Haunting and Hauntology in Hilary Mantel's "Beyond Black"

Proceeding from Mark Fisher's work on Hauntology, this paper will explore how Hilary Mantel presents both the failure of late capitalist imagination and its nostalgic appropriation of the past in "Beyond Black" (2005). The novel follows Alison and her sidekick Colette as they travel London's commuter belt, performing their psychic roadshow and consoling their audiences with messages from the other side. The towns and villages Alison and Collette tour are populated by 'outcasts and escapees [...] limping from the cities', uncharitably described as places 'where nobody comes from'. It is then unsurprising that the audiences, modernity's flotsam and jetsom, attempt to access a meaningful past through the act of the medium.

It is apparent, however, that the reality of the afterlife is far darker than Alison allows her audience to witness. The dead do not exist, as Alison asserts, 'beyond geography and history' safely outside of the mortal realm. Rather they disrupt the present, often in malign and disturbing ways.

Mark Fisher's 'What is Hauntology?' suggests that a retreat into the past in the form of nostalgia is symptomatic of late capitalism's inability 'to conceive of a world radically different from the one in which we currently live.' We are haunted not by the past, but by a future that has failed to materialise.

This paper will argue that, rather than indulging the nostalgia of late capitalism, Mantel's novel counters and critiques this trend by exposing the consoling narratives of the medium. A sanitised form of history is presented, fuelling the 'inertia and retrospection' Fisher observes in late-capitalist cultural production. In "Beyond Black", the outsider is ultimately critiqued as an emblem and facilitator of postmodern apathy, the nostalgic hauntologies of modernity's outsiders are set against the truer malign haunting of the dead.