More of gravy than of grave
Brief early notes on something I wanted to write over the Christmas period, but I went down with, I don’t know, ‘flu, Covid, something shivery and rubbish anyway. But what it wasn’t was a ghost, I’m fairly sure of that. I now don’t want to write this properly because it’s January, it feels unseasonal: it can wait til next Christmas. Here anyway though with some of the ‘ghosts’ business that I apparently said I write about in my substack bio:
I’m a big fan of “without its undergoing any intermediate process of change”. That's how, according to Dickens, the door-knocker becomes Marley’s face — Marley’s face! — in other words, immediately. It doesn’t bend or move; or at least, Scrooge doesn’t see it bend or move, an object of this reality doesn’t warp, or deform, not into an object of ghost reality. The spectre suddenly is just there. (This is a rare moment in which the Muppet film directly contradicts the book: we do see the knocker, as it morphs, into that excellent face.)
Such a blink-of-an-eye change as this seems rarer as the story goes on; it's as if this earliest description, just lengthy enough to draw attention to itself — the switch without visible change, like a brief skip in time, or a discontinuous function — was intended to mark the very first of some ghost-rules being laid out, which he then played fast and loose with.
I had wondered whether it was the case that there are in these hauntings two kinds of change: 1) a flicker, such as this one, where something suddenly becomes something else; and contrarily 2) a sort of melting, where something changes, through a duration, into something else, and we can watch as it does so. And whether the first kind functioned as the difference between reality and haunting — e.g., the knocker — and the second kind applied to those magical changes possible only within the hauntings.
(The distinction reminds me a little of Steve Aylett’s two different kinds of vanishing: the first, nipping round a corner never to be seen again; the second, walking into the distance and visibly fading away.)
That second kind, the melting, does happen within the hauntings. Scrooge’s old schoolroom is made to do it: “The panels shrunk, the windows cracked; fragments of plaster fell out of the ceiling, and the naked laths were shown instead; but how all this was brought about, Scrooge knew no more than you do.” It may be a metamorphosis which is tantamount to time being sped-up, but that’s distinct from time skipped: he watches it happen.
But, my question is answered soon enough, with proof that the hauntings can do jump-cuts just as well: “Holly, mistletoe, red berries, ivy, turkeys, geese, game, poultry, brawn, meat, pigs, sausages, oysters, pies, puddings, fruit, and punch, all vanished instantly. So did the room, the fire, the ruddy glow, the hour of night…”
And what about a return from haunting to reality? The immediate flicker of the knocker at the very start may or may not be mirrored at the end: the final flourish of the very last haunting, when that scary ghoul seems to actually transmogrify itself into Scrooge's bedpost as he watches: “... he saw an alteration in the Phantom’s hood and dress. It shrunk, collapsed, and dwindled down into a bedpost.”
I think, really, however sudden it seems, that’s more a melting than a flicker, isn’t it. Unless you want to get into the difference between what is and what Scrooge sees, which I definitely don’t, not now, anyway. You could join the dots I think, there’s more I’d like to dig into about this. For now though I just want to note that Ebenezer Scrooge, at the very end of the first chapter, ‘Stave One’, quietly mirrors the knocker’s behaviour; he too does something “without any intermediate process of change”:
He tried to say “Humbug!” but stopped at the first syllable. And being, from the emotion he had undergone, or the fatigues of the day, or his glimpse of the Invisible World, or the dull conversation of the Ghost, or the lateness of the hour, much in need of repose; went straight to bed, without undressing, and fell asleep upon the instant.