SPECTRAL MEMORIES: AESTHETIC RESPONSES TO THE FINANCIAL CRASH IN ICELAND 2008

In October 2008, one of the largest bank crashes in history struck Iceland, a country of three hundred and thirty five thousand inhab-itants. The aim of the article is to examine two cultural responses to the crash and the crisis that followed. More precisely, the aim is to analyse how the creation of the haunted house in I Remember You, a crash-horror story by crime writer Yrsa Sigurðardóttir, as well as the spectral half-built houses portrayed by visual artist Guðjón Ketilsson refer quite directly, yet spectrally, to the period. The spec-tral themes of the two works give the opportunity to discuss the moment following the crash as a moment of haunting—but who is haunted and by whom?

was all of a sudden placed in an unforeseen turmoil, with no possible solution in sight.
Even though academics have analysed the political and historical texts that deal with the crash in the Icelandic context, less attention has been paid to the artistic response to the events and how the economic expansion, crash, and crisis influenced and were reflected in fiction and visual art from the period. 4 The article aims to examine two cultural responses to the collapse of the Icelandic economy in 2008. More precisely, the aim is to analyse how the creation of the haunted house in I Remember You, a crash-horror story by crime writer Yrsa Sigurðardóttir 5 , as well as the spectral half-built houses portrayed by visual artist Guðjón Ketilsson, refer quite directly, yet spectrally, to this historical period. 6 The spectral themes of the two works give the opportunity to discuss the moment following the crash as a moment of haunting-but who is haunted and by whom?

THE SPECTRAL SPACES OF THE ECONOMIC CRISIS
Guðjón Ketilsson's series of drawings (Fig. 1, 2, 3 while in real life these empty structures will eventually become houses, or perhaps the opposite, torn down and removed from the urban space, their artistic representation will live on as documents about this period in cultural history. By creating carefully constructed representations, the artist asks for their inclusion in cultural memory, where they will live on, either as works that become part of the canon and are regularly on display in the museum galleries, or carefully hidden from view and preserved in the museum archive or storage: the cultural unconscious. how the prosperous and booming economic expansion came to a sudden end and, with it, the faith in the long-standing tradition of the national heroic ideal. These ruins are haunted spaces and the following analysis will focus on what constitutes the haunting, as well as asking who is haunted and by whom?

THE HOUSE AND THE HUMAN SUBJECT
The parallels between the house and the human body are emphasized when the former is stripped down to its simplest form. The drawing suggests a relation to the viewer who herself experienced the aftermath of the economic crash and shares those memories with a bigger collective: not only with the other inhabitants of Reykjavík and Iceland, but also in the transcultural sense, with inhabitants of, for example, Spain and Ireland. Here, the relation between the self and the home are manifested: the crash brought forth the anxiety of losing one's home as well as losing one's identity, where the home becomes a symbol for both personal and collective senses of identity-an entity that ties a social group to a certain geographical location: family and home, nation and country.
The drawings made by Ketilsson, however, do not only evoke the possible inhabitants of the half-built houses. They also indicate the workers who lost their jobs before completing the construction of the houses. The artist's endurance and long working hours perceivable in the detailed work of the drawings as well as the parallels with the human body suggest yet another human subject related to the reality portrayed, one who is absent from the images: that of the construction worker who spent long hours building the structure. During the prosperity era in Iceland, physical labour was left to numerous migrant workers. Some of them left during the crisis but others stayed, and their part in restoring the finances of the country should not be underestimated. Here, the spectre is not someone returned from the past, it is a person who is overlooked and ignored in the present: someone expendable, marginalised and dispossessed. 10 In traditional narratives of haunting, ghosts have various representational functions and levels of visibility and presence, they can either be powerful or weak. Peeren describes, for example, how Derrida associates the ghost with powerful agents and systematic forces as well as with the dispossessed subjects these systems produce. 11 The former conforms to the idea of the ghost as a sovereign power, following the model of the father ghost in The vulnerable spectre is not only produced by the sovereign spectral system but also, according to Peeren, struggles against it: "The vulnerable ghost struggles against the spectralizing system by which it is produced as invisible and irrelevant." 14 Peeren further refers to Antonio Negri and his article "The Specter's Smile" which the author wrote as a critical response to Spectres of Marx. 15 The spectre, for Negri, offers the possibility of examining the phenomenology of capitalist production and announces a process of alienation and estrangement in the spirit of the uncanny: "A specter is the movement of an abstraction that is materialized and becomes powerful: above all the abstraction of value which, in a bloodless movement, vampirizes all of the worker's labour and, transforming itself into surplus-value, becomes capital; money, secondly, which in a circular movement verticalizes itself and is consolidated into currency." 16 In this way, the drawings by Ketilsson become haunting in more than one sense. Following Peeren's and Negri's discussion of the living spectre of capitalist society, I argue that the half-built houses are haunted by the invisible worker who started building them, and whose labour was "vampirized" during the prosperity years of the economic boom. The absence of the worker from the images raises questions about his whereabouts in the present and his status in the post-crash society. According to this reading, it is the absent spectre who renders these houses haunted. However, the houses can also be considered spectres themselves. They evoke visual connotations with the classical form of the whitesheet ghost and they channel, visually as well as spatially, the uncanny impacts of the collapse and crisis on society. While according to Negri, the invisible worker is unable to haunt capitalist society, the spectral half-built houses become concrete and spacious memorials to the temporary crash of capitalism: in other words, they become capitalist ruins par excellence. Their concreteness, along with their half-built unfinished state, support and suggest the persistence of that spectral and haunting memory.
The spectral reading of these drawings enables the question of what it really is that haunts these drawings, and allows one to focus on something that is not present in the image-an absence. She further describes these ideas as "spectres of the past" that appear as revenants during the economic expansion and are adjusted to the values of the contemporary globalised society. 34 The schoolbooks not only depict a discourse on the superiority of the Icelandic nation but also portray the story of its people as the story of Icelandic men, hardworking and righteous, who built the country. 35 The crash therefore initiated a certain (temporary) 'fall' of masculinity and a related phase of 'hurt' masculinity.
Cultural memory studies tend to focus on contested memories; memory that is challenged and questioned by its blind spots, framing trauma at the core of memory studies as a form of memory that refuses to be narrativized. 36 Hall discusses how the events of the crash have been compared to traumatic events, such as the 9/11 attacks in the USA, and the prime minister's expression, "God bless Iceland", evokes the sentiment associated with speeches made by the US president at that moment in time. 37 However, instead of defining the crash as a national trauma and comparing it to large-scale terrorist attacks such as 9/11, I argue that the crash represents an event that challenges memory and highlights its dynamics, offering the opportunity to question its construction and expose its workings. 38 In terms of spectrality, the crash represents a certain blind spot of memory that is not dealt with but repressed, and returns because it refuses to be forgotten. The crash is therefore a strong example of a spectral memory.
In Specters of Marx, Derrida draws connections between hauntology and politics of memory: "So it would be necessary The characters have not stayed in the house for long when they understand that they are not alone in the area. Initially they believe that a mentally disturbed child is terrorizing them. As the narrative progresses, it becomes clear that the child is a hostile ghost who seems to have returned for revenge, destroying all their plans of restoring their finances and recovering their losses.
Katrín is the focal point of this plotline as she narrates the story to the reader who sympathises with her position. As the story develops, she becomes a victim of her husband and their friend, who turn out to be lovers and have planned to kill her in this remote area, and make it look like an accident to acquire her life insurance. 48 This implies that the ghost might be a 'good' ghost, who sympathizes with the victim, as some of the messages that he leaves around might be read as warnings. Towards the end, however, when Garðar has disappeared, the ghost attacks the two women, killing Katrín and causing Líf severe injuries. At the end of the story, Líf is saved by the police and taken back to civilisation, only to die from her injuries a couple of hours later.
The rescue squad does not find Katrín's remains and the final paragraph in the story describes how she has herself become a spectral subject, a ghost that remains in the house in Hesteyri. At that point, the reader gets a brief chance to look at the story world from a spectral viewpoint, following Katrín's ghostly focal point.
While the hauntings take place in different locations in Hesteyri, the house where the trio resides seems to attract the spectral presence of the ghost. The haunted house echoes Freud's statement on how repression transforms the home into an uncanny space, as it appears, at first sight, to be a 'normal' house: "This uncanny is in reality nothing new or alien, but something which is familiar and old-established in the mind and which has become alienated from it only through the process of repression." 49 On one hand, there is nothing in the appearance of the house in Hesteyri that suggests that it is haunted. On the contrary, it seems to be a fairly ordinary house. On the other hand, it has a certain uncomfortable aura to it: "Even the house, which was in every way a very charming old fashioned Icelandic wooden house, seemed oppressive […] as it stood there silently, daring them to knock on the door." 50 Before they actually see the ghost, the hauntings are evoked with sounds and smells. The eerie 'creaks in the pine' express how the ghost makes its presence known with dins in the house's woodwork, as if someone was walking around.
First, the ghost appears as a shadow, evoking his bodyless state as a spirit or spectre. In other scenes, the ghost is described as a dark silhouette. 51 However, as the hauntings intensify, the ghost acquires a body, which makes them think that they are dealing with a living person and not a superficial creature. Besides, the characters are not at all aware that they are, in fact, being haunted by two ghosts, nor is the reader, who believes that they are dealing with only one hostile creature.
Both ghosts turn out to be young boys who went missing but at different times; Bernódus, who was bullied by his schoolmates, disappeared sixty years before, while Benni got lost playing hide and seek with his friends a few years before the story takes place.
For seemingly unrelated reasons, both boys, or their bodies, ended up in the house in Hesteyri or nearby. Bernódus was clearly an outsider during his life, neglected by his father, bullied by his peers, and picked on by his teacher. His status as an 'oppressed other' is further highlighted by the fact that no one came for him when he went missing in Hesteyri. It is thus clear that he returns for two reasons. The first is revenge: to get even and kill the people who treated him badly in his life. This turns Bernódus into a hostile creature, a gruesome ghost, and therefore uncanny in the Freudian sense: "[m]any people experience the uncanny in the highest degree in relation to death and dead bodies, as well as to the return of the dead, to spirits and ghosts." 52 However, Bernódus also seems to return for a different reason, as his hauntings point towards his corpse in the basement, encouraging the human subjects to look beneath the surface, in the basement, and identify the body that would eventually solve his case and eliminate the uncertainty about his death. This makes Bernódus a spectral ghost in the Derridean sense; the ghost who returns with a message and seeks justice for matters that have been forgotten.
The ghost of Benni does not seem to return for revenge but haunts the house because of the uncertainty of his death that continues to haunt his parents. This makes Benni a friendlier, more passive ghost than Bernódus, who is not only aggressive and violent but also powerful, capable of entering the locked house, of moving between different places in the country to kill his victims, of entering their minds and dreams, and of affecting electrical appliances and drying out batteries. In the final haunting scene, readers come to understand the presence of the two ghosts, and how one of them is not capable of entering the house: "She recoiled in horror, feeling hope drain away, for outside stood a boy who didn't seem to be the same one as they had seen before. This one, who was smaller, stared in with glazed eyes, his greyish face infinitely sad. 53 However, Katrín is also scared of this ghost, and sure that it wants her dead, as his apparition leads her to believe that the place in its entirety is doomed: "Outside or inside.
It didn't matter. They were dead." 54 Katrín's reaction to the two ghosts is steeped in the uncanny gruesome feelings towards the return of the dead, as she seems unable to move beyond her feeling of fear and ask herself why these two spectral beings have returned to precisely this place. The spectral stresses how living human subjects should approach the ghost as a friendly figure who returns for a reason, and how it is their responsibility to discover these reasons. It is therefore worthwhile to see if this approach applies to the three characters in the story in Hesteyri, and to analyse their reaction, in order to examine how the hauntings refer to the broader context of crash and crisis.
Let's start with Katrín, the main character and focal point of the story, who represents the reader's access to the story world.
She appears as an innocent, passive one, who, to a certain extent, sympathises with the ghost, or the 'deranged child' as she believes it to be, and is quick to accept the haunting, yet without trying to understand the reasons behind the ghostly return. Katrín is passive because even though she doesn't agree with her husband's plans, she allows him to bring her to Hesteyri under the pretence of the impossible project of repairing a haunted house. She does not even protest because she is afraid to hurt her husband who is already devastated due to his unemployment and crisis-an identity crisis of sorts, since he has lost his status as a successful banker and is trying to restore his pride. At one point, Katrín refers to the house as Garðar's dream which she does not want to ruin with any 'silliness,' as she calls the hauntings. 60 Katrín therefore passively accepts going to Hesteyri to support her husband and to unite during challenging times. She is furthermore quick to accept the hauntings, and instead of fighting back, she calmly waits for what is to come. This passiveness of Katrín turns her into an ideal post-crisis political subject but also raises certain questions: why is she so submissive and what does this passiveness and absence of agency, the reluctance to react, and letting others control symbolize in a larger context?
Katrín's behaviour can, to a certain extent, be explained by the circumstances of her marriage, and how she, above all, wants to please her husband. Garðar has the idea of repairing the house and bringing them to Hesteyri, to begin with, but he is also in complete denial: both about the ghost as well as about their desperate economic situation. His reluctance to face the situation is perhaps due to his bad conscience. He represses the problems facing him because it helps him avoid admitting his guilt: that he is betraying his wife, not only by cheating on her, but also by planning to kill her to acquire her life insurance. The house project is therefore a decoy for Garðar, even though it might also be a way to restore his identity and become a successful businessman again. Katrín, however, believes it to be a desperate way to recuperate his losses, as he has been unemployed for eight months and deeply desires to get back to work. At one point, Katrín describes how their family pitied them because of his unemployment, emphasising how the economic loss also has to do with pride and shame. For Garðar, the house becomes a symbol of the dream of a better future, and he is not willing to allow some silly ghost to destroy that dream. 61 When they discover that the phone batteries have suddenly and for no obvious reason died, Garðar says that he cannot deal with that right now: "I've got to pretend this thing with the phones isn't happening. He looked at Líf, and then at Katrín, who recognised this reaction all too well; he couldn't cope with this sort of crisis at all." 62 Here, Katrín makes the connection between the situation in Hesteyri and the crisis of the period without realising how deeply desperate Garðar's way to recover his losses actually is.
The story of Garðar, his unemployment, repression, and desperate ways to regain his pride, points directly to the identity problematics caused by the crash and the crisis. His character represents the pre-crash banking greed and the contemporary fall of the twenty-first century global capitalism. However, and more precisely, it also symbolises the downfall of the masculine hero so prevalent in the construction of national identity in Iceland and expressed in the image of the "business Viking" during the pre-crash boom years. The novel challenges this narrative of masculine heroism, by drawing out the weaknesses and flaws in Garðar's character: emphasising his desire and need for repression as well as by turning him into an amoral criminal or villain who is planning to commit murder.
The character of Garðar thus becomes a symbol of the dominant cultural group in Icelandic society, the patriarchy, whose agents seek to repress the crash, its causes and effects, in order to deny and erase their own responsibility and guilt. This is expressed through the relationship between Garðar and his wife, Katrín, who becomes his subordinate and is pressed to follow his ways and decisions even though she does not approve of them. However, because of her husband, she is unable to explore the potentiality of the spectral mourning: to use the present moment to reflect critically on the past and work towards a better future.
The third character, Líf, is very hostile in her reaction towards the ghost as she opts for exorcism to get rid of the ghost, by wanting to kill the disturbed child, and above all, to leave the uncanny location, no matter what: "Just imagine if we could find the little bastard, tie him up and finally have some peace. Maybe we get to kill him, since he obviously killed the man who used to own the house." 63 Líf proves to be an example of an extreme individualist, devoid of all empathy, as she continuously suggests that it is not her job to deal with other 'people's problems', and it is not her role to pay the debts of others. When Katrín finds out about Líf's affair with Garðar, she also learns that Líf would never marry him, because she does not want to marry his debts. 64  Here the question of responsibility rises and the two ghosts, Bernódus and Benni, seem to have two symbolic functions in this regard. The convoluted nature of the plot, the excess, multiple ghosts and hauntings, as well as the fact that the house in Hesteyri is haunted by two ghosts, illustrate the multiple levels of responsibility and guilt for the financial crisis: the economic, in the fact that the nation went almost bankrupt, and the mnemonic, in the sense that the crash brought down the collective national ideal in the form of the "business Viking." The latter expresses the problematics of national identity construction embedded in Icelandic history, which is repressed, and thus keeps haunting.
This mechanism of repression brings us to the second symbolic function of the ghosts: the historical distance of sixty years between the two boy-ghosts which creates the historical long view of the novel. Here, the death and forgetting of Bernódus implies how repression works: how repressed matters are bound to return, indicating that the memory of Benni is also bound to haunt the world if his case is not solved and the guilt and responsibility concerning his disappearance and death are not admitted. Garðar is thus 'guilty' in a double sense, not only of the couple's economic stress and of betraying his wife, but also because, despite the severity of the social breakdown, Garðar is still aspiring to the idea of the dominant masculine hero. Katrín, in her passiveness, becomes partially responsible by not taking action. Líf did not cause the crash, but her husband got rich during the expansion and she benefits from that, without having any feelings of remorse nor being ready to assist her less fortunate fellow men. And it ends badly for all of them; Garðar disappears, Líf dies, and Katrín returns as a spectral subject to the house in Hesteyri. Her anger, furthermore, implies how she returns as a more active subject, looking for revenge, or rather, seeking justice, by haunting those who are guilty, who have something on their conscience and should face the responsibility of their actions in the past.

TO CONCLUDE
The financial crash in Iceland 2008 is an example of a collective shock and an event that challenges collective memory, creating the possibility to expose its inherent tensions, workings, and dynamics. The crisis that followed was a period of spectral mourning; a process that becomes highly ambiguous since subjects do not entirely understand what it is that they mourn.
Analysing the cultural responses to the crash, the literature and visual art of the period, might help to understand this moment of spectral mourning and the reasons behind the 'impossible' grief.
While the analysis of the crime novel indicates how the characters are stuck in their melancholic, inactive state due to their financial loss that also represents their loss of identity and future, the drawings have the potential of spectralising these feelings of loss further and problematizing ideas of 'collective' loss and mourning, by asking the following question: who is haunted and by whom?
In this sense, I argue that the invisible worker is a spectral force who haunts the images by questioning the symbol of the "business Viking" as a unifying ideal capable of representing the many different cultural groups of the pre-crash society. It becomes a force that complicates the idea of collective mourning, and, to a certain degree, deconstructs it, by drawing attention to how the collapse and crisis have had a different impact on different social groups in the Icelandic society.