金融时报:鬼故事为何让我们害怕？

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2021年12月20日

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鬼故事为何让我们害怕？

现在，越来越多的人已经不再相信鬼了。但我却惊讶地发现，即使是不相信有鬼存在的人，依然害怕鬼故事，而我也是如此。当我们怕“鬼”的时候，我们所恐惧的究竟是什么？

测试中可能遇到的词汇和知识：

anachronism[ə'nækrənɪzəm] 时代错误

preoccupation[priˌɒkju'peɪʃn] 先入成见

contemporary[kən'temprəri] 当代的；同时代的

connotation[ˌkɑːnə'teɪʃn]] 隐含意义

equate[i'kweɪt] 等同, 使相等

secularity[ˌsekjʊ'lærɪtɪ] 世俗主义

Why it's scary writing ghost stories?（829 words）

By Kamila Shamsie

Once upon a time, this was a nation of seances, spiritualists and spirit photography. Britain was thick with ghosts and the Victorians knew how to speak to them, and see them. The writers of the time were quick to seize on this interest. Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins and Elizabeth Gaskell were among those who wrote ghost stories — as did many others in the popular periodical presses of the time.

Today, the landscape — or the ether — in Britain is very different. The ghosts that moved with ease on creaking wooden floorboards and could be glimpsed at night illuminated by gas lamps (which, incidentally, contained carbon monoxide, which may have brought on hallucinations) are less at home in silent modern constructions, less likely to reveal themselves in the light cast by a smartphone screen. When ghosts do appear among us in fiction for adults, they often do so by transporting us to the past — as in Susan Hill's The Woman in Black, Kate Mosse's The Taxidermist's Daughter and Sarah Waters' The Little Stranger. This is not merely a British phenomenon, as the Texan writer George Saunders' Booker-winning novel of American ghosts, Lincoln in the Bardo, attests.

By contrast, a 21st-century ghost story set in 21st-century Britain can seem an anachronism. There are two ways to account for this. Ghost stories have long been seen as primarily a Victorian preoccupation, and every contemporary writer who sets a ghost story in the past furthers the notion that the present is not a suitable setting for such a tale. There is also the question of belief. To the Victorians, ghosts were real; it gave their ghosts stories a menace and an edge that our contemporary stories can't match.

Of course that latter theory assumes that Britain has ceased to believe in ghosts. Let me set that assumption against the story of a friend of mine who recently found herself staying overnight, on her own, in a beautiful modern home. Even though she knew the previous occupant of the house had committed suicide there, she didn't think this would affect her in any way. But once she was in the house, she found herself on edge, playing music loudly to stop herself from hearing sounds that weren't there. And at night, her dreams were troubled.

When I started work this year on a ghost story set in contemporary Britain, I was surprised to find that more people than I imagined do in fact believe in ghosts — although they might prefer to call them “spirits” or “presences” to get away from the chain-rattling connotations of the word “ghosts”. I've heard dozens of “real” ghost stories over the years, in every country I've ever spent much time in. Even if the 21st century gives us far fewer examples of them in fiction than was once the case, they continue to exist in the oral form in which they originated.

That is why I started writing my story with the assumption that most people fear ghosts, regardless of whether or not they believe in them. I fall into this category of person myself — I had to write my ghost story in the daylight because I grew too afraid at night. The fact that I had been commissioned by English Heritage to set my story in the ruins of Kenilworth Castle did allow me to fall back on the literary convention that equates old, crumbling structures with ghosts. But even as I wrote it, I knew I could have set the same story in a house as modern as the one in which my friend spent that restless night and, if written properly, it would still infect its readers with ghost-terror. After all, if you scratch the surface, what you find is death-terror, out of which rationality, secularity and reason cannot lift us. It is only literary convention that makes the ruins of a castle seem more appropriate for a ghost story than an eco-friendly modern house.

We return again and again to the ghost story to look at death and look away from it. To imagine our own extinction is near-impossible, and some people manage to go through life without ever really doing so. But we've all had to, or will have to, contend with the extinction of someone we've loved; and we've all had moments where we have stopped and felt not so much sad, as puzzled: “How is it possible that the world is now so completely without this person? How is it possible there will never be a moment when we'll see them again?”

Except, of course, we do see them again. In the weeks and months after someone has died, they are often there in the corner of your eye. You see them in one person's gait, another person's hairstyle, a third person's gestures. We know death has happened well before we learn how to believe it. From this place of sorrow and terror and incomprehension, the ghost story arises. Literary tastes shift with the seasons, but ghosts will always be with us, whether we believe in them or not.

请根据你所读到的文章内容，完成以下自测题目：

1.Why do contemporary writers in Britain often set their ghost stories in the past according to the second paragraph?

A.Because the modern landscape in Britain is not a suitable setting for ghost tales.

B.Because the landscape in Britain now is very different from the Victorian era.

C.Because nowadays people in Britain have ceased to believe in ghost stories.

D.Because ghost stories have long been believed to originate in the Victorian era.

答案(1)

2.Which of the following statement about the author is true?

A.She found that British people no longer believe in ghosts anymore.

B.She writes ghost story in the daytime because she fears ghost at night.

C.She prefers to set her ghost story in a modern house instead of a castle.

D.She is a researcher focusing on ghost stories set in contemporary Britain.