Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses (London: Viking, 1988).

Gregory Rabassa (1967 London: Picador-Pan, 1978). Toni Morrison, Beloved (1987 London: Picador-Pan, 1988) Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude, trans. Saladin earlier used his talents for invention and mimicry to consciously manipulate events to his own ends, but he increasingly feels haunted by his own imaginative creations: Her definition of spectrality is repeated in the novel’s final pages in the thoughts of the protagonist, the actor Saladin Chamcha, as he reflects upon his own imaginative recuperations of the past. Shortly after this, we see Rosa so preoccupied with the “Unfinished business” of her colonial past in Argentina that her imaginative recuperations of the past invade the real world of the present. What’s a ghost? Unfinished business, is what” (129).

2 It is first given by the octogenarian ex-colonial wife, Rosa Diamond, who explicitly denies the specter’s otherworldly nature: “I know what a ghost is, the old woman affirmed silently … And I know what it isn’t, too, she nodded further, it isn’t a scarification or a flapping sheet, so pooh and pish to all that bunkum. 1 In The Satanic Verses, a novel that bears a family resemblance to both Morrison’s and García Márquez’s novels, Salman Rushdie offers a definition of the ghost that is particularly suggestive for the relationship between spectrality, metaphoricity, and history that this book will trace. This book examines the relationship between the figure of the ghost and the use of metaphor in two exemplary modern fictions, Toni Morrison’s Beloved and Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude.

Three Gothic Novels by Peter Fairclough