on nostalgia

mise en abyme

v for vendetta

Did you think to kill me? There's no flesh or blood within this cloak to kill. There is only an idea. Ideas are bulletproof.

Alan Moore, V for Vendetta

Is there a more straightforwardly hauntological comic than Alan's Moore's V for Vendetta, the tale of a superheroic anarchist's mission to bring down a totalitarian government?

Like all good vengeful revenants, V schemes from thickly inked shadows.  Like all good political hauntologies, he embodies a set of undead ideas opposed to a dominant system. This embodiment runs deep. As illustrated by the quote, V is both man and idea. V's humanity is almost entirely earned by proxy through his connections to other more conventional and sympathetic characters. We never see V without his mask and we're told almost nothing about his past.

His status as an idea is given much firmer footing. Everything about V is political, from his quest to overthrow the government, to his ghosts of revolutions past presentation: a Guy Fawkes costume and a plot to blow up the Houses of Parliament. Even his base of operations, The Shadow Gallery, a repository of forgotten cultural artefacts, is a microcosm of a world sculpted by political values quashed by Britain's fascist overlords. More fundamentally, V has some of the key features of a concept. He's transmittable, non local and capable of evolution. Demonstrated when he passes the role onto Evey, his protege, (I'll leave you to think about her name) and ultimately the mob who claim the nation for better or worse to the sound of V's disembodied voice over the radio waves.

For all this, Moore isn't content to abandon the physical collateral of political change. The body, the human mind, both are sacrificed in pursuit of it. The bullet wounds received just prior to the moment where V claims to be bulletproof kill him a few pages later. V's origins lie in imprisonment and torture, and Evey's transformation into V's successor is achieved in much the same way. Eric Finch, the policeman who pursues the truth about V's identity is driven to the point of insanity by what he finds. V's entire revolution is built upon the pain of characters who Moore goes to some effort to humanise.

Because Moore understands that the political isn't cosily abstract, even when we're dealing with political entities that are lost, marginal or suppressed. Perhaps especially then, given that these are concepts whose exhumation entails opposition by those who support a vigorous ideology. All the best ghost stories are grounded in a costly struggle between the living and the dead.

ghost box

After my Father's messy exit in the late 70s, I lived with my grandparents in suburban London while my mother put herself back together. Each morning my brother and I clung to those fleeting minutes of entertainment aimed squarely at children before we slipped off into the abyss of daytime TV.

The Thames Television ident heralded this change from child friendly space to grey adult world. A world which had separated me from my mother. But it wasn’t sadness that I felt when I watched the logo rise from the river. The emotion was more melancholic, captured by that mournful session trumpet.

It was the feeling that something was passing, perhaps ending, and that this was going on around me all the time.

christmas yet to come

As Dickens reminds us, ghosts don't only rise up from the past. The most fearsome hail from the future.

Christmas cuts us adrift from life's familiar rhythms: work, leisure, even the structure of the week is upended. The topology of our living space is disrupted by decorations. Relationships are tested by unusual proximity or distance. Our health is called into question by sickness and the cold and too many glasses of wine. Even mortality is at issue. Winter kills.

Sitting beneath the Christmas tree late at night, drink in hand, we're haunted by the life we've chosen. Its past yes, but also its present and future. The turn of the year, like the witching hour, is one of the few reminders of the passage of time that our post-modern culture has left intact.

There is a future, it tells us, and it's coming.