“An insect trapped in amber” The Flesh of the Ghost in The Devil’s Backbone DYLAN TRIGG We believe we are at home in the immediate circle of beings. That which is, is familiar, reliable, ordinary. Nevertheless, the clearing is pervaded by a constant concealment in the double form of refusal and dissembling. At bottom, the ordinary is not ordinary; it is extra-ordinary, uncanny. (Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought) INTRODUCTION Guillermo del Toro’s The Devil’s Backbone begins with a mediation on what a ghost is. Of the various possibilities, at least six articulations of the ghost emerge: as a tragedy, an instant of pain, a half-dead thing, a suspended emotion, a blurred photograph, and “an insect trapped in amber.” Already in the introduction to the film, we have a complex reading of the ghost, open to multiple interpretations. Much attention on this film has been given (rightly) to the political ghosts and allegories that haunt del Toro’s work. In this, the ghost(s) in del Toro’s film have assumed a legacy as much concerned with the spectrality of death as the violence of history. Yet what remains unsaid is his treatment of the ghost as a ghost. Here, we might ask a question: Is there something specific to del Toro’s analysis of ghosts that sheds light on the nature of hauntings more broadly? I ask this question from the standpoint of a considering what kind of entity a ghost is. To respond to this question, it is helpful to turn to the image of amber, which del Toro signals in the opening of the film. In this chapter, I will pursue the relation [ 53 ] between amber and spectrality from both a temporal and spatial perspective. In the first case, the image distorts boundaries between time, conflating past and present. If the trapped insect belongs to the past, then it is nevertheless preserved in the present as some thing which is still alive, resisting erosion owing to its resin shell, and for this reason, has outlived its own death. In material terms, the significance of amber is manifold. If amber marks the presence of spectrality, then it is no coincidence that the film itself is set in this colour, suggesting from the outset the ghost’s presence is dispersed through the landscape rather than contained to the body itself. Moreover, the quality of the insect/ghost as being trapped in amber allows del Toro to stage a series of paradoxical encounters between the living and the dead — not least the physical interaction between material and immaterial bodies — such that by the end of the film the exact boundary between those who are alive and those who are dead is sufficiently blurred so as to render the division reversible. The plan for approaching this cinematic depiction of spectrality is to turn to phenomenology. What can phenomenology tell us about the nature of ghosts? As it turns out, the topic of ghosts is something of an established motif in phenomenology. Part of this appeal to the figure of the ghost is due to the fact that it can shed light on the nature of what it means to be a human — and, therefore, bodily — subject. Ordinarily, we experience ourselves as being identifiable with our bodies. That is to say, instead of regarding our bodies as units of space or inert matter that allow us to get from one point in the world to another, we instead experience our bodies as the very expression and centre of who we are. One example of this would be to consider the prospect of swapping your body for someone else’s body. The resistance we tend to feel when faced with such a prospect is telling, and reinforces the conviction that the relation we have with our bodies is not contingent to selfhood but necessary. Our values and sense of who we are manifests itself in the way in [ 54 ] dylan trigg which we comport ourselves in the world, and how we comport ourselves in the world depends in large on our bodies. But note that this mention of the body does not simply refer to the physical presentation of the body as an object. While we could certainly consider the relation between our sense of self and our bodies by taking the body as a visual thing with particular characteristics, such a stance would only get us so far. To move beyond this level of analysis, we would need to consider how the body relates to the world, including how it responds to the presence of other people and to the various places in which those people are found. With this in mind, what can the strange (im)material body of a ghost tell us about what it means to be a human subject? After all, the body in question here concerns one that is neither entirely living nor exactly dead. Instead, the body of the ghost seems to occupy a strange realm in-between. To approach the ghosts of del Toro’s film, I will stage a dialogue between Merleau-Ponty and Husserl. In each of these thinkers, we gain a different perspective on the nature of ghosts, which not only helps us to understand The Devil’s Backbone, but also helps us to understand two questions critical to any consideration of spectrality. First, what is the distinction between a living body and a body that occupies the interstitial zone between life and death? Second, does the ghost have a reality outside of it being experienced by a living being or is it simply a narcissistic mirror of the living? By turning to phenomenology we can enter into a dialogue with these questions. In this phenomenological exploration, we will give special attention to Merleau-Ponty’s late philosophy. The reason for this is that Merleau-Ponty allows us to see that both ghost and non-ghost share the same world, a world that if spectral and invisible, is also familiar and visible. Let us begin our phenomenological foray into ghosts, by setting the scene. “An insect trapped in amber” [ 55 ] THE SIGHING GHOST The plot of The Devil’s Backbone concerns the fate of an orphanage during the Spanish Civil War. There, a young boy called Carlos is brought to the orphanage by his tutor, who can no longer care for him after the death of the boy’s father. The owners of the orphanage are concealing a large stash of gold, which is owned by Republican loyalists. In addition, an unexploded bomb remains at the centre of the orphanage. Because of this, the orphanage is under attack from all sides. In all this, Carlos develops a friendship with another boy called Jaime, who is disliked by the other boys because he has a tendency to torment them. Before long, Carlos soon begins having visions of a mysterious apparition he can’t identify, and hears strange stories about a child named Santi who went missing the day the bomb appeared near the orphanage. As the viewer finds out, the child is a ghost known as the one who sighs, an unknown phantasm that haunts the orphanage mostly at night. Del Toro’s treatment of ghosts and hauntings is mediated all at times by a balance between personal and political histories, such that the two are inseparable. Carlos’s encounter with the one who sighs is also a mirror of the surrounding conflicts in the Civil War. In this reversibility between the natural and the supernatural, del Toro imbues the world with a sense of magical realism, transforming the orphanage into a talisman of a greater truth about history, memory, and place. As such, the real horror comes not in the form of the ghost, but in the guise of human brutality and deceit. Indeed, the film’s tagline is “The living will always be more dangerous than the dead.” This proves to be correct. The presence of the ghost is less to terrify the inhabitants of the orphanage, but instead to seek communication with them, presenting itself as a melancholic entity exiled between the living and the dead. This is a complex film, and for the sake of the current chapter, I want to extract a small element from it, which can enable us to understand a phenomenology of ghosts, especially [ 56 ] dylan trigg as the ghost distorts our understanding of space and time. In the first instance, del Toro reveals to the viewer that the notion of a haunting is not something that is localised to one point in space, but is instead dispersed spatially, thus establishing what we might call, a haunted world. From the outset, del Toro’s attention to the creation of a haunted world is evident from the scene of the unexploded bomb placed in the courtyard, as if dropped by accident. This is a striking image, which draws together in one scene both the natural and supernatural currents of the film. We are shown a world that has been left behind and abandoned to its own strange logic. Frozen in time and in space, the bomb marks the centre of the orphanage as a place and the centre of the film as a world in its own terms. Caught in this in-between state, the bomb assumes a material counterpart to that of the ghost himself. Even within the context of this opening scene, then, we are shown the creation of a haunted world is not something that can be constructed in geometrical terms alone, but rather involves a rapport between imagination and memory, as Bachelard writes of the creation of home, “the imagination builds ‘walls’ of impalpable shadows, comforts itself with the illusion of protection” “An insect trapped in amber” [ 57 ] “From the outset, del Toro’s attention to the creation of a haunted world is evident from the scene of the unexploded bomb placed in the courtyard, as if dropped by accident.” (Bachelard 1994, 5). This balance between memory and imagination is never a question of attempting to access the place in itself, but instead marks the grounds upon which the natural and the supernatural can co-exist without any paradox separating them. This intertwining of each realm is evident in our first encounter with the ghost. Early in the film, Carlos is mysteriously led to a basement in the orphanage, which contains a large pool of water shaded in amber. And the descent into the basement is notable. As Bachelard reminds us, the basement is where our unconscious is located. This “dark entity” of the house is the one place where our “unconsciousness cannot be civilized,” meaning that one must “take a candle...to the cellar” (19). We see Carlos slowly descend the stairwell leading to a large expanse, as much a basement as a cave, complete with sound of dripping water and ominous shadows. For reasons that we find out later in the film, Carlos is drawn to the pool of water placed in the centre of the room. From nowhere, a figure scurries in the background before hiding behind a pillar. Carlos investigates, asking “Do you live down here?” Against this “buried madness,” the ghost makes his first appearance. His face is bleached white, his eyes empty orbs, and his entire head surrounded by a mask of water. On the top of his head, a wound is open and blood is pouring upwards, as if carried by the water, which, as we now see, was the cause of his death. Carlos moves in closer. As he does, the ghost proceeds to encircle Carlos, approaching him from behind only to disappear once more after making contact. Throughout this scene, the ghost is presented not as a foreign invasion of a space, but as a revelation of the very life of the space. For his own part, Carlos is as responsible for giving the place life as the ghost is. In each case, both the living and the undead are led through the world in a reflective way, guided by a more diffused atmosphere, which is not reducible to particular objects, but instead can only be understood within the context of a broader world. [ 58 ] dylan trigg HUSSERL’S GHOSTS How can we understand this articulation of the ghost as able to interact with the living but without being circumscribed to the living? To respond to this question, we can turn to our first phenomenological engagement with Husserl. The question we are concerned with here is to what extent is del Toro’s ghost a different kind of entity from Carlos? How are the two boys able to enter into a relationship with one another? It is with these questions in mind that Husserl’s writings on ghosts assume an importance. In the midst of an analysis of subjectivity in his Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, Husserl proceeds to consider the nature of “I as man” (Husserl 1990, 99). This section comes about by way of Husserl’s consideration of what enables me to experience myself as myself. In the same way, how is it that we can speak of other people have being the way they are — be it melancholic, cheerful and so forth? Husserl narrows the question to the body, writing that: “Someone will say that he has been beaten, stabbed, or burnt when it is his Body that has undergone the corresponding actions . . . We say of someone that he is dirty when it is his finger that is covered with dirt” (99). So, what Husserl is doing here is showing us the interdependent way in which we consider the I and the body to belong. To remove the body from the I would leave a disembodied, indeed spectral subject. Likewise, to remove the I from the body would be to transform the body from a living subject to either a corpse or a zombie, as Husserl writes: “When the soul departs, then what remains is dead matter, a sheer material thing, which no longer possesses in itself anything of the I as man” (100). Thus, to posit the idea of a unified and all encompassing subject — a human being — the body and the sense of self remain interwoven. From this discussion of the embodied subject, the emergence of the ghost makes an appearance as an oddity. Husserl introduces it by way of a contrast, at once granting it a material “An insect trapped in amber” [ 59 ] existence while at the same time reducing that materiality existence to an illusion, writing that: “Even the ghost necessarily has its ghostly Body. To be sure, this Body is not an actual material thing — the appearing materiality is an illusion — but thereby so is the affiliated soul and thus the entire ghost” (100). Husserl continues this critique of the phenomenal reality of the ghost by proceeding to consider the perception of the ghost as a material reality. There are two options. The first is to regard the ghost as being real and therefore an actual “man” rather than what would be normally think of as a ghost (100). Here, the sense would be that in seeing a ghost, we are in fact making a perceptual error, as what we would actually be seeing is a human being assuming the form of a ghost. The second option is to concede that what one is seeing is in fact an illusion but to identify a link between the spirit world and the material world. From such a perspective, the existence of a ghost is, for Husserl, “thinkable” (100). Only now, the ghost becomes a “spatial phantom,” while its material existence is marked less by concrete reality and more by a series of “unrealities” (101). This account of the ghost as assuming a material unreality allows Husserl to position the ghost beyond the perception of an individual perception and place it in the context of an intersubjective world. This is a significant move, and has a particular relevance for del Toro’s cinematic treatment of ghosts, which relies at all times on a communal experience. Indeed, one of the clearest aspects del Toro reveals to us about the nature of ghosts in The Devil’s Backbone is the role it plays in structuring social existence. This social dimension also carries with it a philosophical puzzle: How can more than one person experience a ghost if it is the nature of ghosts to belong to the imaginary sphere? As it becomes clear, both Husserl and del Toro are wholly prepared to entertain the idea that if we can grant a reality to ghosts, then such a reality must be grounded in its intersubjective dimension. For Husserl, instead of there being “real” bodies that occupy [ 60 ] dylan trigg the world in the way that all of us are used to, now we are faced with a world of “phantom Bodies,” which once more is perfectly “thinkable” for Husserl, and indeed all the more so thanks to its appeal to being experienced on an intersubjective level (101). This appeal to the intersubjective constitution of the ghost retains just the same relevance that it would for actual bodies, and in each case the existence of a ghost for more than one person depends in large on “empathy” (101). Let us pause to consider Husserl’s mention of empathy within the context of del Toro’s film. What is notable about del Toro’s presentation of the ghost is that it far from being perceivable to those who experience it directly, it instead diffuses itself through the world of the orphanage more generally. In this way, it constitutes a generalised atmosphere of both the place and the people within the orphanage. How is this shared understanding possible? There seem to be at least two options. One, we suggest that the collective experience of the ghost is equivalent to the collective experience of something like guilt or mourning. Two, we think of the ghost more in terms of del Toro’s amber — a dense materiality that seeps through the orphanage itself and into the bodies of those who dwell there. “An insect trapped in amber” [ 61 ] “Even the ghost necessarily has its ghostly Body. To be sure, this Body is not an actual material thing — the appearing materiality is an illusion — but thereby so is the affiliated soul and thus the entire ghost.” In this latter sense that the Husserlian idea of empathy comes into play. By placing empathy central to the experience of the ghost, what Husserl means is not a “sympathetic” attention to the ghost. This is clear enough in the film, too. The experience of the ghost is not dependent on a particular affective response. Rather, the empathic foundation of the ghost means that both the body of the ghost and the body of the living human are able to enter into a relationship with one another. This is possible through an empathic and intersubjective structure. This structure is evident to us in everyday existence. When one person suddenly flinches in the presence of another person, then the typical reaction is to flinch in response. This is not something that is achieved through thinking about it in abstraction. Rather, the flinch response takes place at a prepersonal level. This response is possible thanks to the fact the human beings share the same sort of bodily way of being. In this respect, to speak about empathy as central to intersubjectivity means recognising that whether we like it or not, so long as there are human bodies in proximity to one another, then those bodies will be in communication. The issue we face in del Toro and Husserl is whether the same interdependent relation between bodies is at work between the ghost and the non-ghost. Let us consider here Carlos’s next encounter with Santi. In a key scene that takes place after a series of executions, Carlos approaches the bomb and asks where Santi is. In response, a red ribbon detaches from the bomb and is blown into a dark room. The ribbon attaches itself to Santi, who is in the room with his back turned to Carlos. Carlos pleads with Santi for there to be no more deaths at the orphange. Santi replies: “Many of you will die.” He turns around and the viewer is provided with a clearer impression of Santi’s material existence. Far from wholly ethereal, his body seems to occupy a definite form. As Carlos runs away from Santi, the ghost follows. Led into a corridor, we see Santi’s whole frame. The pool of blood is pouring from his head, upwards as if still submerged in the water where he drowned. [ 62 ] dylan trigg Within his dark shirt, we see the outline of his ribcage still intact. Frightened, Carlos hides in a cupboard. The sanctuary is short-lived as Santi begins banging on the door before revealing himself through the keyhole. Throughout this scene, del Toro shows us the complexity of the ghost in its manifold forms. At once, Santi is able to communicate with Carlos verbally before interacting with his space physically. This is a ghost that fundamentally departs from the notion of a ghost as being consigned to an immaterial form, and that alone. Instead, we are in the company of a ghost that is both of humanity while also being other than humanity. All of which reinforces Husserl’s sense that the empathic structure of intersubjectivity renders communication between different bodies possible. Here, Husserl grants the body a role as the expression of a value, as he says: “The Body is not only in general a thing but is indeed expression of the spirit and is at once organ of the spirit” (102). In other words, what we see in del Toro’s film is the expression of something beyond the level of a living body as we would normally understand it. But at the same time, this spiritual realm depends in large on there being a body in the first place for its mode of expression. Placing Husserl in dialogue with del Toro, we have been able to advance our understanding of ghosts through considering the type of material body the ghost assumes. Yet despite this advancement, there are limitations in Husserl’s analysis of the ghost, which simultaneously prevent us from deepening our understanding of The Devil’s Backbone. Above all, from the outset, Husserl is foreclosing the existence of the ghost to a fragment of the imagination, as if the imagination were somehow less real than non-imaginative perception. This is at odds with del Toro’s own presentation of ghostly bodies, which happily occupies an ambiguous space between memory and imagination, between the natural and the supernatural, and between the real and the unreal. Husserl’s rigid delineation between the real and “An insect trapped in amber” [ 63 ] the unreal prevents us from responding to these porous boundaries in the way that del Toro is tacitly suggesting we do. To move beyond this analysis of the ghost as a variant of the body characterised by the imagination, we need to consider how the body of the ghost and the body of the non-ghost are in fact two sides of the same thing. To achieve this, we turn from Husserl to the works of Merleau-Ponty. THE FLESH OF THE GHOST Moving beyond a Husserlian analysis of del Toro’s ghosts, it is helpful to survey our aims. As we recall, two questions structure our exploration of the phenomenology of ghosts. The first question concerns the type of distinction between the ghost and the non-ghost, and the exact way in which these bodies are both related and separated. In Husserl, this relation was structured by an empathic relation while also being divided through relegating the ghost to an “illusion” of materiality. This account of the ghost as an “illusion” stands in contrast to del Toro’s realist articulation of the ghost as a constituent of the everyday world rather than a departure from it. As to our second question concerning the independence of the ghost, we will have to defer responding to this point until we situate del Toro and MerleauPonty in dialogue with one another. In doing this, we will also gain a new perspective on the relation between the ghost and the non-ghost, which will be more consistent with del Toro’s vision of the ghost. Typically, we tend to think of ghosts as depending on a living memory for their existence. Without the collective sorrows, guilts, and anxieties of the living, what reason would the ghost have to haunt us? But perhaps just as much as the ghost needs us for its survival, so we need the ghost for our own survival. This reliance on the ghost to express something that can be expressed in words alone is evident throughout del Toro’s work, especially The Devil’s Backbone. As the film progresses, we begin to realise that Santi was killed by accident by Jacinto, and then submerged [ 64 ] dylan trigg in water in order to conceal his death. More than this, the fateful death was witnessed by Jaime, the forceful older boy, but also repressed, so that Santi’s death is never revealed except in the form of a ghost. As if by repercussion, soon after, the bomb descends from the skies and lodges itself in the centre of the orphanage, marking itself as a constant reminder of the burden placed on those involved in the death of Santi. Having had enough of the guilt, Jaime vows to kill Jacinto the next time he sees him. In the final encounter between Carlos and Santi, Carlos is no longer afraid of Santi and asks him directly what he wants. In response, Santi makes it clear that he wants Jacinto, remarking “bring him to me.” Carlos obliges. At the film’s conclusion, Jacinto is led to the dank basement where Santi was killed. There, the boys encircle him before wounding him severely with spears. In this terminal condition, Carlos pushes him into the pool of water where Santi’s body is also buried. There, both Santi and Jacinto are reunited with one after, with the latter forcing the former deeper and deeper into the depths below. The final scene revisits the opening question concerning the nature of the ghost, and leaves us with the striking image of Santi standing on water, seemingly elevated from the depths of the “limbo water” that traps bodies born with the “Devil’s backbone” in an interstitial state. How can we understand the nature of this end? Is del Toro suggesting that history is resolved as soon as the burdens of the past are acknowledged by the living? Or perhaps we might read this ending as a confrontation with the avenging spirit of Santi, who, despite his angelic and ethereal presence, is essentially no different from the lust-driven Santi in his quest for greed and gold? All these interpretations depend in large on a particular kind of relation between the ghost and the non-ghost. Instead of viewing the ghost as a fragment of the imagination of the living, Santi has his own desires and his own material existence, which continue to form and indeed solidify throughout the course of the “An insect trapped in amber” [ 65 ] film, such that by the end the viewer draws no genuine distinction between Santi and Carlos. This lack of distinction does not imply that Santi is simply a projection of Carlos’s own memories and imaginations, less even a mirror of those affects. Rather, the interaction between material and immaterial realms — evident not least in the final scene of Santi standing on water — points to more elemental reality, from out of which our own perception germinates. Merleau-Ponty names this reality prior to our perceptual experience the “flesh” (Merleau-Ponty 1968). By it, he refers to a structure of being that allows things, both visible and invisible, to interact and intertwine. Merleau-Ponty’s concern here is to move beyond the analysis we find in Husserl, where different bodies are able to commune with one another thanks to a shared empathic structure. Merleau-Ponty’s own account of the intersection of bodies seeks to explain how we can even conceive of a notion such as empathy in the first place. To put this in perspective, he presents to us the example of one hand touching another. What happens when you touch your own hand? You note that the hand being touched is not inert matter, but senses itself as being touched. Likewise, the hand touching is itself sensing the touched hand. Between the touching and the touched hand, we experience a reversibility of perspectives within our own body. What allows these perspectives to traverse different perspectives is the same type of being that structures our relation to the world. In Merleau-Ponty’s analysis, the world — including shipwrecks, haunted hotels, and orphanages — is not a passive background against which we roam. Rather, these places are fundamentally made of the same stuff as we are: the flesh. It is for this reason that we are able to enter into a relationship with diverse places and beings. Not thanks to a mechanical response, but thanks instead to an elemental relation we have with things. The term “element” is crucial to the notion of the flesh. Flesh is neither matter nor spirit, nor is it a substance. By [ 66 ] dylan trigg contrast, flesh is described as an element insofar as it is root of things without being reducible to those things. In all this, what Merleau-Ponty is seeking to do is posit the flesh as an “ultimate notion,” which can “traverse, animate other bodies as well as my own” (140). At the same time, despite this usage of flesh, Merleau-Ponty’s notion is not reducible to the body. Understood conceptually, the flesh constitutes both forests and humans, and indeed, as Merleau-Ponty reminds us, it is sometimes the case that we can sense a forest gazing back at us, just as we gaze at it. This sense of flesh as imbuing all things allows us to return to the theme of del Toro’s ghosts from a new perspective. Merleau-Ponty’s conception of the flesh confuses the normal way in which we think of the visible and the invisible. Because of this, instead of phrasing the relation between Carlos and Santi as variants of the living and the dead, Merleau-Ponty’s notion of the flesh undercuts this very distinction between that which is alive and that which is dead. Through situating the flesh at the heart of The Devil’s Backbone, we see that the appearance of Santi, far from a visual “illusion,” is in fact an expression of something that already belongs to the world, but only now is revealing itself in another guise. Thus, just as the touching and the touched hand reveal themselves to be two sides of the same thing, so Carlos and Santi can be thought of as the visible and invisible expression of a shared existence, each mutually edifying del Toro’s commitment to the establishment of a haunted world. If the notion of flesh helps us to help understand how the invisible realm of the spirit coexists alongside the visible realm of corporeal existence, then does this mean that the ghost is dependent on the memories of the living for its existence? From the perspective of Merleau-Ponty’s idea of flesh, an alternative understanding of ghosts can be formulated, one that is coexistent with del Toro’s articulation of the ghost as belonging to a world of “magical realism.” The term “magical realism” is as applicable to del Toro as it is to Merleau-Ponty. In each case, the world reveals itself as “An insect trapped in amber” [ 67 ] having two sides. One side is characterised by the social and historical situation of everyday existence. The other side, does not depart from this situatedness, but imbues it with a strange aura, in which parallel worlds simultaneously converge and coinhabit the same space and time. If it is the flesh that allows Merleau-Ponty to grant a reality to things independent of our perception, and thus for things to develop strange ways of being, then the term del Toro applies to this realm is amber. Both amber and the flesh mark a region of being that resists conforming to either reason or imagination. Merleau-Ponty and del Toro’s notions are at odds with this division between reason and imagination, and thus occupy a philosophical and cinematic terrain marked by an enduring and alluring sense of ambiguity, in which the flesh of the body is concurrently the flesh of the ghost. WORKS CITED Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics of Space. Trans. Maria Jobas. Boston: Beacon Press, 1994. Heidegger, Martin. Poetry, Language, Thought. Translated by Albert Hofstadter. New York: Harper Perennial, 1975. Husserl, Edmund. Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy. Trans. Richard Rojcewicz. Dordrecht: Springer, 1990. [ 68 ] dylan trigg Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. The Visible and the Invisible. Trans. Alphonso Lingis. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968. The Devil’s Backbone. Dir. Guillermo del Toro. Perf. Marisa Paredes, Eduardo Noriega, Federico Luppi, Fernando Tielve. Canal+ España, 2001. DVD.