Hauntology

I'm in the process of finalizing my interview with Stuart Dybek for publication in the summer issue of The Missouri Review. Here's an excerpt:

Matt Pearce: What was it about being a caseworker that rubbed you the wrong way?

Stuart Dybek: I worked for two years for the Illinois Department of Public Aid. Part of my district in Chicago's Bronzeville neighborhood on the South Side was the DuSable Hotel, which was at one time one of the most prominent African American hotels in a very racially divided city. At least two plays that I know of are set there. But by the time I was the caseworker for “the Mighty Du,” as it was called, it was filled with junkies and prostitutes and could have passed for a ring in Dante's Inferno. My feeling about the job was hardly a matter of being "rubbed the wrong way." I was appalled by a firsthand look at—not to mention my own inadvertent participation in—institutionalized racism and a system that seemed designed to support the status quo maintaining poverty so long as it was tucked away in prisons, poor schools, slum areas and hotels like the DuSable, mental hospitals, et cetera. The job was at least an education. It all goes on, of course. The jailed population in the US should shame us. Your question about class is posed in a time when the so-called leadership of the country, especially Bush/Cheney engages in what, if there were any perspective whatsoever, could only be described as class warfare on the impoverished...

Matt Pearce: You said that you never saw your neighborhood as anything but dangerous, yet danger in your stories can sometimes be very subtle.

Stuart Dybek: I once taught a course on ghosts. One of the things that interested me when I was teaching the course on ghosts—the ghost as an image, ghost stories—is a term by the very complicated French philosopher Jacques Derrida. Derrida talks about ontology. And he’s making a pun. It sounds in French like our word “ontology,” but the way he’s spelling it is h-a-u-n-t-o-l-o-g-y, “hauntology.” What Derrida’s saying is that there are these economic forces that you don’t even know are there anymore that are shaping your life. They’re like ghosts. They haunt everything. And when I read that phrase, I was like “That’s what I’m after.” I just didn’t have the word for it. I didn’t have the diction for it. It isn’t nostalgia when I write the stories that’s the engine for me. It’s the sense of hauntology. Behind the way these people are acting in these angry, grotesque brutal kinds of modes are all these economic forces that happened in the past that they’re not even aware of anymore. One of the reasons they’re not aware of them is that they’re hidden. The second reason they’re not aware is that their educations are so shitty that they don’t have the educational equipment to know. The third reason is that there’s been a tremendous erosion of family history, because they’re immigrants... I’m glad you asked me that question, because it’s really that complex, about the difference between hauntology's ghosts—real ghosts that are dangerous—and a more bittersweet feeling like nostalgia.