18. Lily’s Ghost She doesn’t know why she’s attracted to him. He’s not bad-looking, he’s just a big guy with small-guy energy. Nervous energy. He’s combustible, she feels it. The cocktail menu is long, so she orders a glass…
In a class I took in grad school, a professor complained about how we use terminology from film and television in order to talk about each other’s writing. We didn’t get what he meant. He said our modern workshop parlance uses, too often, “the camera.” Who is the camera on? Who is in focus? Who does the lens follow? He told us—and I have never verified his claim, but I have no reason not to believe him—that prior to the popularization of film, when people spoke of, say, close-third-person perspective, they spoke of “the ghost.” The ghost is following Cathy in this chapter, Heathcliff in the next. We readers are ghosts, hovering above or behind our characters, occasionally dipping our ghostly heads into theirs to know the inner workings of their thoughts, to see what they see, how they see it.
In the crafting of Landing in Andonia, I thought a lot about ghosts, narratorial or otherwise. The chapter excerpted here is called “Lily’s Ghost.” It is about Lily’s encounter with the spirit of her dead friend. Later, there is a chapter called “Chris’s Ghost.” That one, however, is less literal. These are named “Lily’s…” and “Chris’s…” because the perspective—whom the readerly specter follows—not only shifts from chapter to chapter between these two characters, but also alternates with a third, more mysterious authorial voice that presents a researched history of Andonia.
The authorial chapters are omniscient, but that omniscience is backed with sourced material, and Chris’s sections are possessed—they are told from a close-third perspective that is full of free indirect voice. But Lily’s chapters are told from a more traditional third-person point of view. Her interiority is not as immediately available to the reader as Chris’s. Much of what we have seen of her before this chapter is an attempt at a return to normalcy: diet, exercise, and an emphasis on routine. There is a hazy elusiveness in her narrative partly because Lily has been holding back her story, even within herself, burying what is bothering her, this idea that she may be losing some cognizance of reality.
“Lily’s Ghost” is the longest chapter (at over two thousand words) because it contains a story within the story, a mostly uninterrupted monologue about a ghost, a story that Lily has been carrying inside her like a stone. She has a desire for her life to return to what it once was, but she has been changed by the experience of a spectral visitation, and here she tells a man of science that she might now believe in more than what we can see. It is a confession, to herself as much as to him, of her unthreading reality. A more omniscient narrator could allow for a dramatic irony that would let the reader know what Lily doesn’t know yet, while a free indirect narrator might alight on some information in her stream of consciousness that would allow us to recognize what’s troubling her even when she can’t admit it to herself. Her narrative voice, however, reflects her own self-repression, and thus the monologue, a first-person account, was the only way to really let the reader, and Lily, know her full story.
PHILIP ANDERSON is a writer of fiction and criticism. His writing has appeared in Story, LIT, Archways, Carla, and other places. He has received fellowships from Lighthouse Works, Millay Arts, Lit Fest, and Columbia University. He lives with his husband and his two cats in Los Angeles, where he is currently at work on a satirical novel about art school. Find him on Instagram @philipxanderson.
