Victorian Hauntings

[Dave Monroe]

>From Julian Wolfreys, Victorian Hauntings:
Spectrality, Gothic, the Uncanny and Literature (New
York: Palgrave, 2002), "Introduction," pp.
1-24 ...

"It is, perhaps, something of a truism to state
that there have been ghosts, spirits, phantoms.  It is
nonetheless accurate to suggest that there has been an
interest in haunting generally, for as long as there
have been narratives....  ghosts are always with us,
and perhaps now more than they ever have been
before." (p. 1)

"... haunting remains in place as a powerful force
of displacement, as that disfiguring of the present,
as the trace of non-identity within identity, and
through signs of alterity, otherness, abjection or
revenance.  Indeed, according to Derrida, haunting is
not simply a thing of the past or, indeed, something
from the past.  Instead, the experience of haunting
has never been greater: 'Contrary to what we might
believe, the experience of ghosts is not tied to a
bygone historical period, like the landscape of
Scottish manors, etc., but on the contrary, is
accentuated, accelerated by modern technologies like
film, television, the telephone.  These technologies
inhabit, as it were, a phantom structure.'" (p. 1)

Derrida, Jacques.  "The Ghost Dance: An Interview
   with Jacques Derrida," trans. Jean-Luc Svoboda,
   Public 2 (1989): 60-73.

   "Clearly, ghosts cannot either be contained or
explained by one particular genre or medium, such as
gothic narratives.  They exceed any single narrative
modality, genre or textual manifestations.  It is this
which makes them ghostly and which announces the power
of haunting." (p. 1)

"The ghost does not arrive after the fact, after
the so-called reality of a situation.  It is ... the
condition or possibility of any mode of
representation.  The spectral is that which makes
possible reproduction even as it also fragments and
ruins the very possibility of reproduction's apparent
guarantee to represent that which is no longer there
fully.
   "Another way to approach the question of
haunting might therefore be to suggest that all forms
of narrative are spectral to some extent.  Moreover,
any medium through which we seek to communicate today
that involves a narrativization of our identities in
relation to others not immediately present is
inescapably spectral....  the proliferation of
phantoms and the effects of haunting are undeniable
aspects of the identity of modernity." (p. 2)

   "Furthermore, to tell a story is always to
invoke ghosts, to open a space through which something
other returns, although never as a presence or to the
present.  Ghosts return via narratives. and come back,
again and again, every time a tale is unfolded.... 
There can be no narrative, in short, which is not
always already disturbed and yet made possible from
within its form or structure by a ghostly
movement." (p. 3)

"... all stories are, more or less, ghost
stories....  all forms of narrative are, in one way or
another, haunted." (p. 3)

http://www.palgrave-usa.com/catalogue/index.asp?isbn=0333922514

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