Lifting the mask on Halloween and the Irish ‘capitalist uncanny’

Nigel Mulligan on a sublimated reaction to the cold nullifying grip of late stage capitalism

 

Halloween is commonly known as a festival that involves spooky decorations in gardens, people dressing up in sometimes scary costumes, and children going trick-or-treating, trading mischief-making against sweets and eats. In contemporary Ireland, Halloween has become a mix of traditional customs and modern festivities. In pre-modern societies, the dimension of the uncanny was largely interpreted through different sorts of divination and supernatural beliefs where bonfires were lit to ward off evil spirits. Have some of these customs been hijacked, possessed and exploited for commercial profit making by the demonising monster of capitalism? How can we make sense of some the contemporary fascination with the uncanny dimensions of ghouls, goblins, zombies and vampires? This enchantment with the macabre in Halloween could be a sublimated reaction to the cold nullifying grip of late stage capitalism: neoliberalism, an economic model that can be characterized by people working and consuming more than they need, leaving modern subjects with the feeling of never being satisfied and like zombies monsters in a state of insatiable desire. To explore further, let us explore some of the anthropological origins of the festival.

Halloween and the Uncanny

The name Halloween comes from the word “Hallows” which refers to the saints, while “Eve” indicates the time before the feast day, meaning All Hallows’ Eve is the evening before All Hallows Day, otherwise known as All Saints’ Day, which is celebrated on November 1st. All Souls’ Day, which is observed on November 2nd and is dedicated to a commemoration of the faithful departed, but particularly those in a state of limbo in purgatory. The Irish pre-Christian version of Halloween is referred to as “Samhain” (which is Gaeilge for “November”), which is deeply rooted in the ancient customs of the agrarian culture of the Celts, falling on the last day of the Celtic New Year.

As such, it represented a symbolic marking of the end of the harvest season and the onset of winter, coupled with both reverence for and apprehension surrounding the emerging shorter and darker days. This festival also symbolized a time when the threshold between the living and the dead was blurred, evoking a sense of the uncanny.

Modernity could be characterised by a fourfold developmental process of industrialization, technological advancement, rational thought, and a growing individualism. The Slovenian psychoanalysts Mladan Dolar sees Sigmund Freud’s classic 1919 essay ‘The Uncanny’ as closely linked to the advent of modernity in which the psychological subject is conceived as continuously haunted from the inside. Freud wrote how socially unacceptable wishes and forbidden desires are subject to unconscious repression but return in a distorted form, creating, as he puts it, “uncomfortable, uneasy, gloomy, dismal [and] ghastly” feelings.

Spectres and Zombies

This presentation can be conceptually linked to Karl Marx’s depiction of the uncanny through his images of the “spectre” and “phantom”, in which he describes capitalism as a kind of haunting or dehumanising form of economic society in which people are not only interpersonally alienated from each other through entering into competition to sell their labour power but also undergo an intrapsychic separation and disconnection from themselves, in which people do not have full control over their own thoughts and bodies, which are now objects to be used, abused and discarded if of no use to the capitalist machine.

Marx sympathised with Ireland in the teeth of imperial British capitalism as a key contributory factor to the Great Famine that caused millions to die and emigrate. In 19th century Ireland, some Halloween customs used to involve people dressing up, and sometimes cross-dressing, making grotesque masks and carving faces from turnips, arguably mirroring and representing a time of the Famine where many suffered extreme poverty and malnourishment.

During this period, millions of Irish immigrants brought these Halloween practices with them to America. It could be suggested that the “horror” elements of famine, emigration and millions of deaths became subsumed by American consumer culture through the mass production and marketisation of ghosts, skeletons and zombies costumes in a Freudian return of the repressed, where not only the costumes but the commercialisation of certain Halloween customs in turn returned across the Atlantic to Ireland.

In this late stage capitalism where everything is considered an object to be bought or sold in pursuit of profit, Halloween is big business in modern Ireland. Competitions rate the best costumes in schools, and some people compete to decorate their house and outdo their neighbour to be seen the creepiest home on the street. This is the true logic of neoliberal capitalism where not only competition is present but the psychical economy is infused with an insatiable pressure to engage in excess, as can be seen where children engage in glutinous feasts by gorging themselves on sweets.

Displacement under neoliberalism

However, the activity of Trick-or-treating of early childhood to get a sugar high has become replaced by teenagers chasing alcoholic and narcotic pleasures. In addition to such appetitive excesses, a further trait of neoliberal capitalism s involves the engagement of risky behaviour at Halloween. People collect materials for bonfires months before the day arrives, while the fires themselves often get out of hand on the night, sometimes causing damage to people and property. This excessive acting-out could be deeper symbolic protests against the capitalist neoliberal economy for those who do not feel a part of society – not only the jobless or those who feel rejected. If people cannot fit in with the modus operandi of the capitalist economy of making profit for the ruling class, they can be what French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan referred to as the “the objet a”, the leftovers, the surplus to requirement and essentially dead waste.

In his book Monsters of the Market: Zombies, Vampires and Global Capitalism, radical socialist activist David McNally explores the relationship between Marx’s theory, capitalism and various cultural and historical depictions of monsters, zombies and vampires in literature. To some extent anticipating McNally’s analyses, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, a nod to the industrial age and the on-set era of medicalisation where body snatching and selling flesh blood, muscle and tissue for medical experimentation. Grave robbers would often dig up recently buried corpses and sell them to medical schools, but some more extreme individuals would resort to murder to provide bodies for dissection. The monster in “Frankenstein” can be seen as a form of the return of the repressed, representation of proletarian unrest, embodying the social tensions of the time.

Similarly Irish author Bram Stoker, best known for writing the 1897 Gothic horror novel Dracula, a vampire figure symbolizing aristocratic greed, feeding off the lifeblood of others. This interpretation aligns ‘Dracula’ as a metaphor for capitalist exploitation and the parasitic nature of financial capital. Predating this novel by thirty years, Marx had already referred to capital feeding itself “like a vampire, by sucking up living labour and lives the more, the more labour it sucks.” Marx also referred to religion as the “soul of soulless conditions” and saw religion having a hand in glove relationship with capitalism.

The decline of religion under capitalism … and the rise of psychotherapy

The decline of religious practices after the 1980’s had left theatre as one of the few remaining sacred spaces in Ireland in which people could embrace and confront the uncanny, and contemporary Irish playwright Conor McPherson is something of a master of the uncanny where his conjuring of gothic, macabre, ghosts and spectral presences amplify a sense of haunting for the audiences. His masterful play Shining City (first performed in the West End in 2004) possibly as a metaphorical nod to the dark underbelly to the ‘gleaning’ capital of Ireland, Dublin but the monster in this intriguing play is less as brutish as Frankenstein or as charismatic as Dracula but in Shining City, the uncanny lies hidden in the ordinary.

The play mainly centres on a psychotherapist (John) working with a client (Ian) who is experiencing complications in grieving the loss of his wife and therein an exploration of how we deal with loss and the emotional shadows that linger long after someone we love is gone. Marx and Freud have taught us that the past cannot be left behind but this play has deeper reflections of class struggles and the alienating socioeconomic effects on social identities.

The uncanny mainly emerges between the dialogue of the two men and the supernatural undertones emerge as we see Ian letting the ghost of his wife go, and in some sort of transubstantiation we see the psychotherapist, John becoming more possessed by the work, and there is reprisal of his repressed demons and his personal life appears to mirror that of his client as his family falls apart and but, he further descends the socio-psychological dimensions into dark underworld of Dublin and is intimately embraced by a homeless male prostitute. It was the working man John who became a Dionysus figure and was no exception to what Marx has taught us how our life and work is dominated, subsumed and exploited by capital.

Mystification in late stage capitalism

Has Halloween been totally subsumed by an apocalyptic capitalism and also be a festival that mystifies and represses how parts of society are fundamentally exploited? And are there opportunities to escape this late stage capitalism? If we reflect upon how earlier ancestors in more pagan times celebration around the time of Samhain, it was a time to connect with each other and nature, to embrace the uncanny and make sense of the seasonal shift together. These gatherings were important to symbolically represent not only seasonal transitions but where rites of passage might have been performed, marking the liminal psychological phases between childhoods to teenage to adulthood.

Masks may have been used to ward off evil spirits in the past and even in contemporary times, they can be playfully used transcend different parts of people’s identity that we have been socially captured in, but in the epoch of neoliberalism, masks have arguably become mirrors to deceive and distract us to the reality that we are the creatures shaped in the image and likeness of the capitalist machines. However, they can also be what Irish writer James Joyce referred to as portals to discovery where the uncanny feelings can bring us closer to the truth.

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Nigel Mulligan is a writer, psychotherapist, lecturer and filmmaker living and working in Dublin, Ireland.

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