RabachK VtP Annotation: GhostlyMatters

First, she describes some of her own hauntings. She writes of her journey to a conference with an abstract in hand only to be distracted by a photograph. Rather, only to be haunted by a photograph. She traces her encounter with Sabina Spielrein, a key but often forgotten figure in the psychoanalytical movement. It’s Spielrein’s absence in a photo that leads Gordon on a detour to theorizing exclusions and absences. For Gordon, “a dead women was not at a conference she was supposed to attend—requires attention to what is not seen, but is nonetheless powerful real” (42). As a reader, our notions of real, imaginary, and fictional shift. We are on this journey with Gordon as she tells the story of her own shifting temporalities and notions of reality. The uncanniness of her haunting experiences are transferred (42) to us as she writes her story. Or rather as she poetically dispels her story with all of its repetitions. We feel her frustration with Freud when she looks back and sees how he once thought of the unconsciousness as being related to the social and not just a private thing, a “self-contained closed system” (47). As we read, we see the “markings of her detour” (60). She leads us to two novels: Como en la Guerra and Beloved. Gordon prioritizes fiction, but not necessarily in a fictional sense. She focuses on their complexities and their complications. She pushes us to think of ghosts behind or in between or (beyond?) the pages: how are these absences real in the sense they have material consequences? These novels are avenues for us to understand larger social realities. They are means to counter Freud’s “self-contained” notion of unconsciousness. To understand the state terror and desparacedio of Argentina, we must wait and be open to experiencing hauntings. We must engage with ghosts, even when they aren’t our own ((164). We must recognize that our unconscious is actually accessible to “wordy consciousness” (47). We must awake to reality, much like the character in Valenzuela’s novel. And we must know that history is always a site of struggle with the living and the ghostly. Like we see in Morrison’s novel, the power of the past is always lingering (139) in the present.