“I Know that I Exist”: Lorna Gibb’s A Ghost Story as an Assemblage of Matter and Spirit
“I Know that I Exist”: Lorna Gibb’s A Ghost Story as an Assemblage of Matter and Spirit

Author(s): Rosario Arias
Subject(s): Cultural history, 18th Century, 19th Century
Published by: Wydawnictwa Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego
Keywords: Neo-Victorianism; Spiritualism; ghost; Lorna Gibb; assemblage; networked self
Summary/Abstract: Lorna Gibb’s 'A Ghost Story' (2015) focuses on the story of the spirit celebrity of the 1880s, Katie (and John) King, narrated by the disembodied voice of the ghost, a first-person narrative voice that moves in and out of time and space. The spirit takes the reader to multiple settings and places (London, New York, France, Russia and Naples), following Katie from spiritualist circle to psychic event (both private and public), revealing the tricks employed by Spiritualism, but also at times fuelling the spiritualist belief through her spirit interventions. 'A Ghost Story' is a neo-Victorian novel, mostly set in the Victorian past, but firmly grounded in our current age, as the text consists of the spirit’s autobiographical narrative as well as several documents and texts, both fictional and real. This way, the novel highlights the fluidity of the multiple elements (bodies, parts, terms) involved in Spiritualism, and in séances particularly, as well as in relation to the ambiguous nature of the spirit. In this chapter I discuss the protean nature of the spirit as a networked self, whose story is retrieved in a self-fashioning mode, gaining agency, and constructing her own story, but also made up of assembled materials, collected by different individuals. Then, I demonstrate that the novel shows an assemblage mode of existence, as part of the network turn.

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