150 Notes Notes

150 Notes Notes PREFACE 1. Jacques Derrida, ‘Marx c’est quelqu’un’, in Jacques Derrida, Marc Guillaume, and Jean-Pierre Vincent, Marx en jeu (Paris: Descartes & Cie, 1997), 9–28. Hereafter Mcq. 2. Jacques Derrida, Limited Inc. Trans. Samuel Weber et al. (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1988), 118. Hereafter LI. 3. John Updike, ‘Books Unbound, Life Unraveled’, New York Times, 18 June 2000. 4. Nicholas Royle, ‘Déjà Vu’ in Martin McQuillan et al. (eds), Post-Theory: New Directions in Criticism (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999), 3–20; 11. Hereafter ‘DV’. 5. Jean-Michel Rabaté, The Ghosts of Modernity (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1996), xvi. Hereafter GM. INTRODUCTION 1. Jacques Derrida, ‘The Ghost Dance: An Interview with Jacques Derrida’, trans. Jean-Luc Svoboda, Public, 2 (1989), 60–73; 61. Hereafter GD. 2. Derrida has taken up the connections between matters of technology and haunting more recently, with Bernard Steigler, in Échographies: de la télévision: Entretiens filmés (Paris: Galilée-INA, 1996). Hereafter É. 3. Samuel Weber, Mass Mediauras: Form, Technics, Media (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996), 164; 162–3. Hereafter MM. 4. Avital Ronell, Finitude’s Score: Essays for the End of the Millennium (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994), 312–13. Hereafter FS. On television and tele-technology, see Richard Dienst, Still Life in Real Time: Theory After Television (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994). 5. Walter Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Repro- duction’, in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn, ed. and int. Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), 217–52. Hereafter WA. Seemingly anticipating Derrida’s critique of the metaphysics of presence, Benjamin points out that the process of reproduction dissolves an object’s ‘presence in time and space, its unique existence’ (WA 220). Further- more, while never speaking in the essay directly of haunting or the spectral, Benjamin does turn approvingly to a remark by Paul Valéry, which remark comes close to tracing Derrida’s own understanding of the spectral in relation to technologies of reproduction: ‘Just as water, gas, and elec- tricity are brought into our houses from afar off . .’, writes Valéry, ‘so we shall be supplied with visual or auditory images, which will appear and disappear at a simple movement of the hand, hardly more than a 150 Notes 151 sign’ (Valéry cit. Benjamin, WA 219). Particularly interesting in Benjamin’s reading of still and cinematic photography is the comprehension of technology’s ability to make appear in its reproduction of human experience that which is invisible, that which haunts our actions and gestures and which, without the artifice of the medium, goes, as it were, unseen. 6. David Punter, ‘Introduction: of Apparitions’, in Glennis Byron and David Punter (eds), Spectral Readings: Towards a Gothic Geography (Basing- stoke: Macmillan Press – now Palgrave, 1999), 1–8; 3. 7. Peggy Kamuf, The Division of Literature or the University in Deconstruction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 171. Here- after DL. 8. Defoe’s ‘A True Relation’ is reprinted in Stuart Sherman (ed.), The Longman Anthology of British Literature: Vol. 1c, The Restoration and the Eighteenth Century (New York: Longman, 1999), 2291–97, along with the two letters, by L. Lukyn and Stephen Gray, and the ‘Interview’ mentioned in the following paragraph (2298–2303). I have drawn on Stuart Sherman’s notes throughout for contextual and historical detail. 9. On Defoe’s interest in the spectral and apparitional phenomena, and, more generally, on the category of the uncanny, see Terry Castle’s The Female Thermometer (FT 44–55, 175–6). 10. T. J. Lustig offers a telling commentary on the destabilizing effects of the figurative in Freud’s essay ‘The “Uncanny”’, in Henry James and the Ghostly (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 24–7. 11. Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, trans. Eric Prenowitz (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 86. Here- after AF. 12. The term ‘phantasm’ is not synonymous with ‘phantom’, even though, as we will see in the chapter on Tennyson, both share a common ety- mology which haunts them (that which, we would say, haunts both figures, blurring absolute distinction between them). ‘Phantasm’ or ‘fantasm’, while having specifically psychoanalytic connotations, broadly conceived refers to forms of projection, figuration, fantasies and imaginary con- structions which, though clearly having no ‘reality’ as such, nonetheless are comprehensible, visible we might suggest in their very invisibility. Being of this order, the phantasm crosses any distinct boundary between the visible and invisible, the so-called real and the imaginary (as does the phantom). As Peter Schwenger points out, the fantasm, in English, ‘is both a ghost and an image in the mind’; Schwenger, Fantasm and Fiction: On Textual Envisioning (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), 5. Hereafter FF. Yet what the fantasm is, is not itself nor a rep- resentation of itself, but rather a figure, one amongst many, which spaces and haunts any identity. See Rodolphe Gasché’s comment on the phantasmatic, below. On the persistence of the phantasm from Aristotle to Freud, see Giorgio Agamben, Stanzas: Word and Phantasm in West- ern Culture, trans. Ronald L. Martinez (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993). Hereafter SWP. On the figure and figurality of the phantasm, see Louis Althusser’s commentary, cited below in the chapter on George Eliot’s The Lifted Veil. 152 Notes 13. Abraham remarks that ‘what haunts are not the dead, but the gaps left within us by the secrets of others’; Nicholas Abraham and Maria Torok, The Shell and the Kernel. Vol. 1, ed., trans., and int. Nicholas T. Rand (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 171. Hereafter SK. 14. Rodolphe Gasché, ‘The Witch Metapsychology’, trans. Julian Patrick, in Todd Dufresne (ed.), Returns of the ‘French Freud’: Freud, Lacan, and Beyond (New York: Routledge, 1997), 169–208; 172. 15. Mark Wigley, The Architecture of Deconstruction: Derrida’s Haunt (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993), 162. Hereafter AD. 16. Margaret Russett, De Quincey’s Romanticism: Canonical Minority and the Forms of Transmission (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). 17. Fred Botting, Gothic (London: Routledge, 1996), 14. 18. James R. Kincaid, ‘Designing Gourmet Children or, KIDS FOR DINNER’, in Ruth Robbins and Julian Wolfreys (eds), Victorian Gothic: Literary and Cultural Manifestations in the Nineteenth Century (Basingstoke: Macmillan Press – now Palgrave, 2000), 3–11; 8. 19. See, for example, Vijay Mishra, The Gothic Sublime (Albany: State Uni- versity of New York Press, 1994). 20. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, The Coherence of Gothic Conventions (New York: Methuen, 1986), 3. 21. Robert Miles, Gothic Writing 1750–1820: A Genealogy (London: Routledge, 1993), 1. 22. Kelly Hurley, The Gothic Body: Sexuality, Materialism, and Degenera- tion at the Fin de Siècle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 3. On the gothic body and the spectacle of the body in pain, see Steven Bruhm, Gothic Bodies: The Politics of Pain in Romantic Fiction (Phila- delphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994). 23. And, by implication, photography also. Inspired most directly by the work of Walter Benjamin and Roland Barthes on the technology of photography as one of shadows and spectres, critics have recently addressed the spectral nature of photographs. Particularly interesting amongst re- cent studies are Eduardo Cadava, Words of Light: Theses on the Photography of History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997; hereafter WL), and Marianne Hirsch, Family Frames: Photography, Nar- rative, and Postmemory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997). Both address the relation of photography to the death of the subject. Any photograph, in its reproducibility and its ability to bring back its subject, addresses that subject’s mortality. When I look at a photograph of myself, I know that this image can be reproduced at any time, that it can be presented for another’s view, not only during my lifetime but also after my death. In Hirsch’s words (discussing Barthes’ Camera Lucida), ‘[t]he referent is both present (implied in the photograph) and absent (it has been there but is not here now). The referent haunts the picture like a ghost: it is a revenant, a return of the lost and dead other’ (5). The referent, the image of myself for example, confronts me with this du- plicity, this act of paradoxical doubling, whereby I am here, as the observer, and both there and not there. What is returned through the photograph is only the spectre of an irrecoverable and, therefore, haunting past which Notes 153 can never be present, and which moreover disorganizes temporality in its ability to return repeatedly in the future. Photography, remarks Hirsch, ‘bring[s] the past back in the form of a ghostly revenant, emphasizing, at the same time, its immutable and irreversible pastness and irretriev- ability’ (20). As the trace of phantoms and ghosts, photographs are readable, remarks Hirsch, as ‘fragments of a history we cannot assimilate’ (40). In this, they bear a passing resemblance to the fragmented text in the gothic (of which more in the section of the chapter on the gothic) and, more generally, to the irretrievable fragment as the sign of spectrality. Fragments are themselves akin to snapshots, phatic images resistant to incorporation. While Hirsch comments on the personal in photography, Cadava’s interest is directed to the phantoms of history which return. As he puts it: [l]ike an angel of history whose wings register the traces of this dis- appearance, the image bears witness to an experience that cannot come to light. This experience is the experience of the shock of experience, of experience as bereavement. This bereavement acknowledges what takes place in any photograph – the return of the departed . the return of what was once there takes the form of a haunting .

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