Real Ghosts and Unnatural Narratives in
Matthew Salesses' The Hundred-Year Flood
Spoiler Alert: The following chapter discusses Matthew Salesses’ The Hundred Year Flood at length and assumes that the reader has engaged with the novel in its entirety. You can find his novel on Amazon and learn more about the author by visiting his website, https://matthewsalesses.com/
A version of this chapter was presented at the International Society for Narrative conference in 2023.
Matthew Salesses’ novel, The Hundred-Year Flood, is an exploration of how unprocessed trauma and grief can affect people’s lives, threatening to drown them if they do not learn how to swim. Tee, the main character, deals with several levels of traumatic grief: he witnesses 9/11 in America; then his uncle commits suicide after years of his aunt and father having an affair; and finally, he is a Korean adoptee in a dysfunctional transracial adoptive family and will never get to meet his dead birth mother. After 9/11 and his uncle’s suicide, he goes to Prague where most of the drama of the novel unfolds. The novel introduces him in the hospital as he attempts to regain his memory after a head injury he sustained in Prague. In addition to his brain injury, Tee has a lack of generational memory, in that his parents kept secret his true adoption circumstances; this leads to the consequences of the sudden appearance of traumatic post-memory when he finds out from his adoptive mom that he is a result of one of his father’s affairs. The plotline is disordered much like the information and memory he has and is given about himself. The disorder of the chapters and the plot is reminiscent of what a disjointed memory might look like in action, which is precisely what much of the narrative revolves around: traumatic memory and the lack of traumatic memory.
In the first two case studies, the authors were directly influenced by Lifton’s Ghost Kingdom theory, but that is not the case for The Hundred-Year Flood as Salesses was not directly inspired by Lifton’s work. This chapter instead argues that the textual evidence of coping mechanisms adoptees employ to process the trauma of missing information about themselves often reflect Lifton’s Ghost Kingdom theory, regardless of any explicit influence. I argue that applying the lens of Lifton’s Ghost Kingdom reveals the cognitive processes the main character of Matthew Salesses’ novel, The Hundred-Year Flood, employs to process his trauma, using narrative structures including possible worlds and unnatural narratives. This novel also shows the ways in which the act of fiction-making can substitute gaps in real-life narratives. In other words, this book shows how fiction-making to fill in a gap, even by a fictional character, generates something that is real, even if it is not true, in the face of a critical gap of knowledge about the self.
Throughout the novel, Tee calls attention to the information he is missing about his life. Eventually, the novel reveals that his parents have kept this information from him, lying to him, often by omission. Most prominently, information about his birth mother is missing. Though he is forced to deal with his adoptive family’s generational trauma, the lack of his biological post-memory is equally as distressing. Salesses portrays the consequences of these missing memories through Tee’s exploration of his life narrative. Tee’s unique inheritance is an intergenerational trauma where the relationships within a family can be empty or covered with lies, each a trauma of its own, in addition to a complete lack of post-memory where his birth mother’s story is concerned.
The novel addresses Tee's lack of post-memory in three different ways. The first is that he hides his emotions in what he calls his "container." The second occurs after he suffers a brain injury and attempts to write a fictional version of his birth story. Finally, he is haunted by a ghost. Each of these approaches lends itself to a reading through a particular theoretical lens. The container can be read through a trauma lens; his birth story can be read through possible worlds theory; and the ghost itself can be read as an unnatural narrative. Additionally, all three of them are literary manifestations of coping mechanisms that can be read through the lens of Lifton’s Ghost Kingdom theory.
Tee’s Container
The first introduction to Tee’s mental cognition is the mention of his container. The novel is written mostly through a first person omniscient point of view, and in the first chapter, the narrator explains, “He was filling a container inside of him. Into it, he put the things he couldn’t say—about the seduction of forgetting. When his container was full, he would dump himself out in one dramatic move” (Salesses, The Hundred-Year Flood 6). At various points throughout the novel, his container is filled up, or completely empty, given his emotional state. When Tee’s emotions hit one extreme or another, usually feelings of being overwhelmed or wishing to disappear, is when his container fills or empties.
Additionally, Tee’s container is how he processes his emotions, deals with gaps in his identity, and processes trauma. As Salesses explains in an interview, Tee’s container also represents “Tee’s relationship with passivity and action” (Brown). With all that in mind, Tee’s container works as a kind of crutch for his identity when he is passive about it and perhaps an energy source when he is attempting to process the missing parts of his identity. Because he is a transracial adoptee, he also lacks the genetic mirroring of his Korean biology, which also contributes to the pieces of broken identity he hides in his container. Many moments occur when the dissonance of being a Korean man interferes with moments between him and his white mother or even in Prague when people assume things about his history given his Asian features. As Tony Corsentino writes of the need for genetic mirroring that
“Various likenesses ‘overlap and criss-cross among family members. Mirroring consists in these family resemblances. We cannot summarize them. There is no such thing as ‘what it is,’ definable in terms of a unique conjunction of attributes, to be a member of my or your family. We gain a more or less full sense of our mirroring of our relatives through experience of them.” (Corsentino, “Mirroring Part 2”)
Tee recognizes some of this, but what he does not know how to deal with ends up repressed in his container.
Tee’s container also aligns with two different features of Lifton’s Ghost Kingdom theory. First, as Lifton explains in Journey of the Adopted Child: A Quest for Wholeness, the Ghost Kingdom is a “spectral place . . . located only in the adoptee’s psychic reality” (57). Like a Ghost Kingdom, Tee’s container is a secret place inside of himself that holds all of his unnamed and repressed emotions that he does not know how to deal with. Although he is aware of this emotionality inside of him, he does not seem to have the capacity until the conclusion of the novel to evaluate this inner part of himself.
Second, like the Ghost Kingdom, the container is a narrative demonstration of a cognitive process of a fictional character. This novel employs such realistic fictional attributes that when the narration introduces Tee’s container, it follows that the reader may interpret such a function as a kind of cognitive process. In reference to this place inside of himself, the narration explains at one point, “there had always been something itching inside him, fluttering like a bird in his throat, waiting to fly out” (Salesses, The Hundred-Year Flood 32). Readers familiar with Lifton’s Ghost Kingdom theory might make the connection between Tee’s container and a Ghost Kingdom, but readers without this context can still understand the wobbliness of emotions Tee has around his parentage and how to deal with such heavy grief in the wake of two major losses: his uncle and his birth mother, not to mention his parents’ divorce and all the secrets that have finally been set free in his family.
At different junctions in the novel, readers witness Tee attempt to process what he has been told about his adoption in the past. Based on his ruminations throughout the novel, readers learn the story that his parents told him about his birth. The story was told heroically, that his father had promised his dying birth mother that he would take care of her son. Then, there is another moment when Tee is very young and he goes into the forest with the only picture of his birth mother he has in an attempt to find her, but he gets sick from the cold. After he gets sick, his father intervenes before the priest can say last rites, which Tee interprets as a second kind of rescue on top of the perceived rescue of his adoption. Each of these moments build up into a false narrative of how Tee arrived with his family because these moments are more about Tee’s parents than Tee.
Constellations by Jenni Alpert (aka Cami) and Shane Alexander
Jenni (aka Cami) was born in Los Angeles, CA and adopted out of the foster care system at the age of four. She is a singer-songwriter, guitarist, pianist, and founder of Fine Arts Revolution Inc., a non profit that fosters Creative Arts Wellness Programs and Advocacy Mediation Services for unhoused communities. Learn more about her work on her website.
Tee’s Birth Story
Understanding Tee’s story as it was told to him contextualizes the second introduction to Tee’s inner life. When he sits in the hospital in Boston after everything has happened in Prague, he decides to write a fictional version of his birth story on a typewriter. By the point that this occurs, however, it is not just the lack of knowledge that he is attempting to reconcile with this act of fiction-making; he also has received an email from his adoptive mom during his time in Prague where she explained to him that he is, in fact, his father’s son from an earlier affair after his adoptive mother found out about her infertility.
In life-writing, which is what Tee attempts with the creation of his birth story, storytelling is a common way for people to cope with trauma. It allows the storyteller to witness their grief. The problem for Tee is that he does not have the data about what actually happened at his birth event, and therefore cannot actually compose a piece of life-writing because he cannot ever really witness his own trauma. He can only witness the lack of the story, so his witnessing is always only possible, not real. When he goes to knowingly compose a fictional version of what he imagines his birth event was like, the typewritten story becomes a material manifestation of the container itself. This provides Tee with a physical and external conception of the traumatic lack of memory he has been attempting to reconcile inside of himself.
Unfortunately for Tee, writing the story himself is insufficient. Without a true account of his birth event from his father or birth mother, he is unable to resolve the trauma of both lacking the memory in the first place and then later having to face traumatic post-memory when his adoptive mom tells him he is his father’s son. Secrets and withholding biological truths from adoptees cause a multitude of emotional problems. As Lifton says, adoption trauma is “further compounded when [adoptees] are denied knowledge of the mother and father to whom they were born” (Journey 7). When adoptees are denied such knowledge, a gap opens up which must be filled. Because adoptions like Tee’s happen in infancy, the loss of such knowledge and relationships along with the primal wound of being separated from the mother turns into an ambiguous loss for the adoptee since it occurs before long-term memory develops. Ambiguous loss is even more difficult to process because, as Lifton explains, “adoptees have no pre-traumatic self” (Journey 260). In other words, they have no coping mechanisms mastered before the trauma of separation and loss because it happens so early in life. Tee’s attempt to fill in this gap of knowledge and traumatic ambiguous loss with a fictional rendition of his birth event, then, seems to be the only coping mechanism he can execute safely. This coping mechanism of creating a fiction works as an example of both a counterfactual (what if it happened this way?) and a possible world (it could have happened this way). In this way, his fictional birth story can simultaneously only be possible, but is real in how it affects his perspective of himself.
The Ghost
However, writing his birth story does not resolve the problem of the ghost that haunts him. The ghost that haunts Tee appears and disappears after two important moments in the plot. The first time he sees it is after his lover, Katka, pulls him into the closet to kiss him in the beginning of their affair, and he mistakes the ghost for her husband, Pavel. Even as it is beginning, Tee recognizes this affair as a reenactment of his father’s behavior, yet he cannot stop himself. Then, the day before the ghost disappears during his time in Prague, Tee receives an email from his mother. In it, she says, “You’re your father’s son, Tee. I mean his biological flesh and blood. You would have found out eventually” (Salesses, The Hundred-Year Flood 96). This small bit of information is a blow to Tee as it both exposes part of the truth about his conception, and further damns his affair behavior as inherited from his father. The ghost reappears after Tee returns to Boston with his head injury, and he sees it increasingly in the hospital, but both of these appearances symbolize both the inherited intergenerational trauma and the bit of story, not the complete story, that Tee’s adoptive mom has given him. Additionally, the ghost reinforces the limitations of traditional coping mechanisms. especially when the full knowledge necessary to process such complicated trauma tied to identity is lacking. The interactions with the ghost make Tee's gaps of information about himself visible because he only catches glimpses of the ghost here and there. In fact, in both spans of time that he sees the ghost, beginning after his affair with Katka until his adoptive mom emails him and again in the Boston hospital after all of Prague, he never catches more than the tail of a dress or the curve of a leg.
Finally, the ghost reveals itself as his birth mother. When Tee finally says to his father, “Tell me about my birth mother,” the ghost of his birth mother fully materializes next to his father (Salesses, The Hundred-Year Flood 228). The end of the novel suggests that to end the haunting, he must hear the story of his conception from his father to fill the gap previously filled with both lies and emptiness.
In contrast with Tee’s container, the fictionalized story of his birth he composes by typewriter and the ghost that haunts him are external manifestations of his trauma instead of internal. However, there is no evidence in the narration that the ghost is directly created or controlled by Tee the way his container or his typewritten story is.
Theories of Ghosts
What is unique about this ghost is that the reader is free to interpret it in several different ways. The first interpretation of the ghost is fairly straightforward. Because of how ghosts have been culturally conceptualized in a wide variety of literature and media since the late 1700s beginning, arguably, with Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto, many readers arrive already familiar with what a ghost may mean for a story (Morton). According to cognitive schema theory, readers use “prior knowledge to comprehend and learn from text” and therefore, when they encounter a ghost in a narrative, they may already have cognitive tools available to interpret what the ghost may mean for a narrative (An 130). In the case of this novel, both knowledge about ghosts and Lifton’s Ghost Kingdom theory aid in the interpretation of the ghost. Readers can make sense of the idea of Tee’s mother haunting him from previous experiences with ghosts represented in popular culture. Unlike the previous two case studies, this novel reaches beyond the adoption community into a more general audience, so readers may be more expected to interpret the ghost as simply a person who is dead, especially because Tee’s biological mother is, in fact, dead.
Ghosts, scientifically speaking, are not a proven part of our real existence in the actual world, despite their popularity in our storytelling. (Or are they? ;)) Therefore, readers are presented with the problem of interpretation. How should they interpret the ghost, the only unnatural element, in an otherwise realistic narrative? As Alber et al. claims that Stefan Iverson defines it, an unnatural narrative will “present the reader with clashes between the rules governing a storyworld and scenarios or events producing or taking place inside this storyworld—clashes that defy easy explanation” (103). In other words, because the ghost defies easy explanation and sticks out in comparison to the rest of the novel, readers are given the task of figuring out how to interpret it, based on the contextual clues available. Unlike Tee’s container or his typewritten stories, the clues surrounding the ghost are more elusive throughout this book, in part because Tee himself is attempting to figure out who or what the ghost is, but also because the ghost is the core dilemma of the novel. Revealing it in whole sooner than the end of the novel would undermine the effect of this narrative element.
If Lifton’s Ghost Kingdom theory is added as an interpretive lens, there is more to the ghost than simply a dead person haunting an alive one. According to Lifton, the ghost of the birth mother is “as if dead” to the adoptee, even if she is actually still alive (“The Inner Life” 419). Tee’s family did not openly talk about Tee’s dad and aunt’s affair, nor about the truth about Tee’s conception. Whether the birth mother is dead or not, the lack of memory that Tee has about her drives much of his inner turmoil which, like a flood, rises up to drown him even as he closes himself to hide away from it.
By bringing in Lifton’s Ghost Kingdom theory to read this text, we can see something beyond what a normal ghost might tell us in other narratives. Because the ghost that haunts Tee is so unnatural compared to the rest of the novel, its unnaturalness calls attention to the very real gaps in his memory about his birth mother and by extension, the gaps that hinder him from contextualizing his own life narrative. In this sense, the ghost represents the very real lack of information that Tee must deal with; therefore, even if the ghost is impossible, it is still very real as to how it relates to Tee’s perception of his identity.
Metaphorically, the unnatural ghost serves as a signpost to notify readers that they must figure out how to interpret such a departure from an otherwise realistic autofictional narrative. In this case, the ghost points out the gap of memory about his life that hinders Tee from successfully forming a sturdy identity. Additionally, according to an interview with Salesses, he views ghosts as a “possibility” (Hagerty). So we can also interpret the ghost as a representation of a possible world in which he might have had the opportunity to meet his birth mother or perhaps ask her the questions he can only ask his father since she is dead (Hagerty). The idea that a ghost might represent a possibility speaks directly to Lifton’s Ghost Kingdom theory where she explains that “all of these ghosts are members of the extended adoptive family, which includes the birth family” and each is a person or relationship that could have been (Lifton, Journey 11). This is also the perfect example of possible worlds theory in narrative because the creation of these counterfactuals demonstrate the cognition of a person who is attempting to cope with a severe lack of information about themselves.
As I have pointed out in this chapter, Salesses’ novel demonstrates the cognitive coping mechanisms of a fictional character in an internal way with Tee’s container, an external way with Tee’s typewritten birth story, and further emphasizes Tee’s gaps in his life story with the inclusion of a ghost that, in comparison to the rest of the novel, is completely unnatural and therefore a signpost for readers to interpret the metaphorical meaning. Although the author does not reference Lifton’s Ghost Kingdom anywhere, both Tee’s container and his typewritten story can be interpreted as internal and external versions of a Ghost Kingdom. The many layers of reality and impossibility in this novel work together to demonstrate that even if something is made up to fill a waking gap, it can still be very real to the person (or character!) who has composed such a thing.