Haunted Realities: Exploring the Liminal Space Between Realism and Speculation

Abstract

Engaging with the work of James Baldwin, Jeanette Winterson, Madeline Ffitch, Kamila Shamsie, Clarice Lispector, and other writers from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, this paper interrogates a “larger-than-life” quality in a range of novels usually classified as realist. This sense of heightened reality, I maintain, is distinct from existing categories such as gothic fiction, magical realism, and surrealism. Instead, I argue that these novels exist in “haunted realities,” which straddle the boundary of realism and speculation just as ghosts exist in a suspended state between life and death, religion and magic, and metaphor and memory. I explore a variety of techniques writers may use to lift their stories into haunted reality, such as establishing a sense of inevitable movement or layering conflicting perspectives. Finally, drawing upon the critical framework of hauntology, I argue that haunted realities challenge normative understandings of individualism and agency and are therefore well-equipped to explore themes of alienation and structural violence.