Grant Law

21 February 2019

The Hauntological Spectres in Stalker and Herland: Utopias Stuck in Stasis

            What caught my attention about the study of historical and literary Utopias was the ideological nostalgia for “better times” directly linked into the idea of a utopian society. This ideological nostalgia is better understood as the Derridean term of Hauntology which critic John A. Riley describes as a “conceptualizing [of] our repressed past but also a way of understanding our obsession with failed futures” (19). The repression of lost history and obsession with failed futures is the bulk of utopian and dystopian literature, dealing with issues that either work to advance a social framework based on looking forward towards a progressive reform(Anthem, Utopia) or a return to an agrarian, pastoral sublime of simplistic living (Herland and the real world endeavors of intentional communities). Furthermore, when using a hauntological lens, the symbol of the garden becomes an ideological structure both rooted in the the dualistic desires of longing for both the future and the past, the garden becomes a return and step forward. In Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker the ideological garden known as the zone offers both promises as the utopian garden, an answer for a history of past mistakes and promise of endless solutions. Herland’s entire island nation is a garden built on past scars and hauntological spectres reminding the herlanders of their dark past. Both these examples in some form or fashion use the nostalgia of “better times” to explain their present situation. Therefore, the idea of a utopia can be stuck in a stasis of ideological pining for better times or haunted by the spectre of possible futures.

            While Stalker’s is presented as an industrialised, preverserved wasteland, more akin to what one would see in dystopian literature, there remains an uncanny humanism in the gaps between the dillipated scenery, the physically labored bodies of the characters, and barren ruins of the zone: scars of an ill fated past. Film critic John A. Riley believes that gaps are connected through Tarkovsky’s use of sparse desolate imagery and that this imagery is a “landscape littered with ruins” which always serves as a  “landscape stained by time” which shows scars of a Russian past of industrial ruins which are “a trace of the economic stagnation that had set into the Soviet Union by the Brezhnev era” (20). The images of the film showcase the haunting effect the past has on the present and future. This is dystopian, no doubt about it, and, however, unlike Anthem—whose bureaucratic, altruistic government controlled the lives of all those around them were presented as a social good—Stalker showcases them naturally as they are, just destroyed ruins, remnants of a lost past trying to be reconstructed or understood. 

            Hauntology at its core is a disjointed sense of time where a presence or “spectre” looms  with the liminal presence of both having and have not happened. For Stalker the zone is the spectre of the film, the failed promise of a soviet future and escape from the bleak reality of the present. Here is where the zone and the Herland garden overlap as an isolated interstice that is both removed and a part of the society that happens within their respective narrative frames. The Herlanders live with their scars in the form of “bad eugenics” as well as a history of previous malpractice that led to their now-utopian society. They live within a hauntological garden that is an advanced future with the ghosts of their failed mistakes; these ghosts are brought back in fruition by the appearance of the three men and reopen the wounds of the Herlanders’ past. Mark Fisher talks about the two primary phases of the hauntological effect:

The first refers to that which is (in actuality is) no longer, but which is still effective as a virtuality (the traumatic ‘‘compulsion to repeat,’’ a structure that repeats, a fatal pattern). The second refers to that which (in actuality) has not yet happened, but which is already effective in the virtual (an attractor, an anticipation shaping current behavior). 19

For the Herlanders these two phases can be seen  in their gatekeeping of birthing, weeding out the bad traits for the more desirable ones. Furthermore, this is emblematic of utopian literature at large. Hauntology is directly embedded in the utopian genre because in order for there to be a utopia there has to be a past on which the idyllic present is based. Whether it be in the form of the lost scars of the zone in Stalker, which illustrate the pains of failed future, or the progressive but tortured timeline took towards the Herlander’s utopian garden country, both perform as a hauntological effect. 

            What this research has brought to my attention is that Derrida’s hauntology is an imperative mode for understanding utopian and dystopian literature. While initially I hoped to compare the garden and zone, from Stalker and Herland, respectively, I realized that what these two symbolic forces brought out more was the same effect as the hauntological spectre: a gap out of time and space. This returns to the original point of the research the “better times” or nostalgia of Utopias. The garden in Herland is return to the simple, aggrian notion of the past, the garden of Eden, etc., the zone in Stalker is the scar of that past left blemished on the society for all of its citizens to deal and mourn on their own accord. Both deal with pasts and futures, yesterdays and tomorrows, which gives the presence of the utopian or dystopian scenery. What the hauntological lens does to the utopian genre is highlight that the civilization of the genre are stuck in a stasis of looking back while trying to move forward, which explains why in the texts we have read there had been no change in the utopian society within each narrative.

Works Cited

Fisher, Mark. "What is Hauntology?" Film Quarterly, vol. 66, no. 1, 2012, pp. 16.

Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. Herland. Dover Thrift Edition. 1998.

Riley, John A. "Hauntology, Ruins, and the Failure of the Future in Andrei Tarkovsky's Stalker."              Journal of Film and Video, vol. 69, no. 1, 2017, pp. 18-26.

Tarkovsky, Andrei, director. Stalker. Mosfilm. 1979.