Wave goodbye to the future: Haunting, music, and cultural stasis in the regional novels of Catherine O’Flynn and Joel Lane

Abstract

Using Mark Fisher’s reconfigurations of Derrida’s Hauntology, this article explores the interactions between these narrative features in the works of Catherine O’Flynn and Joel Lane. Fisher reworks hauntology in relation to the distinct features of ‘futuristic’ music and ‘retro’ perceptions of what lay ahead. He links this psychic and cultural trap with ideas of the weird and the eerie. Both O’Flynn and Lane have produced eerie texts set in the off-kilter and marginal West Midlands regions, placing their characters in literal and symbolic haunted sites. Their respective spectres – people, places and cultures – are caught in a perpetual liminality and psychic looping: a hauntological position. These play out through the motifs of melancholic landscapes, personalities and cultural currents, most notably in music. This article interrogates these strange conjugations and interfaces that play out in the fiction of O’Flynn and Lane.