Twenty-First Century American Fiction Justin Pickard

'The uncanny entails another thinking of beginning: the beginning is already

haunted. The uncanny is ghostly. It is concerned with the strange, weird and
mysterious, with a flickering sense (but not conviction) of something supernatural.
(…) But the uncanny is not simply an experience of strangeness or alienation. More
specifically, it is a peculiar commingling of the familiar and unfamiliar. (…) It can
consist in a sense of homeliness uprooted, the revelation of something unhomely at
the heart of hearth and home.' (Royle, 2003: 1)

Discuss the significance of the uncanny in

one or more twenty-first century American novels

With its literary origins in Freud's 1919 essay of the same name, the uncanny has proved as tenacious

a concept as it is difficult to define. Posited as a subset of the frightening or unsettling, Freud's initial analysis

tackled the uncanny as a phenomenology; a state which incited a specific emotional or psychological

response. In the essay, pitched somewhere between 'strange conceptual shopping list'1 and 'a sort of theme-

index'2. Freud says this is uncanny, as is this; and (on closer examination) this also. Unable to reduce the

concept to a clear set of characteristics, he can only approach the concept obliquely. His beginning is an

attempted reverse-engineering of the definition through an indexing of phenomena – all that could

conceivably shelter beneath the heading 'uncanny':

[W]e can collect all those properties of persons, things, sense-impressions, experiences and
situations which arouse in us the feeling of uncanniness, and then infer the unknown nature
of the uncanny from what all these examples have in common. 3

The weakness of this approach is highlighted by Royle, who claims that – for Freud – 'every attempt to

isolate and analyse a specific case of the uncanny seems to generate an at least minor epidemic.' 4 An open

1 Nicholas Royle, The Uncanny (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), p. 13.

2 Terry Castle, The Female Thermometer: 18th-Century Culture and the Invention of the Uncanny (New York:

Oxford University Press, 1995), pp. 4-5.

3 Sigmund Freud, 'The Uncanny' (1919), Part I, <http://people.emich.edu/acoykenda/uncanny1.htm> [accessed

09/02/2010]

4 Nicholas Royle, The Uncanny (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), p. 13.

1
Twenty-First Century American Fiction Justin Pickard

category, the uncanny is is not something that can be preempted: though certain examples will persist,

nothing can predict nor preclude the emergence of new manifestations. Rather, by virtue of its subject, the

list must remain open, an 'obsessional inventory'5 trapped in a perpetual state of becoming. Without some

attempt to circumscribe the concept, this essay could easily become lost in that which Royle describes as the

'maddening logic of the supplement'6. In an attempt to forestall such disorientation, I will begin by limiting

my analysis to a single item from the cascading index – specifically, the haunted house.

Having born witness to many an approximate translation of the German ünheimlich into English as

'haunted', rather than the preferable 'uncanny', Freud is peculiarly wary of the haunted house. As an example

of the uncanny, it is 'perhaps the most striking of all'7, and it is this prototypicality which makes it dangerous.

Though Freud may have wanted to focus on the specific effects of the haunted house, its uncanny elements

were 'too much intermixed with what is purely gruesome and (...) in part overlaid by it' 8. Seeking a definition

or analysis of the concept as a whole, it would have been of insurmountable difficulty to unpick the subject's

uncanny response from the fear of which it was a subset.

Whatever the weaknesses of his text, in which stretches the definition and potential applications of

the uncanny into translucency, in his capacity as Freud's interlocutor, Royle does not lose sight (site) of the

uncanny's origins as the ünheimlich, fundamentally entangled in – albeit primarily as a perverse outgrowth –

notions of the domestic and the homely. Here, heimlich has a double meaning, described by Tatar as

designating both 'that which is familiar and congenial [and] that which is concealed or kept from sight, and

hence sinister.'9 Reflecting the twin practices of containment and concealment, heimlich encapsulates the

ambiguous heritage of the house – ubiquitous, but far from neutral; a domain whose native form is equally as

likely to be grandmother as serial killer; Martha Stewart as Josef Fritzl.

5 Terry Castle, The Female Thermometer: 18th-Century Culture and the Invention of the Uncanny (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1995), pp. 4-5.
6 Nicholas Royle, The Uncanny (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), p. 8.
7 Sigmund Freud, 'The Uncanny' (1919), Part I, <http://people.emich.edu/acoykenda/uncanny1.htm> [accessed
09/02/2010]
8 Ibid.
9 Maria Tatar, 'The Houses of Fiction: Toward a Definition of the Uncanny', Comparative Literature 33 (2), (1981),
p. 169.

2
Twenty-First Century American Fiction Justin Pickard

With his claim that the uncanny 'can consist in a sense of homeliness uprooted, the revelation of

something unhomely at the heart of hearth and home'10, Royle appears to be suggesting that – whatever

Freud's concerns – the haunted house provides as strong a starting point for an analysis of the uncanny as

any. Indeed, in a world where automata have been normalised as vacuum-cleaning trilobites, cremation

increasingly supplants burial, and most people would not know where to begin looking for a waxwork to feel

uncanny at, the (haunted) house remains a highly potent signifier. As Mieville explains;

'The house is sanctuary. The house is despot. The house is the repository of all that is social
and human. The house is animate, alienated dead labour, a product which spins forth
'grotesque ideas'. These opposed conceptions coincide in one particular. The house is
powerful.'11

Linking the 'the familial household to the nation'12, the concept of the domestic constitutes both in

'opposition to everything outside the geographic and conceptual border of the home.' 13 Kaplan highlights the

origins of American domestic discourse, seeing it as fundamentally linked to the formulation of ideas of

Manifest Destiny; a reverse-side to the coin of imperial assimilation. The home was to be a 'bounded and

rigidly ordered interior (...) [existing in opposition] to the boundless and undifferentiated space of an

infinitely expanding nation.'14 In the twenty-first century, notions of domestic insecurity, terrorism, and

unchecked immigration are endemic to an America chafing against its own boundaries. Here, the haunted

mansions of the gothic novel unfold in all directions; metastasising their brethren in the cities, suburbia, and

on the American frontier. Wherever we look, from Desperate Housewives to the Department of Homeland

Security, our gaze reconstitutes the domestic as tragic, culpable; heavy with secrets and ticking bombs.

In this essay, I intend to interrogate the motif of the 'haunted domestic'. The heart of my thesis rests

a close reading of a specific instance of haunting taken from Toni Morrison's 2008 novel, A Mercy. To bolster

my argument, I will also be attempting to link the key case study with comparable examples from DeLillo's

Falling Man and Ellis' Lunar Park. Taken as a composite, the uncanny – or uncanny-ish – elements of these

10 Nicholas Royle, The Uncanny (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), p. 8.

11 China Mieville, 'The Conspiracy of Architecture: Notes on a Modern Anxiety', Historical Materialism 2 (1998), pp.
25-26.
12 Amy Kaplan, 'Manifest Domesticity ', American Literature 70 (3) (1998), p. 582.
13 Ibid.
14 Ibid, p. 583.

3
Twenty-First Century American Fiction Justin Pickard

three novels raise (and occasionally answer) important questions about America's origins; the representation

of history, memory and inheritance; notions value and labour; and the possibility of making a clean break

with the past.

Set against the ongoing settlement and civilisation of seventeenth century Virginia, Morrison's novel

foregrounds the experiences of slave girl Florens, centering its narrative around the events which precede

and prefigure her journey to fetch aid for Rebekka, her dying mistress. Tangential to this central core of plot,

but ultimately still implicated in its grand arc, is the haunting which is the subject of my interest. Opening

one of the later chapters with a description of Jacob – Rebekka's husband, a key character and master of the

other protagonists' household – as having 'climbed out of his grave to visit his beautiful house'15, Morrison

places a claim on both the ontological reality of the haunting and the persistence of Jacob's agency and

identity after death.

While Rebekka is described as having her thoughts 'ble[e]d into one another' 16, and Florens'

experiences unfold in an obsessively detailed stream of consciousness, the labourers' encounter reads

differently, relying instead on a third person perspective that initially seems more objective and far less

limited than the chapters that precede it. For although, as Adams notes, '[e]ach of the women seems locked

inside her own head, and inside her own fate'17, it initially seems that the people and places encountered by

Willard and Scully are granted an existence that, while still coloured by judgement, is independent of their

subjectivity. Immediately followed by their expressions of sympathy for Jacob's return, however, the claim

gains additional significance as part of an indirect dialogue, with the narrator elaborating on their comments:

Jacob Vaark climbed out of his grave to visit his beautiful house.
“As well he should,” said Willard.
“I sure would,” answered Scully.
It was still the grandest house in the whole region and why not spend eternity there? 18

15 Toni Morrison, A Mercy (London: Vintage, 2008), p. 141.

16 Ibid, p. 70.
17 Tim Adams, 'Return of the Visionary', The Guardian, 26/10/2008,
<www.guardian.co.uk/books/2008/oct/26/mercy-toni-morrison> [accessed 17/02/2010]
18 Toni Morrison, A Mercy (London: Vintage, 2008), p. 141.

4
Twenty-First Century American Fiction Justin Pickard

This dialogic engagement, however tacit, problematises a characterisation of the narrative mode as having

moved beyond the subjective limitations of the viewpoint character(s). Willard and Scully are implicated in

the act of narration, with the supposed 'facts' of Jacob's haunting written into being by a narrator, potentially

unreliable, as a gestalt of their individual subjectivities.

Here, it is clear that our understanding of Jacob's haunting is informed by the labourers' reactions –

not incomprehension or raw terror, but a general sympathy for their former master's rationale. If, as Castle

argues, the uncanny was a psychological by-product of the 'psychic and cultural transformations that led to

the (...) glorification of [the eighteenth century] as an age of reason or enlightenment' 19, then A Mercy takes

place before the possibility of an uncanny. In Freudian terms, Morrison's characters possess an 'animistic

conception of the universe'20 – a vernacular cosmology of symbols and phenomena, 'peopled with the spirits

of human beings'21. Despite Jacob's distrust of D'Ortega's Romish excess, his 'thin (...) dregs' 22 of Protestant

humanism are not necessarily embraced by the other members of his household. Here, the fact that Willard

is described as 'knowledgeable about spirits'23 implies there is something to know, while his warning to Scully

of 'the consequences of disturbing the risen dead'24 constructs the spirit as something to be respected,

perhaps feared – though only as one may fear another man. Writing seventeenth century Virginia as a reality

shaped by the historical subjectivities of its inhabitants, Morrison implies that it is simply too soon to expect

a meaningful distinction between subjective and objective reality; belief and knowledge. For Freud, we

should approach the novel as poetic text, 'adapt[ing] our judgement to the (...) reality imposed on us by the

writer'25 – specifically, that of a world of flux.

19 Terry Castle, The Female Thermometer: 18th-Century Culture and the Invention of the Uncanny (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 8.
20 Sigmund Freud, 'The Uncanny' (1919), Part I, <http://people.emich.edu/acoykenda/uncanny1.htm> [accessed
09/02/2010]
21 Ibid.
22 Toni Morrison, A Mercy (London: Vintage, 2008), pp. 25-26.
23 Ibid, p. 141.
24 Ibid.
25 Sigmund Freud, 'The Uncanny' (1919), Part I, <http://people.emich.edu/acoykenda/uncanny1.htm> [accessed
09/02/2010]

5
Twenty-First Century American Fiction Justin Pickard

With a nomos subject to the shifting frontiers of 'battles for God, king and land' 26, the early chapters

see Jacob struggling to orient himself in a world where 'from one year to another any stretch might be

claimed by a church, controlled by a Company or become the private property of a royal's gift to a son or a

favorite.'27 'There had', as Morrison explains, 'never been much point in knowing who claimed this or that

terrain; this or another outpost.'28 But while the ontological uncertainty satisfies Freud's description of the

poetic text, his argument that the 'better orientated in his environment a person is, the less readily will he get

the impression of something uncanny'29 is less than convincing. Of course there are ghosts, say Willard and

Scully, but they do not evoke the toxic feelings of 'strangeness, anxiety, bafflement, and intellectual

impasse'30 described by Castle: Jacob's haunting may yet be gothic, but – to those inside the text – it is not

uncanny.

Having attributed a definite identity and agency to the spirit, Willard and Scully's experience of the

haunting is limited, at best:

They did not see him – his definitive shape or face – but they did see his ghostly blaze. His
glow began near midnight, floated for a while on the second story, disappeared, then moved
ever so slowly from window to window. 31

As a 'glow', does Jacob's spirit even possess the legs required to have 'climbed out of his grave'32? The

labourers identify the 'ghostly blaze' with the identity and intentions of Jacob Vaark, but Morrison's

description of Jacob's posthumous return as echoing 'the way he used to reappear following weeks of

travelling'33 places a greater emphasis on continuity than can be reasonably justified. A more fruitful reading

takes the haunting on two distinct levels. Writing Jacob's subjectivity as capable of surviving death, the first

sees Morrison engaging in an act of prosopopoeia – 'giving face to an abstract, disembodied Other in order

26 Toni Morrison, A Mercy (London: Vintage, 2008), p. 9.

27 Ibid, pp. 10-11.
28 Ibid.
29 Sigmund Freud, 'The Uncanny' (1919), Part I, <http://people.emich.edu/acoykenda/uncanny1.htm> [accessed
09/02/2010]
30 Terry Castle, The Female Thermometer: 18th-Century Culture and the Invention of the Uncanny (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 8.
31 Toni Morrison, A Mercy (London: Vintage, 2008), p. 142.
32 Ibid, p. 141.
33 Ibid, p. 142.

6
Twenty-First Century American Fiction Justin Pickard

to return it to narrative'34. The second concerns the members of Jacob's household, for whom the haunting is

a form of pareidolia – the human predisposition to interpret a vague or random stimulus as something

familiar. Both interpretations move beyond the strict dichotomies of presence/absence, supplanting ontology

with a Derridean 'hauntology' which takes the 'figure of the ghost as that which is neither present nor absent,

neither dead nor alive.'35

As hauntology, Jacob's revenant lacks the ontological menace which is a precondition of the

uncanny. Far from the deprivation of Royle's 'homeliness uprooted' 36, this haunting is grounded in the

corrupt excesses of homeliness at its locus: the patroonship's third house. Tracing the origins of the building

from his early dreams of 'a grand house of many rooms rising on a hill above the fog'37, the roots of Jacob's

desire lie in the envy he feels – 'in spite of himself'38 – for D'Ortega's plantation. In spite of himself: a detail

which constitutes the envy as betrayal; an act of singular self-violence that rends his identity between

perpetrator and victim.

This split, or doubling, resonates with Freud's notion of the doppelgänger. Described as a perverse

recurrence of those archaic cultural phenomena which provided 'an insurance against the destruction of the

ego'39, the double returns either as an ego-disturbing herald of doom, or an interior agency capable 'of

observing and criticizing the self and of exercising a censorship within the mind' 40. Through Jacob's moment

of envy, however, this interior agency begins to impinge on the character's conscious identity – preparing the

ground for a much larger betrayal of self. We find a similar phenomena in Ellis' Lunar Park, in which the

narrator, ostensibly reporting events as they occurred, increasing finds his accounts impinged upon by a

figure born of Brett's trauma. This shadow, 'the writer', whispers of an alternate chronology of events,

destabilising the boundaries of truth and narrative:

34 Eric Savoy, 'The Face of the Tenant: A Theory of American Gothic', in American Gothic: New Interventions in a
National Narrative (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1998), p. 10.
35 Colin Davies, 'État Présent: Hauntology, Spectres and Phantoms', French Studies 59.3 (2005), p. 373.
36 Nicholas Royle, The Uncanny (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), p. 1.
37 Toni Morrison, A Mercy (London: Vintage, 2008), p. 33.
38 Ibid, pp. 25-26.
39 Sigmund Freud, 'The Uncanny' (1919), Part II, <http://people.emich.edu/acoykenda/uncanny2.htm> [accessed
09/02/2010]
40 Ibid.

7
Twenty-First Century American Fiction Justin Pickard

[L]ying often leaked from my writing life – an enclosed sphere of consciousness, a place
suspended outside of time, where the untruths flowed onto the whiteness of a blank screen –
into that part of me that was tactile and alive. But (...) on that third day of November, I was
at a point at which I believed the two had merged and I could not tell one from the other. 41

Similarly, the duplication of Jacob's subjectivity opens up his field of action – superposing the Jacob who

recoils at Jubilo as a vision of excess and the Jacob driven by desire; granted a glimpse of an alternative

mode of existence. In this context, both are gothic figures; 'divided products of both reason and desire,

subjects of obsession, narcissism and self-gratification as much as reasonable, responsible codes of

behaviour.'42 The doubles can coexist for a while, but – in the longer term – a struggle for dominance is

inevitable.

In his acceptance of Florens as payment in lieu of her mother, Jacob began to transgress the

boundary which previously maintained the moral superiority of 'Jacob Vaark, landowner' 43 in the face of

strutting slave-holders. But while the novel's titular act of mercy brought the realisation that 'only things,

[and] not bloodlines or character'44 separate him from someone like D'Ortega, Jacob failed to move beyond

the essentialist binaries, instead transposing them to the things he might yet possess. For the man who

began his journey as a 'small-scale trader for the [Dutch West India] Company' 45, this is the simplest

resolution. While Morrison's Virginia still has one foot placed firmly in Marx's feudalism – in the 'relations of

personal dependence (...) [of] services (...) and payments in kind'46 – the trappings and responsibilities of the

'landowning, independent farmer'47 leave Jacob conscious of 'his boredom with confinement and routine' 48.

Though Jacob flinches at the bodies of slavery, rejecting the trade in '[f]lesh [as] not his

commodity'49, the bifurcation of intent renders him incapable of stepping back. As witness to the excesses of

41 Bret Easton Ellis, Lunar Park (London: Picador, 2006), p. 218.

42 Fred Botting, Gothic (London: Routledge, 1996), p. 8.
43 Toni Morrison, A Mercy (London: Vintage, 2008), p. 23.
44 Ibid, pp. 25-26.
45 Toni Morrison, A Mercy (London: Vintage, 2008), pp. 31-32.
46 Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Vol 1, Trans. Ben Fowkes (New York: Penguin, 1990), p. 170.
47 Toni Morrison, A Mercy (London: Vintage, 2008), p. 31.
48 Ibid, p. 33.
49 Ibid, pp. 19-20.

8
Twenty-First Century American Fiction Justin Pickard

Jubilio, Jacob cannot help but compare his life to that of D'Ortega, and – though he seeks to reaffirm the

Other as unconscionable, or tainted by 'pagan excess'50 – finds himself lacking. Compromised by deficiency,

Jacob's subsequent encounter with Peter Downes, '[b]urly, pock-faced, [with] the aura of a man who had

been in exotic places'51, provides the trigger for his corruption. As proponent of the rum trade, Downes is

'holding forth with the authority of a mayor'52, but Jacob seems unconvinced:

He recognized the manner: hawker turned middle man eliminating all hesitations and
closing all arguments with promises of profit quickly. From Downes' clothes and his
apparent unwillingness so far to stand the drinks, Jacob suspected he had not reaped the
easy profit he described.
Nevertheless, Jacob decided he would look into it. 53

This 'nevertheless' is a weakening of Jacob's resolve; reaffirming his earlier self-betrayal at Jubilo. His

original 'determination to prove that his own industry could amass the fortune (...) D'Ortega claimed without

trading his conscience for coin'54 is fading fast, as he 'fondles' the idea 'of an even more satisfying

enterprise'55. Seeking to justify his participation in the sugar trade while maintaining a stake on a Protestant

identity that 'recoil[ed] at whips, chains and armed overseers'56, Jacob foregrounds the 'profound difference

between the intimacy of slave bodies at Jublio and a remote labor force in Barbados' 57, fervently hoping the

distance, both in geography and experience, will be sufficient to allay his guilt.

Historically, the commodity first emerges through the disavowal of labour. With its origins obscured,

the traders and consumers can only apprehend value 'through the relations which the act of exchange

establishes between the products'58. It enters experiential reality as if a self-sufficient totality: an 'external

object, a thing which through its qualities satisfies human needs'59. Valeri argues that, for Marx, this was

50 Toni Morrison, A Mercy (London: Vintage, 2008), pp. 25-26.

51 Ibid, p. 27.
52 Ibid.
53 Ibid, pp. 29-30.
54 Ibid, p. 26.
55 Ibid, p. 33.
56 Ibid, pp. 25-26.
57 Ibid, p. 33.
58 Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Vol 1, Trans. Ben Fowkes (New York: Penguin, 1990), p. 165.
59 Ibid, p. 125.

9
Twenty-First Century American Fiction Justin Pickard

always a fiction – commodity fetishism may recognise 'the existence of a single essence-value that renders

commodities comparable, but it misapprehends the fact that this essence is human labor.' 60 Here, Jacob

stands as a figuration of the the American economy's origins in slave labour. While well intentioned, his are

the acts by which America was, to quote a reluctant Updike, 'poisoned from the start.' 61

Hoping to liquidate 'his shortcomings as a farmer'62, Jacob's single-minded pursuit of wealth is met

with suspicion. Take Rebekka's description of the changing dynamics of Jacob's return:

It was some time before she noticed how the tales were fewer and the gifts were increasing,
gifts that were becoming less practical, even whimsical. A silver tea service which was put
away immediately; a porcelain chamber pot quickly chipped by indiscriminate use; a heavily
worked hairbrush for hair he only saw in bed. A hat here, a lace collar there. Four yards of
silk. (...) When finally she did ask him where this money was coming from, he said, “New
arrangements,” and handed her a mirror framed in silver.63

Here, Rebekka begins to view her husband with suspicion, with the subjects of her unease forming a prelude

to Jacob's final act. The gifts – 'treasures so useless on a farm' 64 - prefigure his construction of a third house;

an apotheosis of commodity fetishism which Rebekka believes she 'should have anticipated' 65. For the Native

American Lina, however, the new house is as a commodity. Though physically incomplete, it enters their

lives self-sufficient and devoid of history. Taken in the context of Jacob's patroonship, it is a manifestation of

excess:

The first house Sir built – dirt floor, green wood – was weaker than the bark-covered one
she herself was born in. The second one was strong. He tore down the first to lay wooden
floors in the second with four rooms, a decent fireplace and windows with good tight
shutters. There was no need for a third.66

60 Valerio Valeri, 'The Fetish', in Fragments from Forests and Libraries (Durham: Carolina Academic Press, 2001),
p. 25.
61 John Updike, 'Dreamy Wilderness: Unmastered women in Colonial Virginia', The New Yorker, 3 November 2008,
<www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2008/11/03/081103crbo_books_updike> [accessed 29/11/2009]
62 Toni Morrison, A Mercy (London: Vintage, 2008), p. 33.
63 Ibid, p. 86.
64 Ibid.
65 Ibid.
66 Ibid, pp. 41-42.

10
Twenty-First Century American Fiction Justin Pickard

There was no need for a third. No practical need, maybe, but this was never a question of necessity.

Rebutting his wife's misgivings with his belief that '[w]hat a man leaves behind is what a man is' 67, the house

is Jacob's final attempt to efface the lack that he first felt in his encounter with D'Ortego.

Having long since shed the identity of 'landowning, independent farmer'68, Rebekka's description of

house as 'befitting not a farmer, not even a trader, but a squire' 69 indicates the extent to which Jacob's

identity is entangled in its construction. This, then, is a productive fetishism. Graeber invokes Marx's

example of the 'architect who, unlike the bee, raises her building in her own imagination before it is raised in

reality'70. By imagining a Jubilo free of 'pagan excess'71, Jacob not only comes to recognise his 'existing world

as inadequate'72, but brings an alternative world into existence. This reading of the new house as a productive

fetish does not, however, imply that its meaning is necessarily that which it claims. Through the excesses of

obsession, the house – created by Jacob for his own purposes – 'comes to be seen as [a power] imposed on

[him], precisely at the moment when [it] come[s] to embody some new social bond.' 73 The belief that the

house can reconstitute his identity is a 'jumbling of agency'74, which serves only to obscure his position in the

creation of value – and reinforce his disavowal of the truth. For although construction relies on proximate,

transparent labour; the '[m]en, barrows, a blacksmith, lumber, twine, pots of pitch, hammers and pull

horses'75 are secured with the tainted profits of Jacob's trading activities – a detail which remains hidden

from the members of his household.

Though correlation rarely implies causation in the real world, the proximity of the completion of

the house to Jacob's death suggests a definite textual significance. Read against a background of commodity

67 Toni Morrison, A Mercy (London: Vintage, 2008), pp. 86.-87.

68 Ibid, pp. 31-32.
69 Ibid, p. 86.
70 David Graeber, 'Fetishism as Social Creativity: Or, Fetishes Are Gods in the Process of Construction', in
Possibilities: Essays on Hierarchy, Rebellion, and Desire (Edinburgh: AK Press, 2007), p. 114.
71 Toni Morrison, A Mercy (London: Vintage, 2008), pp. 25-26.
72 David Graeber, 'Fetishism as Social Creativity: Or, Fetishes Are Gods in the Process of Construction', in
Possibilities: Essays on Hierarchy, Rebellion, and Desire (Edinburgh: AK Press, 2007), p. 114.
73 Ibid, pp. 138-139.
74 Ibid, pp. 140-141.
75 Toni Morrison, A Mercy (London: Vintage, 2008), pp. 86-87.

11
Twenty-First Century American Fiction Justin Pickard

fetishism and disavowal, the death assumes a decidedly gothic flavour, and – by this point – Morrison has

displayed enough of her particular strain of 'visionary realism' 76 to recommend such a reading. Lloyd Smith

defines the gothic text as that which concerns itself with 'the return of the past, of the repressed and denied,

the buried secret that subverts and corrodes the present'77 – a revelatory dynamic in which the grand house

or castle is both locus and metonym, as outlined in Willams' analysis of George Colman's drama, Blue-

Beard; or Female Curiousity! (1798).

In Colman's play, the new wife of wealthy aristocrat Bluebeard is explicitly forbidden from

exploring certain spaces within her husband's house; rooms which 'given the premises and history of

patriarchy, (...) [are revealed to] contain the most appropriate possible secret – the bloody bodies of

murdered wives that represent the "truth" around which patriarchy is organized.' 78 Here, argues Williams, is

an example of how the gothic text takes architecture as an engineered materiality that instantiates 'the

structures of power that [engender] action within [the] social world' 79. As Williams reads Bluebeard's house

as a spatial realisation of the inequalities of late eighteenth century gender relations, analogous readings of

Jacob's house, Lianne's city, and Bret's McMansion, are – if not entirely unproblematic – certainly possible.

Though my argument focuses on the disavowed origins of Jacob's third house, it is – at this point –

worth examining the relationship between gender and the so-called 'haunted domestic'. DeLillo's Falling

Man sees Keith, a traumatised survivor of the attacks on the World Trade Centre, return to the life and

interiors of his estranged wife and son. In Lunar Park, these very same attacks provide the 'initial

motivation'80 for Jayne – celebrity actress, and, once again, mother of the protagonist's son – to move 'into

the anonymous suburbia of the Northeast (...) safely distant from (...) the increasing horror of urban life' 81,

establishing a new home for her and her family. Entering into these domestic spaces, both Kevin and Bret

start as outsiders – each provided a second chance at a relationship they thought had failed. With their entry,

76 John Updike, 'Dreamy Wilderness: Unmastered women in Colonial Virginia', The New Yorker, 3 November 2008,
<www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2008/11/03/081103crbo_books_updike> [accessed 29/11/2009]
77 Allan Lloyd Smith, American Gothic Fiction: An Introduction (New York: Continuum, 2004), p. 1.
78 Anne Williams, Art of Darkness: A Poetic of the Gothic (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), p. 44.
79 Ibid, p. 41.
80 Bret Easton Ellis, Lunar Park (London: Picador, 2005), p. 40.
81 Ibid.

12
Twenty-First Century American Fiction Justin Pickard

gender is (re)inscribed in the domestic space; a materialisation of social relations in a form which – claims

Kaplan – will shift and realign depending on context;

[w]hen we contrast the domestic sphere with the market or political realm, men and women
inhabit a divided social terrain, but when we oppose the domestic to the foreign, men and women
become national allies against the alien.82

Here, we could expect the uncanny source of haunting to be equated with the 'alien' against which, Kaplan

claims, 'men and women become (...) allies.'83 That said, the textual content of our novels seem to forestall

such an interpretation – not only questioning the automatic allegiance of man and woman in the face of the

uncanny, but mimicking societal shifts in their division of domestic and public responsibilities.

His former workplace reduced to a 'skeletal remnant'84, DeLillo's protagonist retreats to the security

of the familiar domestic routine. For most of the novel he exists only in a domestic capacity, inhabiting the

rooms, corridors and stairwells of the flat he once shared with Lianne. His only engagement with the 'market

realm' comes in the text's final section, when he leaves for the poker tables of Las Vegas. Furthermore, the

'haunted domestic' in this example is not the flat, but Lianne's New York; haunted by the Falling Man - a

photograph given flesh. In this, Lianne alone is the subject of the haunting; hers is the uncanny response.

Though the nominally autobiographical Bret is a high-earning superstar author, working on a new

book in the period covered by Lunar Park, his is another example of the limits of the traditional

public/private binary. As a creative writing teacher, Bret meets a group students 'once a week for three

hours'85, while in his capacity as an author, the McMansion is his workplace. Jayne is the one in the public

sphere; leaving the family home for film sets in Toronto and elsewhere. So when Bret is betrayed by the

McMansion, left facing down a house that appears to be metamorphosing into his childhood home, he is first

ignored, then left alone. Ultimately though, the haunting's subject is Bret rather than the McMansion.

Besieged by uncanny effects, with his domestic life crumbling around him, he is deprived of the possibility of

an alliance with Jayne, who rejects his claims as the product of a drug-addled mind.

82 Amy Kaplan, 'Manifest Domesticity ', American Literature 70 (3) (1998), p. 582.
83 Ibid.
84 Don DeLillo, Falling Man (London: Picador, 2007), p. 25.
85 Bret Easton Ellis, Lunar Park (London: Picador, 2005), p. 200.

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Twenty-First Century American Fiction Justin Pickard

As a counterpart to the uncanny effects of the 'haunted domestic' in Falling Man and Lunar Park,

the conditions of Jacob's haunting stand out as qualitatively different. We have already examined how the

labourers' encounter with the ghost differs from other chapters within the novel, failing to meet many of the

preconditions of the Freudian uncanny, but still managing to destabilise many of our preconceptions about

Morrison's text. In the broader context of American domesticity, the historical setting of A Mercy results in a

gendered spatiality which better reflects Kaplan's analysis – for most of the novel, Jacob is firmly embedded

in public realms of market politics; at any one time, he's more likely to be on the road than back at the farm.

The farm, however, is not the site of his haunting. Unlike Lianne's New York flat or Bret and Jayne's

suburban McMansion, the locus of Jacob's return is a direct product of his own creative endeavours. The

Falling Man 'haunts' New York as an image haunting a population subjected to trauma; Robert Ellis haunts

307 Elisnore Lane as a revenant haunting an heir; but Jacob is haunting his own house. This is one example

in which the domestic is not equated with the feminine, as the construction is described by all the characters

as 'Jacob's house'.

From the moment of haunting, it is clear that Jacob's trajectory – from unexpected inheritance to

the manufacture of his own feudal manse – is steeped in 'the Gothic dynamic of limit and transgression.' 86

Violating his own weakly Protestant morality, though initially for the most noble of reasons, Jacob repeats

this transgression for economic gain. Seeking to limit the effects of his corruption to the distant geographies

of Barbados, he sublimates his misgivings of his trade's complicity in slave labour, channelling the resulting

energies into the processes of construction. And for a while, at least, it seems to work – the Native American

Lina describes how the house appears to return Jacob to an originary, unsullied state; as he must have been

prior to the novel's opening. In stark contrast to the rough and capricious moods of the compromised trader,

from the breaking of ground 'he was cheerful every waking moment' 87 until his death.

Rebekka sees her husband's overriding obsession with the house as a necessary, but ultimately

insufficient, condition for his demise. With a repeat of the flickering suspicion with which she first received

his gifts, her description of Jacob's death appears indicates Rebekka's belief that this was something that –

86 Fred Botting, Gothic (London: Routledge, 1996), p. 6.

87 Toni Morrison, A Mercy (London: Vintage, 2008), p. 42.

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Twenty-First Century American Fiction Justin Pickard

despite the distractions of the construct – she might have forestalled:

The fever of building was so intense she missed the real fever, the one that put him in the
grave. (...) The laborers left with their horses and tools. The blacksmiths was long gone, his
ironwork aglitter like a gate to heaven. Rebekka did what Jacob ordered her to do: gathered
the women and struggled with them to lift him from the bed and lower him onto a blanket.
All the while he croaked, hurry, hurry.88

Dying within its walls, the trader's demise transfigures the house, reconstituting it as both monument and

tomb. Lina had always seen the house as Jacob's 'profane monument to himself' 89, the realisation of which

'distorted sunlight and required the death of fifty trees'90. From the lingering remnants of her native

upbringing, she knows the structure only as a perversion of the natural, an affront to the sacred; noting –

with an uncanny accuracy – that 'having died in it [Jacob] will haunt its rooms forever' 91.

For Williams, 'resolution of the conventional gothic mystery coincides with the revelation of a (...)

family secret'92, but in A Mercy, there is no revelatory dynamic at play. The titular mercy is transparent from

the start, and though Rebekka suspects the nature of her husband's economic activities, she is deprived of an

opportunity to discover the truth. For the acquisitive hypocrisy of his participation in slavery, Jacob's death

provides neither restitution nor revelation. Even in his ghostly return, there is no confession; the truth does

not out. Though the Gothic is supposed to explore 'explores chaos and wrongdoing in a movement toward

the ultimate restitution of order and convention'93, Jacob is only ever in breach of his own moral code. His

death may directly result from a disease contracted in his trading activities, or from his obsession with the

house, but it does not constitute 'punishment and retribution'94, nor does it promise 'the eventual return to

psychic normality.'95

88 Toni Morrison, A Mercy (London: Vintage, 2008), pp. 86-87.

89 Ibid, p. 42.
90 Ibid, pp. 41-42.
91 Ibid.
92 Anne Williams, Art of Darkness: A Poetic of the Gothic (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), p. 45.
93 Allan Lloyd Smith, American Gothic Fiction: An Introduction (New York: Continuum, 2004), p. 5.
94 Ibid.
95 Allan Lloyd Smith, American Gothic Fiction: An Introduction (New York: Continuum, 2004), p. 5.

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Twenty-First Century American Fiction Justin Pickard

Instead, Morrison's spectres are best represented by the figures of Rebekka's fever dreams: '[t]hey

had come to soothe her but, like all ghostly presences, they were interested only in themselves.' 96 Jacob does

not seek to interact with Willard and Scully; indeed, it is unlikely that he (as much as 'he' can be said to exist)

is even aware of their presence. To read the 'haunted domestic' only on the level of spectral effects is a

mistake – it was never about the ghost, not really. Equally, much is attributed to the buildings; the vessels.

Savoy invites you to consider 'a partial catalog of American gothic houses: Poe's House of Usher,

Hawthorne's Custom House, (...) Stephen King's Castle Rock'97. Adding to this list the house of Jacob's

desires, Bret's perfidious McMansion, and Lianne's New York streets, these are – he argues – all sites 'whose

solid actuality dissolves as they accommodate (and bring to spectacular figure) a psychic imperative – the

impossibility of forgetting.'98 As Mieville admits, it is easy to abstract a haunting to its locus – with the theme

of 'the animate, alien building'99 reasserting itself at practically every possible opportunity – to do so is

supremely unhelpful. Perhaps this is what Freud was attempting to explain when he rejected the haunted

house as an emblem for the uncanny. The 'haunted domestic' can be reduced neither to the uncanny effects

of the haunting nor the materialities of the domestic.

Taken as allegory or figuration, however, Jacob's haunting – as with the other, parenthetical

examples from Ellis and DeLillo – is about repetition and memory. As a signifier, it 'veers away from the

clarity of denotation toward the ghostly realm of connotation' 100; toward the Derridean 'hauntological' by

which – as Christiansen describes:

the very concept of Being is always haunted – not in the sense of the past returning as a kind
of return of the repressed, but rather in a more fundamental sense. The origin of anything –
ontology itself – is always spectral, is always repetition’s first and last time. 101

96 Toni Morrison, A Mercy (London: Vintage, 2008), p. 89.

97 Eric Savoy, 'The Face of the Tenant: A Theory of American Gothic', in American Gothic: New Interventions in a
National Narrative (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1998), p. 9.
98 Ibid.
99 China Mieville, 'The Conspiracy of Architecture: Notes on a Modern Anxiety', Historical Materialism 2 (1998), p.
5.
100 Eric Savoy, 'The Face of the Tenant: A Theory of American Gothic', in American Gothic: New Interventions in a
National Narrative (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1998), p. 11.
101 Steen Christiansen, 'Hauntologies', New Mappings, 24/02/2009,
<http://www.newmappings.net/archives/papers/hauntologies> [accessed 18/02/2010]

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Twenty-First Century American Fiction Justin Pickard

In each the textual examples, the haunting is less about the relation between the ghost and its architectural

vessel, and more about the re-petition, re-membering, or re-turn of a specific event. As Derrida reminds us,

the spectre is always a revenant; '[o]ne cannot control its comings and goings because it begins by coming

back.'102 In Lunar Park, this is the death of Bret's father, and – by implication – the entire tumultuous arc of

their relationship, with Bret risks re-enacting with his own son. For DeLillo, the revenant of Falling Man is

the performance artist, who embodies the event by restaging the image:

[T]hat one famous photo (...) The reactions to that photo of a man falling from the North
Tower (...) The man, falling upside-down, hands held behind him, (...) eerily posed between
the two towers.103

If this hermeneutic holds, Jacob's haunting contains – and stands for – the moment in which he first

glimpsed the house at Jubilio. It is a good man's involvement in slavery, the sugar profits which funded its

construction, the first stirrings of commodity capitalism, and the violent and exploitative origins of the

American nation.

So, though thoroughly furnished with the trappings of the gothic and uncanny, if Jacob's haunting

is to be taken as textual reality, it can be read as neither. But even in this halting conclusion, Morrison's text

proves problematic: as fiction, it does not directly challenge the contemporary reader's subjectivity or

ontological security, but if read as allegory or figuration, it elicits a response that – though not truly uncanny

– has an oblique relationship to Royle's description of a 'homeliness uprooted.'104 As previously noted, the

events of A Mercy occur before the disenchantment of the world; before enlightenment, reason, and

industrial capitalism. Jacob's death occurs roughly eighty years before the first batch of gothic novels, and a

full two centuries before the dawn of the nineteenth century, when '[t]error became secondary to horror

[and] the sublime ceded to the uncanny'105. If the temptation of a basically noble man through the events of A

Mercy can be read as an allegory of the tainted Alpha of the American nation, then the incomprehensible

terror of 9/11 – as humanised in DeLilio's Falling Man – is the Omega point, beyond which we now dwell.

102 Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx (Oxford: Routledge, 1994), p. 11.

103 Pamela Thurswell, 'Forecasting Falls: Icarus from Freud to Auden to 9/11', Oxford Literary Review 30 (2008), pp.
223-224
104 Nicholas Royle, The Uncanny (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), p. 1.
105 Fred Botting, Gothic (London: Routledge, 1996), p. 7.

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Twenty-First Century American Fiction Justin Pickard

In each of the texts, through Morrison's lyrical realism, DeLillo's description of the confluence the

human life with overwhelming, world-historical events, and the visionary final pages of Lunar Park, we can

identify a shift in literary descriptions of that which Freud would have described as the uncanny. Here,

Royle's 'peculiar commingling of the familiar and unfamiliar'106 is a pathway to hybridity; the admission of an

unspeakable history, but also – through the admission that America was, from the beginning, 'already

haunted'107 – a promise of the possibility of transcendence. Together, these three novels enact a canny,

knowing return to pre-enlightenment aesthetics; a twenty-first century reimagining of our historical visions

of the terrifying, the transcendent, and the sublime.

106 Nicholas Royle, The Uncanny (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), p. 1.
107 Ibid.

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Twenty-First Century American Fiction Justin Pickard

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