Gothic Hauntology: Everyday Hauntings and Epistemological Desire 3031411110, 9783031411113

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PALGRAVE GOTHIC

Gothic Hauntology Everyday Hauntings and Epistemological Desire Joakim Wrethed

Luke Roberts

Palgrave Gothic

Series Editor

Clive Bloom Middlesex University London, UK

Dating back to the eighteenth century, the term ‘gothic’ began as a designation for an artistic movement when British antiquarians became dissatisfied with the taste for all things Italianate. By the twentieth century, the Gothic was a worldwide phenomenon influencing global cinema and the emergent film industries of Japan and Korea. Gothic influences are evident throughout contemporary culture: in detective fiction, television programmes, Cosplay events, fashion catwalks, music styles, musical theatre, ghostly tourism and video games, as well as being constantly reinvented online. It is no longer an antiquarian pursuit but the longest lasting influence in popular culture, reworked and re-experienced by each new generation. This series offers readers the very best in new international research and scholarship on the historical development, cultural meaning and diversity of gothic culture. While covering Gothic origins dating back to the eighteenth century, the Palgrave Gothic series also drives exciting new discussions on dystopian, urban and Anthropocene gothic sensibilities emerging in the twenty-first century. The Gothic shows no sign of obsolescence.

Joakim Wrethed

Gothic Hauntology Everyday Hauntings and Epistemological Desire

Joakim Wrethed English Department Stockholm University Stockholm, Sweden

ISSN 2634-6214     ISSN 2634-6222 (electronic) Palgrave Gothic ISBN 978-3-031-41110-6    ISBN 978-3-031-41111-3 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-41111-3 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland Paper in this product is recyclable.

Book Blurb

Gothic Hauntology: Everyday Hauntings and Epistemological Desire The study pursues the phenomenon of hauntology within the gothic genre. Hauntings in various forms constitute one of the defining features of the gothic category of fiction from the very Walpolian beginning. Here, hauntology is mainly defined in accordance with Derrida’s central concepts of limitrophy, temporality and the presence of the past in the present. Hauntology is sought on a primordial level of experience in the characters of the narratives. Therefore, hauntology is generally seen as an inevitable affective and experiential phenomenon that highlights a fundamental human predicament. Fiction is an eminent tool for scrutinising such phenomena, which the selection of heterogenous works here emphatically demonstrates. The investigation moves from contemporary works by Atwood, Munro and Ajvide Lindqvist back to older canonised gothic fiction by Polidori, Poe, James and Lovecraft. Hauntology is shown to be a central force in these works in similar but also slightly different ways. By utilising the phenomenological concept of epistemological desire, which is set apart from the desire of needs, the analysis seeks to explicate the human striving for knowledge as a Sisyphus project and as an impossible desire for desire itself. By zooming in on details of experience, parts of the study move within the everyday spheres of the gothic and hauntology. In that way, the gothic and hauntology merge as a realistic force in any life lived

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and the paradox of absolute indeterminacy seems to constitute the only reasonable way of understanding life as an experiential movement. The gothic has always filled the function of reminding us of our vulnerability and to beware of rational and scientific hubris. This study confirms that this is also the case in contemporary fiction.

Contents

1 Introduction:  “Avaunt! And Quit My Sight! Let the Earth Hide Thee!”  1 2 “Penelope  Was Not a Phantom”: Everyday Hauntology in Alice Munro and Margaret Atwood 27 3 “His  Eye Spoke Less than His Lip”: Hauntology, Vampires and the Trace of the Animal in John Polidori’s The Vampyre, John Ajvide Lindqvist’s Let the Right One In, Octavia E. Butler’s Fledgling and Guillermo del Toro’s Cronos 45 4 “Nothing  Is but What Is Not”: Spectral Temporality and Hauntology in Selected Works by Edgar Allan Poe 67 5 “The  Gray Pool and Its Blank, Haunted Edge”: The Hauntology of Indeterminacy in Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw 89 6 “Light  Is Dark and Dark Is Light”: H. P. Lovecraft and Hauntology as Epistemological Desire105

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7 “What  She Had Seen Was Final”: Everyday Hauntology, the Threat of Male Violence and the Power of Fiction in Alice Munro’s “Free Radicals”, “Runaway” and “Passion”127 8 Concluding  Remarks: “I Can Feel My Lost Child Surfacing Within Me”151 Bibliography Gothic Hauntology157 Index163

About the Author

Joakim Wrethed  has hitherto mainly worked in Irish Studies—especially on John Banville—but he also explores the contemporary novel in English more generally without any primary emphasis on national boundaries. Phenomenology, postmodernism, aesthetics, gothic literature and theology are overarching topics of his scholarly work. Some of the more recent publications have been on the postmodern gothic, the gothic origins of Charles Maturin, aesthetics, the anthropocene and the posthuman zeitgeist. Forthcoming with Routledge 2023 is a chapter in Literature and Art: “Conceptual and Performative Art in Tom McCarthy, Michel Houellebecq and Don DeLillo”. Wrethed has worked on hauntology and the gothic since 2021.

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction: “Avaunt! And Quit My Sight! Let the Earth Hide Thee!”

Haunt a. Of diseases (obsolete), memories, cares, feelings, thoughts: To visit frequently or habitually; to come up or present themselves as recurrent influences or impressions, esp. as causes of distraction or trouble; to pursue, molest. b. Of imaginary or spiritual beings, ghosts, etc.: To visit frequently and habitually with manifestations of their influence and presence, usually of a molesting kind. to be haunted: to be subject to the visits and molestation of disembodied spirits. —(OED, s.v. “haunt”)

Hauntology could be said to constitute the bedrock foundation of the whole category of the gothic, even though ‘bedrock’ is perhaps a bad word choice when speaking of ghosts and such an ephemeral concept. ‘Gothic hauntology’ actually sounds like a tautology. This is so mainly because of the massive presence of the past as a general ontological feature and pervasive narratological function within this particular genre of literature. Speaking with literary history in mind, the gothic was from the beginning constructed out of a specific literary representation of an, at least partly, imagined or re-imagined historical era.1 Speaking more

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 J. Wrethed, Gothic Hauntology, Palgrave Gothic, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-41111-3_1

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generally about the function of the past, in cases when it is not felt to be always present, it may instead appear as a similar phenomenon in its perpetual possible return—and sometimes actual return—in various types of narratological arrangements. For instance, something of the past or perhaps even a particular character—which a protagonist thought was forever left behind in her or his life—suddenly reappears and brings all of that troubled history back. Such a re-emergence of the past potentially calls for different theoretical frameworks, which a quick glance at literary history would swiftly confirm. Examples may be Schelling, Freud, Bloom, Lacan, Kristeva, Fisher and Derrida, just to mention a few labels of such possible conceptual configurations, which are intellectual hauntings of the haunting, so to speak. A very general experiential principle underpinning the particular obsession with the past can be elucidated by Søren Kirkegaard’s pertinent observation that we are forced to live our lives forwards, but apparently—because of some experiential or cognitive law—we are compelled to understand them backwards.2 This means that the past has to be continuously processed, interpreted and re-interpreted, obviously both on an individual and on a cultural or collective historical level. There are two paths in every life and in every community, one leading forward and the other leading backwards. We seem to always be travelling on both trails simultaneously. Interestingly, this phenomenon also constitutes the central structure of a great deal of crime fiction, which in many ways is a close relative of the gothic genre.3 Typically, crime fiction displays the journey from the corpse to the crime on the backwards path and the forward-­ moving investigation in the other direction, as it were. Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto—the work seen by many as the first one in the early wave of gothic narratives—unquestionably contains the prominent characteristic of a powerful past.4 An unjust or somehow immoral event or action in history haunts the characters of the narrative in the present. We could certainly go further back in literary history to look for similar examples, but it is perhaps more fruitful for this study to move forwards in time. Along those lines of thinking, Merlin Coverley makes a similar observation about the ubiquity of the past and hauntology as a conspicuous part of our contemporary zeitgeist: Hauntology, it would seem, has expanded its remit to bring everything it touches within its ghostly embrace: the individual psyche, haunted by past trauma; the family, governed by the repressive cycle of patriarchy; religion, built upon the repetition and re-enactment of ritual; society, the patriarchal

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relationship writ large; and history itself, endlessly revisited by the ghosts of all its pasts. Just as once the world was seen as uncanny, so now it appears hauntological.5

However, generally speaking, a too vastly “expanded […] remit” of the concept may become next to useless for readers and scholars alike. If it applies to the majority, or perhaps even all, gothic narratives, how can it possess any analytic and conceptual value? Therefore, the purpose of this introduction is to provide an overview of possible variations of hauntology and closely related phenomena, while moving steadily towards a more strictly conceived understanding of Jacques Derrida’s notion of hauntology, as presented in his work Specters of Marx.6 In addition, another consideration that has to be dealt with in this introduction is that if we expand the notion of the gothic, it seems that the number of narratives becomes almost endless, and sooner or later we will end up so far from a genre definition that the term ‘gothic’ dissolves into meaninglessness. However, it has been argued that the gothic genre was very broad already from the outset. In Contesting the Gothic, James Watt argues that the whole idea of the gothic as a generically structured category is by and large a modern construction. Though the genre of the Gothic romance clearly owes its name to the subtitle of The Castle of Otranto’s second edition, ‘A Gothic Story’, the elevation of Walpole’s work to the status of an origin has served to grant an illusory stability to a body of fiction which is distinctly heterogeneous. Face-­ value readings of the preface to Otranto’s second edition have encouraged the idea that Walpole issued a manifesto for a new literary genre, the emergence of which was coincident with a revival of imagination in an era that privileged rationality. As I will argue, however, any categorization of the Gothic as a continuous tradition, with a generic significance, is unable to do justice to the diversity of the romances which are now accommodated under the ‘Gothic’ label, and liable to overlook the often antagonistic relations that existed between different works or writers.7

The heterogeneity that unfolds in the works pursued in this study is then constituting more of a return to an ‘original’ heterogeneity rather than showcasing an increasing deviance from an original prototype. In investigating various aspects of the hauntological, however, it will inevitably mean that some gothic tropes are more involved than others. The hauntological phenomenon undeniably also verges on other huge fields within

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the humanities, which have been in focus recently and are still vibrant, such as for instance memory studies and trauma theory.8 The purpose of the investigations below is mainly to outline how the diversity of hauntological phenomena may appear in works that are more or less falling within the category of gothic fiction. The somewhat elastic conceptualisation of hauntology is utilised more as an asset than a shortcoming.9 The selection of works is deliberately done in order to cover a larger historical period with few representative works, partly with the aim to display the versatility of the concept that obviously goes hand in hand with the flexibility of the gothic. Sometimes the analyses may perhaps say more about hauntology than about the works themselves, but that is also part of the intention with the overall setup of the investigation. As can be seen above—in the epigraphic display of two major dictionary definitions of the verb ‘haunt’, as the root in ‘hauntology’—the definitions taken together clearly make up an invitation to limitrophic (border-­ transgressing) dynamics. The more concrete side of the hauntological Janus face has got to do with ‘real’ phenomena, such as memories or diseases, while the other side deals with phenomena that more pertain to fiction and imagination, “disembodied spirits”. The similarities in the ways of phenomenalisation give rise to slidings and glidings on an ontological plane, which carries with it hauntological effects. A chimera is both a natural science phenomenon and a figure of imagination. The questions quickly pile up. Is it worse or better to be haunted by nightmares than by diseases? Is it better or worse to be haunted by a stalker or by traumatic experiences? When does a feeling correspond to a real object in the world of objects and when is a feeling just true to itself as an appearance, a certain mood, a plague of unpleasant affective visitations?10 I shall outline a few general hauntological aspects below and then gradually move towards more subtle distinctions and more philosophically elaborate thinking. At the end of these introductory pages, I will outline the different chapters, in order to give the reader a foreshadowing of what is to be expected. The general phenomena are suitable as backdrops to many of the narratives dealt with. Most often, hauntology is so taken for granted that the reader perhaps does not even notice exactly how these forces are there and how they operate.

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Loss The sense of loss can be seen as a very broad understanding of one type of haunting. Obviously, this type could refer to either a very specific one, in terms of the loss of a person, or of a more general version that verges on existential, religious or mythical dimensions. Even more variation is possible, since these two types of concrete and more abstract levels may actually operate in parallel. To illustrate what this may look like, we can turn to the phenomenon of the missing person that definitely traverses the genres of crime fiction, horror fiction and the gothic. For instance in Margaret Atwood’s novel Surfacing (1972), the protagonist’s father has gone missing in the wilderness, somewhere in the vicinity of the family summerhouse.11 When the protagonist goes to the house together with her friends, she has the semi-hidden agenda of wanting to search for the father’s body and to find the answer to what might have happened to him. This whole order of things metamorphoses into a quest for the father in a broader sense and also a search for the protagonist’s own lost self that haunts her and the whole narrative. This sense of loss may even overlap with a vaster Christian experience of the loss of innocence, the theologically central loss of paradise, which governs several different structures of feeling within literature more generally (nostalgia, retromania, pastiche, etc.). In addition, we have the whole kit and caboodle of the psychoanalytic framework, probably foremost represented by the ‘lack’ as a founding principle in the philosophy of Jacques Lacan and in his legions of psychoanalytic disciples. Accompanying the sense of loss is evidently a general feeling of unknowing. This affective mood can appear on the small scale as well as the larger scale. For instance, the unnamed protagonist in Surfacing truly does not know what has befallen her father. She knows somewhere deep inside what has happened to her own self earlier in her life, but these difficult experiences have been blocked and are caught in a vortex of affective returns. Therefore, the protagonist is haunted in two ways, but these tend to merge in her overall and arduous journey towards a higher level of awareness. Focusing more strictly on the gothic genre, we may state that quite often the unknowing has an even vaster superstructure, that is, an ignorance that will never really be converted into knowing. To be sure, this feature indicates the ultimate gothic rebellion against any overly rational outlook on the world, which for instance could be derived from Enlightenment ideals or the epistemological convictions and truisms founding the natural sciences. It shall be a theme below how some

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modern gothic variations of this topic are clad in more everyday and perhaps psychologically realistic robes, as we will see for instance in Atwood’s and Munro’s fiction. But first, a few more related hauntological phenomena, before we zoom in on a stricter definition of hauntology derived mainly from Derrida.

Guilt The phenomenon of guilt is a common constituent of the gothic genre. For instance, a large number of Poe’s short stories may be situated somewhere within the boundary areas between horror, crime and the gothic. These narratives are not seldomly draped in the cold sweat of guilt. Illustrative examples are Poe’s classic short stories “The Tell-Tale Heart” and “The Black Cat”. The protagonists’ sense of guilt in these pieces is so powerful that it conjures the overtones of there being something supernatural at work. However, the narratives could also clearly be read as some form of psychological realism, if the reader prefers that kind of perspective. The ghostly dimensions of such a past that refuses to be laid to rest are noticeable. As is well known from earlier phases of history, murder victims were sometimes nailed to the ground in order to prevent them from walking again (one example is Bockstensmannen, The Bocksten Man—a murder victim from 1340–1370 that was found well preserved in a bog in 1936—who had three wooden poles pierced through his body, one of them through his heart, which was of course the stake made of oak, the best wood).12 This practice is also what gives the background to much of the impaling paraphernalia in vampire narratives. The phenomenological or anthropological aspect of the phenomenon is obviously to ritualise and thereby make manifest the strong urge to concretely harness, and potentially and hopefully even eliminate the inevitable feeling of guilt (one almost hears the sinister snicker of a mocking gothic figure at the thought of succeeding with such an undertaking). The belief in the agency and power of the undead can also be seen in Macbeth that provides us with an early gothic example through the ghost of Banquo: “Avaunt! and quit my sight! let the earth hide thee! / Thy bones are marrowless, thy blood is cold; / Thou hast no speculation in those eyes, / Which thou dost glare with”.13 The ghost is always more powerful than the ‘real thing’. As becomes evident, the sense of guilt may have very concrete and commonsensically valid reasons in the cases of murder, which is something that invites causal thinking. However, guilt can also be instilled in

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individuals through cultural practice. Branches of Christianity have guilt as a central force that is emphasised to varying degree. The towering shadow of original sin seemingly produces more sin. The gothic sensitivity to such affective patterns is discernible in for instance Charles Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer. The monastery that one of the narrators was locked into tries so hard to avoid sinning that the institution itself becomes a dark torture chamber and prison of the soul, clearly light-years (or dark-years actually) away from praising the God of light, redemption and love. To be haunted by guilt may then become a burden that characters in various ways try to cast off. For instance, in Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart”, the protagonist’s crime is revealed by the overwhelming power of his own guilt. He becomes so paranoid that his imagined aural perception—indicating that the visiting policemen really know the truth about his crime—becomes so intense that it reifies, seemingly completely as an autonomous affective force. The underlying power is of course semi-conscious guilt overcoming the self-confident braggart: “[A]nything was better than this agony! Anything was more tolerable than this derision!”14

The Uncanny Coverley suggests that hauntology has replaced the uncanny as the dominant structure of feeling. Still, many aspects of haunting seem to overlap with the uncanny. We shall just briefly consider the connection of hauntology and the uncanny. If we focus as much as possible on Freud’s original essay “The Uncanny” (1919), we can say that the conceptual overlap with hauntology is significant. In the essay, Freud—seemingly suddenly overcome with some form of intellectual desperation or frenzy—presents a plethora of dictionary definitions in the very beginning of the essay. Thus, Freud tries to pin down the phenomenon semantically, which contributes pointedly to the uncanniness of the essay itself that many scholars have commented on.15 The pinning down of the conceptual spectre proves to be very difficult—a not very surprising realisation if we would ask Derrida—but there is a key to hauntology in one of Freud’s attempts at defining the concept more clearly: To many people the acme of the uncanny is represented by anything to do with death, dead bodies, revenants, spirits and ghosts. Indeed, we have heard that in some modern languages the German phrase ein unheimliches Haus [‘an uncanny house’] can be rendered only by the periphrasis ‘a

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haunted house’. We might in fact have begun our investigation with this example of the uncanny—perhaps the most potent—but we did not do so because here the uncanny is too much mixed up with the gruesome and partly overlaid by it.16

Even though the similarity between the concepts ‘uncanny’ and ‘haunting’ is that they share the uncertainty of the validity of boundaries and borders, there is also a central difference between them. For instance, Freud mainly pursues temporality in terms of the return. The ‘time is out of joint’ aspect does not seem to be as central as it is in Derrida’s definition of hauntology, which will be outlined below. Moreover, Freud explicitly contends that the more clear-cut ghostly figures that we find in literature are not necessarily uncanny per se: “The souls in Dante’s Inferno or the ghostly apparitions in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Macbeth or Julius Caesar may be dark and terrifying, but at bottom they are no more uncanny than, say, the serene world of Homer’s gods”.17 Thus, this state of affairs accentuates that the hauntological dimension that we will gradually hone in on has got to do more with temporality and limitrophy, but that does not mean that phenomena within this hauntology cannot be uncanny. In fact, a great deal of the gothic aspects in everyday gothic or domestic gothic can be seen as uncanny, especially in the way that they highlight borderline indeterminacies (limitrophic phenomena). What can be said as a more clear-cut distinction in relation to Freud is that a consequence of the Derridean hauntology is that also the future is involved, especially in Mark Fisher’s emphasis on the mourning of lost futures. Having a special focus on Victorian hauntings, Julian Wolfreys also draws attention to the close connection between the uncanny and hauntology, especially in the stock item of the haunted house, which of course then needs to thematise domestic spaces and architectural phenomena. The act of haunting is effective because it displaces us in those places we feel most secure, most notably in our homes, in the domestic scene. Indeed, haunting is nothing other than the destabilization of the domestic scene, as that place where we feel most at home with ourselves […] The haunted house is a stock structural and narrative figure, whether one thinks of Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw, Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, or Stephen King’s (and Stanley Kubrick’s) The Shining, to take some obvious examples. As Jacques Derrida puts it […] ‘haunting implies places, a habitation, and always a haunted house’. Indeed, […] the Freudian uncanny relies on the literal meaning and the slippage of, and within, the German unheim-

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lich, meaning literally ‘unhomely’. For Freud that which is unhomely emerges in the homely. Haunting cannot take place without the possibility of its internal eruption and interruption within and as a condition of a familiar, everyday place and space.18

This argument shows the overlapping of the concepts in this study, but it also reveals the parts that do not overlap. The hauntology pursued here will sometimes make itself manifest in the typical milieus referred to above, but at other times there will be less or no emphasis on houses and homes. Instead, the focus may shift to temporality and life choices, roads taken and roads not taken haunting the characters, displaying hauntology as a general force that is very hard, if not impossible, to avoid. Strictly speaking, Freudian—and in extension other psychoanalytic—versions of the uncanny and hauntology are understandably very much concerned with how the past determines the life of a subject in the present. Such structures will also be part of what follows below, but there will in addition be other aspects of hauntology that are analysed. In the broadest possible terms, the focus will be on limitrophic phenomena that disturb any attempt at mapping out some kind of stable and intelligible ontology. Another important connection between hauntology and the uncanny introduces the next section below. It is of course impossible to avoid the deconstructive aspects of hauntology, since after all, it is a Derridean concept, which really does not invent gothic hauntology, but it concentrates the attention to how literary texts—or perhaps even all texts—seem to work in relation to semantic ghosts and temporality as related to structures or fluxes of meaning. Nicholas Royle neatly sums this up: Another name for uncanny overflow might be deconstruction. Deconstruction makes the most apparently familiar texts strange, it renders the most apparently unequivocal and self-assured statements uncertain. With a persistence or consistency that can itself seem uncanny, it shows how difference operates at the heart of identity, how the strange and even unthinkable is a necessary condition of what is conventional, familiar and taken-for-granted. Deconstruction involves explorations of the surprising, indeed incalculable effects of all kinds of virus and parasite, foreign body, supplement, borders and margins, spectrality and haunting.19

All of these aspects will appear in various ways in the actual readings and analyses that follow in the chapters of this study.

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Derridean Hauntology In order to narrow down the scope of the vast domain of hauntology, we shall take the backwards path to Derrida’s original ideas in Specters of Marx. As many scholars have remarked, the actual concept does not seem to be very prominent in Derrida’s work. He only explicitly uses the term three times. However, it subsequently proved to be very prolific in the academic sphere, and it has been widely spread and used also within gothic studies during the late twentieth and the early part of the twenty-first century, and in addition, it is still prominent within literary and cultural studies. It must first of all be made clear that Derrida conceptualises in very close contact with temporality. The polemical starting point is Francis Fukuyama’s notorious 1989 article “The End of History” that was expanded into a book in 1992.20 Fukuyama’s basic contention is that with the collapse of the Eastern bloc of the Cold War, communism was ended or dead, leaving space only for Western liberal capitalism. Expressed in a simplified and concise form, Derrida’s take is that something that had not fully arrived—and was always already haunting Europe—could not die. According to Derrida, this is a general principle of spectrality. If there is something like spectrality, there are reasons to doubt [the] reassuring order of presents and, especially, the border between the present, the actual or present reality of the present, and everything that can be opposed to it: absence, non-presence, non-effectivity, inactuality, virtuality, or even the simulacrum in general, and so forth. There is first of all the doubtful contemporaneity of the present to itself. Before knowing whether one can differentiate between the specter of the past and the specter of the future, of the past present and the future present, one must ask oneself whether the spectrality effect does not consist in undoing this opposition, or even this dialectic, between actual, effective presence and its other.21

There are two major consequences of such a re-conceptualisation of ‘ontology’. One cannot kill a ghost and attempts to do so rather conjure than eliminate. The second starting point that Derrida establishes is Marx’s statement in Das Kapital that communism is a ghost that already haunts Europe and that Derrida links to Shakespeare’s Hamlet with its pertinent exclamation “The time is out of ioynt […]” (Act I, sc. v). This provides an inlet to thinking about time that cannot eradicate spectrality. Presence is not stable in the first place; therefore, the spectre cannot be nailed down, it cannot die. That is the essence of spectrality and hauntology, if we

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construe the concept in the way we are compelled to see it as more strictly derived from Derrida. As the French philosopher states: “Let us call it a hauntology”.22 If we move this conceptualisation of hauntology over into the sphere of narratology, there will be other slightly different outcomes that have relevance for the readings to come.23 As is clear, narratological alchemy implies that time is always already plastic in the hands of the creative agent. The form of the short story very much highlights this temporal plasticity, since the ‘space-time’ of narration is rather limited. Features such as in medias res, flashbacks and prolepses are frequent, presumably in order to convey as much as possible of an experiential complexity in a smaller spatio-temporal sphere. These techniques have arguably been used to perfection for instance in Munro and Atwood. In addition, there is the partly thematised aspect of the forkings of life paths, of roads taken always implying roads not taken. In terms of haunting, such an aspect of narrativity will always be of relevance, since the lost life will always linger and sometimes it will haunt. Especially in Munro’s fiction, we shall encounter narrative patterns that mirror life patterns, and there will always be the same sense of absolute chance and absolute fatality, almost as if these opposites were the same thing. To sum up the major foci in the coming analyses, we see that temporality, limitrophy and the power of the past, or the presence of the past in the present, will be prominent features in the analyses below.

Recent Hauntology Studies Ever since the 1990s and the publication of Derrida’s Specters of Marx, hauntology has haunted literary studies, and various aspects of ghosts within prose fiction have been scrutinised on different ontological levels. However, it is also useful to have a look at some more recent studies of hauntology in order to situate the coming chapters theoretically. Mark Fisher had an almost uncanny ability to diagnose the contemporary ideological situation. In Ghosts of My Life, he pursues a hauntology that he claims has saturated our time to such an extent that we hardly discern the phenomenon any longer. Since Fisher mainly traces hauntology in popular fiction, he probably has the ability to capture its most recent shape and the speed with which it moves, or perhaps more accurately, the speed with which it loses speed and almost gets stuck in a frenzy of recycling, posing as perpetual novelty.

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It is the contention of this book that 21st-century culture is marked by the same anachronism and inertia which afflicted Sapphire and Steel in their final adventure. But this stasis has been buried, interred behind a superficial frenzy of ‘newness’ of perpetual movement. The ‘jumbling up of time’, the montaging of earlier eras, has ceased to be worthy of comment; it is now so prevalent that [it] is no longer even noticed.24

Sapphire and Steel, the TV-series referred to, contained agents that basically were supposed to repair fissures in time. Anachronism would be a prominent feature. As compared to the hauntology pursued in the following chapters, anachronism will not be particularly much in focus, but through the transcendence of time and the appearances of forces that do not seem to be stuck in time in the way a human life is, there will appear temporal clashes that have the flavour of anachronism. This is especially the case when it comes to the category of vampires. However, generally speaking, hauntology encapsulates the free-moving temporality of affectivity. In terms of how it feels, or would feel, to be haunted, is most certainly not different in the nineteenth century or the twentieth century, and in terms of more modern ‘realistic’ hauntology, it is just the props and the paraphernalia that are different. It does not matter really if hauntology is seen through a phenomenological or psychoanalytical lens. These forces haunt traditional rationality itself, which is presumably why they are such prominent features in the gothic genre. To understand Fisher’s idea of hauntology, one must first grasp what he means by capitalist realism. Basically, this means that capitalism has now become so pervasive that it is not even possible to imagine an alternative. However, what Fisher emphasises in addition is the obstinacy of the ghost itself, no matter what form it takes. Haunting, then, can be construed as a failed mourning. It is about refusing to give up the ghost or—and this can sometimes amount to the same thing—the refusal of the ghost to give up on us. The spectre will not allow us to settle into/for the mediocre satisfactions one can glean in a world governed by capitalist realism.25

Fisher is obviously analysing hauntology in larger movements of cultural evolution, but the statement about the ghost not being able to leave us alone seems to have almost universal validity within the world of prose fiction.26 The narratives analysed below are from a time span of at least 200

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years. Haunting takes different ‘outer’ forms, but the temporal structures and the core affectivity remain roughly the same. As mentioned above, Merlin Coverley takes a broad grip on hauntology and displays both the history of the concept and its current currency. It is when he explicates Derrida’s hauntology that his thinking becomes most relevant for this study. Coverley emphasises temporality but also its clear Derridean link to limitrophy and deconstructive thinking and interpretative methodology more generally. In the case of hauntology, nothing is more illustrative of the border between being and non-being, than that which could be said to be characteristic of both: the ghost. Simultaneously present yet absent, dead yet living, corporeal yet intangible, in time yet timeless, the figure of the ghost fits perfectly within Derrida’s deconstructive philosophy, its uncanny presence seemingly undermining the nature of every concept it comes into contact with.27

Not only the concept of hauntology is haunted, but all concepts are haunted by the inexactitude of available tools of definition, of durable stakes for pinning down. Such a construal anticipates several methodological choices that will persist through the readings that follow. Limitrophy is used to scrutinise seemingly stable ontological features, and also the Derridean logic of ‘both-and’ is implemented to perpetually challenge the Aristotelian syllogisms of ‘either-or’. However, the effects of the hauntology pursued do not end up as some form of deconstructive soup of ‘anything-­goes’. The strict understanding of ‘both-and’ includes the existence of full stops, final lines, fatality and the absolute. As will be argued below, literature itself, and especially the gothic genre, seems to be almost incapable of pure atheism (c.f. for instance Lovecraft’s paradoxical literary project). The ghosts make manifest a dimension that is impossible to fully pin down, bog-men or bog-women that keep returning in the least expected shape, and this means that even if it is not possible to pin God’s existence down, it is equally impossible to pin down his non-existence. If atheism would mean a complete abolition of the spiritual, hauntology does not in any way support such a standpoint. Katy Shaw emphasises hauntological phenomena that seem to have a strong contemporary impact, since she focuses on twenty-first-century English writings. However, she stresses the temporal dynamics that are important for the present study as well.

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Specters disturb the present with the possibility of alternative pasts and futures. In doing so they also defy time and space, and challenge any fixity of the temporal. This spectral effect is predicated upon the return—the act of coming back—that questions the temporal boundaries of that which has happened, and that which is yet to come […] The paradox of the specter is then perhaps best understood in terms of time, of a repetitious compulsion to return. The distortion of linear time that is required for manifestation means that ‘there may be no proper time’ for specters; they instead function to draw attention to the limitations of time, and the ever-present role of the past in both the structure of haunting and the future of society.28

The label of the ghost may even be slightly misguiding, since we immediately are led to think in the direction of the disembodied. But as indicated above, taking Derrida’s ‘both-and’ seriously, and the limitrophy that comes with that, there will be hauntological forces that are ‘real’, whichever way we attempt to approach it. A pandemic has some kind of corporeal reality on a microscopic level, but obviously that part becomes almost irrelevant from an experiential perspective. The affectivity of fear works in the same way, whether material reality is involved or not. Commonsensically, we believe that the past is fixed, even though it may be hard to access, memory is unreliable, facts may be missing, there are problems related to ‘subjective’ and ‘objective’ realities etc. However, as suggested by several thinkers on hauntology, it may even be the case that the future is fixed. The future is so strongly held in the grip of the past that even though we generally perceive it as open—a sphere of possibilities—at least fiction plays with the idea that there is some fatal force at work. Conceivably, what is indicated is just that human experience is as vast as the universe, and any attempt at harnessing it, will only give birth to new enigmas and other sets of spectres. We shall return to these aspects in a brief explication of epistemological desire below. First, we need to have a look at another rather recent contribution to the field of hauntology studies. Sadeq Rahimi’s The Hauntology of Everyday Life is very important for several of the chapters to come. Rahimi is strongly anchored in the psychoanalytic tradition, which of course is so immense and influential that it cannot be ignored in the present investigation either. But since so much is done via Freud, Lacan, Kristeva, Zizek and Abraham and Torok etc.—within the gothic as well as within hauntology studies—some of this theory will be pushed towards a phenomenology of the hauntological, so that occasionally a focus on the temporal dynamics of hauntology will hold some of the explanatory tendencies of

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psychoanalysis at bay. What is especially noteworthy for this study, in Rahimi’s argument, is that he emphasises that hauntology is a force in our human everyday lives. Fiction is just an adequate tool when one wishes to scrutinise its workings, since it can easily include levels of corporeality as well as phantasms within its form of expression. The act of reading connects to this possible world, which in various mysterious ways overlaps with our own world. What The Hauntology of Everyday Life is meant to put forward is that the very space of everyday life is so filled with ghosts that nobody can avoid them—in fact, that the very experience of everyday life is built around a process that we can call hauntogenic, and whose major by-product is a steady stream of ghosts.29

This is basically what we witness, for instance, when we engage with Munro’s fiction. Overall, the ghosts appear in many different forms, but they continuously disturb the present, even to the extent that they seem to also determine the future. In the proper shape-shifting nature of ghosts, they appear in new-fangled forms and with different labels, but what is beyond any doubt is that they continue to appear and affect human lives in various ways.

Outline of the Chapters Chapter 2 consists of a close analysis of Munro’s short stories “Chance”, “Soon” and “Silence”, as well as of Atwood’s “Death by Landscape” and her novel Surfacing. The overall focus is on everyday hauntology, which of course is strongly connected to the everyday gothic. The most distinguishing features are female characters and protagonists that move close to, or in, the wilderness. Hauntology makes itself known as loss of possible futures or as uncanny absences of persons and events. The truly disturbing parameter in these stories is the ways in which it seems to be impossible to avoid haunting. For instance, if that avoidance is actually performed, it will give birth to other ghosts anyway, which is a feature that accentuates the sometimes-claustrophobic setting of the domestic spheres. Reading these narratives is especially angst-provoking when seemingly miniscule events give rise to life-embracing hauntings. Another notable feature related to that type of haunting is the dynamics of scales. When Lovecraft, for instance, establishes a cosmic monster, this must be understood as a

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large-­scale phenomenon, but when Munro stages a broken-off conversation, it would be reasonable in comparison to pin this down as pertaining to the category of small scales. However, from the level of experiential affectivity (immanence), there is really no significant difference in terms of the power of hauntology. As pieces of literature, these are only different forms for something that is more or less affectively identical. This oscillation between what seems to be large scale and small scale, macro and micro, is what underpins hauntology throughout this study. In Atwood, the trope of the missing person is magnified to intricacies on the root-level of life. Here too, we witness the dimensions of unknowing and the power of absences that control lives in ways we would perhaps rather not admit. The gothic impact consists of a continuous haunting and taunting of the pervasive illusion that we fully control our lives. When Rahimi talks about “[t]he generativity of trauma”, this may be seen as an all-encompassing feature that could just as well be labelled hauntology.30 As suggested in Atwood’s short story, the haunting of the vast absence in that narrative also embraces art, in this case pictorial art. When the protagonist looks at her oil paintings, depicting the wilderness, she actually sees, or perhaps more accurately, she feels the absence of her childhood friend: “She looks at the paintings, she looks into them. Every one of them is a picture of Lucy”.31 In this chapter we look at details in the everyday gothic that indicate the dynamics of hauntology. In Chap. 3, the study moves into more established and well-known gothic areas, namely foremost that of the vampire. Significantly, the vampire is the haunted and the haunting. This paradoxical configuration makes it a special and highly attractive gothic figure. It seems to exist solely to transgress boundaries, since it in itself contains a transgression and disturbance of the dichotomy man–animal. As stated by Benny LeMaster: “Few literary figures possess the polymorphic resilience of the vampire”.32 Following further on Derrida’s hauntology and animal philosophy, we notice the trace of animality. In the act of pronouncing ‘man’ and in utilising the hegemonic privilege of naming the animals, we have set the stage for vampirism. The trace of animality is that ancient echo of bestiality that haunts the human. Extending Derrida’s proclivity for portmanteaus, we can say that the vampire takes the shape of the manimal. In order to study the temporal aspects of the hauntology at work within the vampire genre, we have a closer look at four more or less canonised vampire narratives. John Polidori’s The Vampyre functions as the historical point of resonance for the contemporary works by Ajvide Lindqvist, Butler

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and del Toro. What will be of central importance is the phenomenon that Derrida calls limitrophy. According to Derrida, this is about “what sprouts or grows at the limit, around the limit, by maintaining the limit, but also what feeds the limit, generates it, and complicates it”.33 Such limitrophy will manifest itself differently in the works but also in thematically similar ways. Hauntology as temporality within and around the figure of the vampire will be pursued in these works. Another aspect clearly foregrounded here, is the general gothic disregard of ‘high and low’ art distinctions. Maybe it is actually in the field of cultural studies that the vampire fully spreads its wings. But this notion does not in any way come into conflict with the hauntological pursuit and its potential philosophical complexity. This is partly so because the vampiric is a very rich and thought-provoking gothic source of inspiration, and it contributes plenty of ideas to the topic of hauntology. In Polidori, the mute animalism presents itself as a force from a past without any determinable arche ̄, that is, any clear source-point. Instead of being infected by a vampire bite, Aubrey is infected by the spell of the vampire as the beckoning of the repressed animal as such. In Let the Right One In, vampiric transgressions of the limit can be seen as a liberating force in relation to the theme of bullying. In terms of hauntology, the curse of the past presents itself as an inescapable part of any present. Fledgling treats cultural tradition as a form of haunting, both in its more positive aspects in terms of family life, customs, the persistence of friendship and fellow-feeling and its darker aspects as the historical power of racist structures. Finally in Cronos, the guardian angels contain the vampirism and animality that one would have thought was buried in the past. These angels are supposed to guard the way back to Edenic innocence, but instead they carry the animalistic inside them, which incarnates the very transgression of a limit. The strength of the gothic comes to the fore here, since it treats hauntology as frightening, but in the midst of that fear and horror, it also possibly functions as a cathartic force. Chapter 4 moves into the early developments of the gothic in a selection of works by Edgar Allan Poe, and thereby it deals with some traditional hauntological traits as for instance guilt and trauma. There are two juxtaposable and yet intimately interrelated aspects of the Poesque hauntology. One dimension is commonsensical and rather easily accessible, while the other is more subtle. The former makes manifest what functions as guilt in individual characters, especially in several of Poe’s short stories, while the latter displays a causeless hauntology that is part of human cognition and affectivity as such. The more subtle hauntology is in

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this chapter revealed through readings guided by a modified version of Sadeq Rahimi’s hauntology of the everyday. Such a hauntology posits the desire of needs as central in human experience, which perpetually accentuates the groundlessness of the present. Desire draws the subject constantly towards non-present objects and is thereby future-directed. The validation of the desired objects is sought in the past, as memory and history, which sets spectrality in motion. Even negated meaning and actions not taken may return as haunting ghosts, or even more clearly put, these are probably the most common and strongest haunting forces. The past refuses to remain in the past. Moreover, this cognitive dynamic is tied to Poe’s own notion of ‘perverseness’, which is clearly displayed as a concept in the tales analysed, as well as concomitantly working as a semi-hidden driving force in these narratives of spectrality and devastation—here other etymologically grounded meanings of ‘perverse’ are more suitable than the more modern association with ‘sexual deviancy’, rather ‘contrary, fickle, irrational’. Poe’s own biographically recorded life, and its trauma-like repetitiveness of destructive behaviour, is briefly analysed in the light (or shadow) of hauntology and ‘perverseness’. Finally, the overall haunting of the burden of history in terms of the racism present in Poe’s oeuvre is highlighted as a related but separate phenomenon. All of these hauntological facets are elucidated through focused analyses of the short stories “The Tell-Tale Heart”, “The Imp of the Perverse”, “The Black Cat” and “The Gold-Bug”. In Chap. 5, the hauntological pursuit attempts to grapple with Henry James’s notoriously ambiguous tale The Turn of the Screw. It is argued that the ghosts in that narrative clearly incarnate the hauntological function to its fullest possible potential. In the phenomenology of vision implemented in the prose fiction, one can witness how limitrophy and thereby hauntology operate on a very primordial perceptual level. James’s story emphatically makes manifest two central aspects of hauntology that are important in the whole of this study. Firstly, it very clearly displays prose fiction as the eminent tool for playing with the Aristotelian syllogism of either-or. Such a fundamental structure in Western thought is paradoxically merged with the more deconstructive both-and. Secondly, precisely as a paradox, James displays the trope of the absoluteness of indeterminacy. Or articulated in slightly different terms, it seems undoubtable that something is there— speaking in general philosophical terms—but it is equally certain that it is difficult to know exactly what it is that is there. The ghost fills this position and thereby it functions in a very adequate way. Such absoluteness of indeterminacy would upset any subject with the aim of knowing through an

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empirically rational modus operandi. Hauntology is the study of these areas of paradox, contradiction and skewed logics. James examines the impossibilities of empirical science with an uncanny fictional precision (seemingly introducing a slightly different form of empiricism). In Chap. 6, the reader will be thrown into the maw of the Lovecraftian hauntology. Lovecraft’s central hauntology is here understood as epistemological desire. Such a desire is distinct from the desire of needs. In Lovecraft’s fiction, that which has become labelled as ‘weird’ is fully dependent on the real of life as an embodied, perceptual necessity. Lovecraft’s fiction contains a grotesquely hyperbolic version of phenomenological horizons, which I claim is the true horror of Lovecraft. The nothingness and silence at the centre evoke their opposites in the logic of hauntology’s ‘both-and’ that mainly replaces the ‘either-or’ of the Western intellectual tradition. Through close readings of Lovecraft’s gothic tales “The Lurking Fear”, “The Music of Erich Zann” and “The Haunter in the Dark”, the chapter highlights the fundamental phenomena that build up Lovecraft’s hauntological prose as a death-infused sermon, delivered by a religious atheist. Epistemological desire intimates something like the animal’s attentiveness to ‘the Open’. This sphere of openness is a pre-­objective reality that the human never really reaches. But epistemological desire points in that direction and humanity will always be haunted by its shortcomings and by its desire to break through to something beyond the world of objectity. Lovecraft draws attention to these phenomena, both on a macro and a micro stratum of givenness. At a quick glance, the quotidian or ‘realistic’ setting of these short stories may easily be degraded to the level of the prop, that is, it merely functions as a contrast to the fantastical. However, it is actually in these parts of the narratives that the hauntology is manifested in its most intriguing and perhaps horrifying way. The xenophobia immanent to Lovecraft’s fiction is not pursued here, but is seen as an openness within Lovecraft inspired re-writings and writing back. Hauntology situates itself on a philosophical level that clearly verges on the theological, hence the vast recent interest in Lovecraft as a theological provocateur. These dimensions are also touched upon in the chapter, which without doubt invites further thinking along these lines. Chapter 7 returns to Munro. This is done in order to further emphasise the everyday gothic and thereby the larger forces of hauntology that in certain ways overflow the gothic genre. It is also done to close a small circle of literary history, in which hauntology is shown to be a major force within heterogenous types of gothic fiction. In this chapter, we focus on a

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specific gothic trope, namely that of male violence and the threat of male violence. Munro has ways of utilising this particular aspect in relation to hauntological patterns. As has been suggested by Wen-Shan Shieh, the very form and structuring of Munro’s short story prose invites temporal aspects that in turn of course have hauntological implications. […] Munro is a Gothic modernist who writes to defamiliarize, or to provoke her readers to think differently about their life. To do so, she deploys such narrative strategies as open-endedness of the plot, the splitting of the self, and temporal prolepsis to defy normative expectations about the linearity of the plot, the coherence and intelligibility of the self, and progressive temporality to produce the uncanny reading effects in her everyday Gothic.34

To this outline, one may add the temporal hauntology and the haunting power of life choices, especially all the roads not taken. In “Free Radicals”, Munro hones in on the topics of absolute chance and absolute fate. Within the cold shadow of male violence, we witness a complicated network of hauntings that have made this situation possible. The male intruder appears in the protagonist’s house as a consequence of two related hauntings. He is haunted by the guilt of his recent murder of the rest of his close family. That event was provoked by a larger haunting imposed upon him by the family and the demand that he take care of his mentally ill sister whom he abhors. The solution to the deadlock and seemingly dangerous situation is found in the power of narratives or narrativity. In all of these short stories, the temporality of narrativity is ubiquitously involved and it haunts our thinking about temporality and sequences of events in our own lives, and the ways in which we try to make sense of our lives, which is part of a more general mutual haunting between ‘fiction’ and ‘real life’. If we return to Kierkegaard, we realise that Munro’s fiction is saturated with a thorough investigation of the strange temporality and phenomenology of a life as lived, and that analysis necessarily contains hauntological dimensions. In “Runaway” and “Passion” similar patterns are cognised also partly in the shadow of the gothic threat of male violence. Especially in “Passion”, we have a hauntological setup, since the protagonist is involved in making sense of her life by returning to the life-changing event that has haunted her and compelled her to re-read (that is, re-narrate) her own narrative, which essentially is her life in the form of a hauntological maze. * * *

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As mentioned above, this study pursues hauntology as a strong feature within gothic writing. At times hauntology even seems to overflow genre boundaries, but that is perhaps not a strange thing, since it appears to be part of cognition and experience on a very fundamental level. In relation to that acknowledgement, it is suitable to mention a philosophical dimension that does not become evident in the readings until the later chapters (mainly in Chaps. 4, 5 and 6). However, in hindsight it becomes clear that Renaud Barbaras’s concept of epistemological desire governs a great deal of narratives that in some or other way foreground hauntology. First of all, there is the epistemological desire as the root of life, which makes manifest a dimension of life that does not care about the desire of needs. The epistemological desire opens up the thinking of life as a philosophical and ontological endeavour. Thereby, hauntology inevitably becomes involved. That type of hauntology functions as a philosophical counter-weight to the dominating psychoanalytical theories and uncomplicated thinking about life as a linear journey from the womb to the grave. For instance, Lovecraft’s literary project becomes completely intellectually occluded without this phenomenological approach to life. In Munro’s “Free Radicals”, the protagonist is already immersed in death when the death-­ threat in the form of the haunted man appears. So that narrative is really not about the instinct of survival in terms of subsistence at all. It makes manifest literary thinking as philosophy. The ultimate paradox and haunting is that epistemological desire actually desires itself. Thus, there is no telos in terms of any meaningful objective. Barbaras articulates it in the following way: The essence of living movement, from which the very division of space and time proceeds, and, consequently, all the forms of movement, is Realization such as it is aroused by Desire. It gives way to realities, that is, to realizations (in the static and technical sense of the word). But this happens in such a way that none of these realizations fully realize what there is to realize, namely, desire itself. Nothing is truly realized in any of these realizations. In this sense, the movement of life can be characterized as the realization of the unrealizable. This ultimately could be the definition of Desire.35

This means that, for instance, many of Munro’s short stories ultimately teach this one lesson. That which some readers may find cumbersome or uncomfortable has to do with being forced to think through one’s own life in the engagement with the fiction. So it is in fact possible to state that

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fiction involving hauntology conjures more hauntology in the sense of the reader being forced to confront the haunting aspects of her own life. The other inevitable consequence is that human life and experience is haunted at its very root. It is haunted by the realisation of the unrealisable, which is also clearly mirrored in the numerous open endings in Munro’s short story works. Fiction can be a consolation, a power or even catharsis, but it may also be as disturbing as the gothic genre has always sensed it to be, in terms of the haunting of a fundamental unknowing. The epistemological desire, which Barbaras outlines, pushes the human towards the Open (objectless phenomenality) by immediately closing it. The closing then gives rise to renewed epistemological desire. There is always more to see, infinitely new aspects of seeing the same thing even. The slightly different approaches in the chapters to come draw attention to this phenomenon. Different ways of thinking limitrophy in relation to hauntology open up numerous manners of re-thinking anthropocentrism that mirror prominent contemporary philosophical concerns. What remains of humanity is perhaps not much more than ecological guilt and angst over its caged and mutilated animality.

Notes 1. “The literary and fictional background to the Gothic revival is clearly manifested as an artificial or fabricated aesthetic phenomenon”, Fred Botting, “In Gothic Darkly: Heterotopia, History, Culture”, A New Companion to the Gothic, David Punter (ed.) (Oxford: John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2012), 13–24, 14. 2. The full quote in English from Kierkegaard: “Philosophy is perfectly right in saying that life must be understood backward. But then one forgets the other clause—that it must be lived forward. The more one thinks through this clause, the more one concludes that life in temporality never becomes properly understandable, simply because never at any time does one get perfect repose to take a stance—backward”. The Essential Kierkegaard, Howard V.  Hong & Edna H.  Hong (eds.) (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2000), 12. 3. For instance, Edgar Allan Poe developed the two genres in parallel. “The Tell-Tale Heart” (horror gothic) and “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” (detective fiction) were both written in the same year, 1843. They both contain murders (crimes) and the police (protection against crime); the ­difference is just in the emphasis and focalisation. The focus is on the hor-

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ror and guilt of any atrocious deed or the focus is on the ratiocination that leads to the solving of a mystery. 4. Merlin Coverley makes a rough division: first wave, Walpole, Shelley, Maturin; second wave, the Victorian, Stevenson, Wilde, Wells, Stoker; third wave, the horror boom of the 70s (Hauntology: Ghosts of Futures Past (Harpenden UK: Oldcastle Books, 2020), 60). C.f. also Clive Bloom, “From Horace Walpole to the Divine Marquis de Sade”, Bloom, C. (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of Gothic Origins (Palgrave Macmillan, Cham., 2021), 1–20, 2. 5. Coverley, Hauntology: Ghosts of Futures Past, 81. 6. Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, & the New International (New York: Routledge, 1994 [French edition 1993]). 7. James Watt, Contesting the Gothic: Fiction, Genre, and Cultural Conflict, 1764–1832 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 1. 8. For overviews, c.f. collections such as Casper, Monica, and Eric Wertheimer, (eds). Critical Trauma Studies: Understanding Violence, Conflict and Memory in Everyday Life (New York, USA: New  York University Press, 2016); Philippe Ortell, Mark Turin, and Margot Young (eds), Memory (Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies, 2018). 9. C.f. Michael Peter Schofield: “[H]auntology remains a fairly opaque umbrella term […], which lacks precise definition or simple application” (“Re-Animating Ghosts: Materiality and Memory in Hauntological Appropriation” (International Journal of Film and Media Arts, 4:2, 2019, 24–37), 25). The difficulty of “application” goes hand in hand with its deconstructive pedigree, and this may be utilised as a strength in analytic readings. 10. Throughout this study I will use the concepts of ‘affect’ and ‘affectivity’. To clarify, the underlying theory is the phenomenology of Michel Henry. This can for the purposes here be kept on a rather simple level. Henry introduces the concept of auto-affectivity as the root of life. Feeling feels feeling is a prerequisite for the feeling and perception of objects. This notion can smoothly be combined with Edmund Husserl’s basic concept of intentionality, which means that acts of consciousness are directed towards objects. In the act of feeling there is something felt. These two basic phenomenological principles are fully compatible. Auto-affectivity just has the feeling itself as its own object. This can be explained by emotional phenomena such as a mood. Both auto-affectivity and intentionality are essential in order to analyse hauntological phenomena. Henry sums up the same thing as I have explained: “[I]mpressionality is pure phenomenality as such, the matter and the phenomenological substance from which consciousness is made and thus the original phenomenality of all phenom-

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ena. This is why every objectivity, even the most transcendent one, is clothed with an affective predicative layer that is constituted by a specific intentionality, and ‘act of feeling’” (Michel Henry, Material Phenomenology (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 23). 11. Margaret Atwood, Surfacing (New York: Anchor Books, 1998). 12. “Preventing the Bocksten Man From Becoming a Ghost” (Hallands Kulturhistoriska Museum—museumhalland.se), accessed 230220. This whole phenomenon breathes hauntology: “Many of [the bog] people were sacrificed to higher powers. Some of the best known have been found in Denmark. The Grauballe Man at Moesgaard Museum in Aarhus, and The Tollund Man at Silkeborg Museum. The Bocksten Man is unusual, as he is one of the few bog people from Christian times, when in fact people were not sacrificed in bogs. However, belief in the power of the bog remained strong for hundreds of years, and perhaps that was why the location was chosen. One thing The Bocksten Man has in common with the other bog finds is the unique opportunity they provide us to come close to people from the past and step into the world as they saw it” (museumhalland.se). 13. William Shakespeare, Macbeth, Act III, Sc. IV, The Arden Shakespeare (Walton-on-Thames Surrey: Thomas Nelson & Sons Ltd, 1997), 94–95. 14. Edgar Allan Poe, The Selected Writings of Edgar Allan Poe, G. R. Thompson (ed) (New York & London: W. W. Norton & Company, 2004), 320. 15. C.f. for instance, the very thorough outline of the concept in Nicholas Royle, The Uncanny (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003). 16. Sigmund Freud, The Uncanny (London, Penguin Books, 2003), 148. 17. Ibid., 156. 18. Julian Wolfreys, Victorian Hauntings: Spectrality, Gothic, the Uncanny and Literature (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 5. 19. Royle, The Uncanny, 24. 20. Francis Fukuyama, “The End of History?” (The National Interest 16, 1989): 3–18. The book: The End of History and the Last Man, 20th anniversary (ed) (London: Penguin Books, 2012 [1992]). 21. Derrida, Specters, 39–40. 22. Ibid., 10. 23. The conceptual complexity that can be traced in the intersections between Heidegger, Freud and Derrida does not necessarily have to be pursued here. Especially because this complexity can also be further problematised since four languages are involved, ancient Greek, German, French and English. This translation complexity can be studied in an article by David Meagher, but I prefer to cite his conclusion on Derrida’s original contribution that more zooms in on the ‘function’ of the spectre, in Derrida’s thinking about Marxism, but also more generally: “The spectre that haunts Europe in 1847–48, das Gespenst des Communismus, is the manifestation of

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material processes, historical conditions, and actual relations of production. And (perhaps) the eighteen–day takeover of Tahrir Square from January to February 2011 can be read as its contemporary expression. As its spectre loomed, the societies that formed in those squares, on those revolutionary days and nights, can be read as the carnal form of a spirit or idea of communism. This is the contradiction (beyond Derrida’s concern with the secrecy of the communist movement) which produces the ‘intellectual uncertainty’ (intellectuellen Unsicherheit), the uncanniness and fear of Marx’s legendary incipit. The spectre, when it looms, no longer warns of or promises, but represents a past which returns, is immanent or virtually arrived. It is a brazen threat to conservative forces and a messianic hope to progressive forces” (“The Uncanniness of Spectrality” (Mosaic: A Journal For the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature, 44:4, 2011, 177–93), 189). This is a relevant simplification, since the return of the past itself, in whichever form, is central in any outline of hauntology. It applies to a situation of macro-politics, as here, but it also applies to a life as lived in any godforsaken domestic milieu anywhere in the world. 24. Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures (Winchester, UK: Zero Books, 2014), 6. 25. Ibid., 22. 26. C.f. for instance the arguments of Elisabeth M.  Loevlie, “Faith in the Ghosts of Literature: Poetic Hauntology in Derrida, Blanchot and Morrison’s Beloved” (Religions. 4:3, 2013), 336–350. 27. Coverley, Hauntology: Ghosts of Futures Past, 205. 28. Katy Shaw, Hauntology: The Presence of the Past in Twenty-First Century English Literature (Palgrave Macmillan, Springer, 2018), 7. 29. Sadeq Rahimi, The Hauntology of Everyday Life (Palgrave Macmillan, Springer Nature, 2021), 3. 30. Ibid., 69. 31. Margaret Atwood, Wilderness Tips (London: Virago Press, 2014), 143. 32. Benny LeMaster, “Queer Imag(in)ing: Liminality as Resistance in Lindqvist’s Let the Right One In” (Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, 8:2, 2011), 103–123, 103. 33. Jacques Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 29. 34. Wen-Shan Shieh, “The Uncanny, Open Secrets, and Katherine Mansfield’s Modernist Legacy in Alice Munro’s Everyday Gothic” (Tamkang Review, 48:1, 2017), 47–68, 51. 35. Renaud Barbaras, Introduction to a Phenomenology of Life (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2021), 348.

CHAPTER 2

“Penelope Was Not a Phantom”: Everyday Hauntology in Alice Munro and Margaret Atwood

Alice Munro, “Chance”, “Soon”, “Silence” Alice Munro is firmly anchored in the tradition that has come to be labelled Canadian gothic or Southern Ontario gothic. If one zooms in even more closely, it could be said that the Canadian gothic is one of survival, not only in the wilderness of Canadian landscapes, but also quite plainly in the experiential concentration of the domestic sphere. Katrin Berndt’s definition suits my point of departure very well: “I define the Gothic mode as addressing the indeterminate, obscure, and subconscious spheres of life. It stresses the hidden, ambivalent meanings, expresses fears beyond logic and rational understanding, and reminds its readers that such anxieties may lurk beneath the surface of everyday, ordinary experience”.1 This mode may just as well be called ‘everyday gothic’, since the manner of its appearance is more on the level of the uncanny or of a certain affective mood that may be difficult to pin down.2 However, in addition to these definitions, we shall look more specifically at the temporal spectrality that is central in Derridean hauntology. Munro’s short story “Chance” (2004) starts at a point in time where a substantial part of its back-story has already happened.3 The protagonist receives a letter from a man she met on a train journey six months earlier. He sends an open invitation, exploring the possibility of them meeting again. Then a few pages into the narrative, we are back on the train journey earlier in the story sequence. The part-time teacher and PhD student Juliet sits in the train trying to read. She is © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 J. Wrethed, Gothic Hauntology, Palgrave Gothic, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-41111-3_2

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disturbed by a man who apparently is seeking company. It is clear to Juliet that he does not make a pass on her, but that he probably is just lonely, in search of some kind of casual companionship or fellow feeling. Juliet does not want company at that particular time and at the stranger’s use of the word “chum”, when he suggests that “we could just sort of chum around together”, she freezes up emotionally and eventually moves to the observation car to be able to read.4 This is a small everyday incident out of other small incidents and choices being made in any life. Such forkings of life paths can of course be magnified in fiction. A familiar popular example would be Peter Howitt’s film Sliding Doors (1998), which is a narrative seemingly inspired by the Polish director Krzysztof Kieślowski’s 1982 film Blind Chance, in which three scenarios are dealt with. The German thriller Run Lola Run (1998) is also inspired by Kiéslowski’s film. All three films involve trains, which will be of some significance for the following analysis. The Polish film was named Przypadek, which is a word that appears in the lists of meanings for several English words, such as ‘case’, ‘accident’, ‘chance’, ‘instance’ and ‘event’. Blind Chance is maybe an acceptable translation, but there seems to be something missing. Perchance is the more haunting and temporal connotations. Already here it becomes clear that this aspect of life sequences has an enormous philosophical power and importance, especially on the philosophy of time and its relation to spectrality. Thinking about all possible outcomes of just an hour in a person’s life would be unbearable. If any chosen point can potentially spread out in two or three or even a larger number of scenarios, human cognition cannot even handle it, which is a phenomenon referred to as the multiverse conundrum.5 This is probably why this type of thinking most often sticks to two possible worlds, as in Sliding Doors. Most certainly, it is only heightened dramatic outcomes that normally elicit such thinking, and that assessment would go for both fiction and what we call ‘real life’. That is partly the case in Munro’s “Chance”. Later, the train stops for a short while at a station in the wilderness. Shortly after that, the train stops again after having hit some kind of obstacle. It gradually becomes clear to Juliet that it is the man who tried to strike up a conversation with her that has committed suicide by letting himself be hit by the train. The spectrality is here initially mainly affective. What effect did Juliet’s rejection of the man have? Was that the final drop in his obviously unhappy life? For Juliet, the feelings begin to haunt her. Derrida’s portmanteau hauntology comes to the fore. The mute “H” in French makes the word

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phonetically come out as “Ontology”. The ghostly “H” then haunts Being in a general sense. Thus, the affective source of what we may call spirits and ghosts is perfectly well grounded in anything we can imagine as ‘reality’. The oppositions between past present and future present are dissolved. But why should the unknown unhappy man affect Juliet at all? The everyday gothic is further accentuated in Munro’s narrative. Just after the collision with the man—Juliet at that point does not know with what the train has collided—she urgently has to go to the toilet because she needs to change her sanitary protection: Flushed, crampy, feeling a little dizzy and sick, she sank down on the toilet bowl, removed her soaked pad and wrapped it in toilet paper and put it in the receptacle provided. When she stood up she attached the fresh pad from her bag. She saw that the water and urine in the bowl was crimson with her blood. She put her hand on the flush button, then noticed in front of her eyes the warning not to flush the toilet while the train was standing still. That meant, of course, when the train was standing near the station, where the discharge would take place, very disagreeably, right where people could see it. Here, she might risk it.6

Eventually, hearing people on the outside she decides not to flush. Typically, blood and other body fluids are culturally charged, since they transgress a seemingly stable boundary line. Where does the body end and where does the world begin? Where do I end and where do other people begin? Those seem to be the ontological questions. Blood itself blurs a distinction; it carries the transgression within itself. This is disturbing. For Juliet the whole situation becomes even worse when she gradually realises that it must have been the man she earlier “snubbed” that had been hit by the train.7 When Juliet overhears passengers speak about the suicide someone uses the phrase “Full of blood”, which of course also begins to haunt her.8 As being of the same substance that already haunts her in the shape of her menstrual blood, it augments the overall sense of haunting. On the personal life-level of the protagonist, such seemingly irrational patterns of affects and cognition dominate being at this specific time, and arguably similar phenomena govern being in any life at any given point. This is the everyday gothic. It is a subterranean life-world, which is as gothic as any network of hidden doors, cellars and dungeons.9 “Full of blood. That was disgusting…”, Juliet exclaims to herself.10 The pertinent hauntological question that the text seems to ask is: Was the past already pregnant with

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the man’s suicide or did Juliet in fact cause it by her rejection of this man in distress? This draws our attention to yet another aspect of hauntology, which is the pervasive unknowing. The setting of the train accentuates the overall paradoxical ontology of time and events. The rails are fixed, yet it seems as if they are fixed only in hindsight, when the outcome can be assessed. But what if? What if the rails forward are also set, even though humans habitually live in the illusion that we have a free will and that we can at least to some extent control what will happen or what we will allow to happen.11 The gradual changes that appear in the narrative are draped in a fatalistic and unmerciful affectivity, but which paradoxically also allows for change and difference. Not only does the world change, but Juliet’s interpretative point of view is always in flux too: She tried looking out the window, but the scene, composed of the same elements, had changed. Less than a hundred miles on, it seemed as if there was a warmer climate. The lakes were fringed with ice, not covered. The black water, black rocks, under the wintry clouds, filled the air with darkness.12

The “same elements” have “changed”. It is impossible even for Juliet to tell where her affective state ends and the atmosphere begins. The line of demarcation is not fixed. Hauntology is at work. When attempting to read her book on ancient Greek myth and philosophy—which is actually a re-­ reading, so she sees her earlier notes and underlinings—she discovers “that what she had pounced on with such satisfaction at one time now seemed obscure and unsettling”.13 Her attention is drawn to the perspective of the dead, which certainly has been altered by her recent shocking experience. Then another, perhaps seemingly insignificant, boundary transgression occurs when she falls asleep and the narrative almost seamlessly moves into her dream. The book slipped out of her hands, her eyes closed, and she was now walking with some children (students?) on the surface of a lake. Everywhere each of them stepped there appeared a five-sided crack, all of these beautifully even, so that the ice became like a tiled floor. The children asked her the name of these ice tiles, and she answered with confidence, iambic pentameter. But they laughed and with this laughter the cracks widened. She realised her mistake then and knew that only the right word would save the situation, but she could not grasp it.14

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The five-sided patterns are visualisations of the five pairs of syllables in the regularity of the pentameter. However, presumably the students want the name of the geometrical figure, which would be a ‘pentagon’. This is an example of the everyday gothic at its absolutely highest point of subtlety. There is the transgression of worlds that are made manifest with different logical structures. However, the link to the phonology corresponding to a spatial reality again highlights Derrida’s philosophy. Logos must be upheld, otherwise the ice breaks and chaos and insanity presumably ensue. But the world cannot be “beautifully even”; speech does not normally come out as iambic pentameter. The perfect word is lacking. The image of perfection is also what simultaneously becomes the dangerous crack. The gothic as a challenge to the flawless ice is the mute “H” haunting the sense of a rational ontology. For Juliet, the rather small incident and the bigger incident that follows change the fundamental components of her whole being. Even though no one would sensibly hold her responsible for the man’s death, the whole thing haunts her in the proper sense of that word. The other passenger that Juliet has met, Eric, that she later builds up a relation with and has a child with, tries to console her: “‘What I think is—,’ he said. ‘I think that this is minor. Things will happen in your life— things will probably happen in your life—that will make this thing seem minor. Other things you’ll be able to feel guilty about’”.15 However much the reader, and presumably Juliet, wants to believe Eric’s words, they ring somewhat hollow. All in all, this event makes manifest the gothic obsession with the terrible beauty of life. Also, the illusion of the clear-cut distinctions of scales comes to the fore. The horror actually consists of the jumbled space where distinctions of large scale and small scale do not seem to work according to an established logic. Munro’s everyday gothic pursues the logic or anti-logic or (anti)logic of the unfolding of a life even further. In the collection Runaway, Juliet’s life continues in the immediately following short stories “Soon” and “Silence”. The incident on the train journey in the sixties—which led to her having a relation and a child with Eric, and that also gave birth to the spectre of the man who killed himself—will eventually have a heightened significance. The disappearance of the man that at least for a while haunts Juliet on a conscious level is later accentuated by two other disappearances. Eric is a fisherman and vanishes in a storm and is later found drowned. The daughter Penelope suddenly disappears to go and live her own life in what seems to have been some form of life crisis. As far as we

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readers know, she seems to have the intention never again to have any contact with Juliet. The everyday gothic, with its inherent hauntology, is as skilfully implemented as it is cruel and merciless. The uncanny ending draws attention to the overall haunting and the component of utter unknowing. Juliet would most probably not have met Eric if the suicidal man had not disturbed her reading, since that is what makes her go to the observation car where she meets Eric. It is also the death of this unknown man that makes Juliet want to speak further with Eric on the train. The absence of the dead man does not explicitly haunt her throughout the subsequent short stories, but it seems to do so anyway in hindsight towards the end of the narrative. Penelope’s absence eventually becomes a melancholy presence. Juliet contemplates her relation to her then-partner Gary, but Penelope is there haunting her whole being. Juliet has just, almost by accident, been reached by the information that Penelope is well and by that point she is also the mother of five children. At dinner, she thought that the news she had just absorbed put her in a better situation for marrying Gary, or living with him—whatever it was he wanted. There was nothing to worry about, or hold herself in wait for, concerning Penelope. Penelope was not a phantom, she was safe, as far as anybody is safe, and she was probably as happy as anybody is happy. She had detached herself from Juliet and very likely from the memory of Juliet, and Juliet could not do better than to detach herself in turn.16

In our hauntological context, the phrase “Penelope was not a phantom” of course reads as an exorcism that immediately metamorphoses into an evocation or a conjuration. The spectre of Penelope can precisely not be nailed down. It cannot be eliminated. Juliet’s absorption into her thoughts about this ghost also has concrete consequences: “If Gary saw that she was agitated he pretended not to notice. But it was probably on this evening that they both understood they would never be together”.17 It is not particularly farfetched to see the loneliness of the man who committed suicide in the sixties spreading like a virus. In perfect alignment with the gothic stamp of utter unknowing, this contemporary narrative draws attention to a subterranean temporality in which spectres travel in their own non-­ Aristotelian logic and non-Euclidean space. The last story “Silence” ends in the following way:

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She keeps hoping for a word from Penelope, but not in any strenuous way. She hopes as people who know better hope for undeserved blessings, spontaneous remissions, things of that sort.18

The rather melancholy outcome of this trilogy of short stories is that we leave Juliet in her vague longing for getting a word from her daughter. Maybe longing for that perfect word that is missing, but which on a philosophical level of course will never be there. Now, if we briefly recall the very beginning of “Chance”, we realise that in the moment when Juliet reads the letter from Eric, the past events on the train journey seem to have already settled Juliet’s future. At that point things could not have happened in any other way. Juliet is thrown in the direction of Eric, and as a consequence of that in the direction of her child Penelope, and she is also inevitably accompanied by the spectre of the man who committed suicide. This, as we have seen, leads to a fundamental loneliness, altogether verging on the broadly existential or even metaphysical. In terms of hauntology, we clearly sense the logic of ‘both-and’. In avoiding the conversation of the lonely man, Juliet seems uncannily to conjure a spectre that will guide her own destiny. Furthermore, in terms of epistemological desire, the narrative ends up only with suggestions. Even though it seems to be clear that hauntology is at work and something like predestination or fatality is governing Juliet’s life, we cannot say for certain. Juliet herself seems to stop in front of a horizon, perhaps only sensing the vastness and the return to epistemological desire itself as the propelling force in any life, but also perceiving the lack of substantial telos and the cosmic scale of gothic (un)knowing.

Margaret Atwood, “Death by Landscape” In Margaret Atwood’s 1991 collection of short stories Wilderness Tips, there is a narrative called “Death by Landscape”. Early on in the story, attention is drawn towards the landscape painting of the Canadian group of painters referred to as The Group of Seven. The protagonist Lois will eventually think back on a childhood experience, which is the main narrative. But in the beginning, she is contemplating these landscape paintings: But this [as investments] is not why she bought the pictures, way back then. She bought them because she wanted them. She wanted something that was in them, although she could not have said at the time what it was. It was not

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peace: she does not find them peaceful in the least. Looking at them fills her with a wordless unease. Despite the fact that there are no people in them or even animals, it’s as if there is something, or someone, looking back out.19

The somewhat astonishing declaration here is that Lois desires something that fills her “with a wordless unease”. To be attracted to what seems to repel at the same time draws the analysis in the direction of the uncanny and the abject. However, also in Atwood’s narrative, the specific focus shall be on the temporal upheaval that accompanies hauntology and thereby designates the uncanny to become a sub-category, albeit intimately intertwined with hauntological patterns. Time is out of joint. How hauntology works here is best described by a chiasmatic pattern. As suggested by Teresa Gibert, the protagonist lives a posthumous life engrossed in materialism: “Leading a lonely existence, Lois is deprived of a full life while still immersed in the material world. Her predicament epitomizes the theme of death in life (or living death) which pervades the last section of this short story”.20 It is as if she has lost something essential by the loss of her childhood friend. So she lives death in life, while hauntologically, Lucy lives life in death, mirroring Lois in an affective entanglement. When Lois looks at the paintings showing the wilderness completely devoid of human presence, she senses the absence of Lucy as a presence. This configuration almost functions as an illustration of Derridean hauntology. The most noteworthy thing is that art is involved, which provides a metafictional claim about the capacity of art as an affective domain that can effectively contain absence as a hauntological phenomenon. In her childhood, Lois went to summer camps. On those recurring camps she met a half-American girl named Lucy, who is endowed with an exotic aura by her Americanness and precocious behaviour. Lois and Lucy become friends and uphold their alliance by letter correspondence between the summers: “They signed their letters LL, with the L’s entwined together like the monograms on a towel”.21 That kind of sign-dimension is more central than it first may seem. Lucy’s sensitive skin gets badly burned by the sun: “[S]he burnt spectacularly, bright red, with the X of her bathing-­ suit straps standing out in alarming white; she let Lois peel the sheets of whispery-thin burned skin off her shoulders”.22 The X denotes the unknown position within a logical structure that may be given any kind of numerical value. In a normal mathematical configuration of a solvable equation, the arithmetic context would determine the value. However, in a context of a skewed logic, the X would never be filled, which of course

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is the case in Atwood’s narrative. Moreover, the strong physicality of the fragments of skin yet again draws our attention towards the abject and the uncanny attraction-repulsion of liminality. Where does Lucy end and where does the world begin? The summer camp goes out together on a longer excursion in the wilderness. When they paddle off in their canoes, “Lois can feel the water stretching out, with the shores twisting away on either side, immense and a little frightening”.23 The enormity and slightly scary dimension of the experience conjures the sense of the uncanny, which also seems to be present when Lois contemplates her landscape paintings much later in life, but earlier in the narrative structure. That little detail is decisive in our hauntological reading. Again, affectively, time is out of joint. Gradually, Lois becomes partly absorbed by the uncanny depth of the lake and presumably the sense of deep-time permeating the wilderness: “Lois feels as if an invisible rope has broken. They’re floating free, on their own, cut loose. Beneath the canoe the lake goes down, deeper and colder than it was a minute before”.24 Further on in the journey they leave “V-shaped trails behind them”.25 These subtle inscriptions on the body and on the landscape will become much more significant towards the end of the narrative. At one point, they go ashore for lunch and Lucy and Lois go a little way off on their own. Lucy needs to urinate and does that in privacy out of sight, but then a short scream is suddenly heard and Lucy disappears without a trace. Lois’s perception of what happens is revealed in an analepsis filled with hesitation and ambiguity. She has gone over and over it in her mind since, so many times that the first real shout has been obliterated, like a footprint trampled by other footprints. But she is sure (she is almost positive, she is nearly certain) that it was not a shout of fear. Not a scream. More like a cry of surprise, cut off too soon. Short, like a dog’s bark.26

Inscriptions are often our only connection with the past, the only way we seem to be able to lift things out of the merciless stream, in order to scrutinise and preserve. Still, these inscriptions too are very fragile and temporary in relation to deep-time. For Lois, the disappearance of Lucy merges with her sublime experience of the wilderness that uncannily does not seem to need humans at all. Humanity and human presence are just an extremely minor parenthesis in the vastness of the universe. Earlier the seemingly bottomless lake was revealed, and a little later, Lois experiences

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the sky: “There was a moon, and a movement of the trees. In the sky there were stars, layers of stars that went down and down”.27 After Lucy’s disappearance, she of course becomes a spectre in Lois’s life through her palpable absence that stretches through the decades. Hauntology is here very clearly revealed. Lois explicitly articulates the trauma from a position much later in her life, when otherwise strongly significant life experiences fade like very old handwriting: She can hardly remember, now, having her two boys in the hospital, nursing them as babies; she can hardly remember getting married, or what Rob looked like. Even at the time she never felt she was paying full attention. She was tired a lot, as if she was living not one life but two: her own, and another, shadowy life that hovered around her and would not let itself be realized— the life that would have happened if Lucy had not stepped sideways, and disappeared from time.28

Here the spectrality clearly indicates a doubling, a temporality out of joint. The ghost that will not be put to rest has brought with it something of the terrible weight of existence. The lack of logical inscription transfers the power into fiction, which in the narrative is made manifest by the landscape paintings. The uncanny energy of Lucy’s ghost erupts in the paintings. It erupts as absence: She looks at the paintings, she looks into them. Every one of them is a picture of Lucy. You can’t see her exactly, but she’s there, in behind the pink stone island or the one behind that. In the picture of the cliff she is hidden by the clutch of fallen rocks towards the bottom, in the one of the river shore she is crouching beneath the overturned canoe. In the yellow autumn woods she’s behind the tree that cannot be seen because of the other trees, over beside the blue sliver of pond; but if you walked into the picture and found the tree, it would be the wrong one, because the right one would be further on.29

Fiction is yet another version of reality, or vice versa, the haunting is obviously mutual. It prolongs the deferral of closure. Hauntology is accentuated in Atwood in a similar way that it is in Munro. By beginning and ending the narrative in the temporal sphere of Lois’s later life and by incorporating the landscape paintings, the sense of Lucy’s absence being timeless is achieved. Spectrality is as omnipotent as the gothic trope of

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unknowing. Human affectivity cuts through life and art as the conundrum of spectrality, confirming that life and art are both uncanny and haunted, which may be an insight that is horrifically pleasurable.

Surfacing As stated in the introduction of this study, there is an intriguing liminality already in the semantics of the verb ‘haunt’. From a bird’s-eye perspective, it seems rather unproblematic to draw a line between things like ‘reality’ and ‘fiction’. However, when we move in closer, hauntology is obviously a better description than an ontology, which requires clear-cut borders and categories. Atwood’s novel Surfacing explores this liminality in various more or less subtle ways. Ruby Niemann has analysed the hauntology of adaptation in Atwood, “the ways in which adaptations of colonial texts of proto-Western imperialism can use the specter as a way of making it explicit that the colonized country, like the adaptation, is a haunted space”.30 In Surfacing, however, Atwood explores the haunted space of the Canadian wilderness also as an arena for personal haunting and as the subject’s constraints and possibilities vis-à-vis larger and stronger hauntological forces. Gina Wisker prefers to place parts of Atwood’s fiction within the sub-­ genre of eco-Gothic: “Atwood’s Surfacing (an early novel), Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature (1972) (the critical work establishing Atwood’s take on Canadian writers and writing), Strange Things: The Malevolent North in Canadian Literature (1995), and the short story collection Wilderness Tips (1991), among other work, deploy eco-Gothic to problematize the use of wilderness as a kind of leisure escape, a fantasy of discovery and survival, or myth concerning natural creatures”.31 Broadly speaking, the hauntological aspects of this gothic dimension encompass some of the general features, but more important is the specificity that is discernible in terms of hauntology and limitrophy. First of all, the power of the haunting comes from several sources, which merge into one powerful hauntological energy in the narrative. If one would stick to a simplistic division of human selfhood, and divide it into the subjective and the objective, the outcome of a reading of Surfacing would be equally crude. It is obvious that the hauntology involved is much more sophisticated. If we begin by sorting out the layers of haunting, we immediately recognise the frame of the missing person, which also could be connected to the lack of a father figure more generally. The gravity of the missing father,

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the presence of his absence, of course, feeds the autonomous workings of epistemological desire. The protagonist takes on ‘the case’ in the manner of a detective, trying to move rationally towards a conclusion of the mystery. This aspect of the novel draws attention to the close kinship of gothic hauntology and crime fiction, as for instance developed by Poe in the 1840s. Typically, to be haunted by the lack of a solution is immersed in ciphers and obscure signs in the narrative, some of which may be ‘real’ and some that may be ‘imagined’. The protagonist tries to decipher what her father was up to before he disappeared and the father in turn was at the time occupied with trying to decipher what seems to be almost primeval cave paintings, which he probably had found in or close to the lake, presumably not too far away from the cabin. The stack of papers is still up on the shelf by the lamp. I’ve been avoiding it, looking through it would be an intrusion if he were still alive. But now I’ve admitted he’s dead I might as well find out what he left for me. Executor. I was expecting a report of some kind, tree growth or diseases, unfinished business; but on the top page there’s only a crude drawing of a hand, done with a felt pen or a brush, and some notations: numbers, a name. I flip through the next few pages. More hands and feet, and on the next page a similar creature with two things like tree branches or antlers protruding from its head. On each of the pages are the numbers, and on some a few scrawled words: LICHENS RED CLOTHING LEFT. I can’t make sense of them. The hand-writing is my father’s, but changed, more hasty or careless.32

Limitrophically, there are a great deal of things going on here. The immediate haunting of her missing father is in turn haunted by what seems to be ancient creatures, half-human or half-animal, limitrophically blurred, nothing is clear-cut, neither to the protagonist nor to the reader. The activity of reading these palimpsestic signs is depicted as reading poetry, fragments, “lichens red clothing left”, what does it mean? However, in reading poetry the conclusion can be left hanging, but in this context, the character is primarily looking for the conclusion, otherwise her investigation cannot move forward. Typically, also in terms of hauntology, we have vastly different time scales, in this case, looking back a shorter stretch of time to when the father was not yet missing, but also a much vaster temporal distance that occludes the notes and drawings with myth and very old historical times, which structure the overall fading into obscurity and fragmentation. In addition, there are foreshadowings of another layer of

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haunting, which is indicated by the creatures, especially in the emphasis on hands and feet. The protagonist’s aborted foetus flickers past precisely as hands and feet, uncannily whispering to her, as nature itself seems to want to contact her throughout the narrative. Phenomenologically speaking, we also witness a journey towards a point at which epistemological desire encounters itself as desire, and life turns in on itself as auto-affectivity. There is nothing more to discover than life itself, which is exactly what constitutes part of the overall force of the major hauntology pursued in this study. The intricacy of the multi-layering of hauntings is what primarily makes this novel something out of the ordinary. The reference to reading and writing above is a feature consistently being phenomenalised all through the narrative. This means that there is a limitrophic activity or chiasmatic setup at work. For instance, diving into the dark water of the lake can be seen as a metaphorical representation of the protagonist’s diving into the depth of her own psyche and the blurred contours of her own past or even the past itself. But the fact is that the character is actually diving into the water. The division into what should belong to the ‘literal’ level and what belongs in a realm of ‘imagery’ is always already blurred. In the phenomenological terminology of Renaud Barbaras, we can say that the main character is haunted by a lack of knowledge, which blends with a desire to dissolve into the Open.33 This would essentially mean to liquify into objectless nature itself, further reflected in the late parts of the novel in which she tries to reach some form of primordial, primitive and animalistic life-form. However, not surprisingly this is not possible. The closest one could get is probably death, but that does not solve any enigmas in terms of knowledge. In her quest, the protagonist dives into the lake water at a place heavily marked on the father’s maps, thinking she thereby might find something of the cave paintings her father seemed to have found, and that this would somehow help her in her epistemological endeavours. I waited a few minutes, then moved the canoe farther along and dived again, my eyes straining, not knowing what shape to expect, handprint or animal, the lizard body with horns and tail and front-facing head, bird or canoe with stick paddlers; or a small thing, an abstraction, a circle, a moon; or a long distorted figure, stiff and childish, a human. Air gave out, I broke surface. Not here, it must be further along or deeper down; I was convinced it was there, he would not have marked and numbered the map so methodically for nothing, that would not be consistent, he always observed his own rules, axioms.

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On the next try I thought I saw it, a blotch, a shadow, just as I turned to go up. I was dizzy, my vision was beginning to cloud, while I rested my ribs panted, I ought to pause, half an hour at least; but I was elated, it was down there, I would find it. Reckless, I balanced and plunged. Pale green, then darkness, layer after layer, deeper than before, seabottom; the water seemed to have thickened, in it pinprick lights flicked and darted, red and blue, yellow and white, and I saw they were fish, the chasm-­ dwellers, fins lined with phosphorescent sparks, teeth neon […] I watched the fish, they swam like patterns on closed eyes, my legs and arms were weightless, free-floating; I almost forgot to look for the cliff and the shape. It was there but it wasn’t a painting, it wasn’t on the rock. It was below me, drifting towards me from the furthest level where there was no life, a dark oval trailing limbs. It was blurred but it had eyes, they were open, it was something I knew about, a dead thing, it was dead. I turned, fear gushing out of my mouth in silver, panic closing my throat, the scream kept in and choking me. The green canoe was far above me, sunlight radiating around it, a beacon, safety. But there was not one canoe, there were two, the canoe had twinned or I was seeing double.34

The visual ambiguity runs all through this passage and it displays limitrophy at its most intriguing manner of appearing. Perhaps the most radical manifestation in the passage is the last one, with the two canoes. The reader may immediately suspect that the protagonist sees double, since there should only be one canoe there. She came to the location alone in one canoe. This would suggest that the ordinary ontology of interiority and exteriority rules, that is, this functions as the epistemological ruler. The mistakes are made on the ‘subjective’ side and the errors could be corrected by ‘objective’ reality. However, there are two canoes there. The boyfriend Joe has come after her in another canoe. The human gaze is always attuned to possibilities and there is no pre-given über-gaze. Immanence is the first and last resort. The verification always happens as immanence too and corrections can only be made on that level. Epistemological desire will always be haunted by the possibility that it might be otherwise, also on strata that are part of a primordial level of experience. As suggested by Barbaras, the Open is presumably only accessed by animality, which explains the woman’s pull towards this region of existence and experience in the narrative. The attraction of myth, animal, pure unknowing in terms of objectity, pure unknowing as pure pre-­ objective being. But in accordance with the Derridean logic of ‘both-and’,

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this absolute unknowing is therefore simultaneously a form of knowledge, but on a completely different plane of experience, but which accompanies ‘ordinary’ experience as a haunting shadow. The haunting of nature’s mysterious call is part of this dimension in Surfacing. In the midst of perceptions when diving, something appears, something she knows about, which is something that resembles her aborted child, signifying the most intense level of haunting in the narrative. However, it appears as perception, which completely blurs the distinction of outer–inner, and rather shows the gliding from intentionality (seeing the seen) to affectivity (feeling the felt) and eventually these intense feelings turn into a solid ball of pain or grief. If limitrophy could be followed to levels so close to what can define the human, one realises that hauntology has the capacity to cut deeply into any human life. This phenomenon also draws attention to possible connections between micro and macro structures of experience. There is a parallel haunting here that encompasses the eco-Gothic and the types of postcolonial hauntings that Wisker and Niemann draw attention to. Nature itself, in a deep-ecological sense, shows its power alongside ancient history and myth, beckoning to the confused modern man, in ways that have uncanny undertones. * * * As we have seen in this initial chapter about hauntology in more modern narratives, these forces are definitely active, even though they come out in different forms than would be expected in older and perhaps more ‘traditional’ gothic stories. In Munro’s writing, in subtle investigations of the temporal aspects of everyday life, we see that seemingly minor events have major consequences. These phenomena suggest that haunting and limitrophic dimensions are at work on a very primal level of what we call human life. Similarly, in Atwood we see the play of absence and presence and how these phenomena may have absolute consequences in human lives. Hauntology is also in these works displayed as something inescapable that appears on root-levels of life. In both Canadian writers, we also see a form of literature that intimates that exterior reality is almost surreal or chimerical in relation to a reality of forces situated to the hither side of the life that takes place among exterior objects, pay checks, insurances, real estate and other quotidian concerns. This realm of forces is governed by gothic hauntology.

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Notes 1. Katrin Berndt, “The Ordinary Terrors of Survival: Alice Munro and the Canadian Gothic” (Journal of the Short Story in English 55, Special Issue: The Short Stories of Alice Munro, 2010). EnglishOpenAIRE, January 2011. https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=edsrev &AN=edsrev.C968A95C&site=eds-­live&scope=site. (PDF p. 3). 2. Shieh, “The Uncanny, Open Secrets”, 49. 3. Alice Munro, Runaway (London: Vintage, 2006): 48–86. 4. Ibid., 56. 5. See, for instance, Tim Wilkinson, “The Multiverse Conundrum” (Philosophy Now, no. 89 March 2012): 35–38, or Michael Heller, “Multiverse—Too Much or Not Enough?” (Universe, 5:5, May 2019). 6. Munro, Runaway, 61. 7. Ibid., 60. 8. Ibid., 63. 9. The intimate connection with the Freudian concept of the uncanny becomes very clear here. In his thorough introduction to the Penguin edition of The Uncanny, Hugh Haughton draws attention to how Freud basically moves the whole gothic legacy into childhood experience: “[B]earing the Gothic signature of our own earliest terrors and desires […] childhood is where the repressed, archaic, pre-Enlightenment world of primitive religion, returns in perpetually re-invented home-made forms, forcing us in some sense to repeat or recapitulate such primal myths as those of Oedipus or Moses…” (Freud, The Uncanny, xlix). The way the perpetual return of the past spirals in towards ‘home’ constitutes a pertinent link to Munro’s everyday version of the gothic. However, Munro’s gothic is not only about exactly that type of return. 10. Munro, Runaway, 64 (italics in original). 11. Freud addresses this complicated issue directly in his thinking about the uncanny and the function of the double: “[I]n addition there are all the possibilities which, had they been realized, might have shaped our destiny, and to which our imagination still clings, all the strivings of the ego that were frustrated by adverse circumstances, all the suppressed acts of volition that fostered the illusion of free will” (“The Uncanny”, 143). 12. Munro, Runaway, 65. 13. Ibid. 14. Ibid., 65–66 (italics in original). 15. Ibid., 68. 16. Ibid., 157 (my italics). 17. Ibid. 18. Ibid., 158.

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19. Atwood, Wilderness Tips, 120. 20. Teresa Gibert, “Spectrality in Margaret Atwood’s ‘Death by Landscape’ (1990)”, (Miscelánea: A Journal of English and American Studies 58, 2018), 83–100, 95–96. 21. Atwood, Wilderness Tips, 126. 22. Ibid. 23. Ibid., 130. 24. Ibid., 131. 25. Ibid., 133. 26. Ibid., 136. 27. Ibid., 133. 28. Ibid., 141. 29. Ibid., 143. 30. Niemann, Ruby, “‘Negotiating with the Dead’: Authorial Ghosts and Other Spectralities in Atwood’s Adaptations”, Palgrave Studies in Adaptation and Visual Culture (Cham: Springer International Publishing, 2021), 35–48, 36. 31. Gina Wisker, “Imagining Beyond Extinctathon: Indigenous Knowledge, Survival, Speculation—Margaret Atwood’s and Ann Patchett’s Eco-­ Gothic”, (Contemporary Women’s Writing, 11:3, 2017), 412–431, 418. 32. Margaret Atwood, Surfacing (New York: Anchor Books, 1998 [1972]), 56. 33. Barbaras describes the Open as the animal’s way of seeing: “We must oppose this vision to the human gaze, which makes a world come about. We must understand it as a full vision (‘with all its eyes’), that is, a pure seeing how, that is, a pure knowledge, that does not know, that does not analyze and does not decipher anything in particular. Such a knowledge corresponds to the fact that the creature is within the Open, encompassed by it, immersed in it. But, to the extent that the Open is not a container and is not spatial, this belonging of the creature to the Open can have only a dynamic sense of an ecstasy or a dispossession. Within the Open, the animal is outside of itself, or rather, its being consists in this ecstasy itself. In this dispossession, it is carried away by the Open. It spreads itself out within the Open and meets up with, so to speak, ‘its gap.’ It makes itself equal to the dimensions of the Open” (Barbaras, Renaud, Introduction to a Phenomenology of Life (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2021), 224). 34. Ibid., 143.

CHAPTER 3

“His Eye Spoke Less than His Lip”: Hauntology, Vampires and the Trace of the Animal in John Polidori’s The Vampyre, John Ajvide Lindqvist’s Let the Right One In, Octavia E. Butler’s Fledgling and Guillermo del Toro’s Cronos

The vampire is the haunted and the haunting. This paradoxical configuration makes it a special and highly attractive gothic figure. It seems to exist solely to transgress boundaries, since it in itself contains a transgression and disturbance of the dichotomy man–animal. As stated by Benny LeMaster: “Few literary figures possess the polymorphic resilience of the vampire”.1 It is itself always already deconstructed by not belonging to any category it helps defining and it deconstructs the seeming stability of situations in which it appears. It is parasitic by feeding on human blood and life and it carries its nomadic non-belonging through time. Even without the trait of feeding on blood, it would be a threat to a certain part of humanity, which would typically be the settler, the defender of the land and the protector of the familiarity of the domestic bloodlines. The acute danger is most often foreign and an incarnation of radical otherness. In our present focus on temporality within hauntology, the vampire also has a significant function. It has the tendency to appear as a novelty, while carrying with it, and within itself, something ancient and unknown from a

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 J. Wrethed, Gothic Hauntology, Palgrave Gothic, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-41111-3_3

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distant past. Generally speaking, this temporal tension is central in gothic hauntology. Following further on Derrida’s hauntology and animal philosophy, we notice the trace of animality. In the act of pronouncing ‘man’ and in utilising the hegemonic privilege of naming the animals, we have set the stage for vampirism. The trace of animality is that ancient echo of the non-human that haunts the human. Extending Derrida’s proclivity for portmanteaus, we can say that the vampire takes the shape of the manimal. In order to study the temporal aspects of the hauntology at work within the vampire genre, we shall have a closer look at three canonised vampire narratives and a perhaps lesser-known vampire film. John Polidori’s The Vampyre functions as the historical point of resonance for the contemporary works by Ajvide Lindqvist, Butler and del Toro. What will be of central importance is the phenomenon that Derrida calls limitrophy. According to Derrida, this is about “what sprouts or grows at the limit, around the limit, by maintaining the limit, but also what feeds the limit, generates it, and complicates it”.2 Such limitrophy will manifest itself differently in the works but also in thematically similar ways. Hauntology as temporality within and around the figure of the vampire will be pursued in these works. John Polidori’s Lord Ruthven displays what has become the basic vampire characteristics in many ways—even though notably, and as we shall clearly see—the relative flexibility of vampirism is an important factor of its sustained life in the world of fiction. Lord Ruthven does not have a distinctly and clearly known past. He has an affectively detached appearance since he looks “upon the mirth around him, as if he could not participate therein”.3 That standoffishness obviously attracts “the female hunters for notoriety”.4 What is even more significant is that his eyes do not seem to respond in ways that people expect. Lady Mercer experiences that “when she stood before him, though his eyes were apparently fixed upon hers, still it seemed as if they were unperceived”.5 This enigmatic “man entirely absorbed in himself” seems to carry some kind of auto-inscription of himself, and of itself, in the context in which he and it appears. The characters in the situation do not give the impression of being able to place him or it firmly in any available social taxonomy. Thus, they do not seem to be capable of dominating him, rather, the opposite is more accurate. On the surface, that supremacy can be seen as white, old money and influence, or perhaps with one word, aristocracy, that controls without any obvious contemporary reason for that sovereignty. That power lies dynastically a long way back in history, that is, too far back to allow for any exact objectification of this fact. We shall have reason to return to this aspect, but

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there is a parallel to that completely human sphere. As Derrida shows in his tracing of the animal in western canonised philosophy, the animal always proves to lack something essential that is identified with the human. This can be seen in Descartes and all the way through the history of philosophy into contemporary times, through Kant, Heidegger, Levinas and Lacan. What already in Polidori’s early version of the vampire becomes clear is that the general haunting in vampirism is the trace of the animal as it becomes manifest already in the human, and perhaps all too human, inscription of its ontological rejection. It matters little whether the animal lacks language, sub-consciousness, a face, time-consciousness, is world-­ poor, or all of these negative features altogether. The enigma of the animal re-inscribes itself as fiction and partly in the figure of the vampire. This is the central hauntology that also clearly has its variations in different types of vampire narratives. This aspect of Polidori’s The Vampyre has hitherto not been fully pursued. The tale’s most tormented victim of Ruthven’s vampirism, Aubrey, is notably portrayed as a character with his head almost entirely in the realm of imagination and fiction. He is a loner who has “cultivated more his imagination than his judgement”.6 Polidori obviously takes great care to emphasise that Aubrey thinks “that the dreams of poets were the realities of life”.7 In terms of limitrophy, Aubrey has situated himself, so to speak, on the wrong side of the limit between reality and fiction. One way of seeing this ontological setup would be as a rhetorical move in order to convince the reader to believe that the vampire is real, because it ultimately does not originate in Aubrey’s world of fantasy. In breaking, crossing, transgressing Aubrey’s limit, vampirism becomes uncannily real, albeit still of course presented as fiction in the eyes of the reader. Thus, ultimately the vampirism in Ruthven is portrayed as something beyond epistemological grasp but still as something real. Repeatedly, Ruthven is displayed as some kind of static entity, he has “the same unchanging face”.8 He is described as being “always the same”: Lord Ruthven in his carriage, and amidst the various wild and rich scenes of nature, was always the same; his eye spoke less than his lip; and though Aubrey was near the object of his curiosity, he obtained no greater gratification from it than the constant excitement of vainly wishing to break that mystery, which to his exalted imagination began to assume the appearance of something supernatural.9

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It is notable that they travel through the multiplicity of nature, which contrasts sharply with the static aura that Ruthven exudes. Moreover, the enigma is depicted as a refusal of entering the realm of language and thereby the logocentric cognition. The animality of the vampire stems to a large extent from the bat or the wolf, even though the blood-thirst would in addition conjure bloodsucking insects such as leaches, mosquitoes, fleas and ticks.10 The parasitic characteristics of these insects explain some of the abjectity of vampirism, since these animals do not generally and normally enter a symbiosis. For humans and other hosts, the connection is mostly a poor business deal, since the parasites take blood and in exchange sometimes leave very dangerous diseases. In vampire fiction, the life is taken or the victim is brought into the haunted grey area of the vampire and thus becomes haunting and haunted too. In our context of hauntology, we shall take the liberty to not pursue the obvious aspect of Lord Ruthven’s incarnation of the rake and seducer, the destroyer of innocence and mostly female virtue that was carried on in the vampire tradition by Bram Stoker’s Count Dracula and many others. Instead, we shall tease out the trace of the animal in the tale’s theme of the unspoken and perhaps unspeakable. Aubrey’s encounter with the vampire that kills his beloved Ianthe is a shocking experience, but apart from the traces of the vampire’s teeth on the victim’s throat, the only non-human trait revealed is the creature’s massive strength. Aubrey feels himself “grappled by one whose strength seemed superhuman” and eventually he is “lifted from his feet and hurled with enormous force against the ground”.11 This superhuman capacity builds up the abject bestiality of the vampire, which is akin to the instincts of predators. It is presumably rather fruitless to try to apply verbal negotiation to that instinct or drive. However, what is of greater importance here is Aubrey’s inability to articulate what Lord Ruthven is. The local people searching for Ianthe exclaim that her death is the work of a vampire, but Aubrey seems to lack ability to articulate and elevate the chaotic thoughts and feelings to a linguistically reflective level. Instead he feels that Ruthven’s “smile haunted him”.12 This motif of inarticulacy culminates when Lord Ruthven on his ‘deathbed’ persuades Aubrey to not reveal the ‘true’ nature of him to the public. The wording in the exchange that precedes Aubrey’s oath is utterly significant. Ruthven says: “if you would conceal all you know of me, my honour were free from stain in the world’s mouth”.13 Apart from being a metonymical expression, it also draws attention to a world that has to be spoken to exist, otherwise it does not really exist, at least not as part of the

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human. But of course this simultaneously opens up for haunting and the existence in absence through haunting. Philosophically, this needs to be unpacked in order for us to be able to understand the primordial and fundamental hauntology that the figure of the vampire is part of. In Derrida’s pursuit of the animal in philosophical history, we can find a clue in the unthought of the Cartesian Ego Cogito and the unthought of consciousness or reason that underpins Kant’s project. The whole sentiment of suspicion about a profound perversity within Kantian morality […], is no doubt what guided Nietzsche in his genealogy of morals. One could say […] that this perversity is precisely the other or the unconscious of the “I think” (interpreted along Nietzschean but also Freudian lines); it is the other that thinks me and the other that follows me where I am (following), that other which haunts in advance the “I think that accompanies all my representations.”14

That which haunts in advance is typically what is prior to the human and therefore primordially threatening and unknown. This is what animality produces and what constitutes the animality within the figure of the vampire. The “in advance” is crucial. It is replete with echoes of hauntological traits. Fittingly, this is a permanent fear and horror that cannot be removed. The human dominion over animals is just a primordial reflex and a hastily assembled armour for protection against the threat of the animality within the human, or the animality which is always already prior to the human, and probably even more importantly the animality that has been vanquished in historical atrocities perpetrated by the human masters. The manifestation of this dimension is what creates the strongest horror in Polidori’s tale. The vampire does not die. It cannot be eradicated. It appears somehow before language and therefore controls language. Ruthven definitely controls Aubrey. The sworn oath to not reveal Lord Ruthven’s ‘true nature’ to anyone will expire after one year and a day. This becomes problematic when Lord Ruthven appears in London disguised as the Earl of Marsden and by means of “the serpent’s art” persuades Aubrey’s sister to marry him.15 The inability to save his sister literally drives Aubrey insane. On several occasions he hears a voice close by reminding him to remember his oath. Aubrey hardly dares to look “fearful of seeing a spectre”.16 The limitrophy involved here is the vampire’s transcendence, which for Aubrey conjures spectrality. He is also, in his powerlessness and distress, “anxious to fly that

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image which haunt[s] him”.17 It is utterly important that we acknowledge that this image that Aubrey is haunted by is an image from the future, most probably the image of his sister being destroyed by Lord Ruthven. The unhinged temporality of the vampire’s transcendentality, creates a sense of temporal omnipotence. Its transcendence here controls all the limits that Aubrey is forced to subject himself to. This power resides in the silence that is enforced upon Aubrey through the oath. Philosophically, the trace of the animal within the vampire is made manifest as the transcendental signified, which is animality in its negative inscription as the unsaid within the Judeo-Christiano-Islamic metaphysical tradition. What Lord Ruthven truly is cannot be articulated, as the animality that haunts the human can never be uttered and simultaneously remain what it is. This is the fundamental fear that Polidori’s tale intimates. Moreover, the inarticulacy of the animality in the vampire as well as its blood-thirst have to do with the mouth. The erotically charged moulder of signifiers and meaning turned into an absolute silence that feeds on the human. Articulation as the inscription of two ruby-red holes in the neck of the victim, through which the life force is transported over the limit of the skin to sustain the unsaid. Also in the epistemological dimension of Aubrey’s rational cognition, there are only signs that he himself has to put together. This is what, with modern legal language, would be denoted as a chain of circumstantial evidence. Thus, there is no concluding truth, but a plausible state of affairs. Aubrey can connect a dagger he found on the scene of Ianthe’s murder to a sheath he discovers among Lord Ruthven’s belongings. The intricate ornamentation on both items is the same. So, a pattern that still does not constitute articulated language persists over the limit so that the vampire is not fully pushed over into the realm of the metaphysical. Symbolically, the dagger that fits perfectly in the sheath displays Lord Ruthven’s transcendental capacity. As with the hauntology of the unsaid animal, this is the truly frightening dimension of this gothic tale. To even further accentuate the transcendence of the rational interwoven with metaphysics, we detect that the knife and the sheath are both marked with drops of blood. Ultimately, the idea maintained is that Lord Ruthven is the vampire, but that this is not certain beyond any doubt. In accordance with limitrophy and hauntology, it is clear that uncertainty is always more terrifying than certainty.

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Let the Right One In The vampire in Ajvide Lindqvist’s novel is a child named Eli. Already here, in this clear and straightforward focus on the vampire, there are distinct hauntological components. It is a vampire child, but from the viewpoint of the human, it is already old. The name means ‘high’ or ‘elevated’ and as a derivation from for instance Elias, Elijah or Elisha, it can also mean ‘my god’. The name of God is as significant as the mute name of the animal. It calls into being the different meanings of Jehovah, the ‘I am what I am’, the ‘I am that I am’ and the future form ‘I am he who will be’. Hauntologically, this temporality corresponds to the figure of the vampire too, at least partly it fits Eli in this novel, but also Lord Ruthven in Polidori’s novella, as illustrated above. For Eli himself, the past is unclear, an amorphous haze somewhere in between memory and dream. Especially the becoming vampire is submerged in a dreamlike and imprecise memory of an event that Eli telepathically shares with the bullied protagonist Oskar. Through a kiss, mouth on mouth, Oskar is transported to a film-like experience of some kind of initiation rite, which also reveals the castration of Eli that Oskar experiences from a first-person perspective, actually feeling Eli’s pain and agony. In the sequence, Oskar tries to scream ‘no’ but has had a rope stuffed in his mouth, and significantly “the rope prevents him from forming the word”.18 Typically, the ‘origin’ of the vampire is situated at the limit of myth or dream and something that could have happened in a distant past. The castration is Ajvide Lindqvist’s addition that offers a more contemporary limitrophic theme, since Eli lacks genitals and oscillates between being taken for a girl or a very young and cute boy. The lack of a clear origin is something to be expected, but interestingly, this vampiric trait has merged with the late twentieth century setting in a Swedish suburb. Only one thing was missing. A past. At school the children didn’t get to do any special projects about Blackeberg’s history because there wasn’t one. That is to say, there was something about an old mill. A tobacco king. Some strange old buildings down by the water. But that was a long time ago and without any connection to the present. Where the three-storeyed apartment buildings now stood there had been only forest before. You were beyond the grasp of the mysteries of the past; there wasn’t even a church. Nine thousand inhabitants and no church.

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That tells you something about the modernity of the place, its rationality. It tells you something of how free they were from the ghosts of history and of terror. It explains in part how unprepared they were.19

Even a societal model that rationally constructs forgetfulness will conjure the past, which seems predictable in terms of hauntological and gothic logic. The appearance of the vampire follows the traditional setup, since it arrives and implicitly questions a certain order that prevails prior to the appearance. The mythic haze out of which Eli arises can interestingly be connected to Polidori too. As Anne Stiles et al. have pointed out, “highly popular stage adaptations of The Vampyre emphasized dreams, mesmerism and trance states”.20 Obviously, these liminal phenomena provide the parameters for Ajvide Lindqvist’s contemporary gothic tale as well. In fact, what it adds thematically becomes even more relevant as we approach the other major themes of Let the Right One In, which are bullying and the societal abject that always will be somehow produced by any normative system. Human reason ceaselessly searches for the origin and causes of these phenomena, but it seems impossible to locate them. Where did bullying begin and where did the morbidity of for instance paedophilia begin? These phenomena encompass the strange zone of haunted and haunting that is also occupied by the vampire. The paedophile in the novel Håkan, who is utilised by Eli to bring home fresh human blood, contemplates the perceived decay of canonised art in modern times. Thinking about Michelangelo’s The Creation of Adam, he ponders the intricate details in the painting. The whole point of the picture, at least as he saw it, was that these two monumental bodies each came to an end in two index fingers that almost, but not quite, touched. There was a space between them a millimetre or so wide. And in this space—life. The sculptural size and richness of detail of this picture was simply a frame, a backdrop, to emphasise the crucial void in its centre. The point of emptiness that contained everything.21

Like the novel as a whole, this detail in focus here has a negative and a positive reading that somehow give rise to a melancholy base note. ‘Life’ is positive and ‘life’ as potentiality is positive, but whatever ‘life’ becomes out of this void, there will be choices and traces of that which did not become articulation or narrative. For the paedophile, Håkan, the thought

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must often have emerged, why he should feel desire in a way that makes him into a monster. Why he had to be the one in thrall by Eli, which forces him to collect blood, to kill, in order to sustain an untenable situation. It is like a curse analogous to the curse of the oath in Aubrey’s case. Similarly, to Eli, the curse of the vampire forces him into a position in which the choice is between death and the sustenance of a sordid life, always haunted and always haunting. As for all human victims and perpetrators, there seems to be no choice. The choice appears as an illusion. Håkan ponders this conundrum too. Parallel worlds. A comforting thought. There was a parallel world where he didn’t do what he was about to do. A world where he walked away, leaving the boy to wake up and wonder what had happened. But not in this one. In this world he now walked over to his bag and opened it. He was in a hurry. He quickly pulled on his raincoat and got out his tools. A knife, a rope, a large funnel and a five litre plastic jug. He put everything on the ground next to the boy, looking at the young body one last time. Then he picked up the rope and got to work.22

Apart from the proliferation of worlds in which we do not do what we do, this passage also contains an important narratological detail, which is the strong focus on the minutiae of the practical work of the person allied to the blood craving vampire. The horror comes from the absence of myth and perhaps also the total absence of erotic connotations of the bite. Håkan is forced to extract nourishment from a defenceless child. The double level of meaning comes from the fact that it is Håkan who does what he does, and it highlights the parallelism of paedophilia and vampirism. Being haunted by one’s own haunting is to be both predator and prey at the same time. One moment victim and the next perpetrator. That is the horrible logic that Let the Right One In forces the reader to envisage and ponder. This becomes really pertinent in, and in relation to, the theme of bullying. The victim, Oskar, repeatedly entertains fantasies about usurping the role of the perpetrator, the bully and the master. Notably, such situations seem to offer no other option. Either you are the perpetrator or you are the victim and these persist as each other’s condition of possibility seemingly eternally. When Oskar eventually strikes back, things just get worse, which is completely in accordance with the overarching logic of the novel’s lugubrious equilibrium.

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This whole depressing logic of fate playing with possibility, human choice and free will, connects back to Polidori in an interesting way. Stiles et al. have pursued this theme from Polidori’s Romantic context through the Victorian era up into contemporary times. Taken together, Polidori’s medical thesis and his fictional works express anxieties that are both typically Romantic and surprisingly enduring. His somnambulistic vampires emerged at a time when mental science undermined human autonomy by suggesting that we are controlled by neurological impulses outside conscious awareness. These same concerns resurfaced in the Victorian era and persist today, although they are couched in different scientific language. Some Victorians worried that localization of brain function and so-called “reflex action of the brain” left little room for concepts like the soul or free will.23

In Ajvide Lindqvist’s novel, this is accentuated by Håkan, who after a failed blood-extraction operation pours acid in his own face in an unsuccessful attempt to escape his fate, but, through Eli’s intended mercy-bite that also fails, instead metamorphoses into an undead automaton, only capable of pursuing his one and only paedophilic compulsion. As formulated by Maria Holmgren Troy, “when transformed into the undead, Håkan is the epitome of the pedophile as ruthless predator, governed exclusively by his cravings: a brain-dead monster with a constant erection”.24 The horrible possibility that Stiles et  al. draw attention to is a central part of Derrida’s thinking about the rejection of the animal as the imperfectly human. But seen from within hauntology, it becomes the source of a fundamental fear that the vampire fictionally forces the reader to confront. In close reading Descartes’ ego cogito, Derrida pinpoints the fact that the lack of self-reflection would lead to the animal-automaton that would also contain other aspects of the non-human: Taking this grand mechanicist—and what is also called materialist—tradition back to the drawing board should not involve a reinterpretation of the living creature called “animal” only, but also another concept of the machine, of the semiotic machine, if it can be called that, of artificial intelligence, of cybernetics and zoo- and bio-engineering, of the genic in general, etc.25

In terms of the novel focused upon here, the fear of the human other, whether it is in the form of the vampire, the animal, the semiotic machine or the similarly rejected paedophile, in terms of its monstrosity, is in its

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most terrifying aspect presented as something within the human. The modern fear is that the phenomenon is everywhere and that humans generally can never escape it. The figure of the vampire in the shape of Eli just functions as a catalyst and focaliser, so to speak. Eli is tormented by his/ her state as a vampire. The animalistic traits concretely consist of claws and seemingly superhuman speed and agility of movement, especially when forced to hunt for blood. The other vampiric qualities that make Eli non-­ human are the common trait within vampire lore, the inability to withstand light, especially direct sunlight, but also the more uncommon feature of having to be invited to enter a restricted space, for instance a house, an apartment or a room. This last trait can also be seen metaphorically in Ajvide Lindqvist’s novel. Once the vampire, in the shape of Eli, is let in, the disturbance of the limitrophic sphere sets chains of reactions into motion. Penny Crofts and Honni van Rijswijk draw attention to Eli’s centrality in terms of limitrophy: As a vampire, Eli is an example of Derrida’s undecidability. She is unable to die and exists between life and death. She is neither boy nor girl, young nor old. She destabilizes fundamental cultural dichotomies and in the process undermines binaries of good/bad, present/past. If the basic distinction between life and death is not operative, then neither are other cherished binaries. The vampire figure renders fluid what we understand to be fixed. Card’s notion of the gray zone is primarily focused upon moral ambiguity. Derrida uses the term “undecidable” and Kristeva “abject” to represent things, people or categories that are neither one thing nor another. Mary Douglas uses the term “disorder” to denote the disruption of cherished classificatory systems or order. All these authors note our desire to resolve undecidables, disorder, and the abject. Eli is both an abomination and essential to Oskar’s rescue.26

The difference between the functions of the vampire—in for instance Polidori’s and Ajvide Lindqvist’s versions—is that in the former the vampire remains as a threat in its animalistic otherness, but in the latter it takes on the role of a catalyst in a fictional resolution of an ethical dilemma. The vampiric is also what restores the order at the end and perhaps this order is—and must remain—totally fictional, or to be situated in the grey habitat that is also the vampire’s own para-site, the sphere ‘alongside’ the ‘food’, as the Greek etymology indicates.27 In the typically gothic ambiguity of Eli—made manifest already by his name in combination with his animality—the avenger comes in the form of an angel. When the bullying

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tormentors arrive to revenge Oskar’s violent blow on the ear on one of the bullies, Eli eventually interferes and the witnesses’ testimonies afterwards frequently repeat the word “angel”: “Oskar Eriksson had been rescued by an angel. The same angel who, according to the witnesses, had ripped Jonny and Jimmy Forsberg’s heads off and left them at the bottom of the pool”.28 The angel, as well as the more contemporary version of the vampire, typically straddle the limit between myth and reality and also ethically between right and wrong. This limitrophic effect challenges the reader in a very profound way. The reader may suspect that the catharsis could only be fictional and that the realistic understanding of the novel would be that the bullying never really began in a rational sphere and can therefore never really end rationally. Oskar and Eli leave for Karlstad in the very last scene, but how will their life develop there? Eli needs the blood. Will Oskar take on Håkan’s role and provide the blood. The way out seems to be fictional or religious in terms of the hope for a truly new beginning. This leads us to address the limitrophic topic of fiction-vs-reality in the sphere of the hauntological gothic. The ethics of the vampire and perhaps fiction more generally is to introduce and maintain a space of potentiality and freedom of imagination. In the early parts of the novel, it is as if Oskar can be satisfied with the catharsis of enacting an imaginary revenge on his tormentors. It is not until the end of the narrative that Eli has to intervene and reify this fantasy. This occurs because the perpetrators push the bullying ritual all the way to the limit of life and death, since they most certainly would have drowned Oskar had not Eli intercepted. The significance is contained already in Håkan’s thinking about Michelangelo’s grandiose painting mentioned above. The nothingness that is life is simultaneously everything. The departure-point of imagination is always a perpetual starting point, especially in fictional spheres of undecidability and ambiguity. There is a playfulness that feeds the limit, that problematises it, while also maintaining it. Fiction generally, and perhaps gothic fiction specifically, can be seen as utilising limitrophy to its maximum capacity. Hauntology may also be extended to encompass the merging of realist fiction and the vampire myth that Ajvide Lindqvist has created. Drawing on Derrida, Sadeq Rahimi highlights the absence of any final deciphering of encryption and of texts generally: “This is the sense in which hauntology is a theory not of haunted texts, but of text as such, a theory of reading rather than one of readability, a theory of everyday life”.29 Such a theory of reading would also ultimately have to contain an ethical dimension. Michael Jay Lewis has carefully built his narratological ethics around Let the Right

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One In and he elaborates the reader’s identification, not with the individual characters primarily, but with the concept of the implied author. This denotative expansion also occurs in the gap—the nothingness— between characters and their classifications of others: between Oskar and his imagination of Eli’s victim, between Eli and his memory of Oskar stabbing the tree, between Oskar and his kissinvoked vision of Eli’s past (of Eli’s castration, of Eli’s mother’s death). It is the reader’s interpretation of this nothingness that permits characters to exceed preexisting classifications. As we read and reconsider these passages, we are invited to witness and help construct the performance of imaginative identification that only narratives received as fiction can produce. Responsibility for significance, relevance, or meaning thereby devolves to the reader as interpreter: the “nothingness” that spreads throughout the text is the vacancy in which the voice of the critic emerges. This nothingness both excuses the characters as responsible agents (and any credit or blame the readers would assign to them as representatives of human behavior) and invokes the function of the reader as the articulator of gaps.30

The hauntology of the fear of the animal within vampirism, functions as the narratological motor. The central nothingness is the universal fear of the animal’s mute force. But as Lewis suggests, this anxiety is also the source of the reader’s ethical sensitivity. To be haunted is not entirely a bad thing, since the relation between fiction and life may be seen as a perpetually reappearing mutual haunting.

Fledgling In the celebrated sci-fi author Octavia E. Butler’s last work, the protagonist-­ vampire is also a child. It is fifty years old but appears in the body of a female adolescent. Similarly to Eli, it has an unclear picture of its past. Even worse, after a violent attack on the community in which she lived, Shori suffers from trauma and a severe memory loss, which she partly attempts to amend by detective work in search of her own identity. In that sense, Shori is haunted by the absence of a past, which is similar to Eli’s situation. The difference here is that she once belonged to a community that was relatively stable within the human majority society. The disruption of this comparatively solid condition actually comes from within the species of vampires, not from the humans primarily. Butler creates an idiosyncratic vampire ontology in Fledgling, especially as compared to Polidori.

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The narratological setup is that the reader gradually discovers this ontology alongside the protagonist. Limitrophy is instigated at a very early stage in the narrative. Feeding on animals in the forest, Shori has managed to recuperate from her wounds after the attack on her community. However, she feels that she needs not only human blood but also human companionship and protection. She is picked up by a passing car and the driver is the construction worker Wright Hamlin. Shori takes blood from him and they develop a sexual relationship. This is limitrophically provocative in two interrelated ways. Shori is fifty-three years old, but a completely breastless and hairless child in body. Seen as a human relation, Wright becomes something of a paedophile, or alternatively, the mature woman has found herself some young male affection, since Wright is just above twenty years old. These initial ethical problems gradually dissolve, since it becomes clear that Shori needs several adult, human companions. It also becomes obvious that the transgressive vampire does not respect the normative gender dichotomy either. Shori soon finds a middle-aged woman to replenish her need for human blood and she develops a sexual relation with this woman too. It is clear that the vampire is aware that it cannot take too much blood from one and the same person too often. That would hurt the human and be counterproductive to the vampire’s life situation. In clear distinction to many other vampire narratives, the human and vampire here develop a symbiotic relationship. In exchange for the blood the humans give, they get some form of substance from Shori that makes them healthier and gives them longer lives. The human symbionts become addicted to this benign vampire venom. In terms of the temporal aspects of hauntology, it has two very significant functions in this narrative. Especially in the politically oriented sphere of gothic fiction verging on speculative fiction and a distinct use of verfremdung in relation to human history. In this fictional setup, Shori is a genetic experiment in that she has a black mother. The genetic advantages are that the darker skin makes her less sensitive to daylight. This feature is what probably saved her from the initial attack and she later prevents an assault on her new community, since she is awake in the daytime. The ones attacking always do that in the day, because they know the powerful vampires are then usually sleeping. The racist tendencies come from within the Ina species of vampires. Another ancient vampire family, the Silks, want to eradicate the impurity of darker skin from the species. This aspect reflects racist ideology and the reader can easily make connections especially to the modern American society and obviously American history, but also more

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recent European history. The temporality of the hauntology here is the conservatism of ideas and notions of purity that cannot withstand any progress or changing of limits. The effect of verfremdung is pushed back and forth over the limit and the racism in the contemporary of the novel has a peculiar past when it comes to the Ina vampires. One of the human symbionts, that used to belong to Shori’s father Iosif, fills Shori in on Ina vampire history. [T]hey’ve been scattered all over Europe and the Middle East for millennia, or so their records say. They claim to have written records that go back more than ten thousand years. Iosif told me about them. I think he believed what he was saying, but I never believed him. Ten thousand years!” She shook her head. “Written history just doesn’t go back that far. Anyway, now Ina are scattered all over the world. You just happened to be descended from a people who lived in what Iosif used to call ‘vampire country.’ I think some of your ancestors there were outed and executed as vampires a few centuries ago. Iosif used to joke about it in a bitter way. He said that, physically, he and most Ina fit in badly wherever they go—tall, ultrapale, lean, wiry people. They usually looked like foreigners, and when times got bad, they were treated like foreigners—suspected, disliked, driven out, or killed.”31

Hauntologically, there are a number of significant things here. Obviously, the vampiric transcendence of human time is conspicuous. The vampire species does not only carry animalistic traits, it has also existed alongside the human, almost always ‘before’ the human to some extent. The writing of the historical record is also of importance. Writing as we know primordially introduces difference. Such difference is here seen as giving rise to exclusion, diaspora and suffering. Ironically, the extreme whiteness, the ‘ultrapaleness’, is what historically has marked the Ina species off. In the contemporary of the novel, it is precisely this whiteness that is supposed to be protected from blackness or darkness of skin. Behind specific haunting, there arises a more general haunting that has to do with the sign itself. The distinction may be arbitrary and seemingly meaningless, but value immediately creeps in, so that the Hegelian master and serfdom dialectic takes over. As with the theme of bullying in Let the Right One In, these mechanisms are presented as unavailable to rational thinking. They more resemble haunting and features out of a metaphysical realm. Within the genre of the gothic, these structures are continuously highlighted and scrutinised in ever new constellations. The animality in Fledgling clearly takes a more contemporary position, especially in contrast with what we see in Polidori.

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Animality merges with the human, since the human loses its strong position and partly dissolves into the posthuman sphere. As we know from modern science generally and biology specifically, animality and the microbic universe are not entities the human can exist in isolation from. Thus, the unproductive attitude of strong othering seems to gradually be challenged and weakened. The gothic as a genre has this type of limitrophic complexity in its DNA, to use the parlance of our day. In terms of hauntology, Butler’s version moves the whole issue so that it traverses also the line of demarcation between vampires and humans. Vampire history is not different from human history other than in its vaster temporal span. Vampires have their own history of internal violence and racism. In this fictive exploration of the genre the gothic also becomes elevated into a posthuman sphere. If nothing else, it reveals the extreme versatility of the genre. Paradoxically, it also helps the reader to imagine animality in a more ‘realistic’ way. If vampires are associated with the animalistic as part of the human but also as part of something that transcends the human, Butler envisages a stronger connection to the ecological reality that is a prerequisite for the existence of the human. Notably, in the Ina trial that follows the allegations towards the Silk family for being responsible for the attempts at elimination of Shori’s community, Milo Silk expresses racist ideology presumably in the way a human with such an ideological inclination would. [Milo] stared at me, then turned again to Preston. “For the child’s own sake, I request that she be examined by a physician.” I said, “What are those notes you are making there, Milo? No one else is taking notes. Are you having difficulties with your memory, too?” He glared at me. Katherine Dahlman glared at me. “I am Ina, Milo, and if the doctor must examine me, then for your own sake, I request that she also examine you.” “You’re not Ina!” he shouted. He slammed his palm down on the table, making a sound like a gunshot. “You’re not! And you have no more business at this Council than would a clever dog!”32

Typically, in a polemic situation, Milo reveals the chains of othering that sustain concatenations of hatred, and vice-versa. Ina history reveals persecution and violence because of the vampires’ nomadic otherness and still the Silks repeat the hatred, albeit with a different colour-code. The “clever dog” analogy takes the reader full circle in terms of verfremdung. In my

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overarching claim, animality is inherent in the notion of the vampire. Still, animality can be used for purposes of domination and degradation. The overarching verfremdung helps the reader see the relative arbitrariness of hierarchies in terms of the fact that meaning has to be ‘assigned’. The reader has to at least briefly consider how the animality in the Ina is related to the animality of the dog. As gothic hauntology, this reveals the possibility that myth and fiction can sustain something ‘real’. If the vampire is clearly a fictional or mythic figure, the attached affectivity that it conjures, may very well be absolutely real. A tentative contention would be that the vampire haunts the human in the form of a reminiscence of the human’s subconscious animality. As Lin Knutson has suggested about Fledgling: “Examining the rigid social structures of the novel plays into Butler’s belief that human beings are hierarchical (centralized), yet must embrace change—must embrace liminality”.33

Cronos As the overall haunting of the vampire within the gothic, I have highlighted its strong focus on, and transgression of, temporal laws and seemingly fixed limits. In Guillermo del Toro’s film Cronos (1993), the title indicates transgressive haunting as part and parcel of the vampire genre. Cronos (Cronus or Kronos) is the Greek god that was one of the Titans who castrated his own father. Cronos also found out that he was destined to be slain by his own son as a repetition of the mutilation of his father. In order to prevent that, Cronos eats his children. As is generally known, “Greek legend offers contrasting visions of KRONOS and his regime”.34 Moreover, Cronos is often confused with Chronos, who is the personification of time. However, this ambiguity is even more prolific in relation to hauntology. Time itself also metaphorically eats its children. The flesh of the now continuously remains in itself, renews itself by feeding on the tissue of the just-past. The past further away is made up of partially dead events, corpses, carcasses of Cronos’ leftovers, which can only reappear as spectrality or revisitations of the undead. In the Greek myth, Zeus revolts against Kronos and makes him throw up the siblings that he has already devoured, which also stresses the trope of the past returning, often as some kind of revenge directed towards the perpetrator. In the film, the past returns through and as the metallic beetle. In addition, as in most vampire lore, there is a horrible price to be paid for the ‘gift’ of eternal life (or prolonged life and improved health). The protagonist, the elderly

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antique dealer Jesús Gris, discovers a metallic object hidden inside a guardian angel statue that he has in his possession. The metallic object has an internal mechanism that when started makes the object ‘bite’ the person holding it. This is in a way a clear indication of the posthuman aspects opened up by vampirism. The animality of the object is mechanised and therefore contains both machine-animality and metaphysical animality as anachronistic time. The bite that Gris gets contains some form of venom that gradually turns him into a vampire. The statue’s content is initially revealed by cockroaches that pour out of its semi-hollow interior through the eye of the angel, which is what makes Gris investigate the inside of the statue. This clear highlighting of animality emphasises its epistemological depth. Even for modern biologists, the ways of many animals are still to a great extent unknown, which is why they are eminent carriers of myth and metaphysical dimensions. Again, the vampiric is strongly connected to this version of animality. This may be linked to a more generalised function of the vampiric. As suggested by Claudia Lindén and Hans Ruin, perhaps this is the most horrifying aspect: “The vampire is a genuinely terrifying figure. It is a spectre who not merely returns like a shadowy ghost of the past to remind the living of perpetrated injustices. It is undead history itself, as anxiety and desire, as something the living cannot control, as something they are lured into dealing with but that will thereby prove their undoing”.35 Jesús Gris is accidentally drawn into the vampiric sphere. The mystery and mythical dimension of this event is also notably made up of a combination of clockwork mechanics and the animalistic sting of the antique object he has found. Time appears as mechanistic, seemingly unstoppable determinism, and as animalistic mysticism that infects the protagonist. The past returns with equal amounts of predestination and unknowing. It is as if vampirism itself has decided to survive in the shape of an ancient virus, coming back to haunt humans at random. Jesús Gris has really not done anything noteworthy—nothing that deserves vampiric haunting anyway—he just tries to live a quiet family life with his wife, taking care of his little shop and his diseased son’s daughter. This whole setup goes to show that vampirism may appear as undead history itself and as the repressed animality that points more to a collective human guilt in terms of ecological disaster and a ruthless exploitation of the planet’s different animals. These human crimes lie always already in the past, so to speak, and are therefore hauntological phenomena, that is, an instantiation of the ecological aspect of undead history.

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When Gris gets help from his wife to take care of the wound from the first bite of the cronos device, a little piece of matter is pulled out of the flesh. They speculate if it is a metal shard, but visually to the viewer it might just as well be an insect sting or a piece of a claw. Something has pierced through the skin and infected the blood, which in turn activates a craving for blood in the victim. This is significant from a limitrophic point of view. The skin is the limit, the barrier, holding the blood inside and keeping potentially harmful things from entering the body. This limit is transgressed, which symbolises a release of the abject. There are connotations to addiction of course, but it is also a fantasy of embracing the abject instead of pushing it away. Such reversal is most clearly manifested when Gris shortly afterwards begins to feel the yearning for blood. At a party, he follows a man, who has had a sudden nosebleed, into the toilet. When alone in the public toilet, Gris detects a smallish stain of blood on the floor. He lies down and gingerly licks the blood off the toilet floor, which creates a strong image of the abject and a gothic reversal of what ordinarily is absolutely repulsive and unthinkable. In more general hauntological terms, the rejected animality is allowed to return in the form of fiction. As Rahimi has stated about hauntological grammar more generally: “every meaning, every order, and every representation is haunted by that which it has failed to or refused to represent, that which is not meant, that which is not specularized, and which is therefore a potential victim in need of a voice, and a potential contender for a regime of its own”.36 What returns through the cronos device is animality as such. On another occasion after using the device, Gris looks at some sticky substance between his fingers, which clearly resembles secretion from an insect. The vampire figure may be said to incarnate the floating abject as well as the subdued and maltreated animal. Derrida points to this culturally widespread tradition. I think that Cartesianism belongs, beneath its mechanicist indifference, to the Judeo-Christiano-Islamic tradition of a war against the animal, of a sacrificial war that is as old as Genesis. And that war is not just one means of applying technoscience to the animal in the absence of another possible or foreseeable means; no, that violence or war has until now been constitutive of the project or of the very possibility of techno-scientific knowledge within the process of humanization or of the appropriation of man by man, including its most highly developed ethical or religious forms. No ethical or sentimental nobility must be allowed to conceal from us that violence, and

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acknowledged forms of ecologism or vegetarianism are insufficient to bring it to an end, however more worthy they be than what they oppose.37

What is indicated here in relation to gothic hauntology, is the cathartic possibility of going with the abject and the subversive, instead of trying to desperately fight it off. As mentioned, the violation of animality and ecology generally for that matter, has uncannily always already happened. In Christian terms, it is nothing less than the reliving of the fall again and again. The cockroaches leading Gris to the cronos device fall as tears out of the guardian angel statue. Significantly, Gris’ granddaughter instinctively starts to frantically slap the insects in order to kill them. What the gothic more generally tries to do, is to make humanity humbler towards its own darkness, making us aware that one cannot get familiar with darkness by immersing it in light. * * * As we have seen, the vampiric is a very rich and thought-provoking gothic source of inspiration and it contributes plenty of ideas to the topic of hauntology. In Polidori, the mute animalism presents itself as a force from a past without any determinable arche ̄, that is, any clear source-point. Instead of being infected by a vampire bite, Aubrey is infected by the spell of the vampire as the beckoning of the repressed animal as such. In Let the Right One In, vampiric transgressions of the limit can be seen as a liberating force in relation to the theme of bullying. In terms of hauntology, the curse of the past presents itself as an inescapable part of any present. Fledgling treats cultural tradition as a form of haunting, both in its more positive aspects in terms of family life, tradition, the persistence of friendship and fellow-feeling and its darker aspects as the historical power of racist structures. Finally in Cronos, the guardian angels contain the vampirism and animality that one would have thought was buried in the past. These angels are supposed to guard the way back to Edenic innocence, but instead they carry the animalistic inside them, which incarnates the very transgression of a limit. The strength of the gothic is revealed here since it treats hauntology as frightening, but also possibly as a cathartic force.

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Notes 1. Benny LeMaster, “Queer Imag(in)ing: Liminality as Resistance in Lindqvist’s Let the Right One In” (Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, 8:2, 2011), 103–123, 103. 2. Jacques Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am, 29. 3. John Polidori, The Vampyre and Other Tales of the Macabre, Oxford World’s Classics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 3. 4. Ibid. 5. Ibid. 6. Ibid., 4. 7. Ibid. 8. Ibid., 6. 9. Ibid., 7. 10. The origin of the vampire is contested. There are arguments to place it in the Norse and Icelandic sagas, c.f. Barbara Brodman and James E. Doan, The Universal Vampire  : Origins and Evolution of a Legend (Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2013). Others would point to the origin of the literary vampire in German folklore, c.f. Heide Crawford, The Origins of the Literary Vampire (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2016). It seems to be clear though that the link to bats comes from the colonial settlers that discovered the sub-species Desmodus Rotundus in Central and South America. This creature was given the name Vampire Bat, since it feeds on blood. It seems to be clear that Polidori built on Byron’s abandoned story “The Fragment” that in turn utilised the idea of the Turkish vampire figure, the Giaour. 11. Polidori, The Vampyre, 12. 12. Ibid., 13. 13. Ibid., 15. 14. Derrida, The Animal, 102 (my italics). 15. Polidori, The Vampyre, 22. 16. Ibid., 18. 17. Ibid., 19. 18. John Ajvide Lindqvist, Let the Right One In (London: Riverrun, 2017), 390. [First published in Great Britain in 2007 by Quercus. Swedish original published in 2004 by Ordfront]. 19. Ibid., 2. 20. Anne Stiles, Stanley Finger, and John Bulevich, “Somnambulism and Trance States in the Works of John William Polidori, Author of The Vampyre” (European Romantic Review 21:6, 2010), 789–807, 804. 21. Ajvide Lindqvist, Let the Right One In, 20. 22. Ibid., 28.

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23. Stiles et al., “Somnambulism”, 804. 24. Maria Holmgren Troy, “Predator and Prey: The Vampire Child in Novels by S.P. Somtow and John Ajvide Lindqvist” (Nordic Gothic Edda. Nordisk Tidsskrift for Litteraturforskning 104:2, 2017), 130–44, 142. 25. Derrida, The Animal, 76. 26. Penny Crofts, and Honni van Rijswijk, “‘What Kept You So Long?’: Bullying’s Gray Zone and The Vampire’s Transgressive Justice in Let the Right One In” (Law, Culture & the Humanities 11:2, 2015), 248–69, 267. 27. The Concise Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology, s.v. ‘Parasite’ (Online version, 2003). 28. Ajvide Lindqvist, Let the Right One In, 517–18. 29. Sadeq Rahimi, The Hauntology of Everyday Life, 72. 30. Michael Jay Lewis, “Letting In the Right Let the Right One In: Sympathy for the Making of Fictional Sympathy” (Papers on Language & Literature 54:4, 2018), 343–80, 375. 31. Octavia E.  Butler, Fledgling (New York & Boston: Grand Central Publishing, 2005). 32. Ibid., 238. 33. Lin Knutson, “Monster Studies: Liminality, Home Spaces, and Ina Vampires in Octavia E. Butler’s Fledgling” (University of Toronto Quarterly, 87:1, 2018), 214–33, 231. 34. Robin Hard, The Routledge Handbook of Greek Mythology: Based on H.J.  Rose’s “Handbook of Greek Mythology” (Routledge, London, 2004), 69. 35. Claudia Lindén, and Hans Ruin, “The Vampire, the Undead and the Anxieties of Historical Consciousness”, The Ethos of History Making sense of history, Stefan Helgesson and Jayne Svenungsson (eds) (New York: Berghahn Books, 2018), 32–53, 49. 36. Rahimi, Hauntology, 70. 37. Derrida, Animal, 101.

CHAPTER 4

“Nothing Is but What Is Not”: Spectral Temporality and Hauntology in Selected Works by Edgar Allan Poe

Edgar Allan Poe’s whole life was to a great extent lived in the sphere of haunting. He is relentlessly haunted by the lack of money and his own versions of what he in his fiction labels ‘perverseness’, which for the most part, in his case, would become manifested as drinking and gambling. The latter was most famously what put an end to his university studies. At numerous points in his life, the mysterious force of self-destruction emerges from the haunting shadows giving Poe a devastating blow. For instance, when contemplating the economic security of obtaining a job as a state official, Poe wanted to get into contact with the president at the time, John Tyler of Virginia. The financial security of a state administration occupation would obviously be valuable for a struggling writer. Following up on the successful inquiries he had made, Poe went to Washington D.C., in March 1843 to be interviewed for a minor job in the Tyler administration (and to solicit subscriptions for The Stylus). Perversely, he went on a drunken binge, turned up dishevelled with his cloak turned inside out, and thus ruined his chances for the position. Friends had to assist him to the train for his return trip to Philadelphia.1 The haunting and inexplicable restlessness and destruction, apparently at least, temporarily overwhelm the artist. Alcoholism would be an all too simplistic explanation to the ontological/hauntological force, even though it obviously plays a part. Presumably, some of Poe’s tales try out various strategies in attempting to find out more about the phenomenon of haunting. The American author of

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 J. Wrethed, Gothic Hauntology, Palgrave Gothic, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-41111-3_4

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gothic horror must be regarded as a key figure when we further pursue the topic of hauntology.

Many of Poe’s short stories incarnate the idea of haunting guilt, at least that may be concluded after a rather superficial first reading. Just to name a few of these narratives, we have classics such as “The Tell-Tale Heart”, “The Imp of the Perverse” and “The Black Cat”, in all of which a near-­ metaphysical force takes over the protagonists’ whole being and compels them to reveal the truth, even if that truth is concomitantly their own undoing and their way to perdition, either to rot in prison or to hang from the gallows. Not surprisingly, psychoanalytic readings have suited Poe’s literary universe well.2 More modern concepts such as compulsive or obsessive behaviour, mental deterioration, paranoia, psychotic behaviour and schizophrenia obviously fit many of the characters’ actions in the narratives.3 However, a more strongly historically contextualising reading would have to view these phenomena slightly differently. For instance, Poe’s prose contains a frequent use of the word “soul”. According to Bruce Mills, Poe has a conscious strategy to attempt to reach a form of transcendence through the power of words. In a comment on “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar”, Mills asserts that “the author seeks to transcend death and speak from the position of the soul”.4 Such transcendence via language simultaneously creates the overall sense of haunting. It shall be argued below that this type of hauntology is something very typical and specific for Poe. Closely related to, and partly intertwined with—that which may be read through psychoanalysis and a commonsensical understanding of how guilt actually works—there exists an ontologically more profound and complex hauntology. Such an ontology/hauntology has clear theological and existential overtones. If language has a transcendental capacity, then the haunting of the negation of any declarative proposition will also have a transcendental dimension. As in the case of vampires in the previous chapter, in which animality was suppressed in the name of the human, the transcendence of language is haunted by that which it could not articulate, or simply refused to utter. This may be seen as the whole of the shadow world that the gothic deals with, and has dealt with, since the genre first came into being. As summarised by Eamonn Carrabine: “The origins of the genre are usually traced back to Horace Walpole’s (1764) Castle of Otranto, the second edition of which was subtitled ‘A Gothick Story,’ that did much to establish narrative conventions that are revisited and reworked in subsequent writing. The emphasis on the returning past, transgression and decay, imprisonment and escape, the

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anticipation of the supernatural, usurpation and dynastic intrigue, are all present in Otranto”.5 However, shifting the focus from psychoanalytical readings, we can view Poe’s hauntology as an affective, cognitive and semantic phenomenon. As proposed by Paul Gilmore: […] Poe anticipates these critiques of viewing the imagination—and the functions of the brain as a whole—in utilitarian or rational terms. Where Poe’s account of Dupin and of the human mind in general is ripe for fruitful exploration along the lines some cognitivist has mapped, his emphasis on the gaps in our ability to know and the fundamental role those limitations play in creating aesthetic experience should push cognitive critics to focus less on the rational uses of literature, whether in evolutionary terms or not, and more on how art draws on, elaborates, and plays with the perverse anomalies of the mind.6These “perverse anomalies of the mind” are both a driving force in Poe’s fiction, but also what makes the entity we call ‘human’ fall into the abyss of unknowing, suffering and despair. To put it bluntly, Poesque hauntology depicts the rational as inevitably haunted by the absolutely irrational, not as a consequence, but rather as an inescapable flipside of a hauntological coin. In order to make clear how one can view Poe’s hauntology, I shall utilise a model of experience that originates in Lacanian psychoanalysis, but I shall refine the concepts so that they work without preconceived ideas about how the subconscious is constituted. In fact, without positing a subconscious at all. In his investigations of everyday hauntology, Sadeq Rahimi draws on Lacan to explain the functioning of a type of unavoidable haunting. Any present in any life lived contains the desire of the subject as a central principle. From the basics of the needs of food and sleep to more elaborate levels of desire, this is always directed towards something non-present. This situation makes the present an empty vacuum. The only way for the subject to validate the desire is to anchor it in the past, in history or memory. A particular way for the past to make itself known in the present is as spectrality. In the poetic worlds of Poe, this spectrality could obviously be seen as a dominating force. As formulated by Rahimi: In the progressive stages of abstraction from pure materiality of lifeless substance to the abstract virtuality of networked subjectivity, with each increment of abstraction required to form a new register of representation comes an inevitable amount of “loss,” as something of the original ­“thing/ object” fails to fully translate into the new register. That loss is subsequently incorporated in the new system as spectrality, an absent presence, a negativity. But the absent presence is not inert, it engages the dynamics

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of representation as a ghost, and it causes substantial effect.7Even though the tales we shall engage with below can be read as the workings of guilt upon the ‘soul’, there is also the ontological/hauntological dimension that is very difficult, if not impossible, to avoid. Human life, within literature as well as without, is perhaps more controlled by spectrality than we would willingly admit. Moreover, the loss can also be seen in terms of life lived as an analogy to the progress of a narrative. As was the case in Munro, in Atwood and in Ajvide Lindqvist, choices made will always create a spectrality and a sense of loss regarding the options and life-paths that were not chosen. Narrativity is here a direct analogy to life as lived from a first-­ person perspective. Poe’s protagonists quite often display actions that are hard to understand from a rational point of view. What can be seen as simple guilt often has an inexplicable undertow of something more profound and terrible in its unpredictable movements in human lives.

“The Tell-Tale Heart” The absent presence in this tale is introduced almost immediately: “It is impossible to say how first the idea entered my brain; but once conceived, it haunted me day and night”.8 The idea of the deed creates a spectral non-­ presence of the action. Arguably, this haunting is the true ‘cause’ of everything that follows. The eye obsession is obviously something the narrator makes up in the stride of his thought: “I think it was his eye! yes, it was this!”.9 The more fundamental level of haunting is not something the protagonist can identify and control. This is the real perverse anomaly. To get rid of the haunting, the narrator feels compelled to do something, that is, to translate the virtual into the symbolic and further into an action. In this case, the exploit unfortunately is murder. The dynamics here being played out between idea and deed is very briefly displayed as an escalating energy that somehow needs an outlet. The protagonist is incapable of seeing any other solution than to commit the deed. There is no outer pressure to be seen. At least, the murderer states there is no clear motive. This means that the murder is provoked by the ontology/hauntology of cognition, affectivity and perception. The perverse anomaly consists of the fact that it is worse to have the beckoning of the thought than to actually perpetrate the crime, which is supposed to eliminate the thought of it. We recognise these strange cognitive dynamics from a proto-gothic text as well, that is, Shakespeare’s masterpiece Macbeth (1606), in which the

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phenomenon becomes clear when Macbeth in a relatively early soliloquy contemplates the meaning of the witches’ prophesy: MACBETH, [Aside.] Two truths are told As happy prologues to the swelling act Of the imperial theme.—I thank you, gentlemen. [Aside.] This supernatural soliciting Cannot be ill, cannot be good. If ill, Why hath it given me earnest of success Commencing in a truth? I am Thane of Cawdor. If good, why do I yield to that suggestion Whose horrid image doth unfix my hair And make my seated heart knock at my ribs Against the use of nature? Present fears Are less than horrible imaginings. My thought, whose murder yet is but fantastical, Shakes so my single state of man That function is smothered in surmise, And nothing is but what is not.10 Here too, the thought of the murder is worse than the present life experience and eventually Macbeth too gives in to the deed to be rid of the horrible thought of the deed. Somehow this is an ontological attempt at fixing the subject in the now, instead of being transported into the nothing of the desired object as the future. In the last line, however, comes the terrible insight that “nothing is but what is not”, which means that there is nothing but nothingness, which in turn means that there is only virtuality, no secure ground, just a speaking voice in the void. This is obviously a paradox. If nothing exists except imagination, then imagination has an existence, in fact, it is immensely powerful. This is the phenomenon that Poe investigates in his fiction, with an almost monomaniacal energy. In Macbeth, the deed failing to find an anchorage then releases the past as spectrality, and Macbeth is very quickly back in “horrible imaginings”, in the all-encompassing virtuality, not only in terms of the terrible reminiscence of the bloody murder but also later by the return of the ghost of Banquo. The attempt at anchoring the subject through concrete action only leads to a proliferation of spectrality. Similarly, in “The Tell-Tale Heart”, the protagonist claims he is getting rid of the horrible vulture eye,

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but more plausibly he tries to dispense with the thought, the idea, of the murder itself, which here too proliferates haunting through the return of the old man’s heartbeats. Moreover, as suggested by Paweł Pyrka, the textual haunting is transferred to the readers, since “the narrator’s words explain very little to the readers, instead planting in their minds that very same species of an idea, one supposed to haunt them day and night, with no apparent goal, no identifiable emotion, and, as it turns out, no intellectual satisfaction to be had in the end”.11 Linking this to a more general picture of Poe’s hauntology and what he actually means by “soul”, we can bring in Mills’ attention to another one of Poe’s tales, “Mesmeric Revelation”. Mills points out that the character Vankirk claims that the soul is not immaterial.12 Thus, Poe’s ontology escapes the overall haunting of the Cartesian divide. To translate the materiality of the soul into more contemporary terminology, we can confidently say that affectivity and perception are involved. Just as for instance trauma has a temporality of its own, the soul in Poe can be seen as having a discrete temporality too. The protagonist, pushed on by the haunting of the negation of ‘thou shalt not kill’, and the disturbing beckoning of an idea, murders the old man and dismembers the body. That which his ‘insane rationality’ pushes away inevitably sticks to the soul. Affectively, the narrator cannot get rid of that impression. Haunting is self-­ perpetuating. Time is out of joint. This temporality spreads over into perception and experience. It constitutes something similar to what Christina Zwarg has discussed through the Freudian term of Nachträgligkeit (afterwardsness). In commenting on other works by Poe and his relation to Margaret Fuller, Zwarg highlights the functioning of traumatic temporality when Poe draws on “rhyming scenes where separate moments in the narrator’s life suddenly merge in a high—dare we say traumatic—moment of graphicality”.13 This temporality is precisely the temporality of the soul and of hauntology. The spectral return is out of the subject’s control. Phenomenologically speaking, this is not pure metaphysics. If we equate the Poesque soul with affectivity, we realise that such an entity would have a unity of its own and which therefore constitutes a temporality that does not respect a chronological linearity. A person who lives through trauma—to explicitly use the terminology of more modern theory—is immediately transported back to the traumatic moment when that affective cluster is triggered by some vision, sound or smell or other perceptual physical stimuli. For the protagonist in “The Tell-Tale Heart”, the beating of the old man’s heart becomes unbearable. Temporality is here

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hauntological. The past refuses to stay in the past. The spectral heartbeat bridges the time of the murder and the present in which the protagonist first thinks he is safe and can control actions and that his cleverness stands above hauntological logic. It grew louder—louder—louder! And still the men chatted pleasantly, and smiled. Was it possible they heard not? Almighty God!—no, no! They heard!—they suspected!—they knew!—they were making a mockery of my horror!—this I thought, and this I think. But anything was better than this agony! Anything was more tolerable than this derision! I could bear those hypocritical smiles no longer! I felt that I must scream or die!—and now—again!—hark! louder! louder! louder! louder!—14Again, as in Macbeth, the deed which was supposed to have the function of anchoring the subject more firmly in the present and relieve him of all horrors eventually has the opposite effect. It is possible to argue that the protagonist is mostly concerned with whether the policemen know about the murder, while pretending that they do not. But what sets this whole scenario moving is that the murderer experiences that he actually hears the heartbeat of the victim. This proves that there is a different temporality at work, a sort of spectral temporality that dominates the perpetrator. The diction is similar when the protagonist earlier feels forced to kill: “But the beating grew louder, louder! I thought the heart must burst”.15 This phenomenon indicates what Zwarg calls “rhyming scenes”. If the soul in Poe’s literary universe is material, one could say that the haunting is material too. The protagonist may hear his own heart beating and just imagine that it is the old man’s heartbeat, but to him as a subject of haunting, it takes a distinctly material form, which pushes him towards the edge and the truth as apparently the only way out of the agony. The Cartesian divide is challenged by gothic hauntological forces and a general limitrophic transgression.

“The Imp of the Perverse” Indeed, the Poesque hauntology acquires even sharper contours when we engage with “The Imp”. The possibly fantastical creature referred to actually has its material hauntological counterpart. Already in the beginning, which is shaped in the very typical Poesque essay form, the protagonist declares that there is a “paradoxical something” that more accurately constitutes what governs our thoughts and actions.

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Induction, a posteriori, would have brought Phrenology to admit, as an innate and primitive principle of human action, a paradoxical something which for want of a better term we may call Perverseness. In the sense I intend, it is, in fact, a mobile without motive—a motive not motivirt. Through its promptings we act without comprehensible object. Or, if this shall be understood as a contradiction in terms, we may so far modify the proposition as to say that through its promptings we act for the reason that we should not. In theory, no reason can be more unreasonable, but in reality there is none so strong. With certain minds, under certain circumstances, it becomes absolutely irresistible.16 The descriptive use of the concept of paradox is tremendously important. In terms of affective life, paradoxical or oxymoronic feelings abound. The gothic genre has traditionally taken great interest in this sphere of perverseness. The attraction of the repulsive is probably one of its most prominent features. The contradictory attunement of the subject to the negation of the ‘right’ and ‘just’ also connects with hauntology. This is so because the same irrational logic instigates the haunting of the soul and the impossibility of securing the past in the past and to anchor the subject in the present, because of the future-directedness of its desire. The narrator tells us about a powerful “thought, although a fearful one, and one which chills the very marrow of our bones with the fierceness of the delight of its horror”.17 The pleasure of the horror and the compulsion to do what we should not, all indicate the paradoxical centre of Poe’s prose fiction and the hauntology that is present in it. Furthermore, similar to the development in “The Tell-Tale Heart”, the protagonist here is clearly haunted by his own cognition and by the negation of a negation. He says to himself: “‘I am safe—I am safe— yes, if I do not prove fool enough to make open confession!’ No sooner had I uttered these words, than I felt an icy chill creep to my heart”.18 So again, as soon as the idea is conceived it begins to haunt, either as negation of itself or as a clear declarative. Also in this tale, the compulsion to reveal the secret that is supposed to be buried in the past forever is what sends the protagonist “to the hangman and to Hell”.19 However, there is yet another dimension to consider here. Following J. Alexandra McGhee, this ‘downfall’ may actually be seen as Poe’s “revised notion of the sublime” that potentially “holds within it the potentialities of the greatest artistic expression and unification with the unknowable”.20 Thus, it would be unwise to see these protagonists’ surrender to the haunting force as only something filled with negativity.

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Merlin Coverley draws on Mircea Eliade’s distinction between the two different temporalities at work in human life, sacred time and profane time: “Sacred time describes the point at which myths entered our world to give it meaning, the fabled time of ‘beginnings’, while profane or historical time is chronological and linear, and is the setting for ordinary (non-religious) duration of time”.21 In Poe’s sphere of the soul, sacred time disturbs the idea of a profane, linear time. Rationally, the protagonist in “The Imp” should be able to regard the deed as buried and gone, situated on the diachronical axis at a specific point that falls further and further away from the point of the present. But sacred time does not work in that way. That type of temporality is the same or similar as traumatic or affective time. Once the murderer is tangled up in paradoxical cognition, the only way out is via the truth, taking the shape of clearly articulated words: “[A]t this instant it was no mortal hand, I knew, that struck me violently with a broad and massive palm upon the back. At that blow the long imprisoned secret burst forth from my soul”.22 The autonomy of truth and the soul is powerful. Poe’s hauntology is controlled by sacred time and the irrational logic of the paradoxical language of affectivity. When the truth comes out, bystanders bear witness to the clarity of the words: “They say that I spoke with distinct enunciation […]”.23 Poe’s version of spectral temporality makes manifest a specific type of hauntology that more strongly emphasises the human helplessness as the victim of her own irrationality and obsession with the perverseness of human behaviour.

“The Black Cat” The protagonist in this tale behaves very much in the way biographical Poe obviously conducted himself on certain occasions, of course with the significant difference that the author did not commit murders and perform mutilations of animals, as far as recorded history goes anyway. The haunting force of perverseness can be rationally scrutinised by the protagonist, but it cannot be controlled by reason, which constitutes its foremost semi-metaphysical functioning. Strictly epistemologically speaking, the human species typically utilises knowledge pragmatically in order to foresee and thereby avoid disastrous events and consequences. The narrator in “The Black Cat” offers a mini-lecture on the topic (in the essay-style referred to above), which in part echoes statements made in “The Imp of the Perverse”:

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And then came, as if to my final and irrevocable overthrow, the spirit of PERVERSENESS. Of this spirit philosophy takes no account. Yet I am not more sure that my soul lives, than I am that perverseness is one of the primitive impulses of the human heart—one of the indivisible primary faculties, or sentiments, which give direction to the character of Man. Who has not, a hundred times, found himself committing a vile or a silly action, for no other reason than because he knows he should not? Have we not a perpetual inclination, in the teeth of our best judgment, to violate that which is Law, merely because we understand it to be such? This spirit of perverseness, I say, came to my final overthrow. It was this unfathomable longing of the soul to vex itself—to offer violence to its own nature— to do wrong for the wrong’s sake only—that urged me to continue and finally to consummate the injury I had inflicted upon the unoffending brute. One morning, in cool blood, I slipped a noose about its neck and hung it to the limb of a tree;—hung it with the tears streaming from my eyes, and with the bitterest remorse at my heart;—hung it because I knew that it had loved me, and because I felt it had given me no reason of offence;—hung it because I knew that in so doing I was committing a sin—a deadly sin that would so jeopardize my immortal soul as to place it—if such a thing were possible—even beyond the reach of the infinite mercy of the Most Merciful and Most Terrible God.24The despair is obvious. Paradoxicality even permeates the vision of the God, who is terribly merciful or mercifully terrible. The narrator fully acknowledges the complete irrationality of his deeds and points to the autonomous logic of being haunted by the negation of ethically sound behaviour, so to speak. The stress on “because” three times highlights the iron-hard and merciless functioning of perverseness. The explanation, the cause, is the full grasp of the fact that it is a violation and a transgression. On a somewhat speculative note, one could with good reason suspect that biographical Poe suffered trauma himself. He was especially haunted by the untimely death of his mother, Elizabeth Poe, in December 1811, when Poe was merely two years old. This must clearly be seen as a life-constituting event. In addition, it was also very soon followed by the death of the biological father, David, who had already abandoned the family the year before Elizabeth died. The recurring shocks of self-destructive behaviour may at least partly be traced to such childhood experiences. As argued by Lenore C. Terr: How then could Poe know so much about the disintegration and ugliness of death yet display such ignorance about the finality of the process? In my opinion, it is because his experience just short of age 3 with his

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dying and dead mother (without any adults to help him) left him with a permanently burned-in vision of death, a conscious verbal memory (Terr, 1986), a toddler impression, a traumatic one.25 For Poe then, in his creative imagination, it was probably not difficult to push his own traumatic impulses a bit further to create the even more extreme behaviour in his characters and protagonists. Trauma operates on the level of affective time and thereby comes closer to Eliade’s mythical time. The image of the cat—that appears on the house’s wall after the fire—is painstakingly explained away by the protagonist’s logical reasoning. Nevertheless, he cannot escape the haunting itself: “Although I thus readily accounted to my reason, if not altogether to my conscience, for the startling fact just detailed, it did not the less fail to make a deep impression upon my fancy. For months I could not rid myself of the phantasm of the cat […]”.26 Poe’s characters are in a constant state of limitrophically living through a metaleptic experience, which implies that they are never quite sure if they are in reality or in some kind of fictitious realm of myth, haunting and sacred time. To be sure, that which would be labelled as irrational creates chains of effects. The narrator’s unstable state of mind after the murder of the first cat eventually makes him procure another cat that looks similar. The clearest difference is a patch of white fur. My wife had called my attention, more than once, to the character of the mark of white hair, of which I have spoken, and which constituted the sole visible difference between the strange beast and the one I had destroyed. The reader will remember that this mark, although large, had been originally very indefinite; but, by slow degrees—degrees nearly imperceptible, and which for a long time my Reason struggled to reject as fanciful—it had, at length, assumed a rigorous distinctness of outline. It was now the representation of an object that I shudder to name—and for this, above all, I loathed, and dreaded, and would have rid myself of the monster had I dared—it was now, I say, the image of a hideous—of a ghastly thing—of the GALLOWS!—oh, mournful and terrible engine of Horror and of Crime—of Agony and of Death!27 Reason here initially functions as a protection against the “fanciful”. The hauntological and limitrophic dilemma, however, is that there is no point from which the subject can determine what is real and what is imagination. Any perception, however much one tries to secure its objectivity, will contain levels of meaning and blurry lines of demarcation in terms of where something ‘internal’ ends and something ‘external’ begins. Poe gives an accurate

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depiction of how experience functions. At what point does resemblance become distinct sameness? Hauntology here moves in the sphere of metaphoricity, symbols and interpretation. Not only the cruelty towards animals and the mysticism that surround them draw our attention to Derrida’s philosophy. In addition, the level of limitrophy and interpretation within hauntology highlights deconstruction’s claims about the status of the text. Rahimi makes a comparison between the philosophy of Derrida and that of Abraham and Torok: For Derrida […] a text, a life narrative, an identity, is always already haunted as we have seen here, with no hope for a final interpretation and decryption. This is a sense in which hauntology is a theory not of haunted texts, but of text as such, a theory of the everyday life. For Derrida the ghost is “the hidden figure of all figures.” Or as he says elsewhere, “spectral logic is de facto a deconstructive logic. It is the element of haunting in which deconstruction finds its most hospitable place, at the heart of the living present, in the most lively pulsation of the philosophical.” Compare that to Esther Rashkin’s declaration, for instance, who, following Abraham and Torok, asserts “not all texts have phantoms.”28 The obsession with encrypted texts and encrypted bodies and cats on the fictional level may in the world of Abraham and Torok indicate the possibility of the elimination of the phantom. But in Derrida’s and Rahimi’s hauntology—which obviously fits Poe’s version better—the ghost is there from the start and definitely at the end. If all texts suffer from spectrality, then the gothic genre places special emphasis on the phenomenon. Poe’s “The Black Cat” contains so many lacunae of meaning that it becomes practically impossible to close the text. For that we would perhaps need a detective of Monsieur C. Auguste Dupin’s calibre. Especially, the cause of the protagonist’s perverseness is shrouded, which is something that could be connected to Poe’s own traumatic life experience as well. Terr notes: As for futurelessness which, along with repetition and fears, are, I think, three key findings that occur in the disorders of shock and extreme stress (Terr, 1987), Poe demonstrated this, too, in his lifetime. A girlfriend, Mary Devereax, commented 40 years after it had happened that the 20-year-old Poe told her several times, “there was a mystery hanging over him he never could fathom. He believed he was born to suffer, and this embittered his whole life” […].29 If we zoom in on the complex levels of ‘life’ and narrative, closure is a construction. The protagonist is at first embraced by the same sense of false security that the narrator in “The Imp of the Perverse” experiences: “I looked upon my future felicity as

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secured”.30 Typically, the future appears to be solid and to be able to fix the subject in a stable present. But predictably, according to the logic of hauntology, the past cannot remain in the past. Such overarching hauntology can, as indicated above, also be tied to biographical Poe’s lived trauma in the sense that “Poe’s life itself was full of posttraumatic reenactment”.31 As in the vampire narratives in the previous chapter, part of the more overarching hauntology is here constituted by animality and a more violent version of human disregard for animals. Even though the protagonist is initially driven by perverseness, the cats obviously suffer, and the narrator becomes more and more engulfed by the maelstrom of hauntings that inevitably emanate from the all too confident anthropocentrism—in relation to plants and animals, not to God—that permeates the main Abrahamic religions. Significantly, when the cat bricked in with the corpse of the murdered wife howls through the wall, the descriptive prose indicates the limitrophy involved. It is not clear in what category the cat’s scream should be placed, which is a typical characteristic of the gothic tale: […] I was answered from within the tomb!—by a cry, at first muffled and broken, like the sobbing of a child and then quickly swelling into one long, loud, and continuous scream, utterly anomalous and inhuman—a howl—a wailing shriek, half of horror and half of triumph, such as might have arisen only out of hell, conjointly from the throats of the damned in their agony and of the demons that exult in the damnation.32 The indeterminacy that at first makes itself manifest is typical of the gothic logic. It also indicates the hauntology of the floating ontology of the abject and its disturbing return from the past. Moreover, “the sobbing of a child” gradually metamorphoses into an “inhuman” scream, howl or shriek, which indicates the limitrophic dimension as well as the overarching metaleptic phenomenon. If this is something ‘real’ to the protagonist, how exactly is it ‘real’, what is its precise ontological status? To a modern reader, the punishment for being cruel to the animal is almost on par with the murder of the wife and it of course adds to the horror and moral despair. The scream from the tomb suggests a transgression of the limit or border between the living and the dead. Obviously, the narrator indicates that the cat is the devil incarnate and that is what has seduced him into committing the crime and then also manifesting itself as that which reveals the truth. But from the hauntological point of view, it is more plausible that the protagonist gets tangled up in his own thinking and the contradictions and paradoxes that abound in his perverse mental dynamics. The most

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horrific aspect of Poe’s hauntology is perhaps the notion of this merciless destructivity intertwined with the human as such. No exterior force or entity is to blame. Humanity is in many respects suicidal.

“The Gold Bug” In “The Gold Bug”, we encounter a slightly different type of hauntology. It is introduced at the fringes of the hauntological thematics indicated in the short stories above, but it is nevertheless of significance in order to introduce a wider understanding of the Poesque hauntology. The tale contains encryptions as an explicit theme displaying history attempting to conceal itself to future presents. The treasure buried in the ground and somehow buried in the gold-bug, the scarabaeus caput hominis, the bug with the semblance of a death’s head on its back. Hauntology in this tale becomes a parallelism of the thematised haunting of the explicitly encrypted message that hides the treasure and a broader historical haunting that would certainly not be visible in the same way to Poe’s contemporary readers, but which becomes blatantly clear to a modern reader. This dimension reveals an overarching hauntological structure that involves domination and racism. It has got to do with the character Jupiter. However, the hauntology of encryption will be analysed first and towards the end I shall reflect on the haunting of obsolete hierarchical structures and their very real impact centuries later. The beetle that Legrand has found opens up the whole secrecy of animality and ancient mythologies. As an ancient Egyptian symbol, the scarabaeus or dung beetle symbolises the divine manifestation of the sunrise (Khepri).33 In its incarnation of manifestation itself (which is also part of its symbolical spectrum of meaning), as well as it carrying the connotations of growth and development, the beetle, and Poe’s tale in turn, makes manifest a productive paradox. Legrand does not have the beetle in his home when the narrator first visits, so he eventually feels obliged to draw its visual appearance on a scrap of paper. The narrator immediately sees that the pattern on the scarabaeus’s back resembles a skull, which is something associated with the scarabaeus caput hominis, directly referred to in the text. However, this pattern is not visible until it is drawn. Thus, it becomes a bit unclear to which sphere the skull belongs. To the level of drawing, art, imagination, representation, as filtered through human perception and affectivity, or to nature itself in its factual patterning on the insect’s shell. Legrand exclaims: “‘A death’s-head! echoed

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Legrand—‘Oh—yes—well, it has something of that appearance upon paper, no doubt’”.34 Already here, it becomes an interpretative issue what the gold-­bug is or represents. So not only are the clues to where the treasure is hidden encrypted. The beetle itself is encrypted. This draws attention to limitrophic dimensions and also to strata of hauntology. The encryption is designed to reverse hauntological logic, that is, to bury the past in the past and make it stay there. However, even that is obviously ambiguous and paradoxical, since the encryption could be cracked, and as long as the encryption is preserved it is meant to be a possible path to the secret—to provide a way back to what has been hidden—that is, the treasure itself. The symbolic tension between what the scarabaeus might represent mythologically, for instance growth and development, and the appearance on its back of the complete opposite, a symbol of death, reveals the hauntological logic, where the irrational appears as the direct and irreducible reverse of the rational. Here, death figures similarly as the flipside of life, and thereby it makes manifest the point at which all reason must end. In addition, since the gold-bug is supposed to be part of the key to the treasure and at the same time indicate death as accompanying such an amount of monetary value, it foreshadows the very end of the tale, in which Legrand suspects that William Kidd, the pirate, murdered all the workers involved in digging the pit for the treasure. This is an indication of secrecy being embedded in death, or death being encrypted together with the treasure. This does clearly reflect on the master–slave relation between Legrand and Jupiter. The slaves are dispensable and they cannot be trusted to participate in the full knowledge, which points to Jupiter’s ignorance and how Legrand uses his epistemological advantage to dominate the slave. The presumably plundered valuables can easily be seen as fruits of colonial domination and violence, and the skeletons of the slaves are buried together with the boon of such immoral and unscrupulous endeavours. On this level, hauntology works in two interrelated ways. On the one hand, it becomes rationalised in terms of the Greek ‘kruptós’, which literally means hidden, concealed, private or secret. So rationally, the secret of the treasure’s spatial location can be cracked through logical deduction, which is what Legrand eventually accomplishes. On the other hand, death and what actually happened in and around the pit can only return as spectrality. The power of the gold-bug is the death’s head on its shield. Furthermore, if we follow the hauntological clues to the very bottom, we realise that Poe’s text has hauntological power in itself, mostly in parts that

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are not overtly displayed as gothic or horrific. This aspect draws our thinking back to Eli in Let the Right One In and Shori in Fledgling. These characters all highlight the function of otherness in the gothic genre. By associating animality with the exclusion of the abject, repressed human forces are released as patterns of spectrality. In “The Gold-Bug”, this spectrum is manifested by and in the character of Jupiter. Even if the character may be part of what Teresa A. Goddu calls Poe’s “stock dehumanization of the slave”, Jupiter is here depicted as the faithful and slow-witted slave, who thereby functions as a contrast to Legrand’s splendid mind, which is ostensibly saturated with enlightenment light.35 Their relation comes to resemble that between Aylmer and Aminadab in Hawthorne’s “The Birth-Mark”. The alchemical connotations of both texts are also noteworthy. The “good old negro” Jupiter becomes the image of the intellectually inferior, who in Poe’s tale is posited as someone who deserves to be dominated.36 On several occasions, Jupiter ventilates superstition and a belief in metaphysical forces. Legrand’s intellectual authority gives him the right to treat Jupiter like a tool for his own purposes. Thus, an image of slavery is included in the tale without any critical dimension, which is due to the cultural context in which the tale is embedded, that is, the American South in the early nineteenth century (“The Gold-Bug is set in South Carolina). Legrand has the scheme of having Jupiter climbing a certain Tulip tree and to let the gold-bug, while attached to a string, be moved straight down through the left eye of a skull that is nailed to a particular branch. This is supposed to help Legrand figure out the exact coordinates of the location in which the treasure is buried. Significantly, Legrand does not explain anything to either Jupiter or the narrator, he just orders the servant around with brusque language and threats: “‘If you are afraid, Jup, a great big negro like you, to take hold of a harmless little dead beetle, why you can carry it up by this string—but, if you do not take it up with you in some way, I shall be under the necessity of breaking your head with this shovel’”.37 Jupiter has no idea what the purpose of the whole operation is, which means that he reverts to superstition and beliefs: “‘De bug, Massa Will!—de goole bug!’ cried the negro, drawing back in dismay—‘what for mus tote de bug way up de tree?—d— n if I do!’”.38 The transcription of the vernacular functions as an indication of stupidity and typically Jupiter is being treated like a child who cannot be given the whole story; so in addition, children and Jupiter obviously cannot know why they are not given the whole story either. In this type of epistemological discrimination, the racist discourse is revealed in its stark

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nakedness, but also the historical spectrality comes into being here from the perspective of a more radical version of hauntology. All of these discursively suppressed dimensions presumably come back to haunt the modern reader. The theme of racism and epistemological domination culminates when Jupiter is revealed to not have the binary order of right and left fully clear to himself. This mistake has jeopardised Legrand’s whole project. We had taken, perhaps, a dozen steps in this direction, when, with a loud oath, Legrand strode up to Jupiter, and seized him by the collar. The astonished negro opened his eyes and mouth to the fullest extent, let fall the spades, and fell upon his knees. “You scoundrel,” said Legrand, hissing out the syllables from between his clenched teeth”—you infernal black villain!—speak, I tell you!—answer me this instant, without prevarication! which—which is your left eye?” “Oh, my golly, Massa Will! ain’t dis here my lef’ eye for sartain?” roared the terrified Jupiter, placing his hand upon his right organ of vision, and holding it there with a desperate pertinacity, as if in immediate dread of his master’s attempt at a gouge.39 The colonial dimension is all too obvious. The stupidity of the slave implies, through this piece of rhetorical prose fiction, that the treasure belongs to the white man and the superiority of his intellect and reason. But on a more generalising level of Poe’s hauntology, the existence of blatant racism in this tale subverts the colonial endeavour. As reason is always tainted by its inevitable shadow, Poe’s text here becomes tainted by the hauntology of ‘inferiority’. If Poe pursues the existence of the unity of the soul and its self-corrective ontology in terms of ethical concerns, then the overarching logic of hauntology would insist on disturbing factors regarding the possibility of such a unity. As Maurice S. Lee has argued, the Poesque oeuvre contains something Lee calls transcendental racism, and the tension between an aesthetic striving for unity and Poe’s maintenance of master versus slave and white versus black distinctions create an anomaly that can be clearly elucidated through gothic hauntology. Lee traces the way the notion of the unconscious has into Poe’s imaginative world. According to Lee, Coleridge and other English Romantics have probably inspired Poe’s theoretical aspect of his relentless pursuit of perverseness. Slavery and racism fill precisely a haunting position in the American author’s work. Poe’s sense of absolute truth is not premised on a transparent eye, for his dramatic depictions of absolute identity are occluded by slavery and race, and his thinking is intensely attentive to the productive opacity of the

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unconscious mind. Poe’s terror is of Germany. It is carried through England. And unrelieved from political anxiety, it is shaped by the American slavery crisis as Poe pursues a metaphysic, an aesthetic, and a psychology that for all his sophistication form a conscious and unconscionable system of transcendental racism.40 The racism that appears in “The Gold-Bug” makes manifest a haunting shadow that becomes even more important for the modern reader. The Poesque aesthetics bleeds into the ethical dimension and remains as textual hauntology, accentuating further the dangerous aspects of for instance cancel culture. The power of Poe is hauntological and a censorship would jeopardise such a hauntological paragon. Hauntology carries difficult and painful topics through history. It is by default useless to try to suppress these phenomena because they thrive on and become energised by such attempts at cultural burial. In addition, we may here witness the embryo of more modern gothic texts’ use of hauntological dimensions. For instance, we see how both Ajvide Lindqvist and Butler make use of hauntology in relation to the othered character, the bullied or racially marked one, in order to reveal the injustice of such historically embedded structures. * * * We have seen that Poe’s works contain both a commonsensical hauntology and a more complex version. The way guilt is displayed and the way consequences of trauma appear are fuelled by a more general textual hauntology and an immanent dimension of what Poe called ‘perverseness’. In this illogical logic, the force of hauntology controls the characters and the events they are forced to endure. Human reason and a naïve belief in the existence of a subjective will and an effective subjective control of life-developments are repeatedly thwarted by hauntological forces. These powers play with what we call human will and desire as if characters were puppets on strings. In “The Tell-Tale Heart”, the protagonist becomes obsessed with the thought of the deed and commits it in order to secure himself in the present, but the materiality of the ‘soul’ and its rebellious temporality force him to confess the murder. Similarly, in “The Imp of the Perverse”, the narrator becomes haunted by his own thought of confessing so that he eventually actually confesses, in a desperate attempt at escaping the torment of the haunting itself. In “The Black Cat”, the haunting of animality is released by the main character’s cruel (and evidently causeless) treatment of the household’s cat. This points forward to Derrida’s

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understanding of animality and also more modern gothic tales that utilise human repression of her own cruel treatment of animals, that may resurface in, for instance, vampire narratives. All of these characters of Poe are predestined to their own downfalls and they are locked in iron cages of fatality, obviously unable to control and in any way change hauntological forces. “The Gold-Bug” displays colonial and racist structures that inevitably function as historical hauntings for the modern reader. The lack of contemporary awareness of the absurd racial distinction in the antebellum era will inevitably figure as the textual haunting of Poe’s text, making manifest its transcendental racism. Another theme only touched upon here is the possibility to connect Poe’s investigations of ‘perverseness’ to potential trauma and repeated re-enactments of trauma in the author’s own life.

Notes 1. G. R. Thomson, “Edgar Allan Poe: An American Life (1809–1849)”, The Selected Writings of Edgar Allan Poe: A Norton Critical Edition (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2004), xxxv. All subsequent references to Poe’s fiction below are to this anthology. 2. See for instance: John P.  Muller, and William J.  Richardson (eds), The Purloined Poe: Lacan, Derrida & Psychoanalytic Reading (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1988). 3. Ghada Sasa, and Abdalhadi Nimer Abdalqader Abu Jweid, “Paranoia, Neurotic Trauma, and Re-Traumatization as the Triad of Psychic Monomania in Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’” (Theory and Practice in Language Studies 12:5, 2022), 948–956, 949. 4. Bruce Mills, “Conversations on the Body and the Soul: Transcending Death in the Angelic Dialogues and ‘Mesmeric Revelation’”, J.  Gerald Kennedy, and Scott Peeples (eds) (The Oxford Handbook of Edgar Allan Poe, Oxford Handbooks, 2019), 416. 5. Eamonn Carrabine, “After the Fact: Spectral Evidence, Cultural Haunting, and Gothic Sensibility” (Ghost Criminology: The Afterlife of Crime and Punishment, January 2022), 35–66, 46. 6. Paul Gilmore, “Poe and the Sciences of the Brain”, J. Gerald Kennedy, and Scott Peeples (eds) (The Oxford Handbook of Edgar Allan Poe, Oxford Handbooks 2019), 765–766. 7. Rahimi, The Hauntology of Everyday Life, 69. 8. Edgar Allan Poe, “The Tell-Tale Heart”, The Selected Writings of Edgar Allan Poe: A Norton Critical Edition (New York: W.  W. Norton & Company, 2004), 317–321, 317.

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9. Ibid. 10. William Shakespeare, Macbeth (Arden Edition, Walton-on-Thames Surrey: Thomas Nelson & Sons Ltd, 1997), Act 1, Sc 3, lines 128–42, 20–21 (my italics). 11. Paweł Pyrka, “Haunting Poe’s Maze: Investigative Obsessions in the Weird Fictions of Stefan Grabiński and H.  P. Lovecraft” (Avant, 8:2, 2017), 201–210, 202. 12. Mills, “Conversations”, 415. 13. Christina Zwarg, “Temporal Effects: Trauma, Margaret Fuller, and ‘Graphicality’ in Poe”, J.  Gerald Kennedy, and Scott Peeples (eds) (The Oxford Handbook of Edgar Allan Poe, Oxford Handbooks, 2019), 773–791, 786. 14. Poe, “Tell-Tale”, 320. 15. Ibid., 319. 16. Poe, “The Imp of the Perverse”, Norton, 402–406, 403. 17. Ibid., 404. 18. Ibid., 406. 19. Ibid. 20. J.  Alexandra McGhee, “Morbid Conditions: Poe and the Sublimity of Disease” (The Edgar Allan Poe Review 14:1, 2013), 55–70, 57. 21. Coverley, Merlin, Hauntology: Ghosts of Futures Past (Harpenden UK: Oldcastle Books, 2020), 52. 22. Poe, “The Imp”, 406. 23. Ibid. 24. Poe, “The Black Cat”, 350–351. 25. Lenore C. Terr, “Childhood Trauma and the Creative Product. A Look at the Early Lives and Later Works of Poe, Wharton, Magritte, Hitchcock, and Bergman” (The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child 42 (January), 1987), 545–572, 549. 26. Poe, “The Black Cat”, 351. 27. Ibid., 353. 28. Rahimi, The Hauntology of Everyday Life, 72. 29. Terr, “Childhood Trauma”, 550. 30. Poe, “The Black Cat”, 355. 31. Terr, “Childhood Trauma”, 550. 32. Poe, “The Black Cat”, 355. 33. Britannica, T. Editors of Encyclopaedia. “scarab.” Encyclopedia Britannica, accessed 2022-09-20. https://www.britannica.com/topic/scarab. 34. Poe, “The Gold-Bug”, 324. 35. Teresa A.  Goddu, “Rethinking Race and Slavery in Poe Studies” (Poe Studies/Dark Romanticism, 33:1/2, 2000), 15–18, 16. 36. Poe, “The Gold-Bug”, 325.

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37. Ibid., 330. 38. Ibid. 39. Ibid., 334. 40. Maurice S.  Lee, “Absolute Poe: His System of Transcendental Racism” (American Literature, January 1, 2003), 751–781, 773.

CHAPTER 5

“The Gray Pool and Its Blank, Haunted Edge”: The Hauntology of Indeterminacy in Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw

In certain ways, Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw is the hauntological work par excellence. As formulated by Catherine and Philip Redpath: “Henry James’ ghost story, The Turn of the Screw, is a form of cryptic writing, in that it constitutes a marginal space between divulging and hiding, between revelation and forgetting”.1 In addition to exhibiting this cryptic trait, the tale can be regarded as a typical ‘deconstructive work’ published long before that specific phenomenon was displayed, ‘theorised’ and implemented in the exegetic tradition. The very interpretive history of the narrative itself can be regarded as an exposition of hauntological characteristics and mechanisms. What has hitherto been studied in other gothic works in this volume is—among other things—the gothic genre’s orientation towards blurred areas of existence and irrational or pre-rational sensibilities, as well as their presumably ubiquitous presence in everyday human life. Precisely in the gothic hauntology’s affordances of the ‘both-and’, alongside the Aristotelian ‘either-or’ logic, we find the most interesting hauntological connection to James’s work. This is so because the notorious preoccupation with ambiguity and indeterminacy in the novella is in turn linked to a decidedly ethical dimension that various critics have tried to handle in miscellaneous ways.2 The ethical dimension constitutes the point at which indeterminacy becomes markedly problematic, or actually, indeterminacy itself establishes the point that seems to have to be determined by the reader’s decision about how to understand the ambiguities © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 J. Wrethed, Gothic Hauntology, Palgrave Gothic, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-41111-3_5

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in the novella. In other words, this is essentially to be done by deciding— or attempting to decide—how the ghosts are ontologically defined. Moreover, there also exists a cultural history of viewing indecisiveness as something unwanted that verges on the repulsive and morally destructive, or even as something downright evil. In Dante’s Divina Commedia, for instance, the narrator and his guide early on encounter the souls stuck in limbo. He thus to me: “This miserable fate Suffer the wretched souls of those, who liv’d Without or praise or blame, with that ill band Of angels mix’d, who nor rebellious prov’d Nor yet were true to God, but for themselves Were only. From his bounds Heaven drove them forth, Not to impair his lustre, nor the depth Of Hell receives them, lest th’ accursed tribe Should glory thence with exultation vain.”                   (Canto III)3

The failure to make a distinction that can decide the path of life makes the perpetrators of that non-action—or their grey souls of lacklustre blandness that they seem to ‘embody’—not only to not be welcome in heaven, but on top of that segregation, they are excluded from hell too. Virgil goes on to say: “These of death / No hope may entertain: and their blind life / So meanly passes, that all other lots / They envy”.4 Limbo in a way illustrates some form of primordial haunting, or auto-haunting to use a neologism, since these entities or souls haunt themselves in a cage of indecision. That is the essence of their curse. Furthermore, the use of the word “blind” in “blind life” is something we shall have reason to return to. But what is even more significant is that the critical history of James’s novella is to a great extent built on positions in relation to the indeterminacy itself, or as mentioned, on how to understand the ghosts, which almost summarises hauntology’s core dilemma, if we think carefully about it (for instance, as highlighted through the limitrophy pursued in this volume).5 Wayne C. Booth has divided the main available attitudes towards the ‘reality’ of the ghostly appearances of Peter Quint and Miss Jessel. These are the “straight, ironic, and […] ‘mazed’” readings.6 The straight one reads the novella as a ghost story that has some ghosts in it, without any deeper problematisation of this fact. The ironic reading does not accept the ghosts

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as entities in themselves, but sees these as figments of the mind of the sexually frustrated governess. What Booth calls “mazed” is the reading that accepts an indeterminacy that comes from the work itself. This implies that to avoid ending up in either of the first two categories, the reader must accept an ‘absolute’ indeterminacy emanating from James’s narrative. This is what makes the novella into an overtly ‘Derridean’ or ‘deconstructive’ work from the outset. Furthermore, such an outlook means that ‘maze-readers’ would be limbo-souls, thus rejected by heaven as well as hell. The ethical logic derived from the Comedy entails that it is worse not to choose at all. That very transgression is even worse than to choose the evil path. At least those who go to hell have shown to be “rebellious” in some way. As is well known, the rest of the Comedy reads as a massive excess of ethical distinctions suffused in a rich variety of bodily pain. This is a relevant ethical and ontological issue in relation to the hauntological analysis that will follow. Hauntology of course provides a perspective that disqualifies the either-or of binary logics as the central cognitive tool. If the question of the ghosts is about whether they belong to the ‘objective’ reality of the fiction, or if they belong to the ‘subjective’ reality of the governess-character, the answer from the perspective of hauntological dynamics is that the ghostly indeterminacy belongs to reality in the form of lived experience, that is, to both (and none) of the realms suggested, since it is inescapable and inherently ambiguous. As has already been established in the previous chapters, the typical being of the ghost is that it cannot be pinned down. Ghosts merely constitute a fictional form for the reminder of a vast hauntology of unknowing, indeterminacy and the perpetual return of the past or history in wider circles. As concerns the phenomenology of epistemological desire, the emphasis will be on the fact that even the most strictly empirical basis of perception involves the use of imagination, and it is always already engulfed by an all-encompassing unknowing. Wayne C. Booth expresses something similar when elaborating on his understanding of the ‘mazed’ type of reading. For some, the result of such endless revisions of reading responses should be no bitter frustration but a thrill as bafflement yields illumination about the true nature of literature and life: no interpretation of any story, or indeed of any event in real life, can ever be fixed, determinate, counted on to be the interpretation; all views are underminable, “deconstructible”—in short, not only should every conclusion be held as temporary, but all controversies must be seen as unresolvable, undecidable, or as some critics put it, “unread-

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able.” The story-as-maze confirms this “sophisticated”—and for some quite exciting—view of life. Miles is both persecuted by ghosts and not persecuted by ghosts; the governess is both mad and not mad; Douglas is both involved in the story as a (disguised) character, and not involved. And so on.7

The hauntological development of this more general insight is to show how epistemological desire and visual perceptions work in the novella. It shall be argued that the dynamics of perceptions are essentially hauntological and through that the novella reveals that the mazed attitude is the most feasible one. However, in the present analysis, the content of the mazed perspective will be slightly revised. First of all, the novella contains an array of moments and scenes that are based on vision and gazes. This set of phenomena can of course be regarded in many ways, but here we shall try to pare them down to a phenomenology of vision that can reveal the aspects of hauntology deemed to be significant in James’s notoriously ambiguous tale. Let us start with a set of visual acts. […] our companion, who looked from one of us to the other with placid heavenly eyes that contained nothing to check us […] (30) I have not seen Bly since the day I left it, and I daresay that to my older and more informed eyes it would now appear sufficiently contracted. (31) My second was a violent perception of the mistake of my first: the man who met my eyes was not the person I had precipitately supposed. (38) Yes, I had the sharpest sense that during this transit he never took his eyes from me, and I can see at this moment the way his hand, as he went, passed from one of the crenelations to the next. He stopped at the other corner, but less long, and even as he turned away still markedly fixed me. (39)8

There are a number of important leads for us already through this selection of samples. The first description refers to Flora’s eyes, and they themselves seem to reflect innocence, which is also even more strongly stressed by implying that they potentially could be scrutinising and calculating (to “check”). Overall, it confirms that ‘seeing’ partly refers to the ability to see others seeing, to see other eyes, to imagine what other eyes see. The second example makes manifest that the seeing matures, it learns, it adjusts to shapes and gestalts, and it becomes apt to predict what is expected. In the third instance, we have it clearly confirmed that anomalies can be detected

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and these anomalies emanate from an ability to mentally archive shapes and shades of visual impressions. So, the gaze of the ghost in the last situation is deemed to be seeing. No matter if the ghost is in the governess’s mind or not, or a hologram of some sort, it still appears, and it appears as something that in turn sees, which potentially implies a primordial form of empathy. Before turning to more distinctly interesting hauntological phenomena, it is essential to emphasise why visual perception as such has a crucial importance in the proposed reading here. From a common-sensical point of view, the phenomenon appears to be rather unproblematic. Either you see something or you do not. Either you see something clearly or in a blurred form. For instance, for a logical positivist, it would just be a matter of repeating empirical acts of seeing in order to determine if something is the case or if it is not the case. However, the phenomenologically difficult thing to accomplish—for instance in the event of the appearance of the ghost above—is to disconnect the compulsion to decide the ontological status of the appearance, which in our context means to remain undecided at the very root of perception, while still maintaining that something appears without a doubt. As put by Renaud Barbaras: The discovery of the impossibility of nothingness is simultaneously the revelation of a being that cannot not be, in the sense that it is foreign to negation, that always predates what emerges in it, and that therefore plays the role of originary possibility for any effective reality. The negation of nothingness leads us therefore to what is both most evident and most difficult to conceive of: that “there is” something. It functions indeed as a reduction in that it allows one to see this “there is” as such; to approach being without an interposed nothingness is to approach appearance without an interposed object, in its autonomy.9

This leads us to think of the emergence as a temporarily ‘real’ thing, whatever it may be deemed to be when there is time to scrutinise, theorise, hypothesise and rationalise into vaster ontological maps. The function of the ghost is then to emphatically make manifest the absoluteness of indeterminacy itself. Even perception attuned to a ‘natural’ or ‘common-­ sensical’ mode would in its minutest details involve anticipation and some form of primordial imagination. If we walk around a building, we will have to thematise the meaning of what we see, which is a process akin to interpretation. If the building shows itself to not have a backside, in fact, not

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even an interior, then the theme has to be radically revised and the future as well as the past are changed too. This has to be a prop of some kind, we may conclude, maybe left after the shooting of some film etc. The logical positivist has a mindset continuously maintaining the metaphysical belief that there ever is some permanent way out of this experiential zone. But there is not. Gothic hauntology relentlessly makes us aware of this general state of affairs. In a radical interpretation, there is no life whatsoever lived entirely free from ghosts. If we return to the specificity of visuality that is central in The Turn of the Screw, we have the opportunity to pursue the phenomenology of vision more in detail. A crucial scene is obviously when the first ghost appears. What has to be in focus in that manifestation are the details of its manner of appearing. The governess describes it as her imagination suddenly turns real. Overall, this passage also has the mode of givenness of some form of revelation. It was plump, one afternoon, in the middle of my very hour: the children were tucked away, and I had come out for my stroll. One of the thoughts that, as I don’t in the least shrink now from noting, used to be with me in these wanderings was that it would be as charming as a charming story suddenly to meet someone. Someone would appear there at the turn of a path and would stand before me and smile and approve. I did n’t ask more than that—I only asked that he should know; and the only way to be sure he knew would be to see it, and the kind light of it, in his handsome face. That was exactly present to me—by which I mean the face was—when, on the first of these occasions, at the end of a long June day, I stopped short on emerging from one of the plantations and coming into view of the house. What arrested me on the spot—and with a shock much greater than any vision had allowed for—was the sense that my imagination had, in a flash, turned real. He did stand there!—but high up, beyond the lawn and at the very top of the tower to which, on that first morning, little Flora had conducted me. This tower was one of a pair—square, incongruous, crenelated structures— that were distinguished, for some reason, though I could see little difference, as the new and the old. They flanked opposite ends of the house and were probably architectural absurdities, redeemed in a measure indeed by not being wholly disengaged nor of a height too pretentious, dating, in their gingerbread antiquity, from a romantic revival that was already a respectable past. I admired them, had fancies about them, for we could all profit in a degree, especially when they loomed through the dusk, by the grandeur of their actual battlements; yet it was not at such an elevation that the figure I had so often invoked seemed most in place.10

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The general experience of perceptual givenness is normally a gradual filling in of ‘expected’ adumbrations that we naturally elaborate in a merging of meaning and sense impressions, the outlines of the object are gradually filled in or fleshed out. Here, however, there is also a rupture, which gives the protagonist “the sense that [her] imagination had, in a flash, turned real”. The limit is not temporary, but a constant mode of happening in any perception. Imagination in the form of its sister of protentional expectation and gradual adumbration is always already active. By means of observations of the architecture, the reader also gets an idea of how the “new and the old” merge in the perception itself. This is another hauntological phenomenon that blurs a temporal distinction, and limitrophy is also emphasised by how the towers “loomed through the dusk”. Sharp contours are dissolving and the visual indeterminacy comes into the readerly focus. This whole reasoning about vision can be related to vaster motifs and concerns in James’s authorship. While mainly focusing on The American Scene, Eric Savoy pursues something similar. He zooms in on the presence of the past in the present, but in addition I would claim that this trait can be generalised. James’s interest in the palpability of the past, in the residues of his American self, is invariably a matter of volition and speculation—which is to say, it is not a project conducive to the grammatical indicative. The narrative form assumed by that speculation draws upon the gothic—for it is at once specular and spectral. It is specular because it raises the possibility of continuity with one’s “earliest youth” in the very face of the counterfactual. Such continuity can persist only as a matter of residue, of the trace, the trace that Derrida understood as the site of différance, which might itself, in turn, be grasped as a version of James’s key word, “vibration.”11

So on an ontological level—which automatically means a hauntological level too—we understand that the trace introduces itself as limitrophy (or différance). It does not really matter what the ghosts are or what they may mean to the governess specifically, the main thing is that the instability and indeterminacy also seeps into the very primordial levels of visual perception. As concerns this aspect, James is in The Turn of the Screw pursuing the paradox of the absolute, which is the absolute of the instability of the indeterminacy itself and the repercussions this connection breeds. The serpent bites its tail. James was operating in the realm of psychology, but the

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patterns of what he fictionally ‘discovered’ is equally compatible with phenomenology and the hauntology pursued in this study. The minimal meaning of the ghosts would be that they make manifest the connection with some past, they have a limitrophic force, and they destabilise the whole world of the tale. Savoy also further states: “It is in the plenitude of the Gothic that James accounts for the persistence of memory’s most compelling traces”.12 This insight can be directly tied to the longer quote from The Screw above. If the present is swayed, then imagination seems to be swayed too, and in a connotation of the very word ‘sway’, the reader may be persuaded into an attunement to a wider ontology (that may contain various forms of ghosts). In addition, the governess experiences that her imagination has suddenly become real, which in itself showcases the realm of gothic hauntology. That reification is also a perfectly commonsensical process in any life-experience. Who can say exactly where the lines of demarcation are to be drawn between fiction and real or imagination and real. The ghost is in a way more realistic than any metaphysics of reason, either present or past. The second time the governess sees or thinks she sees—or both of these options together—Peter Quint or his ghost, we have the same sense of revelation and fear. It is important to notice that the narration describes the phenomenon as “knowledge”. The flash of this knowledge—for it was knowledge in the midst of dread— produced in me the most extraordinary effect, started as I stood there, a sudden vibration of duty and courage. I say courage because I was beyond all doubt already far gone. I bounded straight out of the door again, reached that of the house, got, in an instant, upon the drive, and, passing along the terrace as fast as I could rush, turned a corner and came full in sight. But it was in sight of nothing now—my visitor had vanished. I stopped, I almost dropped, with the real relief of this; but I took in the whole scene—I gave him time to reappear. I call it time, but how long was it? I can’t speak to the purpose today of the duration of these things. That kind of measure must have left me: they couldn’t have lasted as they actually appeared to me to last. The terrace and the whole place, the lawn and the garden beyond it, all I could see of the park, were empty with a great emptiness. There were shrubberies and big trees, but I remember the clear assurance I felt that none of them concealed him. He was there or was not there: not there if I didn’t see him. I got hold of this; then, instinctively, instead of returning as I had come, went to the window. It was confusedly present to me that I ought to place myself where he had stood. I did so; I applied my face to the

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pane and looked, as he had looked, into the room. As if, at this moment, to show me exactly what his range had been, Mrs. Grose, as I had done for himself just before, came in from the hall. With this I had the full image of a repetition of what had already occurred. She saw me as I had seen my own visitant; she pulled up short as I had done; I gave her something of the shock that I had received. She turned white, and this made me ask myself if I had blanched as much. She stared, in short, and retreated on just my lines, and I knew she had then passed out and come round to me and that I should presently meet her. I remained where I was, and while I waited I thought of more things than one. But there’s only one I take space to mention. I wondered why she should be scared.13

The intricate pattern of seeing and not seeing here creates a repetition of the hauntological dimension. Hauntology is this repetition in itself. Even the first time the spectre appears it is a return, if nothing else, it is a return of the return itself, of its very possibility. The logical premisses that the governess sets up are of the ‘either-or’ kind, “[h]e was there or was not there”, but instead of this logic, the roles are changed and the protagonist becomes the ghost herself, if we take Mrs Grose’s position and reaction into consideration. The epistemological certainty is merely a momentary flash. This is so because that is the way perception works. There is no point from which a subject could ever determine what ‘objectively’ has happened. Still, epistemological desire pushes the protagonist forward. The puzzlement concerning the fear is a consequence of the lack of full knowledge. Empathy cannot take her all the way to some form of concluding certainty. Thus, gothic hauntology is not a childish game of ghosts presented in a frivolous way. For Henry James too, it is plausible that he utilised the literary form to investigate what these patterns of vision and changes of positions could mean, even though he did it in the realm of fin de siècle psychology or burgeoning ideas and theories about the workings of consciousness.14 The repetition of the pattern reveals the possibility of empirical science to investigate its own premisses. James’s literary experiment here also makes manifest a phenomenological dimension. The whole passage cited above is built on expectation. When the governess repeats the movement from the perspective of the ghost, she reflects on the differences. She even asks herself if she “had blanched as much” as Mrs Grose. Obviously, the unexpected creates a rupture that provokes the fear. It is also in this rupture that imagination is most clearly activated as part of the

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unfolding of an experiential act of vision and movement. In more strictly hauntological terms, the governess inherits the roads not taken by figures from the past, for instance in the presumed desires of the predecessors at the manor. This is also noted by Savoy as an aside in his investigation of James’s hauntology: “Many of James’s richest short fictions are thought experiments that extend specific grammatical moods into overarching narrative modes. Just as ‘The Beast in the Jungle’ is an exercise in the méconnaissance of the subjunctive, and just as ‘The Turn of the Screw’ is haunted by the pluperfect (by that which came before) […]”.15 The liminality of the ghost allows James to examine the limits of perception and thereby the energetic zone of epistemological desire. We shall briefly return to Barbaras in order to make even clearer how Jamesian hauntology taps into the phenomenology of epistemological desire, which I claim is a central part of gothic hauntology. Barbaras speaks of the Open, which may be regarded as the sphere of pre-objective givenness that in other words also designates the eventfulness (the Open) preceding any structured event. The Open is not a site. The creature itself cannot take up residence in it. It is rather what threatens or what constantly undoes the movements that stop somewhere, and it undoes the formations that give rise to the world. Therefore, it is attained only as the other side of this formation. The Open is the background to which the formation returns and which constantly opens this formation up. If the world is always to be conquered over and against the mass of the Open that submerges it, the Open itself is never anything but what takes shape behind the world or within it, as something imminent. If the world is nothing but a program, the Open is nothing but a threat. The movement toward the Open never gets [247] to the heart of the Open, since the Open is an infinite gap. It is the reign of indistinction. This is why this movement toward is at the same time a withdrawal.16

This outline of the movement of epistemological desire clearly shows affinity with Jamesian hauntology as displayed above. The “threat” is actually not primarily that a dangerous ghost may appear, but rather that nothing may appear. In addition, there is also the liminality of indeterminacy that James utilises to the fullest in his novella. The “reign of indistinction” may be threatening and it is also the realm in which imagination reifies. This happens constantly in our everyday experiences and James just extrapolates the phenomenon for his fictional purposes. The Turn of the Screw constantly returns to intricate scenes of vision. This obsession clearly indicates the centrality of perception and its link to

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various levels of meaning. If we turn the screw one more snap, we can zoom in on yet another encounter with an apparition presumed to be Peter Quint for the third time. But now, the governess’s fear seems to abate and she once again contemplates the whole situation as if she logically tries to negotiate the meaning of this indeterminate revelation. I had plenty of anguish after that extraordinary moment, but I had, thank God, no terror. And he knew I had not—I found myself at the end of an instant magnificently aware of this. I felt, in a fierce rigor of confidence, that if I stood my ground a minute I should cease—for the time, at least—to have him to reckon with; and during the minute, accordingly, the thing was as human and hideous as a real interview: hideous just because it was human, as human as to have met alone, in the small hours, in a sleeping house, some enemy, some adventurer, some criminal. It was the dead silence of our long gaze at such close quarters that gave the whole horror, huge as it was, its only note of the unnatural. If I had met a murderer in such a place and at such an hour, we still at least would have spoken. Something would have passed, in life, between us; if nothing had passed, one of us would have moved. The moment was so prolonged that it would have taken but little more to make me doubt if even I were in life. I can’t express what followed it save by saying that the silence itself—which was indeed in a manner an attestation of my strength—became the element into which I saw the figure disappear; in which I definitely saw it turn as I might have seen the low wretch to which it had once belonged turn on receipt of an order, and pass, with my eyes on the villainous back that no hunch could have more disfigured, straight down the staircase and into the darkness in which the next bend was lost.17

There are two very strongly significant aspects of this specific locking of gazes. The governess constantly compares the event to something that she would recognise as ‘real’. The only “note of the unnatural” appears in the seemingly long silence. There is no way of determining how long this moment might have lasted, since it is locked in the governess experience. The extraordinary dimension is here when she doubts if she is “in life”. The hauntological effect is so strong that she does not only contemplate if what she sees is real, but also if she herself belongs to something we could designate as ‘real’. This limitrophic teetering on the brink of ontological dimensions draws attention to areas of extreme experience. The horizon of the phenomenon denies closure and the apparition is lost and melts into the horizon of vision itself, “into the darkness”. In phenomenological

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terms, this scene depicts an encounter with the Open, which closes itself upon disclosing. It withdraws as the point of Derridean differánce. The indistinction reveals its power while engaging with the epistemological desire, which also is bent by time. Time indeed seems to be out of joint. Even though the indeterminacy could be drawn between the governess and the other characters, the novella indicates that hauntology appears directly in perception itself. When she tries to observe Miles, the window itself seems to be haunted: “Wasn’t he looking through the haunted pane for something he could n’t see?”.18 In that sense, James establishes hauntology as something inevitable in any life lived. As in several of the other literary texts analysed in this volume, roads not taken or things not said or left out return as a presence of this absence. This is all too clear in the way James chooses to express these phenomena. The governess expresses that she might be haunted by something Mrs Grose holds back about the past, claiming she does not know whether she is sleeping or not “still haunted with the shadow of something she had not told me. I myself had kept back nothing, but there was a word Mrs. Grose had kept back”.19 Such a withdrawal of meaning still has meaning and it comes back in a hauntological way. When the governess falls down next to the lake after Flora’s outburst and later she sees the lake: “I got up and looked a moment, through the twilight, at the gray pool and its blank, haunted edge, and then I took, back to the house, my dreary and difficult course”.20 Edges, panes and the limit between something uttered and something held back are all seen as “haunted”, which ties in with the horizon of perceptual phenomena and the openness of meaning and the blurry connection between the clearly seen and imagination. Shakespeare may be seen as the iconic writer that haunts all new generations of authors. In addition, Shakespeare was the one who provided both Marx and Derrida with prototypical haunting ghost of Hamlet’s father. Henry James’s fiction seems to make use of the ghost in a similar way. The ghosts in The Turn of the Screw may ‘represent’ any number of things, but in terms of their function, they destabilise the notion of any rigid ontology. In a certain sense, it is possible to say that James was an early writer within a subsequent modernist tradition of haunting that Helen Sword has identified as a strong spiritualist strand in modernist fiction: We can regard the spiritualist pursuits of modernist writers and intellectuals as central rather than aberrational elements of their modernist aesthetics. In an historical era marked by loss, alienation, and a literal fragmentation of

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bodies, it should come as no surprise that the ghosts of dead soldiers haunt the works not only of practicing spiritualists such as W. B. Yeats, Ezra Pound, Rainer Maria Rilke, and H.D.—all of whom engaged in séances, automatic writing, or other forms of at- tempted communication with the dead—but also of such emphatically nonspiritualist contemporaries as Virginia Woolf, D. H. Lawrence, and T. S. Eliot. Troubling the texts of modernism like the plaintive whisper of Hamlet’s father—“Remember me”—the ghosts of the war dead plead for a literary re-membering of the bodies whose loss their spectral presence so eloquently signals. But modernism’s affinities with popular spiritualism, as I shall argue throughout this essay, are more than merely thematic. Like modernist writers, spirit mediums frequently subvert their own invocations of eternal truths by means of an endlessly shifting subjectivity; conversely, like spirit mediums, modernist writers counter a sense of ontological crisis with fragments of history—dead ancestors, ancestral texts—shored against the ruins of an alienating, disjointed present.21

In Henry James though, it seems that the hauntology is of a general kind, hanging over the characters as a cold shadow, a reminder of the instability of any seemingly robust state of affairs, an early hauntology of a modernist memento mori. * * * As we have witnessed, the Jamesian hauntology points out the ability to see as both a blessing and a curse. Mrs Grose seems to be better off by being ‘blind’ and by that not being drawn into the direct effects of the ghosts in James’s novella. By seeing, the governess becomes more deeply involved in the gothic hauntology that signifies the return of the forces of history, on individual as well as collective levels. To some extent, James seems to warn the reader of the dangers of believing that the past can easily be cast off, even before such movements have been initiated or been fully developed, such as for instance the modernist movement of Futurism was inclined to do. When the past is desperately staked to the ground, the returning ghost is infinitely stronger, and it will not stay in the ground.

Notes 1. Catherine Redpath, and Philip Redpath. 2013. “‘Like the Spring of a Beast’: Traumatological Haunting in The Turn of the Screw” (International Journal of the Humanities 9:12, 2013), 235–243, 237.

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2. See, for instance, the edition of The Turn of the Screw edited by Peter G. Beidler, which takes up readings from five different dominant theoretical perspectives: reader-response, deconstruction, psychoanalysis, feminism and Marxism (Henry James, The Turn of the Screw: Complete, Authoritative Text With Biographical and Historical Contexts, Critical History, and Essays From Five Contemporary Critical Perspectives (Boston: Bedford Books of St. Martin’s Press, 1995)). 3. Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy: The Vision of Hell, Purgatory and Paradise, The Project Gutenberg eBook of Dante’s Divine Comedy, by Dante Alighieri, accessed 230508. 4. Ibid., Canto III. 5. C.f. Derrida’s definition of limitrophy as quoted in the introduction to this volume, this is about “what sprouts or grows at the limit, around the limit, by maintaining the limit, but also what feeds the limit, generates it, and complicates it” (Derrida, The Animal, 29). 6. James, The Turn of the Screw, 169. 7. Ibid., 173. 8. Ibid., my emphasis in all quotes. 9. Renaud Barbaras, Desire and Distance: Introduction to a Phenomenology of Perception (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2006), 63. 10. James, The Turn of the Screw, 37–38. 11. Savoy, Eric, “Jamesian Hauntology: On the Poetics of Condensation” (The Henry James Review, 38:3, 2017), 238–244, 239. 12. Ibid., 243. 13. James, The Turn of the Screw, 43–44. 14. The topics of Henry James are ‘psychological’ as evidenced by the amount of criticism with a psychoanalytic angle that it has attracted: “Psychoanalytic critics are drawn to Henry James, and how could they not be? The genius of ‘consciousness’ is also—and necessarily—the genius of the unconscious (if such a paradox makes sense). James’s haunted figures all evidence the way in which the mind is doubled, and the more extensive the charting of its surface, that Jamesian method of using ‘reflectors,’ the more one’s attention might be drawn to the influence of unrecorded depths. Moreover, it is hard to find a preoccupation of psychoanalysis that is not also a preoccupation of James and of his critics. Narrative, reading, representation, knowledge, secrecy, the uncanny, gender, sexuality, repression, the family, loss, identification, desire, transference—the list of psychoanalytic topics in James studies is not easily exhausted” (Julie Rivkin, “The Genius of the Unconscious: Psychoanalytic Criticism”, Rawlings, Peter. (ed), Palgrave Advances in Henry James Studies (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 59–79, 59). 15. Savoy, “Jamesian Hauntology”, 242.

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16. Renaud Barbaras, Introduction to a Phenomenology of Life, 232, my emphasis. 17. James, The Turn of the Screw, 66. 18. Ibid., 110. 19. Ibid., 51. 20. Ibid., 100. 21. Helen Sword, “Modernist Hauntology: James Joyce, Hester Dowden, and Shakespeare’s Ghost” (Texas Studies in Literature and Language, 41:2), 180–201, 183.

CHAPTER 6

“Light Is Dark and Dark Is Light”: H. P. Lovecraft and Hauntology as Epistemological Desire

It’s clear why reading Lovecraft is paradoxically comforting to those souls who are weary of life. In fact, it should perhaps be prescribed to all who, for one reason or other, have come to feel true aversion to life in all its forms. In some cases, the jolt to the nerves upon a first reading is immense. One may find oneself smiling all alone, or humming a tune from a musical. One’s outlook on existence is, in a word, modified. —(Michel Houellebecq, H. P. Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life, 34)

It is not enough to say that Lovecraft was inspired by Poe. Lovecraft is haunted by Poe, and in addition to that, Lovecraft’s own writing is probably one of the most conspicuous haunting forces active within the coldblooded (or heat oppressed) body of our contemporary zeitgeist. In our time we may discern frantic ghosts haunting other ghosts in a world that seems to be moving towards its end. As formulated by Michael Cerliano: To put things simply: it appears to many of us that the world is ending. We talk about it, both in our private lives and in public spaces, including in the numerous Lovecraftian fan communities. A cursory glance at current events appears to confirm it: the COVID-19 pandemic, uncontrolled climate change, nuclear proliferation, and a fresh natural disaster seemingly every week. It seems that when one half of the planet is drowning, the other half is on fire. (284)1 © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 J. Wrethed, Gothic Hauntology, Palgrave Gothic, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-41111-3_6

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To this top list of contemporary apocalyptic phenomena, we can at this point add the escalating war in Ukraine. This war has the semblance of the absolute confirmation of the existence of ideological ‘kamikazenism’, plain insanity and other potential suicidal tendencies of humanity. Affectively, our historical phase is also permeated by the return of the familiar Cold War spectre, since nuclear weapon disaster suddenly appears as a more impending danger than ever before, or at least since the Cuba Crisis in 1962. Marxism haunts the world mainly as an unrealised promise—as Derrida noted when starting the avalanche of the academic preoccupation with ghosts—but in addition the decapitated Russian imperialism stumbles around searching for its lost head. According to Cerliano, our Lovecraftian moment is also inevitably intertwined with hauntology. In order to have a closer look at the American author’s version of hauntology, mainly within the gothic dimension of Lovecraft’s production, we first need a suitable philosophical framework. In his chapter on Lovecraft’s rhetoric of unthinkability, Cerliano uses a model mainly derived from Eugene Thacker. While Cerliano focuses on “The Call of Cthulhu” (1926) and At the Mountains of Madness (1931), the utilised conceptualisation actually works very well on some of the gothic tales that will be the major focus here. I initially follow Cerliano’s outline, but I shall refine and develop some of the concepts along the way in the concrete analysis. The overall (hau)ontology can be divided into three different levels. Firstly, there is the world-for-us; this is the human life world, which constitutes the anthropocentric dimension that is by default fully responsible for the anthropocene era and its concomitant ecological disasters. Secondly, there is the world-in-itself, which humans can only access as a thought experiment; it can only be understood as virtual, since no human empirical gaze could engage with pure plant and animal life, without contaminating it with the human. Thirdly, there is the world-without-us, the indifferent cosmos that cannot in any way be concerned with the habitat of our miniscule clay-ball. These three different aspects are labelled World (worldfor-us), Earth (world-in-itself) and Planet (world-without-us).2 To simplify, one could perhaps say that Lovecraft moves towards the Planet level in large parts of his fiction, since that is a dominant affective quality that any ardent Lovecraft reader could attest to. In “The Call of Cthulhu” for instance, the monster in the depth has a temporality of its own. It has always been there and will always be there. However, as mentioned, the focus of this chapter shall be on haunting forces in works that have been presented more clearly as part of Lovecraft’s gothic production. The tales

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selected for analysis here are from the collection The Gothic Tales of H. P. Lovecraft.3 Before moving into the analysis, there has to be a brief conceptual exposition. Lovecraft’s fiction has been labelled ‘weird’, that is, there has historically been a stronger stress on the weird than on the haunting. According to Mark Fisher, “the weird is montage—the conjoining of two or more things which do not belong together”.4 However, more recent arguments forward the idea that the weird and the hauntological are merging. Jake Poller refers to China Miéville when contending that the hauntological has moved from being associated with the uncanny to become more and more tangled up with the weird. The hauntological was intimately associated with the uncanny […]. Nonetheless, Miéville concludes that ultimately the Weird and the hauntological ‘are two iterations of the same problematic—that of crisis-blasted modernity showing its contradictory face, utterly new and traced with remnants’, and thus ‘traces of the Weird are inevitably sensible in a hauntological work, and vice versa’. In the past, these two iterations have been ‘starkly opposed’, whereas in the current ‘ideological moment’ they are beginning to converge.5

This convergence is foreshadowed in Lovecraft’s gothic tales. The most conspicuous difference in Lovecraft is probably that he completely ‘externalises’ what, for instance in Poe, and a psychoanalytic tradition of readings, would have been ‘internal’ to the psyche or remain in the depths of the unconscious. This is made manifest in something that Lovecraft calls ‘real externality’, which penetrates through several ontological layers, “the psyche, the human envelop, the known world of time and space and physical laws”.6 Jake Poller’s important theoretical contribution is to read Lovecraft through Derrida’s notion of ‘both-and’ in distinction to the ‘either-or’ of the Western intellectual tradition. This altered cognition is eminently compatible with the hauntological and thus it may be utilised as a prolific method when re-reading a few of Lovecraft’s gothic texts with hauntology specifically in mind. If Poe’s hauntology had to do with the soul and the human mind’s complexity and paradoxical desire for the perverse, Lovecraft’s version in contrast is externalised and, as I will argue, on its most horrifying level it should be seen as an epistemological hauntology. Here is where the deconstructive reading is needed. Partly, Lovecraft comes out as being almost excessively explicit in implementing evil in the materiality of nature itself. For instance, in “The Call of Cthulhu” when the police are heading towards the place where the Cthulhu cult is vital

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and where the rites seem to be carried out, they move through “the black haunted woods”. So a body of twenty police, filling two carriages and an automobile, had set out in the late afternoon with the shivering squatter as a guide. At the end of the passable road they alighted, and for miles splashed on in silence through the terrible cypress woods where day never came. Ugly roots and malignant hanging nooses of Spanish moss beset them, and now and then a pile of dank stones or fragment of a rotting wall intensified by its hints of morbid habitation a depression which every malformed tree and every fungous islet combined to create.7

It is as if the haunting of the past, or specifically the evil of the past, has permeated the whole of ‘creation’. Creation itself, or World (nature in itself) has the capacity to be infused by perverseness or death. Nature becomes the opposite of itself, since one is perhaps more commonsensically inclined to see nature as life or as a prerequisite of life in its autoproduction of vitality in various living ‘higher’ animals, insects, plants and microbes. In the externalising excess, the hauntology does not seem to be particularly terrifying. In addition, even though it is strongly externalised, the manner of its manifestation is not principally striking as innovative, at least not on a surface reading. It is merely a materialised and externally oriented version of Poe’s (and other mainstream gothic’s) haunting of the past that does not seem to want to go away or not to be able to go away, because of the logic of the hauntological forces analysed in the previous chapters. The deconstructive reading can, however, let us see the opposite inside the excessive externalised materialism, since there is no other access to it than through perception. Phenomenologically speaking, we cannot see perception as ‘internal’ or ‘external’ in the ‘either-or’ logic, but rather as the ‘both-and’ of a deconstructive reading. It is in this conceptual sphere we will be able to detect Lovecraft’s truly horrifying dimension. Alongside this strongly materialised hauntology, there resides a fundamental or primordial hauntology that lies close to Lovecraft’s ‘Cosmicism’ (stating that we live in a godless universe in which humanity is utterly insignificant). That type of hauntology is something absolutely ‘real’ in terms of human epistemological abilities and shortcomings. The Cthulhu monster can be seen as pure fantasy or as just another phantasmagorical device needed in this type of fiction, but the very phenomenon that Lovecraft returns to again and again may be philosophically more precisely mapped out, and as mentioned, it is as fundamentally real as any ‘world’, either fictional or actual. Temporally, the most significant thing about

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Cthulhu is that it has always been there and will always be there. It makes manifest some form of static temporality that can be tied to hauntology in an intriguing way. In addition, if we turn again to Poe for contrast, we clearly see how some kind of fundamental unknowing is involved, which arguably is the most essential horror in Lovecraft’s oeuvre. Paweł Pyrka draws attention to a specific difference between Poe and Lovecraft. [U]nlike Poe, Lovecraft relies on otherness, biological, cultural and ethical, to evoke the reaction of the reader. The story portrays life as “hideous” but also as an experience burdened by (ideological) obfuscation, with “daemoniacal” truths being separated from humanity by the distance of insufficient knowledge.8

It is the “insufficient knowledge” that permeates Lovecraft’s writing in a philosophically profound way, which may be a dimension hard to grasp without sufficient intellectual preparation. This theme of thinking about Lovecraft shall be developed gradually throughout this chapter. Initially it suffices to pay attention to the fact that the American author fictionally addresses a fundamental hauntology that afflicts human existence at its very root. A preliminary explanation will work as guidance. Renaud Barbaras outlines a basic phenomenology of life construed as a direct connection between life, movement and perception, that is, these constituents are parts of the same thing, a more refined form of esse est percipi. The phenomenology of perception is seen as a more fundamental desire than the mundane desire of needs, since any need functions predictably in accordance with the play of presence and absence. In encountering the overwhelming untotalisable totality of the world, the subject lives through the fundamental affectivity of unknowing and an ultimate absence or nothingness that haunts all the positivity of human existence and its epistemological endeavours. Beyond the break between the spatial and the spiritual, desire and questioning are one and the same movement. Thus it is in the constitutive desire of life that the interrogative dimension is rooted, a dimension that is itself the heart of our knowing; here the confrontation is with a deeper dimension that we are unable to name, of which desire and questioning, life and knowledge are only modalities. The activity of thought, as the quest for a meaning that exceeds the significations in which it is crystallized, prolongs a movement that is at the very root of life. Such is unquestionably the sense of the rational teleology that Husserl observed from the originary level of drive.

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However, it is a teleology without a telos, a wanting that—not being need— lacks nothing, does not refer to a determined object, and cannot therefore be fulfilled. This is why, ultimately, there does not exist an alternative between life and philosophy; by questioning, we reappropriate our roots and make ourselves living beings.9

The ghost of Lovecraft seems to hover within this text. It is important to be clear about what implications such an insight has. What cannot be known is not only the ‘world in itself’ or ‘world without us’, which have more of a fictional dimension over them. At bottom here, in Barbaras thinking, is for instance the absolute reality of the horizon of any simple perception. For instance, the plain perception of a tree is a highly complex experience of disparate impressions. It is thematised as a bundle of meaning in a meaningful perception. But never do we have the ‘whole tree’. What Lovecraft does basically is to magnify this deficit into grotesque proportions. Presumably, this is also the paradoxical joy that Houellebecq believes himself to be able to extract out of the pitch-dark death-infused fiction of the American writer. Life in Lovecraft’s fiction is obviously plagued with death through and through, but in a way that only heightens the sense of the predicaments of life and the beckoning of the unsolvable epistemological issues. There is a force lurking even below the revelation of Cthulhu, namely the ineffable as a present absence haunting, if not all, so at least a great deal of Lovecraft’s writing. We will turn to a few of the gothic tales to see how this dimension of hauntology works.

“The Lurking Fear” Typically, in Lovecraft’s fiction, the narratological setup is that of a beginning in a distinctly physical setting in which something terrible has happened, either recently or in a distant past. The locality seems to be haunted by some strong diabolic and evil force. A man or a group of men with a rational mindset—for instance, prototypically scientist, academic, explorer, journalist, detective and even artist in the very last of the short story examples in this chapter—are trying to figure out what this energy is and/or what has happened. The milieu is typically presented in a semi-realist fashion, albeit often with a malignant colouring as seen in the example from the “Cthulhu” forest above. In this early build-up, we clearly observe how Fisher’s definition of the weird makes sense. The supernatural (evil) force is so strong and hyperbolically inscribed that it is almost out of place, that is, a collage displaying the wrong thing in the wrong environment. In

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“The Lurking Fear” we have precisely this arrangement. Initially, the reader is presented with the common gothic motif of the abandoned house that harbours a terrible secret from the past. The Dutch family of the Martenses used to live there but have in the present of the tale left only a few ruins behind. The vicinity of the locality is beset by the familiar Lovecraftian morbid and death-permeated nature. It was not a wholesome landscape after dark, and I believe I would have noticed its morbidity even had I been ignorant of the terror that stalked there. Of wild creatures there were none—they are wise when death leers close. The ancient lightning-scarred trees seemed unnaturally thick and feverish, while curious mounds and hummocks in the weedy, fulgurite-­ pitted earth reminded me of snakes and dead men’s skulls swelled to gigantic proportions.10

From an epistemological viewpoint it is interesting to note that the protagonist claims to have detected the material wickedness of the environment itself, even if lacking the underlying knowledge of terror. Typically, the materiality seems capable of reifying malignant forces, which is further accentuated by the mentioning of the “fulgurite”. This is a rather strange (not to say weird) natural phenomenon that comes as close to a preserved materialisation of lightning as is possible. Sometimes referred to as ‘fossilised lightning’, fulgurites make manifest the moment of the strike of lightning in a distant past, but reified as persisting materiality. Two extreme forms of time are merged in this trace, which suggests two interrelated things. The terrifying workings of lightning do not have any telos or purpose, lightning just strikes ‘blindly’. Still, the traces of this fundamental arbitrariness remain in material reality, that is, it haunts the present with an absent presence. The phenomenon is something humanity could pursue scientifically, but the ultimate ‘meaning’ of this existence is not accessible—other than through fragile theory, myth or fictional speculation. What Lovecraft does is draw attention to the materiality of this meaninglessness or teleology without telos. That the Lovecraftian world is saturated with materiality only really signals that it forwards its opposite, a fundamental space of nothingness that cannot be spoken, since language dissolves or rots—to be more Lovecraftian in expression—at its threshold. However, in accordance with the fundamental epistemological desire, the protagonist cannot help himself: “I believed that the thunder called the death-daemon out of its fearsome secret place; and be that daemon solid entity or vaporous pestilence, I meant to see it”.11 So the

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epistemological quest goes on. Another limitrophic phenomenon is introduced when the narrator falls asleep on the stake-out with two other men, trying to get a glimpse of the lurking entity. In the dreams he sees “apocalyptic visions” which merge with the situation when he wakes up and feels “the presence of evil”.12 When the creature or entity finally reveals itself, the description is riddled with paradox and ambivalence. Then came the devastating stroke of lightning which shook the whole mountain, lit the darkest crypts of the hoary grove, and splintered the patriarch of the twisted trees. In the daemon flash of a monstrous fireball the sleeper started up suddenly while the glare from beyond the window threw his shadow vividly upon the chimney above the fireplace from which my eyes had never strayed. That I am still alive and sane, is a marvel I cannot fathom. I cannot fathom it, for the shadow on that chimney was not that of George Bennett or of any other human creature, but a blasphemous abnormality from hell’s nethermost craters; a nameless, shapeless abomination which no mind could fully grasp and no pen even partly describe. In another second I was alone in the accursed mansion, shivering and gibbering. George Bennett and William Tobey had left no trace, not even of a struggle. They were never heard of again.13

The language circumscribing the entity is frantically expressing what it claims that it cannot articulate. Strictly speaking, it resembles negative theology, but the entity is not God. It is also noteworthy that the protagonist only sees the shadow, which draws associations towards the creature as an abstract idea. Moreover, it is also “shapeless” which makes the reader wonder how the perception of an amorphous something is even possible, since whatever is perceived surely must have some form. In any case, the haunting of the epistemological desire keeps pushing the protagonist onwards and he states that it appears to him “that uncertainty was worse than enlightenment, however terrible the latter might prove to be”.14 Further in the narrative, Lovecraft juxtaposes science and myth and not surprisingly, myth is on the side of the squatters or “mountain mongrels” as they are also called.15 Together with a new companion, Arthur Munroe, the narrator keeps going on the scientific path, and they manage to map out the patterns of the occurrences of this ‘lurking fear’. On the linguistic level, we can here detect a clear aporia in the hauntology of the tale. To look for ‘fear’ as an externalised entity seems very strange—again, not to use the word weird. Indeed, they almost begin “to regard the lurking fear as a non-material entity”.16 These oscillations are not only signs of active

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use of limitrophy, they also introduce the basic ontological mystery that philosophy always has encountered and presumably will always grapple with. Why is there something rather than nothing? Lovecraft dresses this issue in the robes of gothic horror, but still the epistemological quest is ‘real’ and the protagonist even connects it to the historical context of the case’s background. History had led me to this archaic grave. History, indeed, was all I had after everything else ended in mocking Satanism. I now believed that the lurking fear was no material thing, but a wolf-fanged ghost that rode the midnight lightning. And I believed, because of the masses of local tradition I had unearthed in my search with Arthur Munroe, that the ghost was that of Jan Martense, who died in 1762. That is why I was digging idiotically in his grave.17

The gothic characteristics are very clear. Importantly, the something/ nothing of the entity begins to crystallise as the centre for different discourses or ontologies: science, folklore, myth, historical haunting and of course fiction itself, since we are reading Lovecraft’s tale. There seem to be three ways the entity can go: materialised fearful evil monster, scientifically explicable phenomenon or a ghost of the past that withdraws into obscurity. It is as if it remains all of these things in the end. The historical explanation of the haunted house is that the Martenses killed Jan. Evidence was lacking, but the story spread and the “distant manor was shunned as an accursed place”.18 When the traces lead the protagonist to the house he starts digging through the grave and discovers some subterranean space and in that underground is where he sees, or thinks he sees, the monster with evil glowing eyes and a mighty claw. Again, language is used to reveal its shortcomings. What language can describe the spectacle of a man lost in infinitely abysmal earth; pawing, twisting, wheezing; scrambling madly through sunken convolutions of immemorial blackness without an idea of time, safety, direction, or definite object? There is something hideous in it, but that is what I did. I did it for so long that life faded to a far memory, and I became one with the moles and grubs of nighted depths. Indeed, it was only by accident that after interminable writhings I jarred my forgotten electric lamp alight, so that it shone eerily along the burrow of caked loam that stretched and curved ahead.19

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Apart from the language breakdown, it is noteworthy that the protagonist is deeply involved in bodily perception. Concretely, the narrator is lost as a perceptual body without “definite object”. This lack of telos was indicated as a fundamental aspect of Barbaras’s outlining of the end-point/ non-end-point of epistemological desire. It does not even matter that he becomes “one with the moles and grubs”, he still cannot satisfy the will to know, because obviously the object is not there. That is, it is impossible to know in a totalising way, because that dimension is blocked by the (hau) ontological setup of the human perceptual apparatus. What he eventually sees is also hovering in a miasma of uncertainty. In addition, the narrator later finds out that a ‘monster’ had made an attack 20 miles away at the exact same time that he saw the monster underground. This opens the possible thought of the monster as a twin entity, appearing in two different spatial locations at the same time. The tale was published in 1922, which is actually before speculations about entanglement started to appear in the 1930s. But nevertheless, it goes to show how powerful Lovecraft’s imagination is. It also displays this mad intersection of different ontological spheres that merge in the epicentre of the horror. Moreover, as concerns the scientific aspect vital here, entanglement was long thought of as a hyper-theoretical phenomenon, but in our time it has been empirically confirmed and accepted as a fact within quantum physics. This particular hauntology also states that the universe is not locally real.20 That notion would presumably be something Lovecraft could sympathise with. The protagonist discovers that the underground that he is digging through is like a molehill with subterranean tunnels “under the haunted hillside forest” and it is “as if the unwholesome Martense mansion had thrown visible tentacles of terror”.21 Eventually, he concludes that the “innermost secret of the fear” has to be “definite, material, and organic”.22 The lurking fear proves to be an organic perversion that makes itself manifest as an escalating and chaotic growth of degeneration. However, this excessive materialisation or reification only serves to hide the true horror of the lurking fear, which is never ‘solved’ or revealed. How the lightning has had this effect and what actually happened to the Martense family is never disclosed and articulated. So despite the seemingly overabundant material evidence, the nothingness that drives epistemological desire is still active at the end. There is no explanation to what the connections between the thunderstorms and the Martenses’ degeneration are. The oscillations of the ontological belonging of the entity, from shadow, abstract idea, ghost, to gory material manifestation of degeneration, bear witness to a

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general epistemological failure. Moreover, the creatures are at least twice described as silent: “But it was so silent” and “They were so hideously silent”.23 This manifest inarticulation can also be combined with the deconstructivist ‘both-and’. The material excess dominates but paradoxically that surplus harbours a nothingness, a horizon of total givenness that tantalisingly can never materialise, regardless of how much material excess we can imagine. A philosophical reflection on this is needed, as formulated by Barbaras: Horizon designates this rooting of the manifestation in something invisible that it presents in its invisibility, this excess beyond the self that is constitutive of the manifestation insofar as it is a comanifestation of a world. The structure of the horizon names the fact that the manifestation is always more than itself, that it therefore develops a depth presented in it only as its own absence, that it conceals in the very act by which it reveals.24

In its weird context, “The Lurking Fear” displays this generalised aspect of perception and life as the hauntology of epistemological desire. The form of the gothic, as externalised hyperbolic materialism, has the capacity to reveal the most extreme limits of that aspect. The protagonist stubbornly works towards some form of scientific or rational conclusion, only to discover that the horizon of phenomena is nothingness as somethingness and that underneath the monstrous degeneration there is nothing, but a nothing that beckons as a something, which keeps the subject going. The epistemological desire cannot be satisfied. Such a structure of hauntology will be further accentuated in the analyses of a couple of other gothic tales by Lovecraft below.

“The Music of Erich Zann” In this tale, the setting is urban and mostly plays out in the interior spaces of rooms in a house and through a particular window. Still, Lovecraft uses the same paintbrushes and blackish colours when outlining the urban milieu. The Rue d’Auseil lay across a dark river bordered by precipitous brick blearwindowed warehouses and spanned by a ponderous bridge of dark stone. It was always shadowy along that dark river, as if the smoke of neighbouring

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factories shut out the sun perpetually. The river was also odorous with evil stenches which I have never smelled elsewhere […].25

The protagonist, a student of metaphysics, has found lodging in the specific street mentioned, which he later in life has not been able to locate again. Ultimately, it is like a missing piece of a map. The no-place adds a different type of unknowing than what is generally more common in the Lovecraftian world. In the house, where the student lodges, lives also a dumb man who is a viol-player named Erich Zann, who plays “strange music”.26 Thus, it initially seems as if the articulation has to come through the music, since even if Zann would be able to articulate what he is doing while playing and what kind of music he makes, he could not express it orally in words to the protagonist because of his muteness. The narrator hears Zann play every night and he finds himself “haunted by the weirdness of [the] music”.27 He even relates that the music “enchanted” him and that it could not be described by someone “unversed in music”.28 The narrator asks to be present in the room when Zann plays and realises that the man’s playing communicates with some other music coming from far away through the window. In addition, this window is the only window in the village from which one can see beyond the village wall that the protagonist never has been given the opportunity to look past before. This is clearly another example of how Lovecraft works with perceptual horizons in a concrete way. While fully being played out in a recognisable world with perfectly explicable quotidian phenomena, except perhaps that other strange music that seems to entice Zann to respond with his own peculiar playing. The metaphors and concrete phenomena of unknowing are mainly three: first, to not fully understand what one hears; second, not being able to speak and describe (muteness); and three, not being able to see as far as one desires (through the window, over the wall). Metaphorically, the same spatial language is used when the protagonist says that “Erich Zann’s world of beauty lay in some far cosmos of the imagination”.29 When the narrator is in Zann’s room, the old man tries to write down what his music is about, but that is only a speculation too. Neither the protagonist nor the reader ever gets to know what is unveiled in the pile of “feverishly written sheets”, since a sudden gust from the broken window carries the manuscript away.30 When the speaker eventually gets the chance to look out of that special window, all he sees is “the blackness of space illimitable;

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unimagined space alive with motion and music, and having no semblance to anything on earth”.31 The writing that could have contained some explanation disappears. The endless space taunts the reader and narrator with its unsolvable enigma. When the protagonist realises that Zann has died while frantically playing his “unutterable music”, he rushes out and as mentioned, afterwards he cannot even find the street with the house, any more than he can fully fathom what has happened.32 If we peel away the dramatic features of this short tale, it too—in a similar way that “The Lurking Fear” does—displays the shortcoming of epistemological desire. There is a noticeable point of limitrophic hesitation or oscillation, since we do not clearly see what is plain perception or something supernatural in this narrative. The viol music that continues to play when Zann seems to be dead displays a transgression of the limit between life and death, which is something that invokes Poe’s hauntology. But since nothing is really concluded in the end and obviously the way back for the protagonist is barred, there is no way to verify anything at all. The heap of papers metafictionally connects with the pages of Lovecraft’s own piece of fiction. It may or may not have something to say about the world and the human predicament. But it only does so in terms of the deconstructive ‘both-and’. This may be tied back to the main thesis of this Lovecraft chapter, namely the suggestion that this fiction highlights the real of the epistemological desire and perception as life, or chiasmatically, life as perception. Such a hauntology is not in itself a fantasy but something disturbingly real. As formulated by Barbaras: [T]he fact that it is patently aberrant to posit an absolute nothingness against the background of which being would be cut out does not exclude but on the contrary allows introduction of a form of negativity into the everything of what is—in other words, into the world. If desire can indeed be reduced immediately to the confrontation between a positive feeling and a full reality, then taking into consideration desire’s meaning reveals precisely a mode of negativity within things that does not provide an alternative to their presence.33

The nothingness/somethingness in the midst of ordinary experience is displayed in Lovecraft’s fiction. Beneath the excess of material decay, the failure of epistemological desire is repeated and the existence of a nothingness that the horizon of the world constantly reveals and conceals. A great number of tales contain this structure.

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“The Haunter of the Dark” In this tale we are fairly early on drawn into layers of text, myth and interpretation. The story itself is mainly built on the diary of the artist Robert Blake, who carries striking resemblances to Lovecraft himself. The young Blake goes to the town of Providence to investigate the mystery surrounding a particular deserted church situated on Federal Hill. The gothic aspects here are generally speaking built on secrets from the past and unsolved mysterious deaths that seem to point towards a precise location. In addition to that, the specific gothic architecture and furniture are accentuated on several places in the narrative, concretely putting the reader in a gothic mood and mindset. As the reader is drawn into Blake’s diary, she gets to know that the artist found lodgings from which he could observe the church from a distance. Already here, the specific epistemological hauntology, present in the works of Lovecraft, makes itself known. Blake’s study, a large southwest chamber, overlooked the front garden on one side, while its west windows—before one of which he had his desk— faced off from the brow of the hill and commanded a splendid view of the lower town’s outspread roofs and of the mystical sunsets that flamed behind them. On the far horizon were the open countryside’s purple slopes. Against these, some two miles away, rose the spectral hump of Federal Hill, bristling with huddled roofs and steeples whose remote outlines wavered mysteriously, taking fantastic forms as the smoke of the city swirled up and enmeshed them. Blake had a curious sense that he was looking upon some unknown, ethereal world which might or might not vanish in dream if ever he tried to seek it out and enter it in person.34

From the outlook of the window, the protagonist has a special view of the church and the town below. In certain ways the whole passage draws attention to the phenomenon of perception. As mentioned above, Barbaras contends that we see embodied perception as life itself lived in movement. The literary givenness here of such a ‘plain’ or ‘common’ phenomenon indicates the perceptual setup central in Lovecraftian hauntology. It is not so much that the view appears as spectral, mysterious and mystical. It is rather the highlighted very last sentence that is particularly noteworthy. The world is never fully ‘given’ since we always, as perceiving bodies, have outlines, perspectives, adumbrations of reality. The horizon here makes itself manifest in a way that it also seems to precisely conceal something in its very revelation. The world “might or might not” vanish when the

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protagonist approaches it. This is the epistemological dilemma. It would of course reasonably be the same church and the same town when Blake approaches these entities from another perspective, but how does he and how do we know that? Limitrophically speaking, the passage also draws attention to the thin borderline between actual perception and illusion, dream, fantasy or even narrative, since they appear to be “enmeshed”. This line of thought is further pursued a little later: “As months passed, Blake watched the far-­off, forbidding structure with an oddly mounting interest. Since the windows were never lighted, he knew that it must be vacant. The longer he watched, the more his imagination worked, till at length he began to fancy curious things”.35 This is practically the same limit that typically in Lovecraft turns sinister and the open potentiality of the horizon gets closed as pure negativity and malignity. Moreover, according to the logic of epistemological desire, Blake goes to the church and despite of many warnings he also enters it. The idea forms in Blake’s mind in a noteworthy way concerning the concrete diction: “When the delicate leaves came out on the garden boughs the world was filled with a new beauty, but Blake’s restlessness was merely increased. It was then that he first thought of crossing the city and climbing bodily up that fabulous slope into the smoke-wreathed world of dream”.36 The insertion of the word “bodily” indicates that the perceptual mode of engagement is simply one possibility out of several. However, the bodily dimension also accentuates the concreteness of the overarching hauntology. The pull of epistemological desire is made explicit: “Even then he could not be sure that he wished to enter that haunt of desertion and shadow, yet the pull of its strangeness dragged him on automatically”.37 The word “automatically” makes manifest some form of autonomous force that the protagonist is not fully in control of. The narrative then pursues the textual levels of interpretation, since the secret in the church is given mostly through cryptograms and coded language. Blake finds the scattered notes of the journalist Edwin M. Lillibridge who seems to have died at the threshold of the solution to the mystery. Fittingly, Blake’s diary account also peters out in dispersed and fragmented language, which then becomes the unsatisfying denouement of the short story. This leaves the reader in a complete epistemological vacuum, affectively displaying the point at which epistemological desire starts all over. In the disjointed text of the diary at the tale’s end we can see a few significant expressions. Contradictory and chiasmatic language, that seems to be taken directly out of Shakespeare’s Macbeth, comes back several times:

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“The lightning seems dark and the darkness seems light …”, “light is dark and dark is light” and “far is near and near is far”.38 Lovecraft’s own mythology that also emerges here is not particularly interesting from a hauntological perspective. It is merely a prolonged fictional production of a phenomenon that is already thematised in the fiction itself, the more sensational level, as it were. Where human reason and science dissolve, imagination and myth begin. However, what is even more horrifying would be the lacunae of meaning themselves, if they were left as they are, that is, just as providing a glimpse of the void inherent in all human experience and concrete perception in any life lived. The degeneration that the unknown force seems to have brought forth is indicated by the allusion to Roderick Usher, but that is all it is capable of. The more interesting hauntological and theological levels will be briefly touched upon in the concluding section.

The Believing Atheist As stated by Giovanni Mariotti: “Lovecraft was a relentless atheist. His hostility towards religion is at times so bitter that it may appear even a bit vulgar”.39 Strangely enough, the fiction of this atheist has attracted a great number of scholars with a theological orientation.40 Or maybe it is not peculiar at all. If we stick to the logic of ‘both-and’, the atheist would be haunted by that which he seeks to deny. The more zealous the denial, the more persistent the spectre. This theological dimension of Lovecraft’s hauntology may also be easily understood as intertwined with the hauntology of epistemological desire. As we have seen, that limitrophic phenomenon oscillates in zones where borders between knowing and believing consistently are forming and dissolving, reforming and liquefying, where each revelation reveals while concealing. Partly, this phenomenon may be elucidated stylistically. As Anna Powell suggests: “Lovecraft’s contagious prose […] impresses rather than expresses feelings […]”.41 In the midst of the already displayed text of excessive natural decay, there are also of course the numerous encounters with the ineffable truth. That which reveals itself is perhaps not purely seen or even purely conceived, but the fact that it shows itself to the protagonists is ‘real’. That kind of manifestation cannot be denied and it is so strong in itself that characters either die or go insane when being exposed to it. The theological connection can be made in a rather straightforward way. As Robert Grant Price has concluded, Lovecraft possesses the fictional power to obliterate silly notions of

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religion: “Sentimentality is silly. It’s a shortcut around hard experiences that obscure the truth found through the journey. A cursory view of mass-­ produced, contemporary Christian conversion stories shows how sentimentality distorts the seriousness of conversion”.42 Grant Price draws attention to the violent phenomenology of conversion and establishes the analogy with such confrontations in Lovecraft’s fiction. Here is one instance in which we can see the power of the ‘both-and’. In the moment of the striking lightning, it does not matter much whether it is a confrontation with evil or with good. The structure of the occurrence is the same: “Conversion in Lovecraft’s fiction comes suddenly and is always bound up with fear”.43 The hauntological aspect is extremely important. What is stated is that it does not really matter if the character is haunted by the God that arises out of denial or out of plain belief. God as an autonomous force does not care about such trivialities. It is as if Lovecraft’s atheism brings out a stronger religious experience than any other wishy-washy Jesus is my buddy version would ever be able to do. This Lovecraftian hauntology may be further elucidated by returning to Derrida. Martin Hägglund has put a great deal of effort in reading Derrida back into a radical atheism. Hägglund argues that all of the consequences of deconstructive thinking need to be thought within the frame of the human as absolutely deadly and bound to time. This notion seems to be perfectly compatible with Lovecraftian atheism too. […] Derrida defines the messianic promise as the formal condition for all experience and all hope, since it marks the opening to an undecidable future. The “content” of the messianic promise can be anything whatsoever, but whatever it is, it cannot be exempt from time. Rather, it is necessarily subject to the law of time that “dislodges any present out of its contemporaneity with itself.” As Derrida points out, even if the messianic promise were fulfilled there would still be time in the form of “historicity as future-to-come.” It follows that the messianic promise cannot be a promise of timeless peace, since the fulfilment of such a promise would put an end to time.44

Similarly, in the weird logic of ‘both-and’, the Lovecraftian promise of death and misery somehow provokes an analogous experience that almost moves in a religious direction. Christianity already harbours this ambivalence within the concept of Apocalypse that also means revelation. From within an open deconstructive reading, it clearly does not matter whether Derrida is labelled as an atheist or as promoting some form of spirituality.

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The telos of epistemological desire and belief is the same. There is no purposeful telos. The Apocalypse is always already all around us; the fall means that we fall and continue to fall as the completely depraved humanity we inevitably are. It is possible to conclude that Lovecraft decentres the human in several ways, which is one aspect of why Lovecraft potentially speaks to more modern discourses, such as for instance posthumanism and ecocriticism. Lovecraft decentres the human scientifically and religiously, but also as epistemology in terms of plain perception. Towards the end of “The Haunter of the Dark”, it appears as if Robert Blake has seen too far into the secrets of existence. Secluded in his room, he is on the verge of madness and he only manages to look out the window and scribble down fragmentary notes in his diary. Once again appears the familiar phenomenon of seeing an unsettled entity, that is, being exposed to a force, without being able to determine exactly what it is that makes itself manifest. The text relates “Nothing definite”, “a great spreading blur of denser blackness”, “a formless cloud of smoke” and the spectators claim “[n]ot knowing what had happened”. Immediately afterwards an utterly unbearable fetor welled forth from the unseen heights, choking and sickening the trembling watchers, and almost prostrating those in the square. At the same time the air trembled with a vibration as of flapping wings, and a sudden east-blowing wind more violent than any previous blast snatched off the hats and wrenched the dripping umbrellas from the crowd. Nothing definite could be seen in the candleless night, though some upward-looking spectators thought they glimpsed a great spreading blur of denser blackness against the inky sky— something like a formless cloud of smoke that shot with meteorlike speed towards the east. That was all. The watchers were half numbed with fright, awe, and discomfort, and scarcely knew what to do, or whether to do anything at all. Not knowing what had happened, they did not relax their vigil; and a moment later they sent up a prayer as a sharp flash of belated lightning, followed by an earsplitting crash of sound, rent the flooded heavens. Half an hour later the rain stopped, and in fifteen minutes more the street lights sprang on again, sending the weary, bedraggled watchers relievedly back to their homes.45

“Nothing definite” can be seen and Robert Blake himself is later found dead sitting upright in front of the window. Blake writes in his diary that

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he “can see everything with a monstrous sense that is not sight”.46 Precisely on the verge of perception appears this immensity that seems to kill or make witnesses go insane. However, it is important to keep in mind what these ‘weird’ incidents rest on. They would not have this power without appearing as perceptual reliefs against a background of everyday life and some kind of commonsensical rationality. The “bedraggled watchers [are sent] relievedly back to their homes”. They go back to an everyday life, still being haunted by some surplus reality, but obviously a surplus reality that belongs to our one and only reality, and the backdrop of quotidian life is needed for the Lovecraftian dimension to appear. Moreover, the human perceptual apparatus remains mainly ‘realistic’ in Lovecraft’s fiction. In Powell’s Deleuzian reading, the scattered affects of the weird neatly resemble Deleuzian becoming: “Lovecraft’s vertiginous haptic kaleidoscope is a kind of Deleuzian interstice of becoming”.47 But the perceptual reality of life also needs a unifying affectivity that provides the known so that it can be disturbed by the unknown. Lovecraftian hauntology can best be detected through the ‘both-and’ logic. This can also clearly be seen in such readings of Lovecraft as presented by Michel Houellebecq. The French author proclaims that Lovecraft essentially forwards “a frightful inversion of Christian themes”.48 He also acknowledges with Lovecraft that “life is itself evil”.49 The two authors are perhaps such prominent figures of the contemporary zeitgeist precisely because our time generally represses life. As formulated by Barbaras: “the ontology of the modern period is organized by a fundamental repression of life. The divisions that modern ontology institutes proceed in a straight line from this failure to recognize life. Modern ontology, of which phenomenology is a part, is an ontology of death”.50 In so strongly promoting such an ontology of death, Lovecraft’s hauntology makes possible a semi-hidden growth of life. Even if the whole of humanity seems to move towards the Planet—that is, the world without us—through the hauntological dimension, Lovecraft’s prose simultaneously evokes the possibility of life, as some form of weird catharsis. Lovecraft’s narratives are manifestations of death, but they are simultaneously and inevitably haunted by life. * * *

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Lovecraft’s hauntology functions mostly in accordance with the logic of ‘both-and’. When setting up a fictional universe so obsessed with death and the externality of death-infused matter, the neglected life-dimension is invoked with a force proportionate to the ultra-violence with which it has been repressed. The spectre of life haunts the seemingly dead planet. When it comes to Lovecraft’s fear of the unknown in terms of the explicit racism and homophobia, it seems that younger generations of writers and critics rather re-write or re-read this aspect and transform it into newer queer perspectives.51 As seen in the previous chapter on vampires, the gothic is extremely versatile as a genre, which clearly also goes for the hauntology pursued in this book.

Notes 1. Michael Cerliano, “Lovecraft, Hauntology, and the Rhetoric of Unthinkability”, Lovecraft in the 21st Century: Dead, But Still Dreaming, Antonio Alcala Gonzalez and Carl H.  Sederholm (eds) (New York: Routledge, 2022), 284–94, 285. 2. Cerliano, 287–88. 3. Lovecraft, H. P. The Gothic Tales of H. P. Lovecraft, Xavier Aldana Reyes (ed) (London: The British Library, 2018). 4. Mark Fisher, The Weird and the Eerie (London: Repeater Books, 2016). 5. Poller, Jake, “New Weird Fiction and the Oneirologic of Both-And” (Textual Practice, 36:10, 2022), 1–16, 3. 6. Ibid. 7. H. P. Lovecraft, The New Annotated H. P. Lovecraft, edited with a Foreword and Notes by Leslie S.  Klinger (New York: Liveright Publishing Corporation; A Division of W. W. Norton & Company, 2014), 138. 8. Paweł Pyrka, “Haunting Poe’s Maze: Investigative Obsessions in the Weird Fictions of Stefan Grabiński and H.  P. Lovecraft” (Avant, 8:2, 2017), 201–210, 205. 9. Barbaras, Renaud, Desire and Distance: Introduction to a Phenomenology of Perception (Stanford University Press, Stanford, Calif., 2006), 137. 10. Lovecraft, Gothic Tales, 62. 11. Ibid., 65. 12. Ibid., 66. 13. Ibid., 66 (my italics). 14. Ibid. 15. Ibid., 68. 16. Ibid., 69. 17. Ibid., 73.

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18. Ibid., 75. 19. Ibid., 76 (my italics). 20. Cf. The Nobel Committee for Physics, “Scientific Background on the Nobel Prize in Physics 2022: For Experiments With Entangled Photons, Establishing the Violation of Bell Inequalities and Pioneering Quantum Information Science”, https://www.nobelprize.org/uploads/2022/10/ advanced-­physicsprize2022-­2.pdf. Accessed 23-02-20. 21. Lovecraft, Gothic Tales, 80. 22. Ibid., 81. 23. Ibid., 67, 83. 24. Barbaras, Desire and Distance, 78–79. 25. Lovecraft, Gothic Tales, 34. 26. Ibid., 35. 27. Ibid., 36. 28. Ibid. 29. Ibid. 30. Ibid., 40. 31. Ibid., 41. 32. Ibid., 42. 33. Barbaras, Desire and Distance, 57. 34. Lovecraft, Gothic Tales, 186 (my italics). 35. Ibid., 187. 36. Ibid., 188 (my italics). 37. Ibid., 191. 38. Ibid., 208, 209. 39. Giovanni Mariotti, “The Weird and The Ineffable: H.P.  Lovecraft’s Inverted Theology” (Kaiak. A Philosophical Journey, n. 9—Weird, 2022). http://www.kaiak-­pj.it/it/. 40. C.f. for instance Austin M.  Freeman (ed), Theology and H.P.  Lovecraft: Theology, Religion, and Pop Culture (London: Lexington Books/Fortress Academic, 2022). 41. Anna Powell, “Thinking the Thing: The Outer Reaches of Knowledge in Lovecraft and Deleuze” (The Gothic and Theory: An Edinburgh Companion, May, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019), 260–78, 261. 42. Robert Grant Price, “Sudden Onset Belief: The Brutality of Conversion in Lovecraft’s Stories” (Theology and H. P. Lovecraft), 219–228, 220. 43. Ibid., 222. 44. Martin Hägglund, Radical Atheism: Derrida and the Time of Life (Stanford California: Stanford University Press, 2008), 134. 45. Lovecraft, Gothic Tales, 206. 46. Ibid., 209. 47. Powell, “Thinking the Thing”, 275.

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48. Houellebecq, H.P. Lovecraft, 112. 49. Ibid., 113. 50. Renaud Barbaras, Introduction to a Phenomenology of Life, 13. 51. Cf. for instance Nowell Marshall Chap. 18 and Brian Johnson Chap. 19, Lovecraft in the 21st Century: Dead, But Still Dreaming, 253–83.

CHAPTER 7

“What She Had Seen Was Final”: Everyday Hauntology, the Threat of Male Violence and the Power of Fiction in Alice Munro’s “Free Radicals”, “Runaway” and “Passion”

Scott Matthews draws attention to gothic tropes in Alice Munro’s novel Lives of Girls and Women (1971). Some of these tropes are connected to spatial limitrophy, for instance, concerning the blurry borderline between wilderness and civilisation or in terms of domestic confinement. In the first chapter of the novel, the reader also encounters the madwoman, which is a familiar character within the gothic genre, here in the form of the ‘imported’ wife of Uncle Benny. In addition, Matthews outlines how the gothic features come together in Munro’s novel: Alice Munro’s The Lives of Girls and Women (1971) is the narrator-­ protagonist Del Jordan’s account of growing up in Southern Ontario and is a notable example of this niche genre of Gothic fiction. While the genre seeks to distinguish itself from its American and British counterparts, several familiar Gothic tropes—including madness, spatial liminality, and confinement—are presented in Munro’s novel. In the opening section titled “The Flats Road,” the novel employs the Gothic trope of the domestic madwoman to reflect the liminality of the isolated setting. Thus, the novel reinforces the importance of the connection between character and setting in the Gothic tradition.

To these tropes, it is fairly easy to add a version of the threat of male power. Of course, this is perhaps one of the more well-known and © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 J. Wrethed, Gothic Hauntology, Palgrave Gothic, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-41111-3_7

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established gothic motifs or tropes, but it is equally clear that it has certain idiosyncratic traits in Munro’s fictional landscape. Historically, this threat of male violence has often taken the form of haunting.1 In terms of Munro’s fiction, the more overt paraphernalia of haunting is gone, but the male threat may instead appear as a flickering shadow that suddenly reifies into something concrete and imminent, which has a strong affective power within the fictional world. In Munro’s everyday gothic, the threat takes on a very uncomfortable air, since it gets manifested as something so realistic that it almost feels metaphysical at the same time, which is an effect often produced by a seemingly absolute inability to escape. In other words, Munro’s fiction makes manifest male violence that does not seem to be out of the ordinary from the perspective of quotidian life, but precisely because of that, the threat is so sudden and strong that it acquires an almost surreal aura. As can be seen in Matthew’s outline, the limitrophy has clear spatio-­ temporal connections. The (hau)ontology has in previous chapters of this study mainly been focused upon in terms of temporality. The reason to return to Munro at this stage is to further emphasise the function of temporality as hauntology and to stress the everyday gothic and the concomitant everyday hauntology, not least as indicators of the versatility of the gothic genre. The hauntology of male violence and near-metaphysical power will be analysed through close readings of Munro’s short stories “Free Radicals”, “Runaway” and “Passion”, which are selected by containing some of the gothic traits mentioned above and in addition to that, they exhibit intriguing hauntological dynamics.

“Free Radicals” In a biological context, the phenomenon of ‘free radicals’ displays a fundamental either-or structure. Strongly simplified, these entities can be either harmful or benevolent to the body. The body sustains life or is life in terms of its dependence and incarnation of metabolism. If the biological organism does not function properly, life is obviously threatened. However, it is not bodily ailments primarily that torment the protagonist, even though she has liver cancer, which is depicted as a slow form of cancer in the narrative. More urgently, the protagonist Nita suffers through grief following upon the death of her some 20 years older husband Rich. The presence of the absent man lingers in the house. In hauntological terms, such an absence in presence is nothing alarmingly strange. As an affective

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phenomenon, it is real. Negated sentences seem to conjure the presence of the character rather than manifesting its absence. She thought carefully, every morning when she first took her seat, of the places where Rich was not. He was not in the smaller bathroom where his shaving things still were and the prescription pills for various troublesome but not serious ailments that he refused to throw out. Nor was he in the bedroom, which she had just tidied and left. Not in the larger bathroom, which he had entered only to take tub baths. Or in the kitchen that had become mostly his domain in the last year. He was of course not on the half-­ scraped deck, ready to peer jokingly in the window—through which she might, in earlier days, have pretended to be starting a striptease. Or in the study. That was where of all places his absence had to be most firmly established.2

Without stretching it too far, we can say that the massive absence accumulated by the five negations points out spaces or thingly objects as metonyms of Rich’s actual absence. The absence is tied to objectity. The common setting of the house in the gothic tradition—especially within the focus on hauntology—is used as a sort of everyday version of the unnerving interior of the traditional castle. Memories hover and the ghost of Rich fills the domestic atmosphere. This absence also slightly later in the narrative’s progress becomes pure absence and emptiness when the male threat enters the premises. As indicated by the policeman towards the very end of the tale, since Nita now lives alone, she ought to be careful, which is an indication of the constant peril from the outside. Spatially, this is accentuated further by the location of Rita’s house at the fringes of the more populated community. We must allow for a little conceptual interlude here, just to further stress the hauntological aspects. As Sadeq Rahimi has suggested, if one pursues the functions of metonymy and metaphor in a Lacanian tradition, we arrive at a form of spatial analogy to how these linguistic phenomena work. [M]etonymy functions on the horizontal axis, works / unfolds through time, sustains the experience of linear temporality, and perpetuates the work / flow of desire in a never ending deferral of sense; while metaphor functions on the vertical axis, cuts / jumps through experienced temporality, is closely associated with the psychic functions of condensation, repression,

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and transference, and acts as a time tunnel or a palimpsest always-already “symptomatic,” always-already haunted.3

If such thinking is applied to Munro’s short story, the vertical axis makes sense, but in a slightly altered way, since it is not manifested through any ‘internal’ pressure. However, it sets such dimensions of the psyche in motion. Death is somewhat put on hold in the narrative in terms of Rita’s cancer. In addition, the processing of the death of Rich works like metonymy, but the metaphor of death appears in a more imminent shape through the threat of male violence. The slow-working processes—of grieving and the handling of the effects of the cancer—are suddenly replaced by the metaphor and the arrival of the man. In its abrupt appearance, the metaphor is in itself basically manifested as: ‘Male violence is death’. Generally, Nita refers to “her own immersion in illness”, which is something that to her has destroyed the pleasures of reading fictional literature.4 The imminent threat somehow shakes her out of the daze. The lingering hauntological structure indicates the threat almost in the form of a revelation. It is intimated that Nita somehow has sensed the arrival just before its advent, indicating the always-already lingering sense of being haunted. One morning after sitting for a while she decided that it was a very hot day. She should get up and turn on the fans. Or she could, with more environmental responsibility, try opening the front and back doors and let the breeze, if there was any, blow through the screen and through the house. She unlocked the front door first. And even before she had allowed half an inch of morning light to show itself, she was aware of a dark stripe cutting that light off.5

That stripe which appears as a cut in the flow of the light is the shadow of the man and the metaphor of the male threat of abuse, death or both. Pretending to be an electrician, he penetrates the relative safety of the domestic sphere and enters the house. The suddenness of the situation is what scares the reader, but the protagonist herself is at first a bit slow to register the danger. The man’s voice has some kind of “crack” in it, again marking a break in which the vertical becomes manifested. It is not clearly any form of repression on an individual basis, but the whole setup has the structure of such an arrival. If there is some form of repression or condensation (Verdichtung) going on, it must be on a very general and existential level, similar to Heidegger’s being-towards-death. Nita is immersed in

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grief and her own illness, which are processes that are slow and that presumably just need to take time. Here suddenly, Nita is cornered by imminent danger. The uncanny aura builds up gradually, through the addition of minor details that contribute to the sense of a ‘modern’ form of gothic. It is not sensational, but therefore very frightening. There was a change in his voice—a crack in it, a rising pitch, that made her think of a television comedian doing a rural whine. Under the kitchen skylight she saw that he wasn’t so young. When she opened the door she had just been aware of a skinny body, a face dark against the morning glare. The body, as she saw it now, was certainly skinny, but more wasted than boyish, affecting a genial slouch. His face was long and rubbery, with prominent light blue eyes. A jokey look, but a persistence, as if he generally got his way.6

The last little addition is almost alarming in the tense situation. The wording foreshadows something threatening, at least some form of abuse or even rape. It indicates that he could easily ‘have his way’ with her. In addition, the boy suddenly becomes a man, which is something that also heightens the danger. “[B]oyish” seems less harmful than something “wasted”. While Nita prepares some food for the stranger, he suddenly breaks his plate on the floor and the really chilling moment is when he comments on his clumsiness: “‘Oh mercy me,’ he said in a new voice, a squeaky and definitely nasty voice. ‘Look what I gone and done now’”.7 The wording indicates a domestic situation potentially filled with anxiety and violence, which is that of a mistake that may lead to punishment. This is immediately transferred to the fear that Nita is building up and it gets even worse when the man takes one of the sharp pieces and cuts his arm so that “[t]iny beads of blood appear[…], at first separate, then joining to form a string”.8 In all, this transforms the earlier hope that the man may just be confused and hungry. He is clearly dangerous. From a holistic perspective, the setting is undoubtedly gothic for the reasons mentioned above: domestic confinement, male threat of violence, the location at the fringes of ‘uncivilised’ spheres, the fragile liminality of the man’s mental state etc. Munro’s twist is clearly on the level of very finely tuned details. As the narrative progresses, the man starts to discipline Nita within the domestic sphere. All of that is of course because he wants to keep her away from dangerous items with which she could become a physical threat to him. But along with that comes an uncanny feeling of the unsympathetic domestic patriarch, who rules this miniscule

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world as if it was his own kingdom. In addition, the narrative moves in the direction of a sadomasochist game. The man asks Nita if she is afraid and reassures her that he will not rape her, which certainly is not reassuring, since the possibility becomes horrifyingly reified by being articulated. When the man shows the photos of his family and reveals the whole story, things become almost unmanageable to Nita. The violence involved in this distribution of knowledge is clear. He could probably not let her stay alive carrying this testimony. Here is the point where the narrative and temporal hauntology become the most intense. If the setup so far has seemed to point towards a sudden challenge of the will to live by staging a confrontation with male force and violence as death, that intensity allows for the contact with life itself. Hauntologically speaking, the shadow of death that already held the protagonist in an iron grip suddenly becomes urgent, but in a paradoxical way, somewhat in accordance with the logic of free radicals, which may turn out to be malevolent or benevolent depending on the context of their appearing. Later in the narrative, it definitely seems as if the situation could turn into a saving energy, at least temporarily, since the outcome will most certainly not alter the progression of Nita’s liver cancer. But the emergency-like situation pushes the protagonist towards the edge, which seems to heighten the force of life. In this turmoil, Nita suddenly has the idea of telling a life-story of her own that will put their confessions in a deadlock, again reminiscent of free radicals that can hook up with other molecules with either positive or negative effects for the body. In the analogous situation, the man tells the story of the killing of his family, caused by him feeling strung up for the rest of his life, tied to his mentally and physically disturbed sister. Nita then matches that story with the one in which she fabulates that she has killed her former husband’s mistress. When they have shared secrets, they are less likely to tell on each other, which to Nita means that she can hope that he lets her off the hook and leaves, which is precisely what eventually happens. This trick can be traced to the inspiration from the Bluebeard stories of the Grimm brothers, in which the female protagonist discovers “the advantages of daring, lying, acting and storytelling”.9 However, in our context we shall unpack the core as a tightly knit bundle of hauntings. On the immediate level, the man speaks the truth of a close past that haunts him. The killing of his family is clearly a deed of desperation, and it is an affective explosion of a larger haunting in his life, namely that of the torment of his sister. The murder is an attempt at escaping this whole

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situation and the reaction is not marked by rationality and calculation. In all, this double-haunting is partly what has led up to the encounter with Nita. For Nita, the man’s intrusion becomes an existential catalyst for her own hauntings of grief and illness. The situation provokes a reaction in Nita in which she actually is pushed closer to a sense of life itself. This paradox needs to be looked at more closely through philosophical concepts. Renaud Barbaras draws attention to a particular philosophy of life that may shed light on this state of affairs. A more commonsensical and established view on life would posit it as always manifesting itself as an existence in direct contrast with death, which is a version that Barbaras turns against: “Life is always considered from the viewpoint of death, that is, within the horizon of its own negation”.10 This type of ontology only builds up towards the desire of needs, since “its being alive is understood as exhausted in the satisfaction of needs”.11 Barbaras introduces a different type of view that significantly alters our understanding of hauntology in a way that has importance for the reading and understanding of Munro’s short story. We have to take an extra step and suggest that if the living being lives itself as mortal, this is because death is not simply external to it, as a simple endpoint or a simple abolition, but already belongs to it. Death is, so to speak, “constitutive” of its very life. Here mortality does not refer to the simple assertion of a probable annihilation of the living being. Instead, it is really a possibility of its very being. To say that the living being is mortal is to say that death is its possibility. Death is already, so to speak, “engaged” in it. Consequently, death is not a simple negation of its life; rather, it is originally rooted in its life. Obviously, the ontological meaning of life turns out to be profoundly transformed.12

If we adopt this thinking, the hauntological core of “Free Radicals” may be untangled. The presence of death in Nita’s life aborts the easy solution that her reaction to the threat of the man’s violence is just a response on the level of needs. The presence of death already exists in her body and in her life, it is already deeply engaged with her, so to speak, which elevates the bundle of narrative haunting to a different ontological level. In Barbaras’s thinking, there is a form of desire that is distinct from the desire of needs. This dimension is “life that exceeds the order of the satisfaction of needs, a dimension of Desire that makes sense of the phenomenalizing power of life”.13 In being grounded in death, this level of life is confirmed

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as the life of desire and life as transcendence: “Instead, death lies behind life, as a starting point or an element in which it takes up a position: being-­ alive is the active negation of this starting point. In short, we are not first in life but first in death”.14 Desire on this level is connected to phenomenalisation of which fiction (or storytelling) is a part. The way Nita employs narration is in order to manipulate the man’s narrative. These two narratives hook into one another and prolong life, of course on the level of the organism as well as on the level of the phenomenalisation of narrativity. It is the latter that is of the most significance in our hauntological analysis. By the entanglement of the narratives the characters have tied themselves to a new type of haunting. They will haunt each other but in a way that will be beneficial for both. The man puts it exactly in that way, by referring to memory and of digging up bodies to find out the truth, buried as a secret, that is, finding traces of poison in the imaginary woman Nita said she got rid of. This is in a way absurd, since the reader knows that Nita made this up, but precisely by that setup we get to understand the power of narratives. The man’s rhetoric consists of a threat to be a catalyst for the reification of the haunting that he imagines that Nita is tied to. “I got a good memory,” he said. “Good long memory. You make that stranger [who was here] look nothin like me. You don’t want them goin into graveyards diggin up dead bodies. You just remember, a word outta you is a word outta me.”15

The haunting now consists of the two narratives, one apparently ‘true’ on the fictional plane presented by Munro and the other one obviously ‘false’, since Nita has made it up. Fiction on this level of transcendence becomes the deferral of violence, at least inter-personally. Munro’s final twist is to let the man be killed in a car accident, which potentially introduces haunting on a more markedly metaphysical level. The major structure in Munro’s gothic fiction is of course to transfer some central gothic motifs and tropes into a contemporary domestic sphere. The feminist implications are clearly there in the ways the protagonist deals with the masculine threat in the manner reminiscent of, but not identical to, Scheherazade (see also the reference to the Bluebeard narratives above). Female agency and cunning outsmart male violence. In addition, the hauntology revealed on a more philosophical level is about narratology, transcendence and limitrophy. What is involved is the mutual haunting of ‘reality’ and ‘fiction’. Early on in “Free Radicals”, Nita reflects

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on her disentanglement from fiction that has come with the confrontation with death. It is as if the force of ‘reality’ has eliminated her need of fiction. She hadn’t been just a once-through reader either. Brothers Karamazov, Mill on the Floss, Wings of the Dove, Magic Mountain, over and over again. She would pick one up, thinking that she would just read that special bit— and find herself unable to stop until the whole thing had been redigested. She read modern fiction too. Always fiction. She hated to hear the word “escape” used about fiction. She might have argued, not just playfully, that it was real life that was the escape. But this was too important to argue about. And now, most strangely, all that was gone. Not just with Rich’s death but with her own immersion in illness.16

At the end of the narrative, all this is endowed with a different meaning. Nita’s ‘escape’ from male violence is effectuated by fiction. Thus, in a way, fiction could be said to be ‘real’ in the sense that it can affect what is understood as the reality plane of the narrative. The transcendence of life as desire also involves the mutual haunting of fiction and the real. Within her special form of gothic hauntology, Munro pays tribute to this transcendental power of fiction. Just as in the case of life as Desire and as transcendental phenomenalisation, fiction becomes a force that does not primarily belong to either the real or the fictional. The relation of these two realms could at best be seen as a form of mutual haunting and a limitrophic oscillation.

“Runaway” As already indicated in the analysis above, the gothic sphere in Munro is essentially the home, which replaces the castles and monasteries of the traditional gothic. Tomasz Sikora outlines the importance of this setting in Munro’s and Atwood’s work. Conventional Gothic plots involve a house (classically an old castle with secret chambers and underground passages) which often becomes a woman’s prison. In view of the nineteenth-century conceptualizations of femininity as intrinsically linked with the domestic sphere, these plots seemed an apt metaphor for women’s social position. Not surprisingly, then, much of the ‘Female Gothic’ tradition coincides with what might be termed the Domestic Gothic, that is, the kind of narrative that focuses on the home and the family. The exaggerated castle, typically found in conventional Gothic

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fiction, can be seen as a hyperbole for an ‘ordinary’ house, with essentially the same power relations, the same ‘unspeakable mysteries’ and equally extreme mental states. The home is thus exposed as a fundamentally Gothic space, and the family as a fundamentally Gothic institution; this is where monsters and madmen are bred. With time, the grotesque excesses of Gothic fiction gave way to more realistic representations.17

In “Runaway”, the domestic situation primarily involves a trio of characters: the young woman Carla, her older husband Clark and an elderly woman Silvia. Katrin Bernt has suggested that we should read the three main characters “as ironically subverted versions of Gothic stock characters. Carla, the young wife, Clark, her husband, and Sylvia, the older friend, are representations of such archetypes as the damsel in distress, the dark lover, and the wise woman, respectively”.18 The threat of male violence is a constant menace emanating from the violent nature of Clark, being manifested like something in-between the monster and the madman, but in rather subtle ways that only adds to the intensity of the horror-­ affectivity. This is mainly because there is an element of unpredictability. The reader does not know how and when to expect Clark to “flare up”. Clark had fights not just with the people he owed money to. His friendliness, compelling at first, could suddenly turn sour. There were places he would not go into, where he always made Carla go, because of some row. The drugstore was one such place. An old woman had pushed in front of him—that is, she had gone to get something she’d forgotten and come back and pushed in front, rather than going to the end of the line, and he had complained, and the cashier had said to him, “She has emphysema,” and Clark had said, “Is that so? I have piles myself,” and the manager had been summoned, to say that was uncalled for. And in the coffee shop out on the highway the advertised breakfast discount had not been allowed, because it was past eleven o’clock in the morning, and Clark had argued and then dropped his takeout cup of coffee on the floor—just missing, so they said, a child in its stroller. He said the child was half a mile away and he dropped the cup because no cuff had been provided. They said he had not asked for a cuff. He said he shouldn’t have had to ask. “You flare up,” said Carla. “That’s what men do.”19

Clark’s behaviour is reminiscent of the protagonist in the 1990s film Falling Down, clearly drawing attention to a ‘type’ of masculinity,

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potentially one that has no place in the modern civilised world. The final concluding remark is almost moving in its plain honesty: “That’s what men do”. But in the narrative, this violent tendency becomes an overall haunting that probably is scarier than the presence of a traditional vampire or lycanthrope. That Clark can get so upset over quotidian minutiae means that he is volatile and capable of erratic behaviour, which in turn indicates male violence as both a constant diachronic reality and as something that may synchronically “flare up”. In a similar way, this type of violence ignites the chain of events in “Free Radicals” too. There seems to be nowhere the pent-up violence can go, it just explodes or blazes up, with more or less devastating consequences. The masculine violence functions as a backdrop to the whole narrative. However, in terms of haunting, this short story too employs narrativity or fiction as a central constituent. The trio of characters all have their personal fiction that creates double binds of attraction and repulsion. Silvia seems to take a special interest in Carla and one of Silvia’s friends even suggests that it is a “crush”, but Silvia herself labels it “[d]isplaced maternal love”.20 What is clear is that (following a gothic pattern) Silvia feels that Carla is in need of rescue from her violent husband. Carla’s situation is more complicated. She used to help out around the house when Silvia’s husband Leon was still alive. Towards the end of his life he was bedridden and Carla helped out in various ways, mainly managing domestic chores. As a spice for her sexual life with Clark, she invents a seemingly innocent fiction of Leon being dirty and inviting Carla to perform sexual services. This works as an aphrodisiac for a while, but when Leon has passed away, Clark gets it into his head that they should blackmail the old lady, threatening to reveal the diseased man’s inappropriate behaviour to the public. Caught in this trap of her own fiction, Carla feels more and more miserable. When she helps Silvia cleaning out the house, she breaks down and Silvia thinks she must fulfil her role as the helper in the girl’s escape from violent masculinity. Clark’s narrative is more conventional in that he has a “dream—his plan, really—to have a riding school, a horse stable, someplace out in the country”.21 The urgent need of money is obviously what at least partly keeps him pushing the blackmailing idea. Carla’s eventual escape is the outcome of the core of misunderstandings in this warp and weft of haunting narratives. Carla tries to escape the blackmailing that comes as a consequence of her invention of a snippet of erotic fiction. Clark thinks Silvia intervenes in their life as an upper-class rich bitch, keeping wealth away from a misfortunate and misunderstood person like

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himself. Silvia thinks she fulfils her role as the wise old lady shielding female vulnerability from male violence and power. Limitrophically speaking, all of the narratives are false, but simultaneously carrying some seeds of truth as well. In addition, the fictions are tightly intertwined and they seem to be fatally bound to end in some kind of violent situation. After her nervous breakdown, Carla is supposed to run away and at least for a while live in the home of one of Silvia’s acquaintances in Toronto. However, she cannot go through with the plan and caves in on the bus to Toronto and calls Clark who has to pick her up. When Silvia tries to sleep alone in her house after having sent Carla off on the bus, tension builds up since the reader suspects that Clark is definitely not going to let this humiliating incident pass. There was a playful sound, a tinkling tapping sound, coming from the wall of windows. She switched the light on, but saw nothing there, and switched it off again. Some animal—maybe a squirrel? The French doors that opened between windows, leading to the patio, had not been locked either. Not even really closed, having been left open an inch or so from her airing of the house. She started to close them and somebody laughed, nearby, near enough to be in the room with her. “It’s me,” a man said. “Did I scare you?” He was pressed against the glass, he was right beside her. “It’s Clark,” he said. “Clark from down the road.” She was not going to ask him in, but she was afraid to shut the door in his face. He could grab it before she could manage that. She did not want to turn on the light, either. She slept in a long T-shirt. She should have pulled the quilt from the sofa and wrapped it around herself, but it was too late now.22

The announcement “It’s Clark” is presumably meant to calm Silvia down, but it probably has the opposite effect. This goes for the reader too, since in the causal logic of plots, there has to be some consequence at this point, which heightens suspense and the discomfort hovering over the situation. There is a border of safety that is already transgressed, since Silvia does not dare to close the door. We have the sphere of the home and the vulnerability of the female on one side. This aspect is accentuated by Silvia’s light clothing. On the outside is the wilderness and potential male violence. The narrative as a whole has built this up with an overarching haunting of male power and violence. Carla’s lack of strength and incapability of escape has already been illustrated. Now, female cunning and wisdom are to be put to the test. It is clear from the outset that the masculine much younger man could easily ‘have his way’ with the more fragile woman.

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The radical plot-turn of this narrative has a decisive significance on the hauntological level. As indicated above, all of the central characters are haunted by their own and the others’ narratives. A clear example is Carla’s failure to escape into a more ‘authentic’ life. Munro’s short story has a very ambiguous stance on this issue. The narrative of conversion is normally followed by a complete change of life-path, at least in an ideal type. What dissolves the tension temporarily resembles some form of revelation. Carla’s favourite goat has been missing, but right at the height of tension between Clark and Silvia something appears very unexpectedly. Not far from the house was a wide shallow patch of land that often filled up with night fog at this time of year. The fog was there tonight, had been there all this while. But now at one point there was a change. The fog had thickened, taken on a separate shape, transformed itself into something spiky and radiant. First into some unearthly sort of animal, pure white, hell-bent, something like a giant unicorn, rushing at them. […] Then the vision exploded. Out of the fog, and out of the magnifying light—now seen to be that of a car travelling along this back road, probably in search of a place to park—out of this appeared a white goat. A little dancing white goat, hardly bigger than a sheepdog.23

The gradual development of the perception gives us an immensely interesting hauntological revelation, rendered skilfully in the craft of prose fiction. In all, it is a miniature limitrophical masterpiece. The very short time-span in which phenomenalisation happens is linguistically extended and therefore magnified. The gaseous and amorphous entity seems to hesitate, since the making of sense hesitates, just as the phenomenon is on the threshold of the world. Ambiguity as a primordial phenomenon appears in the “spiky and radiant” and in the “unearthly sort of animal”, which in the moment presents an absolute possibility. Phenomenologically speaking, the ‘both-and’ logic is perceptually concrete. If we get out of the grip of habit, we realise that this is how phenomenalisation always works. Usually, we just do not care to pay attention. It is an absolute revelation, but there is an open horizonality embedded in the presentation. Thinking this through in the phenomenology of Renaud Barbaras, the transcendental aim of desire has a glimpse of the Open (the ‘world’ as not yet congealed into sense and objectity). However, that which appears must appear in the world of objectity, so the actual missing goat, Flora, steps out of the blurred perception. The effect of this ‘revelation’ is that the threatening

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situation dissolves. The whole paradoxicality and ambiguity are embedded in Clark’s wordings of what had happened: “We thought you were a ghost”, he says, and then he reverts to a simile, “[l]ike an apparition”.24 The fact is that the goat is all these things in the logic of ‘both-­and’. The revelation is haunted by that which is not realised in the moment of predicative perception. Of particular interest is the wording in “hell-­bent”. The more menacing possibility of the devilish aspects of this animal lingers as haunting. The intriguing thing is that the goat somehow retains these other possibilities, and as in the very origin of haunting and possible worlds theory, the multiverse of other sequences of events provides a fertile ground for various types of haunting. Yet in its appearance it quickly acquires the sense of fatality in that in hindsight, it happened the way it happened, full stop. However, there is yet another layer of meaning to add, which pulls us back in the direction of narrative hauntings. The devilish connotations are revealed in the process of phenomenalisation, but the other connotative sphere attached to the goat becomes accentuated in the rest of Munro’s short story. The apparition has deferred violence. That is just a fact on the plot level. But then it turns out that Clark never brings Flora back home after this event. Carla is never meant to know about Flora’s appearance, since she finds out about it in a letter from Sylvia, which she then immediately burns. If the first apparition could be seen as a deferral of violence by the manifestation of something sacred in its pure innocence, the second possibility, however, clearly becomes the ritual function of the scapegoat.25 Then the whole situation becomes more violent and awkward again. There is also a creepy sense of unknowing, since neither Carla nor the reader knows what actually happened to Flora. Did Clark chase it away again or did he even kill it? In any case, all of these symbolic meanings and ritually manifested traditions are constructed to—at least temporarily—escape haunting. On a very general level, scapegoating appears when a group or a community needs cleansing from sins, and ritually attaches these sins onto a sacrificial object (animal, human or a group of social agents). Viewing it more strictly sociologically, the rite may help the social machinery to continue functioning by means of this pseudo-solution to a more deeply rooted haunting force. For instance, in the narrative, we realise that some kind of status quo of order is reached, but we also sense the instability and perhaps volatility that still haunts especially Carla. In terms of more established gothic tropes, the female character is still trapped in a domestic situation, dominated and indirectly threatened by male power and

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violence. As noted by Gianfranca Balestra: “She prefers to remain subjugated to her husband, in a way colluding with him by denying his violence against the goat. She is reduced to silence, perhaps even complicity”.26 Taking into consideration the theories of René Girard—who most thoroughly brought the scapegoat myth and ritual into literary studies— we see the power of fiction in Munro’s work even more clearly. In The Scapegoat, Girard’s overarching argument is that scapegoat victims in myths always point back to real victims. That is part and parcel of the power of myths. In the setting of narrativity and gothic tropes in “Runaway”, the ending becomes even more terrifying, since it does not point to any way out of the constant threat of male violence and dominance. Girard alludes directly to this very circularity. In the story itself, Carla incarnates the disturbance of order and the restoring of order through her connection with Flora as well as through her decision to bury her knowledge of the sacrifice. The French scholar describes the mechanism very clearly. The perpetual conjunction in myths of a very guilty victim with a conclusion that is both violent and liberating can only be explained by the extreme force of the scapegoat mechanism. This hypothesis in fact solves the fundamental enigma of all mythology: the order that is either absent or compromised by the scapegoat once more establishes itself or is established by the intervention of someone who disturbed it in the first place. It is conceivable that a victim may be responsible for public disasters, which is what happened in myths as in collective persecutions, but in myths, and only in myths, this same victim restores the order, symbolizes, and even incarnates it.27

The seemingly open ending in “Runaway” becomes its opposite through this lens. The female victim is still breaking her nails tearing at the thick stone walls of the dungeon.

“Passion” As indicated in the analyses above, Munro utilises gothic configurations in more modern settings. In the short story “Passion”, we encounter a similar everyday gothic, which is mostly present through an intricate hauntological dynamism and by its setting at the fringes of rural habitations, with the wilderness close at hand, and road-nets that gradually peter out into the unknown. Already in the beginning of the narrative we realise that the

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protagonist, Grace, is revisiting a house long after certain events in her youth have taken place. The peculiarly mesmerising and lingering effects of the house and what happened there are then revealed in a long retrospective account of a life-changing event. Typically, the haunting of a life that did not happen is present in its absence, and it holds the protagonist in a strong embrace even though most of her life obviously has passed, since she now is an elderly woman. The strength of the attraction/haunting does not even seem transparent to the protagonist herself: “What was Grace really looking for when she had undertaken this expedition? Maybe the worst thing would have been to get just what she might have thought she was after […] Perfect preservation, the past intact, when nothing of the kind could be said of herself”.28 In the longer narrative that follows, it gradually becomes clearer to the reader where the source of hauntological power lies. Typically, the narration has to move in close to Grace’s experiential streams so that we are allowed to follow the subtle play of details that progressively move us towards something closer to ‘understanding’. In that summer and autumn of the year when Grace was 20 years old, she has a summer job as a waitress. She starts dating Maury Travers who has a somewhat paradoxical character: “Scared, fierce, innocent, determined”.29 The protagonist is introduced to an upper-middle-class life that she is not used to and these experiences are mostly tied to the Travers’ house by the lake. In terms of gothic tropes, the narrative performs a play with the notion of the dangerous male who will abduct the damsel in distress and have his way with her. The gothic male in disguise is however not Maury, but his half-brother Neil from his mother’s earlier marriage. Mrs Travers’ former husband, Neil’s father, had lived a troubled life and eventually committed suicide. This is the traumatic shadow that haunts the narrative, and most decisively for Grace, it haunts Neil. Mrs Travers also has problems “with her nerves” from time to time.30 The day on which the decisive ‘event’ occurs is supposed to be the Canadian Thanksgiving, but the whole temporality of the day is confused by the influences of Grace’s partly muddled recollections. Significantly, the memories seem exact and detailed when it comes to certain things and completely erroneous and contradictory when dealing with other aspects. For instance, it seems strange to drive a convertible with the top down in October in Canada (the average temperature around Ottawa this time of year is between 13° and 4°). In addition, Grace starts to question her own memory of the absence of cars and people on the roads: “This cannot have been true— there must have been people on the road, people on their way home that

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Sunday morning, on their way to spend Thanksgiving with their families”.31 However, gradually in hindsight, these aspects have not had any stronger significance. They have fallen by the wayside on the continuous walk on the backwards moving path of life, in the Kierkegaardian sense. In pursuing the temporal hauntology and the intricate workings of chance and fate, we must engage with a great deal of details in the text. One such absolutely crucial event, for the causality of the narrative, is that Grace cuts her foot rather badly while entertaining the younger children outside the Travers’ house. When she went down the stairs “she felt the strap of one of her sandals break”.32 When jumping off the swing she cuts her foot on a clamshell. Just after that moment, Neil, who happens to be a doctor, arrives on the scene. He cleans the injury and stitches her up, but they also need to go to the hospital in the neighbourhood to get an anti-­ tetanus shot. It gradually dawns on the reader that Neil brings Grace along as a hostage so that he can secure the dose of alcohol he needs for the day. Mrs Travers calls to Grace: “You’ll try to keep him away from drinking today, won’t you? You’ll know how to do it”.33 This is the first time Grace meets Neil, so how is she supposed to know how to do that? There are a number of details to note already here. First, the scales of temporality when haunting is involved. For instance, the number of years since Neil’s father committed suicide, which constitutes a shadow over his life, feeding the black root of angst and alcoholism that almost completely rules his life, that span, put into temporal contrast with the split seconds, seconds and minutes that constitute the breaking of the sandal strap, the jump from the swing and the sharp clamshell cutting through the skin. If we later try to determine which one of these details is the major and most decisive ‘event’ in this narrative, we need to think about when any such ‘event’ that we pick would have started. For example, no broken strap, no cut, no car trip out into the back roads of the country. Secondly, an erotic tension has already started to stir in Grace almost concomitant with her realisation that Neil smells of a mixture of alcohol and mint, which she, through her work as a waitress, has recently learned what it actually means. She looks at Neil: “He had a high pale forehead, a crest of tight curly gray-­ black hair, bright gray eyes, a wide thin-lipped mouth that seemed to curl in on some vigorous impatience, or appetite, or pain”.34 The thing to pay attention to here is that the “or” does not mean ‘either-or’ but rather ‘both-and’. The attraction is partly from the pain and the shadow of suffering as intertwined with the taste of the erotic, the pent-up appetite.35 The violence sensed is in this case directed inwards, towards the man

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himself, but in the potential recklessness of the man, it could just as well draw Grace into its powerful haunting maelstrom. After the shot has been given in the hospital, Maury is there in the waiting room to take Grace home. But Neil more or less orders the nurse to inform Maury that they have left the hospital. Upon the leading question if she did not want to go home yet, did she, Grace replies: “‘No,’ said Grace, as if she’d seen the word written in front of her, on the wall. As if she was having her eyes tested”.36 This experience indicates that Grace is somehow suddenly attuned to some stronger force, something blotting out part of her agency, in her own thinking, “an airy surrender, flesh nothing now but a stream of desire”.37 In connection to this appears a captivating description of hauntological power and the workings of temporality and phenomenalisation. Describing this passage, this change in her life, later on, Grace might say— she did say—that it was as if a gate had clanged shut behind her. But at the time there was no clang—acquiescence simply rippled through her, the rights of those left behind were smoothly cancelled.38

This backward moving attention does never provide any “clang”, it just ripples back seeking out nodal-points that actually congeal into a specific meaning only afterwards. The haunting power is also born in the instant, and it is what forces the subject to keep returning to the “clang”. Or the other way around, the decisive moment keeps returning, beckoning for modified interpretations, but itself appearing more with a sense of the absolute. The hauntological streamings emanate from this source-point without any immediately transparent reasons or available explanations. For Grace it would mean, among other things, that she would not marry Maury, which could very well have been a mistake, but most importantly, the truth of that, if there is such a thing, she will never know. Grace will throughout her life be haunted by her other life, or perhaps even more accurately, her other lives.39 There is a more commonsensical interpretation of course. Grace realised her sexual freedom and thereby her possibilities in life, which seemed to become diminished by Maury’s fixed and idealised image of her. But somehow that does not seem to be enough. There is something on a much larger scale going on. On their road trip Neil feels the need to sleep and they park near a lake. The stressful backdrop to the whole situation is of course that in the Travers’ house, the

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whole family—including Neil’s wife and children—are waiting for them to return to the Thanksgiving dinner. But Grace seems to have been transported to a completely different dimension of being. She tried the swings, which faced west. Pumping herself high, she looked into the clear sky—faint green, fading gold, a fierce pink rim at the horizon. Already the air was getting cold. She’d thought it was touch. Mouths, tongues, skin, bodies, banging bone on bone. Inflammation. Passion. But that wasn’t what had been meant for them at all. That was child’s play, compared to how she knew him, how far she’d seen into him, now. What she had seen was final. As if she was at the edge of a flat dark body of water that stretched on and on. Cold, level water. Looking out at such dark, cold, level water, and knowing it was all there was. It wasn’t the drinking that was responsible. The same thing was waiting, no matter what, and all the time. Drinking, needing to drink—that was just some form of distraction, like everything else.40

The near-metaphysical encounter with the outer rims of existence opened through her sudden confrontation with Neil’s haunting pain that opens as the maw of the beast. The constant waiting in the dark of whatever awaits resembles both truth and nothingness. Perhaps they are the same thing. The hauntological power is even more strongly manifested in the end. Significantly, Grace cannot remember if the word ‘good bye’ was even uttered when they parted. That also constitutes a hole in the fabric. It is not clear either if Neil had an accident or deliberately drove his car into the flat darkness. For Grace, the power of hauntology will forever make things holding the darkness at bay seem like “child’s play”. Charles E. May looks at “Passion” through a distinction between the short story and the novel as characteristics of these being different genres. Even though that type of analysis is on a different level with different aims than the one attempted here, to present May’s idea as contrast is of some value to bring out the hauntological aspects. May suggests the following division: The important distinction that must be made is between narratives which strive to make the realm of value seem temporal and graspable by experience and reason and narratives which strive to radically transform the temporal into the spiritual. What I wish to suggest is that the novel is a form domi-

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nated primarily by the first impulse, whereas the short story is dominated by the second motive. The first process requires development in the temporal sense; it requires a slow process of “as if ” lived experience in a world of objects, social relationships, and conceptual frameworks; it requires then, as philosophy does, a logical development. It must have the bigness of the comprehensive theory of the whole man facing the whole world. The second process, on the other hand, requires only the moment, an instantaneous single experience that in its immediacy challenges the social and conceptual framework which has slowly been developed in the process of a life history.41

The peculiar thing here is that I would claim that Munro actually combines these two modes. It is precisely that combination that creates her very special gothic hauntology. Grace’s experience on this day could definitely be seen as very logical, plausible and simple. This is not to claim that the short story does not contain narratological tricks, dramatic causality etc., but it very clearly combines the believable, conceivable and seemingly realistic with something that verges on mystery or the metaphysical. That is probably the immanent suggestion of this chapter, that any dull quotidian reality is haunted by what it is not. Nothing is but what is not. That is the fictional shadow that especially haunts anything that is too confidently understood as a clear-cut reality. * * * As we have seen, Munro plays around with gothic tropes in modern settings and she also allows hauntology to have a much more prominent position than has hitherto been acknowledged in available scholarship. On the level of hauntology, the connection with the gothic is also much more alive and vibrant on a more advanced philosophical level. The female protagonists seem paradoxically to be very powerful and vulnerable and fragile at the same time. Narrativity and the power of fiction have a complicated Janus face in Munro’s writing. It is very difficult to pinpoint, but the ‘both-and’ logic is perhaps the closest we can get. Munro repeatedly investigates something miniscule, which at the same time is as huge as the universe. If one would revisit a version of Lovecraft’s weird, as a collage with highly disparate entities, this ‘something’ may very well be manifested as the place where the clamshell meets the infinity of the black waters.

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Notes 1. C.f. for instance Sue Chaplin, “Female Gothic and the Law”, Women and the Gothic: An Edinburgh Companion, Avril Horner and Sue Zlosnik (eds) (Edinburgh University Press, 2016, 135–49). Chaplin relates to male violence as a phenomenon of haunting in her reading of Eliza Parson’s The Castle of Wolfenbach: “This apparent ‘haunting’ [spooky sounds] indicates that the castle is a repository of past violence that is shortly to return, and the explanation offered for the spectral sounds generates a parallel between the predicament of the heroine (who is escaping persecution at the hands of her uncle) and an imprisoned, persecuted wife and her dead child who now haunt the site of their incarceration and death. The narrative of the ‘haunting’ returns again later in the text, when it almost exactly parallels the account by the Countess of Wolfenbach of her disastrous, violent marriage. Female experiences of trauma are thus mirrored back and forth across the generations, and women rely upon the support of other women to narrate and expose these injustices. At the centre of these narratives is an abused woman lacking any capacity to protect herself legally against the machinations of vengeful men” (142). The haunting in Munro is more on a feminist existential level, but the shadow of male power and violence is the same. 2. Alice Munro, “Free Radicals”, Too Much Happiness (London: Chatto & Windus, 2009), 116–37, 120. 3. Rahimi, The Hauntology of Everyday Life, 34. 4. Munro, “Free Radicals”, 122. 5. Ibid. 6. Ibid., 123. 7. Ibid., 124. 8. Ibid., 124–25. 9. Judith McCombs, “Searching Bluebeard’s Chambers: Grimm, Gothic, and Bible Mysteries in Alice Munro’s ‘The Love of a Good Woman’” (American Review of Canadian Studies 30:3 September 2000: 327–48), 330. 10. Barbaras, Renaud, Introduction to a Phenomenology of Life (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2021), 351. 11. Ibid. 12. Ibid., 352–53. 13. Ibid., 352. 14. Ibid., 353. 15. Munro, “Free Radicals”, 136. 16. Ibid., 122.

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17. Tomasz Sikora, “‘Murderous Pleasures’: The (Female) Gothic and the Death Drive in Selected Short Stories by Margaret Atwood, Isabel Huggan and Alice Munro” (Taylor and Francis; 2016, 204–216), 205. 18. Katrin Berndt, “The Ordinary Terrors of Survival: Alice Munro and the Canadian Gothic” (Journal of the Short Story in English 55, Special Issue: The Short Stories of Alice Munro, 2010). EnglishOpenAIRE, January 2011, (PDF p. 9). 19. Munro, “Runaway”, Runaway (London: Vintage, 2006), 3–47, 6. 20. Ibid., 21. 21. Ibid., 28. 22. Ibid., 36. 23. Ibid., 39. 24. Ibid., 40. 25. For a more thorough Girardian analysis see: Gianfranca Balestra, “Goats, Heifers, Wolves and Other Animals in Alice Munro’s ‘Runaway’” (Caliban: French Journal of English Studies. 2017, 57), 123–38. 26. Ibid., Par., 12. 27. René Girard, The Scapegoat (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), 42. 28. Munro, “Passion”, Runaway, 159–96, 161. 29. Ibid., 163. 30. Ibid., 175. 31. Ibid., 183. 32. Ibid., 178. 33. Ibid., 181. 34. Ibid., 180. 35. This is arguably a mainstream gothic trait that has been there from the very birth of the genre. That is, to challenge norms and explore dimensions of sexuality which are complex, contradictory and of course even ‘dangerous’. For instance, as put by Allen W. Grove: “To a large extent, Gothic and ‘the End of the Enlightenment’ appear to go hand in hand. The authors of early Gothic novels, as they indulged in representing overactive imaginations, the supernatural, unrestrained passion, and, in short, all that is ‘irrational,’ can take at least as much credit for ushering in the ‘Romantic’ period […]”, “Coming Out of the Castle: Gothic, Sexuality and the Limits of Language” (Historical Reflections / Réflexions Historiques 26:3, 2000, 429–46), 431. 36. Munro, “Passion”, Runaway, 182. 37. Ibid., 183. 38. Ibid., 182. 39. Phenomenologically speaking, such processes are rather complex in that they involve several layers of horizons. The first level may be as simple as

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‘something has happened’, then horizons of similar experiences may be added, all of this in a chain of prepredicative interpretation (all of which in an ‘ordinary’ perception happens rather quickly). When more and more diachronic time is added, an ever-richer horizonality is complemented, moving towards a predicative understanding. This goes all the way from an undefined ‘clang’ to a more meaning-carrying ‘clang’, and much later manifesting itself on levels of elaborate reflections in hindsight. For an outline of perceptual horizons, see, for instance, Saulius Geniusas, “The Horizon and the Origins of Sense-Formation” (The Origins of the Horizon in Husserl’s Phenomenology, Springer Netherlands, 2012), 137–54. 40. Munro, “Passion”, Runaway, 193. 41. Charles E.  May, “The Short Story’s Way of Meaning: Alice Munro’s ‘Passion’” (Narrative, 20:2, 2012), 172–182, 180.

CHAPTER 8

Concluding Remarks: “I Can Feel My Lost Child Surfacing Within Me”

Perhaps it is the somewhat imprecise definition of ‘hauntology’ that makes it into such a suitable concept for detecting and pursuing gothic phenomena. Similar to Freud’s notion of ‘the uncanny’, the concept itself is ghost-­ like. Already on a very basic level it comes into conflict with more established analytical tools and methods. For instance, boundaries and categories are necessary to uphold some kind of order and an ontological overview of the literature, or the specific genre of literature, that is under scholarly scrutiny. Moreover, a kind of basic order is also needed for any field of inquiry, since we have to be able to pinpoint what we are talking about. Since the concept of hauntology disturbs such a basic cartography from the outset, it may be vulnerable to contemptuous arguments that would attempt to disqualify the concept from the start. Hauntology seems to invoke some kind of ‘anything-goes’ attitude in relation to literary texts and other cultural artefacts. For example, as noted by Elisabeth M. Loevlie: It goes without saying that this haunting, despite its “success” in post-­ modern thought, is easily rejected and overlooked within the more dominating rationalist and secular discourses of our time. Reality is what you perceive, and hauntology is easily dismissed as merely one more French, fashionable and nonsensical term. However, our time is also one of revived religious activity, of a surging wave of so-called alternative lifestyles and remedies, and one look at popular culture reveals a plethora of vampires, ghosts, and other magical creatures with supernatural powers. Without going into © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 J. Wrethed, Gothic Hauntology, Palgrave Gothic, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-41111-3_8

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details, all can be seen as symptomatic of a yearning to relate to those shades of existence that cannot be defined according to the traditional ontological criteria of being or non-being, alive or dead, material or immaterial. Existence offers a whole range of dimensions that don’t fit this scheme. Rather they are in-between—ungraspable and unidentifiable. And while the dominating discourse, at least of the West, with its scientific, technological and economical base, expels these ghosts, a new desire to experience their mystery is apparent.1

This insight has clearly underpinned the readings in the various chapters in this volume as well. However, we have also altogether tried to go beyond this dichotomy of the rational discourse as opposed to a fictional (or religious) discourse. Rather, as part of the haunting of the limitrophical ‘both-and’, even perception or what seems to be the rational pursuits of empirical science are essentially haunted. What Loevlie refers to as the expression of a deeper, or spiritual, understanding of evidently existing phenomena—for instance the reference to the various fictional creatures overflowing popular culture—can be shown to be ‘real’ phenomena on a primordial experiential level. Moreover, fully in accordance with Loevlie’s general claim—that fiction is a superior field in which the advanced scrutiny of hauntology’s workings can take place—we have seen, perhaps especially in Munro’s and Atwood’s fiction, that haunting is a dominant phenomenon and that it may appear completely without spectacular phantasmagorical devices. Literature is also an arena for deep thinking about existential topics, in which hauntology obviously has a role to play. Hauntology may at least partly open up for our thinking about the “shades of existence” in a very serious and often idiosyncratic way, actually even regardless of how we categorise the literature we are engaging with. In addition to just presenting ghosts and the return or the lingering of the past, hauntology has also been shown to affect the experience of temporality in a more general way. For instance, if the present is not stable or even if it is ‘non-existent’, the future will be strongly intertwined with the past. Such a temporality begins to outline questions about chance and predestination or determinism. Those kinds of temporal conundrums are appropriately dealt with in fictional form. Since time is malleable in the hands of the literary author, this constitutes an excellent stage for examining temporal aporias and temporal aspects of hauntology. As connected to narratological features, this field could certainly be analysed and scrutinised further in global gothic literature or world literature. When it comes

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to thinking through the hauntological along these lines, we may open a dialogue with David Punter, who states the following: But what Miéville is making of [the archetype monster] is not only, or most interestingly, a distinction between the hauntological (the phantomatic, the revenant, the reminder, often with moral inflections) and the Weird (the utterly strange, the unmotivated, the unexpected), but also a fissure in the term ‘uncanny.’ Where we are accustomed, ever since Freud, to thinking of the uncanny as that which has at least some dealing with the familiar, the Weird has more to do with the ‘ab-canny’—which Miéville does not define, but which we might assume to be that which pertains to a realm which is altogether non-human, a mystery that cannot be allayed by psychological acumen, philosophical reflection or ethical righteousness. We might helpfully—or possibly unhelpfully—connect this with psychologists’ ideas on the reptilian brain, which has been said to lie at the base of physical brain structure and thus, we might say metaphorically, at the base of mental activity—and what follows from this seems appropriate to any consideration of the Weird, because the assumption would have to be that the non-human lies at the base of, is deeply embedded within, all those activities that we consider to be human.2

Punter here thinks through the status of monsters, and the relation between the concepts of the uncanny and the Weird, which obviously is a contemplation most clearly related to this study’s Chap. 6 on Lovecraft. But apart from that, we can also pick up on the thinking about the psychological and the brain science Punter refers to. With a phenomenological approach, it is not quite so important to situate the ghost or the monster at a specific location (for instance in the reptile brain). However, disregarding that spatial issue, it is very tempting to go along with the philosophical aspects of the “non-human” to be part of, or “deeply embedded within”, the human. This is essentially what we have tried to unveil all through this study. To pursue a hauntological understanding of literature and experience, we do not have to abandon the rational cognition or the ‘sober’ perception. The claim made here is just that hauntology and limitrophy operate precisely on the threshold of phenomenalisation. We may briefly reiterate the gist of the phenomenology of Renaud Barbaras in order to elucidate what the consequences are when selecting this philosophical path. The French thinker outlines perception itself as the mechanism that harbours the hauntological dimension. The horizon of any perception indicates, or meaningfully includes, the notion of the totality of

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a world, even though this totality can never be present. Thus, there is always already an absence at work. But the absence is present. We see limitrophy and the logic of ‘both-and’ at work on a primordial level of phenomenalisation. We can conclude […] that belonging defines the structure of appearance, and that there is therefore manifestation only as the comanifestation of a world. In other words, there is manifestation emerging only from an all-­ encompassing totality that it simultaneously actualizes and conceals by its becoming present. Approached from the “subjective” perspective, this means that originary intentionality consists in a desire in which are constituted conjointly the limiting manifestation and what transcends it—the horizon as the originary form of appearance. Thus there is manifestation only insofar as it emerges from a distance or a depth, only insofar as it presents an originary totality. The latter contains in principle all that can appear to the degree that it is not unfolded as a positive element, in which it is merely what occurs in it; it merges with the horizon as presentation of the infinite. The world is the reserve of manifestation in the sense of both the interior distance by which it distinguishes itself and what is the potency of any possible manifestation. Everything depends therefore on the fact that the givenness of the world in the flesh is the condition of appearance, which is why there is a test peculiar to absence: the “instinctive” character of intentionality corresponds precisely to the fact that the world’s presence in the flesh implies a constitutive dimension of absence.3

The ambivalence of the ontological belonging of the ghost (absent/present; material/immaterial) is embedded already on this level of plain perception of “the world in the flesh”. The world (as a whole, as potentiality) is co-intended in any perception, but it is itself not present. It becomes manifested as absence, which indicates how the non-human or the ineffable can be present/absent. In the realm of literature, the primordial absence could be seen as nothingness or the inexpressible, as some kind of hole in the semantic fabric. Human subjectivity is haunted by this absence and the unrealisability that follows life itself as a shadow in life’s compulsory epistemological quest. We have seen these forces at work, in Lovecraft, in Poe (as the search for the root of trauma) and in the domestic gothic of Alice Munro and Margaret Atwood. For instance, Lovecraft and Munro constitute two hauntological extremes within the category of literary fiction.

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In addition, in Atwood we have witnessed hauntology and limitrophy at work on a level that cannot be regarded as anything other than ‘realistic’, whatever meaning we attach to that word. The protagonist in Surfacing encounters numerous ghosts, none of which is surreal, but which paradoxically, and completely in accordance with limitrophy, have an aura of the ghostly intertwined with their appearing. To emphasise this aspect of the study, we can look at how the female main character receives her aborted foetus as the liminality of death and life itself. As the gradual realisation that her unborn child is dead, she is drawn towards nature as growth and life, and walking barefoot through the forest her “tentacled feet and free hand scent out the way, shoes are a barrier between touch and the earth”.4 As becoming more and more a perceiving body, she is also gradually embraced by a nature that does not really reside ‘out there’. She drags her boyfriend into her haunted sphere and into her perceiving body. I guide him into me, it’s the right season, I hurry. He trembles and then I can feel my lost child surfacing within me, forgiving me, rising from the lake where it has been prisoned for so long, its eyes and teeth phosphorescent; the two halves clasp, interlocking like fingers, it buds, it sends out fronds. This time I will do it by myself, squatting on old newspapers in a corner alone; or on leaves, dry leaves, a heap of them, that’s cleaner. The baby will slip out easily as an egg, a kitten, and I’ll lick it off and bite the cord, the blood returning to the ground where it belongs; the moon will be full, pulling. In the morning I will be able to see it; it will be covered with shining fur, a god, I will never teach it any words.5

The wordless sphere is actually not a sphere at all, but since we lack language for such limitrophic phenomena, we have to make do with metaphorical compromises. This ‘sphere’ of the non-human is really not to be found ‘out there’. I would also claim that Lovecraft’s spectacular monsters are really not ‘out there’ either. What is referred to here is something that Barbaras labels The Open. This is an impossible point to ‘reach’ since it is not an object, which merely in turn taunts epistemological desire that can never shake off the haunting. This is why humanity is always already haunted, by for instance its lack of reverence for animals—and its own animality—and nature itself as the mother of life or even life itself. This also to some extent indicates why hauntology is an inevitable constituent of the gothic. The genre as such has always been drawn to regions in which seemingly clear-cut dichotomies are challenged and problematised.

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The gothic, as hauntology, is not really a genre or even an entity, it is rather a dynamic phenomenon that continuously undoes what it just recently formed. It unpicks the tapestry while making it. This is disturbing to some readers and exhilarating to others. When the entity that the protagonist in Surfacing feels—which is not something either ‘out there’ or ‘in here’—sends out its “fronds” it is always already haunted by its own absence. It is always already haunted by its escape from language and reason. It is always already haunted by its non-existence and its other life that will develop alongside of it.

Notes 1. Elisabeth M. Loevlie, “Faith in the Ghosts of Literature: Poetic Hauntology in Derrida, Blanchot and Morrison’s Beloved” (Religions. 4:3, 2013), 336–350, 337. 2. David Punter, “Weird or What? The Nautical and the Hauntological” (https://www.atmostfear-­entertainment.com/literature/books/nautical-­ hauntological/), accessed 230301. 3. Barbaras, Introduction to a Phenomenology of Life, 128–129. 4. Atwood, Surfacing, 164. 5. Ibid., 165.

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Index1

A Abraham, 14, 78 Affectivity, 12–14, 16, 17, 23n10, 30, 37, 41, 61, 70, 72, 75, 80, 109, 123 Animality, 16, 17, 22, 40, 46, 48–50, 55, 59–64, 68, 79, 80, 82, 84, 85, 155 Anthropocene, 106 Anti-logic, 31 Apocalypse, 121, 122 Atheism, 13, 121 Attunement/attuned, 40, 74, 93, 96, 144 B Barbaras, Renaud, 21, 22, 39, 40, 43n33, 93, 98, 109, 110, 114, 115, 117, 118, 123, 133, 139, 153, 155 The Bocksten Man/Bockstensmannen, 6, 24n12 Bullying, 17, 52, 53, 55, 56, 59, 64

C The Castle of Otranto, 2, 3, 68 Catharsis, 22, 56, 123 Coverley, Merlin, 2, 7, 13, 23n4, 75 D Deconstruction, 9, 78, 102n2 Deep-time, 35 Deferral, 36, 129, 134, 140 Derrida, Jacques, v, 2, 3, 6–8, 10, 11, 13, 14, 16, 17, 24–25n23, 28, 31, 46, 47, 49, 54–56, 63, 78, 84, 95, 100, 102n5, 106, 107, 121 Desire, v–vi, 14, 18, 19, 21, 22, 33, 34, 38–40, 42n9, 53, 55, 62, 69, 74, 84, 91, 92, 97, 98, 100, 102n14, 105–124, 129, 133–135, 139, 144, 152, 154, 155

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

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164 

INDEX

E Eco-Gothic, 37, 41 Eliade, Mircea, 75, 77 Empathy, 93, 97 Epistemological desire, v–vi, 14, 19, 21, 22, 33, 38–40, 91, 92, 97, 98, 100, 105–124, 155 Ethics/ethical, 55–58, 63, 83, 84, 89, 91, 109, 153 Everyday gothic, 8, 15, 16, 19, 20, 27, 29, 31, 32, 128, 141 F Fatality/fatal, 11, 13, 14, 33, 85, 140 Fisher, Mark, 2, 8, 11, 12, 107, 110 Freud, Sigmund, 2, 7–9, 14, 24n23, 42n9, 42n11, 151, 153 G The Group of Seven, 33

K Kant, Immanuel, 47, 49 Kierkegaard, Søren, 20 Kristeva, Julia, 2, 14, 55 Kronos, 61 L Lacan, Jacques, 2, 5, 14, 47, 69 Levinas, Emmanuel, 47 Liminality/limit, 17, 35, 37, 46, 47, 50, 51, 56, 59, 61, 63, 64, 79, 95, 98, 100, 102n5, 115, 117, 119, 127, 131, 155 Limitrophy, v, 8, 11, 13, 14, 17, 18, 22, 37, 40, 41, 46, 47, 49, 50, 55, 56, 58, 78, 79, 90, 95, 102n5, 113, 127, 128, 134, 153–155 Logic, 13, 19, 27, 31–34, 40, 52–54, 73–76, 78, 79, 81, 83, 84, 89, 91, 97, 108, 119–121, 123, 124, 132, 138–140, 146, 154

H Hamlet, 100, 101 Heidegger, Martin, 24n23, 47, 130 Henry, Michel, 23n10, 24n10 Horizon, 19, 33, 99, 100, 110, 115–119, 133, 145, 148–149n39, 153, 154 Husserl, Edmund, 23n10, 109

M Macbeth, 6, 8, 70, 71, 73, 119 Memory, 4, 14, 18, 32, 51, 57, 60, 69, 77, 96, 113, 129, 134, 142

I Indeterminacy, vi, 8, 18, 79, 89–101

O Ontology, 9, 10, 29–31, 37, 40, 57, 58, 68, 70, 72, 79, 83, 96, 100, 106, 113, 123, 128, 133 The Open, 19, 22, 39, 40, 43n33, 98, 100, 139, 155

J Julius Caesar, 8

N Narratology, 11, 134

 INDEX 

P Paedophile/paedophilia, 52–54, 58 Paradox, vi, 14, 18, 19, 21, 71, 74, 79, 80, 95, 102n14 Perverseness, 18, 67, 74–76, 78, 79, 83–85, 108 Phenomenology, 14, 18, 20, 23n10, 91, 92, 94, 96, 98, 109, 121, 123, 139, 153 Posthuman, 60, 62 Psychoanalysis, 15, 68, 69, 102n2, 102n14 Punter, David, 153 R Racism, 18, 59, 60, 80, 83–85, 124 Rahimi, Sadeq, 14–16, 18, 56, 63, 69, 78, 129 Real, 4, 6, 14, 19, 20, 28, 35, 38, 41, 47, 61, 70, 77, 79, 80, 91, 93–96, 99, 107, 108, 113, 114, 117, 120, 129, 135, 141, 152 Revelation, 89, 93, 94, 96, 99, 110, 118, 120, 121, 130, 139, 140 Royle, Nicholas, 9 S Sapphire and Steel, 12 Savoy, Eric, 95, 96, 98 Shakespeare, William, 8, 10, 70, 100, 119

165

Spectre, 7, 10, 12, 14, 24–25n23, 31–33, 36, 49, 62, 97, 106, 120, 124 Syllogism, 13, 18 T Temporality, v, 8–13, 17, 20, 22n2, 32, 36, 45, 46, 50, 51, 59, 67–85, 106, 109, 128, 129, 142–144, 152 Torok, 14, 78 Trace, 11, 16, 35, 45–64, 83, 95, 96, 107, 111–113, 134 Transgression, 16, 17, 29–31, 45, 61, 64, 68, 73, 76, 79, 91, 117 Trauma, 2, 4, 16–18, 36, 57, 72, 76, 77, 79, 84, 85, 147n1, 154 U Uncanny, 3, 7–9, 11, 13, 15, 19, 20, 27, 32, 34–37, 41, 42n9, 42n11, 102n14, 107, 131, 151, 153 Unheimlich, 7–9 W Walpole, Horace, 2, 3, 23n4, 68 Watt, James, 3 The weird, 19, 107, 110–112, 115, 121, 123, 146, 153 Wolfreys, Julian, 8 Z Zeitgeist, 2, 105, 123 Zeus, 61 Zizek, Slavoj, 14