In spite of the supernatural trappings of Charles Dickens's most famous work, A Christmas Carol, critics from G. K. Chesterton to Edmund Wilson have found its equally famous protagonist, Ebenezer Scrooge, to be a real character, more fleshed-out and compelling than many of the characters of Dickens's longer, presumably more “serious” novels. Much of the reaction to A Christmas Carol and its protean anti-hero can be summarized by Stephen Prickett's succinct appraisal in his seminal study, Victorian Fantasy: “The strength of A Christmas Carol lies quite simply in its psychological credibility” (54). Scrooge is a character we can believe in, a character that, as Margaret Atwood suggests, “remains fresh and vital. ‘Scrooge Lives!’ we might write on our T-shirts” (xiii).

That Scrooge lives, there can be little doubt. Of interest to me is precisely how Scrooge lives. To regard Scrooge simply as a triumph of literary characterization, as a model of psychological complexity, can make us forget that A Christmas Carol is fundamentally a ghost story and that Scrooge, both in his supernatural congress with spirits and in the remarkable fecundity of his literary afterlife through innumerable editions and adaptations of the Carol, can be regarded as a kind of ghost himself. Scrooge may be the ultimate haunted man, but he is also, both inside his text and out, a haunting man. He is an object of near obsession to every character in the text, perhaps in part because he spends much of the text invisibly surveilling them. This is despite – or because of – the fact that he has little interest in social contact of any kind. He has become, like Santa Claus, a personification of Christmas for young and old, despite the fact that we mostly recognize him as a miserable figure who hates Christmas, and who we come to know almost entirely through scenes of loss and death. These seeming paradoxes suggest to me that the power of Scrooge and his book lies not only with its “psychological credibility” but also in the phantasmic forces that compel Scrooge to transmute solitude into solidarity and despair into joy. In other words, Scrooge's unique appeal may reside less in his power to choose than in the ghostly powers that ensure that his choice is correct. I will argue here that Scrooge is a spectral figure who haunts us in large part for his ability to reside in a liminal space between life and death, a nebulous and constantly redefined and defining realm which has made A Christmas Carol not simply a text but what Paul Davis has called a “culture text” (5), in which we can view the Carol as not so much a cultural artifact but as an ongoing cultural process, one in which social pleasure is generated and reified via a curiously repetitive narrative of metaphysical despair.

The vehicle of repetition Dickens and his adaptors use in putting this narrative cycle in motion is, of course, the figure of the ghost. Ghosts have seen a surge in critical interest since Jacques Derrida's 1993 Specters of Marx, which in part served as an elegy/wake for a leftist intelligentsia coming to terms with a world that seemed ready to embrace neo-conservative notions of “the end of history.” In Specters of Marx, Derrida observed that a ghost “begins by coming back” (11). The ghost in this case was that of Karl Marx, whose apparent cultural demise with the fall of the Soviet Union may have been, according to Derrida, greatly exaggerated; it is precisely Marx's role as a ghost, however metaphoric, that makes him unkillable and therefore destined to haunt our cultural consciousness for as long as the issues that engaged him remain our own. In other words, as long as capitalism exists, Marx will, in a sense, live on. And so it is with Dickens's ghosts. Every year, A Christmas Carol begins by coming back as well, forcing us to confront its dialectical, materialist hero/villain, Ebenezer Scrooge, over and over again. Indeed, one may be forgiven for seeing Marx – misanthropic, sarcastic, and obsessed with capital – as a ghostly doppelgänger of Scrooge. The specter of Marx is uncannily similar to the specter of Scrooge.

Derridian ideas of spectrality, or “hauntology,” as he wittily puts it (10), help us to understand A Christmas Carol and its stream of adaptations. Jacques Derrida begins Specters of Marx with another ghost of an idea: “Someone, you or me, comes forward and says: I would like to learn to live finally” (xvi). This hypothetical subject could well be Ebenezer Scrooge, chastened by his long dark night of the soul, exhorting the Ghost of Christmas Yet To Come: “I will live in the Past, the Present, and the Future. The Spirits of all Three shall strive within me. I will not shut out the lessons that they teach” (117; ch. 4). Thus, the climax of A Christmas Carol centers on a man who has, finally, learned to live. But, as both Dickens and Derrida realize, the idea of “learning to live” is a problematic one:

In other words, the finality of living, or the notion of living as an event, is necessarily absent from the process of living. Within this dialectic resides the Derridean theory of the ghost, and with a similar sense of paradox does Dickens raise the narrative of the ghost in order to give a man the ability to “learn to live.” As Scrooge seems to recognize, such learning is impossible without ghosts: it is their lessons and their ability to give Scrooge the semblance of a life lived multiply and simultaneously – “in the Past, the Present, and the Future” all in the same night – that allows Scrooge to learn the meaning of his life, and to enjoy it. Part of this paradox is that Scrooge will cease to be simply a man once he has learned the meaning of his life and of Christmas (one and the same thing, it turns out diegetically and heterodiegetically – in both the narrative of the Carol and in its cultural afterlife, Scrooge will become practically synonymous with Christmas itself). He will live with the Spirits striving within him; he will, in part, become a ghost. It is precisely when the Ghosts cease to haunt him that Scrooge “becomes” Christmas: the haunting really begins when the haunting ends. Dickens's ghosts, like Derrida's specters of Marx, are ontologically figures of repetition. The Ghost “begins by coming back” (11).

This repetitive nature of “hauntology” is apparent in the first sentence of A Christmas Carol: “Marley was dead: to begin with.” In both narrative and grammatical senses, Dickens presents a man's end as a textual beginning: what begins is what has already happened, and what has already occurred is a death. And Dickens continues to press this point in the next three paragraphs of the text:

Dickens's epistemological concerns in this passage, conveying a humorous obsession with relating the knowledge that Marley is indeed dead, and thus able to be a ghost, and therefore not, strictly speaking, dead, illustrate the paradoxical ontology of the ghost as both a liminal and repetitious figure. Syntactically and semantically, Derrida echoes Dickens's famous opening with his own account of the ontology of the ghost:

The meaning of these contradictory statements, of course, lies in the spectral gap which occupies the space between the two: what is “always already” is that which is present/absent, dead/alive – undead.Footnote ¹ Repetition enacts a crisis between process and event which becomes an invitation to a haunting, an invocation of the ghost.

Readers of Jacques Lacan, particularly his “Seminar on ‘The Purloined Letter,’” will likely already have in mind a culprit for this ghost that marks its presence by way of absence – namely, the floating signifier that, like Poe's letter, hides in plain sight, and through its potential powerFootnote ² works, as agent of the “symbolic order which is constitutive of the subject” (7), to inscribe the subject into its discourse. In hauntological terms, the signifier is the ghost that haunts the subject. As Lacan himself says, it “possesses” the subject.Footnote ³ This possession is, paradoxically, due to the lack of the signifier:

Both there and not there, it is what you want, but cannot have: its movement, like Poe's letter, always announces its absence to those who seek it. This is the objet petit a that takes its subjects down an intersubjective train towards the transcendental signifier, The Real, the ultimate lack.Footnote ⁴Lacan tells us, “a letter always arrives at its destination” (30). In other words, the symbolic always points to The Real: “the letter exists as a means of power only through the final summons of the pure signifier” (23). And just as repetition compulsion and the return of the repressed lead Freud to the death drive, so does Lacan's analysis – itself an attempt to visualize and narrativize Freud's theory from Beyond the Pleasure Principle. It shows us that the contingencies of the signifier lead us to the necessity of the pure signifier, in other words, Death:

Lacan's coyness hides in plain side the ominous message of the letter: it makes real the presence of Death.Footnote ⁵

This is the rhetorical thrust of the ghosts in the chain of inter-spectral discourse in A Christmas Carol, from the images of a dead past presented by The Ghost of Christmas Past, to the figures of Ignorance and Want that spell, according to The Ghost of Christmas Present, Doom, to the inexorable progress to the grave exhibited in the tableaux of The Ghost of Christmas Yet To Come. Scrooge's ghosts are not just signifiers of Christmas; they are signifiers of the finality Derrida suggests spurs our need for ghosts. As Lacan shows in the Seminar, the threat of death is part of what constitutes the power of the signifier. Lacan imagines a plaintive question asked directly to the signifier:

In the case of the purloined letter, the signifier has the power to blackmail those in its path. It becomes, as Lacan suggests, their fate. In the case of Christmas ghosts, their reminders of death – their very being as revenants of death – serve to reify Christmas itself, to make it the fate of those they haunt. They make, in other words, a necessity of Christmas. They make sure that we follow the command, which, like Scheherazade's endless story, repeats into seeming infinity: Have a Merry Christmas.

Adaptations of A Christmas Carol naturally focus on its scenes of domestic bliss at Fred's and Bob Cratchit's family Christmas parties – the proof, as it were, that Christmas is indeed merry. What is less seen is the manner in which the merriness of domesticity is enacted, even enforced, by the ghosts in Dickens's text. The Ghost of Christmas Present is particularly illustrative in that he not only shows Scrooge most of these scenes but also helps to bring them about. In many scenes, the ghost acts less like a kindly projectionist and more as a kind of panoptic policeman.Footnote ⁶ In the midst of one of Dickens's most evocative scenes of London teeming with humanity, Scrooge notices the strange power of the ghost's torch:

There is a weary, almost desperate insistence of harmony here that makes all the more poignant and powerful the absence of it. While the scene is ostensibly comic, the narrator cannot help but sigh to Heaven over the necessity of the ghost to enforce good cheer. Here, as elsewhere, the spirits' demands for enjoyment and happiness serve to demonstrate their absence.

Scrooge himself seems to pick up on the difficulties of producing and maintaining Christmas cheer when he accuses the ghost of supporting the Sunday Observance Bill, which placed many restrictions on the poor. The bill was nominally meant to instill piety in an unruly, uncertain working class, but, as critics like Dickens noted, it seemed only to throw a damper on the poors' one day off. As Scrooge notes, the bill served to “cramp these people's opportunities of innocent enjoyment” and “would deprive them of their means of dining every seventh day, often the only day on which they can be said to dine at all” (84; ch. 3). The ghost refutes Scrooge's charge, reminding him that

Here again, the ghost reminds Scrooge of the difficult work of enforcing happiness, and in the process, he evinces the ambiguous question of who is responsible for the enforcement. The pronouns the ghost employs heighten this ambiguity: “some,” “they,” and “themselves” are the shady hypocrites who violate the spirit of Christmas, while the true spirit of Christmas is a shadowy, vaguely sinister (given the anger of the charge) “us.” The ghost presents Christmas as a vast battleground,Footnote ⁷ one in which the combatants are ill-defined.

The vastness of the ghost's surveillance of this battleground is wonderfully imagined in a whirlwind scene, rarely adapted, which moves the scope of the Carol well beyond the cozy domesticity it is famous for. Dickens's talent for atmospheric painting is on full display here, as the ghost whisks Scrooge to apocalyptic locales, barely lit and hardly salvaged by meager, lonely celebrations of the season. Scrooge is taken to a mine in Cornwall that seems like a landscape of Hieronymus Bosch:

The nightmare imagery continues as the ghost takes Scrooge out to sea, where Scrooge, looking back, sees “the last of the land, a frightful range of rocks. . .. [H]is ears were deafened by the thundering of water, as it rolled, and roared, and raged among the dreadful caverns it had worn, and fiercely tried to undermine the earth” (92–93; ch. 3).

From the bowels of the earth to far out at sea, the ghost treats Scrooge to these epic visions, where Christmas songs, sung by lonely figures at the margins of civilization, vie precariously with darker elements:

Christmas here is no laughing matter, or rather, laughing is inextricably linked with a vast cosmic despair. “It was a great surprise to Scrooge,” the text tells us, and it is a surprise to us as well, readers used to adaptations and a cultural shorthand that reduces A Christmas Carol to domestic sentimentality, “what a solemn thing it was to move on through the lonely darkness over an unknown abyss, whose depths were secrets as profound as Death: it was a great surprise to Scrooge, while thus engaged, to hear a hearty laugh” (93). The laugh Scrooge hears is his nephew Fred's, spliced into this dread vision by the cinematic sensibilities of his ghostly hosts. Scrooge and the ghost leap from a montage of barren landscapes to the parlor games of Fred's Christmas Party and back to territory more familiar to us, the heirs of the Carol's cultural legacy. But it is worthwhile to linger on what unfamiliar aspects there are of this, one of the most familiar of tales. Perhaps nowhere is the link between cosmic terror and light comedy more jarringly joined in Dickens's fiction than in this artful jump cut. It is this link that speaks darker truths about Dickens's Victorian Christmas than Fred's party alone can do. In these passages, domestic comfort is fused with its negation, particular pleasures joined to a universal despair.

Before the Ghost of Christmas Present leaves the stage to the last of the spirits, he shares with Scrooge a nightmarish vision: two allegorical children of poverty, akin to their fleshed out cousins Oliver Twist, Little Nell, Jo, and, of course, Tiny Tim, but presented as prodigies painted by Fuseli:

Unlike Dickens's gallery of poor orphans, these children are figures of horror, not pathos. They are meant to chill the blood, not warm the heart. The ghost's monstrous children suggest no program for change. Their rhetorical function is less logical than visceral.

But such disturbing visuals are, in a sense, the message. The Ghost of Christmas Present is, despite his talent for invisibility, deeply concerned with seeing.Footnote ⁸ His first words to Scrooge are “Look upon me!” (80; ch. 3) He often exhorts Scrooge to “See!” (92; ch. 3) or “Look here!” (99; ch. 3). These commands to witness are deeply tied to his ability to go unseen, to seem detached from the web of being which he nevertheless has power to monitor and control. He is, in a way, like Scrooge himself, divorced from humanity, yet inextricably tied to it. This may account for the ghost's rhetorical tendency to ironically spit Scrooge's words back at him (89–101; ch. 3): the verbal admonitions underline the existential reality that Scrooge, however much he would like to see himself as removed from the symbolic order, is essentially part of it, and therefore can – must – react and respond to its needs. Like the warden of Bentham's panopticon, one may have a vantage point in seeing the prisoners, but one must be in the prison oneself in order to do so.Footnote ⁹ The visits to the Cratchit home and Fred's party are not merely scenes of missed invitation; they are reminders that attendance, in a very real sense, is mandatory.

This vision of the inevitability of Christmas moves from the social to the personal when the last of the spirits offers Scrooge glimpses of his own death. The ghost's silence forces Scrooge into an increasingly frantic interrogatory position, and his questions call into doubt the very possibility of choice his questions raise. When Scrooge famously asks the spirit, “Are these the shadows of the things that Will be, or are they the shadows of the things that May be, only?” we suspect, along with Scrooge, what it is he is about to see in the churchyard. When he finally sees his name on the headstone, Scrooge reasonably asks, “Why show me this, if I am past hope?” The narrator informs us that “For the first time the [ghost's] hand appeared to shake” (115; ch. 4).

The rest of Scrooge's interaction with the ghost deserves to be quoted at length, as it supplies perhaps the most dramatic and psychologically revealing example of the desperation underlying Dickens's vision of Christmas:

The kind hand trembled.

A great deal of Scrooge's desperation here lies in his attempt to define the nature of the inter-spectral relationship between himself and the ghost. He calls the spirit “good,” though the only evidence he has for this evaluation is a trembling in the ghost's hand. The narrator seems to check Scrooge's assessment in calling the ghost “kind,” but Scrooge is pleading with the spirit to be good as much as he is recognizing it as such. Scrooge's uncertainty of the ghost's nature is further displayed by his contradictory actions toward it: he attempts to physically detain it, and then prays to it. Though Scrooge's last words to the ghost amount to a definitive pledge of allegiance to Christmas, his actions show that he is much more confused and terrified than his words suggest. His pledge to “live in the Past, the Present, and the Future” seems scripted, and given Scrooge's mental agitation, smacks of the compulsory.

But perhaps this is precisely why the “kind” spirit's hand begins to shake: it is in as unpleasantly compulsory a position as Scrooge is in. Like a sympathetic bounty hunter, the spirit perhaps does take pity on Scrooge. But, given the fact that the spirit “repulses” him and “collapses” the moment Scrooge prays to him, there is no sense here that Scrooge's attempt to bargain with the spirit has yielded any result. Scrooge has asked the spirit for hope, and the spirit has offered him none. No plea has been granted, no future, apparently, reversed. Scrooge, after this encounter, is simply back in his bed, where he started.

In order to make sense of Scrooge's stunning reversal in character, one that has led some critics – not to mention many of his fellow characters in the narrative – to judge Scrooge insane, it may be helpful to remember the proximity of the last and penultimate staves, to see the frightful encounter with the ghost and the hysterically happy ending as juxtaposed rather than opposed. In other words, we need to see Scrooge's ecstasy as a symptom of his terror rather than the result of it. To return to Scrooge and his own headstone, to Scrooge's encounter with a Christmas Ghost who seems related to, if not an actual incarnation of, Death Itself, we may well ask what hope Scrooge has actually received from his encounter. Scrooge asks the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come (if somewhat indirectly) to sponge away the writing on his headstone. Yet surely no human being who has reached the age of reason would consider this a realistic, or even fair, request. After all, what the ghost shows Scrooge is not what may be, but what indeed will be. The ghost, in this respect, does not offer Scrooge the chance to change. He does not offer Scrooge a choice between Christmas or Death. In every scene the ghost presents, in every action the ghost performs, the offer is clear: Christmas and Death. When the narrator informs us that Scrooge “did it all, and infinitely more” and that Tiny Tim “did NOT die” (123; ch. 5), our narrative pleasure at this happy assertion is necessarily mixed with a sense of being sold a false bill of goods. At best, the narrator's claims can be considered a genial form of paralepsis, for Tiny Tim, of course, will die, as will Scrooge, who, as a mortal being, is clearly, at his age, incapable of doing “it all,” much less “infinitely more.” But then, Death and Christmas are now to be lived as constants, ever present and always dictating the action of Scrooge and his social world. As Andrew H. Miller notes, “The elaborate machinery of A Christmas Carol, like that of séances, invites readers to experience death not as a final event, but as a condition tempering our everyday lives” (332). And of course, the imminent deaths of both Scrooge and Tiny Tim, the threat of which propel the narrative of A Christmas Carol, are finally negated by that narrative. The survival of Tiny Tim and Scrooge denies death in order to make it ever present: in a way, it makes Scrooge and Tim into a kind of ghost, undead figures who will return and repeat in countless adaptations of their source. The repetition of adaptation only mirrors the repetitive nature of Scrooge and Tim's curious immortality within A Christmas Carol itself.

Scrooge's living-with-death creates a startling effect in the Carol's remaining pages, one which illuminates the text's uncanny replications as well as our culture's desire to be haunted by them. Scrooge's first act upon waking on Christmas morning is to start spending the money he has been hoarding so long. In fact, Scrooge's first post-spectral intercourse with another human is a crash course in capitalism:

‘I should hope I did,’ replied the lad.

‘What, the one as big as me?’ returned the boy. . ..

Like a catechism, Scrooge asks his pupil where to buy, what to buy, how to buy it, and even an injunction to “Go buy.” Scrooge also stresses the importance of making money move quickly in order that more can be made. Scrooge's first real Christmas opens with a flurry of market activity.

The real beneficiaries of Scrooge's capitalist turn are, of course, the Cratchit family. From Tiny Tim's medical bills to Bob Cratchit's salary, Scrooge immediately sets to work in furthering the enfranchisement of the middle class. This result of Scrooge's spiritual transformation has not gone unnoticed by critics.Footnote ¹⁰ It is perhaps after all unsurprising that the hero of the most popular of all Victorian narratives should become a major champion of Victorian values. Of course Scrooge should be a good capitalist. To paraphrase Chesterton, one suspects he was one all along. What is of interest is why Christmas, and ghosts, are required to make Scrooge aware of this fact.

Here, we return to Derrida's question in Specters of Marx: How do I learn to live? As Derrida points out, and as Scrooge demonstrates, not by living alone. Only a heterodidactics of death and life can teach such a lesson. It takes, in short, a ghost to learn to live. And death is the lesson Scrooge's ghosts have to offer, a death that is as necessary in its arrival as that of Christmas. Much of the strange power of A Christmas Carol resides in its unsettling, but oddly liberating, equation of Christmas and death. Once the ghosts have drilled into Scrooge the fact that celebrating Christmas is, after all, not a choice but a requirement for living properly, Scrooge can finally live like a proper Victorian: one who moves money. After all, A Christmas Carol, like Marx, proposes the inevitability, the necessity, of capitalism. It is as essential to the structure of the Carol's narrative as Christmas. And in uniting Christmas and capitalism in such a way, Dickens makes Christmas as essential to the culture of his fellow Victorians as capitalism itself. Indeed, as the flood of adaptations that have followed in the Carol's wake have shown, this essentialness, this mandate for Christmas, has not diminished.

To cite one example: in October of 2009, Adam Roberts's I Am Scrooge joined the ranks of such spurious classics as Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, Jane Slayre, and Android Karenina. Punningly titled after Richard Matheson's seminal horror novel I am Legend, Roberts's zeitgeist-exploiting parody combines cozy Victorian domesticity with contemporary appetites for zombie apocalyptics and ironic in-jokes. If the appearance of I am Scrooge strikes one as something less than an acme of postmodern genre-mixing, it may be because the parody is not simply another example of a current literary fad, but one in a seemingly endless line of adaptations of its source material. One might easily read the hoards of Victorian zombies converging on a beleaguered Scrooge as a metaphor for the similarly virulent replication of Christmas Carols that have arisen since that “Christmas Zero” of 1843, when Dickens's charming “ghost of an idea” was unleashed upon an unsuspecting world.

Scrooge-like, one could be tempted to view such repetitions as so many waves of implacable zombies. Dickens's narrative, particularly as a culture-text, the field of which constantly expands with each new adaptation, reifies both Christmas and capitalism.

We come to learn, with Scrooge, that capitalism, and Dickens's mythopoeic conflation of it with Christmas, not only writes the rules of the game but is the only game that can be played. Scrooge can only deny Christmas, and capitalism, for so long. Ultimately, Scrooge must play the game. This may in part account for Chesterton's insistence that Scrooge was never “really inhuman at the beginning any more than at the end. There is a heartiness in his inhospitable sentiments that is akin to humor and therefore to humanity” (130). Scrooge's inhumanity is precisely what constitutes and defines his humanity: Scrooge can't really hate Christmas at all.Footnote ¹¹

Under this mandate, Dickens's Christmas ghosts, and their human agent Scrooge, continually redefine the limits of the capitalist universe, constantly expanding through endless repetition. Scrooge and his ghosts work to recode and reify capitalism, and in the process of repetition, they recode Christmas as capitalism and Christmas as everything. This is the diegetic process of Dickens's text. It is also the hetero-diegetic reality of the text's afterlife as culture-text, which operates on one level as an ever-expanding field of narrative reproduction in time and space. Every year, of course, the temporal field of A Christmas Carol grows, but it also occupies a continually expanding arena of material space: more books and bookstores, more televisions and movie theaters, more playhouses devoting more of their space, replicating this “ghost of an idea.”

Whatever one's attitude towards A Christmas Carol, it is undeniable that Dickens and his creations broadened the scope of Christmas from religious and social festival into cultural imperative. And in reifying and reproducing Christmas within the curious genre of the ghost story, Dickens expanded the horizons of capitalism itself. That seemingly limitless expansion can be seen in every retelling. The Victorian zombies of I Am Scrooge are only some of the latest undead progeny of the ghosts Dickens evokes in A Christmas Carol, relentlessly terrorizing us into Christmas cheer. Like Marx, Scrooge is a ghost we can expect to be haunted by for as long as his world is ours. Indeed, as long as demand for this most universalizing, pleasurable, and disturbing of culture-texts persists, one can assume the ghostly supply of adaptations is practically infinite.