Ghosts of the Past: The Language of Trauma and Environment in Hari Kunzru’s White Tears

Extract

Pushed to the point of an existential crisis by a series of nightmarish, hallucinatory, and potentially supernatural events, Seth, the narrator of Hari Kunzru’s 2017 novel White Tears, contemplates the breakdown of the boundaries that once defined the shape of his reality from a prison cell at the conclusion of the novel: “I do not know if I have ever been alive …No single part of a cell is alive. And life itself is just an aggregate of non-living processes, chemical reactions cascading, birthing complexity. There is no clear border between life and non-life. Once you realize that, so much else unravels” (270). This ontological reckoning comes about after Seth, an aspiring musician from a poor white family, is unwittingly drawn into the dangerous world of his wealthy but troubled best friend, Carter Wallace, whose family rose to prominence on the backs of the labor of imprisoned African-Americans in the Jim Crow South. Over the course of the novel, Seth embarks on a journey across boundaries both physical and metaphysical and as he travels from North to South through the desolate landscape of twenty-first century America, a nation blighted by the abuses of industrial capitalism and where the ghosts of the past never seem to remain buried for long. As a result of his encounter with what may or may not be the ghost of Charlie Shaw, an obscure African-American blues musician who died somewhere in the early twentieth century South before he could record his first album, Seth becomes unmoored not only in space but also in time, such that the diegesis of the novel often spans multiple timelines simultaneously as they blend and overlap. The boundaries between life and death, past and present, have completely dissolved by the conclusion of the novel, suggesting that nothing that happens is ever really over, and that the present is not only full of the ghosts of the past, but more startlingly, that these ghosts have the agency to interfere in the lives of the living.