'I Know that I Exist’: Lorna Gibb’s _A Ghost Story_ as an Assemblage of Matter and Spirit.

Abstract

In this chapter I discuss Lorna Gibb’s _A Ghost Story_ (2015), which offers a different take on the story of the spirit celebrity, Katie (and John) King. In this novel the narrator is the disembodied voice of the ghost, a first-person narrative voice that moves in and out of time and place, that it plays a part in people’s lives, as well as possesses the body of several mediums and spiritualist believers in their seánces and theatrical acts, like those of the Davenport brothers. The novel shows a clear rejection of binaries such as human/nonhuman, matter/spirit, embodiment/disembodiment, and in so doing it underlines the fluidity of the multiple elements (bodies, parts, terms) involved in Spiritualism, and in séances particularly. My aim is to examine the shifting relations between those elements, as well as the tension between human-nonhuman, matter-spirit through an assemblage lens, drawing on social theorists such as Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, as well as Bruno Latour.