point: to believe in the earlier animism of Jack’s perceptions, or to follow Nan’s realist perception. Her finding of the wounded Jack allows readers to understand the shaman himself as embodyment of the spirit, “both man and bull,” and the supernatural “it” as a metaphor for the mob of the ritual. The sequence of the presentation (animism first, realism next) counters drug-fueled vision with corrective reality, and readers emerge with a strengthened trust in the narrator’s reliability to provide an authoritative, corrective point of view if necessary.

By comparison, ghosts are misunderstood by all characters throughout the novel as mundane reality—even by the spiritually attuned Jack. It is left to the readers to identify their presence and recognize the disjointing, achronic mingling of the two timelines that these apparitions entail. Ghosts are not only past inhabitants come to haunt present visitors in a spectral reversion of entropy (i.e., Jack haunting Sal and Ian), but they are also future presences manifesting themselves in the (historical) present (i.e., Ian and Sal haunting Jack). A good example of this is the first instance of Jack’s haunting of Sal and Ian: Sal and Ian encounter a man whose narrative description identifies him as a jagger; when he vanishes, they suppose him “‘on the ridge somewhere’” (26-27). Readers are still left to guess at Jack’s presence, though ponies, dog, and the jingle of the harness bells are repeated as indicators of identity. Later in the novel, Jack then reports having seen “‘a couple of chaps standing up on Thoon’” in identical circumstances, one of them struggling with two walking sticks (99), affirming the identification of the first meeting as supernatural, by repetition. There is dramatic irony in an 18th-century protagonist not recognizing the trouser-wearing Sal as a woman and his marveling at her struggle with mobility (“‘How does a chap on two sticks get up on Thoon?’” [99]). Most importantly, however, it is up to the readers to identify the repetition of encounters, to understand it as a disjointing of the [page 47] chronology of history, and thus to experience the eerie presence-in-absence of a haunting, as no classification or contextualization is provided by the narrator.

Besides hauntings, repetition figures occur at several levels of the novel’s text. As motives, bull, hare, bees, honey, snakes, and the tinkling of bells are repeated throughout the text but will only be spectral if their presence is without a biological or physical causality. Individualized standing stones, star constellations above Thursbitch (to which the stones are aligned), weather phenomena, and buildings (an enclosed well, Jenkin’s chapel) provide landscape features repeated in both timelines that allow for the eerie paradox. While clearly also unheimlich and in the case of the cosmic constellations even sublime, they become increasingly familiar to readers by their very repetition. The historical timeline provides more information on the standing stones, for instance, since these are individually named in the 18th century and can be then by readers re-experienced vicariously in Ian and Sal’s contemporary experience of Thursbitch: while they lack these names and lack any recognition, the text provides enough distinguishing features for readers to understand which stones are each spoken of. It is even possible for careful readers to recognize that some stones have been moved from their historical standing places, while others have more evidently become integrated into new topographical features, such as walls and fences. In consequence, readers can experience a homecoming recognition which, too, is part of the eerie paradox. Events in the two timelines’ stories also are repeated, while the most central one, death by cold exposure, reads as a form of becoming absorbed into Thursbitch, a way of spectral homecoming, both in the cases of Jack Turner and of Sal Malley. Jack’s death by its repetition moreover provides a structural frame to the novel (see chapters 1, 2, 31).

Speaking to the question of spectrality and justice, Thursbitch is positioned clearly against capitalist exploitation. Nature exploited as capitalist commodity is ridiculed in the contemporary timeline, when Sal and Ian struggle with the [page 48] crowds who enjoy the Pennines as recreational space. “‘It’s worse than Piccadilly,’” Sal complains, while Ian contemptuously declares, “‘Think of it as a prole trap’” (77).

The capitalist management of disease and death is another central point of critique in the plotline. It enables Ian’s agreement to leave Sal exposed to die despite his original objections, both medical (as a doctor) and religious (as a Jesuit). To be left to such a system is to be trapped in a gruesome ending compared to which death by cold exposure becomes an act of mercy and friendship. Sal remembers a previous hospital stay with trepidation: “‘I kept looking at the wheels on the beds. They were quiet and watching. Then they’d rattle away. But they always came back, and be there, looking at me, waiting, day and night. When I left hospital I knew they were still there. They were in no hurry. And when I went in again, there they were. Now they know I’m coming, and this time, they’ll have me’” (149). Sal’s metaphor for the mechanical, cold observation of institutionalized health care, the hospital wheels, also taps into an imagery of industry and mechanized profit-oriented processes that have dehumanized even death. The novel extends its critique of capitalism to its origins in the history of agricultural reform and land management, when 18th-century enclosures that have changed Thursbitch can be seen to only lead to contemporary ruined farms (38, 109).

Jack’s worst fear, however, that of a “land of great absence” (109), does not come true since the supernatural is still notably present. Though they do not grasp its manifestations, Ian and Sal are engaged in an otherwise careful psychogeography of Thursbitch. In their observational walks they uncover the present otherness of this landscape off the satellite grid (25) with its geomagnetic anomalies (27). Yet their contemporary and academic focus on rationality stops them from fully accepting a meaningful, spiritual, animistic topography:

[Ian] “That is spectacular. If we were anywhere else but here, at this stone, we should not be seeing this effect. It has to be a coincidence, because the only alternative [page 49] would be that the stone was put here in order to provoke the phenomenon.”

[Sally] “I think it’s just a big dick.” (88)

Their spiritual blindness does not preclude them, however, from unwittingly repeating a ritual hand-giving over one of these standing stones (70) in another instance of dramatic irony. The actual landscape of Thursbitch, the geographical valley in the Pennines, thus provides a primary authentication to the narratives of past as well as present. The John Turner memorial stone records the historical jagger’s death in odd circumstances, dated to 1755 (erroneously, Garner maintains): “The print of a womans [sic] shoe was found by his side in the snow where he lay dead” reads the inscription on its back. The standing stones in the valley and Jenkin chapel (fully named Saint John the Baptist, in Salterford) provide additional primary eerie authentications to the text.

A secondary level of authentication is presented by Garner’s illustrated lecture, “The Valley of the Demon,” given at the 2003 Knutsford Literary Festival and made available online minus the pictures referenced in it. In the lecture, Garner recounts his own coming across the John Turner memorial stone and being haunted over several years into research of the valley and its circumstances by the etymology of Thursbitch: “The elements are Old English þyrs and bæch: ‘demon’; ‘valley’. ‘Thursbitch’ is first recorded in 1384, a time when names were descriptive only. This was no Romantic conceit. For the people of those hills in the fourteenth century that valley was frequented by a þyrs: a demon.” Garner reports further contemporary manifestations of the supernatural in the valley, some of which he has clearly included in the novel—especially the presence/absence of a bullbaiting ring in one of the standing stones (Thursbitch 105):

At the mouth of Thursbitch I noticed a block of sandstone. In it was fixed a steel ring. It resembled a bull-baiting stone; and I photographed it. Here it’s important to note that my camera prints the time and date on every frame. . . . Three weeks later, Griselda and I went back to Thursbitch. There [page 50] was no ring in the stone; nor was there any sign that one had ever existed. If it had been removed since our last visit, we should have found the remains of its seating, or at least a spalling of the surface. There was nothing. The surface was unbroken, evenly weathered. I photographed it. Without the comparison, we should have been left doubting our memories. (Garner, “The Valley”)

At this point, of course, reproducing the two photos online would have not led to a “reality-testing” (Gordon 53) but more to a question of simulacra. Garner’s own shamanism is distinctly less traditional than Jack Turner’s. Much like Iain Sinclair’s Egyptian gods evoked by London topography in Lud Heat (1975), Garner’s fictional psychogeography of Thursbitch uncovers, as he claims, “the Minotaur” (“The Valley”). His novel’s cosmic bull spirit and its rites idiosyncratically mingle Minoan and Celtic religion with Siberian shamanism and local folkore. This serves to evoke Eliade’s ur-spirituality, of which shamanism is then the local historical representation: “The icon of the Bull is the ur-Bull of proto-Indo-European myth, from which Western bull (and many other) cults ultimately descend, carrying with them variations on the initially strange ménage of bull, snake, the Fly Agaric fungus, (of which the object in front of the bull here is a stylized representation), the hare, the moon, ivy, honey and bee: all connected” (Garner, “The Valley”). Against the universalist, a-chronic claim of ur-spirituality, Garner employs meta-fictional humor in his novel, a strategy that psychogeographers use to provide “a welcome counterbalance to the portenteousness of some of [psychogeography’s] more jargon- heavy proclamations” (Coverley 13). When one of Sal and Ian’s encounters with the spectral bull of Thursbitch is a manifestation of “still warm” bullshit (literally [Garner, Thursbitch 71]; and declared inexplicable by a ranger [81]), the humor here is not merely at the characters’ expense but also targets the entire concept of manifestations of an animistic spirit.

Garner’s own authenticating lecture is notably more serious by comparison, though here the author blends Thurs-[page 51]bitch’s fictional nature spirits and the ghost of Jack Turner into one spectral haunting. Secondary authentication is provided to this lecture text by the promise of experiencing the now-made familiar eeriness of Thursbitch in the actual valley. Viewranger or Komoot maps available online of the area show comments by hikers referencing the novel, and several hikers’ blogs report and illustrate visits of landmarks from the novel (e.g., Allen, B. Fisher, etc.) and stress the congruence between literary reality and personal, normal experience, to paraphrase Freud, and its haunting/familiarizing features. Mortuza traces the consumer fetish of the magical to capitalism and the psychological needs of easy, comforting consumption (4), yet these hikers’ and bloggers’ engagements enact a familiarizing repetition of the literary uncanny, freely accessible in situ to anyone mobile and healthy and thus, to a certain extent, making the shamanic text indeed potentially “a site for participatory democracy” (43).

Much in Garner’s text seems to hinge on the duality of a materialistic interpretation (fly agaric visions) versus the presence of the supernatural, being and not-being, yet the text clearly manifests spectrality by notable repetition structures and repeated disjointure of causality, achronicity, and revenant disruptions, which need to be tracked by readers and recognized actively. The shamanic author persona thus channels haunting for readers as the text’s narrator and implied author—while Garner’s autobiographical lecture on the genesis of Thursbitch authenticates the spectral further by grounding it in a shared topography of the Thursbitch valley and a shared reality of experience. Thus, the readers’ affective and emotive immersion into the fictional reality of Thursbitch allows their experience of the supernatural. Yet in turn, their familiarization with the eerie valley in the course of the text, their very semantic achievement and interpretative activity, which makes possible their recognition of revenant spectrality in Thursbitch, creates their homecoming in the eerie, a leisured consumption of fictional spectrality that can be extended into the shared, real world. The novel’s open criticism [page 52] of the leisured consumption of landscapes, of the historical enclosure movement, of the capitalist exploitation of resources and institutionalized inhumanity firmly ground Garner’s Thursbitch in our shared reality. Eventually, the spectral indeed always gestures towards justice.

Notes

1. Revisiting the argument of the subjective physicality of spectral affect discussed above, it is notable that such ethical effects of reading have so far only been asserted for physical books in print (cf. Bal and Veltkamp). Reduced sensory impressions provided by e-readers might diminish the impact of textual immersion.

2. In contrast to Mortuza’s readings, I would posit the shamanic not only as a rhetorical strategy but also as an authorial narrator persona, as channeling the supernatural in a text calls for full authority over such a text.

3. In turn, accusations of nostalgia levered at, for example, Ackroyd’s London psychogeography stress a “conservative sense of national identity” (Coverley 113) behind such an intense focus on an essentializing emotional connection to place. (On the connection between the concept of sentient landscape and “fascist human ontologies,” see Coţofană 4)

Works Cited

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Bal, M. P., and M. Veltkamp. “How Does Fiction Reading Influence Empathy? An Experimental Investigation on the Role of Emotional Transportation.” PloS ONE, vol. 8, no.1, 30 Jan. 2013, doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0055341.

Beck Kehoe, Alice. Shamans and Religion: An Anthropological Exploration in Critical Thinking. Waveland Press, 2000.

Bell, Karl. “Phantasmal Cities: The Construction and Function of Haunted Landscapes in Victorian English Cities.” Haunted Landscapes: Super-Nature and the Environment, edited by Ruth Heholt and Niamh Downing, Rowman and Littlefield, 2016, pp. 95-110. [page 53]

Bonnett, Alastair. “Walking through Memory: Critical Nostalgia and the City.” Walking Inside Out: Contemporary British Psychogeography, edited by Tina Richardson, Rowman & Littlefield, 2015, pp. 75-87.

Coţofană, Alexandra. Introduction. Sentient Ecologies: Xenophobic Imaginaries of Landscape, edited by Alexandra Coţofană and Hikment Kuran, Berghahn, 2023, pp. 1-20, doi:10.3167/9781800736627.

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Derrida, Jacques. Spectres of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International. Routledge, 2006.

Ellingson, Ter. The Myth of the Noble Savage. U of California P, 2001.

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Garner, Alan. Thursbitch. Vintage, 2004.

—. “The Valley of the Demon.” (Knutsford Literary Festival lecture, 4 Oct. 2003.) The Unofficial Alan Garner Website, 2008, alangarner.atspace.org/votd.html.

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Heholt, Ruth. “Introduction: Unstable Landscapes: Affect, Representation and a Multiplicity of Hauntings.” Haunted Landscapes: Super-Nature and the Environment, edited by Ruth Heholt and Niamh Downing, Rowman and Littlefield, 2016, pp. 1-20.

Houston, Jean. “The Mind and Soul of the Shaman.” Shamanism: An Expanded View of Reality, edited by Shirley Nicholson, Quest Books, 1987, pp. vii-xvi.

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Luckhurst, Roger. “The Contemporary London Gothic and the Limits of the ‘Spectral Turn.’” Textual Practice, vol. 16, no. 3, [page 54] 2002, published online 2010, pp. 527-546, doi:10.1080/09502360210163336.

Mortuza, Shamsad. The Figure of the Shaman in Contemporary British Poetry. Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2013.

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Therese-M. Meyer holds a doctorate from Tübingen University in English literature. She is the author of Where Fiction Ends (2006), an analysis of the textual construction of fictional author identities in Canadian and Australian literary scandals, and the editor of a German translation of Flinders’ record of his first circumnavigation of Australia. Her research interests include twentieth century and contemporary British literature and (post)colonial literatures in English, especially combining a theoretical, ethical, and cognitive literary studies approach.

MLA citation (print):

Meyer, Therese-M. "A Literary Hauntology: Channeling the Supernatural in Alan Garner’s Thursbitch." Supernatural Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Art, Media, and Culture, vol. 10, no. 1, 2024, pp. 33-54.