M.H.A.G.B.W

Imperceptibly, but certainly for good, “spectre” slipped into the vocabulary of contemporary literary theory in the late 1990s. This first became apparent when the entries ghosts and secret appeared in the second edition of Introduction to Literature, Criticism and Theory, edited by Nicholas Royle and Andrew Bennet (1999) and following the publication of numerous literary critical texts at that time on Gothic and Victorian literature. Three years later, David Punter considered it apt to introduce spectral criticism as a distinct term describing a certain recognizable way of thinking about literature, interpretation and literary texts in Introducing Criticism in the 21st Century (2002). J. Wolfreys (ed.), Introducing Criticism in the 21st Century, Edinburgh 2002.] The author had no doubt that spectral criticism comprised a coherent area of research that employed consistent theoretical assumptions. It was meant to continue the reflections on literature and textuality initiated by the late works of Jacques Derrida (chiefly Spectres of Marx from 1993), Nicholas Royle (Telepathy and Literature, 1993) and Joseph H. Miller (On Literature, 2002). Spectral criticism was also to draw on references to psychoanalytical categories developed by Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok in the mid-1970s.

Punter drew attention to the fact that although spectral criticism was heterogeneous in nature, it lent itself to a more consistent formulation through its use of constantly recurring terms (such as ghosts, crypt, phantom, dead, hauntology, secret, telepathy…), which served as useful instruments for literary-historical research and theoretical reflection. The author recognised these categories as particularly expressive images and metaphors for use in describing how a literary text exists and for properly understanding the nature of contacts with literature.

In response to questions about what literature has to do with spectres and the dead, Punter raised the example of Maurice Blanchot’s metaliterary reflection. For Blanchot, contact with literature was inseparably associated with a unique kind of impossible encounter with someone who, while being dead, continues to be, in a way, alive. According to the author of L’Espace litteraire (1955), entering into a relation with literature presupposes contact with something which lasts in a particular form of suspension, in a shape that does not directly refer to a clearly defined condition, assuming an intermediary form of existence in the space between death, spectral presence and resurrection. It is for this reason that Blanchot compared the experience of contact with a literary work to continually repeated attempts at dialogue with Lazarus in the grave. The work is neither dead nor alive; it appears as a semblance of presence, but simultaneously, because of its disguise and the place it occupies, it assumes the shape of a clothed void, absent and inaccessible, covered with a rock and wrapped in bandages.

Reading, and thus contact with a literary work, as Punter concludes in his comment on Blanchot, resembles the endeavours we undertake to establish a relation with a phantom or to come into agreement with a spectre of one who is deceased. This way of acting may seem to be doomed to failure, but it seems to work in a way which is difficult to define. By reading we come into contact with something that sends us relentlessly to an absence and a void, while opening us up to a peculiar kind of experience which for Blanchot is the opening of a particular kind of space, an area marked by a retreat from being and close to death, described as literary space, while at the same time, in the act of reading we become witnesses to the impact of a form of presence of whose survival and resurrection we take note. In the experience of coming into contact with a text, which exists simultaneously as something both dead and immortal, which through its own death opens a space with the capacity for continuing after death, that is, for surviving death, we are close to communing with the dead.

Spectral criticism is for Punter a way of considering literature as a particular anthropological place for encounters between the dead and the living. Its reflections represent a continuous awareness of the unconditional impossibility of the task which it has undertaken and in pointing to the paradoxically impossible nature of literature as a peculiar kind of medium for this encounter. Yet, it is exactly this mediation which permits us to experience something that remains (alive) after life, and that by the same token is capable of surviving death in the form of spectral excess – being a trace of life after life, its remnant, literature. Spectrality embodies literature also for other reasons. Nicholas Royle and Andrew Bennet, authors who directly refer to Jacques Derrida and his way of thinking about literature, believe that a literary text is characterised by a peculiar modality of existence – it is a form of being devoid of both an unequivocally defined essence and of clearly determined properties. A literary text does not exist as a work in a concrete space, if we understand this as having a presence in a present moment, nor can it be conceived of in the form of an actualised sense which would be fully present and would lend itself to being located in a spatial or temporal structure. The text is its own phantom and the site of an amplified split or visitation; therefore, it is not its own self but is continually becoming “this particular something” which accommodates within itself a certain strangeness and a complete otherness. It does not so much conceal in itself a direct presence of the sense or of the author as it constantly retrieves their spectres which refuse to be tamed and which leave us in a space free of distinctions between truth and falsehood, certainty and doubt, ourselves and the other, being and non-being.