ABSTRACT
What the narrator says here employs the language that is ordinarily used to describe the invocation of a spirit. The rhetorical name for this is prosopopoeia, the ascription of a name, a voice, or a face to the absent, inanimate, or dead. To ascribe or inscribe a name or a voice is performatively to call into being, to invoke, to resurrect, to utter a new version of Jesus’ ‘Lazarus, come forth!’ All historical story-telling depends on the efficacy of such performative prosopopoeias. These figures raise from the dead words on the page the illusions of the various personae, including the narrator. In that sense all historical stories are ghost stories.
