Ghosting Through: Ficto-Critical Translation as a Means of Resisting the Appropriations of History and Place

通过实验小说技巧、档案研究和对相关文化理论领域的调查，这个项目探索了我们如何挑战在试图理解过去和地点的过程中隐含的控制和驯化倾向的方法。这个广泛的研究问题基于一个案例研究，重点是诺森伯兰一个小村庄里的一家酒吧闹鬼，以及与幽灵有关的女巫审判。该项目将鬼魂和历史框定在自我反省的过程中，重新创造历史事件和当代建筑。它通过将研究人员定位为作品中的一个角色来做到这一点。作为一名最近从南非移民过来的人，他试图通过调查这个鬼故事来让自己融入新住所的“英国化”。这个鬼魂是安妮·阿姆斯特朗的，她是一名仆人，1673年指控Riding Mill和周围诺森伯兰村庄的各种居民在现在的惠灵顿酒店举行巫师聚会。这个故事经常以不断变化的版本重现，出现在从导游到该地区住宅物业广告的一切东西上。阿姆斯特朗的指控显然在Morpeth Assies被驳回--之后她上吊自杀或被她指控的人绞死--但她的证词现在被认为是英国巫术史上最引人注目的文本之一。然而，尽管有这些令人信服的细节，阿姆斯特朗的叙述并没有充分反映历史背景。没有发现她的证词后续审判的记录，这让我们不确定她的指控是否得到了审判，或者审判记录是否已经丢失。因此，阿姆斯特朗的故事是具体细节和诱人的开放性的结合，无论是就其真实状况而言，还是就其历史背景而言。这个项目不挑战传统的历史研究模式，而是发展了互补的理解模式，在这种模式中，对档案材料的分析与当前的重述进行了对比。这不是一次纠正干预的练习，而是对一个特定地方构建其过去的复杂方式的探索。鬼魂成为了一个缺席的中心，它阻止了对故事的任何权威控制。这家酒店充满了“英国式”的独特之处，据说酒吧和客栈经常出没的情况也是如此。惠灵顿的闹鬼，以及它背后故事的分配，因此融入了一种当代的地方感，从国家到地方。这个看起来微不足道的鬼故事与证词记录联系在一起，阻止了研究人员试图了解过去，他来生活的地方，以及他自己的认同感。研究人员发现，在帝国纪念馆萦绕在心头的风景中，不断有人提醒人们“家”的存在，强化了人们对身份和地点在网络中同时存在的令人不安的意识，以及权力关系的产物。他致力于重现一座雕像背后的历史，这座雕像是一位在盎格鲁-布尔战争中阵亡的英国军官的雕像。他的努力被他对历史的理解所挑战的方式淹没了，因为他对历史的理解受到了与他所在的地方惠灵顿酒店有关的鬼故事的挑战。通常赋予研究者发现和赋予他的材料意义的权威，是与他形成的与该材料本身在表达地点、过去和现在方面的动态和流动有关的检验。在关键方面，研究人员才是文本中真正的“幽灵”。这是一个以实践为导向的研究项目，它面临的更大问题是如何将这些材料加工成一部成功的小说作品。

Through a 'ficto-critical' combination of experimental fictional techniques, archival research, and investigations into relevant areas of cultural theory, this project explores ways in which we can challenge the tendency to control and domesticate implicit in attempts to understand past and place.This broad research question is grounded in a case study focused on the haunting of a public house in a small Northumberland village, and the witch trial associated with the ghost. The project frames the haunting and the history informing it within a self-reflective account of the process of recreating historical events and contemporary constructions of place. It does this by positioning the researcher as a character in the work. A recent migrant from South Africa, he tries to write himself into the 'Englishness' of his new location by investigating the ghost story. The ghost is that of Anne Armstrong, a servant who in 1673 accused various residents of Riding Mill and surrounding Northumberland villages of holding witches' meetings in what is now the Wellington Inn. This story is regularly reproduced in ever-shifting versions appearing in everything from tour guides to advertisements for residential properties in the area. Armstrong's charges were apparently dismissed at the Morpeth Assizes - after which she hanged herself or was hanged by those she accused - but her depositions are now considered among the most remarkable texts in the history of English witchcraft. For all their compelling detail, however, Armstrong's accounts fall short of full historical contextualisation. No records of a trial following on from her depositions have been found, which leaves us unsure as to whether her accusations ever came to trial, or whether the trial records have been lost. Armstrong's story is thus a combination of specific detail and tantalising openness, both in terms of its truth status and historical contextualisation. This project does not contest conventional modes of historical research, but develops complementary modes of understanding in which an analysis of the archival material is played off against current retellings. It is not an exercise in corrective intervention, but an exploration of the complex ways in which a specific place constructs its past. The ghost becomes a centre of absence which holds at bay any authoritative control over the story. The public house is resonant with peculiar aspects of 'Englishness', as is the widespread alleged haunting of pubs and inns. The haunting of the Wellington, and the appropriations of the story behind it, thus feed into a contemporary sense of place, ranging from the national to the local. Placed in various conjunctions with the deposition records, this apparently slight ghost story resists the researcher's attempts to know the past, the place in which he has come to live, and his own sense of identity. The unsettling awareness of the ways in which identities and places are implicated within networks at once contingent and the product of relations of power is reinforced by the constant reminders of 'home' the researcher discovers in a landscape haunted by memorials of Empire. He commits himself to recreating the history behind one statue in particular, that of a British officer killed in the 'Anglo-Boer War'. His efforts are overwhelmed by the ways in which his understanding of history is challenged by the ghost story attached to what has become his 'local', the Wellington Inn. The usual authority accorded to the researcher discovering and giving meaning to his material is tested against his taking shape in relation to that material which is in itself dynamic and fluid in its expression of place, the past, and the present. In crucial ways it is the researcher who is the real 'apparition' in the text. This is a practice-led research project, and the larger question it takes on is how such material can be worked into a successful work of fiction.