Shadow Ticket III: How the Ghost of You Clings

 

In an earlier post, I promised to return to the supernatural/horror motif in Shadow Ticket. Well, here goes. Just a few more or less random thoughts on the subject as I reach the end of the book.

First thing is that, on almost every page, the supernatural sneaks up on you. It’s there beneath all the jokes, vampires, apported objects, haunted ships, golems, ghost submarines and other assorted weirdness. If you are like me, you expect it all to resolve into an elaborate Pynchonian gag. But it doesn’t … not quite. What it produces instead, is a lingering sensation that something truly unsettling is going on just beyond our field of vision. Somehow, it all seems to have a connection to history. A history that refuses to stay buried.

The earliest hint about this is the book’s epigraph ascribed to Bela Lugosi: “Supernatural, perhaps. Baloney … perhaps not.” The uncertainty inherent in the quotation becomes increasingly important. Early on in the book, the supernatural can perhaps be dismissed as just another of the novel’s comic extravagances. (A Pynchon specialty, to be sure). The further away from home Hicks travels, however, the more difficult it becomes to keep the ghosts et al on the other side of the curtain separating reality from imagination, folklore or superstition.

Consider the Stupendica. The ship, it is intimated, may be haunted by spirits connected to “wrongs still unresolved.” To things, that is to say, that happened in the past but which have never really gone away. It’s a vessel, if you will, for historical memory. How appropriate is that in novel so utterly connected with war, fascism, nationalism, ethnic hatred, capitalism and the powerful political currents that animate the world Hicks is forced to move through?

The frightening thing, therefore, isn’t that the supernatural world may truly exist. It’s that it may in fact have good reason to.

The vampires and all the Transylvanian falderol are obviously played for laughs. Even there, however, Pynchon keeps returning to old violence, old myths, old political identities and rivalries. The golem, too, arrives carrying centuries of cultural memory with him. These are not simply monsters or tropes imported randomly from horror fiction and film. They are, quite purposely, I’d argue, creatures created by and imbued with history.

Even Hick’s vanished blackjack seems to me to be relevant in this context. Something from the material world disappears at the precise moment when he is about to cross a moral line … big time! Supernatural intervention, coincidence … or something else entirely? (Baloney, perhaps?) Does it matter? Whatever happened, the occurrence raises a question: can an unseen force interrupt the course of history and, in so doing, reverberate in the future? Energy, after all, can neither be created nor destroyed.

Finally, I’d also suggest that in Shadow Ticket, Pynchon treats politics as a kind of haunting. Fascism, for example, doesn’t simply vanish because a war ends. Violence (energy, again) leaves traces. Ideologies mutate like viruses. Even more to the point, the dead remain present in the myths, prejudices, institutions and stories of the living.

Maybe that’s the ultimate horror identified in the novel – history seldom stays where we put it. We bury the bodies, rename the streets and buildings, rewrite the stories and declare the current crisis over. But then, sooner or later, something always comes scratching at the door.

Queue the eerie music …