Scan barcode
A review by lkedzie
The Haunting of Alma Fielding: A True Ghost Story by Kate Summerscale
3.0
Alma Fielding had a problem named Jeffrey. Jeffrey was a poltergeist, and would wreck things in her house. Onto the scene arrives Nandor Fodor, paranormal investigator, looking for irrefutable proof of the existence of a haunting. What happens next will not surprise you.
The simple narrative here is as a (spoilers, I guess, for reality) debunking of a fraud. That is how I have heard parts of the story before. But the author, fueled by the discovery of the original presumed lost case file, draws this out into a narrative history about a debunking happening right at the end fo the post WW1 spiritualism craze. This is what makes it interesting. In my review of The Krebiozen Hoax I speculate on Dr. Andrew Ivy as being a Just Asking Questions guy who was doing so in earnest. Fodor is the same, or similar. He is committed to proving the existence of supernatural phenomena. He refuses to settle for equivocal proof. He has modern technology and scientific theory at his disposal.
The result is not proving what he set out to find, but in creating a template of understanding the paranormal that would become paradigmatic to how we tell ghost stories. Or is, if you look at it sideways, but that is what people did. In specific, Fodor connected the fraudulent supernatural to psychoanalytics: the pathology of the con. This translated to psychoanalysis as a understanding for real, or fictionally real, paranormal events: the ghost with unfinished business, telekinetic powers arising only because of, or only in, trauma. It is interesting, but kinda flimsy.
That is the problem of the book. The core narrative of the historical happenings is good, a little slight but there is enough relevant supplementary and accessory information to carry it. But the vibe is one where the author is trying to Say Something and cannot find a singular perch from which to look. In no particular order there is surrealism, dread at the next war, eroticism (which always seemed to me more like an instrument of the hoax rather than its object), technology, and all the Freud you could want, including Fodor's wife gate crashing Freud's apartment. I get the sort of specific history to explain a social context that the author is aiming at, but I also feel it falls short, and maybe more due to an indecisiveness in the text than the narrative's ability to be tied up with something.
Now, I want to be clear that I really liked it in the sense that it ties into my interests. It is a close reading of the sort of thing that I usually get only get broad ones of. The process is nee at in a sort of history of science that isn't science sense. It keeps the people human, who tend to be fictionalized and non-fictionalized in much more stereotypical ways. But I do not think that it gets where it wants to go, so the song plays out in a minor key.
The simple narrative here is as a (spoilers, I guess, for reality) debunking of a fraud. That is how I have heard parts of the story before. But the author, fueled by the discovery of the original presumed lost case file, draws this out into a narrative history about a debunking happening right at the end fo the post WW1 spiritualism craze. This is what makes it interesting. In my review of The Krebiozen Hoax I speculate on Dr. Andrew Ivy as being a Just Asking Questions guy who was doing so in earnest. Fodor is the same, or similar. He is committed to proving the existence of supernatural phenomena. He refuses to settle for equivocal proof. He has modern technology and scientific theory at his disposal.
The result is not proving what he set out to find, but in creating a template of understanding the paranormal that would become paradigmatic to how we tell ghost stories. Or is, if you look at it sideways, but that is what people did. In specific, Fodor connected the fraudulent supernatural to psychoanalytics: the pathology of the con. This translated to psychoanalysis as a understanding for real, or fictionally real, paranormal events: the ghost with unfinished business, telekinetic powers arising only because of, or only in, trauma. It is interesting, but kinda flimsy.
That is the problem of the book. The core narrative of the historical happenings is good, a little slight but there is enough relevant supplementary and accessory information to carry it. But the vibe is one where the author is trying to Say Something and cannot find a singular perch from which to look. In no particular order there is surrealism, dread at the next war, eroticism (which always seemed to me more like an instrument of the hoax rather than its object), technology, and all the Freud you could want, including Fodor's wife gate crashing Freud's apartment. I get the sort of specific history to explain a social context that the author is aiming at, but I also feel it falls short, and maybe more due to an indecisiveness in the text than the narrative's ability to be tied up with something.
Now, I want to be clear that I really liked it in the sense that it ties into my interests. It is a close reading of the sort of thing that I usually get only get broad ones of. The process is nee at in a sort of history of science that isn't science sense. It keeps the people human, who tend to be fictionalized and non-fictionalized in much more stereotypical ways. But I do not think that it gets where it wants to go, so the song plays out in a minor key.